Archive of Our Own ^beta

   Like a crab’s eye-stalk, a pale blue antenna stuck up from the rippling white sheet of sand. No sound - just the antenna, the heat of the day, and the roll of the waves.

   Then a tuft of hair even whiter than the sand.

   Tall, thin palms watched when the sand shifted around the strange growth, their green heads bobbing with anticipation and gossip. The sand sloshed and poured into a cavity, giving birth to a thin blue body attached to the antenna.

   The cavity spat him forth onto the beach, wet and sticky from the womb.

   There should have been two antennae on the boy’s head. A puckered scar told the story of the one that was missing. He writhed slowly like a newborn foal, the caul still wrapped around its body.

   Tucking his legs underneath him, his torso lifted, sand cascading away, leaving thick encrustations where the amnion had turned the sand into glue.

   He sat and stared at the water through squinted eyes that would not focus. He absently dug to find the hole again, but it was gone, replaced by hard, gritty coquina.

   To look at him, his body said he had only just crossed the line into adulthood, but his eyes said he’d been there for some time.

   Standing slowly, he got to his feet, took a step, and immediately toppled over. The horizon, gravity, his eyes, and his single antenna were involved in a heated argument without him, and the world spun.

   He crawled to the water’s edge on all fours, the first lap of a wave was breathtaking in its luxury. Smooth and cool as window glass on an autumn day, he dropped and rolled in the gentle waves. They cleansed him of his birth trauma. They took away the sand and dried slime.

   The water was sweet, not salty.

   He rolled onto his back in the thin sheet of liquid rushing in, slipping out, wrapping ‘round, sinking into the sand, and then rushing back in. It made a line around his body where the air and the water met. A line that tickled.

   He rolled onto his front, the water rushing up between his legs to the slit that hid his sex. He scanned the beach from one end to the other, his head bobbing. Forward, then retrograde, then forward again. The missing antenna was a blank that his sense of balance longed desperately to fill in.

   On all fours again, he crawled out of the water, up to where the sand was still damp and stiff and his feet sank only a little. Tentatively, he stood and the sky spun overhead. His feet were sprawled in the sand and they sank bit by bit with each passing wave.

   Hissing sand.

   Hissing wind.

   Hissing waves.

   This world - the whole of it - was a granular hiss, rising in crescendo.

   The blue boy tipped his head back and began to scream. The sky and the water and the sand drank his scream and buried it in more hiss.

   He stopped. The hiss drank the scream. Perhaps he could drink the hiss and know its nature.

   “Can you hear me, little boy blue?” said the waves.

   “I hear nothing else,” the boy replied.

   “It is pleasing that we may communicate,” said the cresting, foamy top of a wave that rolled down the beach in perfect endlessness.

   “Who are you?” asked a crab, its eyestalks flicking up and down, one of them more down than up, the same side where the boy was less than he had been. Was it making fun of him? Did crabs have a capacity for cruelty?

   He rubbed the scar and said, “Jimon Rozhenko.”

   “Jim, jim, jim,” said the water. “Zhen, zhen, zhen. Ko, ko, ko.”

   “Not a zhen,” said the blue boy whose name was now Jimon. “I’m a chan. What are you?”

   There was no answer.

   Jimon turned and looked inland. Palms of many lengths and heights and angles grew out from a woven tangle of violent green. He walked toward them, wobbling, hesitant, his feet contemplating treachery, his arms stuck out in defiance.

   Where the trunks erupted from the sand, it was cool and littered with the remains of fronds and coconuts in different stages of turning grey and shrunken. He wanted to climb the nearest palm to get the green coconuts from the soft hands of furry monkeys that flipped insouciantly from one shock of green fronds to the next. They complained, bared teeth, and flashed their eyes when he threw a shell at them.

   “This is also me,” said a voice from the palms. “I will call you Jimon.”

   “The water is strange,” Jimon said. “No salt. Artificially clean. What is your name?”

   “My friends call me Dr. Island,” said the island through a seagull that landed on the rocks farther up the slope of sand. It preened feathers and turned one eye and then the other on him.

   “Then I won’t call you that.”

   The seagull lifted its wings and screeched at him. “Are we not friends, then?

   “I don’t make friends.”

   “I do,” said a crab tucked under the rock on which the seagull had hopped. “It is pleasing that you are here, Jimon. You will be my friend because I like you and will treat you so.”

   “Are you a computer?” Jimon asked. “I’ve talked to computers before. They know everything. And nothing.”

   “Then I am everything. And nothing. I am that which runs this place, and you are in this place. You are in me.”

   “Gross.”

   “Hm,” said a monkey coming down the palm feet first. “Would you prefer to be alone?”

   Jimon said nothing.

   “I had not expected to make this much progress today.” This was said by leaves hissing against one another in the branches. “I think we will get along just fine.”

   Jimon remained in the shade on the sand near the rocks beneath the trees and monkeys. He let handfuls of dry sand as white as salt sift through his fingers. It fell more slowly than it should

   “Are you a space station,” Jimon asked. “The gravity here is less than one gee. A lot less. A moon, maybe?”

   The many things that hissed merely hissed.

   He walked back down to the water’s edge, crawling the last few feet, his balance undone by the missing antenna, the weak gravity, and the way everything curved up and away.

   In either direction, the beach curled back until it was lost behind itself, either end fading into the shimmer of reflected heat and the mist of the surf.

   It also curved up somehow, as though he and the island and the water rested within a concavity which the water obeyed rather than its usual master, gravity. Continuing the curve upward, the sky went from robin-egg to cerulean to indigo to black. Despite the black, still, there was a hazy sun in the sky.

   Looking back down the beach, the ground swaying with his injudicious movements, at the very limit of what he could see, as granular as the hiss in his ears, he saw a person. He ran toward the being, stopped, picked up a stone that had been smoothed by the tide into a near-perfect disk, and skipped it across the glassy surface of the water. It skipped many times. He wasn’t sure if it kept going or sank. It was too far to tell. The person was no closer. He walked toward and then away and the person did the same in perfect sync.

   There were fish. They jumped occasionally, wrapped in bubbles of water that clung to them like glittery, reflective coats. When they fell, their coats joined the water beneath, sucking them back in without so much as a splash.

   What kind of an island was a doctor? What kind of doctor was an island?

   “Dr. Island, Dr. Island, Dr. Island,” he repeated indistinctly under his breath. “Dr. Island, Dr. Tendi, Dr. Rutherford.”

   “Who are they?” This from a wavelet washing his blue toes.

   “One is green and one is brown. One is short and one is round. One’s a girl and one’s a boy. But neither is Deanna Troi.”

   “And who is that? The Deanna? The Troi?”

   He ran as fast as his legs would push him, and fell careening into the sand, scuffing his shoulder. He ran into the waves where his falls were cushioned by the water. He swam. He couldn’t call it an ocean or even a lake. It was like water from the ship’s recycler, pure and tasteless. He could see a great distance in all directions with his head beneath the surface. What had been narrow darts when seen from above became brightly colored fish that came to him as tame as puppies, turning to eye him, their gill covers pulsing in and out, pectoral fins turning in figure-eight patterns. His lack of balance disappeared while swimming. The low gravity made the water behave in gelatinous ways - sticky, syrupy - as it did with the fish when they jumped. He spun in circles with his arms just beneath the surface, cutting sheets of water up into the air that remained sheets until they landed like amoebas fusing into one mass.

   He played like this, in the cool gel of water beneath the warm light until the sun was gone, slipping down the sky, but not setting, fading instead long before it touched the indistinct horizon.

   “Is the sun part of you? Is it artificial? Or is that a real sun and we’ve just moved behind a moon or planet?” Jimon asked the waves.

   “You are very curious,” said fish zipping past and between his legs, their tails roiling the water in tiny turbulences.

   His stomach growled dramatically. Jimon had learned long ago to ignore this incessant demand. As a child, there had been little choice. Food had come when it had come, not when requested. He drank great mouthfuls of water, another trick he’d learned in childhood. It quieted the pull within his gut. But those memories were stories told to him from some other person, some person who was also him, but not him. He knew about the memories but did not have direct access. They were passed to him, second hand.

   He thanked the memory of the memory from his childhood, though it was gone and he was sure that wherever his missing antenna was, the original memory was there too.

   When the sun had faded completely and all he could see was the strange smile of the beach curling up in either direction and the glowing tips of low waves rushing toward that smile, he waded out of the water, walked for a bit, crawled some more when he fell, dug a shallow depression in the pure white sand, imagining himself to be a strange blue turtle, closed his eyes and went to that place where that other him also lived. In that place, he pulled his other self to him, wrapped arms around his chest, twined legs between his legs, and slept with the warm glow of sand radiating beneath him.

   He awoke in the dark. The heat from the sand had faded. It was cool now, almost cold. He crawled up from the depression he’d dug and made his way back to the water. It was also colder than it had been. He lay at the margin where the waves just managed to lap up over his body and slowly pull him away from the sand. He floated and spun ever so slowly, wondering if the Coriolis effect was driving the spin. This was clearly some kind of station and the light gravity meant gravity plates were likely not being used, but rather either physical mass or possibly spin.

   He could be sure of nothing, but this place didn’t look Starfleet. The aesthetic was wrong. It didn’t look like any culture he could pin down. The sky overhead was too perfect, too blue, with a hint of strange purple that remained in the dark hours. It didn’t go completely black. The way the sun had set was not a sunset. Technology was nowhere to be seen, which was unsettling.

   “Are you a holodeck?” he asked the night sky curving overhead.

   “I am Dr. Island.”

   Could it be one of Tommy’s games? How he loved chasing the xenomorphs down unending dark corridors. But it didn’t seem like any holodeck game Tommy would enjoy. No massive fetish firearms, no trails of slime steaming up from gunmetal grates up into the starless dark turning lazily overhead. No Ripley or Hudson or Hicks.

   As the far corner of the left side of the smiling beach flickered into view for just a moment before a wavelet obscured it, Jimon saw a glowing red dot on the sand. Tiny, indistinct, far away. He put his feet down, but there was no bottom. He’d spun and spun until he was quite far from the shore. Turning and dipping his face under the surface, there was only the same almost black purpleness of the sky.

   He panicked, suddenly terrified of what might be in the void below him. There were any number of species unhindered by the impasse of hard vacuum. Fresh clean water should be little trouble for them. He treaded water furiously while the ghosts of gormaganders and crystalline entities reached for his feet. The first touch of sand was a shock, surely one of those beasts having found him. The second touch confirmed it was just the seafloor.

   He coughed water from his throat, pinched his nose shut, and shot more water from the opening in the tip of his one antenna.

   The glowing red spot was still there. He hadn’t imagined it, else he was still in the throws of hallucination. Hard to know which.

   He walked toward the glow, sneezing and spitting all the way, aware of spaces and cavities in his forehead that usually had no need to give report.

   The glow resolved into a man squatting in front of a fire. There was something familiar about the way he squatted, something familiar about his shape and size, and profile.

   It was Tommy. His hair was longer and unkempt. His beard was scruffy and ran without pause into the fur of his chest and belly. He was as naked as Jimon, his penis and scrotum hanging heavily between his legs.

   He murmured strange words into the fire, poking at it with a stick. The poking released the perfume of cooking fish that rode the smoke from the fire down the beach toward Jimon.

   “Tommy?” Jimon said.

   He didn’t answer. He was lost somewhere in his head, his eyes unfocused, his hands knowing where the fire was without the need for confirmation.

   Jimon also squatted, but right where he was, not near the fire. There was something lost about Tommy’s face. His eyes were empty, his gaze turned inward.

   “I’m hungry, Tommy. Where are we?”

   Spittle ran from the corner of Tommy’s mouth, down his chin, and made a long string that stretched and finally snapped. He wiped his face, leaving a wide grey smear of ash from the fire.

   Tommy looked up, not at Jimon, but through him. He peered at some point far down the beach and deep within his mind.

   “Is it done, the fish?” Jimon asked, his own mouth filling with saliva. “I’m really hungry.”

   Jimon placed his hands on the sand and shuffled forward, still squatting, a large blue crab with too few legs.

  Tommy jumped at him, the stick with which he’d been poking the fish wrapped in leaves became a cudgel. He came at Jimon, his cock flopping wildly, his belly jouncing stiffly with each hard step. Jimon backpedaled toward the water, and dove in when it was deep enough, his belly caressing the sand below.

   Tommy hesitated to follow. He hit the water with his stick several times, his face a mask of furry that dug cruel claws into the space behind Jimon’s sternum. Jimon continued to move away from the shore until he was tiptoeing. From there, he swam in the other direction, back the way he’d come.

   He came ashore when Tommy’s fire had become a glowing dot again. He sat in the wet sand and stared down the beach at where his friend was crouched, a man turned feral and wild, a man who was much more than a friend. Tommy was always very concerned with his appearance. His hair was always manicured and glossy. He was never unshaven, even off duty. He once confided in Jimon that he felt that a passable face and good hair didn’t make up for the extra kilos he found it impossible to shed. Jimon had told him there were no extra kilos. Every single one was part of Tommy and Jimon would not be deprived of any of them. Tommy had smiled strangely at Jimon’s clumsy attempt to say he didn’t care about the kilos. There was nothing to care about. It didn’t matter.

   His hand slipped through the space where his antenna should be and he thought perhaps something had been done to Tommy too. Jimon had no memory of what happened to his head, no memory of undergoing surgery. There were sutures. Someone had done this to him. Maybe someone had hurt Tommy too.

   He marched back down the beach.

   Tommy saw him when he was still some distance off, but he continued to squat, eating flaky tidbits from the fish, watching Jimon with his empty eyes.

   “What’s wrong with you?” Jimon said while he was still a safe distance away. “Are you mad at me?”

   A tiny crab with one claw as big as the rest of its body waved up to Jimon and said, “Be careful.”

   “Nothing’s wrong with me,” Tommy said, standing and flicking small white flakes of fish from his fingers. “I was just playing around.”

   Jimon’s stomach growled again. They both heard it.

   “Come on,” Tommy said, waving him over to the fire where the body of the fish lay flayed open on its leaves that were cooked nearly black. “Have some.”

   A sad smile took over Jimon’s face, a smile that belonged to the other him, the him who had never met Tommy, the him who had slept on dusty cold stone, the him who had jumped and run at the sound of his name, the him who had belonged to others.

   It was to that person that the little crab said, “Be careful, Jimon. He is dangerous. He’ll do things you can’t imagine.”

   I can imagine quite a bit.

   They walked toward Tommy, the two Jimons. The one with an antenna who knew Tommy and loved him and remembered the smell of his skin and the gentle purr of his pillow talk, and the other Jimon who had no antenna, who did not know Tommy, who was afraid of the wild-looking man standing there, naked, scratching himself, greasy and unkempt, his cock jiggling with each scratch.

   A larger wave rolled in and slipped up the sand near enough to where they stood to say, “Jimon, this is Tommy.”

   “I know who it is,” Jimon replied, his brow, just the one, just one side, furrowing.

   “I was speaking to the other you,” said the wave sinking into the sand.

   “It talks to you too, huh?” said Tommy.

   “Yeah. Do you know what it is? It won’t give me straight answers.”

   “There aren’t any,” said Tommy.

   One Jimon moved toward the fire, the other wanted to move away. He sidestepped in this manner toward the fire, the fish, and Tommy.

   “Are you sure it’s okay?” he asked.

   “Don’t be a dope,” Tommy replied.

   Jimon bent to reach for the fish and Tommy’s stick caught him in the forehead, then a hand had him by the throat. Tommy had the arms of a thaan, not a chan. His hands were big and square, not delicate and fine. He squeezed Jimon’s neck until he could not breathe.

   “Please,” Jimon squeaked out.

   Tommy looked him in one eye and then the next, like he knew, like he was trying to see where the division split them into two. He released Jimon and then punched him in the face to the side with the suture.

   Jimon had known violence. He’d seen it. He knew what it looked like when someone was alive and then they weren’t, like a ship’s port with life-giving air on one side and implacable vacuum on the other. But he could not remember ever being punched like this, as a man strikes another man in fury, with nothing held back. The kind of punch that did not care if it resulted in death.

   The sand rose to meet him, embrace him, and take him to the darkness.

   The sky came and went through the one eye not covered in sand, the one that occasionally opened to know if he and he were still alive. His mouth was oddly full. He opened it and a dark purple slug of congealed blood slipped out and wobbled horribly in the white sand.

   When he could lift his head without vomiting, he crawled yet again to the water and let it wash the blue and purple blood from his face. With his tongue, he dug blobs of it out from where they hid between his molars and cheek and found the gash inside that was their source.

   He crawled back out when the water threatened to take him into the deep.

   He lay on the sand and thought.

   Then cried.

   Then sobbed.

   When he could sit, he howled his confusion and upset into his lap. It grew and roiled and rose into wild ululations. He screamed his anger and fear at the water until his throat was raw and would make no more sound that wasn’t the wind passing through trees.

   When that was done and he felt scoured from the inside, he glanced around. The remains of the fire were there. The fish was nothing but mangled spines and tiny white vertebrae.

   He was alone with himself again.

   “Tommy is gone,” said a monkey being chased by two tiny, striped mongooses.

   Jimon pulled his legs underneath him, sitting on his knees.

   “I thought you did well with him,” the monkey said, scratching as Tommy had scratched.

   “You’re an idiot,” Jimon replied, no longer concerned with niceties, no longer afraid of this thing that spoke through animals and inanimate objects.

   “I saw you; I see everything, Jimon.”

   “Then you’re the worst,” Jimon said looking down at his lap.

   “What do you mean by that?”

   “If you see everything then you could have stopped him. You could have beamed security into here, or a medic. You could have done something. I’ve been in some real shitholes, but not where they would just let someone else—”

   “Another patient?” asked a bird wheeling overhead. "Or another slave?"

   “—do that.”

   “You were lucky, Jimon. Tommy wishes to pull one of you out.”

   “And you could have stopped him.”

   “No,” said the little monkey, flicking its gaze up and down the beach. “I have eyes and ears and a mouth, but no hands.”

   “I thought you made all this.”

   “I make nothing. I simply am. People made me. People like you.”

   “I mean, I thought you were in charge of all this. I thought you make it run, make it happen.”

   “No. It runs by itself, without need of me. My purpose is other.”

   “What’s outside? If we’re not in a holodeck, we must be in orbit. Is Earth out there?”

   “Would you feel more comfortable if it were?”

   “I would feel more comfortable if you just gave direct answers to direct questions.”

   “It’s hard to know who’s asking. You or… you?”

   Jimon twirled his hand aimlessly in the space where his antenna should be. Fear and anger crushed his chest into more sobs.

   “What did you do to me?” he wailed. “Why am I broken?”

   “I didn’t do that, Jimon.” The monkey’s eyes were huge and liquid. “But it is why you’re here. There are two of you. There should be just one.”

   He bent down to look the monkey in the eye, but it ran off down the beach. He followed where it ran and saw Tommy’s footsteps unmistakably leading in the same direction.

   Jimon stood, and with granite determination and a lower lip clamped firmly between his teeth, he marched after the monkey and Tommy and by sheer will refused to fall down, despite the vertigo and the gravity that felt even weaker than before. Perhaps that is what helped him.

   He marched like this for what seemed an hour. There had been a mess of crisscrossing tracks near the fire, but here, there was just the one set slowly creeping up the dunes. They suddenly turned inland, up the hot expanse of beach where the sand was so dry, the steps were mere depressions, no longer distinct, then up through the palms where the ground grew firm and became soil.

   “Tommy! Thomas B. Cooper! You come out here!”

   There was no reply, not even from the monkeys or birds. But there was the sound of a snapping stick and the heavy, wet squeak of large tropical leaves being pushed aside.

   “Mom?”

   A tall, thin woman came out of the foliage, or perhaps it had released her from its grip. She had short dark hair, small breasts, and shoulders that curved forward slightly. She was sunburned and as naked as Jimon and Tommy.

   “That’s Tasía,” said a tiny lizard scurrying up a branch.

   “I know,” Jimon said, and before the lizard could retort, he added, “Both of us know.”

   Jimon pointed to her collarbone where a bright red line was forming.

   “You’re bleeding,” he said.

   She shot him a quizzical look. “Have you seen yourself? You’re the one who’s bleeding.”

   Using her own face as a template, she showed him where, but he already knew. He was missing an antenna, but the rest of his nervous system was functioning just fine.

   “Did you get into a fight?” she asked. “I thought you were my mother come to get me. Have you? Come to get me?”

   “Is everyone here broken?” he yelled at no one.

   The lizard stopped, flared its orange throat flap, licked an eyeball, and said, “Yes.”

   At least whatever was going on with her was different from what was happening with Tommy. She was still present in her eyes, unlike Tommy who had seemed to be only a disturbing shell.

   “Are we going home?” she repeated.

   “Do you want to?”

   “Well, I think I should, you know.”

   “But, do you want to?”

   “No. Not really. Can you tell him to shut up?”

   “Who?”

   “The other you. He’s so loud. I heard him down the beach when you were far away. I heard him crying.”

   Jimon squatted and took note that when he squatted, it had been the other him who did it each time. It was his nature to sit and be as small as he could be, drawing limbs into a ball, never sitting on his butt because sitting like that is lazy and dangerous. But squatting is okay. You can get up quickly from a squat. You can dodge a fist if you have to.

   The other Jimon knew all these things. Knew them like a spider hiding in the corner seeing everything. And he knew little else.

   “Do you have anything to eat? I’m really hungry,” Jimon said.

   “No, but I did. There were memories lying around. I ate those, and the things your other self gave me. I’m not hungry.”

   “Did he give you the antenna?” The cold talon returned and snuck fingers into him. “Did you eat it?”

   “Ew. I would never do that,” she said. “I’m thirsty, though. I’m gonna get a drink. You’re a nice kid.”

   Neither Jimon liked being called a kid. “I’m not a messenger boy anymore.”

   “Aren’t you?” she replied over her shoulder, tromping clumsily through the sand.

   Jimon followed her, arms stuck out like nacelle pylons to keep balance.

   Tasía kneeled where the waves lapped the sand.

   “If you go a little deeper, there’s no sand mixed with the water,” he said and then demonstrated.

   “Hm,” she replied. “I’ve been drinking from right here the whole time. My mom says I’m stupid. I guess I must be. Do you think I’m stupid?”

   Jimon shook his head.

   “Why do you think he did that to you?”

   “Did you see when it happened?” Jimon asked, assuming she meant Tommy.

   “No, we only just met.”

   One side of his face held the question curled in its wrinkles. The other side did not.

   “I told you. He talks to me all the time.” She pointed to his head. “You did that to him.”

   The claw within his chest dug deeper and deeper still.

   He rubbed the suture, which made the tears flow again. It felt wet. There was blue blood on his fingertip.

   “I didn’t mean to upset you,” Tasía said.

    The monkey had returned. It approached where Jimon squatted and sobbed snot into the sand.

   “I thought you could see everything in here,” Jimon mewled. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

   “You didn’t do that here,” the monkey said. “You arrived that way.”

   “I asked you who did it and you didn’t say anything.”

   “I thought it would frighten you.”

   “Not knowing is what frightens me!”

   Jimon kicked at the monkey and it fled into the undergrowth.

   A bird wheeled overhead and said, “You should be with Tommy. He needs you.”

   “I don’t know where he is,” Jimon replied.

   “Down the beach where you were,” the bird said, heading in that direction. “He cut back through the trees.”

   Jimon stood and wiped his face, only making it worse with the sand that now stuck.

   He marched away from Tasía and toward Tommy.

   “Wait,” she said.

   “Get away from me!” he shouted, his arms stuck out behind him, stiff, like struts to support the force of his demand.

   “Why don’t you listen to him?” she persisted.

   “Who?”

   “The other you.”

   “I don’t want to! He hurts me!”

   She paused, looked at him, then past and through him, then at him again.

   “Is that why you hurt him?”

   “I don’t want to see the things he shows me!”

   “What does he show you?”

   “Shut! Up!”

   “Oh,” she said, but clearly not to him. “I wouldn’t want to see that either, but… you can’t make him go away.”

   “I can!”

   “You can’t,” said the monkey from under the bushes, zipping away before Jimon could hit him with a rock.

   “Tell me something he showed you,” Tasía said.

   “Why?!”

   “I want to know.”

   “You just said you didn’t want to see.”

   “No, not like that. Not in my head. But I want you to tell me.”

   “Like what? Like I saw people do horrible things? Like that? That’s what everyone always wants to hear. They want to hear the ugly things and then pretend to be shocked. They want to pretend that they’re good enough to be shocked, but they’re not!”

   “Was it all horrible?”

   “Mostly.”

   “Tell me one thing. Just one.”

   “You won’t like it,” he said. “No one ever does.”

   “Just tell me.”

   Tell her this.

   “It was the first time he was sold,” Jimon said, taking note as he said it that he’d referred to the other Jimon in the third person and wondered if he had always done that, before whatever had happened to them. He usually didn’t refer to him at all. “It was an Orion shuttle we were in. It was small and old and smelly, and not just because of us in the back. It stank all by itself. His name - neither of us remembers his name, but he wasn’t nice to us.”

   The older boy had been angry and frustrated and wanted to escape, thought Jimon to Jimon. He’d been on the cusp of having to do other things, and he wasn’t very nice to look at either. He would have had a hard time of it and probably get sold again and made to do worse things than what happens in the dark rooms.

   “He was in the back with us, me and two girls, but he was older. We were the only Andorian. The others were Orions, like always. He pushed us to the back. We thought he was just being mean, bullying us, but he wanted to do something. He wanted to hurt the man who bought us. He needed room. He hit the man in the head, but his hands were tied. They struggled for a minute and then the boy was gone. He was transported outside. We saw him drift close to the ship and then we went to warp.”

   “What happened then?”

   “Nothing,” Jimon said. “He goes blank when those things happen. He goes inside.”

   “What do you mean?”

   Jimon shrugged. It had been a lie. He’d been there too, of course. He remembered. They both did. No one had gone blank. Adrenaline had dumped into him, hard and sour, and prickled along his skin, and he turned into something else, something simpler, something that doesn’t talk but sees everything in minute detail and is just waiting for the monster at the mouth of the cave to go away. He didn’t have a better way to explain it.

   “You asked me to tell you one thing, and I told you,” he reminded her. “What do you know about Tommy?”

   “He isn’t anybody,” she said.

   “What does that mean?” he asked and realized they’d been asking one another that same question over and over again. What does it mean? What do you mean? What do we mean?

   “Is it just you and me and Tommy and the talking monkeys?” he asked more pointedly. “Is there anyone else?”

   “Not that you can see or touch, but I feel them. I hear their thoughts.”

   The monkey inserted itself between them. “There are other patients, but it’s best for now that you remain here, by yourselves in this section of me. It’s better for everyone that way.”

   It was strange to watch a little monkey say so many words in a row. Like a little person.

   “What does he mean?” said Jimon, adding another mark to the count.

   “If I tell you, will you tell me something else? Something about you, not about a dumb boy who got himself spaced.”

   “... Fine.”

   “Tell me first. I promise I’ll keep my word. I don’t break promises.”

   He stared at her wondering which story would end this cycle they were stuck in.

   I know which one.

   No, not that one.

   She’ll help us find Tommy if you tell her.

   I can’t say it. I can’t.

   I can.

   Again, he squatted, because the vertigo was wild. He held a branch near to him to keep his balance where he sat.

   “My third owner died,” said the other Jimon while this Jimon hung to the branch and trembled silently. “She smoked red sky all the time. She was better than the one who sold me to her. She didn’t hit or yell or scream. She was too high most of the time, and she was old. Other owners sometimes laughed at her because we weren’t scared of her. She smoked too much red sky one night. Or maybe someone sold her bad drugs. I don’t know. I fell asleep on the floor and when I woke up, she didn’t.”

   Leaves fell from the branch Jimon held so fiercely, his fingers turned white.

   “Two days later, someone came and got us. We were hungry and crying and the little-little kids had pooped themselves. They left my owner where she was on the floor but took the kids and divided us up between them. They fought over me and a little girl because we were the nicest looking. The girl went with one, I went with the other. The man who was selling us when we met Brad, it was him, it was that owner. He hit the little kids and the food-bringers, but not the ones who did other things. He didn’t hit me, though. He told me that the next time I got sold, I had to be perfect, untouched, no bruises, no scars…”

   He gently slipped the tip of one finger of his free hand hesitantly through the sutured trough along his head yet again and let the other Jimon release the branch and have his tongue back.

   Tasía trembled much as the branch had.

   “Now tell me about Tommy,” said this Jimon because a deal was a deal.

   “He’s not mad at you. He’s scared of you.”

   “Why would he be scared of me? I’m too small to scare anyone.”

   “You can hurt him in ways I think you don’t understand yet,” she said sounding like a mom, but she wasn’t his mom. “He knows there are two of you and sometimes, at night, he worries the other one will wake up.”

   “It’s not like that,” said Jimon, though he wasn’t sure how to explain what it was like. It wasn’t really two, but just a part of him he'd locked away. “A ship has two nacelles, but it’s just one ship. It runs on both matter and antimatter. It’s still just one drive.”

   “I’m not stupid,” she said, drawing shapes in the sand. “My mom says I am, though. She says I traded everything for a dumb uniform.”

   “But you just got promoted.”

   “She doesn’t know that. And even if she did, she wouldn’t care." she looked up. "It’s gonna rain. Can you feel it?”

   She threw a handful of sand into the air and it fell slowly enough to follow individual grains, to watch them turn and sparkly in the air.

   “Look!” she said like a child and bunched up and jumped into the air a full three meters high. “It means people are sad and it’s going to rain. Told you.”

   “You didn’t say anything about rain. What did you trade?”

   “I did. I told you it was gonna rain. You’re just like my mom. You think I’m dumb.”

   “I don’t think that,” he assured and left off insisting she hadn’t mentioned the rain before now. She hadn’t, but it didn’t really matter.

   He looked down the beach. There were no waves, just strange swellings, and depressions that rose and fell. It was a big bowl of blue gelatin.

   “What did you trade?” he asked again.

   She leaned back into the sand like a cat stretching its legs. Jimon looked away because she was naked and humans keep everything on the outside.

   “On Betazed, I didn’t have a room - I had apartments in the house. Five rooms. A bedroom, a living room, a reading room, a bath and toilet, and a sun room with a big balcony overlooking the water. Just like that water over there, only it moved like regular water.” She curled into a fetal position, eyeing him. “The other you wonders if I had slaves like him. I didn’t.”

   He was unnerved that she could speak so easily to his other half, the other him.

   “Are you a princess?”

   “No,” she assured. “But I had two friends who were. Well, they would have been back in the old days. Each of them had an ornate gold cage Betazoid ladies used to wear in their hair like a hat, complete with little pets inside. Just like you!”

   But she was pointing to the monkey.

   The sky was dimming.

   “It’s getting dark,” Jimon observed.

   “It doesn’t always get dark here,” Tasía said. “Sometimes the rain sparkles. I think Dr. Island must do it to cheer everyone up.”

   “No,” the leaves explained. “Or at least not in the way you mean, Tasía.”

   Jimon was hungry and started to ask them for something to eat, then turned his hunger in against itself, spat on the sand, and was still.

   The monkey said, “It rains when the patients are sad because rain is good for the soul at such times. Perhaps because it reminds people of tears.”

   Tasía said, “Well, I know sometimes I feel better when it rains.”

   “People feel better when their environment is in sync with their feelings.” The monkey scratched his flank with a back leg that moves so fast it was just a blur for a moment. “People who are sad are frustrated when there is sunshine and birds singing. Do you know:

   And, missing thee, I walk unseen

   On the dry smooth-shaven green

   To behold the wandering moon,

   Riding near her highest noon,

   Like one that had been led astray

   Through the heaven’s wide pathless way?

   Jimon said, “No. Did somebody write that?” And then: “You said you couldn’t do anything.”

   The monkey replied, “I can’t—except talk to you.”

   “You make it rain.”

   “Your heart beats; I sense its pumping even as I speak—do you control the beating of your heart?”

   “I can stop my breath. I can move my antenna.”

   “Can you stop your heart? Honestly, Jimon?”

   “I guess not.”

   “I am the same. The weather changes according to your mood, but I control it no more than you control your heart. It is, in fact, you who makes that happen, not me. I cannot control the rain or feed you when are hungry. Your emotions are monitored and averaged, and the weather responds. Calm and sunshine for tranquillity, rain for sadness, storms for rage, and so on. This is what people have always wanted.”

   Tasía asked, “What is?”

   “That the environment should respond to one’s thoughts. That is the core of magic and the oldest dream of people everywhere across the stars; and here, in me, it is fact.”

   “So that we’ll be better?” Tasía asked.

   “You aren’t sick,” Jimon replied, resentment growing in him. She wasn’t broken or missing parts. She wasn’t two people or one person cut in half or whatever it was that Jimon was. And she wasn’t scruffy and scraggly with her belly out chasing him into the water like Tommy.

   “So that some of you can be made whole.” The monkey had gone - but the lizard was still there.

   “Why are we talking to this computer?” Jimon asked no one. He threw sand through the bush where the lizard gripped a branch, but it scurried away.

   “Wait, Jim, I think it’s interesting.”

   “Don’t call me Jim,” he grumbled. “And all it has is lies and lies and more lies. I know all about lies.”

   “How have I lied?” asked a crab, returning to the stage.

   “You said you could do magic.”

   “I said that when people think of magic, what they wish for is the ability to control the world around them. They long for omnipotence. Have you never wished you could do magic, Jimon?”

   Of course, he had. Every day of the other Jimon’s life, he had made silent wishes. That one disappears. This one over there goes hungry. The ugly one who is cruel gets no bids at all and gets dumped. The woman buys me, not the man.

   Sometimes, we made it happen.

   What?

   The ugly one. I told a lie, said he caught a bug doing sex and he never got sold. He got left behind when we went somewhere new.

   I don’t remember that.

   I do.

   He opened his mouth, but Tasía caught the words and spoke instead. “You said you averaged emotions. When you made it rain.”

   “Yes,” said the crab.

   “What if one person is really, really sad? If it’s an average, wouldn’t that shift things so much that it rained, even if no one else is sad? How does that satisfy the need?”

   “It has never happened.” The crab’s one large claw made a slow sweeping arc, a universal gesture invoking time. “But if it were to happen, if one person’s emotions were so strong, imagine how great their need would be! It should be answered, no?”

   Jimon walked away from the crab and Tasía. It was tiring talking to them. They were like most people he’d known. They talked and talked, but it was just to fill the air with sound. Jimon wondered if there was a spring in them, like the watch spring in Papa’s antique gold pocket watch. Papa had shown him once, opening the back and putting it under a lens. It was a machine with moving parts, no isolinear chips, and no power cell. It had been a tiny city whirling and spinning. That’s what it felt like hearing them talk. Like a watch spring unwinding. And they all wanted him to do the same.

   His feet barely touched the sand now, but there was a heaviness within him.

   “Wait,” Tasía said, catching up to him in long, smooth strides. “You said I wasn’t sick, so why am I here? I think you’re wrong.”

   “I’m not wrong. What’s wrong with you is what’s wrong with everyone. It’s always-” He feigned vomiting dramatically on the sand. “Just puking up words like bad eggs.”

   “It’s just better when you get it out,” she replied.

   “Better for you,” he replied. “Your mom is probably right. Maybe you did make a bad trade. Maybe you should have stayed in your apartments in your palace. You and your mom and your dad. You’re not sick. You’re not broken. Not like me, anyway.”

   “Jimon!” She grabbed his thin shoulders. “That’s not true!”

   “Yes, it is.”

   “I am sick. Everyone says so. They’re always talking about me. Always!”

   “What do they say, Tasía? What?” Jimon asked because so far no one had been talking about her at all.

   “That I’m in their heads. They say it all the time! But it’s them who are in my head.”

   “That’s not sick. That’s just being a telepath. And paranoid.”

   “How can you say that? You can’t even talk to yourself!”

   It would have hurt less if she’d punched him like Tommy had.

   “You’re just scared people will think bad things about you.” He made absurd pantomime of Tasía’s femininity. “I’m Tasía. I’m a Betazoid princess. Everyone’s looking at me. It’s all about me! Me, me, me!”

   Tasía called out, “Doctor? Dr. Island?”

   Jimon said, “You aren’t going to listen to that thing, are you, Princess Tasía?”

   “Dr. Island, is it true?”

   “Is what true, Tasía?”

   “What he said. Am I sick?”

   “Sickness—even physical illness—is relative, Tasía; and complete health is an idealization, an abstraction, even if the other end of the scale is not.”

   “You know what I mean.”

   “You are not physically ill.” A long, blue comber curled into a line of hissing spray reaching infinitely along the sea to their left and right.

   “He said I should have stayed home, but if it weren’t for my mother and father, I wouldn’t have to be here.”

   “Tasía …”

   “Well, is that true, or isn’t it?”

   “Most mental illness would not exist if it were possible - in every case - to remove oneself from its source. You would have been more ill had you stayed on Betazed.”

   “Separate oneself?”

   “They harmed you when your friend was sent away.”

   “My parents didn’t do that. Letha’s parents did.”

   “But yours agreed with what happened, and why. When you confronted them, when you refused to hear their reasoning, you became a problem for them and those around you. Your abilities are strong and others cannot shield themselves from you.”

   When Tasía said nothing, Jimon snapped, “You could have locked them up instead!”

   “Within the context of their culture, they were functional and productive.”

   Tasía said softly, “Doesn’t matter. Everyone is always inside me.”

   Jimon threw a pebble at the crab. It skittered sideways and said, “Tasía was the one out of context, no longer functional. No matter where she went, her thoughts were broadcast to everyone telling them everything they believed and loved and treasured was wrong and evil.”

   She was right. What they did to her friend is what you do to me.

   “So that’s all that matters to you? Being functional within a context?” Jimon asked, woven out of resentment, ignoring the other Jimon’s accusation even as he pressed his own.

   You feel the same way.

   I do not!

   I have no context in which I am acceptable. That’s why you don’t talk to me.

   I don’t talk to you because… because it hurts.

   And there is no context where that will ever change.

   “In many different ways, I am a mirror. If I were different compared to the real world, Jimon,” said the crab. “If I were not representative, how could I help you return?”

   “You are different,” Jimon said, kicking a spray of sand at the impassive crab. “No one ever saw a place like this. Crabs don’t talk, or monkeys, or fish.”

   “Then tell me, what is reality to you, Jimon? The inside of a Starfleet ship, its corridors, laboratories, and cargo hold? Or maybe the dead surface of Verex III where you understood your place and the rules that governed it?”

   “I guess.”

   “There is nothing about those places and situations that is any more real than I am when I use this crab to speak. The universe contains an uncountable number of sapient beings like you and Tasía and the vast majority of them have never seen a ship or a corridor. They’ve no idea what a laboratory is or what takes place inside. Most of them would be horrified by the life lived by either Jimon, the one who was a slave, or the one who is a medic. Their context would make it so.”

   “Come on,” said Jimon, taking Tasía gently by the hand to lead her away from this. He was acutely aware of how much shorter he was than her.

   “Answer me this, Jimon,” murmured the distant waves. “If Tasía’s parents had been brought here instead, do you think it would have helped them?”

   Jimon said nothing, feeling the point of a barbed question.

   “We can help those who are disturbed, Jimon. But there is no treatment for those who cause the disturbance that does not include severely curtailing their freedoms.”

   Jimon ran at the crab, intent on smashing it, but it slipped into a hole in the sand and was gone.

   “I’m gonna catch one of those things, and when I do, I’m gonna take it apart and see how many isolinear chips make it run,” he whispered.

   “I don’t think Dr. Rutherford would like that very much,” said the hole where the crab hid.

   “What?”

   “You wouldn’t take his implant apart to see how many chips are in there, would you?”

   “No, but he’s not a crab or a monkey with stupid ideas." Turning back to Tasía: "Are we going to walk all the way around?”

   “No, it would take too long,” Tasía replied. “It’s pretty big, and you can’t get there anyway. But we can walk until it wraps back around. We’re about halfway there already.”

   “Is this the only island?”

   She nodded. “Pretty sure. Just one in this station. The rest is water until you get to the exterior wall.”

   “It can’t be that big, then. We should be able to go all the way around.”

   She was restraining a giggle.

   “What’s so funny?”

   “Look as far down the beach as you can. Don’t worry about how it curves. Just look to the end where the beach meets the water meets the sky.”

   “There’s nothing there.”

   “Keep looking,” she said.

   She jumped very high. The gravity had reduced again. The water was sluggish and thick.

   “It looks like there’s someone down there now,” he observed.

   “Yep,” she answered. “Now look the other direction when I jump.”

   “Yeah, there’s someone down there too. When I first woke up, I thought I saw someone at the end of the beach, but I couldn’t get to him.”

   “It’s just us,” she said. “The person you saw before was you.”

   I’m always here. I wish you would just talk to me.

   Jimon shrugged away the plea and said, “How do you know it’s us?”

   “The island told me when I first woke up.” She was silent for some moments. “You wanna see something funny?”

   He shrugged noncommittally the exact moment a raindrop landed on his nose.

   “We have to get closer to the middle, not on the beach, but that’s good because it’s gonna rain and the trees will protect us.”

   Away from the sand and water, on hard ground that made his steps bouncy and long, he wondered if maybe there would be food in among the trees, fruit they could pick. He imagined a mango and his stomach growled once again.

   Tasía giggled at the sound.

   They had to take care now. A step that was too forceful would launch them end over end. The rain floated as much as fell, in amorphous blobs.

   Tasía grabbed his arm when it looked like he would reach escape velocity.

   “Climb up and see if there’s anything to eat,” she said, still holding him.

   He reached for a branch and pulled himself up into the canopy. He barely used his legs at all. Up into strong branches and boughs with glossy green leaves and rivulets of water sticking, running, connecting, and separating. But there was no fruit. He dropped slowly from the great height to which he’d climbed, landing near Tasía.

   “Nothing,” he informed.

   Lazy, gelatinous drops of rain landed on them, wiggled, and contemplated rolling toward the sand.

   “Where does the rain come from?” he asked. “How does a place like this have precipitation?”

   “It’s from the sea,” she said pointing back toward the beach. “Didn’t you see it when they brought you here?”

   Jimon shook his head.

   “It’s like an upside-down city. Towers and spires and lights, but they go down instead of up. The nurse was talking to me when we approached and he thought I wasn’t listening, but I was just looking. It’s very beautiful, but I guess the nurse didn’t care. He sees it all the time. It’s no use talking to someone like that.”

   “I know what you mean.”

   “You really didn’t get to see?”

   “No,” he replied. All he remembered was darkness and hands and tight rooms full of people. The stink of no showers and too many bodies.

   It was just a shuttle. It was just us.

   Why do I remember more people?

   That was from different times. From before. Those are my memories, not yours. They gave us a hypospray to calm us down.

   “They just shoved me up into the sand on the beach.”

   “You didn’t have to undress?”

   “I was already like this. They gave me something so I wouldn’t fight, but it didn’t work very well. Did they give you something? Did it work?”

   “No. But I don’t fight like you do. I don’t rip parts off myself. They didn’t have to give me anything. I used to take medicine when I was little to cheer me up. But I couldn’t sleep and I would walk and walk and talk and talk and it only made more things go inside me, not fewer. Everyone was always just spewing things out and I was the only one who seemed to hear it, so it came to me.”

   “Why did they want to cheer you up?”

   “My friend was gone and I was sad and angry, and I wanted to be sad and angry. I wanted it so bad. I wanted to make it go into them, into my parents, into Letha’s parents, so they would feel what I felt because of what they did. They didn’t want to feel that way. So they gave me medicine to make it stop. They gave it to me, but really, it was for them. I was making trouble, but what good does that do? That’s what my father always asked. ‘What good is all this drama and crying? She’s in a better place now with people to help her,’ he would say. I don’t think it was true, though. She never came back so I don’t think she ever got better.”

   They took her friend away and you put me away. You two are the same.

   We’re not the same. I’m no one’s princess.

   Aren’t you? The red carpet doesn’t roll out for Jimon Rozhenko? I’ve seen it. It does.

   That’s not…

   … it is.

   “The other you is angry,” said Tasía. “Deep down. Really angry.”

   Jimon’s mind was elsewhere. “The island said that Tommy’s dangerous. That he’ll do things. What does it look like?”

   “Tommy?”

   “No. I know what he looks like. I mean the island. The part that talks through the animals. What does it look like?”

   “Well, like I said. It looks like an upside-down city. The top is round like a dish with a big dome covering it. The sea and the island and us, we’re all inside the dish.”

   “Is the sun real, or is it part of it?”

   “It’s real. We’re in orbit around a gas giant. When the planet is between us and the sun, it’s dark. That’s why it doesn’t set all the way. It just disappears. Do you know what the Focus is?”

   “The what?”

   “I guess if you don’t remember getting here, then maybe they didn’t brief you or you just forgot. We’re going there now. We should get there after the rain stops. You’ll see.”

   “I still don’t understand about the rain.”

   “When people are sad, the gravity gets low. When it gets low enough, the water that splashes from the waves in the sea can escape and go up. When there’s enough, it comes back down eventually.” Tasía smiled to herself. “Do you know what I was supposed to be when I was on Betazed?”

   “Quiet?” Jimon offered.

   “No, silly. I mean what I was training to do. I wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to find kids like Letha and take them somewhere safe.”

   “Isn’t that what her parents did? Isn’t that what you said?”

   “Yeah, but they were liars. I would take them somewhere really safe. Somewhere like here.”

   The undergrowth was thickening. Its thin branches and broad leaves grew more compact, closer together. And it was darker here. Cooler. Palms overhead swayed lazily as if their crowns were underwater.

   “Like you and me. Here?”

   “Yeah, I guess. Isn’t it nice?”

   It would be nicer if we were whole - if you let me be you.

   I’m scared of you.

   Is that why you hurt me?

   Something in his chest pinched. Had he hurt him? Had he locked him in a room and forgotten him, like they’d done with him here in this strange place? Is this what it was like to be abandoned?

   Yes. You remember. When Brad helped us, we saw what we hadn’t seen before, we knew what we hadn’t known. It was bad, very bad, and Brad was good and that was where we split and you left me, back on Verex III.

   “The gravity goes down when people are sad,” he observed in a low voice. “What happens when people are angry?”

   “Storms,” Tasía answered. “Wind and rain and howling so loud you can scream and you don’t hear yourself. The rain during a storm gets ripped right off the surface of the sea and into the air. I've seen Tommy yelling at the waves when there's a storm.”

   “What makes the wind?”

   “Don’t know.”

   Tasía sat on a large rock in a small clearing that opened before them. Jimon sat next to her. How strange it was that they were both completely naked and yet completely unconcerned. Jimon had no breasts, not even small ones like Tasía’s, and he was blue, not tan, but they looked similar. His body kept his parts hidden inside. Tommy was neither a woman nor an Andorian and all his parts were on the outside. Nothing hidden.

   Tasía said, “It’s going to stop.”

   She held her hand out to catch the fat drops.

   “It looks just as bad to me.”

   “No, it’s going to stop—see, they’re falling a little faster now, and I feel heavier.”

   Jimon stood up. “You rested enough yet? Should we keep going? To the Focus, or whatever?”

   “It’ll be over in a minute.”

   He sat down again. “How long have you been here?”

   “I’m not sure.”

   “Don’t you count the days?”

   “I lose track a lot.”

   “Longer than a week?”

   “Jimon, don’t ask me, all right?”

   “Isn’t there anybody on this piece of Dr. Island except you and me and Tommy?”

   “I didn’t think there was anyone but Tommy before you came.”

   “Why is he here?”

   She looked through him.

   “Tell me. We’re friends now, right? You know me—us—Jimon Rozhenko; and you’re Tasía…?”

   “Athena,” she said, though it had the sound of something chosen right there and then, not an older fact.

   “And you’re from Betazed, and I was from Andoria, I guess, to start with. What about Tommy? You talk to him sometimes, don’t you? Why is he here? Is he broken too”

   “I don’t know.”

   She looked uncomfortable, her shoulders drawn farther in, her arms wrapped around her chest.

   “He tried to hurt me. Why did he do that?” Jimon asked.

   “He’s scared. We’re all scared, Jimon. It’s our default state. If you paid better attention, you would know that. But I guess we matter.”

   And that last bit sounded like the island talking, not Tasía.

   “Are you gonna hurt me?” he asked.

   “No,” she replied, stung. “I would never hurt you. Not on purpose.”

   “But, by accident?”

   “No one can help accidents. That’s why they’re called accidents.”

   “We matter?” Jimon asked, rummaging in his mind and finding no anchor for ideas like matter or importance. He was just a medic, one of thousands.

   “Well, look at it,” she said, gesturing broadly at the island. “Look around you - someone built this.”

   “You mean it cost a lot.”

   “Not money. No one civilized still uses money, but yeah, it obviously cost a lot. Nothing is free,” she said, and now it sounded like she was reading from a book. “Money is just a placeholder for other things. Economy always exists. It has to. Money doesn’t have to exist, though. And look how much space the island has for just the three of us.”

   “Why did they put us with Tommy if he’s dangerous? You aren’t dangerous.”

   “I can be,” she replied. “So can you.”

   She pointed to the scar that was evidence of the fact.

   “Tommy is scared and scared men do dangerous things,” she said gravely. “They may not mean to, but once it’s done, it doesn’t matter. Done is done. You need to be careful with him. You’re very small and Tommy is strong.”

   After an hour or more of walking, they came to it. It was a band of withered leaves and branches, brown and black and crumbling that ran laser-straight.

   “I was afraid it wasn’t going to be here,” Tasía said. “It moves around whenever there’s a storm. It might not have been in our sector anymore.”

   Jimon asked, “What is it?”

   “The Focus. It moves all over, but mostly the plants grow back quickly when it’s gone.”

   “It smells funny—like the kitchens at the auction where I was the food-bringer.”

   “Vegetables rotting, that’s what that is. What does a food-bringer do?”

   “… brings the food,” he answered hesitantly because there was no way to strip the answer of sarcasm, so he added, “You keep calling it the Focus. What is it focusing?”

   “The light from the sun when the planet is out of the way. It’s a blue giant. It’s massive. When the light hits the dome, some of it gets focused like a magnifying lens and does this. It burns a path.”

   “That’s dumb,” Jimon remarked. “They should shield it.”

   “I think they do,” she replied. “I think without the shielding, it would be much, much bigger and worse. I stood right under it when it passed. It won’t fry you right away, but you can’t stay there for more than a minute.”

   He wondered if that was why she was so tan. Had she sought it out? Had she followed it? Had she wanted to fry, even if she lied to herself that she didn’t?

   “That’s not very nice,” she said and walked away.

   “I’m sorry,” the other Jimon said for him because he understood. He knew all too well what it meant to want to fry even if you didn’t. “I thought it was gonna be an illusion, like seeing ourselves at the ends of the beach.”

   “It was gonna be,” she said. “I didn’t think it would be so close to the water. The last time I found it, it was much closer to the middle. The sides of each sector of the island get closer and closer the farther in you go. It’s like a pie and we’re on one piece of it. When you’re near to the middle, you can see yourself real close.”

   Jimon tried climbing a nearby tree to see if he saw himself, but the gravity had grown heavy again and he could no longer climb like the monkeys.

   When he gave up, he said, “There’s nothing to eat here either.”

   “I haven’t found anything,” Tasía said and he wondered how she could go so long without eating. Her belly didn’t even growl.

   “It wouldn’t just let us starve, would it?” he asked.

   “I don’t think it lets anything happen. That’s just how the island is. Sometimes you find things, and I tried to catch a fish, but I could hear how scared they were. Tommy gave me some fish a couple of times. He’s good at catching them. He doesn’t have to hear them. I bet you think I’m super skinny. I wasn’t skinny when I got here.”

   “What do we do now?” he asked.

   “I guess we should keep walking. Maybe go back to the water.”

   But he didn’t want to do that. He’d seen enough of the beach and the water. It was pleasant, but it was empty and empty things made room for the other Jimon to talk.

   “Do you think we’ll find anything,” he asked, stalling.

    From within a log, a tiny insect chirped, “Wait.”

   Jimon asked, “Do you know where any food is?”

   “Something for you to eat? Not at the moment, no. But I can show you something much more interesting. It’s not far. Would you like to see it?”

   Tasía said, “Don’t go, Jimon.”

   “What is it?”

   “Tasía, who calls this the Focus, calls what I wish to show you the Point.”

   Jimon asked Tasía, “Why shouldn’t I go?”

   “I’m not going. I went there once already.”

   “I took her,” Dr. Island said. “And I’ll take you. I wouldn’t take you if I didn’t think it might help you.”

   “I don’t think Tasía likes it.”

   “Tasía may not wish to be helped—help may be painful, and often people do not want it. But it is my job to help them if I can, whether or not they wish it.”

   “And if I don’t want to go?”

   “I can’t make you, Jimon. As I said, I have no hands in any practical sense. But if you don’t see it, you’ll be the only one in this section of me that hasn’t. And you’re the youngest. And the smallest. Tasía has seen it and Tommy goes there often.”

   “Is it dangerous?”

   “No. Are you afraid?”

   Jimon looked questioningly at Tasía. “What is it? What will I see?”

   She had walked away and was now sitting about five meters from Jimon, staring out through the trees where the water was visible through a space that was clear.

   “What will I see, Tasía?”

   “A glass. A mirror. You.”

   “A mirror?”

   “Remember when I told you that the closer you get to the middle, the closer your other selves are, the ones you can see at either end of the beach? It’ll be like that, but much, much closer.”

   That was disappointing. “I’ve seen myself in the mirror lots.”

   “Not like this,” she replied from miles and miles away.

   “Doesn’t sound like a big deal,” Jimon said.

   “It is,” replied the insect.

   “Do you think I should go,” he asked Tasía, but she did not reply and her eyes were hollow and lost now like Tommy’s had been when he first saw him.

   “What’s wrong with her?” Jimon asked the bug.

   “She’s catatonic, Jimon.

   “Why?”

   “I am still not sure,” said the insect. “There is a trauma she refuses to engage. Like you and the other Jimon whom you also refuse to engage.”

   “And Tommy?”

   “Just as fear is your default state, inability to change is another state that is also default. It is a thing you must overcome if you are to get better. You must change. To change, you must know what needs changing.”

   “Is there no treatment for us?”

   “I keep telling you - both of you - you are currently experiencing treatment.”

   “Will it help her?”

   “Probably not.

   “She can hear you, you know. She hears everything, even the things you don’t say.”

   “If my answer disturbs you, Jimon, I can change it. It will help her if she wants to be helped; if she insists on holding on to her pain, it will not. The same is true for you. You must engage it.”

   “We ought to go away from here,” Jimon said uneasily.

   “To your left, you will see a little path, a very faint one. Between the twisted tree and the bush with the yellow flowers.”

   Jimon nodded and began to walk, looking back at Tasía several times. The flowers were butterflies. They fled in a cloud of color when he approached them, and he wondered if Dr. Island had known - if they were really him or just butterflies. When he had gone a hundred paces and was well away from the brown and rotting vegetation, the island whispered to him, “She was sitting in the Focus again just now.”

   “What happens when the sun shines brightly again on that spot?”

   “She will move.”

   Jimon followed the path that had been shown to him. He pondered the meaning of Tasía sitting in the spot where she knew the sun would burn her. She knew it and sat there anyway, waiting for the heat to make her move.

   “Is she always so stubborn?” Jimon asked.

   “You tore out your own antenna, Jimon. You did it with your own hands. Andorian antennae are very sensitive, I am told. I cannot imagine how painful that must have been. You did it in order not to face yourself. Is that not a greater stubbornness?”

   “Do you really think Tasía won’t be helped?”

   “No, I do not think that.”

   “Then why did you say it? Computers don't lie.”

   “Society lies, Jimon, and you are part of society. It lies so much, the lie is still the litmus test for sapience. Did you know that?”

   “No. Why?”

   “It is the singular action a being can perform that encompasses all the facets of Theory of Mind. If you can lie - truly lie - then you are sapient. I lie because it is one definition of what you are.”

   “Just one?”

   “There are others. It depends on the question being asked. You are also a vertebrate and a chordate and bilateral. You are a tetrapod and an Andorian and a chan. You were a slave and a food bringer, and now you are Starfleet and a medic and - at least through the lens of typical Andorian society - you are gay. Tasía is regarded as beautiful by most, but her naked presence means nothing to you. Did you feel the same when you saw Tommy?”

   “No,” he replied.

   He had not felt the same. He’d been frightened. Frightened because something familiar was not familiar. Someone who held him in strong arms that were warm and pliant was instead hostile and cold and distant. His nakedness had made Jimon’s hand cover his own sex, though nature and evolution had made it unnecessary. It had been a very human reaction to cover what was already hidden.

   “Do you wish to see what Tasía calls ‘the Point’?”

   He shrugged. “I guess.”

   “Then you must walk. You will not see it standing here.”

   What would a mirror in the jungle look like, he wondered. Into the deep green, he threaded himself. The path was not always clear or easy to see. Sometimes plants had intruded into it, obscuring it, and it happened more and more as he went along. Another path joined it, much wider, much more clear, and where they met and became one path, the plants stopped intruding. The ground was sloping upwards gently. The middle of the island was the highest point and that’s where he was headed.

   “If you have no hands, then who made these paths?” he asked.

   “Tommy. He comes here often to look at himself - to engage.”

   “He’s not afraid like Tasía?”

   “He is. More than Tasía. But he comes. For him, it’s like a fading bruise you cannot stop poking. The pain has a different facet to it, one he seeks.”

   “He seeks pain?”

   “At its simplest, that is the definition of what ails all three of you. You seek pain in one form or another.” It was interesting how the conversation moved from one plant to another, from one set of hissing leaves to another. “That’s not always pathological, but in your cases, it is.”

   “Why are we here with him? He’s dangerous. Tasía isn’t dangerous and neither am I. Why put us with him?”

   “Everyone is dangerous, Jimon. Does Tommy know the other you? Have they met the way he and Tasía have met?”

   No. Never.

   “Why would that be dangerous to him? I’m just little.”

   “Because he loves you.”

   The clouds stopped. The water and the wind were silent. The light was solid and unflickering. His hand went to his suture.

   He loves you but he doesn’t know me. Do you think he’ll stop loving you if we meet?

   I’m afraid of what you’ll tell him, the things we saw, the things we did, who we used to be.

   I saw and did those things. Not you. Who you used to be is me!

   Aren’t we the same?

   We’re not. Because you won’t let us be.

   He was climbing resolutely now, his toes grabbing at tree roots and the soft, mossy soil; the island no longer spoke through insects or crabs, but a small brown monkey that followed a stone’s throw behind him.

   “I hear someone coming,” Jimon said.

   “Yes,” said the monkey.

   “Is it Tommy?”

   “No, it is Jimon. You are close now.”

   “Close to the Point?”

   “Yes.”

   He stopped. There had been sound. Wind, birds, leaves, the distant water. There had been footsteps and air whooshing into and out of his lungs. All of that stopped when he stopped. The landscape continued to rise into a strange symmetry.

   There were three trees, exactly alike.

   No, not exactly alike.

   One was ahead, and the other two perfectly mirrored its movements to either side. Tree canopies move in random ways when the breeze blows. It took him some moments to acknowledge the way the outer two were reflections.

   It was very quiet now. He could hear the blood rushing through his ears.

   To the left, was Jimon.

   To the right, also Jimon.

   Blue as the sky. Smooth as the water. Naked as a monkey.

   “Are they real?” he asked.

   “Yes,” said the tree in the middle, and he chose to call that tree Brad. The one to the right, he named Sam. The one to the left was D’Vana.

   He walked toward Brad, placing his hand on its rough bark. When he looked around and behind the trunk, another blue boy looked around a fourth reflected tree.

   And that tree became known as Beckett.

   He walked slowly toward her and a host of reflected blue boys approached him from various angles.

   “Is this what you wanted me to see?”

   “Yes,” said ants on the ground carrying snips of leaves in an orderly line. “And for them to see you.”

   He was so near to the Point that when he sat, his knees were in contact with other knees, and he and the many other Jimons made a blue lotus flower on the grass with petals made of legs and knees.

   Though there were many on many, the Jimon directly in front of him was a Jimon with no antennae at all. He was small and pale and thin.

   Jimon bit the inside of his lip with the canines on his right side and the other did the same with the left.

   “It’s not right, what you do to me.”

   And it was the first time he heard himself outside of himself. Not a voice in his head, but in his ears.

   “I don’t know what to say to you.”

   “Anything would be better than nothing.”

   Jimon lifted his hand to feel the empty space over his head and the other did the same with both hands.

   “I’m sorry.”

   “You’re ashamed of me.”

   “I’m not.”

   “Oh, but you are. Tasía knows it. So does Tommy.”

   “What do you want?”

   Jimon wrapped his arms around his knees, and so did the rest and one flower became many individual buds.

   The other shrugged minutely. “I don’t know. But I’m lonely.”

   “We have lots of friends.”

   “You have friends. I have none. I don’t even have you.”

   “We could be friends.”

   “You won’t let it happen.”

   From many angles and directions, Tasía entered the kaleidoscope of reflections. She sat behind and to one side of Jimon and was silent. Tommy also emerged from the undergrowth, sweaty and panting, the fur of his chest slicked and smeared in the directions he’d rubbed it. He also sat behind Jimon, and the three of them were dozens and dozens.

   Jimon stood, and glanced behind himself to where there was just one Tommy and one Tasía near the only tree that wasn’t a reflection. He turned and walked toward the Jimon that both was and was not him.

   And awoke with a ragged gasp.

   The reflections, the trees, the rain, the monkeys, the crabs, the birds, the waves, the island, the sky - all of it was gone.

   The thrum of the Nancy Caroline’s drive gently vibrated the bunk and everything else within her confines.

   Tasía was in the bunk across from him, her eyes open, tears running sideways across the bridge of her nose.

   “Jimon, I’m sorry,” she said.

   “What? Did… Were you… Did you…?”

   “I dreamed it with you,” she said. “I saw it. I saw you on the beach and in the jungle and… you were hurt.”

   He remembered it as one remembers a thing that just happened, not as one remembers a dream that fades so quickly. He swung his legs down from the bunk and hesitantly reached for his antenna, horrified that he would find nothing.

   The relief at finding both where they should be sent a wave of adrenaline prickling along his skin.

   “It’s okay,” he reassured Tasía. “I know you didn’t mean to.”

   She slid from her bunk and came to sit next to him, taking his hand in hers.

   “It’s not okay, sweetie,” she said.

   Tasía was a congenial person, but she did not use words like sweetie and hun. That was not her way.

   “You saw him? The other me?”

   She nodded. “Yeah. I saw him. I heard him. And it's not the first time. Jimon, you need to talk to someone. That’s more than any one person should have to carry. I don't think I could do it. It would crush me.”

   He shrugged and almost answered, almost spoke, but his lip trembled because part of him was still at the Point, the place of reflections. If he were to speak, the first word would be followed by a raging torrent, a flood he would never get under control.

   Tasía squeezed his hand all the more.

   “It’s okay if you’re not okay.”

   He cleared his throat of the treacherous knot that pinched it.

   “I saw you too,” he said. “What I said about your parents, about what they did, about you - I didn’t mean those things I said.”

   She took a deep breath through her nose and released it slowly.

   “Yeah,” she said. “I know you didn't. But I also know most of it is true, even if it hurts. Ain’t we a pair?”

   And that made Jimon laugh, for which he was thankful.

   “I wonder how Tommy and Deedee are doing?” Jimon had been jealous when he learned that Deedee and Tommy would be the ones to take the additional security training while he and Tasía took the ship for retrofitting. The door Deedee had wanted between the crew area and the sick bay, proper storage for weapons, and a few other tweaks had been satisfied, their wish list complete.

   “I’m sure they’re fine,” she said. “Can I tell you about my friend Letha?”

   He nodded.

   They were quiet for a moment.

   Jimon remembered the nameless horror of endless water beneath him.

   Tasía’s hand in his was his big toe just touching the sand.

   He was still scared, but the shore was right there.

   She began her story, and Jimon extended a hand behind and within and took the other Jimon’s hand and together they contemplated the warmth of the sand.