Scalpel of Worlds

10 August 2024

Centro Histórico

Quito, Ecuador

Earth-Sol System

Milky Way Galaxy

Laniakea Supercluster

Subspatial c=299,792,458 m/s Universe

Manco Yupanqui Luna sat in his favorite leather armchair smoking his pipe. The smoke from his homegrown wild tobacco, dried to perfection on the patio above, wafted around his head and shoulders. It hit with a ferocious punch, the high concentration of nicotine of the native plant never reduced by the breeders who formulated commercial tobacco centuries before. Manco never smoked cigarettes; his tobacco was a gift from the ancestors. It was a way to keep the old ways alive in this time of prodigious and rapid change.

The still-green leaves crinkled as he placed them in the pipe bowl. He took a propane blowtorch to the tip of a piece of palo santo wood, fragrances of incense and tobacco blending together as the woodfire touched the leaves. A ring of red embers spread outward from the contact point like the rim of a crater as he dragged.

Feeling light-headed and relaxed, he gazed from his bay window on the cobbled street outside. A procession of revelers was passing underneath, brass band and drums celebrating the anniversary of the first cry of independence of Latin America. On this day, two hundred fifteen years before, his country declared its independence from Spain, a spark in the rolling brushfire of anti-colonial sentiment raging across his home continent.

Manco wasn’t much of a patriot; he’d traveled far too widely and seen too much corruption to believe that any government had the right to rule. Still, he liked to imagine that he would have sided with Bolívar’s revolutionaries in their fight against the Spanish Empire. No fate was too ghastly for an institution that had incited so much bloody conquest, nor condemned so many of his ancestors to terrible deaths by smallpox.

Perhaps he would have been a doctor then as well, tending to the wounded on the battlefield and preventing the spread of disease amongst the revolutionaries. Or maybe an intelligence operative, infiltrating the ranks of the Spanish nobles who ruled the viceroyalty of Quito, feeding their plans back to his allies. He fancied the idea of himself as a spy, though the work seemed quite dangerous if James Bond movies were to be believed.

Manco had distaste for the idea of taking life like soldiers did, at the point of a gun. Blades were another story, however. He had made mistakes in his career, and some of his patients had died on the operating table or shortly thereafter. Never had he deliberately taken a human life, but those errors had cost him many nights of sleep. The grief on the faces of mothers and fathers at losing their child, and the horror in the eyes of children left without a parent were hard to bear. It was such a waste to lose those years of loving care invested in young and old alike, tying families together across the generations.

Such emotion was heartbreaking, and at once alien to him. Since he graduated from University he had hardly spoken to his parents. Hard-nosed traditionalist Catholics, he imagined they would have betrayed their own people to the Spanish invaders, and probably been against the Revolution, too. They always insisted he use the formal usted to address them instead of the informal tú. Usted derived from vuestra merced, “your grace.”

Is your grace ready for mass, my liege? Would your grace care to bless us with her presence at the gala this eve? As if they were Spanish lords, these children of the Inca people.

They had two maids and one son. Manco had no maid and no children. He had once thought about getting married and having a nice big Ecuadorian family-doing it right this time around-but never seemed to get around to it. Perhaps, he thought, his work had awakened him too much to the fragility of human life. How would it feel to lose his child, that lone emissary of his genetic heritage to the next generation? To lose his wife, the partner in whom he invested so much?

But he had no children, and was now too old to begin. The destiny that he had taken upon his shoulders was too gruesomely vast, too antithetical to normal thinking to be contemplated by one so tied into the network of human kinship. Even the passing thought of what he intended turned his veins to ice. The steadying effect of the nicotine evaporated in a moment of horror at the magnitude of his coming act.

The embers of the pipe had cooled. Manco retrieved his blowtorch and palo santo spill from the turned burl pedestal where they lay and relit the bowl. He might as well give the ancestral spirits a good send-off.

~