Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [11]
It made him want to dance.
Abruptly, sinuous convulsions started up the girl’s arms and, against her will, her hands contorted through a series of strange positions, oddly graceful. The girl’s legs began a slow involuntary dance.
Time to wake up. He sent the usual trigger to his nanobots—no response. Their mental presence dwindled, flickering, like ghostly pain reminding of a freshly amputated limb. Nathi felt naked. In this lucid dream, his mind was shackled in the narrow confines of the girl’s body—a sensation he had nearly forgotten. He’d forgotten so much….
Just how much—and when? Was not his memory affected by the girl’s amnesia, right now? When exactly had the gaps begun to form? Perhaps, not long ago. Maybe, from the time that he had started on the girl. He had no way of knowing.
And suddenly, he was afraid. He had to break the contact—now! Struggling, clawing his way out of her mind, he pushed his mental focus out, with all the force of centuries of practice—a posthuman soul desperate to leave a body. The girl’s fractured defenses wouldn’t hold. Just one last effort, and he would be free, but—
“Genie, can you help me dance? Please?”
Nathi turned. From outside, she looked so tiny, swimming in the ebb and flow of the plasma wind. A tingling, faint at the periphery of his awareness, his tactile senses clinging still to the girl’s skin. He had an odd sensation of being stretched out.
Now! Just one final effort, and—
He would return—to what? The empty skulls of his nightmares? Or the memory-gapped loneliness? He had no home. No family. And no friends.
Her face. Serene and listless to the sharp eyes of the monitors, in the dreamworld it shone with a mix of curiosity and hope, pain and fear, and surprise. But not despair. That was a learned taste.
The image flickered, overlapping with the monitors’ perspective—deadpan face, closed eyes, hands clenched. But in this dream, the girl was looking back at him—the only link that held her consciousness together. Did she know that? How did it look? A tunnel leading to the light? He couldn’t tell; he was already half-awake. Another moment, and she’d go back to just being a human vegetable—watered and fed, with hair neatly trimmed. She’d never dance again.
The bride must dance.
He stopped.
The waves of the magnetic field, felt by her skin, by Nathi, formed a pattern—and he recognized it.
“Hey!” He once again forgot her name—yes! The amnesia had returned, which meant that he was back; the contact hadn’t ruptured. Yes! He’d never been so happy at forgetting things. “Hey, have you ever sailed a magsail ship?”
Oh yes, she had.
He conjured magnetic sails—superconducting hoops arrayed in linked loops or spread into shifting grids. Two-masted brigantine. He was a genie, after all. “Imagine you’re a ship.”
The girl was at the heart of this revolving, beautiful contraption. Her eyes were filled with light. “Look!”
Their perspective changed. The castle suddenly collapsed into a tiny flower below them. They shot straight up and hovered, surrounded by invisible walls of what would have been the navigation bridge.
He settled back into her senses. “These”—he pushed the girl’s awareness into her arms and legs, caught in involuntary dance—“your sail controls, at autopilot. They must dance to keep us flying. See? It’s good that they keep moving.”
Nathi loaded the magsail navigation model into their shared mind. Unlike solar sails, magnetic sails did not, in most cases, travel in the same direction as the solar wind. They weren’t pushed but slid sideways, deflecting the charged particles