"I don't understand," she said, biting her lip.
He touched her arm lightly, a gesture she found comforting, against her will. "I know. Tomorrow, when you're rested, I'll explain. Tonight don't worry. You'll find everything you need; look for whatever you want in the usual places — food in the kitchen, clothes in the closet." He went out.
She didn't bother to try the door. She knew it would be locked.
She decided to take a bath, a long, hot bath. Perhaps she could soak away the uncertainties of her new life, if only for a while.
Arriangel slept poorly that night in her strange new bed, so far from her old life. Her dreams were muddy with frustration and anxiety; when she woke, she could remember nothing of them.
After she had visited the bathroom and made use of the combs and brushes and cosmetics she found there, a mech servitor emerged from its wallcloset and served her breakfast in the media room. She ate with little appetite.
Later she watched a performance on the holotank. A color dancer she had never heard of created crude, garish effects on a canvas of thousands of grimacing faces. The colors that cycled over the faces were depressing - pasty, clay-colored washes; sickly greens; dark, bloody crimsons. The music was stridently repetitive, and she soon turned it off. She wondered that the world had so deteriorated during her sleep on the ice.
Arbrand had chosen a vengeance even viler than she had at first understood.
She sat in silence for an hour, turning over her memories, worrying at them. When Memfis arrived, she had derived no insights from them. She still could not understand how she had come to be what she now was.
A chime announced his arrival, and she looked up, expecting her door to open without her volition, as it had when she was in the pens. After a moment she realized that Memfis was waiting for her permission.
Perhaps it was no more than a disarming gesture, but it made her feel better. "Enter," she said, running her hand quickly over her hair.
Memfis came in, smiling his reassuring smile. "Ah," he said, clearly delighted. "How lovely you look this morning. No wonder you've been so often loved, Arriangel."
There was an odd inflection to his voice, but she could not decide what it meant. Still, he wasn't at all threatening, and she smiled warmly, pleased to see him.
He rubbed his hands together briskly, as if to warm them, then extended one to her. ''Come along. It's time for you to learn about the work you'll do here."
She put her hand in his, and he lifted her gently to her feet. He must have seen the fear in her face, though she tried to hide it. "No, no, there's nothing to be afraid of, as I've said before. In fact, almost everyone wishes to have the opportunity you're about to receive."
"They do?"
"Oh yes. How many of us would not go back into our pasts and change things, if we could?" He laughed. "No, I have no time machine — none exist, so far as I know."
He drew her into the bedroom, where the tall chair stood. At his touch on a wall-mounted dataslate, the chair slid forward, and the neutral harness lifted up and out of the way. "Will you sit?" he asked.
She could not have said why she was so afraid. Despite its appearance, suggestive of the restraints employed by low-tech torturers in holodramas, the chair's fabric was clean and new, its plastic surfaces unmarred, the straps wide and padded. "Please ...," she whispered.
"All right," he said, apparently not annoyed. "I'll sit. You watch."
He made himself comfortable in the chair. When he was ready, he nodded, and the straps curled around his chest and over his wrists and ankles. Simultaneously, the neural harness descended, until its black plastic hood obscured his face... except for his mouth, which still smiled for a moment longer.
Then his mouth fell into repose, and above the chair the screen came to life, veils of random color swirling.
When the screen cleared, she saw a forest scene — ancient gnarled trees growing amid mossy black boulders, through which a narrow brook poured. From the frosty, directionless light, she assumed she was watching one of the ecosims to be found in the wealthier enclaves of Dilvermoon, a little bit of carefully designed wilderness deep under the steel shell of the artificial planet.
For a moment the scene was static, and then it came to life, the water moving, tree limbs tossing in a moaning wind. A bright green databar slid across the bottom of the screen, flashing the words "MNEMONIC VALIDITY: CONFIRMED." At the same instant, a sensie field touched her, and she shivered. The wind was cold, and some fearful emotion rode on it. The room grew misty around her, though the flashing databar remained clear, and she was drawn into the screen's viewpoint.
The viewpoint panned, and she saw, standing beside a deep pool, a little boy, a child who seemed instantly familiar, though she was sure she had never seen him before. He was perhaps nine years old, pale-skinned, with hair of a familiar fiery color. He was smiling at her, but there was nothing pleasant about that smile. It was too wide and too knowing, and, in some subtle and disturbing way, quite dreadful.
"Come," the little boy said. "Let's see who's better."
The voice was that of a child, but Arriangel repressed a shudder of disgust.
She recognized Memfis — the small features were unmistakable. Or was it him? She saw some unendurably hateful quality in the child... though it was difficult to put her finger on exactly what was so awful.
The boy held the loop of a leash in his hand, and he gave it a jerk. A small, miserable-looking creature came slowly from behind a boulder. It was so hunched over that she took a moment to recognize it as a merlind, a bioengineered pet that had been popular in the enclaves when she was a child. Its body incorporated a malleable alien protein, and its entertainment value derived from the fact that its physical structure could be a altered almost instantly. The boy drew a control module from his pocket.
Her viewpoint spoke, and again she caught the resonances of disgust and fear. "No, Tafilis. I don't want to play that anymore." The voice was also childish and almost identical to the first boy's, except that it seemed sweetly troubled, and not at all monstrous.
"But you will." The awful child tapped at his controller, and his merlind strightened up and began to change.
Arriangel felt a distracting degree of confusion. Her viewpoint called the child Tafilis, not Memfis. What was happening? She shook her head.
The databar still flashed the same message.
The merlind had begun as a small, chubby animal with nappy brown fur and large, dark eyes. Its body elongated, the fur retracted, and hard blue scales surfaced on its skin. Its jaws enlarged and lengthened, and it hissed, opening a mouth full of long yellow teeth. It sprouted a crest of stiff green spines and a segmented insectile tail tipped with a poison-oozing stinger.
"No, really, Tafilis, please ... I don't want to," her viewpoint said in a trembling voice. The sensie field squeezed Arriangel between loathing and terror. She could feel her viewpoint's fear, a twisting hand in her belly.
"You think I give a shit what you want, Memfis?" Tafilis laughed horribly, and the creature he had made strained at the leash. "Come on, I'll give you a slow count to twenty to do your merlind, then I turn Bones loose. Hurry!"