The molecules bound to the grit that still clung to the fabric, and the heat stole the chill from her arms.
It took only a minute to scrub her boots, her clothes, then herself. When the salt crystals were gone, her
skin no longer scratched itself each time she changed expressions. The weather cloth of her trousers and
shirt shed water like glass, and the blunter dried in seconds in the hydrophilic blasts. In less than two
minutes, Tsia was dried and dressed again in all but her trousers, socks, and boots. She ran her hands
over her pockets, checking their contents. She hesitated for a moment at the sharp edges of the safety
cubes. She bit her lip, then left them alone. There was plenty of time to return them.
Ruka's eyes were large and curious as they followed Tsia back to the other room. When she dropped to
the floor by her pack, he padded over beside her and sniffed the tears on her leg. She shoved him gently
away. Ruka growled and settled down beside her, and she murmured her approval.
She unrolled the first skin graft and stretched it out over the scratches. The blood still welled out, but she
ignored the flow and pressed the thin, transparent sheet over her flesh. She could feel the instant
response. As soon as it was exposed to oxygen, the dormant layer of cells activated. Her biogate seemed
tickled with molecules that moved and shifted and touched each other, binding and releasing their
chemical sig-nals throughout the graft.
Amino acids coiled back upon themselves. They bent and flattened and screwed themselves into helixes.
They collapsed into rough spheres with pits and clefts on their surfaces. They became proteins, and
Tsia's body reacted. Her skin and blood and muscle cells sent out cyclins to the graft. Kinases filled the
protein pits with tiny ball-like shapes. AH across the area, phosphate molecules broke off from or
attached themselves to enzymes. She could actually sense the neocell membranes open and close to the
chemicals. Goose bumps spread out across her thigh. To feel life at such a tiny level&
file:///K|/rah/Harper,.Tara.K.-.Collection/Harper,%20T...20-%20Cat%20Scratch%2002%20-%20Cataract(1995)[UC].html (84 of 256)14-7-2004 1:24:03
Tara K Harper - Cataract
She found her lips pulled back in a feral snarl. Ruka stared at her with fear in his mind, and she could
smell the sweet scent of herself in the cougar's nose. She murmured to the cub, soothing him with her
voice until she felt the graft cells differ-entiate. One moment, the graft seemed to crawl with tiny, cha-
otic movement as if it were coated with billions of excited molecules that had no pattern to their dance
and the next, it actually was alive.
Cell membranes strengthened all across the graft. New ki-nases and cyclins burst into action. Cells
became skin that di-vided and grew into a new, transparent layer, separate from the artificial graft. Skin
bound to skin; cells became flesh. Dead blood in the open wound was broken apart, then swept away by
her capillaries. Tiny phages acted as vectors for the proteins that spurred her blood vessels to grow.
Within the hour, the graft would release its calcium and the other growth factors to the wound. The
axons of her nerve cells would turn and grow toward each other, creating new pathways through which
they could communicate. Within two days, the thin layer of tissue would develop to its full sensitivity
and thickness. Within four days, the graft would die and flake off like a sunburn, killed by one of its own
coded proteins.
She stroked the graft across her flesh, ignoring the broad pain that washed her leg while she sealed its
edges with pres-sure. She placed the second graft below the first, covering the lower edge of the gouges.
Ruka, his nose twitching, moved forward, and Tsia let him sniff. The cat's tongue licked out. Its
roughness finally made Tsia flinch, but she held still so that the cub could taste the graft. "It will become
part of me," she told the kitten. "Like new skin. In an hour, its smell will be more like mine."
It took a moment to use the seam-sealer on her trousers; when she was done, the only evidence of the
tears was a slight irregularity in the iridescent cloth. She got to her feet and pulled on the rest of her
clothes, stretching her toes hedonisti-cally inside the boot liners as she felt the warmth of the dry and
grit-clean fabric. When she shrugged her harness back on, she fingered the flat slot where her enbee had
been stored, then turned and searched for a replacement in the e-packs along the back wall. Her fingers
were steady until she put the new enbee in the slot; then a wave of guilt swamped her guts like nausea.
She eyed the cub without expression, then motioned toward the door and built the image of the outside
deck and the skim-mer's shape in her head. Ruka's body became very still, as if the threat had returned
with the pictures. Coaxing him to the door, she turned out the lights and stepped out of the hut. As the
door slammed into the wall with the wind, Ruka bolted straight into the dawn. In her gate, she felt him [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]