The Flesh Tinker and lonelist man
Page 2
Piggy little eyes? Gavagol lifted his chin. «As I said before, I’m satisfied with my face,» he said frostily. «I was only hoping you might spend a few more days here. I didn’t mean to make you angry. But I'm lonely, very, very lonely. I had to do something.»
The Flesh Tinker showed no sympathy. «Watcher, you’ve made an error. I f you tried to force me to remain here, I would run amok. My emotions are larger than I am — it’s one o f the drawbacks o f living to a great age. So, solve your problem in some other way.»
«But, your ship.»
«The ship is dear to me, my home for many centuries — still I would grow too angry.» The Flesh Tinker laughed. «I could eventually replace the starboat. Could you replace your life?»
Gavagol watched the Flesh Tinker. The old man sat quietly enough, but the magenta eyes were icy.
The Flesh Tinker spoke again. «Listen, I have an idea.»
The Flesh Tinker was persuasive. Gavagol found the idea irresistible, but he remembered the look on the Flesh Tinker’s face when he burst into the Tower.
He decided. «Yes» he said. «I’ll accept your offer, with thanks. But just so there’s no funny business, remember, the deadman’s switch is slaved to my cerebral carrier. Alter my mind, and. well, squash.»
The Flesh Tinker’s nostrils flared, and the hard mouth compressed into a straight line. «Don’t worry. I don’t like you well enough to fix your mind.»
Waking was strange, in darkness and stench. Gavagol flung out his arms, to find that he was confined in a space not much bigger than a coffin. His knuckles rang against metal. The smell was so strong as to be unclassifiable, ancient and organic, like a food locker left uncleaned a thousand years. Gavagol gagged on a scream.
His arms felt different. In the blackness, he clutched at his own hands. His fingers were too long and seemed to be hung with bags of flapping membrane, and his skin. slick, moist, utterly alien.
He opened his mouth to try another scream, but then the regentank’s hatch opened. Pressure popped off, and light flooded his eyes. Strong hands took him by the shoulders and slid him out onto a gurney.
He looked up at the Flesh Tinker. The hot magenta eyes were filled with a fierce proprietary pride.
«Just lie still for a bit,» the Flesh Tinker said, smiling that predatory smile.
At the first try, Gavagol’s voice would not obey him. He swallowed a nasty taste, then tried again. «I feel like death,» he croaked.
The Flesh Tinker’s face pinched together. «I’ve, done exactly what you asked: given you the sea. And, I remind you, without charge.»
Gavagol propped himself on his elbows and looked down his body in fascination.
His skin glistened, a slippery gunmetal gray. The membranes that draped his arms were echoed by those on his legs. His feet were twenty centimeters longer, and the slender toes were tipped by sharp, hooked claws. When he saw that his crotch was too smooth, he whimpered, then he reached down, probing.
The Flesh Tinker laughed, good humor restored. «Not to worry. Internal genitals. You don’t want anything vital dangling out in the sea where the wildlife can snap at it, eh? You’ll soon get used to it.» The Flesh Tinker winked, all his wrinkles bunching up.
Gavagol looked about. The cabin was a jungle of eccentric equipment. Everywhere touchboards and readout screens hung, glowing with numbers and words in a dozen unfamiliar alphabets. There, a Genchee DNA-synthesizer covered a bulkhead with a shining tangle of plasmapipe. Over there, a phalanx of antique microsurgeons lifted a glittering thicket of manipulators, all blades and hooks and laser barrels. The other womb chambers that lined the bulkheads had crude steel lockwheels welded to them, so human hands could manipulate the alien hatch dogs.
He’d been reborn from an alien womb, saturated with centuries of alien juices. He shuddered.
«What now?» The Flesh Tinker seemed irritated again. «If you didn’t want my help, you shouldn’t have asked for it.» A dangerous glitter filled the Flesh Tinker’s eyes. «Are you dissatisfied?» The deep cold voice had dropped half an octave, to a grinding rumble.
The Flesh Tinker loomed over Gavagol, magenta eyes narrow, twitching. Gavagol fell back on the gurney, heart hammering. The moment stretched out interminably.
The Flesh Tinker turned away with a jerk.
Gavagol spoke to the Flesh Tinker’s back. «I’m just surprised. But, I forgot to mention. I can’t swim.»
The Flesh tinker turned back to him, still bristling. «What? Now you have the gall to question my workmanship? Naturally, I grew you a custom synaptic linkage; you’ll swim like an eel. Do you think me a beginner at this? Who sent the City’s people into the Indivisible Ocean?»
The Flesh Tinker seized the gurney’s push bar and maneuvered Gavagol out of the womb room. Gavagol clutched at the rails, hampered by the unfamiliar length of his fingers, as the gurney flew along the ancient corridors. «Where do we go now?» Gavagol asked, in plaintive tones.
«I can stand no more of your whining!» the Flesh Tinker said. The gurney slammed to a stop at the lip of the air lock, but Gavagol continued on, flailing out into the open air.
With a huge splash, he dropped into the lagoon.
He struggled in a cloud of bubbles for a moment. Then the new linkage took over, and he shot through the water, quick as a fish.
He gloried in his effortless strength, his new agility, the cool touch of the water on his naked skin. He raced the lagoon from end to end, building enough speed to leap completely from the water. He found that his nostrils closed underwater, like a seal’s, and that his lung capacity had increased enough to permit him fifteen-minute dives in comfort.
But then the sun, shining down through the thick clear monomol of the cyclone shell, began to bum his tender new skin, and he slid under the shady lip of the quay.
Floating there, he watched the Flesh Tinker’s boat. The lock was shut tight; no movement showed at the row of small ports that lined the hull just above the sponsons.
When dusk came, Gavagol swam slowly out through the personnel lock. Fear stewed with anticipation in the pit of his stomach.
The canal wound among the hull blocks, and then out into the sea along a curving breakwater. The City’s movement spun off an eddy of turbulence at the end of the breakwater, and Gavagol tumbled helplessly in it for a moment.
He was over the deep, staring down into the black water. He lifted his head above the water, to see the great flank of the City sliding past.
Panic seized him; the City would leave him behind, alone. He swam strongly in the direction of the City’s movement, and the panic dissolved in a burst of silvery-bubbled laughter. In his new body, he could outswim the City easily.
He knifed through the water, trailing phosphorescence, wild with his new abilities.
The cool glow showed only occasionally above the wave tops, and Gavagol thought of the predators that swam the Indivisible Ocean — the huge toothy squool, with its long hook-studded tentacles; the swift venomous saltweasel; the shoals of voracious butcherfish.
He swam for the safety of the City’s breakwaters, but they caught him. Enveloped in a cloud of blue sealight, he became confused. He felt them bumping against him, curious hands prodding his body, then a nip at his shoulder as one of the young ones attempted to taste him.
A chorus of laughter rose from the pod of merfolk as they circled him. «I was afraid you were a school of butcherfish,» Gavagol said, trying a smile.
«Oho, we feared that you were a victim of the shimmies,» said a big bull who bore the scars of long seasons in the breeding reefs. More laughter. The voice was high and clear; the Standard words carried a clicking, hissing accent.
«The shimmies?»
«Yes, a plague that affects the other jellyfish in the time of the big storms.» The big male swam closer; he was smiling, but he snapped his jaws, making a sound like metal stiking metal. His eyes glowed brighter than the sealight.
«But it's not the time of the storms, is it? And, now, on cl
oser examination, I see that you’re not a jellyfish.» The bull winked at his pod. «My apologies. What are you?»
An impatient young female who wore a garland of silkshell said, «Come, the Silverbacks will be over Helloever Bank at moonrise. If we’re late, they’ll start the hunt without us.»
The pod broke away from Gavagol, swimming to the north. He started to follow.
The bull twisted in the wake of the pod and came slashing back at him. Gavagol was frightened, but the impact of the heavy body against him was gentle.
The bull said, «Not you, old human. You stay with the City, suck its tit; that's where you belong. We count our line from the First Turners; our blood has swum the Indivisible Ocean for a thousand years. Get back to your City before the butcherfish smell you; you stink of the tank.»
It was too much. He had given up his body to join them, and they were rejecting him, so casually. He felt the boiling pressure of rage in his skull. He threw himself at the bull, his jaws open in mindless aggression.
The bull’s eyes widened, and he dodged away, but not quickly enough, and Gavagol’s teeth sank into the bull’s shoulder. The bull screamed, a high thin sound of pain and surprise.
Some calm remote part of Gavagol was equally astonished as he ground his teeth into the hot greasy taste o f blood and blubber and ripped at the bull with his claws. Was this another of the Flesh Tinker’s installed patterns, this urge to rend flesh?
The bull recovered from his initial surprise and struck back, scoring lines of fiery pain down Gavagol’s side. They whirled and ripped and grappled, in a froth of bright phosphorescence. Dimly, Gavagol heard the sounds of the pod, circling them in the darkness, cries of distress, and then fear.
The bull hissed at him, bewildered and angry. «Why, old human? These are dangerous waters…»
He couldn’t answer, but the thought o f the miles of dark water beneath him chilled his anger. He jerked away from the bull, breathing in great heaving gasps.
Then he heard the warning screams and looked down, to see the Medusa squid rising from the blackness below, drawn by the disturbance and the scent of blood. Its dozens of glowing tentacles swirled, hungry. Gavagol was paralyzed with terror, and it saved him. The bull attempted to flee, and the Medusa shot toward him, attracted to the movement.
Gavagol caught one last glimpse of the bull, struggling feebly against the enwrapping tentacles, as the Medusa dropped back into the depths. The pod was gone, the ocean empty.
He fled mindlessly back to the City, sobbing with fear.
His only hope was to beg the Flesh Tinker to undo his handiwork.
The ancient was so prickly, so quick to take offense. But what other course was there?
The Flesh Tinker returned to his boat late in the morning, weaving a bit from side to side. Gavagol surged out onto the quay, right at the old man’s feet. The Flesh Tinker jumped lightly back, startled. «Ah,» said the Flesh Tinker. «Enjoying the water, I see»
«No,» Gavagol said, getting awkwardly to his oversized feet. «I need to talk with you.»
The Flesh Tinker gestured toward the gangplank. «Come aboard, then. I’m exalted with drink, and therefore tolerant. To a point.» He marched past in a flutter of rich fabric.
Waddling awkwardly on his clumsy feet, Gavagol followed the old man into the boat.
The lounge of the starboat was a museum of ancient eccentricities. Curios from a thousand worlds vied for space with bizarre trophies. Some were fabulous animals, some were aliens, and some appeared to be human. They projected from the monomol surfaces, as if frozen in the act of passing through the walls or falling through the ceiling or rising from the floor. Every dead face was full of surprise, as if this were the last place in the universe it had expected to find itself.
Gavagol sat uncomfortably in a chair covered with intricately tattooed human skin.
«Tell, what’s the trouble?» The Flesh Tinker seemed affable. He poured himself a glass of some smoky fluid, but offered none to Gavagol.
Gavagol approached the matter delicately. «Well, you understand I’m not complaining about the job you did. It’s wonderful work; the best, I’m sure.»
The Flesh Tinker nodded approvingly.
Encouraged, Gavagol went on. «But I'm afraid my. request was not well thought out. I mean, the life of a merman seemed wonderful from a distance, from the top of the wave wall. But…» He hung his head.
The Flesh Tinker watched him silently for a long moment. «But what, Watcher?»
«Well. the merfolk, they wanted nothing to do with me. I was foolish: I tried to force them to take me with them.» He went on, slowly. «And a terrible thing happened.»
The Flesh Tinker frowned, and Gavagol thought he saw a trace of understanding on the hard old face. «So, Watcher, you want… what?»
Gavagol drew a deep breath. «Well, my old body.»
«And that’s all? You’ll extort no other ‘request’ from me? You’ll release my ship?»
Gavagol nodded, eagerly.
The Flesh Tinker stood abruptly. «I’ll consider it.»
Gavagol was on his feet, teeth bared, a pressure behind his eyes. «Remember, I can squash your ship like a bug…I can… I…»
The Flesh Tinker watched him alertly, the strange magenta eyes deep as the Indivisible Ocean.
A picture rose in Gavagol’s mind — the stricken face of the bull as the Medusa pulled him down into the darkness. He felt his anger subside as quickly as it had risen.
«Sorry,» he said, humbly. «I thank you for considering» Then he left, waddling out in as dignified a manner as possible.
In the Tower, Gavagol watched the Flesh Tinker’s strange craft arrow away, leaving a silver wake on the sea. He leaned against the window, his hands pressed to the monomol pane. His human hands.
FB2 document info
Document ID: 1590896e-523e-41dc-8c69-6af3d1252d88
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 15 Januare 2013
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