I graduated with good enough grades. They might have been a lot better, if it hadn’t been for the long list of ruined instruments, slides, and optical microscopes.
Good thing they didn’t make me pay for them, or I’d still be deep in debt.
On top of that, I had the great good luck of getting a call just two weeks later, when I was still trying to figure out how to open my own practice, from Dr. Raúl Pineda, one of the epidemiology professors who had made me suffer at the university.
I had once told him, half seriously and half in jest, that when I had nothing else to do and a lot of free time, I’d love to work with him.
Well, now he was taking me at my word. Did I have anything especially urgent to do over the next couple of weeks? No? Beautiful. On Jurassia, the planet where ninety percent of the dinosaurs cloned by Parimazo genetic technology live, an epidemic of constipation had suddenly broken out. There weren’t enough local veterinarian biologists to deal with the poor obstructed lizards, and since they’d asked Professor Pineda for help, and he knew how much I liked working with large-scale fauna, he thought that maybe…
I’ll never know if he was serious about it or just making a sarcastic joke.
But I rushed there straight away, and I’ve never regretted it.
I learned more about super-extra-grande veterinarian biology in those three weeks on Jurassia than I had in seven years of classroom study at Anima Mundi.
Before long, even the cocky team at the local bio theme park, whose members considered themselves the unrivaled experts on dinosaurs, starting listening to and respecting my opinions, even though I was just a novice.
I demonstrated a special intuition for the anatomy of those giant lizards. I seemed to know instinctively where to inject a stegosaurus with half a kilo of intravenous sedatives in order to knock out not only its tiny brain but also the medullar control center back by its rear hips, which controls, among other things, its highly dangerous tail spikes.
From just a glance at an eighty-ton seismosaur writhing on the ground in pain, I could tell its digestive system was incapable on its own of expelling the fecaloma obstructing it. By palpating bare-handed near the base of its tail, I determined where best to apply the ultrasound generator and break up the stone by extracorporeal lithotripsy, allowing the creature to evacuate the obstruction without further pointless suffering.
I was the only one whom the fierce tyrannosaurs and spinosaurs allowed to get close enough to administer the miraculous warm-oil enemas that calmed their howling pain.
By the end of my third week there, the epidemic was over. It had been caused by a local microorganism, its morphology a cross between coccus and spirillum. As so often happens, for years no one even suspected its existence—but from one day to the next it entered an especially virulent phase in its centuries-long life supercycle.
On Jurassia they were ready to erect a statue of me. Novice or not, I’d saved their world’s most important source of income, dedicated as they all were to biotourism. As for the dinosaurs I’d treated, I had them literally eating from my hand.
Speaking of tyrannosaurs and spinosaurs, well, it wasn’t so easy to keep them from eating my hand along with the food. They’re predators, after all, and not terribly bright, and the truth is, they weren’t too clear about where affection ends and abuse of friendship begins.
For my part, I deeply regretted not being able to deal with anything bigger than the seismosaur—which was extra grande, at most. Big, sure, but still not a genuine extra extra grande.
That was when I decided what my professional specialty would be: super-extra-grande animals, perfect for a guy with my body type and manual dexterity—or rather, my lack thereof.
With the not inconsiderable savings I had salted away from working in the mythological holovision series on Anima Mundi, plus a little extra help kicked in by my parents and my already established classmates João de Oliveira and the Amphorian Murgh-Jauk-Larh, I rented an office in the capital of Gea, the most populous Third Wave world, hired my first secretary-assistant, Enti Kmusa, and with an enthusiasm that my skeptical parents both thought I should have reserved for a better cause, I started treating the diseases and afflictions of the largest living creatures in the known universe.
That was my first slogan.
It’s been a few years since then, and I can say without fear of exaggeration that more tons of flesh or cytoplasm have passed through my hands than through anyone else’s.
I simply have no rivals in my specialty. I’ve worked on everything, so long as it’s really big—from threshers infected with a space virus that rotted their hydrogen collector traps to titan leeches on Swampia with gills contaminated by an oxygenated water leak from a nearby Kerkant refinery.
There’s only a handful of problematic giants I haven’t treated yet.
First off, concholants: a species of small (I know that isn’t the best word, but…) living Dyson spheres, which surround medium-sized asteroids with their shells and then devour them to the last molecule. These silicon-based space life forms are so rare and so little is known about them that we can’t even determine with any certainty whether one is alive or dead. Not to mention sick or healthy.
Second, the hissing dragons of Siddhartha. Not because they’re rare or problematic, but because nobody’s too interested in making a pet of a forty-meter-long cockroach that eats anything that falls into its mouth and excretes clouds of sulfurous vapor whenever it’s disturbed. I think there are only four or five specimens in all the zoos in the galaxy. But I’m patient; when one does fall ill, I’m sure they’ll call me to take care of it.
And third, last but not least, of course, my great dream: the laketons of Brobdingnag. The most enormous creatures in the galaxy…
Here, strictly speaking, if this were my autobiography, I’d have to start talking about them, but…
“Boss Sangan, mensaje importante.” Narbuk’s screech shakes me out of my pleasantly lethargic reminiscences, brought on by a combination of exhaustion, satisfaction with a job well done, and our gentle ride spaceward.
I half-open my eyes. Some thirty meters from me, which is as far away as you can get in the spacious orbital elevator, my Laggoru secretary-assistant unfurls his gill pleats in a rather unenthusiastic attempt at a greeting—which the gas mask he has on deforms in a way that doesn’t look nice at all.
Narbuk’s insistence on wearing this breathing gadget when he’s with me proves (as if the fact that we’re the only passengers going into orbit aboard this cable car designed for fifty weren’t proof enough) that even taking five decontamination showers wasn’t sufficient to completely rid my skin of the persistent fecal stench from a fish-fed tsunami with grave digestive ailments.
Good thing I can’t smell it anymore.
I just hope it’ll wear off over time—or else my professional practice is going to take a serious hit.
“If it’s esos ecologistas from Abyssalia otra vez, preguntando how soon we’ll get to their planeta, tell them que vayan a fry un eggplant,” I growl, stretching my limbs and radiating bad humor. “Ellos can wait. Grendels aren’t ni siquiera super extra grandes, really. Yo solamente agreed to look into their out-of-season spawning porque… well, let’s say, porque me sentí nostálgico. I have buenos recuerdos of vivisecting them en mis días de estudiante. That’s all. Ahora que lo pienso, didn’t you already tell a ellos que we were in a space elevator? Any idiota knows it takes horas, even días, to reach la órbita estandard de un planeta stationary in one of these cable cars. Though at least de esta forma I don’t have to go through la experiencia of getting squashed by eight g’s of acceleration otra vez. Algo bueno had to come out of Gobernador Tarkon’s penny-pinching, refuseando to book otro shuttle for our return trip y todo.”