PARACELSUS: THE LAND

     Exploration of the double continent revealed two important facts: first, the large jellyfish apparently did not infest these waters (they probably don't get out to the deep water, because there's no prey out there); and second, the desert conditions were not uniform, as we had feared. There were pockets of what looked like fern-trees, fruit growing on something akin to banana plants, and even, in some swampy inland areas, primitive trees. In places there were large colonies of the scurrying creatures, some of them as large as salamanders. They came in all varieties and shapes and colors. Jama's team of botanists and zoologists were assembling a mass of information. Geologists and soil experts found the land to be fertile, capable of supporting Earth-type plants. There were huge aquifers throughout the entire continent, the parts we surveyed carefully and the parts we surveyed by distant sensors.
     In several well-defined areas, we dug wells, planted trees and flowers, set insects loose, found a way to grow crop plants. The idea was to see, on a return trip in a decade or more, if the planet could become to some extent terran, and if these plants and insects could survive here on their own. But even more importantly, we wanted to plant trees and grasses in part to help retain water and bring about wetter conditions. If enough water were retained in the atmosphere, rainfall might result. Our mathematics experts assured us that their figures showed that we could change the climate of Paracelsus in just a couple of decades.
     One day, I joined an expedition up a mountainside covered with lichens and dry moss. Springs and small rivulets provided water that was astonishingly cool, as though it came from deep inside. And it was potable. Tree ferns surrounded by grasses abounded around these springs, and great colonies of scurriers could be seen.
     "Not exactly Paradise," I remember saying to Jama, "but a lot nicer than that island. How about some coconut palms here? And some orchids?"
     "Have you just named this spot, Christina? Not Exactly Paradise. Apt. And it looks like we could easily plant palms and flowers."
     "Planting trees and flowers are definitely in the plans if we came upon a compatible planet."
     I think it was about this time that we heard a distant rumble. "Thunder? You mean it rains here?"
     "Well, we are on the windward side of the mountain. Maybe there's a rainy season of a week or two! It's hard to believe a rainy season here could last longer than that."
     The rumble grew louder, and closer. "I don't like the sound of that, Jama," I said. "If I didn't know better, I'd almost think it was an earthquake."
     "Or a paracelsuquake."
     "A para.." As I was about to speak, the rumble was replaced by a loud crack, as if the mountain was being rent apart. We looked up towards the source of the noise, and saw that we were caught in an unexpected avalanche of stone. Tons of rock were bounding down the mountain, coming at us at what seemed like the speed of sound. No time to think! We threw ourselves behind boulders, in gullies, wherever we could find a place to hide. I tried to warn the party below us; they had already taken cover.
     The landslide passed directly over us with a roar that has to be experienced to be believed. Pebbles, rocks, boulders crashing onto the rocky soil, onto the dirt, into each other. I am told it was over just as quickly as it had arisen. There were  a few injuries, no broken bones, though. With a single exception. Me. Much of what happened there and subsequently I learned only a long time afterwards.

     Everyone got up, brushed themselves off. People were dazed. A little bruise here, a gash caused by a sharp rock there. What luck! Cave-like indentations in the land, big boulders to hide behind, the big rocks bounding out away from the mountainside for the most part. Fortunately the rockfall was not a real avalanche, although some piles of stone were pushed a good 50 to 100 meters downhill, forming mounds of rubble. It was odd: once the dust settled, if you didn't know there had just been a rockfall, you wouldn't realize that the scenery had changed.
     Jama called out the names of her staff. They were all there, present and accounted for.
     "Commander, have you seen the Captain?" asked Henri.
"Everyone's here except her."
     "Captain! Captain Vasa! Christina!"
     Dead silence.
     "Omygod, she was right next to me! There's no one here, nothing."
     "Do you think she could have been knocked out by a falling rock, or swept down the mountainside?"
     "No chance! She was crouching down behind a stone right here." Jama's voice drifted off and slowed down as she realized that Christina's stone was no longer there. "The stone, a big yellowish-red stone. Where is it? Could it have..." Jama did not finish her sentence. Instead, she called down to the group below.
     "Pedro! Monika! Is the Captain down there?"
     At once the entire squad, those above and those below, scrambled to look among the rubble. Pedro called out, "I think this is her hat! And here are her binoculars!"
     Painstakingly, stone by stone, they broke up the stone stack. Beneath every rock, nothing!
     Another mound. Another futile search. Jama decided to call Constellation.
     "Salini, this is Jama. Listen, we've just experienced a flash landslide, maybe caused by an earthquake. It was over in a minute. The crew is all here and accounted for, able to carry on despite some injuries, but we think the Captain is buried beneath tons of rock. Get a medical crew and some fresh bodies down here to help us dig through the piles of stone. Alert the medical group. Quick!"
     "Jama," replied Salini from on board, "a crew will be down in a couple of minutes. Set your homing device in a safe place for 10 or 12 people and some equipment."
     Just then, a cry rang out from below. They had found Christina! She lay prone, unconscious and immobile beneath a huge boulder. By some stroke of luck, her head seemed not to have been hit by the stones that must have been flying all around her. But one big one was resting on her legs, another on her back. It was not a scene anyone had wanted to see. The ground was stained with blood. Her face was gaunt. It looked grim and gruesome. We soon learned that it was even worse than it looked. But she was breathing! She was alive!
     "Quick! contact Constellation! Tell them we need a machine to lift up the rock. The Captain's bleeding badly, maybe she's dying! Hurry!"
     No sooner said than done. The emergency crew came within a minute with the necessary equipment.
     Janus came down with the emergency crew and took charge of the operation. He placed a machine about ten meters up the hill from where Christina lay, a small derrick with an extensible neck that he had stretched out over the immobile body. "Quick, put the hoisting irons down there. Careful! Good. Are they on solidly? Now turn on the power, half strength. That's it. Lift it up slowly, slowly. Good!"
     While Janus was giving orders, workers put a kind of metallic ring around the bottom of the huge rock that covered Christina's back, and up around the sides to the top. At Janus's commands, the stone was lifted by magnetic force projected from directly above Christina, then moved slowly to the side and set down a few meters away. The procedure had to be repeated for the smaller stone that had broken her legs.
     "My god! look at that! It looks like every rib has been broken. Probably pierced her lungs and injured just about every organ in her body."
     The sight of bones sticking up through blood-covered flesh and right through clothing is never pretty. It gets downright ugly when you see that condition in a person you admire, respect, and well, love. Would she survive, could she survive, and would she ever recover? And if so, in what condition?
     Bernardo, the chief surgeon, who had come down with the emergency crew, contacted Constellation. "Salini, Janus here. Jama, Pedro and I will accompany the Captain. Beam us directly to the sick bay. It looks terrible. It looks hopeless."
     Bernardo's words took away any sense of belief that Christina would survive. Still, there were concerns for her safety.
     "Is she in any condition to be transmatted? Can she withstand the pressures?"
     "If we don't get her up there she'll surely die. This is no time to reason. Transport us now!"
     The familiar blur of snowy light engulfed the small party of four. They disappeared from view, only to emerge kilometers above, in the sick bay. With great care, Christina was lifted onto a gurney. The medical team got to work. There were no smiles in the operating room.
     Once her clothing was removed and the blood washed away, what the medics saw was frightening: both femurs and the right tibia broken, the right patella shattered. The left humerus and the right radius broken. All the ribs. Organs visible through torn flesh. The worst was the spine. The problem was where to begin. They decided to protect the spinal cord as much as possible, work next on the organs, and then take care of the fractures. They were estimating their work in days, not hours.

     When I came to, I felt tremendous pain from my shoulders and arms down to my waist. And I had a mammoth headache. My eyes slowly focussed. I saw Bernardo. I said something to him, then went back to sleep. Or rather, since I had slipped out of a comatose state, it would be more accurate to say that I fell asleep. I was under medication, but there were moments of semi-consciousness when I could hear them talking. It didn't sound good, but I could not concentrate for more than a few minutes before drifting off into a feverish sleep again.
     My legs and arms were broken, and literally every rib. With our medical equipment, these things can be repaired quickly, and you can get back on the job in about a month. Well, longer when it's a matter of all those things. I kept slipping in and out of  consciousness and a deep drug-induced sleep, for months. My organs were repaired during this time: lungs, kidneys, spleen, liver. The boulder had done its job very well. The medics had done theirs superbly.
     Finally, I woke up to a real consciousness.
     "Hey, my headache's gone. My arms feel normal, more or less. No tubes, no contraptions holding me down. Why can't I get up? I can't seem to move."
     "Captain, what a great recovery you've made so far! And how great it is to speak with you!"
     "Bernardo, what's happened?"
     He told me about the avalanche, filled in some details about the operations that went on, bit by bit, over a three month period, and that had put me all back together again, except...
     "Except for what?"
     "Your spine. It was crushed, smashed down, with ten vertebrae broken. And your spinal cord was severed in two places."
     I could feel my heart sink as he spoke. "Spinal cord severed in two places?"
     "Yes, right below the shoulder blades, and in the small of the back. We've been able to reattach the upper tear. All signs point to a complete recovery, in a week or so if it's not already taken place. You woke up as we were about to run a test to see its condition."
     "Run it. Please. But what about the lower tear?"
     "Captain, we tried to have your nerve tissue grow on tissue taken from frogs, which usually works. But it didn't work the first time. Or the second. Or the third. Then we tried experimental rat nerves. The results were also negative."
     "You're telling me that I'll be crippled for life."
     "I was trying not to say that. But honestly, unless we can find a way to put your spinal cord together, you might never walk again. We can hope that techniques back on Earth will work for you; they seem to be coming up with miracle cures every year. Still, in these operations time is usually of the essence; and a five-year journey is not exactly rapid. Unless someone can think of something, the prognosis is not bright."
     "Bernardo, please run that test you wanted to do, then see if I can sit up well enough to eat: I'm famished! Then I'd like to have a couple of people in here to talk about this, and to see how our mission is going. Janus, Jama, and you. And tell them that as crazy as it might sound, I'm more hopeful than you are."

     On the third day, now that I was able to sit up in a motorized wheelchair, I was allowed to leave the sick bay for an hour or two. I had never really imagined myself as being other than I was. After all, I'd been 28 for almost 200 years! But I also could not imagine myself crippled for the rest of my life, another 100 years. I kept telling myself, "I'll beat this, I'll beat this somehow." The question was how. I called together the flight deck crew. They let me know that Jama and Janus were splitting the duties of the command, that the explorations were going on and being continued successfully, and that they had no reason to doubt that this planet, now largely a desert, could in a relatively short time become quite habitable.
     Everyone marveled at my recovery, which in fact is a triumph of Earth medicine and the skill of Bernardo and his team of surgeons and nurses. I was eager to get back to work to the extent I could, but I was more determined than ever to make them talk about my final injury and try to think of ways to reattach my nerves. "Nothing," I said over and over again, "can be too crazy. If you have an idea, suggest it."
     Salini, ever the techie, offered an idea of creating a virtual spinal cord on the computer and somehow attaching it to my spinal cord above and below the cut, where it would function, as long as I was wearing a computer, like a real spinal cord. "It may be far out," he said, "but it's worth a try."
     "Do you really think such a device can be created?"
     "We've got the resources, and if I'm allowed the time to work on it, it might pan out."
     Most people thought the idea was on the wild side, but maybe it would work, after all.
     "I was speaking with Hermione about this the other day, Captain," said Jama. "She had an idea that we should maybe try out some of the nerve tissue from some of these scurrying things, and see if that might work. I've gotten a kind of feeble reaction so far, about the same as with frog tissue: not enough to actually do the job, but enough of a reaction to suggest that this might be a solution. Still, there's got to be a bigger reaction."
     Pharsilla had a sudden inspiration: "Why not use them both at once? You could weave the frog and the scurry nerve cells together, and see if that works."
     "I'll get to work on it as soon as the meeting is over. It's a long shot, but so is everything else that's been suggested so far. But this gives me a second idea. Suppose we do manage to get some kind of reaction with some animal nerve tissue, do you think Salini's machine, if it works at all, could boost the transmission rate?"
     "You mean, use them together? A kind of two- or three-pronged approach? Frog tissue, scurry tissue, virtual spinal cord?" I was so desperate for good news that this was beginning to sound hopeful to me. "If you're willing to do this, let's give it a try!'
     Bernardo had an objection, though, a serious objection. Ever since a series of transplants of alien organs went awry on Mesnos, it's been strictly against policy to mix alien and human body parts. And, if that's the law, Bernardo did not want to break it. I was crushed. Still, I had the experiments begun, and right after the meeting I began scrutinizing the laws and the regulations.
     It was discouraging. The law was written in an obscure manner that seemed to say what Bernardo had told us. Space Fleet regulations permitted experiments of this sort to be conducted, and put in the hands of the commanding officer of any craft or space station to right "authorize any procedure permitted by law when in his or her judgment conditions so warrant." That meant that I could authorize this multiple approach if it turned out to be legal. I had to go back to the law. Obscure, but brief.
 "The nature of alien systems being incompatible with those of human beings, surgeons and medical experts should not mix human and alien body parts. Experiments may be performed, however."
What on Earth did that mean? I put the question to Janus, who asked for a couple of hours to meditate on it.
     "Christina, I have an answer for you. On the one had, Space Fleet regulations and Earth law agree that experimentation is OK, and Space Fleet authorizes you to order any procedure that's legal. The stumbling block is the wording, 'should not mix human and alien body parts.'
     "First of all, we could argue that 'should' is not the same thing as 'must'or 'shall,' both of which would strictly forbid this kind of procedure."
     "Come on, that's a terrible justification in and of itself. A grammatical rule would make this legal?! You've got to be kidding! And you've got to do better."
     "I disagree with what you're saying: the law turns on little things like that. If it didn't, we wouldn't have need of more than a handful of lawyers. But that's only part of my argument, let's say one panel of a diptych."
     "OK, what's the other panel?"
     "Human and alien body parts should not mix. Suppose we could use Hermione's idea to produce a strand of nerve tissue that  consists of frog and scurry nerve cells, with only the frog cells attached to the human cells? Whatever the spirit of the law might be, this would fall within the scope of the word of the law."
     "You mean it would be perfectly legal?"
     "Did I ever tell you I was lawyer before I entered Space Fleet?"
     "It's on your record. That's why I wanted to consult you about this point. OK, I'm convinced."
     "I forgot to tell you that one of Jama's experiments was by accident just like that, scurry tissue and frog tissue intertwined, and it worked. The power of the cells was not just doubled, but increased tenfold. And the cells began to forge together."
     "Tremendous news! Now it will be up to you to convince Bernardo. And everyone who contributed to this experimental procedure, if it works, will go down in history as geniuses. And Salini's computer, if he can figure out what to do and how to do it, can serve as a bridge while the spinal cord is repairing itself."
     My only concern, and I'm sort of ashamed to say this, was that I might get to be as frenetic as the scurry who would contribute part of its nervous system to me. I had complete confidence in the team. And Salini's computer was as thin and about as small as a shoehorn: it could have been implanted in me!
     A couple of months after the operation, which was known only to about a dozen people including the medical staff, I went in my wheelchair to the transmat room, and came down right at the spot of my injury. I was touched to tears by what I saw there: On the large stone that had crushed almost to death was engraved:

 STONE THAT ALMOST KILLED THE BEST COMMANDER IN SPACE FLEET, CAPTAIN CHRISTINA VASA, 13 DECEMBER 2720