The Mind Like A Strange Balloon | Page 8

corridor
afterward. "You seem troubled," he said. 'Also reticent. I want to assure
you that even complex problems can most often be worked out to
mutual satisfaction." He let that statement lie--his attempt to bring me
into the charmed circle of ringi seido, the process of joint consultation
that is the soul of Japanese decision making. It was a nice gesture but
meaningless. I just wasn't feeling Japanese.
I went to my compartment, where she was waiting. Her skin was hot to
the touch. A last time, in seeming slow motion, we came together. She
had just begun her period, and with her blood we traced scarlet
arabesques across the sheets, across our thighs. Standing in the shower
stall, I started to wash the blood away, but I didn't.
The tug fell from high orbit. ICOG had arranged a rendezvous below
with a military shuttle. I touched the small crusts at the back of my
neck, where her nails had punctured me, where she had clasped me.
She still did.
The transfer came, and my pallet was shifted into the shuttle's cargo
bay. Delta wings folded back, the shuttle entered the upper atmosphere
somewhere over Hawaii. White ash from the tear-off thermal shielding
flew past the viewport amid coruscations of red fire. Thin air played
high-pitched cacophonies on the hull.

I loved her; I told her that. And I said, "You're not a monster; don't ever
think it. Do what you must."
Leaving her with a platitude . . I didn't tell her that nature abhors a
vacuum, that everywhere she wasn't, was full of pain.
Flash of white light in the mind's eye, picture of a door opening, of
something astonishing, its shape unclear, passing through.
"Evolutionary emergence," Doctor Chin had said, but I doubted he
would find it. He wasn't looking in the right places.

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