Surgery
The assistant led him across the courtyard to a whitewashed adobe building in the rear.
A bay that held four iron beds all empty. He bathed in a large riveted copper boiler
that looked to have been salvaged from a ship and he lay on the rough mattress and
listened to children playing somewhere beyond the wall. He did not sleep. When they
came for him he was still drunk. He was led out and laid on a trestle in an empty
room adjoining the bay and the assistant pressed an icy cloth to his nose and told him
to breathe deeply.
The kid's nightmare
In that sleep and in sleeps to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A
great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents he was something
wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his
origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what
unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore
of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon
the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any
ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing. In the white and empty room
he stood in his bespoken suit with his hat in his hand and he peered down with his
small and lashless pig's eyes wherein this child just sixteen years on earth could read
whole bodies of decisions not accountable to the courts of men and he saw his own
name which nowhere else could he have ciphered out at all logged into the records as a
thing already accomplished, a traveler known in jurisdictions existing only in the claims
of certain pensioners or on old dated maps.
In his delirium he ransacked the linens of his pallet for arms but there were none. The
judge smiled. The fool was no longer there but another man and this other man he
could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The
judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who
worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men's
fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his
becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his
gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold
slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual
specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the
night does not end.
The light in the room altered, a door closed. He opened his eyes. His leg was swathed
in sheeting...
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