in a dark, pain-filled murk. The pain and disorientation would
fade, but the darkness was, so it seemed, absolute. The rapist
had left her for dead, with multiple skull fractures and a
bleeding brain, and though the surgeons had been able to minimize
the trauma to most of her brain, her optic nerves were damaged
beyond repair: she was blind.
For an instant Diana knew where and when she was. 'Please!'
she said, using the voiceless voice of the egg. 'No more!'
Something changed then, and the fragments moved forward quickly,
faster than she could follow. However, she knew the story they
were telling:
Under drug-induced recall, she had produced an exact
description of the man, and that and the DNA match done from semen
traces left on her legs led to a man named Ronald Merel, who had
come to California from Florida, where he had been convicted once
for rape and assault. He was a pathetic monster, they told her, a
borderline imbecile who had been violently and sexually abused as
a child; he was also physically very strong. Weeks later, he was
caught in Golden Gate Parklooking for another victim, so the
police believedand he was convicted less than three months
later. A two-time loser for savage rape, he had received the
mandatory sentence: surgical neutering and lifetime imprisonment,
no parole.
And so that part of it all was closed.
Her convalescence had taken much longer, and had run a
delicate, erratic course. Even with therapies that minimized
long-term trauma through a combination of acting-out and
neurochemical adjustment, her rage and fear and anxiety had been
constant companions during the months she convalesced and took
primary training in living blind.
However, once she had acquired the essential competence to
live by herself, she had become very active, and very different
from who she had been. In particular, she had no longer cared
what others wanted from her. Since her early years in school in
Crockett, the city at the east end of the East Bay Conurbation,
she had been an exceptional student in a conservative mode: very
bright, obedient to the demands others made on her and self-
directed in pursuing them. Now she was twenty-eight, blind, and
had her Ph. D. in hand, and everything she had sought before, the
degree included, seemed irrelevant, trivial: she couldn't imagine
why she had bothered with any of it.
She had decided to become a physician. She had sufficient
background, and she knew that with the aid of the Fair Play Laws,
she could force a school to admit her. Once she was in, she would
do whatever was necessary: her state-supplied robotic assistant
could be trained to do what she couldn't. She would go, she would
finish, she would discover how to see again:
It had been just that simple, just that difficult
The flow of memory halted, and she was allowed to sleep.
Later, when she began to wake, she put the question, why? why did
you make me relive these things? And the answer came, because I
had to know. Diana remembered then how inquisitive Aleph was, and
how demanding.
13. Cosmos
Gonzales stood with Lizzie in an anteroom just outside where
Diana lay. She wore beta cloth pants, their rough fabric bleached
almost colorless, a silken white tank top, and a red silk scarf
tied around her right bicep, Gonzales had no idea why. He said,
'I had some very strange dreams last night.'
'I know,' she said. 'About one of them, anywayyou were me
in the dream, at least for part of it, and I was you. Think of it
as a peculiarity of the environment.' She leaned against the wall
as she spoke, and her voice lacked its usual ironic edge.
'What the hell does that mean?'
'I'm not sure,' she said. 'No one isAleph's certainly
responsible, but it won't admit it, and it won't tell us how these
things can happen.'
'That's a bit frightening, don't you think? What other
surprises might it have in store?'
She smiled broadly and said, 'Well, that's the fun of it,
exploring the unexpected, isn't it? How did it feel to be a
woman, Gonzales? How did it feel to be me?' She had leaned
forward, closer to him.
'I don't remember.'
'Pay attention next time.'
'I will, if it happens again.'
'It may wellonce these things start, they continue. Come
onit's time to get you into the egg. Follow me.'
#
The split egg filled much of the small, pink-walled room;
above it on the wall was mounted an array of monitor lights and
read-outs. A small steel locker against a side wall was the only
other furnishing.
Charley said, 'We didn't ask for you, but you're here, so
we're making use of you.' Then he coughed his smoker's cough,
raspy and phlegm-laden, and said, 'Diana's bandwidth is over-
extended as is, so we can't use her to establish the topography,
and Jerry's got his own problems. Our people have their own
schedules to fill, so that means you're it. We'll build the world
around you and your memexit's already locked into the system.'
Lizzie stepped up close to him and said, 'Good luck.' She
kissed him quickly on the cheek and said, 'Don't worry. You're
among friends. And I'll see you there.'
'What do you mean?'
'The collective decided I should take part in all this, and
Charley agreed, so Showalter had to go along. So many parties are
represented here, it just seemed inappropriate that we weren't.
