Such thoughts made him uneasy. He knew where he was and what he had to do. That was enough for now.
A world of suffering waited to be eased now that the old order had come apart.
He went and put on his arms, the better to begin picking up the pieces.
3. Diagnosis
Today is the day.
Marchey didn’t look particularly ready for, or happy about it, however. Slouched on the bench seat of his ship’s galley nook, he had an elbow propped on the tabletop and his chin cupped in one silver hand. His second cup of morning coffee sat in front of him, missing no more than a single disinterested sip.
A pad rested on the plastic tabletop in front of him, its screen displaying the continuing-care files for the people he had been treating on Ananke.
The device might as well have been turned off for all the attention he was paying to it. His eyes were hooded, his gaze turned inward. His thoughts kept skittering away from the task at hand, skipping through the day ahead to circle—but never quite settle on—its end, like moths drawn to a light they dared not approach.
He found it hard to believe that three weeks had passed since he’d found an angel in his temporary room at Litman. More had happened to him in the short time since then than in the three years preceding.
So much had changed since that shanghai visitation. And yet so much remained fundamentally the same, locked imperturbably in old orbits and rolling inexorably onward as if nothing had happened.
There were times it seemed to Marchey that human existence—or at least his—was nothing more than a groove cut into a circular disc of time, just like on an antique phonograph record. ’Round and ’round you whirled, creeping incrementally closer to the music’s end. While the groove did give your life direction, the walls of the track abraded, grinding you down so that you fit it perfectly, and nowhere else. Even if you could jump the track, it would be pointless; you would only set yourself back, or skip ahead to a place you were bound to reach sooner or later anyway.
He shook his head, feeling his mood grow even darker. Picked up his coffee, took a sip, grimaced. It had gone cold.
A glance at the time told him why. Almost half an hour had been spent just sitting there, not quite thinking about all the things trying to creep into his awareness, and yet not completely shutting them out. Contemplating his navel and finding only lint.
He turned the pad off and pushed himself to his feet. There were a hundred loose ends he wanted to tie up before the day was over. He couldn’t afford to waste any more time sitting around playing hide-and-seek with the contents of his head.
Besides, you never knew when something might come up behind you, tap you on the shoulder, and say You’re it.
A drink—even a small one—would have been of immense help, but he had given that up. So far, anyway. Work was the only escape he had left, even though that was at least half of the problem.
Today was the day. No way to avoid it any longer.
So he headed toward the small inship clinic aft of the main compartment, hoping that work would be enough to make him forget, at least for a little while.
“Open your hand again.”
Jon Halen did as Marchey asked, still fascinated by seeing it work. He was stretched out comfortably on the soft padding of the shipboard clinic’s unibed, its sides folded down to turn it into an examination table.
Jon loved it here in the clinic. It was so warm and clean and brightly lit. And the air! Sweet and rich as wine—not that some wine wouldn’t be nice, too. Beer, even. After almost a decade of abstinence he wasn’t inclined to be fussy.
The hand in question was a three-fingered claw, the dark brown skin mottled with the startling pink of new tissue. It opened like a mechanical grapple; the stubby, rigid thumb opposed by two short unjointed fingers.
“Close it.”
The thumb and single-phalanged fingers came together like pincers, closing smoothly. Jon had gotten to the point where he no longer had to concentrate to make them work. He shifted his attention to Marchey’s broad, craggy face, pursing his lips thoughtfully at the grim expression there.
He’d watched the man who had rescued them become progressively withdrawn over the past two weeks, starting just a few days after his arrival. Turning dour and aloof. Putting all the distance he could between himself and everyone else. It was like he’d started leaving them even before the orders came down telling him to move on.
Marchey didn’t notice Jon’s scrutiny. All his attention was focused on the results of his handiwork. He knew he should be pleased by what he had accomplished, but couldn’t help thinking about what he could have done with proper supplies and more time.
“Hey, Doc, you know what I did last night?” Jon asked, a mischievous gleam in his brown eyes.
“What?” Marchey asked distractedly. It looked like he was going to have to admit that this was the best he could do under the circumstances. Jon’s hand had been crushed several years before and healed into a lumpy knot with the unmovable stumps of two fingers remaining. Over the space of four sessions he had freed up the fingers, reshaped fused bone and useless cartilage into a movable strut, molded atrophied muscle and tendon around it. Then he had coaxed nerves back into the rebuilt fingers and new-made thumb, turning a gnarled and useless lump into something at least marginally functional.
Still it looked like something a five-year-old might squeeze from a lump of clay. He shook his head. To think he’d once thought himself something of a sculptor. The problem was that he could only work with what was there. He could redistribute bone and tissue, but not make it out of thin air.
“Pinched Salli Baber.”
That got Marchey’s full attention. “You what?” he asked, staring at Jon blankly, unsure he’d heard him right. His patient grinned up at him, tickled by the reaction he’d provoked.
“Pinched Salli Baber. Right on the ass.”
Marchey couldn’t keep a grin from creeping onto his own face. “You pinched her.”
Jon chuckled and nodded, then demonstrated his technique. “My fingers. Her fanny. Yow! You shoulda seen her jump!”
“I’m sure she did.”
Marchey continued to be amazed by how quickly the people of Ananke had begun the monumental task of putting all they had suffered during Brother Fist’s rule behind them, struggling to rebuild something like normal lives.
Not that everything was sunshine and roses now that Fist’s hold over them had been broken. A considerable number of them had been so deeply traumatized that they might never fully recover. A few extreme cases still hid in their cubbies like wounded animals, cringing back in terror when anyone came near. A handful of others drifted continually through the cold, dim tunnels like blank-eyed ghosts, lost now that an iron hand no longer shaped every aspect of their existence.
Yet somehow the majority of them had begun trying to reassemble the fragments of their shattered lives. That they could do so after all they had been through was a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
Some were more resilient than others, taking it on themselves to help the rest. People like Mardi Grandberg and Elias Acterelli, a former nurse and an ex-army medic, together helping him set up a makeshift hospital and institute a rudimentary health-care system. Raymo LaPaz, working day and night to coax more than the bare minimum out of Ananke’s neglected life-support system. Jimmy and ’Lita Chee and their crew, trying to revive the long-disused hydroponics setup.