Starblood

crossed the fur carpet and glided into the special cup-chair of his Mindlink set. Raising a "hand," he pulled down the burnished aluminum helmet and fitted it securely to his bony cranium (the helmet too had been specially crafted). He used the other servo to flip the proper toggles to shift his mind into the receiver in Taguster's living-room.
    There was a moment of blurring when intense blacks and grays swarmed formlessly about him. It was said that this was the moment when death tried to rush into the vacated body—and when the Mindlink circuits dissuaded it from claiming another victim as it wished. Then his consciousness flashed onto the Mindlink Company's beam past thousands of other entities going to other receivers. In less than a second, the blacks and grays swirled dizzily, then cleared and metamorphosed into colors. The first thing he saw through the receiver was Leonard Taguster lying dead against the wall…
    For a moment, he attempted to break away from the artificial brain blank and the camera
eyes
of the receiver, tried to plunge back into the chiaroscuro world of the beam. Taguster simply could not be dead. And if he were, then Ti simply could not admit it There was, after all, no one else in his world, no one with whom he might talk with ease, as equal; no one else who would easily understand him. After Taguster, there was only the house, and the house could not converse. Then the core of him, which had survived so much in the past, gripped him and forced him to cease his childish flight from reality. He settled firmly into the receiver again and looked out through the glass eyes of the cameras attached to the brain blank.
    No, Taguster was not dead. There was blood, surely, pooling about the concert guitarist's head, but the same head was also moving, nodding in near unconsciousness, but nodding nonetheless. Ti operated the voicebox of the machine, spoke in a mechanical harshness. "Lenny!"
    Taguster raised his head a little, enough for Ti to see the thin dart buried half in his throat. Taguster tried to say something, but he could only manage a thick gurgle, like syrup splattering against the bottom of a galvanized bucket.
    Timothy felt a silent scream welling up inside him, heard it booming deep within him. A moment later, he realized it was not silent, but given voice by the receiver. That frightened him, and he looked away from the wounded body of his friend, trying to regain his wits. Darts? Who would want to kill Leonard Taguster? And why hadn't they finished the job?
    The musician made frantic noises, as if he desperately needed to communicate something. His head bobbed, jerked, as convulsions hit him. Ti wished he had not looked back.
    Taguster's eyes were wide open and brimming with tears. He knew he was dying.
    Ti's mind swam inside the receiver, receding into the swirl of black and gray, then surging into color and life again as his fear of retreating overcame his fear of remaining. He was fighting off inglorious panic, and he knew it. But Taguster wanted to say something and that was the important thing to remember. But how could that be accomplished, with the man's pale throat so horribly violated?
    Taguster scrabbled a limp hand against the wall as if writing without implement, and Ti got the idea. He turned the head of his receiver around so that the cameras showed him most of the room. There was a desk with various writing tools lying on it, a mere twenty feet away against the far wall. But a receiver was not mobile—and Taguster could not move. Ti thought of retreating from the receiver and returning to his own body, calling the police from his house. But Taguster's desire to communicate was too intense to ignore.
    Ti squinted eyes that he didn't have (the cameras could not rightly be called eyes, and his own single orb was at home, lying lopsided in his irregular skull) and forced his psi energies to coalesce in the vicinity of the desk. He reached out and toyed with the pencil. It flipped over and almost rolled onto the floor. He doubled his effort, lifted it, and floated it across the room to where Taguster lay dying. He imagined he was sweating.
    Taguster picked the instrument up and held it as if he were not certain what it was. He coughed bright blood, stared at that a moment. When Timothy urged him to write, he looked up blearily at the receiver cameras, seemed to make an expression of assent… or pain. He wrote on the wall: MARGLE. The letters were shaky and uneven, but