Today passed with more variety than yesterday, or three weeks ago, or eight months ago.

Eight months ago. It was only eight months, only a thousand years ago that she had decided to go on somec at this level and live forever. She had noticed her first age wrinkle that day, and realized that she could, after all, get old. So she had decided to skim through time, only touching often enough to see if there was something worth living to experience.

Today she had found it.

And what, she wondered, will we do tomorrow?

KILLING CHILDREN

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne'er hung there.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

He heard the door click open but did not turn away from the tall pile of soft plastic blocks he was building. Instead he sought among the blocks scattered on the warm floor an orange block. Orange was definitely required, since it helped make no pattern whatsoever.

"Link?" said an overfamiliar voice behind him, a strange familiar voice that, alone of all voices, could make him turn, startled. I killed her, he thought softly. She is dead.

But he turned around slowly and there, indeed, was his mother, flesh as well as voice, the slender, oh-so-delicious looking body (not forty-five! couldn't be forty-five!) and the immaculate clothing and the terror in her eyes.

"Link?" she asked.

"Hello, Mother," he said stupidly, his voice deep and slow. I sound like a mental cripple, he realized. But he did not repeat the words. He merely smiled at her (the light making her hair seem like a halo, the fabric of her blouse clinging slightly to the undercurve of her breast, no, mustn't notice that, must think instead of motherhood and filial devotion. Why isn't she dead? Was that, please God, the dream, and this the reality? Or is this vision why I'm in this place?) and a tear or two dazzled in his eyes, making it hard for him to see, and in the dimness he supposed for a moment that she was not blond, but brown-haired; but she had always been blond--

Seeing the tear and ignoring the continued madness in his dancing gaze, his mother held out her arms for a second, only a second, and then put her hands on her hips (note the way the point of her hips and the curve of her abdomen leave two slender depressions pointing downward, Link said to himself) and got an angry look, a hurt look on her face, and said, "What, don't I even get a hug from my boy?"

The words were the incantation required to get Link from the floor to his full 190 centimeters of height. He walked to her, reaching out his long arms for her--

"No--" she gurgled, pushing him away. "Don't-- just a little kiss. Just a kiss."

She puckered for a childish kiss, and so he, too, puckered his lips and leaned down. At the last moment, however, she turned her head and he kissed her clumsily on the ear and hair.

"Oh, how wet," she said in her disgusted voice. She reached into her hipbag and pulled out a tissue, wiped her ear, laughing softly, "Clumsy, clumsy boy, Link, you always have been..."

Link stood in confusion. And, as so many times before, puzzled as to what to do next that would not earn a rebuke. He remained in that confusion, knowing that there was something that he ought to do, something that he must decide, but instead deciding nothing, only playing again and again the same loop of thought in the same childish mental voice in which he had always played it, "Mummy mad, mummy mad, mummy mad."

She watched him, her lips forming a sort of half smile (note the natural gloss on the lips, she never painted, never had to, lips always just slightly moist, partly open, the tongue playing gentle love games with the teeth), unsure of what was happening.

"Link?" she said. "Link, don't you have a smile for Mother?"

And Link tried to remember how to smile. What did it feel like? There were muscles that must be pulled, and his face should feel tight--

"No!" she screamed, stepping back from him and encountering the closed door. She apparently had expected it to be open-- as if this were not a mental hospital and patients were free to roam the corridors at will. She whirled and hammered on the door with her fists, shouting frantically, "Let me out of here!"

They lot her out, the tall men with the pleasant smiles who also took Link to the bathroom five times a day because somehow he had forgotten to notice when he needed to. And as the door closed behind her, Link still stood, unable to decide what he should do, and wondering why his hands were stretched out in front of him, the hands set to grip something circular, something vertical and cylindrical, something, perhaps, the shape of a human throat.

In Doctor Hort's office, Mrs. Danol sat, poised and beautiful, distractingly so, and Hort wondered whether this was indeed the same woman who had wept in the attendants' arms only a few minutes before.

"All I care about is my son," she said. "He was gone, vanished for seven terrible, terrible months, and all I know now is that I've found him again and I want him home. With me!"

Hort sighed. "Mrs. Danol, Linkeree is criminally insane. This is a govemment facility, remember? He murdered a girl."

"She probably deserved it."

"She had supported him and cared for him for seven months, Mrs. Danol."

"She probably seduced him."

"They had a very active sex life, in which both were eager participants."

Mrs. Danol looked horrified. "Did my son tell you that?"

"No, the tenants downstairs told the police that."

"Hearsay, then."

"The government has a very limited budget on ths planet, Mrs. Danol. Most people live in apartments where privacy is strictly impossible."

And Mrs. Danol shuddered, apparently in disgust at the plight of the poor wretches that huddled in the government compound in this benighted capital of this benighted colony.

"I wish I could leave here," she said.

"It would have been nice at one time," Hort answered. "Your son hates this world. Or, rather, more particularly, he hates what he has seen of this world."

"Well, I can understand that. Those hideous wild people-- and the people in the city aren't much better."

Hort was amused at her reverse democracy-- she esteemed all persons her infinite inferiors, and therefore equal to each other. "Nevertheless, now Linkeree must stay here and we must attempt a cure."

"Oh, that's all I want for my boy. For him to be the sweet, loving child he used to be-- I can't believe he really killed her!"

"There were seventeen witnesses to the strangling, two of them hospitalized when he turned on them after they pried him away from the corpse. He definitely killed her."

"But why," she said emotionally, her breasts heaving with passion in a way that amused Hort-- he had known many such closet exhibitionists in his time. "Why would he kill her?"

"Because, Mrs. Danol, except for hair color and several years of age, she looked almost exactly like you."

Mrs. Danol sat upright. "My God, Doctor, you're joking!"

"Almost the only thing that Link has been consistent about since he arrived here is his firm belief that it was you that he killed."

"This is hideous. This is repulsive."

"Sometimes he weeps and says he's sorry, that he'll never do it again. Most of the time, however, he cackles rather gleefully about it, as if it were a game that he had, after many losses, finally won."

"Is this what passes for psychology on this godforsaken planet?"

"This is what passes for psychology on Capitol itself, Mrs. Danol. That is, you recall, where I got my degree. I assure you I have invented nothing." And dammit, he thought, why am I letting this woman put me on the defensive? "We thought that the fact of seeing you alive might have some effect on your son."