Flesh and Silver
by Stephen L. Burns
“You think the technique we’re perfecting here is inexplicable? That it smacks more of magic or psychic mumbo jumbo than science? Listen, when it comes to the human brain we still have more questions than answers. All higher-order mental activity remains essentially an enigma. Hear the music in the background? That symphony was created by the blob of meat in Mozart’s head! Can you explain that?”
For Sue-Ryn
1. Medical History
Dr. Georgory Marchey cracked open his second quatriliter of Mauna Loa of the evening and refilled his glass. His movements were smooth and precise, his hands steady as the proverbial rock.
Mauna Loa was a pale, golden whiskey made on Kilauea, one of the Hartman habs orbiting the volcano-riddled, seething sulphurous surface of Io. Named for an active volcano back on Earth in Hawaii, the liquor was famed systemwide for its flavor and potency. Marchey raised the glass to his lips with a gray-gloved hand and took a sip, again savoring the faint hint of rumlike sweetness it left on his tongue.
He put the glass back down by the half-eaten remains of another local delicacy served by the Litman Memorial Hospital commissary, force-grown prawns the size of his thumb fresh from Callisto. Poached in wine with slivers of garlic and tomato chunks, then served in the resulting sauce over angel hair pasta and dusted with grated Romano cheese, they were good. No doubt about that.
But the whiskey was better. Even if it only came in little runty quatriliter bottles.
The truth of the matter was that he would have given the whiskey more attention than the food even if it had only been the flavored algaecol that passed for liquor most places off Earth and the Moon.
After all, you couldn’t get drunk on shrimp. Even when they’ve been poached in wine.
Drinking more heavily than normal after a procedure was as much a part of his routine as another surgeon’s scrubbing up beforehand. Usually this sacred rite was observed in the austere privacy of his own ship. He’d retreat there as soon as possible after his work was done and start knocking them back the moment the hatch closed behind him.
Here at Litman Memorial, the larger of the two central hospital wheels augmenting the many smaller clinics scattered throughout Jovian space, he’d been derailed. Upon arrival he had been informed that a crew from a local shipyard was standing by to give his packet its triannual hull-integrity check, and given not quite two minutes to vacate. At that very moment the interior spaces of the ship he called home were charged with inert gas at a pressure of over four times normal—hardly a homey atmosphere. The test was slated to last at least another couple-three hours.
With luck and dedication he’d be passed out cold long before then. Which meant he would have to stay the night in the room he’d been assigned here. Not a pleasant prospect, but drinking would make it bearable. Drinking made everything bearable.
Layovers happened, and you made the best of them. As he would then. Denied the safety and solitude of his ship, he would have opted for a private restaurant and the anonymity it could provide. The nearest one was on a hab a measly five thousand kilometers away, but the next shuttle there didn’t leave for over two hours. The need for a drink was far too immediate to make such a wait a workable solution.
Which was how he’d ended up in the staff section of the hospital wheel’s commissary.
In the midst of the enemy.
The food was quite good, the service tolerable. The décor was deplorable, the ambience execrable, the company overtly hostile. The important thing was that they served alcohol. Not every hospital provided that amenity.
Almost as if purposefully devised to make his situation as uncomfortable as possible, the only free table had been dead square in the middle of the room.
He’d taken it anyway. There was some liquor back in his room, but not quite enough to get where he wanted to go. Besides, getting his hands on some Mauna Loa was the only enjoyable part of this stop. There was no place to buy a flagon or three outright, but the commissary bar stocked it, table service only.
So there he sat, well aware that he was very much the center of attention, enjoying the sort of guest-of-honor status accorded the cadaver in a dissection. All around him his erstwhile colleagues eyed him coldly, probed and prodded with harsh whispers pitched just loud enough to reach his ears. Even without the silver biometal pin on his chest they would have known who and what he was. Hospitals were like small towns. Word travelled fast. Pariahs can expect no privacy. Union rules.
Whatever else Bergmann Surgeons lacked or had lost—and the list was considerable—their unhappy notoriety remained.
What these fools didn’t know was how little their hatred and contempt meant to him anymore.
His bland, indifferent gaze settled on one particular couple scowling at him from a table in the corner. He thought he recognized the woman from that afternoon. Maybe a cardiovascular surgeon? His only real lasting impression had been of a dark, hawkish face and bile-bitter comments, some in Arabic.
He raised his glass toward her in salute, grinned and winked like they shared some sort of joke, then inhaled the three fingers of whiskey. Her face closed like a fist.
Marchey barely noticed. His attention had drifted back to the alcohol warming his insides. Over the years that had become his sole criterion for judging the places he was sent: How was the booze?
The commissary was a wonderful place. Top shelf.
Other than that, the hospital was indistinguishable from the last and would be no different from the next. The same sterile steel/stone/ceramic corridors swallowed him up and spat him out. The same faceless insensible strangers were his patients. The same blurry, disapproving faces watched him do what they could not, outraged by his presence—his very existence—and impatient to see him gone. The same half-heard ugly comments greeted him, dogged his heels, bid him bitter farewell. This afternoon, now, next time; all were only moments from a past, present, and future that twisted back on itself like a Mobius treadmill that kept him plodding blindly along in the same place in spite of the millions of kilometers he travelled.
He knew he was at Litman Memorial only because of the crest inscribed on the dinner plate before him. Beyond that it was just a name. He hadn’t the faintest idea or slightest curiosity as to where he was being sent next. And as for where he’d been, well, most of it was indistinguishable from where he was then.
Most, but not all.
His smile twisted into a grimace as he refilled his glass. Half of it disappeared in one swallow.
Since he was one of the barely thirty surviving Bergmann Surgeons, and as such followed the itinerary set for him by MedArm, the branch of the UN Space Regulatory Agency in charge of all facets of off-Earth Health Care, Marchey led a life sharply divided into two unequal parts.
Ninety-nine percent of it was solitary. Safe. It was spent home aboard his automated ship, crossing and recrossing the vast desert of vacuum between human enclaves as he was shuttled from place to place and patient to patient. His adaptation to this part was nearly perfect. He could spend days, even weeks at a stretch adrift in a tranquil sea of alcohol, breathing in the endless lotus scent of nothingness, becoming a rootless, pastless, futureless part of it.
Here he sat in the middle of the other, smallest part. The ruins of his professional life. The part he lived for. The part that was slowly killing him.