“Dear God,” she whispered. She took an uncertain step nearer, but could force herself to go no closer than that. Nor did she voice the name of who it was she wanted God to help: herself, Shei, Ella, or Marchey.
Oblivious and unmoved, he worked on.
Marchey reattached his prosthetics. A mental twist of the wrist and he had solid fingers once more. The arms felt heavy, and even though they were every bit as sensitive as the flesh they had replaced, they still felt like numb dead meat compared to the exquisitely sensitive un-hands he’d just used.
He didn’t ask where Ella had gone. Some detached, then-volitionless part of his mind had registered every detail of what had happened.
Now everything from his old life was gone. The circle was complete.
He sighed. “I was able to repair most of the damage. I think the worst she’ll suffer is some small memory loss, and perhaps a minor temporary degradation of coordination. You know the tests to run.” His tone was as mechanical as his silver hands.
Chang nodded soberly. “You saved her life. You— you healed her face, too.” Her voice was husky with awe.
It had been like nothing she had ever seen before, and not something she really ever wanted to see again; at once wondrous and indefinably wrong.
First the bandages had parted, threads cut cleanly as if by the sharpest microtome, and peeled themselves away from Shei’s face, revealing the mangled, hastily gelsealed flesh beneath.
The gelseal had been swept away and the wounds reopened, chipped bone showing in the deepest lacerations. Then the truly miraculous had manifested itself before her very eyes.
With just one slow pass of an invisible hand Shei’s wounds had been debrided of even microscopic fragments, a haze of foreign materials rising up, coalescing, and settling down on a tray. Damaged bone had been smoothed like soft clay. Torn muscle and severed blood vessels had snaked together and reknit, melding into one as they were repaired at the cellular level. She had watched an eye that would have had to be replaced under normal circumstances become whole again, and an eyelid that had been blown to bloody lace mended to smooth-domed perfection. She had watched subcutaneous tissues move like hot wax, flowing, flattening, filling in, and sealing. She had seen burned skin slough off, and lacerated—no, shredded— flesh ripple as it migrated to reshape itself to its earlier state like water stills after a disturbing hand is withdrawn. Layer by layer, tissue by tissue, the trauma had been erased without benefit of stitches or staples or gels, and with a surety and speed a whole team of surgeons could not have begun to match.
When he was done Shei’s face had been almost perfectly restored, the slightly pinker redistributed skin the only evidence it had ever been damaged.
What she had witnessed was something that went so far beyond the boundaries of what she considered traditional medicine that for her it could only belong in the realm of magic and miracles. Her training and what she knew about his specialty said otherwise, but only in a small uncertain voice. It had been unbelievable. Impossible.
Yet she had seen it happen.
Try as she might, she could not keep herself from maintaining a careful, cautious distance from him. There was no way she could look at him in the same way as when she’d first met him, even though she knew it was a grievous sin against him, and her own rationality. Just a couple hours ago he had been an interesting concept in the literature. Then he had become her best hope, and in realizing that hope he had been transformed into something that raised her hackles and brought a prayer to her lips.
Marchey had been prepared for her reaction. He’d been in a similar situation all too many times before. He shrugged uncomfortably, gazing at the peaceful, now unblemished face of Shei Sinclair.
A life for a love. May she live long, and her second chance turn out better than his had.
“She’s very beautiful,” he murmured. “It would have taken major plastic surgery to have repaired all the damage. There was no reason to make her live with even temporary disfigurement.”
He glanced at the clock. “I gave her a keep-under, so she’ll probably be out for another couple hours. When she wakens she’ll be almost good as new— though I would test her hearing. I’m, um, glad I was here to help.” He made a point of not looking directly at Chang. Had he done so, she would have flinched away.
Fear, revulsion, violent denial, blind hatred, or, as in Chang’s case, a kind of appalled theistic awe; these were what he always saw on the faces of the medical people who witnessed him at his work. Always.
This was one wall of the box he and the other Bergmanns had put themselves in. Even those who knew every detail of the Program reacted the same way. What he was and did flew in the face of all their former colleagues knew and did, and that he could so easily accomplish feats they could only dream about made matters worse. The way he looked when in trance unnerved and frightened them, and his having given up his hands to aquire such abilities burned the bridge between his kind and theirs, marking him in their eyes as a dangerous lunatic who had mutilated himself to become some sort of witch doctor.
Somehow that was never mentioned in the medical journals. At least not yet. Neither was the relief those same people felt when he or any of the thirty-some other Bergmann Surgeons moved on—driven off more often than not. That nobody wanted them on staff, not even the burn units. He hadn’t quite become completely numbed to being a pariah, but he was working on it.
Now Ella was gone. He’d been braced for it, but that didn’t make it any easier to take.
He shrugged again, having given up trying to argue his case a couple years before. He began pulling on his gloves so he could get the hell out of there and find that first of many drinks. The gloves were a necessity. There was no way he’d be able to bear being stared at right now.
“I guess that’s about it.” He cast a last yearning glance at the child whose life he’d saved, wishing he could stay to see her waken. To see those brown eyes open and that sweet face smile.
But that could never happen. Bitter experience had taught him and the other Bergmann Surgeons what would happen if he did, and taught them well. Some memory of his invasions remained inside her, creating a sort of peculiar psychic scarring. If she woke and saw him, she would begin to scream and shriek, gripped by a terror so harsh and primeval it could well kill her.
The Nightmare Effect, they called it. At the beginning of the Program several patients had nearly been lost before the lesson was learned.
Dr. Chang took a hesitant half step toward him. “Thank you… Doctor.” Her eyes met his for an instant, then slid uneasily away. “I—I’m sorry.” She hung her head, face burning with shame. “About Ella. About everything.”
“The child lives,” he answered. “That’s all that matters.” In one way that was even the truth. It was the sole redeeming value of Bergmann Surgery. Because of it the child and hundreds of others in similar dire extremity lived.
He picked up his jacket and left quietly, without looking back.
“Are you done with your dinner, sir?”
Marchey stared sightlessly up at the waitress several seconds before he came back to the here and now of the Litman commissary. He blinked the past away and focused on her face. Broad and Slavic. Blue eyes. Red cheeks and a strand of sweat-dampened hair curling across her high square forehead. A harried, hopeful smile.
She was on duty all by herself. He’d watched the other people in the commissary ordering her around like a slave, and so tried to keep his own requests gentle and to a minimum.