Flesh and Silver

by Stephen L. Burns

  Her nose wrinkled in disgust. “No. I am an angel. I would not eat human food, even if that were what was on your plate.”

  Marchey took a sip of wine. “How would you describe human food, then?” This ought to be interesting.

  “It is a thick green liquid that comes in big blue drums. Each person is allowed two bowlsful each day.”

  What was that line Sal had always used when he came up against someone utterly convinced of something that made no sense? Oh yeah: Where you from, son? Nairobi, ma’am. Isn’t everyone?

  “Two bowls of green glop a day. Everybody eats like this, you say?” What she’d described sounded like survival-grade Basicalgae; spoilage stabilized, nutritionally and dietary-fiber complete, and tasting just about like what you’d expect from enriched pasteurized pond scum.

  “Of course.”

  “I mean everybody everywhere?”

  “What else would they eat?”

  “Well, stuff like I’m eating, for instance.”

  Scylla’s tattooed lips pinched tight. “That is not food.”

  He chuckled again. “QED. Ten points for the lady in the silver skivvies.” He speared a forkful of steak, began to chew. “What do you eat, then?” he asked around his mouthful. “Angel food cake?”

  That green eye narrowed dangerously. “Do you make sport of me?”

  Marchey realized that poking fun at her was about as safe as prodding a pile of gunpowder with a lit match. “Never,” he said with what he hoped was a straight face.

  “Very well,” she said stiffly. “I eat manna.”

  What else? “Well, I guess you’re in the right place.”

  She stared at him. “Explain.”

  “Manna falls from heaven, right? Which from Earth is space. Should be regular hailstorms of the stuff out here.”

  A terse shake of her head. “The things you say make no sense.”

  “So it seems. My tongue must need a tune-up.” He drank some more wine, just in case the problem was excessive dryness.

  “Manna comes in a crate.” She reached into her pouch and pulled out a foil-wrapped wafer. “This is a loaf.”

  “Ah, ratbars.”

  Scylla cocked her head, light gleaming off the polished silver covering everything but her face. “Rat… bars?”

  “Short for ration bars, no rodents involved. Your exo is able to handle all your wastes as long as they are kept to a minimum. Fluids—sweat, urine, and the rest aren’t really a problem. They’re recycled, any excess vented off as water vapor. Solids are harder to manage. The ratbars are nutritionally complete, but extremely low residue. If they’re all you eat, then you probably don’t need to excrete more than what, once a month?”

  Scylla scowled at him. “I am an angel,” she said at last. “I do not make filth as humans do,” she added prissily.

  “Of course not. You’ve got a nanotic colony in your bowels to scavenge what your digestive system misses. But every thirty days or so this cloche”—he pointed at a bulge on her right hip with his fork—“opens. Inside is a lozenge-shaped chunk of grayish matter that you throw away.”

  Scylla only stared at him intently, her webbed lips pressed tightly together, her green eye almost as cold as the lens that replaced the other.

  “Well, am I right?” he prompted.

  She shoved herself to her feet, snatching up the ratbar. “I cannot talk to you,” she said tightly, then stalked off in a huff.

  “Apparently not,” he said mildly, watching her go to the farthest side of the compartment and sit with her back to him.

  He topped off his wine, picked up his book, and went back to reading and eating. He ignored her, and she him, for the rest of the evening and most of the next day.

  —

  The closer they came to Ananke the more keyed-up and fretful Scylla became, the more impatient that this awful task be over and behind her. At long last the end was nearly in sight. Only twenty more hours to be endured.

  Scylla sat alone in the galley, feeling like she had been condemned to Purgatory. Her charge was in an unresponsive stupor. He had been so for the past two days, silent and stinking of alcohol.

  Yet she dared not relax her vigilance. Steadfastness was one of the defining qualities of an angel. Two days cooped up with the sodden, unresponsive lump in her charge, staying ready for action that never came, left her frustrated and edgy.

  The trip out from Ananke in a battered old hopper had taken ten days, but this far swifter return seemed much longer. An eternity. All because of him.

  At first she had come to the conclusion that this man Marchey was dead inside. People whose spirits had broken were common on Ananke; not everyone had the faith or inner strength to tread the hard steep road to perfection. His cryptic, sometimes sarcastic comments were nothing more than echoes of what he might have once been, like ghost data from a wiped program. She had dismissed him as nothing but an empty shell. Any response to being struck was merely an echo.

  But in the evening of the second day her opinion had been forcibly revised.

  He had been stretched out on a lounger, reading, listening to music, and as usual, drinking steadily. Where anyone else would have been watching her fearfully, not for even a fleeting moment forgetting that they were in the presense of an angel, he seemed utterly indifferent to her. That was wrong, contrary to all she knew. It rankled, but if he did not challenge her control over him, there was little she could do about it.

  Boredom had set her to pacing the confines of the ship’s single deck. Back on Ananke there was always something to be done. Serving Brother Fist. Guarding the flock. Overseeing the workers. Hunting out blasphemy. Here she was cut off from all use and diversion.

  Her restless gaze had crossed an overhead storage compartment she didn’t remember having searched when she swept the ship for weapons. So she unlatched the door to check it out.

  Inside, carefully held in place by uniholds, was a bisque-fired clay sculpture. She released it from the clamps and took it down for a better look.

  Brother Fist had objects like this. Pretty things, some of them imbued with a strange indefinable something that she could sense, but not quite understand.

  This object was beautifully made, and it radiated a raw emotional power that caught her unawares. The harsh lines of her face softened as she stared at the thing in her hands in growing wonder.

  It depicted two people who had begun making a single thing together. But the man stood off to one side, staring sadly up at what they had begun and never would finish. He cradled a child in arms that ended just below the elbow. His missing arms lay at his feet. He held the child and stumps of his arms up toward the work in an attitude she knew well, one of supplication.

  The woman was tall and thin. She huddled on the ground near him among her abandoned tools. Her face was filled with such shame and loss and frustration that Scylla felt uneasy looking at it. That face was turned away from both the man and the thing they had begun making together.

  What they had been making were two people embracing. Although it was rough-hewn and incomplete, Scylla could see that the man’s face was Marchey’s. It was the woman on the ground he held.

  She frowned, disquiet rising with the unfamiliar emotions aroused by the thing in her hands. Something about it drew her, and yet that same thing repelled. It set off an uneasy subterranean yearning she could not begin to define. She had to wonder what her prisoner was doing in it, and why it was hidden. She called his name, turning to ask him.

  When he saw her and what she held, his face had gone a terrible bloodless white. He made a strangled, tormented sound that was somewhere between a sob and a snarl, and launched himself at her with his silver fingers hooked into claws.

  His drunkenness betrayed him. He stumbled as his feet hit the decking, and he went crashing to his knees.

  Scylla had already braced herself to fend him off, angel reactions slowing time to a crawl as she waited for him to get up and come at her. Anticipation perked through h
er, hot and invigorating. At last a chance to assume her rightful place as she put him in his!

  For nothing. He remained where he had fallen, hunching in on himself in heaped misery. He began to weep, begging her not to hurt the thing in her hands. He kept repeating a name: Ella.

  Brother Fist’s angel knew that she had finally found a weapon to use against him, a crack in his seamless apathy. That was good.

  Yet for some reason whose rhyme still escaped her, she had carefully returned the thing to its niche, putting its unnerving presence safely out of sight.

  Then she had told him that it was safely back where it belonged, and promised that she wouldn’t hurt it.

  Promised.

  How could she have done such a thing? What was happening to her?

  There was no escaping those questions. They plagued her waking hours and haunted her dreams when she curled up in a corner and set her proximity alarms to waken her if he came within three meters. He never did—at least not in body. Her sleep was fitful and restless, filled with dreams in which he intruded at will.

  Never had she known such inner turmoil. Her sense of self and purpose no longer filled her the way it once had, her certainty complete and unscathable as her silver skin. The more she fought it the worse it became. Like an air leak, it had begun as a mere pinhole when Brother Fist sent her away to fetch this man, and had become a widening rent upon finding him. Only it was her insides escaping, not air.

  Him, she thought grimly, watching him take yet another drink and mumble something to himself. He wasn’t afraid of her, even though all she had to do was look at the people of Ananke to put them on their knees. He didn’t care that she had taken his life in her hands. Where she was taking him and for what purpose meant nothing to him. Outwardly he acted as if he was totally beaten and in her control.

  Yet she knew he was not. But for that one incident, she had not reached him. He no longer disputed her angelic state, but she had the unsettling feeling that he was only humoring her.

  Every time she talked to him she came away feeling even more frustrated and confused. When she spoke of things she knew as truth, he would give her a tolerant, forbearing smile such as an adult would give a misinformed child. Somehow that smile made her feel small and weak and stupid—she who was made by

  God to stand above lowly creatures such as he. When she said other things he gave her a different smile, one that left her feeling absurdly pleased.

  Worse yet, he seemed to know things about her no mortal should. Like their talk of food that first night. Only her master knew—He had been the one who instructed her—that once a month she had to unburden herself of the physical manifestation of her own spiritual imperfection. It came in the form he had described, from the place he had indicated. How could he have known such a thing?

  There were times she thought that maybe he was a devil who had been specifically shaped and sent to taunt and tempt her. His every aspect baffled her. He was an infidel, yet had the hands of an angel. He wallowed in weakness, but there was strength in him that made him nearly impossible to bend to her will.

  Only a devil could have such knowledge or insidious power. Somehow his very presence made her think forbidden thoughts, made her doubt herself and all she knew as true. It was as if his blank indifference turned him into some sort of mirror that reflected back hidden faces of her self while distorting the familiar all out of recognition.

  Where had the silver armor of her certainty gone?

  For all the times she had asked herself that, she still had no answer. Her only certainty was that her only salvation lay in returning to her rightful place at Brother Fist’s side. He would make things right again, just like he had when—

  Scylla frowned as the echo of another almost-memory whispered through her mind, a taunting, impossible remembrance of a time before she was an angel, when—

  Her silver-clad fingers dug into the galley’s tabletop, the hard plastic furrowing and tearing like putty. Her black-webbed mouth tightened into a thin, hard line.

  Deceptions. On every side, even on the inside.

  As much as the man Marchey troubled her, it was being away from the Eden of Ananke, away from Brother Fist’s love that had exposed her to all this doubt and deception and confusion in the first place. He should never have—

  Scylla’s one human eye squeezed shut and she shivered, aghast at how easily and often such blasphemy came into her mind. How had she fallen into such a morass of forbidden thoughts and wickedness? How had her soul become so tainted?

  She must atone. That knowledge—that commandment—tolled in her mind in a voice as great as God’s. It was deafening. Irrefutable as the need to breathe.

  Yet something inside her clenched as tight as her silver fists in denial.

  No. There would be no atoning this time. If she was failing a test of faith, so be it. The blame was not hers alone.

  Refusing the commandment to atone brought intense physical pain, an agony to match that delivered by her prayer-box. Enduring it was a kind of penitence of its own. That realization allowed her to endure the torment of refusing the commandment crackling through her nerves.

  The doubting angel rode out the searing pain, until it passed, and the subtler torment that filled the hours after, counting each moment until she returned to Ananke as an eternity.

  —

  Five days after Marchey had found an angel in his room, he arrived at Ananke. It was one of the smaller outer Jovian moons, an irregular stony lump just over 20km in diameter. The screen over the main board showed its unattractive face as they approached. He hardly gave it a second disinterested look. Most of his attention was on the unpleasant descent into the grim barrens of sobriety.

  Apparently Ananke was not a very friendly place. As they approached it a recorded message came in over the comm, warning them that under no circumstances would they be allowed to land. All incoming and outgoing cargo was to be left on their orbital doorstep.

  Scylla had given an override command that let them land after all. She told him that his was the first outsider ship to do so in over seven years. Somehow he didn’t feel particularly honored.

  They passed through an open-shuttered blister on Ananke’s pockmarked surface and into its interior. The shutters had closed after them like the jaws of a huge trap, leaving them in a narrow stone gullet. Since the moon had been given some spin, in was up. His stomach insisted on another opinion.

  When they came to rest a battered, often-patched locktube blindly sought the ship’s lock like an eyeless lamprey. It finally found its mark and locked on. His own airlock began cycling, flashed orange, and aborted. He had to acknowledge a warning about poor air quality before it would finish the cycle. The pressure read as barely acceptable; any lower and he and Scylla would have needed to take antiaeroembolants to avoid the bends.

  The airlock door hissed open at last. He wrinkled his nose and shrank back as a staggering wave of foul-smelling, overused air rolled over him. Scylla prodded him impatiently from behind.

  Marchey had become increasingly phobic about leaving his ship over the last two years. To make matters worse, the D-Tox tab he’d taken earlier to purge the alcohol from his system had left him feeling wrung out and wincingly sober, his senses shriekingly acute and his nerves like bare, overheated wires.

  He stood there at the threshold, all but gagging on the fetid air and on the verge of hyperventilating. Every instinct told him to close the lock back up and get the hell out of there.

  Scylla had other ideas. This time she gave him a shove. “Start walking, or I will drag you.”

  He hunched his shoulders. Taking a deep breath, he forced himself to step through the lock and begin pulling himself through the creaking tube, silver hands clamped tight on the guideline. Ananke’s innate gravity was negligible. Most small moons and asteroids were spun up to create a semblance of gravity. Here it appeared that the process had been begun and then abandoned. It felt like there was not much more than a tenth g,
which was far too close to free fall for his comfort.

  His ship used a combination of acceleration and spin to maintain at least a half g at all times. Most hospitals had low-or null-g sections, but surgical procedures were always performed in at least a half g. Null-g sex might be delightful, but surgery was a nightmare in it. Blood, rather than pooling, tended to cover everything like a thick coat of paint.

  The tube ended at an airlock large enough to handle cargo. Both inner and outer doors were open. Scylla herded him through them, out onto a wide, shallow ramp leading down into a man-made cavern used as a receiving bay.

  There were eight or nine people in the cold, dimly lit bay, shadowy figures laboring to unload an orbital container. Slowly at first, then in a stumbling rush, they abandoned their work and started toward him. Something about the way they moved reminded him of the street beggars he’d seen on Earth in a city named Calcutta back when he was twenty.

  He watched them draw nearer. His eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the gloom enough to let him see them clearly when Scylla came out behind him.

  The people below cried out as one and flung themselves to their knees on the rocky floor. He turned to see her gazing out over them, nodding in satisfaction. There was something like a smile on her webbed lips.

  “Yes, Brother Fist’s angel has returned,” she called out, her voice echoing hollowly off the stone walls. “Stand and welcome her back into your love.”

  Scylla took his arm. One by one the people below struggled to their feet and formed a double row at the foot of the ramp. Most had their heads bowed and their hands clasped loosely before them.

  Those that could.

  They started down. Marchey’s eyes had adjusted to the dim lighting by then, and what he saw chilled him to the bone. Each and every member of the unhappy honor guard had the gaunt, haunted look of a concentration-camp victim. The best dressed among them wore little more than rags, even though the temperature in the bay had to be in the single digits.

  Every one of them was in one way or another maimed and crippled.

  They came abreast of the first in line, a gaunt black man with downcast eyes. He was missing one leg and leaned on a homemade plastic crutch. The hand on the crutch-brace was a blunt misshappen knot. His other arm ended at the wrist. The face of the woman next to him was a mass of purplish scar tissue wrapped around one brown, fearful eye. Similar scarring covered her neck and disappeared down the front of her torn and greasy coverall. Marchey did not need to see the few strands of hair left on her pale, blistered skull or the tremors that racked her thin frame to recognize the signs of severe radiation exposure.