Strange Trades (42 page)

I had thought no one at the lodge knew who I was.

But I had been wrong.

She rested peacefully in bed. When I entered, she sat up and brightened, donning her mask of brainlessness. She opened her mouth to utter some silly remark. But something on my own face must have told her the game was up. Her beautiful features underwent such a transformation that she looked like a new, more savage person.

With malicious spite, she asked, “How are you feeling, Dr. Strode?”

“Listen, Amy—”

“Don’t soil my name, you murderer!” she spat.

A burst of anger shot through me. What the fuck did she know about me and my life? Did she think I liked living with the knowledge of what I was? She had almost ruined what little beauty I had painfully ransomed from the hard and transient world, and all for selfish revenge for something I couldn’t have altered.

As if reading my thoughts, she said, “You could have tried to save her, you crud. But instead you just zipped by.”

I lost control then, and my hands went for her throat. I put no pressure on it, though.

Not on the outside.

If she knew my body from a week of sabotage, I knew hers from a week of loving treatment. Entrance was as easy as slipping into an old shoe. I knew that she was diving my flesh at the same time, eager for the kill. But my unconscious defenses were restored now, and I left my safety to them.

Now she was going to learn just how good her own were.

I swam her noisy arteries, heading for her heart. She stopped me in the atrium, where a squad of bright lights chased me off with lemon fire. I shot to her gallbladder, and squeezed burning bile into her duodenum. Before she could find me, I was up in her lungs, collapsing alveoli. She caught up with me there, and I barely escaped. I raced toward her brain, hoping to overload her synapses. A blockade was in place, a thorny mesh of blue hatred, and I had to be content with loosening her teeth in their sockets. I managed to snap a ligament in her shoulder on the way south. Lord knew what she was doing to me.

For an indefinite time the battle raged, each thrust of mine being met with a swift reaction from her. Every inch of bloody ground I gained was recaptured by her prowess. I knew, simply from the fact that I wasn’t dead yet, that my own defenses must have been holding up as well.

At last, in wordless concert, admitting the stalemate, we disengaged.

I returned to a body in deep pain. The room swirled as I hauled myself unsteadily off her recumbent form. My limbs were puffy with edemas, and I was pretty sure one knee was broken. I wasn’t up to rationally cataloging the rest of the damage. My unconscious had its immediate work cut out. Already it was snapping painblocks into place.

Amy looked no better. Her face was webbed with burst capillaries, and one hand hung awkwardly from a shattered wrist I didn’t even remember attacking.

As we eyed each other suspiciously, something like remorse stole over us as we realized the full extent of our transgressions. Two physicians, bound by a sentimental, implacable oath half as old as civilization, trying to kill each other. Whatever had driven us evaporated—or at least subsided.

“I could make a lot of trouble for you with the authorities,” I finally said.

“And me for you.”

“So where does that leave us?”

She was silent for some time. Grudgingly, she said, “You’re pretty good.”

“You, too,” I admitted.

“What the hell do you get out of this work?” she asked, waving her good arm to encompass the clinic.

I shrugged. “A living.”

She nodded, calculations plain behind her gorgeous eyes.

I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I kept my mouth shut.

Just when the silence seemed to stretch to the breaking point, she spoke.

“I don’t forgive you, Strode, but—”

“Yes?”

“Maybe I can help.”

No editor among the U.S. sf/fantasy magazines leaped at the sequel to “Skintwister,” but the story happily found a home with the perspicacious and welcoming Chris Reed in the United Kingdom. It occurs to me to mention now that both “Skintwister” and “Fleshflowers” owe their existence to Norman Spinrad’s kick-ass “Carcinoma Angels” another early instance of my imprinting on superior work, from 1967.

I suppose the ending of this tale begs a continuation of Doctor Strode’s career, but it seems unlikely that I’ll ever write one. If a genre author is at all prolific, his or her career is littered with abortive series, orphaned by lack of interest from the marketplace, changing authorial aspirations, or a combination of the two. I myself have at least three such truncated story cycles, and will probably accumulate more.

It’s all just part of the strange trade of fiction writing.

Fleshflowers

Here in exile, I have learned how much it is possible to miss the Earth.

Oh, don’t mistake my meaning. It’s not as some repository of metaphysical meaning that I miss it. Birthplace of humanity, ancestral globe, big blue marble on a black cloth sprayed with diamond chips. What a load of bullshit. No, I miss only the luxurious life I had there, civilization and all its tinsel trappings. The money, the prestige, the women, the food and wine, sleek imported Brazilian cars and elegant Harlem apartments in the clouds.

I can hardly believe now that I used to pity myself then. Sure, I had had a few rough breaks. Failures of will and nerve that rankled, disappointed expectations, evaporated dreams. But my work had its rewards—when it was going good, and I could lose myself in it—and the material comforts more than compensated for the spiritual pangs. Compared to the lives of most people, mine was an easy lark.

Or so it appears now, from the vantage of another world. A world empty of everything I once coveted, a world where the glittering ranks of society consist of a few dozen men and women, preoccupied with science and survival.

When I can’t stand their fatuous faces anymore—and the face of one in particular—I find I have to get outside the domes, and let the elements abrade some of the emotional callous from my soul.

I must start initiating the changes a couple of hours before I want to step out. It’s a demanding process, and I can’t do it that often—maybe once a month. (Of course, I could just suit up, but then I’d feel encapsulated, as if I were carrying the colony with me. And besides, it’s more dramatic this way. I know it creeps the others out, to see me do it. They watch me through the transparent walls until I disappear from sight, disbelief plain on their silly faces. It reinforces my failing sense of superiority.)

Anyway, about three hours worth of self-tampering—much against my old instructor’s advice—allows me, rather like certain seals, to supersaturate my bloodstream with enough oxygen to last for half an hour’s expedition. A slight structural change in my hemoglobin suffices. I toughen my epidermis with a layer of expendable cells that will later messily slough off, stoke the metabolic fires, thicken my corneas, don a pair of insulated boots as my only concession to heat loss, and cycle through the lock.

Not breathing, I step lightly among the red grit and wind-fluted parched pebbles, kicking one now and then. Their motions are strange in the low gravity, they seem to take forever to fall. A frigid dry scentless breeze strokes my altered flesh like a straight razor dipped in liquid hydrogen. Too much of this caress would be lethal even to me. In the leeward sides of the larger boulders, fine-grained brick-hued dust is piled high.

Fifteen miles away to either side of me rear the canyon walls: immense, pocked, riven, mile-long slopes whose steepness is obscured by great slumps of eroded rock clinging precariously to their faces. Crumbled talus litters the valley floor at their feet; side cuts open out onto dead-end tributary valleys.

When I am far enough from the base for solitude, around a slight bend, having used up half my stored oxygen, I stop.

I look up.

At dusk, like a man immured in a well on Earth, I am able to view the stars while the weak sun is still up. They stand out faintly in the slit of darkened Martian sky, occulted perhaps by a high lonely transient cloud, blurred slightly by my horned corneas. I try to find the blue-green star I have convinced myself is Earth.

For a few precious minutes, I dream of returning.

What I don’t know yet is how reality will exceed my dreams.

As I turn to go back, I feel like the only person in the universe. No one can reach me here. Even if others were to arrive in suits, they would still be isolated from me. I am at once utterly exposed and totally shielded.

Then I involuntarily recall what I have been trying to forget. There is one who could stand here unsuited beside me, as an equal. A woman at this moment also exiled to Mars. One bound to me by something different from, but no weaker than, love.

And stronger than hate.

I was standing rapt among the cacti when the news first came.

One of the big linked geodesic domes that comprised the only human settlement on Mars was filled with giant saguaros, multi-armed, towering almost twenty-five feet high—as tall as specimens a century old, although they were only five years removed from biofabbed seeds. Their fantastic growth had been forced by the will of the Banneker psychokineticist who had preceded me.

Now the cacti were my charges, along with the humans. My fellow exile and I were responsible for the health and continued functioning of both.

I preferred tending to the cacti.

Now, fingertips in contact with the solid spined-barrel trunk of one specimen, I had lost myself in their being.

I dived down, among the busy cell factories of the cactus I touched, thrilled by a sense of repleteness that came from water riches stored safely away. Further and further into the trunk my perception raced, assaulted by a distorted mix of sensory input it had taken me years to learn to untangle. Those tarragon-scented, fuzzy violet tangles were chloroplasts, these bloated electric sparkles were vacuoles. I reveled in a vegetative serenity somehow different from the same mechanisms when present in humans.…

 
Deeper now, below the soil, down into the unnaturally thick and elongated filamentary roots, probing, searching with blind tropisms for the water locked as ice beneath the Martian surface. Thirst-seek, thirst-seek, thirst-seek—

Someone was shaking my shoulder. As if from a great distance, I sensed it. Pulling my psychic feelers back in, I returned to my own body.

Joelle Fourier, the colony’s aerologist, removed her hand from my shoulder. My face must have expressed some of my annoyance, for she stepped back warily.

“Doctor Strode, I wouldn’t have disturbed you if it wasn’t important. The expedition is returning, and there’s trouble.”

English was the lingua franca of the colony. Fourier’s was pleasantly accented. She wore a white quilted coverall with an embroidered ESA patch showing an antique Ariane rocket above the breast. She was a veteran in her abstruse field, already an ancient eighteen. After three years’ association with her, I knew nothing about her save this bare minimum of appearance, name and age, and didn’t care to.

“What kind of trouble?” I asked.

“Why, medical, of course. The messages have been vague, but that much is clear.”

I turned away. “Let Sanjour handle it. It’s her watch.”

“I cannot make Doctor Sanjour answer. She is locked in her quarters.”

“Shit. She’s probably cell-burning. Okay, let’s go roust her before she smokes her entire cortex.”

The cacti occupied circles of raw Martian soil separated by sintered rock paths topped with a ceramic glaze that was micro-grooved for traction when wet by occasional spills made when tapping the saguaros. I followed Fourier toward the dome exit. I fantasized that the cacti all bent toward me, reluctant to let me go, wanting to clutch me in their friendly deadly arms.

The two domes containing the living quarters were subdivided into truncated pie-pieces that opened onto central plant-filled atriums scattered with chairs and cushions.

At Sanjour’s door other colonists had gathered, sensing something was up. Their garments exhibited all the different patches of the many nations and organizations that made up the Comity. Their faces looked pale in the weak Martian sunlight that filtered down through the transparent dome top. The mostly young men and women shuffled nervously from foot to foot and whispered among themselves as I approached with Fourier. Make way for the pariah who holds your lives in his hands, folks.…

They cleared a path to the door for me. I tapped the open button on the security keypad. The red locked light lit up, there was a beep, and the door stayed shut.

“Who’s got the override code?”

A boy I recognized as one of the astronomers stepped up.

“Holtzmann left the codes with me,” he said. “But I don’t know about breaching Doctor Sanjour’s privacy—”

I saw as through a crimson curtain. “Listen, kid, we’ve got an incoming POGO full of sick citizens, and one of the two available medicos is locked in her room most assuredly burning her fucking neurons up for kicks. I suggest that the situation amounts to enough of an emergency to violate anyone’s privacy. But if you want to call it differently—”