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.“I’m dead to you, do you hear? I did everything you wanted, and now I’ve thrown you away! I’m my own world now.I’m my own people! I’m reborn! I declare myself reborn, right now! No one else can do it for me!” She sprinted suddenly for the foamy line of surf and threw herself into the sea.She poured briny sea water over her tousled head, three times, carefully, with cupped hands.The shock of the cool water seemed to calm her.She came out of the water, dripping, and threw aside her wet clothing to stand naked, ankle deep in the foam.“I am newborn,” she said quietly.“Did you understand the ritual?”“It’s happened to me before,” I said.“I wish it had been that clean and that easy.”“I suppose I’ll keep the name Anne,” she said musingly, digging into the sand with one naked toe.“I like the name Anne.Why shouldn’t I keep it? From now on I’ll do what I want.”“What do you want to do, then?” I said.Something awful was happening to me.My mouth was dry and my heart was pounding at my ribs like a madman at a prison door.“I want to dance.”I got to my feet.“All right.I’ll teach you.”“No,” she said.“I’ll teach you.First we draw the eight-spoked wheel in the sand, like this.” She stooped over gracefully and began to scrape a wide circle in the damp sand.Trembling, I closed my eyes.I didn’t want to see, for fear it would happen too soon.I pulled off the rags of my bodytight and dropped them in the sand.“The males go on this side, the females on the other.There seem to be only two of us, but there are really four: you and your older self, and me and mine.So, we begin.”The dance did not last long.Instead, we made love in the sand, like gods.“Rominuald,” she said, and I shuddered in her embrace because the name sounded so right.There came a day when we had been on the beach for five months.We had caught a huge ray with one of our heavy bone fishhooks and we were roasting it over a bonfire.They told us later that it was the dark pencil of smoke that had attracted them.We heard the boat coming and we hid in the mangroves.They would never have found us if I hadn’t recognized the boat as Ruffian Jack’s exploring hydrofoil, the Ruffian’s Delight.Even then we were cautious.We didn’t come out until we saw Ruffian Jack and Alruddin Spinney wade ashore, surrounded by clouds of cameras.When we came out of the brush we received a standing ovation and a round of cheers from Jack, Spinney, and their five-man crew.Jack and Spinney ran toward us, grinning broadly.Jack embraced me.Spinney and his mantis embraced Anne.Even the crew jumped ship and slogged in toward shore, with more cameras, narrating the historic moment with off-satellite transmitters.“A beard! I can’t believe it,” bellowed Jack, holding me at arm’s length.“Is it really you, Kid? Or should I be calling you Mr.Tanglin now?” There were cameras all around us—a dozen of them at least.I looked into their lenses nonplussed.“What do you know about Tanglin?” I asked cautiously.Jack laughed.“God’s Death, boy, we’ve got all your tapes! Alruddin, look, he doesn’t know! Kid—Arti my lad—they were beautiful! You’re a hero! Anne’s a heroine! A cult idol! And what about Crossbow, eh? What about its amazing discovery? Where is our sexless savant? I swear it’s more of a man than any of us!”I pointed to the tree.Jack looked.Cameras trained their lenses on it.“Sylvaticum pinnatus,” said Jack absently.“Not native here.What’s it doing this close to shore, eh? Lovely tree.”“It’s Crossbow’s grave,” I said soberly.“We planted it there.It would have wanted it that way.”“You mean he’s died?” said Spinney, letting go of Anne for the first time.“It was an accident,” Anne said, catching on fast.“In the Mass.A terrible illness.The long trek was too much for it.”“It was a martyr to the Cause,” said Spinney sadly, tears coming to his eyes.It was the first line of what was to become Spinney’s lyric masterpiece, “Martyr to the Cause.”“What’s the situation like in Telset these days?” I said.“Why, we’ve won! The Old Cabal has been annihilated! The New Cabal and the Reformed Board have everything under control.It was your tapes that did it, Kid.Tanglin, I mean.Angeluce is dead.Instant Death surrendered! Your tapes caused a planet-wide riot, a full-fledged Revolution! It’s the greatest tape accomplishment in history!” Ruffian Jack waved his arms wildly.“Back on board, crew! It’s back to Telset and a hero’s welcome!”Half-ushered, half-dragged by Jack’s crew, Anne and I were heaved on board and surrounded by yelling, cheering sailors, who ripped bits of our tattered bodytights off for souvenirs and demanded autographs and statements for the planet-wide live broadcast.Jack gunned the engines wildly and the backwash from his craft’s powerful engines nearly swamped the little hut Anne and I had built.We were in Telset in an hour and a half.13Our reception was half power-fantasy, half baroque nightmare.The entire population of Telset met us on the docks.The shore was black with people and packed so tight that citizens were being forced chest-deep into the sea by the pressure of crowding.Every man, woman, and clone in the city was screaming his, her, or its lungs out and setting off powerful, dangerously haphazard fireworks that rained red-hot cinders on unprotected necks and heads.They were chanting, too.“Tang-lin, Tang-lin, Tang-lin!”“Merciful God, I haven’t seen anything like this since Peitho,” yelled Anne.“Whose idea was this?” I screamed in Jack’s ear.“Money Manies’, who else?” he said.The screaming, billowing crowd was on the hair-trigger edge of mass hysteria.Members of the Cognitive Dissonants and the Fourways were trying to keep order.I noticed that they were wearing new armbands, not the rainbow armbands of the Civic Detail, but thick bracelets of linked beads.“Go up to the bow and wave to them,” Jack howled.“Go on, or they’ll tear the city apart!”Anne and I walked to the bow, joined hands, and waved.The crowd went absolutely out of their minds.In seconds we were in the middle of a maelstrom of cameras, bashing each other, cracking their lenses, spinning around in tight circles, going completely out of control as the drone wavelengths were overloaded with contradictory signals.When one of them knocked Anne down, I went berserk and started whacking them to rubble with my nunchuck.They were so thick that we couldn’t see the crowd, could barely see each other.Jack reacted quickly, gunning the engines and pulling us out of the dock, so rapidly that I was almost thrown overboard and Anne saved herself only by grabbing the brass railing on the bow [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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