"As spirals are."
He laughed and handed her back the shell. "Yes. I suppose by its nature it's incomplete. Unless twinned."
Meg stared at him a moment. "Ben? What are we doing here?" His dark-green eyes twinkled mischievously. "Collecting shells. That's all." He stood and walked past her, scanning the sand for new specimens. Meg turned, watching him intently, knowing it was far more complex than he claimed; then she got up and joined him in the search.
Two hours later they took a break. The sun had moved behind them and the far end of the cove was now in shadow. The tide had turned an hour back and the sea had already encroached upon the sands between the rocks at the cove's mouth. Ben had brought sandwiches in his bag and they shared them now, stretched out on the low rocks, enjoying the late afternoon sunlight, the shells spread out on a cloth to one side.
There were more than a dozen different specimens on the bright green cloth— batswing and turitella, orchid spider and flamingo tongue, goldmouth helmet and striped bonnet, pelican's foot, mother-of-pearl, snakeshead cowrie, and several others—all washed and gleaming in the sun. A whole variety of shapes and sizes and colors, and not one of them native to the cold gray waters of the English south coast.
But Meg knew nothing of that.
It had begun when Meg was only four. There had been a glass display case on the wall in the hallway, and noting what pleasure Meg derived from the form and color of the shells, Hal Shepherd had bought new specimens in the City and brought them back to the Domain. He had scattered them by hand in the cove at low tide and taken Meg back the next day to "find" them. Ben, seven at the time, had understood at once; but had gone along with the deception, not wishing to spoil Meg's obvious enjoyment of the game. And when his father had suggested he rewrite his great-grandfather's book on shells to serve the deception, Ben had leaped at the opportunity. That volume now rested on the shelves in place of the original, a clever, subtle parody of it. Now he, in his turn, carried on his father's game. Only two days ago he had scattered these shells that lay now on the cloth.
Seagulls called lazily, high overhead. He looked up, shielding his eyes, then looked back at Meg. Her eyes were closed, her body sprawled out on the rock like a young lioness. Her limbs and arms and face were heavily tanned, almost brown against the pure white of her shorts and vest. Her dark hair lay in thick long curls against the sun-bleached rock. His eyes, however, were drawn continually to the fullness of her breasts beneath the cloth, to the suggestive curve of leg and hip and groin, the rounded perfection of her shoulders, the silken smoothness of her neck, the strange nakedness of her toes. He shivered and looked away, disturbed by the sudden turn of his thoughts. ... • , So familiar she was, and yet, suddenly, so strange.
"What are you thinking?" she asked softly, almost somnolently. The wind blew gently, mild, warm against his cheek and aim, then subsided. For a while he listened to the gentle slosh of the waves as they broke on the far side of the great mound of rock.
Meg pulled herself up onto one elbow and looked across at him. As ever, she was smiling. "Well? Cat got your tongue?"
He returned her smile. "You forget. There are no cats."
She shook her head. "You're wrong. Daddy promised me he'd bring one back this time."
"Ah," he nodded, but said nothing of what he was thinking. Another game. Extending the illusion. If their father brought a cat back with him, it too would be a copy—GenSyn, most likely—because the Han had killed all the real cats long ago.
"What are you going to call him?" She met his eyes teasingly. "Zarathustra, I thought."
He did not rise to her bait. Zarathustra was Nietzsche's poet-philosopher, the scathingly bitter loner who had come down from his mountain hermitage to tell the world that God was dead.
"A good name. Especially for a cat. They're said to be highly independent." She was watching him expectantly. Seeing it, he laughed. "You'll have to wait, Meg. Tomorrow, I promise you. I'll reveal everything then."
Even the tiny pout she made—so much a part of the young girl he had known all his life—was somehow different today. Transformed—strangely, surprisingly erotic.
"Shells . . ." he said, trying to take his mind from her. "Have you ever thought how like memory they are?"
"Never," she said, laughing, making him think for a moment she had noticed something in his face.
He met her eyes challengingly. "No. Think about it, Meg. Don't most people seal off their pasts behind them stage by stage, just as a mollusk outgrows its shell, sealing the old compartment off behind it?"
She smiled at him, then lay down again, closing her eyes. "Not you. You've said it yourself. It's all still there. Accessible. All you have to do is chip away the rock and there it is, preserved."
"Yes, but there's a likeness even so. That sense of things being embedded that I was talking of. You see, parts of my past are compartmentalized. 1 can remember what's in them, but I can't somehow return to them. I can't feel what it was like to be myself back then."
She opened one eye lazily. "And you want to?"
He stared back at her fiercely. "Yes. More than anything. I want to capture what it felt like. To save it, somehow."
"Hmmm . . ." Her eye was closed again.
"That's it, you see. I want to get inside the shell. To feel what it was like to be there before it was all sealed off to me. Do you understand that?"
"It sounds like pure nostalgia."
He laughed, but bis laughter was just a little too sharp. "Maybe . . . but I don't think so."
She seemed wholly relaxed now, as if asleep, her breasts rising and falling slowly. He watched her for a while, disturbed once more by the strength of what he felt. Then he lay down and, following her example, closed his eyes, dozing in the warm sun.
When he woke the sun had moved further down the sky. The shadow of the Wall had stretched to the foot of the rocks beneath them and the tide had almost filled the tiny cove, cutting them off. They would have to wade back. The heavy crash of a wave against the rocks behind him made him twist about sharply. As he turned a seagull cried out harshly close by, startling him. Then he realized Meg was gone.
He got to his feet anxiously. "Meg! Where are you?"
She answered him at once, her voice coming from beyond the huge tumble of rock, contesting with the crash of another wave. "I'm here!"
He climbed the rocks until he was at their summit. Meg was below him, to his left, crouched on a rock only a foot or so above the water, leaning forward, doing something.
"Meg! Come away! It's dangerous!"
He began to climb down. As he did so she turned and stood up straight. "It's okay. I was just—"
He saw her foot slip beneath her on the wet rock. Saw her reach out and steady herself, recovering her footing. And then the wave struck.
It was bigger than all the waves that had preceded it and broke much higher up the rocks, foaming and boiling, sending up a fine spray like glass splintering before some mighty hammer. It hit the big tooth-shaped rock to his right first, then surged along the line, roaring, buffeting the rocks in a frenzy of white water.
One moment Meg was there, the next she was gone, Ben saw the huge wave thrust her against the rocks, then she disappeared beneath the surface. When the water surged back there was no sign of her. "Meg!!!"
Ben pressed the emergency stud at his neck, then scrambled down the rocks and stood at the edge, ignoring the lesser wave that broke about his feet, peering down into the water, his face a mask of anguish, looking for some sign of her.