With a dingy smile, the man sank his blade deep into the helpless woman's solar plexus.
Dark-red blood poured from the wound. Amy screamed. Hermes screamed. Delta gasped. Leela felt a thrill.
Zoidberg leaped to his feet so quickly that he sent necklaces flying in all directions. "Oh, God!" he exclaimed. "She needs a doctor!"
The grinning native yanked his dagger from the captive's chest and prepared to make another stab. Before anyone else had time to react, Zoidberg sprang forward and swatted the man with his claw, sending him and his bloody knife sprawling several yards. "Raven!" shouted the lobster as he snipped the injured woman's bonds and gathered her into his arms. "Medical emergency! Turn back into a ship, now!"
Without hesitation, the black robot bounded away from the pavilion toward a grassy clearing, where it twisted and expanded into its spacecraft form. The ramp descended and Zoidberg scuttled deftly into the ship, followed closely behind by Delta, Hermes, and Amy. By the time his three friends reached the sickbay, he had already laid the native woman on an operating table, and was tying a surgical mask over his mouth flaps.
"Zoidberg, mon!" said Hermes harshly. "Aren't you a little late?"
The Jamaican was met with an open claw in his face. "Scalpel!" the crustacean doctor demanded.
While Hermes fished through a nearby medkit for a scalpel, Amy pressed her hands to the woman's pink blouse in an attempt to slow her bleeding. "You could've stopped this from happening," she chided Zoidberg. "Why didn't you?"
"I don't know," said the physician, retrieving a scalpel from Hermes with one claw and turning on an electronic suturing device with another.
They had never seen Zoidberg work so rapidly, or with such aplomb. His claws were a blur, applying instrument after instrument to the point of injury until his friends finally concluded they could help most by staying out of his way. It seemed like mere seconds before Zoidberg laid down his devices, mopped up the blood with a rag, and let out an exultant "Hooray!"
The patient opened her eyes as Hermes, Amy, and Delta widened theirs.
"Hooray what?" said Amy incredulously. "Don't tell me you're finished."
"I am finished," Zoidberg boasted. "The wound is cleansed and sealed. She'll recover fully within a few days, then go on to find true love, get married, and most likely die while giving birth to her first or second child."
Hermes looked over the wound site, of which nothing remained but a strip of cleanly sutured skin. "I don't believe it, mon," he muttered.
In spite of the cramping pain, the virgin pushed herself into a sitting position and examined the spot on her chest where the dagger had gone in. "Kootooloo hamuvalu," she said, gazing reverentially at Zoidberg. "Kootooloo hamuvalu!"
"I understand the Kootooloo part," said Delta, "but I don't know what hamuvalu means."
"Kootooloo hamuvalu means 'Kootooloo has worked a miracle'," Zoidberg told her.
Suddenly indignant, Amy pointed a dainty finger at the lobster. "You let her get stabbed so you could perform a phony miracle, didn't you?" she accused him. "Shame on you, you…you charlatan!"
"No, no!" insisted Zoidberg. "It's not like that at all!"
"Then why, mon?" said Hermes, his voice at an angry pitch. "Why did you just sit there?"
Zoidberg stared sheepishly at his claws, and the sickbay fell silent except for the native woman's worshipful babbling.
"There was…this feeling that came over me," he attempted to explain. "A weird feeling…a wonderful feeling…as if I was standing in the sky and looking down on the pointless swirl of life, death, good, evil…looking down and laughing, because I was so high up that none of those things could reach me."
"You lazy son of a biscuit!" Hermes scolded him. "While you were in your happy place, this poor girl was being murdered in your name!"
"Ah, yes," said Zoidberg wistfully. "I knew something was being done in my name, but I couldn't tell what. It was hard to see from that height."
Amy and Hermes glared sternly at him, while Delta shook her head in despair. The native girl knelt and moistened Zoidberg's feet with her grateful tears.
"Well?" said the lobster, raising his claws rhetorically. "Isn't your Christian God the same way? All He hears is people calling His name; He doesn't know if they're praying, or swearing, or offering up human sacrifices, or torturing infidels. To Him, it's the thought that counts."
Weary of Zoidberg's flippancy, Hermes and Amy stormed out of the sickbay. Delta, in the meantime, placed her metal hand in his claw and spoke gently. "Please, John, stop trying to be a god to these people. I know you mean well, but you're only reinforcing their superstitions."
"I know, Delta," said Zoidberg. "I'm sure this will all end in disaster. It's just that…for once in my life…I'm surrounded by people who…who think I'm a god!"
Delta's lips formed a Bézier-curve smile. "I'll make you a deal," she offered. "Stop playing God, and I'll give you a Number Nineteen every night from now until we're rescued."
Zoidberg's face lit up with eagerness. "Number Nineteen? Is that better than an Eighteen?"
"You tell me, lover boy."
Amy, Hermes, and Leela struggled to fall asleep in their crude native cots. The darkness was almost complete—Selva had only one moon, and it was too far away to be useful for light. Raven, having resumed her robotic form, stood motionlessly in the hut with her perfectly round wrist chained to Leela's. Two houses away stood the palace, which was roughly twice the size of a normal hut. The night air was filled with the chirping of alien insects, but even more so with the groans and impassioned cries coming from the palace.
"Delta and Zoidberg are at it again," grumbled Amy as she tried to turn over in her cot.
The ecstatic noises continued unabated. "Good heavens, John," they heard the fembot exclaim. "You really are a god."
Leela longed and longed for the sweet embrace of sleep, or failing that, death. However hard she tried, she couldn't put out of her mind the image of the dagger plunging into the virgin's chest, or the rush of primal joy she had experienced while witnessing the sacrifice. Memories of home, of Fry, of blernsball…they all failed to distract her. It's no use, she thought bitterly. I've got the one-track mind of a shark that just smelled blood in the water. I just can't get violence and killing out of my head. I may as well stop trying to fight it. For that matter, I think I stopped trying a long time ago.
I wish I could kill somebody…just to see if the pain goes away…
To be continued
