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when in contact with living flesh other than Kalindan flesh. It may have
served an evolutionary function once, but now it was mainly useful because
wild things in the sea, or those things likely to be encountered in Kalinda,
knew to avoid it and thus tended to leave Kalindans alone unless really hard
up for a meal. The tendrils could also be made to exude an odor that smelled
quite nice, and was individually distinctive, to Kalindans, but considered by
most other species, intelli-gent and not, as one of the most noxious odors
imaginable. More insurance that when you took a little swim you would be able
to pick and choose your own company.
It was one of those continuing self-discovery facts, like the transparent
eyelids. He hadn't noticed that in himself, but it became obvious once he was
in company and in close quarters with others of his kind.
He was, however, beginning to feel as if he were aban-doned and, if not
forgotten, consigned to ward-of-the-state status and out of the swim of
things. Too inconvenient for them, potential unknown, but at least he didn't
seem to be a Hadun.
They even let him go topside once, to see the island and tour the large
facilities there. If you didn't just materialize on the rocks, and if the
weather was decent, they had little electric cars on nice little roads that
were designed to carry Kalindans to and from the plant and exits to the sea,
as well as in and around the plant and the rest of the island. Since crawling
on your hands, dragging your body behind you, was the only alternative, it
seemed very practical, once you got the hang of the semi-sidesaddle seat. The
thing was, though, he was still basically a fixer and a kind of private
detective completely out of his element no matter whether on land or sea.
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What appeared to have doomed him from any better status was the very real
reappearance of Ming
Dawn Palavri.
She had always been there, sort of, and had surfaced for brief but confused
periods when he'd daydreamed or some-times in dreams or just when he woke up,
but at the start this had all been new to him, and she'd had only those brief
times. Now that this had dragged into weeks and months and the novelty was
already well worn off, it would be Ari who went to sleep and Ming who woke up.
There weren't any physi-cal changes as such; that would take weeks under
Kalindan biology, maybe longer. But the moves were different, the voice was
different to a degree, and it began to spook the detail around him. He wasn't
waking up during this period, either, and so had no idea what went on when she
was domi-nant, a fact Ming discovered with some satisfaction.
At first they thought he was faking it or, worse, was really crazy, but after
they decided that this was in fact a second personality, they called the
experts back in, which meant that Inspector Shissik traveled once more from
the capital to Mahakor and waited around until she appeared. When she did,
they notified him and brought her to the interrogation room.
Shissik had been frustrated in any attempts to bring the two newcomers
together or to free either one from their ward status so that they could take
whatever place in society they could manage and contribute.
The politicians were too nervous to do it; it wasn't rational, but if you saw
what appeared to be a well-organized and prepared nest of agent provocateurs
show up and create revolution and war along a large area, you might well be
excused, he knew, for not trusting anybody.
The female, though, was so very gentle, and so very dif-ferent even from the
male, that he felt certain there was no danger. He simply didn't have the
authority to grant them freedom.
Now what was either a unique psychological condition, to Kalindans, a new
wrinkle in newly processed aliens, or something to back up that incredibly
wild story his superiors refused to credit as truthful, was just beginning to
come to light.
Shissik was a trained investigator and one of the best interrogators in all
the Interior Ministry, and before a word was spoken he knew that, while the
body was the same, somebody else was now inside.
"I am Inspector Shissik. And you are ... ?"
"I am called Ming Dawn Pa
Palavri.
The last is my family name." She seemed to be distressed that she had problems
getting that name out.
"You know where you are and what this is all about?"
"I have a good idea by now," she admitted.
"Do you remember any of my conversations with Ari Martinez?"
She shook her head. "No, not real ones. I saw this room and a guy like you
over there like now, but it was
like in a dream, and I could make out no words."
"How much do you remember?"
"Not much at all. I see me shot. I see Ari shoot me. Then there is a time like
a long, dark " She paused, as if groping for words. " bad dream where I can
see things here and there but not as one, and then I just blank out."
"Do you feel complete? Mentally, that is?"
She thought about it. "No. There are holes. All sorts of things. Little
things. Not just from the bad dream time, but way before, when I was a cop,
and even stuff from my real life. It is like some of it just is not there.
Like it has been wiped out by a flat black-and-white line art that kind of
says what was once there, but gives no sense of real.
Some of it is all gone. I I have been told what they did to me, but that is a
blank. I am not even sure I would like to know what it was like. To be
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owned.
To be owned and love it."
Shissik nodded to himself and jotted a few things down in his notes. "It is
not unusual for someone who has been entirely subjected to another's will for
a period to lose those things. The old personal feelings, personal memories
and values, things that meant a lot to you but were irrelevant to the 'new'
you, as it were, were either overwritten or filed away in what the brain uses
for dead storage. Sometimes that storage can be retrieved when there is sudden
stimulus, but I suspect not in your case. I think the dead storage was left
when you sort of united with that computer. I think it's still back there."
That frightened her. A part of her, some of the most per-sonal parts, gone?
"And I just seem slower.
Less intuitive. I feel like I'm talking slower and looking for the right
words. That, too?"
"Some of that can be because Ari considered the link-up a total genius working
at the fastest imaginable speed. Com-ing back to normal might seem grindingly
slow." He didn't mention the possibility that her emerging as mistress of the
right brain and Ari master of the left brain might be part of it. Like
Terrans, Kalindans and many other species had two halves to their brains. In
the Kalindan case, according to the biology text, the brain was divided much
like the Type Forty-ones. Just a comparison of how she talked, her problems in
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