“It can't be both nothing and something. Tell me.”
He breathed in and out, eyes back on the stars. “I said that flesh remembers. Those recollections have been returning to me more and more of late. They say it is often the way with the very old: youthful memories seem suddenly more vivid than reality. But I have no right to ask such a thing.”
There was a catch in his voice that moved her. “Ask anyway. That's what I always do.”
He nodded. “Perhaps it is because I know the end is near. It is just that my old self is awakening, in ways that I … did not anticipate.”
It took her a moment to catch what he was referring to. “You mean, sexually?”
The grin on his face looked almost youthful. His breathing was definitely elevated, his heart pumping faster, and the bulge between his legs was hard to miss. “I had forgotten the simple pleasures of those stirrings and urges.”
“And you wanted to share them one last time?”
“It is too late. There is no time for me to find the right person, grow with them to the point where our union would be … what we both desire.”
She found herself laughing. “Were the Tok always so coy? No wonder you died out.”
“Oh, we enjoyed our sexual natures greatly, revelled in them in all their endless variety, but it is a long time since I have talked in these terms. It is something you should be aware of if ever you consider becoming like me.”
What did she feel for this strange starship core entity? Affection and gratitude, certainly. Love? Perhaps, of a sort. There'd been Falden and then there'd been Myrced, but she was only at the start of working out who and what she was. But there was something inside her at the thought of losing Eb: a dread, a sense of longing. Perhaps it was simply her own fear about what was to come: the thought that she, too, might well be about to die.
Or perhaps it was nothing more than curiosity and lust.
“You are bigger in stature than I am,” she said. “It might present some … physical challenges,”
“I should never have asked, I'm sorry.”
“No, no, quite the contrary,” she said. “That could work. We have some time, and I would give this to you happily.”
His mouth moved several times before he replied. “Only if it would give you what you want, too.” He waved his hands in ways that suggested he was grappling with difficult concepts.
She took both his hands in hers, considered his Tok facial features, his liquid eyes. “This is what I want,” she said.
“I may be … lacking in expertise.”
She pulled him towards the corridor that led to his sanctum. “So may I. Don't worry, we'll work it out.”
There was a moment, half an hour later, their bodies entwined, when it seemed to her that their minds became entangled, too, and she perceived the enormity of the starfields, saw the galaxy as Eb with his metaspace-awareness saw it. This was the reality he moved within. The scale and wonder of it were dazzling. She felt tiny and huge, both at the same time.
She floated there for a long time, enraptured.
6. Toruk
The Radiant Dragon was eerily quiet. Not so long ago, it had been filled with noise and movement: her, Ondo, Eb, Surtr, Hessia. Now she was alone again. She'd resented all the extra bodies, getting in her way, talking to her, but now she missed them.
Eb lay in his sanctum, his mind fully engaged with the movements through metaspace he had to make to safely approach the black hole. Their time together had been unexpected, but welcome. An interregnum of joy and affirmation snatched from the universe, something she'd needed without realising. The temptation to simply stay there, curled up with him, had been almost overwhelming.
Ondo, too, was cut off from her, lying along in the medsuite under heavy sedation. She'd thrown every investigative probe she could at his brain, to no avail. The image of him she carried in her head had offered to assist, but she'd refused, no longer sure she could trust it. Instead, she'd deactivated it. In the end, with the assistance of the Dragon's med AI, she'd identified the break in his engrams, the exploit Concordance had planted there years previously as well as the trigger code they'd scarred into his brain during their imaging laser assault. She'd cursed herself for not spotting it beforehand, not assaying him more thoroughly. She also knew she was being unfair on herself: the dormant code had been encrypted, knotted up in itself within the cortex of his brain. She couldn't have known.
The question was whether the damage was permanent. The disconnects that Concordance had engineered in his brain were widespread and growing. She could contain them, but it meant isolating and perhaps wiping a significant percentage of his natural brain structure – in effect, setting up a closed-off region in his head and routing all his brain activity around it. It would be oddly like the regions of Dead Space in the map of the galaxy. Could she do that to him? The question triggered her own doubts about her nature and identity. If she intervened in his brain to that degree would he still be Ondo? Identity was such a fluid concept, but when it became too fluid it could simply trickle away.
She decided he would be close enough. He would be Ondo as much as she was Selene, as much as anyone was anyone as they grew and changed over the days and years. She refused to accept that the Ondo who had betrayed her was the real version. She would fix him, return him as closely as she could to the version she believed in. As he had once done for her.
Then another thought occurred to her. She had no idea if it was possible. She brought her inner Ondo back online with the summoning
