Free ASIM_issue_54 by ed. Simon Petrie

old for that as well! With you beside me, HG, I’m sure I’ll get through the tour okay. And Robbie will take care of me when you feel you need a break.”
    Robbie and HG took it in turns to sit beside her as she signed her books for delighted fans overjoyed to see her recovered from her stroke and creating again. Many brought her flowers, chocolates, gifts, which she received like a queen, thanking the givers before handing them on to her minders as she got on with her signing and meeting her fans.
    In one instance, as she passed him a small posy of flowers she’d been given, Eliza called HG by name. As he took the posy, the present-giver in front of Eliza reached out a tentative hand and lightly brushed his fingers. “I like your work too,” she told him shyly, and he was as surprised by her words as how they made him feel.
    Eliza watched his reaction to the compliment and chuckled throatily. “Why, HG, I believe you’re blushing!”
     
    * * *
     
    At night in strange hotel rooms when she could no longer type the words for her next novel into her computer she’d lay on the bed and dictate, and he’d transcribe her words into the machine. And when her words slowed and stopped because she had finally drifted off to sleep, he kept writing.
    She noticed. He knew she would because he realised by now that writing fiction was like having babies; you instantly recognised what was yours. Sometimes he’d see her smile as she revised her work and found his words entwined with hers like lovers wrapped about each other celebrating spring. She delighted at the union of their words, themselves.
    And yet her energy seemed to leak slowly out of her through a hole no-one could fix.
    “I don’t have much time left,” she’d whisper to him repeatedly.
    “You can’t know that,” HG would try to jolly her out of her paranoia with a half smile, but she obsessed about it.
    “I know,” she stated with a fierceness that frightened him. “And I must write.”
    Eliza, who had prowled the world like a solitary lioness in her prime, looked at him with the shining eyes of a huntress; yet he was not her prey, and she would not devour him. They would hunt words down together for as long as she had left.
    “The tour is exhausting her,” HG told Robbie privately, knowing he could rely on Robbie’s sympathy. “She needs rest, and a new infusion of nanos—”
    “The doctors gave us a 10 year guarantee,” Robbie interrupted, surprised.
    “Her body continues to deteriorate. You’re all expecting too much of her, she expects too much of herself and she’s pushing herself too hard. I fear she’s heading for another stroke.”
    “But the nanobots are there to stop that.”
    “They can’t make her immortal. If her body deteriorates faster than they can repair it, if she has a bad fall, if her heart stops beating while she sleeps …”
    “Then it’s your job to restart it, isn’t it? What do you think we got you for? We’ve invested a lot of money in her, we expect to recoup it.”
    HG observed how similar Robbie sounded to Powell, but kept his thoughts to himself. “She has given her all to her writing, to you as her publishers, to her fans … but sooner or later …” The death sentence hung between them. “She needs time to rest, regain her strength.”
    And yet HG more than anyone, knew what ever drove her raged hotter than what fuelled him. She was like a dying star, and yet she seemed intent on hurtling towards oblivion as fast as she could, with not a minute’s care for the world she’d leave behind, or the sorrow her passing would cause.
    But how could she know? Why was she so sure she was dying when no test he could run on her could confirm it?
    She was looking so weak and tired, her skin pale, splotched and brittle like old paper, that they ended her tour early. She didn’t even fight their decision. In more than one way she leaned against HG for strength, and with all the nobility she could muster, she