THE SCIENCE OF LOVE

PART SEVEN: CONCLUSION

(Note to reader: I had to wrap this up because I need Sid to come back to NanoCorp in

"Hope Rising" to be our villain again. He'll be making an appearance in about part 4

of that. Also, this chapter will make no sense unless you've read "Desperate Measures.")

For several months Sid and Brianna stayed on the island. He forgot all about NanoCorp, even Maximus was far from his thoughts...most of the time. When they swam in the deep pool by the waterfall, his eyes would gaze at the cave just to the left of the falls where she had taken refuge, had been bitten by the poisonous spider, was nearly dead before Maximus finally found her. Now as he swam, both naked in the clear waters, and he'd put his arms around her, he remembered taking her limp form from Maximus' hands, hurrying with her back to the little shelter where he warped them away from the island, back to NanoCorp. She was beyond help, beyond saving, so the doctors said and as she lay dying in his arms, he warped them back to the island, only to a time before she'd ever taken shelter in the cave. But she had no memory of that, none at all. He'd been certain nothing like that remained within her consciousness.

But when he was with her on the beach, loving her in the sand, or in the shelter at night, sharing the small bed, Maximus was not there. And he was content with his new toy. From time to time she asked him questions for which he had no answers sufficiently innocent.  For the most part he was able to distract her in ways that brought pleasure to the senses of them both. The shelter and the beach were theirs alone. She had shared no intimate moments with the General in either place. Maximus, as Sid had carefully seen to it he would be, was angry with Brianna while he was on the island. She had betrayed him, lied to him, and his tolerance for such things was low due to past experience.

Sid had always known she really wanted Maximus, had turned to him only because Maximus would have nothing to do with her beyond a stiff formality. But there, toward the end, she'd come to love him...him! And that love she had offered was so new, so different from anything Sid had known before he'd come to crave it, to have to have it...and then it was taken from him. But he'd gotten it back. Through his own brilliance he'd gotten it back.

And no one knew. He liked that. That boring clod of a K&R agent thought he was a zombie, trapped in Cort's disgusting excuse for a movie. All of them thought that. It amused him that they did. They had no idea, none of them, what he'd become, what he was now capable of.  He liked that, too. He was tired of them, of the whole lot of them. They had ganged up on him, they had, had worked as a unit to take him down. If Brianna ever got boring, he'd entertain himself by demonstrating to them just what he thought of their plottings.

But Brianna was not boring in the least. She laughed and made him laugh. She was getting more and more used to her capabilities and he could tell that she liked them. He'd thought by now he would have explained to her the facts of her existence, but daily life as it was with her was far too pleasurable to interrupt with things as irrelevant as facts. The very narrowness of what he'd programmed into her, of what remained after all that he'd deleted, had the result of centering her focus on him. It was as it should be. There were those little moments of awkwardness when she started a certain memory and then found herself skipped over to a rather disjointed
continuation. He could tell that puzzled her from time to time, but at this point there was nothing to be done about it but to blame it on her illness. If he were lucky, that excuse could continue in its service to him forever. Memory chips were delicate things. He'd tried to delete sections with as much care, as much thoroughness as he could. But such a thing had never been done before. It was impossible to know the end results.

Now, in this moment, she'd just stood up beside him and he was slowly wiping the adhesions of damp sand from off the backs of her legs. He sat, cross-legged, intent on the patterns his fingertips were making in the grains clinging to her thighs. The constant breeze off the ocean blew her hair goldenly about her face. Tipping his chin, he let his eyes move up her torso. Absolute perfection of female form. And not disguised by clothing. There was no need for clothing in this warm, deserted place. The island as she'd come to know it had been in the year 1248. It was there he'd taken them again.

"Come," she said, looking down at him, "let's go swimming again. The surf is wild and wonderful today."

But they had swum not long before and he was feeling lazy and relaxed where he was. Instead of rising, he lay back, his hands clasped under his head. "Perhaps later," he replied.

"Spoil sport!" she pouted. "Well, I'm going in for a bit. If you change your mind, you'll know where to find me."

He didn't watch her run toward the sea. His eyes were fixed on the odd flip a certain palm frond was doing over and over as the wind passed around it. He'd begun to run the aerodynamic possibilities of it through his mind. Worry for Brianna swimming was no longer an issue. In her renewed form she surpassed the dolphins.

Alone, she swam with strong, sure strokes through the surf. This was the first time Sid had not accompanied her and a sideways glance to her right drew her attention to the rocky headland that jutted out into the ocean. Always Sid directed their swimming away from that so their path lay down the beach to the left. Now past the surf, she treaded water, looking back at Sid's distant form on the sand. He lay as she'd left him, his eyes fixed on the palm above him.

Perhaps? It would only take a moment and he wouldn't even be aware. She swam up to the headland and made her way around the rocky point, curious as to what might lie beyond. She found a small crescent of a beach, very private, entirely cut off by headlands on both sides so that it seemed separate from the rest of the island. A sheer bluff rose up just behind the little beach and opening into it was an almost perfectly squarish doorway of some sort. How strange.

She walked across the sand toward the opening, peering inside and finding it to be the entrance to a huge sea cave. As she entered the cave and walked among the huge natural stone pillars
that held up its roof, an odd tingling began making its way up and down her spinal column. She'd been here before, hadn't she? No, she couldn't have. That wasn't right. Was it?

She continued on toward the back of the cave, finding the rocks there had been shaped by ages of water into forms resembling large flowers. She smiled. They were really quite pretty. The floor of the cave began to rise into a series of natural, low stone steps, above the reach of the incoming tides. The sound of running water caught her attention and she followed it to where

a small spring came out of the rocks, flowed into a little pool then over a lip to disappear into

a tumble of rocks. Near the pool was the remnant of some old campfire, a few blackened small logs half-crumbled on the soot-stained rock. She stopped and stared at it, stared at the pool, her spinal tingling growing by the second.

Something was not right here. For some reason she was feeling strong emotions she had no reasons for. Dropping to her knees, she lay her right palm flat on the rock beside the pool, nearly consumed by a strange combination of anxiety, compassion, and piercing longing. What...what could she be longing for? Placing her hands on either side of her head, she

squeezed hard. "Think, Brianna...THINK!"  This place meant something, had some significance. Why couldn't she remember what it was?  Nothing. Nothing came to her. Only the extreme, unreasoning emotions.

She rolled over onto her left hip, sitting there, staring at the spot by the pool, then leaned forward and dipped her hand into the cool water. She'd done that before. She was certain she had, had dipped something over and over into this pool, right here in this pool. Her head hurt. She hadn't had an ache or a pain in all her time with Sid, but right now her head hurt and it

was getting worse.  She squeezed her eyes tightly shut, aware of little bursts of light behind her eyeballs, aware of a really disturbing sensation of...movement...inside her skull. Something was happening to her...and it hurt.

She lay down on the ledge, her left cheek against the smooth rock, listening to the little gurgling sound of the running water, trying to make some sense of what was happening.  Lying by the pool. That was important, that was why she'd been here before. Had she lain beside this pool
before? Was that it? No, that didn't seem right, either. Not her. It hadn't been her lying beside the pool. Sid? Had it been Sid?

Trying to think through the buzzing in her head, through the dizziness that seemed to be growing steadily stronger as though her brain were...rearranging...something, she fought for the memory of who had lain beside the pool and why she felt such emotion about it.

Brianna had been gone longer than he'd expected. He'd finished running his mental calculations on the movement of the palm frond and sat up, looking at the sea, searching for the sight of her blonde head. A sudden clutch in his belly brought him to his feet. He was almost in the exact

spot he'd been when he'd become aware of her attempt to get back to shore from the headland. The tide had been rushing in and she'd lost her footing, been thrown into the rocks. His eyes searched along the base of the headland. No sign of her there and the tide hadn't even started in yet.

Not sighting her anywhere, he ran back to the nearby shelter. "Brianna! Are you in there?"  But she wasn't. Drawn almost magnetically, his eyes turned to the headland again. She wouldn't.

He started slowly, reluctantly, toward the sea, breaking into a sprint just before he got to the first small foamy edge of what had been a wave. Diving into the breakers, he swam around the headland, two words repeating over and over and over in his mind. She wouldn't.

But she had. The prints of her bare feet showed clearly crossing the sand toward the cave entrance. He bit his lip. Why?

One hand resting on the rocky edge of the entrance, he peered inside. "Brianna?"

There was no reply.

He walked in, remembering his last visit there, and headed toward the back where he knew he'd find the spring. In the dimness he made out a form huddled on the rocky floor. "Brianna!" he called. She didn't move. He ran to her, kneeling beside her, lifting her upper body in his arms. Her eyes were closed and his bionic ears picked up a steady series of small sounds coming from
inside her.

"Look at me," he begged.

She opened her eyes halfway, trying to focus on him, not quite able to manage it.

"I...I...don't...understand," she murmured.

"What, Brianna? What is it you don't understand?"

"You never....," she blinked, trying to focus, "you never...."

He bit down on his lip, his nostrils flaring, his neck muscles cording.

Her eyes closed and the sounds from inside her grew stronger. "Brianna!" he urged. "Stay with me!"

With the last effort she could manage, she lifted her lids just a little. "Maximus," she whispered, then all the sounds stopped and she went all thick and heavy in his arms.

He stared down at her, then tipped his head way back as the gathering darkness in the cave was filled with an inhuman roar.

TO BE CONTINUED IN "HOPE RISING"...

BACK TO LIBRISCROWE

BACK TO PART 6

BACK TO INDEX

BEGINNING OF "DESPERATE MEASURES"