Tin Woodman

by David Bischoff

  The stars, the stars—how dull, lusterless they were—marbles on the black pavement of the sky to scoot about, click into foolish games of the circular logic of a child . . . child . . . child . . .

  The stars melted, congealed into the image of Kervatz’s face, wet with perspiration that should not exist in the temp-controlled operating theater. It loomed before her, gigantic, close to hers. His body trailed out behind him to a tiny point—a place far away, a place she wished she were, A place of cool luster, sun-dappled snow . . .

  . . . trees stark green against glittering white. A fairy dream, pixie . . . dancing its pleasant cold that didn’t hurt against her heart as she peered down from the safe, warm skimmer, her friend driving.

  Karen’s voice broke the sweet crystalline silence. “Tell me about your father, Mora.”

  Father. So long ago. On Earth, so strange. His face was like father’s wrapped up in hospital walls. Mora. Mora. I’m so sorry.

  Father, hospital, all white like silent snow . . .

  . . . the room was bone-white. Gauzy curtains about a window framed a piece of outside: gray sky, roofs of other buildings, an occasional aircraft cutting through the smog. Mother holding her hand. Clammy, her hand . . . uncomfortable, like all of her felt now. On a high bed with a plastic cover was Father, much too high to see. But she saw the machines. The wires and the tubes. The things running into the sickly green sheets lumped up on the bed. Father was there, yes . . . she felt him there.

  Not good . . . sick . . . ill . . . not good. The pain . . . it scared her like nothing she had ever felt before . . . not like Mother being angry, or falling down, clump. It was a pain that went places so deep, so scary; that fell into holes without bottoms.

  “. . . I understand . . .” The doctor speaking to Mother, who looked so desolate. “We should go into the lounge. A shame you didn’t have enough insurance . . .”

  Mother pulled her behind, clutching her hand hard, walking too fast. Don’t be sad, Mother. Don’t hurt. I hurt too when you hurt.

  “I understand,” the doctor continued, when they were in another room. “The financial burden—keeping him that way.”

  Mother lit a cigarette, which made Mora feel better; it was a part of Mother—better than the hospital smell. “You’d think with all advancements medical science has made—” Mother said in a choking voice.

  “It was a terrible accident,” said the doctor. “No one could have been prepared . . .”

  “Death is like life, isn’t it?” Mother said. “Nobody is ever prepared for either.”

  “We’ll let you know,” the doctorsaid. “Again, I’m sorry.”

  It was all so confusing. She was frightened. Inside, she ached.

  The doctor stood, left. It was like he had never been there.

  “Mom,” she said plaintively. “C’mon. Let’s go home. I don’t like to be here. I don’t like to be around Dad this way. Can we take him home?”

  And Mother grabbed her arm so hard, shook her till her teeth rattled. Her face was like a monster’s. “Don’t you understand, you little shit? You’ll never see Dad again! Never! Can’t you feel that with your goddamned Talent your goddamned father insisted we keep? Damn you, Mora.” Her teeth were clenched; tears were running out of her eyes. “If you weren’t here, maybe I’d have the money. But oh no. He wanted a little girl, no matter what the cost is these days. And he didn’t know it, but it cost him his life. Damn you to hell!”

  At first all she felt was numb shock. And then the pain began, fiercer than she’d ever felt before, even worse than when they took her to the special doctors to have her tested. It slipped into her mind like a hot knife: her flash of hatred, barbed with her words. Never see Dad again? Never? Never? And Mother seemed so very distant, running away . . . leaving her alone . . . separated . . . so all alone.

  Mother let go, and she found herself falling onto the carpeted floor—falling and screaming, it hurt so much.

  Suddenly, her mother was pulling her up again, clutching her hard, and she felt waves of sorrow and self-hate from her. “I’m sorry, baby. Oh, God, Mora, I didn’t mean it, darling. Forgive me.”

  Other people were around them now, their alien feelings crowding her, making her feel closed in. She threw her little arms around Mother’s neck, and sheltered herself in familiarity . . . but Mother seemed so strange now, so distant.

  She didn’t understand . . . she didn’t understand at all.

  A finger. The tip of a finger grew before her eye. The finger was holding up an eyelid, and it moved away enough for her to see the vague shapes of ghostly people-things before her.

  “She’s fighting it,” said a voice.

  An angry voice responded, “Well, what do you expect?”

  It was all so white. So very white. She felt the pressure of the finger ease and her eyelid slid slowly back.

  But it was still so white . . . so very white . . .

  “He died when I was four,” she says, looking at the silver-white snow as it slides by beneath the skimmer. “I don’t want to talk about it now.”

  “Sure,” Karen says. “Fathers usually mess up a girl’s mind, in some way. I understand. How about your mother?”

  “Right now, she’s on a colony. A planet circling Fomalhaut. She went there when I was six. I’ve not seen her since. She sent money and letters.”

  “Around Fomalhaut? What’s the name of that planet—can’t remember. I’ve heard about it. Warm. Always warm. Not like here—right now it’s anything but warm.”

  “I like the winter,” she responds. “It’s so peaceful.”

  “And are your thoughts peaceful?” Karen asks.

  Mora turns around in the passenger seat of the skimmer, looks at her friend steering wildly over the drifts, like waves on a white sea. “You don’t know?”

  “Wasn’t sure you wanted me in your head, just now. You look so somber. Oh hell, that damned wind.” She takes her hands away from the controls, catches at her long red hair. “Hey—hand me my hat.” It is tucked down below the seats. Mora hands it to her, and Karen pulls it down over her ears, pushing her hair up under it.

  I wish she wouldn’t be so reckless, Mora thinks.

  And you worry too much, you know? Relax, Karen thought-casts. Enjoy the scenery.

  The landscape is beautiful. Though the skimmer isn’t enclosed and the heating stasis-bubble isn’t working well, and the wind at eighty-nine kays an hour is fierce, it is worth it. The pale blue crystal dome of the sky in these mountains is like no place else Mora has ever been. Karen is keeping the skimmer down low, almost grazing the tops of trees. Some are tall white cones, their branches alive with foliage laden with ice and snow. Others stand stark, gray, solitary—like sentinels guarding some precious unknown. Looking behind them, she sees the path of the skimmer—how the white powder has been whipped into whirlwinds by their passage.

  Karen reaches under the seat and pulls out a flask. She unseals it, takes a drink. She makes a face and hands the container to Mora, who swallows a gulp of the stuff with effort. “Worst whiskey in the world,” she comments. “Has to be.”

  “Yeah,” Karen agrees, steering the skimmer suddenly into a. great leftward arc, heading off toward the frozen lake. “Rig’s stuff. He’s really not very good at it, yet. Keeps trying.”

  “I think he’s carrying self-sufficiency too far,’” Mora says. “Better just to go into town.”

  “I think Rig would have a seizure if he had to deal with a Normal,” Karen says, laughing. “I really do.” The thought strikes both of them as tremendously funny and Mora doesn’t stop laughing until Karen nearly runs the skimmer into the roof of a cabin near the lake. “Geez, Better take her up a hundred meters or so,” Karen says.

  “Better not get any drunker,” Mora says. “You’ll kill us both.”

  “Sometimes I don’t believe you’re real, Mora.
How did you get to be such a worry-wart in fifteen years?”

  “I’ve had a lot to worry about.” Suddenly, Mora feels the need to communicate the calm, the joy that she has experienced here so far away from Normals . . .

  A roar splits the air, shaking the skimmer. Karen leans forward, intent on her manipulation of the craft’s controls. Mora looks up. There, above, is the red glow of a shuttle craft, speeding across the sky. The thunder dies away.

  “Damn thing,” Karen says, finally regaining control of the skimmer and looking up with Mora. “We caught its shock wave.”

  “It’s a cargo shuttle,” Mora comments. “Only things big enough to generate a shock wave like that. Probably resupplying the Orion, which is in Earth orbit right now, expecting a—”

  Karen interrupts. “You certainly know enough about those things.”

  “My father was a shuttle pilot. I don’t really remember him, of course, but I got interested when I was at school . . .” She lets the sentence trail off, falling into thought. “You know, the Philadelphia Starport is just a few kilometers away. The rest of the world is just beyond those mountains—it seems so far away . . .”

  “This is the world,” Karen insists. “What’s out there . . . well, the Normals made it. Let them live in it.”

  A sudden fear grips her. A fleeting foreshadow of loss . . . ? “And if they decide they don’t like us here, grouped like we are?”

  Karen doesn’t answer. Mora looks out at the horizon. Darkness is falling so suddenly . . . it isn’t really that late, and yet it is becoming harder and harder to make out anything. “I won’t let them blank me. I want to live,” Mora says suddenly, not understanding why. She turns to Karen.

  Karen is gone. The skimmer is gone.

  “It’s finally taking effect, Doctor.”

  Finally . . . finally . . . finally . . . final . . . fin . . .

  Darkness comes. It congeals into a light-veined gel which seems to suck her down, smothering her. With a vivid flash, she remembers everything. But the darkness relentlessly drags her down toward a yawning chasm. “Damn you all!” she screams with her mind. “I want to live!”

  It is a revelation.

  But the darkness is deaf as death itself.

  Ston didn’t think it was too serious an injury. But his left hand hurt, and by the time he reached MedSec it was swollen.

  He and Bif Hersil, another newly commissioned ensign in the engineering section, had been doing some maintenance work. They’d been lifting a heavy piece of metal shielding into an airlock, preparing to go EVA and repair a portion of the outer hull which had sustained minor meteorite damage.

  “Pretty brainy work, this,” Hersil had griped amiably, his teeth clenched with the effort of hoisting the plate. “For this I learned hyperspacial field mechanics?”

  Ston had been holding the metal plate by its other end. “A haIIowed tradition—hard work, the initiation of the green officers.” But unlike most “traditions” of the Triunion Space Service, this one ostensibly had a purpose. The greatest danger aboard a starship as huge as this was that the crew would start thinking of it as a self-sustaining world. Let them do a little machine-work, reasoned the brass: maintain the hull, clean the air-filtration and waste-circulation units; then they won’t forget so easily where they are.

  “You got a good grip?” Bif had nodded. “Let’s move it, then.”

  As Ston had begun to back into the airlock, however, he was distracted. For just a moment he thought—he was sure—that someone had called out to him. Not Bif—no, it had sounded like . . . it had sounded like Adria, his sister.

  Which was impossible, because Adria was dead.

  In that disoriented moment the metal plate had slipped through the fingers of his right hand, falling hard against the frame of the airlock door and pinching his left hand beneath it for just a moment before crashing to the floor.

  So now Ston was sitting slouched in a MedSec waiting room chair, in full pressure suit minus gloves. The duty nurse looked up from paperwork, squinting hawkish young features at him when a small plastic mound on his desk blinked pink. “Ah—someone will be with you in a minute. Don’t let them amputate. We’ve only got right hands in stock for grafting purposes.” Ston knew him casually. Ven, something or other. Ven showed perfect white teeth in a smile.

  Everybody in the service seems to have teeth like that, thought Ston. Well, dental implants were a part of the Service Health Coverage Plan. Ston still had his originals, but he was seriously considering new ones. Maybe it was good for them all to have perfect teeth and broad shoulders here on the good ship Pegasus. They were all heroes, weren’t they? On Earth, Crysor, and Deva, anyway.

  Pain, Ston decided, was making him unaccustornedly cynical. Yet it was true: explorers of new lands, discoverers of new riches, bringers of knowledge, the human beings who crewed the starships were indeed heroes on the home worlds. The starships themselves, creations of the vast pooled technologies of three worlds, had become uncomfortably like objects of worship themselves.

  So what did that make him? he wondered. A high priest of the Order of the Cog? Lugging steel plating around, yet.

  “You all right?” Ven asked.

  Ston realized he’d been ignoring the nurse. “My hand just hurts,” he mumbled. “If you don’t hurry this process up, I’m going to bleed on your desk.”

  “Hey—don’t blame me,” Ven protested. “I’m just—” A door at the end of the waiting room slid open and a middle-aged, dark-haired man in a MedSec uniform entered. He stopped at the duty nurse’s desk to have a word with him. Ston couldn’t hear most of what he said, but he picked up the name “Mora Elbrun.”

  The temptation to walk over and join the conversation was strong, but Ston resisted it. He knew about as much concerning Captain Darsen’s injury two days ago as most of the crew, which was very little. Those members of the bridge crew who had witnessed it had been ordered to keep tight teeth on the subject. It had been rumored that Tin Woodman had somehow caused the incident before it vanished. And that Mora Elbrun had been involved. Ston remembered talking to her, less than an hour before she’d . . . done whatever she’d done. Try as he might, he couldn’t imagine how she—

  “You waiting to see a doctor, son?” The man at Ven’s desk had turned toward him, was addressing him.

  “Yes, sir.” Ston rose and moved to him, extending his bandaged hand. “Bit of an accident.”

  “Let me see that.” The man carefully unwound the rag which Ston had wrapped around his left hand. “I’m chief surgeon. Dr. Kervatz. Don’t believe I’ve met you.”

  “Ensign Ston Maurtan, sir,” he responded, watching apprehensively as Kervatz took the hand by its fingers. Experimentally, the doctor grasped the thumb with his other hand, moved it, just a bit. Pain shot through Ston’s hand; he couldn’t help the ragged intake of breath, the low moan.

  “Hurt?” Kervatz inquired, half-smiling.

  “I guess you could say that, sir,” he replied, testily.

  “It should. You’ve had an accident. We fragile machines can’t afford being careless. Pain is our body’s warning system—and if s a kind of penance too, I think.”

  “Sort of a cruel way of seeing it, sir,” Ston interrupted, his hand still throbbing. Realizing he was out of line, he tried to backpedal—“I mean—”

  “No, no,” Kervatz said, nodding absently, preoccupied with something else entirely it seemed. “It certainly doesn’t behoove me, that particular philosophy . . . Well, in any case, young man, my expert guess is that you’ve fractured your phalanx.”

  “Sir?”

  “Most likely a hairline fracture in one of the bones of your thumb. Nothing serious, but smarts like the devil, I dare say. Go down to 4-B, have a nurse scanner it to confirm my hypothesis. She’ll set it, if that’s what you need. And have yourself relieved from active duty for forty-eight hou
rs. My orders.”

  “Thank you, sir.” He flashed a sincere smile. Forty-eight hours was generous. Backing away, a bit overwhelmed by being attended to by the chief surgeon himself, he didn’t notice the young MedSec doctor coming through the door. There was a glancing collision; Ston turned to apologize, but the man didn’t seem to care at all, his attention directed entirely on Kervatz.

  “Elbrun is in 4-A,” the young doctor said, “resting well. She’s strong. We’ll be able to proceed with the second injection on schedule.”

  Ston stopped, listened. They didn’t even seem to notice his presence.

  Kervatz frowned. “You seem pretty eager, Scandon. You’ll be pleased to know that I’ve turned the matter over to you.”

  “Me, sir?”

  “That’s right. You need the experience. Not that anything’s involved. The first injection did most of the preliminary damage, although it won’t take if she doesn’t get another in twenty-four hours. You’ll notice that she’ll begin to show normal responses to her surroundings before that time, though most likely they’ll be feeble. Like you said, she’s strong. She’ll fight. I’ll double-check you from time to time, of course.”

  Ston noted the pleasure Scandon was taking in all this. It made him feel ill. Before they noticed he was listening, he turned into the corridor, walked a few steps until he heard the door slide shut behind him. He stopped and tried to collect his thoughts.

  Injections? Mora Elbrun was a Talent—like Adria. And she’d done something . . . harmed Darsen? If so, she’d be Doped—Adria had told him all about that. There were very strict regulations about Talents.

  He had to find out.