The Clarity of Cold Steel

“NO, MISTER SHAKTEEL.” Doktor Marzipan is inching forward, a hand out. “Not yet. Your wife suffered severe trauma in the explosion. She needs more time. I need more time. Her lungs were—”

“Will she live?” I can’t lose her again, can’t lose them.

“Only with his help.” Doktor Marzipan kneels down to eye level with me, and I’m suddenly staring up at Gortham, a malnourished kid from the Boneyard, his numb gaze fixed down on me, judging me.

I know which way the scales’ll fall. Then I collapse.

“Just what is it you think we do here, Mister Shakteel?” Doktor Marzipan asks as the man in the iron mask snatches the gun and grenade from my numb hands. The doktor removes a pair of scissors from inside his pocket and busies himself cutting open my greatcoat. Then my shirt. “Oh, dear lord.”

“You steal poor people’s organs and sell them to rich fucks like yourself.” I stare up at the lights, Gortham to one side, Aashirya to the other. “You husked him. Gave his heart to the pope, didn’t you?”

“What? Oh, my good sir, how—?” Doktor Marzipan withdraws a handkerchief, folds it, presses it to my wound. I can barely feel it. “Truly, that is what you think? That we are some nefarious organization? Committing such penny dreadful horrors? Trawling the streets in search of fresh meat and plunder? Ghouls? Ressurectionists? I thought you were jesting.” He shakes his head. “Elias, please we must bear him to the grafting facility. Quickly. He’s lost a lot of blood.”

The man in the iron mask stares down at me as his men lay a stretcher beside me, grab me by the shoulders and ankles, lift me onto it. I don’t resist. I can’t. They lift it and start walking. “No,” I reach down toward my boot, for the derringer inside, “I can’t leave her…”

“Bloody hypocrite,” the man in the iron mask grumbles, digging into my boot, snaking my gun out. “I read your file, mate.”

“Fuck off.”

“Ahem, Elias, please.” Doktor Marzipan fixes the lapels of his jacket as he strolls along beside me. “My good man, the sole purpose of this facility is to follow God’s will and preserve life, not to take it.”

Aashirya fades into the distance and past. Then comes my daughter, Kalavati, silver trickling up from her lips, her head and hands bandaged, deep in liquid slumber. The rest are a never-ending line of strangers floating blue and cold in row after row of bubbling cauldron. Engines whir all around, maintaining life. “My sons…?”

“Dead,” the man in the iron mask says. “In the explosion. I went in after them, but…”

“Who killed them?” Tears slide down my face.

“Kalighat thugs,” the man in the iron mask deapans. “Used a three-stone blunderbuss to force activate a package of incendiary cyclonite. Amateurs. Your boys died instantly.”

I look away as he continues, his voice a dead buzz.

“Most of whom you see here are folk afflicted by terminal diseases,” Doktor Marzipan explains. “Diabetes. Cancer. Black lung. But for the lion’s share, it is the neoteric leprosy. They’re all here voluntarily, your family included, because they have hope that one day soon we’ll be able to save them. And their hope, as well as trust, is not misplaced, might I add.”

“Is Gortham here voluntarily?” I manage.

“Ahem, well,” Doktor Marzipan clears his throat, and in my experience, when men do that, they’re not wont to like the aftertaste of what they spout, “I admit the ethics of XXG-547’s situation are a tangled web.” He lets out a long sigh. “We could speak of continuums and of greater goods. We could debate upon the merit of lesser evils and so on and so forth, winding down into a miasma of banality. But we are men of intellect, and prevarication does not befit us.”

“What is it we’re doing right now?”

“You are dying, Mister Shakteel,” Doktor Marzipan says, “and I am trying to save you.” He points toward the vats. “Do you wish me to save you as I am trying to save them?”

As the two guards bear me down the row, I stop turning my head to look at the vats. It’s too much work. Instead, I stare straight up into the lights, posing for my casket. “You’re dodging my question, dok.”

“Yet, what would you say if I told you that along with saving your life, I could also reinstate you back to the Kshatriyas? Give you back everything you’ve lost. Your life. Your status. Your family. What if I told you I could replace your grafted liver with your own liver? What if I told you you’d never have to take another immunosuppressive pill?”

“I’m nearly there, dok.” I clutch my side.

“What would you say?” His hands are balled into fists as he walks along.

“I’d say you’re a liar.”

“Quickly, gentlemen.” We pass through a doorway and into a room populated by stainless steel tables and cabinets. A surgical suite. Doktor Marzipan glances at my side, his bandage, my hand pressed atop it all soaked through with blood. “And I am no liar, Mister Shakteel.”

“Then I’d ask you how much?” My vision’s closing to a tunnel.

The guards drop me roughly onto one of the steel tables, and five white suns blare suddenly above.

“And if you could pay the price, whatever it is, would you?” Doktor Marzipan’s hands are out as Terrence places a gown over his front, though it looks like nothing so much as a butcher’s leather killing-slicks.

I say nothing because I have nothing.

“You asked me before if XXG-547’s current state could be termed as ’life.’” Doktor Marzipan says, donning a surgical mask. “And I said that it was. What I meant was that his current state, as deplorable as it is, is life for you. It is life for me. It is life for your family. For all of mankind. Is there not a sort of messianic beauty to it all? And does that not outweigh the importance of his own life? The price is simple, Mister Shakteel. It just may not be easy.”

Terrence rolls a surgical cart over next to me.

“The price is subject XXG-547’s life.” Doktor Marzipan’s hands are gloved now, his body gowned, his face covered by a surgical mask as he raises a scalpel. “For decades, I’ve hoped for him. Prayed for him. And by God’s will my prayers were answered. The universal donor. XXG-547 is the cure to neoteric leprosy. He is the cure to cancer, to injury, to age, to infirmity. He is the cure to anything, the cure to everything. He is the first rung on the ladder to immortality itself.”

“But he’s only got one heart, dok.” My mouth’s so dry I can’t swallow. “One set of lungs. One liver. One life and they’re all his.”

“This is a cloning facility, Mister Shakteel, and we are cloning subject XXG-547 piece by piece. And yes, the tangled web of ethics you allude to is a snare. A Gordian Knot, inextricable, to be sure. And it is forever a weight, forever a burden to be borne. Not a day, not a night transpires that I’m not plagued by it, haunted by it, destroyed by it…”

“And what do you want from me?”

“Please,” Doktor Marzipan peels back the bandage over my wound and swabs it with some stringent yellow liquid, “I want you to allow me to save you.” It should burn, but I feel only antiseptic cold. “Allow me to perform the surgeries that shall save your life. To save your wife and daughter’s lives. I want you to do what every person in every vat out in that cyclopean room has done. I want you to give your consent to complicity in this act. I want you to share the weight, share the burden of what we all together have done to XXG-547. I simply want you to say ‘yes.’”

“He has a name.”

“He is a thing now, and things cannot possess names.” He lays a palm upon my forehead. “It is easier this way, trust me.” He smiles. “Say yes.”

“Fuck you.”

Terrence cracks open a bottle of ether and holds a mask poised, looking expectantly at the good doktor.

“Say yes.”

“You’re a fucking hypocrite.”

“Yes, I suppose I am that,” Doktor Marzipan shakes his head and I can tell by his eyes that beneath his mask he is frowning, “but as I am certain you know, Mister Shakteel, hypocrisy is the foundation of any enduring civilization.”