On the Razor's Edge

by Michael Flynn

  The Red Hound sighed. “I’m not sure that’s a positive side.”

  IV. THE SYNTHESIS

  And third, there was the scarred man …

  The scarred man had wearied of waking in strange ships, although he did not see how until now he had had much say in the matter. This time, he lay immobile on his back while an autoclinic caressed him, fed him, evacuated him, and numbed him where the pain grew too great. Soothing medications dripped into him; burned skin sloughed snakelike from his arms; cells were cultured, regressed, grafted. New skin grew. Bones knit. He wondered at one point how much of the original him might be left.

  Perhaps he would get a better body out of this. One with skin not so parchment tight across his bones, with eyes less sunken, with the scalp free of the crisscross scars that parted the tufts of snow-white hair. Perhaps he would be restored to the vigor of his youth.

  But probably not. He was not sure he had had a youth, or that it had been filled with vigor. The scars that parted his hair had parted his mind, as well. Years ago, the Names had divided it into sundry and diverse shards, each an expert in some facet of the espionage art. The intent had been a team; the consequence, a committee; the price, a loss of memories.

  So while his body thus healed itself of its wounds, his minds were free to consider how he had come by them.

  At first it was difficult. The mind recoils from injury, and Donovan’s mind had recoiled in multiple directions and it took awhile for them to find one another. It was not exactly amnesia; it was more like fugue. But parts of him remembered different things: sights or sounds; strategies and tactics; thoughts and words. From these fragments he sought to assemble the thing entire.

  How long recollection took he could not say, nor how reliable the result. Pollyanna was prone to burnish his memories with the polish of best construal, and the Sleuth sometimes spanned the gaps with bridges of logical interpolation. Yet events were not always logical and their meanings seldom rosy.

  We been in a fight, the Brute concluded. He could name the blows by the wounds they had left behind. The melted skin implied the penumbra of a dazer burst. The snapped rib entailed the shod foot that had cracked it. The holes in his leg intimated shrapnel; the slice, a sharpened edge.

  But we’re alive, the Sleuth submitted. That means we won. “Although if this were victory,” the Fudir countered, “we would just as soon not taste defeat.” Besides, other events than victory might end with the scarred man bundled in an autoclinic. Rescue, for instance. Preparation for torture, for another.

  Consciousness was a sometime thing. Sleep was a blessing.

  In sleep, the Silky Voice took over, metering out soothing enzymes, working in concert with the autoclinic. Donovan worried, as was his nature, over in whose custody they lay and for what purpose; but as no one in the ship’s crew had made an appearance and as his present state precluded effective response in any case, there was little point to the bother save to upset the enzymatic balance. So the Silky Voice sedated him as well.

  Only the Brute seemed unaffected. But that was because the Brute was immersed always in his senses, keenly aware of his surroundings at all times. He knew how his knee bent just so. He knew the curl of each finger, and the lay of his head. Kinesthesia was his, and proprioception. He knew the drape of each tube across his body, the warmth of the osmotic infusers and the limaceous slime of the gels in which they nestled. He felt the rush of the richly scented air that coursed through his nostrils and into his lungs.

  Like a tiger, the Brute was a smooth stimulus-response machine, his reflexes unencumbered by reflection—yet, for all that, he was not severed entirely from his more cerebral compatriots in the small principality of Donovan’s brain.

  It was a hell of a fight, the Brute told them one morning. But you shoulda seen the other guy.

  He remembered the combat now. The old ruined warehouse. The loyalist Shadows led by Ekadrina Sèanmazy and the rebels led by Oschous Dee Karnatika, locked in the mad embrace of mutual and escalating ambuscade. The abrupt appearance of the late Domino Tight; the sudden and fearful manifestation of several Names; Ravn Olafsdottr and her wild and fatal play wearing Padaborn’s colors that had finally induced him to take up arms himself. And his own death struggle with Ekadrina.

  That was Inner Child, the wary and watchful one.

  “Maybe,” said Donovan. “But if he rescued us from Sèanmazy, he rescued her from us.”

  Gidula is a rebel, said the young man in the chlamys, but he is also a traditionalist. For everyone, the world is as it was when we came of age. Gidula soaked up djibry with his mother’s milk. He can no more act in a non-djibrous manner than he could wear motley to a pasdarm.

  * * *

  A few days later, two magpies in black shenmats with Gidula’s comet on their sleeve brassards entered the dispensary.

  “How we feeling?” the junior magpie asked. He wore the skull-and-crossbones breast-badge that marked him as a medic. He glanced over the readouts on the autoclinic, waved a slug across the infoports, and spoke a few words into it. His was not an idle question. Readouts could tally only quantities. These neurons were firing; those areas of the brain lit under resonance; such were the blood pressure and heart rate—but none of it could capture the quality of pain. There was no gauge for suffering.

  “We’ve felt better,” Donovan allowed.

  “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Two. How many fingers am I holding up?”

  The medic smiled. “One. What is the square root of seventeen?”

  “Four point one-two-three.”

  The medic looked up and Donovan added, “Metric. Four point two-nine-two, in dodeka.”

  “Name the Crossings.”

  “Including the Tightrope? Point Pleasant, Krinthic Junction, Hanseatic Point, Sapphire Point…”

  The smile vanished. “Those are the Peripheral names.”

  “Well, we lived most our life over there—as myan zhan shebang, a sleeping agent—later as a discarded wreck of a man.” He cackled to show how wrecked he was.

  “You were ill-used,” said the older magpie, speaking for the first time. The medic glanced at him but said nothing.

  “I’ve prepared a schedule for your physical therapy,” the medic told Donovan. “Ready to get out of the box?”

  Donovan agreed that they were ready and, with a little assistance from the two comets, was soon disconnected from the support systems and lowered to the floor, where he stood in momentary unsteadiness. The medic spoke another verbal note into his slug. Donovan glanced at the other three autoclinics in the room. Empty, but he had a phantom recollection that one of them had been occupied. He stretched, touched his toes, inspected those wounds visible from his perspective. He wondered if he should pretend to a lesser vigor than he felt. One of a man’s sharpest weapons was underestimation by his foes.

  “What of the others?” he asked. “Ekadrina, Oschous, Big Jacques … Ravn?”

  The medic glanced up from powering down the autoclinic. “Master will discuss that with you.”

  Donovan turned to the older magpie. “You don’t talk much.”

  “Don’t need to.”

  “And you are…?”

  “Your sparring partner. Physical therapy.”

  “We had enough sparring with Ekadrina. We were hoping to relax.”

  The older magpie nodded toward the autoclinic. “You have been.”

  “I think we like you…” Donovan looked at the brassard. “Should we call you Five, or do you have a nicknumber?”

  A smile very nearly cracked the man’s face. “I will have to you soon a schedule sent of our sessions.” And he bowed a fractional amount from the waist. From the man’s careful pronunciation the Fudir judged him not a native speaker of Confederal Manjrin, but he did not recognize the home-world from which the man’s consonants sprang.

  “If you’ll follow me,” the medic said, “I’ll take you to Gidula. He was anxious for yo
ur recovery and wanted to see you as soon as you were ambulatory.”

  Donovan could think of several reasons for that anxiety, not all of them a comfort. Gidula had snatched him away from Ekadrina, but he was not especially certain it had been a rescue.

  Don’t worry, said the young woman in the chiton. Like the Brute always says, we’ve got him outnumbered.

  “Pollyanna,” Donovan chided his optimism, “you’ve forgotten his magpies.”

  We may have a handle there, said the young man, if I’ve read the body language aright.

  The medic led Donovan down a carpeted hallway lined with paintings composed of intersecting geometric figures in various bright colors. Hand painted, the Pedant noted, and not drafted by machine. The subtle imperfections in the art—or should I say “craft”—

  You shouldn’t say anything, the Sleuth suggested.

  —add market value to the work. They grant an assurance of exclusivity that machine-craft does not. Perfection is too easily imitated; flaws are unique.

  The Fudir’s previous life as a thief in the Terran Corner of Jehovah had given him an appreciation for art that a mere connoisseur did not possess. “We could make a shiny ducat from these pretties,” he murmured.

  They give insight into Gidula, said the young man, both their hand-crafted nature and their subject matter.

  Subject matter? said the Brute. They’re just shapes.

  Yes. Exactly.

  The hallway led around an S-curve and ended at an open archway, on the other side of which lay a vestibule. A young magpie sat behind a minimal desk, engaged in a multitude of tasks. One hand wrote on a light-pad with a stylus; the other hand entered data on a touch screen. Her throat worked as she subvocalized into a pickup. Her goggles, which lent her an insectlike appearance, flickered with disparate information on each lens. Earwigs undoubtedly whispered independently in each ear. A paraperceptic. Donovan regarded her as he might an evolutionary ancestor, and not without a little envy. Her channels were merely sensory and motor. Her intellect and will had not been fragmented into independent personalities.

  “Ah, don’t fret, Donovan buigh,” the Fudir told himself. “You’d be lonely without us.”

  Two other magpies sat in the vestibule along one wall, talking to each other in low voices. When Donovan and the medic entered, they glanced up and fell silent. One of them favored Donovan with a barely perceptible nod.

  The office manager appeared not to notice, but that was the way of paraperceptics. They took a certain pride in what they called “multitasking” and delighted in disregard. Donovan was certain that she had seen him, studied him, and informed Gidula immediately of his arrival. The other two magpies returned to their conversation.

  The medic had handed his slug to the office manager and departed. The Fudir looked about the room, and saw two open seats on opposite sides of the room. He started toward one, stopped, and turned toward the other, stopped again, and scratched his head. This attracted the attention not only of the two magpies but also of the office manager, which the scarred man counted as a signal accomplishment.

  “What are you up to, Fudir?” he muttered.

  In a whisper: “Let’s maintain the charade that we’re still fragmented.”

  After that display of prowess with Ekadrina?

  “How many of Gidula’s people actually witnessed that fight? As far as they’re concerned, their boss rescued us from certain death.”

  “Maybe so, but I don’t think the Old One will be fooled.”

  Perhaps not, but the manner in which he is not fooled may tell us much.

  Did you notice the body language of the three magpies? said the young man. Number Two, the paraperceptic, seemed suspicious—but Twenty-three smirked while his friend Seventeen stifled genuine distress.

  “Conclusions?”

  The manager suspects the Fudir was playing Buridan’s Ass. In her position, she’d be privy to most of what Gidula knows. Twenty-three holds us in contempt. He knows we were supposed to be broken and doesn’t yet know we fought Ekadrina to a draw. But Seventeen …

  “… is a genuine partisan of Geshler Padaborn.”

  Who is supposedly us. The scarred man would not mind so much being a great hero from the past if he could remember any of the heroics. When the Names had diced and sliced his mind, they had buried his memories under a pile of shavings and debris.

  Our therapist, Five, is also a Padabornian, the young man added.

  The scarred man considered this. He had decided long before that Gidula was attempting to subvert the Revolution from within. Why bring Padaborn back if you truly believed him a ruined man? To raise the rebels’ spirits with the idea that Padaborn had returned, then crush them with the reality of the scarred man.

  On the other hand—if anything as twisted as the politics of the Confederation had only two hands—broken or not, Geshler Padaborn knew some way into the Secret City; and whatever Gidula’s original purpose in peeling the scarred man from his uisce, he had other purposes now.

  Yet Donovan understood that Ravn had been sent to snatch him more than two metric years ago and the rebels had determined to attack the Secret City a little over a year ago. Their curiosity regarding Padaborn’s escape was more recent than their desire to secure his person.

  Unless, said the young man in the chlamys, we have been misreading them all along.

  “That’s your job,” Donovan murmured. “You’re supposed to get inside the heads of our enemies and figure out what makes them tick.”

  “Without,” the Fudir warned, “empathizing too much.”

  Several of the Shadows now in rebellion had fought to suppress Padaborn’s Rising. One obvious reason for the contradiction was that the Rising had been premature and in the interim minds had changed, enthusiasms had shifted, and the doubtful had grown convinced. Perhaps the Names had overreacted in the aftermath. Such measures could trigger the very revolutions they meant to crush. Lucky Nanduri, the fifteenth maxraj of New Chennai, had put down the Mylapore riots with exquisite cruelty. His tontons had burned entire neighborhoods, blown up family compounds, executed citizens rounded up in sweeps regardless of whether they had participated in the riots or not. “Fear begets obedience,” the maxraj had declared. What it begat was twelve weeks of quiet. Then rebellion erupted across the continent, from Royapuram to Coromandel. When royal troops were ordered decimated as punishment for allowing the sack of the Coromandel Taj, the Palace Guard itself had turned on the maxraj, slaughtered him, and offered the Golden Tuban to a surprised—and rather unwilling—second maternal cousin.

  Something similar may have happened in the wake of Padaborn’s Rising.

  Watch the magpies, the young man advised them. They dream “the great game of the beautiful life.” There is ever romance in the heart of cruelty.

  Aye, thought Donovan. The grand gesture, the emotion that tugs at the heart, the sheer drama of Padaborn on the Rooftops might lure Shadows into rebellion for no better reason than the tears of a pasdarm.

  On the Rooftops…? There was a vague recollection there, but it would not come clear.

  There was another answer, less obvious. The Shadow War was not in fact a resumption of Padaborn’s Rising. “The lamp that was lit” had not been lit again but was another struggle entirely, with different goals and only coincidentally similar objectives.

  “Who fights for anything so abstract as ‘liberty’ or ‘tradition’ anyway?” Donovan grumbled. “The Shadows fight for injury or revenge or ambition, and because they have reached the point where nothing else is left. The fine words they make up later to justify themselves. An ambitious man like Oschous Dee might prate about oppression, but he was not oppressed, and had the paths of his ambition wound the other way, he would be defending the Names as loyally as Ekadrina.”

  “You’re too cynical,” the Fudir told him. “Méarana always said so. Ambitious Oschous may be, but there are safer ambitions than raising the red banner.”

  And would Ekadrina fi
ght so doggedly were she not equally fervent in her loyalty? asked the Silky Voice.

  “The drivers of doggedness and bravery needn’t be devotion and conviction. Ekadrina and Epri are Korpsbrüder, trained together by Shadow Prime himself. She’s in it because Epri is in it, and Epri stayed loyal because Manlius did not…”

  “And Dawshoo rebelled because Manlius did … Never mind. We get the picture.” Motives were complex and seldom known, even to the actor. Purposes were easier, and often could be teased out. Two men might conspire to murder a third: but one to protect himself, the other merely to rob him.

  The inner door opened and a fourth magpie emerged. This one betrayed no emotion on noticing Donovan, and the young man tagged him as “enthusiasm unknown.” The other two magpies rose and the three left the room together, murmuring in low voices.

  The paraperceptic did not look away from her work. Hands danced across touch screens, eyes scanned scrolling images on her goggles, information whispered in her ears. She spared a moment of her mouth. “He see you now,” she said with admirable concision.

  The scarred man hesitated and waited for Two’s reaction to the hesitation.

  “He wait.”

  Donovan grinned at her. “What are you doing after work, babe?”

  The term of endearment was Terran, and unfamiliar to her; the essence of the question was not. “No ‘after work,’ me,” she told him. “You wish enter ‘jade gate pond,’ I multitask.” The face she turned to him was rendered beetlelike by the flickering data goggles, and she seemed suddenly a strange and alien thing.

  Donovan recoiled, his joke gone sour in his mouth. He could imagine her busily manipulating multiple information streams even while she beat her chosen lover wet, and the pleasures of the latter would in no wise interfere with the efficiencies of the former. There was something in that which repelled him. One ought to take pleasure in one’s pleasures.

  * * *

  Gidula sat in a high-backed black padded chair at the far end of a long room. The carpeting was hard and durable, and woven in a tapestry of interlocking brightly colored lines against a sable background. The pattern reminded the Fudir of vines and creepers; the Sleuth, of mazes. The sable was shot through with silver threads, which lent it an odd sense of depth, as if the pattern comprised a catwalk above a deep and dimly lit cavern.