Clavain felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. “How much more abruptly?”
“Complete deceleration in one fifth of a second.” She let that sink home. “That’s around five thousand gees.”
“I can’t survive that.”
“No; you can’t. Not now, anyway. But there are machines in your head now. If you allow it, there’s time for them to establish a structural web across your brain. We’ll flood the cabin with foam. We’ll all die temporarily, but there won’t be anything they can’t fix in Phobos.”
“It won’t just be a structural web, will it? I’ll be like you, then. There won’t be any difference between us.”
“You’ll become Conjoined, yes.” Galiana offered the faintest of smiles. “The procedure is reversible. It’s just that no one’s ever wanted to go back.”
“And you still tell me none of this was planned?”
“No; but I don’t expect you to believe me. For what it’s worth, though…you’re a good man, Nevil. The Transenlightenment could use you. Maybe at the back of my mind…at the back of our mind…”
“You always hoped it might come to this?”
Galiana smiled.
He looked at Phobos. Even without Galiana’s magnification, it was clearly bigger. They would be arriving very shortly. He would have liked longer to think about it, but the one thing not on his side now was time.
Then he looked at Felka, and wondered which of them was about to embark on the stranger journey.
Felka’s search for meaning in a universe without her beloved Wall, or his passage into Transenlightenment? Neither would necessarily be easy. But together, perhaps, they might even find a way to help each other. That was all he could hope for now.
Clavain nodded assent, ready for the loom of machines to embrace his mind.
He was ready to defect.
Milo and Sylvie - Eliot Fintushel
Everything has its portion of smell,” Milo said. His skin and bones were enthroned in a plush, gold club chair facing the doctor’s more severe straight-back with the cabriole legs. Milo strummed his fingers nervously against the insides of his thighs as he looked around the room, richly dark, with scrolled woodwork, diplomas in gilded frames hanging on the wall behind the doctor’s mahogany rolltop next to the heavily curtained window. He could smell the doctor’s after-shave. He could smell the last client too, a woman, a large woman, a sweating carnivore with drugstore perfume.
“Smell?” Doctor Devore always looked worried. Inquisitive and worried-the look was like a high trump, drawing out all your best cards before you had planned to play them. He had white, curly hair. He wore sweaters and baggy pants that made him look like a rag doll. He was old. His cheeks and jowls sagged like the folds of drapery beside him. He wore thick, wire-rimmed glasses that made his tired eyes look bigger and even more plaintive. He was small, a midget, almost; one got over that quickly, though, because he never acted short.
“It’s something my sister used to say.”
“Why?”
“I don’t remember.” Like so much else. Milo moved too quickly for memories to adhere, or for sleep for that matter, except in evanescent snatches. Memories, sleep,haunted him. They were never invited guests. His sister’s name, for example, which he did not remember, did not remember,did not remember , was death to pronounce or even think of.
There was a long pause. Devore was trying to use the silence to suck something out of him-horror vacui-but it didn’t work. Milo had a practiced grip. The things he had to hold down bucked harder than this shrink.
Dr. Devore broke the silence: “Have you been sleeping any better?”
“Yes.”
“Taking the prescription, hmm?”
“Yes.” That was a trade-off. The pills let him sleep dreamlessly for longer spells, but with the danger that his grip would loosen.
“Let’s talk about one of your dreams. Do you have one you want to talk about?”
Grudgingly, Milo said, “Yes.” Could he snatch the cheese and escape the wire? “Go ahead.”
“It’s dark. The fog is rolling in.”
“Where areyou? ” Devore said. Milo began to cry. “That’s all right. Just let the tears come. You don’t have to answer right away, you know?”
“I have another dream.”
“Okay…”
“A Dumpster. One of those big, steel Dumpsters full of scraps and garbage. A car runs into it.”
“Are you driving the car?”
“You don’t get it!” Milo hooked one thumb over the side of his pants and tugged down the waist, hiking up his shirt so that Dr. Devore could see his hip. “It was all smashed up! Everything was steaming and sputtering and dripping.”
“What are you showing me? Are you telling me you hurt yourself? I don’t see any marks, Milo-we’re talking about a dream, yes?”
“Yeah. That was while I was in the waiting room just now. I dozed off.”
“You dreamed that you hurt your hip in a car crash, is that it?”
“No, no! The fender, the hood, the engine! That’s what was hurt!” Milo began crying again. “I’m a monster, that’s all! Give me some more medicine! Give me something stronger! I can’t hold on much longer!”
Dr. Devore paused. “Milo, when the car crashed into the Dumpster, where wereyou? ”
“I have another dream,” Milo blurted. He was angry, like a small child choking back tears to shout his malediction.
“Let’s stay with the last one…”
“A window shatters.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.” Milo felt his skin and skull shattering like glass. He was collapsing into his own pelvis and lacerating the soft tissue of his remaining viscera-but it was the dream. He shouted too loudly, as if trying to be heard against the roar of a hurricane. “It hurts!”
“The glass hits you?”
“No.”
