The door to the left slid silently open, and John turned in time to glimpse the corridor beyond as a young man wearing a short white gown and white pants entered.
“Hlo,” he said, “I'm Liao Hasan.” The name was utterly incomprehensible to John, merely noise, even less meaningful than the other Earther names he had encountered. “I'm glad to see you awake.” The man had the thickest Heavener accent John had heard yet, and also had the same odd skin hue and eye formation as the woman who called herself Tuesday. That startled him; could Tuesday have been, not a freak, but a member of an unfamiliar race? John was familiar with the half-dozen varieties of dog on Godsworld, and had heard that on Earth there had similarly been three separate races of people, white, black, and brown, descended from Noah's three sons, but he had never before encountered any kind but his own; none of the original colonists had been Hamitic or Shemitic, though John had never heard any explanation of why the Japethitic race should be the only one to accept the true faith.
This attendant and Tuesday were surely not black, and even calling them brown would be a gross exaggeration, but perhaps they were another human variant that Godsworlders had forgotten.
“Who are you?” John demanded. “What am I doing here?” His voice cracked on the final word.
“I'm Liao Hasan; I'm a medical assistant here. You were brought here badly burned after your army was nuked three weeks ago; we've regrown your skin and repaired what other damage we found."
John ignored the claims of miraculous healing. “Nuked?” he asked.
“Yes, nuked; your army was destroyed with a clean fusion bomb. Intense heat in a very small area, but only a small shockwave, and virtually no fallout or secondary radiation at all-there's no fission, it's just an overload of a fusion power plant, not really a bomb at all."
John did not pretend to understand any of this explanation. “What happened to the others?” he asked.
Hesitantly, the man said something that John could not make out.
“It is not polite to speak in a language the patient does not understand, sir,” the neutral voice replied.
“Ah… all right, Cuddles, have it your way. Answer my question; am I authorized to tell him that?” John noticed that the ‘medical assistant’ did not look at the window when he spoke, but simply addressed the air over John's head.
“Yes, sir,” Cuddles replied calmly. “There are no additional restrictions on information for this patient."
“Well, we aren't sure how many people you had there to begin with; the central part of the advancing group was vaporized. There were even a few burns in the retreating group-that was a serious miscalculation. Out of the advancing group, we saved one hundred forty-seven men and one woman. Oh, and two horses. We aren't as good with horses-there aren't any back home."
“One hundred forty-seven men?"
“That's right."
“I had… well, after the split, I reckon I had six thousand men."
“I'm sorry."
John struggled to grasp the scope of the disaster. “The others are all dead?"
“It's possible a few fled before our rescue team arrived; I can't say for sure. The only reason you survived was that you were well ahead of the main body. The woman and about half a dozen men were up front; the rest were at the back. We were trying to avoid the retreating group."
“So I'm in your infirmary now?"
“We call it a hospital, but yes."
“And you're a doctor?"
“No, I'm a medical assistant-a nurse."
John stared for a moment, then dismissed the incongruity of a man claiming to be a nurse.
“Who's Cuddles? A doctor?"
“Oh, no, of course not! It's a comsim.” The final word was not any part of the Godsworlder version of English; the ‘medical assistant’ pronounced it even more strangely than he pronounced more familiar words.
“A what? Say it slowly."
“A comsim,” the young man repeated carefully.
John dug back in his memory, picking through the faint memories of childhood lessons about Earth and man's history there.
“Comsymp?” he asked, “Communist sympathizer?"
“No, no, comsim; computer simulation. It's not real, it's just an image the machines use to talk to you."
“Oh!” John had heard stories about machines that talked, machines that thought, or flew, or swam, or whatever, but he had not always believed them completely. He looked at the window; Cuddles smiled and nodded.
“Yes, I am a computer simulation,” Cuddles said. The image suddenly distorted and then reshaped itself, and John abruptly realized that what he had taken for a window was a screen of some kind on which the image of a face was projected.
“Cuddles, do you need me here?” Liao Hasan asked.
“No, I do not think I do,” Cuddles replied. “If the patient has no objection, you may continue your rounds."
“Do you mind if I go? Cuddles will take better care of you than I could, anyway, Mister… I didn't get your name."
With his army destroyed, John saw no need to dissemble-and he did not seriously doubt that his army was defeated, though perhaps not as thoroughly obliterated as the Heaveners claimed. “John Mercy-of-Christ, Armed Guardian of the True Word and Flesh,” he replied.
“Mister Mercy-of-Christ. Glad to have met you.” He turned to go.
“Wait!” John croaked.
The medical assistant turned back.
“What happened to my people?"
“I told you…"
“No, not the army; I mean my tribe."
“The True Worders? Oh, they've joined our protectorate as a client state; the treaty was signed four days ago. Cuddles can show you the tapes, if you like."
John looked back at the screen; the computer's bland artificial face gazed mildly back as Liao Hasan departed. “Would you like to see the tape of the treaty signing?” it asked.
“Yes,” John said, unsure of the proper way to address a machine.
“Do you have a preferred format?"
“Ah… no."
“Very well.” The face vanished from the screen, and John found himself looking at a gathering of people at a peculiar angle, as if peering up through a basement window. He was shocked to recognize all the Elders, and Habakkuk, on one side; on the other were various strangers in peculiar brightly-colored clothing.
The sounds of formal conversation swelled to fill the room, and John watched in horror as each of the Elders in turn first signed a paper, then pressed his hand to a metal plate. Finally, Habakkuk's turn came, and the ceremony hit a snag.
“This says ‘Armed Guardian of the True Word and Flesh'; that's not right,” said Habakkuk's familiar voice. “We don't know for certain John's dead, and you haven't deposed him. I'm just Acting Guardian."
“Just sign it and add ‘Acting’ after your name, then,” Lazarus replied.
“Let's get it over with,” Jacob called.
Uncertain, Habakkuk glanced about.
“Listen, even if John turns up alive, do you think we'll keep him around after what happened?” Paul Baptised-in-Fire demanded. “You're the Armed Guardian now, Habakkuk, like it or not. Sign the treaty; they want a military authority, and you're the best one we've got."
“All right,” Habakkuk said, as John struggled to rise to a sitting position. He accepted the pen and signed.
“Stop!” John called.
The scene vanished instantly, leaving the blank wall panel.
“You said that was four days ago?"
“Yes."
“Oh.” John sank back. A thought occurred to him. “You said a hundred and forty-seven men survived; what happened to them all?"
“One hundred and six were treated and released, and I have no information on their subsequent actions. Thirty-eight, including yourself, are now conscious but still hospitalized; all are due to be released shortly. Three are still comatose; one of those three may not survive, or at any rate may have suffered irreversible brain damage. Of the total, sixty-two ignored the warning to cover their eyes and may still be suffering impaired vision."
“What about the woman?"
“Miriam Humble-Before-God has been conscious and fit for release for over a day now, but refuses to leave until you do, Mr. Mercy-of-Christ. She left a message for you, to be delivered at your request."