Woman on the Edge of Time

Piloted into death by a twelve‑year‑old, she thought. Between the clouds and the vast sea sweeping off into a fog bank, she felt tiny. They were shrunken to the size of insects, of midges and gnats turning in the air. Then she stared at Luciente and her sense of size and proportion returned.

With a red scarf tied around her head to keep her unruly hair from her eyes, Luciente was calm, cheerful at the jizer. She rode out the twists and turns, the plummetings and the shuddering escalations of the floater with apparent pleaure, as if she were riding a spirited horse. Her body moved easily, not freezing in panic as Connie’s did in a futile effort to maintain some reference point of up and down. Luciente swayed and rolled, constantly adjusting her aim.

Hawk carried them down through the center of the fight again. Another floater fell past, broken, burning. This time she could see it was a khaki machine. She tried to count the floaters as they bore in. Perhaps there was one less of each.

Then they were careening in and out among the floaters, spouting forked lightning. She aimed and fired and tried not to lose her way in the twists and turns. Suddenly a khaki floater ran dead at them from five o’clock, straight as if it meant to ram. Just as it came as close as the distance across a ward, the enemy turned abruptly and hung there like a huge mosquito, the jizer preparing to fire on her as she took aim herself and fired. She caught a clear glimpse of the enemy through the bubble glass: the thick glasses, the aquiline nose, the satisfied twinkly blue gaze of Dr. Redding as briskly, efficiently, he shot off the jizer.

As the blasts met in the air, the air itself seemed to buckle and time to pause, humped up in a wave that could not yet fall. She saw that the pilot of the enemy floater was pasty Dr. Morgan, clutching the controls with white knuckles and secretively wetting his lips. Dodging about in the back seat, trying futilely to bring the scammer into action, meticulous Dr. Argent glowered, tossing his silvery hair and dressed in a morning coat, elegant down to the red carnation in his lapel.

She glanced around and saw all the enemy floaters zeroing in on them as if summoned to this attack. As she stared to left and right she saw that they were piloted and manned by Judge Kerrigan, who had taken her daughter, by the social worker Miss Kronenberg, by Mrs. Polcari, by Acker and Miss Moynihan, by all the caseworkers and doctors and landlords and cops, the psychiatrists and judges and child guidance counselors, the informants and attendants and orderlies, the legal aid lawyers copping pleas, the matrons and EEG technicians, and all the other flacks of power who had pushed her back and turned her off and locked her up and medicated her and tranquilized her and punished her and condemned her. They were all closing in, guns blazing. Then the air burst into golden‑red flames and she heard Dr. Redding crow, “Right on the button. That does it. Okay, into the ambulance with her.”

She was rushed south to the university hospital again and injected for the operation. They shaved her head clean of its bristling mat and once again she was bald as an onion.

The operation took less than half the time of the one before. They removed the dialytrode entirely and closed the wound with dentist’s cement. They were going to leave her alone for a while. But they were not done with her, she sensed that.

Two days later she was back on the ward, her bald head bandaged but the evil machine gone from her body and her soul. She beamed thanks to Luciente if she was still alive. Could Luciente have died in the burning floater? But the scene made no sense. Her head still ached and she had trouble remembering exactly.

But she did know something new. The war raged outside her body now, outside her skull, but the enemy would press on and violate her frontiers again as soon as they chose their next advance. She was at war.

She strove to display good patient behavior. She cooperated, she smiled and played up to the staff. She played the nice polite eager humble patient game for all she was worth, because she wanted that damned machine to stay out of her head.

“I do think it helped me,” she lied earnestly to Acker. “I feel much calmer. Those blackouts scared me.”

“Well, that won’t happen again. We try one course of treatment, but we stand ready to switch to a better one if the first has unexpected side effects,” Acker said importantly, playing doctor for Miss Moynihan, who was standing behind him. “Sometimes a patient may express an allergy to penicillin. We have to use another antibiotic. Similarly, you proved to be, let’s say, allergic to the dialytrode … .” He trailed off as he saw Dr. Redding standing in the doorway with his eyebrows raised.

“Allergic, mm?” he said. “How’s our problem this morning?”

“I feel fine,” Connie said desperately. “Ever so much better!”