food, smiling often at each other. Somehow they were thrown together, the man made whole by his experiences, the woman restored to what she perceived as her original 'self.' It made them similar, after a fashion, and they converged. Some repressions are, in the end, beneficial.
'Do you suppose she'll ever be the same?'
The Selenite shrugged. 'You probably know as much about it as I do, Ax. We won't know how much we rescued until she calms down a little.'
The woman nodded meditatively, thinking back about what she knew, drawing on the resources of a more complicated past. 'Yes. And until we know how much of Demo's true self resided in the cells of his brain. It's a pity things had to turn out this way. We should never have come out here like this.'
'I know what you mean. I'm sorry I had to leave the Moon, but there wasn't any other way. While I stayed there I could never be free. I could never find out about who I was.'
'So it all had to take place then, for us all to grow. If I'd stayed on Earth, my life would've killed me. I took the drugs, ate all the experiences I could grasp, and ran and ran. I had to flee from a heritage that was strangling me, and at last it brought me here.' She rested her chin on small, delicate hands and smiled across at his bearded bulk, her eyes seeming to glisten in the subdued light of the room they were in.
'We've become adults, Tem, after a too long adolescence. I wonder: is it too late?' He shook his head, his smile slowly fading as he gazed into the depths of her vision. 'Never. Only I have to ask myself— what happened to us in there? Was this feeling of ... happiness . . . somehow imposed from without?'
'Does it really matter? Or, to put it another way, is therereally a difference? From the moment we were born everything has been, as you say, imposed from without.'
'If it were a hundred years ago, I'd ask you to marry me, Aksinia.' Her cheeks dimpled at the compliment. 'If it were a hundred years ago, I'd accept, Temujin Krzakwa.'
They laughed, together, and moved on.
Jana stood before a clear, cold window, looking at the crystal pulp that remained from her body, seeing the death that she'd bought for herself. It was an unreal sight, steaks frozen, thawed, and frozen again. Her hair had turned to a stiffened spikiness, limned with frost and ice crystals. The beloved physical processes which shaped the world beneath her feet were responsible for this transformation. Ice queen —how appropriate that she had come to study and love the geology of the outer Solar System. But it wasn't that simple, not by a long shot. And, indisputably, the woman that she had been was dead. Did I feel it? she wondered. Did it hurt? It was more than just that, of course. Am I still in there? You can record a song over again, then burn the original tape, and the song still lives . . . but is it still the same song? Is a recording ever real? Does a song vanish forever when the singer's breath runs out, when the last echoes die down? What's left of me? She sighed. Probably nothing. I'm Demogorgon, with a rebuilt personality. . . .
Then something in her rebelled, a heat rising out of nowhere, a flame rising to devour her doubts. It cannot be! But she deflated again. No. Jana is gone. Demo is gone. Just little Li-jiang remains to carry on in their stead, making a little pretense of life.
Li-jiang strode from Jana's mausoleum, not wondering what had become of the one whose body she now owned. Process instructions cascaded down the sequences of a mind in turmoil, unwinding, and the self-image, rising out of the depths, recognized itself as male, if nothing else. The various impulses coalesced, melting together to form a coherentwhole, because the alternative was a permanent and incurable madness.
Demogorgon and Jana had survived the exacting demands of their own lives, separate. Now, together, Li-jiang would survive because he had to.
Purpose came, and drove him on into the darkness.
Brendan Sealock sat at his desk going over the hard copy of Bright Illimit that he'd made before leaving Earth. It was a heavy, cumbersome volume printed on expensive paper only tens of molecules thick, with more than twenty thousand pages, and would probably have been impossible to get for someone not in his position on the Design Board. These things were archaic, but they had their uses. You could hold an entire entity in your hands, access it by essential feature and taxon , scan it without an explicit overlay.
He was going through it now, marking off the places where conjoiner programs would have to be inserted. If he assumed that everything was actually intact, then all that was necessary was to sew the damned thing back together.... He came to the section that handled the GAM-and-Redux functions and smiled, feeling strange. He'd put himself into that, in a way, but the program lacked the externals that made other people invent their personae for him. Just, be smart and helpful. He could see how it had begun to manifest higher functioning once Torus-alpha had been booted. Now, he thought, once I get this thing up and running again, it'll know where to start and what to look for. The pieces of the rest should still be there for it to latch onto. . . . And, what the hell, I can preserve the resonance within Centrum as a reward . . . The door crackled open.
Brendan looked up, almost absent-mindedly, and winced. The form of Demogorgon was standing within the opening, staring at him rather somberly. He sat back and took a deep breath, then said, 'Come in, Jana.'
The man came in and walked slowly across the room, feet gliding bare centimeters from the floor.
'Please don't call me that anymore,' he said.
