“Calm down, Dee, and listen.
“You’re going to get rid of Kinney and you’re not going to trick me again. I don’t know how bad the pentabarbitol messed up your memory, but I think there’s enough of you left, am I right?”
She sat still for a moment, then nodded as best she could.
Baker smiled. “And the memories of the clone—are they with you?”
She tried to shrug. Her eyes glistened. She looked at him like a wounded animal.
“I just want to be cured, Dee. I just want to make sure that when I die, it won’t be like a picture fading in the sun; my mind, my self eroding bit by bit until I forget I exist. That’s why I turned on you. I want to die as a whole person, not as someone else’s dimming memory. For what we had back on Earth, do this. I could threaten to kill you and rebuild you a
thousand times until you do what I want. I could and would do it. Don’t make me. Cure me. Then I’ll be Jord for good.”
Teardrops broke away from her eyes and drifted like jewels in front of her.
“I may be in a different body, but I’m Jord. We were lovers once. My death changed that, but I’m alive, see? We can have it all again. We don’t even have to transfer ever again. There’s a habitable planet here that we can use the engines to reach.”
She closed her eyes and clenched her fists. Her breaths came in short sobs.
“We’re the only ones left,” he said. “Everyone we know died in the Earth-Belt wars, and it’s years after that. It’s Twenty-Two Twenty-Four, Dee. More than a century. We’re all alone. Get rid of Kinney and we can live and die together.”
Her sobbing grew audible. Her hands unclenched and fluttered weakly. Her chest trembled.
“Say you’ll help me.” When she nodded her head, he said, “Thank you, Dee. Push your jaw forward. The gag is knotted around the brace and it’ll loosen if you tug at it like that.” After several minutes of tearful effort, she tugged at the gag and it untied, drifting free.
She looked at him with the sorrowful eyes of a little girl. “I’m sorry, Jord,” she said. “Hide.”
“Bitch!” He shrieked and lunged against his belts.
The bitch tricked me and I can see me sink away— and — I see Death Angel lashed before me and I feel the dead man burying down and I know now what he wants. Why he’s been hurting Death Angel, why I’m here. All his memories come, now. I’ve crossed and touched him. He wants to die. I’ll show him dying.
This is dying.
“Virgil!” Delia cried as he unstrapped from the table. “Jord’s trying to drive you under permanently. You’re in control now. I couldn’t let him do it. I... I lo—It wouldn’t be right.”
“I’ll show him, Death Angel. Don’t worry.”
He bounded away from her, out of the room.
“Virgil—No!”
The roar becomes too much. Death Angel you foiled the final plan of
Master Snoop. He almost got my mind. My me.
He raced toward the prow of the ship like a human missile.
Dead man you wanted death you’ll get it. I can die a million times. How many can you survive?
He lunged at the console and started pushing buttons. There. Random number generator locked in. Are you watching, dead man, as I watched you? This is galactic roulette. Round and round the numbers go and where we transfer—
He pressed the button when it lit.
Nobody knows.
Like rubber stretching, the walls bend away and grow thin. I see the corridor open, twisting somehow, different. Maybe this time. Maybe this time I’ll go. Happy, with mother and father and Jenine urging me through.
No!
The viewing port before him turned deep violet. The glow of a sun filled the entire screen. Throwing his hands up to cover his eyes, he punched the transfer button again.
Jenine and the lady in white grow impatient. They argue with me, pointing at my naked body standing at the console. They plead, and I tell them I want to but I can’t seem to—
“No!” he screamed, looking out the port at a place where no star shone. The darkness terrified him even more than blazing suns. He jabbed the button.
Out of black into black. The lady calls, urging me into the doorway as a lover, as a friend. I want to go along but Something pulls me back. I almost see it this time. It has to fight harder to pull me—
“Back!”
“Cease transferring,” the computer thundered. “I cannot override. We are in danger of transferring into matter!”
“More darkness than light in the sky!” Virgil cried. “More void than value. Forward!” He shoved his finger into the button again and again.
I’m back and the corridor is dim. No one greets me. Now it is all mine. I run down it and almost reach the door. My fingers scrape the handle and something grabs me and throws me back.
The spaceship sped through a cluster of stars at a velocity that made them streak like meteors. He slammed a fist against the console.
Out of Nightsheet’s flame arcade into cool darkness.
I have to crawl uphill to the door this time. I grasp it and it creaks open. I almost see who seizes me and pulls me down, back into the Circus where I see vast swirls of gas and dust all around me. Reds, yellows, purples, blacks, they boil and snake
and I die again, feeling my heart stop, my blood seize, my muscles
brake. Please free me. Doesn’t death mean an end anymore?
No. I return again and float in the center of a ring of flame encircling two suns in a fiery bolo. I leave and feel myself shoved through a tiny hole that doesn’t exist and I’m falling toward the door. I swan dive, then look behind me to see something white and blinding lasso me and pull me up into the world.
“Why?” An explosion rocked the spacecraft. Virgil pressed the button. Nothing. He whirled around.
Out of the wall it comes, silver and gold, swinging its fist at my head and I just watch it connect and I spin and it bends over me and raises me and pushes me. I can’t move anything but I can watch. Back to the playroom it takes me, Ben’s personal strongarm. I knew they lurked in the walls and now I’ve seen one.
Death Angel sits there wide-eyed, her mouth open. The roar is too strong for me to hear what chokes from inside her. She looks at me, jaw slack and eyelids fluttering like captive moths.
Ben’s robot climbs back inside the walls with Master Snoop and I reach for the bruise on my head. Red comes off on my fingers, matching the red on Death Angel’s ankles and wrists. I move toward her. Ben babbles something in my ears but the roar is too great.
“Damage report: Ship transferred into asteroid belt surrounding massive infrared source. Transfer unit in six-oh-five defeat. Vernier pitch controls damaged. We cannot maneuver or transfer out of orbit. Human assistance required for repairs.”
Death Angel is limp as I unstrap her. She watches through eyes that echo hollow in my gaze. She says something and I strain to hold back the roar. It parts and I hear a complex cipher.
“I’m killed,” she said. “I’m killed. I died there again and again and they tried to comfort me by the entrance but this man kept sending me back. I wasn’t done, he said like a school teacher. I’m done. I’m done.”
She grows all firm in my hands and hits me on the head. I spin away from her and watch her bundle up and scream, her body studded with sweat diamonds.
She screamed again, whipped her head savagely around her, and ran her hands all over her body in a frenzied attempt to wipe away the perspiration. Trembling fingers clutched for the instrument table and pulled her to it. An electrosurgical knife glinted silver in her hand.