Last time, the brainslug explained he should beat her face in with a rock.
It made a squishing sound and a thud–that was the first thing I noticed–and then the shock of the blow wore off, and I felt it, too.
“Ungh,” I groaned. I hadn’t meant to make any sound. I knew that would make it worse for him.
Yes, poor Jared:
“Wanda? Mel? I’m sorry!”
His arms wrapped around us, pulled us into his chest.
“’S okay,” I whimpered. “We’re okay. Did you get it all?”
His hand touched my chin, turned my head.
“Ahh,” he gasped, sickened. “I took half your face off. I’m so sorry.”
“No, that’s good. That’s good. Let’s go.”
What’s particularly horrible is that the reason this is necessary is because he gave her horrible scars in the first place.
She says that she’ll need to drive and he should hide.
“Okay. I’ll hide. But if you take us somewhere I don’t tell you to go…”
Oh! Melanie was stung by his doubt, as was I.
He’s right to doubt you. You didn’t consciously betray your own kind because you realized the humans deserved your aid, your brain just doesn’t work right. There’s no reason to think that wandering back into a brainslug camp won’t make you change your mind again when your brain chemistry shifts. You’re insane.
He then tells her to go faster.
“I’m right at the limit,” I protested.
He paused for a second. “Souls don’t speed?”
I laughed. The sound was only a tad hysterical. “We obey all laws, traffic laws included.”
Except traffic laws work under the framework that people don’t act in everyone’s best interest. The official limit isn’t actually the exact safe speed, it’s just there so that if you’re driving too fast in traffic or poor weather (or if the police department is short on funds) the police can pull you over. It’s also useful as a guideline for how fast you can safely go.
The brainslugs have no true laws because the brainslugs have no concept of punishment and need no such enforcement. No brainslug wants to hurt themselves or another brainslug, so they would only ever willingly drive at safe speeds – but this doesn’t seem a factor in her decisionmaking here, and the idea that hugging the edge of the speed limit so you’re not breaking the letter of the law is something that should only matter to humans.
And if they still use the speed limit framework despite it being nonsense, that speaks of a rather disturbing inability to innovate. Brainslug takeover doesn’t simply mean genocide of the human race but utter stagnation, killing the original culture and preserving its corpse forever, going through empty motions. Perhaps that’s why it’s so important to them to keep expanding, it’s the only way they can gain new ideas and viewpoints.
It was hard to be in this unfamiliar city. To see houses and apartments and stores with signs lit up. To know I was surrounded, outnumbered. I imagined what it must feel like for Jared.
Well, no. Because they’d kill him but all they’d do to you is take you out and try to get you some therapy and see how much of your personality can be repaired.
They reach the hospital and she stabs herself in the arm because she needs a wound that resembles Jamie’s.
The receptionist is a black women who keeps calling her dear and honey – the only character who talks like this, everyone else has very straightforward language. I guess brainslugs keep their host’s speech patterns. The doctor is brown and also female.
So hm. As soon as we rejoin brainslug society, we start seeing people other than white men.
I don’t think there’s any deliberate malice to this. The most charitable option is that it’s the human group she cares most about, so she naturally made them white guys, then made an effort to balance the cast with the brainslug side. It might also just be that this is her unconscious association with the wussy communist brainslugs.
“A little no pain should help, don’t you think?”
I saw the label again as she twisted the lid off. Two short words. No Pain? Was that what it said?
…
Almost as if she were trying to help me fulfill my mission, she listed the names as she reached for them.
“Clean–inside and out… Heal… Seal…
It doesn’t occur to her what a fucking moron she is. The stuff is labeled and it doesn’t even require anything special to work. And it seems it’s the exact same stuff they use for any injury, so hacking her arm up was unnecessary.
And where is… ah, Smooth. Don’t want a scar on that pretty face, do we?”
“Ah… no.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll be perfect again.”
Oh christ so that’s why the book was so fine with her being scarred, it was because it wasn’t really any more permanent than the initial injury.
Also, speaking of perfect…
No one has suggested checking for any other injuries. The various times I’ve managed to hurt myself in multiple places, I find I’m not aware of all of them, and this only gets more absurd the more injuries I’m dealing with. I managed to fall pretty badly and get scraped and bruised all over, and found I was never aware of more than two injuries at a time, and usually only one. As time went on one injury would fade out and the next one would come in, and it ended up cycling around a few times. And this doesn’t have any connection to what the worst injury is – when I was little, I scraped both my elbows going down a slide. One was deep enough it was dripping blood on my shirt but I couldn’t feel it, the hurt so horribly I covered it with my hand and wouldn’t let anyone touch it but turned out to only be skinned.
If someone’s fallen badly enough to tear open their face, they’re going to be scraped and bruised all over. There’s also a decent chance she’s concussed, which makes it even dumber to assume she’d know if she had any other injuries. The obvious thing to do is check her knees, because those are the most likely to be damaged and the most likely to cause problems if they are.
Inside clean is breathed in to kill off all microbes in the body just in case, so it’d actually really fuck up humans to be getting their internal bacteria completely wiped out all the time. Also, it seems like it should probably be killing off mitochondria, which should make people just drop dead.
The healer says that the deeper wound will leave a tiny scar because that’s just how deep wounds are, even though there’s no actual reason why scar tissue absolutely has to form and it should be pretty easy to have something that’ll make it dissolve and get replaced by regular tissue.
They chat and she lies about her job and then the healer goes off to get her some water, so she starts grabbing stuff.
Cool. For fevers? There were no instructions, just the label. I took the stack. Nothing here would hurt a human body. I was sure of that.
So in other words, you’re admitting this seeing the healing was completely unnecessary, because this stuff is idiot-proof.
She also grabs some of the scar-fixy stuff, because vanity is important. The healer and secretary return and she’s given a mirror.
My face looked the way I remembered it from San Diego. The face I’d taken for granted there. The skin was smooth and peachy across my right cheekbone.
See! Remember what I said way back at the beginning, sun-tanned is a way of saying the skin is naturally light.
It was a face that belonged to Wanderer, the soul. It belonged here, in this civilized place where there was no violence and no horror.
No, it was the face that belonged to Melanie. All the abuse was because of Wanderer, the soul.
I realized why it was so easy to lie to these gentle creatures. Because it felt right to talk with them, because I understood their communication and their rules. The lies could be… maybe should be true. I should be filling a Calling somewhere, whether teaching at a university or serving food in a restaurant. A peaceful, easy life contributing to a greater good.
This is interesting and might have something to do with reconciling the claim that souls don’t lie with the furious rumormill that was the see weed planet. They don’t actually have any attachment to the truth, they just have few reasons to lie normally.
Also, a return to the sparkleyeerk portrayal now that we’re back in brainslugville. These gentle creatures will kill Jared if they find him simply because he’s not a useful host.
“I look perfect. Thank you.”
“It was my pleasure to heal you.”
I looked at myself again, seeing details beyond the perfection. My hair was ragged–dirty, with uneven ends. There was no gloss to it–homemade soap and poor nutrition were to blame for that.
You know, maybe it makes sense the healer is incompetent. This seemed to be a less demanding job than, say, flipping burgers. So maybe she doesn’t think anything of how this person seems in generally ill health anymore than it occurs to her to check for other injuries (do the brainslugs even have anything for bruising? I think the author may have just forgotten there’s other sorts of injuries).
Jamie? Mel asked urgently, beginning to feel nervous. I was too comfortable here. She could see the logic of the other path laid out before me, and that frightened her.
The Melanie that dragged her body back to her family is officially gone. She’s at the brainslug’s mercy now, and it’s only whim that keeps them on track.
“It’s very late. You could sleep here if you’d like.”
“I’m not tired. I feel… perfect.”
The Healer grinned. “No Pain does that.”
See, that seems an undesirable side effect. She isn’t actually perfect, she’s tired and she’s lost blood and she still has to heal her injuries, all the brainslugs did was put goop on to encourage healing and seal up the wound. It’d make more sense here for them to be saying that it’s because they need to give her more than usual to block the pain, but that’s impossible – the no-pain meds come in tablet form and anyway, that’d require the healers to be smart enough to judge dosage.
“You did it.” His tone was full of wonder.
“Wasn’t that the idea?”
“Yes, but… I guess I didn’t really think we were going to make it out.”
He figured someone too stupid to know anything about medicine than that it exists wouldn’t be able to actually steal the stuff, presumably.
“It was very easy. Probably any of you could get away with it, if you acted naturally. She did look at my neck.” I touched it reflexively. “Your scar is too obviously homemade, but with the medicines I took, Doc could fix that.”
It would be pretty awesome to find out that there’s actually lots of fake brainslugs running around. We know Sharon was able to walk around a brainslug city.
Anyway, they return and the brainslug wants to be blindfolded even though it’s pointless because she’s so concerned about how the others feel.
“Jared… if they… if they don’t listen… if they don’t wait…” I started talking faster, feeling a sudden pressure, trying to get him all the information before it was too late. “Give Jamie the No Pain first–lay that on his tongue. Then the Inside Clean spray–he just has to inhale it.
In fairness, they really are stupid enough that they probably won’t be able to work this out themselves.
“Look–I’m bringing the jeep in under cover, okay? We’ve got meds for Jamie, and we’re in a hurry. I don’t care what you’re thinking, you’re not going to get in my way tonight.”
And as far as I can tell, Jared does not let them check his eyes but instead alphadogs everyone objecting. It’s idiotic and should end with him getting shot.
“Wanda’s got what we need.” He was moving fast now, sliding downhill.
“I can carry her.” Ian, of course.
“She’s fine where she is.”
And with our return to male human civilization, we return to her being a doll.
Kneeling beside him, her hand still holding a wet cloth to Jamie’s forehead, was Sharon. Her face was almost unrecognizable, it was so contorted with fury. Maggie was struggling to her feet on Jamie’s other side. Jamie still lay limp and red, eyes closed, his chest barely moving to pull in air.
“You!” Sharon spit, and then she launched herself from her crouch. Like a cat, she sprang at Jared, nails reaching for his face.
Also, we return to how evil women are.
“C’mon, Doc,” Ian said. The little room was too crowded, claustrophobic, as Ian came to stand
with his hand on my shoulder. “You gonna let the kid die for your pride?”
“It’s not pride. You don’t know what these foreign substances will do to him!”
That’s bullshit. They know brainslug meds work. Their problem was having no way to get them and not knowing how to use them.
So, she gives him the painkiller and also the anti-fever meds. I’m not sure why the brainslugs have that, actually – fevers are a defense against an illness. If for some reason they can’t get rid of a fever by just removing the illness, then artificially turning it off will just make the person worse.
“Doc, do you have a sharp knife?”
“I have a scalpel. You want me to open the wound?”
“Yes, so I can clean it.”
“I thought about trying that… to drain it, but the pain…”
Well, that answers my question! He really isn’t an actual doctor, because no actual doctor would think this. Doctors have operated on people without painkillers before. A quick cut to drain an already painful wound is nothing, and leaving the pus in ensures he’ll die.
“The fever has cooled, but the infection may remain in his leg. Help me with his wound, Doc.”
Arg. His leg is a seething mas of pus, even if there was no “infection” because it was all sterilized by the clean stuff, it would get infected again immediately.
Then Jamie wakes up and says hi, and for some reason that’s where the chapter ends.