The staff have nicknamed him “the General,” for no clear reason; perhaps because there is something grand and military in his posture and the fierceness of his eye? I would not assume from the name that he was, in fact, an officer or even a soldier. The staff have given at least seven other patients the same unimaginative nickname, for equally trivial reasons. (There are also four “Barons” and innumerable “Princesses.”)
At first G seemed a hopeless case. He responds to nothing, and hardly moves. But his eyes are intelligent, and sad. Where we know nothing, we must admit that we know nothing, and trust to intuition. I propose to begin with the electrical therapy.
She took Daisy—Colla, her name was Colla, but it was terribly difficult not to think of her as Daisy—out into the garden. The grass was a hardy desert species, sharp to the touch, and the flowers were battered and dusty and harshly colored, and the garden was full of large red rocks. Still, the girl seemed to like it.
Through gentle motions, Liv encouraged her to sit.
“Colla,” she said. “It’s nice to get outside, isn’t it.”
Those huge eyes darted to the band of blue sky visible between the canyon’s towering walls.
“You like to ride horses, don’t you, Colla?”
The eyes fixed intently on Liv then darted away.
“Colla—”
“Oh, Daisy, my dear, had I only the flair, to pen you a verse that’s as fair as your hair, or the perfume you wear, then I wouldn’t be in such a state of despair over you. . . .”
“Yes, Colla. I wonder where you first heard that song. Did someone sing it to you? A young man? Do you—?”
Daisy lurched suddenly to her feet. Still singing, she ran madly down the garden path, fell, cut her scalp on a rock, and lay there grinning and bloody, curled like a baby, and always still singing.
To Liv’s chagrin, Dr. Hamsa had been leaning against the back wall of the House, smoking and watching the whole affair.
“Bravo,” he said. “A triumph of modern science. Whatever would we do if you weren’t here to show us the way.”
The West Wing of the Doll House held a number of doctors and surgeons. They were a crude lot. Nearly all of them were military men, and they approached disease and injury like an enemy, to be cut out or bludgeoned into submission. They liked to be called “Doc” or “Sawbones” and Liv could never keep their names straight. The distinction between surgeons on the one hand and guards and porters and handymen on the other was not rigorous, and seemed to depend mostly on who’d happened to have brought a saw with them when they drifted into the House’s shadow. That they didn’t kill more people was surely a tribute to the healing power of the Spirit below.
The East Wing, where the mad patients were kept, had only two doctors, not counting Liv. One was a Mr. Bloom, who wasn’t really a doctor at all, but a Smiler, who bothered the patients with pamphlets and meeting circles and encouragement to “buck up.” The other was Dr. Hamsa, who claimed proudly to have studied at Vansittart University in Jasper City. Liv was only passingly familiar with the institution. If Hamsa was typical of its graduates, she was not impressed. She suspected he might have been expelled. He was unshaven, slovenly, seedy. He abused medications for recreational purposes. He had a simple and rigid theory of psychological correspondences, according to which each patient’s psychic wound was supposed to mirror some physical wound sustained at some point during their lives, the soul-stuff being composed of the same matter as the body: so that aphasia was a sign of an injury to the jaw; hysteria, of course, arose from damage to the womb; and mania was connected for unclear reasons to injuries of the hands. When he first explained this to her, Liv gently offered obvious counterexamples. He never forgave her.
Both of them regarded the victims of the mind-bombs as hopeless.
“The cause is very simple,” Hamsa said. “Engines did this. Their noise brutalizes every part of the body and soul at once and leaves nothing behind. Therefore the Spirit is powerless to heal them, because there is nothing to heal; and because, though the Spirit is strong, the Engines are stronger. Cleverer. I know you think you’re cleverer than us, but are you cleverer than them?”
“Buck up,” Bloom said. “Some things aren’t meant to be. The trick is to keep