The volume of space encompassed by Jupiter’s moons was huge, but it was a cozy neighborhood when compared with the Belt, which has a circumference roughly four times the distance between Earth and Jupiter. Although he couldn’t say so for certain, Marchey was pretty sure he had made at least one, maybe two trips completely around the Belt.
His review of the facts and figures about Jovian space were more than a little disconcerting, and he had come to the conclusion that he ought to get some sort of medal for utter and unalloyed obliviousness. He’d traveled hundreds of millions of kilometers and been to almost every part of inhabited space, and yet didn’t really have the faintest idea of where he’d been or how far he’d gone.
Studying the data on his pad, he’d been amazed by how heavily settled the Jovian system had become. Not so many years ago it had been the frontier. Only scientists and a few brave and crazy wilders had been willing to venture even farther than this, to Ixion Station—and beyond—in hopes of making their names and fortunes from Saturn’s lunar real estate.
Now, every moon was either settled or being exploited. There were habs everywhere. In near Leda a shipping tycoon named King—everyone called him Crazy Eddie—had set up an odd combination hab/hotel/pleasure dome that he’d built and brought all the way out from the Belt. In fact, a woman who’d accidentally fallen into Fist’s web while searching for an aunt a few years back had suggested asking King for aid. Jon Halen had contacted him just two days ago, and King had promised supplies on the next available transport.
AllMine and OmniMat were the big sticks in Jovian space. They had moved in and glommed onto what others had found or begun, just as they had done in the Belt, and before that on Mars. It was nearing the point where anyone who wanted to remain independent would have to move outward, toward Saturn. Already Ixion had become more of a way station than the end of the line it had been when he’d visited Ella there.
Somehow all of these changes had slipped past him, even though he had been sent to several stations and settlements over the last few years. One operating room looks pretty much like another—especially if you don’t give a flying fuck where you are. His ship was fully automated, following instructions from elsewhere. Ail he had to do was get aboard and it did the rest. More often than not he hadn’t even bothered to find out where he was bound next.
Looking back, he had to admit that he had been pretty well automated himself. Dr. Georgory Marchey, Robot Surgeon. Keep him well lubricated and he’ll give you years of trouble-free service.
Angel’s accusations kept coming back to haunt him. At each recurrence he would tell himself that caring where he went wouldn’t have made any difference. It would be like caring that every year you got a little older. It happened. Dwelling on it changed nothing.
So here he was, in the middle of the evening of his first day back on the circuit. He’d done his homework on Botha Station. He’d played cat and mouse with Fist, and still had his whiskers and tail intact.
Unsurprisingly enough, there was a drink in his hand.
That was another of the day’s great accomplishments. Admitting to himself that he couldn’t face the silence and the solitude without it. Knowing full well how easy it would be to let himself resubmerge into the sodden life he’d led before, he’d devised a strictly controlled regimen of alcohol intake. Prescribing enough to pacify, but not enough to pickle. He hoped the little rules and schedules would give him something else to occupy his mind.
At least it had blunted the feeling of being caged by the steel box of the ship, and stopped his restless pacing. Although he had his doubts that the dosage was high enough, he’d kept himself from upping it. At least so far.
He sat at the galley table, rolling his glass between his silver hands and trying to concentrate on the medical journal he’d called up on the pad propped before him. But instead of staying on a new mutagenic strain of parasite fond of vacationing in the islets of Langerhans, his mind kept drifting back to the cold, dimly lit tunnels of Ananke.
“Screw this,” he mumbled after reading the same sentence for the tenth time. He snapped off the pad in disgust and sat back, trying to put a name on the way he felt in hopes that would help him get a grip on it.
He felt… almost, well…
…homesick.
He scowled and gulped at his drink. What an utterly ridiculous notion!
It was just that he was having a hard time readjusting to life on the circuit. To the solitude. To semisobriety.
Still, he kept wondering how Jon was doing. And what about Salli and Ivor and Indira and Ray and Danny and Mardi and Elias and Laura and all the other people he’d met and treated? How were they getting along?
Then there was the sharp point on this pyramid of curiosity, the ten-million-credit question.
Was Angel all right?
He told himself that he kept wondering—all right, dammit, admit it, worrying—about her only because what Fist had said was stuck in his brain like a splinter, causing a festering doubt that infected all his thoughts.
You have doomed her.
Each time that sinister echo sounded again he reminded himself that this was the old psychopath’s genius. Fist wielded abnegation with the skill and precision of a surgeon. Just as he himself could put his prosthetics aside and reach inside a patient’s skull to smooth away an aneurysm or erase a tumor, Fist could just as easily reach inside a person’s head and twist their brain’s contents, warping pleasure into pain, hope into despair, and all certainty into a sucking quicksand of doubt.
He’s lying. Making it up. That was easy enough to say, but not to really believe. Marchey knew it wasn’t that simple.
The old monster was a consummate liar, but he could be just as easily telling the truth if he thought that would best serve his ends. He could be stitching the true and the false so seamlessly together that there was no way to tell where one ended and the other began, turning what he created into a straitjacket, a prison uniform, a jester’s motley, a shroud.
Only one thing was certain. Fist had wanted him to worry.
The old bastard had succeeded. In spades.
Marchey stared into his glass. Was there any reason he shouldn’t call Ananke to see how his former patients were doing? If something was wrong with Angel, they’d tell him. Even if it was something Fist wanted him to do, what harm could there be in it?
The only way to find out was the hard way.
He put his glass down and headed for the comm-board. Less than a minute later he was apprehensively waiting to hear the sound of a familiar voice.
Angel trudged back to her cubby. The normally graceful swing and flow of her movements had been reduced to the ponderous plodding of some clumsy machine by nearly thirty straight hours of physical labor. Her last and only break had been her disastrous farewell to Marchey.
Her green eye was glazed with exhaustion. It kept drooping shut on her. Not that she could see straight when it was open.
Her angel eye had no lid to sag. It faithfully reported her slow, lurching progress through the tunnels. Messages scrolled along the top of the lens’s view, firing back along her nano-encrusted optic nerve and into her fatigue-muddied mind.
*** WARNING***XO PHYSICAL SYSTEMS REDLINE***
her second silver self warned in pulsating red letters.
***REST AND NOURISHMENT PARAMETERS EXCEEDED***PARTIAL SYSTEMS OVERRIDE INVOKED***HOST MUST EAT AND REST BEFORE IRREPARABLE DAMAGE OCCURS!***