Scylla frowned as the echo of another almost-memory whispered through her mind, a taunting, impossible remembrance of a time before she was an angel, when—
Her silver-clad fingers dug into the galley’s tabletop, the hard plastic furrowing and tearing like putty. Her black-webbed mouth tightened into a thin, hard line.
Deceptions. On every side, even on the inside.
As much as the man Marchey troubled her, it was being away from the Eden of Ananke, away from Brother Fist’s love that had exposed her to all this doubt and deception and confusion in the first place. He should never have—
Scylla’s one human eye squeezed shut and she shivered, aghast at how easily and often such blasphemy came into her mind. How had she fallen into such a morass of forbidden thoughts and wickedness? How had her soul become so tainted?
She must atone. That knowledge—that commandment—tolled in her mind in a voice as great as God’s. It was deafening. Irrefutable as the need to breathe.
Yet something inside her clenched as tight as her silver fists in denial.
No. There would be no atoning this time. If she was failing a test of faith, so be it. The blame was not hers alone.
Refusing the commandment to atone brought intense physical pain, an agony to match that delivered by her prayer-box. Enduring it was a kind of penitence of its own. That realization allowed her to endure the torment of refusing the commandment crackling through her nerves.
The doubting angel rode out the searing pain, until it passed, and the subtler torment that filled the hours after, counting each moment until she returned to Ananke as an eternity.
Five days after Marchey had found an angel in his room, he arrived at Ananke. It was one of the smaller outer Jovian moons, an irregular stony lump just over 20km in diameter. The screen over the main board showed its unattractive face as they approached. He hardly gave it a second disinterested look. Most of his attention was on the unpleasant descent into the grim barrens of sobriety.
Apparently Ananke was not a very friendly place. As they approached it a recorded message came in over the comm, warning them that under no circumstances would they be allowed to land. All incoming and outgoing cargo was to be left on their orbital doorstep.
Scylla had given an override command that let them land after all. She told him that his was the first outsider ship to do so in over seven years. Somehow he didn’t feel particularly honored.
They passed through an open-shuttered blister on Ananke’s pockmarked surface and into its interior. The shutters had closed after them like the jaws of a huge trap, leaving them in a narrow stone gullet. Since the moon had been given some spin, in was up. His stomach insisted on another opinion.
When they came to rest a battered, often-patched locktube blindly sought the ship’s lock like an eyeless lamprey. It finally found its mark and locked on. His own airlock began cycling, flashed orange, and aborted. He had to acknowledge a warning about poor air quality before it would finish the cycle. The pressure read as barely acceptable; any lower and he and Scylla would have needed to take antiaeroembolants to avoid the bends.
The airlock door hissed open at last. He wrinkled his nose and shrank back as a staggering wave of foul-smelling, overused air rolled over him. Scylla prodded him impatiently from behind.
Marchey had become increasingly phobic about leaving his ship over the last two years. To make matters worse, the D-Tox tab he’d taken earlier to purge the alcohol from his system had left him feeling wrung out and wincingly sober, his senses shriekingly acute and his nerves like bare, overheated wires.
He stood there at the threshold, all but gagging on the fetid air and on the verge of hyperventilating. Every instinct told him to close the lock back up and get the hell out of there.
Scylla had other ideas. This time she gave him a shove. “Start walking, or I will drag you.”
He hunched his shoulders. Taking a deep breath, he forced himself to step through the lock and begin pulling himself through the creaking tube, silver hands clamped tight on the guideline. Ananke’s innate gravity was negligible. Most small moons and asteroids were spun up to create a semblance of gravity. Here it appeared that the process had been begun and then abandoned. It felt like there was not much more than a tenth g, which was far too close to free fall for his comfort.
His ship used a combination of acceleration and spin to maintain at least a half g at all times. Most hospitals had low- or null-g sections, but surgical procedures were always performed in at least a half g. Null-g sex might be delightful, but surgery was a nightmare in it. Blood, rather than pooling, tended to cover everything like a thick coat of paint.
The tube ended at an airlock large enough to handle cargo. Both inner and outer doors were open. Scylla herded him through them, out onto a wide, shallow ramp leading down into a man-made cavern used as a receiving bay.
There were eight or nine people in the cold, dimly lit bay, shadowy figures laboring to unload an orbital container. Slowly at first, then in a stumbling rush, they abandoned their work and started toward him. Something about the way they moved reminded him of the street beggars he’d seen on Earth in a city named Calcutta back when he was twenty.
He watched them draw nearer. His eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the gloom enough to let him see them clearly when Scylla came out behind him.
The people below cried out as one and flung themselves to their knees on the rocky floor. He turned to see her gazing out over them, nodding in satisfaction. There was something like a smile on her webbed lips.
“Yes, Brother Fist’s angel has returned,” she called out, her voice echoing hollowly off the stone walls. “Stand and welcome her back into your love.”
Scylla took his arm. One by one the people below struggled to their feet and formed a double row at the foot of the ramp. Most had their heads bowed and their hands clasped loosely before them.
Those that could.
They started down. Marchey’s eyes had adjusted to the dim lighting by then, and what he saw chilled him to the bone. Each and every member of the unhappy honor guard had the gaunt, haunted look of a concentration-camp victim. The best dressed among them wore little more than rags, even though the temperature in the bay had to be in the single digits.
Every one of them was in one way or another maimed and crippled.
They came abreast of the first in line, a gaunt black man with downcast eyes. He was missing one leg and leaned on a homemade plastic crutch. The hand on the crutch-brace was a blunt misshappen knot. His other arm ended at the wrist. The face of the woman next to him was a mass of purplish scar tissue wrapped around one brown, fearful eye. Similar scarring covered her neck and disappeared down the front of her torn and greasy coverall. Marchey did not need to see the few strands of hair left on her pale, blistered skull or the tremors that racked her thin frame to recognize the signs of severe radiation exposure.
Marchey ached to reach out and wipe the pain away, to see if her face could still be found under the horror that had been done to it. But Scylla towed him relentlessly down the line past a man whose arms had been broken and not properly straightened before they set, which had left him looking like he had an extra set of elbows. Across from him was a coughing woman with black blood on her lips and and a body warped by arthritis.
It seemed he had been brought here for good reason. It appeared he had his work cut out for him.
Still, to make her and these others stand here like this! “All right, Scylla,” he said curtly, “I’ve seen enough. Unless you have a very good medical facility—which looks pretty damned unlikely—I can treat these patients better in the small clinic on my ship.”