“You’re safe now,” Dantan said, with no expression in voice or face.
“Yes. I can return.”
“And you will?”
“Of course I shall.”
“We are more alike than you had realized.”
She looked up toward the colored curtain of the screen. “That is true. It is not the complete truth, Dantan.”
He said, “I love you—Quiana.” This time he called her by name.
Neither of them moved. Minutes went by silently.
Quiana said, as if she had not heard him, “Those who followed you are here. I have been listening to them for some time now. They are trying to break through the door at the top of the shaft.”
He took her hand in his gloved grasp. “Stay here. Or let me go back to Zha with you. Why not?”
“You could not live there without your armor.”
“Then stay.”
Quiana looked away, her eyes troubled. As Dantan moved to slip off his helmet her hand came up again to stop him.
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
For answer she rose, beckoning for him to follow. She stepped across the threshold into the shaft and swiftly began to climb the pegs toward the surface and the hammering of the Redhelms up above. Dantan, at her gesture, followed.
Over her shoulder she said briefly, “We are of two very different worlds. Watch—but be careful.” And she touched the device that locked the oval door.
It slipped down and swung aside.
Dantan caught one swift glimpse of Redhelm heads dodging back to safety. They did not know, of course, that he was unarmed. He reached up desperately, trying to pull Quiana back but she slipped aside and sprang lightly out of the shaft into the cool gray light of the Martian morning.
Forgetting her warning, Dantan pulled himself up behind her. But as his head and shoulders emerged from the shaft he stopped, frozen. For the Redhelms were falling. There was no mark upon them, yet they fell…
She did not stir, even when the last man had stiffened into rigid immobility. Then Dantan clambered up and without looking at Quiana went to the nearest body and turned it over. He could find no mark. Yet the Redhelm was dead.
“That is why you had to wear the armor,” she told him gently. “We are of different worlds, you and I.”
He took her in his arms—and the soft resilience of her was lost against the stiffness of the protective suit. He would never even know how her body felt, because of the armor between them… He could not even kiss her—again. He had taken his last kiss of the mouth so like Quiana’s mouth, long years ago, and he would never kiss it again. The barrier was too high between them.
“You can’t go back,” he told her in a rough, uneven voice. “We are of the same world, no matter what—no matter how—You’re no stranger to me, Quiana!”
She looked up at him with troubled eyes, shaking her head, regret in her voice.
“Do you think I don’t know why you fought for me, Dantan?” she asked in a clear voice. “Did you ever stop to wonder why Sanfel risked so much for me, too?”
He stared down at her, his brain spinning, almost afraid to hear what she would say next. He did not want to hear. But her voice went on inexorably.
“I cheated you, Dantan. I cheated Sanfel yesterday—a thousand years ago. My need was very great, you see—and our ways are not yours. I knew that no man would fight for a stranger as I needed a man to fight for me.”
He held her tightly in gloved hands that could feel only a firm body in their grasp, not what that body was really like, nothing about it except its firmness. He caught his breath to interrupt, but she went on with a rush.
“I have no way of knowing how you see me, Dantan,” she said relentlessly. “I don’t know how Sanfel saw me. To each of you—because I needed your help—I wore the shape to which you owed help most. I could reach into your minds deeply enough for that—to mould a remembered body for your eyes. My own shape is—different. You will never know it.” She sighed. “You were a brave man, Dantan. Braver and stronger than I ever dreamed an alien could be. I wish—I wonder—Oh, let me go! Let me go!”
She whirled out of his grasp with sudden vehemence, turning her face away so that he could not see her eyes. Without glancing at him again she bent over the shaft and found the topmost pegs, and in a moment was gone.
Dantan stood there, waiting. Presently he heard the muffled humming of a muted bell, as though sounding from another world. Then he knew that there was no one in the ancient laboratory beneath his feet.
He shut the door carefully and scraped soil over it. He did not mark the place. The dim red spot of the sun was rising above the canyon wall. His face set, Dantan began walking toward the distant cavern where his aircar was hidden. It was many miles away, but there was no one to stop him, now.
He did not look back.
REGENESIS, by Cynthia Ward
Last cybercast from Google-Fox reporter Daniel Lundgren:
Lundgren [in a hallway bustling with suited men and women]: “This is Dan Lundgren, Google-Fox News, in Paris. I’m at the World Health Organization Conference on Genetic Therapy, where doctors and scientists are expressing alarm at the latest fashion trend. ‘A fashion trend?’ you might say? Medicine has nothing to do with style. Or, rather, had. A medical breakthrough has become just another fashion statement.”
Cut to a young woman onstage, playing electric guitar in front of a thunderous retro-industrial band. Cut to Lundgren backstage with the woman: “We’re speaking with Marie Durand, lead guitarist of Jackhammer. Marie, many people would say you’re abusing genetic therapy. They believe you’re desecrating a medical miracle for the sake of au couture.”
Durand [in a heavy French accent]: “They are fools. It has nothing to do with style.” Her hands rise into sight, gesturing. They seem too large for her slight size. “Fashion is transient. Art is eternal.” Closeup of one hand: The fingers are too long for the palm, and there are too many of them. Six. “I cut off my fingers. I would never do such a thing, except for art.”
Cut to a bandaged hand, a stump without fingers or thumb. Time-lapse video shows five bumps peeping through the bandage, and the bandage bulging along the outside edge of the palm. Then the palm is bare, fingers and thumb growing—growing too long—and a second thumb swelling from once-raw flesh.
Durand [voiceover]: “I cut off my fingers only to become the greatest guitarist in the world.”
Cut to a small brown tailless lizard, sprouting a tail in time-lapse. Lundgren [voiceover]: “Once genetic engineers decoded the lizard’s ability to regenerate a lost tail, human limb regeneration was no longer a fantasy. But no one realized the fantastic uses to which it could, and would, be put.”
Cut to a beautiful Congolese woman with one brown eye, one green eye, and, in the center of her forehead, one blue eye.
Voiceover: “Are we taking regeneration too far?”
Cut to Lundgren, alone: “One thing is clear: Genetic therapists are giving plastic surgery a whole new meaning.”
Cut to Lundgren with an East Indian man in a Western suit tailored to reveal a long, supple, black-haired taiclass="underline" “Dr. Charaka Ashok is a genetic engineer participating in the WHO Conference. Dr. Ashok, many would claim you’ve made a mockery of your profession by giving yourself a monkey’s tail.”
Dr. Ashok [in a faint Bengali accent]: “They speak from ignorance. I haven’t introduced a single gene from another species into my body. My tail is from the human genetic code—from the ‘junk DNA.’ ‘Junk genes’ are fossils: dormant genes inherited from our prehuman ancestors. Selective activation of the lizard gene and other fossil genes can stimulate the growth of tails, fangs, body fur, and other physical features not normally part of the human body.”