Текст книги "Alternate Realities (Port Eternity; Wave without a Shore; Voyager in Night)"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 38 страниц)

IX

They waited; that was what they were left to do, prisoners of the corridor, of Lindy’s scattered pieces, of Kepta’s motives and the small remnant of former realities.

“I can’t,” Rafe Two mourned, having tried to will himself away into the dark where Paul had gone; and Rafe himself looked with pity on his doppelganger.

“That’ll be Kepta’s doing,” Jillan said. She sat tucked up in a chair that phased with her imperfectly, near Paul, loyally near their relict Paul, whose face mirrored profoundest shame.

“I tried too,” Paul Three said, in a hushed, aching tone, as if he were embarrassed even to admit the attempt. “Nothing. It’s shut down, whatever faculty we had.”

“You were outmaneuvered,” Rafe said. “He’s a little older than you.”

“Not much,” Jillan said to Paul on her own. “Hours. But a few choices older. He knew, that’s what. He’d had time to figure it out; and he was way ahead of us. He got us all.”

There was a glimmering of something in Paul Three’s eyes. Resolve, Rafe thought. Gratitude. And something he had suddenly seen in that other Paul Gaines, the look of a man who knew absolutely what he was doing.

Rafe Two picked that up, perhaps. Perhaps envied it; their minds were very close. That Rafe got up and turned his back as if he could not bear that confidence.

Why not me?The thought broadcast itself from Rafe Two’s every move and shift of shoulders. He walked away, partly down the corridor. Why not choose me? I was best. Oldest. Strongest.

Responsibility.

“Don’t,” Rafe said. “Stay put.”

“I am,” Rafe Two said, facing him against the dark, with bitterness. “I can’t blamed well get anywhere down the hall, can l?”

And then there was a Jillan-shape at his back, glowing in the dark.

“Rafe,” Rafe said, and Rafe Two saw his face, their faces, if not what was at his back. Rafe Two acquired a frightened look and turned to see what had appeared behind him in the corridor.

The light retreated before them, continually retreated.

“I guess,” Rafe said, not breathing hard, because they could not be out of breath, or tired, nor could what they pursued, “—I guess it’s not willing to be caught.”

“If that’s the case,” said Jillan, “we don’t have a prayer of taking it.”

“Unless it’s willing to catch us,” Paul said. “Maybe it’s counted the odds and doesn’t like three of us at once. I’llgo forward. Maybe that will interest it.”

“You can bet it will,” Jillan said, and caught his arm. She was strong; strong as he: that was the law of this place; and he was going nowhere, not against her, not by any means against the two of them. Rafe stepped in his way and faced that distant light in his stead.

“You!”Rafe yelled at it. “Lost your nerve? Never had it in the first place?”

“That’s one way,” Paul said. “Let me tell you about that thing. It knows it’s a coward. It lives with that real well. It knows all kinds of things about itself. That’s its strength.”

“You’re wrong,” Jillan said. “If it’s you it’s not a coward.”

“Let’s say it’s prudent,” he said. “Let’s say—it knows how to survive. If we split up—it’ll go for one of us. Me, I’m betting.”

“Me,” said Jillan. “I’m the one it doesn’t have.”

“It’s scared of you,” Paul said with a dangerous twinge of shame. “I really think it is.”

“What’s thatmean?” Jillan asked.

“That. Just that. It is. Keep pressing at it.” He walked farther with them. The light they pursued grew no brighter.

“Ever occur to you,” Jillan asked then, “that we’re being lured—ourselves?”

“Where’s Kepta?”Rafe demanded of the uncounseling dark, the void about them. “Dammit, where is he? He could be more help. What’s he expect of us?”

“Kepta’s saving his own precious behind,” Jillan said. “We’re the delaying action. Don’t you figure that?”

But they kept walking, kept trying, together, since he could not persuade them otherwise. “Think of something,” Paul said. “That’s mewe’re chasing. It knows every move I’d make. Think of something to surprise it.”

“It knows us,” Jillan said, a low enthusiastic voice. “Too bloody well. It’s not taking the bait.”

“Kepta?” Rafe Two asked, facing Jillan’s shape that strode toward him; but even while he asked it he kept backing up until he was within Lindy’s limits, until he had Rafe beside him, and true-Jillan and Paul Three. There was something very wrong with that Jillan-shape, something very much different from Kepta in its silence, the curious unsteadiness of its walking.

“Kepta?” Rafe himself asked it, at his side, half-merged with him.

“Maranduuuu,” it said, this puppetlike Jillan-shape, “Marandu,I—”

“Stay back from us.” Rafe Two held out a forbidding hand, making himself the barrier, remembering in a cold sweat that it could touch him, if not the original, that he could grapple with it if he had to—but he had wrestled Jillan-shape before when it was Kepta and he knew his chances against that strength. “Keep your distance. Jillan, Paul, get Rafe back. Get him back!”

“Safe,” it said. Its hands were before it, a humanlike gesture that turned into one chillingly not, that tuck of both hands, against Jillan’s naked breasts, like the paws of some animal. One hand gestured limply. “Safe. Kepta sent—” Eyes blinked, as if it were sorting rapidly. “Me,”it decided. “Me. Marandu. To defend you.”

“Do your defending from there,” Rafe Two said, hand still held out, as if that could stop it.

invaded another center of the ship, dislodging a few of the simpler passengers, who wept; and one complex, ||||, who sent out a strong warning pulse.

did not counter this, or attack. The entity was not capable of aggression, but of painful defense. offered |||| choices. In time |||| redefined the necessities of ||||’s situation and wandered away.

That was the first layer of <>’s defense about the replication apparatus. It went altogether too quickly, tempting to imprudent advance on the chiefest prize: the inner circle, the computer’s very heart.

So guessed where <> had centered <>self: would have done so. <> was there, wound about the replication apparatus and possessing every template there was. It was necessary to advance against that center sooner than had intended, and knew raw terror, approaching this place.

There were doomsday actions that <> could take.

“ advise <> against such measures,” said from a safe, distance to the core. “They are ultimately destructive. Surplus copies of–” ( used a pronoun collective of the ship and passengers) “would complicate matters. Get out of there. Give up. promise will replicate <> when have won the ship, when things are secure.”

And in <>’s infuriating silence:

“<>,” said, “have not always kept the promises make?”

“Are not one that <> kept?” came the answer, faint and deceptively far away. “<> regenerated in our last such impasse. <> did as <> said. Give up,” <> added, a hubris that astonished , “and <> will show this mercy one more time. The struggle is inconclusive again. There is,” <> added further, “always another time.”

laughed in outrage. “ will amalgamate these newcomers with <> when copy <>, since <> are so defensive of them. will add <^> and lump all y enemies together.”

“Do this,” <> whispered, no louder than the whisper of the stars against the ship-sensors, loud as the universe, “do this and regret it infinitely. Reciprocation, . Remember that. don’t have the keys <> have. always have to resurrect <>. <>’ve changed the keys; <>’ve been doing it all through <>y waking. <> learned—from ur old trick.”

This was likely truth. <> was fully capable of altering the ship. But disdained the warnings and pressed forward, urging ’s other parts to advance as well.

Paul/Rafe was one. He was afraid, in aggregate. He trembled, constantly keeping his enemy in sight, but constantly assailed with doubts.

He was in space, the, stars about him, nothing for reference.

He looked about forLindy , but there was nothing there.

So Rafe-mind fought him still, deep within his structure, having saved back some shred of itself for this. It fed Paul self-doubts.

Fargone station’s deepest ways, and it was not Security after Rafe Murray this time; it was another kind of force.

No one freelance-smuggled with the likes ofIcarus , no one crossed the moneyed interests that ran what they liked past customs; and if they caught him, if they saw his face—

So Paul fought back, and drove Rafe-mind into shuddering retreat.

Rafe made a mistake, a wrong turn in docks he had known all his life; but a stack of canisters against the wall became a maze, became a dead end, and cut off his retreat.

“Got you, you bastard, “ said the first of the four that filled the aisle between the towering cans.

He did not defend himself. It was not wise to antagonize them further. He only flung up his hands and twisted to shield himself as best he could, let them beat him senseless in the hopes they would be content with that, private law privately enforced, the kind they might not want Fargone authority involved in.

They did a thorough job. They knew, from his lack of defense or outcry, that he would not be going to authorities to make complaint; that he had something to lose that way more than they could do to him. And in that frustration they took their time about it.

“Where’s the other one?” they asked him over and over, knowing they had chased two, but he had diverted them his way. He never answered them about Jillan, not a syllable.

That was not the kind of thing Paul had hoped for. The memory died, quickly; but Rafe-mind stayed intact, locked into that moment with deliberate focus, with a certain satisfaction, the same he had shown the smugglers from Icarus.

I, Paul kept thinking, until it was himself who had been betrayed and Rafe had done it. So he warped all such memories.

Rafe wept, believing it at last.

No police, he had thought, dragging himself away with a broken arm that, finally, had cost him and Jillan four months’ savings for the meds. He evaded the police, passers-by, all help. There were questions that way; there was Welfare always ready to take charge of them and assign them a station job or send them to the mines to pay for Welfare help, forever, no hope of ships, no way out of debt for all their hopeless lives. A broken arm, the other things they did—that was small coin for freedom; and he must not talk, never complain, no matter what they did.

“I fell,” he told the meds, three days after, when the arm got beyond their care, and Jillan made him go.

There were inconsistencies. At times he thought that Paul had helped them; at others it seemed that Paul was destitute as they, which he had not remembered.

Rich, always rich, Paul Gaines, superior to him, clean and crisp in his uniform, station militia, sometimes Security—

Was it Security, then? Was it the police and notIcarus crew that had found him in the corridors that day and left him bruised and bleeding among the canisters for outbound ships?

Welfare agents?

Paul?

Things muddled in his mind, defense collapsing.

“Paul,” he murmured, and felt the invasion of his mind, the superfluity of limbs which worked against his will.

“They’re there,” Paul whispered to him. It seemed that he could see the folk of Icarusfar across the dark. “There they are.”

“Crazy,” Rafe whispered back; and in a paroxysm of effort: “Paul—you died.”

“Good,” Paul said, quite satisfied with his state. “They’re Icarids, Rafe. Aren’t they? Let’s go do something about them, why don’t we?”’

The legs moved.

“No,” Rafe cried, “no, no, no.”

And Paul enjoyed it. It was a weapon, Rafe’s fear, and he had mastered it.

They were no nearer than they had ever been on that dark and starless plain, the horizonless void which felt like nothing to their feet. The glow moved steadily, changing angles as they did, as if some invisible line connected it and them.

“It’s leading us,” Rafe said, glancing aside as he said it; and Paul agreed the same heartfrozen moment that somethingturned up in their midst, all black segmented coils and legs glowing yellow, at their joints as if light escaped. It towered among them, in nodding blind movements of its head.

“Aaaiiii!”it wailed.

“Get back,” Jillan cried, hauling at his arm. “Run, for God’s sake, run! Paul! It can’t catch us—”

It did. Shock numbed his nonexistent bones, ached in his joints as it roiled into him and out again. “Paul!” Jillan yelled; she and Rafe came back to distract it from him, darting this way and that.

“Help,” came a strange multiple voice, choruslike, as it pursued their darting nuisance to it. “Help, help, help—”

“Look out!” Paul cried, for Jillan misjudged: he flung himself at it as Rafe did, as she screamed.

It hit like high voltage: the beast itself yelped and writhed aside. All of them screamed, and then was silence.

Paul froze ... in the numbness after shock, the fear that Jillan and Rafe were likewise crippled—all these things applied. Most, it was the voice, the dreadful voice that wailed at them and stole wits with its frightfulness. “Help,” it kept saying, and its forward end nodded up and down serpentlike, like something blind. It made a whistling sound. “Rafe? Rafe? Fles-sh-sh.”

“O God,” Jillan, breathed, moving then, tugging backward at their arms. “Get back, hear me– get back. It’s nothing we can handle, not this thing—”

“Lonely,” it said, snuffling; it had the sound of a ventilation system, a periodic sibilance. “F-f-flesh-sh. Rafe—lonely.”

“Don’t!” Paul cried, for it had encircled them, leaving them nowhere left to run. And to nothing at all, to the betraying, light-less air: “Kepta! Help!”

“Can’t,” it said, snuffled, in its myriad of voices. “Name—can’t– Aaaaiiieee!”

“It’s that howler-thing!” Jillan cried.

“Aaaaaaee,” it said. The head swayed back again and aimed toward the dark. “Came to this ship. We. Long time—long—Crazy, some. Rafe-mind ran.”

“What, ran?” Rafe Three asked it.

“Fight,” it said, blind head questing. “Fight.” The voices entered unison. “—go with. Fought once. Paul—” The head nodded off toward the star, the glow along the horizon, that seemed nearer now.

“What are you?” Paul asked.

“Fought once,” it said, which seemed the sum of its identity. It started off, in pursuit of the ebbing light.

Dead, Paul reminded himself. You’re already dead. Quit worrying. Time’s short.And he wished that death was all.

“Come on,” he said to Jillan and Rafe Three, because he saw nothing else to do. He started walking in the wake of the looping creature, which humped and zigged its way through the dark like some great sea creature aswim in the murk, with graceful fluidity.

Rafe was by him; he never doubted his constancy; and Jillan at his other side, never faltering.

The star grew in their sight.

Worm came circling back to them when the will-o’-the-wisp they chased had begun to shine globular and planetlike in the dark.

“Paul,” Worm named that light. “Rafe. Pain.”

“Take us there,” Rafe Two demanded, of that Jillan-shape that had come to them. “Take us there, you hear me? If you want your enemies fought, then, dammit, let us out of here!”

And the shadow-eyes turned from regarding the wall, came back to them, so full of secrets that a chill stirred all through Rafe’s own all-too-substantial bones.

“You,” Jillan yelled at Jillan-shape, “answer, will you? Why do you keep us here?”

“For his defense,” it said; Jillan/Marandu in a far, soft voice. “For yours.”

“Kepta cares,” Rafe Two said in heaviest bitterness. “I’m sure.”

“For his defense,” it said again, making different sense than before.

“For Kepta’s?” Rafe asked, himself. “Is that the game?”

“Game.” The thing stood there with that infinity-look, god/goddesslike in stillness. “That’s not what to call it. The ship is at risk. We’re all at risk. There are always quarrels. Some would like to sleep. Some find that more comfortable. Time wears—on some. But we go on doing what we were set to do.”

“What?” Rafe asked. He stood behind Rafe Two’s shoulder, dodged round him, to the fore as if he were solid, out of courtesy. “ Whatwere you set to do? What are you up to?”

“Some passengers never ask,” Marandu said. “There’s one, for instance, completely without curiosity. It doesn’t dream either. But it knows a lot of things. It can’t dream because it can’t forget. Different approaches to consciousness.”

“Stop the nonsense,” Jillan snapped at it. “You’ve got your fingers in my mind right now. You can guess what I’d ask; so answer it.”

“Where the others are?” A blink. “But you don’tknow that. You think you’re physical. So do they.” It cast a disturbed look at Rafe. “You know. Kepta knows you know. You saw the apparatus. You ought to have told them.”

A chill like ice came over him, foreknowledge of harm.

“What’s it mean?” Rafe Two asked. “Rafe, what’s it saying?”

“You don’t have physical bodies,” Rafe said. He turned his shoulder to the intruder, to look instead at them. “Patterns, Computerlike. Simulacra. You’re not physical.”

“What do you mean?” Jillan asked. “Make sense, Rafe.”

“I’m making the best I know.”

“We’re here,” Jillan said.

“Position in the ship,” said Jillan/Marandu, “is simultaneous. You only control a small priority. Kepta’s, mine—is virtually universal in the circuitry. Size—is illusory; distance is; all these things—are what you choose to manifest. What I choose—in your shape.”

“You mean we’re bloody programs?” Rafe Two cried, and with a wild, despairing look: “Rafe?”

“You’re real,” Rafe said. “You go on living, changing. You always knew that. Is a separate body so important?”

“Oh, damn,” Rafe Two breathed, and shook his head. “Dammit, twin.”

“Rafe,” Paul said fretfully, stepping through the counter. “ Hedoesn’t know. Paul doesn’t know ... what he’s up against out there. They don’t know what they are. Marandu—whatever you call yourself—Send me to him. Now. While there’s time.”

There was doubt in Jillan/Marandu. It showed in the eyes, in the nervous clench of hands to the breast. Indecision.

“ Where’s Kepta?”Rafe asked, in sudden, horrid certainty. “Marandu, has Kepta—place?”

The head jerked in a faint—perhaps—negation.,

“What isKepta, Marandu?”

“I,” it said, flinching back, almost fading out. It looked afraid. “I’m one version.”

“One?”

“One,” it said.

It had grown from globe to legged shape to figure, still coasting along the formless horizon in the dark.

But the legs were many; the reverse-silhouette warned of deformity.

“Steady,” Paul told his companions, told himself, for now he truly knew why he had come, that it was his monster; and that in one sense and perhaps both shapes he was to die here, again, and soon. He searched for Rafe’s hand, Jillan’s, hugged them close; and Worm lurched along beside him.

The light receded then.

“It’s running away,” Jillan said. “How can it get distance on us, when we can’t catch it?”

“Now,” said Worm in its multiplicity of voices. “ Fight.Fight now.”

“How?” Paul asked it. He had nerved himself, and now in default, the old weakness came back, the old insecurity, deadly as swallowed glass, and worked within his gut. He should not have taken the lead. He was not up to this. It outmaneuvered him—that easily.

Then he cast a look at Worm, one wild surmise. “Worm—how? How do youcome and go?”

It knotted upon its coils like a wounded snake, convulsed, phased with them in one aching shock that hit the nerves and fled.

“O God,” Rafe moaned, catching his balance where it had thrown him, as it had thrown them all. Jillan gasped and staggered on her feet, and Paul—Paul refused to think of ground or up or down, but absorbed the shock and shuddered.

Homeworld, he thought out of some source like old memories; remembered—a world like orange ice, with skies that melted and ran; with lightnings like faint glow constant in the clouds; and drifters, drifters with no color at all except the backflare of the clouds– That you?he whispered to Worm. Was that you?But whatever Worm had tried to say was gone.

The nodding head touched him, and now, with the whiskered, chitin-armored head thrust up before him, it arched its body and presented to him the upper surface; five jewels shone atop its head, black and glistening, and he thought of eyes.

“Come,” it whispered back, and its bristles quivered. “Passage.”

There was difference in the dark, as if something dire had happened, and yet nothing had changed.

Except suddenly, to their left, a figure loomed distinct.

“O God,” Jillan said. “It’s movedus—”—meaning Worm; for they werewhere the enemy was.

Paul stood still, and Rafe did beside him, facing this nightmare, this many-limbed amalgam of themselves, a thing of legs and arms and faces. It turned slowly, presenting Paul-face to them, and it smiled with a gorgon look.

“The thing got you here,” Paul One said. “I wonder if it can get you out. What do you think?”

And Rafe-face answered: “ Killit, Rafe, kill it, stop it, stop him—”

“Let me hold you,” said Paul One, offering its arms; and Worm gibbered: “No—”

“What do we do?” Rafe asked, Rafe Three, tight and low, backing up until they made one line with Jillan. “Paul, did it tell you what to do?”

“Worm,” Paul said, his gut liquid with fear. “Worm, get us out of here!”

They were elsewhere, at a little greater distance. They hugged one another in shock, trembling. Paul held Jillan; Rafe held them both; and Worm made a circle about them, looping and making small hisses of defiance or consternation.

Lost,Paul thought. We’re lost, we’re helpless against that thing.

And then he remembered Jillan, and took her gold-glowing face between his hands, making her look up at him. “It hasn’t got you,” he said. “It hasn’t got you, Jillan. That monster’s one short. We’re one stronger. You’re my difference.”

“I can’t do it, Paul. Can’t.”

You must meet it on its own terms,Kepta had said.

You will know what to do when you see it, or if you don’t, you were bound to fail....

“There’s one way,” he said to her, “one way we can meet it all at once, the way it is, on its terms.” Jillan looked so much afraid, for once in her life afraid. He wanted to cry for her; wanted to hit out at whatever threatened them, and instead he touched Jillan’s face, reminding himself they both were dead and hopeless and illusion only. Rafe had more than he: a living self. And less, far less. “Want you to trust me,” he said, “Jillan; want you to do with me—with me—what it’s done to Rafe. Just slip inside; we’re not that substantial: itdid it. So can we.”

There was already contact. She pressed herself against him then, harder and harder. “I can’t, she said then. “I can’t. You’re solid to me.”

He tried too, from his side. “Rafe,” he said, extending his left arm, and Rafe came against them, held them tight with all his strength, but there was no merging.

“Won’t work,” Jillan said, “ won’t.”—And he felt all too much the fool, trying the possible-impossible, the thing that Paul did, that Kepta did as a matter of course. Worm looped about them all, circled, wailing its distress. “Help,” It cried. “Help, help—”

Worm.

“Worm—how do you do it? How do you pass through us? Show us, Worm!”

“Make,” Worm said.

“What—make? Make what?”

It whipped through their substance with one narrowing of its legged coils. Rafe screamed, becoming part of it, and Jillan—

The pain reached him. His vision divided, became circular, different from his own, and he owned many legs—

—view of skies like running paint, lightnings, repeated shocks, the sound of thunders never ceasing—

Fargone swinging in ceaseless revolution;Lindy ’s dingy boards; the oncoming toad-shaped craft and, the merchanterJohn Liles —

Got to destruct, destruct, destruct—All those kids and lives—

A thousand of them, Rafe—

–self-abandonment—

It’s dumping!—

Jillan’s voice, reprieve, with his finger on the button, the red button that was a ship’s last option—

Cool and calm: It’s dumping, Paul—

We’re here, Rafe said, calmer and calmer now.

We’re—wherever we’ve gotten to. Take it easy, Paul; easy—

The pain had stopped. Worm eased from their body. Their hearing picked up multiple sound from somewhere, like wind rushing; there was—if they opened their eyes—too much sight, though the universe was black; and the knowledge ripped one way and the other like tides, memories viewed from one side and the other, shredded, revised.

—walkwalkwalk—

Some one of the multiple brain chose movement: Rafe, Paul thought; Paul tried to cooperate. There was progress of a kind.

Awkward trifaced thing maneuvering into Paul’s way.There was humor in that self-image, even in extremity: that was Rafe-mind, steady and self-amused.

I love you, Paul thought to their amalgamated self over and over again, without reservation, without stint; and got it back, Rafe-flavored. He wanted Jillan too; felt her fear, her reserve against all their wants: it was all too absolute.

Me, she insisted, me, myself, I, I, I—even while she moved her limbs in unison with them. There was pain in that.

“We need you,” Paul whispered, desperate. He knew, of a sudden, knew what privacy in Jillan this union threatened. She shielded them from her own weapons, from rage, from resentment, every violence.

“You’re our defense, Jillan; Rafe’s our solid core; me—I go for himwhen I can get at him. But I need what you’ve got—all of it, hear—no secrets, Jillan-love.”

“No one needs all,” Jillan flung back at them both. “But that was always what you asked.”

It stung, it burned. It took them wrathfully inside itself and taught them privacy.

No one,thought Jillan-mind, with a ferocity that numbed, no one can ask myself of me.

Our shield,Paul whispered to Rafe, in the belly of this amalgam they had become. Give way. Give up for now. Let Jillan have her way.

There was outrage left: memories of Fargone docks, of Welfare and Security.

You asked it.That was Rafe, in self-defense.

I never asked. You made up your own mind what I should be.

His arm was broken. He had never talked. He never would.

There was terror(Jillan now) in the dark, hiding there, dodging a drunken spacer who had a yen for a fourteen-year-old, a kid without ship name to defend her—she eluded him, hurled invective at him; shook, afterward, for long, stomach-wracking minutes.

Grandmother had a number(Paul-mind, in self-defense) which all lab-born had.

“Why don’t I?” he had asked, wanting to be like this tranquil model of his life. He touched the number, fascinated by it. He could see it forever, fading-purple against Gran’s pale mine-bleached skin, against frail bones and the raised tracery of veins under silk-soft skin. It was one with the touch of Gran’s hand, the softest thing he knew; but she had wielded blasters, shoved rock, had a mechanical leg from a rockfall in the deep. Her eyes, her wonderful eyes, black as all the pits, her mouth seamed and sere and very strong: the number brought back that moment.

“You don’t want one,” his mother said, harshly, as harshly as she ever spoke to him. “Fool kid, you don’t want one of those.”

“Your gran’s lab-born,” a girl had said once, seven and cruel as seven came, the day his gran had died. “Made her in a tank. That’s what they did. Bet they made a dozen.”

He had cried at the funeral; his mother did, which reassured him of her humanity.

But perhaps, he thought even then, she was pretending.

“None of her damn business,” Jillan-mind insisted of that seven-year-old, with a great and cleansing wrath; and Rafe was only sorry, gentler, in his way. “Stupid kid,” he said. There was no doubt in them of humanity; the memory grew clean, purged; “She loved you,” Rafe-mind said, confusing his own half-forgotten spacer mother with the daughter of lab-born gran. Heknew; Jillan knew; there was no doubt at all in them, why a woman would work all her life and hardly see her son—to leave him station-share, the sum of all she had, her legacy. Merchanters knew, who had bought a ship with the sum of their own years.

They progressed; limbs began to work.

Rafe’s suffering in this—a stray thought from Paul, shame, before the man who was so godlike perfect, feeling his horror at the shambling thing they had become.

Shut up, Jillan said, severe and lacking vanity, as she had killed it in herself years ago (too great a hazard, on the docks, to look better than one had to, to attract anything but, maybe, work. One had to look like business; and be business; and mean business; and she did.)

Use what you’ve got.(Rafe-mind, whose vanity was extreme, and touching, in its sensitivity).

You can’t get pregnant,Jillan hurled at him, ultimate rationality; and caught his longing, his lifelong wish for some woman, for family—

Vanity serves some purposes,Rafe-mind thought, recalling it was his smoothness, his glib facility with words that got them what they had: he had bent and bent, so Jillan never had to– A room in a sleepover, an old woman gave it to me—I took even that. Even that, for you—

She felt the wound, shocked. Her anger diversified, became a vast warm thing that lapped them like a sea.

Mine,she thought of them, and saw Paul-shape ahead of them. Wailing went about them. Worm nudged their flanks, little jolts of pain too dim to matter.

“Paul,”Worm said, slithering about them, round and round; and the creature before them lingered, murkish in its light. Limbs came and went in it. The face changed constantly.