'Sit down and tell me.' She put her hands on him to guide him toward a Morris chair, and two blue sparks snapped from her fingertips.
Carl's eyes went fish-round. He looked again at her hair and the wrinkled blouse clinging to her pale flesh.
'I wasn't thinking clearly,' he said in a voice crispy with apprehension. 'The zotl had me freaked. And I just felt I had to be with you. I needed sympathy'
'Tell me about it.' She steered him to the upholstered chair, and the smell of her was fresh as the browse of a summer shower.
'Here, sit down.'
'I got selfish,' he continued through the static of his nervousness. 'And, well, to get to the point -I think I exposed you to the same spore that first turned me into light. The spore's in my blood, and-'
'You what?' Her romantic mask curdled to a scowl.
''The euphoria you're feeling-the sparks...' His hands opened futilely before him. 'They're all symptoms, Sheelagh! But you don't have to be afraid-'
'You infected me?' Anger and fear pulsed in her eyes. 'I'm going to be taken to that other world?' Her breath spit with her shock. In a gesture made strong with her sudden loathing, she shoved Carl, and he dropped backward into the plump chair.
The springloaded hypodermic hidden in the cushion punched him squarely in the upper right quadrant of his buttocks, and his face buckled with shock. Zeke felt Carl's outrage as he realized he had been duped. He raised the lance at Sheelagh, and she gasped, the angry flush of her face draining to the color of metal. But the drug was a nervelock, and one second later, Carl was paralyzed.
Another second, and he was unconscious.
Time collaged, and Zeke witnessed the arrival of the police and the siren-whirling transport of Carl's body to a surgery room in Sloan Kettering. The images shrank and went colorless, wrinkling up like a mushroom, collapsing into the dark duff of sleep.
Carl woke to a searing headache. His brain felt sunburned.
When he opened his eyes, the blisters inside his skull winced with the weight of the light. He tried to sit up, but his muscles were so much cooked squid. The brash light sat on his-chest, and his eyes adjusted enough for him to see that he was in a white-tiled observation chamber. An overhead camera silently watched him. His hands fluttered over his body, and he felt wires taped to his nakedness.
'Carl Schirmer,' a woman's voice spoke. 'I am Commander Leonard. You are in my charge now, and I've placed you under maximum security watch-for obvious reasons. Are you willing to cooperate with me?'
Carl squinted up at a whitehaired old lady with cheeks brown and wrinkled as walnuts. Her iguana eyes regarded him dispassionately.
'What've you done to me?' Carl groaned. He was hollowed out, and the gonging emptiness terrified him.
- 'Your weapons have been removed, Carl.' The clack of a lock resounded in the chamber, and a hatch opened at the far end. A muscular fellow in a scarlet jumpsuit waited there.
'Can you sit up?' Commander Leonard asked.
'I don't think so.'
'Let's try'. She lifted his head and put an arm under his shoulders. With an unexpected strength, she sat him up, and his head pounded like a diesel. His within life was vaporous. The hymn-presence of the armor was gone. Only the sinuosities of his body, shivering with alarm, were real.
'Now I want you to stand up,' she informed him.
He looked at her as though she had asked him to kill himself.
She pulled off the wires taped to his body, and he leaned his face into the shoulder of her white jacket. The purple odor there reminded him of the kindly
matrons that came to St. Tim's on holidays to play with the children.
'We've taken the armoring chip out of your skull,' she said, helping him to stand. 'We couldn't take the chance of leaving it in.
And even with it out, we've kept you unconscious just to be sure.
You've been out for three days now, and in that time we've examined you and your artifacts thoroughly.'
Carl wobbled, and the scarlet-suited bouncer who had stepped into the chamber steadied him. Commander Leonard unfolded a green hospital gown. While she dressed him, she spoke: 'You have the chromosomes of a newborn--no chipping on any of the alleles, and the supercoiling of your genomes is tight as it gets. You're genetically perfect. And that means you're somehow artificial.
You're not really human.'
The pain in his head was dimming, and psychic space rippled like wind-bright curtains.
'The painkiller should be coming on about now,' Commander Leonard said, fastening the gown's ties behind his back. 'I think you can walk. Please, try.'
He swayed forward, and the guard guided him. At the hatch, his escort put a hand on his head to keep him from braining himself as he went through. The outside of the chamber was darker and cooler. The guard led him down a melon-pale corridor past doorless ofce stalls. To one side was a burnedout cavity that had once been an office. The black, tar-droopy shapes of a desk and chairs were discernible in the ash-slush.
'That's where Sheelagh caught light,' Commander Leonard's grandmotherly voice said. 'No one really believed her story until that happened. Fortunately, the agent interviewing her fled when he saw green fire crawling over her.'
