Alastair Reynolds - Diamond Dogs by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

FOUR

'It'll do,' Forqueray said, tilting his new arm this way and that.

'Do?' Trintignant sounded mortally wounded. 'My dear fellow, it is a work of exquisite craftsmanship; a thing of beauty. It is unlikely that you will see its like again, unless of course I am called upon to perform a similar procedure.'

We were sitting inside the shuttle, still parked on Golgotha's surface. The ship was a squat, aerodynamically blunt cylinder which had landed tail-down and then expanded a cluster of eight bubbletents around itself: six for our personal quarters during the expedition, one commons area, and a general medical bay equipped with all the equipment Trintignant needed to do his work. Surprisingly - to me, at least, who admitted to some unfamiliarity with these things - the shuttle's fabricators had been more than able to come up with the various cybernetic components that the Doctor required, and the surgical tools at his disposal - glistening, semi-sentient things which moved to his will almost before they were summoned - were clearly state of the art by any reasonable measure.

'Yes, well, I'd have rather you'd reattached my old arm,' Forqueray said, opening and closing the sleek metal gauntlet of his replacement.

'It would have been almost insultingly trivial to do that,' Trintignant said. 'A new hand could have been cultured and regrafted in a few hours. If that did not appeal to you, I could have programmed your stump to regenerate a hand of its own accord; a perfectly simple matter of stem-cell manipulation. But what would have been the point? You would be very likely to lose it as soon as we suffer our next punishment. Now you will only be losing machinery - a far less traumatic prospect.'

'You're enjoying this,' Hirz said, 'aren't you?'

'It would be churlish to deny it,' Trintignant said. 'When you have been deprived of willing subjects as long as I have, it's only natural to take pleasure in those little opportunities for practice that fate sees fit to present.'

Hirz nodded knowingly. She had not heard of Trintignant upon our first meeting, I recalled, but she had lost no time in forming her subsequent opinion of the man. 'Except you won't just stop with a hand, will you? I checked up on you, Doc - after that meeting in Childe's house. I hacked into some of the medical records that the Stoner authorities still haven't declassified, because they're just too damned disturbing. You really went the whole hog, didn't you? Some of the things I saw in those files - your victims - they stopped me from sleeping.'

And yet still she had chosen to come with us, I thought. Evidently the allure of Childe's promised reward outweighed any reservations she might have had about sharing a room with Trintignant. But I wondered about those medical records. Certainly, the publicly released data had contained more than enough atrocities for the average nightmare. It chilled the blood to think that Trintignant's most heinous crimes had never been fully revealed.

'Is it true?' I said.

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