Voice of the Whirlwind Read Free

to be used again.”
    Steward felt his nerves go warm. He felt, obscurely, the touch of something important. “Used? How?”
    “I don’t have that information.”
    “Is that what the second wife said? What’s her name, Wandis?”
    Another little pause. “Yes. She said that he only manipulated her, that she doesn’t want to see you.”
    “It wasn’t me.”
    “You must form your own attachments, Mr. Steward. The past is closed to you. And Wandis, to you, is only a name. She shouldn’t mean anything at all.”
    Steward felt a little claw tugging at his mind, pointing at something significant, if only he could understand what it was.
    “It wasn’t me,” he said again.
    *
    “I met someone,” Steward said. “Someone from before.” Inside him he felt a phantom desire for a cigarette. He had given up smoking during his internship with Coherent Light. They’d thought it would be good for him.
    “Where?” asked Dr. Ashraf. “When?”
    “It was an accident. I was walking in the zoo two days ago and saw her. She recognized me. She was there with her—I think she said niece.”
    “Who?” asked Ashraf.
    “Her name was—is Ardala. Her parents were our neighbors in the CL complex in Kingston, that time Natalie and I were both training there. She was thirteen or fourteen then, I think.”
    Steward was seeing Natalie’s face, the broad white forehead that wouldn’t take a tan no matter how she tried, the dark hair that framed her strong jaw, wide cheekbones, green eyes, thick, generous lower lip.
    “We met for a drink that night, after she’d returned her niece to—to whoever. Talked about things. She works in a career placement office.”
    “You didn’t tell her?”
    Natalie sitting on a balcony twined with wrought iron, her face obscured by cigarette smoke. While gunfire echoed from the pink stucco walls.
    “I told her I was divorced. She said it made me younger.” Steward could almost taste the tobacco.
    “You should have told her, Mr. Steward,” Ashraf said.
    “She asked me if I wanted to come home with her.” She’d had Natalie’s eyes. “I said yes.” The rest of her had become Natalie, in the smoke, the dark, the fire.
    “Mr. Steward”—Ashraf was displeased—“this is your first attachment outside the hospital.” Attachment? Steward thought.
    “You cannot allow a relationship to begin with such a fundamental deception,” Ashraf said. “Furthermore, I don’t think it’s healthy that your first such relationship is based on a past that, for everyone except you, does not exist. Better to have involved yourself with a complete stranger than to have tied yourself more thoroughly to a delusion.”
    “No one’s deluded,” Steward said. “No one’s unhappy.”
    Ashraf’s voice was brutal. “We can’t have this woman think,” he said, “that you’re the original, can we?”

CHAPTER TWO

    Molten city towers cut a darkening sky, reflected a burnished Arizona sunset that was itself invisible from where Steward walked down among the groundlings. He had his green bracelet pushed up high under a light blue cotton sleeve as he stepped across an air-conditioned pedestrian plaza whose translucent roof crawled with mutating art forms and whose floor was flecked with the droppings of pigeons. Green-eyed Ardala, her light brown hair swinging, waved from across a sea of bobbing heads. The makeup rimming her eyes was extravagant, like butterfly wings, a new fashion that had originated somewhere beyond the orbit of Mars.
    She and Steward kissed hello. There was a slight shock in the realization that this woman was a stranger. Steward wondered how he’d ever managed to see Natalie in those eyes, in that smile.
    They walked into the bar where they’d agreed to meet. Dark, plush seats, white plastic tabletops, waitresses in corsets and short skirts, styles from thirty years before that were supposed to seem quaint. Standing in a corner was an ornate piano/synthesizer, all gleaming black plastic