She looked up into his face. Their eyes met. He was smiling, but it was one of the saddest smiles she’d ever seen.
“I’m sure you can,” he said in a thick voice, “If that’s what you want to do to me.”
Merry had the business of punching a man’s buttons down cold. It would be so easy to reduce this one to the level of just another juan. She knew he wouldn’t even fight it.
Yet she could not make herself ignore the disappointment shadowing his face and voice, implied by his answer. He wanted her, and badly. But not yet. There was something else he wanted first, wanted more, and she found herself wanting to give it to him if she could.
Only to earn the big payoff he’d promised, of course.
But what was it he was looking for?
Merry had not become a whore because she was too stupid to do anything else. Tech work demanded superior problem-solving skills, and prostitution had taught her a hundred seminars’ worth of applied psychology. Part of her job was figuring out what it was her customers wanted and providing at least some acceptable semblance of it.
She studied the schematic lines of this strange man’s face, trying to read what was behind it. He wanted her to trust him, he’d said that at the very start. He wanted her to tell him about herself. The first thing he’d done when they were alone had been to ask about what had happened to her face.
He’d been acting in a very specific manner: getting her trust; asking about the things that had happened to her; how they affected her; how she was dealing with them. There was something very familiar about all that…
Something someone who’d spent as much time being put back together by doctors as she had would recognize.
Bedside manner, it was called. Whores had their own version of it. He was a doctor, and had been treating her like a patient. His moves had been subtle, but now she saw them clearly.
Things he’d said took on new meanings. That remark about having an itch he couldn’t scratch, for instance. Were those silver hands keeping him from practicing medicine?
Driving him to hire a prostitute to play patient?
All that made her wonder what he meant by that bit about paying her with something better than money. Was he hinting that he could fix her up right when no one else could?
That was a logical conclusion, but it didn’t jibe with having to pay someone to be his patient. Besides, how could he fix something every other doctor had said was irreparable? A fried mod was a fried mod, and that’s all there was to it.
Still, if her guess was right, then what could she do to cater to him? She doubted he wanted to play doctor like the usual juan might. Show me where it hurts, little girl.
“Trying to figure out what I’m up to, Merry?” he asked quietly.
She blinked in surprise, startled from her thoughts. For just a moment there it had been like the old days, getting so wrapped up in trying to solve a problem that everything else faded away. She considered his question. No sense in denying it. None of the usual rules worked here. With him.
“Yes, I am,” she admitted.
He patted the couch beside him. “Sit with me, please.” Merry did as he asked, but arranged herself so that he’d get a good eyeful of the merchandise. His smile said that he was, and not minding it one bit.
“If I’m acting more doctor than, um, patron, I’m sorry. I can’t help what I am. If I seem to be getting too personal, it’s because I like you.”
Hearing him say that made her feel absurdly pleased. She fought the feeling by saying, “It’s just my body you’re not crazy about.”
He shook his head. “That’s not true, and you know it. It’s just one of the many things I like about you, and I plan to get around to it in a while. The thing is, if I’d wanted nothing but mindless sex, one of the other girls downstairs would have been good enough.” His voice dropped lower, as if confiding a secret. “But I want more, Merry. I don’t want to settle for an empty package wrapped with a pretty face and a certified disease-free vagina. I want to share my night with a woman who’s lived a little, and maybe even died a little. I want to spend my time with someone keeping on, no matter how hard it is or how much it hurts. Someone I have something in common with.” He sighed. Merry saw resignation in his face, and the need and desperation and even despair that lurked behind it. Those things were easy to recognize. She’d seen them all too often in her mirror when she put on her working face, painting them over with that night’s good-time-girl smile.
“I’m just like you, Merry. I’m not what I once was.” A wry smile twisted his lips. “When you get right down to it, I’ve become a bit of a whore myself. Good for only one thing as far as most are concerned, and once I’ve turned my trick for them they want me gone. How I feel about the way I’m used doesn’t enter into the matter at all. I don’t like it, but I live with things the way they are because I have no choice…”
It was Merry’s turn to sigh. “Choice is an illusion, love.”
“Is it?” He shook his head. “I sure hope you’re wrong. I keep telling myself that it’s just something you have to wait for. That if you can just hold on, it will come along sooner or later and give you a chance to escape from the box where circumstance has put you. That it will save you.”
“You mean like some knight in shining armor coming along to rescue you?” Merry clasped one silver hand in hers. “Sorry, love, but there ain’t any such animal. At least not outside the storybooks.”
Marchey still had his drink in his free hand. He took a long pull on it, regarding her over the rim of his glass and pondering what she’d said.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said at last. “But what if there were? What if that knight suddenly came along, riding out of nowhere on his white charger, and all at once both your face and hands were whole again? What would you do?”
She snorted. “Drop dead surprised.”
“No, really,” he insisted. “If suddenly, unexpectedly, you had choice again, would you recognize it? And if you did, what would you choose? Would you stay a prostitute, become a tech again, or choose to become someone else entirely?”
Merry shook her head. “I don’t know.” She didn’t even like thinking about it. Thinking like that could make you crazy.
An uneasy laugh escaped her. “It doesn’t matter because it would never happen anyway.”
Marchey put his glass aside. “I’ll tell you what, Merry. Think about it for a while. Let me know what you decide.”
“When?”
He gave her a smile she hadn’t seen yet. A mischievous gleam lit in his gray eyes and a bawdy twist curled onto his lips. It made him look younger. It made her smile back.
“Later,” he said.
She watched those shining silver hands drift toward her. Felt them circle around her waist. He leaned toward her, planting a tender kiss on her numb cheek, then pulled back to look deep into her eyes. Not like a juan looks at a whore, but as a man looks at a woman. Eye to eye. Asking if she felt what he felt. Inviting her to share rather than demanding his money’s worth.
Merry gazed back at him, knowing that for all her talk of honesty she had lied to him. She’d worn a mask for years, worn it this very night. It was a cold and brittle thing, the name and persona called Merry. It had been melting and slipping all evening long. Looking into his eyes something inside her finally gave, like ice melted to the point where it crumbles and slides off what it has sheathed, letting the warm come in. Merry vanished, leaving the woman who had hidden behind the mask naked before him.
“In the morning,” he said.
“All right,” she whispered, then covered his mouth with hers, kissing him with an abandon Merry had never given a juan. His mouth tasted of whiskey and dreams.
He embraced her, and she closed her eyes and held on tight, transported back to a time when love and happy endings had not seemed out of reach, and hope had not yet become a four-letter word.
It was five in the morning local time when Marchey sat up in bed, wakened by
a signal from one of his arms. He yawned and stretched, then took a moment to gaze down at the woman sprawled across the bed beside him. In the low amber light of the bedside lamp her long lean body looked like it was shaped from ivory, coral, and gold wire.
But nothing made of such things could be so soft and warm. So beautiful. So giving.
A fond smile slipped out onto his face as he drank in the sight and smell of her, the very feel of just being beside her. He wanted to fix this moment, these sensations, this feeling in his memory, frame it like stained glass so it could lend its glowing colors to the gray days ahead.
“‘Thank you,” he whispered under his breath, knowing she couldn’t hear him but needing to say it. She had given him so much. More than she knew.
There remained one more thing she had it in her power to give, in its own way the most precious of all. But he would have to wait to see if it came to him.
There were things which needed to be done to prepare the way for that moment. Debts to be paid in the most valuable coinage he had. It was time to get up and get started.
He slid out of bed and dressed quietly, even though there was little chance that she would waken. The tab he’d slipped into the drink he’d brought her just before their last bout of lovemaking would see to that.
First he retrieved a pocketcomm from his pouch, carried it into the other room, and made a couple calls. Once those arrangements had been made, he returned to the bedroom.
Leaning over, he planted a kiss on her forehead, then padded to the foot of the bed and began the breathing exercises that would take him into his deep working trance.
Before long he was ready to begin. He laid his silver arms aside and ratcheted back around to the side of the bed.
Had she wakened then and seen him, her trust would have turned to horror at the frightening, forbidding look the trance put on his face.
But the woman who called herself Merry slept on, untroubled and serene.
Merry awakened some four hours later with a dreamy smile on her face. She stretched lazily, yawning hard enough to make her jaw crack, then rolled toward her bedmate to see if he was awake yet. If not, she knew how to bring him around.
She found that she was alone among the tumbled covers. She peered hopefully out into the sitting room, but it was deserted. Just like she had been.
The bed’s warmth turned to cold as it was transformed from a cozy lover’s nest to a whore’s padded workbench in an instant.
She slumped back, squeezing her eyes shut to blot out the sight of her own stupidity. Not even one juan in a thousand wanted a morning after with an old hooker with a messed-up face. How could she have been dumb enough to let herself think this one would be any different?
But she had, damn her. She’d thought he understood just how awful it felt to be used and abandoned. She’d let him raise up her expectations only to chop them off at the knees.
So much for the knight in shining armor.
So much for answering his stupid frigging question in the morning.
Choice. What a laugh! But somehow she didn’t feel much like laughing…
She couldn’t even choose just to lie there and feel sorry for herself. Now that she was awake the messages from her bladder were too urgent to be ignored any longer.
No rest for the wicked, she thought sourly, heaving herself out of bed and padding naked into the small dark bathroom. There was no need to turn the light on. She knew where everything was.
Draining off some of the far too much she had drunk made her feel a little better. Remembering the thousand credits waiting for her made her feel a little better yet, at least partially blunting the sting from the slap in the face.
When she turned up the lights and tried to check herself in the bathroom mirror to see if she looked any better—or worse—than she felt, she found that it had been covered over with the pink plastic tablecloth from the sitting-room table. Something had been written on it in tall black letters so meticulously formed that they might have been machine printed.
Merry frowned and rubbed her bleary eyes, then started reading.
Choice it began, is better than money.
By the time Merry had finished reading the message Marchey had left her, he was already over two thousand kilometers away from Vespa, the ship around him still gathering velocity as it carried him toward the next place his skills would be used. Where he would be used.
He sat in the small galley nook, nursing a coffee and brandy, and musing on the past day and night.
The two surgical procedures he had performed were routine in that only a Bergmann Surgeon could have done them, that he had not met the patients before or after, and the hospital staff had given him the bum’s rush the moment he was done. No one had called him a pariah to his face. They hadn’t needed to. Actions spoke louder than words.
The departure from business as usual was Merry.
A fond smile crept onto his face. Her scent still lingered on him, sweet and beguiling. He said her name aloud. Softly, like a prayer or a benediction. Merry, full of grace.
She’d treated him like a real person, not a monster or a freak, something you used when you had to and sent packing the moment its purpose had been fulfilled. That alone was such a pleasurable feeling that he was scarcely drinking for fear of blunting it.
Since the circuit began his life had been swallowed up by a friendless, rootless, choiceless monotony. It was as if a night of a thousand days had fallen, casting a tarnish across his spirit. He felt himself corroding, drawing inside and growing a thick rusty skin of apathy to survive.
But when someone took the time and trouble to rub a small clear spot in the tarnish…
Marchey gazed down at his gleaming silver arms.
Did a knight in shining armor emerge?
Or had it been a cruel trick on both of them to try to give her what he most wanted for himself? To try to prove to himself that such a thing was still possible?
He pictured it in his mind. The covered mirror and the disassembled comm on the counter below, along with a tool kit he’d had delivered to the room. Taking the unit apart while in working trance had been child’s play. In that state he could play tiddlywinks with platelets and strum single strands of DNA like harp strings. After reattaching his arms he had written:
CHOICE IS BETTER THAN MONEY. THAT’S WHAT I WANT YOU TO HAVE. PUT THIS COMM BACK TOGETHER. YOUR HANDS ARE AT LEAST 85% OF WHAT THEY ONCE WERE, AND WILL RETURN TO 95% WITH USE.
WHEN YOU HAVE DONE THAT, PULL THIS DOWN AND LOOK IN THE MIRROR.
You did what was necessary to survive, keeping your head down and stumbling blindly along.
But if you were very lucky, every once in a while you got a chance to try to shove the night back a little. If your nerve held, and if you could still believe that turning the grim eclipsing tide was possible.
YOU WILL PROBABLY HAVE NIGHTMARES ABOUT ME. I CAN’T HELP THAT, AND HOPE YOU CAN REMEMBER ME FONDLY IN SPITE OF THEM.
The commboard chimed.
His heart began to race, and his hands tightened on his cup. He had to swallow hard before he could speak.
“Yes?”
“Incoming message,” the comm’s smooth, sexless synthesized voice informed him crisply.
“Go ahead.” He closed his eyes. Some obscure impulse made him cross his silver fingers.
“A one-thousand-credit posting you made on Vespa has been returned to your account,” the comm announced. “There is a printed message attached. Shall I read it?”
Marchey settled back, eyes still closed, the better to savor the moment. “Yes. Proceed.”
“ ‘You can wake up from bad dreams, and choose to dream better ones. I know that now. Thank you. If the knight in shining armor is ever on Vespa again and needs some repairs done on his tinwork, look me up.’ The message is signed Delores Esterbrook.”
Marchey’s face eased into a satisfied smile. In his mind he saw her smiling back at him, her face lit like a lamp raised against the dark.
Both sides of it.
—
The third—no, fourth quatriliter of Mauna Loa was empty.
The memory of that smile barely touched him anymore. And as for choice—
Marchey chose to stand, get his bearings, and head for his room so he could finish drinking himself to sleep.
2 Administration of Tests
The temporary cubby he’d been assigned was in the half-g section of the hospital wheel. The combination of reduced gravity and enough whiskey under his belt to stop most men’s clocks had him moving with the slow, exaggerated caution of someone attempting to walk on the ceiling.
His mind precessing like a gyroscope, he considered the day’s events. As layovers went this had been about average. Forgettable. In the morning he’d be back on the circuit. In a month the only thing he’d be able to remember about today was the excellent Mauna Loa whiskey.
Next stop… where? Ganymede? It didn’t matter. Thanks to the splendid efficiency of MedArm he didn’t have to know. He would be picked up and deposited there like a chess piece.
Queen to King’s bishop 3. The Red Queen, of course. Running like hell but getting absolutely nowhere.
The image made him laugh. But it was a joyless, unpleasant bark that caused a young couple waiting for the elevator farther along the corridor to turn and stare.
He gave them a less than reassuring grin. “Actually,” he called cheerfully, “I’m more a pawn than a queen.” He blew them a kiss. “Really.”
They retreated toward the stairwell, glancing nervously back over their shoulders and whispering. The expressions on their faces suggested that they thought he might be an escapee from the wing with the padded walls.
Marchey’s attention had already strayed from them and back to the task of keeping his feet under him. Whispers were nothing new; they were the sound of the blur, signifying nothing. A behind his back shout of Freak! or Quack! could still penetrate his awareness, but that was about all.
Flesh and Silver Page 7
