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  “Jane, relax! Nothing is hurting you. You’re safe—”

  “No!” Her own voice sprayed air into the water all around her, surrounding her and the DNA in a snowstorm of bubbles. ‘I am hurting something! Too close, they come too close. I must guard what I have gleaned. It will not be permitted for my self to be compromised—self must survive for the gleaning’s sake. I see now! The other power speaks from the man’s mouth, it oozes around coils, into neutrons and electrons trapped in boxes. My body makes them dance, the bits of being, so fast that they burn, they boil, they… expire. The machine wraps itself in its own shroud of suicidal particles and rolls away, far away, down into the dark.”

  “That’s not the woods! That’s Matusek, Jane! You’re reliving Matusek’s squad car blowing up and rolling off the Crow Wing bluff the night he found you. You caused that, didn’t you, Jane?”

  “Jane? Jane was not Jane then.”

  “No, you hadn’t been officially tagged a Jane Doe quite yet, but, Christ, even if it was some defensive mechanism the aliens had genetically engineered into you—Matusek was just a country cop. He was calling for an ambulance, why blast him?”

  “The machine… competes.”

  “The squad car radio? That explains the tape recorders you got into telekinetic wrestling matches with later. You’re at war with household appliances? God, when they program a glitch, your snow angels do a damn good job of it. Wait. Rest now. Let me… Just calm down. You. And tell me.”

  Jane waited, dangling in half water, half air. Breathing both. She remembered the holding tank and drifting in its artificial atmosphere. She remembered the chill familiarity of half-being.

  Kevin’s voice came again in the old lulling singsong.

  “What about Kellehay?”

  “Kellehay?”

  “The other cop who found you that August night. The man who was with you when Matusek died, who rode back with you in the am—in the ecnalubma… to the hospital in Minneapolis. The young guy who died—the day after.”

  Jane felt her head shake leadenly, felt a warm grasp on her wet, chilled forearm. It threatened her grip on the DNA rope ladder.

  “Jane, you must remember! My God, he went through the window of your hospital room—backwards, from the way the glass cut him—and you were semiconscious by then.”

  “Someone came,” she remembered unhappily, her mind twisting, twisting to elude the images that came flashing up the rope. “At night. Alone. He… talked a lot. To himself, I think. He pressed the pillow over my mouth and pushed me down, down… down again—”

  Jane gasped as she felt her self slip and spiral down the endless filaments…

  “There was, there was… that within me then that would not allow my existence to end. The cells bring forth. The cells repel. He fell back, but came again, I think. I’m not sure. He came so close, and the I of me was so far away. He pushed, and was pushed away. From me. Toward himself. His self poked a hole in the night and went shattering into sharp little pieces. I never knew he had a name.”

  “We all have names. We just don’t know them sometimes.” Jane cocked her head to the deep resignation in Kevin’s voice. She pulled herself up along the DNA rope again, listening.

  “Then it was self-defense, at least,” he was saying, more to himself than to her. She could barely comprehend his words. “Kellehay had cracked, not hard to see why. He’d seen your built-in… defenses… kill his partner, but no one would listen when he said you were dangerous, especially his shrink for a day. Chalk up another one for the whiz kid… All right.”

  A sigh of air brushed Jane’s cheek. Her consciousness sensed a new location. She seemed to be floating now, on the surface, twined in weedy chains of DNA.

  “All right,” Kevin repeated. His voice no longer bubbled with distortion, as if he, too, had come back from someplace dark and deep. “We’re back in the woods I asked you about in the first place. It’s night. Dark. I’ve left you in the van to see what the men in the car behind us want. I guess I know. They’re after you—government errand boys out to deliver one missing piece of merchandise… slightly reused in a few other worlds, but your basic telekinetic human model, after all.

  “And I do my Custer’s Last Stand bit, and the two guys pretty much cream me. They’re pros. My head makes a good gong on the van doors. I wake up in the snow to find their car torched, the guys spread like… like goddamn strips of Sizzlean over the hood. How did that happen, Jane? Are you some preprogrammable Rambo? Did your built-in defenses take over again? This is the one they’ll burn us for. What the hell happened?”

  She turned her head too quickly. It hit something she couldn’t see, a black impenetrable barrier, like a box floating on the water. An oblong black box that didn’t mean anything to her.

  “Don’t fade on me now,” Kevin’s voice urged. “I know it hurts. It hurts me, too. That’s the price of being human. Be human now. Tell me! Tell me how—why—you killed those two men.”

  Jane’s hands clenched on masses of soggy DNA, wringing them taut. The bright blue balls that formed it floated alongside, buoying her.

  “Remember, Jane. You can remember anything you want to if you try hard enough. Try! It’s important. I have to know why you did it. I think I know why you forgot it—the first thing that happened to you in your own world that you blocked out. I think you don’t want to be a killing machine anymore. You want to take your risks like the rest of us. Maybe the aliens disarmed you when they let you go. Maybe you can’t do whatever you did anymore. It’s not your fault. It’s never been your fault. But I have to know. Tell me, please—”

  She sighed, and let the weeds enfold her, let herself float on their surrounding mass. From far above, a spotlight of sunshine dissected her in its rays. Her skin seemed pinned back. Exposed, her memory expanded like a ripe melon in the sun.

  At its exact center, white and dead and cold, a scene was tacked to her inner eye: the drilling yellow headlight eyes of the idling car behind the van; two hulking figures black against the light. As she saw, she spoke, feeling her lips move, but hearing nothing. Seeing only, Jane moved into her memory.

  She saw the black of night held back only by a dark fence of bare trees. The humpbacked silhouette of the car. The men waddling through the snowdrifts toward her. And there, another midnight spot—the lump of Kevin collapsed at the rear of the van.

  Dead, she thought. Gone, she thought. Thought became feeling. They came toward her, the two vague figures, came to take her—again—to somewhere else. Came to rend her memory from her—again—and give it to something else. Some machine. Came to take Kevin, who was so quiet and still, almost as still as the woods and the night.

  Were these men those who had a right to take? For a moment she was confused. And then she heard Kevin’s voice and he seemed to be saying that no one—no one at all—had a right to take… to take her. To take him. To take anyone against their I-ness.

  And so she stood there half-blinded by the headlights but seeing more efficiently than ever before. She remained, even as the defensive forces bunched in her body, leaving her little room. She remained this time, and decided. When the men came close enough to touch her, touch him, she refused them. She felt the strength pushing at the fringes of her mind, and gathered her awesome energy into a fine- honed flare of power.

  It seized her and flowed through her and spit out from her in breath and the heat of being, wind and fire propelling, repelling.

  She saw—this time she saw, clearly—how her internal energies consumed the men. She saw their thick winterwear crackle and vanish, heard bone crunching on metal, smelled ash and flesh in the clearing.

  When it was still, she looked to the form at her feet. It remained as motionless as the others. Emotion opened up its empty lungs and screamed. Memory would look no further. Jane released the rope, plunging down through every element within her, as she had then turned and fled into the endless winter woods.

  At last the defensive programming found an openi
ng and rushed inward to flood and uphold the organism, to crush a cold compress of forgetfulness over the inner eyes. Jane sank into her self, and the survival instincts she had been engineered to follow finally took her.

  The recaptured moments of consciously wielded power turned screwlike in her brain, slowly seating themselves. She felt herself sink again, under the weight of too many memories. Kevin, she thought, might call it humanity, but she was not sure she could claim that condition.

  “Jane. I’m bringing you out. Now! Hang on. Just listen to my voice. When I count to three, you’ll be in your normal consciousness. You’ll be back. One.”

  She was leagues deep by then, spinning into seclusion.

  “You’re coming up. Hang on! Two. For God’s sake, Jane—three! Three.”

  Three.

  The word hung between two worlds, between inhale and exhale. Between then and now.

  “Jane… ?”

  Something shook her, bubbles bursting and propelling her to the surface again. She sputtered, blinked her eyes to rid them of water… She opened them to utter dryness, her mouth too sand-gritted to speak. Jane stared into the blue of Kevin’s eyes and mistook them for sky. His expression clouded.

  He shook her again, desperately. “Jane? Okay?”

  Her tongue wet her lips.

  “You should remember everything now. I can make you forget if it’s too painful—”

  “No!” This time the drowning panic beat along her pulses. “If I forget what hurts, how will I remember what doesn’t?”

  His anxious face sagged into relief. He drew her hard into his arms. “Welcome to the human race,” he said, laughing and not laughing.

  Over his shoulder, Jane regarded the closed curtains of the window. “I’m not very… human, am I?”

  Kevin laughed again, ruefully, pushing her away to stare into her face. “No, but you’re getting better. Or should I say, worse. I understand now. Your genes were programmed to defend you without discrimination. You killed Matusek by mistake, by reflex, without even thinking about it.

  “When Kellehay came to your hospital room, he was attacking you. Your powers automatically pushed him out the window when he became lethal, but you were already developing a sense of good and bad, of necessity and impulse. You knew on a subconscious level that you had to use the powers. You were defending yourself against a real attacker, God help the poor fool. And that night in the woods, with the two government men—”

  She looked away, lost again in an elliptical orbit around herself.

  “Jane, look at me.” Kevin pulled hard on all the easy-come-by persuasion in him. Jane had to see that herself and her acts were justified. So did he.

  “That’s what bothered me most,” he admitted. “The cold-blooded way you torched those men, bad guys or not. The way you forgot it again. It smelled of regression. Only, now I see… it’s progression!

  “You were defending me, in a way, weren’t you? That’s what set you off. You thought I was dead. So instead of fading and letting reflex take over, you controlled your powers to defend someone else as well as yourself. Me. You’re beginning to know better. I only hope they don’t hang you for being what you were made to be.”

  “Hang,” Jane repeated. “ ‘To fasten from above with no support from below.’ That’s how I feel when you hypnotize me. That’s how I felt when they… kept me dormant.”

  “Don’t try your dictionary declensions on ‘hanging,’ Jane. Here’s the best application of the word: something— someone—to hang onto. Let’s you and me hang onto each other. Sanity can wait.”

  “Was I wrong?” she asked, her mouth muffled against his neck.

  “About what?”

  “To let… it… take those men?”

  “It was either them… or us. And I don’t want them to get you.” Kevin pushed her away to look hard into her eyes. “If the men come again, if they get me—don’t think about anything. I can take care of myself. You just… run. Get away from me fast. Use what you have to stay free, to stay yourself. I wish your powers came in a sliding scale, with something this side of lethal, but don’t feel guilty about what you are, were.

  “You’re so lucky. You were born free, guiltless. No original sin on your soul. If you only knew how the theys in our world can use you with guilt! That’s the real original sin. I bet that’s something your aliens haven’t even begun to learn from us yet…

  “So promise me. From now on, it’s Jane first. Jane free.”

  She nodded, as Jane always did, very seriously.

  Chapter Twelve

  * * *

  Son of a bitch!”

  Kevin stared at himself in the motel mirror.

  Blood welled profusely from the jagged nick his so-called safety razor had gouged in his neck about two whiskers away from his jugular vein.

  He stopped the flow with a corner torn from the in-wall Kleenex dispenser, which seemed incapable of disgorging an entire sheet at one tug, and swore again.

  Behind him in the mirror, Jane’s face popped into view. “I liked your beard better,” she commented with customary—and at the moment irritating—dispassion.

  “So did I, but any photos of me the police care to circulate are bound to be bearded.” Something occurred to him and his eyes netted hers in the mirror. “Did they show any facial hair—your aliens?”

  “They are not mine. If anything, I am theirs. And no, they didn’t, not at all—!” Her eyes lit up. “Kevin, do you realize? Since you hypnotized me, I can remember my last time with them on the, the—”

  “Don’t be shy. The improbable is hard to articulate; the impossible should be easy. Spit it out: the spaceship. Star cruiser. Pick up any paperback space opera at the bookstore. Some inventive brain has thought up something different to call an interstellar vessel. Be imaginative.”

  “The… ship,” Jane decided upon demurely. “And they had no hair.”

  “Not even on their heads?”

  “No… but maybe they were wearing.,. Caps.” Jane frowned as she boosted herself atop the sink cabinet beside him. “I really didn’t pay much attention. Why are you laughing?”

  “God, what the government, the people at SETI, what Chariots of the Gods addicts would give their red corpuscles to know, you didn’t pay attention to! I hope they goddamn catch us! It would almost be worth it to have a front seat at the government think-tankers trying to debrief you…”

  Jane reached out to pull the bit of tissue from his neck and replace it with a new piece. “When the student nurses taught me to shave my legs, I cut myself. Once.”

  “Never again?”

  “No. I learned how to avoid it. It’s very simple, if you know how. Why do so many humans do things that make them bleed?”

  “First of all, not every human is a klutz. Second, a little bleeding does us good. Reminds us we’re vulnerable. Third, our kind is basically inconsistent, which you’ll discover when you spend more time with real people.”

  “You aren’t real?”

  “Yes, but… we’ve been existing in a pressure cooker, Jane. You’ve been thrust from one abnormal environment into another—hospital, university dormitory, motel rooms. Someday, I hope, you’ll get a chance to lead a normal life—to sleep in the same bed night after night, buy a Coney Island, read the Sunday morning comics…”

  Panic surfaced in her eyes. “I don’t know what any of that is, except for the bed.”

  “That’s okay. It’s basically unimportant stuff that becomes important when you can’t have it anymore, that’s all.”

  Jane pensively leaned her head on Kevin’s shoulder. He froze as if upholding something ponderously fragile. “Kevin, will you ever stop having to know about me?”

  “No.” He wished sometimes he could. “It’s my job, my nature. And you were made to be demystified.”

  “Sometimes I wish—”

  “Wishes are the stuff of humanity, Jane,” he teased, uneasy at the plaintive note in her voice. “Watch out or some Blue Fairy w
ill pop out from behind the shower curtain and you’ll become a real girl in no time.”

  “Ah.” She glittered with knowledge received, recognized and catalogued. “That’s from Pinocchio. I could do that,” she added.

  “Do what?” he asked, not paying much attention. Jane wore only her thermal underwear. Kevin, responding to their loose but long embrace, began pressing her closer, losing himself in her scent and accommodating softness…

  “The thing with the nose.”

  The moment was definitely gone. “What!?”

  “It would take time, of course.” Jane examined the ceiling to consider. “Maybe… overnight. But I don’t think it would happen only if I lied. I could do it even when I told the truth.”

  “You always tell the truth.”

  “Yes, but I might need to lie if they catch us. Maybe I should practice.”

  “Jane!”

  “You didn’t like it when I made my fingernails grow overnight, though.” Reconsideration made her mournful. “You probably wouldn’t like a longer nose, either.”

  “For God’s sake. I don’t know whether to laugh or commit hara-kiri. Jane, when you made your fingernails grow out overnight that time, it wasn’t that I didn’t… admire… your, uh, talent. What I really didn’t like about your telescopic talons was that they proved the incontestable… otherness of you.”

  “You don’t like me!”

  “No, I do. I’m beginning to like you almost as much as I love you, which puts me in real trouble. I had forgotten that fingernail incident. I guess you could alter your nose, if you set your inalienable mind to it, but I wish you wouldn’t. I like it the way it is. And I’m confused enough as it is.”

  He finished by pecking the tip of her nose. Jane giggled, then plucked the tissue off his neck. He winced as the now-caked blood pulled away a bit of epidermis.

  “I’m glad I don’t have to shave my face,” Jane said.

  “Me, too.”

  Kevin busied himself rinsing off the razor and the faucets, thinking ahead to making sure the rooms were clean of any trace when they left.