The Sardonyx Net (65 page)

The hand still looked like a construct, something made, not flesh, and it still had no fingers. Reparative paint, a thick, membranous substance, covered the ungainly lump. The paint gleamed like tarnished silver. Ja picked up a sponge from the tray and dabbed at the crusted paint. Slowly the paint dissolved, dripped, and fell off. Fingers began to emerge from the lump. They looked red, grotesque, ugly...."Looks good,” Ja said. He sponged off the last flake of paint. “Waggle your fingers,” he commanded.
 

Zed tried. He felt a tingling in the wrist. Then the fingers moved. “Response time one point three seconds,” Ja said. “That's quite common. Left hand, please.”
 

As Ja picked away at the left-hand bandages, Zed tried moving his right hand. He had seen the effect before in cases of limb replacement or tissue match: no matter how expert the surgeon—and Ja Narayan was very good, indeed—it took a certain time before the original and the new neural pathways synched. The response lag would lessen and finally disappear, he knew. He was more concerned about the numbness. He wiggled the fingers, turned the hand at the wrist, searching for a way to waken feeling in the restored digits.
 

Ja finally freed the left hand from its wrappings. “Move it,” he said. Zed moved the fingers. “The synaptic lag appears less, don't you agree?”
 

“What do you think?” Zed asked.
 

“I think you should stop taking up a bed,” said Ja.
 

“How much can I use them?”
 

“It depends what you plan to do with them,” said the surgeon. “Don't lift anything heavy, and don't try to do anything precise. Get some gloves without tips to protect them.”
 

“That's a good idea,” said Zed. He closed his eyes and tried to pour his senses into his hands, to reawaken the nerves. Nothing happened. He opened his eyes.
 

Ja said “Try the claws.” Zed licked his lips. The claws would not extend unless the fingers were slightly crooked: he curved them. Ja prompted him. “Keep the hand extended and make a fist.”
 

“I remember.” The instructions sounded contradictory but were not. Zed imagined as he tensed that he could feel the neural impulse traveling down his arms.
 

The claws slid out.
 

They were impressive: about two and a half centimeters long, metal, gleaming, sharp as a scalpel. Zed turned his hands in the air, admiring them. He relaxed the tension; they retracted. “Thanks, Ja,” he said. “They're exactly what I wanted.”
 

Ja gazed at his handiwork as if he had never seen it before. “Not bad,” he said. “What're you going to do with them?”
 

“Climb mountains,” Zed said. “And—other things.”
 

“Put a gel layer on them before you go out,” Ja advised.
 

“When can I ...?”
 

“Climb mountains? Come back here in three weeks. It'll be at least that long before the meld takes, maybe longer.”
 

“Can I scratch?” Zed said. “Can I bathe?”
 

“You can scratch anything you like,” Ja said. “As for bathing, they won't rust, if that's what you mean.” Dutifully, Zed smiled. “And they won't extend by accident. The fingertips may feel a little sore.”
 

Zed nodded. “Got it,” he said. “Ja, many thanks.”
 

“Wait'll you see my bill,” said the surgeon. He took his gloves off, dumped them into the disposal, and left. Zed sighed, and, cautiously, scratched his left arm with his right hand. He could not feel the texture of the skin, nor—he moved his hand—the texture of hair, or the fabric of his clothes. No matter, he told himself, discernment would come. Quickly he hunted around the room for his belongings, and found only clothes and Rhani's letter. Everything else—bookviewer, booktapes, old PINsheets—belonged to the Clinic.
 

Haldane Ku walked in. “How do they feel?” he said.
 

Zed held the lumpy hands for him to see. “It's nice to have the bandages off.”
 

“I'll bet,” said the rotund orderly. “You want to leave now, I suppose.”
 

“Yes. I need some protective gel.”
 

Ku went to the supplies cabinet and brought out a tube. Zed extended his hands. Carefully Ku covered them with a thin layer of paint. “How's that?” he said.
 

Zed flexed the hands, feeling the slight coolness of the gel through the new skin. The sensation delighted him. “Good. Now gloves.”
 

Ku rummaged in the cabinet for a pair of gloves. “Hmm,” he said, holding them up, “large enough? No, I think not.” He found the next larger size. “Better let me do this.” Zed submitted—for the last time, he told himself—to the indignity of having someone else assist him in donning an article of clothing.
 

“The tips have to come off,” he warned.
 

“Right,” said Ku. He procured a pair of shears from the cabinet and nipped the ends of the fingers from the gloves. “Now—” he tugged the gloves on the rest of the way. The extra layer seemed to increase the anesthetic effect, but Zed told himself that this would not last, that soon the sense of discriminate feeling would come back.
 

“Thanks,” he said to Ku.
 

The orderly smiled. “Glad you're going home,” he said.
 

“Sorry I was such a bad patient.”
 

“No, you're not,” said Ku calmly. “Sorry, I mean. I don't think you could be anything else.”
 

Taken aback, Zed glared at him. But the truth of what the orderly said penetrated and unwillingly, he laughed. “You're right.”
 

“I know. Good day, Senior. Have a pleasant life.” Ku smiled, turned his back, and began to strip the bed.
 

Zed walked into the corridor.
 

The lounging guards came to attention automatically, and then relaxed. He recognized them vaguely: they were both members of the Net Communications unit. “How's it going, Commander?” said one of them, the shorter of them. She wore a stun gun on her hip. Zed was surprised that the Clinic had let her display the weapon so openly. She followed his glance and grinned. “It isn't loaded,” she said. A stun cylinder flickered between the fingers of her left hand, and vanished. “But this is.”
 

Zed said casually, “Let me see that.” She held it out to him, and he gripped it in his right hand. After a moment of stupefaction, she laughed.
 

“Hey,” she said, “the bandages—gone! You gettin' out of here?”
 

“I am,” said Zed. He dropped the silver cylinder into her left hand.
 

“Hey, Raeka, tell the others,” she said to her companion. The tall woman with the communicator on her belt lifted it to her lips. She thumbed the stud and spoke softly. Zed heard his own name. “Where to, Commander?”
 

“Home—or, at least, where my sister is,” he said.
 

“Right. We're ready.” Raeka thumbed the communicator stud to off and put the device back in her belt.
 

Zed frowned. He did not want to be escorted around the city as if he were an incompetent or a tourist. “I didn't ask for company,” he said.
 

The two women looked at each other, and then the short one—whose name, he remembered suddenly, was Barbara—said, “We know that, Commander. But when we decided to do this, we decided to keep at it until the fucker A-Rae's caught. You want not to see us, we can do that, I think, but we're not shinnyin'. Sorry.”
 

Despite himself, Zed's fingers began to curl. He recognized the gesture and, alarmed, halted it. What the woman said was fair—indeed, with the Net gone, the crew was free to do what it liked and technically they were all on leave, certainly not subject to his orders.... After a while his breathing steadied. Neither of the women had moved, but Barbara's little stun pistol glinted in her hand. He wondered if she would have used it. His throat hurt.
 

He shrugged. “I won't argue,” he said. They walked from Recovery to CTD, CTD to Outpatient, Outpatient to the street. At the door of Outpatient, Zed halted. The waiting room, as usual, was filled with people punching computer keyboards, baring their arms to technicians, holding urine samples, reading booktapes or listening to auditors while they waited for someone else to appear from the bowels of the building.... He wondered if he should go back to Surgery and say farewell to the people he had worked with.
 

But the only people he wanted to see again were Sai Thomas and Yukiko.
 

He gasped as he walked onto the street. The Clinic was temperature-controlled; even in four days, he had forgotten what Abanat's heat was like. He fumbled Rhani's letter from his pocket and read the address again. Forty-seven Cabell Street. He stopped in front of a pressure map. He found Cabell Street: it was two blocks long, in the southwest quadrant of the city, equidistant from the Clinic and Landingport East. He wondered why she had chosen to live in so unfashionable a district. The homes were very different from those in the western section of Abanat—maybe that was why. A vendor swerved toward him; Zed saw Raeka, on his left side, glide toward the unsuspecting man. He waved her away. “Chobi seeds,” he said.
 

The vendor tossed them to him underhand. “You're welcome, Commander,” he called as Zed dug for his credit disc.
 

Forty-seven Cabell Street was a corner house. It was all on one story, and so surrounded by vines that he could barely see the configuration of the roof. As he knocked on the front door he saw Barbara and Raeka vanish into the garden. The door opened; a thin, brown man with no tattoo nodded to him and stepped back to let him enter. “Welcome, Commander.”
 

“Thank you,” Zed said. He gazed at the house's interior. He had stepped not into a hall but into a room. Soft green light filled it; sunlight, shining through leaf-covered windows. The rug on the floor was woven straw. Some of the interior walls were latticelike, not solid, and through them he could see the shadowy figures of other people. “Rhani?” he said.
 

“Zed-ka.” He turned. One of the latticed walls had grown a door. She stood framed in it, wearing Yago blue. Her hair was braided and the braids fastened to her head with a silver comb. “Thank you, Cole,” she said, and the dark man effaced himself. Zed's pulse was suddenly beating hard and fast. He wanted to run away. Memory moved in him, and behind it lay an agony that he did not want to remember, did not dare remember.... He held out his reconstructed hands, and she gripped them. She said, “You told me to give your skeleton to Yianni Kyneth, Zed-ka, but I couldn't. It's in your room.”
 

His room was opposite hers and looked directly into the garden. She brought him to it, kissed his cheek, and left him there. The skeleton was there: he rubbed its bald head as he passed it, feeling hardness but no other sensation through the deadening layers of gel and glove. Sitting on the bed, he flexed his arms. The muscles did not seem weak. He pushed against the wall with both hands. They trembled. He needed to exercise, he thought, to rebuild the strength which had been seared from the old muscle tissue by ... by ... Warned by his racing pulse, he slammed his fist against the wall. He would
not
remember. Pain like a cold wind shot through his punished hand and arm.
 

A terrible, gelatinous darkness seemed to hover just outside his field of vision, poised to descend. He clamped his lips and waited for the throbbing to stop. When it ceased, he extended the hand and, curving the fingers, willed a fist. The claws slid out. He marveled at the interior sheathing that Ja had devised to keep the edges from ripping open his fingertips.
 

He would get another pair of gloves—silver, he thought, with blue trim. He would have to have them made. He relaxed his hand; the claws retracted, he did not even have to look at them. A noise made him start; he glanced outside to see Raeka prowling through the shrubbery. Rhani called him; he went to the hall and looked through the lattices to find her. A woman in dark clothing directed him to one of the solid-walled rooms, calling it “the library.”
 

Zed found it. It had shelves for booktapes, but the shelves were bare. In one corner stood an empty, old-fashioned viewer on a metal stand. Rhani stood beside it, reading a letter. She gave it to him. He scanned it briefly, and saw that it was in fact one letter repeated four times. It was from Family Yago, to the Federation. The first sheet had the initials “FD” in the margin. The second and third sheets had comments down the sides. The fourth sheet had a page of comments attached to it, signed “C. Wu.”
 

Rhani said, “Christina wants me to cite legal references. Theo's changes are trivial. Imre sends his love and agreement. Ferris had the sense just to sign his name.”
 

“How much money are you asking for, Rhani-ka?”
 

She grinned. “Sixteen million credits. That's what it would cost Family Yago to replace the Net.”
 

“I see,” he said. “And with that money—”
 

“We will build a dorazine plant.”
 

“What will the other sector worlds do for prison transport, without a ship?”
 

She shrugged. “They'll do what they did before the Net was built. Each of the worlds will be responsible for shipping its own prisoners to Chabad. Family Yago will supply the dorazine and the technicians necessary to staff the ships.” She held out another piece of paper. It was a contract, stating Family Yago's intention to pay Narcosis Enterprises the sum of fifteen million credits.