"Do you understand what I'm saying, Derek? It's important that you understand. The feeling we label 'being loved' is totally independent of whether you are loved or not. Don't you see? If someone actually does love you but you don't know it-you don't make the correct inference-then you don't feel that love. If someone doesn't love you, but you infer incorrectly that they do, then you do feel it. See? You're not feeling love at all, you're only responding to some state internal to yourself, to some conclusion you're making about the outside world.

"That's all I ever felt," she went on softly, "that's all anyone ever feels. I never knew anything else could exist."

"Until…" I whispered.

My sister nodded. "Until I felt the love of the Hive Queen," she said simply.

I couldn't hold her gaze. Frag, I couldn't stand any of this-to face someone who looked and sounded and felt… and Christ, even smelted like my sister, and listen to her spouting this… I wanted to pull my hand away, but I didn't have the fragging guts.

She squeezed my hand again, almost hard enough to hurt. "Listen to me, Derek," she said, "please."

"Why?" I demanded. "Why the frag should I? So you can convince me, too? So your… your Hive Queen can suck out my soul, too?"

She didn't flinch at the venom in my voice, didn't look angry. Instead she looked sad. "That's not what we do," she said.

I cringed at that terrible word. We.

She saw it, but pressed on. "We don't convert by force-by fire or by the sword. That's the way human religions are traditionally spread, but this isn't a religion, Derek. People come to this way of life because it's what they choose, it's what they want, deep down in their core."

"Bulldrek," I snarled, suddenly angry. "I found you in a fragging coma, with a fragging umbilical cord stuck into you, Theresa. That doesn't sound like a fragging choice to me."

My anger left her untouched, and when I saw that, the rage just seemed to bleed away, leaving me cold and empty. She shrugged slightly. "I really don't remember much about what led up to it, Derek," she admitted. "But I do remember what I felt when I belonged."

"Remember how? You were in a coma."

She shrugged again. "I don't know how I remember, I only know I do."

"You never talked about it. With me, with the doctors, with the therapists…"

"I know. Maybe part of me didn't want to talk about it-to remember it, or maybe to admit it. But the memories were there, Derek, they still are. I couldn't access them all the time. Mainly they came out in dreams-dreams where I'd wake up crying my eyes out because I was so lonely and empty.

"I'd travel," she went on gently. "I'd go to a new place, a new city. I'd look at the people, and they'd all be lonely and empty, too. Some of them knew it; most of them couldn't let themselves think about it. They were all alone, all of them alone. And the memories came back more often, and they kept getting stronger. And the sadness wouldn't go away."

"So you went back to them." In my own ears, my voice sounded like a cold wind blowing through a graveyard.

"Not at first," she corrected.

"Why not, if living your own life was so terrible?"

"Because of you, Derek," she told me. "Because I was afraid you wouldn't understand, you wouldn't approve."

I don't understand or approve, is what I didn't say to her. I just nodded wordlessly.

"And then I remembered something you told me," she went on, "and I made my decision."

That shocked me. "Something I told you?"

"Of course. You told me once that I should live my life with the end always in mind. Remember, Derek? You suggested it as a kind of decision-making tool. That I should imagine I was at the end of my life and looking back. Would there be regrets? Would I lie on my deathbed, praying for one chance to go back and do something-experience something, have something-I'd decided against at the time? Do you remember that. Dirk?"

Well, of course I remembered that, now she parroted it back to me. Another one of those facile oversimplifications that I seem able to dredge up on the spur of the moment. Okay, maybe it wasn't totally facile oversimplification. Maybe I believed it sometimes. When I was sitting at my 'puter, trying to bash out a few more lines of code and I knew there was a gorgeous sunset outside over the skyline of Cheyenne, for example. Which would I remember when I was on my deathbed, I'd ask myself: a soul-touching sunset or an¬other dozen lines of code? If nothing else, it was a convenient excuse to slack off, couched in me trappings of "wisdom."

"I thought about what you said," Theresa was continuing. "I thought about dying. And I thought about dying without feeling that love, that belonging, ever again. I couldn't face that."

"So you went back to them," I repeated.

They came to me, actually," she corrected. "In Denver. It was as if they knew I was there, and they knew that I needed them. They came to me, and they offered to love me, and need me."

"And possess you," I almost spat, "and steal your goddamn fragging soul!"

My sister looked at me sadly. It was a… a complex sadness, that's the only way I could describe it: regret, alloyed with understanding, and something that could almost be compassion. I hated the expression in her eyes. I feared it.

"That's not how it is, Derek." Her voice was as gentle as a breeze stirring the leaves of an elm tree. "I am me. I'll always be me. But I'm more as well. I am the Hive Queen. I am the other members of the Hive. And they are me.

"In a sense I'll never die. As long as one member of the hive remains, I remain. Some of my memory-some of who I am-will continue to live. Forever, maybe. There's no loss, Derek, none. It's a gain. I'm Theresa, just as I always was… but more so."

Now I did pull my hand back, and I did cover my face. "No," I said. That's all, just, "No." I couldn't bring myself to say what I was thinking-that she had lost something. Her humanity, if nothing else. And with it, she'd lost the ability to know that something was lost.

Someone touched my arm, gently. Not Theresa; I knew her touch. I took my hands from my eyes.

It was the gray-faced man, the insect shaman. I flinched back from him as though his hand had been a white-hot iron bar, searing my flesh. I stared at him, at his glassy eyes, at the face that had once belonged to a human. I thought I'd hated before in my life. I was wrong. I think I smiled as I reached for the Manhunter stuffed down the waistband of my trousers.

The pistol was clear. My thumb flicked off the safety as I brought the big gun up. On came the laser, and I tracked it onto the shaman's right eye. The ruby light gleamed from the watery-looking cornea. I took up the slack on the trigger, then squeezed it.

And stopped, just short of the break-point. The shaman hadn't reacted in any way. He just watched me. Frag, his pupil didn't even seem to have contracted under the laser's light.

Suddenly, I became aware of the tableau around me. The three bodyguards all had their nasty little SMGs out. Kono and the one they called Lupo held dead aim on the shaman. Pohaku's weapon panned back and forth between me and the shaman, as if he didn't know what the frag to do. The woman, Akaku'akanene, was staring at me with those bright, birdlike eyes of hers. I think she understood what I was feeling-I think it was understanding in those eyes. But there was determination there as well. Deep down, in the base of my brain, I had the unshakable conviction that if I'd actually tried to fire my pistol into the Insect shaman's head, I wouldn't have been able to do it. The final member of the tableau was Theresa. In her eyes was something that, in another, I'd have had to call genuine sadness.

"Chill, people," I said quietly. I put up my gun and safed it. Just to spare myself from temptation, I turned and scaled the big hunk of metal onto the bed. Then I turned back to the gray-faced insect shaman. "Well?" I said quietly. "Speak your piece."