Strange Wine (29 page)

“Greetings, Director. I’m pleased to see you at long last. I think you’ll find–”

“Shut up.” Her eyes narrowed at Berne. “Does this man have to die?”

Berne started to speak, but Breame quickly, nervously answered. “Oh, no; no indeed not. This gentleman has been most helpful to our project. He was just leaving.”

“I was just leaving.”

The old woman motioned to one of the guards, and the Floridan took Berne by the upper arm. The pronger winced, though the guard apparently was only serving as butler. The alien propelled Berne toward the iris, and out. Neither returned.

Dr. Breame said, “Will these, uh, gentlemen be necessary, Director? We have some rather delicate surgery to perform and they can…”

“They can
assist
.” Her voice was flat as iron.

She dropped her hands to her hips again, flicking up the locking levers of the exo-braces that formed a spiderweb scaffolding around her withered legs. She strode across the operating room toward the girl immobilized on the table, and Breame marveled at her lack of reaction to the cold in the room: he was still shivering in his insulated coverall, she wore an ensemble made of semitransparent, iridescent flow bird scales. But she seemed oblivious to the temperature of the Knox Shop.

26 Krystabel Parsons came to Verna and looked down into her face. Verna closed her eyes. The Director could not have known the reason the girl could not look at her.

“I have an unbendable sense of probity, child. If you cooperate with me, I shall make certain you don’t have a moment of regret.”

Verna opened her eyes. The Director drew in her breath.

They were everything they’d been said to be.

Gray and blue, swirling, strange, utterly lovely.

“What do you see?” the Director asked.

“A tired old woman who doesn’t know herself well enough to understand that all she wants to do is die.”

The guards started forward. 26 Krystabel Parsons waved them back. “On the contrary,” she said. “I not only desire life for myself…I desire it for you. I’m assuring you, if you help us, there is nothing you can ask that I will refuse.”

Verna looked at her,
seeing
her, knowing she was lying. Forever eyes told the truth. What this predatory relic wanted was: everything; who she was willing to sacrifice to get it was: everyone; how much mercy and kindness Verna could expect from her was: infinitesimal. But if one could not expect mercy from one’s own mother, how could one expect it from strangers?

“I don’t believe you.”

“Ask and you shall receive.” She smiled. It was a terrible stricture. The memory of the smile, even an instant after it was gone, persisted in Verna’s sight.

“I want full passage on a Long Driver.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere I want to go.”

The Director motioned to one of the guards. “Get her a million credits. No. Five million credits.”

The guard left the Knox Shop.

“In a moment you will see I keep my word,” said the Director. “I’m willing to pay for my pleasures.”

“You’re willing to pay for my pain, you mean.”

The Director turned to Breame. “Will there be pain?”

“Very little, and what pain there is, will mostly be yours, I’m afraid.” He stood with hands clasped together in front of him: a small child anxiously trying to avoid giving offense.

“Now, tell me what it’s like,” 26 Krystabel Parsons said, her face bright with expectation.

“The mutation hasn’t bred true, Director. It’s still a fairly rare recessive–” Breame stopped. She was glaring at him. She had been speaking to the girl.

Verna closed her eyes and began to speak. She told the old woman of
seeing
. Seeing directions, as blind fish in subterranean caverns see the change in flow of water, as bees see the wind currents, as wolves see the heat auras surrounding humans, as bats see the walls of caves in the dark. Seeing memories, everything that ever happened to her, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the grotesque, the memorable and the utterly forgettable, early memories and those of a moment before, all on instant recall, with absolute clarity and depth of field and detail, the whole of one’s past, at command. Seeing colors, the sensuousness of airborne bacteria, the infinitely subtle shadings of rock and metal and natural wood, the tricksy shifts along a spectrum invisible to ordinary eyes of a candle flame, the colors of frost and rain and the moon and arteries pulsing just under the skin; the intimate overlapping colors of fingerprints left on a credit, so reminiscent of paintings by the old master Jackson Pollock. Seeing colors that no human eyes have ever seen. Seeing shapes and relationships, the intricate calligraphy of all parts of the body moving in unison, the day melding into the night, the spaces and spaces between spaces that form a street, the invisible lines linking people. She spoke of
seeing
, of
all
the kinds of seeing except. The stroboscopic view of everyone. The shadows within shadows behind shadows that formed terrible, tortuous portraits she could not bear. She did not speak of that. And in the middle of her long recitation the Floridan guard came back and put five million credits in her tunic.

And when the girl was done, 26 Krystabel Parsons turned to the Knoxdoctor and said, “I want her kept alive, with as little damage as possible to her faculties. You will place a value on her comfort as high as mine. Is that clearly understood?”

Breame seemed uneasy. He wet his lips, moved closer to the Director (keeping an eye on the Floridans, who did not move closer to him). “May I speak to you in privacy?” he whispered.

“I have no secrets from this girl. She is about to give me a great gift. You may think of her as my daughter.”

The doctor’s jaw muscles tensed. This was, after all,
his
operating room!
He
was in charge here, no matter how much power this unscrupulous woman possessed. He stared at her for a moment, but her gaze did not waver. Then he went to the operating table where Verna lay immobilized by a holding circuit in the table itself, and he pulled down the anesthesia bubble over her head. A soft, eggshell-white fog instantly filled the bubble.

“I must tell you, Director, now that she cannot hear us–”

(But she could still
see
, and the patterns his words made in the air brought the message to her quite distinctly.)

“–that the traffic in mutant eyes is still illegal. Very illegal. In point of fact, it is equated with murder; and because of the shortage of transplantable parts, the MediCom has kept it a high crime; one of the few for which the punishment is vegetable cortexing. If you permit this girl to live you run a terrible risk. Even a personage of
your
authority would find it most uncomfortable to have the threat of such a creature wandering loose.”

The Director continued staring at him. Breame thought of the unblinking stares of lizards. When she blinked he thought of the membranous nictitating eyelids of lizards.

“Doctor, the girl is no problem. I want her alive only until I establish that there are no techniques for handling these eyes that she can help me to learn.”

Breame seemed shocked.

“I do not care for the expression on your face, Doctor. You find my manner with this child duplicitous, yet you are directly responsible for her situation. You have taken her away from whomever and wherever she wished to be, you have stripped her naked, laid her out like a side of beef, you have immobilized her and anesthetized her; you plan to cut out her eyes, treat her to the wonders of blindness after she has spent a lifetime seeing far more than normal humans; and you have done all this not in the name of science, or humanity, or even curiosity. You have done it for credits. I find the expression on your face an affront, Doctor. I advise you to work diligently to erase it.”

Breame had gone white, and in the cold room he was shivering again. He heard the voices of the parts calling. At the edges of his vision things moved.

“All I want you to assure me, Dr. Breame, is that you can perform this operation with perfection. I will not tolerate anything less. My guards have been so instructed.”

“I’m perhaps the only surgeon who
can
perform this operation and guarantee you that you will encounter no physically deleterious effects. Handling the eyes
after
the operation is something over which I have no control.”

“And results will be immediate?”

“As I promised. With the techniques I’ve perfected, transfer can be effected virtually without discomfort.”

“And should something go wrong…you can replace the eyes a second time?”

Breame hesitated. “With difficulty. You aren’t a young woman; the risks would be considerable; but it
could
be done. Again, probably by no other surgeon. And it would be extremely expensive. It would entail another pair of healthy eyes.”

26 Krystabel Parsons smiled her terrible smile. “Do I perceive you feel underpaid, Dr. Breame?”

He did not answer. No answer was required.

Verna saw it all and understood it all. And had she been able to smile, she would have smiled; much more warmly than the Director. If she died, as she was certain she would, that was peace and release. If not, well…

Nothing was worse than life.

They were moving around the room now. Another table was unshipped from a wall cubicle and formed. The doctor undressed 26 Krystabel Parsons and one of the two remaining Floridans lifted her like a tree branch and laid her on the table.

The last thing Verna saw was the faintly glowing, vibrating blade of the shining e-scalpel, descending toward her face. The finger of God, and she blessed it as her final thoughts were of her mother.

26 Krystabel Parsons, undisputed owner of worlds and industries and entire races of living creatures, jaded observer of a universe that no longer held even a faint view of interest or originality, opened her eyes.

The first things she saw were the operating room, the Floridan guards standing at the foot of the table staring at her intensely, the Knoxdoctor dressing the girl who stood beside her own table, the smears of black where the girl’s eyes had been.

There was a commotion in the passageway outside. One of the guards turned toward the iris, still open.

And in that moment all sense of
seeing
flooded in on the Director of Minet. Light, shade, smoke, shadow, glow, transparency, opacity, color, tint, hue, prismatics, sweet, delicate, subtle, harsh, vivid, bright, intense, serene, crystalline, kaleidoscopic, all and everything at once!

Something else. Something more. Something the girl had not mentioned, had not hinted at, had not wanted her to know! The shadows within shadows.

She
saw
the Floridan guards.
Saw
them for the first time. Saw the state of their existence at the moment of their death. It was as if a multiple image, a strobe portrait of each of them lived before her. The corporeal reality in the front, and behind–like endless auras radiating out from them but superimposed over them–the thousand images of their futures. And the sight of them when they were dead, how they died. Not the action of the event, but the result. The hideous result of having life ripped from them. Rotting, corrupt, ugly beyond belief, and all the more ugly than imagination because it was
seen
with forever eyes that captured all the invisible-to-normal-eyes subtleties of containers intended to contain life, having been emptied of that life. She turned her head, unable to speak or scream or howl like a dog as she wished, and she
saw
the girl, and she
saw
the doctor.

It was a sight impossible to contain.

She jerked herself upright, the pain in her withered legs barely noticeable. And she opened her mouth and forced herself to scream as the commotion in the passageway grew louder, and something dragged itself through the iris.

She screamed with all the unleashed horror of a creature unable to bear itself, and the guards turned back to look at her with fear and wonder…as Berne dragged himself into the room. She
saw
him, and it was worse than all the rest, because it was happening
now
, he was dying
now
, the vessel was emptying
now!
Her scream became the howl of a dog. He could not speak, because he had no part left in his face that could make a formed sound come out. He could see only imperfectly; there was only one eye. If he had an expression, it was lost under the blood and crushed, hanging flesh that formed his face. The huge Floridan guard had not been malevolent, merely Floridan, and they were a race only lately up from barbarism. But he had taken a long time.

Breame’s hands froze on the sealstrip of the girl’s tunic and he looked around her, saw the pulped mass that pulled itself along the floor, leaving a trail of dark stain and viscous matter, and his eyes widened.

The Floridans raised their weapons almost simultaneously, but the thing on the floor gripped the weapon it had somehow–amazingly, unpredictably, impossibly–taken away from its assassin, and it fired. The head of the nearest Floridan caved in on itself, and the body jerked sidewise, slamming into the other guard. Both of them hit the operating table on which the Director of Minet sat screaming, howling, savaging the air with mortal anguish. The table overturned, flinging the crippled old woman with the forever eyes to the floor.

Breame knew what had happened. Berne had not been sent away. It had been blindness for him to think she would leave
any
of them alive. He moved swiftly, as the remaining Floridan struggled to free himself of the corpse that pinned him to the floor. The Knoxdoctor had the e-scalpel in his hand in an instant, palmed it on, and threw himself atop the guard. The struggle took a moment, as Breame sliced away at the skull. There was a muffled sound of the guard’s weapon, and Breame staggered to his feet, reeled backward, and crashed into a power bin. Its storage door fell open and Breame took two steps into the center of the room, clutching his chest. His hands went inside his body; he stared down at the ruin; then he fell forward.