LITMIR.BIZ

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for him in that cock of the head, but he wasn’t sure; as he got older he felt he understood her (along with everyone else) less and less.

      She said, “It is sad the old dome is gone, isn’t it? But we must focus on what is coming. This too is viriditas. To concentrate not on what we have created, but what we will create. The dome was like a flower which wilts and falls, but contains the seed of a new plant, which grows and then there are new flowers and new seeds. The past is gone. Thinking about it will only make you melancholy. Why, I was a girl in Japan once, on Hokkaido Island! Yes, as young as you! And I can’t tell you how far gone that is. But here we are now, you and me, surrounded by these plants and these people, and if you pay attention to them, and how you can make them increase and prosper, then the life comes back into things. You feel the kami inside all things, and that is all you need. This moment itself is all we ever live in.”

      “And the old days?”

      She laughed at that. “You’re growing up. Well, you must remember the old days from time to time. They were good ones, weren’t they? You had a happy childhood, that is a blessing. But so will these days be good. Take this moment right here, and ask yourself, What now is lacking? Hmmm? … Coyote says that he wants you and Peter to go along with him on another trip. Maybe you should go and get out under the sky again, what do you say?”

      So preparations for another trip with Coyote were made, and they continued to work on the new Zygote, informally rechristened Gamete. At night in the relocated dining hall the adults talked for a long time about their situation. Sax and Vlad and Ursula, among others, wanted back into the surface world. They couldn’t do their real work properly in the hidden sanctuaries, they wanted back into the full flood of medical science, terraforming, construction. “We’ll never be able to disguise ourselves,” Hiroko said. “No one can change their genomes.”

      “It’s not our genomes we should change, but the records,” Sax said. “That’s what Spencer has done. He’s got his physical characteristics into a new record identity.”

      “And we did cosmetic surgery on his face,” Vlad said.

      “Yes, but it was minimal because of our age, right? We none of us look the same. Anyway, if you do something like what he did, we could take on new identities.”

      Maya said, “Did Spencer really get into all the records?”

      Sax shrugged. “He was left behind in Cairo, and had the chance to get into some of the ones being used now for security purposes. That has been enough. I’d like to try something similar. Let’s see what Coyote says about it. He’s not in any records at all, so he must know how he did it.”

      “He’s been hidden from the beginning,” Hiroko said. “That’s different.”

      “Yes, but he might have some ideas.”

      “We could just move into the demi-monde,” Nadia pointed out, “and stay off the records entirely. I think I’d like to try that.”

      Maya nodded.

      Night after night they talked these matters over. “Well, a little change of appearance might be in order, you know Phyllis is back, we have to remember that.”

      “I still can’t believe they survived. She must have nine lives.”

      “In any case we were on too many news shows. We have to take care.”

      By day Gamete was slowly completed. But it never seemed right to Nirgal, no matter how much he tried to focus on the making of it. It wasn’t his place.

      News came from another traveller that Coyote would be by soon. Nirgal felt his pulse quicken; to get back under the starry sky again, wandering by night in Coyote’s boulder car, from sanctuary to sanctuary …

      Jackie stared at him attentively as he talked about it to her. And that afternoon, after they were dismissed from the day’s work, she led him down to the tall new dunes and kissed him. When he recovered his wits he kissed back, and then they were kissing passionately, hugging each other hard and steaming all over each other’s faces. They knelt in the trough between two high dunes, under a pale thin fog, and then lay together in a cocoon made of their down coats, and kissed and touched each other, peeling down each other’s pants and creating a little envelope of their own warmth, huffing out steam and crackling the frost on the sand underneath their coats. All this without a word, merging in one great hot electric circuit, in defiance of Hiroko and all the world. Under the strands of her black hair grains of sand gleamed like jewels, as if minute ice flowers were contained within them. Glories inside every thing.

      When they were done they crawled up to glance over the dune crest, to make sure no one was coming their way, and then returned to their nest and pulled their clothes over them, for the warmth. They huddled together, kissing voluptuously and without haste. And Jackie prodded him in the chest with a finger and said, “Now we belong to each other.”

      Nirgal could only nod happily and kiss the long expanse of her throat, his face buried in her black hair. “Now you belong to me,” she said.

      He sincerely hoped it was true. It was how he had wanted it, for as long as he could remember.

      But that evening in the bathhouse Jackie sloshed across the pool, and caught up Dao and gave him a hug, body to body. She pulled back and stared at Nirgal with a blank expression, her dark eyes like holes in her face. Nirgal sat frozen in the shallows, feeling his torso stiffen as if preparing for a blow. His balls were still sore from coming in her; and there she stood draped against Dao, as she hadn’t been in months, staring at him with a basilisk stare.

      The strangest sensation swept over him—he understood that this was a moment he would remember all his life, a pivotal moment, right there in the steamy comfortable bath, under the osprey eye of the statuesque Maya, whom Jackie hated with a fine hate, who was now watching the three of them closely, suspecting something. So this was how it was. Jackie and Nirgal might belong to each other, and he certainly belonged to her—but her idea of belonging was not his. The shock of this knocked his breath out, it was a kind of collapse of the roof of his understanding of things. He looked at her, stunned, hurt, becoming angry—she hugged Dao all the more—and he understood. She had collected both of them. Yes, it made sense, it was certain; and Reull and Steve and Frantz were all equally devoted to her—perhaps that was just a holdover from her rule over the little band, but perhaps not. Perhaps she had collected all of them. And clearly, now that Nirgal was a kind of foreigner to them, she was more comfortable with Dao. So he was an exile in his own home, and in his own love’s heart. If she had a heart!

      He didn’t know if any of these impressions were true, didn’t know how to find out. He wasn’t sure he wanted to find out. He got out of the bath and retreated into the men’s room, feeling Jackie’s gaze boring into his back, and Maya’s too.

      In the men’s room he caught sight of an unfamiliar face in one of the mirrors. He stopped short and recognised it as his own face, twisted with distress.

      He approached the mirror slowly, feeling the strange sensation of momentousness sweep through him again. He stared at the face in the mirror, stared and stared; it came to him that he was not the centre of the universe, nor its only consciousness, but a person like all the rest, seen from the outside by others, the way he saw others when he looked at them. And this strange Nirgal-in-the-mirror was an arresting black-haired brown-eyed boy, intense and compelling, a near twin to Jackie, with thick black eyebrows and a … a look. He didn’t want to know any of this. But he felt the power burning at his fingertips, and recalled how people looked at him, and understood that for Jackie he might represent the same sort of dangerous power that she did for him—which would explain her consorting with Dao, as an attempt to hold him off, to hold a balance, to assert her power. To show they were a matched pair—and a match. And all of a sudden the tension left his torso, and he shuddered, and then grinned, lopsidedly. They did indeed belong to each other. But he was still himself.

      So when Coyote showed up and came by to ask Nirgal to join him on another trip, he agreed instantly, very thankful for the opportunity. The flash of anger on Jackie’s face

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