Kevin Anderson - Resurrection, Inc.

Van Ryman could not resist. His arms slowly moved up to fend them off, but he felt a stinging in his neck. One of the Coven Managers herding him toward the altar withdrew his finger; he saw a glint from the silver thimble needle that had been dipped in curare. Vincent knew it would take only a moment, and he felt the vestiges of his muscle control dissolving into mist.

He lay back, barely able to feel the roughness of the altar against his naked back. He stared up at the ceiling, originally hewn from the end of a deep subway tunnel but now embellished with papier mache stalactites.

“Rah hyuun!”

“Rah hyuun!”

Vertigo engulfed him as the chanting reached its climax. He could not move or even turn his head now. It was a major effort simply to blink his eyes.

Then the chanting stopped abruptly. The tape-recorded choir cut off, and the neo-Satanist attendees stopped their own voices a moment afterward. The hushed silence pounded at him.

Into his field of view he saw, like a mirror moving up in front of him, his own face, his stolen face, fixed with a fanatical, confident expression, looking triumphant. The real Van Ryman could see a line of faint red pinpricks along the imposter’s jaw. Then he caught the glint of orange candlelight on the edge of the wide, rune-marked sacrificial dagger, the arthame.

The imposter spoke the last words, the benediction of the High Sabbat, as he brought the arthame down. “Ashes to ashes, blood to blood; fly to Hell for all our good!”

Van Ryman was not able to blink; the curare denied him even an instinctive flinch. Blackness and pain exploded outward from the center of his chest as the blade drove in….

Now, Danal came up out of the memory gasping, sucking cold air into his lungs like a drowning man clawing his way to the surface. Servants did not sweat—their body temperature was too closely regulated to make perspiration necessary—but he felt drenched with an emotional backwash.

The memory of the High Sabbat scorched the backs of his eyes, yet the pain grew more endurable. The mental ache did not fade, but he learned how to tolerate it, how to face his own past. He stepped into the middle of the winding street, leaving behind the fixation with his memories. Danal had more practical considerations for the moment.

What was he going to do now?

He couldn’t go back. He couldn’t ask for help. The imposter remained living inside Danal’s own home, playing the part of Vincent Van Ryman. Danal had no place there. The imposter had planned something, led Danal through the motions of a careful script, and he had unwittingly performed like a pre-programmed machine.

But Francois Nathans was dead at the Servant’s hands. Some of the self-directed horror faded as Danal remembered what Nathans had done to him in life, but Nathans had never been stupid. The killing had been too carefully set up, as if Nathans had specifically planned to trigger Danal’s murderous rage. As if he had a death wish, or something else in mind. Had he been trying to commit suicide? Not Nathans. Was there something more, something that Danal still could not see even with the restoration of his memories?

The Servant finally began to heed the pain in his shoulder. He cocked his head and looked down at the torn gray material of his jumpsuit, at the cut-meat remains of his shoulder where the shrapnel had struck him. Clear, saplike synBlood oozed from the wound.

Doctor. Medical attention. He would have to be repaired. Servants had difficulty healing themselves. The synthetic blood did carry micro-platelets to dissolve and coagulate, sealing leaks upon exposure to air, much like some antifreeze solutions sealed mechanical leaks. But the wound sealants in synBlood were not very efficient, good mostly for minor injuries. After all, if a Servant was too badly damaged, an owner could just get a new one.

The slow healing might be Danal’s greatest danger, letting him bleed to death before he could adequately seal off the injury. Even in that case, the synHeart would dutifully keep beating, and the microprocessor would continue to drive his brain while the bloodless body burned itself out.

Danal searched his mind, accessing all the general information stored in the microprocessor until he found the implanted map of the Metroplex. Inside his head Danal located the nearest medical center.

The red swath of Nathans’s blood stood out like a banner on his jumpsuit. Danal would have to explain the blood and his own injury. He wasn’t certain if the center would treat him at all. He set off, trudging down the street, mentally slowing his synHeart to retard the bleeding. He would worry about explanations later.

By the time Danal arrived at the medical center, he had reached the middle stages of dizzy euphoria, feeling light as air and drained of blood. The world moved slower around him.

The transplastic doors glided open in front of him, smooth and silent on their chrome tracks. He plodded into the room, peripheral vision suddenly gone fuzzy. Black spots danced in front of his eyes, like holes in the universe that winked in and out of existence.

Several Servants worked behind the expansive front counter, keying information, moving boxes, delivering papers and supplies. Other patients waited in separate privacy cubicles surrounded by bright plastic plant-things, but the reception area itself seemed relatively empty. The casualties from the street riot had apparently not yet overflowed the medical centers closer to Resurrection, Inc.

Danal shuffled up to the counter, trying to speak, but his throat was too dry. A female Servant stood with her back to him, paying no attention to his arrival. One of the fluorescent light panels overhead flickered spasmodically, as if struggling to throw out just a few more photons before the repair-rats replaced it.

An overweight nurse/tech strolled out from another corridor to meet the wounded Servant. Her hair had been dyed black and looked like plastic; her face was weighted down with so much makeup that Danal doubted he could see a square centimeter of her real skin. Thin surgical gloves covered her hands.

The nurse/tech looked at him with a puzzled, astonished expression. Dried blood from Francois Nathans stained the front of Danal’s jumpsuit, and the Servant’s own colorless synBlood darkened the fabric around his ragged wound. She spoke with a thin voice he would not have expected from her matronly body. “What do you want here, Servant? Has there been an accident?”

Danal placed a blank mask on his face and answered her calmly. “I was told to come here to be healed.” He used the last of his mental strength to wrench himself back to awareness of his surroundings.

Still not sure what to do, the nurse/tech refused to move. Then she clutched at her usual routine and stepped back behind the counter to reach a Net terminal. After hitting a few burst keys, she called up an input screen and looked at him with detached professionalism.

“Okay, how were you injured?”

Danal responded automatically with the self-programmed answer he had pounded into the front of his brain. “A riot in the streets. A stray projectile struck me. The Enforcer told me to come here.” His Servant programming rebelled, trying to deny the lie and state the bald facts, but Danal managed to control the other self.

“What’s your ID number? And who is your Master?” she asked in a flat voice, routine questions to her.

Danal balked and covered his momentary hesitation with a sigh of pain. Vincent Van Ryman was not his Master. Vincent Van Ryman was not even real, not anymore. An imposter now had the name and the physical appearance, but the real Van Ryman was dead, living again only as a simulacrum of disguised flesh, resurrected memories. Danal couldn’t give out his ID number. That would be like a beacon for anyone trying to track him down, a signal for the Enforcers and the Guardian Angels to locate him, to terminate him once and for all.