Cancilleri's Law excerpt

Cancilleri's Law



Waxman swore she lived, but you would be hard pressed to prove it to me. I saw no sign of breathing, not a twitch of muscle. Not once during the long hours I sat and watched from across the primitive wood-slab table, did she blink. A rough, hand woven scarf shrouded her lower face and hair -- part of her period costume, Waxman had told me. The material's color matched her crystalline blue eyes.
Unless I touch her, I thought, despite my knowledge of her situation, how can I be certain she's real?
She stood poised in a half-squat of indecision as if trapped before her thoughts had time enough to sift evidence. Her room was constructed from pale gray sound-deadening plastics. Light strips around the baseboards subdued the space into the dusk of her original departure.
The furniture, one table and chairs padded and upholstered in dark ruby velvet, sat on a floor carpeted with a thick pile, blood red synthetic both soft and resilient -- except where her feet touched bare earth grown over with knee high wheat or barley.
I stood and went around the table. She did not move. By then, I wanted to believe I witnessed a mirage, a holographic prank. I could still hear my mates at the Advanced Chrono Sciences Lab laughing at my naiveté when I had announced I would be the one, the person to bring her the rest of the way through.
However, the woman was a frozen mannequin, incredibly life-like and frighteningly human. The briefing data provided by the Loyal Order of the Keepers had not exaggerated.
I rounded the table's corner to close the distance between us. I could smell her, but could not identify the sweet sickly aroma.
Her unblinking eyes remained fixed on the place where I had been sitting. I studied my hand as I reached to touch her, and stopped. Will she suddenly come to life and attack me? Will she scream? Or will nothing happen?
I lowered my hand, and decided to stare directly in her eyes before I touched her. I could only see shadows below her scarf; the highlights across her cheekbone, the swirls of her right ear, and of course her eyes.
The briefing data said her life span had reached thirty years when the accident occurred over two hundred years ago; she had not and would not age.
I moved closer and saw strands of blue-black hair poking from beneath the scarf. The woman was stunningly beautiful. I felt there was something hauntingly familiar about her, which increased her mysteriousness. I wondered, maybe she's ... Then thought, No. It's not possible.