Eutopia - A Novel of Terrible Optimism by David Nickle

Author:David Nickle [Nickle, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror
ISBN: 9781926851402
Publisher: ChiZine Publications
Published: 2011-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

17 - The Dauphin’s Women

The first morning after Loo’s death, Andrew Waggoner went to see her body intending to perform a post mortem examination.

He might even have done it. Good as their word, the families had neither burned nor buried her, but wrapped the girl up in a blanket and placed her back on that foul bed in the awful shack where he’d found her. He brought his physician’s bag and a candle to see her by as he went into the single room that stank so sweet of death; he shuffled in like an old, sick man, and he fell to his knees, as though in prayer.

He was not in prayer—not precisely—but as he crouched there he realized that he would not be able to cut into this girl’s body and learn anything from it. It was as much as he could do to lift the cloth from her head and look at her face. And even that, he could not do for long.

In some, death brings a final serenity. That was how it had seemed for Maryanne Leonard, whose face had been so pure and clear in death, above her mangled torso. One could have imagined that her fleeing soul had paused an instant to show a hint of the transcendence it sought. One could take comfort in such a thought.

There was no such comfort looking on Loo. Death had etched a final, leaden idiocy to her: no joy, no redemption signalled in her face. There was not even the pathos of surrender. In the end, she was just insensate meat.

Bergstrom meant to spare you from this, he thought.

Andrew knew, of course, that Bergstrom meant to do no such thing when he travelled here with his armed surgery. He meant to spare the race, his race, more abominations like Loo. But as for Loo?

The doctor was not caring for his patient; he was not caring for the unborn children she might make. He was caring for a larger body of patients than this girl and her young.

Which was something Nils Bergstrom had over Andrew Waggoner. When Andrew had made his cut, he hadn’t even been sure he could help her; he was in fact fairly certain that he could not. Andrew was looking after his own curiosity and nothing else.

And now, crouched in the darkness of the cabin, he was tending it some more. How hateful, he thought.

Norma came in to get him at lunchtime.

“Come on,” she said, laying a cool hand on his shoulder. “You’re in no shape for this.”

He looked up at her as she guided him to his feet.

“No,” he agreed, “that is true.”

He went back to Norma’s house, and drank down a tea of rose and mint and something else he couldn’t identify. He lay down in the bed while she changed the dressing on his older injuries and packed them with a compound of mud and twigs.

“What is all that?” he asked.

“Remedies,” she said.

“What kind of remedies?”

“Wild onion and ginger. Fireweed. Some yarrow. Rose and mint in the tea.

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