After she got even with him for that, they both reported for final debriefing, and all had been erased.
Now Tamme did remember. She sat up with an anguished effort, her wounded side and chest excruciating. "Subble died on his next mission!" she exclaimed.
Strong arms came about her shaking shoulders. "Easy, Tam," Veg said. "You're dreaming."
"No -- I'm only now coming awake! You knew him!" she cried. "You killed him!"
He bore her back to the bed. "We knew him. We liked him. 'Quilon especially. He was a decent sort. For an agent. He may have died, but we didn't do it."
She clung to him. "I'm terrified! Stay with me -- please!"
"Always." He lay down beside her, smoothing her troubled forehead with his hand, careful of the bandage. "Rest. Rest. You're still very weak."
Tamme had other missions. One by one she relived them: one a mere interview with a scientist, another a spell as housemistress to an outpost halfway across the Earth-Sphere of colonization, keeping the normals sane. She had acted, always, with complete, objective ruthless-ness, forwarding the interests of that government that had fashioned her in that manner it required.
Right up until her assignment on the first alternate world, Paleo. That mission, surprisingly, had been a multiple-agent venture. It brought her to the present.
When she was well enough to walk, Veg took her out of the house. The building was made of blocks of foam-like fog, and it tended to degenerate. Periodically, the farmer and his family cut new fog from the bank and built a new residence. The makings of the old house were chopped up for cattle bedding; the bovines liked the impregnated people-smell of it.
They were hard workers, these Fognosers (as Veg called them), and their children helped. They used hands for brute work, and prehensile snouts for fine work. They harvested certain types of mist for foods; most varieties tasted rather like scented soap but were nutritious.
"Now I remember," Tamme said. "We met these people once, and you showed them the hexaflexagon."
"Yeah. They have seen many Vegs and many Tammes, but I was only the second one who happened to show the hex. Lucky I did because they remembered us. I mean, distinguished us from all the others just like us and helped. I've been making hexaflexagons like crazy; that's how I repay them."
"And how shall I repay you?" she asked.
He shook his head. "I wasn't doing this for pay."
She gripped his hand. "Please -- I need you. I want to please you. What can I do?" Oh, God -- she was pleading, and that would drive him off.
He looked at her. "You need me?"
"Maybe that's the wrong word," she said desperately.
His mouth was grim. "When you use a word you don't understand, just manipulate -- yes, it's the wrong word!"
"I'm sorry!" she cried. "I won't use it again. Only don't be angry, don't turn away..."
He held her by the shoulders at arm's length. "Are you crying?"
"No!" But it was useless. "Yes." If only she hadn't been so weak physically and emotionally! Strong men didn't appreciate that.
"Why?"
What was left but the truth? "When you are near me, I feel safe, secure. Without you, it is -- nightmare. My past -- "
He smiled. "I think you have already repaid me."
What did he mean? "I don't understand -- "
"You had a brain injury on top of everything else. I guess it gave you back all those erased memories, right back to -- Bunny. And it broke up your conditioning. So now you can have nightmares from your subconscious, you can feel insecure -- that's why you need someone."
"Yes. I am sorry. I am not strong." Like a child, weak; like a child, to be taken care of.
He paused, chewing meditatively on his lower lip. Then: "Do you remember our conversation once about what 'Quilon had that you didn't?"
She concentrated. "Yes."
"Now you have it, too."
"But I'm weak. I can't stand alone, and even if I could -- "
He looked at her intently, not answering. Her ability to read emotions had suffered, perhaps because her own were in such disarray. She could not plumb him for reaction, could not be guided by it. She was on her own.
"Even if I could," she finished with difficulty, "I would not want to."
Then with an incredible brilliance it burst upon her.
"Veg -- this, what I feel, the whole complex, the fear, the weakness, the need -- is this love?"
"No. Not fear, not weakness."
She began to cry again, her momentary hope dashed. "I'm not very pretty now I know. My face is all splotched and peeling from that acid burn, and I've lost so much weight I'm a scarecrow. I'm Bunny all over again. So I don't have any right to think you'd -- " She broke off, realizing how maudlin she sounded. Then she was furious at herself. "But damn it, I do love you! The rest is irrelevant."
She turned away, sorry she had said it yet glad the truth was out. She remembered Bunny, but she was not Bunny. When he left her, she would not commit suicide; she would carry on, completing her mission... somehow.
He took her into his arms and kissed her, and then she needed no other statement.
Tamme grew stronger -- but this made her uneasy. In a few more days she was able to outrun Veg and to overcome him in mock combat. She tried to hold off, letting him prevail, but he would not let her. "I want you healthy," was all he said.
"But once I achieve full capacity, I'll have emotional control," she said. "I will be able to take you or leave you -- as before."
"I love you," he said. "That's why I won't cripple you. I've seen you as you are when the agent mask is off, and that's enough. We always knew it couldn't last between us. When you are well again, it'll be over. I'll never say it wasn't worth it."
Her face was wet, and she discovered she was crying again. She cried too much these days, as though making up for the tearless agent. "Veg, I don't want to be like before! I don't care how weak I am if it means I can stay with you."
He shook his head. "I had a quarrel with Cal once on Paleo, and so did 'Quilon. She was miserable, and I was with her, and we thought that was love. It wasn't. Real love doesn't need weakness or misery. I won't make that mistake again."
"But when I was strong, you said -- "
"You can be as strong as Sampson, I don't care!"
"Please -- "
"I'm strong for a normal man," he said. He picked up a stick an inch in diameter, spliced it between the fingers of one hand, and tensed his muscles. The stick snapped into three pieces. "But I need people. I need Cal, and I need 'Quilon, and I need you. You didn't need anyone."
Tamme picked up a similar stick and broke it the same way. The fragments flew out to land in a triangle on the ground. "I'm strong, too -- and now I need you. But what about tomorrow?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. All I can do is live for today. That may be all we have. That's the way it is with agents, isn't it?"
She drew the knife she carried. "If I stuck this back into my head, maybe it would -- "
He dashed the blade out of her hand. "No! What's got to be, 'sgot to be!"
She yielded, knowing he was right. "Then love me now, right now," she said, moving into his arms. "What we defer today may never come tomorrow..."
Even the natives knew it was ending. Veg cut and hauled huge amounts of fog to make a new wall for their cattle, and Tamme took the children for walks through the forest, protecting them from the wild predators that lurked there. It was perhaps the only taste of woman's work she would ever experience.
On the day that Tamme decided, using cynical agent judgment, that she had regained ninety-five per cent of capacity, the hosts invited the neighbors for a party. They ate fog delicacies and sang nasal foghorn songs and played with the hexaflexagons Veg made, and in its simple fashion it was a lot of fun.
In the evening she and Veg walked out, holding hands like young lovers. "One thing nags me," he said. "Tamme Two could have killed you, couldn't she? After you fell down, and she put the kni
fe in you, she just turned away. I wasn't sure which of you had won. But she could tell us apart -- I guess it was by our reactions, and I still had the burn marks of the rope on me -- and she looked at me, for all the world just like you, but sharper somehow -- even before the fight, you had gentled some -- and she said I was the enemy. I guess she was going to kill me, and she sure as hell had little conscience about it, but my double wouldn't let her." He paused, smiling reminiscently. "I sort of like that guy, you know! He has guts and conscience. He told me during the fight that he had to stay with his own, but he wished Tamme Two was more like you and hoped she'd get that way. So it wasn't just the knife in your head that changed you; you were getting there on your own.
"So they projected out, and I went down to find you. I thought sure you were dead. But you'd hung up on a crossbar with that knife in your hand. I guess you'd yanked it out somehow. You were hardly even bleeding."
"Agents are tough," she said. "I shut off the blood and went into what we call repair-shock. I don't remember it; the process is automatic. Actually, the damage was too extensive; I would not have survived without help."
"Yeah. I carried you up and projected us here, and the folks understood. They were great! But why didn't Tamme Two come down and finish you off for sure?"
"She should have. I think, at the end, it must have bothered her to kill herself -- even her alternate self. I know I had little stomach for it. So she pulled her shot, just a little, and left it to nature. Perhaps she is further along the way to becoming normal -- like me -- than we supposed. The odds were still against my survival."
"I guess they were! If the fog people hadn't taken us in and brought their doctor -- you should have seen him putting in stitches with that nose, no human hand could match it -- well, I wouldn't have wished it on you, but I'm glad I got to meet Bunny."
"Who?"
He didn't answer. Her perceptions were back to norm; she could read the passing trauma that shook him, the realization that Bunny -- and all that she implied -- had been suppressed.
"We can't stay here any longer," Tamme said.
"Right," he said heavily. "You have a mission. Got to get back to Earth and report."
She read the resignation in him. He knew he was giving her up -- yet his conscience forced it. But there was one thing he didn't know.
"I do remember -- some," she said.
"Don't play with me!" he snapped. "I don't want an act!"
"You wanted the moon."
"I knew I couldn't have it."
"You preserved my life. This will not be forgotten."
"Why not?" he muttered. "The computer will erase it, anyway."
They returned to the fog house.
She activated the projector, and they were at the bazaar.
Crowds milled everywhere, surging past the multi-leveled display stalls. Human, near-human, far-human, and alien mixed without concern, elbows jostling tentacles, shoes treading the marks of pincer-feet. Eyeballs stared at antennae; mouths conversed with ventricles. Frog-eyed extraterrestrials bargained for humanoid dolls, while women bought centaur tails for brooms. Machines of different species mixed with the living creatures, and walking plants inspected exotic fertilizers: horse manure, bat guano, processed sewer sludge.
"Hey -- there's a manta!" Veg cried, waving.
But it was an alien manta, subtly different in proportion and reaction, and it ignored him.
They walked among the rest, looking for the projector. Then Tamme's eye caught that of a man: a terrestrial agent of a series closely akin to hers.
He came over immediately. "Oo gest stapped in? Mutings ot wavorium." He indicated the direction and moved on.
Veg stared after him. "Wasn't that Taler?"
"Possibly. SU, TA, or TE series, certainly -- but not from our frame."
"I guess not," he agreed, shaking his head. "Sounded like you and that machine-hive chitchat. Hey -- this is a good place to leave that lentil!"
"True," she agreed. She took it out and flipped it into a bag of dragonfly-crabs, one of which immediately swallowed it.
"The gourmet who eats that crab will get a surprise!" Veg said, chuckling. Then he turned serious. "What do we do now? There may be thousands of agents here. We can't fight them all!"
"I have lost my taste for fighting."
He glanced at her. "Then you're not all the way better yet. Still, we have to do something."
"We go to the wavorium."
"I feel dizzy," he muttered.
The wavorium was a monstrous frozen fountain whose falling waters, though fixed in one place, were neither cold nor rigid. Tamme parted them like curtains and stepped into a turbulent ocean whose waves had the texture of jellied plastic. The surface gave slightly beneath their weight but sprang back resiliently behind them.
Perched on the central whitecaps were a number of Tammes, Vegs, Talers, Aquilons, and Cals. From the outside, more were entering, just as she and Veg were.
"Very wall, les coll it tu urder," a Taler said. "Em eh cumprohonsible?"
"Cloos nuif," another Taler responded. There was a general murmur of agreement.
"Need a translation?" Tamme asked Veg. "He called the meeting to order and asked if he were comprehensible. The other said -- "
"I heard," Veg growled. "I can make it out, close enough."
"That's what the other said." She concentrated on the speaker, once more adapting her auditory reflexes so that the speech became normal to her.
"We all know why we're here," the chairman-Taler said. "This happens to be a central crossover point for a number of alternate loops. Now we can't go wandering aimlessly forever; we have to come to some sort of decision. It is pointless to quarrel among ourselves -- we're all so nearly equal that chance would be the deciding factor. We need to unify, or at least agree on a common, noncompetitive policy that will serve the best interests of the majority. Discussion?"
"Suppose we pool our resources?" a Tamme said. "If we represent different alternatives, we may be able to assemble enough information on our real enemies to be of benefit."
"Not likely," Taler said. "We are so similar we had to have diverged from a common source at or about the time the three agents made captive the three normals on Paleo. Several of us have been comparing notes, and our experience seems to be identical prior to that point. After that, we evidently divide into three major channels: In each case the three normals are accompanied to the desert frame by one agent. Taler, Taner, or Tamme. Each of these subdivides into three channels, as that agent enters the alternate clover-pattern with one normal. Nine variations in all. However -- "
"That is assuming reality is diverging," a Cal pointed out. "I suspect the framework is considerably more complex. All the alternates appear to exist through all time, separated from each other by a fraction of a second. Thus we are not precisely parallel with each other, and our seeming unity of earlier experience is illusory."
Taler paused. "You disconcert me," he said, and there was a general chuckle. "Let's call our unified origin a fictional reference point of convenience, much as the hexaflexagon is an imperfect but useful analogy and guide. Obviously, our best course is to return each to his own alternate -- if we can find it. Can we agree on the nature of the report we should make to our home-worlds?"
"Stay out of alternity!" Veg bawled, startling Tamme, who had not been paying attention to her own Veg amidst this assemblage of doubles.
There was a smattering of applause, especially from the normals. The Cal who had clarified the framework concept nodded at Veg as though they were old friends, and several Aquilons smiled warmly.
"I believe that sums up the sentiment of this group," Taler remarked with a smile of his own. He seemed more relaxed and human than he should be, as though he had diverged too far from his original conditioning. "Now how can we be certain that the right couples return to their worlds? Or does it make a difference?"
"We'll have to get off at the same frame we got on," an Aquilon said. "We hav
e twelve couples here -- one from each starting point. It should match."
Taler shook his head. "Right there, it doesn't match. Twelve couples, nine combinations: Three are duplicates. The extras are all male-female, so we have seven male-female pairs, four male-male, and one female-female. Now -- "
The Tamme/Aquilon couple stood together. "Are you implying -- ?"
"By no means, ladies," Taler said quickly. "I merely point out that there seems to be a bias here in favor of male-female pairings -- yet chance would have had only four such couples out of every nine. This suggests that our gathering has been selected from a larger pool. There must be hundreds of couples, traveling in both directions. We represent a selected cross-section."
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