Flesh and Silver

by Stephen L. Burns

  Brother Fist’s gaze turned outward again, fixed on Marchey. He felt it bite into him, sharp and paralyzing as a viper’s fang. That black knife-slash mouth twisted into a sinister smile. “You’ve had a chance to sightsee, Doctor. What do you think of my crucible?”

  Marchey licked his swollen lips, tasting blood. The man’s virulent madness seemed to infect the very air he breathed like some deadly biowar virotoxin, suffocating him, shriveling his wits and will. He squirmed in his chair uneasily, but could not find the strength to look away.

  Unaware of what he was doing, he slowly reached up to touch the silver metal pin on his chest as if to find some reminder of his own identity. The emblem was still there, dangling on a bloodstained scrap of his slashed tunic. Metal touched metal with a faint click.

  It was almost as if a circuit closed inside him. The sense of who and what he was flowed through him again. With it came the memory of a one-eyed child this man had condemned to die out of a cynical contempt for human life. Out of cold, raw cruelty.

  “I think it sucks,” he heard himself say. He blinked and sat up straighter, returning anger making him clamp his hands on the arms of his chair. “I think someone should jam some of what you’ve been dishing out right back down your fucking throat.”

  Brother Fist lolled back, eyes hooded and smirking. “Perhaps you are correct,” he agreed softly.

  “Damn right I am.”

  “You sound so certain. Are you volunteering to be the hand of justice, Doctor?”

  Marchey stared at him, imagining his silver hands on Fist’s scrawny wattled neck. They tightened on the arms of his chair, strong enough to snap Fist’s spine like a twig.

  “Think of all the pain and suffering that would be averted.”

  He already was. Killing Fist would be like curing a disease.

  “Come on, Doctor,” he wheedled, lifting his chin and stroking his neck in invitation. “Do what is right. Take the matter in hand. Expunge the suffering. Balance the scales.”

  Marchey stared at his tormentor, but remained where he was. Cold sweat crawled down his sides.

  Fist smiled with hateful pleasure. “I thought not. You won’t raise a hand against me. Your righteous indignation is a joke. I find it quite hilarious, but do you?”

  Marchey looked away, feeling ill. Fist continued to taunt him, making him feel sicker with every word.

  “You can’t forget yourself. You are sworn to preserve life, not take it. To heal rather than hurt. You’ve pledged your life to an oath. One that has mocked you for years. That mocks you now, even as I do.”

  —I pledge my life to the practice of healing—

  Marchey said nothing. Fist had summoned up the words he held as the one holy thing in his life. The Healer’s Oath. Based on the Hippocratic Oath, but further reaching; an ethical ideal he had upheld through thick and thin, and which had held him up as well. His vocation had become an empty shell. That Oath was the glue that held the fragile, cracked pieces together.

  “I’m sick, my dear doctor,” Brother Fist continued, smirking as he tightened the screws. “Probably dying. That is why I had you brought to me. Now that I have you here, you will do everything in your power to cure me.”

  “I won’t.” Marchey forced the words out, but they were no more than a hollow whisper.

  Brother Fist’s mocking laughter made him feel like there were maggots slithering through his insides.

  “Oh but you will!” he wheezed. “You have no choice. Keeping your ridiculous Healer’s Oath is the single fingertip that keeps you from falling into the abyss. It is the one tattered shred of self-respect you have left.”

  He paused to catch his breath. “I have studied your kind. I know more about you than you do yourselves. Fail your Oath, and your entire existence becomes meaningless. You will have given up everything you hold sacred for nothing.”

  Marchey could only shake his head from side to side like a punch-drunk fighter, trying to get away from the blows hammering into him and backing him into a corner.

  —holding every life sacred—

  But there was no escape. This terrible old man knew his situation too well, knew precisely which buttons to push.

  “You cannot refuse to help me.”

  —refusing none who seek my help—

  “Welcome to my crucible, Dr. Marchey.” Brother Fist spread his thin hands. “You think I have turned up the heat beyond bearing, but I have really only just begun. After all, how hot can it be if your scruples are not yet burned away?” He gazed at Marchey with baleful pleasure, closing his hands as if he gripped Marchey’s life and fate in them. “Yet.”

  His hands fell to his lap. “Do your duty. Begin examining me.”

  —because my duty is to save lives, not judge them—

  Marchey stood up, feeling sick and doomed, bile on his tongue and lungs clogged with choking despair.

  “Scylla said you don’t believe in medicine,” he protested in a pathetic attempt to escape the nightmare swallowing him up.

  His tormentor’s laughter hacked through his hopes for a way out like an antique bone saw, leaving them in raw, bleeding pieces.

  “Please don’t demean yourself by pretending to such naïveté,” Fist said, his voice filled with the cloying sweetness of rotten meat. “I simply don’t believe in letting the sheep have it. It pleases me to hear their futile prayers. I so love watching them abasing themselves because their faith isn’t perfect enough to make them whole again. That is one of the brightest, sweetest-smelling blossoms in my little garden of pain.”

  Garden of pain, Marchey thought with numb horror. And I’m supposed to give the gardener the renewed health he needs to continue tending his bitter crops…

  —

  Scylla hunched like a cast-silver gargoyle at the end of her pallet. Head down. Shoulders sharpened with tension. Teeth bared. Her one green eye glazed and sightless.

  Brother Fist had—

  Her talons were out, and she shredded the foam pad without even knowing it, hands rhythmically clenching and unclenching.

  He had—

  His own voice, the damning words coming from his own tongue, his contemptuous laughter as he turned her service to himself and to God into acts of willful cruelty. Turned Revealed Truth into proof that he had—

  —lied to her.

  This was no weakness. No deception sent to test her faith.

  Brother Fist was sick.

  He had sent her for Marchey because he needed a doctor.

  Because…

  God would not heal him.

  The orderly walls of her world were shuddering and cracking, their concrete foundations turned to a quicksand of lies. In the chaos strange things that felt almost like memories surfaced like raw earth thrust up through split and buckling pavement. Faces. Feelings. Sensations. People and things she had no names for, but which seemed to know her as a sister.

  Her mind reeled blindly, buffeted in a hundred directions, seeking solid ground, seeking escape, and all she knew for sure was that if she heard any more she would—

  She lifted her arm, reaching out to turn the Ear off. To stop this before she went mad. Her silver hand hung there in front of the stud that would bring silence and safety and sanity.

  Hung there. As if reaching for a lifeline.

  Hung there. Between truth and silence.

  Hung there, wavering—

  —trembling—

  —then fell.

  Almost as if that were some sort of signal to thaw time and start the world moving again, Marchey’s voice came to her, breaking the silence.

  —

  Marchey had reviewed his options. It hadn’t taken long. They had been few, and equally grim.

  His only choice was in mode of self-destruction.

  Brother Fist had drawn him into a maze where the walls were built from his own moral strictures, and every turning led to darkness and defeat.

  He couldn’t break his Oath without breaking himself. Brother Fist h
ad seen that with the cynical clarity of a worldview uncolored by honor, ethics, or scruples. He could not bring himself to kill this pestilence masquerading as a person. He could not even let him die if it was in his power to heal him. Those might in one sense be the “right” things to do, but not for him.

  He had long ago sworn to accept the precept that every life was sacred, had value. His entire life had been dedicated to that principle; it was the ability to save lives that might have been otherwise lost that had kept him from renouncing Bergmann Surgery and trading his silver arms for flesh. Even now he could not bring himself to abandon that vow.

  Besides, even if he could bring himself to refuse, no doubt Scylla could force him to reconsider.

  He would hold to his Oath, even though healing this monster would be such a rape of his skills that it would probably have the same destructive effect as breaking the Healer’s Oath. It would despoil the one thing of value and meaning left in his life.

  There was no escaping the crucible unscathed.

  All he could do was hope that maybe afterward he could find some opportunity to make amends for what he had done. Maybe he would get a chance to treat some of Fist’s subjects and begin redeeming himself. Maybe if he let himself be used and broken, he would be cast away and get a chance to escape on his ship and find help.

  He took a deep breath. “Let’s take a look at you,” he said heavily. The heartsick resignation in his voice was no ploy. He climbed reluctantly to his feet and started toward his new patient.

  Willing himself to walk deeper into the crucible.

  Brother Fist produced a gun from a hidden pouch in the arm of his chair, pointed it at Marchey’s chest.

  Marchey froze midstep, eyes on the weapon. He knew just enough about arms to recognize the big, blued-steel handweapon as an old-style Fukura “Spring Flower” pistol. The folded alloy projectile it fired would make a fingerprint-sized hole going into a human body. It would exit the other side like a whirling dinner plate heaped with gore.

  Brother Fist hacked gleefully. “Think of this as Malpractice Insurance.” He gestured curtly with the gun. “Come on, get to it.”

  Marchey obeyed, tearing his gaze away from the weapon. “You don’t have much faith in your fellow-man for a priest,” he said, trying for sarcasm but his voice coming out flat-line.

  “Please, Doctor. I’m no priest, and you know it.” He cocked his head. “But you’re an intelligent man. Surely you must wonder what I am, and how I got here. I wasn’t always Brother Fist, you know.”

  “No?” Marchey said tonelessly. “Give me your arm.”

  The old man offered his free hand, a bundle of twigs covered with wrinkled yellow parchment. Marchey took it, the cool dry skin like paper under his fingers. A silent command started the devices inside his prosthetics recording pulse, blood pressure, NFD, GSR, and a dozen other tests. Data whispered through his mind, the first bare threads in the warp of diagnosis.

  Brother Fist settled back as if totally at ease, but kept his weapon centered on Marchey’s solar plexus. “I came here not quite a decade ago. Back then about a fifth of the people on Ananke were wildcatters. The rest were members of a religious commune calling themselves the Immanuel Kindred. It looked like a perfect place to drop out of sight, further my studies, and entertain myself by practicing my specialty.”

  Marchey pressed a yellowed nail, let up. No color change. “What specialty is that? Slavery?”

  A sardonic chuckle. “Nothing so crude. It is an art most often referred to as phagewar.”

  “Never heard of it.” He began scanning Fist’s extremities, the wasted limbs under the black cassock thin sticks vined with blue-black veins.

  “What a pity. It is a lovely combination of the most effective elements of psychological and guerilla warfare, covert action, intelligence-guided subversion, terrorism, sabotage, propaganda, disinformation, and brainwashing. It is war fought without an army and prosecuted from within. Many of its stratagems are modeled on that splendidly successful, highly adaptable, and wholly admirable creature, the virus. I was— and remain—one of the top theorists and practitioners of this art. Remember the Martian Rebellion against UNSRA? I was the architect of its defeat. After that I went freelance. Undergound, really. You would find my real name turning up quite often in certain sub rosa literatures.”

  “A real Renaissance man,” Marchey mumbled.

  “Renaissance is rebirth, my dear doctor. You are more right than you know.” He chuckled at some private joke.

  “Anyway,” Fist continued, “that life grew tiresome after a while. The governments and MuNats I worked for were reaping what I sowed, and even what you would call the worst of them had these archaic compunctions that prevented me from implementing my sharpest-cut plans. Then there was the growing temptation to bite the fat soft hands that fed me only scraps. So I decided to seek an out-of-the-way place to contemplate my arts and exercise them as I saw fit. A laboratory, if you will, complete with human rats.”

  Marchey had gone on to scanning and palpating Fist’s sunken chest. The combination of the old man’s sick pride in his work and what he was finding put a grim frown on his face. “Here,” he said heavily, “on Ananke.”

  Fist nodded. “Just so. The Immanuel Kindred showed me the light, so to speak. They believed that man was made in God’s image, and so remaking space in man’s image served God. Isn’t that a lovely sentiment? They were friendly, open-minded, tolerant, trusting, pacifistic, and, most importantly, industrious. They worked twice as hard as the wilders, believing they served a higher goal.”

  He sighed, tipping his free hand. “So many systems fail for lack of initiative. Their childish religion offered me possibilities far beyond what I could get from simply co-opting the politics of this place.”

  “So you took over the Immanuel Kindred,” Marchey said to prove that he was still listening. This was nothing that he wanted to hear, but the more he knew, the better his chances. Moreover, the vague outline of an idea had occurred to him while he was examining Fist. A possible way out.

  Fist showed him a sharkish smile. “I ate them alive, hallelujah and amen! Then I began turning them into something useful while bringing the wilders into the fold. On their knees, of course.”

  “You did this all by yourself?”

  “I was a wolf among sheep. Oh, I had a mercy to do the cruder bits of wet work. A Shock-trooper who’d killed an officer, deserted, and gone renegade.”

  Marchey looked up, confused. “Scylla?” There were female Shock-troopers, but she seemed too young.

  The old despot’s bubbling laughter made Marchey shiver as if ice water had been dribbled down his back. “My angel? Isn’t she a lovely thing? But no, she came later. The mercy was an expendable who finally met his defining fate. Although you could say that the best part of him lives on to this day.”

  “Scylla’s exo.” Marchey stepped back. The woman inside that dead man’s battle armor didn’t even know it was machinery. As he had guessed before, she was just one more of this creature’s countless victims.

  “Exactly. Why have you stopped examining me?”

  Time to bite the bullet.

  “I’ve learned all I can externally. Now I have to go inside.” He already had a pretty good idea of what he would find. If he was right, he might just have a chance after all. Besides, before he could work as a Bergmann Surgeon Fist had to be—

  —unconscious.

  Those rheumy eyes brightened with interest. “Ah, now you perform the uncanny procedure which has made your kind outcasts among your small-minded fraternity. I can hardly wait to see you in action.”

  Marchey sighed. “Then we have a problem. You have to be unconscious for me to work.” He’d wondered what was going to happen at this hurdle; it was hard to imagine Fist giving up control for even a moment. But he must have known he’d have to.

  “Oh yes, the sacred rituals of Bergmann Surgery.” That skeletal face took on a crafty look. “Tell me, does the name D
r. Keri Izzak ring a bell?”

  “Yes.” Reluctantly.

  “Who is she?” Fist prompted sweetly.

  “She—she’s a Bergmann Surgeon, like me,” Marchey answered unhappily, feeling new tentacles of cold trepidation curl through him. Fist’s knowing Keri’s name couldn’t mean anything good.

  “Not anymore. The lovely Dr. Izzak no longer practices your branch of medicine.” He chuckled. “Or breathing, for that matter. About a year ago I had her kidnapped and taken to a quiet place on Earth. There she was subjected to some tests of my own devising. It was a tawdry business, and cost me a considerable sum. But I think it was money well spent. And she allowed me to prove a theory of mine.”

  The cold was all through him now. Keri dead?

  He found his voice. “Theory?” he croaked. Keri dead to prove a theory?

  Brother Fist wagged a bony finger at him in admonition. “You mustn’t forget that I am a scholar. A scientist. I started getting sick about three years ago. So I began learning everything I could about you people and your specialty—as you well know, it’s the most advanced form of medical technique presently available. Would you care to guess what I found?”

  Marchey shook his head, both unwilling and unable to guess.

  “A blind spot in the data. Something so simple that it has been overlooked all these years. It looked promising enough to be worth spending some of the credit my flock has so generously provided me on having a Bergmann Surgeon kidnapped and taken someplace quiet so I could put my conclusions to the test.”

  Fist paused a moment to make sure Marchey was getting all this. The shocked, sick look on his face said that he was.

  “Dr. Izzak had the honor of being the subject of the tests. Unfortunately, she soon understood what I was trying to prove. Such a bright woman. I had to dispose of her—and the hirelings who tested her, of course—to protect what I had learned.”

  “You disposed of her,” Marchey repeated tonelessly, unable to accept the offhanded way Fist had said it. Like her life had no more value than the wrapper around a stick of gum.