Mirror Dance

face. Golden skin. Brown eyes with a hint of an epicanthic fold. Stubby, stubborn black lashes. The bridge of her nose was coolly arched. A pleasant, original face, not surgically altered to a mathematically perfect beauty, but enlivened by an alert tension. Not an empty face. Somebody interesting was in there. But not, alas, somebody familiar.

She was tall and slim, dressed in a pale green lab smock over other clothes. “Doctor,” he tried to guess, but it came out a formless gurgle around the plastic in his mouth.

“I’m going to take that tube out now,” she told him. She pulled something sticky from around his lips and cheeks—tape? More dead skin came with it. Gently, she drew out the throat-tube. He gagged. It was like un- swallowing a snake. The relief of being rid of it almost made him pass out again. There was still some sort of tube— oxygen?—blocking his nostrils.

He moved his jaw, and swallowed for the first time in … in … Anyway, his tongue felt thick and swollen. His chest hurt terribly. But saliva flowed; his dry mouth re-hydrated. One did not really appreciate saliva till one was forced to do without it. His heart beat fast and light, like bird wings fluttering. It did not feel right, but at least he felt something.

“What’s your name?” she asked him.

The subliminal terror he had been studiously ignoring yawned black beneath him. His breath quickened in his panic. Despite the oxygen, he could not get enough air. And he could not answer her question. “Ah,” he whispered. “Ag …” He did not know who he was, nor how he had come by this huge burden of hurt. The not- knowing frightened him far more than the hurt.

The young man in the pale-blue medical jacket snorted, “I think I’m going to win my bet. That one’s coagulated behind the eyeballs. All short circuits back there.” He tapped his forehead.

The woman frowned in annoyance. “Patients don’t come popping up out of cryo-stasis like a meal out of a microwave. It takes just as much healing as if the original injury hadn’t killed them, and more. It will be a couple of days before I can even begin to evaluate his higher neural functions.”

Still, she pulled something sharp and shiny from the lapel of her jacket, and moved around him, touching him and watching a monitor readout on the wall above his head. When his right hand jerked back at a prick, she smiled. Yeah, and when my prick jerks up at a right hand, I’ll smile, he thought dizzily.

He wanted to speak. He wanted to tell that blue fellow to take a wormhole jump to hell, and take his bet with him. All that came out of his mouth was a hollow hiss. He shuddered with frustration. He had to function, or die. That, he was bone-sure of. Be the best or be destroyed.

He didn’t know where this certainty came from. Who was going to kill him? He didn’t know. Them, some faceless them. No time to rest. March or die.

The medical duo left. Driven by the obscure fear, he began to try to exercise, isometrics in his bed. All he could move was his right arm. Attracted by his thrashing as reported by his monitor pads, the youth came back and sedated him. When the darkness closed in again, he wanted to howl. He had very bad dreams, after that; any content would have been welcome to his bewildered brain, but all he could remember when he woke was the badness.

An interminable time later, the doctor returned to feed him. Sort of.

She touched a control to raise the head of his bed, saying chattily, “Let’s try out your new stomach, my friend.”

Friend? Was he? He needed a friend, no question.

“Sixty milliliters of glucose solution—sugar water. The first meal of your life, so to speak. I wonder if you have enough basic muscle control to suck on a straw yet?”

He did, once she touched a few drops of liquid to his lips to get him started. Suck and swallow, you couldn’t get much more basic than that. Except that he couldn’t drink it all.

“That’s all right,” she rippled on. “Your stomach’s not fully grown yet, you see. Neither were your heart or lungs. Lilly was in a hurry to have you awake. All your replacement organs are a bit undersized for your body, which means they’re going to be working hard, and won’t grow as fast as they did in the vat. You’re going to be short of breath for quite a while. Still, it made it all easier to install. More elbow room for me, which I appreciated.”

He wasn’t quite sure if she was talking to him, or just to herself, as a lonely person might talk to a pet. She took the cup away and came back with a basin, sponges, and towels, and began washing him, section by section. Why was a surgeon doing nursing care? dr. R. durona, read the name on the breast pocket of her green coat. But she seemed to be doing a neurophysiological examination at the same time. Checking her work?

“You were quite a little mystery, you know. Delivered to me in a crate. Raven said you were too small to be a soldier, but I picked out enough camouflage cloth and nerve disrupter shield-netting, along with the forty-six grenade fragments, to be quite sure you weren’t just a bystander. Whatever you were, that needle-grenade had your name on it. Unfortunately, not in writing.” She sighed half to herself. “Who are you?”

She did not pause for an answer, which was just as well. The effort of swallowing the sugar water had exhausted him again. An equally pertinent question was, Where was he, and he was peeved that she, who must surely know, didn’t think to tell him. The room was an anonymous high-tech medical locale, without windows. On a planet, not a ship.

How do I know that? A vague picture of a ship, in his head, seemed to shatter at his touch. What ship? For that matter, what planet?

There ought to be a window. A big window, framing a high hazy city-scape with a rapid river cutting through it. And people. There were people missing, who ought by rights to be here, though he could not picture them. The mix of generic medical familiarity and particular strangeness tied his guts in knots.

The cleaning-cloths were icy, grating, but he was glad to be rid of the goo, not to mention all the disgusting crud stuck in it. He felt like a lizard, shedding his skin. When she was done, all the dead white flakes were gone. The new skin looked very raw.

She rubbed depilatory cream over his face, which seemed redundant, and stung like hell. He decided he liked the sting. He was starting to relax, and enjoy her ministrations, embarrassingly intimate though they were. She was returning him at least to the dignity of being clean, and she did not feel like an enemy. Some sort of ally, at least on the somatic level. She cleaned his face of cream, beard, and a good deal of skin, and also combed his hair, though unfortunately, like his skin, his hair too seemed to be coming out in alarming clumps.

“There,” she said, sounding satisfied. She held a large hand-mirror up to his face. “See anybody you recognize?” She was watching him closely, he realized, noting his eyes focus and track.

That’s me? Well … I suppose I can get used to it. Red skin stretched over its frame of bones. Jutting nose, a sharp chin … the grey eyes looked bizarrely hung-over, their whites solid scarlet. His dark hair was patchy, like a bad case of mange. He’d .really been hoping for something much better-looking.

He tried to speak, to ask. His mouth moved but, like his thoughts, too disconnectedly for coherence. He puffed air and spittle. He couldn’t even swear, which made him want to swear even more, which rapidly degenerated into a gurgling snarl. She hastily took the mirror away and stood staring at him in worry.

Steady on. If he kept thrashing around, they’d probably hit him with another dose of sedative, and he didn’t want that. He lay back panting helplessly. She lowered the bed again, dimmed the lights, and made to leave. He managed a moan. It worked; she came back.

“Lilly called your cryo-chamber Pandora’s box,” she murmured reflectively. “But I thought of it as the enchanted knight’s crystal coffin. I wish it were as easy as waking you with a kiss.”

She bent over, eyelids fluttering half-closed, and touched her lips to his. He lay very still, half-pleased, half-panicked. She straightened, watched him another moment, and sighed. “Didn’t think it would work. Maybe I’m just not the right princess.”

You have a very strange taste in men, milady, he thought dizzily. How fortunate for me… .

Feeling hopeful of his future for the first time since recovering consciousness, he lay quietly, and let her go.