Chapter 13 — Vehicle
Freezing rain played a staccato on the farm house’s roof as its farmer wheezed in his bed. Yvette sat at his bedside as the farmer’s wife and a handful of their children awaited her prognosis. The farmer’s name was Conor, or maybe Cormac, the wife’s name started with an ‘M’, Yvette was sure of it, and the children’s names… she couldn’t remember. Rína had handled introductions and other social pleasantries, bless the girl, with Yvette only having to occasionally nod politely.
She turned her attention fully to the bedridden man coughing up phlegm. Similar to how one’s fingers might blindly plunge through an overstuffed pocket or purse in search of a specific object, so too did Yvette plunge soul threads beyond counting into his body. It only took a moment to locate the bacteria causing the illness, and all without the man being any the wiser. It was one of the local species she had encountered before, though she hadn’t seen this specific, particularly aggressive strain. With half of her attention she began tearing apart what invading bacteria she could find, while the other half of her attention went to the man’s lymph nodes.
He was perhaps fifty years old and it showed in his immune system’s response time. He had reportedly started showing symptoms days ago and yet the majority of the body’s defensive measures had still yet to fully activate. No matter. Yvette had the protein signature of the bacteria’s membrane; it was just a matter of modifying and activating a number of immune cells to target the signature, and then repeating the process a few dozen times across his body.
Yvette had always found immune systems, human or otherwise, to be a kind of paradox. At once they were incredibly effective and prone to subversion. Both an elegant dance of various subsystems and a mess of pieces that only just scraped by. One unequivocal shortcoming however was that immune systems generally could not share information and thus immunity among members of the same species. Ironic that so much of humanity’s success came from cooperation and communal knowledge and yet the human immune system—
“So what do you recon?” rasped the man.
Yvette’s glazed over eyes snapped into focus, “Hm? Oh, it is just—”
“That she’ll have to check your breathing,” Rína cut in.
Yvette gave the girl a quizzical look.
“As well as your pulse, just for starters.” Rína continued.
“Oh, of *cough* course,” the man said, wearily sitting up and proffering his wrist to Yvette.
She silently admonished herself as she put her fingers to his wrist, making physical contact with him for the first time.
“Uh, ah yes. Very interesting.” Yvette said after several heartbeats before pressing her ear to the back of his chest, “Now take a deep breath… Now a shallow one… Now… lift both arms above your head and cough.”
The man did as he was instructed before Yvette pulled back.
“Yes, well that concludes my inspection… which was very informative.” Yvette managed.
“How bad is it? Will my Conor be alright?” the woman asked as she nervously combed her fingers through her hair.
Yvette considered, “Illnesses like these come in a wide variety of severities, but I expect he will make a fast recovery.”
“We see cases like this all the time,” Rína reassured, “In fact, we have some medicine specifically for this kind of thing in our wagon. At least, I think we still have some in stock. Right Yvette?”
Yvette nodded, catching on, “Yes, we do. And it happens to taste similar to herbal tea.”
“Well thank you very much,” the man weakly bowed his head, “but it could taste like goat piss for all I care, so long as it gets me out of this bed.”
Minutes later the man was sipping from a freshly brewed cup of tea and the woman was reaching for her coin purse.
“How much do we owe you? We don’t have much but—”
Yvette waved her off, “The fodder for our oxen was payment enough.”
“Nonsense,” the woman frowned, “at least let us feed the two of you dinner; it’s about time for it anyhow.”
“Thank you, b—” Yvette began.
“We’d love to.” Rína interrupted, shooting Yvette a challenging glare.
Yvette conceded with a shrug, “Very well.”
The meal was a simple fare shared across a table that was soon filled with lighthearted conversation. Rína once again took the lead, trading stories of village life and deflecting the family’s questions about their time as traveling healers. Yvette meanwhile was allowed to merely give the occasional single word response, and with nothing better to do, she returned her attention to the man’s body.
His recovery was a foregone conclusion, but there were still pathogenic bacteria that his bolstered immune system hadn’t gotten to yet—bacteria Yvette idly tore apart as she widened her search. She also found a worrying amount of plaque building up in one of his arteries which she took great care in breaking down so as not to cause an embolism downstream. His knee cartilage was also looking thin, and of course the infection had left scar tissue in his lungs—for all of its self healing ability, the human body still seemed content to let large sections of itself fall to disrepair. Yvette figured that she may as well give the bodies of the woman and her children a check as well, seeing as they may have caught what their father had—not to mention that Yvette had spied an unpleasant looking rash poking up from the collar of one of the children…
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The next morning amid a light snow, Rína waved goodbye to the farming family as Yvette drove the wagon onward. After a night’s rest, Conor was back on his feet with a broad smile on his face, energetically waving farewell, while Meara looked to be just as happy with her husband back in good health. As the family’s farmhouse disappeared behind a bend, Rína turned to Yvette and reflexively lowered her voice despite their privacy.
“So how bad was it actually?” Rína asked.
“It was a severe bacterial infection of the lungs that was beginning to spread into his bloodstream; what would a Weaver call this?”
Rína scrunched her brow, trying to recall one of their more recent lessons, “That’s… severe pneumonia and early stage sepsis—shit.”
Yvette nodded, “And perhaps in a week or two, assuming his body couldn’t fight off the infection?”
“Organ failures.” Rína said as her stomach dropped, “And you wanted to just keep going down the road. Aren’t you glad I insisted we check in on him?”
Yvette nodded begrudgingly, “I am. They seemed like good people. And in my defense that farmhand greatly downplayed the man’s condition.”
“Well then maybe we could make this a habit? You know, check in on and cure sick folks? And before you say it, I know we can’t be too obvious about it, but if we have plausible deniability on our side, why not?”
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“Hmm, so long as we are careful to not draw the wrong kind of attention, I suppose we could.”
“Perfect. Plus this way you get to meet new people, make connections, maybe make a friend—and yeah, a lot of them will be sick, but that just means that they’ll be happy to see you.”
Yvette eyed Rína suspiciously, “I think you are already doing enough socialization for the two of us—something for which I am grateful, by the way.”
“Well, you’re welcome. But, you know, you could always take a page out of my book,” Rína paused to look Yvette in the eye, “We’ll probably never see any of them again—hells, this is probably the first and last time we’ll see this whole village—but that doesn’t mean we can’t tell dumb jokes, or trade exaggerated stories. It’s all temporary, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile.”
Yvette frowned, “You sound like my brother… And we’ll see in a century if you have the same outlook.” Yvette said, eliciting a subtle wince from Rína, “Even then, if I were to ‘take a page out of your book’, it’s not like there are many farm boys with whom it would be appropriate for me to flirt.”
“What?” Rína balked.
“I do not mean to admonish your romantic decisions, it is simply that for me to—”
“No, I mean: I don’t flirt with people—ever.”
“What about last night, after dinner? You were laughing with one of the farmer’s sons—the tall one that was about your age?”
“You mean Rory? No, he and I were just hanging out.”
“Huh. I suppose I just assumed. Whenever you looked at him, his heart would start to flutter—at first I thought the poor boy had heart palpitations or arrhythmia.”
“Oh. Uh, no. Yeah, I’ve never been interested in romance, and that goes double for all that…” Rína grimaced as she vaguely waved her hand, “...other stuff. Wait, why were you spying on his heart rate?”
“To ensure he was healthy, of course.”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t your patient. At least Conor agreed to be treated, even if we had to lie about how exactly you were doing it.”
“I fail to see how that’s relevant. But I suppose if any of them felt cheated of the opportunity to slowly die of a preventable disease, I will have to apologize.”
Rína shot Yvette an admonishing look, “Permission and a person’s privacy is always relevant—you should have asked first.”
“If there was any risk involved with what I was doing, I would agree with you, but there wasn’t; it was an unambiguous benefit. I didn’t ask for permission for the same reason you wouldn’t ask permission to pluck a plant burr out of someone’s hair. Also, if I had sought permission then I would have had to go through a stilted performance of traditional healthcare for each and every one of them.”
“It still seems pretty dodgy… Hold on,” Rína narrowed her eyes on Yvette, “do you ever go looking inside my body?”
“Of course. It would be irresponsible of me not to.” Yvette stated matter of factly.
Rína was briefly dumbstruck by the audacity of the woman’s statement, “I—Th—H… What the fuck!”
“Pardon?” Yvette said with a look of confusion.
“What do you mean ‘Pardon’!?” Rína snarled, “Why the fuck would you think it was ok for you to look into my body?”
Yvette had the gall to continue looking confused, “Because you are my apprentice? You even consented to being such, just as the farmer consented to be my patient.”
Rína immediately found her chest heaving and her blood pounding through her body.
“Just because someone agrees to be your apprentice doesn’t mean you can look up their SKIRT! And Hells! With Rory and the rest of them, I get it: they might have caught what their dad had, and you couldn’t just tell them you were a Weaver. But you could have done the BARE MINIMUM and asked me. So again: WHY. THE FUCK. DID YOU THINK. THAT WAS OK!?”
Yvette seemed taken aback, with concern of all things passed across her face, “There was no salacious intent, if that is your concern. As your teacher it is my responsibility to ensure you are healthy. And that is a duty of mine that I never intend to shirk.”
Rína forced herself to take a deep breath as her fingernails dug into her palms, “But why. Didn’t you. Ask permission?” Rína nearly spat between clenched teeth.
Yvette frowned, “I apologize. If I thought you would feel this way, I would have asked. In truth the thought hadn’t occurred to me. If, say…” Yvette paused to consider, “If the driver of a mundane wagon were to find that a professional cartwright, whom they trusted, had repaired their wagon free of charge and without their permission. Would the driver have any reason to object?”
Rína took another deep breath, “Yeah, obviously not, but we’re talking about my body, not some random cart.”
Confusion returned to Yvette’s face, “Why would you think the two were qualitatively different?”
“Hells, now you’re just trying to make me angry. A cart is just some chunk of wood that gets you from A to B and my body is me—” Rína cut herself off. Yvette raised an eyebrow and opened her mouth to respond, but Rína knew what was coming.
“Shove it up your ass,” Rína preempted, “If you really thought bodies are just vehicles for our souls then where the hells does your modesty come from? Why the hells haven’t I seen you prancing around naked?”
Yvette snorted, “Whoever said I had any?”
Rína balked, “What?”
“It’s true. As for why I don’t go ‘prancing around’, as you say?” Yvette said, “Well, first and foremost, comfortable clothing is comfortable to wear, if you can believe it. And clothing is an effective way at hiding the fact that I don’t possess a typical human skeleton.”
To illustrate, Yvette pulled the collar of her blouse—normally kept tight around her throat—open and to the side. Confusion briefly overtook Rína’s anger as she looked at the woman’s exposed shoulder. At first glance, hers looked like that of a regular woman’s, albeit more muscular. But a moment later, Rína spotted an absence that became glaring once she noticed it.
Yvette did not have a collarbone. True, her shoulder had the general shape of having one, but where there should have been a kind of divot or valley between the collarbone and the rest of the shoulder, there was just a continuous curve.
“You see? The parlor trick of a doppelganger is the least of the modifications I’ve made to my own vehicle.” Yvette said, “And it will be just a matter of time before you begin making modifications to your own.”
Rína’s anger cooled slightly as she reassessed the woman. Her imagination wanted to run off with daydreams of future possibilities, but she kept herself in the present.
“You genuinely see our bodies as just machines.”
“Of course,” Yvette nodded, “‘See the soul, not the flesh’ after all. And to clarify, I do not see our bodies as machines. Our bodies are machines—it is a fact. Granted, they are incredibly complex machines, but machines they are nonetheless. The only true self we may lay claim to is our soul—and even then, only its innermost reaches.”
Rína narrowed her eyes, her anger cooling further, “But what about all that stuff about making your body a self portrait? You really don’t feel any need for privacy of your body?”
“No, at least beyond the general need to keep the fact that I am a Weaver a secret. And while I stand by my body as a self portrait, it’s not like I have my deepest hopes and fears written on my labia.”
“Pfffffh,” Rína burst into a chuckle, “Oh gods, the mental image of that…” Rína let her laughter flow freely, but once it was done, she glared at Yvette, “You know I’m still pissed.”
“And I respect that… Here,” Yvette said before continuing in a solemn tone, “I swear to you on my name and profession that I shall not affect nor perceive your body in any way without your full, informed consent.”
Rína continued to glare as she mulled over the impromptu oath. There were bound to be edge cases and loopholes, but no matter the words, it would always be a matter of trust and intent.
“Hmm… Well… Apology accepted.” Rína eventually managed.
The two women continued in silence as the pair of oxen pulled them ever forward, away from the current valley and on through a pass to the next. The silence was eventually broken when light laughter bubbled up from Rína.
“Hmm? What is it?” Yvette asked.
“I was just thinking. It would hurt like the hells, but if you had to get some secret codeword, or whatever, tattooed on your body…” Rína gave an exaggerated shrug, “I mean, that would actually be a pretty good spot.”
Yvette tittered before her expression turned to faux seriousness, “Well my student, you should know that the first lesson of espionage… is to keep your lips shut.”
“Oh, gods, that’s awful,” Rína shook her head, but still couldn’t help but laugh.