Mickey replaces the skin of my back and the skin of my hands where Eo ap- plied bandages to my burns. This, he says,is not to be my real skin. It is only a homogeneous baselayer: "Your skeleton is weak because Mars gravity is zero point three of Earth's my delicate little bird. Also, you have a diet deficient in calcium. Gold Stan- dard bone density is five times stronger than naturally occurring bone density on Earth. So we will have to make your skeleton six times stronger; you must be of iron if you want to last the Insti- tute. This will be fun! For me. Not you." Mickey carves me again. The agony is beyond language or comprehension "Someone has to dot God's i's." The next day, he reinforces the bones of my arms. Then he does my ribs, my spine, my shoulders, my feet, my pelvis and my face. He also alters the ten- sile qualities of my tendons and mus- cle tissue. Mercifully, he does not let me wake from this last surgery for sev- eral weeks. When I do wake, I see his girls around me applying new cultures of flesh and kneading my muscles with their thumbs. Slowly, my skin begins to heal. I am a patchwork fleshquilt. They begin feeding me synthesized protein, creatine and growth hormone to promote mus- cle growth and tendon regeneration. My body trembles in the nights and itches as I sweat through new, smaller pores. I cannot use pain medication strong enough to numb the agony, be- cause the altered nerves must learn to function with the new tissue and my altered brain Mickey sits beside me on my worst nights telling me stories. It's only then that I like him, only then that I think he is not some monster cooked up by this perverted Society "My profession is to create, little bird," he says one night as we sit together in the darkness. Light from the ma- chines bathes his face in queer shad- ows. "When I was young, I lived in a place they call the Grove. It was what you might think of as a circus culture We had spectacles every night. Celebra- tions of color and sound and dance." "Sounds terrible,' I mutter sarcasti- cally. "Just like the mines.' He smiles softly and his eyes find that distant place. "I suppose it may seem a plush life to you. Yet there was a mad- ness to the Grove. They made us take pills. Pills that could make us fly between the planets on wings of dust to visit the faerie kings of Jupiter and the deep mermaids of Europa. My mind al- ways separate from body. No peace to it. No end to the madness." He clapped his hands then. "And now I Carve the things I saw in my fever dreams, just as they always wished. I dreamed of you, I think. In the end, I suppose they'll wish I hadn't dreamed at all." "Was it a good dream?" I ask. "What?" "The one with me." "No. No, it was a nightmare. One of a man from hell, lover of fire." He's silent for a spell. "Why is it so horrible?" I ask him. "Life. All this. Why do they need to make us do this? Why do they treat us like we're their slaves?"
