-as her face throbbed. They were removing the bandages. So cinematic. It's a damn shame I can't see it. Expectant faces gathered around---camera cuts quickly among them-dirty gauze falling beside the bed, layer upon layer unwinding-- and then
. why... why, Doctor... she's beautiful.
But she hadn't been. They had told her what to expect. Two monstrous shiners and puffed, angry red skin. The features were intact, there were no scars, but she was no more beautiful than she had ever been. The nose still looked vaguely like a hatchet, and so what? It hadn't been broken, and her pride would not allow her to have it changed for purely cosmetic reasons.
(Privately, she hated the nose, and thought that it, along with her height, had secured her command of Ringrnaster. There had been pressure to select a woman, but those who decided such things could still not put a pretty five-footer in command of an expensive spaceship.)
Expensive spaceship.
Cirocco, you're wandering again. Bite your tongue. She did, and tasted blood-
-and saw the frozen lake rush up to meet her, felt her face hit the panel, lifted her head from shattered glass which promptly tumbled down a bottomless well. Her seat belt held her above the abyss. A body slipped through the ruins and she reached out for his boot ...
She bit again, hard, and felt something in her hand. Ages passed, and she felt something touching her knee. She put the two sensations together and realized she had touched herself.
She had a slippery one-woman orgy in the dark. She was delirious with love for the body that she now re-discovered. She curled tight, licked and bit everything she could reach while her hands pinched and pulled. She was smooth and hairless, slick as an eel.
A thick, almost jellied liquid rippled through her nostrils when she tried to breathe. It was not unpleasant; not even fright- ening once she was used to it.
And there was sound. it was a slow bass, and it had to be her heartbeat.
She could touch nothing but her own body, no matter how she stretched. She tried swimming for a while, but could not tell if she was getting anywhere.
While pondering what to do next, she fell asleep.
Waking was a gradual, uncertain process. For a time she could not tell if she was dreaming or conscious. Biting herself didn't help. She could dream a bite, couldn't she?
Come to think of that, how could she sleep at a time like this? Having thought of that, she was no longer sure she had slept at all. It was becoming rather problematic, she realized. The differences in states of consciousness were tiny with so little sensation to give them shape. Sleeping, dreaming, daydreaming, sanity, madness, alertness, drowsiness; she had no context to give any of them meaning.
She could hear her terror in the increased rate of her heartbeat. She was going to go crazy, and she knew it. Fighting it, she held tenaciously to the personality she had reconstructed from the whirlwind of madness.
Name: Cirocco Jones. Age: thirty-four. Race: not black, but not white, either.
She was a stateless person, legally an American but actually a member of the rootless Third Culture of the multi-national corporations. Every major city on Earth had its Yankee Ghetto of tract houses, English schools, and fast-food franchises. Cirocco
had lived in most of them. It was a little like being an army brat, but with less security.
Her mother had been an uninarfled consulting engineer who often worked for the energy companies. She had not intended to have children, but had not counted on the Arab prison guard. He raped her when she was captured after a border incident between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. While the Texaeo ambassador negotiated her release, Cirocco was born. A few nukes had been sown in the desert by then, and the border incident was a brush-fire war by the time Iranian and Brazilian troops overran the prison. As political balances shifted, Cirocco's mother made her way toward Israel. Five years later she had lung cancer from the fallout. She spent the next fifteen years undergoing treatments slightly less painful than the disease.
Cirocco had grown up big and lonely, having only her mother for a friend. She first saw the United States when she was twelve. By then she could read and write, and could not be developmentally harmed by the American school system. Her emo- tional development was another matter. She did not make friends easily, but was fiercely loyal to those she had. Her mother had funny ideas on how to raise a young lady, and they included handguns and karate as well as dancing and voice lessons. Outwardly, she did not lack self-confidence. only she herself knew how frightened and vulnerable she was beneath it all. It was her secret-- one she kept so well that she fooled the NASA psychologists into giving her command of a ship.
And how much of that was true? she wandered. There was no point in lying here. Yes, the responsibility of command frightened her. Perhaps all commanders were secretly unsure of themselves, knew deep inside that they were not good enough for the responsibility thrust upon them. But it wasn't the sort of thing one asked about. What if the others weren,t scared? Then your secret was out.
She found herself wondering how she had come to command a ship, if it was not what she wanted. What did she want?
I'd like to get out of here, she tried to say. I'd like something to happen.
Presently, something did happen.
She felt a wall with her left hand. In time, she felt another with her right. The walls were warm, smooth, and resilient, just as she imagined the inside of a stomach would be. She could feel theni moving past her hands. And they began to narrow. She lodged, headfirst, in an uneven tunnel. The walls began to contract. For the first time, she felt claustrophobic. Tight spaces had never bothered her before.
The walls pulsed and rippled, pushing her forward until her head slipped through into coolness and a rough texture. She was squeezed; fluid bubbled out of her lungs and she coughed, in- haled, found her mouth filled with grit. She coughed again and more fluid came out, but now her shoulders were free and she ducked her head in the darkness to avoid getting another mouthful. She wheezed and spit, and began to breathe from her nose.
Her arms came free, then her hips, and she began digging at the spongy material that enclosed her. it smelled like a childhood day spent in a cool, bare earth basement, in that narrow space adults visit only if the plumbing is acting up. It smelled like nine years old and digging in the dirt.
One leg came free, then the other, and she rested with her head bent into the air pocket formed by her arms and chest. Her breath came in wet spasms.
Dirt crumbled behind her neck and rolled down her body until it nearly filled her air space. She was buried, but she was alive. It was time to dig, but she could not use her arms.
Fighting panic, she forced herself up with her legs. Her thigh muscles knotted, her joints cracked, but she felt the mass above her yielding.
Her head broke through into light and air. Gasping, spitting, she pulled one arm out of the ground, then the other, and clawed at what felt like cool grass. She crawled from the hole on hands and knees and collapsed. She dug her fingers into the blessed ground and cried herself to sleep.
Cirocco didn't want to wake up. She fought it, pretending she was asleep. When she felt the grass fading away and the darkness returning, she opened her eyes quickly.
Centimeters from her nose was a pale green carpet that looked like grass. It smelled like it, too. it was the kind of grass found only on the greens of the better golf courses. But it was warmer than the air, and she couldn't account for that. Perhaps it wasn't grass at all.
She rubbed her hand over it and snffied again. Call it grass.
She sat up and something clanked, distracting her. A gleaming metal band circled her neck, and other, smaller ones were on her arms and legs. Many strange objects dangled from the large band, held together by wire. She slipped it off and wondered where she had seen it before.