“It’s opening!” Tamara breathed.
Noiselessly, the metal gate was sliding upward.
Elverda began to clamber to her feet. Dorn lent her a supporting hand.
Yuan felt perspiration beading his lip. Once Tamara takes a step past the gateway we’re all in this for keeps, one way or another.
“You first,” he said to Tamara.
She hesitated. “No.” Turning to Elverda, “You go first.”
“Me?”
“You’ve seen it before. I want you to see if it’s the same as it was then.”
Yuan thought, Or if it causes the old woman harm.
Elverda nodded, looking slightly anxious. “Very well,” she said.
She handed her folded shawl to Dorn, then stepped firmly past the thin groove in the dusty floor that marked where the gate had rested.
Yuan saw a diffuse light coming from beyond the gateway. Elverda walked toward it, her frail figure erect, unbent. Then she turned a corner and disappeared from his view.
Dorn stood like a stolid figure carved from ironwood. Tamara was on tiptoes, her arms extended as if she were about to take flight. Yuan heard his pulse thumping in his ears.
No one spoke a word. The tunnel was absolutely silent.
Elverda stepped toward the light, her own pulse racing. The only other time she had seen the artifact it showed her a vision of her own life, of the mother who bore her and loved her, of the baby she had never had. It transformed her from a bitter old woman ready for death into a companion for the man-machine Dorn, willing to ply the cold emptiness of the Asteroid Belt to help him find his atonement.
Now she ducked into the grotto where the light glowed coolly. She stopped and stared into the radiance. Its brightness softened, and she saw vague shapes forming and dissolving over and over again, like waves lapping up on a beach, like clouds wafting through the summer sky. She wanted to see her mother again, wanted to hold her and tell her what she’d never been able to say in real life, that she’d always loved her.
But when the shapes coalesced it was not her mother who faced her: it was Dorn, half human, half machine, reaching toward her with both his arms. Like a helpless baby. Like a boy reaching toward his mother. Like a man who felt lost and despairing, desperate for a helping hand. And she knew that she had to sculpt this semi-human, make his heroic statue for all the world to see, make it out of metal and stone, etch every fine tracery on his metal side, make the stone glow like the living flesh of his other half. That was her task, her duty, her goal, to immortalize this man and make his final atonement a memorial to human conscience.
The figure faded, the light dimmed down to a soft pastel radiance. Elverda knew she was finished here. The artifact had opened her mind again and made her understand the path she must take.
With a heavy sigh that was part thanksgiving, part regret, she turned and walked back to the three who were waiting for her.
“Well?” Tamara asked, even before Elverda stepped over the line that the gate had made. “Is it the same?”
Elverda smiled at the woman. “Yes, the same. And different.”
“What does that mean?”
Gesturing toward the grotto, Elverda said, “See for yourself.”
Tamara licked her lips. Dorn remained unmoving. Yuan wondered what he would see—if he worked up the nerve to face the artifact. Better to let Tamara go in, see how it effects her first.
“All right,” Tamara said. “I will.”
She took a deep breath, like a fighter facing an unknown opponent, and strode past the open gateway.
And the gate began to slide shut behind her.
“Wait!” Yuan yelled, lurching toward the metal gate. He tried to hold it, but the impassive steel slipped past the palms of his hands and settled firmly on the stone floor.
“It’s never done that before,” Dorn said, his deep voice sounding puzzled.
“How long will it stay closed?” Yuan asked.
“I don’t know,” replied Dorn.
“She’s trapped inside there,” Elverda said, “with the artifact.”
Tamara heard the soft whisper of the gate sliding shut, heard Yuan’s startled, “Wait!”
Whirling about, she saw the gate coming down slowly, inexorably. It settled on the stone flooring, cutting her off from the others. For the flash of an instant she balled her fists to pound on the impassive metal, but she realized it would be futile.
Looking around, she saw that she was in a womblike grotto, a natural hollow in the rocky body of the asteroid. Or was it deliberately carved out by whoever created the artifact? she asked herself.
The artifact. Tamara saw a soft glow coming from around a bend in the grotto. It must be in there. She glanced back at the gate again, felt a pang of alarm that it had closed her in. But there’s air to breathe, she realized. It’s warm and snug in here. It’ll open again. The cyborg says it operates on its own schedule. I just happened to be on the inside when it automatically shut. It’ll open again. It hasn’t deliberately trapped me in here.
Summoning up her courage, she stepped softly, hesitantly, toward the light. It seemed to glare brighter as she approached it, pulsing like a living heart, blazing so intensely that she closed her eyes to mere slits and yet they still watered painfully. Tamara threw an arm over her brow. It was like staring into the Sun.
But there were shapes in the brilliance. Shifting, undulating shadows that seemed to beckon her closer, closer.
She saw a ten-year-old girl in leotards practicing at a barre before a ceiling-high mirror. Herself, at school in Novosibirsk. The day…
Ten-year-old Tamara did not cry. She walked stiffly to her locker to change into her school uniform. But Tamara saw the expression on her own young face: the world had come to an end for her. She never danced again.
Her father. Drunk, almost always. Petting her when he wasn’t beating her. Tamara learned that it was better to be petted. She learned how to soothe her father’s drunken rages, how to warm his bed and take her mother’s role in his life. Daddy. She saw him in his coffin with the snow sifting down like frozen tears.
And he stirred to life and became Martin Humphries. Humphries, who bedded her the first day he saw her. Humphries, who commanded her. Humphries, whose half-insane anger reached across the solar system to bring death to those he feared.
And she understood how to soothe him, how to control him, how to turn his own wrath into a weapon to use against him.
Of course! It’s so simple! Tamara laughed despite the pain. She had known it all along: how to control a man, how to keep him from hurting you. But now she understood far more. How to use her innate power not merely to protect herself, but to control a man, to make him do what she wanted, to be in command of him. So simple. So primitive. So powerful.
Two deaths, perhaps three, and Martin Humphries would welcome her back to his bed. From there she could control the most powerful man in the solar system. From there she would wield the power. Humphries would do her bidding. Gladly.
But the pain. The searing, merciless pain that cut through her like a red-hot knife. The pain persisted. It would never go away.
