in a nutrient bath which stimulated the nerve clusters in the outer layers of her unnatural flesh. Soon, she was tossing this way and turning that, murmuring softly, fingers twitching as she grasped at dreams of death as if refusing to accept the life so suddenly flooding into her.
More of the synthetic flesh, in its liquid form, spilled into the capsule-womb, and the cycle was begun again as Pertos chose the next wafer from the identity file and fed the disc to the machine. But Sebastian did not care about the creation of the prince of the demon-possessed stepmother, of the good angel or the three suitors who came before the prince in the story. Bitty Belina, was alive, and that was all that really mattered.
He wanted to get up.
He dared not; Pertos would send him out.
He wanted to touch her hair.
He was afraid to.
He watched.
And as the light flickered from green to crimson to white and the making of life from the Vonopoen synthetic flesh continued, as other small bodies, each no smaller than eighteen inches and no taller than twenty-four, were laid in the nutrient bath trays, strange images shot through the idiot’s mind, sometimes dark and hideous, sometimes naive and gay, but always without coherence.
Bitty Belina reminded Sebastian of someone . .. someone long ago and long gone, someone whose phantom visage, resurrected in memory, was teasingly familiar and yet utterly strange. He remembered golden hair most of all. Bitty Belina, had it, and so did the girl in the past, curls and curls of it. Somehow he was certain he had been close to the unremembered yellow-haired girl, very close, painfully close-and abruptly, painfully separated by the sound of a sharp twig cracking underfoot, though it was not a twig but something else. What had it been? What had taken the blonde girl from him? And who had she been? Bitty Belina?
The prince lay in the nutrient bath alongside Bitty Belina and her three unsuccessful suitors.
The good angel was being created now.
Golden wings were forming in the womb.
Golden hair. The sharp sound, snapping. And blood. Yes, yes, lots of blood, running down his right hand, soaking his shirt sleeve. And the golden girl was looking down at his hand and at herself, and she was still laughing and he was laughing and then she was screaming and he was laughing and then she was gagging and he was getting scared and then she was . . . she was dead.
But who?
Sitting here now, he felt guilty, though he could notr understand why. He felt as if he had sneaked some money from Pertos’ lockbox to buy candy. He had done that once. And felt awful and sorry when he was caught. But this guilty-it was worse. Much worse. It hurt.
The winged angel lay in a nutrient bath himself, his lovely appendages draped across the edges of the pan. Behind closed eyelids, his eyeballs moved spasmodically. It was hard to let go of non-being and accept the role of life in all its facets.
In the capsule-womb, the stepmother formed.
Sebastian felt a kinship for her, knowing both were guilty. But her guilt, he realized, was much easier to take than his, for she knew what she had done. And he did not.
He tried to remember the bleeding girl and the blood on his hand and the laughing and the screaming. But it hurt, and his eyes fogged, and his jaw went loose. He couldn’t remember. He stopped trying, and he felt so much better that he resolved never to think of that memory again.
He had made the same resolution hundreds of times before, though he never remembered it.
At last, all the characters for the story of Bitty Belina were lined up in nutrient baths. Bitty Belina herself had sat up and was looking about at the dark room and the shapes of the puppet master and the idiot. Her eyes were very wide, and she kept brushing herself as if there were dust all over her, though that could not be.
Pertos closed down the Furnace, deposited all the identity wafers in the file again and touched the Olmesclan amoeba in the proper rhythm, causing it to spread out over the Furnace like a film of water, until it was not visible. He turned around, looked at the puppets. His face was drawn, and his large eyes looked sick, like a man bearing too much of a burden.