Eventually fear can kill you. It starts by sapping the will and turning the body into a shivering sickly husk. Tach had reached that state. Without the support of Peanut's arm, she could never have reached the chamber in which they now stood. In another lifetime she would have shrunk from that rough contact. But she had endured the sweating, stinking, flaccid mound that was Bloat, and she had felt his love and his despair. She had been assaulted by the physical beauty that was Blaise and known his hate.

"It doesn't matter," she whispered as she sank down on the glittering sand that formed the floor of the cavern chamber. "What, Doctor?"

She looked up at him. The sad, sad eyes, the chiseled wrinkles about that slit of a mouth.

"Peanut… you're a very handsome man."

"No, Doctor, I'm a joker." Bending, he held out his single hand to her. "You rested enough? Can you go on? That Blaise… he knows we're running."

The tinkling of falling water drew her attention. She looked and located the source. "Let me bathe my face and hands. That will help."

"Okay," said Peanut dubiously.

The water was icy cold, but it revived her like a slap. She looked down at her dress, gave a little mew of disgust, and pulled it over her head. Immersed it beneath the tiny waterfall that had first attracted her. The waters of the pool were soon fouled and darkened with the bloatblack. She put the dress back on, shivering at its clammy touch, but at last she was clean, and the stink was gone.

They kept walking. Tachyon slid a hand into Peanut's. He looked back and smiled. Striations of mica in the rock walls threw off a soft phosphorescent glow. Tachyon was no geologist, but she didn't think that mica could do that. Elaborate stalagmites and stalactites yearned for each other from the floors and ceilings of the caverns, their colors shell pink, sea green, amber.

"Peanut, Ellis Island isn't a real island," Tach said conversationally. They were passing another underground grotto, and on a whim Tach kicked a small pebble into the mirror-like water. The reflected stalagmites and stalactites bowed and swayed like stony dancers.

Forehead buckling with a frown that made the horny skin erupt like the earth in an earthquake, Peanut said, "But it's surrounded by water."

"That's not what I mean. It was made from landfill. There can't be caverns like this beneath its surface."

"But they're here," said Peanut with a blunt practicality that made Tachyon's intellectual maunderings seem inane. Tachyon nodded, shrugged, but only made it through part of the action because she saw the spider. The size of a coffee table, it was stalking deliberately through the caverns, its eight multijointed legs making a horrible creaking sound. A tiny mew of fear made it past her blocked throat.

Peanut followed her terrified gaze. Adding a cocky swing to his normally stiff, blundering walk, Peanut strolled over and ran his hand through the body of the arachnid. It broke apart like stirred oil, globules of ectoplasmic spider floating in all directions.

"Don't worry, it's not real. None of 'em are real. You see things down here. Monsters and people, and just plain things. I think this is the place where nightmares live."

"Whose?" asked Tach a little breathlessly.

"Maybe everybody's in the whole world. Maybe just ours-us on the Rox, I mean."

"Then my nightmares…"

"Oh, there're probably a few sneaking around," answered the joker.

It was an intriguing thought, and Tach searched for these fragments of self. There was a strange sense of deja vu when she finally spotted one because she so clearly recalled the dream that had given birth to this sad-faced phantom. Cody, lost, crying-so strange because Tachyon couldn't recall ever having seen Cody cry. Adding to the grotesquerie-the tears were slipping from beneath her eye patch but not from the normal healthy eye. She was in her green surgical scrubs, a giant bloodstain directly over the crotch.

"Don't let them hurt me. Keep him away from me. Don't let him hurt me again."

The phantom wasn't really speaking. The mouth moved, and Tachyon supplied the words. Rape dreams seemed to torment her. Her own, of course, but also Cody's. Was she safe, or had Blaise inflicted the most brutal assault and indignity upon her?

Peanut became alarmed at her rigid, white-hpped stare. "You want me to break it up, Doctor?"

"No, don't touch her. Let nothing touch her." Tach resumed her plodding trek for freedom.

Minutes passed, marked by the scuffle of their shoes in the white sand and the hiss of their puffing breath. Tachyon walked diagonally across the path in front of them. Tachyon froze and watched himself pass. The Tachyon phantasm was bigger than in reality. The expression was cruel, the knuckles of the artificial right hand stained with blood.

"I'm glad-" her voice was a low, ugly growl, "glad to know that I'm part of Blaise's nightmares. The Ideal knows he forms a prominent figure in mine."

Peanut rolled a wary eye at her. Shook his head, kept walking. Around a curve, a new apparition waited. A narrowhipped, broad-shouldered man of indeterminate years. Hair like silver gilt caught the ghostly light from the walls forming an effect like a nimbus about his head. He was dressed in a white and gold uniform that would have been in place at an Austro-Hungarian ball. The man was seated on an outcropping of rock, one booted foot drawn up, nursing a knee. He was very beautiful.

"Wow!" An expression of awe from Peanut. "Like an angel."

Tach laughed. It echoed back from the unseen cavern roof, a strange sound in these dim halls. An even stranger sound in the dim recesses of her burdened soul. Idly, she wondered when she had last laughed.

"Hardly. It's my wicked cousin Zabb. Zabb and several other of my relatives tried to meddle in your affairs back… oh, I guess it must be five years now"

"What'd he try to do?"

"Drop a very large asteroid on top of your pretty planet." The path was beginning to rise. Tach could feel the stress in the muscles of her calves. Her mood rose with the angle of the floor. Free-free-free-free-free, sang a jaunty little litany in her head.

"Who stopped him?"

"I did, ably and critically assisted by Cap'n Trips. Yes, that was certainly one of Zabb's more flamboyant and malicious gestures. On a more personal, less cosmic scale, he's just plotted and tried to kill me several times," Tach continued with great joviality. "I wish I had seen Zabb first. Then I would have known this was all a mind cheat." She answered Peanut's puzzled glance. "Zabb's either dead or several hundred light-years away. I know damn good and well he's not living in a tunnel under New Jersey."

"You've had such an interesting life," said Peanut wistfully. Tach saw Blaise slipping through the rock formations to their left. She shuddered, and increased her pace. "The Chinese curse. Don't long for it, Peanut. Embrace, caress, cherish the mundane-"

Hands closed around her hips just below the curve of her pregnancy, lifted her into the air. Tach screamed. "Going somewhere, Granddad?" crooned Blaise in her ear. Spittle wet her lobe, and his stubble rasped across her cheek. "But the fun's just begun. You can't leave until you've popped… and I've given you another one. You wouldn't cheat a father out of his firstborn, would you? It's not a very fucking Takisian thing to do." The words dripped with venom. Jumpers were emerging from the rocks and shadow. Poor Peanut was splayed on his stomach, held down by several young men. Blaise casually tossed Tachyon into the arms of one of his lieutenants. Sauntered over to where Peanut lay supine and shivering. Tachyon realized she was making a horrible little mewling sound in the back of her throat. She had never heard a sound like that out of a human or a Takisian before-only out of dying animals. She bit down on her cheek to still the shocking sound.