Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.
--Webster
"NOW WILL YOU TALK?"
Cretans have eyes under their back hair, or let's face it, Entertainers
aren't Soldiers. Kaby weaved to one side and flicked a helpful hand and
poor old Maud went where she'd been going to send Kaby. It sickened me
to see the gravity take hold and yank her down.
I could have jumped up and made it four in a row for Kaby, but I'm not a
bit brave when things like my life are at stake.
Lili was starting to get up, acting a little dazed. Kaby gently pushed
her down again and quietly said, "Where is it?" and then hauled off and
slapped her across the face. What got me was the matter-of-fact way Kaby
did it. I can understand somebody getting mad and socking someone, or
even deliberately working up a rage so as to be able to do something
nasty, but this cold-blooded way turns my stomach.
Lili looked as if half her face were about to start bleeding, but she
didn't look dazed any more and her jaw set. Kaby grabbed Lili's pearl
necklace and twisted it around her neck and it broke and the pearls went
bouncing around like ping-pong balls, so Kaby yanked down Lili's gray
silk bandeau until it was around the neck and tightened that. Lili
started to choke through her tight-pressed lips. Erich, Mark and Illy
had come up and crowded around, but they seemed to be content with the
job Kaby was doing.
"Listen, slut," she said, "we have no time. You have a healing room in
this place. I can work the things."
"Here it comes," I thought, wishing I could faint. On top of everything,
on top of death even, they had to drag in the nightmare personally
stylized for me, the horror with my name on it. I wasn't going to be
allowed to blow up peacefully. They weren't satisfied with an A-bomb.
They had to write my private hell into the script.
"There is a thing called an Invertor," Kaby said exactly as I'd known
she would, but as I didn't really hear it just then--a mental split I'll
explain in a moment. "It opens you up so they can cure your insides
without cutting your skin or making you bleed anywhere. It turns the big
parts of you inside out, but not the blood tubes. All your skin--your
eyes, ears, nose, toes, all of it--becoming the lining of a little hole
that's half-filled with your hair.
"Meantime, your insides are exposed for whatever the healer wants to do
to them. You live for a while on the air inside the hole. First the
healer gives you an air that makes you sleep, or you go mad in about
fifty heartbeats. We'll see what ten heartbeats do to you without the
sleepy air. Now will you talk?"
* * * * *
I hadn't been listening to her, though, not the real me, or I'd have
gone mad without getting the treatment. I once heard Doc say your liver
is more mysterious and farther away from you than the stars, because
although you live with your liver all your life, you never see it or
learn to point to it instinctively, and the thought of someone messing
around with that intimate yet unknown part of you is just too awful.
I knew I had to do something quick. Hell, at the first hint of
Introversion, before Kaby had even named it, Illy had winced so that his
tentacles were all drawn up like fat feather-sausages. Erich had looked
at him questioningly, but that lousy Looney had un-endeared himself to
me by squeaking, "Don't mind me, I'm just sensitive. Get on with the
girl. Make her tell."
Yes, I knew I had to do something, and here on the floor that meant
thinking hard and in high gear about something else. The screwball
sculpture Erich had tried to smash was a foot from my nose and I saw a
faint trail of white stuff where it had skidded. I reached out and
touched the trail; it was finely gritty, like powdered glass. I tipped
up the sculpture and the part on which it had skidded wasn't marred at
all, not even dulled; the gray spheres were as glisteningly bright as
ever. So I knew the trail was diamond dust rubbed off the diamonds in
the floor by something even harder.
That told me the sculpture was something special and maybe Doc had had a
real idea in his pickled brain when he'd been pushing the thing at all
of us and trying to tell us something. He hadn't managed to say anything
then, but he had earlier when he'd been going to tell us what to do
about the bomb, and maybe there was a connection.
I twisted my memory hard and let it spring back and I got "Inversh ...
bosh ..." Bosh, indeed! Bosh and inverse bosh to all boozers, Russki or
otherwise.
So I quick tried the memory trick again and this time I got "glovsh" and
then I grasped and almost sneezed on diamond dust as I watched the
pieces fit themselves together in my mind like a speeded-up movie reel.
It all hung on that black right-hand hussar's glove Lili had produced
for Bruce. Only she couldn't have found it in Stores, because we'd
searched every fractional pigeonhole later on and there hadn't been any
gloves there, not even the left-hand mate there would have been. Also,
Bruce had had two left-hand gloves to start with, and we had been
through the whole Place with a fine-tooth comb, and there had been only
the two black gloves on the floor where Bruce had kicked them off the
bar--those two and those two only, the left-hand glove he'd brought from
outside and the right-hand glove Lili had produced for him.
* * * * *
So a left-hand glove had disappeared--the last I'd seen of it, Lili had
been putting it on her tray--and a right-hand glove had appeared. Which
could only add up to one thing: Lili had turned the left-hand glove into
an identical right. She couldn't have done it by turning it inside out
the ordinary way, because the lining was different.
But as I knew only too sickeningly well, there was an extraordinary way
to turn things inside out, things like human beings. You merely had to
put them on the Invertor in Surgery and flick the switch for full
Inversion.
Or you could flick it for partial Inversion and turn something into a
perfect three-dimensional mirror image of itself, just what a right-hand
glove is of a left. Rotation through the fourth dimension, the science
boys call it; I've heard of it being used in surgery on the highly
asymmetric Martians, and even to give a socially impeccable right hand
to a man who'd lost one, by turning an amputated right arm into an
amputated left.
Ordinarily, nothing but live things are ever Inverted in Surgery and you
wouldn't think of doing it to an inanimate object, especially in a Place
where the Doc's a drunk and the Surgery hasn't been used for hundreds of
sleeps.
But when you've just fallen in love, you think of wonderful crazy things
to do for people. Drunk with love, Lili had taken Bruce's extra
left-hand glove into Surgery, partially Inverted it, and got a
right-hand glove to give him.
What Doc had been trying to say with his "Inversh ... bosh ..." was
"Invert the box," meaning we should put the bronze chest through full
Inversion to get at the bomb inside to disarm it. Doc too had got the
idea from Lili's trick with the glove. What an inside-out tactical
atomic bomb would look like, I could not imagine and did not
particularly care to see. I might have to, though, I realized.
But the fast-motion film was still running in my head. Later on, Lili
had decided like I had that her lover was going to lose out in his plea
for mutiny unless she could give him a really captive audience--and
maybe, even then, she had been figuring on creating the nest for Bruce's
chicks and ... all those other things we'd believed in for a while. So
she'd taken the Major Maintainer and remembered the glove, and not many
seconds later, she had set down on a shelf of the Art Gallery an object
that no one would think of questioning--except someone who knew the
Gallery by heart.
* * * * *
I looked at the abstract sculpture a foot from my nose, at the clustered
gray spheres the size of golf balls. I had known that the inside of the
Maintainer was made up of vastly tough, vastly hard giant molecules, but
I hadn't realized they were quite _that_ big.
I said to myself, "Greta, this is going to give you a major psychosis,
but you're the one who has to do it, because no one is going to listen
to your deductions when they're all practically living on negative time
already."
I got up as quietly as if I were getting out of a bed I shouldn't have
been in--there are some things Entertainers are good at--and Kaby was
just saying "you go mad in about fifty heartbeats." Everybody on their
feet was looking at Lili. Sid seemed to have moved, but I had no time
for him except to hope he hadn't done anything that might attract
attention to me.
I stepped out of my shoes and walked rapidly to Surgery--there's one
good thing about this hardest floor anywhere, it doesn't creak. I walked
through the Surgery screen that is like a wall of opaque, odorless
cigarette smoke and I concentrated on remembering my snafued nurse's
training, and before I had time to panic, I had the sculpture positioned
on the gleaming table of the Invertor.
I froze for a moment when I reached for the Inversion switch, thinking
of the other time and trying to remember what it had been that bothered
me so much about an inside-out brain being bigger and not having eyes,
but then I either thumbed my nose at my nightmare or kissed my sanity
good-by, I don't know which, and twisted the switch all the way over,
and there was the Major Maintainer winking blue about three times a
second as nice as you could want it.
It must have been working as sweet and steady as ever, all the time it
was Inverted, except that, being inside out, it had hocused the
direction finders.