The events of the recent past warred powerfully against five hundred years of humanism. She knew that each human being was a unique, powerfully ensouled entity, an unpredictable absolute. Every moment of her consciousness proved it as surely as if it were etched in stone. There is a me that goes beyond my leaden flesh, and, even though I will die one day and it will stop, that doesn't mean anything. Why shouldn't it be so? My love of existence and other people, all the things that go into making me an individual? She had an image of herself as a machine, all the things that she truly was recorded on an old-fashioned reel of tape, able to be transferred at will to another machine, another muddy hulk. The idea was repellent. Things that lack meaning aren't things.
She passed on to gentler yet still more troublesome ideas. She had become united with the others during the battle in Bright Illimit. They had fought together and, she knew, facing the adversity and triumphing over it had made them close. What would the future bring to them? Undoubtedly they would return to Earth, and she had no doubt the feeling could be broadened and she would be strengthened by the knowledge that intimacy could be achieved through understanding. She puzzled over the strangest void, however— Brendan, Jana, and John were somehow totally excluded from her view of a common, joyous humanity. In fact her reaction to Sealock's resurrection was one of near revulsion. She felt infinite pity for poor Demogorgon, yet it did not extend to his repopulated body. And of course her feelings toward John were vasty complicated by all that had happened between them. She thought of John and wondered, Did I do the right thing? I know we can never be right for each other. Our ideas about love and life are just too different. We can never come together, be one, like Seven Red Anchorelles and his Cooloil. How delicious to think of it being that way. . . . An image of John floated up before her face, still handsome and dark, brooding deep within his intelligence. Strange to think of him as such a cold, remote being at times, and so filled with his own uncertainties. It wasn't just nonsense that the fullness of him ate away at the very soul of her existence during DR. He existed in such a way that she couldn't exist as well. His ideas always ran away with him. Instead of feeling his emotions he felt about them. I cannot imagine, still cannot comprehend, what it must be like to truly be such a person. But it was more than that for him. Could it be for her as well? The very existence of another person lacked the all-important criterion of meaning. She shuddered. What an awful idea! That can't be right.
There was a noise and she looked up, jumping slightly, fearful that it would be John, come to try for her yet again. What would I say?
The slim form of Demogorgon stood there naked, in his sleek nonmuscularity somehow the perfect image of a human being. There was nothing about him that bespoke his history and his current secrets.
"Hello, Beth," he said. "Can I come in?"
She nodded. "Hello, Dem ... uh ... Jana? Yes." She felt the hated confusion welling up. How do I deal with this?
The man smiled, walking toward her, and she found herself almost mesmerized by his slow stride. "It's hard, isn't it?" he said. "Call me Li-jiang. That's the name my parents and playmates had for me when I was a little . . . girl. After the break." He laughed softly.
"OK." She felt slightly breathless. She had been thinking very depressed thoughts, and she needed a diversion. "Li-jiang. Is that your real name?"
"No. My birth certificate read Hu Hua -hung. Changing names has always been a common pastime in the Sinified Orient . . . Mao Ze -dong. Ho Chi Minh . Chiang Kai-shek.
All made up, just like the names I used. It'd be pretty coincidental to have a Chinese revolutionary leader really be named Hair Enrich-East, don't you think?" Li-jiang was grinning. "Did you know that caesaries means 'a head of hair' in Latin? Very inscrutable."
"Very. I can imagine it, though. It's no more fantastic than having a French national hero being named Charles de Gaulle. Did Le Gros Legume make up his cognomen too?" Beth wondered at the course of their conversation. He's putting me at my ease, she thought. He? She? Ohhh . . . Li-jiang was sitting at her side, still smiling, eyes shining with an eerie light, something of a reflection from Iris. He was running his fingers gently across her thigh, using just the right pressure, just the right feather touch, and Beth was horrified to notice that he had the beginnings of an erection. Demo? No, Jana. This can't be happening!
She clutched at his fingers, stopping their gentle, persuasive motion. "Demo, ah . . . Li-jiang. Please. What . . ."It was hopeless. The situation was making her totally inarticulate, gagging her from within. From nowhere, images from the depths of Centrum overwhelmed her. She saw all the times that this body had knelt before Sealock, begging for some kind of human response. She saw all the times that it had been taken advantage of, used and then sent away to suffer in silence. She felt like crying for him. The memories led to other images, the old, horrible scenes from Sealock's life, the whirling miasma of impersonal sexual contacts, the life-views that took such a narrow focus, zooming in on close-ups of women's bodies, yawning moist chasms of red flesh, ready receptacles for an insensate lust. She felt sick, and said, "Please. I can't."
Li-jiang'sface, still smiling slightly, flattened out, then twisted with an evident dismay. "Beth. I ..." He turned away for a moment, then returned to stare earnestly at her, eyes projecting some overwhelming emotion. "God, Beth. Please don't turn me away. Not now."
She felt a cold remorse, some being from deep within showing her stop frames from that last falling descent through the Illimitor World, and all the things they'd learnedtogether. She thought of Demogorgon, then of Jana, and reached out to embrace Li-jiang, shaking.
John stood in the open doorway, undetected, invisible, watching the animals mate. Think about it, he told himself, consider it carefully and let the old emotions be pushed far, far down, where they ought to be. It might be moisture that was welling up in his eyes, but nothing spilled over, and everything could be denied. Watch her recede.
Taken as an absolute, what they were doing looked foolish. From the outside, there was none of the transcendent glory, no physiological overrides to stop the mind. He watched their rubbings and listened to them gasp, saw them burst into an athletic sweat, saw their faces become unintelligent, begin to gape and stare. It should have brought on a natural revulsion, but he felt that curious emptiness begin to fill him up once again. Talk to me, a voice whispered in his brain, but there was nothing to reply with. Self-conversation facilities can fall mute.
He pressed his cheek to the cool plastic liner of the doorway and watched, never quite aware of the things that were boiling below the event-horizon of his consciousness. Beth and Li-jiang moved against each other, grappling like gentle wrestlers, stroking, breathing, whispering to each other in what looked like some kind of planned cadence. Beth wrapped her legs around the man's slim thigh and ground herself against his flesh, cooing absurdly.
John felt a silent rage well up swiftly and then recede, consciously pushed back down into his depths by a desperate, rational hand. I could hate them, he realized, astounded. I feel almost . . . betrayed. Why is that? The hatred came back up, moving fast to avoid his clutches, and he was riven by its dense, boltlike quality. It seemed that Beth was hurting him purposely, in the most effective way, by now doing what he had wanted of her. He briefly imagined himself strangling the man's dark, slender throat. Deja vu plucked at him.