Second after second, my own memories pounded into my mind like a repeating loop. Sam soaked with blood; Verity dead; carrying young Innocence in that bag; Sam and her blood again. As if the thing riding with me up the Sperm-tail was trying to make me see something, but I wasn’t smart enough to understand.

Sam’s blood. Me, reaching down to touch the red stick-mess. Lifting my fingers to my nose…

A voice screamed No! inside my head: fighting the memory, fighting the thing that was trying to make me remember. The screaming voice didn’t seem part of me, any more than the force pummeling me with my own memories; but I was eager to shout No! myself. Anything to escape ugly replays of the most awful night of my life.

So I yelled, No, go away, stop it, stop it, stop it! I could feel the memory-thing howl in despair, burning with frustration at my refusal to watch. It pounded away on the thready thin barrier that separated its consciousness from mine; but before it could bash through, I hurtled back into normal space and collided with a mound of soft padding.

I don’t know how long I lay there, trying to clear my head. Not long — the padding was jelly bagged up in rubbery plastic, nice and yielding on impact but cold and wobbly the longer you stayed on top of it. They must have made it that way on purpose, so you wouldn’t sprawl there forever… especially when other people were coming through the Sperm-tube right behind you.

Other people. Kaisho.

With a surge of adrenaline, I tried to heave myself off the landing pad. The jelly beneath me gurgled and sloshed, absorbing my motion; when I pushed harder, my hand just sank into the folds of the bag. Like trying to fight a tar baby, I thought. Forcing myself to be calm, I pulled my hands tight to my chest and simply rolled sideways… off the bag just as Kaisho barreled out of the tube behind me.

Her mossy legs missed me by a whisker. I was sure that’s why she’d come right after me — in hopes of an accidental collision. The Balrog would slam into me, then a splurge of hungry red spores would ooze across my skin…

No, I told myself. Don’t be stupid. The Balrog couldn’t want to possess a person with screwed-up chemicals in his brain. Especially not when I was already half-possessed by something else. "Help me up," Kaisho whispered as she sprawled on the jelly pad. "Please."

On her trip through the Sperm-tail, Kaisho’s hair had got all mussed… which means it’d fallen off her face enough to show what she really looked like. I found her striking in an elegant, weathered way — what people usually call "handsome," because they won’t call women beautiful after the first wrinkle appears. Kaisho had her share of wrinkles around her soft brown eyes… but the wrinkles had such a well-aged grace, maybe they deserved to be called crinkles instead. Serene and amused, both at once. Strong cheekbones, wide half-smiling lips…

She saw me staring. The half smile froze on her face — not a sudden jolt, but a clamp-down of control, keeping her expression exactly as it was till she could cover up. I could tell she was forcing herself not to hurry; oh so slowly, she shook her hair down over her eyes, then brushed her fingers through a few times to make sure there were no gaps in the veil.

"Maybe someday you should stop hiding," I said.

"Maybe someday I will," she answered in her usual whisper. "When the Balrog has ‘elevated’ my consciousness to such heights I can’t feel childish emotions." For a moment, the fingers she was combing through her hair clenched into fists — gripped by some sudden emotion, rage, shame, I don’t know. She trembled with the power of it; I could imagine her face scrunched in on itself under that hair, her eyes squeezed shut, the serenely crinkled skin bunched up into ridges and hollows.

A long ten seconds passed before she relaxed. Then she shook her head and flung her arms wide toward me, crying, "Help me, Teelu." Not a whisper — a desperate plea.

But in the next instant, a shudder went through her; and though her position scarcely changed, all the pleading passion vanished. Got squashed down. "Help me, Teelu," she said, back to her old staid whisper. "Help me up, if you please. Festina promised me time to get clear, but soon that Sperm-tube will spit out a three-hundred-kilo lobster with big sharp claws."

I stared at her a moment. What had just happened? The woman herself speaking, "Help me," then the Balrog choking her off? Or was it all playacting: the Balrog amusing itself by making me worry, or trying to trick me into something I’d regret?

No way to know. But Kaisho was right about one thing — if Zeeleepull flew out of the tube while she was still in the line of fire, his pincers could spear straight through her. I hurried over to pull her away… but realized in the nick of time that if I picked her up face-to-face the way her arms were outstretched, her legs would flop into mine when I lifted her. Instead, I slipped behind her, hiked my hands under her armpits, and dragged her backward off the padding.

"This is a damned undignified position for an advanced lifeform," she muttered.

I didn’t answer. I was marveling at how light she was… like a child. Whatever was under the moss on her legs, it didn’t weigh half as much as human flesh and bone. Still, it had to be pretty strong — it’d withstood the sploosh into the jelly pad, not to mention me dragging it across the floor. Normal moss would have crumbled to pieces with all that knocking around. Then again, the Balrog wasn’t normal moss, was it?

As I set her down, well clear of the landing pillow, Kaisho reached up and pressed her hand warm against my cheek. "Thank you, Teelu" she whispered. "You shouldn’t really call me that," I said. "It’s only for queens."

"Ah," she said, kissing her fingers, then brushing them against my lips. "Thank you for clearing that up, Teelu."

As we waited for the next person to shoot through the Sperm-tube, I had a chance to check out our surroundings. We’d arrived in the transport bay of a navy starship: a big empty room with an irising entry mouth at one end. The mouth was wide-open, showing the ghostly white Sperm-field outside as it stretched off into the distance — all the way down to the planet. At the moment, the starship would be orbiting tail down; if you pictured the Sperm-tube as a big tornado sucking up things from Celestia’s surface, the transport bay was like a bucket at the top of the funnel, ready to catch anything the wind brought us.

The upper part of the bay’s back wall was transparent pink-tinted plastic, a window into the control room where someone would be monitoring the transport process. From my angle down on the floor, I couldn’t see if anyone was actually up in the room; but safety regs required a qualified operator at the console whenever people Spermed in or out.

It kind of surprised me the person in charge hadn’t said a word: no hello, not even a warning for us to get off the landing pad and clear the way for others. I told myself it must take lots of concentration, keeping track of technical details — aligning the Sperm-tube properly so folks flew straight into the ship, maintaining the proper air pressure in the bay so that it was balanced with Celestia’s surface — but still, a simple welcome would be nice.

For one thing, I wanted to know what ship this was. There were rainbow-colored trees painted on the walls of the transport bay, but I didn’t recognize the trees’ species. Something tropical and flowery. At least they weren’t willows; and this wasn’t one of the conifer ships (Jackpine, Sequoia, Golden Cedar) used as flagships for admirals. That was good. If this’d turned out to be my father’s ship, the Royal Hemlock, I would have stood in the entry mouth, just praying for Zeeleepull to come through and skewer me.