The Ertian Surgeon
Role: Elderly empire trauma surgeon. First-person narrator of Ch. 05 — A Dictionary, writing the memoir for the Empiral Archive. Affiliation: Galactic Human Empire — professionally. Politically, a cynical near-retiree. Era: Late empire. Born on Orb Dannika, practised there in emergency medicine, then on Aerth, then on Orb Ertia; took a topolog to Aerth in old age.
Summary
Name never given. A hardened trauma surgeon who claims to have “seen perhaps a thousand patients die” and who thought, before the Vasily Incident, that he would never be shocked again. He trained and practised his residency on Orb Dannika — the mining world — treating “oxygen burns, plasma gashes, limbs missing and stumps that pissed blood all about the place.” After Dannika he moved to Aerth, married Henrietta, and then fled the stale marriage to Orb Ertia — a four-hundred-year longsleep journey he frames, with weary self-knowledge, as “one way to overcome marital issues.”
On Ertia he settled into a valley cottage a mile from a small southern-continent hospital where “the most pressing ailment of the day was often a broken leg or a botched suicide attempt.” Several years pass pleasantly before the Vasily disintegrates in the TZ star’s orbit and he is press-ganged aboard by Tabitha Dimitrova as part of an emergency medical boarding party. Inside the wreck he finds and saves Ivan Tellinger, the bifurcated but still-conscious survivor of Lab 9 Phi.
He bluffs Dimitrova into telling him the real nature of the incident (the TZ sphere, the dictionary), at the cost of being threatened with a scalpel and with indirect retaliation against his great-great-niece Eda Hamebe. He goes on to spend eleven more years on Ertia and then, refusing gerontological drugs (“I will be going out in the standard fashion”), takes a topolog back to Aerth to meet Eda before death. He arrives in a thoroughly modified late-empire Aerth — implants in every face, chimney-orange skies, unrecognisable cuisine — and finds Eda and her family on a farm in Winchester, implant-free. Over dinner she shows him The Dictionary, tells him Henrietta remarried and has been dead two centuries, and offers to walk him to the grave the next morning. The story ends with him tired and a little wet-eyed, agreeing.
His running meditation through the chapter is on ageing as a cruel inversion — meaning arrives just as the body fails — and on the decline of the empire through the faces of its officials: “The empire is old already, wearing thin at the edges of its influence. Great unkindness is now necessary to preserve the state of things.”
Appearances
- Ch. 05 — A Dictionary: POV throughout.
Related
- Henrietta — first wife, long dead.
- Eda Hamebe — great-great-niece, his last known living relative.
- Tabitha Dimitrova — empire official he bluffs into speaking.
- Ivan Tellinger — the half-a-corpse he finds alive on the Vasily.
- Orb Ertia, Orb Dannika, Aerth, Winchester
- Vasily Incident, The Dictionary, Topology Casting
Open questions
- Name, never stated.
- How did his memoir reach the Empiral Archive, given the existence of Dimitrova’s threat against Eda? Either Dimitrova’s successors forgot; Eda’s fate was never retaliated against; or the leak from the “science division on Rosance” made the whole subject public anyway.
- Whether he ever makes it to Henrietta’s grave is outside the story’s frame.