There are patterns, sure-he likes to arrive in dreams, because dreams are the parts of her closest to Aura, the closest thing she has to an Auran soul. He can step between Aura and her world, the place he calls Coldworld, by his own logic, wholly separate from the unity and symmetry of physics. But even post-diagnosis, she’s never doubted her own sanity. She grew up into an engineer, a scientist, steeped in skepticism, armed with instruments of rationality and phenomenology.
Superliminal polite recognition skin#
Put a man with golden eyes and golden skin in her nursery, a smoke-smell man who can, in the space between his circled thumb and forefinger, open windows into a world of amber and blood and myth, a world of true names-put him there, and young Zaleha accepts him. Take her rattle out of sight, hide it behind Bapa’s back, and it ceases to exist. To a little kid, absent any metafaculties, perception is reality. (If she believed, she wouldn’t have pissed him off five years ago.) He came to a young Zaleha, pre-empirical, practically pre-conscious, and so she understood him as a piece of the world, natural by definition. She’s never believed that he’s really malak, an angel. They’ve had four test fires now, and three of them have aborted on that damn fault-active magnetics trying to enforce symmetry. She squeezes Zaleha’s shoulder reassuringly. “We’ll fix that symmetry fault,” Siv says. Siv Ahlstrom, a rocket scientist through and through, doesn’t like feelings that can’t be immediately converted into action. But if she did, Siv would tease her for being maudlin. Later Siv asks her: “Why tell me then? Right in the middle of a test fire?”īecause I was surrounded by everything important to me, Zaleha wants to say. “Field azimuth symmetry fault,” the control officer calls. Go away, she thinks, and then, regretting it instantly, please help me. Mom and Dad, trying to raise a good Muslim daughter, always told Zaleha that the malaa’ikah were made of light. And even through the vacuum, she hears him ask: will you come now? Has this made you ready? He looks out at her through the exhaust spike, the cloak of fairy fire. Zaleha hugs her back, and stands on her toes to stare over Siv’s shoulder, into the plasma shine, into the glare of the engine she built, searching-Īnd there he is, the visitor, the malak, the angel, her childhood haunt, her other secret. Siv holds her, even though it’s unprofessional, even though the crew will notice and she doesn’t have an excuse. “I want to keep working,” she says, and then, horribly choked up, please, she has to get a hold of herself, here where the whole test crew’s watching, “keep trying to fix the symmetry fault and get the thruster flight-ready, until-uh-until it’s not, you know, practical any more-”
Zaleha nods, her own goggles abruptly ineffective-her eyes have started to prickle.
“Oh, no.” And then, as the computer recites specific impulse and exhaust velocity, nominal at seven zero point seven two kilometers per second, “Is it a secret?” Siv stares at her, plasma flare mirrored, starlike, in her goggles, like she’s just thought of something so brilliant it’s burning out her skull. “Isn’t that cool? Double methionine at codon 129. “I’m the ninth case ever diagnosed,” Zaleha says, smiling bravely. She can never let the world have its way. Siv, a zealous futurist, keeps track of all these biotech dreams, cures and augments and embryos with two mothers. Or she’ll try to get Zaleha into an induced coma, clinical substitute for the sleep she’s about to lose forever. Siv will try to figure out a way to fix her-she’ll write to some gene therapy clinic in Stanford or Minnesota or Boston, volunteering Zaleha as a subject. Zaleha’s been imagining this conversation for hours, now. “What? That’s insane,” Siv says, pale antishadow in the engine glare, a slim tall shard of brighter light. In the vacuum of the test chamber, the plasma thruster ignites, a brilliant violet arc, silent, steady. “I’m going to lose the ability to dream,” Nur Zaleha tells her best friend.
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