Flesh and Silver

by Stephen L. Burns

  Marchey ached to reach out and wipe the pain away, to see if her face could still be found under the horror that had been done to it. But Scylla towed him relentlessly down the line past a man whose arms had been broken and not properly straightened before they set, which had left him looking like he had an extra set of elbows. Across from him was a coughing woman with black blood on her lips and and a body warped by arthritis.

  It seemed he had been brought here for good reason. It appeared he had his work cut out for him.

  Still, to make her and these others stand here like this! “All right, Scylla,” he said curtly, “I’ve seen enough. Unless you have a very good medical facility—which looks pretty damned unlikely—I can treat these patients better in the small clinic on my ship.”

  The angel stared at him as if he had begun speaking in tongues. “You are here at Brother Fist’s command.”

  “Then I’m supposed to treat him first?” Marchey told himself that this Brother Fist character had better be in goddamned rough shape if he was putting himself in line before these poor bastards.

  She scowled. “Brother Fist is God’s Chosen One. Through Him we know that secular medicine is a cheat and a deception, a blasphemous affront to God’s Will. He needs nothing you can offer.” She glanced indifferently around at the cringing wretches on either side of them. “These ones will be healed if their faith is strong and their obedience perfect enough.”

  She had led him along this rue of misery to draw even with a black-haired boy of perhaps twelve. Both his hands were crudely bandaged with dirty rags. One of his eyes was gone, the socket black-crusted and badly infected. The boy’s face was flushed with fever and beaded with sweat in spite of the cold. The whole area around his eye was an angry red, and so swollen that the tight and shiny skin looked ready to burst. Under it was a glistening tear track of pus. The sickly-sweet smell of gangrene filled the air. His other eye, dulled by pain and filled with mute appeal, sought Marchey’s face.

  The boy tried to smile.

  Marchey tried to smile back, but could not. For a moment it was as if every cell in his body had stopped motion and function. Then he shivered, feeling fury ignite in a place where there had only been cold ash for a very long time.

  He shucked free of Scylla’s arm and glared at her. “Listen,” he spat through clenched teeth, his voice dripping anger and contempt. “This boy’s eye is badly infected. Necrotic. He is going to fucking die unless he gets proper care. This Brother Fist character is full of shit if he says—”

  He never saw it coming. Silver lightning struck him, blasting him off his feet. He pinweeled sideways, narrowly missing the boy and slamming back first into one of the orbital containers. He hung there as if glued to its cold steel side with the wind knocked out of him, dazed and desperately gasping for breath.

  Ananke’s feeble gravity never had a chance to claim him.

  Scylla swept down on him like a chrome harpy. She grabbed him by the front of his tunic, her ceramyl claws raking across his chest like a fistful of knives. She peeled him off and jerked him close. Wrath turned her tattooed face into that of a Chinese dragon. Her breath steamed like smoke in the frigid air.

  “Never dare speak of Brother Fist like that again,” she hissed, black-webbed lips peeling back from her serried teeth. “My punishment will not kill you.” Her one human eye narrowed to a glittering slit. The blank lens that replaced the other gleamed with machine-cold menace. “Because death would be a mercy, and there will be none for you.”

  She slammed him onto his feet. Marchey staggered, but somehow managed to keep from falling. Blood from his slashed chest already stained the pristine white of his mangled tunic. He was at last able to breathe again and sucked the foul air in greedily. It tasted almost sweet.

  He was hurt and scared, but his outrage still outweighed his fear. He stood up straight, gathering the shreds of his dignity about him, and stared Scylla straight in her eye.

  “Your objection is noted,” he panted, “but mine still remains.”

  Scylla’s mouth twisted, her lips drawing back from her mouthful of knives. She raised her hand, talons all the way out now, her next blow a killing blow. Somehow Marchey managed to stand his ground on legs that had turned to jelly under him.

  But before she could strike again, a voice rang through the cavernous bay.

  “Scylla! Bring the infidel to me now.” The voice was a clotted, rasping whisper amplified to the volume of thunder. It raised the hackles on the back of Marchey’s neck and sent cold crawling down his spine.

  The crippled people fell to their knees. Scylla went rigid as a statue, her armored, blade-tipped hand and arm cocked over Marchey like a scythe. Anger and something Marchey could not name warred across the nightmare landscape of her face. For five endless, awful seconds he was certain that she was going to disobey and he to die.

  But in the end she shuddered, let out a strangled, inarticulate sound, and let her arm fall. She bowed her head.

  “I hear and obey, Brother Fist.” Her voice was low and meek. Fearful.

  “Of course you do. Come to me now. I wait. ”

  Her head came up. She eyed Marchey coldly, pointing to the door at the far end of the bay. “Move.”

  Marchey decided not to press his luck, silently obeying her order. He stumbled into clumsy motion on rubbery legs.

  He kept his head high, doing his best to hide the sense of dread that made him feel as if his insides had been filled with chilled formalin.

  That awful voice still rang in his head. That its owner could cow Scylla so easily did not bode well.

  Nor did this place. If what he’d seen of Ananke so far was any indication of what was to come, then he’d just been brought into the first circle of hell.

  There was no way for him to guess what horrors might wait in the inner circles. Humanity—and wasn’t that an ironic descriptive?—had long ago proved that when it came to the practices of cruelty and oppression, especially in the name of religion, its inventiveness was nearly infinite.

  Caught between Scylla and Charybdis. That was the original rock and a hard place. There was no mistaking the danger Scylla represented. And as for the Charybdis of this Fist person and Ananke—

  The door at the back of the bay opened, revealing a gloomy tunnel ahead.

  —He’d know more than he wanted to sooner than he wanted.

  The door closed behind him. Scylla gave him a push.

  Once thing was for certain. He was no longer trapped on the old, endless treadmill where he had plodded for so long.

  Once he would have said that any change would have been an improvement. Now he was getting an inkling of just how wrong he would have been.

  —

  —Scylla’s metal-shod feet made a sound like the relentless ticking of a bomb against the mesh-covered stone floor of the tunnel. Her face was as set and grim, a bulwark against the furious hellbroth of conflicts and pressures boiling inside her.

  Thinking about how close she had come to killing the infidel Marchey made her head pound and her insides roil uneasily. It was not that killing bothered her. After all, God’s terrible swift sword was edged so that it might draw blood. All life was His to give or cut short.

  But Brother Fist had laid on her the task of delivering her prisoner unharmed. She had come within one furious heartbeat of failing Him.

  Of disobeying Him. The sin of disobedience was cardinal and unforgivable. That he had provoked her with blackest blasphemy would mean less than nothing in this case. She was an angel, and her obedience was expected to be more perfect than that of intrinsically corrupt human flesh.

  She stared at her captive’s broad back, watching him shuffle cautiously along the uneven floor in the oversized magnetic slippers she had made him put on. For all the time she had spent with him, she had to admit that she could come nowhere near being able to predict his actions or reactions.

  She was sure he had known full well how close he was to death back in the bay, yet
he had only reacted with a quiet defiance that seemed to have been half courage and half his usual unbreakable indifference. Still his anger over the state of sinners who meant less than nothing to him had been real enough, if completely inexplicable.

  There was anger in him after all, perhaps even in measure to equal her own. This was good to know. Yet as with so many things about him, the how and why of it remained a baffling mystery.

  Brother Fist had not revealed why He wanted this man brought to Him. She had not dared ask; it was not her place to question His purposes and plans. Now that he was here, she had to ackowledge the possibility that her master might wish to speak to him alone.

  That prospect troubled her deeply. Marchey was not cowed. He could not be trusted. He might even be a devil sent to hurt her master.

  Brother Fist had not seemed quite Himself of late. He said that the Hand of God was heavy on His shoulders. Was it possible that He might overestimate His ability to control this strange, unpredictable man?

  She certainly had.

  Just thinking that her master might be wrong about anything made the pain and nausea she already felt spike so high that her head swam, and she very nearly lost her balance. Such thoughts were unworthy. Forbidden. Blasphemous.

  But she had become used to suffering such pain on the trip back here. She accepted it, endured it.

  The silver chain she clung to was the knowledge that she was Brother Fist’s angel, His servant, and— most of all—His guardian. His holy person was to be protected at any cost. Pain was a small price to pay when her life and soul were already pledged to that sacred duty.

  Scylla knew where the hidden pickups covering this section of tunnel were mounted. As they moved into a blind spot she reached into the pouch at her hip and pulled out one of her Ears. It was a thin, transparent chip the size of a fingernail, perfect for being hidden in the homes and workplaces of those suspected of laziness, ill faith, or blasphemy.

  She scraped her finger across its back to activate the adhesive, carefully keeping her Angel eye averted in case Brother Fist was watching through it. By the time they came in range of the next pickup the Ear was stuck tight to her prisoner’s belt.

  Scylla permitted herself a small, secret smile. There was some risk that Brother Fist would frown upon what she had done, were He to find out about it, but it was worthwhile.

  Now she could do her duty, guarding her charge no matter what happened.

  —

  Marchey hurt. More every minute.

  The slashes across his chest were lines of fire. His back felt like one massive bruise. He could feel his lips ballooning, and his jaw felt half-unhinged. He moved it experimentally. At least it wasn’t broken.

  He’d been lucky back in the landing bay and knew it. Scylla had only backhanded him—and pulled her blow at that. That exo gave her enough strength to have literally knocked his block off.

  Some angel! It would have been funny if it wasn’t so tragic.

  He was beginning to see her in a new fight shed by the abject obedience that had saved his life. Could it be that she was just another pawn in whatever reprehensible game was being played here? He was beginning to think so. Someone—this Brother Fist character, most likely—had turned her into a killing machine with that exo, and somehow brainwashed her into believing she was an angel. That would explain her truncated personality, her flat, knee-jerk responses.

  He wished he’d spent the time coming here trying to learn something about the woman hidden—or trapped—inside that demon-faced, silver-metal monster. But he hadn’t bothered, had he? Such matters had exactly nothing to do with him, right?

  Sure. Besides, why think when you could drink? He shook his head sadly. He might as well admit that she wasn’t the only one operating under flatworm-simple programming.

  All right, he told himself sternly, stop using your head for a proctoscope for a change. Pay close attention to everything in this cut-rate Eden. Your life might—and probably does—depend on being on your toes for a change.

  Not that what he’d seen so far was easy to ignore. The only way to describe the place was unrelentingly grim. The cramped tunnels were cold and poorly lit, the floor grid patched and curling, the unsealed walls and ceiling rough-hewn and in some places crumbling. The flat floor meant that the tunnel’s builders had planned to give the moon more spin, making up and down more than a hazy theoretical concept.

  The air was only minimally breathable. Not only did it stink of sweat and poorly recycled waste, it seemed saturated to the weeping point with a suffocating miasma of fear, misery, and despair, like the air in a dungeon. Unscavenged water vapor had condensed on the walls, making them and everything else damp and clammy. Every other surface was covered with mildew.

  Other than those poor bastards in the bay, Marchey had seen only a few of the inhabitants of this horrible place. Those he and his escort had encountered reacted by either cringing back against the walls as they passed with their heads bowed and eyes averted, or scuttling back out of sight like frightened mice.

  If this was an Eden, then it was of the sort created by such infamous Utopians as Jim Jones, Pol Pot, and Gerald Van Hyaams. He didn’t need to see the mines to know what sort of conditions these people worked in; he’d already observed evidence of enough injuries to close down any normal operation.

  It was obvious that human life was as cheap as dirt here. The people he had seen so far were clearly bereft of such basic human rights as comfort, freedom, or dignity. This was not a place where people laughed, or even smiled.

  Nor did it appear to be some nest of religious zealots. It was not fanaticism he saw on people’s faces, it was fear and exhaustion. Service to God might have been the name of the game here, but the rules were from an old, old practice that went by the name of slavery.

  It had been a long time since Marchey had felt anything like real anger or fear. Since he had really felt much of anything at all.

  Much to his surprise, he found that the machinery for such emotions was still intact, the rusty gears grinding faster and faster. He felt like some piece of equipment that was coming back on-line after years of being on standby.

  They turned into a wider tunnel. Scylla stalked beside him now, tight-lipped and impatient. It was all he could do to keep up with her.

  He watched her out of the corner of one eye, finally giving the reason she had brought him here some serious thought. Did she know the reason, or was she just unquestioningly following orders? The latter seemed the most likely.

  He plotted it out in his mind. She had been sent for him, specifically. She’d known his name and where to find him. How? He had no idea. Why?

  Only one answer made any sense. He was a Bergmann Surgeon. Not only competent at all conventional medical procedures, but also able to treat conditions no regular physician could. The inescapable conclusion was that Fist had ordered him kidnapped and brought here because of who he was and what he could do.

  According to Scylla, this Fist preached that medicine was a cheat and a deception. She acted as if she believed him, even though she was the one bringing a doctor to him.

  Marchey knew he shouldn’t be surprised. Fanaticism and blindness to reality always went hand in hand; they were ultimately different faces of the same spurious coin. He was tempted to point out the contradiction to her, but felt fairly safe in predicting that her reaction would be vehement denial at best. More likely it would be violent.

  That made him wonder if this Brother Fist had taken into account the chance that she might find out he was lying to her. He seemed to have her on a short leash, but still…

  Watching her surreptitiously, so superhumanly fast and strong in that indestructible silver exo, he knew that he wouldn’t want to be in her master’s shoes if her illusions were shattered.

  —

  Scylla punched in the code that unlocked the massive steel door that barred the way to her Master’s chambers, a code known to her and Brother Fist alone. Hope and fear and doub
t and confusion fought for supremacy inside her, making it hard to concentrate.

  It would be good to be back at her Master’s side. Back where she belonged. It felt like she had been gone for an eternity.

  She knew that she had somehow been changed by being away from Ananke for the first time in her life. Just how, she could not quite say, and deep in her heart she had prayed that simply coming home again would make everthing right again.

  But it only made things worse. The Eden of Ananke seemed a different place than the one she had left. Smaller. Dirtier. Oppressive and almost… ugly.

  She shook her head to clear it. Deceptions. The fault lay in her eyes, not what they beheld.

  Even an angel’s heaven-made flesh was weak. The doubts that continued to assail her were proof of that. What should have been a joyous homecoming had come under a pall of apprehension as she realized that she would have to go before her Master with an unclean heart.

  She could not help but be afraid He would see the black stains on her soul the moment He laid eyes on her, for did He not always say that He could read her every thought? His disappointment would be deep and justified. Ever quick to anger, the way she had failed His trust might provoke Him to rage.

  Even if somehow He did not see her failings at first glance, she knew she would have to confess them. To withhold would only compound her transgressions.

  No matter which way her sins were revealed, she would have to be punished to atone for them. She had meted out many such punishments, and knew just how high the price of redemption might be set. Many put the sinner back in God’s hands so that He might fling them down to Hell, where they belonged.