At him . . .
She stared at the slim, dark man in front of her, his face mimicking her most usual expression, his brow taking on the lines that had always creased hers. Her thought furrows were reborn. How did this happen? She thought she knew. Theexplanations had been made. She was intelligent and could piece the story together on her own. She shook her head and Demogorgon's head made the same moves in return, an instant response. She touched the mirror and he reached out to her. . . . She burst into tears and watched him cry unashamedly before her gaze.
What is my name? she wondered. Li-jiang. No Jana. No Achmet Aziz el-Tabari. No Demogorgon. Those people are all dead. She stared at the curdled semen still sticking like cold glue to her skin, shining at her eyes, mocking her. Something far within felt like laughing.
Slowly, she turned and walked out the door of her chamber, still naked, to walk the halls of the CM, seeking an unneeded, unheralded absolution. And to give it forth in lieu of honor. . . .
Reluctantly, with a numb dread that actually felt like friction against his shoulders and neck holding him back, John moved to the chair that he used for composing and sat. He rolled back the headrest and lay his head back, looking blankly at the ceiling. Every part of him recoiled from the idea that he could actually go back to music after all that had happened—deep inside he felt the total inadequacy of the medium—and, further, he felt somehow that using the pain that filled him for the task would somehow be trivializing it, and himself in the process.
A quick, almost abstract vision appeared in his head, accompanied by a riveting, stirring sensation of deja vu. It was blue above, green below, with an almost sourceless yellow light everywhere in between. He was tumbling, moving across the soft, perfect lawn, enchanted with the new concepts of himself and the world and the joyous intermingling of the two. It was his earliest memory. He couldn't have said when, or where it was, or who had been there, for he seemed to be alone, out of time. And then the second memory, in a room at night, the impossibly bright face of the three-quarter moon staring in at him, scaring him beyond his little ability to reason, hanging there, a specter or icon so far removed from what heunderstood as to reduce the world and himself to symbols in the dark misunderstanding.
The memories passed. He thought he understood something of what it all meant. Calling up his overlays, he began with a first note.
Vana, Harmon, and Ariane sat in the latter's room, talking far into an ersatz night of their own making. Their flesh needed a comforting touch, a renewal of contact, but still they held off, filled with questions without answers and a formless dread that had no name.
Prynne sprawled bonelessly on the bed, his arms and legs lying in the positions to which they had fallen, listening, without speech, without ideas. The time within Centrum had made him whole, but it had also left him empty. He knew himself for what he was now, and knew that he would never go beyond those limits. It was enough. It had to be.
Berenguer sat cross-legged at his feet, looking at the other woman. "What does it all mean, Ariane?" She laughed at the age-old question, a soft sound, giving them some sense of the destruction that had been wrought upon her. "Mean? It means nothing, Vana. The changes that have been made in us are all illusory. We're still the same, we just see each other more clearly now. Brendan's still what he always was ... I just never knew it before." She laughed again, a harsher, bitterer sound. "I called him a god once! I was in love with what I thought was the depth of his soul. It's not there and never was. I loved what I thought I saw, and that was just a construct, a blank space filled with images from the depths of my own longing. . . . I'm glad it's over. Seeing the truth has made me freer than I ever dreamed possible." The others nodded wisely at that, imagining that they understood. Finally Prynne sighed and said, "I wish Demo was still here. I'd like to go into the Illimitor World once again . . ." Ariane smiled, then reached out and touched them both softly. "We don't need it anymore," she said,
"for we have each other." She stretched slowly before them, watching theradiance of her beauty grow in their eyes. "And Demogorgon will always live on in our hearts." Because she said it, for the moment it was so.
Axie and Tem were having dinner together, enjoying one of his lesser creations. They tasted it and praised the food, smiling often at each other. Somehow they were thrown together, the man made whole by his experiences, the woman restored to what she perceived as her original "self." It made them similar, after a fashion, and they converged. Some repressions are, in the end, beneficial.
"Do you suppose she'll ever be the same?"
The Selenite shrugged. "You probably know as much about it as I do, Ax. We won't know how much we rescued until she calms down a little."
The woman nodded meditatively, thinking back about what she knew, drawing on the resources of a more complicated past. "Yes. And until we know how much of Demo's true self resided in the cells of his brain. It's a pity things had to turn out this way. We should never have come out here like this."
"I know what you mean. I'm sorry I had to leave the Moon, but there wasn't any other way. While I stayed there I could never be free. I could never find out about who I was."
"So it all had to take place then, for us all to grow. If I'd stayed on Earth, my life would've killed me. I took the drugs, ate all the experiences I could grasp, and ran and ran. I had to flee from a heritage that was strangling me, and at last it brought me here." She rested her chin on small, delicate hands and smiled across at his bearded bulk, her eyes seeming to glisten in the subdued light of the room they were in.
"We've become adults, Tem, after a too long adolescence. I wonder: is it too late?" He shook his head, his smile slowly fading as he gazed into the depths of her vision. "Never. Only I have to ask myself— what happened to us in there? Was this feeling of ... happiness . . . somehow imposed from without?"
"Does it really matter? Or, to put it another way, is therereally a difference? From the moment we were born everything has been, as you say, imposed from without."
"If it were a hundred years ago, I'd ask you to marry me, Aksinia." Her cheeks dimpled at the compliment. "If it were a hundred years ago, I'd accept, Temujin Krzakwa."
They laughed, together, and moved on.
Jana stood before a clear, cold window, looking at the crystal pulp that remained from her body, seeing the death that she'd bought for herself. It was an unreal sight, steaks frozen, thawed, and frozen again. Her hair had turned to a stiffened spikiness, limned with frost and ice crystals. The beloved physical processes which shaped the world beneath her feet were responsible for this transformation. Ice queen —how appropriate that she had come to study and love the geology of the outer Solar System. But it wasn't that simple, not by a long shot. And, indisputably, the woman that she had been was dead. Did I feel it? she wondered. Did it hurt? It was more than just that, of course. Am I still in there? You can record a song over again, then burn the original tape, and the song still lives . . . but is it still the same song? Is a recording ever real? Does a song vanish forever when the singer's breath runs out, when the last echoes die down? What's left of me? She sighed. Probably nothing. I'm Demogorgon, with a rebuilt personality. . . .
Then something in her rebelled, a heat rising out of nowhere, a flame rising to devour her doubts. It cannot be! But she deflated again. No. Jana is gone. Demo is gone. Just little Li-jiang remains to carry on in their stead, making a little pretense of life.
Li-jiang strode from Jana's mausoleum, not wondering what had become of the one whose body she now owned. Process instructions cascaded down the sequences of a mind in turmoil, unwinding, and the self-image, rising out of the depths, recognized itself as male, if nothing else. The various impulses coalesced, melting together to form a coherentwhole, because the alternative was a permanent and incurable madness.