The part which evoked unwelcome reminders that there had once been more to life than this bottle and the dogged pursuit of oblivion. Love. Respect. Idealism. Hope. Friendship. A sense of place. Satisfaction. Optimism. Even imagination. One by one they had withered away, or been amputated by circumstance.
But what the hell, he thought, a small, rueful half smile appearing as he slumped back in his chair. Getting his nose rubbed in the pile of shit his life had become was just one more thing he had to endure if he wanted to continue being a Bergmann Surgeon. One more drawback. Not that it was so much a matter of want as being completely unable to imagine giving it up. The very thing that had blighted his life redeemed it, an irony of which he was well aware. At times it was even funny, a joke of the rubber crutch or exploding suppository variety.
Still, places like the commissary were dangerous. The pervasive, unmistakable hospital atmosphere, the being around other people; any number of things could summon up the unquiet ghosts of his past. There was no way to tell what might set it off. It might be a voice, a face, a gesture, a scent, or just the continual pointed reminders that he no longer belonged among his former associates. He no longer belonged anywhere, and sometimes situations like this cast him helplessly adrift on the anywhen between past and present.
Well, that was just one more reason to drink.
I think we definitely need some more anesthesia here, Doctor, he told himself, topping off his glass.
A snatch of conversation from somewhere behind him caught his ear, a sour comment about the way he was drinking, and a forgiving soul suggesting that maybe it was because of a woman.
Not anymore, he answered silently, Or at least hardly ever.
But this reminder sent his thoughts skidding back nearly ten years, conjuring up a tall, thin, green-eyed woman with skin and hair so pale she could almost pass for an albino in the empty chair across from him.
He closed his eyes and drained his glass. The whiskey went down like water.
But it didn’t wash away the memories…
There they were, sharing a restaurant table after more than eight years apart
Ella Prime drank it all in. The soft music, the candlelight and wine. Erratic flickerings of the old electricity leaping the gap between them. And memories.
So many memories. Crowding around the table at their shoulders and whispering in their ears; the best friends and most implacable enemies of two people who have come back together to see what remains of a lost love.
Ella watched Marchey refill his wineglass, wondering if he always drank this heavily, or if it was seeing her again that was driving him to it. She didn’t ask, and whatever the reason, at least it did seem to be helping him unbend a bit.
The four months of waiting for him to work his way to Ixion Station had given her plenty of time to dream of this moment. She had imagined their reunion as joyous and passionate, quite often fantasizing them going straight from the shuttle back to the privacy of her microhab, where they could peel the years off with each other’s clothes and start making up for lost time. Such thoughts made her ache with longing for his touch.
The first crack in the fantasy had come when one of her bug’s main thrusters had flamed out on the way in from her hab. She had gotten in all right, but that stranded them on Ixion Station until it was fixed.
Still, the where of it didn’t really matter that much, and the revealing blouse of sheer ivory silk and the skintight black skirt that showed off a mile of leg she’d worn for the occasion had been calculated to make the critical parts of her plan come to fruition in her fallback venue. As had her suggestion that they go to the room she’d hastily rented so they could “freshen up”—a code phrase from the old days.
He’d caught the signal, but pleading bad food on the shuttle, asked if they could first go someplace to eat.
The way she’d thrown herself at him it was no wonder the poor man had ducked! Cursing herself for moving too fast, coming on too strong, she’d brought him to this restaurant. She had to remember that a lot of water had passed under the bridge since she’d seen him last—a bridge she herself had burned. Building a new one this many years downstream was going to take time and patience.
But being near him again made that so very hard.
“What’s with the gloves, Gory?” she asked, to break the silence which had crept up between them. “Getting kind of obsessive about protecting those surgeon’s hands of yours, aren’t you?”
He laughed. “Something like that.” She couldn’t help noticing that his smile looked a little pained, and his laugh sounded forced and unconvincing. Avoiding her gaze, he inhaled half the wine he’d just poured.
“Hey,” she said, wondering what she’d said wrong and wanting to repair the damage. “That’s nothing. I’ve got mine insured for one hundred and fifty million.”
That made him look directly at her. “Really?”
She nodded, holding them up and wriggling her long thin fingers. “Bet your ass. These babies can turn fifty credits worth of clay into several hundred thousands’ worth of sculpture.”
“You’re getting that much now?” He chuckled and shook his head. “I remember the first time you cracked the thousand mark.”
Ella smiled. Now there was a memory…
“So do I.” But not as clearly as she remembered celebrating that event with him. He’d made the night unforgettable with dinner and champagne, a suite in a five-star-hotel and ten-star sex. Yet it was his absolute and utterly unselfish delight in her accomplishment she remembered best of all.
Less than four months later she’d broken it off, tired of coming off as second choice to his Bitch Mistress Medicine, and incidentally freeing herself to devote all her time to her art and the search for even greater fortune and fame.
Even now she couldn’t say for sure which had been the reason and which the excuse.
“It sounds like you’re doing pretty well, Ella.”
Career-wise, anyway. She shrugged. “That’s what my agent and my accountant tell me.”
The truth of the matter was that she’d grown almost absurdly rich and famous since then. Her rise in the art world had been meteoric. Now they called her a living legend. Each new piece she offered set off a bidding war. Almost pathologically reclusive, solitude had always been extremely important to her. Now she had it in spades, living in splendid isolation in a richly appointed microhab all her own just off a research station in one of the most isolated places imaginable. She had everything she’d ever wanted.
Except a life.
She gazed at Marchey, wondering if it was the sharp scent of her desperation that was putting him on guard. It was probably pouring off her in waves.
He had turned out to be the one big love of her life. Oh, there had been the random lover in the years since then, but nothing like what they had shared. Not even close.
Over the past couple years she’d begun to feel as hollow and brittle as a porcelain bust of herself. Her thoughts kept returning to the time Gory had been there for her, and seeing it as the high point of her life. Looking ahead, she’d felt like she was on a greased slide to the lowest. God, even the frigging critics had begun to talk about the “melancholy sense of existential loneliness that has come to permeate her work.”
Terrified by the future she saw hardening around her, she’d sought to re-create the past. She hadn’t quite begged Gory to come see her, but that was an option she’d been prepared to take. Just knowing he was coming had filled her with a hopeful new energy. The most recent works she would be shipping sunward on the returning transport would fetch the highest prices yet, she was sure of it.