Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

Once she was unconscious, they undid her chains and the two big men straightened her out, something that would have produced unbearable agony had she not been sedated. Now they lay her on the surgical bed and the medic performed a far more extensive series of tests.

“You all can go now, prepare the male. This won’t take long,” the medic told them. “However, you should tell the Captain that neither one of them are likely to be physically able to walk for some time.”

“He won’t like that,” one of the men warned.

The medic shrugged. “Then he shouldn’t truss them up like this. You can’t get full muscular function back easily or quickly after such abuse any more than you can stop a storm by telling it to not get you wet. If reality was like that then he could just will the damned crashed ship to fix itself and take off. Now, go.”

“You sure she’s not gonna wake up and maybe do some harm in here?” the woman asked.

“Were you listening? Odds are this girl couldn’t lift her arms or walk two feet at the moment. I’m sure if we had a full ship’s hospital we could do wonders, but we don’t even have a real doctor here, so forget it. Besides, the shot I gave her is good for an hour or more at her weight. My only danger from her is if I spend that hour talking to you and then turn my back on her.”

With that, they left, leaving him to his business.

There was bruising and cramping for sure, but nothing that couldn’t be overcome if she went through a series of exercises over the next day or so. Without the automatic machines to do that, though, he could only rely on the leech.

He had often wondered who had invented the ghastly things, and he was sure that he never wanted to meet them. They certainly were an unfinished product. An artificial parasite, programmable, controllable, and knowledgeable about the human nervous system. He pulled down the full body probe and passed it over her from head to foot, then back again. The data piled up in the medical computer he normally used to see about internal injuries and breaks and the like and gave a three-dimensional hologram of the woman. He could even spot the implants in her head and admired the workmanship. If only they had that kind of skill!

Then he reached into a drawer and pulled out a small sealed container. There weren’t many in there, and there were no more when these were gone. He put the container directly into a special socket made for it in the medlab computer console, and said, “Download human schematic.” What the probes had learned, which was quite a lot, was compressed, condensed, and passed down to the leech.

The damned things scared him a bit, not so much for what they did but for what they probably could do in their finished, polished form which must be perfected by now somewhere in the human side of colonization. This thing could turn a complex human into a far simpler machine. Very limited usefulness, really. He could imagine, though, that whatever mad scientist or madder government or agency had been working on these must by now have one that fused with and reprogrammed the host. You’d seem the same, but you’d be always totally loyal to the leader, you would be obedient to all law and authority, and you’d turn in your own mother if she deviated. And that would be just for starters. This was bad enough, but at least it was basic and as easy to recover as to implant.

Maybe somebody had blown up the gates going back to the Mother System. Maybe they didn’t want a virus of slavery spreading so quickly. That sure would explain the Great Silence.

He turned her over on her side a bit. She gave a mumbled protest but didn’t awaken, and he didn’t need very much area. He looked over, saw green, and removed the container from the programming slot, then turned it and positioned it just so against her neck. When he had the exact spot he wanted, he pushed a small switch at the end of the container. The thing quivered, and something small and black and sluglike went from the container into her body at that point. He withdrew the container, noted the clean but small and almost antiseptic-looking wound, got some cotton and alcohol and cleaned it off, then patched it with artificial skin. In a few hours there would be no trace of it unless you were looking for it, and even most medical diagnostics would miss the leech as it virtually merged with the spinal column just at the back of the head where it emerged from the brain. And you’d need the code and the container to transmit it to get the thing out.

One of the men who’d brought her in came back. “You all done, Doc?”

“As much as I can right now. I want you to take her to the recovery area, lie her flat, and find and bring me her robe and put it in there. Make sure there’s nothing in it, of course.”

“Oh, they all been stripped. Kind of a shame, though. You gonna dress her? I mean, she looks—”

“Never mind. There’s enough of that around as it is. We want control, nothing more. When you’ve done that, bring in the male.”

I’ve been here too long , the medic told himself. I’m beginning to care again.

For Eve, it was like coming out of a sweet, motherly embrace back to a colder and harsher consciousness. Still, there was no pain, and perhaps for good reason. She found herself barely able to feel much of anything at all, almost like she’d been bathed in some painkilling lotion that had made her skin dead and nonreceptive.

She was lying on her back on a basic straw mattress, and that was interesting. She tried moving, but nothing at all seemed to work. It was as if she were paralyzed; perfectly awake, but unable to move or even feel much of anything at all.

The thought brought momentary panic. What if they had paralyzed her? It didn’t take much—you learned that in martial arts classes. Naturally, when The Mountain was whole and everything and everybody was on ship’s routine you could use the medical labs there and grow new connections, but down here, like this, it was a particularly frightening idea.

The big men wheeled in another figure, this time a man, and for a moment she was afraid that it was John Robey. She tried to move her head to see, but she simply couldn’t. She was blinking, she was breathing, even swallowing as needed or required, but she could control nothing at all.

They’d put him next to her, so it wasn’t possible to see much beyond his legs and feet. He was a hairy guy, anyway, and appeared to be, well, large if that which was partly glimpsed was what she thought it was. Still, there was no way to even tell when or if he was awake, let alone communicate with him. It was as frustrating as the cave where they’d been chained, although, she had to admit, less painful.

The medic came in after a few minutes and examined each of them professionally and clinically, top to bottom. She was somewhat embarrassed by this but could hardly protest. What good would it have done had she been able to, anyway? This was the man who’d paralyzed them both, wasn’t it?

He finished, stood back, and unclipped a small rod-shaped device from a utility belt and held it like a small portable microphone. He pressed two buttons on the side and then said into it, “Legs up in the air, backs flat against the bed.”

To her complete astonishment, her legs went straight up vertical to her hips and held there.

“Legs together. Yes, that’s right,” he continued. “Now, because I know you know what this means, I want you to use only the legs and do a bicycle movement with both. Slowly, now. Yes, that’s good.”

In both their cases, their legs were going back and forth as if riding some sort of imaginary bicycle or exercise machine. What was amazing to her was that she barely felt it, and had nothing to do with it.