His voice was a low rumble. “Just a pup, Master Khorog. I asked for a man.”
“Beggars can’t be choosers, Mister Zeal. This is what was on offer.”
Zeal stood up from the table and studied me with a curl on his lips, wiping his right hand against his apron. He pushed his left hand against the rust-dappled side of one of the surgical machines, causing it to move back on a set of caterpillar tracks. He stepped over a body that happened to be lying on the floor, scuffing his boot heel against the chest.
The voice rumbled again. “What’s your name, lad?”
“Peter,” I said, fighting to keep my nervousness in check. “Peter Vandry.”
He pushed the goggle off his eye, up onto his forehead.
“Your hands.”
“I’m sorry?”
He roared: “Show me your damned hands, boy!”
I stepped closer to the surgeon and offered him my hands. Zeal examined them with a particular attentiveness, his scrutiny more thorough, more methodical, than Khorog’s had been. He looked at my tongue. He peered back my eyelids and looked deep into my eyes. He sniffed as he worked, the curl never leaving his lips. All the while I tried to ignore the semihuman thing laid out on the operating table, horrified that it was still breathing, still obviously alive. The crewman’s torso was completely detached from his hips and legs.
“I need a new mate,” Zeal told me. He kicked the body on the floor. “I’ve been trying to manage ever since with this lobot, but today…”
“Temper got the better of you, did it?” Khorog asked.
“Never mind my temper,” Zeal said warningly.
“Lobots don’t grow on trees, Master Zeal. There isn’t an inexhaustible supply.”
The surgeon snapped his gaze back onto me. “I’m a pair of hands down. Do you think you can do better?”
My throat was dry, my hands shaking. “Master Khorog seemed to think I could do it.” I held out my hand, hoping he didn’t notice the tremble. “I’m steady.”
“Steadiness is a given. But do you have the stomach for the rest?”
“I’ve seen worse than that,” I said, glancing at the patient. But only today, I thought: only since I left Happy Jack flopping and oozing on the carpet.
Zeal nodded at the other man. “You may leave us now, Master Khorog. Please ask the captain to delay drive start-up until I’m finished with this one, if that isn’t too much trouble?”
“I’ll do what I can,” Khorog said.
Zeal turned smartly back to me. “I’m in the middle of a procedure. As you can tell from the lobot, things took a turn for the worse. You’ll assist in the completion of the operation. If things conclude satisfactorily…well, we’ll see.” The curl became a thin, uncharitable smile.
I stepped over the dead lobot. It was common knowledge that space crews made extensive use of lobots for menial labour, but quite another to see the evidence. Many worlds saw nothing wrong in turning criminals into lobotomized slave labour. Instead of the death sentence, they got neurosurgery and a set of implants so that they could be puppeted and given simple tasks.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
Zeal lowered his goggle back into place, settling it over his left eye.
“Looking in the rough direction of the patient would be a start, lad.”
I forced myself to take in the bloody mess on the table: the two detached body halves, the details of meat and bone and nervous system almost lost amid the eruptive tangle of plastic and metal lines spraying from either half: carrying pink-red arterial blood, chemical green pneumatic fluid. The tracked machines attending to the operation were of ancient, squalid provenance. Nothing in Zeal’s operating room looked newer than a thousand years old.
Zeal picked up the end of one segmented chrome tube. “I’m trying to get this thoracic line in. There was a lot of resistance…the lobot kept fumbling the job. I’m assuming you can do better.”
I took the end of the line. It was slippery between my fingers. “Shouldn’t I…wash, or something?”
“Just hold the line. Infection’s the least of his worries.”
“I was thinking of me.”
Zeal made a small gutteral sound, like someone trying to cough up an obstruction. “The least of yours as well.”
I worked as best I could. We got the line in, then moved onto other areas. I just did what Zeal told me, while he watched me with his one human eye, taking in every slip and tremor of my hand. Once in a while he’d dig into the wide leather pocket sewn across the front of his apron and come out with some new blade or tool. Occasionally a lobot would arrive to take away some piece of equipment or dead flesh, or arrive with something new and gleaming on a plate. Now and then the tracked robot would creep forward to assist in a procedure. I noticed, with skin-crawling horror, that its dual manipulator arms ended in a perfect pair of female human hands, long-fingered and elegant and white as snow.
“Forceps,” he’d say. “Laser scalpel.” Or, sometimes: “Soldering iron.”
“What happened to this man?” I asked, feeling I ought to be showing interest in more than just the mechanics of the operation.
“Hold that down,” Zeal said, ignoring my question completely. “Cut there. Now make a knot and tie off. God’s teeth, careful.”
A little while later, the engine lit up. The transition to thrust weight was sudden and unannounced. The floor shook violently. Equipment clattered off trays. Zeal slipped with a knife, ruining half an hour’s work, and swore in one of the ancient trade languages.
“They’ve lit the drive,” he said.
“I thought you asked…”
“I did. Now apply pressure here.”
We kept on working, even as the ship threatened to shake itself to bits. Scoop instability, Zeal said: it was always rough at first, before the fields settled down. My back began to ache from all the leaning over the table. Yet after what felt like many hours we were done: the two halves reunited, the interconnects joined, the bone and flesh encouraged to fuse across the divide.
With the patient sewn up, rebooted and restored to consciousness, I rubbed my back as Zeal spoke softly to the man, answering his questions and nodding now and then.
“You’ll be all right,” I heard him say. “Just keep away from any cargo lifts for a while.”
“Thanks,” the cyborg said.
The crewman got up off the table, whole again—or as whole as he would ever be. He walked stiffly to the door, pawing at his healed injuries in a kind of stunned wonderment, as if he had never expected to leave the operating table.
“It wasn’t as bad as it looked,” Zeal told me, when the patient had gone. “Stick with me, and you’ll see a lot worse.”
“Does that mean you’ll let me stay?”
Zeal picked up an oily rag and threw it my way. “What else would it mean? Clean yourself up and I’ll show you to your quarters.”
IT WAS A job, and it had got me off Mokmer. As gruesome as working for Zeal might have been, I kept reminding myself that it was a lot better than dealing with Happy Jack’s button men. And in truth, it could have been a lot worse. Gruff as he had been to start with, Zeal gradually opened up and started treating me…not exactly as an equal, but at least as a promising apprentice. He chided me when I made mistakes, but was also careful to let me know when I had done something well: when I’d sewn up a wound nicely, or when I’d wired in a neuromotor implant without causing too much surrounding brain damage. He wouldn’t say anything, but the curl of his lip would soften and he’d favour my efforts with a microscopic nod of approval.
Zeal, I came to learn, enjoyed an uneasy relationship with the rest of the Iron Lady’s crew. It must have always been that way, for ship’s surgeons. They were there to keep the crew healthy, and much of their work was essentially benign: the treating of minor ailments, the prescribing of restorative drugs and diets. But occasionally they had to do unspeakable things; things that inspired dread and horror. And no one was beyond the
surgeon’s reach, even the captain. If a crewman needed treatment, he was going to get it—even if Zeal and his lobots had to drag the man screaming and kicking to the table.
Most of the accidents, though, tended to happen during port time. Now that we were under flight, sucking interstellar gases into the ramscoop field, climbing inexorably closer to the speed of light, Zeal’s work tended to minor operations and adjustments. Days went by with nobody to treat at all. During these intervals, Zeal would have me practising on the lobots, refining my techniques.
Three or four years, Khorog had said. Longer if Zeal couldn’t find a replacement. With only a week under my belt, it seemed like a life sentence aboard the Iron Lady. But I would get through it, I promised myself. If conditions became intolerable, I would just jump ship in the next port of call.
In the meantime I got to know as much of my new home as I was allowed. Large areas of the Iron Lady were out of bounds: the rear section was deemed too radioactive, while the front was closed to low-ranking crewmembers like myself. I never saw the captain; never learned his name. But that still left a labyrinth of rooms, corridors and storage bays in which I was allowed to roam during my off-duty hours. Now and then I would pass other crewmembers, but apart from Khorog none of them ever gave me the time of the day. Zeal told me not to take it to heart: it was just that I was working for him, and would always be seen as the butcher’s boy.
After that, I began to take a quiet pride in the fear and respect Zeal and I enjoyed. The other crew might loathe us, but they needed us as well. Our knives gave us power.
The lobots were different: they neither feared nor admired us, but simply did what we wanted with the instant obedience of machines. They didn’t have enough residual personality to feel emotions. That was what I’d been told, anyway, but I still found myself wondering. There were nine of them on the Iron Lady: five men and four women. Looking into their slack, sleepwalker faces, I couldn’t help wondering what kind of people they had been before; what kinds of lives they had led. It was true that they must have all committed capital crimes to have become lobots in the first place. But not every planet defined capital crimes in exactly the same way.
I knew there were nine, and only nine, because they came through Zeal’s room on a regular basis, for minor tweaks to their control circuitry. I got to know their faces; got to recognise their slumping, shuffling gait as they walked into a room.
One day, however, I saw a tenth.
Zeal had sent me off on an errand to collect replacement parts for one his machines. I’d taken a wrong turning, then another one, and before I realised quite how lost I was, I had ended up in an unfamiliar part of the Iron Lady. I stayed calm at first, expecting that after ten or twenty minutes of random wandering, I’d find a corridor I recognised.
I didn’t.
After thirty minutes became an hour, and every new corridor looked less familiar than the last, I began to panic. There were no markings on the walls; no navigation consoles or colour-coordinated arrows. The ship’s dark architecture seemed to be rearranging itself as I passed, confounding my attempts at orientation. My panic changed to dread as I considered my plight. I might starve before I found my way back to the part of the ship I knew. The Iron Lady was huge, and its living crew tiny. If they had little cause to visit these corridors, it might be years before they found my dead body.
I turned another corner, more in desperation than hope, and faced yet another unrecognised corridor. But there was someone standing at the end of it. The harsh overhead light picked out only her face and shoulders, with the rest of her lost in shadow. I could see from her collar that she wore the same kind of overall as the other lobots. I could also see that she was quite pretty. The lobots were usually shaved to the scalp, to make life easier when their heads had to be opened. This one had a head of hair. It grew out ragged and greasy, tangled like the branches of an old tree, but it was still hair. Beneath it was a pale, almond-shaped face half lost in shadow.
She started back from me, vanishing into deeper shadow and then around a bend at her end of the corridor.
“Wait!” I called. “I’m lost! I need someone to show me the way out of here!”
Lobots never spoke, but they understood spoken instructions. The girl should have obeyed me instantly. Instead she broke into a running shuffle. I heard her shoes scuffing on the deck plating.
I chased after her, catching up with her easily before she reached the end of the next corridor. I seized her by the left arm and forced her to look at me.
“You shouldn’t have run. I just need to know how to get out of here. I’m lost.”
She looked at me from under the stiff, knotted overhang of her hair. “Who you?” she asked.
“Peter Vandry, surgeon’s mate,” I said automatically, before frowning. “You talk. You’re not meant to talk.”
She lifted up her right arm, the sleeve of her overall slipping down to reveal a crude mechanical substitute for a hand. This clawlike appendage was grafted onto her forearm, held in place by a tight black collar. I thought for a moment that she meant to shock me, but then I realised that she was only making a human gesture, touching the tip of her mechanical hand against the side of her head.
“I…talk. Still…something left.”
I nodded, understanding belatedly. Some of the lobots were clearly allowed to retain more mental faculties than others. Presumably these were the lobots that needed to engage in more complex tasks, requiring a degree of reciprocal communication.
But why had I never seen this one before?
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I…tend.” She screwed up her face. Even this stripped-down approximation to normal speech was costing her great effort. “Them. Keep them…working.”
“What do you mean, them?”
She cocked her head behind us, in the direction of wall plating. “Them.”
“The engine systems?” I asked.
“You…go now.” She nodded back the way I had chased her. “Second… left. Third right. Then you…know.”
I let her go of her, conscious that I had been holding left her arm too tightly. I saw then that both her hands had been replaced by mechanical substitutes. With a shudder my thoughts raced back to the surgical machine in Zeal’s operating room, the one with the feminine hands.
“Thank you,” I said softly.
But before I could leave her she suddenly reached out her left hand and touched the metal to the side of my head, running her fingers against the skin. “Wethead,” she said, with something like fascination. “Still.”
“Yes,” I said, trying not to flinch against the cold touch. “Zeal’s talked about putting some implants into me soon, to help with the surgery… nothing irreversible, he says…but he hasn’t done it yet.”
Why was I talking to her so openly? Because she was a girl. Because it had been a long time since I’d seen someone who looked even remotely human, let alone someone pretty.
“Don’t let,” she said urgently. “Don’t let. Bad thing happen soon. You OK now. You stay OK.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You stay wethead. Stay wethead and get off ship. Soon as can. Before bad thing.”
“How am I supposed to get off the ship? We’re in interstellar space!”
“Your problem,” she said. “Not mine.”
Then she turned away, the sleeves of her overalls falling down to hide her hands.
“Wait,” I called after her. “Who are you? What is…what was your name?”
She paused in her stiff shuffle and looked back at me. “My name… gone.” Then her eyes flashed wild in the shadows. “Second left. Third right. Go now, Peter Vandry. Go now then get off ship.”
ZEAL AND I were midway through another minor procedure when the engagement began. The Iron Lady shook like a struck bell. “God’s teeth!” Zeal said, flinging aside his soldering iron. “What now?”
I picked up the iron and wiped sandpaper across its ti
p until it was bright again. “I thought the scoop fields were supposed to have settled down by now.”
“That didn’t feel like a field tremor to me. Felt more like an attack. Pass me the iron: we’ll sew this one up before things get worse.”
“An attack?” I asked.
Zeal nodded grimly. “Another ship, probably. They’ll be after our cargo.”
“Pirates, you mean?”
“Aye, son. Pirates. If that’s what they are.”
We tidied up the patient as best we could, while the ship continued to shudder. Zeal went to an intercom, bent a stalk to his lips and spoke to the rest of the crew, before returning to me. “It’s an attack,” he said. “Just as I reckoned. Apparently we’ve been trying to outrun the other ship for weeks. Quite why no one thought to tell me this…” He shook his head ruefully, as if he expected no better.
We were a long way in from the hull, but the impacts still sounded like they were happening next door. I shuddered to think of the energies being flung against the Iron Lady’s already bruised armour. “How long can we hold?” I asked.
“Come with me,” Zeal said, pushing the goggle up onto his forehead. “There’s a reinforced observation bubble not far from here. It’s not often you’ll get to see close action, so you might as well make the most of it.”
Something in Zeal’s tone surprised me. He’d been annoyed at the interruption to his surgical work, but he still did not sound particularly alarmed at the fact that we were being shot at by another ship.
What did Zeal know that I didn’t?
As he led me to the observation bubble, I finally found the nerve to ask the question I had been meaning to put to him ever since I met the girl in the corridor, several weeks ago. Now that he was distracted with the battle, I assumed he wouldn’t dwell overlong on my questions.
Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds Page 31