Boaz was conscious the whole time.
Not only that, he was on rheobase setting three. Put simply, lowered rheobase meant hyperaesthesia. Every sensation was felt with an unnatural keenness – every datum of pain had that extra edge. Not only that, he was on felicity setting two. Everything he received with his senses was being shunted to his emotions.
Boaz grabbled in his mind. Instant insanity might have been a refuge of sorts, but the preservation function was charged with maintaining not only his physical but also his psychological health. Mental coherence was another matter, however. He called on his bones to help him, trying to mouth trigger syllables as though screaming prayers to the gods.
He was too overwhelmed with pain to have any real control over what his mind pronounced. The heat had probably affected the bone functions, too. Because he did not even have the syllable for what followed.
Felicity retuned itself to setting eight – three settings higher than the bonemakers had allowed him to experience.
His burden of physical agony, already inconceivable in terms of what human awareness can be expected to survive, crashed through the remaining gates of his mind to take possession of the entire gamut of his emotions. Pain that had already stripped his consciousness bare, that burned and whipped him, that transcended all thought or explanation, that became a living entity, a personality that spoke to him, played with him, raped him, punished him with its enfolding caresses, now had access to the ‘joy function’ – a reservoir of positive emotional energy. It instantly turned that energy negative.
Misery would have been too bland a word to describe the rivers of ultimate horror that flooded and ran through Boaz. It is not often that emotional pain can equal physical pain of even a normal kind. Yet he knew grief that arose from and was the equal of his physical torment. There were no hidden parts to Joachim now. Not a thought, not a feeling, not a memory was not dredged up and drenched permanently in that grief. He howled his suffering until that howl echoed in an emptiness which was his own self, and that self contracted around and became only one thing. PAIN, AGONY, SUFFERING, GRIEF, repeated and repeated and repeated, forever and ever. Amen.
The alchemists in the distance heard his screams. They listened to them with curiosity and fascination. How could screams be so seemingly endless in content? How could they seem so much like a new language, for a new world? When the ethereal fire at length dissipated (rising through the atmosphere and into space, they said, seeking its proper abode among the stars) they ventured cautiously closer. They found the blackened form of Boaz still clinging as if in rigor mortis to the laminated diamond-and-mica lip of the pit. He wasn’t screaming now; the preservation function had robbed him of the physical strength to do so as it commandeered every erg of energy in its desperate fight to keep him alive. They presumed he was dead, of course. They scooped up his charred body and placed it on a wooden board. Then, amazed to find he was still breathing, they carried him into their small surgery, but appeared to think the case hopeless and did nothing for him.
As chance would have it the company ship put down to pick him up only an hour later. The ship’s robot doctor, observing that he did not immediately die, consulted Boaz’s medical record. Then it did its duty and informed the captain of his duty. Boaz was delivered, still suffering, to the bonemakers twenty light-years away.
The bonemakers, in turn, did their duty as they saw it. They set about to repair Boaz. The task was more massive than any they had yet envisioned; it made the mere making of silicon bones seem easy.
And indeed, bones were of no use in a case like this. Every cell, every nerve, every gland, every single metabolic process would have to be closely and permanently regulated by artificial means; truly speaking, Boaz’s entire somatic integrity was gone, and would never in future be able to stave off total collapse. On the other hand, all the adp that would be needed could never be packed inside Boaz’s frame, not even using bones – and even if some means of incorporating could be found, the bonemakers would have decided firmly against it. So fine were the attunements that were required that bringing the processors into physical contiguity with the ruined soma would in short order have led to functional coalescence. Boaz would no longer have been human.
So regulators and soma had to be separate, and to house everything necessary to keep his destroyed body miraculously walking, digesting, feeling and thinking would take a building the size of a small dwelling.
But that would effectively have imprisoned him within a radius of a few miles. The bonemakers chose another course. They felt they owed it to Boaz to do more than merely heal him. They owed him something in recompense.
Knowing of his ambitions, they bought him a ship. A newly built cargo ship, crew-robotized (independent shipkeepers disliked hiring employees), with range enough to allow him to roam almost anywhere, provided he could find cargoes to pay his way. And into that ship they put all the processing. Into it they put the transceivers that linked him to this secret brain, larger than any natural brain since it undertook to keep biological functions running that should have been able to run themselves. The ship was, in fact, a preservation function, but one far more capacious and more penetrating than that put earlier into his silicon bones. Correspondingly, it gave him a survivability that was unparalleled.
The bonemakers’ unheated apologies still rang in Boaz’s ears. They admitted to having made a serious mistake. It might comfort him to know that other bonemen would benefit from his experience. Future models would have an automatic cutoff on the preservation function to render the owner unconscious beyond a set level of pain, or even to permit him to die. And they were calling in all bones installed so far for modification.
While Boaz and the bonemakers could never be quits, they had done all they could for him. In their opinion he was still far better off than when they had first picked him up off that Corsair spaceground.
His bones, they informed him, were still operable. It made no difference to Boaz. He had never used them since.
Captain Boaz groaned out loud.
AGONY – AGONY – AGONY –
Normal physical pain, however bad, is mentally unrecoverable once it is over. That it happened can be recollected, the nervous system can be permanently depressed by it, but the memory carries no storage facility whereby the experience of it can be relived.
Emotional pain, however, the mind can remember, and relive. Boaz’s pain had not been normal. It had been physical and emotional all at once, supernal physical pain married to emotional pain of like intensity. And the memory of it bubbled up unbidden, again and again.
And yet such memory was not the worst of it; burdensome though it was, it was but a pale copy of the original. Worse was knowledge. The knowledge that it had happened.
In the doctrine of an extinct religion the wicked were consigned after death to a lake of supernatural fire. This fire burned a thousand times more intensely than ordinary fire, and was a thousand times more agonizing. Yet it burned without consuming, and those cast into it burned forever.
Boaz understood the description. He had been dipped into the lake of hellfire.
As if in dim after-image to the brilliant pain-flash, he remembered when, after a long time spent in the medibath, his tissues were mended and he emerged as a lumpy, scarred version of his former self – but only physically. Psychologically he was broken.