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feels very strange, but it doesn't do actual damage."
Counselor winced. "You're not filling me with confidence,Teelu."
"Then watch."
I walked over to the Sperm-tail. Before reaching down to the mouth, I asked
Festina, "Shall I go first?"
"Be my guest," she replied. "I'll go last to make sure everyone else is all
right."
I nodded and knelt. If you want the honest truth, I'd never gone through a
Sperm-tail before either. Real Explorers shot the chute all the time, but me,
I'd always traveled in the company of diplomats. "Diplomats," Sam once told
me, "do not subject themselves to indignities. It's called a Sperm-tail, for
heaven's sake. The name alone is enough to demolish your credibility. And I
understand that riding one is appallingly visceral. Diplomats hate that; we
like to remain detached from physical reality at all times."
Maybe part of that was joking, but Sam still meant it. She and the rest of
the diplomats took shuttles from ship to surface, not the slippery white way.
At the last second, just as I was sticking my hand into the Sperm's mouth, I
wondered what my sister meant by "appallingly visceral." Then I found out.
22
SQUIRTING THROUGH THE TUBE
Gulp.
That was the Sperm-tube swallowing me. Out of the real universe, into an
artificial one that fluttered and fish-tailed, taking me with it. My whole
body turned to water, pumping through a pipe that twisted, turned, narrowed,
expanded, did loop-the-loops. I had no bones; I had no solid parts at all,
just liquid and steam, spurting up the Sperm-tail at high pressure.
One other thing: I wasn't alone.
I could feel another presence squirting along with me, a blaze of
intelligence burning right next to my skin, as if it was only separated from
me by a tissue-thin membrane. It had to be the thing that'd been possessing
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me: a spirit, a ghost, an alien parasite, some entity that hitchhiked in my
body and occasionally shoved me aside so it could drive.
What are you?I thought.What do you want? Why me?
The answer was a blast of fiery emotions angers and sorrows, regrets and
resolutions, all knotted up in a package of memories.
Myown memories.
Samantha's body, her clothes sodden with the blood that kept gushing from her
punctured chest. A red pool spreading over the floor. Smears of red on my
fingers.
Queen Verity's head plunked on a platter and placed on the royal dinner
table... while the rest of her corpse lay ten paces away, both venom sacs
sliced open and spilling dribbles of green.
Me running through the night with a heavy black sack over my shoulder, while
shooting echoed in the palace behind me. Racing to a garden shed, lifting up a
floorboard, seeing the little black box with the gold horseshoe inlays, and
the narrow mouth of a Sperm-tail threading off through an underground conduit.
Feeding one end of the sack into that mouth and holding my breath as the bulky
load disappeared through the impossibly tiny opening, zipping off heaven knows
where. Smashing my heel down on the anchor box, breaking it, releasing the
Sperm-tail to slither off on its own so no one could follow...
Could follow...
Innocence. My daughter.
Whom I hadn't seen in twenty years.
Whom I'd abandoned on a planet at war.
And I was supposed to be "The Little Father Without Blame"? If I hadn't been
riding the Sperm-tail at that second if I'd had a solid body I would have
thrown up everything in my stomach.
Second after second, my own memories pounded into my mind like a repeating
loop. Sam soaked with blood; Verity dead; carrying young Innocence in that
bag; Sam and her blood again. As if the thing riding with me up the Sperm-tail
was trying to make mesee something, but I wasn't smart enough to understand.
Sam's blood. Me, reaching down to touch the red stick-mess. Lifting my
fingers to my nose...
A voice screamedNo! inside my head: fighting the memory, fighting the thing
that was trying to make me remember. The screaming voice didn't seem part of
me, any more than the force pummeling me with my own memories; but I was eager
to shoutNo! myself. Anything to escape ugly replays of the most awful night of
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