Mr. Antonio switched off the comm and smiled. The groundwork had already been laid. Nickolai would be ready when the time came.
PART ONE
Original Sins
I believe in the incomprehensibility of God.
—HonorÉ De BALZAC (1799-1850)
CHAPTER FOUR
Stigmata
We serve most those beliefs that we first reject.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
[Animals] do not make me sick discussing their duty to God.
—WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)
Date: 2525.10.15 (Standard) Bakunin-BD+50°1725
Nickolai Rajasthan slowly woke from a drugged slumber. For a few brief, precious moments, he didn’t remember the past year. His subconscious still refused to accept his punishment, or his exile. For an instant he was ready to find himself in his own bed in the southern palace, to smell the scent of his siblings, his sisters . . .
Then he remembered.
He wasn’t in the southern palace, and he wasn’t on Grimalkin. The priests hadn’t been able, politically, to have a member of the royal family put to death, but they had made sure that he would never set foot on his home planet again.
Nickolai groaned.
“Easy there, big boy.” The voice spoke a dialect of the Fallen. It burned in Nickolai’s ears. Even after a year, the alien, almost squishy, tones of their languages were a constant reminder of his crime and his exile.
The priests had maimed him and had thrown him to the chaos of Bakunin to be little more than a beggar in hell. A lesser person might have spent his time finding an honorable way to die.
Nickolai always had a contrary nature.
“Are you awake?” the voice repeated.
“Yes,” Nickolai slurred.
“Good news. The implants took. I’m going to remove the bandages now. You may want to close your eyes.”
Nickolai couldn’t bring himself to do so. After a year of blindness, he already could sense a fuzzy light source on the periphery of his vision. Then, suddenly, the bandages came away from his face, and the world was a bright white light that was too intense for his brain to process.
Surprisingly, his new eyes didn’t hurt.
He blinked and the world changed, eyes adjusting to the brightness quicker than he had ever remembered. Shapes resolved for him, and he found himself looking at a too-small examination room. He lay in a chair that seemed barely able to hold him.
“Colors seem wrong,” Nickolai slurred.
A human face leaned into his field of vision, looking down at him. “Variable spectral sensitivity. Takes a while to get used to.” The man reached down and pulled up Nicolai’s left eyelid. “Good. No sign of any inflammation.”
The man hit a switch, and the chair slowly tilted upright with a pneumatic hiss. The progress was slow, but Nickolai still felt a little dizzy.
“Standard military specs,” the human said. Now that he was awake enough to place the voice, Nickolai remembered his name was Dr. Yee.
The doctor took a double handful of bandages from an examination tray and tossed them in a disposal chute. “Once you get used to adjusting the settings, you’ll be able to duplicate your natural range of vision. The hard part was scaling up the human design—and the pupil, of course . . .”
Nickolai nodded. It was sinking in. This wasn’t just a dream vision, he could actually see. If Dr. Yee wasn’t here to see the loss of dignity, Nickolai would have been jumping off the wall, and roaring an epic curse on the house of the priests who had burned his eyes.
Compared to that, his right arm was almost an afterthought.
He felt his shoulder itch, and he reached over to scratch it. He felt a new scar and looked down.
He had a new right arm. He touched his bicep, and even the yellow-and-black-striped fur felt real. He flexed his right hand, and his brain told him he could feel bones and tendons flexing even though he knew that the bones were metal and the tendons some sort of mechanical analog.
He extended the claws on his fingers and saw the only obvious sign that this was a prosthetic. The claws on his right hand weren’t black, but a gray metallic alloy.
Dr. Yee noticed Nickolai looking and said, “I apologize for that. This was all custom work, and unfortunately the mechanical tolerances on that hand turned out to be too tight for me to apply any sort of finish to the claws.”
“You did it all in a single operation?”
“I decided it would be easier to hold your body in stasis until I completed all the work. It shortens the recovery and rehabilitation time not to have multiple surgeries. And your benefactor suggested it would be, uh, better if you recovered quickly.”
Nickolai shook his head. Could this actually be real? Could he be whole? No, that is the wrong word . . .
“Intact” was better. He doubted he could be whole again, not after what happened. And now he was three times removed from his home. Once for his crime, twice for the blasphemous mechanical prosthetics now connected to his flesh, three times for the way he had chosen to pay for that blasphemy. His “benefactor,” as Dr. Yee put it.
The priests might have enjoyed the little shame Nickolai felt, until they realized that it was not for his crimes or for Dr. Yee’s unclean attentions. Nickolai’s shame was only for his own impatience.
He was strong enough. He could have waited another year, another five. To collect enough of his own resources to pay for his reconstruction without accepting the terms dictated by Mr. Antonio.
Perhaps.
As he pushed himself upright, he knew the reality. What value was his pride and the distant possibility of becoming himself again, when measured against the certainty of regaining his eyes, and his arm? If it required a pact with the Fallen, so be it; the priests had declared him damned already.
“Be cautious with that arm until you are used to it,” Dr. Yee said. “It is unlikely you can damage it, but it could cause you harm if you miscalculate any aggressive action.”
“It is stronger?”
“In some senses. The musculature is calibrated to match your natural limbs, but it has more tensile strength and can move faster—” Dr. Yee touched Nickolai’s shoulder. “You do not want to stress where it is attached.”
Nickolai touched the scar on his bicep, where the amputation had been.
“Oh, yes, that’s the biological skin, but I needed to excavate the remaining bone and much of the muscle that was left so we’d have a clean connection to the joint. Much less likely to have a failure that way.”
One more pound of flesh. No matter.
He looked at Dr. Yee, a full meter shorter than him now that he was standing. He wondered if Dr. Yee was short for a human. He was the first one he had actually seen in person.
“Have you been paid?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” Dr. Yee said. “Quite handsomely. If you have any further need—”
Nickolai ducked down and walked out the door of the examination room.
Nickolai stood outside Dr. Yee’s offices for a long time, facing the city of Godwin. The chaos of noise and scent was familiar, but he hadn’t been prepared to see the city for the first time. A clot-red dawn sky scabbed over the nightmares of a mad architect. There was no coherence to the blocks, spires, and twisted forms that made up the buildings of central Godwin. Aircars sped by at every level, dodging pedestrian walkways and tubes that seemed to connect buildings at random. What spaces weren’t filled by buildings, and traffic and people were flooded by massive holo displays throbbing with colors too saturated to have originated in this universe.