I am Delia. Delia Trine. I was born in Denver, February twenty-eighth, Twenty Eighty-

And you are also Virgil and Jord. I am Virgil Delia Baker. I am Delia Jord Trine. I am Jord Delia Kinney. I am you and you are we and we are me and we are all togeth-

No!

Why not, Death Angel? You’ve seen Nightsheet, the ghost of humanity. We shall never die.

You’re still mad!

No, Delia. Mad Wizard is most probably dead by now. Now the rational side of Jord moderates Virgil’s mad side, and Virgil’s gentle nature neutralizes Jord’s violent streak. See? I can talk about them, now. I can see myself from both sides. Now, you’re a third perspective on my consciousness.

It’s all blackness. Can’t you see where we are? Darkness and desolation.

That’s just catatonia. Relax and allow us to merge.

I can’t.

You will…

Delia Diana Trine felt the presence of the other two, as if they were all together in a lightless room. Thoughts and feelings touched her like fingers from the shadows. They caressed her with a lover’s tenderness.

I was born and I was born and I was born.

I meet now, eons late, at the gateway to the Universe.

It stands between me and the door, waiting for a sign. Now I know. I step up and tell it-him, her, whatever its changing aspect is-I tell it that we don’t want each other. That we were never meant to walk through the gate together. That I wanted no field of sleep, no rest eternal. It nods, surrendering so easily I think it must yearn for its own peace.

And I see myselves.

Delia Virgil Jordan awoke in the medical bay. Everything seemed dim. Thoughts came slowly to her. Sensations felt duller. She drifted among the loose bed straps as in a dream.

Virgil Delia Jordan awoke a short time later. He looked across the room at her and blinked sleepily. His hair flowed in golden cascades around his neck and shoulders down to his waist. His smooth skin was whiter even than Delia Virgil Jordan’s. Her own hair, black and silky, spread weightlessly away from her naked form.

“From here, our consciousnesses will diverge. Even now, with your shifted perspective of five meters, your mind is receiving different information than mine. We aren’t one anymore.” He smiled. I wonder what I’m feeling like inside her now. It’s not you anymore, though.

“How many tries did it take?” she asked, unbuckling and floating away from the bed.

“Only one,” the computer answered. “The People are quite adept at genetic reconstruction. They recovered a suitable cell of Virgil’s from the disposal tank and set it up for cloning, duplicated the picotechs and RNA, and even threw in a few innovations of their own. I transferred eleven-and-a-half light years out and back, so you are the same age. I thought you might appreciate it.”

Virgil Delia Jordan laughed giddily. “So who’s in control?”

I am, of course. We three.

“I would suspect,” the computer said, “that there might be a Virgil-dominant personality in Virgil’s body and a Delia-dominant personality in Delia’s.”

“No,” the pair replied, almost in unison. “I am one.”

He looked at her. “Virgil, Delia, Jord… Three can go into two evenly.”

She laughed. “I thought the same thing.”

“There’ll be a lot of that going on for a while.”

Virgil D. Jordan climbed out of bed to gaze approvingly at Delia V. Jordan. “Shall we go say hello to the People?”

She returned his gaze with one of inner calm and peace. “I was just about-” she stopped and laughed. “I hope this mental synchrony wears off quickly.”

“It will. You don’t really want it to, though, do you?” So lovely, Delia, so pure and so fresh.

“I know. And I know you know.” Virgil, Jord-untouched by hate, by death, by time.

This is the code, my love, the ultimate code, the final closeness we all searched for.

And none of them suspect. Not the whole truth, anyway. Not Nightsheet, not Master Snoop, not Wizard…

She smiled, her blue eyes misting. “A billion years have passed. We’re all alone in a whole new universe.”

He reached out to touch her hand. “I’ll be with you. Forever.”

About the Author

Victor Koman is the author of eight novels and is at this moment working on his ninth. A native Californian, Koman wrote the underground classic millennial-noir novel The Jehovah Contract and the medical thriller Solomon’s Knife. Both novels won the Prometheus Award in their respective years.

The Jehovah Contract was written in 1978 and ’79. It was first published in 1985 – in Bavaria (by publisher Heyne Verlag) – as a German language paperback titled Der Jehova-Vertrag. Ray Bradbury says of Koman’s novel, “The Jehovah Contract has a fascinating concept, imaginatively delivered,” and of Koman, “Would that there were a dozen more writers like him in the field.” Solomon’s Knife was written in 1988. Politically potent, it is a medical thriller and courtroom drama that shatters the moribund philosophies clinging to the abortion dilemma and creates a radical fusion of Pro-Life and Pro-Choice forces when a new medical technique threatens to make abortion obsolete. Franklin Watts published the hard-cover in 1989 and it won the Prometheus Award (making Koman the first two-time winner) in 1990. A German translation, Der Eingriff, came out in 1991 from Goldmann Verlag. He co-wrote (with Andrew J. Offutt), two novels in the Spaceways saga: #13, Jonuta Rising! and #17, The Carnadyne Horde, published by Berkley Books in 1983 and 1984. Both were issued under the house name “John Cleve.”

Koman’s short story “Bootstrap Enterprise” appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and was noted by critic Ellen Datlow as one of the best stories of 1994. His stories have also appeared in Fred Olen Ray’s Weird Menace, Paul Sammon’s The King is Dead – Tales of Elvis Postmortem, Ed Kramer’s Dark Destiny II and Dark Destiny III, as well as Kramer’s and Brad Linaweaver’s Free Space.

His novel, Kings of the High Frontier, won the Prometheus Award in 1997, making him the first three-time winner of the solid-gold prize. The novel was the first exclusively Web-available novel to win such an award…and went on to earn a spot on the Preliminary Ballot for the Science-Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s prestigious Nebula Award.

The Magazine of Fantasy amp; Science Fiction calls Kings “an intriguing, exhilarating, thought-provoking and, yes, sprawling novel that brings back the sense of wonder that drew so many of us into science-fiction in the first place.”

A community activist with a quixotic sense of what’s important, Koman was instrumental in preventing the destruction of Disneyland’s last bubble-topped Mark III monorail (“Old Red”), generating a one-man public relations campaign that resulted in nationwide news coverage. The Walt Disney Company subsequently saved, restored, and converted the historic monorail fuselage into a street-legal promotional vehicle. Koman has also appeared as an extra in several films, including Star Trek – The Motion Picture, CyberZone, Nightshade, Rapid Assault, Mom’s Outta Sight, X-Ray Kid, Billy Frankenstein, and Little Miss Magic (in which his actress daughter, Vanessa Koman, played the title role). He lives in southern California with his wife, Veronica, and daughter, Vanessa, as well as their cat and goldfish.