Free The Pure Cold Light by Gregory Frost

refused to specify. No one had to ask about that. He wore layers of loose robes, red sneaker-boots, and either a tarboosh or a turban on any given day.
    What none of Aswad Lobly’s neighbors remotely suspected—as he intended—was that he was a woman. Thomasina Lyell, to be exact.

    ***

    Lyell made no attempt to check the gossip about her alter-ego; conflicting stories served to act like an extra layer of camouflage to protect her. All that was known about Lobly was that he might have been an Orbiter once but had taken the cure before he suffered any obvious tissue damage. Maybe he’d lost a couple toes, maybe not—the stories varied because she never spelled out anything.   Lobly could discourse quite knowledgeably about the effects of the drug, and that was really all the proof anyone needed. The Boxers’ inherent reticence to talk about their former lives or the families they’d fled, deserted, or slain helped her in this. Past lives didn’t exist down here. Box life was timeless.
    The knowledge of Orbitol and some of Lobly’s appearance Lyell had borrowed from a lifer she’d met while serving time on Corson’s Isle. The lifer’s name was Poleby.
    At some date prior to his incarceration on the prison island, Poleby had mixed up his drugs with volatile, even suicidal, abandon. He had mistakenly assumed that site-specific drugs couldn’t conflict with one another. The result of Poleby’s experiments was a permanent, degenerative rewiring of his salivary glands.  
    In the cell he shared with Lyell, he spent most of his time with a bucket between his knees to catch the waterfall of drool that ran ceaselessly down his face. It dripped from the tips of his mustache and out of the cleft in his chin. Poleby kept a two-liter pitcher of water on a table beside him to keep from dehydrating in the night, and slept with a plastic tube hooked over his lip. The first few weeks, the sucking and trickling sounds had nearly driven Lyell crazy.
    The supply of the drugs in the prison astonished even Lyell. From Poleby’s stories, she figured out soon enough that as many as five dozen pharmaceutical companies were using the prisoners on Corson’s Isle as test subjects for experimental substances and practices. According to Poleby, the first unnatural effects of Orbitol had come to light there.
    “It was a girl, one a their first users. (Slurp.) Her toes, you know, went away. When she refused to take any more a the shit, they strapped her into her cell and shot it into her—bang, bang bang! (Slurp.) Well, ya know—after awhile she’s begging for it, can’t stand to be without it, and she didn’t care no more that she didn’t have no legs or hands.” He paused dramatically to spit. “Didn’t matter to her half so much as gettin’ fucked up. She let the bastids do anything just so she got fixed. They gouged samples outen her, trying to see what what goin’ on, and every day there’s less and less of her.   One day she just faded right out from under ’em—they’s so fuckin’ dumb they thought she’d escaped. And they’s right , too, ya know.” He laughed, but self-consciously glanced at his empty sleeve as he sucked saliva. “Now, ain’t I a fine one to talk?”  
    One night, while he flew high on Orbitol, Poleby described quite lucidly for Lyell the vision he had of another reality. According to him, it was a vision he shared with all other Orbiters.
    “It doesn’t come every time right at first, ya know, like gettin’ a signal from a pirate satellite or somepun,” he said, “but when it comes, it’s a message from God. Glimpse a heaven, gettin’ stronger with each visit. That’s why I come back to it—why that girl did, why they all do—get another peek at it, ’nother look at God. Ya don’t know that it’s got its hooks in ya till it’s happened. And then you’re the fish and the other world just reelin’ you in.
    “It’s a place where everything sparkles like that little jewel in