Read My Brother's Keeper for Free Online

all it proves is that you have the verbal part of the brain under control. That's all in your hemisphere, we know that's a left hemisphere function. You feel just the way you ought to, at this stage in the recovery. Do you know what the corpus callosum is?"
    "No. "
    "Well, you will, for the rest of your life." He pushed the two apple segments together, then drew them apart again. "The corpus callosum is the part that sits between the two brain hemispheres. It acts as a sort of a bridge between them, and pons would be the natural Latin name for it, 'cause that means a bridge. But we got smart too late, so another bit of the brain is called the pons. But it's the corpus callosum that's the real bridge, and handles all the information transfer directly between the hemispheres. There's lots of other communication goes on, of course, through a bit called the anterior commissure, but that's mainly indirect and chemical. To make the story short, just now you're missing a corpus callosum between your brain segments and Leo's. But it'll regenerate, thanks to Madrill's treatments."
    "When?"
    "Ah, now there you have me. It could take three months, or it could be a couple of years. Just to complicate things a bit more, the left side of your body is mainly controlled from the right side of your brain. That's why I wanted to know if you were getting any information through that left eye. That'd give us some idea how fast regeneration of nerve tissue is going. Nothing yet?"
    I closed my right eye. "Nothing. Look, are you saying that Leo's sort of alive still? I mean, if you transplanted his kidney into me you wouldn't say he was alive, would you?"
    "I wouldn't; but then not many people think with their kidneys. If you want my honest opinion, yes, I think that Leo Foss is still alive, in some sense, and he's inhabiting part of your skull. At some time—don't ask me when and where, or even how—I would expect the two halves of the brain to integrate again. You'll become a single individual. And beyond that, I can't go."
    He pressed a button at the end of the bed. "Now, I think you've had all the excitement that's good for you for one day. Miss Thomson will be here in a minute or two and give you an injection. If you don't mind, I'd like to sit here and watch as that takes effect."
    He handed the carved-up apple to the nurse when she appeared and took the second one from his pocket. While she checked my blood pressure, pulse, and temperature (I suspect I tested worse than I had that morning) I looked at Sir Westcott and had terrible visions of those uncouth, pork-butcher hands meddling with the delicate couplings of my brain, cutting and tying and stitching.
    While I watched, Sir Westcott took his open clasp knife and started absentmindedly to peel the apple. He didn't seem to look at it, and the thick fingers were as clumsy-looking as ever. But the apple peel came off magically in one beautiful regular strip, a uniform half inch wide. There was no trace of green peel left on the body of the apple, and no sign of white overcut flesh on the lengthening spiral that came off it.
    By the time the injection took effect, at least one of my worries had been eased.
     

- 3 -
    As Mark Hambourg remarked, three things are essential if you want to be a professional musician: the first requirement is good health, and the other two are the same. A performer's life is hard, and there's no way you can tell the critics that you didn't play well because you were feeling less than your best.
    I had always taken health for granted, and never been really sick in my whole life. That made me a bad patient. My convalescence broke naturally into two phases: very sick, then very bored. I gradually began to regain full control of the left side of my body, but no one could tell me how fast that should happen. The operation that Sir Westcott had performed on me was experimental—as he explained, the previous subjects had been dogs, where it was much commoner to have