Wild Dolls

The next morning all their beautiful brushstrokes were ruined. I was ruined. I wept because my new rock was just too weak to cling to any longer. It washed away. They washed me right there where I woke. They scrubbed me and kneaded the tears from me as I watched the paint run off me and drain away. My new and past religion. Once my body was bare of any mark they made love to me once more.

You don't know what you have got till it is gone.

A morning like any other, I woke to find the Mother beckoning me up from where I slept entangled in silk ribbons and the limbs of her torpid daughters. I had been crying but I didn't remember why. Youngest had taught me a new trick. I had come without being touched. Just watching her hands dance with the mere possibility of contact she had reduced me to a whimpering, giggling wreck then brought me to orgasm through anticipation alone. That was just how the night began. They played me like a violin. They praised my exquisite performance. I had glowed with pride. Why this wetness on my cheek?

Still trailing ribbons like a raggedy bride I followed the Mother to a room I had never visited before, to stand before a column of suspended liquid. The column rippled slowly. It appeared to contain the decomposing remains of a doll, very like the doll that the military had grown to test the Hazer Coil collar, the first doll I had ever seen. Wriggling black worms worked its flesh.

Its eyes opened. Glistening black orbs I remembered so well swiveled my way.

With horror I understood. This corpse was not rotting. This was decomposition in reverse. Recomposition. The worms were not consuming but spinning each silk-like strand of muscle anew. This could only be that very Doll from the secret lab on level Minus Six, destroyed but now reincarnating before my eyes.

Mother spoke. "She hid a fragment of herself. The merest drop of doll blood driven deep into the wall by a wood splinter. A single motile cell, containing her summarized personality in it's junk DNA, survived the incineration and eventually made it to fertile ground and open sky. It subverted the growth of a dandelion to produce a radio flower that contacted our sky eyes. She did it all to find you, Alice."

Mother held my shoulders gently but firmly, holding me for that abomination's gaze. It's half completed face twisted into a smile, and its lips mouthed silently. I knew what it was saying: the same words it had mouthed mechanically as I left it to it's fate, before that sudden violence. Come in and talk. The wisps of flesh that already bore delicate fingernails beckoned dreamily in the amniotic fluid.

I struggled in the Mother's arms but she guided me closer, pressing me up against the surface tension of the fluid's column. Almost I blacked out in my panic, sure that she would force me into the fluid chamber where the Doll's wraithlike flesh could stroke me as I thrashed and drowned.

"Control your fear, child," said the mother. "You are precious to her. You are her life. The need to possess you defines the will that crackles in her half formed and immature pathways."

I turned to Mother, pleading. "But she can't! I am yours. You claimed me for your daughters."

Mother turned her luminescent blue eyes towards me and smiled sympathetically. "Her claim is prior. You are hers."

---

It was many hours since I had fled that room. I found myself cowering in the garden. I hadn't slept. I had called for my angels, my sometime-slaves, but this time the doll daughters did not come. Even when the lamps dimmed for sleep they hadn't come to use me. They had abandoned me. They had enjoyed me but now I was put aside, a cast off toy. I wish I had treated them better, not that they cared if their pet had preened like a cat or begged like a dog.

They'd.. they'd dressed me for that thing. I hated them.

I had been a soldier. I'd had friends and people who needed me. I'd had something to die for even if a lie. Now I had only myself and I was terrified.

It had tried to come to me, worms still infesting the unfinished holes in its flesh. Mother promised not to release it until it was finished this time. But I had seen it when it was finished. It had no pretense of humanity until I deactivated the collar. When I reactivated it, it had been a dead thing again; almost - I remembered it had rage.

And it was free now. Somewhere in the station it was crawling from the amniotic fluid of its rebirth, face blank while there was no human in range to mimic. It would come to find me, and as soon as it did, it would know how to put on a mask of humanity, to get inside me, seduce me. But underneath it would always be the blank thing that was crawling towards me now.

I couldn't just wait. I got up and started to run. I would kill myself. They wouldn't let me. I'd find a place to hide. She'd find me. I would just run.

I wish I could run forever, like the dolls that ran through the forest. I ran and ran through the corridors with their drifting lights.

When I finally stopped running, limping and out of breath, I was in the chamber of the spider.

Its eight lidless eyes stared out from behind the small glass bubble, in perfect bliss. The fount of everything. The station was the spider's dream. Why had the mother shown me this? I think that had been the instant I had understood they could not give me true happiness. Walking with even a compassionate deity you learn you are an insect. They eroded my soul. Better to be dead.

I looked around for a heavy object. Nothing appeared detachable. Wait. The light itself was cast by one of the corpuscular lamps that drifted throughout the station. My weight was just enough to drag it free of the magnetic track that suspended it near the corridor ceiling. I brought the skull-sized ovoid of metal and glass down on the spider's glass bubble, a scratch, a chip, on the third blow crushing it, reducing the helpless creature to a tiny smear of organic matter.

What had I done?

The light in my hands flickered then dimmed to a steady dull red. A shiver ran through me. It didn't stop. It came though the floor.

I had just destroyed Terminus.

The lamp rolled from my limp fingers to hit the floor with a dull metallic clang. A continual rattle was emitted from its contact with the tremoring floor. Where it stopped rolling, a naked girl crouched weeping.

Her face was hidden in her hands, and by bedraggled brown hair just long enough to lie on a trembling white shoulder. I was balanced between the need to comfort her and the need to recoil in horror. She was still wet from the amniotic slime. She had found me.

12 Her story

Paralyzed, I sank to the floor, unable to look away, filled with pity, revulsion and fear.

"I HATE YOU!" she cried, the inhuman volume earsplitting.

Eventually her weeping subsided. She still wouldn't look at me.

"Why do you hate me?" she finally whimpered.

I knew not to answer. Yet I did. "I don't hate you, You are not real."

She fidgeted, examining her toes.

"You value your life so little, but you threw it away rather than share. Its spiteful."

She began again in anger. "You are impossible! The only thing I wanted was to make you happy, look how far I came! but you are defective. Nothing we do can please you... It's not fair."

What would a frustrated doll do? Keep her talking. Maybe the station will crack in half before she makes up her mind to skin me or fuck me till I like it. On cue, a rumble shakes the station followed by the shriek of tortured metal. The rumble fades but does not die.

Keep her talking.

"You talk with the other dolls then?"

She sniffed and smiled ruefully.

"Sure. Though I don't always understand."

I felt sorry for her then because I suspected she, like myself, was little more than a stray pet they had taken in.

"Did the Mother know I'd do this?"

"No. I mean, She said it was 50/50. Exactly."

Of course the Mother knew. She had shown me what to do and then balanced my choice so finely that even she didn't know which way it would fall. Perhaps that was her way of giving me free choice. Were my choices all used up now?

I looked up. The doll's eyes stared directly into mine, transfixing me. They were not black orbs but beautiful, sorrowful brown. A light spatter of freckles lay across her cheeks. I wanted to comfort her so much. I felt myself slipping into her without moving.

"Do you really wish to leave?" she asked.

"Yes! Of course I do." It wasn't true, but I thought it would be if she would just release my gaze a second.

She looked away again, leaving me shuddering.

"You haven't even tried."

Leave? Why had I not thought of it before? Forgetting my fear of her I dashed from the chamber. Terminus was coming apart around me. There was still hope. Perhaps not a good hope, but still a hope.

I cursed myself as I ran. I had never tried this in all the days of my captivity. They would have stopped me, probably simply ravished me to sleep and carried me away but now? I had been a prisoner but never tried the door.

The elevator was there waiting, open, inviting. I leapt through the door without questioning my luck. It closed instantly behind me. Terminus knew what I wanted. It would allow me to leave or it would not.

The elevator slowly began to move. I watched the massive spinnerets that spun the skythread slide past, the disintegrating station shrink as it receded beneath me, the earth above, a shade of blue I had almost forgotten. Back against the glass, I sank to the floor in exhaustion and tentative relief.

The doll sat opposite. She smiled shyly then looked away, a bit embarrassed.

"Hi," I finally said.

"Hi," she smiled shyly again. The blush of first love.

A flash lit us from beneath. She stood and walked towards me daintily despite the shuddering floor. She held out a hand and I took it. She pulled me to my feet.

"Im not up to dancing right now." Just as I said that the floor bucked, throwing me into her. "What was that?"

"An explosion on the station. The wall would have hurt you."

The skythread rushed past at a phenomenal rate now. There was something unhealthy to our motion; a rhythmical sway and shake.

I clutched her as the g forces increased. I had forgotten about that. Her smooth naked limbs had limitless strength, but then, seeing I was too weak, she made a bed of her own body for me to lie on. She was much softer than the floor of my previous trip but the ride was rougher. The cable was lashing with undamped oscillations.

"We are not going to make it are we."

"No. Not this way" she said. "The cable has broken from the lower anchor point also. It had snapped before you reached the elevator."

"Then why didn't you tell me!"

"Did you have somewhere better to be?"

I couldn't help but laugh. How skillfully she had got what she wanted. Me all to herself, spending my last minutes crushed into her body.

"I guess you just want to talk," I muttered sardonically, face pressed to her shuddering breast.

"I'd like that."

Still she waited for me to begin. I couldn't think of anything to say but silence seemed cruel.

"Im sorry," I finally said. "Im sorry I never thought about you."

I knew there would be tears in her eyes. She felt what I felt.

"What is it like, being a doll?"

I think she sighed. "When I'm with you, I feel human."

She paused. "I didn't just start. I mean, my body was only days old but it didn't feel that way. Dolls don't just boot up knowing how to be dolls. We remember actually learning those things. Its implanted but it feels like it really happened. I had a thousand parallel childhoods, a thousand first times, a thousand years in training to please. It all happened to me."

"Then a thousand years of waiting. I couldn't say exactly when my memories became those of the body you met. I know that when you saw me I wore a paper dress. I have several memories of a doll being dressed in it. I remember sitting there, able to move but without any reason to do so."

"I remember you entering the room, but you were only a shape. Then you lit up. You illuminated me. I became real."

"You were streaming live. You made everything make sense. You were a mystery. A gift to unwrap. You were a skittish foal and I was a thousand years old, never kissed. I had so much I wanted to show you. I knew you couldn't see how beautiful you were. I wanted to show you. Then you took your light away."

For a long time we just held each other tightly. My life had seemed like clockwork, without choice. She, the actual clockwork girl had escaped her prison but I never had. Given choice I had thrown away my life, the thing she valued so much and I so little.

"Do you want to live?" She asked. This close, our spines aligned like aerials, she could probably read my thoughts.

"Yes." I didn't want to die. I still wanted to be saved. One more chance, and this time.. As if to punctuate that thought, one of the ten strands suddenly lashed against the almost molten glass and was whipped away at a thousand k.p.h.

"We both need a miracle, don't we" said the Doll. "Both forsaken by our gods. Maybe this wasn't your story at all. Thats why you couldn't control anything. Maybe your story hasn't begun yet."

As I searched her face for irony she kissed my forehead.

"I don't understand."

"I can save you" she said. "But not myself. I reset to zero."

Though her face was calm, I saw the vulnerability there. I wanted to say yes to whatever she needed but she laid a finger on my lips.

"Please," said the doll, "just let me in. Could you bear me inside you, a little while?"

"I don't understand," I murmured, then realized it didn't matter. Even if she lied. "What do I have to do?"

Another thread broke and suddenly the pressure, the shaking and the sound stopped. We had broken from the sky thread entirely. Our two entangled bodies floated out from the floor.

Into that deceptive peace the Doll whispered, "Kiss me."

I looked into her eyes, and then I was kissing her. It wasn't because I thought a kiss would save me. In her eyes I had seen something I had never seen in my angel's eyes. She didn't just want me. She needed me. We made love desperately and I did not remind her of her silly promise as the anvil of the world loomed over us, and now filled most of half the sky.

13 The dream is over

I woke staring up into a perfect sky. For a while I just watched, unconvinced yet content. After a while I noticed the faintest streak of cirrus vapor.

Rising to sit, I perceived that the stalks of wheat that had framed my view of the sky continued in all directions to the horizon; exactly as it is always described: a sea of gold.

I had spent near all my days on a convent farm like this one, before my conscription. We had been raised on a diet of lies and deprivations, yet it was as if I had lived two childhoods. I had lived inside those walls but also outside them in the fields, in the sun and the golden wheat. That second golden memory stretched forever, like this field.

My belly was tight and heavy and it was not just emotion. I looked down and was unsurprised to find that I was completely naked.

Also, I was heavy with child.

I laid a hand on my taut, rounded belly. It was a miracle but, you must understand, that familiar landscape was just as wondrous to me. I only gazed upon the evidence of my pregnancy occasionally. I had my hand laid upon my belly to confirm the child was there. Most of my gaze was spared for drinking in the waving golden sea around me.

I stood carefully, unaccustomed to my new balance and unwilling to divert my eyes, still drinking in that golden ocean.

It was some minutes before I had sated myself enough upon the sight to begin to wonder about my place in it.

I stood in a slight flattening of the wheat. The wind sometimes caused such. Fragments lay scattered around as if I had fallen from the sky onto a pumpkin. Maybe it had been a pumpkin once, but among the mangled remains were the familiar square petals of a radio flower. The dolls were even here, in this perfection.

No matter now. The post terrestrial weed was well dead. I felt that if I watched it long enough I would perceive its disintegration with my own eyes. The thoughts this lead me to were depressing, and my mind shied away from them. It was such a nice day.

It was very hot.

I had to choose a direction to walk. There was no sign of a road, nor any roofs to break the line of the horizon.

A waving fragment of white drew my eye. For a second I thought it was a scrap of paper tangled in the stalks but then I realized that I had mistook the scale entirely. There stood a convent girl little more than a speck. She must have been attempting to gain my attention for some time, for she had taken off her white smock and tied it to her hoe to wave it at me, and her skin was almost as golden as the corn.

As I made my way towards her, and her to me, I wondered what the convent mothers would make of my baby. This body felt so new. I was a virgin once more, I was sure of it; a virgin with child. Just as surely, I knew this child would change the world.

Already she wanted to talk.