His face hardened. “My request was summarily refused. The reason I was given was that it would be a, quote, ‘inefficient disposition of resources’, unquote.”
“We’re being used very efficiently,” Marchey said heavily, remembering Angel’s accusation. He also remembered his angry denial. Had she come too close to a truth he hadn’t wanted to face?
“We are still people, but they do not treat us so,” Ludmilla said quietly, “We are little better than robota now.”
“Yeah,” Marchey agreed. She had used the Czech word Karel Capek had given the world in his play RUR: Robota. Slaves. Robots.
“We robota have no rights. No say in how we are being used.” Her tone sharpened. “After a while we robota become so worn-out we are needing replacement. We become too troublesome to maintain.”
“Or it looks like a better robots can be made,” Sal added. “I got a call from an old friend inside MedArm, someone who had been culdesacked—”promoted’—into a trivial job with no real power. Some information she wasn’t supposed to see happened to cross her desk. She warned me that MedArm planned to ‘retire’ me, take over the Institute, and start cranking out a new batch of Bergmann Surgeons. Crash Priority.”
Marchey shook his head in confusion. It was late, and this was too much to absorb and understand all at once. “I still don’t see what brought on this sudden reversal of policy.”
“I can’t say for sure,” Sal said, “but I don’t think it’s coincidence that all of this seemed to start right after you found a way around the Nightmare Effect.”
Marchey’s first impulse was to dismiss the idea. But on second thought, it did make a certain amount of sense. He himself had wondered if it might be possible to restart the program, now that at long last a cure had been found for one of its most destructive elements. The next generation of Bergmann Surgeons might be able to lead something like normal lives.
But why the big fucking hurry to restart something the powers that be had been insisting was a failure? Why the power play? He said as much to Sal and ’Milla.
“The obvious conclusion is that they want the program strictly under their control,” Sal answered glumly. “But what would that give them that they don’t already have? They already have total control over you and ’Milla and the others.”
He sighed, looking down at his hands. “You were right, Gory.”
“About what?”
“About things turning out like this. I remember when Med Arm first instituted the circuit. You said that all of you had been reduced to nothing more than specialized medical machinery—to tools. I told you you were wrong.”
His tone turned apologetic, edged with self-recrimination. “I was wrong. It only made a bad situation worse. In the beginning I had a say in your disposition, but when I complained that they were running you too hard, they started cutting me out of the loop. The harder I tried, the worse things got.” He raised one hand, let it fall in a helpless gesture. “I had to give up before I made matters worse.”
“You’ve stood by us all the way, Sal,” Marchey said quietly. Ludmilla nodded in agreement.
“Have I? The most useful thing I’ve been able to do for years now was to just be there when one of you needed a friend.”
“That is thing to be proud of, love,” Ludmilla told him, one silver arm hugging him tight. He stared at her a few moments, then back at Marchey, still looking like someone who believed he had done more wrong in his life than right. Marchey knew how he felt.
“When I heard what Med Arm was planning, I knew I had to do something. So I asked for a couple weeks’ vacation. They were glad to grant it because it would put me conveniently out of the way when they took over the Institute.”
Something of the old Sal appeared in his grin. “Well, I fooled the fuckers! I grabbed all the critical stuff—the hypnoregimens, tests, and the rest—wiped everything else, leaving dummy files in their place. ’Milla happened to be there for some repair work on one of her arms. So I showed up at her airlock, told her what was going on, and here we are.”
“Where’s here? And what are you going to do next?”
Sal made a face. “Here is nowhere, and I wish to hell we knew. We really didn’t have time to plan ahead. ’Milla disabled her ship’s transponder, scrambled the circuits that let them control the autopilot, and we hightailed to the outer edge of the Belt because it’s a good place to lose yourself. We were kind of hoping you might know of a good place for us to hide until we get this mess straightened out.”
Marchey scrubbed his face with his hands, totally at a loss. The only thing that came to mind was the question he’d wanted to ask Sal in the first place. So he asked it.
“By the way, have either of you ever heard of the Helping Hands Foundation?”
Sal and ’Milla exchanged a puzzled glance. Sal shook his head. “No, why?”
“I’ll tell you some other time.”
The unlikely fugitives watched him expectantly as he sat there, his thoughts stumbling through all he had just heard like it was some sort of mental obstacle course. He was beginning to get a sneaking suspicion that somehow all this crazy stuff was connected. Nothing he could put his finger on, just a feeling.
He rubbed his eyes, forcing himself to put all that aside. Right now the important thing was figuring out some safe place for them to hide. Some out-of-the-way place where the people around them could be trusted not to reveal their presence.
At last a question with an easy answer. Maybe even a great answer if this Helping Hands Foundation was some half-ass bunch of incompetant do-gooders.
“I know just the place for two renegade doctors to go,” he told them with a chuckle, pleased that he could be of some help to his old friends after all. “It’s not much to look at, but I’d trust the people who live there with my life.”
Coffee.
No brandy in it.
Slouched in the galley seat. Chin propped in his hand like a cut-rate copy of Rodin’s Thinker. Its head was generally made of hollow bronze. People forget that.
He’d already been up for over three hours, having given up on sleep as a lost cause and dragged himself out of the sack quite a bit earlier than normal. All he had been doing was tossing and turning anyway. He had gone back to bed after saying good-bye to Sal and ’Milla, but the occasional fits of uneasy slumber had been filled with disturbing dreams that had him grinding his teeth and curling into a protective fetal ball.
He had dreamed of the people of Ananke, all slat-ribbed and hollow-eyed, chains on their legs, and silver arms like his own held out in entreaty. Walking among them, he had tried to pretend they weren’t there. One by one they they had crumpled behind him, whispering gratitude as they fell. Another had a colossal Brother Fist prodding him through a dark maze, laughing at him when he stumbled into dead end after dead end while desperately trying to reach the small silver figure sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand at the maze’s center. He had a rope to throw her. It was around his own neck. Not a restful night.
The morning, however, had been highly productive. He had spent most of it pacing. Back and forth. Around in circles. Getting nowhere just as fast as his feet could carry him.
It was as if his world had fractured into an antique jigsaw puzzle. But no two pieces would fit together, and what the finished picture would be was a mystery. Or if the pieces did fit together, he couldn’t see the congruence.
Pieces like: What was MedArm up to? Why were they trying to cut Sal out and take over the Institute— which was independently funded from Bergmann’s estate, and supposedly autonomous as long as it met certain basic requirements MedArm itself had set?