Strange Trades

by Paul Di Filippo

  “That seems like no problem—Amy. Have you made the tour of our facilities yet?”

  “Yes. The pool is splendid, and so’s the gym. I really feel at home here. I think this week will turn out to be just what I’ve been needing.”

  “I hope so. Maybe you’ll recommend the clinic to your friends. Now, shall we begin?”

  She reclined wordlessly, her legs primly crossed at the ankles, yet somehow managing to convey a sense of wanton invitation.

  With restraint, I managed to touch her quite neutrally on the shoulders. An affair with one of my patients would have the Review Board down on me in seconds.

  I hesitated for a moment before leaving the external world behind. I still remembered the unexplained vertigo that had followed my last contact with this woman. Was there a cause-and- effect relationship I was missing, or had it been strictly coincidence?

  Time to find out, I figured.

  I dipped tentatively beneath her surface.

  Almost instantly I popped back out.

  “What quack did this to you?” I demanded.

  “Did what?” she asked, seemingly genuinely puzzled.

  “Your muscles are pouring out fatigue poisons. You may as well be running a daily marathon. No wonder your energy’s down.”

  “I was seeing a psychokineticist for a time. I prefer not to name names, though. He’s a friend of the family. I can’t believe he’s responsible.”

  “It’s the only explanation. He should have his license revoked.” Only then did I remember clutching the heart of the man in the restaurant. I swallowed my hypocrisy, tasting bitter gall. That had been different, hadn’t it? I was provoked, and drunk. Surely mitigating circumstances.

  “Can’t you just restore things, without knowing how they got that way? I won’t go back to him—I promise.”

  “It’s unethical—but without your cooperation, I don’t see what else I can do.”

  “That’s that, then. Let’s go on.”

  I went into her secret self of raucous tissues and proud bones once more, and began the repairs. So demanding were they that I had to exercise greater concentration than I had called upon in years. Time passed in a quantumless blur.

  Exiting, I anticipated the vertigo I had experienced at our first contact.

  It wasn’t there. But instead I felt an odd inner disturbance, as if, while rewiring Amy, some unseen individual had been busy inside me.

  “That felt wonderful, Doctor,” she said with a smile.

  Have you ever felt something slipping away from you and been unable to stop it? Perhaps a lover became unexplainably cold, without a reason you could discern. (If you knew what was wrong, you would change, wouldn’t you?) If you’re an artist, perhaps you felt your powers waning in inexplicable ways, as if fleeing misuse. (Could it be the drinking, the carousing, the hack work?) Or maybe it was nothing as easy to finger as these examples. Maybe it was just a diffuse sense of losing your grip on life; of becoming something you swore you’d never be.

  I think you’ll know what I mean now if I tell you this was how I felt during that period that coincided with Amy’s stay at the clinic. My mind felt like a dusty bottle of forgotten wine in a cellar no one would ever visit again. I made the rounds of my patients with such an absentminded, distracted air that I’m surprised none of them got up and left, rather than entrust themselves to such sloppy care.

  Cautiously, I plumbed my own depths at intervals, trying to ascertain the source of my troubles. A malfunctioning unconscious? There had been no more bad dreams. Something wrong in an objective physiological sense? If so, it was nothing I could pinpoint with my talents, a loss of focus more subtle than anything I could name.

  I fought not to let it interfere with my work, with mixed results. Amy’s progress seemed to be fine, her body gradually regaining normal functioning. I was proud of catching and reversing deliberate damage, and I found myself visiting her twice as often as necessary, performing the laying on of hands more than she actually needed to continue mending. I told myself it was innocent and motivated solely by the pleasure I took in wallowing in her healthy aura. She was a pleasantly cooperative patient, and I had experienced no more untoward side effects after diving her vibrant flesh.

  Other cases were not going so well. Hana’s, for instance. Hers was the only full facial biosculpt I happened to have that week. I don’t think I could have handled another. As it was, I barely handled hers. I began to treat her in a perfunctory manner. Are the melanocytes doing their job to get her complexion the right shade? Good, let’s get out. A little malformation in the mandibular area? Tweak it fast and forget about it. Why was I acting so unprofessionally toward Hana? I asked myself at lucid intervals: Did I resent her willful and vain decision to replace her natural beauty with a product of the fashion marketplace? I had had no such compunctions about similar cases, and could hardly afford them anyway, being one of those responsible for encouraging such trade.

  After a few days I deliberately ignored the dilemma. I went on like a talented zombie, reaming out the atherosclerotic arteries of the self-indulgent, dissolving adipose tissue, killing hair follicles in inconvenient places.

  The outside world seemed to be conspiring to remind me of what I was, and had forsaken. There was a disaster in one of the orbital factories; hundreds injured, including the resident physician. Medical volunteers were needed. I didn’t respond. Workers dismantling an archaic fission reactor received inadvertent rad overdoses. Repairing the cell damage required the talents of many peekers. I turned the sound lower for the rest of the newscast.

  One morning I was sitting alone in my office, dreaming that my talent worked on inorganic matter instead of living substances alone. What would I do then? Turn lead to gold? Make a fortune at the roulette wheel? Anything had to be better than what I was doing now.

  The door opened without warning, and Maggie hurried in, concern written plain on her face.

  “Doctor, I think you’d better come at once. It’s Ms. Morrell. Something’s happened overnight.”

  Together we rushed to her room.

  Hana’s racking sobs greeted us at the door. Lacking a mirror, she was running her frantic hands over the ruins of her face.

  All my work had been undone somehow. Instead of the porcelain-figurine features that yesterday had been almost finished, loose folds of corrugated skin hung in obscene draperies and convolutions. It looked as if someone had melted a plastic doll with a torch.

  “Oh, my Christ,’’ I swore, my stomach turning inside out.

  “I get readings indicative of a massive disturbance of the lymph system,” Maggie said. “Almost like elephantiasis.”

  Through her wails, out of her swollen lips, Hana cried, “Doctor, do something!”

  But I couldn’t bring myself to touch her.

  The man removed his hands from my face.

  “Someone’s been walking all through you like you were a public park,” he said.

  That was the last thing I had expected to hear when I had called in one of my colleagues. Madness, some strange virus, poisoning—a hundred implausible explanations had thronged my brain. Everything but the truth.

  “Just what the hell do you mean?”

  He regarded me with a minimum of cold sympathy. “Exactly what I said. One of us has been peeking you like a patient, and there was no way you could see it for yourself. Once he got in the first time, he set up dozens of blocks on your own talents, forbidding corrective measures or even recognition of trouble. After that he had free run of all your systems. And what a massive tangle he caused! It was very elegant work—some of the best I’ve ever seen. The goal seems to have been not to totally disable your skills, but rather to misdirect and ball them up. I’m surprised you didn’t kill someone, you were so screwed up.”

  I couldn’t believe it. But I had to. What else could it be?

  “So I caused the girl’s disfigurement?”

  “Damn right. Toward the end of her treatment, every move you m
ade had an unpredictable result, almost as if you willed your hand to scratch your nose and found yourself raising your foot.”

  “Did you calm her down and start repairs?”

  “Yes. And I think I managed to convince her to keep quiet about the whole thing. I had to promise you’d refund your fee and compensate her for any missed time at work.”

  “Good. And me?”

  “I restored everything I could spot. And with the blocks on your inner perceptions removed, you should be able to handle any residual cleanup.”

  “I owe you,” I said, getting up to accompany him out.

  “Just find out who did this to you, and stop him. We can’t tolerate a rogue.”

  I thought I could find out who, all right.

  But what could possibly be the answer to why?

  That night, clutching Jeanine tightly as she slept, I craved some certainty in my life. I penetrated her essential self, reading the record of her cells, searching for the imprint of past manipulation on gross morphological scales.

  All of my best efforts revealed no such tampering. She was as life alone had made her. But could I have any certainty in the result? Were my talents truly restored? How would I ever be certain of anything again?

  The night seemed like an endless cave without egress or a safe corner, Jeanine’s body a cold stone corpse, petrified by millennia of slow mineral drips.

  As the registered physician of Amy Sanjour, I had a limited access to her datafiles. I couldn’t get to her financial records or voting history, but certain innocuous biographical data that might have a bearing on her treatment were mine to command.

  I brought up her employment history. The current entry read UNEMPLOYED. That much I had known. She had counted on me looking no further, and I had unwittingly obliged. I scrolled forward now to the next entry, backward in time.

  PSYCHOKINETICIST, GRADUATED BANNEKER INSTITUTE 2045. SPECIALTY: NEUROPATHOLOGY. ABANDONED PRACTICE 2053 FOR PERSONAL REASONS…

  That bitch. But why?

  I went hastily through the rest of her files, looking desperately for some motivation. At last I came to one entry whose significance hovered at the edge of my understanding like a moth batting at a screen:

  SISTER, ELIZABETH SANJOUR, BORN 2029, DIED 2053. CAUSE OF DEATH: INTERNAL HEMORRHAGING INCURRED IN SKIING ACCIDENT.

  Skiing. The single word triggered memories I had tried so desperately to forget.…

  * * *

  Med school was so easy. I had always been a quick study, sharp and bright, and the chemistry and anatomy, dissection and lab work were a snap. When I tested positive on the Banneker exam, I was carrying a straight 4.0. Entrance to the institute was guaranteed.

  Even in the first few months there, I had no trouble. I remember how they started us on bacterial colonies and little quivering cubes of vatflesh, where our amateur psychic probes could cause no irreparable damage. Those initial forays into the mysteries of living tissue, combined with the new mastery over my own body, were heady experiences. I felt like God himself. When we were ready, they brought in the sick ones. I was eager to show what I could do, to cure and heal like a beneficent deity.

  I can’t explain why I had such an adverse reaction to the tainted auras of anyone suffering severe traumas or illnesses. It was the last thing I had been expecting. All I know is that when I dove the flesh of the cancerous, the mutilated, the dying, I lost all my nerve. Forgetting all I had learned, I floundered amidst their gaudy, excessive pain, as inept as a norm. I came out of their bloody shells shaking, tachycardia thundering in my chest, the requisite work barely done. I tried to hide it, but my instructors eventually found out. No therapy worked to cure me. I graduated only with the tacit understanding that I would enter biosculpture.

  That was why, when I came down the expert slope at Innsbruck and found the beautiful woman wrapped moaning around the pine tree, blood leaking from her mouth and staining the snow an unholy color, I just kept going, making for the lodge, where I notified the staff doctor, a norm. But by the time he and the rescue team coptered in, she was dead.

  I had thought no one at the lodge knew who I was.

  But I had been wrong.

  She rested peacefully in bed. When I entered, she sat up and brightened, donning her mask of brainlessness. She opened her mouth to utter some silly remark. But something on my own face must have told her the game was up. Her beautiful features underwent such a transformation that she looked like a new, more savage person.

  With malicious spite, she asked, “How are you feeling, Dr. Strode?”

  “Listen, Amy—”

  “Don’t soil my name, you murderer!” she spat.

  A burst of anger shot through me. What the fuck did she know about me and my life? Did she think I liked living with the knowledge of what I was? She had almost ruined what little beauty I had painfully ransomed from the hard and transient world, and all for selfish revenge for something I couldn’t have altered.

  As if reading my thoughts, she said, “You could have tried to save her, you crud. But instead you just zipped by.”

  I lost control then, and my hands went for her throat. I put no pressure on it, though.

  Not on the outside.

  If she knew my body from a week of sabotage, I knew hers from a week of loving treatment. Entrance was as easy as slipping into an old shoe. I knew that she was diving my flesh at the same time, eager for the kill. But my unconscious defenses were restored now, and I left my safety to them.

  Now she was going to learn just how good her own were.

  I swam her noisy arteries, heading for her heart. She stopped me in the atrium, where a squad of bright lights chased me off with lemon fire. I shot to her gallbladder, and squeezed burning bile into her duodenum. Before she could find me, I was up in her lungs, collapsing alveoli. She caught up with me there, and I barely escaped. I raced toward her brain, hoping to overload her synapses. A blockade was in place, a thorny mesh of blue hatred, and I had to be content with loosening her teeth in their sockets. I managed to snap a ligament in her shoulder on the way south. Lord knew what she was doing to me.

  For an indefinite time the battle raged, each thrust of mine being met with a swift reaction from her. Every inch of bloody ground I gained was recaptured by her prowess. I knew, simply from the fact that I wasn’t dead yet, that my own defenses must have been holding up as well.

  At last, in wordless concert, admitting the stalemate, we disengaged.

  I returned to a body in deep pain. The room swirled as I hauled myself unsteadily off her recumbent form. My limbs were puffy with edemas, and I was pretty sure one knee was broken. I wasn’t up to rationally cataloging the rest of the damage. My unconscious had its immediate work cut out. Already it was snapping painblocks into place.

  Amy looked no better. Her face was webbed with burst capillaries, and one hand hung awkwardly from a shattered wrist I didn’t even remember attacking.

  As we eyed each other suspiciously, something like remorse stole over us as we realized the full extent of our transgressions. Two physicians, bound by a sentimental, implacable oath half as old as civilization, trying to kill each other. Whatever had driven us evaporated—or at least subsided.

  “I could make a lot of trouble for you with the authorities,” I finally said.

  “And me for you.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  She was silent for some time. Grudgingly, she said, “You’re pretty good.”

  “You, too,” I admitted.

  “What the hell do you get out of this work?” she asked, waving her good arm to encompass the clinic.

  I shrugged. “A living.”

  She nodded, calculations plain behind her gorgeous eyes.

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I kept my mouth shut.

  Just when the silence seemed to stretch to the breaking point, she spoke.

  “I don’t forgive you, Strode, but—”

  “Yes?”

  �
��Maybe I can help.”

  No editor among the U.S. sf/fantasy magazines leaped at the sequel to “Skintwister,” but the story happily found a home with the perspicacious and welcoming Chris Reed in the United Kingdom. It occurs to me to mention now that both “Skintwister” and “Fleshflowers” owe their existence to Norman Spinrad’s kick-ass “Carcinoma Angels” another early instance of my imprinting on superior work, from 1967.

  I suppose the ending of this tale begs a continuation of Doctor Strode’s career, but it seems unlikely that I’ll ever write one. If a genre author is at all prolific, his or her career is littered with abortive series, orphaned by lack of interest from the marketplace, changing authorial aspirations, or a combination of the two. I myself have at least three such truncated story cycles, and will probably accumulate more.

  It’s all just part of the strange trade of fiction writing.

  Fleshflowers

  Here in exile, I have learned how much it is possible to miss the Earth.

  Oh, don’t mistake my meaning. It’s not as some repository of metaphysical meaning that I miss it. Birthplace of humanity, ancestral globe, big blue marble on a black cloth sprayed with diamond chips. What a load of bullshit. No, I miss only the luxurious life I had there, civilization and all its tinsel trappings. The money, the prestige, the women, the food and wine, sleek imported Brazilian cars and elegant Harlem apartments in the clouds.

  I can hardly believe now that I used to pity myself then. Sure, I had had a few rough breaks. Failures of will and nerve that rankled, disappointed expectations, evaporated dreams. But my work had its rewards—when it was going good, and I could lose myself in it—and the material comforts more than compensated for the spiritual pangs. Compared to the lives of most people, mine was an easy lark.

  Or so it appears now, from the vantage of another world. A world empty of everything I once coveted, a world where the glittering ranks of society consist of a few dozen men and women, preoccupied with science and survival.