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.
She shook her head wearily and opened the hatch.
At the far end of the room, the surface of Earth moved across the viewing port. She recognized Africa, though something appeared to be dreadfully wrong with the continent. A slash through it marked a new ocean, and the northern edge of the continent was rimmed with sheets of ice. She wondered if there could possibly have been that much damage during the Earth-Belt war. Then her eyes focused on the two dozen wraiths within the room.
They floated, impassively scrutinizing her with black dot eyes that could have been painted on their bulbous heads. They looked like bleached octopii trailing gowns instead of tentacles.
Death Angel meets Nightsheet, and I get to watch.
She took a startled breath of air and sneezed. The musky smell seemed thick enough to grasp. Several of the creatures hissed and shot backward. A few emitted a high pitched, soft giggling noise. All of them had raised their hands to cover the ear holes on the sides of their heads.
One smaller ghost broke away from the group and jetted forward. It zipped back and forth across the room, arms bent at an angle and pumping up and down. It twirled about, stopping, starting, spinning, and shaking like an enchanted handkerchief. In the center of the room it halted, bent at the middle, then looked up at Delia and opened its toothless mouth in a broad crescent smile.
Delia laughed and clapped her hands. The diminutive creature’s smile vanished; it made an embarrassed flatulent noise and shot toward the overhead, hitting it with the sound of wet clothes slapping. It turned and drifted deckward, cradling its soft head in its hands. The other beings bent over double, the air filled with gentle, hysterical giggles. It looked back and almost turned transparent.
“Delia,” the computer whispered. “Please avoid any further sudden motion or loud noises. The People have unusually sensitive hearing. The world they come from is a Dyson shell completely enclosing a dying star. They are used to very low light. And they have not lived under gravity for hundreds of millions of years.”
“I’ll be careful,” she whispered back. “What should I do next?”
“Do you feel comfortable around them?”
She smiled. “Well, of course. They’re sweet.”
Sweet. I hope she doesn’t start using baby talk.
“Good,” the computer urged. “Move slowly toward them.”
“It’s just that it stinks in here.”
“It is their means of zero-gee locomotion, similar to squids.”
“Squids don’t smell up the air.” She floated forward, using the railing near the star chart console. The small one fluttered away and ducked behind the crowd. A few thin filaments clung to Delia’s face.
“What’s this?” she whispered, brushing the stuff out of the way.
“Metabolism by-products. Excreta. Another reason not to scare them.”
She wrinkled her nose and kept moving. One of the wraiths- the fattest one-moved toward her, too.
“Remember, Delia, they cannot hurt you. They are very fragile, and you are more likely to injure them. Be careful.”
“I’m… straight with that.” She stood less than a meter away from the other. It raised one of its tentacles, manipulating array splayed. It shook it at her urgingly. She raised her own hand and the creature grasped it. Delia returned the light squeeze with equal gentleness. Its touch felt like warm, animated putty.
“Bleezthed do beed oo,” whispered a soft soprano.
Delia cocked her head for a moment, then smiled and answered. “I am pleased to meet you, too.”
The ghost smiled and let go her hand.
“That is about all they have had time to practice,” the computer whispered. “They spent most of their time modifying the transfer unit.”
Delia looked out the viewing port at Europe. Italy was missing. So was the rest of the Mediterranean. A glacier-crusted mountain range rose in its place.
Something’s wrong with Earth, but just try telling her.
She ran a hand through her hair and smiled. “What next, you overgrown calculator?”
“Nothing. We shall complete the mapping orbits around Earth, pick up the shuttle that carried to the surface a few hardy explorers in anti-gravity suits, then return to the Sphere.”
“Have they met with representatives of Earth?”
“There are none.”
She was silent for a moment. She had not realized that the war had been that bad.
“How about the Belt? Trans-Plutonian orbit? The Öort layer?”
“Delia-” For once, the computer had to pause to search for the right words. “Delia, when Virgil connected the random number generator to the coordinate plotter, he transferred Circus Galacticus to several distant loci. I could not shut down the board because of reprogramming by Jord.”
Jord? she thought. Virgil?
“When we appeared inside a debris belt surrounding the Sphere-the only remnants of the People’s planets after they constructed the shell-micro-explosions damaged the transfer board and I was able to incapacitate Virgil. During those transfers, we had traveled a very great distance.”
“All mankind couldn’t have died! There have got to be human beings somewhere!”
“You are looking at them, Delia.”
“What?” The image of the wraiths before her began to swim, to drift as sinuously as they.
“We transferred over a billion light years. As near as the People and I can determine, they are indeed a race evolved from Earth settlers. One of many, according to them. They are very grateful to me for finding their cradle world.”
She began to smile and cry at the same time. Some of the beings moved toward her, concerned, their hands rising and falling helplessly.
“Then it’s all right,” she said through a sob. “That means we made it out after all. To the stars… to-”
“Did you ever have any doubt, Delia?”
“A billion years!” Some of the People covered their ears. “We’re alone. Where’s… Where’s-His name, his name-you said it once.”
“Virgil?”
“Yes! Virgil! The one I took from DuoLab. The one who saved me from Jord. Jord was… Where’s Virgil?”
Right here.
She whimpered and grabbed at her head. “No God no please no.” She propelled out of the chart room, blinded by tears.
“You killed him,” the computer said.
“No.”
“I leeched the RNA and picotechs out of his body and injected them into you.”
“No.” Yes. “Why?”
“I could predict no certain end to this slaughter in which you three indulged, so I exercised the option of consolidation. And while the picotechs were outside Virgil Baker’s brain, I endeavored to-”
“I’m alone. Alone!” She raced through the corridor, her arms straining to pull her and guide her. She breathed in labored, sobbing gasps. Her head thundered. “A billion years away from anyone!”
“It does not matter. There are new worlds to see, and the People will care for you.”
“As a fossil!” Something roared inside her ears. A kaleidoscope of colors shimmered at the center of her vision, spreading outward. She no longer felt the handholds, nor the bulkhead against which she slid to a stop.
Alone in blackness, she thought. I am alone.
No.
I hear you, but you’re not part of me.
I am, Dee. You have to learn that as I learned.
Jord?
I am Jord and I am Virgil. After the first day, I was never two separate entities. It was merely an insane battle against the truth. One that kept proving fatal.
I am Delia. Delia Trine. I was born in Denver, February twenty-eighth, Twenty Eighty-
And you are also Virgil and Jord. I am Virgil Delia Baker. I am Delia Jord Trine. I am Jord Delia Kinney. I am you and you are we and we are me and we are all togeth-
No!
Why not, Death Angel? You’ve seen Nightsheet, the ghost of humanity. We shall never die.
You’re still mad!
No, Delia. Mad Wizard is most probably dead by now. Now the rational side of Jord moderates Virgil’s mad side, and Virgil’s gentle nature neutralizes Jord’s violent streak. See? I can talk about them, now. I can see myself from both sides. Now, you’re a third perspective on my consciousness.
It’s all blackness. Can’t you see where we are? Darkness and desolation.
That’s just catatonia. Relax and allow us to merge.
I can’t.
You will…
Delia Diana Trine felt the presence of the other two, as if they were all together in a lightless room. Thoughts and feelings touched her like fingers from the shadows. They caressed her with a lover’s tenderness.
I was born and I was born and I was born.
I meet now, eons late, at the gateway to the Universe.
It stands between me and the door, waiting for a sign. Now I know. I step up and tell it-him, her, whatever its changing aspect is-I tell it that we don’t want each other. That we were never meant to walk through the gate together. That I wanted no field of sleep, no rest eternal. It nods, surrendering so easily I think it must yearn for its own peace.
And I see myselves.