There was no light.

Even that bit of negative knowledge was something to cling to. The realization that the swaddling darkness was the result of the absence of something called light had cost her more than she would have believed possible, back when time had consisted of consecutive moments, Ue beads on a string. Now the beads scattered through her fingers. They rearranged themselves in a mockery of causality.

Anything needs a context. For darkness to mean anything there must he the memory of light. That memory was fading.

It had happened before, and would happen again. Sometimes there was a name to identify the disembodied consciousness. More often, there was only awareness.

She was in the belly of the beast.

(What beast?)

She couldn't remember. It would come back to her. Things usually did, if she waited long enough. And waiting was easy. Millenia were worth no more than milliseconds here. Time's stratfied edifice was a ruin.

Her name was Cirocco.

(What's a Cirocco?)

"Shur-rock-o. It's a hot wind from the desert, or an old model Volkswagen. Mom never told me which she had in mind." That had been her standard answer. She recalled saying it, could almost feel intangible lips shape the meaningless words.

"Call me Captain Jones." (Captain of what?)

Of the DSV Ringmaster, DSV for Deep Space Vessel, on its way to Satum with seven aboard. One of them was Gaby Plauget....

(Who is …)

... and ... and another was ... Bill ...

(What was that name again?)

It was on the tip of her tongue. A tongue was a soft, fleshy thing ... it could be found in the mouth, which was ...

She had it a moment ago, but what was a moment?

Something about light. Whatever that was.

There was no light. Hadn't she been here before? Yes, surely, but never mind, hold onto it, don't let the thought go. There was no light, and there was nothing else, either, but what was something else?

No smell. No taste. No sense of touch. No kinesthetic awareness of a body. Not even a sense of paralysis.

Cirocco! Her name was Cirocco.

Ringmaster. Saturn. Themis. Bill.

It returned all at once, as if she was living it again in a split second. She thought she would go mad from the flood of impressions, and with that thought came another, later memory. This had happened before. She had remembered, only to see it all slip away. She had been insane, many times.

She knew her grip was tenuous, but it was all she had. She knew where she was, and she knew the nature of her problem.

The phenomenon had been explored during the last century. Put a man in a neoprene suit, cover his eyes and restrain his arms and legs so he can't touch himself, eliminate all sounds from the environment, and leave him floating in warm water.

Free-fall is even better. There are refinements like intravenous feeding and the elimination of smells, but they are not really necessary.

The results are surprising. Many of the first subjects had been test pilots--well-adjusted, self-reliant, sensible men. Twenty- four hours of sensory deprivation turned them into pliable children. Longer periods were quite dangerous. The mind gradually edited the few distractions: heartbeat, the smell of neoprene, the pressure of water.

Cirocco was familiar with the tests. Twelve hours of sensory deprivation had been part of her own training. She knew she should be able to find her breathing, if she looked for it long enough. It was something she could control; a non-rhythrnic thing if she chose to make it so. She tried to breathe rapidly, tried to make herself cough. She felt nothing.

Pressure, then. If something was restraining her it might be possible to pit her muscles against it, to at least feel that some- thing was holding her, however gently. Taking one muscle at a time, isolating them, visualizing the attachments and location of each, she tried to make them move. A twitch of the lip would be enough. It would prove that she was not, as she was beginning to fear, dead.

She retreated from the thought. While she had the normal fear of death as the end of all consciousness, she was glimpsing something infinitely worse. What if people did not die, ever?

What if the passing of the body left this behind? There might be eternal life, and it might be passed in eternal lack of sensa- tion.

Insanity began to look attractive.

Trying to move was a failure. She gave it up, and began ransacking her most recent memories, hoping the key to her present situation could be found in her last conscious seconds aboard Ringmaster. She would have laughed, had she been able to locate the muscles to do so. If she was not dead, then she was trapped in the belly of a beast large enough to devour her ship and all its crew.

Before long, that began to look attractive, too. If it was true, if she had been eaten and was somehow still alive, then death was still to come. Anything was better than the nightmare eternity whose vast futility now unfolded before her.

She found it possible to weep without a body. With no tears or sobs, no burning in the throat, Cirocco wept hopelessly. She became a child in the dark, holding the hurt inside herself. She felt her mind going again, welcomed it, and she bit her tongue.

Warm blood flowed in her mouth. She swam in it with the desperate fear and hunger of a small fish in a strange salt sea. She was a blind worm, just a mouth with hard round teeth and a swollen tongue, groping for that wonderful taste of blood which dispersed even as she sought it.

Frantically, she bit again, and was rewarded by a fresh spurt of red. Can you taste a color? she wondered. But she didn't care. It hurt, gloriously.

The pain carried her into her past. She lifted her face from the broken dials and shattered windscreen of her small plane and felt the wind chill blood in her open mouth. She had bitten her tongue. She put her hand to her mouth and two red-filmed teeth fell out. She looked at them, not understanding where they had come from. Weeks later, checking out of the hospital, she found them in the pocket of her parka. She kept them in a box on her bedside table for the times she woke up with the deadly quiet wind whispering to her. The second engine is dead, and there's nothing but trees and snow down there. She would pick up the box and rattle it. I survived.

But that was years ago, she reminded herself.

-as her face throbbed. They were removing the bandages. So cinematic. It's a damn shame I can't see it. Expectant faces gathered around---camera cuts quickly among them-dirty gauze falling beside the bed, layer upon layer unwinding-- and then

. why... why, Doctor... she's beautiful.

But she hadn't been. They had told her what to expect. Two monstrous shiners and puffed, angry red skin. The features were intact, there were no scars, but she was no more beautiful than she had ever been. The nose still looked vaguely like a hatchet, and so what? It hadn't been broken, and her pride would not allow her to have it changed for purely cosmetic reasons.

(Privately, she hated the nose, and thought that it, along with her height, had secured her command of Ringrnaster. There had been pressure to select a woman, but those who decided such things could still not put a pretty five-footer in command of an expensive spaceship.)

Expensive spaceship.

Cirocco, you're wandering again. Bite your tongue. She did, and tasted blood-

-and saw the frozen lake rush up to meet her, felt her face hit the panel, lifted her head from shattered glass which promptly tumbled down a bottomless well. Her seat belt held her above the abyss. A body slipped through the ruins and she reached out for his boot ...

She bit again, hard, and felt something in her hand. Ages passed, and she felt something touching her knee. She put the two sensations together and realized she had touched herself.

She had a slippery one-woman orgy in the dark. She was delirious with love for the body that she now re-discovered. She curled tight, licked and bit everything she could reach while her hands pinched and pulled. She was smooth and hairless, slick as an eel.

A thick, almost jellied liquid rippled through her nostrils when she tried to breathe. It was not unpleasant; not even fright- ening once she was used to it.

And there was sound. it was a slow bass, and it had to be her heartbeat.

She could touch nothing but her own body, no matter how she stretched. She tried swimming for a while, but could not tell if she was getting anywhere.

While pondering what to do next, she fell asleep.

Waking was a gradual, uncertain process. For a time she could not tell if she was dreaming or conscious. Biting herself didn't help. She could dream a bite, couldn't she?

Come to think of that, how could she sleep at a time like this? Having thought of that, she was no longer sure she had slept at all. It was becoming rather problematic, she realized. The differences in states of consciousness were tiny with so little sensation to give them shape. Sleeping, dreaming, daydreaming, sanity, madness, alertness, drowsiness; she had no context to give any of them meaning.

She could hear her terror in the increased rate of her heartbeat. She was going to go crazy, and she knew it. Fighting it, she held tenaciously to the personality she had reconstructed from the whirlwind of madness.

Name: Cirocco Jones. Age: thirty-four. Race: not black, but not white, either.

She was a stateless person, legally an American but actually a member of the rootless Third Culture of the multi-national corporations. Every major city on Earth had its Yankee Ghetto of tract houses, English schools, and fast-food franchises. Cirocco

had lived in most of them. It was a little like being an army brat, but with less security.

Her mother had been an uninarfled consulting engineer who often worked for the energy companies. She had not intended to have children, but had not counted on the Arab prison guard. He raped her when she was captured after a border incident between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. While the Texaeo ambassador negotiated her release, Cirocco was born. A few nukes had been sown in the desert by then, and the border incident was a brush-fire war by the time Iranian and Brazilian troops overran the prison. As political balances shifted, Cirocco's mother made her way toward Israel. Five years later she had lung cancer from the fallout. She spent the next fifteen years undergoing treatments slightly less painful than the disease.

Cirocco had grown up big and lonely, having only her mother for a friend. She first saw the United States when she was twelve. By then she could read and write, and could not be developmentally harmed by the American school system. Her emo- tional development was another matter. She did not make friends easily, but was fiercely loyal to those she had. Her mother had funny ideas on how to raise a young lady, and they included handguns and karate as well as dancing and voice lessons. Outwardly, she did not lack self-confidence. only she herself knew how frightened and vulnerable she was beneath it all. It was her secret-- one she kept so well that she fooled the NASA psychologists into giving her command of a ship.