The Diamond Moon by Paul Preuss

have both thoughts and feelings.”
    Sparta was momentarily confused. She had come here to tell Linda about matters of profound importance and inti-macy; Linda seemed to be confusing the issue with these remarks about herself . . . it self.
    But perhaps Linda had anticipated the rest of what Sparta intended to reveal. Sparta pushed on. “What they did to me wasn’t arbitrary. Some of it was a mistake; still they . . .” But she quickly floundered again; it was difficult to find straightforward language for what she was trying to express.
Linda tried to help her. “We’ve talked about the mission they planned for you.”
     
“The mission remains.” Sparta took a sharp breath. “To fulfill it I will require certain modifications.
    Some that they anticipated, but that I . . . that have been . . . damaged. I need to restore the capacity to see , microscopically and telescop-ically—and the capacity to image the infrared. And other modifications, specific to the anticipated environment . . .”
Linda interrupted her before she could begin busily list-ing them. “You intend to change yourself?”
     
“The arrangements have been made.” Sparta seemed edgy, defensive. “The commander is cooperating. I haven’t said anything to my mother and father . . . yet. But I will, really.”
     
Linda was still; she gave the impression that she was lost in thought.
     
She was quiet so long that Sparta sniffed noisily and said, “I don’t have a lot of time before . . .”
    “You have made vital progress,” said Linda, abruptly cutting her off. “I applaud and admire your courage in de-ciding to choose this difficult task, which others tried to thrust upon you without your consent, but which nothing now compels you to undertake. You have mastered your groundless fears and faced up to one or more fundamental questions that must eventually confront all people of sensitivity and imagination.” She paused only a moment before she added, “I worry about only one thing.”
“What?”
     
“No one can make progress by running away.”
     
“Meaning?” Sparta demanded.
     
“You must interpret what I say in your own words. You are aware by now that I am little other than what is poten-tial in you.”
    With that, as if to underscore her Sibylline message, a blue flash of light and a soft “pop” emanated from the cen-ter of Linda’s persuasively solid body, and she vanished. Sparta stared at the empty room, shocked and a little offended.
Then she smiled. Linda really was—had been—the perfect psychotherapist. One who knew when it was time to stop.

IX
Even in this age of microminiaturization, of tailored artificial proteins and nucleic acids, of nanomachines, some rad-ical procedures still began and ended with the scalpel.
    Sparta was continuously under the diamond-film knives for forty-eight hours before she began her swim back to consciousness. Rising to be born again through dim and surging depths toward a circle of lights, she burst like Aph-rodite from the foam—
    —in her case, a froth of bloody bubbles the surgical nurses bent quickly to clean away from the multiple inci-sions in her thorax. She had taken them by surprise, willing herself to wake up even while still in the operating theater.
    They handled the emergency competently, and within moments were wheeling her away. By the time she was fully alert, multiple growth factors had done their job: her skin was pink and unscarred, her internal organs unbruised; her many changes were virtually undetectable.
    For another twenty-four hours she stayed under observation, allowing the doctors to keep watch on her for the sake of their professional ethics and their personal consciences, although with her acute selfawareness Sparta monitored her internal states better than they could.
    From the window of the private room in the high secu-rity wing of the Space Board clinic she looked east, across a pea-soup river of algae with huge stainless steel harvesters poised