“Xenophobe.”
“What’s that? That scraping?”
Delia smiled. “Neither of us is in control at the moment, Jord. You could always get up and stop me if I tried the wrong thing on you. How does it feel to be the helpless captive?”
“Shut up! I think they’re going away.”
“Now, why do you want to kill the one man that can open humanity’s path to the stars?”
“He’s not the only one. You heard. They can handle the Valliardi Transfer and they’ve even got modifications.”
“So? Maybe theirs doesn’t impart the death illusion and you can use it happily ever after.”
“Shut up! I still want to die, don’t you see? Crys was waiting for me. My father, too. They want me there. They called to me so many times and I tried to go with them but I kept getting pulled back and I want to die in a way I’ll be sure I can be aware enough to-to-” He began to cry.
“Hide,” Delia said, watching his face for a clue to any change. “Hide.”
“No.”
“Hide, Jord. You are now Virgil Grissom Kin-”
“No!”
“Prepare to transfer,” a disembodied voice said.
“Virgil. It’s me, Delia.” She swallowed and forced a grin. “Death Angel, Virgil.”
“I’ll kill you, Dee, when I get out of this. I’ll make you feel every bit of it as I grind you up-”
Up. Up. I’m being lifted by something. Out of the bed. Up. Something pushing me up faster and faster and faster till the walls blur into white and my body smears into a rainbow streak and I stretch across a plain so vast its horizons red shift away. I rush across it to see someone at the far end approach me like a reflection. Kinney!
Jord speeds toward me and we stop, watching each other. I move. He moves. A mimetic standoff. He stands back. As do I. His body looks like mine, but also his. My own flickers. Him. Me. Him. Me. Himmy.
We’re one.
I refuse.
Mixed up together like water and air make fog.
Never.
Soon! Inseparable. You can’t leech a soul away from itself.
It’s not fair. I sit down. He sits down.
He sits down. I sit down.
I sit down.
What did you just do?
Me? What did-
I just do?
The flickering speeds up-
And I can’t tell-
Where I end-
And I-
Begin.
I feel both aspects, now. The plain contracts at the speed of white and bends to a cone, a tube, a cocoon. Tighter it shrinks, forcing me inward at mind-searing speeds. All white around me, blinding eyes I don’t have. A roar that fills ears I don’t possess wraps me in its strange sound. Something pushes the body no longer part of me and I feel the awful crush-
And release. Suns explode around me. Planets cascade. Races crawl out of seas of water or bromine or ammonia, rise to great heights, and tumble back in. Thoughts caress my mind, cat’s paw soft, and they are gentle. Galaxies swirl into a pattern from which rises a mighty city greater than any eyes have seen. A shimmering city of metal and more, where all the dead live as one nation. The dead from all the worlds, from all of time, from all of all.
I see them and know I’m one. Then grains of black appear on the towers, darkening them. Black dust tars my death’s tin nation like cinders from nowhere. The blackness spreads and a voice like every voice combined wishes me the gift of peace for my souls and it all begins, on two tracks.
I am born. I grow. I die.
Yet Virgil Grissom Kinney lives on.
With Jordan Baker inside.
And we become as one.
And return.
Chapter Fifteen
The God in the Machine
He opened his eyes and observed the robot for a few moments, a tranquil expression on his face.
“Computer. This is Virgil Baker. Please release both tovar Trine and me. I would like to meet whoever built this crazy roller coaster.”
“The robot will remain at your side to prevent any aberrant behavior on your part toward Delia Trine or the People.”
“Do what you will. It’s unnecessary, but I see how you’d expect me still to be insane.”
“You are not, now?”
“I told you. I am Virgil Baker.” The robot unstrapped his arms. Massaging his wrists, he said, “Our psyches have fully integrated thanks to the improved manner in which the People’s Transfer works. Didn’t you notice anything different?”
“No,” the computer said. “As I informed one of you, I have succeeded in making my neural net insensitive to such effects.”
The robot finished unstrapping him, and he pushed toward Delia. “You felt it, Delia, didn’t you? Something different? Something good and liberating?”
“Stay back!” she cried. “I did. Maybe. You said you’d kill me, though, and if Jord is still there in there, awake, scheming…”
“It doesn’t matter, Dee. I saw it all. Death isn’t the end even if we go all the way. It’s actually a trivial waypoint in our development. You saw that. The marker of death should not be the tombstone, but the milestone.”
“Stay away!” The robot had finished untying her and she kicked backward. “I know what I went through, and I know what it means, and we obviously didn’t see the same thing. I somehow lost the memory of the first clone sometime after I was put into the second. I was alone out there. Scared.”
“You shouldn’t have been.”
“Get back, Jord!”
She maneuvered between the robot and Virgil Baker. The robot blocked the computer’s view of the scene, she blocked the robot’s. Using that hidden instant, she grabbed a scalpel and slashed at his throat. At the crooks of his arms. Under his groin. He stared uncomprehendingly at her through the roiling lifeblood that whorled around him like a tornado.
“Virgil!” she screamed, watching his life pulse away in quivering droplets. “Forgive-!” She laid the scalpel to her own carotid artery.
Spattered by her blood, the robot closed in to stun her with an electrical jolt, then carried the two bodies to the medical bay. It followed the silent commands of the computer, lowering the draining corpses into the boxdoc and actuating the RNA leeching process. The grinding disc descended.
Delia clutched at her head.
“Ooh.” She floated in a sleeping quarters decorated completely in light shades of blue. The air smelled of horses, she thought, and summer morning dew. Everything seemed slightly out of kilter. The room, spare and functional, appeared to turn in slow, dizzying quarter circles that stopped with unnerving suddenness and then repeated. Sounds coming through the walls seemed to rise and fall with her breathing. The taste of fresh wintergreen tingled in her mouth. The colors and smells and tastes, she knew, were snatches of memory from her childhood, idealized and concentrated by the filters of nostalgia.
She tried to reach for a handhold, but she had been purposely suspended in the center of the chamber, out of reach of anything to grasp or kick. With the slow effort of hand movements and exhalations, she was able gradually to propel toward a bulkhead. Her head ached from the effort. Unsteady fingers punched the computer pager. “This is Trine. Where the hell am I?”
“You are in Ring One, Level Two, Section Six O’Clock. Please proceed to Prow Four Center to meet the People.”
“What people?”
“The People of the Sphere, whom we have led to Earth. I think you will find them most interesting.”
Delia rubbed the itchy bump on her skull. “Earth?” Her eyes brightened. “We’re back?”
“In a manner of speaking. Please proceed to the chart room.”
She stood in front of the hatch for a moment before opening it. Why, she thought, did she feel as if there was a constant undercurrent of chatter going on? Is it the same schizophrenic roar described by… by…? She frowned, trying to remember something about a blond man with green eyes. Something about angels, and poor, dead Jord.