Mubende was a district capital, half a day’s drive west of Kampala. Iganga delayed our promised trip to the Yeyuka clinic there until my last fortnight, and once I arrived I could understand why. It was everything I’d feared: starved of funds, under-staffed and over-crowded. Patients’ relatives were required to provide and wash the bedclothes, and half of them also seemed to be bringing in painkillers and other drugs bought at the local markets — some genuine, some ripoffs full of nothing but glucose or magnesium sulphate.
Most of the patients had four or five separate tumours. I treated two people a day, with operations lasting six to eight hours. In ten days, seven people died in front of me; dozens more died in the wards, waiting for surgery.
Or waiting for something better.
I shared a crowded room at the back of the clinic with Masika and Okwera, but even on the rare occasions when I caught Masika alone, he seemed reluctant to discuss the details of getting hold of a bootleg HealthGuard. He said, “Right now, the less you know the better. When the time comes, I’ll fill you in.”
The ordeal of the patients was overwhelming, but I felt more for the clinic’s sole doctor and two nurses; for them, it never ended. The morning we packed our equipment into the truck and headed back for Kampala, I felt like a deserter from some stupid, pointless war: guilty about the colleagues I was leaving behind, but almost euphoric with relief to be out of it myself. I knew I couldn’t have stayed on here — or even in Kampala — month after month, year after year. However much I wished that I could have been that strong, I understood now that I wasn’t.
There was a brief, loud stuttering sound, then the truck squealed to a halt. The four of us were all in the back, guarding the equipment against potholes, with the tarpaulin above us blocking everything but a narrow rear view. I glanced at the others; someone outside shouted in Luganda at Akena Ibingira, the driver, and he started shouting back.
Okwera said, “Bandits.”
I felt my heart racing. “You’re kidding?”
There was another burst of gunfire. I heard Ibingira jump out of the cab, still muttering angrily.
Everyone was looking at Okwera for advice. He said, “Just cooperate, give them what they want.” I tried to read his face; he seemed grim but not desperate — he expected unpleasantness, but not a massacre. Iganga was sitting on the bench beside me; I reached for her hand almost without thinking. We were both trembling. She squeezed my fingers for a moment, then pulled free.
Two tall, smiling men in dirty-brown camouflage appeared at the back of the truck, gesturing with automatic weapons for us to climb out. Okwera went first, but Masika, who’d been sitting beside him, hung back. Iganga was nearer to the exit than me, but I tried to get past her; I had some half-baked idea that this would somehow lessen her risk of being taken off and raped. When one of the bandits blocked my way and waved her forward, I thought this fear had been confirmed.
Masika grabbed my arm, and when I tried to break free, he tightened his grip and pulled me back into the truck. I turned on him angrily, but before I could say a word he whispered, “She’ll be all right. Just tell me: do you want them to take the ring?”
He glanced nervously towards the exit, but the bandits had moved Okwera and Iganga out of sight. “I’ve paid them to do this. It’s the only way. But say the word now and I’ll give them the signal, and they won’t touch the ring.”
I stared at him, waves of numbness sweeping over my skin as I realised exactly what he was saying.
“You could have taken it off under anaesthetic.”
He shook his head impatiently. “It’s sending data back to HealthGuard all the time: cortisol, adrenaline, endorphins, prostaglandins. They’ll have a record of your stress levels, fear, pain…if we took it off under anaesthetic, they’d
His logic was impeccable; I had no reply. I might have started protesting about insurance fraud, but that was all in the future, a separate matter entirely. The choice, here and now, was whether or not I let him have the ring by the only method that wouldn’t raise suspicion.
One of the bandits was back, looking impatient. Masika asked plainly, “Do I call it off? I need an answer.” I turned to him, on the verge of ranting that he’d willfully misunderstood me, abused my generous offer to help him, and put all our lives in danger.
It would have been so much bullshit, though. He hadn’t misunderstood me. All he’d done was taken me at my word.
I said, “Don’t call it off.”
The bandits lined us up beside the truck, and had us empty our pockets into a sack. Then they started taking watches and jewellery. Okwera couldn’t get his wedding ring off, but stood motionless and scowling while one of the bandits applied more force. I wondered if I’d need a prosthesis, if I’d still be able to do surgery, but as the bandit approached me I felt a strange rush of confidence.
I held out my hand and looked up into the sky. I knew that anything could be healed, once it was understood.
“Actually I’ve been wanting to do something on BOFFO [aka humanist sf] for some time…. I was further stimulated by the appearance of [Kim Stanley] Robinson’s ‘Down and Out in the Year 2000’ in the April MOV’S, with its long Gibson parody and slashing backhand to Sterling. This was one of Robinson’s best stories, I thought, and a point well taken. His attempt to seize the moral high ground in the debate seemed a canny attempt to use BOFFO’S perceived strengths — at least vis-a-vis the anomic medical objectivity of true chrome-and-matte-black cyberpunk. Also, Shepard’s amazing ‘R&R’ in that issue seems to capture a kind of Mirrorshades incandescence without in any way kowtowing to shock-effect high-tech.
It seems to me that ‘R&R’ and ‘Down and Out’ both represent a kind of elastic and powerful reaction of other 80s writers to the impact of cyberpunk. A kind of waking from dogmatic slumbers which, without following the c-p line at all, still shows a new kind of alertness and commitment. A sense that the stakes have been raised. A healthy and very encouraging reaction to challenge — and not a blind reaction by any means, but an intelligent and wide-ranging response.”
Pat Cadigan
The Final Remake of The Return of Little Latin Larry, with a Completely Remastered Soundtrack and the Original Audience
Pat Cadigan gives us a variety of VR that aspires to historicity in this witty piece; “fraudulent pasts and faked memories” will get you a kick in the teeth from the authorities. The surface of this story is ornamented with all the bedazzlements of classic cyberpunk: drugs and rock and roll and cyborgs and a technophilic art form. Narrators with an attitude have always been a specialty of Cadigan and here Gracie lays down a line of pharmaceutical quality wisecracks and caustic insight. But what informs this story is its pervasive sense of irony: this culture, so desperate to recover a lost past, has got it pretty much all wrong.
So! Fix yourself a smell and sit down!
There’s a wet bar, too, if you go that way. You know, for years I told myself I didn’t, even though I always kept a full complement of cheers, vines, and the hards and their pards. I’d say to myself, Oh, but of course the hooch is strictly for hospitality and nothing else.
But now, I’m out about it and I really feel much more non-bad about it. And wasn’t it Elvis who said, “Drinkers, like the poor, we will always have with us”?
