Sal Bophanza appeared to have aged a decade in the four years since Marchey had last seen him in person. His glowing ebony skin had lost its sheen, and he seemed to have shrunk and slumped inside it. What had once been a wild black dreadlocked mane was now a thinning salt-and-pepper fuzz. His body had broadened and thickened, but his face had thinned, and it wore the resolute, resigned countenance of the captain of a sinking ship. As director of the Bergmann Medical Institute, that was uncomfortably close to his job description.
Sal’s smile was fleeting. “I try. The fact is we’re dead in the water here. When we first started having problems and the word came down our first crop was to be our last, at least for a while, I was angry. Now I’m glad. Jesus could heal, and got crucified for his trouble. Nobody’s nailed any of you guys up yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they got around to it eventually.”
Sal came out from behind his desk and began to pace. Marchey remained sprawled in his chair, waiting patiently. He knew Sal was working his way up to something. Probably more bad news.
“It really pisses me off,” Sal went on, his voice dripping disgust. “The system will use you when they don’t have any other options, but treat you like fucking pariahs before and after. The word has gotten around. Becoming a Bergmann Surgeon is the kiss of death. Even if the program weren’t on hold, it wouldn’t matter. We haven’t had an inquiry or application in over two years.”
“That’s probably for the best.” See, he could do understatement, too. Now to something he’d been dreading. “I heard that Sara-Lyn Neff, Josiah Two-trees, and Grace Nakamura all killed themselves. Is it true?” Three out of thirty-five. Not a positive trend.
Sal’s face fell, the anger leaking out of him. “It is. So did Ivan Kolinski.”
Four. Marchey shook his head sadly. “They were all damned good doctors.” Ivan had been an incorrigible practical joker. Once he had “borrowed” one of Josiah’s prosthetics while he was operating and replaced it with one made of foil-wrapped chocolate. The look on Josiah’s face…
It was easier to imagine him playing dead than being dead. Those four—all thirty-five of them—had been so full of life. Bursting with energy and idealism. So committed to the Healer’s Oath and to medicine that they had risked all in hopes of breaking ground to a new frontier. Well, they had, and become outsiders in the process.
“The best,” Sal agreed in a somber tone. “Ivan’s death was the worst of all. It was—” He closed his eyes a moment. “It was partially our fault. We brought him back here after he gave himself a near-fatal drug overdose on Cassandra Station. We had to make him stop practicing. He’d just gotten too erratic to be trusted.”
Bophanza stared down at his hands as if Ivan’s blood was on them. “He put himself in trance, put his prosthetics aside, and stopped his own heart. He left a note. It said that the way he had to practice now was killing him by inches, but without it he was nothing, and had nothing left to live for.”
He looked up at Marchey, his eyes moist and haunted. “He said he knew why we made him stop, and didn’t blame us. He… thanked us…”
“You didn’t have any choice,” Marchey offered, knowing nothing he said would ease Sal’s pain.
His old friend nodded mutely, then said, “It’s killing you all. I know that.”
Marchey made himself sit up straight. “Yeah, and knowing that is eating you alive. But I doubt that you called me back here so we could compare our beds of nails. I’m here. What happens now?”
Sal looked relieved to drop the subject of Ivan’s death. He parked his buttocks on one corner of his desk, taking on a brisk, businesslike air. “You go back out. But MedArm came up with an idea that might just make the best of a bad situation. You are each being assigned a high-speed UNSRA courier ship of your very own. No more depending on the schedules of the regular carriers to get from place to place. The ships are fully automated. We will handle logistics and itinerary from this end. See, MedArm agrees that your skills are far too valuable to be wasted. What you can do is still in demand—”
“Even if we’re not.” Marchey turned the idea over in his mind. “We can cover a larger area this way. Having our own ships will give us at least the illusion of having a place we belong, right?” He watched his old friend nod, and kept on doing his best to look at the idea in a positive light.
“Maybe it will even help our reputation. We’re constantly on the move to serve the greater good, not because we’re about as popular as tapeworms. Highspeed house calls in a back-assward ambulance.” He shrugged. “Why not? It can’t make things any worse.” Sal leaned closer, his face intent. “It’s still not going to be easy. But the couriers are big enough for two…” He raised one eyebrow and let the implication dangle like a baited hook.
Marchey snorted. “Then I’ll have lots of elbow room.” His voice dropped lower, and he looked Sal straight in the eye. “So we’re admitting that we’ve turned ourselves into nothing more than pieces of specialized medical equipment to be passed around on a rotating basis.”
“No, dammit, that’s not true!” Bophanza snapped. “You’re a healer, Gory! A goddamned good one! You and the other Bergmann Surgeons were some of the brightest, most dedicated doctors—”
“Were is the operative word, Sal.” Marchey spoke softly, but with steel-clad certainty. “I used to be a doctor. I remember what it was like. Doctors don’t give their patients nightmares. The mere sight of them doesn’t risk scaring the patient to death. Doctors treat people. I haven’t met one of my patients in years. They’re not people, they’re conditions. Diseases. Traumas. Unconscious and broken meat machinery.” He thumped his chest. “I know what I’ve become. Just a meat mechanic. That’s all.”
“No,” Sal insisted stubbornly, “That’s not true.”
“Bullshit!” Marchey roared, slapping his hands onto the arms of his chair hard enough to crack the veneered plastic. He realized that he was getting angry. But not at Sal, who had trouble enough of his own without being put in the position of an emotional punching bag.
“Sorry,” he said, getting up and going to lay a silver hand on Sal’s shoulder. “I’m not mad at you. Just at the way things turned out.”
“You have a right to be,” Sal answered wearily. “We all do.” In one way Sal had taken the hardest road of them all. Marchey smiled and squeezed his old friend’s shoulder.
“I remember when you flunked the final tests,” he went on. “They wouldn’t let you give up your hands. I remember how disappointed you were. How hurt.” He shook his head. “There was already a lot of heat on the program, a lot of controversy about what we were trying to do. People thought we were crazy, and maybe we were. I know how easy it would’ve been for you to have repudiated us and what we were doing to make yourself feel better about missing the final cut.”
He wondered if he could have showed half the guts and class Sal had displayed. “But you didn’t. You kept on believing in what we were trying to do. You took an even harder choice than we did, staying on to help us realize a dream that was denied you.”
“You don’t know how close I came to quitting,” Sal admitted softly.
“But you didn’t, and now you run the place. Your dream soured, but you kept on serving it anyway. It hasn’t gotten any sweeter or easier since then, but you’re still here. Still trying to make it work.”
He gazed up at the dusty emblem on the wall, recalling the hope it had symbolized, the pride he had felt every time he saw it. “Come to find out, we weren’t the lucky ones either. We gained an incredible skill, but lost everything else in the bargain. But we’re still keeping on the best we can because it’s all we have left. We can still be useful, and who knows, maybe someday…”