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ABOUT FIVE THINGS SLAMMED into my conscience all at the same moment: 1) the place was a lot cleaner; 2) Notch was standing there grinning at me cheerfully; 3) the container I’d been so worried about was in the horizontal dock; 4) the resuscitator was laid out, plugged in and open for business; and 5) my best pants were badly ripped.
Stevedore was out and striding to the resuscitator. By the time I caught up with him they were laying Tyge gently inside.
“Those splints had better come off,” I said, my voice sounding like it had come from someone else. This surely had to be a dream. Wasn’t I down a hole suffocating in cheese?
“No worries, mate.” They eased off the splints and tossed them aside. This gave me a few moments to take a really long look at Tyge for the first time since her 'death'. Her face was pale and, lacking the driving force of constant cellular activity, all the colour had gone from her tattoos. [I won’t try to explain the exact mechanism here, but they were not coloured by normal pigments.] She looked a hell of a lot like Sharp, except for that orange-and-black hair, of course.
Did I really love this woman? Was this the Tyge I really wanted to love, the vulnerable one underneath the tiger? Or was I already missing the tiger? Wasn’t the tiger important too?
Notch interrupted my high speed emotional musings. “So, Doc, about that career in medicine you said you wanted?”
I looked up. He was gesturing to the resuscitator control panel. There was only one control that really mattered, the RUN key. Catching his eye, unable to speak, tears in my eyes, I hit it. The device hummed to life. I’d only worked these things before in simulations. This time it was for real. This was Tyge, not some anonymous sim.
The primary scanner rolled up from the edge to its highest position. Beams of light stroked her body, indicating where the scans were currently passing. I glanced at the main screen, reading the data as it was coming up. I began to breath easy. Everything looked good for an immediate kick-start.
The chest-cage should deploy at any moment. Yes, up it came from the sides like precisely curved fingers of gleaming medical-grade plasto. It was all set to jolt her heart back into action, but first she would need re-heating. Once again I studied the screen.
I was tempted to over-ride and take manual control, but I left it on Auto. Safer; considering my current mental state. Breathing easier now, I watched the timer begin counting off the last minutes.
There was a familiar bang behind us. I turned, startled.
A vehicle had just docked, and another one came up about two seconds later. The two domes flipped up as one. Four people sprang out and hurried towards us: Tipper, Sharp, Mayor Bol and Komodo. I'd never seen him in a strider before. Thought he hated the things.
“How is she?” boomed Tipper urgently.
“Nearly cooked,” I answered, carelessly using a word us medicos only used in private, “we’ll have her pumping again in three minutes.”
Tipper seized my shoulder, “God! I got such a fright when I saw you coming up. I was yelling at you, Doc. Didn’t you hear anything?”
“Helmet was fried,” grunted Stevedore.
Sharp, meanwhile, had slid smoothly between everyone and knelt to gaze anxiously down at her sister. I saw her reach in and ease something from Tyge’s left hand. The card. She glanced up at me. I quickly glanced away, pretending to study the screen.
“Nearly there.” I said professionally. (Yeah, right.)
Then the mayor seized me, “Doc! You did a splendid job down there. Simply splendid! And about those legs; you’re a bloody marvel, mate. A bloody marvel!”
“Huh?” Guess I must have had a pretty blank look on my face. I thought he was referring to Tyge’s legs, about which I had yet to do anything.
“Stevo told us!”
Another blank look.
“You know!” he went on, “how you got those programs out of that old computer! I didn’t know you could do that sort of stuff! Brilliant, mate, totally brilliant! Gave us a whole new strategy!”
“It did?”
“We knew we were stuffed unless we dropped a line clean down the hole. Didn’t want to bury you under a tonne of crap, eh? Then Stevo says, ‘lets just take the whole bloody truck yard’. Well we looked at him like he was mad, of course. Then he told us how.”
The truck yard? “It walked here?”
“Yeah! Oh man, it looked magnificent! Then Stevo turns to me with a smile and says, ‘Want to take the main street too?’” (By this stage Bol was dancing on the spot like a simpleton, utterly delighted in his tale.) “It’s been great for business!”
“Great.” I echoed weakly, yet I felt my heart surge with delight at the sheer audacity of these people. Absolute genius. I glanced towards Stevo, but he'd already slipped away.
The resuscitator’s ready-signal pinged. I glanced at the screen; all okay; then paused to look at the Tyge I was probably never going to see again: like a child. Utterly vulnerable.
“Doc, you gonna do this or what!?” snapped Tipper anxiously.
“Sorry.” I slapped the PULSE key. Tyge twitched. Her mouth opened and her chest heaved up. We all heard that first gasping breath. She hung like that for a terrible moment, something my training simulators never did, then she relaxed down, took another breath, and another, and another...
We all gasped for breath ourselves, relieved that the horror was over. Despite everything our minds told us, despite our faith in the machinery, we had all been in the most primitive of places. We had all been in the presence of Death.
Tyge breathed on. Her tiger-stripes returned but her face was still very relaxed. Since her legs were such a mess, the auto-setting was keeping her unconscious. I studied the readings, decided I wouldn’t interfere, got my emotions back under control and allowed myself to look around at the others.
Notch was grinning at me, his hand out. I took it. His grip was immensely strong. “Congrats, Doc. You’re a real Edger now.”
I grinned back at him stupidly.
Tipper was next. She hugged me loudly and savagely, but I thought I detected one genuine sob hidden in her usual fury of physical excess. I let it be.
Sharp, for the moment, was beyond reach. Huddled beside the resuscitator, she was laid over her sister as best she could, weeping softly. It occurred to me that I could have explained this to everyone in just three words, ‘they’re sisters’, but decided against it. Perhaps she still wanted to keep it secret. And I knew how Edgetown thrived on secrets.
Suddenly I felt a hard knobbled claw on my shoulder. I turned. Komodo was only up to my shoulder but he was built like a bulldozer none the less. “Doc,” he growled, “guess I’ve given you a fair bit of crap since you got here, but you know: I still regarded you as part of Them. At least ... until now...”
I nodded cautiously.
“...So anyway; you saved my arse and so I guess I owe you a big one.” He flexed the moveable scales on his neck (his version of a squirm, I guessed) and said, “So this is yours now. All yours.” His lizard-y gesture took in the entire building.
My jaw flapped open for the second time in ten minutes.
He went on, “Well, you always wanted a private clinic, didn’t ya? So here it is already! Oh and don’t panic, we’ll do it up for ya! Was going to be a surprise, but anyway...”
I thought he’d finished, then he added, “And, ah, if you’d honor me with one thing?”
“What’s that?” I managed to stutter.
He brushed a claw over his missing eyebrow spikes, “Can I be your first customer?”
I broke into a big smile, actually bowed (a bit of my parents' culture coming through), “I’d be honoured, sir! Really honoured!”
He grasped my hand, human-style, and tried not to crush it too badly. Then another hand landed on my shoulder, the broad mitt of Stevedore. He was back. “Doc?”
“Yeah?”
He glanced at Sharp and Tyge. “I think they’ll be alright now, y'reckon?” My eyebrows must have gone up or something. He grunted and rubbed at the back of his neck self-conciously, “Hey well – I knew something was going on. Would have taken an idiot to miss they were sisters or something.”
#
I HAD SERIOUS WORK to do. I couldn’t bring Tyge around until those legs were locked in, pain-blocked and rebuilding. Shooing everyone out but Sharp I focused on getting a full picture out of the resuscitator, then plugged in a nano-factory from the container, stripped her legs of boots and clothing (will spare you the sickening details), closed the lower half of the resuscitator, checked the force-field generators were mapping her new bone-plan accurately, then hit ‘RUN’.
She’d also need a lot of nutrients so I arranged an extra supply through a good old-fashioned drip. After that I was pretty much done.
Real medicine had been done: real coal-face medicine. OMG it felt good! I finally sat back. It was well after midnight. “I can wake her up, if you want,” I said to Sharp.
“Whenever is best.”
I stretched once more to the controls, changed some settings. “It’ll be very gradual.”
She didn’t reply, just sat beside her sister on a beautifully embroidered cushion that Komodo had fetched for her from somewhere else in the building.
“I, ah, I have a confession to make.” I finally said.
Her eyes lifted slowly to meet mine. She had been crying so now they looked like a pair of boot-holes in a patch of snow, but at least her makeup was still perfect. Whatever it was, tears weren’t washing it away. “What?” she said suspiciously.
“I, ah, I was a bit slow with the card. Only remembered it just as she... ah, just as I had to... when she got chilled.”
Her gaze hardly flickered, like I’d hardly let her down, like this was just another familiar chapter in her crappy life. What, I wondered, was ever going to get this lady riled? What, I also wondered, had I ever seen in her? I hurried on with my planned story.
“But she spoke about you, at length! It was her big issue; the thing that she needed to share. So... uh, I know who you are, Gracie.”
Silence.
I tried a different tack, “She told me that, more than anything else in the world, she wanted to get out of that hole so she could go and find you.”
Something stirred in those snow-holes. “Whatever for?” she whispered.
“To save you.”
“I saved myself, as it happens.” Very cool, very level. Life had made her tough; way way tougher than me.
“So you still won’t forgive her?” I asked.
At which point she blew. “I did four years in a TL Penitentiary thanks to her, four bloody years! I thought it would never end! It was hell, Doc, sheer bloody hell! Embroidery; music; deportment, the tea ceremony... You’ve no idea what it’s like, Doc, no idea!”
She was right, I very definitely had no idea. To me it sounded pretty good!
Anyway I put on my professional empathising face and hoped we could move on. Time for a slick diverting question. “So is that where you learned to play?” I gestured 'piano'.
“I had talent,” she said bitterly, “It had to come out somehow.”
“And now let me guess: you got your vocal chords modified...”
“How’d you guess that?”
“People recognise voices, and she didn’t.”
“That wasn’t the reason,” she said huskily, her voice shrinking down almost to a whisper, “and it wasn’t my choice. Not really. It was forced onto me.”
Her eyes drifted elsewhere, into her past; away to another planet and another life. I saw how haunted she looked but I kept shut and let her be. Her story.
“We were holed up with some other low-lifes in an abandoned ship. Big old freighter. It was laid up for scrap. Water ship, not spaceship. Anyway the local cops decided to clear us out, some idiot started a fire, I got trapped on the wrong side of everything, freaking out, really freaking out, just smashing and smashing at this one door, it broke through, the fire was right there, I took a lungful of superheated air, and ... and died.”
She shuddered. Despite all the psych-editing she must have had, she was still remembering death. “That’s how they got me; classic ‘dead-arrest’.” Her hand tapped quietly on the side of the resuscitator, “I’ve been in one of these myself.”
Silence. She was remembering. I gave her five seconds. “So your voice..?”
“There was this police doctor did the re-suss, just like this, I guess. She had to make some fast decisions and move on to the next victim. She didn’t know what my voice had been like, didn’t have time to run a full GGS, but she cared enough to do a good job. So she pulled up a file and assigned me a singer's voice.”
She actually laughed, very dry. “I couldn’t exactly say 'no', could I?”
That made me squirm. A police medic – some underpaid B-Grad hack – but with enough ethics to do a good job on every crim who came her way. No question. Astounding. (Not that I said anything to Sharp about my thoughts.)
“I like it,” I said instead.
“It ain’t sweet.”
“That’s why I like it. And your tattoo...?”
“It's still there. My burns were mostly first degree. Doctor Ishikawa didn’t have the budget to etch them out, so they stayed functional under my new skin.”
Ishikawa? I made a mental note to look her up some time, thank her, praise her, give her a job if I could!
“So exactly what sort of make-up do you use to...?” (I’d been dying to ask.)
“Low-op Chameleon, Type Two. They weren’t paying for anything fancy.”
“The police?”
“No no no no, Mum and Dad.”
“You went back?”
She nodded, “To apologise. And to face their wrath if necessary.”
“And?”
“They hugged me, said they were sorry. I said I was sorry too, then we got on with looking for Tyge.”
“After everything she put you through?”
Those purple eyes darkened momentarily, “I was doing it for Mum and Dad, okay? And anyway; I was young, I was free, and I had the means to pay my way around the Galaxy, which they didn’t. And in case you’re wondering what lead me here, well, there’s only so many places where people can escape iSearch these days.”
She looked down at her sister and added, “Only took me a year.”
“What did you hope to do when you found her?”
“Try and save her,” she admitted, her voice wry with the irony.
“Do you still think you need to?”
“No,” she said, sitting back, “looks like she saved herself. This place sort of fits her, doesn’t it? She’s got her own business, she’s got friends, people sort of respect her here,” she glanced up at me, “even love her...”
“Do you?” I risked asking, still poking at her tender spot.
She grimaced, then slowly nodded.
“But you still don’t forgive her?”
“She buggered up my life so bad...!”
“Yeah,” I intercepted quickly, “and I can tell you straight: she knows it. She was so riddled with guilt down there, couldn’t stop talking about it once she got started.”
Sharp reached out, stroked Tyge’s spiky hair, murmured something. It gave me a moment to glance at the read-outs. Tyge was nearly awake.
“Look,” I said, “if you don’t want her to ever know...”
“No!” she said quickly, “I’ve got to.”
“Okay. Well, I’m here for you both.”
“Thanks.”
“So, what do you look like?” I asked unexpectedly, deciding to follow a bit of an intuitive notion I had about her inner psychology, “I mean, Tyge told me about the vow: the tattoos for life. But of course I’ve never seen yours.”
She gazed at me a long moment, then slowly reached into a pocket, brought out her compact and held it in front of her face. That same flash of pink light and the white was gone. She faced me, silent and proud. As Tyge had tigers, Sharp had little dancing devils; and very cute little devils they were too.
Even so, it was hardly the right look for getting work in fancy bars.
“That tattooist was an real artist.” I said to make conversation, then glanced down at the silent breathing form between us. “How do you suppose Tyge would feel to see you now?”
Sharp said nothing. I saw her hand twitch on the compact as if she were fighting the urge to return to her usual bland cover. I waited for some sort of reply, and it came from a not-so-completely unexpected quarter.
“She’d feel like a million creds,” spoke a wispy voice between us, “Correction: a zillion creds!” Tyge’s eyes were open. They rolled slowly towards Sharp. For someone coming out of a medical coma, she was doing remarkably well. “How are ya, Gracie?”
Sharp’s lower lip quivered. I saw her eyes fill with fear.
“It’s okay, kid,” whispered Tyge, her good hand fluttering up towards the devil face, “I still love ya. Just don’t ever run out on me again.”
I left them holding hands, crying a bit, trying to talk to one other.
Sure; I wasn’t doing their eyebrows, but that was the best bit of medicine I ever did.