Cataract. Part 16

Tsia eyed her for a moment. The tiny lines around her eyes deepened with her uneasiness. "The webs are

on my old ID line," she added. "The one I had before I joined the meres. They're not on my current traces."

"I understand," Nitpicker said more sharply.

"And?"

"That's all."

Tsia stared at her. "No questions?"

"No."

A spark of anger grew in Tsia's gut. "That's it?"

"Yes."

"Just 'Yes'? No discussion? No questions at all?" No trust in what I say? she wanted to snap.

Nitpicker turned finally and met her eyes with a cold look of warning, then turned and walked back along the trail.

Tsia took a half step after her, then halted. Her hand went halfway to her throat. She could almost feel Nitpicker's fingers against the flesh of her neck. Could almost feel the fear in the woman beating against her own ribs. Her jaw set abruptly. The pale scars along her cheek went whiter as she held her tension with fury.

As Nitpicker pa.s.sed Kurvan, the other mere said something, and the mere leader nodded with a faint smile. Kurvan glanced up and met Tsia's eyes, and she could taste the satisfaction that flushed through her biogate. He hated her, she thought. Had hated her since Tucker's death. He wanted her to fail. She could taste it like dung in her mouth. Kurvan looked once more at her face, then turned away to the cave. Tsia, left like a stick in the rain, merely stood and stared, her eyes unfocused, and her biogate taut as her jaw.

She stared at Ruka where he crept down to meet her. Never in the ten years she'd worked with Nitpiker had the pilot provoked her so deliberately. Had that been an act? A test? And if so, who had she been testing?

An old ghost cropped up in a node that was supposedly down. A pilot choked out one of her meres. A biochip s.h.i.+pment was not expected for weeks, but a group of meres was so jittery that their tension cut through Tsia's biogate like a laze. She pressed her hands against her temples and climbed off the trail till she could crouch in the shelter of a fissure, far above the cave. She could still hear the meres, their voices floating up through the crack in the stone, but Ruka was too close to her mind, and she could not focus her thoughts.

The cub rubbed his head on her fingers. Wet hairs stuck to her skin, and she stared at them as if they were tiny lines of the node. Her stomach growled. Or his. Absently, she pulled a slimchim from her pouch and handed it to him. "You're like a fluke on the heart of its host," she told him sourly. He gulped the slimchim quickly, and she let him take another. "You create a hole, through which you suck my thoughts." She watched him chew on the chim and said slowly, "Yet without you, I think I would bleed to death."

She stared at the rock crack from which the other meres' voices rose. Resolve seemed to settle in her guts. Deliberately, she got up and carefully, silently, followed the fissure down until their voices were clear and sharp.

"... so why shouldn't she tell us?" Kurvan was demanding. "A guide linked with marine life does us no good out here. Look at what almost happened to Nitpicker. We might as well be trying to follow a broken scanner as her."

Striker's voice returned. "How do you know she's linked with a fish? Why not a reaver or hawk or pipeplant?"

"She called the eels to help 'Picker. A guide linked with a tree or digger couldn't do that."

"Give her a break, Kurvan," Striker said sharply. "It's tough enough to get a guide into the mere guild without making her miserable while she's on contract. Beside, she got 'Picker out of the mud. She's earning her credit as much as any of us."

"I still want to know what her gate is."

"Why?"

"Did you see her expression when Doetzier caught up to her an hour ago? She didn't exactly help him up that rock. How can we expect her even to do her job when she's that uncontrolled? She's just a guide, and not a good one at that."

Nitpicker's voice cut in quietly. "She's a genetic ecologist, Kurvan. A skilled terrain artist. If being a guide makes her a little wild too, that's only to be expected. What guide, so changed by viruses, is ever completely human? Look them up in the stock charts. They're M-three, not M-one. Mutants, twice-removed from our original genetics."

"And just as unpredictable as any alien. For our own safety, we need-"

"To know no more than we do." Nitpicker cut him off in a calm voice. "Hand me that seam-sealer, would you, Wren? I've got another hole to patch."

Thoughtfully, Tsia sat back. She stared at the fissure, as if more words would float out, but only the wind made sounds.

The cub's ears twitched as he regarded Tsia with the patience of a hunter. Against her fingers, his slick, waterproof hair felt almost greasy, not sticky, as the sponge mucus had felt. She sniffed her fingers. She could still smell the turpen-tinic scent of the sponges on her skin. She rubbed her slim, strong fingers together and felt again those other steel hands at her throat. Unconsciously, she touched the swollen flesh. "Did you feel it?" she asked slowly. "Did your throat choke with her fingers?"

Ruka growled, and Tsia laughed, a short, bitter sound. "I'm so desperate for someone to talk with, I turn to you-an animal, for Daya's sake-as if you were my family-"

Abruptly, she stood and began to stalk back to the meres. "d.a.m.ned idiot," she cursed herself. "Talking with an animal. Your brain can't take in my words," she snarled. "You think in catspeak which I barely understand; and I project emotions which you don't even have." She turned and stared at him as he paced her in the brush. "What do you really sense? The hunger in your stomach? The smell of the hare in the gra.s.s? Could you sense a biochip? Or tell a freepick from a zek?" She stared at him, letting the sense of his hunger gnaw at her guts. Then she dug out the last of her slimchims and, with a sharp motion, dropped them in the mud. Deftly, he snagged them in his teeth, gulping them as quickly as a wolf takes a piece of meat.

Tsia glanced at the hill where an older cougar watched her move, and wiped her face of expression. Then she made her way back to the trail, where Doetzier could spot her from the cave.

Curtly, she waved for him and others to rejoin her. Doetzier motioned for her to wait for Wren before she took the lead. A moment later, Wren came abreast of her and said quietly, "Bowdie ran some scans on the trail. He found nothing, but we all had the sense we were being watched. Is it you?"

"No." She half snarled the word, and his hand flashed to her arm before she could wrench away. His thick fingers clenched her jacket. "Just the cougar," she forced the words out. "It's not hunting. Only curious. The trail is clear."

"Like your mind?"

She shrugged away. "My mind is clear," she said sharply. Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. "It's only my heart that's clouded."

"The link is getting stronger," he stated, more than questioned.

She nodded.

"Dammit, Feather," he said harshly, his voice almost a whisper. "You have to get rid of him. Push him away. Think of him as alien, as an Ixia, if you must. Or are you so desperate for your sister that you subst.i.tute the cub?"

She snapped back. "I see little difference between them, Wren. Ruka is here, now, climbing into my brain, and I can't seem to stop him. Shjams was always there, and I can't cut her out."

"So tell yourself that she's no longer part of your life. If you must, tell yourself that's she's dead."

She stared down the trail. "But I know she's alive. And knowing that-and not being able to see her or talk to her- not being able to connect... It's like having a sister with a terminal illness. One which has taken her to the lip of the grave-but refuses to push her in. As long as she still lives, I can never finish grieving, and I can never quite give up. It's like a death that has no resolution. A death that has no proper end."

"You said once that she was searching for herself. Can't you just give her the distance she wants and get on with your life?"

"If that was what she was doing," Tsia returned shortly, "then, yes. But we know it's not. She's lost, Wren. She's up there in s.p.a.ce running-sprinting-from her demons, and all she's done is run right into their hands."

Wren gave her a speculative look. "You of all people should be able to understand that."

The catspeak drummed in her head, and Tsia's lips thinned. "You have to face your demons, Wren. You have to destroy them before they annihilate your self. Something happened to Shjams in the past. Something that caught her in a cycle of fear as securely as... as I was caught before. But Shjams never moved out of that cycle. She's still running. Like a reaver who can't find its way out of its own dike, she is digging her own grave."

"And you have found your way out of the grave? Away from your nightmare-demons?"

She looked at her wrists. They were tanned and weathered like the rest of her skin, but she always saw them white, marked with the same iron-chafed circles that Wren bore on his. Her face was so still that only those dark blue orbs seemed alive in the toughness of her scarred and weathered skin. She smiled suddenly, and the expression did not seem to touch the muscles of her face.

His sharp eyes noted flecks of b.e.s.t.i.a.lity that glinted from her eyes. He dropped her arm and motioned to the trail. She stared at him, then led the others on.

By late afternoon, when the gloom pretended to lighten to the shades of a medium gray, they dropped into the steep cut between the Pallas Ridges. The trail there was a meter-wide ledge which ran above Pallas Cat Creek. The rain barely reached into the cut, but the shadows and cras.h.i.+ng creek kept the air dark and moist.

It took an hour to build a tiny, two-line rope bridge out of the flexan cord and metaplas pieces they carried. Then Tsia led the first two meres in a swaying, edging, hand-sliding movement along the flimsy bridge. Behind her, Kurvan slipped in the crossing, and Tsia caught his arm as it flailed out. With a cry, he countergrabbed and crushed her slender fingers. He looked into her eyes and smiled; his hand seemed to sprout claws. Instinctively, she jerked back. A surge of cold energy hit through her gate. Her lips bared in a snarl. Bowdie, behind them, cursed and lunged. He caught Kurvan's hand, and then Tsia grabbed again at the other mere's arm. Her flexor caught for an instant on Kurvan's elbow and almost snapped out from her harness. The weight of Kurvan's pack swung both her and Bowdie down. The bridge whipped wildly in a V toward the rocks. Bowdie's long legs slipped along the line. On the-far bank, the others could do nothing but watch. Then the wind gusted and Bowdie yanked hard, and Kurvan's hands scrabbled for a grip on their harnesses. Tsia's straps split; Bowdie's mottled edges unsealed. Dark objects fell away. Tsia's flexor slapped hard against her thigh. The wind, which had helped a moment before, thrust at their bodies. Kurvan looked down and saw the boiling water and ebony rocks. He jackknifed and kicked up. Then his feet regained their purchase, and Tsia and Bowdie hauled him up.

Kurvan gripped the cord of the bridge, glanced down once more, then murmured his thanks to Bowdie. He gave Tsia a dark look. She stared at him, then twisted away along the rope. Her body still s.h.i.+vered, and the power of his grip seemed to cling to her skin. There was a hunter in his body, she thought. A predator as deceptive and eager as the dark puma who watched the group from its den. High up, in caliginous shadow, the adult cat eyed Tsia and reinforced her fear of the man. Encroacher... Danger... She shuddered again, hiding the motion in the sway of the bridge. Not until she reached the bank on the other side did she relax, and only then because she moved quickly upslope, where she could turn and crouch in the lee of a tree.

She stared at her hands as if they belonged to a stranger. Had she lost all control over her gate? And this wariness-was it hers or the cat's? Her gate widened with the touch of Ruka's mind, and she twisted at his proximity. He had crossed upstream on the boulders, and now he slunk close, visible only as a trick of tawny light in the forest.

"Daya," she whispered. She pressed her palms to her forehead and closed her eyes as tightly as she could, as if she could hold in her biogate by flesh alone. She could smell Kurvan's sweat on her fingers. There was an almost turpentinic musk to the fear in it as it mixed with the rain and sweat, and she s.h.i.+vered and drew her blunter close.

The cougar on the ridge projected more strongly, its eyes flicking from the meres below to her own predator shape in the woods. She snarled at it through her gate, and her message, even in words, was clear: Do not hunt. Don't attack. The humans here are protected.

Her lips twisted as a warning was returned: Pa.s.s through. Pa.s.s through, but do not stay. The lines of territory were marked and they would be defended.

Against the meres. Against her. Instinctive reactions and natural fear... Command: response, countered by the faith in the Landing Pact. That was what she felt. She was like a puppet. She moved, but her movements were ch.o.r.eographed; she acted to another's direction. Kurvan had smiled, and she had jerked back. As though he could have antic.i.p.ated her response, he had given her a look that seemed so full of menace, she could not help but recoil. She rubbed at her wrists with a s.h.i.+ver. His hands seemed imprinted on her arms. His biofield seemed to feed the anxiety of her gate. If he had fallen-if Bowdie had not been there...

She wiped her hands against her trousers. The hard edges of the safety cubes sc.r.a.ped against her palm. "I feel dirty," she whispered to Ruka. "As if I had been used."

Ruka turned his head to stare back, unblinking. His claws extended. Pressing through her blunter, they cut, cold and hard, through her s.h.i.+rt till they began to pierce her chest. She lifted his paws, and s.h.i.+fted her harness, and realized its edges were unsealed. Uneasily, she looked down.

The medkit and her e-wrap-both of them were gone. They had fallen away when Kurvan grabbed for her harness. "Sleem take it," she muttered. All the gear from her front straps was gone, including her antigrav packs. Only the raser, with its short, knifelike laser blade powered down, was still on her hip by her flexor; and her bios.h.i.+eld-but nothing else-was still in the pouch against her chest. She felt the cold in her teeth, and realized her lips were bared as she stared down at her unsealed harness. Kurvan and Bowdie, and her gear falling away...

Ruka growled, low in his throat, and Tsia's eyes gleamed. "Had I claws like you," she said softly, "I would have cut, not caught, Kurvan's hand." A chill struck her shoulders. <2 "daya,"="" she="" whispered.="" "have="" i="" lost="" my="" mind?"="" she="" stared's="" her="" hands.="" they="" were="" clutching="" her="" flexor,="" and="" she="" didn't="" remember="" drawing="" it.="" she="" flicked="" her="" wrist.="" the="" weapon="" flowed="" into="" a="" thin-edged="" bar,="" like="" a="" sword.="" she="" s.h.i.+fted="" her="" grip="" and="" snapped="" it="" into="" a="" point="" with="" a="" set="" of="" hooks="" along="" a="" long,="" thin="" blade.="" the="" hooks="" flowed="" smoothly="" back="" into="" b.u.mps.="" stars="" in="" a="" biofield;="" b.u.mps="" on="" a="" sword...="" she="" flicked="" her="" wrist="" and="" the="" flexor="" became="" a="" stiff="" tri-blade.="" the="" shadow="" of="" the="" point="" cast="" a="" faint,="" fiamelike="" ghost="" on="" her="" trousers,="" and="" she="" stared="" at="" it="" for="" a="" moment.="" the="" windburn="" from="" the="" storm="" felt="" like="" fire="" to="" her="" skin,="" and="" she="" saw="" in="" her="" memories="" the="" coal="" cla.s.ses="" in="" which="" she="" first="" learned="" to="" dance.="" the="" heat="" against="" the="" pads="" of="" her="" feet;="" the="" sweat="" she="" had="" learned="" to="" call="" at="" will...="" and="" the="" other="" guides="" whose="" bodies="" flashed="" and="" leaped="" as="" lithely="" as="" her="" own.="" faces="" that="" had="" disappeared="" with="" time.="" like="" the="" features="" of="" her="" sister,="" which="" had="" not="" changed="" in="" her="" memory,="" but="" only="" deepened="" and="" aged,="" as="" if="" tsia="" had="" acknowledged="" the="" years,="" but="" not="" the="" distance="" that="" had="" grown="" between="" them.="" firedancing...="" the="" guide="" guild...="" her="">

She wiped her hands on her trousers and stared at Ruka as if she could imprint him even more deeply on her mind. "Do you know," she asked the cat in a harsh voice, "how long I waited to have you in my head? What I have given up to touch you? And how little it takes to strip you away?"

The cougar rambled. She got slowly to her feet. She felt old inside. Not the forty-nine years that made up her life, but five hundred years or more. What good was her past, she asked herself, if she could not let it go? And what had she become, that she could no longer separate herself from the biogate in her head? The wind's rough hands tore at the bark beside her, as if daring her to do the same. She threw her head back and opened her throat. The sound came out as a bitter laugh that turned into an animal scream.

She did not answer when Wren climbed up and gestured, but she moved out of the gloom like a cat. When her feet hit the trail, she did not bother to look at the meres. Even when Nitpicker signaled for her to take the lead, she did not acknowledge the woman's motion with a word. She merely bent her head against the wind and hiked on.

Another hour on the trail turned into two; the afternoon pa.s.sed like a ghost. They forced their way through two waterfalls that blasted across the trail. The medlines of the node were no longer active- they had dropped out halfway through the day. Tsia had barely noticed. Her mind was filled with the sense of the cat and the pulse that beat in her throat, and when they came to a wall of broken rock, she pointed toward the peak. "Shortcut," she shouted. "Straight up." Halfway up across the rocks, she looked back at the meres, who followed like dolls on a string. Or lifers, she thought, like puppets with guns. She stared at her hands and wondered...

Early evening found them at a rise of basalt, where moss and lichen overgrew the stones, and gray-white trunks of a burn as old as Tsia dotted the slopes around them. The ache in the legs of the meres had turned to a numbness that they bore in silence while they cursed at the mud. When Bowdie, then Tsia took a break behind a boulder, Tsia stumbled, and Bowdie caught her arm. The heat of his biofield seemed suddenly sharp with sparks, and she stared up at his suddenly shuttered face. He tossed her his decomposition spray and returned to the group. Tsia was left by herself.

The scents that clung to the deke tube he'd tossed made her nostrils flare. She hesitated before she sprayed her fecal matter. There was something about the scent of the deke... Her brows drew together, and she lowered her head to sniff the tube. To a normal human, a deke had no odor; but to Tsia, with the senses of the cats interpreting the smell as they crawled into her mind, there was a distinct sweetness to the tube. Memory flicked at the back of her brain. Today... That morning. Another tube, and a cave...

The medkit. The salve-when they had climbed out of the lake, her neck had still been sore, even after the use of the scame. Kurvan had thrown her a salve tube out of Wren's medkit. She had opened the tube, but had not used it, and the odor... She sniffed again, then deliberately, she aimed the deke at her stool. The small pile dissolved in seconds, leaving only a darkened place on the soil.

A deke in a salve-in a medkit? "Insane," she whispered. One drop from a deke, and a cut would become a necrotic gash. A gash like that could result in an amputated limb. Her stomach tightened. When the cat feet padded through her head, she started. She was too close to her gate, she thought. It was clouding her mind with suspicion. Abruptly, she made her way back to the group. She tossed the deke to Bowdie without a word, but she could not help the look she shot at Wren as she stalked back to the head of the line.

Shadow turned to blackness, and fir dancers became tree demons. The darkeyes of the meres allowed them to continue into night as if it were day, but Tsia had to look through Ruka's eyes to see the placement of her feet. At ten, when they took two hours to sleep, Tsia curled up and opened the biogate, and let the cougar's mental hum lull her into dreams. Faces seemed to march through her mind, in time to the cougar's growling. First Ruka, then Wren, then Nitpicker's eyes... A hard-chiseled face floated above her, and she kissed the man before he melted into the stone that formed his own biogate... He sank into earth that cracked and cried and turned into a stream, where her sister's visage, cloudy as ice, seemed trapped beneath the surface. She reached in for her sister, but the water rippled, and it was her own face that stared out...

At midnight, they resumed their ragged march. The dark was now so thick, and the rain so blinding in the violence of the wind, that the night seemed impenetrable and solid. The sky breathed, like a G.o.d, in their faces, battering them from one side of the trail to the other while the trees broke and flew through the wind. It was a night of brutal darkness; a night that had no end.

At a switchback, she missed the trail and slipped, lengthwise, like a log down a water track, into a nest of hummers. The rodents squealed as her feet broke through the flimsy roof of the nest. Three sets of teeth snapped at her boots. Cursing beneath her breath, she yanked her legs out and climbed back to the trail, her fingers digging her holds out of the sodden earth while the wind slammed into her back.

"You remember this?" Bowdie shouted over the wind as he helped her back up to the trail.

She shook her head.

"I thought you knew this trail."

She stared at the pale blur of his face. "In the dark?"

He seemed to grin.

"This isn't one of the main trails, and I ran this one only twice up to here." She pointed. "I had to take the long route around the meadows and lakes when I was working this area before."

There was a shriek of wood, a cras.h.i.+ng sound from ahead, and Bowdie stared into the darkness. 'Too bad your biogate won't tell you what's ahead."

"Like a bird's-eye view of the sky?" She laughed. "Even that wouldn't tell me much in this."

He eyed the darkness of the woods with its black and whipping branches, then nodded shortly. He gestured for her to lead on.

They crossed the yellow-white gra.s.s quickly, then went again beneath the trees. At a fork in the trail, Tsia paused, and Wren pointed to the thin, boiling sky with a grin, as if she had lost their morning bet. She jerked her thumb east in return. The heavy blackness promised the rains that she projected. "By dawn," she yelled above the wind, "you'll have your rain, and then some."

She moved on, and the cougar paced her in the brush. With a narrowed gaze, she accepted Ruka's sight to look beyond the fork that split the trail. There was a blurred sense of trees, which bent with ponderous grace. Then she felt the wind that ruffled her fur. The left trail petered out in a box canyon, she realized. The right went on to a meadow.

"I understand," she breathed.

Ruka's growl seemed pleased.

The images faded; the cat feet in her skull became fainter. She rubbed her fingers together. She had been able to read the felines for ten years, each year with greater sensitivity. But Ruka had just pointed out the trail to the freepick stake as clearly as Tsia did for the meres. As if the cub understood her goal. To partner with that kind of intelligence... To move through the mountains with two sets of eyes... Daya, but what had the Landing Pact given up for guides like her?

She guided the meres across a creek, then into another meadow. One creek ran beside the wide clearing; another gray line of water glinted across the expanse of two-meter tallgra.s.s. The gra.s.s flowers, tightly closed against the wind, were small gray flags, which would flare yellow after dawn. Soon the flowers would be ripe, and the wind would tear them open so that their seeds blew out like static-charged foam and clogged the branches of the shrubtrees around the meadow.

The meadow itself was like a lake, and Tsia could feel the shadows of movement beneath the puddled ground. To her left now, Ruka slunk into the meadow, but between the gloom and the gra.s.s, his body was just another motion of the wind, invisible to her eyes. Behind her, Wren, then Bowdie, then Kurvan filed through the gra.s.s. They began to fan out as the ground grew too wet to follow exactly where she stepped.

Her foot sank up to her knee, and she struggled to pull it out. Her biogate distracted her from her path. She stepped for a clump, missed it in the dark, and sank into the puddle beside it. Phosph.o.r.escence swirled like tiny sparks. It took full seconds to struggle free.

"Daya," she muttered. The sense of life in the meadow was strong enough to make her frown. Behind her, the other meres formed a long line in the gra.s.s. The steadiness of their bodies looked odd surrounded by the whipping stalks. Wren, the closest, staggered heavily, and she moved back into knee-deep roots to give him a hand and check the settings on his pack. Neither tried to speak in the wind.

Ruka was already across, waiting, hunkered down on a rock. His golden eyes watched the meres unblinkingly. Only his ears and tail twitched as he crouched; and Tsia judged the distance between them. Where the creek between them flooded out into a small pond, the meres would have to wade--or swim in the dark, she admitted with unease. She glanced down and scowled at the water pooling between the clumps of gra.s.s, then jumped ahead again.

The earth s.h.i.+mmied beneath her and, startled, she jumped ahead to a more solid clump. Even that gra.s.s s.h.i.+vered with her weight, buckled. Ahead, the flooded gray creek grew wider, until it seemed as if the sky lay down in the meadow to sleep out the storm on the ground. Tsia grinned at the image. She put her foot down. Into nothing. And toppled forward.

Cat feet leaped abruptly in her head; someone snarled in her ear. "Daya-" She twisted frantically before she hit the water. Her legs and hips slapped the lake with a flat splash. Her arms flung out as she grabbed at the gra.s.s. Her torso hit the edge of the mat, and she clung to that flimsy raft like a gale net spread on the sea.

For that was what she lay on, she realized. A weedis on a black sea of water. A raft of gra.s.s. There was no meadow beneath her feet-it was actually a lake. And not a temporary lake that had flooded from a simple creek, but the water that had lain, still and dammed, for years behind the ridge of earth that blocked its lower end.

Infinitely slowly, she dragged herself back up on the mat. The thin island trembled; its root system shredded beneath her weight. In her head, the cougar paced and clawed at her skull until she snapped at him to leave her alone. Easing back in a long-body crawl, she s.h.i.+fted her elbows, then hips past her footsteps where the traces of herself were left in phosph.o.r.escent, sparkling pools among the gra.s.s.

As Wren caught sight of her, he quickened his pace.