and waist and thighs. Hands upon her, eager, admiring, greedy-lusty and appreciative, gradually grabbing harder, more needy, in perfect tempo to her own, back-arching desire. A mouth, nibbling, play-biting, covering and devouring hers with guileless kisses…
Except the mouth and hands and kisses changed. Transformed. Improved. Still supple, still masculine- demanding, yet flavored now-in pleasant ways-with a tangy added hint of
Tor fought against awakening. But her dream faded as the cool-nap monitor cruelly said enough. Ten days of sleep, that was the limit, followed by two awake, tending the ship. Eating and stretching and exercising. Tending to real life.
As usual, Tor had to spend her first waking moments negotiating with her complicated self-image. Her layered boundaries included metal and plastic encasements, without which she would die.
She had chosen to keep all the internal chemistry from her old self. Including a libido that still foamed through her dreams. Reconnecting all of that to real skin, real flesh… well, one could always hope.
“Oh criminy,” Tor muttered, wishing she could pinch the bridge of her nose-if she still had one-or splash her face with cold water. Instead, with a sigh, she unplugged the cool-napper umbilicus and floated free. Getting to work.
Hours later, with all of her inspections done and ship systems apparently nominal, Tor rested in the dim control room, half-floating in faint pseudo-gravity provided by the
As it had since the womb, Tor’s heart beat against her rib cage. And the gentle pulse rhythmically rocked her inner body against the cerametal casing that enclosed her. Tor’s carapace ever after flames enveloped the
Shells within shells. And beyond the skin of her ship, more layers still.
With her percept expanded by the ship’s wide-gazing sensors, Tor felt awash in clusters and nebulae, as if the stars were flickering dots of phosphorescent plankton in a great sea. And, once again, she felt drawn to wonder.
She felt haunted by the story that small hands chiseled into the Rosetta Wall. Though some parts seemed clear, the rock mural’s core eluded understanding. Scenes that portrayed strange, machinelike beings, doing incomprehensible things. Tor suspected some parts of the puzzle no archaeologist or smart-mob-biological or cybernetic-would ever decipher.
The Wall testified to a time when simple, naive rules gave way. Machines changed. Evolved.
The carvings also depicted something else-the plague of fomite viroids, portrayed as little packets of peril, crisscrossing the Rosetta Wall. Infecting. Enticing. Replicating and spreading.
Facing all this, should a sensible lungfish scoot back underwater? Surely, that path to safety was chosen by many races. To cower. To live in shabby, feudal nostalgia, praying to heaven while ignoring the sky. But hunkering also means declining to irrelevance. Existing, not thriving, while using up a single, fragile world.
An image came to her, of Gavin’s descendants-and hers-forging bravely into a dangerous galaxy. Explorer- machines who had been programmed to be human. Or humans who had turned themselves into starprobes. A maker race
A pattern she had not seen among the rock wall depictions. Because it was doomed from the start?
What options had a fish, who chose to leave the sea a billion years too late?
Tor blinked. And as her eyelids separated, stars diffracted through a thin film of tears, breaking into rays. Innumerable, they streaked across the dark lens of the galaxy and beyond, spreading a myriad ways. In too many directions. Too many paths to follow.
More than her mind could hold.
PART EIGHT
TO BE…
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
– Richard Brautigan,
