Flesh and Silver

by Stephen L. Burns

  For Sue-Ryn

  “You think the technique we’re perfecting here is inexplicable? That it smacks more of magic or psychic mumbo jumbo than science? Listen, when it comes to the human brain we still have more questions than answers. All higher-order mental activity remains essentially an enigma. Hear the music in the background? That symphony was created by the blob of meat in Mozart’s head! Can you explain that?”

  —Dr. Saul Bergmann during an interview by Dr. Susan Stanach on the Sysnet medical magazine Cutting Edge thirteen months before his death in 2049.

  1 Medical History

  Dr. Georgory Marchey cracked open his second quatriliter of Mauna Loa of the evening and refilled his glass. His movements were smooth and precise, his hands steady as the proverbial rock.

  Mauna Loa was a pale, golden whiskey made on Kilauea, one of the Hartman habs orbiting the volcano-riddled, seething sulphurous surface of Io. Named for an active volcano back on Earth in Hawaii, the liquor was famed systemwide for its flavor and potency. Marchey raised the glass to his lips with a gray-gloved hand and took a sip, again savoring the faint hint of rumlike sweetness it left on his tongue.

  He put the glass back down by the half-eaten remains of another local delicacy served by the Litman Memorial Hospital commissary, force-grown prawns the size of his thumb fresh from Callisto. Poached in wine with slivers of garlic and tomato chunks, then served in the resulting sauce over angel hair pasta and dusted with grated Romano cheese, they were good. No doubt about that.

  But the whiskey was better. Even if it only came in little runty quatriliter bottles.

  The truth of the matter was that he would have given the whiskey more attention than the food even if it had only been the flavored algaecol that passed for liquor most places off Earth and the Moon.

  After all, you couldn’t get drunk on shrimp. Even when they’ve been poached in wine.

  Drinking more heavily than normal after a procedure was as much a part of his routine as another surgeon’s scrubbing up beforehand. Usually this sacred rite was observed in the austere privacy of his own ship. He’d retreat there as soon as possible after his work was done and start knocking them back the moment the hatch closed behind him.

  Here at Litman Memorial, the larger of the two central hospital wheels augmenting the many smaller clinics scattered throughout Jovian space, he’d been derailed. Upon arrival he had been informed that a crew from a local shipyard was standing by to give his packet its triannual hull-integrity check, and given not quite two minutes to vacate. At that very moment the interior spaces of the ship he called home were charged with inert gas at a pressure of over four times normal—hardly a homey atmosphere. The test was slated to last at least another couple-three hours.

  With luck and dedication he’d be passed out cold long before then. Which meant he would have to stay the night in the room he’d been assigned here. Not a pleasant prospect, but drinking would make it bearable. Drinking made everything bearable.

  Layovers happened, and you made the best of them. As he would then. Denied the safety and solitude of his ship, he would have opted for a private restaurant and the anonymity it could provide. The nearest one was on a hab a measly five thousand kilometers away, but the next shuttle there didn’t leave for over two hours. The need for a drink was far too immediate to make such a wait a workable solution.

  Which was how he’d ended up in the staff section of the hospital wheel’s commissary.

  In the midst of the enemy.

  The food was quite good, the service tolerable. The décor was deplorable, the ambience execrable, the company overtly hostile. The important thing was that they served alcohol. Not every hospital provided that amenity.

  Almost as if purposefully devised to make his situation as uncomfortable as possible, the only free table had been dead square in the middle of the room.

  He’d taken it anyway. There was some liquor back in his room, but not quite enough to get where he wanted to go. Besides, getting his hands on some Mauna Loa was the only enjoyable part of this stop. There was no place to buy a flagon or three outright, but the commissary bar stocked it, table service only.

  So there he sat, well aware that he was very much the center of attention, enjoying the sort of guest-of-honor status accorded the cadaver in a dissection. All around him his erstwhile colleagues eyed him coldly, probed and prodded with harsh whispers pitched just loud enough to reach his ears. Even without the silver biometal pin on his chest they would have known who and what he was. Hospitals were like small towns. Word travelled fast. Pariahs can expect no privacy. Union rules.

  Whatever else Bergmann Surgeons lacked or had lost—and the list was considerable—their unhappy notoriety remained.

  What these fools didn’t know was how little their hatred and contempt meant to him anymore.

  His bland, indifferent gaze settled on one particular couple scowling at him from a table in the corner. He thought he recognized the woman from that afternoon. Maybe a cardiovascular surgeon? His only real lasting impression had been of a dark, hawkish face and bile-bitter comments, some in Arabic.

  He raised his glass toward her in salute, grinned and winked like they shared some sort of joke, then inhaled the three fingers of whiskey. Her face closed like a fist.

  Marchey barely noticed. His attention had drifted back to the alcohol warming his insides. Over the years that had become his sole criterion for judging the places he was sent: How was the booze?

  The commissary was a wonderful place. Top shelf.

  Other than that, the hospital was indistinguishable from the last and would be no different from the next. The same sterile steel/stone/ceramic corridors swallowed him up and spat him out. The same faceless insensible strangers were his patients. The same blurry, disapproving faces watched him do what they could not, outraged by his presence—his very existence—and impatient to see him gone. The same half-heard ugly comments greeted him, dogged his heels, bid him bitter farewell. This afternoon, now, next time; all were only moments from a past, present, and future that twisted back on itself like a Mobius treadmill that kept him plodding blindly along in the same place in spite of the millions of kilometers he travelled.

  He knew he was at Litman Memorial only because of the crest inscribed on the dinner plate before him. Beyond that it was just a name. He hadn’t the faintest idea or slightest curiosity as to where he was being sent next. And as for where he’d been, well, most of it was indistinguishable from where he was then.

  Most, but not all.

  His smile twisted into a grimace as he refilled his glass. Half of it disappeared in one swallow.

  Since he was one of the barely thirty surviving Bergmann Surgeons, and as such followed the itinerary set for him by MedArm, the branch of the UN Space Regulatory Agency in charge of all facets of off-Earth Health Care, Marchey led a life sharply divided into two unequal parts.

  Ninety-nine percent of it was solitary. Safe. It was spent home aboard his automated ship, crossing and recrossing the vast desert of vacuum between human enclaves as he was shuttled from place to place and patient to patient. His adaptation to this part was nearly perfect. He could spend days, even weeks at a stretch adrift in a tranquil sea of alcohol, breathing in the endless lotus scent of nothingness, becoming a rootless, pastless, futureless part of it.

  Here he sat in the middle of the other, smallest part. The ruins of his professional life. The part he lived for. The part that was slowly killing him.

  The part which evoked unwelcome reminders that there had once been more to life than this bottle and the dogged pursuit of oblivion. Love. Respect. Idealism. Hope. Friendship. A sense of place. Satisfaction. Optimism. Even imagination. One by one they had withered away, or been amputat
ed by circumstance.

  But what the hell, he thought, a small, rueful half smile appearing as he slumped back in his chair. Getting his nose rubbed in the pile of shit his life had become was just one more thing he had to endure if he wanted to continue being a Bergmann Surgeon. One more drawback. Not that it was so much a matter of want as being completely unable to imagine giving it up. The very thing that had blighted his life redeemed it, an irony of which he was well aware. At times it was even funny, a joke of the rubber crutch or exploding suppository variety.

  Still, places like the commissary were dangerous. The pervasive, unmistakable hospital atmosphere, the being around other people; any number of things could summon up the unquiet ghosts of his past. There was no way to tell what might set it off. It might be a voice, a face, a gesture, a scent, or just the continual pointed reminders that he no longer belonged among his former associates. He no longer belonged anywhere, and sometimes situations like this cast him helplessly adrift on the anywhen between past and present.

  Well, that was just one more reason to drink.

  I think we definitely need some more anesthesia here, Doctor, he told himself, topping off his glass.

  A snatch of conversation from somewhere behind him caught his ear, a sour comment about the way he was drinking, and a forgiving soul suggesting that maybe it was because of a woman.

  Not anymore, he answered silently, Or at least hardly ever.

  But this reminder sent his thoughts skidding back nearly ten years, conjuring up a tall, thin, green-eyed woman with skin and hair so pale she could almost pass for an albino in the empty chair across from him.

  He closed his eyes and drained his glass. The whiskey went down like water.

  But it didn’t wash away the memories…

  —

  There they were, sharing a restaurant table after more than eight years apart

  Ella Prime drank it all in. The soft music, the candlelight and wine. Erratic flickerings of the old electricity leaping the gap between them. And memories.

  So many memories. Crowding around the table at their shoulders and whispering in their ears; the best friends and most implacable enemies of two people who have come back together to see what remains of a lost love.

  Ella watched Marchey refill his wineglass, wondering if he always drank this heavily, or if it was seeing her again that was driving him to it. She didn’t ask, and whatever the reason, at least it did seem to be helping him unbend a bit.

  The four months of waiting for him to work his way to Ixion Station had given her plenty of time to dream of this moment. She had imagined their reunion as joyous and passionate, quite often fantasizing them going straight from the shuttle back to the privacy of her microhab, where they could peel the years off with each other’s clothes and start making up for lost time. Such thoughts made her ache with longing for his touch.

  The first crack in the fantasy had come when one of her bug’s main thrusters had flamed out on the way in from her hab. She had gotten in all right, but that stranded them on Ixion Station until it was fixed.

  Still, the where of it didn’t really matter that much, and the revealing blouse of sheer ivory silk and the skintight black skirt that showed off a mile of leg she’d worn for the occasion had been calculated to make the critical parts of her plan come to fruition in her fallback venue. As had her suggestion that they go to the room she’d hastily rented so they could “freshen up”—a code phrase from the old days.

  He’d caught the signal, but pleading bad food on the shuttle, asked if they could first go someplace to eat.

  The way she’d thrown herself at him it was no wonder the poor man had ducked! Cursing herself for moving too fast, coming on too strong, she’d brought him to this restaurant. She had to remember that a lot of water had passed under the bridge since she’d seen him last—a bridge she herself had burned. Building a new one this many years downstream was going to take time and patience.

  But being near him again made that so very hard.

  “What’s with the gloves, Gory?” she asked, to break the silence which had crept up between them. “Getting kind of obsessive about protecting those surgeon’s hands of yours, aren’t you?”

  He laughed. “Something like that.” She couldn’t help noticing that his smile looked a little pained, and his laugh sounded forced and unconvincing. Avoiding her gaze, he inhaled half the wine he’d just poured.

  “Hey,” she said, wondering what she’d said wrong and wanting to repair the damage. “That’s nothing. I’ve got mine insured for one hundred and fifty million.”

  That made him look directly at her. “Really?”

  She nodded, holding them up and wriggling her long thin fingers. “Bet your ass. These babies can turn fifty credits worth of clay into several hundred thousands’ worth of sculpture.”

  “You’re getting that much now?” He chuckled and shook his head. “I remember the first time you cracked the thousand mark.”

  Ella smiled. Now there was a memory…

  “So do I.” But not as clearly as she remembered celebrating that event with him. He’d made the night unforgettable with dinner and champagne, a suite in a five-star-hotel and ten-star sex. Yet it was his absolute and utterly unselfish delight in her accomplishment she remembered best of all.

  Less than four months later she’d broken it off, tired of coming off as second choice to his Bitch Mistress Medicine, and incidentally freeing herself to devote all her time to her art and the search for even greater fortune and fame.

  Even now she couldn’t say for sure which had been the reason and which the excuse.

  “It sounds like you’re doing pretty well, Ella.”

  Career-wise, anyway. She shrugged. “That’s what my agent and my accountant tell me.”

  The truth of the matter was that she’d grown almost absurdly rich and famous since then. Her rise in the art world had been meteoric. Now they called her a living legend. Each new piece she offered set off a bidding war. Almost pathologically reclusive, solitude had always been extremely important to her. Now she had it in spades, living in splendid isolation in a richly appointed microhab all her own just off a research station in one of the most isolated places imaginable. She had everything she’d ever wanted.

  Except a life.

  She gazed at Marchey, wondering if it was the sharp scent of her desperation that was putting him on guard. It was probably pouring off her in waves.

  He had turned out to be the one big love of her life. Oh, there had been the random lover in the years since then, but nothing like what they had shared. Not even close.

  Over the past couple years she’d begun to feel as hollow and brittle as a porcelain bust of herself. Her thoughts kept returning to the time Gory had been there for her, and seeing it as the high point of her life. Looking ahead, she’d felt like she was on a greased slide to the lowest. God, even the frigging critics had begun to talk about the “melancholy sense of existential loneliness that has come to permeate her work.”

  Terrified by the future she saw hardening around her, she’d sought to re-create the past. She hadn’t quite begged Gory to come see her, but that was an option she’d been prepared to take. Just knowing he was coming had filled her with a hopeful new energy. The most recent works she would be shipping sunward on the returning transport would fetch the highest prices yet, she was sure of it.

  Her imaginings of seeing him again and reality differed in yet another way. Of course she had expected him to have changed, but there had to be more than just time between the image in her mind and the man sitting less than a meter away.

  His hairline had retreated to the back of his head, only a few discouraged strands of his lank black hair remaining on top. That happened to a lot of men, but most cared enough to have it replaced. Where once his face had been round and glowingly robust, now it was pared down to the austere bones underneath, fatigue chiseled into every hollow and line. His gray eyes had retreated into their sockets, brui
sed-looking bags under them. He had also lost a lot of weight, which left his broad, blocky body looking rawboned and starved.

  The change was so radical that when she’d seen him appear in the shuttle’s airlock her first thought was that he’d been sick. He had the look of someone with something relentless and unforgiving gnawing at his insides.

  But holding him close again, feeling the warmth of his arms around her and his face snuggled against her breasts had brought back such a rush of sensation and memory her knees nearly buckled under her. It was like coming home after far too long out in a place cold and comfortless.

  In some ways he was still the sweet man she remembered. Yet in others he had become a complete stranger. Although he seemed genuinely glad to see her, there was a subdued air about him, a guarded remoteness that gave her the uneasy feeling that he was hiding something.

  Or maybe he was just afraid she’d break his heart again.

  That wasn’t going to happen. If there was a problem, she’d deal with it. Now that they were together again, nothing could come between them.

  Ella seemed to come back from some far-off place and gave Marchey a smile. “I know I’m repeating myself,” she said shyly, “but I’ve really missed you, Gory.”

  “Me too,” Marchey agreed. He had never really stopped loving Ella. The worst of the symptoms might have subsided over the years, but the condition itself seemed to be incurable.

  He’d known that seeing her again might put him at risk of a major reinfection, and tried to convince himself that he’d developed emotional antibodies that would keep him from finding her as attractive as he had in the old days.

  One look at her had blown that theory all to hell.

  He knew Ella wasn’t all that beautiful by most men’s standards. She was almost freakishly tall, and thin to the point of emaciation; less than forty-five kilos of lean flesh and pale, almost translucent skin spread over more than two meters of angular jutting bone. Her long, narrow face wasn’t the sort to launch a thousand ships; it was rescued from being plain only by big white-lashed eyes of an unusual bottle green.