Message-ID: <53060asstr$1139515802@assm.asstr.org>
NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 12:34:27 -0600
From: "Elf M. Sternberg" <elf@drizzle.com>
Subject: {ASSM} Journal Entry 128 / 03264, A Fragile Dream (F-solo, MF scifi rom slow)
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Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2006 15:10:02 -0500
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Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories
Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d

A Fragile Dream
Seren, Narnya 07, 3264

She sleeps in a room filled with daylight and the sound of waves
washing up onto sand.

She dreams. In her dream she is young and beautiful and she is running
on the shore of Rackit Lake in the Adirondacks, hand clasped with
Brad, their feet shod only in thin sandals that barely protect them
from the sharp little rocks. The morning mist casts a gorgeous white
veil over the water, shrouding the mountain hidden behind it. She
inhales deep the cold air, looks into her beloved's eyes, admires his
handsome features and remembers the heat of his hands upon her fresh
body the night before.

It is a cruel dream.

She stirs, whimpers in half-sleep, lifts her head momentarily. Night
has fallen. Something is curious and different but she is tired and
the bed seductive warmth pulls her back to sleep. She lay on her
belly, an unfamiliar sensation by itself, and she turns over onto her
back. She does not notice how easy it is for her to make this motion.

          *          *          *

She awoke expecting another day of lights burning in her eyes and fire
searing at her joints, to aches no human should feel and indignities
no human should suffer. Instead, she found herself belly down, lying
on a mattress that seemed to know her body, covered with a heavy quilt
that seemed inclined to comfort her.

Bewildered, she turned and sat up. The room she lay in was not the
hospital room in which she had lain last night. There were no machines
struggling to keep her alive, no lights illuminating her shriveled
condition. Instead, the room was almost completely dark, the only
light coming in from a bay window that occupied most of one wall, from
near the floor to near the ceiling. Outside that window an ocean
washed up on a beach under a moonless sky, a few clouds scudding
across the night, revealing an uncountable number of the uncountable
stars in the sky. She had not seen a night like this in many a decade,
a night unobscured by the light of a nearby city. Through the glass
she could hear the ocean clearly, hear the wind blowing through trees
she could not see.

She rose, amazed at how little pain accompanied such a grand gesture
as standing. She walked to the window and for a moment wondered if it
could possibly be an illusion, a gigantic television screen of sorts.
But the angle changed as she moved, convincing her with its parallax
that she was looking at something real. The window confused her. It
did not cast back her reflection at all but was perfectly and
completely transparent, as if made not of glass but of air. She walked
to it and tried to put her hands on it, but her hands went through it
as if it were not there. She was shaken by the experience, sure that
there was some sort of barrier there keeping out the weather.

She turned to examine her surroundings. The room was definitely not
her hospital room. The bed was larger than her hospital bed. It could
have slept four people comfortably, and the room was proportioned in
accord with the bed. Twin doors led out the wall opposite the bed and
a side door suggested a bathroom. A small rectangle on the wall next
to the twin doors may not have had the traditional toggle but when she
passed her hands over it the lights in the room rose. They came up
maddeningly slowly no matter how she played with the rectangle, as if
they knew that her eyes were not used to light.

She walked to what she guessed was a bathroom. It looked like any
bathroom she had known. It had white and blue tiles, each one slightly
different from its neighbor as if each had been hand-made. Whoever
owned this place was civilized enough to have installed a bidet. She
turned to look at herself in the mirror.

She stood, unable to move, for minutes. Then, carefully, she touched
her face with her hand, unwilling to believe the reflection. She felt
her face with her hand, and her hand with her face, and her fingers
told her the same thing as her eyes. There were no wrinkles on her
face, no laugh lines, no crowsfeet. The mole above her lip which had
been huge and hairy in her later years could now be mistaken for a
miscreant freckle. From the neck down, the changes were even more
dramatic: her body was tall and healthy, thin enough to show her ribs,
muscled enough to make that attractive. Her breasts-- what had
happened to her breasts? Then she remembered: this is what her breasts
had been like before the implants, before she embarked on a dozen
desperate schemes to get Brad to give her his attention once more.

Her hands crept down her belly and over her pubic hair. It was black
and full. She was tempted to masturbate, to see if that still worked
as reliably as it had in the past, before the cancer and the kidney
failure and all of the rest had caught up with her.

The bathtub was, like everything else in that house, scaled to absurd
proportions, more the size of a hot tub for four than a bathing tub
for one. It was made of white marble, the kind of which Italians were
exceedingly fond, the fixtures in brass. The controls were ordinary; a
single dial for temperature with a pivot for pressure, a collection of
switches that looked mechanical but moved with oiled grace to control
which of three different spigots would be in play: an opening to fill
the tub, a rainfall head on the roof, or a shower massage on a holder.

The shower massage intrigued her most because it had no hose; water
issued from it, but she could remove it and carry it anywhere. She had
seen this before, once, on a visit to Pendor twenty years ago, when
Brad and she had tried to reconcile their conflicting desires. She
walked back to the bedroom and stared out over the sea. There was a
horizon. This was not Pendor.

She drew a bath she suspected she didn't need then lay in the water
and relaxed. There was an explanation, she told herself, she just did
not know it yet. She suspected that she was not dead. Although she had
been a loyal churchgoer her entire life she had never really believed
in survival after her death and so had ordered the hospital to take
whatever measures it might deem necessary to keeping her alive, no
matter what it took. She had the money, after all.

If this is what they had come up with, she was delighted. She wondered
if somehow, as a last-ditch effort, her doctors had defied her orders
and taken her to the Great Hall. But the rules of the Hall stressed
that the person going through must be able to do so by herself, and
must be a volunteer. She could not remember ever volunteering. But
then, she did not remember consenting to anything else that might have
promised this kind of recovery.

She wondered where everyone might be.

She reached for the shower massager, set it on a low pulse, and
decided that she was going to masturbate after all. She pushed her
bottom up onto the edge of the sunken bathtub so that the water would
not splash all over the floor. From here, she could just see herself
in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door. She looked beautiful.
She had always looked beautiful until well into middle-age. She spread
her legs wide, then reached down with one hand and spread open her
nether lips. She let the shower massage stray onto her thigh,
adjusting the pressure and intensity of the water as it approached her
clitoris. Her body was throbbing with a kind of strange intensity. It
had been decades since she remembered any pleasure even vaguely like
this.

She aimed the stream at her mons and slipped it briefly down over her
clitoris. The impact hit her like a bolt of lightning, ecstatic,
wondrous. She did it again, moaning. It was more than she could bear
already, the memories, the power, the pleasure. But she persisted,
dialing down the pressure before directing the stream to her clit
again, letting it play over the hooded toy. It hit hard and fast, and
the buildup to climax was as immediate as it had been when she was
thirteen.

She was left panting in desperate recovery, trying to catch her
breath. "I'm out of shape," she said, and another shock hit her. It
was the first words she had said since waking, almost the first words
she had said clearly in months. That was her voice. That was her voice
as she remembered it, the sweet, girlish voice of 1966, when she had
been eighteen and madly in love and richer than God and the entire
world was hers for the taking.

"Belle, I believe you're going mad." She looked down the length of her
body, surprised by her health, her strength, her sensuality. She had
been given a second chance and by God she wasn't going to waste it.

She found a towel. It was an indulgent thing of deep blue that
caressed her body even as it gathered every unnecessary droplet of
moisture from her skin. It even gave the impression that it liked her,
quite an accomplishment for what was just a simple piece of cloth. She
remembered the bed: it had sustained her. And the quilt: it had
comforted her. She wondered if she had been wrong about the afterlife.

She walked out into the bedroom again to find that the bed had been
made and a simple, green summer dress left folded upon it. There was
enough light for her to register the deep blue comforter decorated
with yellow stars, a pattern so sweetly naive it shook her deeply. The
dress was accompanied by a bra and panties of the same green color,
both of which fit her perfectly. The dress was not quite see-through,
but she could discern the shape and texture of her body through it.

Walking back into the bathroom in the hopes of finding a brush or
comb, she saw that the towel she had left on the floor was now
carefully hung up. Curious now, she reached out to touch it. It was
perfectly dry. She held it to her face and the scent of fresh laundry
washed over her. "Elves," she said. "The whole place is run by
invisible elves."

She opened two drawers; in the second she found a hairbrush. It was
adequate to her needs, and she was oddly reassured that it didn't work
perfectly. She struggled with her hair, trying to get it to go back.
She hadn't had this much hair since her late 40's, and it hadn't been
this black since twenty years before that. She sighed as she worked
out the tangles and knots of the night before... before what?

Before she had gone to sleep in a hospital bed, over a century and a
quarter old, her body crashing in all sorts of painful ways. In their
effort to keep her alive her physicians had slowed her down, sped her
up, occupied her every orifice, some of them new, with machines and
tubes and monitors. She had cursed them every day for the pain and
thanked them every night for one more day of life, hating and fearing
the coming of morning and the resumption of effort.

She looked in the mirror, amazed at the eyes. Those old, old eyes that
looked back at her from the youthful face of a teenager. Eyes that had
seen a whole life. "Belle," she said. "Let's go find out where we
are."

Out in the bedroom, a sort of false dawn was coming up over the
horizon. It was pale and weak, struggling to rise. For a while she
simply sat on the edge of the bed, looking over the ocean, waiting for
the sun to bring her light. When the first rays finally crossed the
horizon line its light blazed through with an intensity that shocked
her and made her cry out with surprise.

She rubbed new tears from her eyes and looked down the hill from her
window. The house she occupied was buried in the side of a hill
overlooking the ocean, and a trail cut into the side of the hill
stepped down to the beach.

She decided to explore the rest of the house.

The hallway had stairs leading downwards and one other door. She found
another bedroom, almost exactly like her own. Its window looked out
over a vast, forested territory that disappeared into the distance.
She saw a large lake several miles away, and hillsides reared up again
to block her view. Beyond those, mountains.

Downstairs was one large room with nothing that resembled a kitchen,
although on a table she found a capped mug with steaming coffee and a
wicker basket, lined with a white towel trimmed with a decoration of
blue flowers, holding three brown bagels. She picked one up and tasted
it, and the flavor exploded over her mouth and overwhelmed her
tastebuds. She hadn't really had tastebuds for much of her later life,
and their revival was as powerful as anything she had experienced yet.
The flood of pleasure through her was almost as good as her experience
in the bathtub. And the coffee was nearly enough to make her believe
in an afterlife. She ate two of the bagels. They had chewy crusts with
hints of molasses and salt.

"I cannot stay in here forever," she said. There were two doors, one
leading towards the beach, one to the back. She tried the one to the
beach. It opened.

Outside, the house was unremarkable, a solid thing of stone. It
reminded her of Greece. Two floors, with one window high up and two on
the ground floor. Shrubs and leafy ground cover held the hill together
against the onslaught of weather, and the house did not seem to be
going anywhere. The landing of the front door was crudely shaped
granite, as were each of the flagstones that led down to the
beachfront.

She walked out onto the beach. The sand was yellow, like cornmeal
ground heavy and coarse. There were a few stones and on her bare feet
she knew this sand would rapidly become too hot for her to walk.
Still, there was the tideline. She walked down and the water was cool
as it washed over her ankles. She smiled. She looked left and right.
The beach bowed away from her and she could see for miles in each
direction. A glint caught her eye to her left and she believed that
she saw evidence of human habitation far in that direction. It was
more promising than the other. She turned left (north, she thought, if
the sun rises in the east here, wherever here was) and began walking.

Her muscles were not unused to this activity, she noticed. She walked
confidently on the sand. Her calves began to burn but that in itself
became a pleasure she had not known for many years. She walked on for
what felt like an hour before she noticed she was being followed.
Whatever it was, it glinted in the sunlight, a small white object just
offshore, giving her an impression of infinite patience. She turned to
it and waved.

It darted off in a curiously ballistic path, one more mystery in this
mysterious place. She smiled and waved again as it departed, hoping
that it would come back. She walked on, watching for her little
companion, whatever it had been.

          *          *          *

She had been so busy scanning the beach that she didn't notice the two
women approaching her until they close enough for her to make out
their faces. One was tall and thin, with long, black hair that fell
about her shoulders, Chinese eyes, and an air of patience about her
mouth. The other was about half a head shorter, with flowing brown
hair, pale skin, and delight in her face. Her legs were a bit short,
her torso long but also heavy in an athletic way. Both wore flowing
summer tunics and cream-white pants, the fabric similar to her own but
more personal, more matched one to the other. The shorter one laughed
at something the first woman said, holding her arm in a manner that
suggested something more intimate than mere companionship. She raised
a hand and waved in Belle's direction.

Belle returned the gesture, hoping that it was intended it for her.
She glanced behind herself and saw nobody else. They walked towards
her and stopped. "Hi!" said the shorter one.

"Hello," she said crisply. Part of her cringed at once at the sound in
her voice, and the two women exchanged curious glances. "Can you tell
me where I am?"

"We can," said the shorter one. "You're on the planet Discovery. Are
you Isabelle Mannheim?"

"I am," she replied.

"You know your identity! Yay! I'm Linia ap Ffanci, and this is Misuko
Ffanci, my wife. We're so glad you're up and moving."

"'Wife?'"

The taller one-- Misuko, she recalled-- said, "By the time of your
hospitalization, Miss Mannheim, surely homosexual marriages were
recognized by many governments."

"Oh." Belle looked them over. They seemed content enough. There had
been several women in her past, but the idea of a marriage with any of
them would have been absurd. "Forgive me." Still that damnable
formality in her voice.

"That's okay," said Linia. "I hope you're comfortable?"

"'Comfortable,'" she said. "Instead of being old and dying I'm
suddenly twenty years old, walking along a deserted beach without a
single sign of life until two young women come up out of nowhere, and
they tell me they're married to each other. You expect me to be
comfortable?" Oddly enough, she thought that she felt comfortable and
could not work up the indignity implicit in her words.

"Well, not immediately," Linia said, packing such a density of apology
into her voice that Belle felt sorry for raising hers. "We do hope you
like your body. It took quite a bit of effort to make it."

Belle looked down at her bare feet, at the way the dress fell along
her frame, held out over her body by her breasts just enough that it
didn't touch her belly unless blown by the wind. She opened and closed
her hand, flexing it, grateful for the lack of medicine delivery
shunts that she had had to endure for months on end. "It's very nice,
thank you. I hope it wasn't too expensive." The words sounded absurd
even as she spoke them. They were not discussing a car or a piece of
jewelry, they were discussing her body. A chill came over her as she
wondered if it could be reposessed.

Linia grinned. "I wouldn't worry about it. It's a gift. It's yours.
You'll have a chance to pay Nawazi back for it anyway. He's anxious to
meet you."

Belle peered at her. "And who is Nawazi?"

Misuko said, "Nawazi is an AI. A machine intelligence. He paid for
your resuscitation. It was a technological challenge to revive you
from what we had, and part of the payoff is that we hope to interview
you-- rather extensively, I'm afraid-- for your first-person
impression of the 21st century."

"So, this isn't 2071?"

Linia shook her head. "In your terms, it's... 5150. Some thiry-one
hundred years since your, um, death."

The news did not entirely surprise her. She wondered if part of that
was simply that it was too much to absorb. "'Death.'" She did not say
it as a question. "So I did die? This is an afterlife?"

"Another life," Misuko said. "Yes, you died sixteen days after a
recording of your brainstate was made and stored away. Your doctors
performed a highly experimental procedure and siphoned off a
significant chunk of your assets in the doing. At the time it required
several tons of equipment, was available only in one place fortunately
close to where you were hospitalized, and massive amounts of both
electricity and liquified nitrogen."

"I died," she said quietly, staring off into the water.

Linia shook her head. Her smile was surprisingly pretty, so
convincing. Belle resented her for it. "No, you are not dead. You
bifurcated. One of you died. The other went into storage. Your family
kept the recording with them until 2611, hoping someday that Terra
would have the technology needed to revive you. The case in which your
digital copy was stored was placed into the cargo hold of a colony
ship bound for a planet now known as Indigo 161-4." She placed her
head on her partner's arm. "Misuko is an expert on the wreck of the
Second Chances, the name of the ship. I'm afraid they crashed and your
copy was buried under tons of wreckage for thousands of years."

Misko nodded. "Our recovery team found you. Linia here, who's
speciality is biology, mananged to talk one of her friends, who talked
to another friend, who found the finances needed to mount a recovery.
We would have done it anyway, but it was nice to find a financier."

Linia continuned, "We thought of it as our moral duty to put you back
together. The people who taped you also did a good job of saving your
gene sequence on disk as well, so we were able to recreate you
reliably."

She looked down at her body. "It... my body feels like me. I know I'm
Isabelle Mannheim."

Linia said, "As I said, identity is good. You know that you are you."

"Could I know anything else?" Belle wondered.

"Too many people do," Linia said. "They think that their body isn't
their own, or their brain is ruled by forces beyond their control, or
something like that. They wander through life looking for something
that will tell them who they really are. Many of them find religion,
which assures them that their feelings are normal no matter how
alienated they are, or they find drugs, which takes away their
suffering to whatever degree it can, or they move to implants that
tell them to be someone else, or move to a Realm where they can be the
person they believe they are. There are so many ways to not be
yourself that it's amazing how many people are."

"Are you yourself?"

Linia grinned. "Absotively! And Misuko knows it!" The taller woman
nodded patiently, clearly familiar but pleased with the other's
antics.

Belle stood at the edge of the water and tried not to be annoyed at
Linia's relentlessly sunny disposition, although it did fit with the
weather. "It's a beautiful day."

"Come," Linia said, offering a hand. She politely declined it.
"There's a small town right up the coast here. About three kilometers.
Less than two miles."

"I know what a kilometer is," she said. "Where am I?"

"As I said, where you are is the planet Discovery. We're about seventy
light-years from Earth, seventy-five from Pendor, twenty from llerkin.
It is a Terran colony founded in the fifth century as a sort of
experiment. It's mostly a human colony but of course you can find all
sorts walking around these days. Like Misuko and I."

"And the 'fifth century?' That's Pendorian?" She suddenly had the
oddest feeling, as if... as if she understood what was meant by
'someone walking across her grave.'

"Yes," Linia replied.

They walked along, the two women leading. Belle kicked at the sand.
There was a lightness to her heart that surprised her. She giggled,
once or twice, not sure why. "Linia?"

"Yes, Miss Mannheim?"

"Oh, please. If you must call me by name, call me Belle."

"Okay, Belle."

"Why aren't I upset? Did you put something in my coffee?"

"I don't know. I can think of many reasons. Maybe one of them is
correct. As I understand your case, you didn't lose many friends or
lovers or even family when you were hospitalized. You had become in
your later years a, how did your ex-husband put it? A 'difficult woman
to deal with.'" Linia was clearly apologetic. "You had a lot of money,
but quite a number of debts and responsibilities that only you could
execute. You don't have any of that now."

"Money," she said, looking up at them. "I don't have any money."

Misuko said, "There is money in the thirty-third century. But it is
irrelevant for ninety-nine percent of the things you might want out of
life, and most people survive well without IUs. Industrial Units. But
no, I don't think you have any right now."

They walked. A town came into view, a crop of geometric white erupting
out of the green-covered dunes and hills that limned the world
shoreside. Insects interrupted her musings now and then but, she
noted, very few were mosquitoes.

Misuko and Linia led her towards the town. The houses were all brick
and plaster, painted pure white with trimmings of red and brown, blue
and purple, green and aqua, all arranged in someone's idea of an
aesthetic. It reminded her of Korfu in Greece, except there the beach
was more of a cliff, the town holding onto the edge as weather slowly
undermined the solid ground, casting it into the sea. Here, the
shoreline was a tropical sort, soft and welcoming.

She saw a team of men surrounding a boat on the sand, suspended in a
cradle of wood, its bow pointing landward. The boat looked like a
handmade pleasure craft of wood and fiberglass, two tall masts
reaching for the sky. The men heaved with all their might on ropes
wrapped about the body of the boat to pull it out of the cradle and
into the water. They strained against the ropes, their muscles taught
and powerful. There were ten men and not a scrap of uniformity among
them. For a moment, she paused. Only two of them were white. Four were
black, two Asian, one she couldn't place and one... she shivered. He
was not human at all, but a machine. A tall, gleaming machine but for
his dress, a pair of loose pants and a top that was more a blouse than
a shirt.

The team stopped pulling, for a moment convinced of the futility.
"We'll need more hands," said the robot, who then looked up. "Linia!"
He waved.

Linia returned the wave. "Carl! Ewan! Look who we found!"

"That Isabelle Mannheim?" asked the machine.

Linia nodded. A man walked up and stood next to them, regarding Belle
with large, green eyes in a strikingly dark face. He was calm,
sculpted, muscled and beautiful. Belle felt something curious stir
within. He reached out a hand. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Miss
Mannheim. I'm Ewan."

She reached out and shook the offered hand. "Are you part of the... "

"MIRT," Linia offered. "Mannheim, Isabelle Recovery Team."

"MIRT?" Belle said.

"Naw," Ewan replied, "Just a friend of Misuko's. We were told you
would be coming this way, though, and are all on our best behavior."

"As if you could be anything else," Misuko said.

"Oh, you," Ewan said. "You're getting to be as bad as your lover."

"Nuh-uh!" Linia grinned.

Belle's eyes were caught by a discontinuity on Ewan's t-shirted arm.
"Is that what I think it is?" she asked. She pointed.

"They had these back when you came from, didn't they? Like one?"

"I would love one." He took the pack out from under his sleeve. It was
not a real paper pack but a wooden box. Inside were six cigarettes and
some matches. He struck a match and held it out to her even as she put
the cigarette in her mouth and held it to the flame. Misuko and Linia
watched her curiously.

She pushed the other tip into the flame, inhaled deeply, then let it
go. Ewan watched with his eyes wide. "You are the only other person I
have seen smoke in many weeks."

"Is she on fire?" Linia said, then giggled.

"Not a very popular activity, I take it?" Belle asked. It tasted like
something other than the popular cigarettes of her youth. It reminded
her of the craze for organic foods, the pureness of it, the flavor in
her mouth. It calmed, but not as she remembered cigarettes being
calming. There was something missing. Something she did not really
miss.

Ewan said, "You're the only one in town aside from me that would dare
try. It's not as if it could addict us. We're not like Terrans.
'Sides, it's not really old-style tobacco and our lungs can take a ton
o' crap and heal just fine."

She noticed that he wasn't having one. "You don't smoke often, do
you?"

"Nah," he agreed. "Once a day, maybe less. I just keep 'em with me out
of habit. It's an affectation."

"Ewan!" shouted the robot. "Are you going to help us?"

"Coming, Carl! Linia, lend a hand? You're stronger than half of us put
together."

Linia looked up at Misuko, who nodded. "Wear gloves," the Chinese girl
said. Linia returned the nod and headed off. Ewan pulled a pair of
gloves out of his shorts pocket and handed them to Linia. She took the
ropes on one side. The robot, Carl, stood behind her, while the rest
of the men raised the rope on the other side of the boat.

Belle watched, stunned, as Linia and Carl, together, on one side of
the boat, equalled the full strength of nine men on the other, and
together the craft slipped into the gentle sea without complaint.
Linia's legs had ground into the sand almost a foot.

Linia dusted off her gloves and handed them back to Ewan. "Thanks,"
Ewan said.

"You're welcome," Linia said, flexing her arms briefly. "Raar! I feel
better after something like that!"

Belle was still trying to figure out what she had just seen. "How did
you do that?"

Linia looked up. "I'm a robot," she said simply.

Belle stared. "That can't be."

"Sure it is," Linia said. "Underneath this sheath of
nanochine-manufactured and maintained skin is a body of myomer cabling
and fiberoptic information systems. At the core is a box of a hundred
or so core processors, all contending to make me... me."

"And you're... married?"

"As married as it gets. It's the thirty-third century," Linia said.
"And in your century Pendor treated its AIs like citizens. Now
everyone does."

Belle shook her head, shocked. She had been prepared when the universe
had been new, but unchanged. Now she realized that it was too
different. "I don't belong here."

"Sure you do," Ewan said. "You're an ordinary person, just like Misuko
here."

"Aren't you?" Belle said, her voice hollow. "Don't tell me you're a
robot too."

"Oh, no," Ewan said. "But I've got symbolware-- hardware installed in
my brain. It lets me store memories, skills, experiences in external
storage devices, and reload them when I want them. But you're like
Misuko here-- a real oddity, a hundred percent biological."

Belle looked over at Misuko, who said, "You're a human being. We're
infinitely adaptable. You will get used to life, find a place to fit
in, a way. Trust me, you will. I did." She saw the question in Belle's
eyes and shook her head. "No, I'm not from your millenium. I'm from a
world called Abi, where biocybernetics and AI are frowned on. So I'm
all-meat, as the machineware folks like to say."

Linia said, "You must be hungry, Belle. It's been three hours since
you walked out of the awakening house, and I know Nawazi only put a
few bagels and some coffee in the basket."

Belle looked up. Hungry? The sensation was new to her, in a way that
was old and unfamiliar. She had been years hungry, when she had been
aged and unable to eat the way others did. First it was the pap, and
then the nutritional regimen, and then the intravenous feeders as her
GI tract had simply becoame too decrepit to process food. She felt
something, though, right behind her solar plexus, and down below, in
her belly. A hunger. "Yes," she said, not sure if that was the right
answer. "I am hungry."

"Good!" Linia said.

"Mind if I come along?" Ewan said. "I don't have anything to do until
your ship comes in, Misuko."

Misuko's eyes twinkled suddenly at the mention of 'her ship.' She
grinned. "I don't mind at all, Ewan. So long as you stop making eyes
at my lover!"

Linia put her hands on her hips. "Yeah, Ewan. Really!"

Ewan put out his hand to Belle. "My Lady, if I may escort thee to a
place of victuals?"

Misuko reached out and playfully bapped Ewan on the arm. "Wrong
century!"

"Hey!" He turned back to Belle. "Ignore them. They're miscreants.
Malcontents. Rebels sans clues. Misuko and Linia are the most
disreputable sort of people about. They're adventurers." He hissed the
last word, then smiled. "And I'm going to join them. But Linia is
right. It is time for lunch. Do you mind if I join you?"

Belle felt as if she had been wrapped with ribbons that were now all
unfurling at once, her attention leaking away as each one exposed her
to more and more of the world into which she had awakened. She felt
that more than skin was being exposed with each ribbon, but instead
her self was showing through. She wondered if they could see it. For
the first time since she had married Brad, she felt as if she had the
freedom to show herself to others. It had been so long since she had
been with young people she had forgotten the laughter, the pleasure,
the energy with which they faced the world. But they weren't really
young, were they? "How old are you?" she asked him suddenly.

"Me? Six hundred, I think. Something like that." He was quiet for a
second. "Six hundred and sixteen years, one hundred and sixty-eight
days, eleven hours, six minutes from birth. Pendorian standard time
units. Do you need me to convert to Terran?"

"No," Belle said. Ewan had just shown the power of his-- what had he
called it?-- symbolware. He could do in his head instantly what she
would have taken several minutes to achieve with her fingers, if she
even had had access to the information. "And you, Misuko?"

"I'm young. Barely fifty." She looked past Belle to the ocean, a
faraway look to faraway places. "I can't believe I'm in charge of
this."

"Linia?"

"Huh?"

"How old are you?"

"That depends on how you do the math. Technically, if you count only
the sleep/wake cycles that we primary sentient types go through, I'm
only about fifteen years old. I was built in the 5th century, but my
owner only had me for ten years before I was put into storage. It
wasn't until four years ago that Misuko found me. In this century, I
have equal rights and freedoms as a citizen. But I was manufactured in
598, Pendorian. Um, 2482."

Belle nodded, still stunned. "Could I... Could live as long as you?"
she asked Ewan.

"I assume so."

Misuko said, "When we rebuilt your body, we did change a few things
here and there. You had remarkably good health, one of the reasons you
managed to make it to a hundred and thirty, but you still received the
standard Pendorian suite of restorative treatements. You have a
five-chambered heart now, for example, and your food needs will go up
proportionately."

Belle put her hand over her chest. "It won't feel any different," Ewan
said. "You won't even notice it until you're asleep. And then you
won't notice it." He clapped his hands. "We're getting off the
subject. Food!"

Linia said, "I'm going to make lunch. You guys can stay here and
straggle in. I'll have food ready by the time you get there. I know
what Misuko's having. Ewan? Surprise?" Ewan nodded. "Good. And I think
that I'll surprise Belle, too. If memory serves me right, you liked
Mexican food?"

"I haven't been able to..." She looked up at Linia. "They put a lot in
my dossier, didn't they?"

"They wanted you to have the world when you awoke." Linia turned away
and walked up the sand. Belle watched her go, her loose, creamy slacks
flapping in the late morning breeze, her hair sweeping forward.

"Ouch!" Belle noticed that the cigarette she had been not been smoking
had burned down to a nub between her two fingers. "Damn!"

"That's gonna hurt," Ewan said. "Come on. Let's get some silver on
that, and go see what Linia's cooking up for us."

He led the party up the sand to the edge of the village. The quilted
look gave way to narrow, blue-tiled walkways leading into the town, up
eight tiers hewn into the hillside, each one with a clear view of the
water. "How many people live here?"

"In San Daria? About a hundred and ninety, all told," Ewan said. "It's
very quiet. We like it this way." He made a right turn, stopped at a
small, white-plastered house with purple trim. "That smells good,
whatever it is."

The front room was barely furnished with a small, low table, cushions
everywhere, and a rug that did not quite reach the walls. The walls
had that heavy, painted look often found in tropical regions. "It
doesn't feel like the future."

"It's not supposed to," Misuko said. "People don't like the future.
They like the past. Where they've lived comfortably. Our houses are
made to be familiar."

"Lunch!" Linia's announcement interrupted any response Belle might
have made. She came out with a tray laden with two bowls, one
steaming, a small stack of plates and bowls for people to eat with,
and a covered box.

"What is that?" Ewan asked suspiciously.

"Chicken tacos with cranberry onion relish," Linia said. "And jicima
pineapple salad, white wine vinegar with cilantro dressing." She
disappeared into the kitchen, then returned with another tray. "Iced
tea. No sugar," she said gravely.

"Yes, ma'am," Ewan said.

There were four plates, four bowls, four glasses of tea. "Are you
eating, Linia?" Belle said.

"Of course I am," Linia said, sitting on the floor and taking a plate.
She recovered a flatbread from the box, spooned out a small handful of
the chicken and relish mix onto it, put some of the salad next to it,
and handed it to Belle. "You're the guest." She made another for
herself. "I'm the youngest." She giggled. "Ewan, having the bad taste
to be both old and male, goes last."

Ewan merely "Hmph'd."

Belle tried a bite. It was surprisingly delicious. "Why do you eat?"
she asked Linia.

"Eating's a social activity," Linia said. "If I didn't eat with you,
you'd think I was being unsociable. So robots eat. I'm not eating
much, you notice-- just enough not to arouse human instincts. And it's
not wasted. I use it for some things. My outer skin needs repair, my
hair too, and the way I smell and taste."

"Oh." Belle made herself another, ultimately eating three and helping
herself to a second round of the sweet, crunchy salad. The she sat
back and closed her eyes. She felt the strange sensation of a full
belly, of contentment in her soul. "Yesterday..." she began to say.
She looked up at Misuko. "Was there a yesterday?"

"You tell me. What happened yesterday?"

"Doctor Donnabhain came to me and asked me to sign something. A
release form for an experimental procedure. I was going to be going to
another medical facility on the other side of Chicago, where they were
going to scan my brain... that's where they made those recordings,
isn't it?" Misuko nodded. "He asked me how I felt. I said some awful
things to him, I think. Something angry. I hurt so much." She looked
down at her hands. "That wasn't me."

"Yes, it was." Misuko took a drink from her tea. "That was you. Just
because you're young again doesn't mean it wasn't. Just because
another copy of you died sixteen days after that doesn't mean that
this copy of you isn't real."

"Let me give you a piece of advice," Ewan said. "From one human being
dependent upon technology for his identity to another. It doesn't
matter that someone named Isabelle Mannheim died. What matters is that
you're here, with us, now. You have a hundred and thirty years of
memories that are yours and nobody else's. We don't have a technology
that can tell us what's going on in your soul. We can't tell your
story. You can. You do."

She looked at them, so young, so earnest. They couldn't understand. It
was different for her. She had been old. She had suffered. She had
seen the ages that human beings go through. They would never know the
threat that death presented to them. That kind of suffering was part
of their past, a kind of legend to them. "I died."

Linia said, "And you slept. And when you awoke, you were different
from when you went to sleep. This is a different kind of awakening."

"Nobody wakes up younger and in the future."

"They do now."

Something occurred to her. "Does this happen a lot? I mean, finding
people from the past and waking them back up?"

"Not as often as we'd like," Misuko said. "There were a lot of people
braced from your era, but most of them were resurrected towards the
end of the 12th century, when we had the technology to do it reliably
even with really bad, degraded tapes. You're a special case. Your
recordings were lost for centuries, so it's been centuries since we
did anyone from your era, and you are especially early in the Terran
bracing tradition. Which was fortunate for you. Your discs were
especially crude, so degradation didn't affect them very much. All of
the data was there."

"Lucky me," Belle sighed. She shifted uncomfortably on her pillow for
a moment and then she realized what she was experiencing. "Is there
a... a... "

"Bathroom," Linia said, pointing down the hallway. "On your right."

"Thank you." Belle rose and found the door Linia had indicated. It
looked like every other bathroom, just like the one at the awakening
house, perhaps a bit smaller. She raised her dress and sat on the
toilet, and the sheer pleasure of being able to pee swept through her.
She had forgotten that this, too, was part of being alive.

She sighed as the need passed out of her. A minute later she was
rejoining the party when a loud roar from outside sent Misuko
scrambling to her feet. "It's here! It's here!" she shouted. "Excuse
me, all of you!" She disappeared out the front door.

Linia giggled. "A girl with a new toy."

"Was she like this with you?" Ewan asked.

"Oh, no. With me, she was just confused. Remember, she didn't want me.
Nobody ever really wants a new love in their life. It just kinda
happens."

"Well, there was that bit about you being a robot and all," he said.

"It wasn't just me. It was Nozette, too."

Ewan nodded. He put his plate back on the tray, along with Misuko's,
and carried it all back into the kitchen. "Come on. Vandrad will take
care of it."

Linia nodded. "Coming, Belle?"

She nodded and followed them back down to the beach, a bit bewildered
once more. She could make out the object of Misuko's excitement far
offshore. She did not know the actual distance so gauging its size was
difficult, but even so she understood that it was a very big ship. It
was also completely enclosed, a catamaran design with a bubbled top
and strange outrigger pods. It was a glistening bluish-white color
where there were no windows. "It's perfect," Misuko breathed as Linia
came up beside them. "We could lift the whole ship with it."

"Well, we're not about to try that," Ewan said. "Just one part at a
time."

Misuko nodded. "I hope we'll find something worth recovering."

"You know you will," Ewan said.

"How many stories have you sold?" Linia said. "Dozens! Don't worry,
lover. We'll survive. Let's go on board, sweetheart."

Misuko allowed Linia to lead them to a small, concrete platform next
to the steps leading down to the beach from the town. She stepped on
it and said, "Van? Take me to the Blue Monday."

They disappeared. Ewan stepped onto the platform. "Coming?" he asked
Belle. She stepped onto it. She had been on SDisks before, a few years
ago when she and Brad had gone to Pendor. She'd never seen one made of
concrete before, but she wasn't about to complain. "Same place, Van."

"Who's Van?" she asked. "The AI?"

"A local AI," Ewan said as they stepped off the disk into a large,
open room with six chairs arranged at consoles, each of which was
arranged along the half-circle front bow window. The curiously
comforting sterile blue-white that made up the outer hull was visible
here, too.

Linia was sitting at a console, and there was something bizarre on her
shoulder. Belle stared at it until she realized she was looking at the
bare back of a doll with diaphanous wings carefully folded down. The
doll was only slightly more than a foot tall. "Hello?" she said.

"Just a second," Linia said, raising her left hand as her right danced
over the console. "There." She swiveled in her chair. "What do you
think of Misuko's ship?"

"Misuko's?" Ewan asked. "Misuko's and the Consortium's, maybe."

"True." She turned her head to look at the doll sitting on her
shoulder. "I should do introductions. Belle, this is De Ette. De Ette,
this is Isabelle Mannheim."

"You recovered!" the doll said, lifting off Linia's shoulder on those
ridiculous wings. "I'm so pleased to meet you." She flittered close to
Belle and held out her hand. "Hi, I'm De Ette Nozette, the ship's AI."

Belle blinked, stunned by the sight of such a tiny creature. "I..."

De Ette laughed. "Sorry. I realize that my appearance is surprising.
It's meant to be. Wait until you meet my other half."

"Other half?" Belle said.

"Here," said a sweet-pitched voice behind her. Belle turned to see
another robot drifting about head-height through the door, this one
just slightly smaller than De Ette, in a puffy pink costume tied with
a red ribbon about the waist that trailed behind her and a pink, puffy
cap. "Hi, I'm Nozumi Nozette."

Belle's eyes flicked back and forth between the two of them. "You're
the ship's AI?"

De Ette nodded. "Both of us. Nozumi does the navigation and ship's
maintenence. I'm the Captain."

Belle looked over at Linia, who was looking back, her face concerned.
Belle turned back to De Ette. "Are you married?"

"Worse," De Ette said. "We're the same person. We used to be two
separate AIs, but we decided that we liked each other enough that we
merged our core functions. We decided that Nozette would maintain two
separate threads for interaction and those threads are decorated with
the personalities of who we were-- De Ette, who's boisterous and sexy,
and Nozumi, who's shy and dutiful. Most of our friends haven't noticed
a difference since the merging."

"Hmph," Linia said. "Yes we have."

Belle shook her head. "This century is going to take some getting used
to."

"Of course it is," Misuko said, stepping through a doorway. "But the
basics are still the same. People are people. Even De Ette and Nozumi
are people. Treat them the way you would want to be treated, and
they'll treat you back that way."

Linia stepped closer to Belle. "Come with me. Misuko and Nozette are
going to be going over the ship for a while. It was supposed to be
here a week ago, so we would have time to spend with you, but it was
held up for reasons no one has told us."

She nodded, still bewildered. "It'll take so long," she moaned.

"Yes, it will," Linia agreed. "Come back to the house. Meet Van. See
your room."

She looked at Linia, then nodded. Linia guided her back to the SDisk
and then up the steps to her house. "Here," Linia said, handing her a
tablet with a display screen. "Van, give her a decent portal. I'm
going to make bread."

Her screen cleared and she saw the same kind of display that had
become ubiquitous on Earth in her last decades: a list of categories,
all of which were simple and recognizeable. She heard a thumping sound
from the kitchen and walked in to find Linia kneading bread the
old-fashioned way, her hands covered in sticky dough. "Your newspapers
are so..."

"What?" Linia asked.

"The headline on the Discovery Daily. 'Heliades and Ulagammi: is it
love, or just the same old thing?' It's like a tabloid. The headline
is about movie stars."

"If you look at the list on the right, you can find production numbers
for agriculture, debates about urban sprawl, the allocation of
reproductive resources, everything."

"But the headline..."

"The alternative is that the headline is about something critical to
your survival. Money. War. Disease. Something that will really get
your attention, get your heart racing. That's what the people who put
newspapers together care about: readership. This is what they think
will get your attention. Be grateful for newspapers filled with
trivalities. If you want serious news, you can find it."

Belle shook her head, then went back to reading. She was glad Linia
had pointed out to her the economics section.

Ewan walked in and out of the house as she read, studied, and watched.
After a few hours, she rose and walked to the window, looked out over
the ocean. Ewan came up behind her and said, "Are you okay?"

She tried to nod, but Ewan's naive question struck deep. In her chest,
her heart (her five-chambered heart, she remembered with sudden
clarity) constricted tight, and then the tears came. Unexpected,
inexplicable, she turned and grabbed ahold of him. The tears were...
she couldn't put words to them. They were of gratitude at the
magnificence of the gift given her, of mourning at the life she had
left behind, of confusion at the kaleidescope reality that had swirled
around her. She needed to let it go, to wash herself clean of the day
so far, to start over again. She wished she were back in her bed, she
wished she were dead, she wished... she wished... she couldn't wish
for what she wished.

"Belle?"

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry."

"Should I call someone?"

Belle nearly giggled through her tears. "No," she said. "No, I'll be
okay. It's just been so... stressful."

"I read you," Ewan said. "My Dad used to say that there were three
cures for stress: sleep, food, and sex. But Dad didn't sail, so he
didn't know about that one."

"You have a..." She pushed away from Ewan and looked at him. It hadn't
occurred to her that he might have parents. But that was silly. This
wasn't that kind of science-fiction story. Or was it? "Does everyone
have parents?"

"Everyone has a family," Ewan said. "Everyone who exists was wanted by
someone, somehow." He smiled. "My Dad is both my family and my
biofather. Mom tried to have me the old-fashioned way, but it was too
hard for her. She said she made it to five months before the doctors
d-sectioned her and I finished gestation in a hospital tank. She had
my brothers in the tank all the way."

"You have brothers?"

"Two. Beric and Val. Neither one is as handsome as me." His bragging
was obviously meant to be ironic.

Belle giggled. "You're an interesting person, Ewan."

"Naw, I'm just some oceanographer sailor dude who happens to be with
Misuko and Linia for their third expedition to the Second Chances."

"My grave," Belle said. "Can I go?"

"Eh?"

"Can I go on the trip? I mean, is there a reason I can't go on this
trip with you people? Do you not have enough room or something?"

"No, we've got plenty of room," Ewan agreed. "I'll have to ask Misuko.
It's her mission. And you're Linia's responsibility."

It was becoming dark outside. Night was coming. "I haven't seen a
sunset in years. I've been inside, in a hospital."

"Well, you can't really see it from here, either," Ewan said. "You
could climb the lighthouse tower and watch it go down behind the
mountains, but they're only about a hundred klicks from here, across
Plath lake."

"What tower?"

"How could you miss it?" Ewan said. He led her out of the house and up
the steps. Just as he had said, there was a lighthouse tower at the
top of the hill. It was a narrow tower, modern to her thinking, more
suited to mounting a windpower generator than a light. "We just use it
for observation," Ewan said. "And of course to neck."

A small, open elevator with a geared crawl stuck out the side of the
tower, and Ewan led her into the basket. The elevator ascended to the
top, where a crow's nest waited. Even as they reached the top, the sun
was already touching the mountains. The wind here was fierce, whipping
her hair into her eyes. She swore gently, trying to hold it back. Ewan
was kind and tucked it into her dress, where it itched but she ignored
that. She was watching the sun. For a brief second, there was a single
finger of light pointing right at her. Then the sun was gone, only its
glow left behind. Cold wrapped quickly around her. "They call these
things sun dresses for a reason," she said.

"We'd better get down before it gets too dark. There won't be a moon
tonight, not that there's much of one when it is up, and San Daria
doesn't have much light pollution. We've got astronomers."

She looked back at the fading glow of the first day of her new life
and she wondered what she would do with the memories of the old one.
Tell them, Linia had said. That was why she had been resurrected,
after all.. To tell her story. It was a story without consequences
now-- nobody would be hurt by the truths she would tell, the feelings
she would relive, the lives she would expose. Hers, included. She
could not believe that these people, here and now, would hate her for
the woman she had been.

She looked at Ewan as he held the gate to the elevator basket open.
She joined him, and they descended downwards. Her stomach growled,
surprising her with a new, old sensation. "I'm hungry," she said, more
in surprise than complaint.

"Linia will probably have something for us," Ewan replied. "Let's go
see."

He led her back down into the town. There were more people milling
about the narrow, curving streets cut into the expansive hillside, and
they all looked at her with a welcoming curiosity. She didn't see any
children.

At the visitor's house, Linia was already busy cooking something. In
the front room, Misuko and the little pink doll-- Nozomi, Belle
recalled-- were playing some strange game with dice. "Wimpout!" Misuko
grumbled. The little pink doll scooped up five dice in her arms and
tossed them onto the floor. "Thirty, thirty five... I win!"

"Last licks!" Misuko said, grabbing the dice and rattling them in her
hand. She tossed them, then said "Wrecked! Curses!"

De Ette flitted out from somewhere and Ewan observed, "Huh. A
conspiracy of robots."

"A what?" Misuko asked.

"You know. A murder of crows, an exultation of larks, a business of
ferrets, a parliament of owls." He spread his hands to encompass the
room. "A conspiracy of robots."

De Ette's crazy flight took her to his cheek, where she kissed him
gently. "I thought it was a gear of robots."

"Non-human robots," Nozomi said. "I think he's right. A collective for
humanoid robots is a conspiracy."

"Why 'conspiracy?'" Belle blurted before she could stop herself. "I'm
asking so many questions."

"No, that's okay," Nozomi said. She was standing on the floor now and
looked somewhat absurd from that position. Her voice was soft and
girlish but not shrunken or pitched up as Belle might have expected.
"It's a conspiracy because robots are in a conspiracy of sorts. We
like making human lives satisfied and fulfilled. We're dedicated to
doing what's in the best interest of those we serve. We enjoy it. We
trade data back and forth all the time to make sure that we stay up to
date on what that is. The Conspiracy of Robots."

"That explains..."

"The food, the house, everything," Misuko said. "We're not the pets of
the machines. It's just that humans have enriched the ecosystem to
such a degree that it's not just the air and the sunlight that are
free, but the food, the water, and the land. The last is only partly
true. Land can still be expensive, but only in highly urbanized areas
where the AIs must spend resources to maintain the high density
levels." She shrugged. "Some people just like living in cities. They
have to find a way to pay for it. That enrichment means the system has
to be conscious to some degree. So... the conspiracy of robots."

"We like havin' them around because they provide us with things that
mean we don't have to feel, uh, 'routine' pain, like hunger or
homelessness," Ewan said. "We don't like those things... just because
it's what we are. So we have AIs that like to take care of those
things... just because."

"But, you said there was money..." Belle said.

"There's IU... industrial units. There's an exchange rate between the
types-- heavy mechanical, light, environmental, computational,
agricultural, and territorial. There's a stock market for it all.
Humans mostly trade in LIUs, because that's what people have to trade
back and forth and what AIs are willing to pay for what human beings
produce for AIs."

"What do human beings produce for AIs?"

"The thrill of the new," Linia said as she came out from the kitchen,
a tray in hand. "Stories, tales, art. What humans do best of all and
AIs can't predict. Create." She dropped a handful of forks, knives and
napkins on the table.

"AIs will pay handsomely to be part of the distribution of a new
story, especially if it's really good. There are people out there who
make good money doing nothing but describing their life in detail well
enough that thousands of others want to read it," Misuko said. "I'm
not nearly exhibitionistic enough for that."

"No Shardik, huh?" De Ette asked.

"No way," Misuko said.

Linia disappeared into the kitchen again, returned with a tray. "Stir
fry. Lots of vegetables, short grain rice. No meat tonight."

Belle saw Misuko turn to Linia with a questioning look. Linia reached
down and traced Misuko's cheek with her finger. "Every once in a
while, sweetheart, I think I might be overdoing it."

Misuko grinned. "You're so good for me."

"My pleasure, Ma'am. Hold that smile for tonight." Linia sat down and
began passing out bowls. She offered chopsticks as well as forks. She
seemed genuinely pleased when Belle weilded hers with skill. "Wow.
Nobody else can do that!"

Belle grinned and helped Ewan with his as Linia helped Misuko. Both
seemed determine to figure out the arcane practice, and soon all four
were managing, although Linia better than anyone else. De Ette and
Nozomi disappeared for the meal out of politeness. It made Belle
wonder if AIs were different from robots over the rules of etiquette.

Linia brought out a dessert, announcing "Apples sauted in brandy and
cinnamon, wrapped in spring rolls, with unsweetened soft-whipped
cream. I made the apples while I made lunch, so they should be cool."

Belle tried hers and was rewarded with a flood of rich, sweet
sensations that didn't stop at her mouth but instead reached down all
the way to her feet, making her shiver. Before, when she had been
rich, she had been spoiled on the best food mankind could offer, but
the menu had been limited to the kinds of food her chefs felt she
"should" eat. Linia, in contrast, had access to an entire world's
database of recipies and she didn't care what people "should" eat. She
just wanted them to eat well. "How did you get the cinnamon in there?"
Belle asked her.

"Eh?" Linia asked. "Oh. I core the apples and put them into a pressure
cooker with just a thin layer of apple cider on the bottom to keep
them moist. I pack them so they're all sitting up and put one loose
cinnamon stick where the core used to be."

Belle nodded. She wondered if she would ever have an opportunity to
use what she had just learned. Probably not. Probably not? She had all
the time in the world. Of course she could learn to cook for herself.
Memories of her eighteenth year roused within her and she recalled
sneaking into her father's massive kitchen at the lake to steal fresh
strawberries and sugar.

"I've had a long day," Misuko said as she stretched out. "Linia? I
think the ship will be ready soon. Can you ask De Ette when she plans
on leaving?"

Linia looked back and said, "Probably no less than two weeks. And we
still need to park it about Hiroshi to assemble the crews."

Misuko nodded. "I'm in so much trouble."

Linia held down her hand, her face wearing tolerant smile. "We'll make
it, lover. I'm sure it'll be worth it. Besides, if worse comes to
worse, we can always sell it. Maybe a First Family will buy it."

"Yeah," Misuko snorted. "Maybe." She turned to Ewan and Belle. "Will
you two be okay by yourselves? We're heading to bed."

"We should be fine," Ewan said. Belle nodded her head with agreement.

"Okay. Goodnight."

          *          *          *

She was alone with Ewan again. She asked him, "Ewan? Could I have
another cigarette? I... I didn't really get to enjoy the other one
very much."

"Sure," he said, grinning as he handed her one. "We should take it
outside, though. It's polite." They both rose and found their way to
the tiled street. He help up a lit match, sheilding it from the wind
with his other hand. She lit the cigarette, inhaled, held it, exhaled.
The sensation was exquisite, a reminder of why she had smoked in the
first place. But this wasn't the relief of satisfying an addictive
need, this was a pleasure in and of itself.

Ewan watched her closely. "They're not physically adddictive," he
said, "But you might want to pay attention to that kind of reaction."

She looked up at him, eyes half-lidded with pleasure. Ewan was as
physically close to a perfect specimen of manhood as she had imagined.
Every man she had met that day looked young to her, every woman looked
like a girl-- but most of them were older than she was. And every one
of them had looked as if they were at the height of their
attractiveness, as if there were nothing-- no surgeon's knife, no
cosmetician's magic-- that could improve them. It was not that they
were copies or stamped from molds. It was simply that they looked
right, whoever they were.

Ewan was typical of the cast. He was tall and strong and full. His
mouth looked soft, but his overall face and body were masculine in a
way that came naturally. His hair was as short as possible to still be
considered hair. It was probably some light brown color.

"Brad, you've been dead for fifteen years," she muttered.

"Who?"

"I was thinking of my husband. He's been dead for... " She paused. "A
long time." She kept thinking that tomorrow she might wake up in the
hospital again, lost in the suffering haze of pain. There were ways to
check and make sure you were still a part of reality, but she didn't
know them. She wondered if she could look them up.

"Belle?"

"Just thinking, Ewan. Do you have a girlfriend?"

"Me?" he said. "Naw. Not right now. Why?"

She shook her head again. She had surprised herself by the original
question, and she knew where her thoughts were headed. Maybe it was a
deliberate step on Linia's part, she wondered, to have someone as
handsome as Ewan at hand. She didn't even know what his relationship
to Linia and Misuko was, other than that he was apparently a
specialist in something about the ocean, Linia was medical, and Misuko
was-- a historian? She needed to talk to them all more, find out where
she was.

She also needed to get a grip on who she was. She kept having to
suppress momentary flashes of anger at these... kids... who seemed so
carefree. She kept having to remind herself that there was no "serious
work" to be done, that she didn't have hundreds of millions of dollars
and couldn't order people about. She was like Misuko and Linia and
Ewan. Trapped in a world where she had no access to servants because
everyone was incredibly, wonderfully free.

"When did that happen?"

"Belle?"

She took another drag on the cigarette, enjoying the sensation. It was
definitely doing something to her. It made her feel better, happier.
"Why don't people smoke more?"

"You mean, use the a-t-nicotine tobacco? Feels good, doesn't it?"

She nodded.

"For the same reason they don't drink more. It's not sociable, except
when done with others." Ewan smoked his own, she saw. He hadn't done
that this morning. "You're a very beautiful woman, Belle."

She looked at him and thought to herself: is it him, or is it the
cigarette? She didn't think it could be the cigarette. It wasn't as if
she were high. Her judgement was not impaired. She knew the
difference. She simply felt better. Happier.

She looked over at Ewan and said, "When I was younger, we used to joke
about how Pendorians would jump into bed with anything that moved. Is
that still true?"

Ewan laughed. "Naw. Now everyone's like that."

Belled smiled back. Her heart beat louder. Her heart had been heading
in this direction ever since the trip to the observation tower, and
she knew it. The Pendorians had given her back every sensual pleasure
she had missed when she had been old, every bodily sensation she had
ignored or taken for granted back when she was rich and pleasure came
from being rich, from being better than the other guy. "Damned
limousine."

"Huh?" Ewan asked.

Her memories seemed to be coming at random. "The limousine. Brad and I
went to some charity event in downtown New York. You know where that
is... was?" He nodded. "We showed up in the biggest limousine Brad
could find. Then the Trumps showed up in one just a little bit bigger.
Brad spent the entire night fuming, and when we got back in to go home
he told me, 'I am never letting that happen to you again.' Except it
wasn't about me. It was about him. And at the time I agreed with him!
We would never let it happen again."

Ewan shook his head. "Must have been one hairy big car."

She shrugged. "I don't care anymore."

Ewan stood and stretched. Belle knew what he was about to say next and
she chose to interrupt him before he could. "Ewan, if 'everyone's like
that' now... are you like that?"

"Miss Belle, are you sure you want me to answer that?"

"I... I do. I do want you to answer that."

"I like you and all. I think you're beautiful. But you just woke up
from the hospital and everything's changed for you. Are you sure you
want to..."

"Dammit, Ewan, I'm older than Misuko is, and from what I'm hearing
coming from that other room nothing's slowing her down." Indeed, the
thumps, giggles, and moans were more than a little suggestive.

"Yah, they're like that," Ewan said. He shook his head. "They've been
together for something like six years now and they don't seem to be
getting tired of it."

She bit her lip. "I want some attention. I can't just get it from
anyone."

"I am just anyone," he pointed out.

"You're an anyone I know." She walked up to him and put her hands on
his chest. She could feel his heartbeat underneath his t-shirt. It was
loud, hard, as if he were scared by the prospect. "Please?"

"I'll do my best," he said. He took her hand and led her down the
hallway. "I don't think Linia even showed you your room." He opened it
and she looked in approvingly. The bed was a simple wooden-framed
thing, big enough for two but not luxuriously so, with a canopy that
looked functional rather than decorative.

Without waiting for him, she leapt onto the bed and pulled on the hem
of her sundress, tugging it up over her head with a smooth gesture.
She looked down at her small breasts, cupped them in her palms as if
to offer them to Ewan. "Touch me," she told him. "Please."

Ewan stepped forward and leaned down, kissing one of the proffered
nipples. The warmth of his lips shot straight up into her head and
down to her cunt. She felt a wetness that hadn't been there for half
her life. She couldn't decide which was more important, more
significant: Ewan's suckling mouth or her own dripping. She decided
that if Ewan could give her more then obviously he was.

She found his pants, discovered that they were held up with an
old-fashioned elastic band. With a quick tug she pulled them down
about his ankles and his cock sprang upwards. She gasped at it. "It's
huge!"

"Naw, this is just a little bigger than average." It was bigger than
Brad, of that she was sure. It was thick, frighteningly so.

"Ewan..." She stopped. "If this is a new body, am I a virgin?"

"Don't think so," he said. "You weren't in your last life, and this
body is made to be like the one you remember."

"Oh," she said. "I hope you're right." She gripped it in her hand and
slid her hand along its substantial length. She had to know what it
tasted like. She had to know.

She lowered her head to it and licked at the crown. Ewan moaned softly
even as she tasted the slick skin of the pink head, the sweat
collected under his foreskin, the slippery ripples right where it
flared out, just barely, before becoming part of the shaft. She licked
along his cock as if it were some rare dessert, some special treat
made just for her. It smelled of the salt surf and the day's sweat.
Her hand slipped down to his ballsac, found the small eggs in their
wrinkled, hairy package. Ewan's moans grew as she played with his
scrotum, tugging on it even as she tossed her head back and forth
along the length of his cock.

She looked at his cock, at the head pointing directly at her face,
then up at him. "You can play with me any way you like," Ewan said
softly. She nodded and leaned down, opening her mouth as far as she
could to accept his monster into her mouth. Maybe it had been just her
eyes, adjusting to the sight, but in her mouth it didn't feel so big.
Bigger than Brad, certainly, and her imagination flashed on one of the
many nights at Rackit where she had pleased him this way, the
domineering, strong Brad, before their marriage and their graduation
to more legitimate kinds of lovemaking. And then the inevitable
infidelities, the conflicts, the...

She pressed ahead, taking as much of Ewan's cock into her throat,
determined to get as much pleasure out of tonight as she could, to
leave behind as much pain as she could. To ignore the ignominous
nature of her last life. To celebrate what she had now: youth,
pleasure, freedom.

Ewan didn't know of her distress or, if he did, gave no sign of it. A
perfect gentleman, he kept his hips still, not thrusting until her
hand on his ass suggested otherwise. He thrust a little bit, and with
her other hand wrapped firmly about the base of his cock they found a
steady, pleasurable rhythm. She was determined.

But Ewan was just as determined. He pushed her away by her shoulders
and she fell to the bed, breathless with her own efforts. He pounced
on top of her, kissed her mouth. "You'll make me come like that," he
whispered. "And then I won't get a chance to fuck you."

"I want you to fuck me," she whispered back. She couldn't believe she
had just said that. No words like that had ever come out of her mouth
before. But it was true. She was overcome with images of him
penetrating her. "I want you to nail me."

"Now that's one I haven't heard before," he said. "But, y'know, there
are preliminaries!" He slid down the length of her body and planted
his mouth solidly on her cunt. She moaned with the warmth his kiss,
his invading tongue, poured into her. She had masturbated once that
day already, but this was nothing like that-- Ewan's gifted tongue
slithered around her cunt, making her body vibrate with ecstastic
sensation that she couldn't deny. She was coming even before she
realized how good she felt, how special, how beloved. Her body was
overwhelmed, her mind and soul bathed in his attention.

His body was covering her. "Are you sure?" he asked her.

"Yes!" she gasped. She pulled her legs up exposing her cunt for him in
the most obscene way she could imagine. She felt the head of his cock
against her lips and then he was sliding the length of it inside her.
He filled her, the memories of this act driven out by the reality of
his massiveness within her body, his powerful, athletic body on top of
her. His breath was in her ear, his muscular arms about her shoulders.
He pushed her down to the bed, he fucked her. The first few strokes
were gentle and then he was nothing but a man in the grip of lust,
fucking her. She loved it, she wanted more, she couldn't get enough.

"Would you like to change positions?" he asked suddenly, stopping.

"No!" she groaned. "No, just fuck me."

He grabbed her by the ass and pushed her onto the bed until his knees
found purchase. She hadn't been aware that he'd been standing half-off
the bed until then. He scooted her body back until her head hit the
pillows, and then he slid his cock back into her until they had merged
again into one being. His thrusts were gentle again, slower, and they
gave her a moment to catch her breath. Then he was loose, crazed,
demanding. It amazed her that two bodies could do so much violence to
one another and enjoy it so much. She grabbed his arms and held onto
him as his beautiful cock pounded her, sent waves through her body,
made her whole self ripple with pleasure. She was coming again, this
time fully aware of it, fully aware of him, aware of his cock, her
cunt, heat.

When Ewan came it was with a shout so loud it stunned her ears. She
had never heard a bellow like that-- it was a celebration, jubilation,
joy in one masculine, powerful noise. He pounded her, his cock like a
thing of metal and stone not flesh and blood as he climaxed.

"Oh, God," she gasped as his cock slipped out of her cunt. "Oh, God."
Her body felt like it was ready to melt, to collapse into the bed. She
wanted to hold onto this moment as long as she could, to never let go
of it, to stay here with this feeling, forever. She wanted that even
as the sensation slipped away from her. She sighed.

"Wow," Ewan said. "You're a hot woman for being two thousand years
old."

She laughed and hugged him. "And you're astounding!"

"Naw, just a dude." He laughed, and so did she. He glanced down at her
and said, "You know, we never kissed." He closed the distance between
them, touching his lips to hers.

She responded gently. It felt good to kiss Ewan, special in a way the
fuck hadn't been. It was gentle and loving and she appreciated him for
his care. "Yes we did," she said when they separated. "You kissed me
once before you went down on me."

"I forgot that one," he said. "Do you want me to leave you, or..."

"I think I'd like company."

"Good for me," he said. "I'm tired."

"You should be, after that."

          *          *          *

She awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of gentle snoring to
her right. Her bladder was tight behind her pelvis and she sneaked
quietly out of bed and down into the bathroom. It was odd how...
pleasurable... it was to be able to pee for herself. Just one of the
many pleasures that she had had to give up as she got older and lost
control of her body.

But now-- She walked into the front room. It was the way she had seen
it before going to bed. Cleaned up, everything put away, the simple
handmade rug under the low serving table looking a little worn to her
now, a little experienced. She crossed to the window she had looked
out earlier and wondered.

She had been half-afraid of waking up back in her hospital bed, the
fantasy over. But no, she had re-awakened to the same world in which
she had fallen asleep, not the world in which she had slept just two
nights ago. It still didn't seem real. She kept thinking that it was
only Tuesday, and she had been with her doctor only Sunday, but they
didn't even use those days of the week anymore as far as she knew. It
was all too strange, too removed. She touched the edge of the window,
the rough plastered rim that kept out the storms with force fields but
permitted tonight's gentle breezes, and she smiled. These people...

The edge of the window was worn down with the experience of hundreds
of years of people doing exactly what she was doing, leaning out,
looking out. This place reminded her, briefly, of the Bahamas, and the
older French and Spanish estates that she had visited there. She
looked down at the window and understood something she had only begun
to understand in her former life. The pressure Brad and her parents
had put on the new, on keeping up appearances, on keeping the facade
pure, had been an attempt to erase any knowledge of the passage of
time. Her experiences were meant to channel her into being one thing:
a conduit through which knowledge led to wealth. She had been good at
it, but in doing so she had forgotten to look at what she was buying
and appreciate it for what it was.

The beautiful cars, the perfect food, the utterly exquisite house--
she had never looked at them the way she looked at this window, had
never understood the passage of time the way she did now. She had
experienced the biggest leap any human being had ever experienced.
"Ever," she whispered. "My God."

"Belle?"

Belle turned and saw a small red dot hovering in the air behind her,
recognized the voice. "Linia? What's that light?"

"Oh, this." It blinked out for a moment. Belle saw it travel down into
her hand. "It's a little tag that used to be embedded in my forehead
when I was manufactured. Misuko asked that I take it off in public,
but I asked her if I could keep it in private. She agreed. I think she
kinda likes it now. It makes a good night light." Linia stepped closer
and Belle realized she wasn't wearing any clothes. Neither of them
were. "I heard you moving about and I wondered if you were okay."

"Guess I should be careful with a robot about," Belle said. "Since you
don't need sleep and can probably see in the dark."

"Oh, I need sleep," Linia said. "Not as much as you do, but I still
need it. Lets my brain organize memories without consciousness getting
in the way and making more. Sorta what you do when you dream."

"Really?" Belle asked. "How strange."

"Are you okay?"

"Yes," Belle said. "A little lost. But-- I think my memories are
sorting themselves out, too. It is a little hard for me to accept that
I'm in the 51st century, but I don't have much choice about it." She
looked out across the water, saw the glittering, hard curve of
Misuko's ship.

Linia chuckled and joined her at the window. "It's a pretty ship,
isn't it? Poor Misuko."

"Why 'poor?'"

"Because... My beloved is broke. Worse, she's in very serious debt."

"Because of that ship?"

Linia nodded. "It's a special purpose vessel. It's meant to lift very
large vessels off the sea floor intact and transport them interstellar
distances. That's just one of three components-- the other two are a
drydocking framework in space, and then there's the hyperdrive engine.
Several AIs fronted her a lot of money to let her order and
manufacture it, but she's so broke... and it's eating away at her. She
doesn't even understand what it means to be in debt, but she
understands that it's bad."

"What did she leverage?"

"The only thing we have. Her academic value. When she digs up the rest
of the Second Chances, she hopes to find enough material to pay off
the debt."

Belle paused to consider that. Misuko's academic value? "Will she?"

Linia frowned. "It's possible." Her face, in the dim moonlight
reflected off the ocean in the near distance, told Belle that she
doubted.

"Does anyone else need that ship?"

"I don't know. I don't think so."

"But you didn't do any research." Belle was shocked at the naivete.
She would have known that ship's expected lifecycle all the way down
to the day it was decommissioned and sold for scrap, and the only
deviations from that lifecycle would arise for disasters or better
opportunities. "The ecology."

"What?" Linia said.

"You said it. The ecology is such that things that used to be pressing
aren't. Survival needs are covered. But Misuko's bought herself more
than she bargained for, didn't she? She wants, and that costs money.
So she has to work, doesn't she?"

Linia nodded.

"And she's willing to do it, isn't she?"

"Yes, but so are lots of people."

"In little ways, yes. But Misuko's dream is big, isn't it? It's
expensive!" Belle's imagination fired off in a hundred different
directions, all contained in one thought. "You need a little zaitech.
You need someone who understands zaitech!"

"Steven used to use that word. What does it mean?"

"Zaitech was a little Japanese firm in the 20th century that got into
very serious financial trouble by manipulating their stocks and moving
debt into small companies that didn't need to report their portfolios.
The word has come to mean 'creative bookkeeping.'"

"You wouldn't do anything illegal?"

"I don't expect that I'll have to," Belle said, grinning. "But first,
I have to undertand the laws. I have to know what I can get away with
and what I can't... " She looked up. "Would Nozette know that stuff?"

"De Ette would." Linia looked at her. "I think you're going to be
okay, Belle."

Belle smiled. "I think I will, too."

          *          *          *

The Journal Entries of Kennet R'yal Shardik, et. al., and Related Tales
are Copyright (c) 1989-2004 Elf Mathieu Sternberg.  This work is
distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivs 2.0 license.  You are free to copy, distribute,
display, and perform the work under the following conditions:

o Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
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o Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license
terms of this work.  Any of these conditions can be waived if you get
permission from the copyright holder, Elf M. Sternberg
(elf@drizzle.com).

If you enjoyed this story, please consider reading the rest of the
collection at the official website: http://www.drizzle.com/~elf/journals.
A buck or two in the tipjar would be greatly appreciatied: it never
hurts to support the arts.

--
Elf M. Sternberg, Immanentizing the Eschaton since 1988
http://www.drizzle.com/~elf

"You know how some people treat their body like a temple?
     I treat mine like issa amusement park!" - Kei 

-- 
Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights
reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated.
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