We Are Both Mammals by G. Wulfing Read Free Book Online Page B

wanted, and it would be procured for me
and loaded into the player. Sleeping was easier when I could be
lulled into it by music. With books, music, a clearer head, a
gradually healing body, and some food passing over my tongue
once more, I began to feel a little bit alive again.
    It seemed like so long since I had felt
alive. Five weeks can feel like half a lifetime.
    Perhaps it was a lifetime. Perhaps I had
died; the single human, the autonomous Daniel Avari had died, and
now there was a different creature in his place – a two-headed,
conjoined freak of a creature. From now on, my life would not be
anything like what it had been before. For all practical purposes,
I had died. The life I was living now was not mine.
    And I continued to wonder what Toro-a-Ba had
been thinking when he volunteered for the surgery.
    Did he not understand?
    No matter what they said, the surgeons had
not operated on me to save my life. They had experimented on me. If
their experiment was successful, I might live. But my living was a
side-effect: they had been operating on a dead man. When Surgeon
Fong had seen me lying injured in that hospital, her thought had
not been that she might be able to save me: she had seen only a
perfect chance to experiment with her and Suva-a’s theories. Since
I was already as good as dead, I was the perfect specimen on which
to test surgery with a high risk of fatality.
    Toro-a-Ba was merely part of that
experiment. He had volunteered to be their test subject. He was not
my saviour; he was an accomplice to the experimentation they had
done on me.
    How naïve was this thurga? Did he actually
think that he had done some good?
    Idiot.
    Unfortunately for me, the surgery had
succeeded.
    Why? Why, when there were so very many
things that could have gone wrong, had the surgery succeeded?
    I should have been dead. The odds were that
I should have been dead. But I wasn’t. A die with a hundred black
faces and one white had, inexplicably, landed with the white face
up.
     
    –––––––
     
    Shortly after I received my music player, Surgeon
Sarah Fong announced with some pleasure that, now that it was
apparent that both Toro-a-Ba and I would survive and our recovery
was progressing satisfactorily, she had arranged for a psychologist
to speak with us, to assess the psychological aspects of the
surgery. She mentioned that the psychologist was human, and
inquired of Toro-a-Ba whether he would like to see a thurga
psychologist in addition. He declined, saying that such an
arrangement was not necessary.
    The thought made me feel
nervous, ill – many things still made me feel ill – and
confused. How was I supposed to talk to a psychologist? What on
earth was I supposed to say? I was scarcely sure even in my own
mind what I felt about what had been done to me; how could I
explain anything to a psychologist? And how was I supposed to speak
freely about how I felt about being conjoined to another without my
consent when that other was present, in the room, in the
same bed ?
    I was an experiment, a test case; perhaps I
was not supposed to feel anything. Perhaps my right to an
independent opinion had disappeared with my ability to function
independently; killed in the accident that had left my body unable
to support itself.
    The psychologist, when she arrived a couple
of days later, seemed nice enough. She was frank, but not
insensitive. I felt a grudging appreciation for this: finally,
someone on the medical staff seemed to be genuinely aware that I
had feelings aside from my physical ones.
    She spoke with us privately, with only the
three of us in the room, and invited us to call her by her first
name, Tara. Most of the questions she asked were simple, ‘getting
to know you’ sorts of questions, like how old I and Toro-a-Ba were,
where and how we had grown up, et cetera. I am sure that she knew
most of this stuff from the information she must have been given
about us when Fong and Suva-a hired her to counsel such an