“I’m sure she did.”
—
Marchey continued to be amazed by how quickly the people of Ananke had begun the monumental task of putting all they had suffered during Brother Fist’s rule behind them, struggling to rebuild something like normal lives.
Not that everything was sunshine and roses now that Fist’s hold over them had been broken. A considerable number of them had been so deeply traumatized that they might never fully recover. A few extreme cases still hid in their cubbies like wounded animals, cringing back in terror when anyone came near. A handful of others drifted continually through the cold, dim tunnels like blank-eyed ghosts, lost now that an iron hand no longer shaped every aspect of their existence.
Yet somehow the majority of them had begun trying to reassemble the fragments of their shattered lives. That they could do so after all they had been through was a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
Some were more resilient than others, taking it on themselves to help the rest. People like Mardi Grandberg and Elias Acterelli, a former nurse and an ex-army medic, together helping him set up a makeshift hospital and institute a rudimentary health-care system. Raymo LaPaz, working day and night to coax more than the bare minimum out of Ananke’s neglected life-support system. Jimmy and ’Lita Chee and their crew, trying to revive the long-disused hydroponics setup.
Hands moving again, helping and healing. And behind all of those projects and a dozen others like the mainspring of a multifaced clock was Jon Halen.
He had to be the strongest and bravest person Marchey had ever met. His wife and two daughters were dead. Forced labor in the mines had cost him both hands and a leg. He had been one of the discards working in the landing bay when Marchey had arrived, toiling away until the too-thin air and hypothermia killed him.
Yet within hours of Fist’s fall he had begun hobbling tirelessly through the tunnels on his homemade crutch. Spreading the word that they were free at last. Reassuring them that this was the beginning, not the end. Cracking jokes. Chivvying others into motion, into action. Reaching into some deep inner reservoir and pulling out optimism, enthusiasm, and humor, then spreading them like a balm.
Jon had made sure that everyone had something to do, just mentioning that this or that needed to be done and making it sound like no one else could do the task, He’d assigned care of those worst off to those who had fallen into listless apathy, giving them a purpose to cling to, keeping them too busy worrying over another’s welfare to dwell on their own misfortunes.
Before the end of the first day he had come to Marchey with a priority-indexed list of those who needed medical attention. When asked where he had learned triage, Jon had smiled and said that he had used the big fancy setup in Fist’s quarters to do it for him, punching the data in one key at a time with a stylus he’d had someone tape to his useless hand because the machine refused to accept voice commands without a passphrase.
His own name had been on the list. Dead last.
Marchey had moved him up, and begun trying to shape a hand out of the ruin at the end of his right wrist. Now he was using those new fingers to cop a feel. Halen was some piece of work, no two ways about it.
Nor was he content with being just a patient. Marchey had managed to keep everyone on Ananke pretty much at arm’s length. Everyone but Jon, that is. He kept waltzing past Marchey’s guard like it was a fence with a ten-meter hole in it, slyly slipping bonds of friendship around him every chance he got.
—
“You know what that means, don’t you?” Jon asked.
Marchey scratched his chin. “You’re getting, um, horny?”
Jon’s grin spread even wider. “Well, that too—and the look Salli give me makes me think I mightna be the only one.” He grabbed the side of the table with his pinching equipment and levered himself around so he was sitting up, his good left leg dangling over the edge, the stump of his right braced off at an angle. His left arm, which ended just short of where his wrist should have been, rested in his lap.
Now he was eye to eye with Marchey. He held up his new hand between them. “Pretty damned ugly, in’t it?”
Marchey had to agree. “Yes, and I’m sorry, but—”
“But nothin’” he stated flatly, looking Marchey straight in the eye. “It mightna get me a job modellin’ jewelry, but as far’s I’m concerned it’s beautifu’. Have you got any idea how great it is to be able to hold a cup? To use a comp again?” Mischief crept back into that gaunt face. “Hell, Doc, do you know how wonderful it is to be able to pick your pluggin’ nose when you needs to?”
“Well, I’ve heard…” Marchey answered, trying to keep a straight face, but failing miserably.
“It’s a top-shelf experience,” Jon assured him. His expression turned serious, showing something of the sharp-witted intensity he kept hidden behind his amiable grin and Belter’s slur most of the time.
“When you come here, all I had was this big lump at the enda my arm. It hurt so bad all the time I used to think about stickin’ it in one of the smelters to be rid of it. If that killed me, well, I could live with that. But I didn’t, and now I’m glad. I’ve got me fingers again. The pain is gone. I can touch and hold and feel things. I can even grab Salli’s ass and feel somethin’ like a man again.”
He tapped Marchey’s chest with a stubby finger. “When you took Fist off’n our backs I kind of woke up, looked around me, and figured maybe I could do a little somethin’ about our situation. Start fixin’ some of the damage. So that’s what I did. But I never once thought anythin’ could be done with the mess at the enda my arm. I planned to just go on doin’ my best with what couldn’t be changed.”
His voice dropped lower. “But you looked at it and saw somethin’ I didn’t. Saw that somethin’ better might be made from it. I might’ve seen it myself, but I’d gotten resigned to it bein’ the way it was, and it never occurred to me that I oughta think about it any differenter way.”
He let his hand drop. “There’s somethin’ to be learned from that,” he concluded, watching Marchey’s face expectantly.
“It proves you don’t know diddly about reconstructive surgery, Jon,” he said, intentionally missing the point.
A flash of disappointment crossed Halen’s face, then he shrugged and smiled. “I guess I surely don’t.” He slid off the table and onto his good leg. Marchey handed his crutch to him, then walked him to the clinic’s door.
“By the way,” Jon said with contrived disinterest, “You’re sayin’ good-bye to Angel before you leave, an’t you?”
Marchey had expected him to bring this up sooner or later. Halen had been inordinately interested in his relationship to Angel from the very first. Not that there was one.
“Yes,” he replied shortly. “Now you keep exercising that hand. Continue taking the Calcinstrate to build up bone mass.”
“Butt out, in other words.” Halen grinned disarmingly. “Hey, I can take me a hint, even if you can’t.” He limped on across the main compartment toward the airlock. “Wouldn’t want to rub you the wrong way.”
“More to the point,” Marchey called after him, “don’t you go rubbing Salli the wrong way.”
Jon leaned on his crutch, looking back and leering. “Hell no, Doc! I plan to rub her the right way—providin’ I haven’t forgot how!” He waved his handless arm in farewell and continued across the main compartment and out the airlock.
—
Marchey went back to the console built in along one wall of the small clinic, shaking his head with amusement. He sat down, his smile fading. “Record update. Jon Halen.”
“Ready,” the comp replied.
“Halen’s gains in finger strength and mobility have exceeded my expectations.” Pinching Salli proved it. Yow!
“As noted before, all residents of Ananke are suffering from severe calcium leaching caused by inadequate diet and low gravity. In Halen’s case, I had to redistribute bone for reconstructive purposes. The Calcinstrate is increasi
ng bone density. At the present rate of accretion I should be able to begin building a second set of phalanges within another week—”
He paused, realizing what he had said. He would not be here in another week. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten that fact; some traitorous part of his mind was still taking it for granted that he would finish the work he had started.
But it was not to be. MedArm was putting him back on the circuit. They said he had been here long enough.
He supposed they were right. Another week might allow him to give Jon those finger joints, but it would not let him do all that needed doing here. A year wouldn’t be enough. It was the work of a lifetime.
It wasn’t like he was abandoning them. MedArm had assured him that the medical help and supplies they needed would be sent soon. There wasn’t much more that he could do until then anyway. His small inship clinic had never been designed to handle anything more than small-scale emergency work or the occasional single-patient transport.
He was out of most pharmaceuticals. The small bank of tissue cultures had been used up, and he lacked the equipment to grow more. He had no transplantable organs—not even such common ones as eyes, livers, hearts, and kidneys—and no temporary prosthetics. Requests through MedArm to the other hospitals and clinics in Jovian space had netted nothing yet. Not even regrets.
The emergency was over. He had stabilized the situation. None of the remaining tasks couldn’t be done by others.
“Delete last sentence,” he said gruffly. “Continue: It is my considered opinion that only plastic and orthopedic procedures be used on Halen’s partially reconstructed hand, even though it might appear that more cosmetically correct results could be gained by full amputation and replacement. I believe he would refuse the latter course, anyway. This is not an irrational or neurotic response; he simply has a, ah, sentimental attachment to his hand.
“End update.” Let them figure that out. “Close file.”
There, he’d done all he could to look out for his patient. What Jon and the others needed now was a well-equipped team of specialists. Once MedArm got them on-site the people of Ananke would be in the best possible hands.
Just as whatever patient he was being sent to see would be getting the best help available to him or her. Ananke didn’t really need a Bergmann Surgeon any longer, and this person, whoever he or she was, did.
He sat back, pinching the bridge of his nose and feeling a dull ache in his temples.
So why did he keep feeling so guilty about leaving? And in direct opposition to that, so relieved? And guilty about feeling relieved, and—
“Fuck,” he muttered, leaning forward to open a storage compartment a bit above eye level. He stared at what was inside for almost a full minute before taking it out.
Just one. That’s all
He placed the bottle of vodka on the counter in front of him, a glass beside it. Creating a still life portrait of his existence before Ananke.
What’s wrong with this picture? he asked himself.
That was an easy one. The bottle was still full.
The whole day had been a killer. Every one of the people he’d treated had asked him to stay. Some had asked him straight out, practically begging. Others, like Jon, had brought the subject up more obliquely. It felt like fingers and hooks being sunk into his skin in a thousand different places, trying to hold him here, to pull him toward the impossible.
Worst of all was how each and every one of them had been so damned grateful, their gratitude a sort of insidious reproach. After about the fifth one he’d had to bite back the urge to shout at them, to slap them back so things could remain on the safe clinical level where they belonged.
But he had gotten through it somehow. Now he just needed a little something to wash the taste out of his mouth. That was all.
He stared at the bottle, remembering how those first heady hours after Fist’s fall had made him drunk on possibility. He’d let himself think…
Marchey snatched up the bottle, face twisting into a bitter facsimile of a smile at his own naïveté. Giving up drinking had been a grand gesture. I am whole again. I don’t need this any longer.
“I am full of shit,” he muttered, pouring the clear truth into the glass.
He picked it up. The vodka sparkled with promise.
Finally being able to have contact with his patients had seemed like a wish finally granted by a suddenly benevolent universe.
For a few glorious hours, anyway.
But he had quickly found himself in the position of someone who, after years of wandering thirsty on a parched, endless desert, suddenly finds himself snatched up and hurled into the middle of a vast lake. It was no wonder he had begun to drown. There were too many of them, their need was so great, and each and every one wanted a piece of him.
It had been a sobering experience, making him step back and take a long hard look at his situation. The work still had to be done, but he had waded in only as deep as he absolutely had to, keeping his feet on the solid ground of detachment.
For a little while there he’d lost sight of who and what he was, but he’d come to his senses. He was still a Bergmann Surgeon. That meant sooner or later he would have to move on. Which was all the more reason to keep from getting too cozy.
The time to depart had come around again. It always had and always would. He reminded himself that he had left hundreds of places without a backward glance.
He brought the glass to his lips. Closed his eyes.
He’d be leaving this place, too. In just a few hours he would put the people who lived here behind him. Nothing to it. Like falling off a cliff.
Or a wagon.
The vodka went down easy. It brought tears to his eyes.
—
Angel strode along the gloomy tunnel. She was in a hurry, but made herself move slowly and deliberately. Some of the people she passed smiled at her. She smiled back, carefully keeping her mouth closed each time.
She had put in long hours of practice in front of a mirror to get it right. The face she saw reflected back was still a revelation. Her metal-and-glass angel eye still remained, but for the most part she saw the smooth white face of a young woman. This stranger in the mirror was her.
Slowly she had come to understand that it was a rather nice face. More than one person had even told her that she was pretty—though not the one she most wanted to hear say it.
Still, she had to be careful when she smiled. If she let her lips open, that exposed her teeth. They were not pretty. She now understood that they were not supposed to be. They had been filed to sharp points and capped with white and red ceramyl for the same reason her face had been tattooed; to help make her an object of terror and dread.
The trick still worked. Her teeth could turn her sweetest smile into something that harrowed up chilling recollections of Scylla, like skeletons buried under a thin layer of earth. She did her best to keep them hidden.
He had erased the Scylla face overlying her own with just a pass of his invisible hands. She had been as much asleep as awake, but she had felt it happen, felt it more acutely than anything else in her whole life. That touch had reached a place far below the surface of her metal carapace, deeper than her hidden skin, a secret place she had not even known she possessed.
All the terror and pain she had caused as Scylla could not be expunged so easily, or by another. She knew that. There were few certainties in this new life of hers, but that was one of them.
Not only did Scylla lurk behind her smile, waiting to show if she forgot herself, but her every thought and action had to be considered, guarding against lapses into Scylla-thought and reaction. The line between what she had been and what she wanted to be was fine, and oh so fragile.
There were times the task of rebuilding her life as Angel, and not the other, seemed impossible. Still wearing her angel skin—her exo, he called it—only made the task harder. As long as it was a part of her she could not help but remind both the Kindred and herself of what sh
e had been and done to them.
She had awakened from the long dark dream that was life as Scylla to find herself not found, but lost. All she had known and believed had been cast into doubt. Bereft of purpose, and her identity in fragments, she felt like a creature trained to perform a task that no longer existed.
Now she knew that was exactly what Scylla had been—a monster created by a monster to unquestioningly carry out his monstrous acts. Not more than human, but less.
There was no way for her to know if the urge to serve, to be of use, that she found inside herself was something innate, or more of Fist’s programming. In the end she decided that it did not matter. That was what she saw those she most admired doing, and to become a good person she must emulate good people.
Service gave her some renewed sense of purpose and a way in which to atone for her sins. The silver skin and sinew of what she had been made her better able to help repair some of the endless damage her former Master had wrought. It gave her a way to repay the Kindred for their forgiveness. A forgiveness she sometimes doubted she would ever deserve.
The payments were made by long hours spent doing the work of machines that had fallen into disrepair because Fist had decreed that all tools were to be locked away, being potential weapons and temptations to sabotage. Her exo allowed her to perform tasks which would have taken cranes or winches or twenty strong people. She became the engine powering the truckles that hauled the ores and ices to the processors. She became a human grabmaw, tearing away at Ananke’s stony breast with her ceramyl-taloned hands, working as if it were her own sins she was rooting out of herself chip by chip.
She turned a corner, entering the wider main tunnel. Elias Acterelli trotted toward her, his short legs carrying him along at his usual breakneck pace. He had a bundle of blankets under one arm, a carry sack over the opposite shoulder, and three children hot on his heels. No doubt he was on his way to the crude hospital ward that had been set up in a former dining hall.
He slowed down and grinned at her. “Hi, Angel,” he called cheerfully, brave or foolish enough to even pat her on the shoulder in passing. She smiled back, keeping her mouth closed.
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