The Talosite by Rebecca Campbell

Author:Rebecca Campbell [Campbell, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Undertow Publications

She waited until Calloway had gone to his room, worried he would look for her as he often did when, tired and drunk, he wanted to talk about St Bartholomew’s, about the War Office’s demands, about whether this would ever end. She worked rapidly, a little clumsily, collecting the minimum necessary components from Récamier’s still rooms: a spinal cord and head with eyes intact, bathed in cold ichor from the horses. A single hand, palm up, attached by the loose ulnar, median, and radial nerves that ran from the wrist to the brainstem, linked with a nearly invisible four-strand cross stitch, a cruciate flexor that was not as tiny as she liked, but adequately bound the system together. She threaded hair-thin wire along the nerve-sheath, using tweezers and magnifying glass. Her hands were so cold by the time she had assembled a simple system—wire, green glass battery, spine—she had to warm them up before she could continue her work.

A cocaine solution injected just below the elbow for a regional nerve block. Then a tourniquet. In a minute her left hand felt like it was no longer hers, like meat attached to her body and she wondered if these were the sensations of a Talosite on awakening, a body both theirs and not-theirs, in parts alive with sensation, and in other parts still dead, moving in collaboration with minds they could only sense. An unhomely body. A stranger.

She held the ring for a moment, then made a neat incision in her left wrist and was surprised that in the silence she could hear her own flesh cut, its meaty resistance just like the tense muscle and cartilage of her Talosites, which resisted her needle in much the same way. Then the most delicate nick in the ulnar nerve’s sheath, which should leave sensation in the thumb and forefinger intact, though damaged, and from which she should recover in a matter of months. Based on observation, she could most easily sacrifice the action of the smallest finger of her left hand. Then she stood over her derelict child, as drop after drop of that most precious, most dynamic materiel fell into the open spinal column on the white table before her. It would be an entirely new creature, one she had only ever imagined. A brainstem and a hand. A head with an eye. She activated the battery. The familiar snap and sizzle. A flash of light.

“What have you done?” The voice first, then Calloway’s hand around her forearm. She couldn’t feel it properly, just pressure on the thick, senseless flesh. Not hers, not Anne. Someone else’s hand.

“I avoided the vein,” she said, irritated. “I needed a living human sample.”

“For what?” His fingers still tight on her wrist, her hand limp, whether from damage or cocaine or his grip, she could not tell.

On the white enamel table, the creature worked its jaw. The eye opened and rolled upward, appraising them with an intelligence she had never seen in a Talosite.

Its single hand flicked one finger, then two.

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