She thrashed and raged, what was left of her, so that the fluid in which she was suspended—thick and inert as mucous to absorb the Newtonian forces to which even a K-ship was sometimes prone—slopped over the side and onto his patent leather shoes. Dr. Haends didn’t notice. He reached down into that stuff and pulled her out. In the microcameras she saw herself for the first time in fifteen years. She was this small, broken, yellowish thing, its limbs all at odd angles, curling and uncurling itself feebly against the pain of the open air. What she heard as a scream of horror and despair was only a faint rough groan. The skin stretched over her like the tanned or preserved skin of a bog-burial. There was no flesh between that and the bones beneath. The withered lips drew back over small, even teeth. The eyes glared out of tarry sockets. When she saw the thick cables trailing from the core-points in the scoliosed spine, she felt numb and disgusted. She felt the most awful pity for that thing. She felt the most awful shame. To begin with, that was why she fought him: she simply didn’t want him to see her. Then, when she saw what he was doing, she fought him for that, too.

He had landed the ship. The cargo ramp was down. He was taking her outside. Terror fell across her like the light from the Kefahuchi Tract. What could she do, if she was no longer the White Cat? What could she be?

“No! No!”

The Tract pulsed above her.

“There’s no air,” she said pitiably. “There’s no air.”

The sky was on fire with radiation.

“We can’t live! We can’t live in this!”

But Dr. Haends didn’t seem to care. Out there on the surface, among the strange low mounds and buried artefacts, he prepared for surgery. On went his white gloves. Up went his sleeves. While out of his eyes and mouth poured the white foam of the K-code, to assemble from the dust itself the necessary instruments. Dr. Haends looked up. He held out one hand, palm up, like someone testing for rain. “No need for extra light!” he decided.

Seria Mau wept.

“I’m dying! How can you give me a new body here?”

“Forget your body.”

They had to shout to hear themselves across the silent roar of the Tract. Particle winds blew back the tails of his coat. He laughed. “Isn’t it amazing, just to be alive?” Behind him, the shadow operators poured out of the ship like shoals of excited fish, flickering and dancing.

“She’ll be well again,” they called to one another. “She’ll be well.”

Dr. Haends raised his instruments.

“Forget yourself,” he commanded. “Now you can be what you are.”

“Will you hurt me?”

“Yes. Do you trust me?”

“Yes.”