“He has something better!” Chang said so forcefully it sounded almost like a shout. She gripped Ella’s hand tighter and spoke softly, reassuringly. Almost reverently.
“Let me try to explain. There is a phenomenon sometimes experienced by amputees called the ‘phantom limb syndrome.’ What that means is that they think they can still ‘feel’ the missing limb. The flesh and bone is gone, but some strange ghost of sensation remains. The intensity of that feeling varies from person to person. Some do not experience it at all. Once the replacement of missing limbs with banked tissue became commonplace it very nearly became a forgotten occurrence.
“Almost, but fortunately not quite. A very great man, a prostheticist named Dr. Saul Bergmann became intrigued by this phenomenon. He began to study it, eventually learning that a small percentage of those who felt it were capable of actually manipulating matter with that limb image. The ability was so weak and wildly erratic that it took him years conclusively to prove it existed. But he did prove it, and then went on to develop techniques to help the ability grow stronger and under better control.”
Ella stared down at Dr. Chang, trying to absorb and understand what she was being told. It sounded impossible. Insane. As insane as what she had just seen, as what was happening at this very moment. And anyone who could believe in such a crazy thing had to be—
“These very few special people had to work in a deep trance to maintain the concentration it took to use this limb image, but they could do many unexpected—you might even say miraculous things with it. The strangest and most wonderful things of all were the things it could do inside a human body. Anyway, once the techniques became better perfected, Bergmann Surgery—”
Ella’s gaze had been drawn back to Marchey as she tried to reconcile what she was hearing with him. Her free hand went to her mouth, and the small shocked sound that escaped past her fingers made Dr. Chang turn and stare.
A jagged metal fragment the size of a fingernail slowly emerged from the gauze pad covering Shei’s damaged eye. It poked out apparently on its own power, twisted free of the threads, hung there in the air for a moment, then settled to the white bandaging. A small bloodstain began spreading away from it, darkening the snowy gauze.
Marchey was oblivious to their wide-eyed scrutiny. Sweat sheened his wide forehead. A silver-capped stump turned toward his head momentarily, and the sweat vanished. He shifted position slightly and continued his work, the silver plates hovering over the child’s head. Discs of reflected light crawled across her bandaged face.
Ella shuddered and looked away. This was worse than knives and bone saws and a rubber-gloved hand coming up dripping with gore. Those were at least things you could understand. Horrible, but comprehensible. Not like invisible hands on phantom limbs wielded by the horrific stranger inhabiting Gory’s body.
Chang picked up the thread of what she had been telling Ella again, but she no longer addressed the younger woman directly. She seemed to be speaking for her own benefit as much as Ella’s, trying to reduce what she was witnessing to something explicable. She clutched Ella’s hand tightly. Her other hand was clasped tightly around the crucifix at her breast.
“Bermann Surgeons perform procedures light years ahead of conventional surgery. He can wipe away a tumor or a clot or sterilize an infection. He can coax an aneurism out, smoothing it away like a bubble in clay. He can thrust his hands into a living, beating heart without breaking the skin or altering its rhythm. Bone, muscle, blood, and tissue—even the very cells themselves—he can work on any of it directly. Look at what he’s doing here. The strongbox of the skull presents no more barrier than the surface of water to him. He can reach through it to work on the delicate tissues inside as easily as you or I could turn over stones at the bottom of a fishbowl. No scars, no complications, no blood, no pain…”
Chang’s voice trailed away. After a few moments she spoke again, her voice barely above a whisper. “I envy him, Ella. Can you understand that?”
Ella stared down at Chang’s wan, sweat-glazed face, too numb to answer even if she had known what to say.
“Soon all my skills will be as obsolete as cupping and lobotomy. Surgeons will be like him.” She grimaced. “Compared to what he has become I am just a crude mechanic with a few blunt tools at my command. He is a healer.”
She squeezed Ella’s hand. “I know this has been a lot to absorb all at once, and it’s very frightening to see him like this. But he is not a monster. He is not a cripple.” She managed an unconvincing smile. “I saw the way you looked at him. You love him, don’t you? This doesn’t change that.”
Ella’s face was that of a shock victim, her skin pale and bloodless as wax. It took all her strength and concentration to speak.
“H-how did he get like this?” Her voice was thin with bewilderment. She pulled her hands free from Chang’s grasp and shoved them under her arms as if to protect them from the same fate his had suffered. “H-how was he m-maimed? He never said anything about any a-accident…”
Dr. Carol Chang was a kind woman. A caring and considerate woman. But she was badly unnerved herself, and she answered Ella’s question without stopping to think about what a terrible thing some truths can be sometimes.
She shook her head. “There was no accident. His professional rating was high enough to be considered for the Bergmann Program. He scored well enough in the preliminary tests to become a candidate. Once it became clear that he had something of the innate ability needed, he gambled on success and had his hands amputated. God, I’d trade—”
Ella stared at Chang in absolute horror, her mouth working soundlessly at the word amputated but unable to force it past her lips. In her mind a gleaming, razor-edged silver cleaver chopped down, severing his hands, her hands, her heartstrings.
She stumbled back clumsily, her horrified gaze seeking out Marchey. He’d done this to himself. Willingly. Mutilated himself so he could become this—this—
Her back came up against the door.
“Gory?” His name came out a heartsick plea for proof that some fragment of the man she loved remained inside what he had become. What he had turned himself into.
No response. “Gory!” Louder, shrill with desperation.
Not even a flicker of recognition showed on the cruel cold landscape of his face. His hooded eyes remained dead and indifferent, focused on some crazy mental image, buried in the child’s brain. The image burned itself into her retinas, through them into the tender folds of her own brain, into places so deep it could never be erased.
A sob escaped her as she spun around, pushed through the door, and fled, knowing knowing knowing she would never again be able to see him any other way.
Dr. Carol Chang watched the door swing shut, her shoulders slumping defeatedly. After a moment she slowly turned back toward the table where Marchey worked. She felt clumsy and stupid. Guilty. Out of place, there in her own clinic.
She shivered as before her eyes another twisted fragment of metal emerged from a place no one else could reach, brought out by a spectral hand she could not see.
Science, she told herself, that’s all this is. Science. Like light and a ruby make a laser, like Schmidt crystals and electricity produce anesthetic fields. He is only a man who has gained a special skill.
But at what cost?
No triumph showed on the face of the hand’s owner at what he had just accomplished, no regret for what he had just lost. He might as well have been a machine—a soulless, inhuman construct empty of everything but fixed, unswerving purpose.