–––––––
The next thing I remember with any degree of clarity
is that the clock on the wall read five o’clock, and I could tell by the gloom
that it was early in the morning. I blinked, feeling more awake than before,
and pressed the pad under my hand.
In a moment a pair of nurses arrived, both female,
wearing pale blue uniforms, and they seemed vaguely familiar somehow. They put
on a dim light, raised the upper part of the bed a little, and helped me to
drink. There was a cabinet at my left that held the disposable cup from which I
had been drinking.
As one of the nurses, standing at my left, helped me
to drink, I realised that the other was on the other side of the large bed, on
my right, doing something. As my brain cleared a little more, I looked
sluggishly in that direction, and realised that there was another patient in
the bed with me: a thurga.
For an instant my drug-addled brain thought it was an
animal, as thurga-a do resemble brushtail possums in many ways, though they
have longer limbs and are the size of a large domestic cat; and it was mostly
covered by the bedclothes, as I was, as it lay on its back over a metre away
from me. Its furry, dark brown arms, with their hands like a rat’s forepaws,
lay on the sheets that reached to its chest. As the creature’s bright dark eyes
looked back at me from its dark-furred face, I recognised it as a thurga: a
native of the planet on which I was living and working.
“Daniel,” said the nurse on my left, very gently,
“have you met Toro-a-Ba?”
In that instant, a curious and terrifying thing
happened. It was as though my brain realised long before I did that something
was horribly wrong. Whether it was the nurse’s tones or the puzzling sight of
the thurga sharing my hospital bed or something else, I do not know; but a sick
chill gripped my heart. I stared stupidly at the thurga, which held my gaze.
“No,” I murmured, not understanding why I felt such
trepidation.
“Daniel, you and Toro-a-Ba have undergone the same
surgery.”
“Oh,” I mumbled, wondering vaguely why the thurga’s
surgery was relevant to mine.
“Hello, Daniel,” the thurga said to me softly, in
English, and there was what seemed like great tenderness in its voice, almost
as though it knew me well. Something about this seemed very wrong to me, but I
could not understand what. Perhaps I was supposed to know this thurga. To a
human, many thurga-a look very similar, so perhaps I did know this one and
simply didn’t recognise it, or something … My head felt so muzzy and bewildered
…
“Hello,” I mumbled blankly in reply, still regarding
the thurga.
But I was weary already, just from being awake, so I
rolled my head back to its normal position of looking straight ahead, and my
eyes closed almost without my command, and drowsiness subsumed me. I barely
felt the hospital bed being lowered gently back into its almost-horizontal position
beneath me.
And even as I drifted to welcome sleep, something in
the back of my mind squirmed uneasily.
–––––––
We Are Both Mammals will soon be published on Smashwords, where it will be available to download in a variety of formats for a small price. You'll also be able to find it at a number of other online booksellers.
