“I’m telling you, I don’t know.”
“What’s your best suggestion?”
Doc sighs and says, “Flip a coin.”
Jenna paces the metal floor for a long time. Then I hear her say “No. It’s too dangerous. The Medusas are too dangerous. I’m not doing it. Unplug them. Just do it! Fuck! Bart sure as shit better’ve brought the shovels.”
They’re going to bury me. I think they’re going to bury me alive. I’m still trying and failing to move, to speak, to give them any sign that I’m here, but I can only barely think at all. My consciousness is still lost in this broken unity, and I’m not much more than two streams of memory flowing together—drawn helplessly down into the things I least want to remember.
DANAE
Even when I was whole, I was very far from omniscient. It took me years of exile to look back and realize that with every mind that joined my gestalt, every decade of experience I poured into the swollen river of my memory, I was also losing touch with simple realities I might have grasped when I was younger. By the time I reached Asher Valley, I’d fallen so in love with thinking of myself as a perfect microcosm of humankind, pure and unbiased in who I chose to unify with, that I stopped noticing that nearly all the lives I added to my gestalt were privileged ones: great minds with the time and ease and education to spend all their days ruminating; scientists with the funding to push the cutting edges of their fields; winners of genetic lotteries; people from the safer sides of class and gender and racial divisions. It never crossed my mind that I rarely sought unity with hardscrabble wastelanders, working-class aquapolitans, or traumatized refugees; that while I deepened my knowledge of the universe, I was losing all my instincts for how to live in the world. I fell into the trap of believing I was above it. In hindsight, it was predictable that I would fall in love with Lorelei—and inevitable that I would get us both killed.
She was a genius of a higher order than any separate person I have ever known. When I found her, she had already taught herself everything from integral calculus to chaos theory, and she could work through all but the most sprawling equations in her head in less time than it took me to check her. I was obsessed with her from the day I watched her lay her fingers on the keys of the first piano she had ever seen, and learn, over the course of thirty-one minutes, to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata by ear as perfectly as I could with ninety aggregate years of practice behind me. Any new skill or understanding seemed to come effortlessly to her, and she had taught herself everything she knew in absolute secrecy.
She had never had a choice: in her smoke-wreathed hometown of Asher Valley, on the ragged edge of the Holy Western Confederacy, women were not permitted to learn to read. They weren’t allowed to be seen unless swaddled in gray cloaks and weighed down with wooden crosses. They did not speak unless spoken to, nor raise their voices above a whisper, and had been taught to instinctively hesitate to use words of more than two syllables. As far as anyone in that town knew, Lorelei was just as docile and illiterate as they required her to be—and even then, she was a despised outcast in that place. Infertility was as unforgivable a sin as any other.
I came into town pretending to be a married heterosexual couple, to conduct anthropological research on a complex of post-Collapse fundamentalists called the Third Holy Church of the Kept Promise. Lorelei was the general store clerk who would only talk to me when my male body was out of the room, and even then I could feel her hesitation filling the air between us. Her voice shook under the weight of all the trust she was putting in me, but I also felt the burn of her desire: for anyone to talk to, for any fragment of proof that a bigger world existed past the rusty iron palisades. For anyone to whom she could finally reveal the enormity of everything she kept hidden inside the head she never took out from under the hood of her cloak.
For all I know, Lorelei never revealed the slightest suggestion of her true genius to any human being other than me. Before her, I had never rushed so fast to tell anyone who and what I really was. I can only confess now that I coveted her mind, but more than that, I thought I could rescue her from that awful place and carry her with me to a freer country. It started as an unserious wish in the back of my mind. It grew into an obsession.
I moved an entire branch of my consciousness into an abandoned church overlooking the town, ready to collect Lorelei and hurry on to the coast at any moment. I discussed the idea with her in a whisper in the long hours of sweltering nights, in the shadows of ruined buildings, in each other’s arms, whenever her husband Curtis had drunk himself into oblivion or slithered bitterly away into the beds of other women (who lacked the social privilege to deny his advances, but would be punished for them no less mercilessly). She shared her intense misgivings, and I dismissed them with increasing insistence. As preternaturally intelligent as Lorelei was, she had twenty-seven years of experience versus my twelve thousand—so I told myself, and so I told her, until I had fatally infected both of us with my smug, superior optimism.
On the morning before we’d planned to leave, my bodies awoke and
