Free Star quest by Dean Koontz Page A

underground stream emptied into a shallow lake that reflected the uneven ceiling with mirror clarity so that the water almost denied its own presence.
    She was sitting on a rock overlooking the water, her knees drawn up, curled much like a cat sitting upon a window ledge. Her back was to him, her hair falling to the middle of it, sleek and shiny.
    "That's beautiful," he said.
    She didn't turn around. "I knew you were there. Thought you were watching in secret, huh?" She did turn around now, smiling.
    He could do nothing but smile in return.
    "I have ears like a cat," she laughed. "I heard you when you first stepped from the hallway."
    "I'm clumsy by nature," he said, sitting next to her. "What are all these caves?"
    "The land about here is honeycombed with them, for we transferred them with the city. We have an exit, a back door, through these caverns."
    "The song you were singing—"
    "One of the songs Fish wrote."
    "Fish?"
    "It has the currents of the waters in it, don't you think? The noises of the ocean. The words are nonsense words written merely to evoke a feeling of the sea."
    And as she sang more of it, he realized it did exactly that. He could nearly feel the eddies in the water, the waves. There was that quality of sea-talk he had often heard.
    "You certainly are a talented group," he said at length.
    "You gain something when you lose normality, Tohm. Nature mutilates your fetus, smashes you about in drunken folly, then repents and, at the last moment, presents you with many talents, some even superhuman. Every Mutie I know has, besides the ability to sense and affect the Fringe, some talent, some beautiful ability."
    "I see."
    "I doubt it," she said, standing.
    They began walking the rim of the Lake.
    "No," he said. "Really, I do. I can understand what it must be like. This is not my original body. I went through something similar."
    He explained his history, the chemical tanks, the brain transplant, the machine buried eighty-three miles under the sands back near the City That Used To Be.
    "That's fine," she said, wrinkling her tiny, perfect face into an expression of distaste, "but it shows you don't really understand."
    He looked at her, felt his tongue tying itself in knots. From the glint of her eyes, he could see that something was about to happen. But he didn't know what, and he was powerless to stop it. He didn't even know if he wanted to stop it.
    "You never thought that with that machine of yours, one of the rare Romaghin Jumbos, you could give Hunk I a real body! You could take Babe out of that farcical r shell of his and put him inside a big, strong, hulk like your own."
    He swallowed his heart. Twice. "Of course! How stupid of me! We'll go back now. I can do that for every Mutie you bring me."
    No."
    He stopped tugging at her. "What do you mean—no." Are you even more stupid than I thought? No means no! No, we don't tell Corgi. No, we don't tell Babe. No, you don't put any of them in he-man bodies!"
    "Come on. Let's find Corgi—"
    "No!"
    "But you said—"
    "I baited you. I wanted to see if you have even the slightest glimmer of understanding about us, Tohm, wonderful Tohm, Hero Tohm."
    "Now wait," he said desperately, clutching her hand. He could feel the final rumbles as the volcano began to surge with lava. He didn't think he wanted to see the eruption.
    She jerked her hand from his. "You wait! What makes you think Babe could adjust to being normal, huh? Two hundred and twenty-three years he's been a Mutie. Two hundred and twenty-three years he's been a child. Just overnight he takes a he-man body of a normal and thinks nothing of it? And Hunk. Precious goddamn Hunk. Hunk spits out his bodily wastes, a green liquid that smells damned unpleasant. Hunk, you think, could just up and be normal without any trauma involved, no mess up in his mind."
    "The machine surgeons are good. They won't make a mistake in—"
    For a moment, she seemed to snarl. "I'm not talking about the physical end of it.