The Demons at Rainbow Bridge

Modra Stryke seemed radiant when she returned to the capital, and she looked fabulous as well. She was made-up, dressed in a fancy outfit that certainly wasn’t cheap, and she’d had her flaming red hair redone by somebody who really knew what they were doing. Dressed, made-up, even bedecked with jewelry, she looked so fine that had she not been well-known around the grungier end of the spaceport, she most certainly would have been mugged.

Each of the small, independent teams had an office there; nothing more than a cubicle in a run-down warehouse, but it was an address nonetheless. She waltzed in jauntily, getting compliments from the humans who could recognize her and stares of disbelief from the other races who knew her but didn’t understand human vanity at all.

The central "receptionist," was a Quamahl with six arms terminating in pincerlike yet soft claws and another at the end of a long, trunklike snout. It was a creature who could not appreciate human appearance at all, and acted as if there was nothing different about her. In point of fact, the Quamahl probably couldn’t see any difference, considering its own standards were so different and also considering that it had never met a human it didn’t find repulsive-looking.

"I see you are back," grumbled the Quamahl.

She smiled and nodded, used to the creature. "Anybody up there?"

"Just Lankur right now, probably sound asleep. The Durquist is working on the ship and Trannon Kose is in the city at the Exchange on some kind of business errand."

She nodded. "Tris will do just fine." she walked to the square lift that was the only way so many different shapes could be accommodated and said, "Four." The lift immediately hummed, and rose with her to the fourth-level catwalk.

She walked past various small offices she knew well, noting that most were dark, then got to hers, opened it and walked in.

Tris Lankur was not asleep; in fact, he was on the phone arguing with somebody, but when he looked up and saw her he said, "Look, something’s come up. I’ll get back to you." He hung up, then settled back and took all of her in. Lankur was one of the few in the complex who could appreciate her, and he gave a soft whistle.

"My, oh, my! A few weeks home does wonders," he commented.

She smiled. "I came right over. Besides, I wanted to keep looking like a woman for a little while longer."

"You certainly do that," he agreed, "although you don’t look too bad without all that and in a skintight team suit, either. At least nobody would ever mistake you for me." He paused a moment, sensing there was something more on her mind that she was reluctant to broach. "You work out your problems?"

"I—I think so," she responded, her expression suddenly serious, thinking about how to say what she had to say. Finally she sighed and said, "Oh, the hell with it. Tris, I got married."

He was so surprised that he stiffened, and his brow furled, and he grew suddenly a bit cold. Then he chuckled. "Married? Baby, nobody gets married anymore. Not around here, anyway, and not in our kind of business."

"Yeah, well, I used to think that, too, Tris, and maybe for most people it’s still true, but—well, it was like me taking over this company. An impulse, a gamble, but one that felt right for me."

He stared at her. "You’re serious!"

She nodded.

That chill stiffness was suddenly back. "Who to? Nobody I know, I feel certain. Couldn’t be anybody you knew, either, unless it was some old sweetheart from the home fires."

She sighed, cleared the junk off a stool, and sat down. "Look, this is kind of hard to explain. I’m not even sure I can explain it. It just—happened—that’s all. After that last job I was just a wreck. Call me a coward or just call it the one that put me over, but that was the case. I had nightmares, I was paranoid, I kept expecting tentacles to rise from anything liquid, even my soup. I needed company, somebody to lean on right then, and I met this guy who was very nice and very understanding and very interesting. I kept it up with him because we both came from villages in the same county back home, and, at first, it was just because he was nice, and then it was also because I discovered he had money, and finally because I enjoyed his company. I think I was somebody exotic to him, too; a First Team owner who was from the same place he was but who had been through the kind of experiences he’d only dreamed about. I think maybe that was part of it—I lost my feel for the romance of this job, but he still had it."

"So you have a nice time, you have a few laughs, maybe even a roll in the hay, and you have a new friend and contact," Lankur responded. "You didn’t have to marry this guy!"

"I know, I—look, this is hard for me, okay? It just seemed so right, somehow, and the longer it went on, the more right it seemed, at least for me. He was, just, well, very kind and very gentle and treated me like I hadn’t been treated since before I left home, only with respect, too. Hell, I had to seduce him, he was so nice. When I was with him I didn’t have the bad dreams, didn’t feel so insecure, got some of my empty spots filled up again. And I gave him something, too; like his overlooking all my faults and thinking of me as if I were his romantic fantasy. I’m an empath, remember. I could feel it, and feel his genuineness."

She could feel now, too, and it disturbed her. Around and in Tris Lankur there seemed to be a cold, utterly dark emptiness, a mixture of barely controlled rage mixed with tremendous—sorrow. It wasn’t what she expected at all. Surprise, yes, but his emotional reaction was more akin to a husband who thought he had the perfect marriage learning that his wife had run off with another man.

"Damn it, Tris! Stop it! We weren’t married! We were—are—partners!"

He stared at her with a cold hurt inside him that was physically painful for her to bear. "You could’a married me if you had to be married. Somehow I just never saw you as the type. Hell, we spent five years together and never even screwed for fun."

She felt acutely uncomfortable, her earlier mood completely destroyed by her empathic awareness of his pain. "You said it yourself—people out here, outside home and culture, don’t get married. Least of all you. I know I turned you on more than once, and you turned me on, too, but if we’d had sex, it would have changed things and you know it. I would have been demoted to on-board whore and there would have been no sense of equality at all. You’re too much in love with this lifestyle to love somebody personally. Sex you got back here, probably better than I could do it."

"And you didn’t?"

"I—I wasn’t any virgin when I came here, I’ll admit that, but I decided when I wanted to get into this business that it would be everything to me, that until lightning struck I wouldn’t have any sex life, and I didn’t. Not until I was on the way home. It happens when you’re an empath. There’s no mistaking lust for love. The way you’re feeling right now is like I betrayed you or something. We’re not lovers, Tris! We never were! Just like you, I was in love with the job, the life, the thrills and challenges, not with anybody personal. Oh, I do love you, in the same way I love Tran and even the Durquist and poor Hama, too, but it’s not the same kind of love."

Nothing inside him died down or quieted, although he remained on the surface a model of control as always. "So now what? You quit or sell out and go hobnob with the business types and be a good little wife and make tons of babies?"

"No, no! Not exactly, anyway. Yolan—my husband—is a partner in a company with a seat on several exchanges. He’s about to switch from commodities over to the full Exchange, the big one. He won’t be making the real decisions, of course—I don’t think any human has that much status yet—but he can influence the implementation of the investments. In effect, we’ve become, through my marriage and the agreements we signed, a subsidiary of his company. Automatic business—as much as we want, with a good bankroll to boot. We keep going, just like before. The only difference he insisted on, and the way the last one went he didn’t have to insist very much, was that I not be a member of the ground team. Tran’s wanted to get off backup for years, ever since I knocked him out of his slot by coming aboard. I know the ship and I’ve had the experience on the ground now to do backup. That way I’ll be the intermediary between the company and the team. To you and the others, it won’t seem any different, except that Tran will be going down instead of me. It’s perfect, don’t you see?"

His hurt was rapidly being superseded by rage, and he finally couldn’t keep it in any longer. "Business as usual, huh? Nothing changes, except that we become some damned salaried employees and lose our independence and I have to work with you close as ever knowing—" He paused. "Why did you come back? Why not at least have enough feeling for me to sell out and vanish? I could handle that, sooner or later, but this—!"

"Damn it, I was always out of reach before!"

"Of everybody! And not out-front unattainable! Damn it, this changes everything! And, sooner or later, Mister Broker’s gonna want kids ’cause it’s the final fulfillment and you’ll be sitting there bloated and pregnant with another guy’s kid and—fuck it! Fuck you!"

She felt so awful at his reaction that she groped for what to say. "I—I had no idea this would be your reaction! I—I don’t know what to do now."

"Undo it! Get a divorce or annulment or whatever it takes. Cancel the deal. Go back to square one again!"

"That’s not fair! I’ve finally found somebody who loves me for me and I finally have a few things right! I’m not going to throw it all away!"

"Not fair? Not fair? You bet your iron heart it’s not fair!" He suddenly got up and swept all the papers, phone, intercom, and most of the contents of the desk onto the floor, then stalked out and slammed the door so hard that had the window been glass, it would have shattered.

She hadn’t cried in years, but she had to cry now, and she still wasn’t absolutely sure why she felt so guilty, but she stared at that door for a very long time.

She was still there when the Durquist came in.

To everyone, a Durquist was called simply a Durquist. Although they were as individual as most other races, they all seemed to have the same personality to others, and they all looked and sounded pretty much alike except to other Durquists. The Durquist culture somehow got along without names; they tried to explain it to others, but such comments as "Why do we need names when we know who we are and we aren’t anyone else?" quickly spun non-Durquist heads and the subject got changed.

Strictly speaking, a Durquist was shaped like a five-pointed star around a central orifice that looked very much like a huge set of jet-black human lips, behind which, mostly invisible to the onlooker, were row after row of sharp, pointed teeth. Brain, stomach, and all the internal organs were somehow clustered inside that hard center. From it emerged the arms—fluid, sucker-clad, able to stretch and twist and bend in almost infinite ways, yet with incredibly powerful muscles. The Durquist’s eyes were a stalked pair, one on each side of the mouth; it allowed the creature to assume almost any posture from walking upright on any two arms of its choice and looking weirdly humanoid from a distance or on any combination of four.

The Durquist came in bipedally, the only practical way to get in the door, and the two eyes fixed on Modra.

"They said that you came in, and shortly after, Tris left as if he were on his way to blow up the Exchange and anything and anyone else who got in his way," the creature said. "You want to tell me about it?"

She nodded, and proceeded to recount the whole tale, sparing nothing. The Durquist settled back and listened intently, interrupting only a couple of times to clarify a vague point.

When she finished, the creature was silent for a moment, then said, "I do not fully understand your people, you know, for all that we live so closely together, but there are constants among the bulk of races, particularly when more than one sex is involved, and I am curious and observant by nature. It may be that I am totally wrong in the way I interpret these things, but I find it personally astonishing that you would think that he would react any differently than he did."

"I thought he’d be surprised, maybe have a little bruised ego, but nothing like what I got," she responded.

"I would have thought an empath in particular would never be taken that way. I know that an empath supposedly can tell lust from love, but it is possible that being too familiar for too long would blur the interpretation. What you could instantly divine in others you could not in him, because it was slow, steady, day-to-day, and, in essence, you tuned it out."

"He—has great control, too, until today," she told him. "An ability to damp down what rises, to lessen what was there. They say that telepaths can read the surface thoughts but often miss what is way down deep. I think maybe it’s that way with me."

"You felt his growing respect and concurrently growing affection, and it was what you wanted to feel from him, so you dug no deeper. The cause of most misery in any history isn’t the lack of data, but the misinterpreting and distortion of the data. You have brothers, I believe?"

She nodded. "Yes, two."

"You mistook him for another brother, then. It is—comprehensible, at any rate. The respect you earned caused him to love you, but you, an empath, could not tell one from the other. Being neither empathic nor telepathic himself, he was free to fantasize. Were he an empath, he would save done the opposite of you and mistaken the respect and affection for love. There is a great tragic saga in all this. In fact, I think I saw it on one of the entertainment channels the other day."

"Don’t go your usual cynical ways on me right now," she implored him, sincerely trying to figure it out. "I need advice."

"Why? He loves you. You do not love him. It seems a perfect tragic impasse."

"But I do love him—just not in the same way."

"No. You do not love him. you love what he represents—what we all represent. More of that bad entertainment, You came here with all you had because you were in love with an idea. You found us in a time of need and you fell in love with the team and the lifestyle. What you love in Tris is his near perfect personality for the kind of cast you sought. Adventurous, brave, daring, highly competent, but a rogue. Not quite the sterling, perfect hero of fiction, but with enough of those qualities that you could ignore or tune out the flaws. You laid upon him your romantic vision, and even your empathic ability could not be allowed to soil he image. Yet you are intelligent enough to know that fiction ends before the romance goes bad; that there is no happily ever after with that kind of person. If there was, he would cease to be the person he was and become, in a word, dull. You want Tris to be what your romances imagine him to be. To have settled on him would have been to destroy the very qualities in him that you loved. That is not difficult to understand. Naive; juvenile, perhaps, but understandable even to someone like me."

"You’re making me sound like some kind of idiot."

"The ignorance of the immature is common, regardless of age or experience. Tris in his own way is living out a romantic fantasy and is as guilty, if not more so, as you. But it is you who made the choice, not him, because he is a permanent adolescent. You needed more. You finally looked death in the face and you didn’t like it. You found that you needed solidity, permanence, some kind of security, some guarantee of a contented future no matter how this went, and you needed it just as much, but no more, as you needed the team life and somebody like Tris. In your naiveté, and emotional upset at the admittedly horrible experience you survived, you saw a way to have both. The solidity and fallback that your broker offered, and the adventure and challenge of the team. Even now, you have been sitting here because you do not want to accept the reality that you cannot have both. you must choose—Tris and the rest of us, or the solid and loving if comparatively dull life of a broker’s mate, possibly getting a job in his firm."

She felt suddenly angry, as if an orderly and perfect world had just been burned to ashes before her eyes. "And why should I have to choose? I’m the true owner of this company. I hold the majority. If he’s not happy with it, he can leave. So can you and Tran. I’ll find others, if I have to."

"It is not that simple. I’m getting on in years, and there are younger ones in the Guild Halls right now looking for any position I might fill. I have greater experience than they, but that only makes me more expensive to a prospective hire. The same with Tran. We might eventually find other work, but when you go through this so many times you become insecure. Nobody in this buyer’s market is secure unless they are already working, and nobody voluntarily gives up a berth for that same reason. For Tris it is even worse. This is all he has. He’s spent his whole life crawling up from the most abysmal beginnings on a world of perpetual poverty and woefully short lives to where he is captain of a team. Not much of a team, and not much of a ship or bank account, but compared to where he started, it is higher than he ever dreamed of getting. To ask him to walk out, to give it all up, when whatever we are he built, is to ask him to commit suicide. He can’t leave. Even less than the rest of us, he has nowhere else to go. There are only two things that matter to him in this whole universe, and they are this company and you. You have removed yourself from even his fantasies and he could not stand to work with you as usual, when every contact with you will reinforce the hurt. In one moment you removed everything he had, even his dreams."

She sighed. "Shit! I feel like a rotten bastard, but I don’t see a way out. Back home, when we went to get married, they of course sent us to some psychs—hypnos, as usual. The psychs approved the marriage, said it was the best thing for both of us, but with conditions. They said I needed this team life, too, but to continue with it, being away from each other for many weeks at a time, me with Tris, and him back here maybe wondering if he did the right thing, the only way they’d sign off is if we both submitted to a hypno bonding. No matter what feelings I have on other levels for Tris, I feel no physical attraction to him at all—or any other man but one, and that one only wants, desires, or can get it up for one woman—me. No doubts, no questions, no insecurities, you see?"

"You can do the same thing to your mind with drugs and chemicals and not have to bother with all the paperwork," the Durquist grumbled. "Still, we have what is classically known as a ‘situation’ here. I just hope Tris isn’t off to do something rash and stupid. Is your husband here in the city and well protected?"

Her head snapped up and she stared at the star creature. "You mean—! Oh, my God! He might, too! But, no, wait a minute. The marriage isn’t registered here yet, so he can’t look it up, and I never gave him Yolan’s last name or even a company name, let alone an address. But I think I should call Yolan, anyway."

"Indeed. Tris, as you well know, can be quite—resourceful."

She suddenly snapped into action. "Get hold of Tran—I don’t care where he is or what he’s doing. I’ll call Yolan and fill him in. Might be an idea to call the Prefecture and have them on the lookout as well. If Tris has really gone round the bend, they can help, and if not, he’s bound to wind up in one of their holding cells sleeping it off."

But when a man like Tris was hurting like he was and yet was as resourceful as he was, in a city like the capital, if he wanted to stay invisible he very well could do so. A day passed, then two, then three. Even Trannon Kose’s underworld contacts couldn’t turn up much—or wouldn’t. Humans were such a tiny and insignificant group here on the capital world that those who were not a part of the system tended to be very clannish; it would take a human who knew the underworld to find a man who didn’t want to be found.

At the end of the fourth day following Tris’s disappearance, she began to think, even hope, that the Durquist had been wrong. After five years she hated to part with Tris in this way and with this much hurt, but if he couldn’t bear working with her under the new conditions, well, then good luck and Godspeed to him.

But in the middle of the night, in the high-rise comfort of the big apartment she now shared with her husband, the phone awakened her and the robotic switchboard put it through because it was from one of the few who had the right to preempt.

It was Trannon Kose.

"I think you better get down here," the pilot told her. ‘District Four, Hospital Nine, Intraspecies Intensive Care."

She was suddenly awake. "Why? What’s the matter?"

"I found Tris. Or, rather, the coppers found him. I—I think you better get down here as soon as you can. I’ve called the Durquist and he’s on the way."

"Why? What’s the matter?"

"I just think you ought to come down here, Modra. Now. There are decisions to be made." And, with that, he cut the connection.

Yolan offered to take her, but she told him to get back to sleep. He had a long day ahead and this was her business right now, not his.

Running a hospital capable of handling emergencies for such a wide variety of species wasn’t easy; most hospitals were in districts mainly populated by only two or three races and set up for them. Transport was swift in any event, and, even for humans, there was at least someplace within minutes of an emergency that could handle a human. Expert care was not as much of a problem, but for quite different reasons.

Trannon Kose was a Ybrum, a creature that looked like a set of oval pods connected by spindly, furry, giant pipe cleaners. He looked fragile, but moved with a swiftness and grace that belied his appearance, and the Ybrum were a pretty tough bunch when they had to be.

Modra barged in, spotted Tran and the Durquist, and went right to them. "All right, now what’s all this about?"

"Apparently I was quite correct in my basic analysis," the Durquist responded. "Tris was suddenly placed in an untenable position, losing what he most cared for and yet unable to leave as his sanity demanded. We feared that this would take the form of violence, and it did, but not in the way we originally thought."

"He apparently headed straight for the District and went under," Kose put in. "He popped so many feelgoods and so much else that they had to send his blood up for chemical analysis just to find out how much was natural. He stayed like that for the past three and a half days, in a hole provided by an underworld friend for whom we’ve done some favors now and again. Apparently he overdosed, awoke, and felt the massive depression that coming down from such a chemical high produces, which added to his existing depression. He shot himself in the head, apparently with some sort of archaic projectile weapon he either owned or got from somebody down there."

She took a sharp breath and stiffened as the shock hit her. "He’s dead, then?"

"That is the usual condition one finds oneself in after blowing one’s brains out," the Durquist responded pragmatically. "The question now is whether or not to let him stay that way."

That shocked her almost as much as the initial news. "Huh? But you just said—"

"That he is dead," the Durquist completed. "In most cases that would be it, but we’re in the capital. The technology available here is quite a bit more advanced than they allow us mere citizens, since all the surgeons are cymols capable of plugging themselves in and reading into their own brains, or whatever is inside those heads, the exact medical data and skills they need for any race It appears that we and Tris have blundered into a moral, legal, and ethical conundrum of the Guardians themselves. Ah—here’s the physician in charge now. We wanted you here for this, since in a way it’s up to us."

The surgeon turned out to be a human, or at least a human in appearance, and a rather young and delicate-looking woman at that, with dark features and very short hair, dressed in a surgical gown. she was walking a bit oddly, and there was something unnerving in her manner as she approached.

To Modra, there was an additional unnerving aspect as well. She was an empath, and while she could damp it down, it was never completely suppressed, and, being tired, she was even less able to do so. Almost everyone in this reception center radiated something—fear, concern, joy, sorrow—all those things common to almost all sentient life forms. All but the surgeon and a few of the others in medical garb. She almost had to force herself to ignore that sense she had that most did not, and remember that the doctor was really there. There were no emotions, no feelings, emanating from the doctor at all, any more than from the walls or desks or chairs.

"I apologize if I seem out of sorts," the surgeon told them, "but at the moment I have just finished five procedures on five different life forms and I have the data, from anatomy and physiology down to the molecular level, as well as the psychological data on all of them, inside me. It often creates problems, as all are equal in my mind at the moment and the human one is, shall we say, outnumbered."

"That’s all right," Modra responded, able to comprehend the problem if not the kind of brain that could hold that much data. "Now, what’s this all about?"

"Your associate committed suicide, but we were able to have a crew there within a few minutes, get him tanked, and perform a data readout before full electrochemical activity ceased in the undamaged areas. The damage was quite extensive but mostly to the forebrain area; the way the human mind stores data is quite complex but is not generally in those areas, which are used primarily for synthesis. We lost much of the newest information but got most of the rest into storage. It’s routine in these cases, and helps us understand the various races better and also why and how these things happen."

"Let me get this straight," Modra said, feelingly bit odd, as if this weren’t really happening, but some sort of dream. "He’s dead, but you have his memories in some kind of storage bank, like computer data?"

"Something like that, yes. It is not terribly common that we can get this much—the damage is usually to areas further back as well and we usually get to the victim too late—but it’s not unheard of. We get a few dozen cases a year, mostly from accidents of course, so there are procedures to be followed. Your company insurance was paid up only three days ago after long arrears, but it was paid up before this occurred and there is a determination that the two actions, the premium payment and the suicide, are not related. That is, the patient didn’t know about the insurance, and you three did not suspect the patient would kill himself. As an employee, he is therefore fully covered for any procedures we might do."

"Somehow the fact that we’re insured is not very important to me right now," Modra said dryly.

"No, it simply calls for a decision on your part, since the patient has no declared next of kin and is, therefore, subject to your company’s decisions."

"You mean," Modra asked, mild hope growing within her, "that you can actually restore him to life?"

"In a manner of speaking only. If it were simply a matter of being able to restore him, we would do so, curing at the same time the root cause of his psychosis, of course. The insurance would mandate it, since the death benefit is huge. What is possible in these cases is to perform the cymol conversion, then read back in his memories and simulate as much as possible of his old self, just as all of the information for five races is now inside me."

The implications of this were staggering. "You mean—remove his brain, essentially, and replace it with an artificial brain, a computer of some kind capable of running the body and then feed it data to convince it that it was still him?"

The doctor reached up to her own hair and tugged at it gently, removing the natural-looking wig as if it were a hat She was totally bald beneath, without a sign of hair—or surgery—but on one side of the skull was a large rectangular metal plate that seemed to have hundreds upon hundreds of tiny silver dots on it. "It is not quite as bad as all that," she said.

Modra sank slowly into a chair that wasn’t really built for the human form. She just had to sit down, though. It was strange—somehow she felt curiously unreal, disconnected, as if this weren’t really happening. Still, she was there, and clearly the other two were deferring in some measure to her as owner of the company.

She tried to think about this, but really couldn’t. Finally she said, "So it would look like Tris and have Tris’s memories but it wouldn’t really be Tris."

"Yes and no," the doctor responded, replacing her hair and looking more human again. "At the root level, he would be cymol, not human. His personality would be synthesized from his own recorded self-images and from any that you all provide, but it would be synthesized, a layer atop the cymol. He would not be the same, but he would seem—close. The psychochemistry would no longer be there for many things. Emotions would be synthesized, rather than real, and would never be out of control. Certain drives that are brain-driven would no longer exist. Things like sexual urges, rages, even endorphin highs, would be impossible, of course. My body, for example, requires rest but my brain requires no sleep."

"I don’t want some inhuman android going around animating his corpse!" she snapped, then realized how that sounded. "It’s different with you and the others. I mean, I don’t know you. I didn’t know you before you became a cymol, and I have no personal attachments or biases."

"I believe," the Durquist interjected, "that the real questions here go beyond that. I find the decision distasteful, but I am forced to be totally pragmatic here. If we say yes, we get back an approximation of Tris Lankur. If we say no, he dies completely."

"Essentially. I must add, at the risk of sounding insensitive, that you would in that case forfeit the death benefit from the insurance, since the cymol route was available and was offered."

"I don’t care about the damned money!" Modra snapped. "Damn it, I was the one who caused this! I was the one who killed him! Isn’t that bad enough? Isn’t that enough for me to have to live with? Do I have to work with a living, breathing reminder of what I’ve done?"

"Fascinating," the Durquist commented, mostly to himself. "This is a most intriguing wrinkle. One that Tris, wherever his spirit is now, if such a thing exists for humans, must find cynically amusing. By his action, he has precisely reversed your positions, handing you the very situation that you presented to him. Instead of his being forced to live and work on the ship around you, with a constant reminder of what he can never have, it is you who would be in that situation."

"I—I don’t think I could do it any more than he could!" she told him.

"Then you could quit the team as you suggested he do. Unlike him, you have an alternative livelihood. We already have to hire a replacement for poor Hama; finding an experienced empath would not be much more of a chore. You can leave, or you could work with him."

"I could let him die!"

"A singularly selfish act, although I fear one in character at least as far as the new Modra is concerned. Having a cymol on the team would transform us from a second-rate and never-was broken down company into one that would be almost, if not absolutely, unique. The access to the master data banks alone would be invaluable. The competitive advantage alone would be enormous. The potential staggers even me. Not to mention having someone who could carry with them the skills and data for everything from highly technical analysis to patching up a Durquist or a Ybrum. And, although imperfectly, it would go a ways to undoing what you originally caused. For competitive, commercial, economic reasons you must approve it. And for selfish reasons, too. A team is no better than its members. If you alone remain, with that dilapidated ship and trash-filled office, your husband’s company will hardly send business your way. They’ll write you off. A team is called a team because it always works together, knows each other. That is how I was able to find you back on that slime world. How you and Tris could find each other and work together so seamlessly. No husband worth anything would let you go out with a totally new, green crew. No Exchange member corporation would tolerate it."

"And," Trannon Kose put in, "you owe it to him."

She looked up at them in anguish, looking for friends and finding only torturers. "You two really would want that?"

Of course not," Tran responded simply. "We want Tris back. But, if we can’t have him, then we want the next best thing."

"And there is the pragmatic side," the Durquist added. "We do not do this sort of work because it is a fun game. If I could sacrifice the advantage presented here and have the old Tris back, I would do so, because the integrity of the team comes before all else, and because he was my friend and comrade. We cannot have the old Tris back. He is gone, and I am still here. Hama is gone, but I am still here, too. Unlike poor Hama, however, Tris left us a legacy which can profit those of us still here. I am not inclined to refuse it because you might feel just awful to get it. I will supplement Tran’s sage comment. You owe it to us. Or would you rather slink back to your kind husband and fancy apartment, with two more so-called friends and long associates to add to your list of victims?"

She didn’t have any reply to that, and just sat there for several minutes, not really able to think. Finally she looked at the surgeon and asked, "Just how much of what we’d get would be Tris? And how much would be illusion?"

The surgeon hardly blinked at that one. "To be truthful, a fair amount of him will survive. The nature and area of the wound, and its precision, well, it almost seems as if going cymol was what he had in mind all along, as incredible as that may seem."

"Not very incredible," commented the Durquist. "It would be just the sort of revenge he’d come up with, and just the type of gamble."

Modra gave the Durquist a killing look, but realized it was true "Honestly, though—how much of the real him would—come back?"

"Memory, habit patterns, that sort of thing. Much of what made him a unique individual. What is damaged beyond repair, and would be replaced in any event, is the control center, as it were. The central processor. But there are no guarantees. There is shock, trauma, and bleeding that needed to be tended to and that took a bit of fine surgery just to get him to this point. As to illusion—as long as no fraud is involved, why worry? I am not saying that he will be the same. He won’t. But he’ll be close, for all intents and purposes."

"Look, I’ve had four hours sleep, and right now I’m just wrenched and drained out. Can’t I have a little time to think this over? Sort it out in my own mind?" Modra pleaded.

"Maintaining a body under these conditions, as well as the storage, is quite difficult and quite expensive," the surgeon noted. "The insurance company wants an immediate decision for its own cost containments, and, of course, every hour we wait decreases the chance of a successful operation. I’m afraid that no decision is a decision."

"I don’t know why you hesitate," the Durquist noted acidly. "What you are being offered is exactly what you wanted, isn’t it?"

"No!" she snapped, but her anger wasn’t really directed at the Durquist. She felt upset, confused, as if everything she’d taken for granted just shattered. This wasn’t fair, damn it! She didn’t put a stupid gun to her head, or his. She’d always had a full measure of confidence in her dealings with others because her empathic talent gave her an edge. Now it, too, had betrayed her.

But wasn’t the Durquist right? Hadn’t she been so self-centered, so blind to anybody’s interests or feelings but her own, that, in fact, she had caused all this? From her own viewpoint, from a practical and day-to-day point of view, wasn’t this exactly what she had wanted?

No! Damn it! She had loved him. Really loved him. There was never any real doubt in her mind about that. She just didn’t want to ruin him, and what she needed would have ruined him for sure.

Well, he couldn’t be more ruined than this, could he?

She should have just quit, should have just walked away and given Tris his damned company back and to hell with it. Clean break. She knew that now, understood it, but it was hindsight. It had seemed so simple, so perfect, only a few days and an eternity ago. Complicated things always seem simple to children, and in this she’d been acting like a child all along.

But, as Tris had said, once it gets in your blood you can’t just walk away. It wasn’t that easy, particularly when she did love him, too, in a far different way than she loved Yolan. And, suddenly, she could see the Durquist’s angry point, and the quiet Tran’s as well.

She could have walked away at the start, and none of this would have happened. But to walk away now would add callousness to her insensitivity. It would leave all these terrible events with no meaning at all.

But did this decision involve Tris at all, really? Tris was dead. Gone. It was done, and she couldn’t undo that, as much as she wanted to, craved to, undo it. She would replay this over and over for the rest of her life, living with regrets and might-have-beens.

More important right now were Tran and the Durquist. It was more than just self-interest on their part; she understood the unspoken code they were insisting upon. Hama’s death had been nobody’s fault; although they’d been lucky up to then, that kind of risk came with the job. But the team was a team or it was nothing. To them, Tris’s tragedy was the direct result of her actions, and that meant it was due to one member of the team letting down another. This decision boiled down to more than just her feelings and Tris’s continued existence in some way. What they were really saying was that her own feelings and interests were against the feelings and interests of the team. If she refused what they wanted, she would be in effect dissolving the team. If she said no, there wasn’t a being on a hundred worlds who would trust her to make coffee, let alone make decisions that might mean their lives. If she said no, she would not be a team player; her name would be passed around and her story told so that no spacer would ever even speak to her again. To make a mistake, even one like this, was understandable; to violate the team code was the unforgivable sin.

She hadn’t worked five years for that.

She had made a mistake and it had cost. Now they wanted to know how much it had cost, and whether it really was just a mistake.

Most spacers never struck it rich; most spacers lived the same kind of hand-to-mouth existence they had, kludging and coveting their rickety ships and equipment to keep going, doing whatever they had to do, always according to their own code and their own ways. she had not deliberately caused this thing; they would accept that. But if she said no, against the team now, she would lose the only things a spacer really had: pride, honor, and a sense of belonging, things that were earned the hard way, and the last things tossed out. No matter what, her thoughts and memories would force her to live with what she’d done. But to quit now, walk out on the team, would be to walk out on the only important thing she’d ever done or earned on her own.

But damn Tris for not sticking that gun barrel in his mouth and making so much of a mess of it that this wouldn’t have been an option!

"I cannot go against the interests of the team," she told them softly, in a voice without much expression at all. "You have my vote to proceed, Doctor. How long before we would get him back?"

"A matter of a few weeks. It’s not as easy as all that. Only when we begin the process will we have an idea of the length and problems."

"Do what you must, and the best you can for him. Tran, Durquist—we’ll need another telepath. That’s not going to be easy. Most telepaths are so unnerved by just being in the same room as a cymol that they’ll starve first."

The two others visibly relaxed when she had given the go-ahead. Suddenly it was business as usual.

"Not to mention the practical problem that we lost a team member last time out and then had this happen on top of it," the Durquist noted. "For a while we will have—what is it you humans call it?—a Jonah reputation. Yes, that’s it. This will not be easy. We may have to take what we can get."

"Do what you have to—only, if possible, we want somebody with experience. Somebody who’s used to working with an established team. We have a few weeks, and I can cover the bills until then. There’s no rush."

"I know. But the only ones that have that kind of experience and would work for us under these conditions are probably Jonahs themselves. It will be difficult." The Durquist paused, its big black lips almost clenched for a moment. Then it said, "Modra—go home and take a pill and get some sleep."

She nodded wearily. "I plan to do just that," she said, and got up to leave. The doctor had already left, since there was no point in remaining at this stage. Drained, Modra Stryke headed for the door.

"Modra," the Durquist called softly.

She stopped, turned, and faced the star creature. "Yes?"

"Welcome back, Modra."