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.Anne put down her chopsticks and I stopped wolfing down the gelatin.She shivered.I was frightened too.It seemed to have grown colder inside our snug little bubble.For a long moment we heard only the impersonal hum of the generator and the quiet breathing of the two old people.Their breathing seemed to be synchronized.They were going through something that we didn’t understand, that we had never seen before.They were both so incredibly old.Anne and I couldn’t help it.We were overcome by a sort of superstitious dread.I felt that there was some sort of tainted power at work; an old, cold, strong power that could eat us up like a viper eats young birds.Moses had dropped his facade again, just as he had when we were floating in the water, convinced that we would die.His face seemed to shine and there was a look in his round yellow eyes that terrified me.A glance at Anne showed that she felt the same way.I wanted to beg them to stop, but I was afraid to break their eerie concentration.At last they released one another’s hands and Anne and I both drew a sigh of relief.I was deeply glad that she had been with me to share that peculiar ordeal, and her look at me showed that she was also grateful.It had lasted only twenty seconds but it had drawn us much closer to one another.I wanted to embrace her and sit and breathe in the warmth of young, human contact, but I didn’t, for Crossbow spoke.“You are Moses Moses.”Moses nodded.“Yes, Crossbow.I slipped past death and ran for the light with destruction gnawing at my heels.And I lived.I have nothing beneath me but a shell, but I live.It rasps away inside me until I echo with hollowness, but it has never caught me.”Crossbow nodded.“Yes, we are members of the same brotherhood.You have seen how my old friend compromised with death.” It nodded sharply at me.“I found an anchor.He thought he had found one too, but she destroyed him.And even now my enemies pull at me.They seek to tug me from the sea bottom just as this flying island tugged itself from its rooted moorings and floated up into the airy thinness of despair.But they won’t succeed.You can help me.”Moses shook his head.“I haven’t the strength.I haven’t your conviction.Ask the young people.They have the vitality you need, not me.I haven’t anything—I even envy you what you have.You’ve studied life.You understand it.You have meaning.I have nothing.”“There is a way, Moses.”“You’re mad.”“No! Did you see madness within me? No.Think, Moses.It is awful, it is dreadful, as all things of great power contain an element of dread.But it can be ours.It is immortality.It may be tainted.Tainted with great age.But we are tainted.How could we live but with a tainted life?”The terrible intensity of their rapport seemed to scorch us.Anne could not bear it any longer.“Stop! Please stop!” She folded her small hands over her sunburned ears, and shrank into a ball, drawing up her arms and legs.Moses and Crossbow jerked up their heads, the thread of their rapport broken by her cry.In an instant their friendly, genial masks were back on; they seemed to drop over the two of them like flesh shrouds naked bone.They stopped leaning toward one another; they broke their eye contact.Moses reached down and picked up his platter.Crossbow stood up and smiled its old parental, protective smile at me.It seemed to drape it over me as if it were an old, warm blanket.It seemed intolerably artificial; I just stared.“I still haven’t told you what I’m doing on this island,” said Crossbow brightly, leaping to a new subject with the agility of a mountain goat.“My presence here must have shocked you as much as yours shocked me!” It chuckled genially but without much conviction.Anne uncurled and moved closer to me; we sat together on the floor, touching hips and shoulders.I felt the warmth of her shoulder through the fabric we wore.Moses Moses was eating stoically and apparently ignoring the neuter, but I could sense him vibrating inside like the plucked strings of an autoharp.I slipped my fingers around Anne’s naked wrist and the touch seemed to calm us both.“I discovered this island in its bud stage three years ago,” Crossbow said.“I found it on a tape while I was mapping the sea bottom near my house, with undersea drones.I had tracked the life cycle of the flying islands before, with drones and tracers, but I had always wanted to observe one personally and do a great deal of necessary detail work.I was able to estimate this island’s eventual destination by calculating the trade winds and the paths of other islands; in fact, to be frank, I chose this island because of its destination.”“The Mass,” Moses Moses said.Crossbow nodded.“The Mass.” It seemed pleased that Moses Moses had guessed correctly.“But we can’t go there,” Anne said in alarm.“That’s a horrible place.”“The Corporate terms of settlement are supposed to forbid human exploration,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral.I didn’t disapprove; I merely wanted to point it out.“And the drone tapes I’ve seen of the Mass … well … they didn’t look promising.” In my mind’s eye I saw the nightmare landscape of the Mass: sticky pools slimed with white muck, leafless trees furred inches deep in bright mold, crawling things bristling with damp ridges of shelf fungus, breathless stillness broken only by dripping … a landscape not of death but of fervid, fetid life.“I’ve been there before,” Crossbow said.“I wasn’t able to stay as long as I liked.But I had time to make a crucial discovery.” It looked at Anne and me, then it shrugged and smiled shyly.“I might as well tell you; there’s no call for false modesty, as my friend Tanglin used to say.It was this thing—this organism.” It pointed with one slim webbed finger at the tangled wiring overhead.“This is a model of its molecular structure—a very limited one of course, though the torus shape seems to be well established.You’ll notice the helical gaps within the structure; there are twenty-three of them, though why that number I can’t say.Notice the peculiar arrangement here at these genomes; you can see that by faulting and folding this long double chain is moved shut almost like a trap door.” The neuter stood up and began crimping and bending a section of wire with its thin but powerful fingers.Anne and I watched nonplussed as a long chain of linked beads moved up over a gap in the structure, like jaws closing.A section of fatigued wire popped with the strain and half-a-dozen beads of varying color spilled to the fabric floor and rolled off drunkenly under the generator, but Crossbow didn’t seem to notice.“See how it covers up that helical gap!” said Crossbow, filled with admiration.“It can trap an entire chain of genes in there—a whole half-helix
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