“Talk about a hollow threat.”
“Are you willing to take the risk?”
“All you do is talk, but the clock doesn’t stop, does it, General? You’re easily distracted. You’re failure prone. Daddy says.” She curtsied.
“This thing of yours probably won’t even work.”
“A mix of biological material from both earths. It’s bound to.”
“Well, great, because if it doesn’t we can all kiss our asses good-bye. We fail here and we die here—in this facility, fifteen hundred cubits beneath gorgeous Kansas.”
The doctor began to set out his instruments. “Get support services in here,” he said, “if you want this done.”
“I’ll be your support services. This is extremely classified.”
“Nothing like a military idiot for a nurse-assistant,” the doctor muttered.
“Maybe I’m better than you think. Maybe I’ve even been trained.”
“I bought my job and your Daddy sure as hell bought yours. If I’m lucky, I might be able to flush a child’s craw. Very lucky.”
Jennifer opened the small box she had brought in with her, in which there was red liquid. “Look at it, Doctor. This is living material from the one-moon earth.”
“You’re kidding.”
“There are humans crossing between the two worlds,” Samson said miserably.
“That’s ridiculous,” the doctor replied.
“We believe it was a lucky accident. But that might not be the case. The union’s hand might be in the matter somewhere.”
Mazle, suddenly interested, strode up to him. “You didn’t tell me this.”
“You didn’t need to know,” he replied.
“This casts everything in a very different light.”
“In what sense?” the doctor asked. He had a stake in the matter, too. They all did.
“If we’re defeated by enemy action, Echidna might not be so—well, so hard.”
“Harder, never doubt it,” Samson said. “I’ve had experience in the palace.”
“I grew up with her last crop of children,” Mazle said. “My egg was honored with a place in her basket.”
“I’ve seen them running eggs through that exalted basket. A new clutch every ten seconds.”
Mazle turned on her hireling doctor. “Get to it,” she shouted at him. “Get to it now!”
He lifted the lid of the black lacquer box, looked at the blood-covered material within. “Won’t this explode, if it touches this air?”
“It’s not going to happen.”
He drew out a long, wet object. A lip. “This is dead.”
“So is the cadaver, but we’ve got its soul.”
General Samson thought of the millions of them collected deep under this room. The harvest of bodies had a certain value when terraforming began, but the harvest of souls was truly valuable plunder. It wasn’t the doctor’s business, though, or the Captain’s. For Samson, it was a guarantee of wealth beyond imagination, the kind of wealth that bought an endless supply of perfectly cloned bodies, and with them the sort of eternal life that only the highest nobility enjoyed.
The doctor unrolled his instruments, taking a fleam in his long, narrow fingers, and drawing it along the line of one of General North’s eye sockets, removing the dried flesh from the edges of the wound.
Then, using instruments like two golden chopsticks with splayed ends, he drew out a bloody ball. “This eye is not in acceptable condition.”
“Acceptable for what, Doctor?” Mazle asked.
“For use!”
“It won’t see?”
“Oh, it’ll see. For a while. Somewhat. But—look at it, look how it’s deteriorating.”
“Why is that?” General Samson asked.
“General, I know you go topside because I prepare your allergy kit. Think if you entered their world without your serums. You’d disintegrate, and this eye is disintegrating.”
“But if we get it back to its home world, then the rot will stop, won’t it?” Mazle asked.
“This is all ridiculous. This can’t work.”
She persisted. “Can you attach it to the cadaver?”
“Um, sure.”
“THEN DO IT NOW GOD DAMN YOU!”
He began using his instrument to touch the left eye socket, gingerly, experimentally. As the doctor touched the socket just with the tip of his probe, his fingers working with a pianist’s virtuosity, immense generators that drew their energy directly from the planet’s core started up deep beneath the facility.
Tiny sparks appeared around the eye, until the whole rim of the socket was shimmering as if with millions of little stars, each one of which was actually an enormously complicated object in itself, a whole miniature universe consisting of billions upon billions of stars no bigger than dust motes on a gnat’s toe.
“Is the tissue going to explode?” Samson asked.
“No,” Jennifer said.
“I can’t be sure,” the doctor responded. “We’ll have to see.”
“We’ll have to see? We could all be killed!” Samson shouted, backing away from the table where the operation was taking place.
“Good,” the doctor said. He then rested the instrument in its case and took the eyeball between the gloved fingers of his left hand.
“How dare you say that!” Samson hissed.
“Look, I’m here because I have to be. This whole thing—taking this planet like this—it’s wrong. These creatures don’t deserve this kind of treatment because of the avarice of a bunch of developers, and to be drafted by the military to do the work of a greedy few, it’s sick and it’s evil, General, and I don’t give a rat’s ass who knows what I think.” He inserted the eyeball, which settled into the socket with a sucking plunk. “Well, whaddaya know, it didn’t explode. Too bad, we live on.”
“I ought to have you disensouled,” Samson muttered.
“Ah, the hollow threat again. You two are certainly expert at tossing those around. Problem is, you can’t do without a doctor, therefore I’m not in any danger, am I?”
He inserted the second eyeball, then attached the lips. The doctor stared for some time at a photograph.
“Hurry!”
“The lips are too fat.”
“Thin them, then!” Samson glared at Mazle. “Time?”
“01048.”
Still staring at a photograph of Al North, the doctor pressed a glittering cloth against the lips, the contours of which gradually grew more and more to resemble those of the general.
He then addressed his attention to the genitals and rectum, which were taken out of the box and attached to the body. In the end, it appeared fresh and undamaged.
Finally, he stood back. “It’s completed,” he said.
“Bring up the soul,” Samson said.
Jennifer Mazle spoke into a fist-sized walkie-talkie, and in a few moments two of her soultechs appeared carrying between them the enormous glass tube that contained the living soul of Al North. The light inside the tube no longer flashed and twisted, but clung close to the copper filament, which glowed deep red. “You think this will actually work?”
“Postoperative reensoulment isn’t exactly gravitic science,” the doctor said. “If you could stuff him for me, Captain.”
Jennifer drew Al’s body up, and hung the head back over the end of the table until his mouth lolled open. She sprayed into it from an aerosol can gaily painted with hieroglyphics, in colors familiar to anybody in any of the three
