Michael Flynn: On the Razor’s Edge

Perhaps he would get a better body out of this. One with skin not so parchment tight across his bones, with eyes less sunken, with the scalp free of the crisscross scars that parted the tufts of snow-white hair. Perhaps he would be restored to the vigor of his youth.

But probably not. He was not sure he had had a youth, or that it had been filled with vigor. The scars that parted his hair had parted his mind, as well. Years ago, the Names had divided it into sundry and diverse shards, each an expert in some facet of the espionage art. The intent had been a team; the consequence, a committee; the price, a loss of memories.

So while his body thus healed itself of its wounds, his minds were free to consider how he had come by them.

At first it was difficult. The mind recoils from injury, and Donovan’s mind had recoiled in multiple directions and it took awhile for them to find one another. It was not exactly amnesia; it was more like fugue. But parts of him remembered different things: sights or sounds; strategies and tactics; thoughts and words. From these fragments he sought to assemble the thing entire.

How long recollection took he could not say, nor how reliable the result. Pollyanna was prone to burnish his memories with the polish of best construal, and the Sleuth sometimes spanned the gaps with bridges of logical interpolation. Yet events were not always logical and their meanings seldom rosy.

We been in a fight,the Brute concluded. He could name the blows by the wounds they had left behind. The melted skin implied the penumbra of a dazer burst. The snapped rib entailed the shod foot that had cracked it. The holes in his leg intimated shrapnel; the slice, a sharpened edge.

But we’re alive, the Sleuth submitted. That means we won. “Although if this were victory,” the Fudir countered, “we would just as soon not taste defeat.” Besides, other events than victory might end with the scarred man bundled in an autoclinic. Rescue, for instance. Preparation for torture, for another.

Consciousness was a sometime thing. Sleep was a blessing.

In sleep, the Silky Voice took over, metering out soothing enzymes, working in concert with the autoclinic. Donovan worried, as was his nature, over in whose custody they lay and for what purpose; but as no one in the ship’s crew had made an appearance and as his present state precluded effective response in any case, there was little point to the bother save to upset the enzymatic balance. So the Silky Voice sedated him as well.

Only the Brute seemed unaffected. But that was because the Brute was immersed always in his senses, keenly aware of his surroundings at all times. He knew how his knee bent just so. He knew the curl of each finger, and the lay of his head. Kinesthesia was his, and proprioception. He knew the drape of each tube across his body, the warmth of the osmotic infusers and the limaceous slime of the gels in which they nestled. He felt the rush of the richly scented air that coursed through his nostrils and into his lungs.

Like a tiger, the Brute was a smooth stimulus-response machine, his reflexes unencumbered by reflection—yet, for all that, he was not severed entirely from his more cerebral compatriots in the small principality of Donovan’s brain.

It was a hell of a fight,the Brute told them one morning. But you shoulda seen the other guy.

He remembered the combat now. The old ruined warehouse. The loyalist Shadows led by Ekadrina Sèanmazy and the rebels led by Oschous Dee Karnatika, locked in the mad embrace of mutual and escalating ambuscade. The abrupt appearance of the late Domino Tight; the sudden and fearful manifestation of several Names; Ravn Olafsdottr and her wild and fatal play wearing Padaborn’s colors that had finally induced him to take up arms himself. And his own death struggle with Ekadrina.

«And then Gidula swooped in.» That was Inner Child, the wary and watchful one.

“Maybe,” said Donovan. “But if he rescued us from Sèanmazy, he rescued her from us.”

Gidula is a rebel, said the young man in the chlamys, but he is also a traditionalist. For everyone, the world is as it was when we came of age. Gidula soaked up djibry with his mother’s milk. He can no more act in a non- djibrous manner than he could wear motley to a pasdarm.

A few days later, two magpies in black shenmats with Gidula’s comet on their sleeve brassards entered the dispensary.

“How we feeling?” the junior magpie asked. He wore the skull-and-crossbones breast-badge that marked him as a medic. He glanced over the readouts on the autoclinic, waved a slug across the infoports, and spoke a few words into it. His was not an idle question. Readouts could tally only quantities. These neurons were firing; those areas of the brain lit under resonance; such were the blood pressure and heart rate—but none of it could capture the quality of pain. There was no gauge for suffering.

“We’ve felt better,” Donovan allowed.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Two. How many fingers am I holding up?”

The medic smiled. “One. What is the square root of seventeen?”

“Four point one-two-three.”

The medic looked up and Donovan added, “Metric. Four point two-nine-two, in dodeka.”

“Name the Crossings.”

“Including the Tightrope? Point Pleasant, Krinthic Junction, Hanseatic Point, Sapphire Point…”

The smile vanished. “Those are the Peripheral names.”

“Well, we lived most our life over there—as myan zhan shebang, a sleeping agent—later as a discarded wreck of a man.” He cackled to show how wrecked he was.

“You were ill-used,” said the older magpie, speaking for the first time. The medic glanced at him but said nothing.

“I’ve prepared a schedule for your physical therapy,” the medic told Donovan. “Ready to get out of the box?”

Donovan agreed that they were ready and, with a little assistance from the two comets, was soon disconnected from the support systems and lowered to the floor, where he stood in momentary unsteadiness. The medic spoke another verbal note into his slug. Donovan glanced at the other three autoclinics in the room. Empty, but he had a phantom recollection that one of them had been occupied. He stretched, touched his toes, inspected those wounds visible from his perspective. He wondered if he should pretend to a lesser vigor than he felt. One of a man’s sharpest weapons was underestimation by his foes.

“What of the others?” he asked. “Ekadrina, Oschous, Big Jacques … Ravn?”

The medic glanced up from powering down the autoclinic. “Master will discuss that with you.”

Donovan turned to the older magpie. “You don’t talk much.”

“Don’t need to.”

“And you are…?”

“Your sparring partner. Physical therapy.”

“We had enough sparring with Ekadrina. We were hoping to relax.”

The older magpie nodded toward the autoclinic. “You have been.”

“I think we like you…” Donovan looked at the brassard. “Should we call you Five, or do you have a nicknumber?”

A smile very nearly cracked the man’s face. “I will have to you soon a schedule sent of our sessions.” And he bowed a fractional amount from the waist. From the man’s careful pronunciation the Fudir judged him not a native speaker of Confederal Manjrin, but he did not recognize the home-world from which the man’s consonants sprang.

“If you’ll follow me,” the medic said, “I’ll take you to Gidula. He was anxious for your recovery and wanted to see you as soon as you were ambulatory.”

Donovan could think of several reasons for that anxiety, not all of them a comfort. Gidula had snatched him away from Ekadrina, but he was not especially certain it had been a rescue.