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hwrnmnbsol) wrote2011-07-11 12:22 am
hwrnmnbsol) wrote2011-07-11 12:22 am
State of Denali
"They're an almost perfect match." Doctor Truong held up Denali's brainwave scan up alongside the xenomorph's. The peaks and valleys were noted with a felt-tip pen. The patterns did look very similar.
Doctor Truong smiled. "Congratulations, Ms. Kray," he said. "Your daughter's been accepted as a correspondence candidate. I know she's going to love this experience."
Simone Kray looked through the window at her daughter, still lying on the gurney and chatting with the imaging technicians. Denali was so small and her body was so crooked, but she gabbed away so brightly. Simone couldn't hear what they were saying, but the technicians were chuckling. She suddenly felt very much afraid for her daughter. Her life was so difficult already.
"Will it hurt?" she asked. "This… this…"
"Somnostat," supplied Doctor Truong. "No, installing it is an entirely non-surgical procedure. It just snaps into place around her neck. And none of the correspondence candidates have ever complained of any type of pain resulting from the device." He sensed Simone's anxiety and put a hand on her shoulder.
"This is going to be a grand adventure," he said. "Denali will be one of only one hundred and forty nine people ever to do this. And I think I know your daughter well enough to feel certain that she's going to be wonderful at it."
"I know," said Simone softly. She thought of the years of corrective operations that had been performed – heart repair, liver resection, two procedures to support her one functional lung so she could breathe. It was all nothing compared to the tumor removal scheduled in a month. She wasn't supposed to think of the odds of Denali's survival, but she did anyway.
"Just think, Simone," said Doctor Truong. "Tonight when Denali dreams, she'll be sharing her dream with a being from another planet."
Simone tucked Denali into bed. Denali was a normal size from the neck up, but her body massed half the normal amount for a ten year old child. Her head looked enormous swimming in the toddler bed. Denali snuffled a little around the oxygen tube in her right nostril. Her left arm – normal in function but frail, frail, frail – tugged at the somnostat.
"Kinda itchy," she said, her voice piping like a little bird. "How'm I supposed to fall asleep, Mama?"
"I guess the usual way," said Simone. "When you're tired, the sleep will come."
Denali digested that. "Well then," she said, "how do I find this alien thing anyway? Or will she find me?"
"I don't know, honey," said Simone. "You'll just have to find out. The way I understand it, it's easy."
"I wonder what an alien dreams about," mused Denali. "I hope I get a girl alien. Do they have girl aliens?"
"We don't know too much about them, Denali," said Simone. "They live very, very far away."
"How far?" asked Denali.
"I don't know," replied Simone. She wasn't very good with this astronomy stuff. "Far enough away that just talking to them would take thousands of years to pass a message back and forth."
"Oh." Denali's forehead wrinkled. "Am I gonna dream for a thousand years?! Like Sleeping Beauty?"
"No, silly," chuckled Simone. "When you dream, your mind goes to a special dream-place. It's the same place for everybody who dreams. If you dream just exactly the same way, you can sometimes bump into somebody like you. Even if they don't look exactly like you."
Denali yawned. "Well, if I have to get to this dream-place, and it's between here and some alien planet, I guess I better get started. Can I have some soy milk?"
"All right," said Simone. By the time she came back with the drink, Denali was fast asleep.
**
Denali was a princess. She wore a sparkling blue dress that set off her beautiful brown skin, and she had a matching headpiece with a flowing train. Denali got up from the stone bier upon which she had been resting and twirled around, watching the dress swish around her ankles. It took her a few minutes to realize that she was standing on her own two feet, perfectly straight, and nothing hurt.
Laughing, she ran to the high arched window of her room and looked out. She was in a tower atop a castle, looking out over an endless garden of twisted thorns. Denali realized where she was: she was Sleeping Beauty, in her fairytale castle surrounded by a cursed forest. She was a real princess! Denali whooped.
"Are you all right?" asked a voice. "Are you in distress?"
Denali looked into the corner of the room. Something coiled there. It reared itself up. It looked like a bundle of worms. Denali giggled.
"Now you're making another kind of noise," said the bundle of worms. "I don't understand what you're trying to say."
"I'm not saying anything," said Denali. "Sometimes I just make noises. Are you an alien?"
"No, you are," said the bundle of worms.
"I am not," said Denali, stamping her foot. "I'm a princess."
"Oh," said the ropy thing. It slithered like a snake, but when one end grabbed the top of the bier and pulled itself up, it looked just like a hand. The twin ends of the worm-bundle surveyed the room, the worm-ends twitching sensitively.
"This must be your dream, not mine," said the bundle. "I don't see anything I recognize."
"Yeah, we're in a castle," said Denali. "We're supposed to be princesses." Inspiration struck her. "You should probably be a princess too. With a dress."
The ropy thing was suddenly clad in shimmering green, with a mesh cap of sorts that threaded through the worms at one end. The other end came off the bier and split into two bundles, and now there were two princesses standing in the tower, one awkwardly learning the ropes of how to stand bipedally, but learning fast.
Denali guided the other princess over to the window. Out in the distance, a man on a charger was lopping away at the poisonous shrubs and trees that stood between him and the castle. Going was slow. Denali watched his progress.
"Who's that?" asked the worms.
"That's our prince," said Denali. "He's going to save us."
"Do we need saving?"
"Not really." Denali looked at the other princess. Talking with a bundle of worms didn't seem strange at all for some reason.
"I'm called Denali," she said.
"My name's Itikit," said the not-alien princess.
They watched their prince approach.
**
The next night they were in Itikit's dreams. They swam through a deep ocean, illuminated by phosphorescent bubbles and strands. Itikit swam like a seal. It was harder for Denali at first, but she got the hang of it fast. It never occurred to her to worry about not breathing.
"You're not really a princess, are you?" asked Itikit.
"No, I'm just a regular girl," Denali said. "But it's fun to play make-believe."
"What's that?" asked Itikit.
"It's where you pretend you're something that you're not, and it's fun," said Denali. "Like, in this dream, I'm pretending I'm a bundle-of-worms swimming in the ocean. Whee!"
"Oh," said Itikit. "I guess I'm playing make-believe in this dream too. I'm not allowed to swim freely like this."
"How come?" asked Denali. "This is fun!"
"Well," said Itikit, "my family are prisoners."
Denali drew up short. "What are you talking about?" she asked.
"I have three parents," Itikit explained. "They served on the Science Council for our government. They got me into this dream program. But there has been a war. We fought with the Crambor for who gets to own our world, and we lost." Itikit flashed through corals and whipped through the stalks of something like kelp. "We're kept in a special camp. They make my parents do stuff. I'm afraid they're going to kill my parents a lot of the time."
Itikit began jerking convulsively. Denali took this to be a crying analog and twined herself around Itikit.
"I'm afraid a lot too," she said. "When I'm not dreaming, I'm really sick. I might die. Sometimes they do operations on me to make me less sick. I'm more scared of the operations than I am of dying."
"I don't like to be scared," said Itikit.
"Me neither," said Denali. The two dreamers snuggled together and swam as one through the iridescent sea.
**
Denali was falling. She was also drinking tea. There was a beautiful round table with tablecloth and tea service set up on it, all falling at the same rate as Denali. She latched onto a chair and swung herself into it, then reached for the teapot. As she did, Itikit plopped into the chair on the opposite side.
"Guess what!" she said excitedly.
"What?" asked Denali. "And would you like tea?"
Itikit eyed it suspiciously. "What do I do with it?"
"Well, you could drink it," Denali said. "But really it's more fun to pass it around and be polite."
"Okay. May I please have some tea?" asked Itikit.
"Of course; I'll pour," said Denali. "What's going on?"
"I played dress-up!" said Itikit proudly.
"Do tell, do tell," encouraged Denali, pouring the tea and then passing the cream and sugar. Her ponytail whipped straight up in the air as they fell.
"Well!" said Itikit. "Every morning they separate the children from the adults and send the adults off to work camp. Well, me and my spawn-mate Ubulun didn't want to be separated and go to Indoctrination School. So, we disassembled!"
"You what?"
"Disassembled." Itikit struggled for the words. "I'm made up of twelve strands; you call them worms. Every year our parents spin us a new strand and it gets added to our bundle. When we add strands we get a little smarter and a little more mature. Back when I was only three strands I couldn't even feed myself. When I was six strands I started to learn to speak. Now I'm twelve. When I get fifteen strands we go through the Fusing; our strands stick together forever, and we're adults and can have our own children. But before then we can unwind our strands whenever we want to."
"Really?" asked Denali. "That's so cool. We're all just one big piece of meat. We don't come apart."
"Then how do you fix yourself when you get hurt?" asked Itikit. "When we hurt a strand, we just throw it away and our parents spin us a new one, and then we're good as new."
"Wow!" said Denali. "What happens to the bad strand?"
"Well, if it survives, we let it loose into the ocean," said Itikit. "It can feed out there like a dumb animal. And if it's lucky, it can link up with other loose strands and become an intelligent creature again."
"When we get hurt, it's hard." Denali thought of her numerous surgeries. One was coming up in a week. "There's a lot of pain and we only get better slowly. It sucks."
"Oh. I'm sorry," said itikit. "Well, anyway, we can disassemble for a while, but we have to reassemble quickly if we don't want to lose our sense of self. Anyway, me and Ubulun disassembled and wove ourselves into each other so we looked like a tube of twenty-one strands – an adult. And then we went with the adults into the work-camp!"
"How exciting!" said Denali. She tried to drop cubes of sugar into her tea but they kept flying upwards. "Then what happened."
"Well, it wasn't much fun," admitted Itikit. "When we revealed ourselves to our parents, they were upset. They made us reassemble and took us to the Crambor guards. They apologized and asked that we not be hurt and be taken back to Indoctrination Camp. The guards took us back. The end."
"Huh," said Denali. "Did you get punished?"
"No," said Itikit, "but my parent got hurt. I saw a guard cut its bundle; a couple of strands were severed. My other parents begged and pleaded for mercy. It was awful to watch. Later on my parents told me never to do anything like that again, or we could all be executed."
"That's terrible," said Denali.
"Yeah," said itikit, "but I got to play make-believe, like I was an adult."
"Pretty cool," Denali admitted.
**
They were shooting through tubes of bubbles. Denali was very quiet. "What's the matter?" asked Itikit.
"My surgery's tomorrow," said Denali. "They're going to remove a big tumor. It's sort of stuck between my heart and my lungs, in a very bad place. It's got to come out, but it's not going to be easy."
"I'm sorry," said itikit. "I wish you could just disassemble. Then you could throw the bad parts away and put the rest back together."
"Can't do that," said Denali. "Mom's not saying anything, but I know that I might die. I don't want to die, Itikit."
"Me neither," said Itikit. "I'm scared too. Things have gotten bad. We heard yesterday that an entire pool-block of captives was taken to a holding tank to be decontaminated. Only, the rumor is, it's just a big steam chamber. Nobody's heard from that entire pool-block since. They've disappeared. My parents are worried that they might come for us too."
"Oh no," said Denali. "I'm keeping my fingers crossed."
"What does that mean?" asked Itikit. Denali showed her.
"For luck," said Denali.
Itikit crossed two of her strands. "For luck," she echoed. "Yeah."
Denali looked at Itikit. "I can be brave if you can," she said.
"Then be brave," said itikit.
**
Doctor Truong pulled his mask off as he came out into the waiting room. Simone stood up immediately.
The doctor smiled. "She did great," he said.
"Oh, my baby," gasped Simone, collapsing back into her chair under the weight of her relief.
"We think we got all of it. Your daughter's a trooper. It'll take her a while to come out of it, but you can talk to her probably within twelve hours." Doctor Truong grinned. "She's single-minded about that somnostat, I'll tell you that."
"How do you mean?" asked Simone.
"Well, it's the darndest thing," said Doctor Truong. "I had to take the somnostat off of her to do the procedure. She made me promise we'd put it back onto her while she was coming out of it so she could talk with her friend."
**
She was tap-dancing on a stage, footlights and all. There was nobody out in the audience, but Denali didn't care. Her feet flew across the stage in a way she could only dream about.
"Don't you want to dance?" she asked itikit.
"No," said Itikit.
"What's the matter?" asked Denali, putting an arm around her friend. Itikit leaned in.
"Oh Denali, it's awful," said itikit, her bundle of tubules convulsing. "They took my parents away."
"No! Oh, Itikit, tell me."
"I think they took them to the steam tank. They took all the members of the Science Directorate and their families away. I don’t know why I'm still alive but I think I might be next. They've stuck me in a bare holding tank all by myself. They didn't take my somnostat; I don't think they knew what it was. Denali, I'm afraid I'm going to die."
Denali squeezed Itikit. "You made me be brave," she said. "Now you be brave for me. Don't cry. It's going to be okay. You're going to survive."
"I'm so afraid," said Itikit. Denali stroked her friend's strands.
"Tell me about where they're holding you," she demanded.
"It's just a little tank," Itikit said. "There's no light except what comes in through the oxygenator grille. There's a little drain at the bottom. That's it."
"A drain?" Denali pushed itikit away. "How big a drain?"
"I dunno," said Itikit. "Why?"
"Because you could disassemble," said Denali. "You could turn into a bunch of strands and get down the drain one by one."
"No I couldn't," said Itikit. "I'd only have a few minutes to reassemble or I'd lose my sense of self. I'd go back to individual loose strands swimming in the sea – dumb animals eating single-celled organisms."
"But you might survive," said Denali. "And the Crambor wouldn't care about a bunch of dumb strands swimming away. You said yourself: you might get lucky and reform. It's better than boiling alive."
"I'm scared of losing myself," said Itikit.
"I'm scared of losing you!" Something occurred to Denali.
"Will your somnostat fit down the drain?" she asked.
"Yes, it's very narrow," said Itikit. "It fits around my first strand, like a princess's ring."
"Then you'll never be all the way lost," said Denali decisively. "That strand will have me in its dreams, and I'll have it in mine. Oh, Itikit – be brave and save yourself."
The two friends held each other for a long time.
**
"You're very quiet," said Simone at the breakfast table.
Denali sat in her highchair and poked at her breakfast. "I'm not really very hungry."
Simone sighed. "Honey," she said, "it's been two weeks since you lost contact with your friend. I know you're worried, but you've got to eat. And you definitely can't keep taking naps all the time hoping to get back to the dreamspace."
"I know," said Denali irritatedly. She pressed the stud to make the chair transfer her into the ambulator. "It's okay, Mama. I'm just feeling a little weak from all the antibiotics they got me on. And my scar is itching really badly. Do you think I could go swimming today?"
"I think you're healed up enough," said Simone. This was a promising sign; getting Denali back in the therapy pool would be a positive step towards getting her back into the real world.
Denali smiled and rolled towards her bedroom to find her custom-made swimsuit. Swimming would feel good, she knew. She wanted to get lots of practice in.
Because during the previous night, she had felt something. It was just a brushing touch in her dream, a feeling of something swimming freely in open water, looping about itself. She felt the primal joy of plunging through chilly seas, scudding between rocks, sifting microscopic creatures out of the water and digesting them. And, too, she felt the wonder of touching the skin of another being like her, grappling it and holding it close to her, becoming one with it, and in so doing broadening the dimensions of her understanding.
Denali stripped out of her PJ's and struggled to pull on her bathing cap with one hand. She wanted to feel the water sliding across her body, and slowly kick her way from one side of the pool to the other.
Swimming, she thought. Soon I'm going to be doing a lot more of it.
Doctor Truong smiled. "Congratulations, Ms. Kray," he said. "Your daughter's been accepted as a correspondence candidate. I know she's going to love this experience."
Simone Kray looked through the window at her daughter, still lying on the gurney and chatting with the imaging technicians. Denali was so small and her body was so crooked, but she gabbed away so brightly. Simone couldn't hear what they were saying, but the technicians were chuckling. She suddenly felt very much afraid for her daughter. Her life was so difficult already.
"Will it hurt?" she asked. "This… this…"
"Somnostat," supplied Doctor Truong. "No, installing it is an entirely non-surgical procedure. It just snaps into place around her neck. And none of the correspondence candidates have ever complained of any type of pain resulting from the device." He sensed Simone's anxiety and put a hand on her shoulder.
"This is going to be a grand adventure," he said. "Denali will be one of only one hundred and forty nine people ever to do this. And I think I know your daughter well enough to feel certain that she's going to be wonderful at it."
"I know," said Simone softly. She thought of the years of corrective operations that had been performed – heart repair, liver resection, two procedures to support her one functional lung so she could breathe. It was all nothing compared to the tumor removal scheduled in a month. She wasn't supposed to think of the odds of Denali's survival, but she did anyway.
"Just think, Simone," said Doctor Truong. "Tonight when Denali dreams, she'll be sharing her dream with a being from another planet."
Simone tucked Denali into bed. Denali was a normal size from the neck up, but her body massed half the normal amount for a ten year old child. Her head looked enormous swimming in the toddler bed. Denali snuffled a little around the oxygen tube in her right nostril. Her left arm – normal in function but frail, frail, frail – tugged at the somnostat.
"Kinda itchy," she said, her voice piping like a little bird. "How'm I supposed to fall asleep, Mama?"
"I guess the usual way," said Simone. "When you're tired, the sleep will come."
Denali digested that. "Well then," she said, "how do I find this alien thing anyway? Or will she find me?"
"I don't know, honey," said Simone. "You'll just have to find out. The way I understand it, it's easy."
"I wonder what an alien dreams about," mused Denali. "I hope I get a girl alien. Do they have girl aliens?"
"We don't know too much about them, Denali," said Simone. "They live very, very far away."
"How far?" asked Denali.
"I don't know," replied Simone. She wasn't very good with this astronomy stuff. "Far enough away that just talking to them would take thousands of years to pass a message back and forth."
"Oh." Denali's forehead wrinkled. "Am I gonna dream for a thousand years?! Like Sleeping Beauty?"
"No, silly," chuckled Simone. "When you dream, your mind goes to a special dream-place. It's the same place for everybody who dreams. If you dream just exactly the same way, you can sometimes bump into somebody like you. Even if they don't look exactly like you."
Denali yawned. "Well, if I have to get to this dream-place, and it's between here and some alien planet, I guess I better get started. Can I have some soy milk?"
"All right," said Simone. By the time she came back with the drink, Denali was fast asleep.
**
Denali was a princess. She wore a sparkling blue dress that set off her beautiful brown skin, and she had a matching headpiece with a flowing train. Denali got up from the stone bier upon which she had been resting and twirled around, watching the dress swish around her ankles. It took her a few minutes to realize that she was standing on her own two feet, perfectly straight, and nothing hurt.
Laughing, she ran to the high arched window of her room and looked out. She was in a tower atop a castle, looking out over an endless garden of twisted thorns. Denali realized where she was: she was Sleeping Beauty, in her fairytale castle surrounded by a cursed forest. She was a real princess! Denali whooped.
"Are you all right?" asked a voice. "Are you in distress?"
Denali looked into the corner of the room. Something coiled there. It reared itself up. It looked like a bundle of worms. Denali giggled.
"Now you're making another kind of noise," said the bundle of worms. "I don't understand what you're trying to say."
"I'm not saying anything," said Denali. "Sometimes I just make noises. Are you an alien?"
"No, you are," said the bundle of worms.
"I am not," said Denali, stamping her foot. "I'm a princess."
"Oh," said the ropy thing. It slithered like a snake, but when one end grabbed the top of the bier and pulled itself up, it looked just like a hand. The twin ends of the worm-bundle surveyed the room, the worm-ends twitching sensitively.
"This must be your dream, not mine," said the bundle. "I don't see anything I recognize."
"Yeah, we're in a castle," said Denali. "We're supposed to be princesses." Inspiration struck her. "You should probably be a princess too. With a dress."
The ropy thing was suddenly clad in shimmering green, with a mesh cap of sorts that threaded through the worms at one end. The other end came off the bier and split into two bundles, and now there were two princesses standing in the tower, one awkwardly learning the ropes of how to stand bipedally, but learning fast.
Denali guided the other princess over to the window. Out in the distance, a man on a charger was lopping away at the poisonous shrubs and trees that stood between him and the castle. Going was slow. Denali watched his progress.
"Who's that?" asked the worms.
"That's our prince," said Denali. "He's going to save us."
"Do we need saving?"
"Not really." Denali looked at the other princess. Talking with a bundle of worms didn't seem strange at all for some reason.
"I'm called Denali," she said.
"My name's Itikit," said the not-alien princess.
They watched their prince approach.
**
The next night they were in Itikit's dreams. They swam through a deep ocean, illuminated by phosphorescent bubbles and strands. Itikit swam like a seal. It was harder for Denali at first, but she got the hang of it fast. It never occurred to her to worry about not breathing.
"You're not really a princess, are you?" asked Itikit.
"No, I'm just a regular girl," Denali said. "But it's fun to play make-believe."
"What's that?" asked Itikit.
"It's where you pretend you're something that you're not, and it's fun," said Denali. "Like, in this dream, I'm pretending I'm a bundle-of-worms swimming in the ocean. Whee!"
"Oh," said Itikit. "I guess I'm playing make-believe in this dream too. I'm not allowed to swim freely like this."
"How come?" asked Denali. "This is fun!"
"Well," said Itikit, "my family are prisoners."
Denali drew up short. "What are you talking about?" she asked.
"I have three parents," Itikit explained. "They served on the Science Council for our government. They got me into this dream program. But there has been a war. We fought with the Crambor for who gets to own our world, and we lost." Itikit flashed through corals and whipped through the stalks of something like kelp. "We're kept in a special camp. They make my parents do stuff. I'm afraid they're going to kill my parents a lot of the time."
Itikit began jerking convulsively. Denali took this to be a crying analog and twined herself around Itikit.
"I'm afraid a lot too," she said. "When I'm not dreaming, I'm really sick. I might die. Sometimes they do operations on me to make me less sick. I'm more scared of the operations than I am of dying."
"I don't like to be scared," said Itikit.
"Me neither," said Denali. The two dreamers snuggled together and swam as one through the iridescent sea.
**
Denali was falling. She was also drinking tea. There was a beautiful round table with tablecloth and tea service set up on it, all falling at the same rate as Denali. She latched onto a chair and swung herself into it, then reached for the teapot. As she did, Itikit plopped into the chair on the opposite side.
"Guess what!" she said excitedly.
"What?" asked Denali. "And would you like tea?"
Itikit eyed it suspiciously. "What do I do with it?"
"Well, you could drink it," Denali said. "But really it's more fun to pass it around and be polite."
"Okay. May I please have some tea?" asked Itikit.
"Of course; I'll pour," said Denali. "What's going on?"
"I played dress-up!" said Itikit proudly.
"Do tell, do tell," encouraged Denali, pouring the tea and then passing the cream and sugar. Her ponytail whipped straight up in the air as they fell.
"Well!" said Itikit. "Every morning they separate the children from the adults and send the adults off to work camp. Well, me and my spawn-mate Ubulun didn't want to be separated and go to Indoctrination School. So, we disassembled!"
"You what?"
"Disassembled." Itikit struggled for the words. "I'm made up of twelve strands; you call them worms. Every year our parents spin us a new strand and it gets added to our bundle. When we add strands we get a little smarter and a little more mature. Back when I was only three strands I couldn't even feed myself. When I was six strands I started to learn to speak. Now I'm twelve. When I get fifteen strands we go through the Fusing; our strands stick together forever, and we're adults and can have our own children. But before then we can unwind our strands whenever we want to."
"Really?" asked Denali. "That's so cool. We're all just one big piece of meat. We don't come apart."
"Then how do you fix yourself when you get hurt?" asked Itikit. "When we hurt a strand, we just throw it away and our parents spin us a new one, and then we're good as new."
"Wow!" said Denali. "What happens to the bad strand?"
"Well, if it survives, we let it loose into the ocean," said Itikit. "It can feed out there like a dumb animal. And if it's lucky, it can link up with other loose strands and become an intelligent creature again."
"When we get hurt, it's hard." Denali thought of her numerous surgeries. One was coming up in a week. "There's a lot of pain and we only get better slowly. It sucks."
"Oh. I'm sorry," said itikit. "Well, anyway, we can disassemble for a while, but we have to reassemble quickly if we don't want to lose our sense of self. Anyway, me and Ubulun disassembled and wove ourselves into each other so we looked like a tube of twenty-one strands – an adult. And then we went with the adults into the work-camp!"
"How exciting!" said Denali. She tried to drop cubes of sugar into her tea but they kept flying upwards. "Then what happened."
"Well, it wasn't much fun," admitted Itikit. "When we revealed ourselves to our parents, they were upset. They made us reassemble and took us to the Crambor guards. They apologized and asked that we not be hurt and be taken back to Indoctrination Camp. The guards took us back. The end."
"Huh," said Denali. "Did you get punished?"
"No," said Itikit, "but my parent got hurt. I saw a guard cut its bundle; a couple of strands were severed. My other parents begged and pleaded for mercy. It was awful to watch. Later on my parents told me never to do anything like that again, or we could all be executed."
"That's terrible," said Denali.
"Yeah," said itikit, "but I got to play make-believe, like I was an adult."
"Pretty cool," Denali admitted.
**
They were shooting through tubes of bubbles. Denali was very quiet. "What's the matter?" asked Itikit.
"My surgery's tomorrow," said Denali. "They're going to remove a big tumor. It's sort of stuck between my heart and my lungs, in a very bad place. It's got to come out, but it's not going to be easy."
"I'm sorry," said itikit. "I wish you could just disassemble. Then you could throw the bad parts away and put the rest back together."
"Can't do that," said Denali. "Mom's not saying anything, but I know that I might die. I don't want to die, Itikit."
"Me neither," said Itikit. "I'm scared too. Things have gotten bad. We heard yesterday that an entire pool-block of captives was taken to a holding tank to be decontaminated. Only, the rumor is, it's just a big steam chamber. Nobody's heard from that entire pool-block since. They've disappeared. My parents are worried that they might come for us too."
"Oh no," said Denali. "I'm keeping my fingers crossed."
"What does that mean?" asked Itikit. Denali showed her.
"For luck," said Denali.
Itikit crossed two of her strands. "For luck," she echoed. "Yeah."
Denali looked at Itikit. "I can be brave if you can," she said.
"Then be brave," said itikit.
**
Doctor Truong pulled his mask off as he came out into the waiting room. Simone stood up immediately.
The doctor smiled. "She did great," he said.
"Oh, my baby," gasped Simone, collapsing back into her chair under the weight of her relief.
"We think we got all of it. Your daughter's a trooper. It'll take her a while to come out of it, but you can talk to her probably within twelve hours." Doctor Truong grinned. "She's single-minded about that somnostat, I'll tell you that."
"How do you mean?" asked Simone.
"Well, it's the darndest thing," said Doctor Truong. "I had to take the somnostat off of her to do the procedure. She made me promise we'd put it back onto her while she was coming out of it so she could talk with her friend."
**
She was tap-dancing on a stage, footlights and all. There was nobody out in the audience, but Denali didn't care. Her feet flew across the stage in a way she could only dream about.
"Don't you want to dance?" she asked itikit.
"No," said Itikit.
"What's the matter?" asked Denali, putting an arm around her friend. Itikit leaned in.
"Oh Denali, it's awful," said itikit, her bundle of tubules convulsing. "They took my parents away."
"No! Oh, Itikit, tell me."
"I think they took them to the steam tank. They took all the members of the Science Directorate and their families away. I don’t know why I'm still alive but I think I might be next. They've stuck me in a bare holding tank all by myself. They didn't take my somnostat; I don't think they knew what it was. Denali, I'm afraid I'm going to die."
Denali squeezed Itikit. "You made me be brave," she said. "Now you be brave for me. Don't cry. It's going to be okay. You're going to survive."
"I'm so afraid," said Itikit. Denali stroked her friend's strands.
"Tell me about where they're holding you," she demanded.
"It's just a little tank," Itikit said. "There's no light except what comes in through the oxygenator grille. There's a little drain at the bottom. That's it."
"A drain?" Denali pushed itikit away. "How big a drain?"
"I dunno," said Itikit. "Why?"
"Because you could disassemble," said Denali. "You could turn into a bunch of strands and get down the drain one by one."
"No I couldn't," said Itikit. "I'd only have a few minutes to reassemble or I'd lose my sense of self. I'd go back to individual loose strands swimming in the sea – dumb animals eating single-celled organisms."
"But you might survive," said Denali. "And the Crambor wouldn't care about a bunch of dumb strands swimming away. You said yourself: you might get lucky and reform. It's better than boiling alive."
"I'm scared of losing myself," said Itikit.
"I'm scared of losing you!" Something occurred to Denali.
"Will your somnostat fit down the drain?" she asked.
"Yes, it's very narrow," said Itikit. "It fits around my first strand, like a princess's ring."
"Then you'll never be all the way lost," said Denali decisively. "That strand will have me in its dreams, and I'll have it in mine. Oh, Itikit – be brave and save yourself."
The two friends held each other for a long time.
**
"You're very quiet," said Simone at the breakfast table.
Denali sat in her highchair and poked at her breakfast. "I'm not really very hungry."
Simone sighed. "Honey," she said, "it's been two weeks since you lost contact with your friend. I know you're worried, but you've got to eat. And you definitely can't keep taking naps all the time hoping to get back to the dreamspace."
"I know," said Denali irritatedly. She pressed the stud to make the chair transfer her into the ambulator. "It's okay, Mama. I'm just feeling a little weak from all the antibiotics they got me on. And my scar is itching really badly. Do you think I could go swimming today?"
"I think you're healed up enough," said Simone. This was a promising sign; getting Denali back in the therapy pool would be a positive step towards getting her back into the real world.
Denali smiled and rolled towards her bedroom to find her custom-made swimsuit. Swimming would feel good, she knew. She wanted to get lots of practice in.
Because during the previous night, she had felt something. It was just a brushing touch in her dream, a feeling of something swimming freely in open water, looping about itself. She felt the primal joy of plunging through chilly seas, scudding between rocks, sifting microscopic creatures out of the water and digesting them. And, too, she felt the wonder of touching the skin of another being like her, grappling it and holding it close to her, becoming one with it, and in so doing broadening the dimensions of her understanding.
Denali stripped out of her PJ's and struggled to pull on her bathing cap with one hand. She wanted to feel the water sliding across her body, and slowly kick her way from one side of the pool to the other.
Swimming, she thought. Soon I'm going to be doing a lot more of it.