her hands under my head, doing what she could to comfort me. It took a good five minutes for the burning in my leg and arm to subside, but eventually it did, at least enough for me to consider what had happened.
I reached out to her shoulder, felt the cloth of her blouse, and ran my hand down the side of her body. The texture of the cloth changed when I got to her slacks, but there was no naked flesh—yet I knew I hadn’t hallucinated it. You hallucinate after you’re in agony, like now, not before.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” I asked.
“You fell.”
“Don’t play dumb with me,” I said. “It’s unbecoming in someone as smart and lovely. Just tell me what’s happening.”
“Try to rest,” she said. “We’ll talk later.”
“You said yesterday that you wouldn’t lie to me. Did you mean it?”
“I will never lie to you, Gregory.”
I stared at her perfect face for a long minute. “Are you human?” I asked at last.
“For the moment.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that I am what I need to be,” she said. “What you need me to be.”
“That’s no answer.”
“I am telling you that right now I am human, that I am everything you need. Isn’t that enough?”
“Are you a shape-changer?” I asked.
“No, Gregory, I am not.”
“Then how can you look like this?”
“This is what you want to see,” she said.
“What if I want to see you as you really are?” I persisted.
“But you don’t,” she said. “This”—she indicated herself—“is what you want to see.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Gregory, Gregory,” she said with a sigh, “do you think I created this face and this body out of my imagination? I found it in your mind.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “I never met anyone who looked like you.”
A smile. “But you wish you had.” And a pause. “And if you had, you were sure she would be called Rebecca. I am not only everything you need, but everything you want.”
“Everything?” I asked dubiously.
“Everything.”
“Can we…uh…?”
“When you slipped you caught me off-guard,” she answered. “Didn’t I feel like the woman you want me to be?”
“Let me get this straight. Your clothes are as much of an illusion as you are?”
“The clothes are an illusion,” she said, and suddenly they vanished and she was standing, naked and perfect, before me. “I am real.”
“You’re a real something,” I said. “But you’re not a real woman.”
“At this moment I am as real as any woman you have ever known.”
“Let me think for a minute,” I said. I stared at her while I tried to think. Then I realized that I was thinking all the wrong things, and I lowered my gaze to the ground. “That thing that drove the Nightstalker away,” I said. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
“It was what you needed at that instant,” she answered.
“And whatever pulls the leaves down from the treetops—a snake, a bird, an animal, whatever—that’s you too?”
“You need a mixture of the leaves and the herbs to combat your infection.”
“Are you trying to say that you were put here solely to serve my needs?” I demanded. “I didn’t think God was that generous.”
“No, Gregory,” said Rebecca. “I am saying that it is my nature, even my compulsion, to nurture those who are in need of nurturing.”
“How did you know I needed it, or that I was even on the planet?”
“There are many ways of sending a distress signal, some of them far more powerful than you can imagine.”
“Are you saying that if someone is suffering, say, five miles away, you’d know it?”
“Yes.”
“More that five miles?” I continued. She simply stared at me. “Fifty miles? A hundred? The whole damned planet?”
She looked into my eyes, her face suddenly so sad that I totally forgot about the rest of her. “It’s not limited to just the planet, Gregory.”
“When you ran off for a few minutes, were you saving some other man?”
“You are the only man on the planet,” she replied.
“Well, then?”
“A small marsupial had broken a leg. I alleviated its suffering.”
“You weren’t gone that long,” I said. “Are you saying that an injured wild animal let a strange woman approach it while it was in pain, because I find that very difficult to believe.”
“I did not approach it as a woman.”
I stared at her for a long moment. I think I half-expected her to morph into some kind of alien monster, but she just looked as beautiful as ever. I visually searched her naked body for flaws—make that errors—some indication that she wasn’t human, but I couldn’t find any.
“I’ve got to think about all this,” I said at last.
“Would you like me to leave?”
“No.”
“Would it be less distracting if I recreated the illusion of clothing?”
“Yes,” I said. Then “No.” Then “I don’t know.”
“They always find out,” she said. “But usually not this quickly.”
“Are you the only one of…of whatever it is that you are?”
“No,” she replied. “But we were never a numerous race, and I am one of the very few who remains on Nikita.”
“What happened to the others?”
“They went where they were needed. Some came back; most went from one distress signal to another.”
“We haven’t
