She was trembling. She could almost see how he would have crushed her, how he would have broken the slim bones of her legs and back.
When she came into the open, reciting some of the funny lines from her play, he seemed to have forgotten all about what had almost happened between them.
They laughed and finished the wine.
Wind rocked the truck.
Outside, snow began to fall again, after several days of clear skies. The sound it made when the wind whisked it across the roof of the cargo hold made Belina’s flesh goosebump into thousands of little hills.
When the lights were turned out, Sebastian fell asleep almost instantly, but Billy Belina lay awake for a long time, trying to think of some way to kill the idiot.
It must be carefully done. He must have no chance for revenge. If she only wounded him, it was quite possible that he would catch her and feed her to the Furnace and never call her forth again.
But she was still out when she killed him, because she would be alone and there would be no puppet master to resurrect the prince and Wissa and the others. She might as well be liquid flesh herself, unfeeling and unthinking, rather than be the only puppet alive.
She fell asleep pondering murder, her pretty face a dream of soft lines and golden hair and eyes as bright as seawater.
He was happier now than he had ever been in his life. He no longer had nightmares about a blond girl with a knife in her belly. Nor did he dream about his father stabbing his mother every night. He was never plagued with an indefinable guilt, and he seemed even to have forgotten Pertos Godelhausser and the five years they had spent together on the road, drifting from city to city in their strange symbiosis.
They made only thirty or forty miles a day, driving slowly so as not to miss anything. With Belina, it was as if he had four eyes, and every inch of the land dazzled him as it never had before. They camped for two and three days at a time, playing games in the snow and reciting lines at night. Now and then, Bitty Belina would read to him from one of Pertos’ old books, and he would fall asleep listening to the lilting music of her sensuously childlike voice as she recounted the exploits of knights and sorcerers, of magicians and barbarian heroes.
He could even hear her in his dreams, it seemed: pleasant dreams where the sun and the water spoke like Bitty Belina and comforted him with heat and with coolness.
When the idiot finally dozed, his slack face averted, chin on his chest, Bitty Belina quietly closed the book she had been reading from and laid it on the floor. Rising, she hurried to the front wall of the cargo hold where they lived. She climbed the rungs of a stool, stepped from the seat of that to the control console of the Furnace beside it. She looked into the empty capsule-womb, then went to the pair of knobs and worked them back and forth, getting the feel of things. She took a wafer from the identity file and slid it into the proper slot.
The Furnace lighted.
It was bright green.
Liquid spilled into the forming tray beyond the thick viewplate above the womb.
She punched the left knob straight down, rejecting the project. The liquid flesh was withdrawn from the forming tray and restored to the tank to await future creations. The identity wafer popped out of the slot and was replaced in the file.
It had occurred to Belina that she might be able to resurrect the others on her own hook. The idiot had left the Olmescian amoeba curled toward the back of the machine, and everything was ready for use. If she had remembered anything from all those times she had set in a nutrient bath, watching Pertos create her comrades, now was the time to find out. And it appeared that she had learned and remembered well.
At first, she had rejected the thought, for she could not see how a puppet could ever expect to become a puppet master. She was not as bound by rules and patterns of life as Sebastian was, though the concept was too large for her to absorb very quickly. Even Pertos would have balked at the suggestion that he might one day ascend into heaven and become a genuine god rather than a demi-god, guiding the fates of real men rather than the fates of puppets. The Furnace occupied a place of reverence in a puppet’s view of things, and no simulacrum regarded the womb with less than a fear of the supernatural. For them, it was both heaven and hell. It was the void. It was the end, yet without an end, the beginning without a beginning. To take command of it seemed no more than egotistical folly that would terminate in some awful disaster.