Transgalactic--A Novel by James Gunn

Author:James Gunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466876125
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The air was chilly and filled with the sharp chemical smell of the viscous fluid in which Sharn and the other dreamers were immersed. With their baths kept at body temperature, the dreamers had no need for external warmth, but Sharn’s body was still damp and sticky. She shivered. Riley took off his shirt and wrapped it around her, covering what he had once viewed with desire and touched with passion but now seemed like the body of a child still wandering through adult dreams.

“You’re not the same person,” Sharn said, her voice hoarse from disuse.

“Nor you,” Riley said.

“Because of you,” she said.

“I was going to say that.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “They told me it was necessary. They said you had a brain condition that caused you to be self-destructive. It all made sense, at least then, when I was still recovering.”

“From what?”

“From your anger, your rejection.”

“As I recall,” Riley said, “it was you who left me.”

“You drove me away,” she said, “trying to get rid of me, like you were rejecting your arm. You couldn’t stand being happy; you hated yourself too much. I saved your arm, but I couldn’t save myself.”

Riley recalled those dark days, when Sharn’s presence was the only relief from the memories he could never shake, of loss, the people he had killed, and the destruction he had caused. “That isn’t the way I remember it.”

“That was part of the problem.”

“So, you put that thing in my head because you were angry, or hurt, about something I did or didn’t do.”

Sharn put her hand on Riley’s arm, the one she had replaced. “It’s been so long ago,” she said. “I’m not sure anymore. I’ve been wandering through strange lands. It’s hard to remember how it really happened.”

“Try,” Riley said. “It’s important.”

She shook her head as if to rid herself of the dreams that clung to her mind the way her body was shedding the fluid in which it had been immersed. “They said your psychological problems were causing your body to reject the transplant and your mind to reject the healing possibilities of human interaction. They said it was making you try to lose yourself in the various levels of pleasure on Dante and finding none of them sufficient to ease the suffering in your soul. They told me that the ninth-level sim tanks that you finally turned to would end up in total destruction, that you would become a captive of your dreams, slowly drifting away into a simulacrum of paradise until you would die like a fetus absorbed back into the womb.”

“And you believed them.”

“Not until they took me to the ninth level and showed me your body in the tank. You were smiling. That was what finally convinced me.”

“And how did they say the operation was going to help?”

“They had a new technique that introduced into the brain a kind of continually adjusting psychodynamic monitor, like a built-in chiatrist.”

“Right.”

“I know,” she said. “It sounds foolish now. But I was desperate. I wanted to believe that there was some magic treatment for the psychic disease that was killing you.

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