Flesh and Silver

by Stephen L. Burns

  After a few moments the picture built back up line by line, but in a low-resolution monochrome.

  Ludmilla was no longer alone.

  “Hey there, Gory,” drawled the man now standing beside her with his arm around her waist, his voice sounding hollow and synthetic. The loose open-throated shirt he wore showed the ritual scarifications on his chest, put there when he had achieved manhood on Mandela.

  Marchey dropped into the chair before the console, gawping back in surprise. The man smiled at him, looking tired, but enormously pleased by the reaction he’d provoked.

  “Surprised?” he asked.

  Marchey nodded. “I sure as hell am, Sal.”

  It took Marchey a few moments to figure out what to say next. “No wonder I couldn’t reach you back at the Institute,” he managed at last.

  Sal gave him a crooked grin. “I ran away from home.”

  Marchey remembered the ominous comment made by the man who had taken over Sal’s desk. “I think they want you back. Quite badly, in fact.”

  “I’m sure they do. I, ah, appropriated a few items from the Institute when I left.”

  “You always did have your eyes on that Kamir holosculpture in the lobby.”

  Sal looked pained. “Actually, I had to leave that behind.” He shook his head ruefully. “Hated to, but I had all I could carry.”

  Marchey knew what he was supposed to ask, and obliged his old friend. “What did you take, then?”

  Sal shrugged his thin shoulders. “Oh, just everything MedArm needed to start turning out more Bergmann Surgeons.”

  It took Marchey several seconds to get his mind around that. “You’re joking, right?”

  “I wish I were.” Sal’s face was utterly serious now.

  “I don’t get it. You’re saying MedArm wanted to take over the program and start making more of us. Aside from the fact that they allowed the Institute to be largely autonomous, I thought they had decided we were—how was it they put it?”

  “Unworkable” Ludmilla put in. “ ‘An intriguing but unworkable dead end.’ ” A sardonic chuckle escaped her. “How could we argue? If there is one thing flat-butt bureaucrats should know, is dead end.”

  “So why the sudden change?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Sal shrugged. “I can’t say for sure, Gory. There’ve been a lot of changes in MedArm over the last few years, not many of them for the better as far as I can see. A lot of new faces in key positions, and damn few of them with any sort of medical background. Real sweethearts, some of them.”

  “I think I met one of them when I tried to call you earlier today. A man named Schnaubel. He was sitting at your desk like he owned it. Pleasant fellow. All the warmth and charm of an ice-covered proctoscope. He seems to be looking forward to your return.”

  Sal nodded. “I imagine he does, and I sure hope he has to get used to disappointment.” He hesitated, biting his lip. Ludmilla gave him a reassuring squeeze, whispering something in his ear. He nodded, then stood up straight, like a man facing a firing squad.

  “I took them by surprise, Gory. Not because I was clever or anything like that. They just didn’t expect me to do anything.” He spread his hand in a helpless gesture, looking Marchey in the eye, appealing to him to understand.

  “I haven’t been much more than a figurehead in charge of an empty shell for a long time now. It’s been years since I’ve had anything to do with scheduling or itinerary. MedArm took that over, and I couldn’t do one damn thing to stop them. About four years ago I went to them, trying to arrange a convocation for all of you. I figured it would do you good to get together again. It has always killed me to see all of you so isolated, so alone.”

  His face hardened. “My request was summarily refused. The reason I was given was that it would be a, quote, ‘inefficient disposition of resources’, unquote.”

  “We’re being used very efficiently,” Marchey said heavily, remembering Angel’s accusation. He also remembered his angry denial. Had she come too close to a truth he hadn’t wanted to face?

  “We are still people, but they do not treat us so,” Ludmilla said quietly, “We are little better than robota now.”

  “Yeah,” Marchey agreed. She had used the Czech word Karel Capek had given the world in his play RUR: Robota. Slaves. Robots.

  “We robota have no rights. No say in how we are being used.” Her tone sharpened. “After a while we robota become so worn-out we are needing replacement. We become too troublesome to maintain.”

  “Or it looks like a better robots can be made,” Sal added. “I got a call from an old friend inside MedArm, someone who had been culdesacked—”promoted’—into a trivial job with no real power. Some information she wasn’t supposed to see happened to cross her desk. She warned me that MedArm planned to ‘retire’ me, take over the Institute, and start cranking out a new batch of Bergmann Surgeons. Crash Priority.”

  Marchey shook his head in confusion. It was late, and this was too much to absorb and understand all at once. “I still don’t see what brought on this sudden reversal of policy.”

  “I can’t say for sure,” Sal said, “but I don’t think it’s coincidence that all of this seemed to start right after you found a way around the Nightmare Effect.”

  Marchey’s first impulse was to dismiss the idea. But on second thought, it did make a certain amount of sense. He himself had wondered if it might be possible to restart the program, now that at long last a cure had been found for one of its most destructive elements. The next generation of Bergmann Surgeons might be able to lead something like normal lives.

  But why the big fucking hurry to restart something the powers that be had been insisting was a failure? Why the power play? He said as much to Sal and ’Milla.

  “The obvious conclusion is that they want the program strictly under their control,” Sal answered glumly. “But what would that give them that they don’t already have? They already have total control over you and ’Milla and the others.”

  He sighed, looking down at his hands. “You were right, Gory.”

  “About what?”

  “About things turning out like this. I remember when Med Arm first instituted the circuit. You said that all of you had been reduced to nothing more than specialized medical machinery—to tools. I told you you were wrong.”

  His tone turned apologetic, edged with self-recrimination. “I was wrong. It only made a bad situation worse. In the beginning I had a say in your disposition, but when I complained that they were running you too hard, they started cutting me out of the loop. The harder I tried, the worse things got.” He raised one hand, let it fall in a helpless gesture. “I had to give up before I made matters worse.”

  “You’ve stood by us all the way, Sal,” Marchey said quietly. Ludmilla nodded in agreement.

  “Have I? The most useful thing I’ve been able to do for years now was to just be there when one of you needed a friend.”

  “That is thing to be proud of, love,” Ludmilla told him, one silver arm hugging him tight. He stared at her a few moments, then back at Marchey, still looking like someone who believed he had done more wrong in his life than right. Marchey knew how he felt.

  “When I heard what Med Arm was planning, I knew I had to do something. So I asked for a couple weeks’ vacation. They were glad to grant it because it would put me conveniently out of the way when they took over the Institute.”

  Something of the old Sal appeared in his grin. “Well, I fooled the fuckers! I grabbed all the critical stuff—the hypnoregimens, tests, and the rest—wiped everything else, leaving dummy files in their place. ’Milla happened to be there for some repair work on one of her arms. So I showed up at her airlock, told her what was going on, and here we are.”

  “Where’s here? And what are you going to do next?”

  Sal made a face. “Here is nowhere, and I wish to hell we knew. We really didn’t have time to plan ahead. ’Milla disabled her ship’s transponder, scrambled
the circuits that let them control the autopilot, and we hightailed to the outer edge of the Belt because it’s a good place to lose yourself. We were kind of hoping you might know of a good place for us to hide until we get this mess straightened out.”

  Marchey scrubbed his face with his hands, totally at a loss. The only thing that came to mind was the question he’d wanted to ask Sal in the first place. So he asked it.

  “By the way, have either of you ever heard of the Helping Hands Foundation?”

  Sal and ’Milla exchanged a puzzled glance. Sal shook his head. “No, why?”

  “I’ll tell you some other time.”

  The unlikely fugitives watched him expectantly as he sat there, his thoughts stumbling through all he had just heard like it was some sort of mental obstacle course. He was beginning to get a sneaking suspicion that somehow all this crazy stuff was connected. Nothing he could put his finger on, just a feeling.

  He rubbed his eyes, forcing himself to put all that aside. Right now the important thing was figuring out some safe place for them to hide. Some out-of-the-way place where the people around them could be trusted not to reveal their presence.

  At last a question with an easy answer. Maybe even a great answer if this Helping Hands Foundation was some half-ass bunch of incompetant do-gooders.

  “I know just the place for two renegade doctors to go,” he told them with a chuckle, pleased that he could be of some help to his old friends after all. “It’s not much to look at, but I’d trust the people who live there with my life.”

  —

  Coffee.

  No brandy in it.

  Slouched in the galley seat. Chin propped in his hand like a cut-rate copy of Rodin’s Thinker. Its head was generally made of hollow bronze. People forget that.

  He’d already been up for over three hours, having given up on sleep as a lost cause and dragged himself out of the sack quite a bit earlier than normal. All he had been doing was tossing and turning anyway. He had gone back to bed after saying good-bye to Sal and ’Milla, but the occasional fits of uneasy slumber had been filled with disturbing dreams that had him grinding his teeth and curling into a protective fetal ball.

  He had dreamed of the people of Ananke, all slat-ribbed and hollow-eyed, chains on their legs, and silver arms like his own held out in entreaty. Walking among them, he had tried to pretend they weren’t there. One by one they they had crumpled behind him, whispering gratitude as they fell. Another had a colossal Brother Fist prodding him through a dark maze, laughing at him when he stumbled into dead end after dead end while desperately trying to reach the small silver figure sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand at the maze’s center. He had a rope to throw her. It was around his own neck. Not a restful night.

  The morning, however, had been highly productive. He had spent most of it pacing. Back and forth. Around in circles. Getting nowhere just as fast as his feet could carry him.

  It was as if his world had fractured into an antique jigsaw puzzle. But no two pieces would fit together, and what the finished picture would be was a mystery. Or if the pieces did fit together, he couldn’t see the congruence.

  Pieces like: What was MedArm up to? Why were they trying to cut Sal out and take over the Institute— which was independently funded from Bergmann’s estate, and supposedly autonomous as long as it met certain basic requirements MedArm itself had set?

  And what, if anything, did that have to do with them letting some foundation do their relief work for them on Ananke?

  He scowled and slouched lower, eyes half-focused on the steam curling up from his cup. Just like those nebulous vapors, there didn’t seem to anything he could get a solid grip on.

  Maybe Sherlock Holmes could figure this mess out, but he sure couldn’t. He took a sip of his coffee, put the cup down. Drinking nothing but coffee and staying sober was supposed to have let him think more clearly. So far all it had done was send him to the head twice and make him more jittery than ever. Much more and he’d end up spending the rest of the morning alphabetizing his socks.

  A glance at the clock reminded him that in just under half an hour Fist would be waking up. Which in turn reminded him that he had a whole other puzzle to deal with. One probably twice as insoluble and considerably more dangerous, a cryptogram that could put him in a crypt.

  He toyed with his cup. In a way he almost had to admire the diabolical old bastard. There he was, on his way to be turned over to the authorities, so close to death that he could probably read the population number from the welcome to hell sign. So what does he do? He laughs and jokes and tries to play with my head. He drops hints that there’s something going on I should know about, and tries to draw me into playing guessing games about what he wants in trade for telling me about it. As if he—

  Marchey froze, coffee cup halfway to his mouth, eyes going wide with realization.

  There was something going on. MedArm was trying to force Sal out and take over the Institute. So they could restart the Bergmann program. Their own way, whatever that was.

  Fist had done considerable research into the Bergmann Program. Enough to find a way around the Nightmare Effect. Which meant he had an information pipeline into it. But—

  —But Sal had just told him that the Institute had been cut completely out of the process of choosing where the Bergmanns went and who they treated. Yet Fist had known precisely when and where to send Scylla to grab him. That could only mean—

  —he also had a pipeline into MedArm!

  Marchey sat up straighter, brow furrowing as he followed that line of reasoning.

  Everything Fist did was based on information. He learned all there was to learn about something, pinpointing its strengths and weaknesses.

  He proved that he knew enough about Bergmann Surgeons to subjugate me, using my own ethics against me. He hinted that he knows all about this business with the Helping Hands Foundation—which leads back to MedArm again. Which means—

  The old bastard probably knows exactly what MedArm is up to. All of it. He’d as much as come right out and said so. Some of the information was sure to be locked away in those files Jon has so far been unable to crack, but the whole picture is stored away inside that tumorous reptile cage Fist has for a brain.

  Some of what he’d said could be construed as an offer to hand over part of that information. To help.

  But why would he want to change sides?

  Allegiance. Fist had said that, hadn’t he?

  But his only allegiance was to himself. He had no more loyalty than a gun or knife or bomb. Marchey remembered the old man saying that he had once worked for countries and corporations as a—what was it he called himself?

  A phagewar specialist. He had been, in effect, a mercy. A freelance soldier of misfortune who would work for you if properly motivated.

  What motivates me?

  “Damn,” he muttered, his line of reasoning turning circular. It was like the old fairy tale about Rumplestiltskin. Guess my name. Only in this case it was Name my price.

  Marchey sat back, pondering Fist’s motivations.

  He has some sort of stake in all this. Botha Station figures into it. There’s something he wants. But he won’t come right out and say what it is. He has to make a game of it…

  Marchey sat very still, sensing but not quite clearly seeing the shape of the puzzle piece in his hand. He thought back over all Fist had said to him, searching for a clue.

  Challenge. Reward. Accomplishment. Fulfillment.

  He can’t keep himself from playing deadly chess with people’s lives. Until I came along he had won the game on Ananke. He could have lived like a king, but instead had lived an almost monkish existence. Why?

  Because the winnings didn’t matter to him?

  Because only the game itself mattered?

  Because… only the game was real?

  That seemed close, but not quite right. Then it turned itself around in his mind, taking on a whole new shape and meaning.

 
Because he was only real—only truly alive—when he was playing?

  It sounded too bizarre to be possible, but then again so was the man himself. Rather than rejecting the idea out of hand, he tried using it as a lens for examining the situation.

  Several things suddenly sprang into clear focus. For instance, he’d put the old man under a sleepfield right after his fall. That should have slowed the progress of his disease to some degree. But it hadn’t. Instead, his condition had soon after turned terminal. Yet he seemed to have hit some sort of plateau since first being awakened here on the ship.

  Since he started playing with me. Almost as if that fed him, gave him a reason to keep living.

  Marchey’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. What was it he said?

  Even love. I love life when it puts the sweet raw stuff of possibility in my hands.

  But that wasn’t all. Right after he’d said—

  It’s put that same sweet stuff in your hands as well.

  What cards am I holding? Maybe jokers and deuces, but no aces.

  After a moment Marchey sat back and began to chuckle to himself. The game was still a mystery, but he was beginning to get an idea as to what his next move ought to be.

  If jokers are all you hold, then that’s just what you have to play.

  —

  Marchey beamed down at his gruesome patient and passenger. One sweet warm shot of scotch was nestled in his belly and on his breath. Another had been carefully splashed onto his clothes. He could smell its tantalizing scent with every breath. The slight flare of Fist’s nostrils told him he smelled it, too.

  In one hand he carried a glass, in the other a bottle.

  Grinning like he had a head full of laughing gas and saying not a word, he put the glass aside and went to work.

  First he racked in a second bottle next to the bottle of sterilized in the unibed’s liquids dispenser, this one filled with amber fluid. The tap of a pad filled the siptube with liquid gold. Then he clipped the tube next to the one for water, where Fist could reach it just by turning his head.

  “There you go,” he said jovially as he straightened back up. “Have a snort, old man.” He retrieved his glass, held it up. “Be sociable. It’s Happy Hour, and the drinks are on me.”