Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 28 Razor's Edge, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]

Flash/no flash.

Doc Joyce claimed to be the man who'd fixed five miles of diamond-hard neon tube to the far wall of RipJointShuts and he refused to tell anybody how to turn the thing off. So it just sat there and illuminated the darkness with its message.

"Welcome to Tomorrow."

The interesting thing about this, apart from the fact the sign gave visitors something to head for in the gloom of the fourteenth level, was that it spoke to anyone who got close enough, repeating its mantra inside one's head.

A town of about three hundred (barely half of them recognizably human), RJS was old, marginally dangerous and had briefly been famous some years before when the newest emperor manifested in a hut several levels above and Doc Joyce, owner of the local bar and a cut-price splice merchant, went on the feed to announce that he'd birthed the boy, his brother and the mother.

He might even have been telling the truth.

A plaque at Doc Joyce's place (put up so visitors would know that this was the place the Emperor's mother came for advice), announced that RipJointShuts was the oldest inhabited shanty town on Heliconid, a thousand years being mentioned.

Inventive as the dapper little man was, he still got the scale wrong by a factor of four. People had been squatting in RJS for over forty centuries. Pretty impressive for a town that didn't officially exist on a sliver of steel that was meant to be uninhabited.

Near the bottom of the Razor's Edge, that endless tear down the side of Heliconid and a day's hike into the interior of level fourteen, stood an abandoned cargo container, in the shadow of the Tomorrow sign. This was Schwarzschilds, Doc Joyce's bar.

Few tourists came to drink and fewer still came back. Schwarzschilds made it into the guides but most of what was written was third-hand, hearsay taken from hearsay.

A smaller cargo pod, barely a tenth of the size, had been abandoned millennia before at the back of Schwarzschilds. Some of those who described the pod said it looked like a calf following its mother. Others, less whimsical, thought it looked like something the bar had shat.

It was inside this smaller container that a naked fifteen-year-old girl swapped half a kidney for a completely new set of shoulder sinews. Unusually, Tris did this before her own got ripped. She'd seen too many drop queens reduced to shuffling crabs on the level.

As having her shoulders rewired cost less than she'd expected, Tris used the other half to get her arms and legs restrung, ending up with all of her sinews upgraded to full-drop status with the tensile strength of the new sinews making a mockery of those they replaced, obviously enough.

Underestimating the obvious was to give Tris the most terrifying twelve hours of her short life. A week after the operation, with the original scars long since healed, Tris took an updraft to the top of Razor's Edge and dropped the full seventeen levels in a head-whirling handful of minutes, feeling her life zip through her fingers and across her back as she touched only twice, kicking off into nothingness and waiting until the last minute to use her diamond gloves.

The sinews worked perfectly. It was Tris's shoulder muscles which did a really embarrassing first-time-out crackle and pop.

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

If Tris had known a worse curse she'd have used it. All she could feel was white pain. A shock so absolute it was more or less indescribable. One that put all her previous experiences of feeling sick to shame.

She was inside her own pain. On the end of a rope.

And so began the longest night and morning of Tris's life. Crawl by crawl she made her way up the rope, knees locked tight and hands gripping on as best they could. It took eight hours to climb three levels and the rest of that day to reach Schwarzschilds.

"Hello, Tristesse," said Doc Joyce, when he finally bothered to look up from the mixing desk. "I wondered when I'd see you." Doc Joyce was the only person to call the skinny Riprat by her full name. The only person ever to stand up when she came into his room.

He'd done that the very first time she appeared in his doorway, wanting to know the prices. Tris had never forgotten. The Doc had still overcharged her but she could forgive him that. Doc Joyce overcharged everyone.

"You busy?"

The Doc snorted. "What does it look like?" he said.

A creature lay on the slab, completely naked but genital-free. All secondary sexual characteristics were also absent. The navel and nipples were gone, as were any breasts that might have supported them, always assuming the patient started out female. A completely smooth, hairless groin showed no sign of labia. In fact, it showed no signs of anything.

Two tiny horns budded from either side of the creature's narrow forehead and, in place of hair, its depilated skull was combed with corn rows of bone plate. It was a look Tris had seen often.

"Yeah," said Doc Joyce. He pulled up one eyelid, twisted the unconscious patient's skull from side to side, then shrugged. "Don't you just hate tourists?... What happened?" he asked as an afterthought.

"Slipped," whispered Tris.

The Doc's smile was not kind. "Sure you did."

Tris looked at the drugged tourist.

"God," said the Doc, "do I need to do everything?" Tipping the creature off the mixing desk, Doc Joyce patted the slab, dislodging a spider which had been busy behind the patient's ear. "Up you go."

On the floor the spider scuttled away to stand a few paces from the body. After a second or two, during which its metal legs quivered and reformed in restless twists of smoke, the spider sidled up to the tourist's skull and went back to work.

"Come on," Doc Joyce said, then took pity on the girl and tossed her a spider, letting it cut free her clothes. He left her knife where it was, taped to the small of her back. Minus clothes was one thing, defenceless was another, and Doc Joyce understood that naked meant different things to different people.

"Should have had the bones," Doc Joyce said. He'd tried to sell her a set of bird-weight legs, hips and shoulder bones and had run the maths for her as he pulled each one from its vat, suggesting skin flaps between her upper arms and ribs. Tris had been shaking her head before he'd even finished.

She lay on her front, because this was the way Doc Joyce wanted her to lie. It hurt just as much as lying on her back but had the advantage of letting Tris rest her face against the slab, which promptly adjusted itself to help the girl get as comfortable as possible. If she'd been face up, the brightness of Doc Joyce's ceiling would have stopped her doing that.

For reasons she never quite understood, Doc Joyce skipped the scolding that Tris had been expecting and went straight to work, his fingers cold on her skin.

She shivered.

"It's a mess, Tristesse," Doc Joyce said. "I don't need spiders to tell me that." Fingertips pushed into the pain across her shoulders and Tris found she was crying, racking sobs that only made her body hurt all the more.

Doc Joyce sighed.

When the girl turned up wanting replacement sinews he'd suggested she get her muscles upgraded in tandem and even given her a good price. This was prior to suggesting new bones. As the muscle swap would be invisible the kid's very vocal contempt for visible modification could remain uncompromised.

(It was noticeable that everything she'd ever had done was on the inside. Doc Joyce had his own theories on this, but then the Doc had a theory about everything.)

Out of the thousands who came and went he remembered Tris because the very first time she came she wanted an augmentation so old-fashioned he almost did it for nothing to see if he still could. The kid had wanted her existing synaptic topology augmented with fullerenes to increase the speed at which connections could be made in her brain.

He pointed out that it would be far easier and infinitely more efficient just to replace her organic brain with a synthetic unit, maybe something with an open connection to the feed. The kid had been adamant. What she wanted was what she'd asked for.

In many ways the fact that Doc Joyce liked Tris was a triple bluff on himself. Everyone knew that the Doc was cantankerous, unreliable and avaricious. That was the description mostly given in the guides. Cantankerous, unreliable and money-grubbing (this last being a specific form of avaricious).

Those who knew him better understood that Doc Joyce was much less of the above than he first appeared; which was, of course, a cliché. In a feed novella he'd be played as a drunk who made good at the end and died heroically, his colleagues discovering too late that he'd secretly given up alcohol, drugs or whatever weakness the novella's AI had pulled off the shelf and nailed to him.

And the kicker would be that his last bottle of hooch, the one that shattered as he fell, its contents standing in for blood in the dust, this bottle would be unopened and the seal unbroken.

They'd both watched variations of that episode, several times.

The truth was different. Doc Joyce was cantankerous, unreliable and avaricious. He wasn't even a man, at least not on a genetic level. Although this had never made it into the guides because he'd done the op himself and done it long before most of the guides existed.

That secondary, half-hidden warmth and twinkle in his eye was as false as the first growl and snap. Only being golden-hearted was what the punters wanted and so that was what the Doc gave them, golden-hearted moments while his eyes twinkled, his mouth twisted into a rueful smile and he emptied their lives of anything interesting enough to catch his fancy.

It was a good act, convincing even, and Tris was his only weakness. Grinding his fingers into ruptured muscle, Doc Joyce watched Tris's head come up off the slab.

"Fuck," she said.

"Keep still," said Doc Joyce but the order was redundant, the kid had passed out with pain. The muscles he grafted were old stock, from a batch grown for a family on Turquoise who'd fallen one third of the way down Razor's Edge and decided to go easy on dangerous sports for a while.

When their houseAI queried the Doc's invoice for surgical-grade muscles, he sent by return a highly convincing and properly completed order, including an appropriate retinal scan for each member of the family. The house paid up after that and for a full set, everything from biceps brachii to vastus medialis for each family member.

He always managed to sell a surprising percentage of the tissue he grew on spec and if the muscles billed never quite matched the number actually used then these things happened. At least they did when you used a clinic as old and cranky as Doc Joyce's.

The spiders were his crocodile. He'd said this once to Tris, when she first came in to discuss brain rewiring.

And then, of course, he'd had to explain what crocodiles were and why alchemists in the old world kept stuffed reptiles hanging from their ceilings to impress their patrons. A loop of logic that forced him to divert through a definition of alchemy to a quick and dirty outline of human history. Doc Joyce was slightly shocked to discover that Tris was only crudely aware that most inhabitants of the 2023 worlds originated from the same species. And totally, utterly shocked to discover that Tris had no idea what he meant by the word "Earth."

"I still don't get it," Tris had said finally.

"What?"

"The stuff with the spiders."

So Doc Joyce had scooped up a handful, crushed them between his palms and then parted his hands to reveal a much larger spider standing in their place. His smile was that of a conjurer who'd just performed a particularly impressive trick. "You know how old these are?" he said.

Tris had shaken her head.

"Older than you."

"That's not so difficult."

"Older than me," added Doc Joyce, ripping the spider in two and dropping both bits on the floor, where the halves became spiders in their turn and scurried away, in exactly opposite directions.

"Really?" Tris said. She said it mostly because Doc Joyce seemed to expect a reply.

"Yeah," said the Doc. "Older than me, older than you, older than everyone in RipJointShuts added together." He smiled. "These days replicators are so small most people don't even know they exist. These came over on the SZ Loyal Prince."

"You're talking about smoke?" Tris looked puzzled. "You know, you buy time in a clinic and that smoke just rolls over you, mending as it goes..."

"Clinics are pointless," Doc Joyce said. "Most people are born already prepared."

"On the worlds?"

Doc Joyce nodded.

"So why do they come here?"

He'd looked at her, that time he was shaving her head to open her skull, slight smile twisting his lips as he wondered whether to say more.

"You can tell me," Tris said.

"You know, Tristesse," said the man, "maybe I can." He took a long look at the naked girl strapped to his mixing desk. "You remind me of someone," he said, then stopped himself. "When you get to my age everyone looks like someone else."

Tris could see the logic in that.

"People come to me," the old man said, "because they've tried everything else and because I have a reputation." The Doc shook his head, a gesture meant to signify his acceptance that this idea was absurd. "I don't cure them because they're not ill. I change them. Not always into what they want. That's what brings them here. The risk."

Imagine that someone has cooked thread noodles, the tiny almost translucent kind so that they are too flexible to snap like dry twigs but need another ten seconds or so to become properly soft. Then imagine that person taking a fat handful of those noodles and twisting, so that some pop, others half rupture and a few, mostly in the middle, stay whole.

This was the muscle inside Tris's shoulders.

The spiders worked swiftly at a level below human sight. First they cut away damaged tissue and then they knitted new muscle into place. It would have been possible to repair the original, but even with neural blocks Tris would be reluctant to climb until the stiffness had gone and by the time this happened the girl might be unwilling to climb at all.

A risk Doc Joyce felt reluctant to take. For his uncharacteristic kindness now had a price. It was obvious, at least in retrospect. The kid needed major repairs and he needed someone who could climb three klicks of wire and finesse open the hatch of a racing yacht.

All Tomorrow's Parties was currently berthed off the Chinese Rocks. Its owner was an off-world racer who owed Doc Joyce for a couple of complex augmentations, a debt he'd proved very bad at paying. In the circumstances Doc Joyce might even throw in some extra fullerene tubes.

The kid was going to need all the smarts she could muster.