disoriented. The low tunnel would lead somewhere, and they would
emerge. This was a test of some kind, it seemed.
Light appeared, at first almost a pinpoint coming from some
undefinable distance, then a glow that she moved quickly toward,
following a twist in the passage that brought her to an opening in
the rock.
Framed by the mouth of the tunnel, an impossible scene: a
balloon, its canopy an oblate sphere of green, blew as if in a
strong wind, and its top swung toward her so she could see a great
eye at its apex, wide open and peering up into the infinite sky.
The iris was dark gold set with light gold flecks. Around the
eye, a fringe of lashes flickered in the wind.
Hanging beneath the balloon from a dense nest of shrouds, a
platform held a metallic ball, a kind of bathysphere. Two figures
crouched there, holding to the shrouds and each other, and peered
up into the sky. By some trick of perspective, the distance
etween her and the balloon shrank until she saw Diana and Jerry,
young and fearful. She crawled forward, and the balloon and Diana
and Jerry disappeared.
At one turn of the tunnel, red hand-prints on the wall
phosphoresced in the darkness. At another, she heard the bellow
of a thousand animals, then saw them run toward a cliff and pass
over it, the entire herd of bison running screaming to a mass
death. Below, she knew, men and women waited to butcher the dead
and carry their meat away.
The rock slanted sharply beneath her, and she began to slide
forward, then she rolled sideways and tumbled out of the chatire
and into a pool of icy water.
'Shit,' she said, now soaked completely through, and crawled
out of the shallow pool onto the dry rock surrounding it. In very
dim light she saw two pedestals with the figure of a bison atop
each, carved in bas-relief out of wet clay.
She looked up to see a figure emerge out of darkness at the
cave's other end. He was at least eight feet tall, with antlered
head and a face made of light; the water seemed to dance around
him. They stood facing each other, and she felt herself go weak
at the giant magical presence.
He said, 'I'm waiting.'
'For what?'
'For you to choose.'
'Choose what? What kind of test is this?'
'Not a test, just a fork in reality, where you will turn down
one road or another.'
'Where do the roads go?'
'No one knows. Each road is itself a product of the choices
you make while on it. One choice leads to another, one choice
excludes another; one pattern of choices excludes an infinity of
patterns.'
'I don't like such choices. I don't want to exclude
infinity.'
'Too bad.' The figure raised a stone knife; the dim light
glinted on its myriad chipped faces. 'You choose, I cut. You
choose the right hand, I cut off the left; you choose the left, I
cut off the right.'
'No!'
'Oh yes, and then your hands grow backboth left or both
right, the product of your choice. And one choice leads to
another, so you choose again.'
Lizzie found herself weeping.
He said, 'Choose: reach out a hand.'
She looked at her hands, both precious, thought of all the
richness that would be lost with either one. Then, puzzled, still
weeping, she asked, 'Which is which?'
He laughed, his voice booming through miles of caverns and
tunnels in the rock, carrying across more than thirty thousand
years of human history; he whirled in a kind of dance, the waters
fountaining up around him, chanted in unknown syllables, then
leapt toward her and grabbed both wrists in his great hands and
said, 'You will know in the choosing. Which will it be?'
'I won't choose.'
'Then I will take both hands.'
'No!' she yelled out in the moment that she extended a hand,
having chosen, and saw the stone knife fall.
#
Diana stood in the living room of her apartment at Athena
Station. She stood in two times at onceshe was a young, blind,
woman; she was an older, sighted one.
The sighted woman looked around; she had never seen this
place other than in holos, and she felt the touch of a peculiar
emotion for which she had no name: the return of the almost-
familiar. The blind woman was unmovedshe carried the apartment
in her head as a complex map of relations and movements, and the
visual patterns this other self saw had no relevance for her.
She put her hands on the touch-sculpture in the center of the
floor, the work of a blind sculptor named Dernier, then closed her
eyes and felt its familiar rough texture and odd curves let her
hands trace a form other than the visual.
Behind her Jerry's voice said, 'Diana.' She turned to him,
and there he stood as he had more than twenty years agohe was
younger than she'd ever have imagined, and beautiful, and filled
with the same desire as she.
Blind and seeing, young and old, Diana went across the room
to him, but he held up a hand and said, 'Stop. If you come to me
now, then you take up an obligation that you can never put down.'
'I can't let you die.'
'I have lived long past any reasonable reckoning; I am dead.'
'I can't leave you dead.'
'Can you stay with me in the unreal worlds, forever? Until
the city stops turning or its animate spirit dies? Until one or
