Flesh and Silver

3. Diagnosis

Today is the day.

Marchey didn’t look particularly ready for, or happy about it, however. Slouched on the bench seat of his ship’s galley nook, he had an elbow propped on the tabletop and his chin cupped in one silver hand. His second cup of morning coffee sat in front of him, missing no more than a single disinterested sip.

A pad rested on the plastic tabletop in front of him, its screen displaying the continuing-care files for the people he had been treating on Ananke.

The device might as well have been turned off for all the attention he was paying to it. His eyes were hooded, his gaze turned inward. His thoughts kept skittering away from the task at hand, skipping through the day ahead to circle—but never quite settle on—its end, like moths drawn to a light they dared not approach.

He found it hard to believe that three weeks had passed since he’d found an angel in his temporary room at Litman. More had happened to him in the short time since then than in the three years preceding.

So much had changed since that shanghai visitation. And yet so much remained fundamentally the same, locked imperturbably in old orbits and rolling inexorably onward as if nothing had happened.

There were times it seemed to Marchey that human existence—or at least his—was nothing more than a groove cut into a circular disc of time, just like on an antique phonograph record. ’Round and ’round you whirled, creeping incrementally closer to the music’s end. While the groove did give your life direction, the walls of the track abraded, grinding you down so that you fit it perfectly, and nowhere else. Even if you could jump the track, it would be pointless; you would only set yourself back, or skip ahead to a place you were bound to reach sooner or later anyway.

He shook his head, feeling his mood grow even darker. Picked up his coffee, took a sip, grimaced. It had gone cold.

A glance at the time told him why. Almost half an hour had been spent just sitting there, not quite thinking about all the things trying to creep into his awareness, and yet not completely shutting them out. Contemplating his navel and finding only lint.

He turned the pad off and pushed himself to his feet. There were a hundred loose ends he wanted to tie up before the day was over. He couldn’t afford to waste any more time sitting around playing hide-and-seek with the contents of his head.

Besides, you never knew when something might come up behind you, tap you on the shoulder, and say You’re it.

A drink—even a small one—would have been of immense help, but he had given that up. So far, anyway. Work was the only escape he had left, even though that was at least half of the problem.

Today was the day. No way to avoid it any longer.

So he headed toward the small inship clinic aft of the main compartment, hoping that work would be enough to make him forget, at least for a little while.

“Open your hand again.”

Jon Halen did as Marchey asked, still fascinated by seeing it work. He was stretched out comfortably on the soft padding of the shipboard clinic’s unibed, its sides folded down to turn it into an examination table.

Jon loved it here in the clinic. It was so warm and clean and brightly lit. And the air! Sweet and rich as wine—not that some wine wouldn’t be nice, too. Beer, even. After almost a decade of abstinence he wasn’t inclined to be fussy.

The hand in question was a three-fingered claw, the dark brown skin mottled with the startling pink of new tissue. It opened like a mechanical grapple; the stubby, rigid thumb opposed by two short unjointed fingers.

“Close it.”

The thumb and single-phalanged fingers came together like pincers, closing smoothly. Jon had gotten to the point where he no longer had to concentrate to make them work. He shifted his attention to Marchey’s broad, craggy face, pursing his lips thoughtfully at the grim expression there.

He’d watched the man who had rescued them become progressively withdrawn over the past two weeks, starting just a few days after his arrival. Turning dour and aloof. Putting all the distance he could between himself and everyone else. It was like he’d started leaving them even before the orders came down telling him to move on.

Marchey didn’t notice Jon’s scrutiny. All his attention was focused on the results of his handiwork. He knew he should be pleased by what he had accomplished, but couldn’t help thinking about what he could have done with proper supplies and more time.

“Hey, Doc, you know what I did last night?” Jon asked, a mischievous gleam in his brown eyes.

“What?” Marchey asked distractedly. It looked like he was going to have to admit that this was the best he could do under the circumstances. Jon’s hand had been crushed several years before and healed into a lumpy knot with the unmovable stumps of two fingers remaining. Over the space of four sessions he had freed up the fingers, reshaped fused bone and useless cartilage into a movable strut, molded atrophied muscle and tendon around it. Then he had coaxed nerves back into the rebuilt fingers and new-made thumb, turning a gnarled and useless lump into something at least marginally functional.

Still it looked like something a five-year-old might squeeze from a lump of clay. He shook his head. To think he’d once thought himself something of a sculptor. The problem was that he could only work with what was there. He could redistribute bone and tissue, but not make it out of thin air.

“Pinched Salli Baber.”

That got Marchey’s full attention. “You what?” he asked, staring at Jon blankly, unsure he’d heard him right. His patient grinned up at him, tickled by the reaction he’d provoked.

“Pinched Salli Baber. Right on the ass.”

Marchey couldn’t keep a grin from creeping onto his own face. “You pinched her.”

Jon chuckled and nodded, then demonstrated his technique. “My fingers. Her fanny. Yow! You shoulda seen her jump!”

“I’m sure she did.”

Marchey continued to be amazed by how quickly the people of Ananke had begun the monumental task of putting all they had suffered during Brother Fist’s rule behind them, struggling to rebuild something like normal lives.

Not that everything was sunshine and roses now that Fist’s hold over them had been broken. A considerable number of them had been so deeply traumatized that they might never fully recover. A few extreme cases still hid in their cubbies like wounded animals, cringing back in terror when anyone came near. A handful of others drifted continually through the cold, dim tunnels like blank-eyed ghosts, lost now that an iron hand no longer shaped every aspect of their existence.

Yet somehow the majority of them had begun trying to reassemble the fragments of their shattered lives. That they could do so after all they had been through was a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

Some were more resilient than others, taking it on themselves to help the rest. People like Mardi Grandberg and Elias Acterelli, a former nurse and an ex-army medic, together helping him set up a makeshift hospital and institute a rudimentary health-care system. Raymo LaPaz, working day and night to coax more than the bare minimum out of Ananke’s neglected life-support system. Jimmy and ’Lita Chee and their crew, trying to revive the long-disused hydroponics setup.

Hands moving again, helping and healing. And behind all of those projects and a dozen others like the mainspring of a multifaced clock was Jon Halen.

He had to be the strongest and bravest person Marchey had ever met. His wife and two daughters were dead. Forced labor in the mines had cost him both hands and a leg. He had been one of the discards working in the landing bay when Marchey had arrived, toiling away until the too-thin air and hypothermia killed him.

Yet within hours of Fist’s fall he had begun hobbling tirelessly through the tunnels on his homemade crutch. Spreading the word that they were free at last. Reassuring them that this was the beginning, not the end. Cracking jokes. Chivvying others into motion, into action. Reaching into some deep inner reservoir and pulling out optimism, enthusiasm, and humor, then spreading them like a balm.

Jon had made sure that everyone had something to do, just mentioning that this or that needed to be done and making it sound like no one else could do the task, He’d assigned care of those worst off to those who had fallen into listless apathy, giving them a purpose to cling to, keeping them too busy worrying over another’s welfare to dwell on their own misfortunes.

Before the end of the first day he had come to Marchey with a priority-indexed list of those who needed medical attention. When asked where he had learned triage, Jon had smiled and said that he had used the big fancy setup in Fist’s quarters to do it for him, punching the data in one key at a time with a stylus he’d had someone tape to his useless hand because the machine refused to accept voice commands without a passphrase.

His own name had been on the list. Dead last.

Marchey had moved him up, and begun trying to shape a hand out of the ruin at the end of his right wrist. Now he was using those new fingers to cop a feel. Halen was some piece of work, no two ways about it.

Nor was he content with being just a patient. Marchey had managed to keep everyone on Ananke pretty much at arm’s length. Everyone but Jon, that is. He kept waltzing past Marchey’s guard like it was a fence with a ten-meter hole in it, slyly slipping bonds of friendship around him every chance he got.

“You know what that means, don’t you?” Jon asked.

Marchey scratched his chin. “You’re getting, um, horny?”

Jon’s grin spread even wider. “Well, that too—and the look Salli give me makes me think I mightna be the only one.” He grabbed the side of the table with his pinching equipment and levered himself around so he was sitting up, his good left leg dangling over the edge, the stump of his right braced off at an angle. His left arm, which ended just short of where his wrist should have been, rested in his lap.

Now he was eye to eye with Marchey. He held up his new hand between them. “Pretty damned ugly, in’t it?”

Marchey had to agree. “Yes, and I’m sorry, but—”

“But nothin’,” he stated flatly, looking Marchey straight in the eye. “It mightna get me a job modellin’ jewelry, but as far’s I’m concerned it’s beautifu’. Have you got any idea how great it is to be able to hold a cup? To use a comp again?” Mischief crept back into that gaunt face. “Hell, Doc, do you know how wonderful it is to be able to pick your pluggin’ nose when you needs to?”

“Well, I’ve heard…” Marchey answered, trying to keep a straight face, but failing miserably.

“It’s a top-shelf experience,” Jon assured him. His expression turned serious, showing something of the sharp-witted intensity he kept hidden behind his amiable grin and Belter’s slur most of the time.

“When you come here, all I had was this big lump at the enda my arm. It hurt so bad all the time I used to think about stickin’ it in one of the smelters to be rid of it. If that killed me, well, I could live with that. But I didn’t, and now I’m glad. I’ve got me fingers again. The pain is gone. I can touch and hold and feel things. I can even grab Salli’s ass and feel somethin’ like a man again.”

He tapped Marchey’s chest with a stubby finger. “When you took Fist off’n our backs I kind of woke up, looked around me, and figured maybe I could do a little somethin’ about our situation. Start fixin’ some of the damage. So that’s what I did. But I never once thought anythin’ could be done with the mess at the enda my arm. I planned to just go on doin’ my best with what couldn’t be changed.”

His voice dropped lower. “But you looked at it and saw somethin’ I didn’t. Saw that somethin’ better might be made from it. I might’ve seen it myself, but I’d gotten resigned to it bein’ the way it was, and it never occurred to me that I oughta think about it any differenter way.”

He let his hand drop. “There’s somethin’ to be learned from that,” he concluded, watching Marchey’s face expectantly.

“It proves you don’t know diddly about reconstructive surgery, Jon,” he said, intentionally missing the point.

A flash of disappointment crossed Halen’s face, then he shrugged and smiled. “I guess I surely don’t.” He slid off the table and onto his good leg. Marchey handed his crutch to him, then walked him to the clinic’s door.

“By the way,” Jon said with contrived disinterest, “You’re sayin’ good-bye to Angel before you leave, an’t you?”

Marchey had expected him to bring this up sooner or later. Halen had been inordinately interested in his relationship to Angel from the very first. Not that there was one.

“Yes,” he replied shortly. “Now you keep exercising that hand. Continue taking the Calcinstrate to build up bone mass.”

“Butt out, in other words.” Halen grinned disarmingly. “Hey, I can take me a hint, even if you can’t.” He limped on across the main compartment toward the airlock. “Wouldn’t want to rub you the wrong way.”

“More to the point,” Marchey called after him, “don’t you go rubbing Salli the wrong way.”

Jon leaned on his crutch, looking back and leering. “Hell no, Doc! I plan to rub her the right way—providin’ I haven’t forgot how!” He waved his handless arm in farewell and continued across the main compartment and out the airlock.

Marchey went back to the console built in along one wall of the small clinic, shaking his head with amusement. He sat down, his smile fading. “Record update. Jon Halen.”

“Ready,” the comp replied.

“Halen’s gains in finger strength and mobility have exceeded my expectations.” Pinching Salli proved it. Yow!

“As noted before, all residents of Ananke are suffering from severe calcium leaching caused by inadequate diet and low gravity. In Halen’s case, I had to redistribute bone for reconstructive purposes. The Calcinstrate is increasing bone density. At the present rate of accretion I should be able to begin building a second set of phalanges within another week—”

He paused, realizing what he had said. He would not be here in another week. It wasn’t that he’d forgotten that fact; some traitorous part of his mind was still taking it for granted that he would finish the work he had started.

But it was not to be. MedArm was putting him back on the circuit. They said he had been here long enough.

He supposed they were right. Another week might allow him to give Jon those finger joints, but it would not let him do all that needed doing here. A year wouldn’t be enough. It was the work of a lifetime.

It wasn’t like he was abandoning them. MedArm had assured him that the medical help and supplies they needed would be sent soon. There wasn’t much more that he could do until then anyway. His small inship clinic had never been designed to handle anything more than small-scale emergency work or the occasional single-patient transport.

He was out of most pharmaceuticals. The small bank of tissue cultures had been used up, and he lacked the equipment to grow more. He had no transplantable organs—not even such common ones as eyes, livers, hearts, and kidneys—and no temporary prosthetics. Requests through MedArm to the other hospitals and clinics in Jovian space had netted nothing yet. Not even regrets.

The emergency was over. He had stabilized the situation. None of the remaining tasks couldn’t be done by others.

“Delete last sentence,” he said gruffly. “Continue: It is my considered opinion that only plastic and orthopedic procedures be used on Halen’s partially reconstructed hand, even though it might appear that more cosmetically correct results could be gained by full amputation and replacement. I believe he would refuse the latter course, anyway. This is not an irrational or neurotic response; he simply has a, ah, sentimental attachment to his hand.

“End update.” Let them figure that out. “Close file.”

There, he’d done all he could to look out for his patient. What Jon and the others needed now was a well-equipped team of specialists. Once MedArm got them on-site the people of Ananke would be in the best possible hands.

Just as whatever patient he was being sent to see would be getting the best help available to him or her. Ananke didn’t really need a Bergmann Surgeon any longer, and this person, whoever he or she was, did.

He sat back, pinching the bridge of his nose and feeling a dull ache in his temples.

So why did he keep feeling so guilty about leaving? And in direct opposition to that, so relieved? And guilty about feeling relieved, and—

“Fuck,” he muttered, leaning forward to open a storage compartment a bit above eye level. He stared at what was inside for almost a full minute before taking it out.

Just one. That’s all

He placed the bottle of vodka on the counter in front of him, a glass beside it. Creating a still life portrait of his existence before Ananke.

What’s wrong with this picture? he asked himself.

That was an easy one. The bottle was still full.

The whole day had been a killer. Every one of the people he’d treated had asked him to stay. Some had asked him straight out, practically begging. Others, like Jon, had brought the subject up more obliquely. It felt like fingers and hooks being sunk into his skin in a thousand different places, trying to hold him here, to pull him toward the impossible.

Worst of all was how each and every one of them had been so damned grateful, their gratitude a sort of insidious reproach. After about the fifth one he’d had to bite back the urge to shout at them, to slap them back so things could remain on the safe clinical level where they belonged.

But he had gotten through it somehow. Now he just needed a little something to wash the taste out of his mouth. That was all.

He stared at the bottle, remembering how those first heady hours after Fist’s fall had made him drunk on possibility. He’d let himself think…

Marchey snatched up the bottle, face twisting into a bitter facsimile of a smile at his own naïveté. Giving up drinking had been a grand gesture. I am whole again. I don’t need this any longer.

“I am full of shit,” he muttered, pouring the clear truth into the glass.

He picked it up. The vodka sparkled with promise.

Finally being able to have contact with his patients had seemed like a wish finally granted by a suddenly benevolent universe.

For a few glorious hours, anyway.

But he had quickly found himself in the position of someone who, after years of wandering thirsty on a parched, endless desert, suddenly finds himself snatched up and hurled into the middle of a vast lake. It was no wonder he had begun to drown. There were too many of them, their need was so great, and each and every one wanted a piece of him.

It had been a sobering experience, making him step back and take a long hard look at his situation. The work still had to be done, but he had waded in only as deep as he absolutely had to, keeping his feet on the solid ground of detachment.

For a little while there he’d lost sight of who and what he was, but he’d come to his senses. He was still a Bergmann Surgeon. That meant sooner or later he would have to move on. Which was all the more reason to keep from getting too cozy.

The time to depart had come around again. It always had and always would. He reminded himself that he had left hundreds of places without a backward glance.

He brought the glass to his lips. Closed his eyes.

He’d be leaving this place, too. In just a few hours he would put the people who lived here behind him. Nothing to it. Like falling off a cliff.

Or a wagon.

The vodka went down easy. It brought tears to his eyes.

Angel strode along the gloomy tunnel. She was in a hurry, but made herself move slowly and deliberately. Some of the people she passed smiled at her. She smiled back, carefully keeping her mouth closed each time.

She had put in long hours of practice in front of a mirror to get it right. The face she saw reflected back was still a revelation. Her metal-and-glass angel eye still remained, but for the most part she saw the smooth white face of a young woman. This stranger in the mirror was her.

Slowly she had come to understand that it was a rather nice face. More than one person had even told her that she was pretty—though not the one she most wanted to hear say it.

Still, she had to be careful when she smiled. If she let her lips open, that exposed her teeth. They were not pretty. She now understood that they were not supposed to be. They had been filed to sharp points and capped with white and red ceramyl for the same reason her face had been tattooed; to help make her an object of terror and dread.

The trick still worked. Her teeth could turn her sweetest smile into something that harrowed up chilling recollections of Scylla, like skeletons buried under a thin layer of earth. She did her best to keep them hidden.

He had erased the Scylla face overlying her own with just a pass of his invisible hands. She had been as much asleep as awake, but she had felt it happen, felt it more acutely than anything else in her whole life. That touch had reached a place far below the surface of her metal carapace, deeper than her hidden skin, a secret place she had not even known she possessed.

All the terror and pain she had caused as Scylla could not be expunged so easily, or by another. She knew that. There were few certainties in this new life of hers, but that was one of them.

Not only did Scylla lurk behind her smile, waiting to show if she forgot herself, but her every thought and action had to be considered, guarding against lapses into Scylla-thought and reaction. The line between what she had been and what she wanted to be was fine, and oh so fragile.

There were times the task of rebuilding her life as Angel, and not the other, seemed impossible. Still wearing her angel skin—her exo, he called it—only made the task harder. As long as it was a part of her she could not help but remind both the Kindred and herself of what she had been and done to them.

She had awakened from the long dark dream that was life as Scylla to find herself not found, but lost. All she had known and believed had been cast into doubt. Bereft of purpose, and her identity in fragments, she felt like a creature trained to perform a task that no longer existed.

Now she knew that was exactly what Scylla had been—a monster created by a monster to unquestioningly carry out his monstrous acts. Not more than human, but less.

There was no way for her to know if the urge to serve, to be of use, that she found inside herself was something innate, or more of Fist’s programming. In the end she decided that it did not matter. That was what she saw those she most admired doing, and to become a good person she must emulate good people.

Service gave her some renewed sense of purpose and a way in which to atone for her sins. The silver skin and sinew of what she had been made her better able to help repair some of the endless damage her former Master had wrought. It gave her a way to repay the Kindred for their forgiveness. A forgiveness she sometimes doubted she would ever deserve.

The payments were made by long hours spent doing the work of machines that had fallen into disrepair because Fist had decreed that all tools were to be locked away, being potential weapons and temptations to sabotage. Her exo allowed her to perform tasks which would have taken cranes or winches or twenty strong people. She became the engine powering the truckles that hauled the ores and ices to the processors. She became a human grabmaw, tearing away at Ananke’s stony breast with her ceramyl-taloned hands, working as if it were her own sins she was rooting out of herself chip by chip.

She turned a corner, entering the wider main tunnel. Elias Acterelli trotted toward her, his short legs carrying him along at his usual breakneck pace. He had a bundle of blankets under one arm, a carry sack over the opposite shoulder, and three children hot on his heels. No doubt he was on his way to the crude hospital ward that had been set up in a former dining hall.

He slowed down and grinned at her. “Hi, Angel,” he called cheerfully, brave or foolish enough to even pat her on the shoulder in passing. She smiled back, keeping her mouth closed.

Few others would do such a thing, perhaps fearing that touching her exo would somehow summon up Scylla like some terrible genie from inside her. The reaction of the children was more typical. They gave the silver-skinned ex-angel cautious smiles and as wide a berth as the tunnel allowed.

It was not that she did not want to be free of the armor in which she had been an unwitting prisoner. She hated it now. The gleaming biometal had gone from a source of pride to a mark of shame, tarnished by the blood of innocents and creaking with the memory of mindless cruelty.

At last she reached her destination, passing through the massive steel door that had once barred the way to the chapel and the chambers off it, including what had once been Fist’s inner sanctum. Now it remained open wide, welcoming any and all back into the place which had been the center of the Kindreds’ faith.

The chapel was one of the few rooms they had managed to complete before Fist’s advent, the work of their finest artisans. Angel entered, sparing not a single glance at the radiant solar clockwork overhead or the intricately-set mosaic floor.

It was the altar table at the far end that had her whole attention. The webbed restraints that had once been bolted to it were gone now. She had torn them off herself. But bloodstains still darkened the scarred top of the white-stone slab, left there as a testament to those who had bled upon it.

A shudder passed through her. As always, the sight of the altar brought back memories of the “penances” she had meted out, and confessions she had extracted on it as Fist’s punishing angel.

Although still in a hurry, she took the time to stop and kneel, her heart tightening in her chest.

In days since Fist’s fall the altar had been quietly turned into a shrine to those who had been lost, lovingly created and tended by those who survived and remembered. A single precious real beeswax taper burned in a tall holder, its soft, lambent glow giving the objects spread across the bloodstained white stone the golden aura of cherished memories.

Indeed, that was what they were.

Dozens of flat and solido pictures of those who had died during Fist’s reign of terror had been placed there. The faces were of every age and sex and color, each of them frozen in a moment from an innocent past. Scattered among them were other momentos. Locks of hair tied in bits of wire or ribbon. Wedding rings and inscribed bracelets. Lockets opened to show a face or faces that had been carried near the heart. Medals. A briar pipe with a well-chewed stem. A china bird with a broken wing. A pair of wire-framed eyeglasses, one lens cracked down the middle. An antique leather-bound Bible and a broken compad diary.

Dried flowers, their faded petals as fragile as the life that had once been in them.

The list went on, but of all the things that had been so loving placed there, she was always the most deeply touched by the saddest testimonials of all. These were toys that had outlived the children they had belonged to. There was an air of hopeless abandonment about them. The dolls and stuffed animals looked mournful, bereft, their staring eyes searching forlornly for the lost one who had loved them.

Angel blinked back a tear in her one green human eye. The blank-glass lens that replaced the other looked on with dry indifference.

There was little of her own childhood she could remember, no more than uncertain whispers. It had been torn from her mind and discarded as useless. Gone with her childhood were all but the most fleeting memories of her mother. The moment she remembered most clearly was the one she most wanted to forget, that moment when as Scylla she had killed her mother. She could recall only shards of that act, but they were vivid and sharp enough to cut her to the quick each time they surfaced.

Once she understood the purpose of the shrine, she had tried to find something of her mother’s to put up there. After two days of fruitless searching she had given up, forced to admit that not a trace of Anya remained.

So she had made a vow that one day she would lay the silver skin of her exo down among the other offerings to the past. Until that time she would remember her mother and all the other dead by serving the living as best she could.

Angel raised her arms, holding her hands toward the altar, candlelight glinting off the polished metal. A mental flick of the wrist sent the ceramyl talons sliding from their sheaths. Try as she might, she could not entirely suppress the traitorous Scylla-thrill it set off.

“This is what I was,” she said in a husky whisper, addressing the dead gathered about her in the quiet chapel. “I still bear the mark of what I was, and it grows heavy on me…”

She bowed her head, leaving the rest unspoken. There were some things she could not say aloud, and the deepest, most secret reason for wanting to shed the angel skin was one of them. Her mother and all the other dead knew what was in her heart, she was somehow sure of that. All she could do was hope they could forgive her for her selfish secret desires.

“I will never hurt one of yours again,” she promised, retracting her claws. She gazed up at the altar, and speaking as if laying down Law to herself and whatever of Scylla remained inside, added, “I will never hurt anyone ever again.”

She stood up, comforted by the renewal of her promises to them and to herself. Even so, she knew that in the end promises weighed no more than the breath on which they were spoken. That was one of the few truths she had learned from her old Master. Only actions had real weight; only the keeping of a promise had value or meaning.

Promises. They were holding her together and tearing her apart.

She had made a promise to prove that she was no longer a monster before she allowed herself to shed the skin of the one she had been. That promise had turned into an iron collar around her neck. Yet she could not bring herself to break it, not even now, when it looked like it might cost her release and acceptance and everything else she dared want for herself.

This seemed to be one of the many prices of becoming human.

Marchey did as much of his work as possible on his ship.

His main excuse was that his small inship clinic was better equipped than anything Ananke had to offer. While that was true, it wasn’t the whole truth.

He felt safer there. More in control. It was his place, it was where he belonged. At odd moments he thought about Ella locked away in a fortress of her own making, and found himself all too easily able to understand her fanatic reclusiveness.

Staying onboard also served to remind his patients that his stay was only temporary.

Still, he had to make rounds at the half-assed hospital he’d helped put together, and there were certain chores that had to be done in the office where the medicomp that had belonged to Ananke’s former doctor had been set up.

There were no more patients to be seen that day. The end was in sight. All that remained was a bit of work in the office, his Final Appointment, and a last swing through the hospital. Then he could finally get the hell out of here.

“Dr. Marchey!”

It was a high, childish voice that called his name from somewhere behind him. He heard running footsteps, turned to see who it was.

Danny Hong skidded to a halt before him. Looking at him now, it was hard to believe that this was the same sick and frightened boy he’d seen when he first arrived on Ananke. His golden skin glowed with returning health. His straight black hair stuck up in every direction, as if set on end by all the energy inside. A white bandage covered the empty socket that had once contained the dangerously infected remains of one eye. A lopsided, long-lashed eye had been crudely drawn on the bandage with a black marker.

“Nice peeper, Danny,” he said, pointing. “Did you draw it?”

“Yes sir. Well, Jimmy and ’Lita helped.”

He nodded approvingly. “Good job. Pretty soon you’ll get a real one.”

Eyes had been on the list of needed tissues he’d sent to MedArm. There had been no way to save Danny’s eye; gangrene had been too advanced. Even using conventional technique implanting a new one would have taken an hour at the most, but there had been none in his ship’s small tissue bank. Nor had he been able to return sight to a woman who had been blinded by exposure to vacuum, or replace the steel-and-glass lens filling one of Angel’s eye sockets.

The boy gave a squirming shrug, shoving his hands in his pockets. “I guess.” He bit his lip, then squinted up at Marchey with his good eye. “I wish you didn’t have to leave.”

“I have to, Danny,” he said gently. ‘There are other sick people who need me.”

A glum nod. “I guess. I—well, I wanted to tell you a secret before you left. ’Lita said you can tell a doctor anything and it stays a secret.”

“She’s right. Secrets are part of our business. What’s yours?”

Danny looked around to make sure they were alone, then lowering his voice to a whisper, said, “I know how to read and write, sir.”

Marchey blinked in surprise. “Is that so?” He’d been expecting something more along the lines of an adolescent confession of confusing physical urges. Danny was about the right age for such things.

“Yes, sir. Brother Fist said we kids weren’t s’posed to learn such stuff, that he and God would teach us everything we needed to know. But my mom, she taught me anyway. She made me promise never to tell anybody. She said it was our little secret. But now I guess it’s okay to tell you, isn’t it?”

Another of Fist’s nasty little policies coming to light. Not that the old tyrant was the first god-pounder who preferred his flock to remain as ignorant as possible.

He bent down so that he and the boy were eye to eye. “It’s okay to tell everybody now.” He riffled the boy’s hair. “God gave you brains so you could use them. Knowing how to read and write is a wonderful thing. It’s something to be proud of, something you might even want to help teach the other kids.”

Danny absorbed this solemnly. “Then it’s not bad, not a ’bomination?”

He shook his head. “No, it’s not. Let me tell you something, Danny. Your mom was very wise and brave. Even though she knew it was dangerous, she passed on to you the most precious thing she possessed because she knew it was important. Saying that it was bad was the abomination.”

Danny’s mother had been dead for over a year, the boy all on his own at the age of thirteen and put to work in the mines like an adult. Jimmy and ’Lita Chee, their own daughter four years dead, had taken him in since Fist’s fall. Families like this were springing up all over Ananke, like determined flowers sprouting from scorched earth.

“You should be proud of her and proud of yourself. Every time you read something you should remember her.”

“I do. I read every minute I can.” The boy hesitated, scuffing the ground with his toe, then peered at him slantwise. “I write stuff, too,” he said quietly.

Before Marchey could ask what kind of stuff, the boy spoke in a rush, as if letting out something he’d kept bottled up far too long. Or getting it said before he lost his nerve.

“That’s what I want to do when I grow up. I want to write about my mom. About what happened to her. About what happened to Jimmy and ’Lita and everybody else here. About how Brother Fist did such bad things to us. I want to write about you changing Scylla from an angel into our friend, and how that saved us all from Brother Fist. I want to make sure everybody knows about it, and if I can get it all written down just right, then nobody’ll ever forget about my mom and everybody else, will they?”

Marchey stared at that small earnest face in dismay. He could see that the boy was frightened: of having said his dream out loud, of chancing exposing it to ridicule, of its sheer size and difficulty. But the boy’s face was set with determination to achieve what he had set for himself in spite of his fear, in spite of everything. Like a mirror into the past, it reminded him of the burning sense of purpose he’d once had himself. To be a doctor. To be the best doctor ever. To do what other doctors could not…

What could he say? That the curse of humanity was forgetfulness, and history was nothing but generation after generation repeating the same mistakes? That idealism was the surest road to disappointment, and the higher you set your sights the more certain you were to fall short?

“I—” he said around the lump in his throat, “I think you’re right. I also think your mother would be very proud of you. I know I am.” He offered the boy one silver hand. “Good luck.”

Danny shook it solemnly. His hand was small, but his grip was firm and sure.

Even though it was a constant reminder of a past she desperately wanted to put behind her, Angel had not been able to make herself give up her old cubby in a side room off the chapel. It was one of the few things in her life that had not been changed beyond all recognition by Marchey’s arrival and Fist’s fall.

She had another reason for keeping it. One darker and more complex, one that made her feel guilty and weak and unworthy.

Ashamed of what she was doing but helpless to stop herself, she crossed to the big multifunction communit at the end of the room. Trying to ignore the sense of sin she felt, she took it off standby and sat down on the end of her pallet, remote in hand and eyes on the meter-square main screen.

Then she began scanning through the hidden surveillance cameras, searching for Marchey the way she had once used them to sniff out indolence and blasphemy. Viewpoints bloomed and vanished in quick succession on the main screen, the tick of her thumb against the button the loudest sound in the room.

Finally, she found him approaching the door to the cubby he had been given, just down the tunnel from the makeshift hospital.

The pickup zoomed in until his head and shoulders filled the screen. She glanced down at her hand, surprised to see one silver finger on the stud which had called for the closeup.

She knew it was wrong to spy on him like this, but could not seem to help herself. From the moment when he had first touched her, first called her Angel, she had been drawn to him. The pull was constant and terrifyingly strong. It was like nothing she had ever experienced, and far too powerful to be denied by fear or shame.

Scarcely aware of what she was doing, she got off her pallet and drifted closer to the screen.

Sadness whispered through her. He looked so tired. There were bags under his eyes. His broad shoulders were slumped as if his silver arms weighed a hundred kilos each, and some vast unseen weight had been piled on his back.

Angel automatically switched to the pickup inside the cubby as he pushed through the door. She tabbed the sound on. Now he was coming toward her, sitting down, taking up a pad.

She watched him work, broad forehead wrinkled in concentration and his voice a soft murmur. It wasn’t until her metal-clad fingers clicked up against the smooth unyielding surface of the screen that she realized she had reached up to touch him. Trying to regain that momentary contact, that scary and splendid connection, which had since eluded her.

“Angel?”

She jumped, the sudden, unexpected sound from behind her catching her so completely off guard that her old angel-self responded reflexively. In the blink of an eye she snatched her hand back and whirled around to face the intruder, crouching down and preparing to pounce. She bared her teeth, legs coiling themselves to fling her across the room in a single bound, her hooked fingers ready to sprout gleaming blades.

Her exo-accelerated senses gave her ample time to recognize Salli Baber. To realize that there was no threat. To understand that once again she had allowed her old reflexes to betray her.

Salli’s reactions only worked at normal human speed. Even as Angel was untensing and beginning to damn herself for her lapse, Salli was paling at the sight she presented. Her mouth stretched into a frightened O and the stack of folded clothing she carried went flying from her hands like startled birds.

Angel compounded her first mistake with a second. She saw Salli’s legs start to fold under her and acted instinctively. Her amped systems empowered her to cross the room and catch the woman before she was even halfway to the floor.

Her intentions might have been good, but fear of the silver-skinned angel of vengance had been so deeply hammered into Anankeans’ psyches that most of them were still haunted by the stalking spectre of Scylla in their dreams. Salli let out a strangled squeak of terror and fainted dead away, her brown eyes rolling back into her head.

Angel stared down at the unconscious woman in her arms for several long seconds, faced with further proof of her own inadequacy. Shoulders slumped in defeat, she carried Salli to her pallet and gently laid her down on it.

Face tight with fury and shame, she shut off the monitor, then rifled through her drawers in search of a stim. Finally she found one, and trying to keep herself from thinking about how she had last used one on a man who had passed out during an atonement, pasted it on Salli’s neck.

Then she stepped back out of Salli’s line of sight, hugging herself as she pensively watched over her and waited for the stim to take effect.

Salli was a wiry, dark-haired woman in her early forties. Like so many others, Fist had made her a widow. Although of average height and fairly muscular, the baggy black coverall she wore made her look smaller. Like everyone else, the years of Fist’s rule had left her painfully thin. No one got fat on two bowls of processed algae a day.

Her face was of the sort you would call handsome, good bones and too much character to be merely pretty. Her olive skin was almost completely smooth and unblemished now. Before Marchey had arrived and worked on her, the left side of her face had been twisted and ridged with rough brown scar tissue, a puckered hole large enough to let her broken teeth show through punched in one cheek. That whole side of her body had been similarly scarred, and her left arm had been weak and stiff.

Angel could not keep herself from remembering when Salli’s accident had happened. An overage, under-maintained BoresAll head had exploded. One worker had been killed outright, decapitated by flying steel and stone. Salli had been standing a bit behind him, and so partially shielded from the blast by his body.

Fist had sent Scylla to check on Salli after her coworkers had carried her limp, bleeding body back into the living cubic. She had given them permission to remove the steel and stone splinters which had turned one side of her body to bloody meat, and at Fist’s behest, given them a coagulant and antibiotic spray to use on her. This departure from the ban on secular medicine came about because Salli was their best surviving drill operator and Fist didn’t want to lose her.

Nobody had mentioned the contradiction.

Nobody had suggested giving her any sort of painkiller. Not Fist, not herself, and least of all her comrades from the mines. They knew she was getting better care than most, and asking for such a forbidden thing would have earned them punishment.

Salli’s head moved from side to side, as if denying wakefulness. Angel called her name.

The woman on the pallet moaned as the stim reeled her back to consciousness. Her head rolled in Angel’s direction, and her brown eyes snapped open, bulging in terror as the fearsome silver afterimage burned into her retinas was replaced by the real thing.

“Forgive me—!” she cried, cringing back and flinging up her hands to ward Scylla off. As if that ever could have stopped her.

Angel hugged herself tighter, blinking her one green eye against the dampness she felt welling in it. “It’s all right, Salli,” she said soothingly, forcing the words past the constriction in her throat. “It’s just me. Angel. Not Scylla. I will not hurt you.”

“You won’t hurt me?” Salli repeated in a small voice, sounding unconvinced. She peered past her upraised hands.

“I will never hurt anyone ever again,” she answered with a quiet certainty. “I—I am sorry I scared you. You scared me, and I overreacted.”

Salli’s hands fell and she stared back in wide-eyed disbelief. “I scared you?” she said, surprise replacing her fear.

Angel forced a smile onto her face, carefully keeping her teeth hidden. “Startled me, anyway. I forgot you were coming.” That last was half a lie; it was more a matter of someone else filling up every corner of her thoughts.

The other woman returned a tentative smile that let the knot in Angel’s chest begin loosening. “I think maybe I better knock louder next time,” she said with an uneasy laugh, sitting up and looking around. “I brought you some things…”

“I will get them.” They were scattered all over the threshold where they had fallen. Angel went after them, careful to move slowly.

Salli was on her feet by the time Angel had gathered up the articles of clothing and carried them back.

“Thanks,” she said. She selected one item, dropped the rest on the bed. “Let’s see what we have here. I’ve had most of this stuff hidden away for years.” She shook out the pair of pants she’d picked out, then held them up against Angel’s waist.

“Too small.” Salli tossed them aside, rummaged around and found another pair. “Maybe. The color suits you.” She put them aside for the final cut. Next she pulled out something small and sheer, looked at it, then at Angel’s sexless, silver-sheathed body.

“I guess you don’t really need panties, do you?” she said, chuckling as she tossed the silky undergarment atop the discarded pants. “Or a bra, for that matter. You could probably park an ore truck on them babies and they wouldn’t sag.”

Angel didn’t know how to answer that. She watched Salli start pulling one item after another from the pile and measuring them against her. Before long she was chatting away as if nothing had happened, telling Angel about her first bra and her first pair of something called “crotchless panties” while she picked out things for her to wear.

Angel only stood there in wide-eyed dismay, stiff as a pot-metal mannikin. This was a lot more than she had bargained for when she asked Salli to help her dress like a regular woman for her final chance to see Marchey. All the different cuts and colors bewildered her. The rules for matching the various items seemed incomprehensible.

Getting the right things picked out would not be the end of it, either. Then she was going to have to ask Salli to help her put them on.

Rack her brain as she might, she could not remember ever getting dressed like a normal person. The girl she’d been before being turned into Scylla must have worn such things, but she couldn’t remember it.

Marchey put the pad aside, his throat dry from almost an hour of straight dictation.

But he was done. The pad now contained the proper procedures for dealing with anything likely to come up with any of the patients he was leaving behind. The tap of a button copied it into the old Medicomp. He’d put new MedMems in both the pad and the Medicomp for Mardi and Elias to fall back on, but this would be faster and easier. All either of them would have to do was name the patient and his or her symptoms. The pad would search out the proper response and walk them through the correct course of action. It wasn’t quite the same as being there, but it would have to do.

He settled back, taking a last look around the room. The Kindred had given him this cubby to use as a combination office and guest room just a couple days after his arrival. The rough-walled room contained the old Medicomp and chair along one side, and a bed at the far end. Along the other side they had placed a couch, table and chair set taken from Fist’s chamber to give it a homey feel. It was supposed to be a place of his own here. They’d even put his name on the door, as if hanging out his shingle for him.

By then he had come to his senses enough to realize that he didn’t belong here, and his stay would be temporary. There had been no polite way to turn it down, but he had used it as little as possible. The bed had never been slept in.

He poured a cup of water from the carafe at his elbow and took a sip. It was flat and tasteless. It eased the scratch in his throat, but did none of the things another sort of drink would do for him. A glance at the clock told him that the time for what he thought of as the Final Appointment had finally come around. Angel was due to show up any minute now.

Thinking about facing her only made him want a real drink all the more.

Just one more. That old familiar refrain.

Less than ten seconds’ indecision passed before he reached toward his pouch for the small flask he’d brought with him in case he needed another shot of nerve tonic. No sense in letting such careful preparations go to waste.

Just as his hand closed around it he heard something thump against his door.

Angel stood before the door to Marchey’s cubby, the present she had brought him clutched in one hand, the other poised to knock. She stood there like that for over a minute before she let her hand fall, admitting to herself that she had made a mistake.

She looked down at herself. The problem was with the clothes. She had worn a pair of coveralls once, using them to disguise her silver body when she had ventured into the steel corridors of the hospital wheel to kidnap Marchey. Fist had occasionally bidden her to wear a white ceremonial robe.

But all that had happened in another life. Those things had not been worn so that she might look like a normal woman. So she might look, well, pretty.

For all the life she could remember her silver armor had been enough. Never once had she felt a whisper of shame or self-consciousness. She hadn’t even known that all the things which made her a woman were hidden under there.

Now she did know, and covering the places other women covered made her acutely aware of them, secret places that felt suddenly exposed by being doubly hidden.

All she had wanted to do was try to breach the wall he had thrown up between them, a wall that might as well have been built from meter-square blocks of nitrogen ice, it was so palpably cold and solid.

Scylla would have torn the wall down and forced him to acknowledge her. To Angel, it looked insurmountable.

In the beginning he had been so kind and warm. He smiled when he saw her, that smile making her feel like her insides were filled with warm syrup. He took time to talk to her, tried to make her laugh. He called her Angel, and when he said that name it made her want to be Angel more than ever.

Then suddenly one day the warmth and kindness were gone. It was almost as if he’d gone to bed one night as one man and woken up the next as a stranger.

From that moment on he had begun treating her with a brusque impatience that left her hurt and bewildered. He would grimace when he saw her, as if the sight of her pained him, and speak only in monosyllables, if at all.

Sometimes she thought that maybe he still saw her as Scylla, as the monster who had threatened his life and hurt him. Or maybe he was angry at her for refusing to let him release her from her exo. Maybe she simply didn’t deserve his attention. Hadn’t earned it. Maybe it was all that and more, each reason another block in the wall.

When she had found that he was going to leave, she had thought she was going to die. She had gone to him, and though she had wanted to beg him to stay, she had only asked that he give her an hour of his time before he left. He had grudgingly agreed, and she had kept herself away from him since then so that he would not have an excuse to change his mind.

Now that fateful hour had come around, and with it her last chance to break through. She had thought that maybe if she looked different he might see her differently. But this was not going to work. The blouse and slacks were only making her so nervous that she was sure to make a fool of herself.

So she put his present on the floor and began trying to figure out how to remove the blouse. She remembered that it had fastened up the back—for reasons Salli had not been able to make entirely clear. She reached behind her and began fumbling at the buttons.

Either the exo limited her range of motion just enough to make the operation impossible, or dealing with things such as pearl buttons was an arcane, acquired skill. No matter how she contorted herself, she could not get even one button loose. Finally she abandoned that approach and tried to pull the blouse off over her head.

Only to get hopelessly stuck when she had it half on and half off. She wriggled and writhed in rising desperation, face trapped in a fold of silky cloth, unable to see, afraid she would tear the fragile thing, and wishing she had learned to curse.

Now in full-blown panic, she shuffled and shucked and spun, only succeeding in kicking over the present she had brought.

She heard it skid across the stone floor. Her heart froze when it clunked up against the foamstone door panel. Moments later she heard the door open, followed by the surprised sound of a sharply indrawn breath.

Her first impulse was to shred the source of her humiliation into a thousand pieces as she ran away to hide. But this was her last chance to see him, and she couldn’t bring herself to throw it away.

Angel made herself stand there, her hidden face red with shame as she waited for whatever happened next.

The sight that greeted Marchey when he opened the door stopped him cold. His eyes went wide as he saw Angel there in the tunnel, apparently being eaten by a shirt.

He almost laughed, but caught himself in time. After a moment he figured out what had probably happened. Like a child unskilled in dressing herself, she had gotten tangled up in the blouse that she was trying to either take off or put on.

Doing his best to keep a straight face, he went to her aid. “On or off?” he asked gently.

“Off!” came the muttered, muffled reply.

“Off it is.” He didn’t have any trouble getting it unbuttoned and peeled off her, even though it had been several years since he had helped a woman undress. There was something subtly erotic about it.

Or maybe not so subtle. When he stepped back it seemed like a good idea to hang on to the shirt and hold it in front of him.

Angel looked miserable, her pale face pinked with embarrassment. She stood there with her head bowed, staring at her feet as if trying to figure out how to kick herself.

Marchey’s heart went out to her. He was all too aware that she was caught somewhere between childhood and womanhood, with a stiff dose of delayed adolescence thrown in to make things even more difficult. Added to all that was her hardly knowing how to be a person.

The only way out of it was to pretend that nothing had happened, a coping mechanism that was hard to beat for all-around usefulness. So he bent down to retrieve the object on his doorstep. It was obviously a bottle, carefully wrapped in a piece of cast-off insulating foil. “For me?”

Angel nodded, refusing to look at him.

“Are you going to come in so I can unwrap it?”

She peeked shyly up at him. “Are you sure unwrapping me was not enough for you?”

Once he’d thought she didn’t have a sense of humor. But she did, which as much as any other indicator told him that she had a chance to be a whole person again. This proved she also had timing.

At last it was safe to laugh. It felt good. It felt even better when he saw a sheepish smile creep out onto her face.

Angel followed him inside, hovering near the door, her hands nervously plucking at the material of the slacks she was still wearing as if trying to get rid of them one thread at a time.

“Why don’t you sit on the couch?”

“All right,” she said, edging over and sitting down on one end, her back ramrod straight. She looked up at him, her pale face solemn.

He smiled at her. “Let’s see what we have here.” The foil peeled away, and what a surprise, it was a bottle. His eyebrows climbed his forehead when he saw the label, and he had to take a second look to be sure he was reading it right.

“This is real single-malt scotch. Bottled in Scotland,” he said softly, staring at Angel in amazement. “It’s over seventy years old!”

Angel ducked her head. “I remembered you liking to drink that on the trip here. I—I hope it is still good, being so old and all.”

Marchey chuckled. “Oh, I’m sure it is.” He hefted the bottle in his hand, trying to guess its value. A couple hundred credits would probably just buy a shot—if an open bottle could even be found. “Where did you get it? Has this place got an AlkaHall nobody’s told me about?”

“No,” she answered seriously. “Broth—uh, my old Master had boxes and boxes of different kinds of bottles stored away.” A frown appeared as she tried to remember the different kinds. “He had brandy, other kinds of whiskey, gin, vodka, bore—borebon? And wine. All kinds.” She jumped up. “I can go get you some more. Just tell me what you want. Or I can take you there.”

It was a tempting offer. If this was any example of what the old monster had stashed away, it had to be an alcoholic treasure trove, a tippler’s Shangri-La.

But this bottle was the one she had picked out for him. One diamond alone is a treasure. When you have a whole sackful no one gem can have the same value and meaning.

“That’s all right.” He patted the bottle fondly. “You brought me the best one of the whole bunch.”

“You are sure?”

“Positive.” A thought occurred to him. “You might take Jon Halen and Elias Acterelli there, though. Let them, ah, inventory the stock.” They would dole it out fairly, and if anyone deserved a stiff drink, it was the people of Ananke. He also knew that Mardi and Elias had quietly begun assembling a beer-brewing setup in a storage room just off the infirmary. It would be algae beer, since that was the only raw material they had on hand. Fist’s stock would tide them over until they got into production.

“All right.” She sat back down, perching on the edge of her seat as if ready to bolt and run. Her nervousness was painfully obvious. No doubt she was working herself up to something, and it wasn’t too hard to guess what.

Fortunately he knew how to deal with both matters at once. He had planned to keep their meeting short and formal. Somehow that hadn’t worked out, but this might work out even better.

“Well, Angel,” he said, “I think we ought to sample a little of this wonderful stuff. How does that sound to you?”

“I do not—” She made a helpless gesture, a jittery lift of her hands and shoulders. “I mean I do not know how. I have never consumed alcohol before.”

“Then it’s high time you learned.” He found two cups and put them on the table, then cracked open the bottle. “Don’t worry, you’re in the hands of a very experienced teacher.”

Half an hour later Marchey was slouched in the chair, his cup in one hand and his feet up on the table between it and the couch. He was feeling pretty good. The scotch was even better than he had thought it would be; taste and bouquet incomparably smooth, yet with a kick like a caber applied to the cerebrum.

Angel had been unsure if she really liked the taste or not, and the modest amount she had consumed had hit her hard. No surprise there; hundred-proof whiskey is not exactly an ideal drink for beginners.

Her earlier nervousness had been replaced by an almost feline abandon. She was sprawled across the couch, staring dreamily into space with a vague smile on her face.

Marchey took another sip, savoring the taste on his tongue as he contemplated his drinking partner.

Although it was not something he was particularly comfortable thinking about, he had to admit that she was attractive. Hell, she was beautiful. Who could have guessed that there had been a face so sweet under the tattooed horror?

Her filed teeth and the blank glass lens that replaced one eye did little to detract from her beauty. They were nothing more than repairable conditions his eyes automatically subtracted. In fact, he’d gotten to kind of like her teeth. As for her exo, it revealed enough of her form to make him wonder what was hidden. She’d come up with a pearl necklace from somewhere. The strand was looped around one tidy silver breast in a way that kept pulling his eye back again and again.

Her physical appearance accounted for only a small part of her allure. There was a freshness about her, a beguiling innocence. An inviting vulnerability completely at odds with the indestructible shell surrounding her body.

Then there was her eagerness to please him. The awe and yearning and yes, even the love that shone in her eyes when she looked at him. Any man would find that hard to resist. Especially one with far too many years of celibacy under his belt, so to speak. He found her so frighteningly enticing he dared not let himself be around her.

The bewildered hurt he’d seen in her face and eyes when he’d begun keeping her at arm’s length had made him feel like as big a monster as her old Master. But it had to be done. He knew she couldn’t understand why he had shut her out, and he doubted he could explain it to her. She was young and inexperienced enough to think anything was possible.

He was too old not to know better.

Still the impossible and yet so damn tempting notion of asking her to come with him kept recurring. He usually suppressed it the moment it glimmered in his mind, but seeing her there before him in all her glory made that difficult. Nor did the scotch he’d consumed help matters. It helped float his imagination easily over the low, leaky levee of his inhibitions.

He had to admit that he was tired of being alone. The close press of people here might be more than he could handle just yet, but the best face he could put on returning to the hermetic solitude of the circuit was a nerveless resignation which already needed help from his old friend alcohol to be maintained. For all that things had changed, his life would be pretty much the same.

Marchey sipped his drink, staring into his glass and feeling his mood curdle.

There was no point in tormenting himself with daydreams. He was going back to shuttling from hospital to hospital and patient to patient, with an emphasis on waiting out the periods of suffocating nothingness in between.

It would be like the glass in his hand. Mostly empty, with just a taste of what he needed to get him through puddled on the bottom. It was bad enough that he had to live like that. But to bring someone else into it?

She had a chance to lead something like a normal life now. Taking it away would be selfish and cruel. Maybe even criminal. She had to stay. He had to leave. End of story.

“Can’t you stay here on Ananke?”

Marchey blinked in confusion. The question had risen up out of his own turgid thoughts, but he didn’t think he’d said it aloud. He looked up from his glass toward Angel. She huddled on the couch, hugging herself as if against a chill, her one green eye squeezed shut.

It wasn’t too hard to guess that it had slipped out of her mind and onto her tongue, greased by whiskey. He could answer, or pretend he hadn’t heard. If he asked her what she said, she might say Nothing, and let the matter slide. But he doubted it. He’d been dreading this moment, fairly certain that the subject was going to come up sooner or later.

He decided to answer, as much to remind himself as to explain it to her.

“I wish I could.” Saying it out loud made him realize just how much it was true. But once again it was a matter of knowing what was possible and what was not. This was not.

She hunched her shoulders as if gathering his answer in to keep. “Why can’t you?” she asked, voice little more than a whisper. “Doctors cannot stay in one place?”

Marchey stared down at his silver hands, the polished metal reflecting his distorted face back at him, reminding him that he had no choice but to be what they made of him.

“My kind can’t. At least not yet. There aren’t very many of us, and we have a duty to go where we’re most needed.”

“It could not be done some other way?”

He shrugged. “Maybe it could. I don’t really know. For now we’re sent from place to place because it’s the best, most efficient way for us to be used.”

“I see.” She sat up, finally looking directly at him. “Brother Fist’s system used everyone very efficiently, too.”

He shook his head. “It’s not the same.”

Her green eye narrowed, fixing on him as unblinkingly as the glass lens that replaced the other. “Isn’t it?”

“No!” He snorted. “Not even close.”

“Then tell me how it is different. You go where you are told to go, and do what you are told to do without question or complaint. You have let yourself be used for so long you have forgotten what it is to have a mind of your own.”

Marchey glared at her. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” He knocked back the rest of his drink.

“Don’t I?” She shot back, her voice rising. “Have you forgotten who you are talking to? I am the one who kidnapped you and brought you here. You were so used to having your life controlled that you did not even put up a fight!”

“You threatened to rip me to frigging shreds if I didn’t come with you!” Marchey snapped, on the verge of shouting. He couldn’t believe that they were arguing about this, but he’d be damned if he’d let her get away with saying that she had just snapped her fingers and he’d followed after like a whipped dog.

“Yes, but you were easily coerced. You did not care where I took you. You did not even care if you lived or died! It has taken me some time to be sure I understood this, but what I have concluded is that you were almost completely dead inside when I found you. You had smothered your sense of self inside a bottle and corked it with apathy. Since you have been here you have been faced with the prospect of coming out and living again, and it so frightens you that you are running away!”

“I’m not running away,” he spat. “I’m just doing my duty. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“You keep saying that. Even I can see what you have been doing.” She put her cup down with exaggerated care. “You have hidden on your ship almost the whole time you have been here. You have hidden from everyone, treating them like devices to be repaired, not like people. You have hidden from me. Every time I have tried to see you, you have always had somewhere to go or something else to do. You have run and hidden from me like you never did from Scylla.”

“I haven’t been hiding, dammit! I just want you to start leading a life of your own.” He said it with all the force he could muster, as if that might help get it through her thick silver-plated skull.

Angel stared at him in disbelief. “That is what I have been trying to do!” She shook her head. “But not you. You want to seal yourself back in that ship like it was your coffin and go back to being dead inside.”

“Me?” Marchey growled, her accusations making fury bubble through him. He levelled an accusing finger at her. “I’m not the one who’s still hiding inside that fucking tin can, afraid to come out and be like the rest of us!”

She flinched as if he had slapped her, shocked hurt flitting across her face. “Afraid to come out?” she cried, lurching to her feet, lips peeling back from her jagged teeth. “This is Scylla’s skin! She is in here with me! As long as I wear this I have to be on my guard against her every moment of every day!”

Hooked silver fingers clawed at her smooth, sexless silver breast. “Don’t you know how much I want to be free of this prison? Of her? To be like everyone else? To have a chance to be a woman? To be a woman for a man! To—”

She couldn’t say it. Not to him, of all people. She had said too much already. Her hand cut the air in a slashing motion, as if severing that line of thought and argument. Her voice dropped to an imploring whisper as she tried to make him understand. It was that or scream.

“I cannot let myself do that—have that—until I have finished paying for at least some of the evil I did. I have a duty to earn my way out. I have to give, to serve, to put what I want last or it will mean nothing.”

Marchey had listened in glowering, tight-lipped silence, dismissing all she said as rationalization. A caustic mixture of frustration and resentment churned in his gut.

“Bullshit. You’re afraid. Call it duty if you want, but you’re just looking for something to replace Fist in your life.” He spoke coldly, his voice sounding like that of a stranger. His face hardened. “Do you really want to know why I’ve been trying to stay away from you? Do you? Well, I’ll tell you, little girl. Because I wasn’t about to let you substitute me for him!”

The moment those brutal words left his mouth he regretted them. But there was no way to take them back. And it was true, dammit!

Angel stared at him, the color draining from her face. Anger and hurt beat at her insides with steel fists, seeking release. The ghost of Scylla stirred in the urge to return the hurt a hundred times over.

She turned away and stumbled toward the door, knowing she had to get away before she lost control. But she stopped short of it, wanting to repay him for what he had said, wanting to hurt herself for driving him to it, staggering under the weight of what she had said and wanted to say but had not been given the chance to tell him.

She took a shuddering breath. “I am afraid,” she admitted in a low hopeless voice. “I am afraid I will have to live in this thing for the rest of my life. Because I am afraid you are the only one who can free me from it. Not just my body, but me. And you…”

She hunched her shoulders and ducked her head as if to protect herself from the results of what she dared not say, but which had to be said anyway. “You do not even care. About the people here. About me. About anything. Even about yourself. Or that someone might I-I-love you!”

That was it, that was the end. All the emotions surging inside her were too new, too raw and wild to be contained. She lifted her foot, her exo multiplying the power of her coiling leg muscles thirty times over, then lashed out with all of her strength.

The force of her kick ripped the door from its pins, flinging it against the unyielding stone of the tunnel’s opposite wall and shattering it as completely as her hopes. Had anyone been in front of it, they would have been killed.

Angel was past such considerations. Shame and loss consumed her, sending her fleeing into the tunnel and away from all the things she had ruined, the door least among them.

Marchey stared at the empty doorway, feeling old and stupid. Worse yet, he felt ashamed.

I shouldn’t let it end like this. He knew he should go after her, try to repair some of the damage. At least apologize.

He didn’t move a muscle.

But it did have to end. Who said endings had to be happy?

“Are you all right?” Mardi puffed from the doorway. Her lined face was pale and frightened, and she’d come from the hospital ward just down the tunnel at a dead run, a bedpan clutched to her chest like a shield.

He gave her a meaningless smile and waved her away. “Just fine. Everything’s all right. You go back. I’ll be along shortly.”

As soon as she was gone he picked up the bottle Angel had brought him. It was still nearly half-full. That might be enough nerve tonic to get him the hell out of there.

She has to live her own life. So do I. A clean break was probably for the best.

He uncorked the bottle and filled his cup. His silver hand dispensed the medication without a tremor.

“Life goes on,” he informed the silence, raising his cup.

He drank half of it off in one desperate gulp. As he waited for that to hit bottom so he could inhale the rest he wondered why the gift she had given him suddenly tasted so bitter.

After committing the travesty of swilling the fine old scotch down like rotgut, Marchey made his last stop at the infirmary to leave the pad with Mardi and Elias. For some reason it seemed important to hang on to the all-but-empty bottle all the way to the lockbay.

The cavernous, stone-walled chamber was jammed with people there to see him off. Passing through the doors and into the bay he ran into a living wall. Dismayed by this one last barrier to making his escape, he’d stalled, knowing he should have expected something like this. But his mind had been on other things.

There was only one way to get to the other side. After a few moments to gather his nerve, he lowered his head, took a deep breath and waded in, the scotch bottle clutched protectively to his chest.

Every one of the people gathered there seemed to have put on their best clothes for the event, items hidden away for many long years, inappropriate to Fist’s drab dictatorship. Most of this faded finery could best be described as glad-rags, and it was worn by people badly out of practice at having fun. Still, there reigned a festive air such as the place hadn’t known for far too many years.

Jon Halen was waiting for him at the top of the ramp, right in front of the locktube doors. Instead of his usual coverall, he was decked out in a ratty wine-colored velveteen tux that hung on his emaciated frame as if on wire hangers, a tattered red-silk carnation on one lapel. To Marchey he looked like the master of ceremonies at a death-camp talent show.

Marchey stumbled up the ramp to Jon’s side. He felt as if he had been kissed, thanked, hugged, and patted on the back by everyone at least twice. If he’d been sober, he couldn’t have endured it. As it was, he felt like someone who had been thrust out naked and unprotected on Jupiter’s surface, squeezed beyond endurance by an inescapable gravity and pressure. He hadn’t seen any sign of Angel. One small favor.

Jon gave him a welcoming grin. “Well, Doc, this is it.”

Marchey nodded distractedly, wanting only to get the hell out of there as soon as humanly possible. “What about Fist?”

“All aboard. Still sleepin’ like the most uglysome baby you ever did see.”

“Great. Thanks for taking care of that.”

Jon snorted. “Hell, we’re the ones should be thankin’ you! We’d pay you good credit to haul his miserable ass outta here if he hadn’t stole it all.”

“It’s no big deal. Any luck finding out what he did with everything he took from you?”

Halen shook his head. “Nah. I’ve started hackin’ at his comp in my spare time, but I’m a few years outta practice, and that paranoid old bastard set up so many layers of protection it might take me years to chop through ’em all.” He shrugged and grinned. “But let me tell you, it sure do feel good to be back in the saddle again.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I get my tap fixed, and my chances to break the bank’ll be better.”

Marchey had carried only two spare taps in his ship’s stores, and had been forced to use both on patients who needed the extended life-support and monitoring capabilities a direct linkage to their nervous systems offered. Those who’d had taps when Fist took over had been forced to submit to the injection of a black-market nanovirus that attacked their taps’ nanostrand linkages, rendering them useless and unrepairable. A tap was a potent tool, which made it a threat to Fist’s rule.

“Well, Med Arm will fix you up soon. Good luck on your treasure hunt.” He turned toward the locktube. “If Fist lets anything slip, I’ll pass it along.” He would have headed up the tube, but Jon put a restraining hand on his arm. He turned back reluctantly.

“Listen, Doc. That’s a generous offer, but I want you to promise me you won’t go messin’ with him any more than you absolute have to. Okay?”

“All right,” Marchey mumbled, casting a longing look up the tube. “Sure.”

“One more thing.”

“What?” He managed to bite back the now. Halen was staring at him, his face solemn. His gaze was so direct it made Marchey uneasy.

“You’ve done more for us than we can ever repay,” he said with quiet force.

“That’s all right,” Marchey muttered, embarrassed.

“No it in’t. We don’t have much. But the honor of offerin’ you what we do have has been given to me. It an’t somethin’ you have to take right now, and its value is somethin’ only you can tote up.”

Jon drew himself up, his lean humorous face suddenly turning stern and proud. Marchey had opened his mouth to say he didn’t want anything, but was silenced by the man’s magisterial air. The bay went silent as all talk, as though even breath itself, was withheld.

Jon began to speak, raising his voice so all could hear, his Belter’s slur gone and his words ringing out clear and strong as the notes of a trumpet.

“Dr. Georgory Marchey, you were brought here among us against your will, and as a stranger. You are a stranger no more. You have been a true friend to us all. Now you say that it is time for you to leave us. Although we wish you would stay, you depart with our blessings. But there are some things we want to give you before you go.

“Our friend, we give you our lives, for it is you who has redeemed them for us. We give you our trust, for that is the least of what you have earned. We give you our eternal friendship, for you have been a true friend to us when we needed a friend the most. We give you our love, for love is the font from which friendship and trust and even life itself flows.”

Jon put his hand on Marchey’s shoulder, his face grave as a judge’s and yet suffused with pleasure. “Last of all, we give you our home. It is your home now, because home is the place where love and trust and friendship and life wait for you. Come in fear or come in joy, come in triumph or come in direst extremity; know that you can return here to your home and you will find us waiting to embrace you in full welcome.”

Jon embraced Marchey then, kissing both of his cheeks. When he stepped back, his brown eyes sparkled with tears of joy. The Kindred had few rituals, and this was their oldest and most precious. It meant all the more to him and all the rest because it had so nearly died with them.

“Come home again, Brother Marchey,” he intoned, completing the rite, “Come home to where your kindred wait for you.”

No one broke the throbbing silence that followed. Every eye was upon Marchey, many of them gleaming with tears.

Marchey realized that they were waiting for him to respond. Their simple, sincere offering had moved him deeply, leaving him at a loss for words.

“Thank you,” he said, the tightness in his chest and throat turning it into a strangled croak. He gazed out over their upturned faces, so many of them familiar to him now. His whole body felt rocked by the massive wave of love and gratitude washing over him, threatening to carry him away. Deep enough to drown him.

Vast enough to bury him there.

“Thank you!” This time it was a desperate shout, and a thunderous cheer echoed back from it, shivering him from end to end. It grew louder and more jubilant.

He clumsily turned toward the lock tube, breathless and shaking. Jon offered his misshapen hand. He took it, silver fingers gripping the gnarled pink-and-black knot. There was no thought of its being an imperfect work. It was the hand of a friend.

“Fare you well, my friend,” Jon yelled over the uproar. He winked. “It’s still not too late to change your mind!”

Marchey ducked his head, an inarticulate yes and no all at once. Jon released his hand, and he hauled himself up the sagging guide-line into his ship with one arm, the bottle clutched to his chest in the other.

Once inside he banged on the lock’s close bar with desperate haste. The doors hissed shut, silencing the cheers and farewells. He crossed the main compartment at a stumbling half run. When he reached the control board he tucked the bottle under his arm and slapped the pad that brought up the message:

The ship rumbled into life around him like a steel beast preparing to digest what had fallen into its belly. He stood there, silver hands locked on to the edge of the board like vises, eyes blindly fixed on the orange abort pad.

The battered panels covering the docking area ground back to reveal the starry void. There was a slight jolt as the clamps were released, then the ship started to fall slowly toward the waiting emptiness.

A minute later it emerged from the uncovered blister on Ananke’s stony, pockmarked surface into pale warmthless sunlight. The craft sideslipped, angling away, electronic senses casting for the next destination.

The abort pad still glowed as the time to change his mind ticked away. He closed his eyes, putting temptation out of sight.

The acceleration warning sounded. Ten seconds later the ship’s primary drive flared. Weight settled over Marchey, pressing him down as the ship flung him away from Ananke, gathering speed with every passing second.

At last he opened his eyes, and stood there watching the barren gray moon dwindle to a smeary dot on the screen.

Such a small, pitiful place. Ugly inside and out. Barely 20 km in diameter, scarcely enough gravity to attract dust.

Yet he could feel it pulling at him, raising a tide in his blood. The stupendous gravity of Jupiter was a weak force beside it. That could only captivate the body.

“Doctor,” he muttered tonelessly, “I diagnose a serious need for medication to help you recover from your time in near free fall.” He turned his back on the screen and lurched toward the galley nook.

A pad combination he knew by heart got him a cup of synthetic vodka from the dispenser. As always, the ship was ready to provide him with what he needed. All forms of escape at his fingertips.

He tossed it back, shuddering as it went down. When his eyes quit watering enough to see the pad clearly he called for another.

This one he raised in mock salute. “Well, I made it. I’m safe now.”

He laughed, but it had a hollow, mocking sound, and the expression on his face was not that of a man who has slipped free of a trap and regained his freedom.

Angel watched the shining blue mote centered in the star-flecked darkness of her bedroom screen dwindle and dim. When she could no longer differentiate it from the other glowing points, she turned the unit off.

The screen blanked, the light fading with it.

Her angel eye automatically shifted fo a combination of light amplification and infrared, allowing her to see in the gloom. But there was nothing it could do to help her find her way through the blackness that had descended inside her. Only one light could do that, and now it was gone.

She hung her head, admitting defeat.

There were so many things she had wanted to tell him.

But she hadn’t even said good-bye.

Angel heaved herself to her feet with a sigh. There was work to be done. Work at least was something she was good at. Good for.

Maybe if she filled all her hours with it, she could keep her mind off the endless, comfortless night that was the future.

Marchey managed to pry his eyelids open, even though they seemed to weigh several kilos each. Bright light crashed into his bloodshot eyes like broken glass fired from a shotgun. He squeezed them shut again to keep from getting holes in his brain.

He lay there for several seconds, steeling himself for another attempt. Groaning at the effort it took to lift his head, he squinted blearily around to get his bearings. Little by little his brain ground into action like a gearbox full of sand, rocks, and tar.

He licked his lips. “Yurk.” His mouth felt like a dog with mange had slept in it.

He found out that he’d passed out at the galley table, which explained why one side of his face felt flat and numb. Clear memories of his first and second helpings of vodka remained. He recalled using the table’s touchpad to check on his passenger, and remembered the drink he’d gotten himself as a reward for remembering to do so. After that things got kind of fuzzy.

A glance at the clock told him that twelve hours had passed since his last grip on reality. Wincing at the thunderous clang of his fingers against the auto-kitchen’s touchpads, he punched in an order for coffee spiked with brandy. He gulped it down greedily, scalding the fur from his tongue.

That fortified him enough to get his feet under him and totter off to take a shower. The ship’s real-water shower was more than a luxury; it was a lifesaver at times like this. In his delicate condition a sonic shower would probably have killed him.

Fifteen minutes later he returned to the galley, looking and feeling like he might be able to pass for human. He had changed into soft, baggy black trousers and embroidered slippers. Ignoring the water dripping from the hair at the back of his head, he pulled on a loose red-and-black tyon shirt.

He punched up a second coffee, straight this time, and forced himself to eat some sort of tasteless, nutritionally balanced breakfast cake that was gone before he quite figured out what it was supposed to be besides good for him.

When his cup was empty he considered a third, spiked again, but decided he’d better not. At least not yet.

There was something he had to do before he could talk himself out of it. Something best done when he had all his wits about him. Another drink or two of liquid courage might make him feel braver, but would only make the task more dangerous.

He had left the compartment housing the inship clinic brightly lit, as if its occupant were some sort of nocturnal monster the harsh glare could keep contained. Had such things been available, he might have even hung up a shitload of garlic and a gross of crucifixes just for safety’s sake.

He hesitated in the doorway, reconsidering his decision to eschew another drink. Surely just one more would be more help than hurt.

Right. Then one more after that. He stuck to his plan and made himself go on inside.

A deepening chill that had nothing to do with the temperature made him shiver as he approached the unibed. The unit’s sleek black sides had been folded up into patient transport mode, giving it a coffinlike appearance.

He went to the control side of the ’bed and gazed down at the skeletal figure of the man who called himself Brother Fist.

The old man lay there still as death, looking more like something recently exhumed than anything alive. Naked but for a blanket covering him up to his chest, the wrinkled parchment skin slackly draped over the bones of his emaciated body looked too gray and bloodless to be the skin of anything other than a cadaver. His eyes were closed and deeply sunken into their sockets. The liverish slash of his mouth hung slightly open. Only the faint rise and fall of his thin chest betrayed his tenacious hold on life.

Marchey knew that by all rights he should have been dead. Little better than death warmed over because of Form V cancer when he’d had Marchey kidnapped to cure him, his overthrow had been the beginning of the end. The Form V had immediately gone into its wildfire terminal stage.

The average interval between the beginning of terminal stage and death was a week. Anyone else would have been dead from it by now. But not Fist. Somehow he kept his decaying body and putrescent soul together by force of will alone.

Marchey laid one silver hand on the flat touchpad on the unibed’s side, the circuits in his prosthetic directly interfacing with its complex systems. Data whispered into his mind, soft as music from another room: Respiration slow and shallow [7/31], but consistent with patient’s condition. Pulse slow and thready [14], blood pressure low and steady [40s/28d], but CWPC. Blood gasses—

The data whispered on, Marchey interrupting every so often to tweak an adjustment in the life-support parameters. The ’bed’s neural fields were in Pain Suppression, Patient Immobilization, and Deep Sleep modes.

The old monster was fine just the way he was. Still alive, but dead to the world. A sleeping dragon, its fires banked and its hunger held in check. Although weighing barely over forty kilos and only days away from death, he was still almost as dangerous as he had ever been. As long as his mind functioned he would remain so.

Back on Ananke, Marchey had kept him locked in a storage room and buried under a sleepfield. The locks weren’t to keep Fist in, the sleepfield would see to that, but to keep his former subjects out. There was no way he could guarantee Fist’s safety, but he felt that he had a duty to do what he could to insure it.

The lock had seemed like a logical precaution. After all, his former subjects had ample reason to want at him. Most people would have been rabidly trying to get their hands on him, first to torture his secrets out of him, then lynch what was left after the interrogation.

But not the Kindred. They had learned their lesson and learned it well. To have any dealings with Fist was to flirt with destruction. He had enslaved them, tormented and murdered the ones they loved, perverted their faith, and stolen everything of value they had: the fruits of their labor, their freedom, their dignity, and their future. Fist would have seen to it that vengeance cost them all they had regained, and they knew it. They avoided him like the plague he was. After a few days Marchey quit locking the door.

Shortly after he had been given orders to go back on the circuit again he’d offered to take Fist with him and turn him over to whatever authorities would have him. It stood to reason that the people of Ananke would have a better chance of recovering from what had happened if the source of the infection were removed.

The offer had been made to the community as a whole through Jon Halen, who had already emerged as something of a leader. Or at least a spokesman for the consensus. The Kindred had never been much for leaders before Fist, and it was doubtful they would want any others after him. Unsurprisingly enough, Jon returned saying they would gladly be rid of him.

Since then Marchey had toyed with the idea of trying to get Fist to reveal what he had done with the spoils from Ananke. Standing in the shower with the water beating down on his aching head, feeling a tidal pull from behind and faced with the empty hours and days ahead, the idea had taken on a new attraction.

It would help divert his thoughts from… other matters.

“Sleepfield off,” he said, the unibed chiming in response to his command. 4‘Bring the patient around. Keep immobile and anesthetized.”

Wake the dragon. Up to now he had only let Fist rise up to a semiconscious state, first when repairing his broken arm and lacerated throat, then afterward during his daily check on him.

Marchey was perfectly willing to admit that Fist scared the living hell out of him. Anyone with half a brain would feel the same way. His heart beating faster in trepidation, he gripped the side of the bed as if to keep himself from running away. Playing with Fist was a dangerous diversion. Shaving his face with a hundred gigawatt mining laser would be far safer.

Fist’s crepey eyelids fluttered as he began to come around.

Marchey could not shut out the memories of Fist’s endless unapologetic cruelties. His utter delight in the suffering of others. The way he had nearly ruined his life. That brought him the tempting notion of shutting off the painfield as well.

The idea had its own dark magnetism, but he let it slide. Not only because it would be contrary to his Oath and all his principles, but also because he knew Fist would only sieze on it and use it against him. He had no doubt that the old man could surmount his own pain, then use it to cause someone else to suffer.

The frail draped birdcage of Fist’s chest rose higher with each indrawn breath. His bony hands twitched weakly.

Marchey resisted the temptation to step back. Not only was the old man’s breath unspeakably foul, reeking with death and disease, but he knew that the doors to a human chamber of horrors were about to open.

Fist’s rheumy, pus-colored eyes opened slowly, blinked. If he was confused, it didn’t show. The warped animus lurking behind those eyes stared out at what was around it with a cold, inhuman calculation empty of surprise or expectation or ungoverned emotion.

When Marchey was still in college he had visited Earth for the first and only time, and in a stone temple in a country named India seen a real live crocodile the monks kept there. It was said to be almost a hundred years old, one of the last natural-born specimens alive. The huge, cold-blooded creature had lain there half-submerged in its pool, regarding the world around it with that same fearless, carnivorous dispassion. Its soulless gaze assayed you as either meat or threat, and if you were lucky, it dismissed you as neither.

Fist turned his head to look up at Marchey, exposing the jagged scars Scylla’s talons had carved into his thin neck. He stared up at him for several long, unpleasant seconds before speaking.

“You’ve taken me… off Ananke.” Fist’s voice was a papery whisper, sibilant and reptilian. The disease in his lungs had gone into full-blown terminal stage. There wasn’t much more than a handful of functioning tissue left. All else was dark carcinomic growth, nightshade blooms spreading in the warm darkness.

“That’s right,” Marchey answered, reminding himself to choose his every word carefully. “You had pretty much worn out your welcome.”

Haaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Fist’s laughter was a bubbling ophidian hiss that raised the hackles at the back of Marchey’s neck.

“I suppose… I did at that.” The ghost of a shrug. “You took me away… so they could not kill… the poor old man… who has done… so much for them?”

Marchey shook his head, almost smiling because he had a chance to score a hit on the old man’s ego. “Not one of them raised so much as a hand against you. I guess you didn’t corrupt them as much as you thought.” Of course keeping him buried under a sleepfield the whole time hadn’t hurt. Fist could drive a saint to homicide.

“Or I taught them… better than they know.” His hand twitched dismissively. “No matter. What of… my Scylla?”

“Her name is Angel,” Marchey returned coldly, the pleasure he’d felt a moment before clabbering at the mention of her name and the memories it conjured. “Scylla was the name of the thing you tried to turn her into. But that didn’t work out so well after all, did it? Remember how she very nearly took your goddamn head off? She’s not Scylla anymore, and she’s not yours.”

Those cruel yellow eyes bored into Marchey’s face, commanding his full attention. “If she is… my toy no longer… she must have… become yours. You subverted her… supplanted me. That makes her… yours.”

Fist’s smile was a horrific thing. Again it reminded Marchey of laughing, scythe-wielding Plague in medieval art. “Isn’t she… a delightful possession?” He licked his thin black lips with a long gray tongue. “Young. Beautiful. Innocent. So eager… to please.”

“She’s nobody’s possession,” Marchey responded heavily. “She’s not a pet or a puppet. She’s her own person now. Nobody owns her—least of all me. Now that you’re no longer pulling her strings she has a chance at a life of her own.”

Fist’s baleful, unblinking stare held all the warmth of a breath of space. Under it confidence withered like an orchid blasted by frost. “You… abandoned her?” he asked, an ominous note of accusation sharpening his tone.

Marchey kept himself from looking away, feeling like he was pinned to a board under a microscope, being examined to see if he was fit for dissection. Besides, he wasn’t sure he could if he wanted to.

“Yes.” He hadn’t really abandoned her, but he knew better than to try to argue the point. In a war of words he’d be the first and only casuality.

“Then you have… doomed her,” Fist pronounced, looking pleased by the prospect.

“I set her free.” He couldn’t keep the defensive note out of his voice. “I gave her a chance to make something of herself.”

“You have… doomed her,” Fist repeated with a steely certainty that made Marchey’s blood turn to neocaine. He told himself that Fist was just trying to bait him. Angel’s life or death had meaning to Fist only as something he could use to his advantage.

Try as he might, Marchey still couldn’t resist the bait. He had to ask Fist what he meant, even though he was almost certainly playing into the old man’s hands.

“Explain what you mean by that.” It came out more of an appeal than the demand he had intended.

Fist ignored his question. He examined what small part of his surroundings were visible from inside the unibed, then turned his attention back to Marchey. “Where are you… taking me?”

Marchey shook his head, unable to let the other matter drop. “First tell me what you meant by saying I’ve doomed Angel.”

The bundle of paper-covered sticks that was Fist’s hand twitched in a gesture that said the matter was of no real consequence. “Nothing.” That rictus sardonicus of a smile again. “If she is… as you said… her own person… then her fate… is of her own making… and no concern… of yours.” He peered at Marchey expectantly. “Is that… not so?”

Marchey opened his mouth to answer, closed it. His crash course in dealing with Fist had taught him that anything he said would only sink him deeper in the morass. So he reluctantly left the matter unresolved and answered Fist’s question.

“We’re headed for a place called Botha Station.”

He saw something flicker across Fist’s masklike face. It was there and gone too quickly to be identified for certain. He didn’t think it had been fear, but it might have been… dismay?

Fist closed his eyes, his face unreadable. But the ’bed’s monitoring equipment reported a transient spike in his pulse rate. His reaction had not been artifice.

“I would rest a while,” Fist said imperiously, turning his head away. “Leave me.”

Marchey stared down at the old man, trying to understand what had just happened. Fist ignored him, his face inscrutable.

After a couple minutes he rechecked the ’bed’s settings, then reset the sleepfield on delay, allowing the old man to remain awake for another twenty minutes before it came back on.

He paused in the clinic’s doorway, gazing thoughtfully back at his passenger. The mention of Botha Station had hit a nerve, that was fairly certain. Giving Fist time to dwell on the matter might prove useful. And in case his suspicion was correct—

“We reach Botha Station in four and a half days, old man.” He left without waiting for a reaction, closing the door behind him.

“Then we have…” Fist whispered, something like a smile creeping out onto his shriveled face, “a deadline…”

Marchey had killed a couple hours at a compad, finding out what he could about Botha Station. It had been fairly educational, but put him no closer to understanding Fist’s reaction.

Botha Station was a regional control, secondary processing, and staging area owned by OmniMat, the second largest space-based mining and materials megacorp. Only AllMine was larger. Those two, plus United Resources, made up the Big Three—or the Unholy Trinity, as they were more often called. The next largest mining and materials combine after United Resources was not very large at all; anything even remotely capable of competing with the Trinity had been either gobbled up or driven out of business decades ago.

Botha was heliostationary, maintaining a position on the sunny side of Jupiter between the orbits of Himalia and Callisto, some 9 million kilometers out from Jupiter’s surface. Ugly little Ananke was over a third of the way around Jupiter’s vast bulk from Botha. While that was one hell of a distance to travel—some 18 million kilometers—it wasn’t really all that long a trip. Some of his house calls took over three weeks to complete.

The volume of space encompassed by Jupiter’s moons was huge, but it was a cozy neighborhood when compared with the Belt, which has a circumference roughly four times the distance between Earth and Jupiter. Although he couldn’t say so for certain, Marchey was pretty sure he had made at least one, maybe two trips completely around the Belt.

His review of the facts and figures about Jovian space were more than a little disconcerting, and he had come to the conclusion that he ought to get some sort of medal for utter and unalloyed obliviousness. He’d traveled hundreds of millions of kilometers and been to almost every part of inhabited space, and yet didn’t really have the faintest idea of where he’d been or how far he’d gone.

Studying the data on his pad, he’d been amazed by how heavily settled the Jovian system had become. Not so many years ago it had been the frontier. Only scientists and a few brave and crazy wilders had been willing to venture even farther than this, to Ixion Station—and beyond—in hopes of making their names and fortunes from Saturn’s lunar real estate.

Now, every moon was either settled or being exploited. There were habs everywhere. In near Leda a shipping tycoon named King—everyone called him Crazy Eddie—had set up an odd combination hab/hotel/pleasure dome that he’d built and brought all the way out from the Belt. In fact, a woman who’d accidentally fallen into Fist’s web while searching for an aunt a few years back had suggested asking King for aid. Jon Halen had contacted him just two days ago, and King had promised supplies on the next available transport.

AllMine and OmniMat were the big sticks in Jovian space. They had moved in and glommed onto what others had found or begun, just as they had done in the Belt, and before that on Mars. It was nearing the point where anyone who wanted to remain independent would have to move outward, toward Saturn. Already Ixion had become more of a way station than the end of the line it had been when he’d visited Ella there.

Somehow all of these changes had slipped past him, even though he had been sent to several stations and settlements over the last few years. One operating room looks pretty much like another—especially if you don’t give a flying fuck where you are. His ship was fully automated, following instructions from elsewhere. Ail he had to do was get aboard and it did the rest. More often than not he hadn’t even bothered to find out where he was bound next.

Looking back, he had to admit that he had been pretty well automated himself. Dr. Georgory Marchey, Robot Surgeon. Keep him well lubricated and he’ll give you years of trouble-free service.

Angel’s accusations kept coming back to haunt him. At each recurrence he would tell himself that caring where he went wouldn’t have made any difference. It would be like caring that every year you got a little older. It happened. Dwelling on it changed nothing.

So here he was, in the middle of the evening of his first day back on the circuit. He’d done his homework on Botha Station. He’d played cat and mouse with Fist, and still had his whiskers and tail intact.

Unsurprisingly enough, there was a drink in his hand.

That was another of the day’s great accomplishments. Admitting to himself that he couldn’t face the silence and the solitude without it. Knowing full well how easy it would be to let himself resubmerge into the sodden life he’d led before, he’d devised a strictly controlled regimen of alcohol intake. Prescribing enough to pacify, but not enough to pickle. He hoped the little rules and schedules would give him something else to occupy his mind.

At least it had blunted the feeling of being caged by the steel box of the ship, and stopped his restless pacing. Although he had his doubts that the dosage was high enough, he’d kept himself from upping it. At least so far.

He sat at the galley table, rolling his glass between his silver hands and trying to concentrate on the medical journal he’d called up on the pad propped before him. But instead of staying on a new mutagenic strain of parasite fond of vacationing in the islets of Langerhans, his mind kept drifting back to the cold, dimly lit tunnels of Ananke.

“Screw this,” he mumbled after reading the same sentence for the tenth time. He snapped off the pad in disgust and sat back, trying to put a name on the way he felt in hopes that would help him get a grip on it.

He felt… almost, well…

…homesick.

He scowled and gulped at his drink. What an utterly ridiculous notion!

It was just that he was having a hard time readjusting to life on the circuit. To the solitude. To semisobriety.

Still, he kept wondering how Jon was doing. And what about Salli and Ivor and Indira and Ray and Danny and Mardi and Elias and Laura and all the other people he’d met and treated? How were they getting along?

Then there was the sharp point on this pyramid of curiosity, the ten-million-credit question.

Was Angel all right?

He told himself that he kept wondering—all right, dammit, admit it, worrying—about her only because what Fist had said was stuck in his brain like a splinter, causing a festering doubt that infected all his thoughts.

You have doomed her.

Each time that sinister echo sounded again he reminded himself that this was the old psychopath’s genius. Fist wielded abnegation with the skill and precision of a surgeon. Just as he himself could put his prosthetics aside and reach inside a patient’s skull to smooth away an aneurysm or erase a tumor, Fist could just as easily reach inside a person’s head and twist their brain’s contents, warping pleasure into pain, hope into despair, and all certainty into a sucking quicksand of doubt.

He’s lying. Making it up. That was easy enough to say, but not to really believe. Marchey knew it wasn’t that simple.

The old monster was a consummate liar, but he could be just as easily telling the truth if he thought that would best serve his ends. He could be stitching the true and the false so seamlessly together that there was no way to tell where one ended and the other began, turning what he created into a straitjacket, a prison uniform, a jester’s motley, a shroud.

Only one thing was certain. Fist had wanted him to worry.

The old bastard had succeeded. In spades.

Marchey stared into his glass. Was there any reason he shouldn’t call Ananke to see how his former patients were doing? If something was wrong with Angel, they’d tell him. Even if it was something Fist wanted him to do, what harm could there be in it?

The only way to find out was the hard way.

He put his glass down and headed for the comm-board. Less than a minute later he was apprehensively waiting to hear the sound of a familiar voice.

Angel trudged back to her cubby. The normally graceful swing and flow of her movements had been reduced to the ponderous plodding of some clumsy machine by nearly thirty straight hours of physical labor. Her last and only break had been her disastrous farewell to Marchey.

Her green eye was glazed with exhaustion. It kept drooping shut on her. Not that she could see straight when it was open.

Her angel eye had no lid to sag. It faithfully reported her slow, lurching progress through the tunnels. Messages scrolled along the top of the lens’s view, firing back along her nano-encrusted optic nerve and into her fatigue-muddied mind.

her second silver self warned in pulsating red letters.

Angel had no idea what any of that meant. Nor did she care, now that she knew it was not instruction from God. Whatever tatters of concentration she could muster were wrapped around the strange way she felt. She knew she wasn’t moving her legs. She was only thinking about moving them, and her exo was doing the rest, carrying her slack, numb body along inside it. It felt odd, but not unpleasant.

Suddenly she felt something being pushed against her lips. She peered woozily down past her nose, saw her hand forcing a cake of manna into her mouth. She chewed the bland biscuit out of reflex, swallowed the dry crumbs. Her pouch. There had been manna in her pouch. Was that distant gnawing sensation hunger?

Before long her pallet hove into view, doubling and blurring as her organic eye lost focus and track. She couldn’t even remember having passed through the outer door to the chapel.

The next thing she knew she was stretched out on her bed, flat on her back and unable to move.

wrote itself inside her angel eye.

For the first time in memory her angel eye went dark of its own accord, shutting down so that sensory input from it did not keep her awake. Everything vanished in the darkness that followed. Her pale, haggard face grew lax as she began to sink into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

Moments later she was dragged back toward wakefulness by a loud, insistent buzzing sound. Her angel eye remained stubbornly dark, but she managed to pry the other one back open.

She was still blearily trying to make sense of the sound when it stopped. An instant later the meter-square main screen of her comm lit.

Angel’s breath caught in her throat as Marchey stared out of it at her like a face from a dream. Her heart raced faster and her head swam at the rush of emotions that surged through her. The comm had been left on standby against the one-in-a-million chance that he might try to call her, and against all odds he had!

She tried to get up, desperately wanting to get closer, to touch him if he was real, to answer if he was calling her, but her silver-armored body lay stiff, as if cast from solid metal.

Panic set in. She strained and twisted, trying to flog her body into motion but only able to lift her head slightly off the pillow. Commands to her traitorous limbs were swallowed up by a silent nothingness that furled tighter with every exertion.

wrote itself in fiery red print inside her still-dark angel eye.

Angel’s head fell back, her breath sawing in and out in ragged sobs. Her head spun. Dizziness made everything unreal. She couldn’t think straight, couldn’t tell if she was really awake or trapped in a nightmare, wanting to reach him so badly the need was more than she could contain; but her exo and her weakness defeating her.

The last thing she saw through the tears welling up in her eye was a smile appearing on his face.

She tried to smile back—