Cara paused.
“So will there be nothing left of her?”
“Of course!” Ambus said. “Her knowledge of nanotech, her facility with plants, a few random experiences. Her most useful skills will survive encorporation, creating a new me.”
“What about her dreams, Ambus?” Cara’s voice trembled. “What about her dreams of exploring the universe?”
He paused. “I’ve come to like it here on Titan, Cara. I can’t say …”
Juan Carlos shot her a look and glanced dramatically at his watch.
“Bea, honey,” Cara said, patting her hand. “I have to go, I’m sorry. Juan Carlos needs to be somewhere right now and I promised I’d accompany him.”
“That’s fine,” Ambus answered. “But Cara, you have to promise you’ll come visit again soon. Beatrix would love to see you again before encorporation is complete.”
Beatrix’s eyes remained rolled back in her head and a bit of clear drool oozed out of the corner of her mouth. Cara couldn’t bear to see her like this. But she would never abandon her friend in the final moments of her life.
“Of course I’ll be back, Bea.” She leaned in close and whispered in her ear. “We’ll go to the lake again and you can sit on the shore and watch while I dive for perpuffers for us, okay?” She felt the tears well up and fought them back.
“Cara,” Juan Carlos said softly. “We should get going.”
She took a deep breath and waved goodbye to her friend, wondering how much of her would remain when next they met.
ENCRYPTED Med. Journal Entry No. 228 by Dr Juan Carlos Barbaron: Cutting the tether of mated Wergens results in an instantaneous loss of identity, followed by a rapid and painful death.The smog that blanketed Titan was thinner than usual on this day. So much so that Cara could almost make out the outline of ringed Saturn filling half the sky. In all of her years of living on Titan this was the first time she’d ever seen the planet with her naked eye. Its proximity caused the tidal winds that drove down from the poles towards the equator.
She felt awkward visiting Beatrix’s hearth. So much time had passed that her friend was certainly long gone by now. Damn Juan Carlos. She would never forgive herself for allowing him to keep her away all this time. She had made a promise and she would keep it. If nothing else, she owed it to Beatrix’s memory.
As she followed the winding trail down a steep hill toward the familiar hearth, she slowed down. What if encorporation wasn’t complete? What if pieces of Bea were still visible? She imagined the segments of an arm jutting out of Ambus’s chest, two half-heads merged together into a disfigured monstrosity. She wouldn’t be able to bear the sight of it.
No, more than a year had passed. She began walking again.
When she got within twenty feet of the hearth, four Wergen children raced out through the archway in her direction. They ran in circles around her, saying “Good morning” and “Can we help you?” over and over.
She stooped down. “Are you Beatrix’s children?”
One of the thicker, squatter females said, “My name is Antillia. Ambus is our father.”
“Is he inside?”
The children nodded excitedly and followed close behind her.
When she entered the hearth’s archway, Ambus stood there as if expecting her, even after all this time.
“I knew you would come,” Ambus said. There was no longer any sign of the Ambus she remembered, the Wergen who spurned all contact with humanity. He threw his arms around her and she hugged him back. He looked different. Thinner. And his scales had familiar flicks of silver.
He guided her into the fireroom, where a transparent tube that ran from floor to ceiling blazed with flames. “Your children are beautiful, Ambus,” she said.
The Wergen children tittered and whispered to each other.
“I need to speak alone with Cara for a moment,” he said to them and they slowly, reluctantly left the fireroom staring over their shoulders at her, trying to sneak one final glance.
Housebots skittered at Cara’s feet, taking away her boots while others brought in a tray with a cup of steaming spicy sap.
“How is Juan Carlos?” he asked as they took their seats in front of the roaring fire column at the center of the room.
“I broke off our engagement.”
Ambus gasped.
“He was so possessive. So secretive about his work at Biotech. I thought I could change him. But it didn’t happen.” She set down her cup of cider-sap. “He didn’t like it when I visited with friends, when I did anything without him. And I went along with what he wanted. I started to feel … suffocated. I couldn’t continue living that way, under someone else’s thumb. I didn’t like the person I was becoming.”
Ambus stared incredulously. After a long pause, he said, “Sometimes I forget how truly alien you are.”
She smiled. “No, of course you wouldn’t understand.”
They drank their sap and all the while Ambus leaned forward on his elbows and fixated on her every word; he offered her food; he asked whether she wanted him to feed the flames so she could luxuriate in the warmth of the fire column.
“Are you sure I can’t get you something else?” Ambus said.
The initial joy Cara felt at being back in Beatrix’s hearth began to drain away as she listened to Ambus’s steady stream of fatuous remarks. She had to face the bittersweet truth: her best friend was gone forever. It could never be the same with just any other Wergen. She couldn’t imagine herself without Beatrix. Before she even realized it, she started to cry.
“Cara, what is it?”
“I was thinking about something you told me once. That it was unfair of me to have remained friends with Beatrix for so many years.” She wiped away the tears and regained her composure. “I think you may have been right. I should have … freed her of her biochemical shackles.”
“Again, I wasn’t myself at the time. I had taken the suppressant, which skewed my perception of reality. Please forget about what I said to you. It was unkind of me.”
“Unkind, but true.”
“Cara … did Beatrix explain what happened to my suppressants?”
Cara recalled their conversation on the lakeshore, when Beatrix had explained how she’d found where Ambus hid the drugs and destroyed them. “Yes, she kept them from you.”
“On the day that we met you at the shore …” Ambus paused as if considering the consequences of his words. “Beatrix had taken the suppressants herself.”
“What?”
“She said she wanted to have … a better understanding of her relationship with you, Cara. Its effects were temporary—only a matter of minutes—but in those minutes she experienced a clear understanding of her true feelings.”
Cara dreaded asking, but she did. “And how did she really feel about me in that moment of clarity?”
“She never told me. And the memory didn’t survive encorporation. I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
After an extended, awkward silence, they talked about other subjects: politics, the terrorist attacks on the Martian settlement, the rumored abandonment of the Langalanan outpost, the future of human-Wergen colonization efforts. And so on. And when it came time for her to leave, Cara knew that she would never return here again.
As she stood and the bots re-laced her boots, Ambus said, “Before you go, there’s something I need to give you.” A few seconds later a bot entered the room carrying a small metal box. “Beatrix wanted you to have this.”
“It’s a stasis box,” Cara said. She carefully lifted the lid and looked inside.
A purple perpuffer sat at its center.
“Beatrix preserved it for so many months,” Ambus said. “I don’t understand its significance.”
Cara slipped it onto her wrist. Removing it from the stasis box meant that the perpuffer wouldn’t last for more than a day or two before decaying. But it didn’t matter.
“Thank you, Ambus,” she said softly.
Ambus tilted his head to the left in a familiar manner, and nodded.
