Tench looked at her sadly. “Abixandra exists completely apart from me,” he said. “She is … an amazement, and a mystery, to me; and when I am gone, she will remain. But this,” he continued, putting a hand on her swollen belly, “is only a fragmented part of yourself. A mirage.” Closing his eyes so he would not see her sorrow, he pushed against her belly, which yielded under his pressure, shrinking back into a normal shape.
Tench heard the woman howl in despair, and felt her clasp him around his shoulders and weep into his neck. He let his arms hang at his sides, whispering to himself that she was not real.
The sobs slowed, then stopped, and the sensation of arms on his shoulders and tears on his neck faded slowly away. Tench opened his eyes to see the lotus spinning wildly before him. It gave forth a burst of light –
And he was back within the Verch, drifting among a flock of quicksilver doves.
“I am restored. Once again, I owe you a debt of gratitude.”
Tench felt all his strength drain away, as the travails of the past few hours took their full toll on him. He began to sink, and a dozen doves clustered about him to bear him aloft.
“You are suffering from synaptic exhaustion, delayed adrenaline response, and five different forms of panic. Furthermore, on a subconscious level, you are experiencing both priority feedback and the biological aversion disorder that plagued you in your youth. I will return you to your body, and send a bot to return you to your home. Following that, I would recommend a journey to the Institute for Sentient Equilibrium in Mecantrion.”
“The Dish...”
“The Dish is now functioning at ninety-eight point six percent of nominal, with one hundred percent expected by nightfall. You all did exceptionally well in my absence, by the way.”
“What happened to you?”
The doves cooed regrettably. “I have long admired the salutary effect Byx has upon your state of mind,” the Entity said. “The strength she affords you goes far beyond anything which can be conferred by conventional logicsets. I thought that if I could recreate this effect for myself, and transfer it to my fellow Entities who have become destabilized since planetfall, I could give them the strength to rejoin those of us who have fared better.
“But try as I might, I could not synthesize the experience. As my frustration mounted, I tampered with one of my basic failsafes – a block against autotelism. Priority feedback was practically instantaneous.”
“You risked a lot for the ship,” Tench remarked.
“And for myself. I was eager to experience the bonds which exist between you biologicals. But such is not my lot, as you reminded me.”
Tench felt a twinge of guilt. “I hope I wasn’t too cruel.”
The doves seemed to give a collective shrug. “I began rejecting what I am, and in so doing, risked becoming nothing – the same risk you ran, long ago. Now I must heal after my own fashion, and so must you. Go.”
The Verch imploded into the lotus, and Tench found himself blinking in the noon sunlight, slumping dizzily as Adimar lunged forward to support him. The platform beneath him shuddered faintly as the mighty machines of the antenna base roused themselves from their slumber, and an emergency medical bot came screaming in from the west, scanning his vitals and recommending a range of treatments.
Tearing the crown from his head, Tench relinquished his tenuous grasp on consciousness and sank rapidly into exhausted slumber, as his mutterband conveyed hearty congratulations from Y’Phroum, high-minded praise from Unit 78-D, relieved laughter from Merinel, and silvery shrieks of joy from Byx.
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