om with
his eyes; to him it would not seem cosy and clean, but--habituated to
white sterile tile, Terran rooms and corridors--dirty and unsanitary as
any beast's den.

Kyla said broodingly, "You're a strange man, Jason. What sort of man are
you--in Terra's world?"

I laughed, but there was no mirth in it. Suddenly I had to tell her the
whole truth:

"Kyla, the man you know as me doesn't exist. I was created for this one
specific task. Once it's finished, so am I."

She started, her eyes widening. "I've heard tales of--of the Terrans and
their sciences--that they make men who aren't real, men of metal--not
bone and flesh--"

Before the dawning of that naive horror I quickly held out my bandaged
hand, took her fingers in mine and ran them over it. "Is this metal? No,
no, Kyla. But the man you know as Jason--I won't be him, I'll be someone
different--" How could I explain a subsidiary personality to Kyla, when
I didn't understand it myself?

She kept my fingers in hers softly and said, "I saw--someone
else--looking from your eyes at me once. A ghost."

I shook my head savagely. "To the Terrans, I'm the ghost!"

"Poor ghost," she whispered.

Her pity stung. I didn't want it.

"What I don't remember I can't regret. Probably I won't even remember
you." But I lied. I knew that although I forgot everything else,
unregretting because unremembered, I could not bear to lose this girl,
that my ghost would walk restless forever if I forgot her. I looked
across the fire at Kyla, cross-legged in the faint light--only a few
coals in the brazier. She had removed her sexless outer clothing, and
wore some clinging garment, as simple as a child's smock and curiously
appealing. There was still a little ridge of bandage visible beneath it
and a random memory, not mine, remarked in the back corners of my brain
that with the cut improperly sutured there would be a visible scar.
_Visible to whom?_

She reached out an appealing hand. "Jason! Jason--?"

* * * * *

My self-possession deserted me. I felt as if I stood, small and reeling,
under a great empty echoing chamber which was Jay Allison's mind, and
that the roof was about to fall in on me. Kyla's image flickered in and
out of focus, first infinitely gentle and appealing, then--as if seen at
the wrong end of a telescope--far away and sharply incised and as remote
and undesirable as any bug underneath a lens.

Her hands closed on my shoulders.