think. I supposed the designers had worked out a simple push-and-twist method.
Paolo was belly-down at the corner of the open trap, torso balanced over the chasm, lowering his throat toward the buzz razor jammed into the space between cover and floor.
“Don’t,” I said. Don’t, because it will please Hepple; because it will make a mess and I’ll have to clean it up. Don’t, because you won’t be able to change your mind later; because if you do, oh, I’ll feel guilty, so guilty, and I won’t, ever, be able to make it up to you. . .
He couldn’t hear me, of course, but he saw me, saw my lips, and his muscles knotted long enough to hold his upper body away from the humming blade, a few inches above the point where he would fall, and I moved gently, not too quickly, and lifted the slippery, ugly razor free. I flicked it off. The muscles over his ribs were tight and absolutely still. He hung in the balance. I didn’t think I could hold him up if he started to fall.
“Don’t move,” I said. “Don’t move.” I put the razor down carefully, not wanting to make a sudden move, a noise that might startle him out of his stasis. His skin gleamed with sweat. I knelt, braced one hand on the floor, and slid the other around his waist. If he wanted to, he could throw us both off, and we’d be sucked away in seconds and drowned, if we weren’t crushed first. He doesn’t know you’re a van de Oest, I told myself. I could feel him trembling.
I heaved him away from the edge.
He lay on his back, limbless, staring at the ceiling. I had the urge to apologize.
I got up and hit the stud that closed up the floor. I could hear his harsh breathing. I picked up the pile of limbs, carried them to his side. “Which one do you want first, right or left?”
“Right.”
We were both very matter-of-fact. There was no other way to be. I reconnected the prosthesis to his right shoulder, then turned away politely while he snapped on the other arm and then the legs. When he had put his skinny back on, I squatted down beside him and handed him the razor. He slipped it under his left cuff with a practiced motion. Carrying a razor was a habit. I wondered how I would have felt, before, if I’d known that.
His eyes were brown, opaque. “You shouldn’t have stopped me.”
“Why?”
For a moment I thought he would not bother to answer. Then he looked at me for a long time, and asked, “Who am I?”
“Paolo Cruz.”
“No. I’m nobody, a nothing.” So bitter. “The only person who cares that I exist is my brother. He brought us, me and my sister, here from Venezuela, to lobby for our rights. But my sister died, and no one will listen to me or my brother. ‘It was all settled long ago,’ the courts say. They’ve given us nothing. Except these plastic arms and legs. And maybe that’s all me and people like me are worth.”
No, I wanted to say. But why should he believe me? Who had there ever been to tell him any different?
“To the courts and the medical industry, to those rich people who caused all this in the first place, I’m one of the disposable masses. Not even wholly human.” He thrust his arm at me. “Feel that.”
“I—”
“Feel it!”
It was soft and warm and dry. Pleasant.
“Just once, I thought, just once I wanted to be someone to those people, those Hepples and van de Oests. If I killed myself here, if my body fell into the water, they would have to turn everything off. They’d lose money. They would know who I was, me, Paolo Cruz, the man made of plastic.”
I did not know how to tell him that all his death would have accomplished was a minor inconvenience to this shift: his corpse would have been caught on the sieves, easily fished out, and the blood would only have provided more food for the microbes. Unless, of course, he’d thrown in his prostheses, which might have been tough enough to foul the machinery.
We were quiet for a while, then I stood up. “Are you coming back to work? Maybe Magyar will find a way to get your job back.”
“No. I don’t want to be a nobody in this place anymore.”
“But with what I’m teaching you, you could. . .” I shut up.