Flesh and Silver

1. Medical History

Dr. Georgory Marchey cracked open his second quatriliter of Mauna Loa of the evening and refilled his glass. His movements were smooth and precise, his hands steady as the proverbial rock.

Mauna Loa was a pale, golden whiskey made on Kilauea, one of the Hartman habs orbiting the volcano-riddled, seething sulphurous surface of Io. Named for an active volcano back on Earth in Hawaii, the liquor was famed systemwide for its flavor and potency. Marchey raised the glass to his lips with a gray-gloved hand and took a sip, again savoring the faint hint of rumlike sweetness it left on his tongue.

He put the glass back down by the half-eaten remains of another local delicacy served by the Litman Memorial Hospital commissary, force-grown prawns the size of his thumb fresh from Callisto. Poached in wine with slivers of garlic and tomato chunks, then served in the resulting sauce over angel hair pasta and dusted with grated Romano cheese, they were good. No doubt about that.

But the whiskey was better. Even if it only came in little runty quatriliter bottles.

The truth of the matter was that he would have given the whiskey more attention than the food even if it had only been the flavored algaecol that passed for liquor most places off Earth and the Moon.

After all, you couldn’t get drunk on shrimp. Even when they’ve been poached in wine.

Drinking more heavily than normal after a procedure was as much a part of his routine as another surgeon’s scrubbing up beforehand. Usually this sacred rite was observed in the austere privacy of his own ship. He’d retreat there as soon as possible after his work was done and start knocking them back the moment the hatch closed behind him.

Here at Litman Memorial, the larger of the two central hospital wheels augmenting the many smaller clinics scattered throughout Jovian space, he’d been derailed. Upon arrival he had been informed that a crew from a local shipyard was standing by to give his packet its triannual hull-integrity check, and given not quite two minutes to vacate. At that very moment the interior spaces of the ship he called home were charged with inert gas at a pressure of over four times normal—hardly a homey atmosphere. The test was slated to last at least another couple-three hours.

With luck and dedication he’d be passed out cold long before then. Which meant he would have to stay the night in the room he’d been assigned here. Not a pleasant prospect, but drinking would make it bearable. Drinking made everything bearable.

Layovers happened, and you made the best of them. As he would then. Denied the safety and solitude of his ship, he would have opted for a private restaurant and the anonymity it could provide. The nearest one was on a hab a measly five thousand kilometers away, but the next shuttle there didn’t leave for over two hours. The need for a drink was far too immediate to make such a wait a workable solution.

Which was how he’d ended up in the staff section of the hospital wheel’s commissary.

In the midst of the enemy.

The food was quite good, the service tolerable. The décor was deplorable, the ambience execrable, the company overtly hostile. The important thing was that they served alcohol. Not every hospital provided that amenity.

Almost as if purposefully devised to make his situation as uncomfortable as possible, the only free table had been dead square in the middle of the room.

He’d taken it anyway. There was some liquor back in his room, but not quite enough to get where he wanted to go. Besides, getting his hands on some Mauna Loa was the only enjoyable part of this stop. There was no place to buy a flagon or three outright, but the commissary bar stocked it, table service only.

So there he sat, well aware that he was very much the center of attention, enjoying the sort of guest-of-honor status accorded the cadaver in a dissection. All around him his erstwhile colleagues eyed him coldly, probed and prodded with harsh whispers pitched just loud enough to reach his ears. Even without the silver biometal pin on his chest they would have known who and what he was. Hospitals were like small towns. Word travelled fast. Pariahs can expect no privacy. Union rules.

Whatever else Bergmann Surgeons lacked or had lost—and the list was considerable—their unhappy notoriety remained.

What these fools didn’t know was how little their hatred and contempt meant to him anymore.

His bland, indifferent gaze settled on one particular couple scowling at him from a table in the corner. He thought he recognized the woman from that afternoon. Maybe a cardiovascular surgeon? His only real lasting impression had been of a dark, hawkish face and bile-bitter comments, some in Arabic.

He raised his glass toward her in salute, grinned and winked like they shared some sort of joke, then inhaled the three fingers of whiskey. Her face closed like a fist.

Marchey barely noticed. His attention had drifted back to the alcohol warming his insides. Over the years that had become his sole criterion for judging the places he was sent: How was the booze?

The commissary was a wonderful place. Top shelf.

Other than that, the hospital was indistinguishable from the last and would be no different from the next. The same sterile steel/stone/ceramic corridors swallowed him up and spat him out. The same faceless insensible strangers were his patients. The same blurry, disapproving faces watched him do what they could not, outraged by his presence—his very existence—and impatient to see him gone. The same half-heard ugly comments greeted him, dogged his heels, bid him bitter farewell. This afternoon, now, next time; all were only moments from a past, present, and future that twisted back on itself like a Mobius treadmill that kept him plodding blindly along in the same place in spite of the millions of kilometers he travelled.

He knew he was at Litman Memorial only because of the crest inscribed on the dinner plate before him. Beyond that it was just a name. He hadn’t the faintest idea or slightest curiosity as to where he was being sent next. And as for where he’d been, well, most of it was indistinguishable from where he was then.

Most, but not all.

His smile twisted into a grimace as he refilled his glass. Half of it disappeared in one swallow.

Since he was one of the barely thirty surviving Bergmann Surgeons, and as such followed the itinerary set for him by MedArm, the branch of the UN Space Regulatory Agency in charge of all facets of off-Earth Health Care, Marchey led a life sharply divided into two unequal parts.

Ninety-nine percent of it was solitary. Safe. It was spent home aboard his automated ship, crossing and recrossing the vast desert of vacuum between human enclaves as he was shuttled from place to place and patient to patient. His adaptation to this part was nearly perfect. He could spend days, even weeks at a stretch adrift in a tranquil sea of alcohol, breathing in the endless lotus scent of nothingness, becoming a rootless, pastless, futureless part of it.

Here he sat in the middle of the other, smallest part. The ruins of his professional life. The part he lived for. The part that was slowly killing him.

The part which evoked unwelcome reminders that there had once been more to life than this bottle and the dogged pursuit of oblivion. Love. Respect. Idealism. Hope. Friendship. A sense of place. Satisfaction. Optimism. Even imagination. One by one they had withered away, or been amputated by circumstance.

But what the hell, he thought, a small, rueful half smile appearing as he slumped back in his chair. Getting his nose rubbed in the pile of shit his life had become was just one more thing he had to endure if he wanted to continue being a Bergmann Surgeon. One more drawback. Not that it was so much a matter of want as being completely unable to imagine giving it up. The very thing that had blighted his life redeemed it, an irony of which he was well aware. At times it was even funny, a joke of the rubber crutch or exploding suppository variety.

Still, places like the commissary were dangerous. The pervasive, unmistakable hospital atmosphere, the being around other people; any number of things could summon up the unquiet ghosts of his past. There was no way to tell what might set it off. It might be a voice, a face, a gesture, a scent, or just the continual pointed reminders that he no longer belonged among his former associates. He no longer belonged anywhere, and sometimes situations like this cast him helplessly adrift on the anywhen between past and present.

Well, that was just one more reason to drink.

I think we definitely need some more anesthesia here, Doctor, he told himself, topping off his glass.

A snatch of conversation from somewhere behind him caught his ear, a sour comment about the way he was drinking, and a forgiving soul suggesting that maybe it was because of a woman.

Not anymore, he answered silently, Or at least hardly ever.

But this reminder sent his thoughts skidding back nearly ten years, conjuring up a tall, thin, green-eyed woman with skin and hair so pale she could almost pass for an albino in the empty chair across from him.

He closed his eyes and drained his glass. The whiskey went down like water.

But it didn’t wash away the memories…

There they were, sharing a restaurant table after more than eight years apart

Ella Prime drank it all in. The soft music, the candlelight and wine. Erratic flickerings of the old electricity leaping the gap between them. And memories.

So many memories. Crowding around the table at their shoulders and whispering in their ears; the best friends and most implacable enemies of two people who have come back together to see what remains of a lost love.

Ella watched Marchey refill his wineglass, wondering if he always drank this heavily, or if it was seeing her again that was driving him to it. She didn’t ask, and whatever the reason, at least it did seem to be helping him unbend a bit.

The four months of waiting for him to work his way to Ixion Station had given her plenty of time to dream of this moment. She had imagined their reunion as joyous and passionate, quite often fantasizing them going straight from the shuttle back to the privacy of her microhab, where they could peel the years off with each other’s clothes and start making up for lost time. Such thoughts made her ache with longing for his touch.

The first crack in the fantasy had come when one of her bug’s main thrusters had flamed out on the way in from her hab. She had gotten in all right, but that stranded them on Ixion Station until it was fixed.

Still, the where of it didn’t really matter that much, and the revealing blouse of sheer ivory silk and the skintight black skirt that showed off a mile of leg she’d worn for the occasion had been calculated to make the critical parts of her plan come to fruition in her fallback venue. As had her suggestion that they go to the room she’d hastily rented so they could “freshen up”—a code phrase from the old days.

He’d caught the signal, but pleading bad food on the shuttle, asked if they could first go someplace to eat.

The way she’d thrown herself at him it was no wonder the poor man had ducked! Cursing herself for moving too fast, coming on too strong, she’d brought him to this restaurant. She had to remember that a lot of water had passed under the bridge since she’d seen him last—a bridge she herself had burned. Building a new one this many years downstream was going to take time and patience.

But being near him again made that so very hard.

“What’s with the gloves, Gory?” she asked, to break the silence which had crept up between them. “Getting kind of obsessive about protecting those surgeon’s hands of yours, aren’t you?”

He laughed. “Something like that.” She couldn’t help noticing that his smile looked a little pained, and his laugh sounded forced and unconvincing. Avoiding her gaze, he inhaled half the wine he’d just poured.

“Hey,” she said, wondering what she’d said wrong and wanting to repair the damage. “That’s nothing. I’ve got mine insured for one hundred and fifty million.”

That made him look directly at her. “Really?”

She nodded, holding them up and wriggling her long thin fingers. “Bet your ass. These babies can turn fifty credits worth of clay into several hundred thousands’ worth of sculpture.”

“You’re getting that much now?” He chuckled and shook his head. “I remember the first time you cracked the thousand mark.”

Ella smiled. Now there was a memory…

“So do I.” But not as clearly as she remembered celebrating that event with him. He’d made the night unforgettable with dinner and champagne, a suite in a five-star-hotel and ten-star sex. Yet it was his absolute and utterly unselfish delight in her accomplishment she remembered best of all.

Less than four months later she’d broken it off, tired of coming off as second choice to his Bitch Mistress Medicine, and incidentally freeing herself to devote all her time to her art and the search for even greater fortune and fame.

Even now she couldn’t say for sure which had been the reason and which the excuse.

“It sounds like you’re doing pretty well, Ella.”

Career-wise, anyway. She shrugged. “That’s what my agent and my accountant tell me.”

The truth of the matter was that she’d grown almost absurdly rich and famous since then. Her rise in the art world had been meteoric. Now they called her a living legend. Each new piece she offered set off a bidding war. Almost pathologically reclusive, solitude had always been extremely important to her. Now she had it in spades, living in splendid isolation in a richly appointed microhab all her own just off a research station in one of the most isolated places imaginable. She had everything she’d ever wanted.

Except a life.

She gazed at Marchey, wondering if it was the sharp scent of her desperation that was putting him on guard. It was probably pouring off her in waves.

He had turned out to be the one big love of her life. Oh, there had been the random lover in the years since then, but nothing like what they had shared. Not even close.

Over the past couple years she’d begun to feel as hollow and brittle as a porcelain bust of herself. Her thoughts kept returning to the time Gory had been there for her, and seeing it as the high point of her life. Looking ahead, she’d felt like she was on a greased slide to the lowest. God, even the frigging critics had begun to talk about the “melancholy sense of existential loneliness that has come to permeate her work.”

Terrified by the future she saw hardening around her, she’d sought to re-create the past. She hadn’t quite begged Gory to come see her, but that was an option she’d been prepared to take. Just knowing he was coming had filled her with a hopeful new energy. The most recent works she would be shipping sunward on the returning transport would fetch the highest prices yet, she was sure of it.

Her imaginings of seeing him again and reality differed in yet another way. Of course she had expected him to have changed, but there had to be more than just time between the image in her mind and the man sitting less than a meter away.

His hairline had retreated to the back of his head, only a few discouraged strands of his lank black hair remaining on top. That happened to a lot of men, but most cared enough to have it replaced. Where once his face had been round and glowingly robust, now it was pared down to the austere bones underneath, fatigue chiseled into every hollow and line. His gray eyes had retreated into their sockets, bruised-looking bags under them. He had also lost a lot of weight, which left his broad, blocky body looking rawboned and starved.

The change was so radical that when she’d seen him appear in the shuttle’s airlock her first thought was that he’d been sick. He had the look of someone with something relentless and unforgiving gnawing at his insides.

But holding him close again, feeling the warmth of his arms around her and his face snuggled against her breasts had brought back such a rush of sensation and memory her knees nearly buckled under her. It was like coming home after far too long out in a place cold and comfortless.

In some ways he was still the sweet man she remembered. Yet in others he had become a complete stranger. Although he seemed genuinely glad to see her, there was a subdued air about him, a guarded remoteness that gave her the uneasy feeling that he was hiding something.

Or maybe he was just afraid she’d break his heart again.

That wasn’t going to happen. If there was a problem, she’d deal with it. Now that they were together again, nothing could come between them.

Ella seemed to come back from some far-off place and gave Marchey a smile. “I know I’m repeating myself,” she said shyly, “but I’ve really missed you, Gory.”

“Me too,” Marchey agreed. He had never really stopped loving Ella. The worst of the symptoms might have subsided over the years, but the condition itself seemed to be incurable.

He’d known that seeing her again might put him at risk of a major reinfection, and tried to convince himself that he’d developed emotional antibodies that would keep him from finding her as attractive as he had in the old days.

One look at her had blown that theory all to hell.

He knew Ella wasn’t all that beautiful by most men’s standards. She was almost freakishly tall, and thin to the point of emaciation; less than forty-five kilos of lean flesh and pale, almost translucent skin spread over more than two meters of angular jutting bone. Her long, narrow face wasn’t the sort to launch a thousand ships; it was rescued from being plain only by big white-lashed eyes of an unusual bottle green.

Still, something about those impossibly long crane-like legs, those tiny cupcake breasts, that body with every muscle and bone as starkly evident as that of an anatomy illustration, those big green eyes, even the pale austerity of her face turned in his heart like a key in a lock. It always had, and it seemed it always would.

He’d lost her once. Watching her eat and listening to her talk and catching tantalizing tastes of her scent, he wondered how he could have let himself gamble with losing her again.

This was not a new line of reasoning. The long, labyrinthine trip out to Ixion Station had given him plenty of time for doubts and second thoughts.

The place Ella had chosen to live was not exactly an easy one to reach. The big wheelhab named Ixion Station hung halfway across the barren gulf between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, pacing the latter. Only twice a year would a passenger-and-supply transport make the long journey into the vast emptiness beyond the orbit of Jupiter’s settled moons to visit. The UNSRA labs, observatories, research and training facilities—along with the small but thriving society that had grown up around those installations—rated no more than that as yet.

While it was a jumping-off point for the first tentative explorations of Saturn’s mysteries, as yet only a few were allowed to make the leap. Settlement on the moons of that ringed world was so sparse and austere there was nowhere for them to go. Yet.

Someday that would change, and the trickle would become a steady flow. Until then Ixion remained humankind’s farthest flung permanent outpost.

If getting to Ixion was difficult, arriving was disconcerting. Cut off as they were, the Station’s inhabitants treated the transport’s arcing flyby and the shuttleloads of goods and personnel it brought them as a cause for celebration. Nearly everyone dropped what they were doing, turning out to greet the new arrivals and hurling themselves into an almost desperate round of partying they called ShipTime.

This meant that Marchey’s first glimpse of the place had been the sea of upturned faces filling the receiving bay. The people below laughed and clapped and stamped their feet. They whistled and hooted and waved, treating him and his fellow passengers like visiting celebrities.

The shuttle stewards had warned them beforehand, so he knew they weren’t there to greet him, specifically. That had helped a little, but already apprehensive about the prospect of seeing Ella again, the welcome had made him feel like he’d been suddenly thrust onto a stage under a blazing spotlight. At any moment the rowdy throng below him might demand that he sing or dance. That he amaze them.

And he could have, if he’d wanted to. How did it go?

Observe carefully, ladies and gentlemen. You’ll see that I’ve got nothing up my sleeves…

Then he’d seen her, sudden panic nearly sending him fleeing back into the shuttle.

“I’m just so glad you really came,” Ella continued, her low husky voice sliding liquidly into his thoughts. Her face was so serious. He knew she had more riding on this than she was saying. Well, so did he.

He made himself smile. “So am I,” he agreed, neatly managing to lie and tell the truth with the same three words.

Her invitation had taken him by surprise, as had his spur-of-the-moment decision to take a break from his frustrating, fruitless search for a permanent place to practice.

It had been the act of a man grasping at straws. She was his last tenuous link with the sort of life he’d led before his idealism and dedication had led him to join the Bergmann Program.

Her green eyes sought his, a glint of desperation in them. “Sitting here like this, you and me together again…”

She bit her lip. “It’s so much like before. That’s—that’s what I’ve dreamed of. It’s what I want for us, Gory. For things to be the way they were before.”

“We had some problems,” he said carefully.

She dismissed them with a careless flick of one thin hand. He saw that her nails were bitten to the quick. “Then things will be better.”

“Maybe… but you know our work can still get in the way,” he said, reminding her of their earlier relationship’s greatest obstacle, and taking a halfhearted swipe at being honest about the one it faced now.

Total dedication to your vocation took the best of what you had to offer, leaving only sloppy seconds for the one you loved. Theirs had torn them apart and driven them in opposite directions. Ella had begun her journey outsystem and up the ladder, at last holing up out here at the edge of nowhere.

He had certainly found his own extremes. She hadn’t been able to accept how much of himself he gave to medicine then. And now?

Nobody else did. Why should she be any different?

First emptying his wineglass, he crept up a little closer to the matter.

“I’ve changed, Ella.” That was a bit of an understatement, but he had to start somewhere.

She nodded. “So have I. That’s why I think we can work it out now.”

Her face, her voice, all echoed with her need to have it be so. He recognized his own loneliness in her, his own need to fill the emptiness, to find something to cling to.

“You have changed,” he said, smiling as he backed away from treacherous ground. “You’re more beautiful than ever.” That was true, but it avoided the candor she deserved.

His deceit had been calculated, and had begun before he left the shuttle. In the time between leaving his seat and reaching the lock he had nervously checked himself over one last time. The gray-velvet gloves he wore were clean and secure. The darker gray sleeves of his jacket were snug at the wrist. The fly of his baggy black pants was shut.

Lastly, unconsciously and by habit, he had touched the gleaming silver biometal pin clipped to his red silk shirt over his heart, half-hidden by the lapels of his jacket.

It was the Bergmann Surgeons’ emblem: two arms crossed at the wrists, arms ending just below the elbows, fingers spread wide.

When he had realized what he was doing he took his hand away, clasping it with his other hand to keep it from straying there again. But his awareness of the pin—and what it meant—remained at the fore of his mind.

He had considered leaving the pin behind when he came here, or at least leaving it off, but found that he could not. Not so much out of honesty, but because it was a part of him, branding him as one part of an experiment that was both an incredible success and a dismal failure: medal and stigmata all in one.

There he sat, the silver pin barely peeking, feeling like a cheat and a liar. Sleeves and gloves might hide the path he had taken from her for a while, but she would find out in the end.

Until then all he could do was try to make the best of their time together. The wine helped.

Ella had ordered a large bottle of genuine French wine, never batting an eyelash at the price, but had taken no more than a couple polite sips from her glass.

Marchey felt no similar reticence. In the years since joining the Program, alcohol consumption had increased to the point that someday it might just become a real problem. But that was a concern for some other time. He already had the bottle down to the halfway mark, and planned to see the bottom by dessert.

Fortifying himself for the moment when he finally revealed his pride and his shame.

Each glass made it a little easier to belive she would understand, and that their love could rise up like a phoenix rather than crash and burn yet another time.

Even with things still a little strained and uncertain, Ella felt more at ease with Gory than anyone else she had ever known. She remembered pushing him away there at the end, and how it had seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Now she had to wonder how she could have been so selfish. So stupid. Had it really been that hard to make allowances for his work?

They were halfway through the main course when their waiter, a thin, smoothly courteous man with a hooked nose and a walrus mustache approached their table.

“I regret the intrusion on your meal,” he said quietly, “but there is an urgent call for you, Miz Prime.” He held the flat book shape of a communit against his chest like a stack of menus.

Ella scowled at him. “Who the hell is it?”

“The caller is Dr. Carol Chang, Director of Ixion Medical Services. She was most insistent about speaking to you, and instructed me to tell you it was a matter of life and death.” He stepped back and waited impassively for her answer.

Marchey’s eyes had narrowed at the mention of Chang’s title and office. Already suspecting what sort of a call it might be, Ella was staring at him intently. She seemed to be holding her breath. The call might be for her, but obviously the decision was up to him.

Like it or not, he really had no choice. He tried to smile. “Maybe you better take it.”

Her mouth turned down. That hadn’t been the answer she wanted. She gestured curtly. “Put her through.”

“As you wish.” The waiter placed the unit on the table facing her, keyed it on, then faded back out of sight.

The image of a diminutive, middle-aged oriental woman appeared on the screen. When she saw that she had been put through, the grim, impatient look she wore shifted to a tight smile. “Ms. Prime?”

Ella inclined her head fractionally. “Yes.”

“I am Dr. Carol Chang. I deeply regret the intrusion on your privacy, and would not have called if I’d had any other choices. I understand that Dr. Georgory Marchey is your, ah, guest here. An emergency has arisen, and it is imperative that I speak to him.”

“Well,” Ella began unhappily, an old old resentment still there inside her, as good as new. It was always an emergency, she remembered. Every damn time. How many times?

“Please,” Marchey whispered.

“He’s right beside me,” Ella said tonelessly. She turned the unit toward him, then snatched up her wineglass and drained it.

Chang’s features lit in a genuine smile when she saw him. “Dr. Marchey, this is indeed an honor. Again, I apologize for the interruption.”

Marchey glanced away, watching Ella refill her glass, her jaw set with anger. He closed his eyes a moment, then faced the screen again. “You said there’s an emergency?”

Chang nodded. “Yes. One of our young people, a girl named Shei Sinclair, somehow managed to build a toy cannon and make powder for it as a way of celebrating ShipTime. It exploded in her face the first time it was fired.”

Marchey grimaced. Ella stiffened, wineglass halfway to her lips.

“We have removed most of the fragments and stopped the worst of the bleeding, but her condition remains extremely grave. Two fragments entered her skull through her left eye socket, their flattened profiles making them follow curving paths. The damage they did is considerable. Both are lodged deep within her brain, one impinging on the medulla. There is steady intracranial hemorrhaging, and her autonomic functions are failing fast. We are already using machine assist to keep her breathing. I am afraid that cardiac function will soon fail as well. The fragments must be removed, but going in for them would be extremely risky. I am prepared to try if I must, but—”

The oriental woman paused to take a deep breath. “I was reviewing the medical records of our new arrivals when this happened,” she continued in a rush. “Yours was a surprise. I have read about Bergmann Surgeons, but never thought I would see one way out here. Now I have to look on your arrival as a gift from God. If you—”

There was suddenly a high-pitched buzzing sound in the background of Chang’s pickup. The grating buzz was quickly replaced by a metronomic beeping. She glanced off-screen, brow furrowing. When she faced Marchey again her grim expression had returned and redoubled.

“She just went ECS. Can you help?”

Had Marchey been by himself, he would have already been on his way. But for once he wasn’t alone. He turned toward Ella, a strong flash of déjà vu swallowing him up and making him feel unreal. This was so like the times before that the intervening years might as well have been the dream of a single bad night.

Ella’s face was blank. She stared past him at nothing, green eyes glazed and sightless.

“Ella?”

She scarcely heard him, remembering the too many times their lives had been interrupted by a call like this. The resentful hours spent waiting for his return…

But only if she let them be resentful. Her eyes snapped back into focus. “Go,” she said, digging her fingers into his shoulder.

Marchey’s relief was obvious. His sunken gray eyes flicked back toward Chang’s image. “You heard?”

The hope on her face said she had. “Yes. Thank you—both of you!”

“Now how do I get—”

Ella’s fingers gripped him even tighter. “I know the way. I’m going with you.” The look on her face defied him to argue.

He didn’t plan to. “Good.”

He knew then how she was going to learn what he’d been hiding from her. The end of the suspense gave him no real comfort. This might just be the best way, but would it make any difference in the long run?

He pushed all those thoughts to one side. There was no turning back, not for any of it. All he could do was keep going and try to cope with where events carried him.

He shoved his chair back and stood up, Ella rising to her feet beside him as he took a last look at the screen.

“We’re on our way.”

“I have seen your Dr. Marchey’s name in the medical journals several times,” Dr. Chang said as she poured two cups of tea. She smiled back over her shoulder at Ella. “And please call me Carol.”

“All right, um, Carol.” Ella had expected to hate on sight this woman who had spoiled their reunion. Much to her surprise the opposite had been true.

Chang had greeted them at the door to her office and ushered them inside.

All Ella could do was wait for whatever happened next and wish she had a sketchpad with her. Lacking that, she tried to memorize Chang’s every move and gesture.

The head of Ixion Medical Services stood just over a meter and a half tall. She was flawlessly proportioned, uncannily graceful, and had an almost perfect genotype with straight jet-black hair, almond eyes, and skin the color of aged amber.

Though she had to be an unrejuved fifty, Chang had one of those faces whose beauty time could not diminish. Ella’s artist’s eye subtracted her crisp white coverall and the small silver crucifix worn outside the coverall’s blouse. Dressed in a kimono, she could have been one of Hiroshito’s exquisite porcelain figurines come to life. But warmer, not so aloof and opaque. Old, young, and ageless all at once. She planned to ask the woman if she would sit for her when this was over. Nude, if possible.

As for Marchey, he might as well have been in another room. He’d asked to see the young accident victim’s medical records and stats the moment they reached Chang’s office, and had been hunched over her Medicomp and oblivious to all else since.

Ella’s nostrils flared at the spicy aroma of the tea when Chang handed her an eggshell-delicate cup. “Thanks.”

“You are most welcome.” Chang remained standing. That put her and the seated Ella nearly eye to eye.

“It is I who should thank you,” she continued. “There are only a handful of Bergmann Surgeons as yet. Your, ah, friend is one of the first and most accomplished of them. Now I know that they are somewhat, well, controversial, but I don’t doubt that in the end the prejudice will disappear.” She turned her head to gaze at Marchey, hope filling her face. “For myself, I can only say that his being here at this time is the answer to a prayer. His special skills give Shei a better chance than anything I can do for her.”

Ella frowned at Chang over the rim of her cup. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about. You called him that before, a Bergmann Surgeon. What’s it mean?”

Marchey heard Ella’s question. He risked a glance at his old lover. Her whole attention was focused on Dr. Chang as she waited for an answer.

Chang’s poise faltered. She took a sip of her tea, her movement uncharacteristically jerky and uncertain. After an uncomfortable pause, she said, “You don’t know.” It came out as both a question and an unhappy statement all at once.

Ella frowned, puzzled by her reaction. “Gory has always been a surgeon. Is this different somehow?”

Marchey spoke up at last. “Yes, it is.” Both women turned toward him, Chang looking relieved and Ella clearly baffled by the sudden tension.

“I must see the child now.” He met Ella’s gaze. “I want you to come and watch. There’s something you don’t know about. Something I haven’t been able to tell you. The only way to understand is to see it for yourself.”

He spoke firmly. His apprehension showed only in the way his gloved hand strayed for a moment to the silver pin over his heart.

Chang put her cup aside and started toward the door. “This way, please.” She strode ahead without looking back.

They both followed, Marchey moving with a businesslike briskness, Ella trailing uncertainly behind.

Chang led them to a small combination Surgery/ICU just two doors down from her office.

The brightly lit, antiseptic-smelling room made Ella even more uneasy. She didn’t want to think about the type of things done in such a place. Invasions of the body and dignity. Proof that the flesh could fail in all sorts of horrible and humiliating ways.

Her unanswered questions weighed heavily on her, leaving her off-balance. From the very first she’d felt Gory’s reserve, suspected that he was holding something back. Hiding something. It seemed that the veil was about to be lifted. She had a sinking feeling that she wasn’t going to like what was behind it one bit.

When she finally made herself look at the small, white-swaddled form on the padded table in the center of the room, took in the tubes and sensors and other medical arcana hooked up to it, the urge to turn and escape screwed tighter around her. There was nothing here she wanted to know about. This was all a part of him she had kept at arm’s length the first time around.

Yet she stayed, hovering fretfully near the door. Her hands worried and plucked at each other nervously. Her question remained: What was a Bergmann Surgeon?

Marchey went straight to the table, his face intent, and began his initial examination in silence. Chang dismissed the medico in attendance and started toward the table. He waved her back without turning around.

“Will the secondaries take over if I unplug her for a moment?” he asked over his shoulder while checking the pupil response of Shei’s undamaged right eye. The other one was hidden under a thick sterile covering. The whole left side of her head was heavily bandaged; her face had been partly averted when the toy cannon had turned into a pipe bomb.

He shook his head at what he saw. Her pupil was dilated and showed only minimal response. Hang on, my brown-eyed girl Help is here now.

“Yes, it’s a full table.”

Marchey nodded absently at Chang’s answer. He sighed, squared his shoulders, then turned to look across the room at Ella.

The expression on his face made her take an involuntary step back. He wore the face of a condemned man, despairing and apologetic, the face of a man saying a final farewell. Part of her was drawn to comfort him, to tell him that nothing could be that bad. But she could only stand there, the anxiety buzzing through her bones defeating that impulse.

Marchey’s gaze dropped, and he turned away. First he shucked off his jacket and laid it aside. Next he rolled up the sleeves of his red-silk shirt. The gray-velvet gloves covered his arms up to his elbows.

He began stripping off the right glove. The fabric slid down his forearm, revealing not white skin but burnished silver. His wrist was silver. His hand, palm, thumb, and fingers were silver; gleaming metal shaped into smooth, perfectly sculpted folds and curves, supple seamless biometal shaped to mimic the flesh and bone it had replaced down to each knuckle and crease.

He removed his other glove, his already-bared silver hand gleaming and flashing as it moved like a thing alive. His left hand and arm were the same, a mirror twin of the right. Face burning self-consciously, he put the gloves aside. Through all this he kept his head down, studiously avoiding Ella’s shocked and uncomprehending stare.

She stumbled forward a step, protest filling her chest to the bursting point. Dr. Chang caught her arm and held her back, speaking quietly but firmly.

“Not now. Please. Wait until he is done.”

“But his hands, w-what happened to his—” She swallowed hard, silenced as he held up one shining hand. An implug extruded from his palm like an electronic stigma, hung there on a braided silver cable.

He turned to his patient and gently probed the base of her skull. When he found the impline linking her to the table’s life support and monitors he pulled it and substituted the implug dangling from his palm.

Ella shivered and hunched her shoulders. Taps were common, but she had always been revolted by the idea of letting a tap’s quasi-alive nanostrands slither into her brain like electronic worms. Just the thought of it made her stomach churn.

Marchey stood there, swaying slightly, the abstracted look he wore making it appear he was daydreaming.

Dr. Chang spoke up before Ella could find voice for her question. “He’s linked to Shei’s tap and reading her condition. Most imped doctors can do that, but only through a special interface. His interface is built right into his prosthetic.”

Ella mouthed the word prosthetic. It tasted like tin-foil against her tongue and teeth.

There was a soft snick as he disconnected. He hooked the girl back up to the table once more, gently lowering her head back down onto the padding.

Next he placed a hand on either side of the girl’s skull. Keeping them parallel with each other, he moved them in slow wide circles. They emitted the faintest of hums, nearly lost in the background noise made by the other medical equipment.

“Now he’s scanning the location of the fragments. He doesn’t have to do this, we’ve taken full scans. He’s just being careful. In fact, he could go in cold and do better than I could with every scan and test possible at my fingertips.”

Ella watched intently, hearing every word the woman said and even understanding some of it. Her whole attention remained welded to the alien argent metal that replaced the gentle hands she remembered. Marchey seemed lost to all but what he was doing.

At last he straightened up, muttering something under his breath. One silver hand brushed the dying child’s bandaged forehead tenderly.

Something clicked inside Ella. She was suddenly inundated by a flood of jumpcut, staggeringly vivid sense memories of Marchey’s hands touching her: a velvety knuckle kissing her cheek as it wiped away a tear; his warm palms and fingers cupping her breasts; fingers trailing sweet fire along her flanks, heating her nerves to the flash point; thumbs and fingers that knew her secret places and what to do there, possessed of a special wisdom of their own; his warm hand in hers in the dark, comforting and reassuring…

But those hands were gone. Gone. Her skin crawled at the thought of those cold metal things touching her, creeping across her flesh like sinister steel spiders.

“—gone—” It was a breathless whisper, a crack in the speechless silence, forced out by all the things building up behind it. She started toward him to demand that he tell her what had happened to him. How this horrible thing had come about.

Dr. Chang barred her way, grasping her arms. “Ella,” she said sternly, “I know this has to be difficult for you. But you must not break his concentration.” Her voice throbbed with urgency. “Shei’s life depends on it.”

The pleading note in Chang’s voice reached Ella. She swallowed the sour wave in her throat, looking down and meeting the other woman’s eyes. After a moment she nodded.

Her eyes sought Marchey again. Chang turned to watch as well, but kept a restraining hand on her arm.

Marchey stepped back from the table. He crossed his arms before his broad chest and began to breathe deeply, eyes closed, doing some sort of pranayama or breathing exercise. Crossed at the wrist, his silver arms were posed like the ones depicted by the pin on his shirt.

Ella watched in growing bewilderment as his silver hands began fluttering and flashing like mechanical birds in rhythm with his breathing. His face became increasingly strange as his breathing slowed, all expression flattening away to leave a rigid, blankly inhuman mien in its place. The seconds limped by, and his face became colder and stranger still; a sinister Mr. Hyde emerging from the sweet Dr. Jekyll she thought she knew.

She sought the comfort of Chang’s hand against the sense of dread climbing up her spine and wrapping clammy, spatulate fingers around her heart. Chang’s hand was cold, her grip tight. Was she afraid as well?

Marchey’s sunken gray eyes slowly opened, the lids sliding back like shutters over a void.

There was nothing of the Georgory Marchey Ella had known and loved to be seen in them. They were deep dark caves: cold, empty, and forbidding. Not even the faintest spark of who he had been remained in them, every gleam of humanity expunged by whatever radically altered state he had just invoked.

Ella fought the urge to run away from the awful stranger he had become. Had turned himself into, right before her eyes.

Staring straight ahead, his gaze sweeping indifferently across the two women like a scanning beam, Marchey moved to the foot of the table with slow, ratcheting steps. He bent at the waist like a badly made puppet and rested his forearms on it, elbow to wrist flat on the padded surface.

The chrome clockwork birds of his hands were still. His eyes drooped shut. He drew his breath through his clenched teeth sharply, as if trying to lift some impossible burden.

After a moment his breath came out in a long hiss. He slowly straightened up and stepped back. His silver arms remained on the table, abandoned, and somehow obscene. Just below the elbows his arms ended in flat, featureless silver plates. After that, nothing.

Chang clutched Ella’s hand tightly. “It’s all right,” she whispered, her tone reedy and uncertain.

Ella could only stare at her former lover, her face white and immobile as carved bone, her lips pressed tightly together to keep in the contents of her squirming gut. Had what she was seeing always been inside him? Looking out? Watching?

Marchey moved to the head of the table, his movements stiff and jerky. Once there he brought the truncated stumps of his arms down toward the child’s bandaged head, pausing when they were an arm’s length away. His posture, his face, everything about him made it look like he was about to do her terrible harm. Ella’s insides jangled with the impulse to snatch the child out of his grasp, but the thought of going nearer to him filled her with terror.

Then he reached.

Had he still possessed hands, they would have been driven through the skull and buried deep within the delicate tissues of the girl’s brain. He changed position. The silver plates at the end of his arms winked knowingly. His eyes drooped shut to become glittering slits. His face showed no more animation or humanity than that of a granite gargoyle.

Ella forced a question past the knot in her throat. “W-what is h-he—?” What is he doing? What is he?

“He is locating the fragments by touch,” Dr. Chang replied softly. She licked her lips. “Since they are metal, he will trace each path of entry and bring each fragment back along its path to minimize the damage inflicted by removal. If he hadn’t been here, I might have tried to do it myself, but even with nanotic forceps I would have done more harm than good.”

Ella’s bewilderment was total. “But he doesn’t h-have any h-hands,” she stammered, tearing her gaze away to stare at the smaller woman almost accusingly. “They’re gone!”

“He has something better!” Chang said so forcefully it sounded almost like a shout. She gripped Ella’s hand tighter and spoke softly, reassuringly. Almost reverently.

“Let me try to explain. There is a phenomenon sometimes experienced by amputees called the ‘phantom limb syndrome.’ What that means is that they think they can still ‘feel’ the missing limb. The flesh and bone is gone, but some strange ghost of sensation remains. The intensity of that feeling varies from person to person. Some do not experience it at all. Once the replacement of missing limbs with banked tissue became commonplace it very nearly became a forgotten occurrence.

“Almost, but fortunately not quite. A very great man, a prostheticist named Dr. Saul Bergmann became intrigued by this phenomenon. He began to study it, eventually learning that a small percentage of those who felt it were capable of actually manipulating matter with that limb image. The ability was so weak and wildly erratic that it took him years conclusively to prove it existed. But he did prove it, and then went on to develop techniques to help the ability grow stronger and under better control.”

Ella stared down at Dr. Chang, trying to absorb and understand what she was being told. It sounded impossible. Insane. As insane as what she had just seen, as what was happening at this very moment. And anyone who could believe in such a crazy thing had to be—

“These very few special people had to work in a deep trance to maintain the concentration it took to use this limb image, but they could do many unexpected—you might even say miraculous things with it. The strangest and most wonderful things of all were the things it could do inside a human body. Anyway, once the techniques became better perfected, Bergmann Surgery—”

Ella’s gaze had been drawn back to Marchey as she tried to reconcile what she was hearing with him. Her free hand went to her mouth, and the small shocked sound that escaped past her fingers made Dr. Chang turn and stare.

A jagged metal fragment the size of a fingernail slowly emerged from the gauze pad covering Shei’s damaged eye. It poked out apparently on its own power, twisted free of the threads, hung there in the air for a moment, then settled to the white bandaging. A small bloodstain began spreading away from it, darkening the snowy gauze.

Marchey was oblivious to their wide-eyed scrutiny. Sweat sheened his wide forehead. A silver-capped stump turned toward his head momentarily, and the sweat vanished. He shifted position slightly and continued his work, the silver plates hovering over the child’s head. Discs of reflected light crawled across her bandaged face.

Ella shuddered and looked away. This was worse than knives and bone saws and a rubber-gloved hand coming up dripping with gore. Those were at least things you could understand. Horrible, but comprehensible. Not like invisible hands on phantom limbs wielded by the horrific stranger inhabiting Gory’s body.

Chang picked up the thread of what she had been telling Ella again, but she no longer addressed the younger woman directly. She seemed to be speaking for her own benefit as much as Ella’s, trying to reduce what she was witnessing to something explicable. She clutched Ella’s hand tightly. Her other hand was clasped tightly around the crucifix at her breast.

“Bermann Surgeons perform procedures light years ahead of conventional surgery. He can wipe away a tumor or a clot or sterilize an infection. He can coax an aneurism out, smoothing it away like a bubble in clay. He can thrust his hands into a living, beating heart without breaking the skin or altering its rhythm. Bone, muscle, blood, and tissue—even the very cells themselves—he can work on any of it directly. Look at what he’s doing here. The strongbox of the skull presents no more barrier than the surface of water to him. He can reach through it to work on the delicate tissues inside as easily as you or I could turn over stones at the bottom of a fishbowl. No scars, no complications, no blood, no pain…”

Chang’s voice trailed away. After a few moments she spoke again, her voice barely above a whisper. “I envy him, Ella. Can you understand that?”

Ella stared down at Chang’s wan, sweat-glazed face, too numb to answer even if she had known what to say.

“Soon all my skills will be as obsolete as cupping and lobotomy. Surgeons will be like him.” She grimaced. “Compared to what he has become I am just a crude mechanic with a few blunt tools at my command. He is a healer.”

She squeezed Ella’s hand. “I know this has been a lot to absorb all at once, and it’s very frightening to see him like this. But he is not a monster. He is not a cripple.” She managed an unconvincing smile. “I saw the way you looked at him. You love him, don’t you? This doesn’t change that.”

Ella’s face was that of a shock victim, her skin pale and bloodless as wax. It took all her strength and concentration to speak.

“H-how did he get like this?” Her voice was thin with bewilderment. She pulled her hands free from Chang’s grasp and shoved them under her arms as if to protect them from the same fate his had suffered. “H-how was he m-maimed? He never said anything about any a-accident…”

Dr. Carol Chang was a kind woman. A caring and considerate woman. But she was badly unnerved herself, and she answered Ella’s question without stopping to think about what a terrible thing some truths can be sometimes.

She shook her head. “There was no accident. His professional rating was high enough to be considered for the Bergmann Program. He scored well enough in the preliminary tests to become a candidate. Once it became clear that he had something of the innate ability needed, he gambled on success and had his hands amputated. God, I’d trade—”

Ella stared at Chang in absolute horror, her mouth working soundlessly at the word amputated but unable to force it past her lips. In her mind a gleaming, razor-edged silver cleaver chopped down, severing his hands, her hands, her heartstrings.

She stumbled back clumsily, her horrified gaze seeking out Marchey. He’d done this to himself. Willingly. Mutilated himself so he could become this—this—

Her back came up against the door.

“Gory?” His name came out a heartsick plea for proof that some fragment of the man she loved remained inside what he had become. What he had turned himself into.

No response. “Gory!” Louder, shrill with desperation.

Not even a flicker of recognition showed on the cruel cold landscape of his face. His hooded eyes remained dead and indifferent, focused on some crazy mental image, buried in the child’s brain. The image burned itself into her retinas, through them into the tender folds of her own brain, into places so deep it could never be erased.

A sob escaped her as she spun around, pushed through the door, and fled, knowing knowing knowing she would never again be able to see him any other way.

Dr. Carol Chang watched the door swing shut, her shoulders slumping defeatedly. After a moment she slowly turned back toward the table where Marchey worked. She felt clumsy and stupid. Guilty. Out of place, there in her own clinic.

She shivered as before her eyes another twisted fragment of metal emerged from a place no one else could reach, brought out by a spectral hand she could not see.

Science, she told herself, that’s all this is. Science. Like light and a ruby make a laser, like Schmidt crystals and electricity produce anesthetic fields. He is only a man who has gained a special skill.

But at what cost?

No triumph showed on the face of the hand’s owner at what he had just accomplished, no regret for what he had just lost. He might as well have been a machine—a soulless, inhuman construct empty of everything but fixed, unswerving purpose.

“Dear God,” she whispered. She took an uncertain step nearer, but could force herself to go no closer than that. Nor did she voice the name of who it was she wanted God to help: herself, Shei, Ella, or Marchey.

Oblivious and unmoved, he worked on.

Marchey reattached his prosthetics. A mental twist of the wrist and he had solid fingers once more. The arms felt heavy, and even though they were every bit as sensitive as the flesh they had replaced, they still felt like numb dead meat compared to the exquisitely sensitive un-hands he’d just used.

He didn’t ask where Ella had gone. Some detached, then-volitionless part of his mind had registered every detail of what had happened.

Now everything from his old life was gone. The circle was complete.

He sighed. “I was able to repair most of the damage. I think the worst she’ll suffer is some small memory loss, and perhaps a minor temporary degradation of coordination. You know the tests to run.” His tone was as mechanical as his silver hands.

Chang nodded soberly. “You saved her life. You— you healed her face, too.” Her voice was husky with awe.

It had been like nothing she had ever seen before, and not something she really ever wanted to see again; at once wondrous and indefinably wrong.

First the bandages had parted, threads cut cleanly as if by the sharpest microtome, and peeled themselves away from Shei’s face, revealing the mangled, hastily gelsealed flesh beneath.

The gelseal had been swept away and the wounds reopened, chipped bone showing in the deepest lacerations. Then the truly miraculous had manifested itself before her very eyes.

With just one slow pass of an invisible hand Shei’s wounds had been debrided of even microscopic fragments, a haze of foreign materials rising up, coalescing, and settling down on a tray. Damaged bone had been smoothed like soft clay. Torn muscle and severed blood vessels had snaked together and reknit, melding into one as they were repaired at the cellular level. She had watched an eye that would have had to be replaced under normal circumstances become whole again, and an eyelid that had been blown to bloody lace mended to smooth-domed perfection. She had watched subcutaneous tissues move like hot wax, flowing, flattening, filling in, and sealing. She had seen burned skin slough off, and lacerated—no, shredded— flesh ripple as it migrated to reshape itself to its earlier state like water stills after a disturbing hand is withdrawn. Layer by layer, tissue by tissue, the trauma had been erased without benefit of stitches or staples or gels, and with a surety and speed a whole team of surgeons could not have begun to match.

When he was done Shei’s face had been almost perfectly restored, the slightly pinker redistributed skin the only evidence it had ever been damaged.

What she had witnessed was something that went so far beyond the boundaries of what she considered traditional medicine that for her it could only belong in the realm of magic and miracles. Her training and what she knew about his specialty said otherwise, but only in a small uncertain voice. It had been unbelievable. Impossible.

Yet she had seen it happen.

Try as she might, she could not keep herself from maintaining a careful, cautious distance from him. There was no way she could look at him in the same way as when she’d first met him, even though she knew it was a grievous sin against him, and her own rationality. Just a couple hours ago he had been an interesting concept in the literature. Then he had become her best hope, and in realizing that hope he had been transformed into something that raised her hackles and brought a prayer to her lips.

Marchey had been prepared for her reaction. He’d been in a similar situation all too many times before. He shrugged uncomfortably, gazing at the peaceful, now unblemished face of Shei Sinclair.

A life for a love. May she live long, and her second chance turn out better than his had.

“She’s very beautiful,” he murmured. “It would have taken major plastic surgery to have repaired all the damage. There was no reason to make her live with even temporary disfigurement.”

He glanced at the clock. “I gave her a keep-under, so she’ll probably be out for another couple hours. When she wakens she’ll be almost good as new— though I would test her hearing. I’m, um, glad I was here to help.” He made a point of not looking directly at Chang. Had he done so, she would have flinched away.

Fear, revulsion, violent denial, blind hatred, or, as in Chang’s case, a kind of appalled theistic awe; these were what he always saw on the faces of the medical people who witnessed him at his work. Always.

This was one wall of the box he and the other Bergmanns had put themselves in. Even those who knew every detail of the Program reacted the same way. What he was and did flew in the face of all their former colleagues knew and did, and that he could so easily accomplish feats they could only dream about made matters worse. The way he looked when in trance unnerved and frightened them, and his having given up his hands to aquire such abilities burned the bridge between his kind and theirs, marking him in their eyes as a dangerous lunatic who had mutilated himself to become some sort of witch doctor.

Somehow that was never mentioned in the medical journals. At least not yet. Neither was the relief those same people felt when he or any of the thirty-some other Bergmann Surgeons moved on—driven off more often than not. That nobody wanted them on staff, not even the burn units. He hadn’t quite become completely numbed to being a pariah, but he was working on it.

Now Ella was gone. He’d been braced for it, but that didn’t make it any easier to take.

He shrugged again, having given up trying to argue his case a couple years before. He began pulling on his gloves so he could get the hell out of there and find that first of many drinks. The gloves were a necessity. There was no way he’d be able to bear being stared at right now.

“I guess that’s about it.” He cast a last yearning glance at the child whose life he’d saved, wishing he could stay to see her waken. To see those brown eyes open and that sweet face smile.

But that could never happen. Bitter experience had taught him and the other Bergmann Surgeons what would happen if he did, and taught them well. Some memory of his invasions remained inside her, creating a sort of peculiar psychic scarring. If she woke and saw him, she would begin to scream and shriek, gripped by a terror so harsh and primeval it could well kill her.

The Nightmare Effect, they called it. At the beginning of the Program several patients had nearly been lost before the lesson was learned.

Dr. Chang took a hesitant half step toward him. “Thank you… Doctor.” Her eyes met his for an instant, then slid uneasily away. “I—I’m sorry.” She hung her head, face burning with shame. “About Ella. About everything.”

“The child lives,” he answered. “That’s all that matters.” In one way that was even the truth. It was the sole redeeming value of Bergmann Surgery. Because of it the child and hundreds of others in similar dire extremity lived.

He picked up his jacket and left quietly, without looking back.

“Are you done with your dinner, sir?”

Marchey stared sightlessly up at the waitress several seconds before he came back to the here and now of the Litman commissary. He blinked the past away and focused on her face. Broad and Slavic. Blue eyes. Red cheeks and a strand of sweat-dampened hair curling across her high square forehead. A harried, hopeful smile.

She was on duty all by herself. He’d watched the other people in the commissary ordering her around like a slave, and so tried to keep his own requests gentle and to a minimum.

“Ah, I suppose I am.” He checked the level in the bottle near his glass. Running toward empty from drinking on autopilot. That would never do. “I could use another flagon of this fine whiskey, though. When you get the time.”

The waitress nodded as she took his plate away. “All right. What about dessert?”

“Why not? Something chocolate. You pick.”

“I guess I can do that,” she said, not sounding very sure about it. “I’ll be back in a couple minutes.”

“No rush.” She hurried away, veering off to answer an imperious summons from another table.

He poured the dregs from the bottle into his glass, took a meditative sip. Not so many years ago remembering the last time he’d seen Ella would have torn him apart. Now he felt scarcely a quiver. Amazing what enough time—and nearly half a liter of 110 proof whiskey—could do.

Every year he felt less and less. Soon he would feel nothing at all. This was a state he alternately looked forward to and dreaded during those odd times he was sober enough to think about it.

Shei Sinclair had been a child of thirteen then. Now she probably had a husband and children, and retained only vague memories of her brush with death. Perhaps the odd nightmare. He hoped her life was a happy one.

Two days after his interrupted reunion dinner he’d joined the boarding queue and trudged up the ramp, his bag in his hand. As he stepped into the lock he turned and looked back. No one was there to see him off.

He hadn’t heard a single word from Ella. Nor had he tried to contact her. Some things were beyond the reach of his healing skills, and would always remain so.

Dr. Chang had sent two messages detailing Shei’s condition. Memory loss had been minimal. A slight hearing impairment was already fading. Her most severe aftereffect proved to be vivid recurrent nightmares of an armless monster pawing through her insides, nightmares terrible enough to make her wake up screaming in spite of sedation. The messages were very formal and quietly apologetic.

Just before leaving he had composed and sent a reply:

Once on the shuttle he’d slumped back in his seat, the red edges of a headache beginning to throb at his temples. While sorting through his beltpouch for one of the soporifics he had become increasingly dependent on, the shuttle’s steward approached him, a large foil-wrapped package in his arms.

“Dr. Marchey?”

“Yes?” Ah, there was one. He popped the pill out of its blister and put it in his mouth. It tasted bitter, but then again so did everything lately. He swallowed it dry.

“I was told to see that this package got to you.” The steward handed it over. “Careful sir, it’s heavy.”

So it was. Surprisingly heavy.

“Thanks.” He lowered it to his lap, dug into his pouch again and located a five-credit chip. “Here you go. When do you start serving drinks?”

“Soon as we debark, sir.” He touched his cap. “Thanks.”

The steward sidled down the aisle, slipping the chip into his pocket. Marchey put the package on the empty seat beside him, then picked it right up again, unable to contain his curiosity.

Under the foil was a carbon-fiber box, and inside the box—

Marchey sat in the commissary, glass of Mauna Loa in his hand, remembering the moment with an aching clarity. Like it had happened only yesterday, not nearly a decade ago.

Inside the box had been a bisque-fired clay sculpture, the ceramic the color of old ivory. The piece was exquisitely wrought and yet fairly throbbed with raw power and emotion, eloquent proof that her talent remained undiminished under all the hype.

The piece portrayed two sculptors who had begun work on a statue of two lovers embracing. But one sculptor stood helplessly by, gazing hopefully up at the unfinished lovers. His arms lay at his feet, arms crossed at the wrists and tools still clutched in his hands. He cradled a wounded child in the stumps of arms held up toward the sculpture as if in supplication.

The other sculptor, the tall thin woman, huddled on the ground near him, her averted face a mask of frustrated shame. Her posture was that of someone who could not muster the courage to pick up her scattered tools and stand, taking the first step in trying to help complete the work they had begun. Her face was turned away from fellow sculptor and work alike.

The lovers were rough-hewn and unfinished, yet there was no mistaking who they were.

Marchey recalled staring at it for a very long time, tears streaming down his face.

When the acceleration warning sounded he’d returned it to its box, then belted it into the seat beside him.

She understood. Not that it changed anything, but at least she understood.

Marchey stared into his empty glass, adrift between past and present, and finding comfort in neither.

The waitress returned. She placed a plate and fresh fork in front of him. “Here’s some chocolate cake, sir. I hope it’s all right.”

He gave her a fractured smile. “It looks delicious.”

She replaced the empty bottle of Mauna Loa with a fresh one. “And your drink. Can I get you anything else?”

“Nothing, thanks. I’ve got everything I need.”

She went away. He opened the bottle and filled his glass, then forked off a bite of cake, tasted it.

It was delicious.

But the whiskey was better.

“I want to talk to you, Doctor Marchey.” A peremptory tone and sarcastic emphasis on Doctor.

The swarthy, hawk-faced woman whom he’d saluted with his glass earlier had come to his table for a showdown. He’d remained vaguely aware of her presense all through his second bottle of Mauna Loa and memories of Ella. She and her companion had argued in harsh whispers for several minutes. Finally he left their table, looking angry.

She’d sat there for a while, drinking coffee and no doubt working herself up to a fine rage. At last she’d flung down her napkin and stood up, strode over, and planted herself at the other side of his table. Her arms were crossed before her formidable bosom, and she was radiating enough righteous wrath to make the whiskey in his glass begin to bubble and steam.

He peered at the name tag pinned to her dark blue jacket. Dr. Ismela Khan. That explained her splendid command of Arabic invective.

He met her tight-lipped glare squarely. “I doubt that.”

Her dark brows drew down. “Just what do you mean by that?”

“Just what I said,” he answered mildly. “You don’t want to talk to me. You don’t want to have anything to do with me. Nor do you want to talk. Harangue, maybe. Perhaps villify. Insult and condemn, almost certainly. You can save your breath, Dr. Khan. I’ve heard it all before.” He picked up his glass, took an unhurried sip. “If I’m not mistaken, I already heard a lot of it from you this very afternoon. Why repeat yourself?”

She gave a grudging half nod. “All right, maybe I did say some things I shouldn’t have—”

“No need to apologize. I was ignoring you anyway.” He waved his glass toward the empty chair across the table from him. “Have a seat, Dr. Khan.”

His invitation took her off guard. She looked around the commissary, as if trying to decide how the other staffers might react to her getting cozy with the outcast, then faced him again. “Thank you, no,” she said stiffly.

“Suit yourself. How about a drink?” Instead of waiting for an answer, he flagged the waitress down as she trotted by.

“I’d like one more bottle of this fine whiskey and a glass for the lady, please,” he told her.

The waitress looked uncomfortable, biting her lip and staring at her feet. “You’ve already had three whole quatriliters, sir,” she pointed out diplomatically.

A hopeful look. “Wouldn’t you prefer some coffee or something?”

Marchey smiled at her, touched by her concern. “Do I look drunk?” he asked gently. “Act drunk?”

“No,” she admitted.

He chuckled and gave her a wink. “Well, actually I am. The thing is, being drunk is something I happen to be exceptionally good at. In my expert medical opinion I’m not nearly drunk enough. So please help me continue this great work. All right?”

She ducked her head in acceptance. “All right.”

“Thank you.” When she hurried off he turned his attention back to Dr. Khan. “Please pardon the interruption. Now what’s on your mind?”

“You’re an alcoholic,” she said accusingly.

He emptied the bottle into his glass. “I suppose I am.” He took a drink. “What of it? Want lessons?”

Her upper lip curled in distaste. “You’re disgusting.”

His eyebrows lifted in mock shock. “I do believe that was an insult!” Then he shook his head sadly. “Not much of one, though. Surely a surgeon of your caliber can do a better job of drawing blood than that.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but bit it back because the waitress had returned. Khan stood there, the muscles in her jaw twitching with repressed anger as a glass was placed on the table before her and the empty bottle traded for a fresh one.

She watched the waitress beat a hasty retreat, then scowled at Marchey. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you’re a drunk,” she informed him in a low hard voice. “It’s probably the only way you can live with yourself.”

“Maybe so.” He shrugged. “What would you suggest as an alternative? Suicide?” A faint pang of sorrow surfaced, sank back into quiescence. “Some of my friends have been driven to just that, you know. Me, I prefer to drown myself one glass at a time. It’s really quite pleasant. You should try it.”

“You really don’t care what you are, do you?”

Another shrug. “I’m reconciled to it.” He put down his empty glass and cracked open the new bottle. “I’m reconciled to a lot of things, like the rude, rotten treatment I get from people like you in places like this. But I do my duty and go where I’m needed. Whether you or I or anybody else likes it doesn’t enter into the matter. I run your gauntlet. I do what needs to be done. I leave.” He poured an amber splash into his glass. “That and happy hour are usually the best part.”

Dr. Khan watched sourly as he drained his glass and filled it yet again. On days when he operated it always took a lot more to reach the place he liked to live. Some of that came from the D-Tox he’d taken that morning. Instead of starting with half a tank he had to work his way up from dead empty.

But he could really feel the whiskey now. By the time he finished this bottle he’d be ready to find his way back to his room, have a final nightcap, and pass out. Tomorrow morning he’d reclaim his ship and once again be gone, on his way to somewhere else he could do this all over again. And again. And again.

Even this conversation was nothing new. Once or twice a year someone took his presence personally enough to want to take a whack at him. He knew if he ignored her she’d go away eventually. The Dead Horse Defense. Her whip arm would get tired sooner or later.

But maybe if he took a swipe back at her, then the next time a Bergmann Surgeon was sent here she’d leave the poor bastard alone. It wasn’t like he had anything else to do while he killed this last jug.

He turned his flat, sunken gray eyes on her. “I’ll tell you one thing I’m not reconciled to,” he said in a soft, passionless voice. “That’s the waste of my skills. In a good month I might get the chance to help three patients. Three patients. By all rights I should be on staff in a place like this and treating that many a day. But thanks to narrow-minded prigs like you, my dear Dr. Khan, I’m not.”

He picked up the bottle and offered it to her.

“Maybe you ought to take this, sweetheart. Drink to forget that today I gave a patient help you couldn’t begin to provide. Drink to forget that I could do the same thing tomorrow for another patient if you hadn’t helped make it impossible for me to stay. Drink to forget that you’re putting your own petty prejudices ahead of the well-being of your patients, and forcing me to waste skills that make your best surgical technique look like something done with fucking hatchets and meat cleavers.”

Khan ignored the bottle in his hand. “Are you through?” she asked, grinding the words out between her clenched teeth.

“Almost.” Marchey slouched back in his chair and took a long drink straight out of the jug. “You can choose between accepting what I can do, or only using me when MedArm forces you to. My only choice is between doing what little I’m allowed to do or quitting. I took the Healer’s Oath, and quitting isn’t a part of it. So I get by. How I get by is none of your goddamned business, and since it’s you forcing me to live like this, I suggest that you stuff your sanctimonious attitude up your tight judgemental ass and leave me the fuck alone.”

He grinned at her. “Now I’m done.”

Dr. Khan uncrossed her arms and leaned toward him, resting the knuckles of her clenched hands on the table. “You dare talk about the Healer’s Oath,” she spat. “At least I’m willing to treat anyone who needs help, as it demands. Not like you.”

Marchey stared back at her. “I treat whoever MedArm has the Institute send me to treat.”

She nodded, her face taking on the look of a prosecutor who has extracted the damning confession she sought. “Yes, your kind do, don’t you?”

She straightened up, pointing an accusing finger at him. “If I was letting myself be used the way you are, I’d probably drink, too.” Her mouth twitched into a harsh smile. “If anybody ought to stuff their sanctimonious attitude up their ass it’s you. We’re not stupid. We know what’s going on.”

She turned on her heel and stalked away. Marchey watched her, scowling and wondering what he’d missed. We’re not stupid. We know what’s going on. What the hell was that supposed to mean? He could always call her back and ask…

He took another swig from the bottle in his hand, the sweet whiskey dissolving the question like a clot dosed with hemaflux. For all he knew she was convinced that the Bergmanns got their abilities from human sacrifice or a pact with Satan. Some of the more fanatic Christian and Islamic sects did.

He sighed and closed his eyes. Damn being out around people like her. The talk of choice, and his treating only those people MedArm assigned…

He opened his eyes. Another ghost from the past began to materialize across the table from him. He probably could have banished the shade, but let her be. She was one of his few good memories.

When he thought of her now, it was her smile that came to mind through the thickening boozy haze.

A certain special smile he had never seen…

Merry put down her glass, the wine hardly touched.

She gazed coolly at the man across the table from her, intrigued in spite of herself. “Something better than money, you say.”

The night hadn’t begun all that well. In fact, it’d been shaping up as a real 4D: Dead, Dull, Disappointing, and ending in Deficit.

She’d been sitting at her usual table in Randy’s Rest, gloomily nursing a cheap algae-based white wine and wondering if there was really any point in sticking around when this juan had pushed through the bead-curtained doorway.

He wasn’t a regular, she knew that at first glance. So she looked the fresh meat over.

He was middle-aged, nearly bald. Well dressed in loose gray pants, crisp white open-neck shirt that was either real silk or a damn good fake, gray gloves, black-cotton and leatherite jacket, black-suede boots. No jewelry except a silver pin on his broad chest. Tasteful and understated. Not some rowdy dusty rock-jock or smirking tourist out for a thrill.

He’d done what most of the new sticks did, standing there just inside the door and checking out the available talent—getting checked out himself at the very same time, the credit scanner in each girl’s head humming over him and reading his paying potential down to the decicredit. This went on during the momentary pause while they waited to see if he got this dumbjohn look of surprise on his face and stumbled back out, having drunkenly mistaken Randy’s for Billy’s Club next door, where the doe-eyed boys posed and preened in their satin loincloths and tight leather jeans.

These tests passed, there was a lacy rustle as the other girls went into display mode, making sure their charms were shown off to their best advantage.

Merry hadn’t even bothered to sit up straight to show off the merchandise, or put her try me look on her face. Habit told her she should, but the disgruntled voice of cynicism said Why bother?

It was a slow Tuesday night in the Rest, with a dozen idle girls besides herself vying for the attention of this one customer. Much as she hated to admit it, she knew she was well past the first-choice category, and maybe even the second or third. Randy let her keep working there more for old times’ sake than for the money she brought in. But he was a practical man. Now her table was way in the back, where the light wasn’t too good, and the sour smell that at times wafted from the head just a couple meters away sometimes seemed like a foretaste of her next step down the ladder.

Oh, the men who came into Randy’s would take her if all the other girls were busy, and not a one of them wasn’t shown at least as good a time as the other talent could give them. Maybe even better, because she didn’t try to coast by on looks alone. Besides, if you could get them to become one of your regulars, that meant that you didn’t have to hustle so hard. A stable of regulars was credit in the bank, and maybe even a ticket out of the Life. She had a couple, but the poor bastards were almost always as stony broke as she was.

It had been hard enough before, on the downhill side of thirty and competing with girls almost half her age. And now?

There was no way she could hope to compete with those perfect young faces.

Yet this coddy hadn’t given any of the other girls a second look. The moment he had seen her his face had gone all funny for a moment.

But not with that What the fuck happened to you? look she’d seen so many times in the past months. It was more like he’d seen a ghost, or stumbled across the last thing he had ever expected to find here. Like maybe his wife, his mother, his sister, or a long-lost lover.

After a moment he got a handle on himself, smiled at her uncertainly, and headed straight for her table.

She did sit up straight then, her translucent red skin-suit tightening around her. A smile went onto her face, part habit, part screw you to the pouts appearing on the other girls’ flawless faces as they saw the trade choosing her over them.

Watching him come closer, she thought about how every so often Fate gave you something besides the finger. This might just be one of those nights. She sure as hell was due for one.

Too many of the juans just waltzed right over to your table and plunked themselves down like they owned it and you, figuring that what they had in their pockets plus what they had in their pants made them irresistible.

They were half-right, anyway.

But this one had politely asked if he could join her, and thanked her when she said yes. He’d ordered a triple whiskey neat from the waitbot, another wine for her, then come right to the point. He wanted to purchase her services for the night.

All-nighters were rarer for her than they used to be, and though she was tempted to shave her price to guarantee he took her, some ornery remnant of her pride made her quote the standard fee set by her union.

Besides, she could haggle if he said that was too much.

The juan’s face was broad and craggy, with big dark pouches under eyes of a clear cool gray. It was the face of someone who’d lost a lot of weight sometime in the past, and maybe a lot of other things, too. A widower’s face, drawn and dispossessed. But there was humor there, too. He’d given her this puckish smile, and then hit her with this “something better than money” stroke.

“What’s better than money?” Merry figured that maybe he wanted to barter. No problem there, Randy could help her convert almost anything into cash. For a cut, of course, but at least he was honest. More or less.

His smile turned wry. “Lots of things. Trust, for instance. Choice is another.” He peered slantwise at her, probably seeing the look that had crept onto her face at this line of patter.

“I know you don’t know me well enough to trust me,” he continued. Most juans said something like that, she’d have laughed in their faces. But there was something about him and the way he said it that made her take his words seriously.

“You seem nice enough,” she admitted, “but so does my landlord until I come up short when the rent comes due.”

After six years of turning tricks Merry’s internal radar was tuned to within a couple microns of dead center, and she wasn’t getting any rip-artist readings. That was the only thing keeping her from telling him to go try his line on one of the other girls.

He chuckled. “Point well taken. I’ll tell you what. I’ll get us the best room this establishment has to offer, something to eat and drink from room service—”

“The price of a suite gets you a snack tray, and there’s a free bar in the room,” Merry put in. “Drugs and benders are extra.” She could have told him the number of tiles in the ceilings of the bedrooms as well, having had plenty of chance to count them. A hundred in the suites and 144 in the singles.

Another chuckle, and a nod of his balding head. “I love the room already. I’ll also preauthorize a one-KISC charge to be paid to you tomorrow morning. If you still want it.”

He said the number as if it didn’t mean anything to him, like it was the number of tiles in a protel ceiling, and it caught her so off guard she had to make sure she’d heard right.

“You said one KISC?” Hoping she’d heard right.

He grinned at her in obvious amusement. “That’s what I said.”

Merry found it hard to imagine not wanting the thousand International Standard Credits. It was twenty times the price she had quoted him, the union rate for five full days of an A-list girl’s services. Even after Randy skimmed his 10 percent off the top she’d still have over four months’ rent on her cubby.

She held out her slim, red-nailed hand. “You’ve got yourself a deal, handsome.”

Her voice dropped to a sultry purr. “Shall we get the vulgar financial details out of the way, darling, then go somewhere more private?”

“I would be honored,” he replied, closing his gloved hand around hers to seal the deal. His hand felt strangely hard, but his grip was gentle. “My name is Marchey, by the way. Georgory Marchey. My friends call me Gory.”

Merry had noticed that he wore gloves right off the bat, and once again she had to wonder why. But she gave it only a moment’s thought. She’d dealt with odder kinks than that. Much odder.

Of course that still didn’t mean he wasn’t hiding a nun’s habit, a pink-lace merry widow, or even a chicken suit under his clothes. If so, she could play along. One kay bought one hell of a lot of leeway.

“Pleased to meet you, Gory. My name is Merry.”

Marchey made himself comfortable on the suite’s shapeless black couch, watching the woman who called herself Merry fix them each a drink.

He knew that Merry was just her working name. Her real name wasn’t supposed to matter. While she was Merry it was her job to be whoever and whatever he wanted her to be.

From the back she looked so much like Ella it made him ache. Although not quite as tall, she had that same impossibly thin frame, the narrow waist and small firm behind, the same long lean limbs that would be gawky but for an innate inner grace. She had the same close-cropped, nearly white hair, straggling tendrils curling down her knobby spine.

But when she turned around the illusion unraveled.

Her face was pretty where Ella’s had been plain, softer and less severe, underlaid by an elegant bone structure. Her eyes were brown instead of green, with long dark lashes.

He watched her come toward him, one side of her wide, ruby-lipped mouth curved up in a warm smile that showed no sign of artifice. The other side of her mouth—the other side of her face—remained lax and nearly expressionless. That eyelid drooped in what looked like sleepy suspicion.

There was also a scarcely perceptable drag to her foot on that side. It was so slight that only someone trained to look for such things would have noticed the minor paralytic trace.

His observations were by no means all diagnostic. He was also paying close attention to the undulating roll of her slim hips, the rhythmic flexings of the long lean muscles in her thighs, the sweet and subtle sway and swing of her breasts. He feasted on the sight of her, feeding a gnawing hunger, and sharpening that hunger at the very same time. Just knowing he was still capable of feeling it was a pleasure in itself.

It had been almost two years since he had last been with a woman. There were times—usually those increasingly rare moments when he was stone-cold look-at-yourself-in-the-mirror sober—that he became dismayed and depressed at just how accustomed he was getting to his solitary life and his celibacy. It was almost as if he could feel his libido shrivelling up like some vestigial organ that no longer had a purpose. Before long he was going to have to start counting his balls each morning to make sure he still had them.

Not that he had much choice in the matter. In fact it was better that way. A sex drive firing on all thrusters would have driven him mad, making intolerable a life spent all alone on a ship of his own, ricocheting from place to place like some spacefaring surgical Flying Dutchman.

MedArm called it the circuit, and it had been instituted less than a year after he last saw Ella. That meant he had been on it for over four years. Hard to believe.

Working with the Bergmann Institute, MedArm had created the circuit, giving each Bergmann Surgeon a ship of their own and sending them where they were needed worst. He had no idea how the higher-ups decided where they should go and whom they should treat. It didn’t really matter. At least they were allowed to be of some use.

He and his fellow Bergmanns remained constantly on the move, skulking in and out of health facilities like thieves. The circuit’s chief advantage was that once he was freed from the schedules set by the regular carriers less time was wasted waiting around to get from point A to point B.

Unfortunately that also meant no more long layovers during which he might at least try to find some companionship, be it a brief flirtation, a one-night stand, or even the boozy camaraderie created by adjoining barstools. He would arrive at his destination, perform the procedure he had been brought in for, and more often than not go straight from surgery to the local equivalent of a liquor store and be in his ship and on his way again before the patient regained consciousness.

Only rarely did he remain anywhere long enough for even an unsatisfying taste of paid sex such as with that prostitute on Ceres two years ago. This stop at Vesta was the longest break from the monotonous treadmill he’d had in months. Not only was he here long enough for two procedures, his ship was undergoing some minor refitting, which gave him a bonus night of his own.

He’d ventured into Gusto Mews, Vesta’s infamous pleasure district, looking for something—anything—to fill up some small corner of the emptiness inside himself. Some proof he was still alive, still a man. He’d been resigned to settling for paid sex and simulated affection if that was all he could find.

But when he had caught sight of Merry he’d suddenly glimpsed a chance to find something worth having.

She handed him his drink as she sat down on the couch beside him, folding her long legs under her. “Here you go, love.”

“Thanks.” He helped himself to a sip, grimaced. It was cheap fake scotch whiskey, algaecol and artificial flavorings, probably made on-site. Not that such distinctions made all that much difference. He would drink the good stuff when he could get it, and whatever was available when he couldn’t. Humanity had risen from the tribes in the treetops to cities in space because of its ability to adapt. It was only fair he did his part.

The “suite” was as low-rent as the whiskey. It consisted of a three-meter-by-three-meter sitting room furnished with the lumpy couch under his butt, a chunky foamstone table cemented to the floor in front of it, its top covered with a pink-plastic tablecloth and bearing a platter of unidentifiable soy- and algae-based delectables. Then there was the bar. That was no more than a shallow alcove in one wall equipped with four shatterproof glasses, three smudged decanters, a beer tap, and a metered ice dispenser.

A wide arched doorway led to the bedroom, which was barely larger than the fake-fur-covered king-sized bed. There was a deep narrow bathroom off to one side of the bedroom, complete with pay shower. The suite’s black-glazed stone walls were stenciled with patchy red flocking in an Early Bordello design. Bad erotic art hung askew on the walls. Wallscreens faced both the bed and the couch so the happy couple could watch themselves, or some quite likely more photogenic other couple at sport.

Well, he hadn’t really been expecting the Mars Grande. At least it was fairly clean and private.

He peered down into his glass. “Not exactly sippin’ whiskey, is it?”

Merry’s face fell. “Sorry. Maybe I can get Randy to—”

“Don’t worry about it. That just means there’s no point in sipping it.” He drained his glass, knowing the sooner he got his palate numbed the better it would taste.

When she started to jump up to get him another, he restrained her by resting one gloved hand on her thigh. “That’s all right. No hurry.”

She settled back. “Okay, but if you want more just say so.” Her face was turned so that the damaged side was hidden from him, and her smile promised all wonders for the asking. “If you want anything,” she added, “I’m here to please you.” That last was said in such a way there was no mistaking her meaning.

Her eagerness to cater to whatever urges or impulses he might have was a little disconcerting. No doubt it had been sharpened by the size of the payoff he’d promised her. He felt a little guilty about sandbagging her with such a large sum, but he needed even more forbearance than was usual in her profession. One way or another she would feel satisfied with their transaction.

The money meant nothing to him, but if she took it, he was going to feel cheated. Only time would tell.

“Don’t worry, I will.” He took a deep breath, suddenly feeling as nervous as a boy about to steal his first kiss, and told her one of the things he did want.

“What I would like is for you to tell me what happened to your face.”

Merry was a pro. The expression on the working side of her face barely changed. But the warmth in her brown eyes was snuffed out in an instant. “Airlock accident,” she answered tonelessly. “Blowout.”

Just as he’d thought. “Ah. Savatinian embolism?”

She stared at him in unconcealed disgust. “Look, if you’re a cripfreak, that’s your business. But it’s not mine. I may not like it, but I’ll put up with you getting your rocks off on the way I look if that’s what it takes to earn my money.” Her good eye narrowed and her mouth hardened. “But I’ll be damned if I’ll talk it up just so you can get it up.”

This flash of fierce pride made Marchey like her even more than before. He gave her his most disarming smile. “The reason I asked is because I’m a doctor.”

She snorted. “Right. And you’re here to make me all better with your magic syringe.”

Marchey couldn’t help guffawing at the image she’d conjured. “No, nothing like that,” he assured her, chuckling and shaking his head. “Your condition was caused by hundreds of microscopic gas bubbles bursting numerous small blood vessels in your brain; like a stroke, only widely diffused. Savatinian embolism is a condition that occurs in about one-tenth of one percent of people subjected to explosive decompression.”

“You sure talk like a doctor,” she said grudgingly.

“That’s because I really am one. Here, give me your glass.” He took it from her long slim fingers, carried it and his own to the bar to fix them both refills.

“Sorry I was so touchy,” she said behind him. “It’s just that I don’t like being treated like a freak.”

“Believe me, nobody does.” Just this morning some of the staff at the hospital had treated him like a radioactive pedophile. And those had been the polite ones.

But that was then and this was now. One hurdle had been cleared. He finished assembling their drinks and prepared to go on to the next.

“As for your being a cripple,” he said as he returned to sit beside her, “that’s not a word I particularly care for.”

“Thanks,” she said, accepting the glass he handed her with a nod. “Why’s that?”

“Aside from its cruelty, some would say it fits me, too.”

She looked him up and down. “I don’t see anything wrong with you.” Then her gaze went to his lap and a pink tinge of embarrassment crept onto her face. “Oh… you mean you don’t—I mean you can’t…?” She shrugged. “You know.”

“No, nothing like that,” he assured her. “There might be dust or cobwebs on it, but I’m fairly sure it still works. The thing is, I don’t have any forearms or hands.”

She gave his gloved hands a look, scowling slightly. “What’re those, then? Extra feet?”

“Prosthetics.”

Her scowl deepened. “Proswhats?”

“Prosthetics. Fakes. Artificial substitutes.” He put his glass aside, then peeled off one glove to show her.

Merry gazed in wide-eyed wonder at the silver-metal hand that emerged. “It’s beautiful!” Her voice was hushed, awestruck. Even her drooping eye widened slightly.

Marchey was surprised by her reaction. “Well, it’s shiny anyway,” he allowed. Even though it wasn’t some crude hook or whirring, humming antique Cyberhand, most people were put off by the sight of it and its twin. In a world where missing limbs could be easily replaced or regenerated, and even normal prosthetic devices were covered by vat-grown skin and could not be identified except by scan, it was proof that there was something strange about him.

They were self-contained, powered only by the whisper of electricity carried by the nerves, self-maintaining, and all but indestructible, the gleaming biometal several times harder than hullmetal, yet supple as skin and providing the same degree of tactile feedback. Most importantly, they were easy to take off and put on. No synskin covered them, and they needed none of the structural or cyberneural connections other kinds used. When brought up against the silver stump-caps the biometal arms melded seamlessly back into them to become one. They were glaringly obvious, but in the beginning there had been no thought of hiding what they had done. They were all proud to have given up their hands and taken these silver replacements.

Now he wore gloves in public.

She started to reach out to touch his hand, hesitated, turning her wide brown eyes toward his face. “Do you mind?”

He held it out palm up. “Be my guest.”

There was nothing cautious or squeamish about the way Merry handled his hand. She stroked the smooth curve where thumb sloped into wrist and leaned close to examine where the fingers met the palm. She felt the shape of the knuckles and tried to wriggle the fingers from side to side as if expecting to find them loose.

“A perfect replica,” she said half under her breath. “Body temperature. Jointed just like a regular hand, but except for a couple access seams, like here on the palm, it’s seamless. It even gives to conform to the surface of whatever object you’re holding, just like a real hand.”

She looked up at him again, still holding his hand like it was a gift he’d given her. “This is stunning workmanship. Absolutely perfect. Class I Biometal, right?”

“The best money can buy,” he agreed. “I was told that each hand and arm have almost twenty-five KISC worth of biometal in them.” He hesitated, marshalling his nerve for the next step, then with his other hand cautiously reached up toward the frozen and drooping side of her face. “May I… ?”

“I guess so,” she answered uneasily. He doubted that most men wanted to touch her there. But he did. Needed to.

“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,” he said softly. “I can juggle eggs with these things.” His silver fingers lightly traced the slack muscles around her eye, along her cheek, around her mouth. Not even a reflexive twitch. She sat stiffly, her eyes warily tracking his hand, her full lower lip caught between her even white teeth. “Of course I always end up with two mitts full of scrambled eggs and the yolk’s on me.”

A laugh burst out of her, sudden and hearty. Marchey felt it filling a place inside him that had been silent and empty for a very long time. Making someone laugh is such a little thing. Such a wonderful, rewarding thing. Only by living without it could you learn just how priceless it was. It felt so good to know he still could dispense the best medicine.

Even if she did take the money—and he hoped she didn’t—that laughter, and her easy acceptance of the way he was, were worth far more than the thousand credits.

Things had been going quite nicely until he asked The Question. Merry had been afraid he might, and hoping he wouldn’t. Now he had, spoiling everything.

“Hard luck.” She shrugged, trying to pass the matter off. “It’s like gas. Everybody gets their share.”

“And it eventually passes. What was yours?”

She stared at this strange man who had purchased her services for the night, feeling torn. How she’d become a pro was her own business and nobody else’s. It wasn’t exactly a secret, but it was part of her life, not part of her job.

Yet she found herself trusting him enough to tell him. Even wanting to tell him. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because he treated her like a lady, like a person. That felt good, and it only made her resent his ruining things all the more.

“You won’t tell me how you lost your hands,” she pointed out, hoping to derail him that way.

He grinned at her over the top of his glass. “Yes I will. I had a run-in with the Manicurist from Hell.”

She snorted derisively. “Right. Well, I became a whore because instead of being curly, all my pubic hair’s shaped like dollar signs.”

His grin got even wider. “Really? That’s most unusual. You must show me later.”

She gave him a smoldering look. “I’ll show you everything I got right this minute.” Not that the translucent skinsuit she wore hid all that much. Still, nothing distracted a man like sex. She reached for the sealtab nestled between her breasts.

He reached out and gently closed a silver hand around hers. His metal fingers rested so lightly on hers they might have been foil butterflies.

“Please tell me,” he said, looking her straight in the eyes. “You can trust me.” He released her hand. “At least I hope you can.”

Merry looked away, stood up abruptly. “I need another drink.”

She retreated toward the bar, her gait somewhat unsteady. Part of that came from three glasses of wine on an empty stomach. But not all of it. Not even most of it.

To survive as a whore you had to keep your head on straight. Always be the one in control, even when playing the submissive. Keep your emotions out of the transaction. Remember that no matter how nice the juan seemed, he had paid for the use of your body and nothing more. When you lost your handle on all that, you were just asking for trouble.

She knew she was skating on the thin brittle edge of trouble now. Slipping closer and closer, almost as if she wanted to go over it.

Why?

Because this man she had sold herself to for the night was trying to seduce her, and she was liking the way it felt.

Not seduced in the sexual sense, that was already bought and paid for. This was being seduced in the sense of being enticed into dropping her defenses and letting him inside. Of being subtly drawn into the vulnerable nakedness of letting him see the private places she kept hidden by the Merry face she showed the world.

Keeping her back to him, she picked up the scotch bottle and topped off her glass with that instead of wine. Her hand shook, splashing liquor over the rim of the glass, reminding her how rock steady that hand had been once upon a time.

Yes, once upon a time. Didn’t stories which started that way always end with They all lived happily ever after?

She leaned heavily on the bar, keeping her back to this strange juan who refused to follow the rules.

Tell him this, and the next thing she knew she’d be telling him her real name!

“I was a microtech,” she said softly, eyes on her traitorous hands. “Most tech work is troubleshooting and mod-swapping. But sometimes, most often with special purpose equipment, the mod itself has to be rebuilt or reconfigured. That calls for a microtech. The parts are so small and delicate, the circuiting so intricate, it calls for someone with a really fine touch, like a—” she hesitated, searching for the proper comparison.

“Like a surgeon,” he supplied quietly from behind her.

She nodded. “Yeah, like that. I had that touch. I was good. Damn good.” She had been, too. The best on Vespa and within thirty thousand kilometers of it. She’d made serious money and her rep was solid gold.

She took a swallow of whiskey and grimaced, steeling herself to tell the next part. The hard part.

“One day I was working on setting up the controller-mods of an industrial circuiting machine for Iolus Fabrique here on Vespa. Some clown on the crew accidentally left the bolts off a substrate roller collar. Or they had been left out at the factory where it was built. Whatever the reason, that two-hundred-and-fifty-kilo roller broke loose and came crashing down inside it, flattening the modbox directly under it. A modbox I just happened to have my hands inside.”

Retelling it, she shuddered at the remembrance of that sudden blinding burst of pain/surprise/confusion/horror, of stumbling backward, a bubbling scream plugging her throat when she saw the terrible ruined things at the ends of her arms, flopping bonelessly and spurting red in every direction…

The juan, Marchey, was silent. But she could feel his attention wrapped around her as he waited for her to continue. And she would. Now that she had started this there was no turning back. It had to be replayed to the end, just like when you began falling there was no stopping until you hit bottom.

“Both my hands were crushed. Almost every bone in them was broken, and the muscles turned to mincemeat.”

The foreman had taken one horrified look at her, turned white as a sheet, and puked all over his shoes. They’d had to put plastic bags over her hands to keep from losing pieces of them, holding the bags in place with tourniquets to keep her from bleeding to death.

She wheeled around to face him. “You know, I really shouldn’t trust you,” she said in a dead voice.

“Why is that?” Softly, not in challenge. His face solemn, but not forbidding. Willing to accept whatever she said. A bitter wave of spite rose up inside her.

“Because you’re a doctor. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine, they told me.” Her upper lip curled in disgust. “Sure, they fixed up my hands so that they look all right if you don’t check too close, and I can do most normal things with them. But my career as a microtech ended that day.” She shivered. “In fact, I can barely stand to be around machinery anymore. I look at it and feel an itch I just can’t scratch.”

He nodded soberly. “Believe me, I know how you feel.”

No, you don’t! screamed the shrill voice of frustration, but the words never made it past her lips. A glance down at his silver hands silenced it, telling her that he just might understand after all.

“So you blame the doctors for not fixing you up the way you were before. First with your hands, and then with your face after the embolism.”

Merry’s thin shoulders slumped. “No, not really,” she admitted. Oh, she had for a while, but had gotten over it.

“Why not?”

“I know that not everything can be fixed. Some things just seem fated to end up on the scrap heap.” She shrugged. “I guess I’m one of them.” The worst part was how long the trip took.

“Why do you say that?”

Merry had to wonder what he was after. Why he cared, if he really did. Yet she couldn’t keep herself from answering. It had been so long since anyone had just listened to her, had been interested in her as anything other than something to get their rocks off with when nothing better or free was available.

It was true that some men wanted to talk as much as they wanted to get laid. More of them than an outsider might think. But what they really wanted to talk about was themselves. Any questions about her were either nervous chatter, a form of voyeurism, or in some cases a desire to get their money’s worth by sticking themselves into her life as well as her body.

She spread her hands. “Isn’t it obvious? I knew I’d never again be the tech I had been. My lawyer warned me that it would be years before I got any sort of settlement. I needed a new career because I needed the income. When my landlord offered to eat my month’s rent if I screwed him, I heard opportunity’s bastard cousin knocking. Even though I was getting a little old for the trade, I was still doing okay until I got caught in a blowout a few months ago.”

She fingered the lax side of her face and let out a sardonic chuckle.

“I became Frankenwhore. Now I’ve got two maybe-someday settlements coming. Now my landlord keeps his fly closed and demands cash. Not only am I getting old, this isn’t exactly helping further my career as a prostitute. My body’s still okay—”

“Your body looks great.” He grinned. “Believe me, I’ve noticed. As for your face, couldn’t you change your name and maybe wear a mask to hide it, and make you more exotic?”

She ducked her head. “I could, I guess. But I was an honest tech. I never palmed parts or faked burnouts. I never padded my hours or strung a job on. I try to be as honest a pro.” Her tone sharpened. “This is how I am, take it or leave it. I never fobbed off damaged goods as new when I was a tech, and I’ll be damned if I’ll do it as a whore.”

“It must be hard.”

God, you don’t know how hard! She wanted to scream it, cry it, let it out of the damaged fist she kept clamped around it.

And this was hard, laying herself open to a stranger. Exposing parts of herself no one saw no matter how many times she removed her clothes. It was unbearable.

She polished off her drink, the raw liquor searing her throat. She rarely drank this much while working unless it was demanded of her, but at that moment it was just what she needed. Anesthetic and fuel all in one.

This madness had gone on too long. It was time to take control and stop it while she still could. She put her glass aside and forced a smile onto her face.

You’re nothing but a juan, she told him in her head. A coddy. Time I started treating you like one.

“It’s you that should be hard,” she purred, keeping her head turned so only the best side of her face showed. Her fingers toyed with the skinsuit’s sealtab, and once his eyes were on it she drew it slowly down, opening it from breastbone to crotch. Cool air rushed across her skin, making her nipples stiffen.

She sauntered toward him, putting a lot of hip into it. Planting herself right in front of him she bent over, feeling the front of her suit gape open even wider. “Hard instead of difficult. Difficult won’t feed the kitty.” She ran her tongue around her lips. “But I can fix that.” She trailed her red nails up the inside of his thighs, feeling his muscles quiver.

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:

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.

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.