“Stop there! Stay back!” I cried, flattening myself against the wall behind my bed and raising my bedsheet as if it might armor me against her advance.

I felt extremely vulnerable, having recently reverted to sleeping naked beneath a smart sheet instead of wearing a sleepskin. Neither a sleepskin nor a conventional suitskin would have been adequate protection against whatever infection she carried—I would probably have needed a spacesuit to insulate myself completely—but I would have felt a great deal better had my modesty been better guarded. I was slightly surprised when she obeyed my command, but she had come to talk as well as to act.

“Don’t be afraid, Mortimer,” she said, in a voice hoarsened by trachéal mucus. “I’ve come to help you, not to hurt you. I’ve come to bring you out of the tomb of life and back to the world of flood and fire. I’ve come to set you free.”

I knew that she must have disabled the external alarms, but I also knew that my silver must have put out a mayday as soon as she started work on the living tissues of the house. The police would be able to get a drone to the scene in a matter of minutes—but as I looked past her at the ragged gap in the wall I saw that she’d set up some kind of shamir to seal the breach in the stone wall. There was no way she would be allowed to get away again, but my silver was only a glorified answer-phone; even with police collaboration, it would find it extremely difficult to disable the intruder before she could hurt me.

At the very least, I had to buy time.

“I amfree,” I assured my unwelcome visitor. “This is my home, not a tomb. I’m always in the world. I work in the Labyrinth for eight or ten hours a day, and I spend a further six or eight in recreational VEs. I’m perfectly happy with the quality of my experiences, and I certainly don’t need the kind of excitement you’re trying to give me. If I don’t want it, it isn’t a gift.”

I would have felt a lot safer if my visitor had stood still in order to plead her case, but she seemed incapable of that. Her desire to keep moving was as irresistible as her desire to communicate. The derangement of her body and brain by whatever designer disease was consuming her was not yet powerful enough to make her fall down or impair her crazed eloquence.

“Come with me!” she begged, as I huddled back against the wall, desperate to evade her spasmodically clenching fingers. “Come with me to the far side of life, and I’ll show you what’s there. There’s no need to be afraid! Even death isn’t the end, just a new beginning—but this isn’t death, just a better way of being. Disease is the metamorphosis that frees us from our caterpillar flesh to soar as spirits in a mass-less world blessed with infinitely more light and color than any mere VE. I have come to be your redeemer, Mortimer—the redeemer for whom you have waited far too long. Love me as I love you, dear Mortimer: only love me, and you will learn. Let me be your mirror; drown yourself in me!”

She made a lunge for me as she spoke the last few words, but I dodged aside and she stumbled. Her uncanny fever was interfering with her motor responses, and she couldn’t get up immediately, but when I made a bid for the door she was quick enough to block the way.

“Don’t be silly!” I implored her. “Help is on the way. Even if you were to contaminate me, I’d be in hospital within the hour.”

I knew that I wasn’t getting through to her. Her own speech wasn’t completely incoherent, but that didn’t mean that she could listen or understand what I said to her.

She came after me again, and I had to grab a chair, using the legs to fend her off. I didn’t know whether it would do any good—for all I knew, I might have been infected already simply by virtue of breathing the same air—but the notion that she might actually lay her fevered hands upon me seemed particularly horrible.

“There’s no return from eternity, Mortimer,” she babbled on, the words beginning to tumble over one another in spite of their adequate grammar and syntax. It was as if she had programmed her voice to deliver her message whether or not she could keep conscious control of it—and perhaps she had. “This is no ordinary virus created by accident to fight a hopeless cause against the defenses of the body,” she went on. “The true task of medical engineers, did they but know it, was never to fight disease but always to perfectit, and we have found the way. I bring you the greatest of all gifts, my darling: the elixir of life, which will make us angels instead of men, creatures of light and ecstasy. We were fools to think that we had drunk at the fountain of youth when we had only armored our bodies against the ravages of age. Youth is a state of mind. The finest flame burns hot and brief, my love, and must be shared. What you call life is petrifaction of the soul.”

I kept moving all the time, while her movements grew jerkier. As she came to resemble a mere marionette I thought that it was only a matter of time before her strings broke, but she stubbornly refused to collapse.

I tired before she did, and she tore the chair from my grasp. I found myself backed into a corner, with nowhere to go.

FIFTY

The flesh of my persecutor’s face was aglow with silver, and it seemed impossible that she could still be upright, but she was in the grip of a terrible supernatural urgency, and she pounced like an angry cat, catching me by the arms.

I tried to knock her down. If I had had a weapon in hand I would certainly have used it, with all the force I could muster. It probably wouldn’t have done any good. I doubt that she would have felt any pain, and no matter how badly disabled her internal technology might have been, I wouldn’t have been able to disable her with anything less than a sledgehammer.

In the very last moment, I gave in.

There seemed to be no sensible alternative but to let her take me in her arms and cling to me. Nothing else could possibly soothe her. When she finally wrapped her arms round me, therefore, I wrapped mine around her.

We hugged.

I was afraid for her as well as for myself. I didn’t believe, then, that she truly intended to die. I wanted to keep us both safe until help arrived.

My panic faded while I held Hadria Nuccoli in my arms, only to be replaced by some other emotion, equally intense, to which I could not put a name. I made every effort to remind and convince myself that it hadn’t ever mattered whether she infected me or not, given that medical help would soon arrive.

“This is the only real life,” she murmured, as the script she had somehow internalized wound down to its amen. “Emortality makes a sepulchre of the flesh. If we are to become more than human, we must live more fervently, burn more brightly, die more extravagantly.”

“It’s all right,” I assured her. “Help will be here soon. Everything will be fine.”

I was right about the help, but wrong about the everything.

My naive faith in medical science and internal nanotechnology left me completely unprepared for the kind of hell that I endured before the attending doctors got the bug under control. Nature had never designed diseases capable of fighting back against the ministrations of IT, but the makers of new plagues were cleverer by far.

As the infection ran its vicious course I wished, over and over again, that I were able to live the experience as Hadria Nuccoli presumably lived it, not as hell but as passion, but I couldn’t do it. I was an emortal through and through. I couldn’t abide that kind of fervor, that kind of extravagance. All I wanted was the restoration of peace of mind and metabolic calm. While my nanotech armies fought tooth and nail against enemies the likes of which they had never faced before for possession of the battleground of my flesh, all I was capable of wanting was to be still and self-controlled.