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to consciousness. When she awoke the war had been over for a month and the
military standard interface wafer buried at the back of her skull had been
removed. The effects of the synchroneurobonding virus were irreversible, while
the nanotechnology and tissue-
cloning techniques that repaired the ravages of the radiation pulse were only
withdrawn after the course of treatment had finished.
And - perhaps - something else had been added; the crystal virus that had
grown over the years and then lain dormant within her skull until a few weeks
ago, when she'd been running with the others through the dried-up tank of the
ancient oil-carrier, in the Log-Jam.
Her memories of the hospital in the mine complex were hazy. She remembered the
Tenaus military prison hospital much better; gradually recovering, waiting for
the final peace deal to be worked out, beginning to exercise her body in the
gym to restore her lost fitness, and exercising her brain whenever she could,
remembering - obsessively, the prison psychologist had worried - every detail
she could dredge from her memory from the age of five onwards, because she'd
been terrified that the treatment had altered her, made her somebody different
by destroying some of her memories.
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She wanted to recall everything, and to try to assess if the memories she
found buried in herself were the ones she could remember from before; it
seemed like a check on the kind of alteration she feared that the act of
recalling a memory itself left a memory, and that that could be compared with
the experience of remembering in the present.
In the end there was no sure way of telling, but she found no obvious holes in
her memory. When she'd been allowed to send and receive communications, the
people who wrote to her seemed to relate to her the way she remembered. Nobody
seemed to notice any change; certainly they didn't mention any.
They had to write to her because visits were not allowed and the light-delay
from Tenaus Habitat to almost anywhere else was too long for real-time
conversations. She had had one phone call with Miz, calling from
HomeAtLast, in orbit above Miykenns. In a way it had been the best phone
conversation of her life; the minutes-long gaps while the signal carrying the
words you had just spoken travelled to their destination meant that you just
had to sit there looking at the screen and the other person. Calling anybody
else, she'd have watched screen or read something in between, but with Miz she
just sat and stared at his face. They'd had an hour; it had only really been
ten minutes and had seemed like one.
Had they put the crystal virus into her there, in Tenaus? Nachtel's Ghost
seemed like the more obvious place, while she'd been hovering close to death
in a state more like suspended animation than anything else, beyond stimulus,
sensation or dreams . . . but perhaps it had been done in Tenaus. Why would a
Tax-neutral mining company want to implant a transceiver virus in a near-dead
crashed military pilot?
But then, she thought, why would somebody in a military prison hospital want
to do that either?
Why would anybody?
A cold, keen wind cut out of a sky the colour of verdigris. The sun dangled
like a hopeless bauble dispensing thin amounts of light. Leeward, the dark
train of a departing storm trailed its snowy skirts high into the swivelling
tides of light. The snow-cliff at her back reared like an enormous wave,
poised ready to break on the sloped black beach of the shield volcano's
flanks.
The crawler which had brought her here rumbled back on its tracks, over the
clinker and the wind-drifted ramps of ash, reversing into the snow-tunnel. She
watched its glinting metal carapace and maser-nostrilled snout slide back into
the base of the snow-cliff and trundle back and up until the slope of the
tunnel removed it from her view.
She turned and looked up the barely discernible slope of the volcano through
veils of lifting steam and vapour towards the tumbled remains of the old
geothermal station buildings, a set of fractured concrete blocks strewn
haphazardly across the darkly gleaming lava field. Snow-covered pools dotted
depressions in the lava, and in the distance - maybe twenty kilometres away
the latest of the volcano's vents piled white steam and smoke into the sky.
She looked straight up. Overhead, the gas giant Nachtel hung hemispheric, pale
gold and hazy orange in the sky,
filling a quarter of it.
She pulled the hood of her jacket tighter against the thin, freezing wind, and
set off across the fractured, grey-
black lava field towards the ruined concrete buildings up the slope, clutching
the empty book to her chest.
She was breathing hard when she got to the smashed blockhouses; the atmosphere
was desperately thin, even though comparatively little effort was required to
walk in the Ghost's weak gravity. Agoraphobia was endemic in visitors to the
planet-moon who ventured into the open; the air felt so thin and Nachtel could
loom so huge above that it seemed each floating step must send the walker
bounding away from the surface altogether, swept away into the green,
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subliming sky.
`Hello?' she called. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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