Axiomatic by Greg Egan

infirmary, or a military hospital.

    ‘You saved my life.’

    The chimera’s voice was deep and quiet and calm, and she looked right at me as she spoke. I’d expected her to be painfully shy, amongst strangers for perhaps the first time ever. She lay curled on her side on the bed, not covered by a sheet but with her head resting on a clean, white pillow. The smell was noticeable, but not unpleasant. Her tail, as thick as my wrist and longer than my arm, hung over the edge of the bed, restlessly swinging.

    ‘Dr Beatty saved your life.’ Muriel stood at the foot of the bed, glancing regularly at a blank sheet of paper on a clipboard. ‘I’d like to ask you some questions.’ The chimera said nothing to that, but her eyes stayed on me. ‘Could you tell me your name, please?’

    ‘Catherine.’

    ‘Do you have another name? A surname?’

    ‘No.’

    ‘How old are you, Catherine?’ Primed or not, I couldn’t help feeling a slight giddiness, a sense of surreal inanity to be asking routine questions of a sphinx plucked from a nineteenth-century oil painting.

    ‘Seventeen.’

    ‘You know that Freda Macklenburg is dead?’

    ‘Yes.’ Quieter, but still calm.

    ‘What was your relationship with her?’

    She frowned slightly, then gave an answer which sounded rehearsed but sincere, as if she had long expected to be asked this. ‘She was everything. She was my mother and my teacher and my friend.’
    Misery and loss came and went on her face, a flicker, a twitch.

    ‘Tell me what you heard, the day the power went off.’

    ‘Someone came to visit Freda. I heard the car, and the doorbell. It was a man. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I could hear the sound of his voice.’

    ‘Was it a voice you’d heard before?’

    ‘I don’t think so.’

    ‘How did they sound? Were they shouting? Arguing?’

    ‘No. They sounded friendly. Then they stopped, it was quiet. A little while after that, the power went off. Then I heard a truck pull up, and a whole lot of noise — footsteps, things being shifted about. But no more talking. There were two or three people moving all around the house for about half an hour. Then the truck and the car drove away. I kept waiting for Freda to come down and tell me what it had all been about.’

    I’d been thinking a while how to phrase the next question, but finally gave up trying to make it polite.

    ‘Did Freda ever discuss with you why you’re different from other people?’

    ‘Yes.’ Not a hint of pain, or embarrassment. Instead, her face glowed with pride, and for a moment she looked so much like the painting that the giddiness hit me again. ‘She made me this way. She made me special. She made me beautiful.’

    ‘Why?’

    That seemed to baffle her, as if I had to be teasing. She was special. She was beautiful. No further explanation was required.

    I heard a faint grunt from just outside the door, followed by a tiny thud against the wall. I signalled to Muriel to drop to the floor, and to Catherine to keep silent, then — quietly as I could, but with an unavoidable squeaking of metal — I climbed on to the top of a wardrobe that stood in the corner to the left of the door.

    We were lucky. What came through the door when it opened a crack was not a grenade of any kind, but a hand bearing a fan laser. A spinning mirror sweeps the beam across a wide arc — this one was set to one hundred and eighty degrees, horizontally. Held at shoulder height, it filled the room with a lethal plane about a metre above the bed. I was tempted to simply kick the door shut on the hand the moment it appeared, but that would have been too risky; the gun might have tilted down before the beam cut off. For the same reason, I couldn’t simply burn a hole in the man’s head as he stepped into the room, or even aim at the gun itself — it was shielded, and would have borne several seconds’ fire before suffering any internal damage. Paint on the walls was scorched and the