He could imagine Angel smiling through her surgical mask.
“Miles?” she said.
“I dunno…”
“Please…”
“If it were anyone else but you and her, I wouldn’t. OK, Angel, my ass is on the line now too. Do it good, lady.”
Angel glanced back at Thorny. “Looks like all our rears are uncovered,” he said.
“OK I’m going to reestablish cardiopulmonary bypass and cardioplegia.”
What happened next was a blur, like watching the operation on a fast forward. Unhindered by human reaction time, Angel showed her full range of talents. Much more now, Thorny realized, than what the consortium had built into her. Tools seemed to fly into her hands as she plucked them off their trays unerringly. Microwaldos buzzed like hummingbirds. Thorny could follow only the large-scale details in real time. The heart was stopped and laid open, the valve repaired, and the entry closed in a matter of minutes. Angel restarted the heart as the doors to the OR flew open.
“You can’t do that, Angel! Benson, make her stop!” Creighton shouted as he caught on to what was in progress. A first, Thorny realized—Creighton had addressed Angel directly, admitting, essentially, her personhood. However, Thorny thought grimly, it was too late, and he would choose to ignore Creighton’s accidental trip to reality.
“No,” Thorny responded, “Angel and I can do it. With Angel, I can do more than any specialist, and be a friend to my patients as well. You should consider retraining in family practice, Elvis—you might learn to like it.”
“Do you want to close, Dr. Creighton?” Angel asked, surgically.
Angel’s next appearance before the Director was at a meeting of the full medical staff in the ground floor auditorium. Winter was in full cold bore again outside, and the coat racks were full of greatcoats and stocking caps, not a few of which were hand-knit white with big red hearts on them; Thorny’s yarn bill was beginning to get significant.
Linda Coombs was accounting for some of that; Thorny was helping her finance her boutique by buying the raw material. Last he heard, she was getting friendly with a skier who’d bought a sweater from her. She was writing a book about her experience, with Angel’s memory to help, of course.
The atmosphere in the meeting was much more friendly this time, now that Elvis Creighton no longer sat as department head. The “official” line was that Creighton had resigned from the staff to pursue a better employment opportunity in another state. But word travels fast in a hospital, and everyone was talking of how the Director had invited him to review, in her presence, a huge folder filled with formal complaints filed against him by patients and staff—the last few from Linda and Nurse Miles.
When he was done, the story went, she had smiled thinly and raised both eyebrows.
Thorny’s report and recommendations concerning Angel had been accepted, unconditionally.
“Angel,” the Director called. “Would you come up here?”
Angel smiled and walked up to the dais. The Director first handed her a frame wrapped in brown paper, which Angel unwrapped. She read what was in the frame and gave a squeal of delight.
“What is it?” Nurse Miles called out.
“It says I’ve completed my internship!” Angel gushed. “Thank you! But how did you manage that without my being a person?”
There was a bit of a gleam in the Director’s eyes as she answered, and a twitch upward at the corners of her normally severely straight, thin, lips. “Forgive me if I found an obstetrician’s solution to that little problem. This,” she produced a simple vanilla envelope and read it, “is for you, Dr. C. Thornhart Benson. Congratulations.”
He went forward and accepted the envelope. Angel looked at them in confusion.
Thorny opened it and then laughed hard and long. “Well, assuming this holds up in court—”
An eyebrow went up and Thorny coughed a retreat. “Ahem. Angel, it appears I’ve finally become a father. It’s a birth certificate. Yours.”