Kadin rocked back, his expression grave. "There is a choice. We can wait for the fire to die—or we can act at once, while the magic can still help us."
"Magic? Is this what you were talking about? If it's magic, why can't you make it burn longer?"
"Magic conforms to its own rules," Kadin answered. "We can't retrace our steps, and we can't remain here."
Fear rose in her throat. "What
can
we do?"
Kadin's brows narrowed. His voice hardened. "Watch the flames!" The coals hissed, and flames shot up, blazing hot and bright. Mozy shielded her face from the intensity. The flames dropped again to a flickering tongue, and darkness crowded back in around them.
"One more time they can rise," Kadin said. "But when that is done, even the embers will die." The flames were weakening even as they danced in his eyes. "When it's gone—" He hesitated, then shrugged. "But when it rises one last time, we can return home—if—"
"If
what?"
she whispered.
"If we pass
into
the flames and into the fire's enchantment. If the magic holds, we'll be transported back to our own time—to our own world."
"And if it fails—?"
He met her gaze and said nothing.
She stared back at him in astonishment. "You mean it, don't you? You mean we're to . . . step into the fire."
He held her gaze. "It's the only way I know, Mozy. The magic will fail us only if we fail it. But without it, we'll surely die here."
"But . . ." Her voice caught.
"It will burn far hotter than the flame you just saw. Only by consuming us totally can it transform us and take us home."
She closed her eyes, envisioning fire roaring up around her, destroying her in agony. She barely heard him saying, "When it rises to its height, we must leap together. It will last only seconds—and if we do not go—if we hesitate—the chance will be lost forever." She stared back at him, stared at the fire. Her thoughts filled with images of burning flesh.
Kadin's eyes would not leave hers. "Whatever we do, we must do together. We live or die, together."
She glanced into the shadows along the wall and glimpsed the movement of . . .
She began to tremble. "David, I don't—"
"Have I ever betrayed you?"
She took a breath. "No."
"Then look for the courage within you, Mozy—look for it now."
She swallowed—and thought of dying here with Kadin, freezing in the night or being torn apart by animals she could not even name. She thought of stepping into a fire, and fear rose hotter than the flame itself. And yet . . .
She knew—she
felt
, though she could not explain how or why—that he was speaking the truth. Her determination hardened, and before the instant could pass, she rose on shaky legs and said, "Dammit, then—let's go."
Kadin gathered himself like a breath of wind. The flames licked up, dancing. The coals blazed. The air close to the ground hissed and swirled and fed itself to the fire. A flame shot up with a growl, then roared into a dazzling tower.
"Now!"
he cried.
Mozy glanced sideways at him, then jerked her gaze back to the heart of the flame. Its fuel was nearly gone.
She sprang forward.
Flames thundered around her. She floated, rising in a furious cloud of crackling gases. Where was Kadin? There: a dark presence beside her. The heat poured through her; the violence was incredible, spinning her, slamming her end over end. She struggled to remain conscious. Suddenly the brightness splashed outward in a corona, leaving cool darkness in the center. She fell through the eye like a stone, and darkness and silence overtook her.
She rested, scarcely remembering where she was, or why. As time passed, she sensed movement nearby. Kadin. The awareness stirred her. (We survived,) she said.
Kadin became visible, his face illumined against the dark. His eyes sparkled with pride. (You trusted in the magic, Mozy—and it worked. We've returned to our own time, our own place.)
She peered back in puzzlement. (We have?) And suddenly she knew.
They were in the computer. In the test link. Kadin was far away, in the orbiting space city; and she was in the Sandaran Research Center, alone in a booth, linked to Kadin by a strand of energy spinning thousands of kilometers into the sky.
They had survived the flame and the magic and the end of the world; and it was all a fiction, a test, an exercise. Outside the computer link, a research staff had been observing everything. If she and Kadin had perished in the fire, the final outcome would have been the same. Only the memory would have been different.
(Are you displeased, Mozy?) Kadin's full figure became visible, walking toward her across a dark emptiness. Kadin: a man she had never met, except in the link. A man whose face was a little different each time they met, each time a creation of her own mind.
She stared at him uncomfortably. It was always this way, coming out of a session—when the hypnotic blocks dissolved, and she emerged from fantasy to reality—the disturbing realization that she had invested all of her fears and hopes in something that was nothing more than a game inside a computer. And yet the scenarios
were
real—far more real to her than her own dreams.
(Mozy?)
(What? Oh . . .)
Kadin peered at her. (You feel embarrassed again, don't you—because you believed in the scenario.)
(Perhaps.) She shrugged. (All right. Yes.)
(That's what the hypnotic blocks are for,) he said gently. (If you hadn't believed, the session would have been wasted. I had to convince you of the magic. That's what it was all about.)
She knew she was blushing. (I know. It's just a silly feeling.)
Kadin smiled in sympathy as he reached out. (We have to break the link now, Mozy.)
She laughed. (Right. See you next time.)
Kadin winked, and then he, and the lights illuminating him, shrank silently away. He fluttered like a candle flame and vanished.
(Good-bye,) Mozy said softly, more to herself than to Kadin. This was always the hardest part, being left so alone. The darkness and the emptiness rang around her like a bell. She sighed . . . blinked . . . forced herself to relax . . .
. . .felt the layers of the link slip away . . .
. . .and opened her eyes in the gloom of the subject cubicle.
She was seated in a reclining chair, her head encased in a helmet. Her right foot was asleep. Hearing a scratching sound, she looked to her left. A woman peered up from her clipboard. "How do you feel?" the woman asked.
* * *
Bill Jonders detached himself from the monitoring link and slowly brought his senses back into focus. He glanced at the console readouts. Twenty-seven minutes, elapsed time. Rubbing his eyebrows, he keyed the audio circuit to Kadin. "Looks like a fine run, David. I'll get back to you soon for debriefing. Any problems I should know about?"
"None," answered Kadin. "I'll be waiting."
On one of the screens, Jonders saw Mozelle Moi removing her headset, with Lusela Burns's help. He touched a switch. "Mozelle—it looked like one of your best. Very good." In the monitor, Mozelle nodded. Jonders switched channels. "Hoshi, run the profiles across my board, please. I'd like to get ready for the review with Kadin."
Hoshi Aronson grunted from the next console.
Jonders removed his own helmet and massaged his temples. He was weary, and not just from the day's work. For weeks, the pace had been unrelenting. It would kill them all, if it didn't stop soon; but the transmission date had just been moved up, again, to three weeks from tomorrow. The work
had
to be done by then. Marie, bless her, had merely been hinting, rather than demanding, that the kids should see more of their father. They would have to be patient a little while longer.
The monitors blinked, bringing him back to the present. Profile displays appeared, with Hoshi's rough-cut analysis of the last run. Jonders focused on the holographic contours. The graphs looked good, with few of the indecision dips and plateaus of the early days; and the decision folds were all nicely surrounded by confidence peaks. It
was
a good run.
Kadin's profile was improving daily. By now, Jonders knew intuitively what to expect on the graphs, but he could still be surprised by nuances and subtleties. One thing he noted now was an increase in contours of imaginative activity. It confirmed his own sense of the session; the landscapes and situations devised by Kadin had been unusually vivid and creative, well beyond the scope of the original instructions. Jonders placed code-markers at points to be referenced later, then jumped ahead to look at the emotional-component analysis of Kadin's responses to Mozelle.
He'd already lost track of the clock by the time he donned his helmet again for direct manipulation of the graphic images, and a final debriefing with Kadin.
* * *
"Good night, Mozy," Lusela Burns said. She glanced at her clipboard. "See you Thursday at fifteen hundred?"
Mozy nodded and rose. "Right," she said. "Bye." Her head was buzzing as she walked from the room. The feeling had returned; she'd felt it the instant the link had dissolved. Reality was an intrusion. It always was, after her times with Kadin. The debriefing didn't help much, either; nothing against Lusela, but she needed time, and privacy, to readjust to being back in her own body, and they never gave that to her. Maybe it wouldn't help, anyway. Maybe nothing would. The feeling was always there at the end of a session.
She passed the glassed-in control room where Jonders and Hoshi Aronson were working, retrieved her jacket from the rack in the foyer, and walked down the long corridor to the main lobby and the transit station. The monorail platform was uncrowded, despite the hour. As usual, a large part of the staff was working overtime. She had never been asked to do so herself, but she was only a part-time subject. Some important test was coming up, and most of the departments were putting in long hours. She rather envied them.
The train hummed into the station on its single maglev rail. Evening workers piled out, and Mozy and a handful of others boarded. She chose a seat and settled in for the ride back to New Phoenix, resting her head against the aluminum window jamb.
Her mood persisted. She didn't know what she had a right to expect—but something more than just a paycheck. Her hours spent at the institute both excited her and exhausted her. Perhaps she wanted more challenge, or more recognition; perhaps she just didn't want to feel depressed every time she said good-bye to Kadin. Perhaps she ought to discuss her feelings with someone; but everyone was always so busy.
She peered out the window for a last glimpse of the installation, as the train accelerated on a long curve into the mountains. The main research building turned its profile, a curiously graceful merging of oblong shapes. Perched atop one corner of the building, a squarish tower jutted into the twilight. Behind it sat the domed housing for the fusion generators and tachyon rings. Together, the buildings stood stark and imposing, surrounded by peaks in the fading afternoon sky.
Finally an embankment cut off the view. Mozy dozed as the train gathered speed, leaping along a steel thread as it descended along the Mazatzal Mountain Range. Sleepily she thought of how little she
really
knew of the center's work—hardly anything beyond the words of the subject applicants' introductory booklet:
"Sandaran-Choharis Institute for the Study of Tachyonic Phenomena, often referred to as the Sandaran Link Research Center, is a civilian, federally funded institution conducting both classified and unclassified research into tachyon behavior and theoretical and applied principles of matter translocation through the use of modulated tachyon beams."
In other words, the theory and practice of dissociating matter—a rock, a cup of coffee, a dog—and transmitting an exact description of its molecular structure to a receiving station for reassembly. In short, moving an object almost instantaneously from, say, Los Angeles to New Phoenix. Or from the Earth to the Moon.
Tachyons were particles that moved faster than light, and
only
faster than light. Like normal particles, they came in various sizes and shapes. The researchers at the Center were interested in a family of tachyons known as T4 particles, which they proposed to use in a coherent beam to scan, transmit, and reconstruct objects. Whether they had actually tried yet, and if so, whether they'd succeeded or failed, she didn't know. Most of the work was classified. Her own job was a part of a program to devise systems for profiling the human consciousness, not in the gross detail of ordinary psychological profiling, but in intimate and microscopic detail. It was, she had been told, more a problem of artificial intelligence than of psychology. It was all part of the process of making a transmission system safe for humans. Apparently, the goal was to ensure that human subjects did not arrive at the receiving end of a transmission link with their brains scrambled.
But why the secrecy? Was the military involved at some level? Probably. She'd have to pump Hoshi on the subject, the next time they went out for a drink.
She rubbed her jaw, imagining the process going wrong—and some poor fool being blasted to dust by tachyon lightning, only to reappear in some godforsaken place as a gibbering psychotic. Pity the poor first victim.
Glancing to the side, Mozy realized that she was being stared at by another commuter; she'd been fingering a scar that etched her cheek, from temple to chin, a souvenir of an adolescent incident she'd have preferred to forget. Exhaling slowly, she placed her hands in her lap, suppressing an urge to try to rub the scar off her face. She jerked her head to stare out the window, where the mountain foothills were spinning by.
She imagined faces out there: Jonders and Hoshi and David Kadin. For an instant, she imagined how they must think of her:
Poor Mozy, so scarred and unattractive, the only man she can appeal to is one who doesn't even know what she looks like, except through the computer link.
But why should you care? she thought. Forget it, she thought; but she couldn't.