“Fantastic.” Marygay would be whole again, too.
He shrugged. “Guess so. They’ve been doing it since before I was born. How old are you, sir?”
I told him, and he whistled. “Goddamn. You musta been in it from the beginning.” His accent was very strange. All the words were right but all the sounds were wrong.
“Yeah. I was in the Epsilon attack. Aleph-null.” They’d started naming collapsars after letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in order of discovery, then ran out of letters when the damn things started cropping up all over the place. So they added numbers after the letters; last I heard, they were up to Yod-42.
“Wow, ancient history. What was it like back then?”
“I don’t know. Less crowded, nicer. Went back to Earth a year ago, hell, a century ago. Depends on how you look at it. It was so bad I re-enlisted, you know? Bunch of zombies. No offense.”
He shrugged. “Never been there, myself. People who come from there seem to miss it. Maybe it got better.”
“What, you were born on another planet? Heaven?” No wonder I couldn’t place his accent.
“Born, raised and drafted.” He put the pen back in his pocket and folded the clipboard up to a wallet-sized package. “Yes, sir. Third-generation angel. Best damned planet in all UNEF.” He spelled it out, didn’t say “youneff” the way I’d always heard it.
“Look, I’ve gotta run, lieutenant. Two other monitors to check, this hour.” He backed out the door. “You need anything, there’s a buzzer on the table there.”
Third-generation angel. His grandparents came from Earth, probably when I was a young punk of a hundred. I wondered how many other worlds they’d colonized while my back was turned. Lose an arm, grow a new one?
It was going to be good to settle down and live a whole year for every year that went by.
The guy wasn’t kidding about the pain. And it wasn’t just the new leg, though that hurt like boiling oil. For the new tissues to “take” they’d had to subvert my body’s resistance to alien cells; cancer broke out in a half-dozen places and had to be treated separately, painfully.
I was feeling pretty used up, but it was still kind of fascinating to watch the leg grow. White threads turned into blood vessels and nerves, first hanging a little slack, then moving into place as the musculature grew up around the metal bone.
I got used to seeing it grow, so the sight never repelled me. But when Marygay came to visit, it was a jolt — she was ambulatory before the skin on her new arm had started to grow; looked like a walking anatomy demonstration. I got over the shock, though, and she eventually came in for a few hours every day to play games or trade gossip or just sit and read, her arm slowly growing inside the plastic cast.
I’d had skin for a week before they uncased the new leg and trundled the machine away. It was ugly as hell, hairless and dead white, stiff as a metal rod. But it worked, after a fashion. I could stand up and shuffle along.
They transferred me to orthopedics, for “range and motion repatterning” — a fancy name for slow torture. They strap you into a machine that bends both the old and new legs simultaneously. The new one resists.
Marygay was in a nearby section, having her arm twisted methodically. It must have been even worse on her; she looked gray and haggard every afternoon, when we met to go upstairs and sunbathe in the broken shade.
As the days went by, the therapy became less like torture and more like strenuous exercise. We both began swimming for an hour or so every clear day, in the calm, pressor guarded water off the beach. I still limped on land, but in the water I could get around pretty well.
The only real excitement we had on Heaven — excitement to our combat-blunted sensibilities — was in that carefully guarded water.
They have to turn off the pressor field for a split second every time a ship lands; otherwise it would just ricochet off over the ocean. Every now and then an animal slips in, but the dangerous land animals are too slow to get through. Not so in the sea.
The undisputed master of Heaven’s oceans is an ugly customer that the angels, in a fit of originality, named the “shark.” It could eat a stack of earth sharks for breakfast, though.
The one that got in was an average-sized white shark who had been bumping around the edge of the pressor field for days, tormented by all that protein splashing around inside. Fortunately, there’s a warning siren two minutes before the pressor is shut down, so nobody was in the water when he came streaking through. And streak through he did, almost beaching himself in the fury of his fruitless attack.
He was twelve meters of flexible muscle with a razorsharp tail at one end and a collection of arm-length fangs at the other. His eyes, big yellow globes, were set on stalks more than a meter out from his head. His mouth was so wide that, open, a man could comfortably stand in it. Make an impressive photo for his heirs.
They couldn’t just turn off the pressor field and wait for the thing to swim away. So the Recreation Committee organized a hunting party.
I wasn’t too enthusiastic about offering myself up as an hors d’oeuvre to a giant fish, but Marygay had spearfished a lot as a kid growing up in Florida and was really excited by the prospect. I went along with the gag when I found out how they were doing it; seemed safe enough.
These “sharks” supposedly never attack people in boats. Two people who had more faith in fishermen’s stories than I had gone out to the edge of the pressor field in a rowboat, armed only with a side of beef. They kicked the meat overboard and the shark was there in a flash.
This was the cue for us to step in and have our fun. There were twenty-three of us fools waiting on the beach with flippers, masks, breathers and one spear each. The spears were pretty formidable, though, jet-propelled and with high-explosive heads.
We splashed in and swam in phalanx, underwater, toward the feeding creature. When it saw us at first, it didn’t attack. It tried to hide its meal, presumably so that some of us wouldn’t be able to sneak around and munch on it while the shark was dealing with the others. But every time he tried for the deep water, he’d bump into the pressor field. He was obviously getting pissed off.
Finally, he just let go of the beef, whipped around and charged. Great sport. He was the size of your finger one second, way down there at the other end of the field, then suddenly as big as the guy next to you and closing fast.
Maybe ten of the spears hit him — mine didn’t — and they tore him to shreds. But even after an expert, or lucky, brain shot that took off the top of his head and one eye, even with half his flesh and entrails scattered in a bloody path behind him, he slammed into our line and clamped his jaws around a woman, grinding off both of her legs before it occurred to him to die.
We carried her, barely alive, back to the beach, where an ambulance was waiting. They poured her full of blood surrogate and Noshocko and rushed her to the hospital, where she survived to eventually go through the agony of growing new legs. I decided that I would leave the hunting of fish to other fish.
Most of our stay at Threshold, once the therapy became bearable, was pleasant enough. No military discipline, lots of reading and things to putter around with. But there was a pall over it, since it was obvious that we weren’t out of the army; just pieces of broken equipment that they were fixing up to throw back into the fray. Marygay and I each had another three years to serve in our lieutenancy’s.
But we did have six months of rest and recreation coming once our new limbs were pronounced in good working order. Marygay was released two days before I was but waited around for me.