Alien Landscapes 2 Read Online Free Page B

another halting step forward, stretching his hand toward her, imploringly.
    “Oh, Chandler, I wanted to be closer to you,” she said, “not to become you.”
    Chandler shook his head. “You won’t become me. We’ll become us .” Swirling thoughts screamed for her attention, but Chandler kept talking. “We won’t even need the jacks anymore. We can do it ourselves. Our minds have already started growing together. We’ve intertwined. I’m in you, and you’re in me.”
    She tried to respond, but found no words. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have constant mutual support, shoring up each others’ weaknesses, never to be alone, always a part of a team? She thought of herself, and wondered how much she really had to lose.
    Tara found her own hand lifting toward his as she stood on the brink of the fiery river, gazing at him, knowing she was the image of perfect beauty, fragile yet enduring. And he stood in the lava, powerful, a symbol of unending labor in all its grimy ugliness.
    Her hand hovered in the air as the molten rock continued to bubble and hiss. She longed to join with her husband, but she knew that one personality would ultimately prove stronger. For now, Chandler could stand unharmed in the purging fire—but eventually one or the other of them would be consumed.
    As Chandler touched her fingers, Tara viciously jacked out.
    #
    With an abrupt motion, like a drowned woman gasping back to life, Tara wrenched the end of the jack cable from the illegal splitter in the wall.
    Reeling and disoriented, she suddenly found herself back in her mundane den, where Chandler still sat on the floor beside his old maroon chair, his face slack, his mind lost on Mount Olympus. Tara threw the jack cable down with a sharp gasp, as if it had stung her. She looked at it lying on the floor like a disembodied tentacle, and uncontrollable shudders wracked her body.
    She never wanted to go back into the same data stream with Chandler. She had no boundaries left, and neither did he. They would keep merging, averaging. She had to get rid of the temptation—before Chandler could talk her out of it.
    Tara dug behind the wall plate, routed Chandler over to the main network access, and disconnected the splitter. The clunky-looking gadget made of plastic and wire snapped like cracking knuckles as she ground it under her heel. The prototype had not been made for durability. She tossed the pieces into the kitchen incinerator and came back to stare at her husband.
    Crouched in a lotus position, Chandler remained unaware of her presence. His eyes REMed back and forth; his red-gold hair hung limply over the interface cable. She wondered if he was grieving in the forge of Hephaestus.
    They were already intermingled. Their minds had touched and shared and come away with pieces of each other. But from this point on they would no longer be on the same path; partners, yes, but not two people averaged together. From here, she and Chandler could move on parallel life roads, or they could diverge—but they would not be stepping in the same footsteps.
    She could be part of him, and apart from him. The best of both worlds, if he would settle for that.
    Tara’s eyes filled with tears as she stared at Chandler, who now seemed separated from her by an impenetrable wall. When she called his name, he didn’t answer, and so she reached out and caressed his hair instead.

    * * *

Good Old Days
    The future isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Weren’t we all supposed to be flying regularly to big pinwheel space stations in orbit? Vacationing on Mars, or going to college at the Lunar Dome Academy? The future didn’t turn out exactly the way we all saw it depicted on The Jetsons . *sigh*
    But a story is all about turning preconceptions around and looking at things in a different way. What if a future character, much like George Jetson, were to look back at our present with fond nostalgia, wistfully thinking that simpler times without the dazzle of so much