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cries. I avert my eyes. I go on into the next room and collapse on her bed, huddle shivering under my blanket.
The coolness of the tower amazes me after the heat outside. But Song is a sorceress; she bewitched me, she is a magician. . . .
There is a portable cooling unit under the table. I open my eyes and stare at it. Slowly I begin to realize where I am, and that I am alive, still alive. I could have died today . .. but death was the easy choice.
With a kind of amazement I realize that I still want to live. / want to live. I think of Moon again, and suddenly life catches fire inside me. Its heat gathers in my loins and surges into my brain. I lift my head. Two shadowy figures are making love on the bed beside me.
Their passion pours into my mind.
I roll off the bed with a groan. On my knees on the floor I watch myself with Song in a haze of red--our lust made visible. My body throbs with pleasure as my own
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ghost fills my head with inarticulate cries. I stumble back into the next room, and Song looks up at me now with hunger in her eyes, as if she shares my hallucination. How can we share each other's madness? But I am only listening to my blood. I drag Song from the chair onto the floor, pulling her reality into my fantasy as I surrender to my lust for her.
But she's not Moon--! my eyes shout at me. I break away from Song's lips, panting, shaking my head. Not Moon. Not the woman whose every touch was as warm and sweet as spring, whose gentle understanding made the joining of our bodies into something as beautiful as life itself--a celebration, a consecration ... an act of love. Not Moon. Not Moon. Not.
The fire inside me turns to ashes. Loss and bitter disappointment crystallize my thoughts. I look down into the face of a stranger, seeing her clearly at last, seeing that the real need inside me is not yesterday's mindless
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lust, but the need to change fate, to turn back time.
"No," I whisper. "I don't love you. I don't even know you. This isn't right."
Fury and frustration blaze in her eyes as she sees that
I no longer want her. She shoves me off of her. "Get away from me. You're useless! You're not anything I
need, you're not even a fuck!" She spits at me. "I thought you were the one who knew the answer--that's why I
took you, that's why I infected you. The Lake promised him to me. But it lied. It always lies, it's like you are!
You're weak, you're nothing now! Why didn't you kill yourself out there? I hate you, you failure, you lunatic --"
I see my reflection in her eyes. I don't answer her;
there is nothing I can say.
A smile of horrible spite fills her face, and suddenly I
remember what she did to the men on the platform. I
pull away from her, terrified that she will call up her power and tear me apart. "You're afraid of me now--"
she whispers. But instead she draws me closer to her, and asks me quietly, "What are the first one thousand prime numbers?"
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"I don't know," I mumble. I feel a tingling, a rushing, as an irresistible force roars into my mind and swallows my consciousness whole.
I lie at the heart of a smothering unlife, in a darkness that is the denial of all being, and yet is ... as ancient as stone, as infinite as space, as intimate as a second. An eternity passes inside of an instant, I grow old and die a thousand times, unmourned. . . .
Until, after an eternity, I am reborn into my own body again, whimpering mindlessly. Song sits in her chair, watching me. "What are the one hundred major exports of Kharemough?" she asks.
/ don't know. And I am swept away again . . . this time to my homeworld, and with my own eyes I see the
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interior of the New Hall of the Republic. The famous
Ramosthenit frescoes, which my mother unearthed in the ruins of Old Dimmarh, are so close to me that I could touch them. But I am trapped in someone else's body, and I am paralyzed. I can only stare and stare in helpless longing as concerned hands, the hands of my people, reach out to me. . . .
I am back with Song. Before I can even speak she asks me another question, and I am wrenched down into utter blackness again.
The game goes on and on, as her words suck me out of myself and abandon me on other worlds, or alone in the Nothing Place. . . . Until at last she tires of the sport, and when I come to once more she rises from her seat and stands over my strengthless body. "You see, Mother?" she screams at no one. "You see, you see--?"
Weeping furiously, she runs from the room.
I lie clawing at the dusty rug, too exhausted to move.
Sleep covers me with its gentle blanket.
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Iwake to the choir of madness. I lie where I lay last night, curled fetally on the floor. Gods, gods.... I pray, but I know there will be no answer. "Religion is only our futile attempt to force order on chaos. " My mother told me that when I was a child. Now, at last, I understand.
Mother . . . Mama. . . . But I know there will be no answer. I bury my face in my hands, drawing my knees up tighter.
"BZ. . . ."
I open my eyes. I see my mother's sad, impatient face bending above me, hazed in red. She kisses my forehead and I am a child of five again. "I'm sorry," she whispers, "I have to leave you now.
... I have to go away."
I push myself up on my arms, frightened and confused, reaching out for her. "Why?" Asking the question that I have asked myself again and again through a lifetime. What did I do wrong?
She shakes her head, looking away from me. "Because
I can't live a lie instead of a life anymore. Try to understand.
... Be a good boy." She kisses me again, pulling
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away from my hands. "Good-bye." And then she leaves my room, and our home, forever.
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"Good-bye, Mother. ..." I whisper. And at last I understand.
I sit up slowly, feeling as though I have aged a hundred years. I look at my hands, expecting them to be withered and bent. But they are my own, the backs
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smooth and brown, scattered with pale freckles and stained with paint. My wrists are still scarred. I sigh, rubbing my aching shoulder. The pain in the abused joint is like hot needles, but I savor it. Yesterday when
I woke I could barely feel it ... yesterday when I woke
I could barely see or hear. Getting used to it, I think, hopefully.
But then I remember last night, the fresh wound that Song opened in my sanity. The Transfer . . .
the sibyl
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Transfer. Not some evil magic. I try to make myself believe it was only that. I know that sibyls are human computer ports, linked to a hidden data bank--the blackness, the heart of a machine--and to sibyls on other worlds. Predictable responses, my mind insists. Not insanity.
But real sibyls control the Transfer, they aren't lost every time someone asks a question!
Song enters the room. My hands fly up to cover my ears, and I listen with all my strength to the cacophony inside my head. Song's lips mock me as she drifts past, her sky-blue translucent outer robe trailing her like a cloud of lost souls. There is food on a silver tray by the door. She takes only a single piece of dried fruit and disappears down the steps.