Star Harbor Nights

She started by picturing a blank page... not a sheet of paper, of course. She dealt with paper as little as possible. Trying to force her thoughts into slow enough patterns that she could transcribe them with pen or pencil invariably caused the tremors to start.. which only grew worse the more she tried to force her hand to be steady. Left hand or right hand, it didn't matter... Claire was ambisinistrous: equally clumsy with either of them. 

Instead, she saw in her head the blank white "page" of a word processor document. A title appeared at the top, "Gnosticism and Industrialization: The Poetry of William Blake." By the second stanza, she'd put in sentences detailing her main points to act as placeholders for each of the paragraphs. She continued fleshing these out with her reactions to the lines which the professor said, while adding supporting material from books she'd read about philosophy, theology, and English society in the early 19th century.

Claire liked poetry. Unlike her math and physical science classes, she actually encountered new things. She'd initially been excited about the prospect of receiving formal training in those disciplines, but she'd never yet been introduced to any concept in her mathematics courses that she hadn't already known, hadn't considered to be so manifestly obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning, and science was much the same way. The instructors didn't appreciate being told this, of course, but Claire had a tendency to let words just spill out of her mouth at times.

While she took equivalency tests for as many math and science classes as she could so that she could still get credit for knowing what she knew, she'd filled her schedule up with as many disciplines as she could that taught her things that couldn't be so readily extrapolated from the world around her: social sciences and the humanities. She favored history and anthropology over sociology and psychology... the rules of the latter were exactly identical to those which governed any physical system, though her professors didn't like hearing her say that. History and anthropology were, of course, nothing more than the study of how those rules had unfolded given a particular set of variables... but that deceptively simple description didn't change the fact that the subjects were fascinating. There were new things to be learned in them.

"When the stars threw down their spears.. and water'd heaven with their tears," the professor recited, "Did he smile his work to see? Did he," he said, pausing dramatically, and then intoning the next six words with considerable emphasis, "who made the Lamb... make thee?"

The line struck Claire like a cannonball. The back of her brain had started running in the same useless circles it did whenever a theological question was posed to her: if God exists, by the definition of God, He made everything, so God made everything that is evil as well as God, but God by the definition of God is good, so He can't have made evil, so He didn't make everything, so he (lowercase now) isn't God, so he could have made evil things, so he could have made everything, so He (and back to the uppercase inflection) could indeed be God, so...

A slightly more active part of her brain wanted to stack up the arguments for and against, while also pointing out that the definition of "God" was arbitrary, and that the simplest explanation was that no such being existed, while the part of her that she thought of the front of her brain, the part that felt most like herself, normally watched with horror as her runaway mental faculties built to critical mass, knowing that in the absence of a meaningful conclusion her brain would keep going in circles until she burst a blood vessel or had a seizure.

Ordinarily this would be where she'd try to make herself think about sex to jolt herself out of a (she feared) potentially fatal loop, but this time, the foremost part of her mind was equally concerned with the implications of what they had just heard, though for different reasons.

"Tyger! Tyger!" the professor chanted, oblivious to the massive drama unfolding beneath the stunning golden blonde hair of his most gifted student, "burning bright, in the forests of the night. What immortal hand or eye..."

Did he who made the lamb make me? Claire's mind was still echoing.

"Oh... shit," she said, loud enough for her voice to carry to the front of the auditorium-style classroom... moments before her entire lower body went rigid at once, her legs swinging out to kick the seat in front of her. Her hands reflexively gripped the edges of the desk arm, and her back strained backwards so hard that the blue plastic seat bent. The whole world went bright and dark, and when she came out of it she was holding the wooden pressboard desk, wrenched free of its moorings.

Everybody was staring at her.

She slunk down, holding the useless piece of wood in front of her face.

"Oh, don't sit there!" Claire cried as Beau approached the other side of the lunch table in the open-air seating area. "There's ketchup all over the seat."

He looked skeptically at her, but glanced down at the bench. She hadn't been kidding.

"How the hell did that happen?" he asked, coming around to sit next to her.

"I did it," she said. "I'm testing a... hey, Ford, don't sit there! There's ketch... oh," she said as Beau's brother sat down on the messy seat.

"Oh, nice," Ford said, feeling the wet, squishy mess he'd just sat in. He half-stood and scooted over a place. "Who makes a mess like that and doesn't clean it up?"

"I did," Claire said. "I'm testing a hypothesis."

"That's real mature," Ford said.

"I told you it was there!" Claire said. "Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about... who made me."

The brothers looked at her doubtfully.

"You, uh, haven't joined the Campus Crusade or anything crazy like that?" Beau asked.

Claire gave him a withering look.

"I don't think God is directly responsible for my condition," she said. "I think... I think somebody made me like this."

Ford and Beau exchanged meaningful glances.

"You know, Claire," Ford began slowly, "I think we all want to believe, on some level, that there's somebody to blame for..."

"Oh, don't talk down to me," Claire said. "I'm serious. I think somebody designed me this way. I mean, look at me..."

"Uh, okay, if you insist," Beau said, staring in exaggerated fashion at her chest.

"Well, yeah, go ahead and look at those," Claire said. "Massively disproportionate secondary sex characteristics..."

"That's enough to make a man believe in God right there," Beau said.

"...but with a short in my brain that freaks out when I'm sexually stimulated," Claire said.

"I'd call that a fairly compelling argument against you having been designed this way on purpose," Ford said.

"Nature isn't cozy and cuddly, but it's not so pointedly cruel," Claire said. "I'd say it took human intelligence to give me a body like a porn star, a libido like... Beau's... and then make me go all spastic if I even try to stimulate myself, to say nothing of involving another person. If Minerva hadn't spent so much time desensitizing me to sex stuff, I wouldn't even be able to have this conversation like this."

"Can we just stop and reflect for a few minutes on how exactly Minerva desensitized you to sex?" Beau asked. "Slowly, and in as much detail as possible?"

"Hey, let's focus here," Ford said.

"That's what I'm trying to do," Beau said.

"No, look... you really think somebody took the time and resources to, what, genetically engineer you so you'd be all messed up?" Ford asked.

"Well, maybe it wasn't on purpose," Claire said. "Maybe I'm some kind of... failed experiment. That would explain why I was abandoned, wouldn't it?"

Ford sighed heavily and looked at his brother.

"What?" Beau asked.

"Say-something-nice," Ford said, compressing the sentence into the middle of a cough. Unlike when most people did it, it really sounded like a cough... unless the person listening also had superspeed.

"What-am-I-supposed-to-say?" Beau asked in the same fashion.

"Anything-shes-only-going-on-about-this-because-of-her-abandonment-issues-so-say-something-comforting," Ford said.

"You know, I can decode you guys when you do that," Claire said, though her left eye was twitching madly with the effort. "And this is not about me feeling abandoned by my parents, because if I'm right, I don't have parents in the traditional sense... although that makes it sound like it is about me being abandoned by my parents, but it really isn't, okay? You guys are like my only friends, outside of a few teachers, and one of you is actually my boyfriend, and honestly I wouldn't say no if both of you wanted to be, you know, like at the same time, or maybe taking turns..." she stopped, her face pulling sideways in a violent tic before she abandoned that train of thought. "But, anyway, I'd appreciate it if you'd both take this a little more seriously."

"I'm sorry," Ford said. "I am trying to take it seriously, but... it seriously sounds to me like you're using an elaborate defense mechanism." He shrugged. "I'm not trying to be dismissive or anything, but even giving it all due consideration, it still seems unlikely."

"Like you gave all due consideration to my warning about the ketchup?" Claire asked.

"I still have precious little idea what you're on about," Beau said. "But... you're pretty smart and so I should probably listen to you, right?"

"You keep saying that," Claire said.

"Well, it's true, isn't it?"

"But, don't you ever think that I might be right about anything?" Claire asked.

"Isn't that what I said?" Beau asked.

"No, you said I'm smart so you should listen to me," Claire said. "That's not the same thing. If I'm so smart, shouldn't... every once in a while... I say something and you just go, 'Hey, that sounds right to me.'"

"I can say that if you want," Beau said.

"That's not what I mean!" Claire said, stamping her foot under the table. Her body began trembling.

"Settle down," Ford said soothingly. "Look, Beau copies your anatomy homework... he wouldn't do that if he didn't respect your intelligence, right?"

"That isn't the same thing," Claire said. "Why do you think you sat down on the ketchup after I told you about it?"

"It was more kind of at the same time as you told me," Ford said. "There just wasn't time for me to react..."

"You have superspeed!" Claire shouted.

"Say that a little louder, please," Ford said, looking around to make sure nobody had heard.

"I'm confused," Beau said. "Does the ketchup on the seat have something to do with you being abandoned?"

"It's just weird," Claire said.

"Smearing ketchup all over a bench on purpose? Yeah... little bit," Ford said.

"Okay, look," Claire said. "I was talking about the samurai weeks ago. Why didn't anybody believe me?"

"It's like you said," Ford said. "You were going on about the samurai for weeks before anybody else ran into him... and in the absence of any evidence, somebody running around the city in full samurai armor firing magic arrows is just kind of freaky sounding, you know?"

"You... have... superspeed," Claire said again, through gritted teeth.

"Wait, are you calling us freaky?" Beau asked hotly. "'cause that's pretty rich, coming from a spazz like..."

Claire went very white. Most people would have thought she had gone completely still, but in fact, the two brothers could tell that her whole body was actually shaking rapidly.

"What?" Beau said. "What'd I say?"

"Dumbass," Ford said. "Should we, uh, do something? She looks... broken."

As he said that, Claire's eyes rolled back inside her head and she started to topple backwards off of her bench, but Beau caught her.

"Oh, shit," he said. "Do you think we should maybe call Athena?"

"I'd say that's a very good idea," a voice, soft and dangerous, said from behind him. He turned his head to see the famed heroine who was Claire's legal guardian standing there. "Because it's about time you and I had a talk, anyway."

Ford... as Claire had said... did indeed have superspeed, but his eye couldn't begin to follow what happened next. One instant, Beau had his arms around Claire and Athena was standing behind them. The next, the unconscious Claire was lying down on the bench, and Athena and Beau were gone.

"Well, hell," Ford said.