Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand Read Free Book Online Page B

she is another engineered breeze.
    The trees draw nearer. I stare at them until they shift, stark lichened branches blurring into limbs bowed with green and gentle leaves. Now they are great and verdant trees that would never grow within a station. I sense the oneironaut’s faint puzzlement at this change, but in another moment we are beneath their heavy welcoming boughs.
    I place my hand against the rough bark and stare into the heart of the greenery. Within the emerald shadows something stirs. Sunlit shards of leaf and twig align themselves into hands. Shadows shift to form a pair of slanted beryl eyes. There: crouched among the boughs like a dappled cat, his curls crowned with a ring of leaves, his lips parted to show small white teeth. He smiles at me.
    Before he draws me any closer I withdraw, snapping the wires from my face. The tree shivers into white sheets and the shrouded body of the woman beside me.
    My pounding heart slowed as I drew myself up on my elbows to watch her, carefully peeling the mask from her face. Beneath lids mapped with fine blue veins her eyes rolled, tracking something unseen. Suddenly they steadied. Her mouth relaxed into a smile, then into an expression of such bliss that without thinking I kissed her and tasted a burst of ecstatic, halcyon joy.
    And reeled back as she suddenly clawed at my chest, her mouth twisted to shout; but no sound came. Bliss exploded into terror. Her eyes opened and she stared, not at me but at something that loomed before her. Her eyes grew wide and horrified, the pupils dilating as she grabbed at my face, tore the hibiscus blossom from my hair, and choked a scream, a shout I muffled with a pillow.
    I whirled and reset the monitors, switched the NET ’s settings, and fled. In the hallway I hesitated and looked back. The woman pummeled the air before her blindly; she had not seen me. I turned and ran until I reached the stairway leading to the floors below, and slipped away unseen.
    Downstairs all was silent. Servers creaked past, bringing tea trays to doctors in their quarters. I hurried to the conservatory, where I inquired after the Aide Justice. The server directed me to a chamber where Justice stood recording the results of an evoked potential scan.
    “Wendy!” Surprise melted into dismay. “What are you doing here?”
    I shut the door and stepped to the window, tugging the heavy velvet drapes until they fell and the chamber darkened. “I want you to span me,” I said.
    He shook his head, nervously fingered his long blond braid. “What? Why—” I grabbed his hand as he tried to turn up the lights, and he nodded slowly, then dimmed the screen he had been working on. “Where is Dr. Harrow?”
    “I want you to do it.” I tightened my grip. “I think I have entered a fugue state.”
    He smiled, shaking his head. “That’s impossible, Wendy. You’d have no way of knowing it—you’d be catatonic, or—” He shrugged, then glanced uneasily at the door. “What’s going on? You know I can’t do that alone, especially now.”
    “But you know how,” I said, stroking his hand. “You are a student of their arts, you can do it as easily as Dr. Harrow.” I leaned forward until my forehead rested against his, and kissed him on the mouth. His expression changed to fear as he trembled and tried to move away. Sexual contact between staff and experimental personnel was forbidden and punishable by execution of the Aides in question, since empaths were believed incapable of initiating such contact. I pinned both of his hands to the table, until he nodded and motioned with his head toward the PET unit.
    “Sit down,” he said. I latched the door, then sat in the wing chair beside the bank of monitors.
    In a few minutes I heard the dull hum of the scanners as he improvised the link for my reading. I waited until my brain’s familiar patterns emerged on the screen.
    “See?” Relief brightened his voice, and he tilted the monitor so that I could see it more