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 insi
des 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.
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