Chapter 26

Everything started moving again.

For the longest instant I felt like I was blind, and deaf, with cotton covering me. I had seen and understood everything, and now I was only seeing with my eyes and, like a dream that vanishes when you awake, I could remember how it felt to look at all the pieces and see them fit together, but I couldn't quite remember how it worked. I recalled an odd little book I read in college, called Flatland. In it, a resident of a two-dimensional world had only four directions he could conceive of: north, south, east, and west. "Up" and "north" were identical words to him. He's befriended by a three-dimensional creature and taken out of his world, up through the third dimension. On his return, he tries vainly to explain to his fellow Flatlanders that there's another direction: up, but not north. They can't understand him, and he can't even demonstrate what he remembers.

In that instant of return, I felt exactly like Mr. A. Square of Flatland. I remembered I had done these things, but I could no longer even express how. Whatever link I had somehow found was gone.

Victor had finished his stagger forward from when he had pushed me; from his point of view, the sphere must have simply vanished, and the silence must have been shocking. There was for him suddenly no hum, no wind. I saw him blink in confusion for just a brief second, and then gather himself for a rush towards me. I stood calmly as he headed for me with upraised fists.

He got to within three feet of me before he began to falter. His face looked puzzled for an instant, and he dropped his hands to his stomach, bent over, and began gagging.

"Aversion therapy," I told him.

He tried to straighten up, still with a murderous look in his eye, and he reached for me again, only to start gagging again. He dropped to the ground, still holding himself.

"I told you," I said. "Aversion therapy."

I turned away from him and sought out Lauren. She was still up on the arm of the dish, hanging on tightly and looking very confused. "Hang on, love," I said. "Just give me a sec to get you down."

She smiled weakly at me. "Hang on?" she said. "Yeah, the thought did occur to me."

I found the joystick control, walking around the prostrate Victor without a second glance to get there, and used it to lower the dish to waist-high level over the platform. I stepped back onto the platform and offered Lauren my arm. She grabbed me, shakily, and disengaged herself.

"What happened to him?" she asked, looking down at Victor. He made a brief attempt to move again and then subsided.

"Aversion therapy." I nudged him, none too gently, with my toe. "He is finding out right now that he can't touch anyone in anger. It makes him sick." I paused. "Not sure what that's going to do to his sex life, because I have a funny feeling that 'in anger' pretty much describes ever sexual encounter he's been having lately."

"But how did—"

I quieted her with a finger laid over her lips. "Wait. I'll tell you everything, but not now, OK?"

She was looking worried. "Just one question, Rick, OK?" She kissed me briefly, then pulled away and said, "Did you like my lips?"

I smiled at her. "Best lips west of the Missouri. East, too."

"What ... have ... you ... done ... to ... to ... me?" gasped out Victor. He had pulled himself up a bit and was staring at me.

"I keep telling you, Vic. Aversion therapy. You can't do anything in anger now to anyone. It'll make you really sick whenever you try."

"You fucker! You..." He winced. "I didn't do anything!"

"Save it, Victor. Please."

"This won't last, you know. When I get my hands on ... on ... you know, on the thing..." he stopped talking, a growing look of puzzlement on his face. "Goddamnit," he spit out, "The thing that does the thing!"

"Which thing?" I asked innocently.

"The thing with the ... the ... the stuff!" he said. "The ... the stuff!!"

"Oh, that thing," I said. "Yeah, you can't remember that. You can't remember where it is, or how it works, or the last four or five crucial insights that let you take control of it." I paused. "You can't even remember what it does, exactly."

I knelt down to look at him. "You can't even remember what it does. All you can remember is that you used it and it helped you. And now you can't even remember where it is or what is does. For all you know," I said, standing again, "this might be what you're talking about."

He glanced at the dish I was pointing to. "Yeah, right," he said. "That's not it. It's the ... the... " his face contorted with effort. "The thing!"

"Yeah," I said. "The thing." I paused. "The thing that's far away and the thing you'll never get your hands on again. Trust me."

"But I need it ... I have to..."

"No, Vic," I said. "You don't have to. And it doesn't matter anymore, because you can't."

"You BASTARD!" he cried. "You did this to me!"

"I did. Yeah. And I can't wait to see how the rest of your life turns out, Victor." I paused for a second, studying him. "You've already been found guilty of six counts of rape. I know you don't remember it, but the trial has happened and you were convicted. You're an escapee. You're going to prison. Six counts — that's one for each person I know about, and you're getting off lightly for that."

He shook his head. "I didn't..."

"Yes, you did. And think about this: in prison, you are going to have an interesting time, because you can't fight. At all. The moment you try, you're going to get violently ill. So you spend some time thinking about how your fellow prisoners are going to treat you, Victor, when they find you're a dedicated pacifist. I think you may gain some excellent insight about being an unwilling recipient of sexual attention."