There were four of them, inside Changling Station, on the wheel of rebirth. It was a doughnut, the Station; brightly lit, screened. Around it, in all directions, ships—trapper ships with their catch, bait ships hauled by timid trappers, supply ships out from Triton, couriers from Earth and Mars and Luna with commissions for the fast-friends. And derelicts. Hundreds of ill-fit hulks, holed, abandoned, empty, filling up the Jungle like hunks of cold steel garbage.
Between the ships moved the fast-friends.
The airlock where they donned their spacesuits had had a window in it; it was a large, empty chamber, a good place for long looks and last thoughts. Brand and Melissa and a fat blonde girl named Canada Cooper had stood there together, looking out on the Jungle and the fast-friends. Canada had laughed. “I thought they’d be different,” she said. “They look just like people, silly naked people standing out in space.”
And they did. A few stood on the hulls of derelicts, but most of them were just floating in the void, pale against the starlight, small and stern and awesome. Melissa counted fourteen.
“Hurry up,” the government man had said. Brand hardly remembered what he looked like, but he remembered the voice, the hard flat voice that whipped them all the way out from Earth. They were the candidates, the chosen. They’d held to their dream, they’d passed all the tests, and they were twenty. That was the optimal age for a successful merger, the experts said. Some experts. Adams, the first-merged, had been nearly thirty.
He remembered Melissa as she put on her suit, slim and clean in a white coverall zipped low, with her crystal pendant hanging between her gold-tan breasts in the imitation gravity of the spinning Station. Her hair was tightly bound. She’d kept it long, her red-blonde glory, to wear between the stars.
They kissed just before they put on helmets.
“Love you,” she said. “Love you always.” And he repeated it back to her.
Then they were outside, them and Canada and the government man, walking on the skin of Changling Station, looking down into the Pit. The arena, the hole in the doughnut, the energy-screened center of the whole thing, the place where dreams came true.
Brand, young Brand, looked down at where he’d have to go, and smiled. There was nothing below but stars. He’d fall forever, but he didn’t mind. They’d share the stars together.
“You first,” the government man said to Melissa. She radioed a kiss to Brand, and kicked off toward the Pit.
She didn’t get far. There were darks in there, three of them, trapped and imprisoned. Once she was beyond the screens, one came for her. The sight was burned deep in Brand’s memory. One moment there was only Melissa, suited, floating away from him towards the far side of the Station. Then light.
Sudden, instantaneous, quick-dying. A flash, nothing more. Brand knew that. But his memory had elaborated on the moment. In his dreams, it was more prolonged; first her suit flared and was gone and she threw back her head to scream, then her clothes flamed into brilliance, and lastly, lastly, the chain and its crystal. She was naked, wreathed in fire, adrift among the stars. She no longer breathed.
But she lived.
A symbiote of man and dark, a thing of matter and energy, an alien, a changling, a reborn creature with the mind of a human and the speed of a dark. Melissa no longer.
Fast-friend.
He ached to join her. She was smiling at him, beckoning. There was a dark waiting for him, too. He would join it, merge. Then, together, he and Melissa would run, faster than the starships, faster than light, out, out. The galaxy would be theirs. The universe, perhaps.
But the government man held his arm. “Her next,” he said. Fat Canada kicked free of the place where they stood, hardly hesitating. She knew the risks, like them, but she was a dreamer too. They’d tested and traveled with her, and Brand knew her boundless optimism.
She floated towards Melissa, chunky in her oversize suit, and reached out her hand. Her radio was on. Brand remembered her voice. “Hey,” she said, “mine’s slow. A slow dark, imagine!”
She laughed. “Hey, little darkie, where are you? Hey, come to mama. Come and merge, little…”
Then, loudly, a short scream, cut off before it started.
And Canada exploded.
The flash was first, of course. But this time, afterwards, no fast-friend. She’d been rejected. Three-quarters of all candidates for merger were rejected. They were eaten instead. Except, this time, the dark hadn’t enveloped her cleanly. If it had, then, after the instant of conversion, nothing would have been left.
But this dark had just sheared her off above the waist. Her legs spun wildly after the explosion of violent depressurization. Her blood flash-froze.
It was only there for a second, less than a heartbeat, a pause between breaths. Then another flash, and emptiness. Just Melissa again, her smile suddenly gone, still waiting.
“Too bad,” the government man had said. “She did well on the tests. You’re next.”
Brand was looking across at Melissa, and the stars behind her. But his vision was gone. Instead he saw Canada.
“No,” he’d said. For the first time ever, the fear was on him.
Afterwards he went down into the Station and threw up. When he dreamt, he woke up trembling.
Brand left Robi with her dark, and sought the comfort of his angel.
She was waiting for him, as always, smiling and eager for his company, a soft-winged woman-child. She was playing in the sleep-web when he entered, singing to herself. She flew to him at once.
He kissed her, hard, and she wrapped her wings around him, and they tumbled laughing through the cabin. In her embrace, his fears all faded. She made him feel strong, confident, conquering. She worshiped him, and she was passionate, more passionate even then Melissa.
And she fit. Like the fast-friends, she was a creature of the void. Under gravity, her wings could never function, and she’d die within a month. Even in free-fall, angels were short-lived. She was his third, bred by the bio-engineers of the Jungle who knew what a trapper would pay for company. It didn’t matter.
They were clones, and all alike, more than twins in their delicate sexy inhuman angelic simplicity.
Death was not a threat to their love. Nor fights. Nor desertion. When Brand relaxed within her arms, he knew she’d always be there.
Afterwards, they lay nude and lazy in the sleep-web. The angel nibbled at his ear, and giggled, and stroked him with soft hands and softer wings. “What are you thinking, Brand?” she asked.
“Nothing, angel. Don’t worry yourself.”
“Oh,
He couldn’t help smiling. “All right then. I was thinking that we’re still alive, which means Robi left the dark alone.”
The angel shivered and hugged him. “Ooo. You’re scaring me, Brand. Don’t talk of dying.”
He played with her hair, still smiling. “I told you not to worry. I wouldn’t let you die, angel. I promised to show you the fast-friends, remember? And stars, too. We’re going to the stars today, just like the fast-friends do.”
The angel giggled, happy again. She was easy to please. “Tell me about the fast-friends,” she said.
“I’ve told you before.”
“I know. I like to hear you talk, Brand. And they sound so
“They are, in a way. They’re cold, and they’re not human anymore, but they are pretty sometimes. They move fast. Somehow they can punch through to another kind of space, where the laws of nature are different, a fifth dimension or hyperspace or what-you-will, and…”
But the angel’s face showed no comprehension. Brand laughed, and paused. “No, you wouldn’t understand those terms, of course. Well, call it a fairyland, angel. The fast-friends have a lot of power in them, like the darks do, and they use this power, this magic, for a trick they have, so they can go faster than light. Now, there’s no way we can go faster than light without this trick, you see.”
“Why?” she asked. She smiled an innocent smile.
“Hmmm. Well, that’s a long story. There was a man named Einstein who said we couldn’t, angel, and he was a
She hugged him. “I bet
