She fled, but the echo of that vision was everywhere until she fetched up in her father's arms, in his Farris channel's nager so Infinitely Gen. She looked up and saw two crippled renSimes leaning 6n each other, trying to pretend to be Gen, needing to be Gen to someone.

The grotesque image repelled her. She stumbled away, confronting everywhere the reflection of her face with the wolf's snout sticking out, dripping blood, her own blood, her own selyn misting off to infinity.

She stared at the image that stared back as if in a contest of wills. No, that's not the essence of renSime, nor the essence of me– It has been, yes, but it doesn't have to be.

The colored-ball models of her two compounds, K/A and K/B, floated into her vision, mirror images perfectly suited to this infinite but limited environment. The universe was constructed on pairs of opposites that were nevertheless identical: channel /Donor; Sime/ Gen; Actor/Reactor. Who was responsible?

She had seen how everything that had happened to her was the result of a decision she made independently and with full personal responsibility. But she had also seen how each event was just as much the result of the decisions others had made, independent of herself yet a reflection. Each of them in the scenario was both Actor and Reactor, each reacting to something that happened before.

She stood outside of time and looked at the events since her changeover/kill, and looked backward in time from that moment, and looked and looked to infinity. The reflections dazzled to infinity and beyond until she could go rip further than some abstract First Cause, a Prime Mover whose Word began creation. God.

She saw those energies weaving down a Jacob's ladder of twined pylons that supported manifest reality, a brilliant gold current, a flood of pure undifferentiated energy that poked through the mirror-screen that surrounded reality and emerged as the tiny zone of phase conversion at the core of every soul, Sime and Gen alike.

She saw how channels were able to dam up this energy, refusing to let the polar-opposite Sime and Gen come into direct contact, to let the essence of life flow forth and celebrate the full unifying force of the Will of Nature.

But renSimes were unable to do this. The renSime would always succumb to the will to live, no matter the cost. The renSime could be the Force of Nature.

The Gens could choose to oppose that force, and die, or acknowledge their oneness with it, and celebrate life.

Each could choose, each was Actor and Reactor, each personally responsible, but none totally responsible. To change, they must change as a group. Yet to change as a group, they must each change first separately. Reflections within reflections, where all opposites were identical.

The dripping beast jaw that protruded from her face began to dissolve. She pulled herself up to her full height and, back straight, head high, she turned without haste and calmly walked away toward her new destiny, free at last of the fear that had made her flee.

She came-to where the invisible barriers had always stopped her. The sea of reflected faces dimmed, thinned, and evaporated, smiling calmly back at her as they died away.

The barrier they had formed turned to gossamer and parted before her until she came to a reflection that had no reflection of its own, as if it existed in the instant of its own creation, before reflections could be bounced back.

Shanlun and Azevedo. More than just faces. Whole and complete bodies. Whole, complete nager, joined into Shanlun's scintillating pyrotechnic display.

They were dressed in emerald-green ankle-length robes that enveloped their bodies. Azevedo wore a headdress of three tiers piled on top of each other making him very tall, with folds of white cloth

shrouding his neck and hair, exposing only his face to her view. Their sleeves were elbow-length, cut full and loose, exposing forearms.

Each wore a jeweled starred-cross emblem on his breast, and the emblems glowed preternaturally.

I never found anyone who required me for an enemy, Shanlun had once said.

Oh, yes you have, Shanlun. And it was me. But I don't want that to be anymore.

Let us change together, offered Shanlun, as always answering her unspoken thoughts.

Choices precipitate consequences, thought Azevedo. If you would return to the real world with us, you must return as someone. You cannot be everyone when you dwell on the other side of the mirror. You must become only one of the people within you. You must choose which one.

How?

By choosing the source of your life, replied Shanlun. His headdress was a simple glowing green cloth draped about his head and down around his shoulders, fastened under the chin. He shook it back now, as a woman shakes back her long hair. I've come to be that source to you, if you choose me. And with the same shaking gesture of his head, he disengaged his nager from Azevedo's and stood resplendent, though pale beside the channel.

Azevedo added, And I am your other choice. His nager sparkled with the scintillating effect she had come to associate only with Shanlun. |

Though separate now, the two of them blurred together. They had transfer, she thought.

Do I want to return to the real world and live without what they've had? For that bliss was not only forbidden to every renSime, that peculiar perfection Azevedo and Shanlun shared was slilbliss, unattainable by any renSime.

But then her new perspective took hold. There was no way she could evoke any trace of any sort of bliss in Shanlun. But Azevedo was like her father, a channel needing to function as a Gen, wanting very much to give.

She moved toward Azevedo. She zlinned no blocking or damming up of the life force within him. He was open inside, all the way to infinity. And at infinity, within Azevedo, whirled the vitality of Shanlun.

Remembering her years taking transfer from Tecton channels, Laneff knew that they'd be horrified at Azevedo. The Tecton channel presented the renSime with the pleasure his Donor had experienced at his previous transfer, modulated by the channel's Sime sense of relief from need. But there was no way any renSime could discern via the channel which Gen had provided for the channel that month. Selyn was anonymous in the Tecton.

The disgust that rose in Laneff was identical to the disgust she had felt when confronted with her own junctedness. That anonymity creates and perpetuates junctedness.

But Azevedo was offering her §Shanlun in his full glory, plus all the Sime's own satisfaction modulating that glory.

She went for it, a decision that came from the very center of her new being. Perception and action were one.

She entered a cloud of scintillating powdered gold that whirled and coalesced into a brilliant sunfire, a swirling, boiling locus where the primal life energy of creation surged through into reality.

She was a dark aching void, frozen with need and aware that the need had passed into attrition. It was only a distant, dull aching that had nothing to do with herself. But the warm sun suffused her, melting her, surrounding her in gold dust fraught with happy rainbows of life.

And need returned, a shrill knife of voracious pain.

"She's coming around!"

Azevedo had a long-handled, snub-nosed cutter with which he snapped through the cable binding her. Her body slumped but Shanlun's hands caught and steadied her.

The numb cold of attrition left weakness behind, but need drew strength back into her limbs. The Gen left her on her own two feet and backed away, his whole attention trained on her. The channel, likewise, backed away until the three of them occupied the corners of an equilateral triangle.

But her choice was made. It remained only to force her numb body to stagger toward Azevedo, two, three steps, four; reaching out with her hands, tentacles spread, she let the brilliant, dancing gold draw her forward, seizing contact with his offering laterals, dragging herself upward as he bent to offer lip contact.