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THIRTY-FIVE

Kawashita removed a chart from a plastic pouch and unrolled it for Anna. The hot bricks in a hibachi beneath the table kept their feet warm in the cold room, but little else. They were wrapped in several layers of clothing, but Anna was still chilly and not very attentive.

"We've covered these paths so far," he said. "Together, look at the patterns."

"So? Straight lines, curves, all the normal ways a vehicle runs."

"I'm not so sure," he said. "I've numbered the times we went certain ways. Some paths have been covered a dozen times, with variations of only a few meters."

"So?"

"I don't know. I thought maybe you could suggest something. After all, you were born into a more complex world." That had become a standing joke between them. Anna ignored it and said in a stage whisper, "I don't understand why we should freeze to death when we have a perfectly good environmental system. All we have to do is turn it up."

"I think better when I'm cold."

"I don't," she said. "Can't think at all. Maybe I could decipher your squiggles if it was warm."

"We can find warmth within ourselves," Kawashita said, rolling the paper. "Just concentrate on your—"

"I'm no good at meditating," Anna said. "Not as good as you are, anyway. And I'm getting tired of all this pretense. Why give up the comforts of home? And don't dodge the question—I'm getting irritated."

Kawashita nodded and slipped his feet from under the table. "I am trying to reproduce a situation," he said. "It must have been ten years ago. I had a dream."

"About what?"

"I'm not sure now. I was so involved in the illusions that I thought it was a simple nightmare. Just after we came back, it occurred to me there was more to the dream than fear. But I cannot remember details."

Anna laughed. "So you're going to nudge your memory with a bit of tea cake? Search for times lost?"

"I don't understand."

"I never finished the book, but some French author from your time wrote about incredibly detailed memories conjured up by the taste of a tea cake."

He shrugged. "The cold helps. It was in a situation like this that I ate breakfast, ten years ago, after the nightmare. It was winter outside, and I warmed my legs with an urn of hot bricks under a table. And I did something that related to the dream . . . but I'm not sure what."

"Wrote it down? Talked it over with someone?"

"No. It wouldn't have made sense to them."

Anna swung her legs out of the pit and stood up. "Well, this experiment is at an end, unless you want me to live in another part of the dome. Jog your memory some other way. If you want, we'll order a memory analyzer."

"Yes, I thought about that, but the brochures said such devices are very bad at retrieving dream memory. When the mind wants a dream forgotten, the process is pretty thorough."

"The mind, or your hosts," Anna said.

"Yes. It was something about my situation." He frowned. "I think . . . wait. I know! I was a great king, in a magnificent palace, watching a huge spiritual hand scrawl something on a stone wall with a fingernail made of fire. But what did it write?"

"Read the Bible."

"I don't understand."

" 'You have been weighed in the balance, and found wanting,' or something to that effect. An old biblical tale."

Kawashita looked at her with brows lifted, mouth open slightly, eyes showing prominent whites. "Yes," he whispered. He scurried off, robe shustling behind him, to another room in the house.

"Anna the muse," she said to herself. She reached into a fold of her robe and brought out a remote switch. "Let's get this place heated. And clear the hibachi out. Bring back the usual furniture."

"Yes, madam," the voice replied.

Kawashita scribed busily on the surface of his tapas pad. The memory extension units—containing all the libraries he thought would prove useful—rested in their cases next to his sleeping pad. A meter away was Anna's sleep-field, a luxury she had refused to give up.

The dome followed a twenty-four-hour cycle. Judging from the brightness of the artificial sun, and the color of the sky projection, it was late afternoon. Anna left Kawashita in their bedroom and walked among the bare shoots of trees and bushes planted around the house. The hills were beginning to green with fresh grass. After the recent shower the air was fresh and smelled of wet loam. The dome didn't have all the conveniences of the Peloros, but it was pleasant, and she had little cause for complaint.

Since early adolescence she had wanted to use an artist's modifier to create and record four-dimensional abstract experiences. She fulfilled her dream in a shed a hundred meters from the house, working an hour each day. In a month or so, she thought she might have something worth showing to Kawashita. Attached to the shed was a cloning laboratory with an agricultural attachment, which she was adapting for landscape and gardening purposes. That took another hour or two a day.

Next came the five years of business records to examine and assimilate. Using a tapas, she looked over the bases of her financial empire and worked out theories for improving profits and efficiency. As an adjunct to that study, she was brushing up on planetary geology, exobiology, xenopsychology, and a touch of warper science. Since she foundered on anything beyond algebra, she relied on her tapas to solve complex problems.

Still, she was restless. She didn't say anything, but it was clear Kawashita knew. She guessed she might last a year, even two, but beyond that she'd have to become active again. She watched the approaching orchestrated sunset. "I'm burned-in," she said. "Fixed and unchangeable." She turned to take another path, this leading past the truck-garden plots. A few lettuce heads were making their debut, but everything else was still dormant or undecided. An earthworm—one of sixty thousand born two weeks before—struggled on the concrete path. She reached down and carefully removed it to the soil.

Two weeks ago Kawashita had shown her a few entries from his tapas journal. They'd interested her but had been too rough and esoteric to mean much. Still, his ideas seemed to be reaching some conclusion. She hoped their schedules would coincide.

The stars came on. They were set to mimic the outside sky. A sensor on the top of the dome followed the skies closely, and if any event presented itself—meteor, aurora, or ship in orbit—the inner projector reproduced it.

"I've become awful domestic the past year," she whispered to herself. She kneeled in the dirt and sniffed the flowers on a blackthorn hedge. The routine was pleasant, her life was settled; for the first time in her memory she was content. Yet . . . not. The pressure in her throat began and moved up to squeeze a few drops of moisture from her eyes. She was afraid. If she had to leave, would he love her enough to come with her? If not, what would she do without him? They'd twined like the squash vines—separation would tear a few roots and leaves, bloody them both.

She repeated her name to herself, like some mantra of strength, but all the power had gone from it. She knew, now, of things more important than her planet-swapping career and reputation. There was peace to think about, and self-knowledge, and asking questions—probing for the sources of human corruption.

She respected Kawashita's search, but she wasn't anxious to join in on it.

It was clear what her life would be like, one way or the other. Peace would never last long. She'd always rush from goal to goal. "Dammit, that's the way I am," she said through clenched teeth. She filtered the dirt through tightened fingers. A worm, squeezed in half, wriggled out and fell to the peak of the little pile. She stood up quickly and brushed her hands on her overalls. She longed for the clean, certain corridors of her ship. Her clumsiness didn't result in any tiny slaughters there.

The dome, despite its far-reaching night sky, seemed to cramp her. Her lips worked as she half walked, half ran, to the perimeter. A honeycomb of shelves for equipment storage stood by the airlock. She chose an environment backpack and cycled through the lock. Outside she slipped on sunglasses—the planet's true time was still before sunset—and turned up the shield's radiation filters.

The stretches of concrete were heartbreaking. They went on and on without relief, like some nightmare of infinity brought down to human terms. A few kilometers off was one tiny relief in the expanse—the Waunters' abandoned probe. She stared at it speculatively for a few minutes. Before she could reach it, dark would fall on the outside, and she didn't want to be caught on the plains at night—not again. Tomorrow, then. It would be something to look forward to.

 

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Framed