“Will the secondaries take over if I unplug her for a moment?” he asked over his shoulder while checking the pupil response of Shei’s undamaged right eye. The other one was hidden under a thick sterile covering. The whole left side of her head was heavily bandaged; her face had been partly averted when the toy cannon had turned into a pipe bomb.
He shook his head at what he saw. Her pupil was dilated and showed only minimal response. Hang on, my brown-eyed girl Help is here now.
“Yes, it’s a full table.”
Marchey nodded absently at Chang’s answer. He sighed, squared his shoulders, then turned to look across the room at Ella.
The expression on his face made her take an involuntary step back. He wore the face of a condemned man, despairing and apologetic, the face of a man saying a final farewell. Part of her was drawn to comfort him, to tell him that nothing could be that bad. But she could only stand there, the anxiety buzzing through her bones defeating that impulse.
Marchey’s gaze dropped, and he turned away. First he shucked off his jacket and laid it aside. Next he rolled up the sleeves of his red-silk shirt. The gray-velvet gloves covered his arms up to his elbows.
He began stripping off the right glove. The fabric slid down his forearm, revealing not white skin but burnished silver. His wrist was silver. His hand, palm, thumb, and fingers were silver; gleaming metal shaped into smooth, perfectly sculpted folds and curves, supple seamless biometal shaped to mimic the flesh and bone it had replaced down to each knuckle and crease.
He removed his other glove, his already-bared silver hand gleaming and flashing as it moved like a thing alive. His left hand and arm were the same, a mirror twin of the right. Face burning self-consciously, he put the gloves aside. Through all this he kept his head down, studiously avoiding Ella’s shocked and uncomprehending stare.
She stumbled forward a step, protest filling her chest to the bursting point. Dr. Chang caught her arm and held her back, speaking quietly but firmly.
“Not now. Please. Wait until he is done.”
“But his hands, w-what happened to his—” She swallowed hard, silenced as he held up one shining hand. An implug extruded from his palm like an electronic stigma, hung there on a braided silver cable.
He turned to his patient and gently probed the base of her skull. When he found the impline linking her to the table’s life support and monitors he pulled it and substituted the implug dangling from his palm.
Ella shivered and hunched her shoulders. Taps were common, but she had always been revolted by the idea of letting a tap’s quasi-alive nanostrands slither into her brain like electronic worms. Just the thought of it made her stomach churn.
Marchey stood there, swaying slightly, the abstracted look he wore making it appear he was daydreaming.
Dr. Chang spoke up before Ella could find voice for her question. “He’s linked to Shei’s tap and reading her condition. Most imped doctors can do that, but only through a special interface. His interface is built right into his prosthetic.”
Ella mouthed the word prosthetic. It tasted like tin-foil against her tongue and teeth.
There was a soft snick as he disconnected. He hooked the girl back up to the table once more, gently lowering her head back down onto the padding.
Next he placed a hand on either side of the girl’s skull. Keeping them parallel with each other, he moved them in slow wide circles. They emitted the faintest of hums, nearly lost in the background noise made by the other medical equipment.
“Now he’s scanning the location of the fragments. He doesn’t have to do this, we’ve taken full scans. He’s just being careful. In fact, he could go in cold and do better than I could with every scan and test possible at my fingertips.”
Ella watched intently, hearing every word the woman said and even understanding some of it. Her whole attention remained welded to the alien argent metal that replaced the gentle hands she remembered. Marchey seemed lost to all but what he was doing.
At last he straightened up, muttering something under his breath. One silver hand brushed the dying child’s bandaged forehead tenderly.
Something clicked inside Ella. She was suddenly inundated by a flood of jumpcut, staggeringly vivid sense memories of Marchey’s hands touching her: a velvety knuckle kissing her cheek as it wiped away a tear; his warm palms and fingers cupping her breasts; fingers trailing sweet fire along her flanks, heating her nerves to the flash point; thumbs and fingers that knew her secret places and what to do there, possessed of a special wisdom of their own; his warm hand in hers in the dark, comforting and reassuring…
But those hands were gone. Gone. Her skin crawled at the thought of those cold metal things touching her, creeping across her flesh like sinister steel spiders.
“—gone—” It was a breathless whisper, a crack in the speechless silence, forced out by all the things building up behind it. She started toward him to demand that he tell her what had happened to him. How this horrible thing had come about.
Dr. Chang barred her way, grasping her arms. “Ella,” she said sternly, “I know this has to be difficult for you. But you must not break his concentration.” Her voice throbbed with urgency. “Shei’s life depends on it.”
The pleading note in Chang’s voice reached Ella. She swallowed the sour wave in her throat, looking down and meeting the other woman’s eyes. After a moment she nodded.
Her eyes sought Marchey again. Chang turned to watch as well, but kept a restraining hand on her arm.
Marchey stepped back from the table. He crossed his arms before his broad chest and began to breathe deeply, eyes closed, doing some sort of pranayama or breathing exercise. Crossed at the wrist, his silver arms were posed like the ones depicted by the pin on his shirt.
Ella watched in growing bewilderment as his silver hands began fluttering and flashing like mechanical birds in rhythm with his breathing. His face became increasingly strange as his breathing slowed, all expression flattening away to leave a rigid, blankly inhuman mien in its place. The seconds limped by, and his face became colder and stranger still; a sinister Mr. Hyde emerging from the sweet Dr. Jekyll she thought she knew.
She sought the comfort of Chang’s hand against the sense of dread climbing up her spine and wrapping clammy, spatulate fingers around her heart. Chang’s hand was cold, her grip tight. Was she afraid as well?
Marchey’s sunken gray eyes slowly opened, the lids sliding back like shutters over a void.
There was nothing of the Georgory Marchey Ella had known and loved to be seen in them. They were deep dark caves: cold, empty, and forbidding. Not even the faintest spark of who he had been remained in them, every gleam of humanity expunged by whatever radically altered state he had just invoked.
Ella fought the urge to run away from the awful stranger he had become. Had turned himself into, right before her eyes.
Staring straight ahead, his gaze sweeping indifferently across the two women like a scanning beam, Marchey moved to the foot of the table with slow, ratcheting steps. He bent at the waist like a badly made puppet and rested his forearms on it, elbow to wrist flat on the padded surface.
The chrome clockwork birds of his hands were still. His eyes drooped shut. He drew his breath through his clenched teeth sharply, as if trying to lift some impossible burden.
After a moment his breath came out in a long hiss. He slowly straightened up and stepped back. His silver arms remained on the table, abandoned, and somehow obscene. Just below the elbows his arms ended in flat, featureless silver plates. After that, nothing.
Chang clutched Ella’s hand tightly. “It’s all right,” she whispered, her tone reedy and uncertain.
Ella could only stare at her former lover, her face white and immobile as carved bone, her lips pressed tightly together to keep in the contents of her squirming gut. Had what she was seeing always been inside him? Looking out? Watching?
Marchey moved to the head of the table, his movements stiff and jerky. Once there he brough
t the truncated stumps of his arms down toward the child’s bandaged head, pausing when they were an arm’s length away. His posture, his face, everything about him made it look like he was about to do her terrible harm. Ella’s insides jangled with the impulse to snatch the child out of his grasp, but the thought of going nearer to him filled her with terror.
Then he reached.
Had he still possessed hands, they would have been driven through the skull and buried deep within the delicate tissues of the girl’s brain. He changed position. The silver plates at the end of his arms winked knowingly. His eyes drooped shut to become glittering slits. His face showed no more animation or humanity than that of a granite gargoyle.
Ella forced a question past the knot in her throat. “W-what is h-he—?” What is he doing? What is he?
“He is locating the fragments by touch,” Dr. Chang replied softly. She licked her lips. “Since they are metal, he will trace each path of entry and bring each fragment back along its path to minimize the damage inflicted by removal. If he hadn’t been here, I might have tried to do it myself, but even with nanotic forceps I would have done more harm than good.”
Ella’s bewilderment was total. “But he doesn’t h-have any h-hands,” she stammered, tearing her gaze away to stare at the smaller woman almost accusingly. “They’re gone!”
“He has something better!” Chang said so forcefully it sounded almost like a shout. She gripped Ella’s hand tighter and spoke softly, reassuringly. Almost reverently.
“Let me try to explain. There is a phenomenon sometimes experienced by amputees called the ‘phantom limb syndrome.’ What that means is that they think they can still ‘feel’ the missing limb. The flesh and bone is gone, but some strange ghost of sensation remains. The intensity of that feeling varies from person to person. Some do not experience it at all. Once the replacement of missing limbs with banked tissue became commonplace it very nearly became a forgotten occurrence.
“Almost, but fortunately not quite. A very great man, a prostheticist named Dr. Saul Bergmann became intrigued by this phenomenon. He began to study it, eventually learning that a small percentage of those who felt it were capable of actually manipulating matter with that limb image. The ability was so weak and wildly erratic that it took him years conclusively to prove it existed. But he did prove it, and then went on to develop techniques to help the ability grow stronger and under better control.”
Ella stared down at Dr. Chang, trying to absorb and understand what she was being told. It sounded impossible. Insane. As insane as what she had just seen, as what was happening at this very moment. And anyone who could believe in such a crazy thing had to be—
“These very few special people had to work in a deep trance to maintain the concentration it took to use this limb image, but they could do many unexpected—you might even say miraculous things with it. The strangest and most wonderful things of all were the things it could do inside a human body. Anyway, once the techniques became better perfected, Bergmann Surgery—”
Ella’s gaze had been drawn back to Marchey as she tried to reconcile what she was hearing with him. Her free hand went to her mouth, and the small shocked sound that escaped past her fingers made Dr. Chang turn and stare.
A jagged metal fragment the size of a fingernail slowly emerged from the gauze pad covering Shei’s damaged eye. It poked out apparently on its own power, twisted free of the threads, hung there in the air for a moment, then settled to the white bandaging. A small bloodstain began spreading away from it, darkening the snowy gauze.
Marchey was oblivious to their wide-eyed scrutiny. Sweat sheened his wide forehead. A silver-capped stump turned toward his head momentarily, and the sweat vanished. He shifted position slightly and continued his work, the silver plates hovering over the child’s head. Discs of reflected light crawled across her bandaged face.
Ella shuddered and looked away. This was worse than knives and bone saws and a rubber-gloved hand coming up dripping with gore. Those were at least things you could understand. Horrible, but comprehensible. Not like invisible hands on phantom limbs wielded by the horrific stranger inhabiting Gory’s body.
Chang picked up the thread of what she had been telling Ella again, but she no longer addressed the younger woman directly. She seemed to be speaking for her own benefit as much as Ella’s, trying to reduce what she was witnessing to something explicable. She clutched Ella’s hand tightly. Her other hand was clasped tightly around the crucifix at her breast.
“Bermann Surgeons perform procedures light years ahead of conventional surgery. He can wipe away a tumor or a clot or sterilize an infection. He can coax an aneurism out, smoothing it away like a bubble in clay. He can thrust his hands into a living, beating heart without breaking the skin or altering its rhythm. Bone, muscle, blood, and tissue—even the very cells themselves—he can work on any of it directly. Look at what he’s doing here. The strongbox of the skull presents no more barrier than the surface of water to him. He can reach through it to work on the delicate tissues inside as easily as you or I could turn over stones at the bottom of a fishbowl. No scars, no complications, no blood, no pain…”
Chang’s voice trailed away. After a few moments she spoke again, her voice barely above a whisper. “I envy him, Ella. Can you understand that?”
Ella stared down at Chang’s wan, sweat-glazed face, too numb to answer even if she had known what to say.
“Soon all my skills will be as obsolete as cupping and lobotomy. Surgeons will be like him.” She grimaced. “Compared to what he has become I am just a crude mechanic with a few blunt tools at my command. He is a healer”
She squeezed Ella’s hand. “I know this has been a lot to absorb all at once, and it’s very frightening to see him like this. But he is not a monster. He is not a cripple.” She managed an unconvincing smile. “I saw the way you looked at him. You love him, don’t you? This doesn’t change that.”
Ella’s face was that of a shock victim, her skin pale and bloodless as wax. It took all her strength and concentration to speak.
“H-how did he get like this?” Her voice was thin with bewilderment. She pulled her hands free from Chang’s grasp and shoved them under her arms as if to protect them from the same fate his had suffered. “H-how was he m-maimed? He never said anything about any a-accident…”
Dr. Carol Chang was a kind woman. A caring and considerate woman. But she was badly unnerved herself, and she answered Ella’s question without stopping to think about what a terrible thing some truths can be sometimes.
She shook her head. “There was no accident. His professional rating was high enough to be considered for the Bergmann Program. He scored well enough in the preliminary tests to become a candidate. Once it became clear that he had something of the innate ability needed, he gambled on success and had his hands amputated. God, I’d trade—”
Ella stared at Chang in absolute horror, her mouth working soundlessly at the word amputated but unable to force it past her lips. In her mind a gleaming, razor-edged silver cleaver chopped down, severing his hands, her hands, her heartstrings.
She stumbled back clumsily, her horrified gaze seeking out Marchey. He’d done this to himself. Willingly. Mutilated himself so he could become this—this—
Her back came up against the door.
“Gory?” His name came out a heartsick plea for proof that some fragment of the man she loved remained inside what he had become. What he had turned himself into.
No response. “Gory!” Louder, shrill with desperation.
Not even a flicker of recognition showed on the cruel cold landscape of his face. His hooded eyes remained dead and indifferent, focused on some crazy mental image, buried in the child’s brain. The image burned itself into her retinas, through them into the tender folds of her own brain, into places so deep it could never be erased.
A sob escaped her as she spun around, pushed through the door, and fled, knowing knowing knowing she would never again be able to see
him any other way.
Dr. Carol Chang watched the door swing shut, her shoulders slumping defeatedly. After a moment she slowly turned back toward the table where Marchey worked. She felt clumsy and stupid. Guilty. Out of place, there in her own clinic.
She shivered as before her eyes another twisted fragment of metal emerged from a place no one else could reach, brought out by a spectral hand she could not see.
Science, she told herself, that’s all this is. Science. Like light and a ruby make a laser, like Schmidt crystals and electricity produce anesthetic fields. He is only a man who has gained a special skill.
But at what cost?
No triumph showed on the face of the hand’s owner at what he had just accomplished, no regret for what he had just lost. He might as well have been a machine—a soulless, inhuman construct empty of everything but fixed, unswerving purpose.
“Dear God,” she whispered. She took an uncertain step nearer, but could force herself to go no closer than that. Nor did she voice the name of who it was she wanted God to help: herself, Shei, Ella, or Marchey.
Oblivious and unmoved, he worked on.
Marchey reattached his prosthetics. A mental twist of the wrist and he had solid fingers once more. The arms felt heavy, and even though they were every bit as sensitive as the flesh they had replaced, they still felt like numb dead meat compared to the exquisitely sensitive un-hands he’d just used.
He didn’t ask where Ella had gone. Some detached, then-volitionless part of his mind had registered every detail of what had happened.
Now everything from his old life was gone. The circle was complete.
He sighed. “I was able to repair most of the damage. I think the worst she’ll suffer is some small memory loss, and perhaps a minor temporary degradation of coordination. You know the tests to run.” His tone was as mechanical as his silver hands.
Chang nodded soberly. “You saved her life. You— you healed her face, too.” Her voice was husky with awe.
Flesh and Silver Page 3
