The moment he could move, he dived across to her, oblivious to the agony from his own shoulder. He tried to lift her. His arm failed him, and his hand was wet with blood.
“DOC!” he screamed. But Doc was deep in the butchery of the Magh’mmm. The pure ones did not defile themselves with slowshields. The pseudo-chitin of their carapaces was soft. The shrapnel from the laser disaster had reduced their number still further. And not for countless millennia had Magh’mmm had to fight for themselves. It was pure carnage. Rat and bat heaven.
Chip was left with poor Ginny’s bleeding head on his lap. He didn’t dare to try pressure to stop the bleeding. Her skull might be fractured. Oh God, how it bled!
He was supremely unaware of the tears streaming down his face. Then her eyes opened. “Lie still. Lie still, love. Don’t try to move.” His voice cracked.
* * *
Ginny just remembered something hitting her head. The hammer-blow and the pain. Opening her eyes was involuntary. Chip, above her, was merely a blur. But his voice was recognizable . . . he’d called her his love. Her head was chaos and confusion. She closed her eyes again. Pain. Pain—and worse.
A terrible, terrifying woolliness enveloped her. Her mind was cotton, hay . . . and rags, rags of memory. Precious, precious memories. She opened her eyes. The blurring, if anything, was worse. She strained to focus. His face swam briefly into view. Dirty, covered in dark stubble, and tear tracked. Homely as hell. She loved him so much she thought her heart would burst. He blurred away again, into pain . . .
She tried desperately to think, and slipped away into a feathery limbo that she strained furiously against.
This time wakefulness was just as blurred and confused. Well, maybe a fraction less so. Because now she knew what was wrong. A tentative hand went up and touched her head . . . and confirmed her worst nightmare.
The warm wetness seeped from her left upper temple, just inside her hairline.
She’d touched the scar so often. The tiny cut that had given her back her life . . . Where they’d inserted her soft-cyber chip.
“Don’t touch it, Ginny. You might make it worse.” Chip’s voice was overflowing with care.
She started to cry.
“Don’t cry, my love. Don’t cry. It’ll be all right.”
“It’s not all right!” she said, shaking her head in anguish.
“Lie still, Ginny. Please. It’ll be fine. I promise.”
“No, it won’t! You don’t understand! I’m going to be stupid, stupid, stupid,” she blurted out desperately.
“You’ll be fine,” insisted Chip. “You’re three times as bright as me. Take more than a little knock on the head to spoil that.”
“Yes, I will. I will! It hit me on my implant. My soft-cyber. Oh God, I didn’t want to tell you about my implant. I’m going all stupid again. I can’t think! You’ll hate me now,” she cried hysterically. “You hate implants!”
Everything blurred once more. His voice came from far off, and didn’t make any kind of sense.
When the fuzziness receded again, she’d decided what to say. “Chip. I love you. I’ll always love you. I’ll always love you even after I go back to being a brain-damaged little girl again. I’m just so scared I won’t remember you. I might end up just a cabbage. Please, kiss me again while I can still think. Oh God, I want to remember you. You won’t love me any more now. I’m only a mechanical doll and now I won’t even be that.”
* * *
Chip found speaking virtually impossible. His “Ginny” came out as a croak. But he did manage to kiss her. As gently as he might a flower.
“Kiss me hard!” she insisted. “Please. Nobody ever kissed me until you did.”
He tried to oblige. “Ginny. No matter what, I’ll love you forever.”
“Kiss me again, Chip,” she said faintly. “When I’m stupid you must go away. I don’t want you to see me like that.”
“No way am I leaving you, kid. No matter what.” He bent and kissed her again.
“Yet lecherous as a monkey and the whores called him mandrake,” said Fal. “Too busy to even lend us a hand, eh, Chip?”