All My Sins Remembered Read Online Free PDF Page A

sparse beard and glowered at the center of Crowell’s chest. “For whatever good it does. What do you know about Bruuchian anatomy?”
    “Well…” Crowell hiked himself up onto a stool, which creaked. “The early studies were inconclusive, and I haven’t—”
    “Inconclusive! I don’t know much more than that myself. They have several internal organs that seem not to have any function. Not all of them even have the same set of organs. And if they do, they aren’t necessarily in the same place in the body cavity.
    “The only consistent results I get are from that thing.” He stabbed a thumb in the direction of a large structure that looked like a nineteenth-century diving bell. “Stokes chamber, for quantitative metabolic analysis. I hire them to sit in there and eat and excrete. They think it’s a big joke.”
    He punched his palm with his fist. “If only I could get a cadaver! Did you hear about last month, the laser?”
    “No, nothing.”
    “They say it was an accident; I have my doubts. Anyhow, a native fell, or was pushed, in front of a mining laser. Sliced him in two.”
    “God!”
    “I was right up here; took me less than ten minutes to get down to where it happened. But relatives had already spirited the body away. Must have gone up on one elevator while I was going down on the other. I took an interpreter and got to the village as fast as I could. Found his hut.
    “I—I told them I could sew him back together again, I could cure him. God, I wanted to get a look at that body!”
    He kneaded his forehead with two fingers. “They believed me. And they apologized. But they said they had thought he was ready for stillness, and they had already ‘sent’ him.
    “I asked if I could see his body and they said, sure, they were happy that I would want to join the celebration.”
    “Surprised they’d let you,” Crowell said.
    “They’ve eased up on that. Anyhow, you know that room, the family room, where they keep their ancestors’ mummies. I went in there; must have been fifty of them leaning against the walls, three and four deep, perfectly preserved.
    “They pointed out the new arrival: he looked just like all the others, except for a hairless circle around his middle, where the laser had cut through. I looked at the ring of skin closely—they let me use a flashlight—and there was absolutely no seam, no scar! I checked the serial number on the foot, and it was the right one.
    “The cadaver couldn’t have gotten there ten minutes before I did… that kind of scar suppression takes induced skin regeneration, weeks of convalescence, and you can’t do it on a dead organism.
    “But try to find out how they do it—you might as well ask a person how he keeps his heart beating. I don’t think they really understand the question.”
    Crowell nodded. “When I wrote my book, I had to be satisfied with a simple description of the phenomenon. All I could find out was that it involves some ritual using the oldest and youngest family members. And nobody teaches them what to do. They say it’s obvious. But they can’t explain, and they won’t let you watch.”
    Struckheimer went to a big free-standing refrigerator and got two beers. “Stand another one?” Crowell nodded and Struckheimer uncorked both of them. “Make it myself—one of the native boys tends the brew for me. Going to lose him in a few months, though—he’s almost old enough for the mines.”
    He handed Crowell a beer and sat down on a lower stool. “I suppose you know they don’t have anything like a study of medicine. No shamans or anything. If somebody gets sick, they just sit around and cheer him on, and if he recovers they offer him their condolences.”
    “I know,” said Crowell. “How do you ever get them to come around for treatment… and, for that matter, how can you know what to do for them when they come in?”
    “Well, my medical assistants—I’ve got four—inspect each of them when they go into the mine,