The Snow Queen Part 21

She smiled. "The last time we talked about that, you didn't want me to go at all."

"I still don't," gruffly. "But I'm not talking to the same woman. Who am I to argue with destiny? My father taught me to believe in reincarnation a" that what we are in this life is the reward or punishment for what we did in the last one. If I wanted to play philosopher I'd tell you that when Elsevier died her spirit was reborn into you, there in the sea. A sea change."

"I want to believe thata"" She closed her eyes; smiled at last, opening them again, as belief metastasized. "Miroe, do you ever wonder who you were before? And whether, if we were born knowing what we had to make up for instead of crawling blindly through a penance, anything would be different?"

He laughed. "That's the kind of question I should be asking you, sibyl."

Sibyl. I belong again. I am whole again. Whaler. Holy... The cold air burned in her lungs. She pressed the spot beneath her parka where the trefoil lay hidden; found herself looking to the north again, longing for a glimpse of what lay beyond sight. It was nearing the time of the final Festival, when the Prime Minister came to Carbuncle for the last time. She felt a stirring of curiosity at the thought that he was following her here from Kharemough. But it would be another fortnight before a trader's s.h.i.+p put in here to take her to Carbuncle. Only a fortnight until she would know-She was suddenly aware of her heart beating hard hi her chest, and did not know whether she was feeling antic.i.p.ation or fear.

They pa.s.sed the outbuildings where he kept his peculiar workshops, kept going downhill toward the vast flooded fields that embroidered the narrow coastal plain, northa" and southward to the limits of his land grant. In his workshops Ngenet tinkered with an incredible variety of obsolete engines and primitive tools a" things that would have seemed marvelous to her short months ago, but that simply seemed pointless to her now. She had asked him why he bothered with them, when he had things from the city that could do everything they did, and much better. He had only smiled, and asked her not to tell anyone else about his quirks.

Whiter laborers strolled past them on stilts through watery beds of sea hair a" a staple crop for human and animal here in the harsher northern lat.i.tudes. The workers glanced up in respectful greeting; a man here, a woman there gave Moon an extra, fleeting smile. Ngenet had told his household staff only that she was a sailor saved from drowning by the mers. But the outback Winters, who lived with the Sea, were not as far removed from belief in the Sea Mother as she had always heard. They had nursed her with all the solicitude due the object of a small miracle. The field hands had taught her to walk on stilts one sunny afternoon: Balancing precariously, taking awkward, stumbling strides on the dry land, she knew ruefully why they wore watertight suits when they worked in the tangle of inundated gra.s.ses.

She followed Ngenet along the raised stone walkways that netted the fields, pa.s.sing through a tunnel of time, the sight and the smell of the sea harvest carrying her home to Neith: to Gran, to her mother, to Sparks a" to the lost time. To the time when the future had been as certain as the past, and she knew that she would never have to face it alone. The lost time. Now she had heard the voice of the new future, and it called her from star to star, to the City in the North...

Their boots rattled on the wooden pier that sat in the sheltered inlet which served as the plantation's harbor. The waters of the half bay, held in safe arms away from the constant wind, lay blue and silver under the sky. She could still look at the Sea without being swept back into the nightmare of the Lady's ordeal by water; it had surprised her to find that she could. But stronger than the memory was the knowledge that the Sea had spared her in the end. She had survived. The Sea gave and She took away, an elemental manifestation of a greater, universal indifference. And yet twice she had faced that indifference, with her mind and her body, and been spared. A nameless counter fate was alive inside her, and while it lived in her, she would not be afraid.

The far blue surface of the water fountained white as a tandem of mers shattered its peace with the perfect arc of their bodies. She watched them rise and fall again and again through the surface of the bay; disappear once more into the watery underworld. Another track, less obtrusive, veered toward her across the water as she stood leaning on the splintery rail: Silky, who had spent most of his time since their arrival here in the bay. "What's he going to do, Miroe? He doesn't have anyone, any home." She remembered how Elsevier and TJ had found him.

"He's welcome here; he knows that." Ngenet gestured across his land, smiled at her concern.

She smiled back at him, looked out over the water again. The irony of Silky's presence among the mers struck her deeply now, as she watched them together: The humans of the plantation hated and distrusted all his kind a" not simply because they were alien, but because they were the Snow Queen's Hounds, who hunted and killed the mers. And she had learned that not only did Ngenet hate the slaughter and protect the mers within his boundaries, but he had surrounded himself with workers who felt the same way. Ngenet had known Silky as a comrade of Elsevier for years enough to trust him; his people had not.

But the mers, who should have been the most mistrustful, accepted him; and so he spent his time mainly in the sea. She could glimpse his emotions only through the narrow window where his perception and her own looked out briefly on the same world; he was more taciturn and less communicative than ever, and it was only from her memory of the last moments on the LB that she could guess that he mourned. He joined them now on the hinged, sighing dock, pulling himself fluidly up and over the rail to stand dripping beside them. His wet, s.e.xless body was bare of any trappings of the world of air, beaded with the ephemeral jewels of the water world. (It had seemed odd to her that Elsevier and the others regarded him as male, when to her mind his smooth body could as easily have been female.) His eyes turned back their own merging reflections, keeping them from any penetration of his inner thoughts. He nodded to them and leaned on the rail, tentacles trailing.

She looked past him at the bay, where three more mers had joined the first pair in a flas.h.i.+ng ballet, an outward image of their selfless inner beauty. Every afternoon when she walked down this way, the mers performed a new quicksilver dance on the water, almost as though they celebrated her return to life. Their grace caught her up in a sudden pa.s.sion to be as they were, as Silky was: a true child of the Sea, and not forever a foster-daughter... "Silky, look at them! If I could change my skin for yours, for even an houra""

"You're wanting to go back into the sea, after I fished you out of it ice blue and rattling only a fortnight ago?" Ngenet looked down at her with disbelief or indignation. "I think you suffered some mental impairment after all."

She shook her head. "No a" not that way! Lady, not ever again." She winced, rubbing the muscles of her arms through her heavy parka. The spasms of her hypothermia had wrenched every muscle in her body, and left her disoriented and crippled. Now that she could think and move again, she walked longer every day in Ngenet's patient company, stretching the knots out of her body, trying to remember what it felt like to move without hurting all over. "All my life my people have belonged to the Sea. But to really belong to the Sea, like they do, for even a little while; long enough to knowa"" She broke off.

The mers had ended their dance and disappeared beneath the waters again; now, abruptly, three slender heads with runnel led fur emerged in the half-shadow below her. Their sinuous necks bent back like sea gra.s.s flowing, the eyes of polished jet looked up at her together. Protective membranes slid smoothly over the obsidian surfaces; the ridge of feather-tipped bristles above their eyes stiffened upright, giving them a look of amazement. The one in the middle was the mer who had held her like its own child when she was lost at sea.

Moon hung over the rail, stretching down with her hand. "Thank you. Thank you." Her voice was strong with feeling. One by one the mers rose in the water, b.u.t.ted briefly against her down reaching hand, and submerged again. "It's almost like they know." She straightened away from the railing, feeling cold bite her dripping hand. She pushed it back into her glove, and into a pocket.

"Maybe they do." Ngenet smiled at her. "Maybe they even realize somehow that they've rescued a sibyl, and not just another unlucky sailor. I've never seen them dance like that for a stranger, or linger here the way they've done. They're remarkable beings," answering the question in her eyes.

"Beings?" She realized how much he had said and denied in one word. Since her rescue she had learned many things about Ngenet, about his relations.h.i.+p to the mers, his respect for them, his concern for their safety. There was even a rudimentary communication of sign and sound that pa.s.sed between mer and human; that had sent them searching for her, and led Ngenet to the crash site in time. But she had not suspected ... "You mean a" human beings?" She blushed, shook her head. "I mean, intelligent beings, like Silky?" She glanced from face to face and back.

"Would that be so hard for you to believe?" Half a question, half a challenge. His voice held her with an odd intensity.

"No. But, I never thought ... I never thought." Never thought I'd ever meet a stranger from another world; never thought he might not be human; never thought a sibyl would have to answer any question like this one. "You a" you're asking me a" to answer ... ?" Her voice was high and strained, she felt herself slipping...

"Moon?"

Slipping away ... Input.

Chapter 30.

"What did I say?" She had asked him, afterwards.

"You told me about the mers." And Ngenet had smiled.

Moon repeated the words in her mind as she moved through the blue-green water world with sinuous undulations. The liquid atmosphere resisted and yielded, resisted and yielded, to the pressure of her hands. This was Ngenet's gift to her, for answering his unspoken question, for affirming his belief: She knew at last what it was like to be of the Sea, wholly, exuberantly; not forever balanced on the precarious tightrope between sea and sky, on the thin edge between worlds.

She listened to the rhythmic, rea.s.suring hush of air that answered every demand for breath; savored its warm faintly-staleness feeding in through the regulator valve. In the distance the boundless s.p.a.ces of the sea were curtained by a mist of sand in solution. But here in this shallow bay she could see clearly enough a" see the flawless beauty of the mers and Silky, her companions, Their streamlined forms suspended by unseen hands.

"This is why you sing!" Her voice went out to them on a cloud of laughter through the mouthpiece speaker; undistorted, although it meant no more to them than a cloud of bubbles. Because you can't hold in your joy. In the s.p.a.ces between her breaths the mer songs reached her, the siren songs she had heard only in legends and dreams: a tapestry of whistles and wails and bell-like chimings, sighs and cries a" forlorn, abandoned sounds heard separately, but weaving together into a choir that sang hymns of praise to the Sea Mother. Their songs continued sometimes for hours a" and they were songs hi the truest sense, songs that were sung again and again by Their ageless creators, unchanging over centuries.

She knew that; although their complexity was beyond her ability to separate one song from another, although she was not sure they had any meaning in the sense that a human song did... She knew because she had told herself so.

When she had come out of her unexpected Transfer she had found Ngenet pinioning her hands, his bronze face crumpled with emotion. When she knew him again, he had raised her gloved hands and kissed them. "I believed ... I always believed, hoped, prayeda"" his voice broke. "But I never would have dared to ask you. And it's true. I don't know whether to laugh or cry!"

"What a" what is?" Shaking herself out, mentally, physically.

"The mers, Moon! The mers ..." an intelligent, oxygen-utilizing mammalian life form; artificially created through genetic manipulation, designed to serve as host for experimental virusoid longevity factor, special cla.s.s IV... The Old Empire biological specifications had run on endlessly, all but meaningless to her. But Ngenet had made her listen to every detail that had been burned into his memory, the words rough edged with feeling. Intelligent life form ... intelligent...

Moon felt her arms wrapped by Silky's tentacles as he drew her up and over in a somersault, into the pattern of spiraling bodies; caught her up in creating the moment's image. She saw the blue shafted ceiling of the bay slide by far overhead, and the shadowed sandy bottom latticed with colonies of brachiform crenolids, polka dotted with lurid crustaceans. On every side of her slow-motion helix was life, singly or in schools, familiar and unknown, hunters and hunted ... and she pa.s.sed freely among them all in the company of mers, whose ancestral territory she had traveled to this place to see a" who were a threat to few and feared none, here in the ocean depths ... who feared nothing except the Hunt.

Stunned, she had asked Miroe how the off worlders could justify the water of life if they knew that the mers were more than just animals. "They must know it, if the sibyls know."

"Human beings have been treating each other like animals forever. If they can't recognize an intelligent being in the mirror, it's not so d.a.m.n surprising that they treat nonhumans even worse." Ngenet had glanced down at Silky, crouched pensively by the rail watching the water surge and retreat. "And even if the mers were no more than animals, what right does that give us to murder them for our vanity? The mers were genetically synthetic. They must have been meant as a test case; the Old Empire must have collapsed before anyone could generalize their 'benign infection' to give perfect immortality to a human being. But killing mers for the water of life goes back into the chaos at the Empire's end a" when the ones who took immortality for themselves didn't care what it cost in lives. The truth was probably suppressed a millennium ago, when the Hedge first rediscovered this world. So now they only have to worry about what it costs, period."

"But a" why did the Old Empire make mers intelligent at all?"

"I don't know. And neither do you." He had shaken his head. "There must have been a reason, but why? I only know that they weren't given intelligence in order to become victims of the Hunt!" He had told her then about why he had had use for a smuggler's services, and his father before him: A tradition had been pa.s.sed down from his grandfather, the first native-born ancestor, who had come to love the mers as he loved this world, and made his lands a sanctuary. But later generations had not been satisfied with a pa.s.sive role as protector, and had begun secret hostilities against the exploiters a" with warnings, interference, sabotage a" until ... "that day the Blues burst in on you at the inn, and tore a hole in all our lives." And he had looked northward again with a quizzical frown that had nothing to do with the words.

But now, after another one hundred and fifty years of exploitation, the off worlders were about to leave Tiamat again; the injustice he had tried to stop was almost at an end ... and the time of regression and ignorance almost returned, another half-revolution on an endless wheel of futility. At least Summer would give the mers an inviolate s.p.a.ce in time a" time to replenish their numbers with painful slowness, inevitably righting the hideous wrong their creators had done them.

But wrong and right, time itself, meant nothing to the mers, formed no concept that Moon could recognize in their scheme of things. Unmolested they lived for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. A different set of parameters took precedence in their brain: They lived for the moment, for the ephemeral beauty of a bubble rising into the light and vanis.h.i.+ng a" for the act of creation, of becoming. There was no need, and no purpose, to a lasting artifact; for the song, the dance, the act, was in itself a work of art, like a flower or a life, made more beautiful by its impermanence. The tangible, the material, were of no more use or consequence to them than time itself. Their lives were endless by human standards, and they lived them hedonistic ally absorbed in the sensuous caress of their pa.s.sage through the supple water, the flow of heat and cold, current and surge a" the stunning schism between water and air, the fluid heat of desire, the soothing pressure of a clinging child.

There was little she could have shared in words with them, if there had even been a translator to cross the barrier of incomprehension. And yet here and now among them, even enclosed in the insensate skin of her diver's dry suit she could feel the rigid mind-skin of her perceptions, values, goals, dissolving. She could put aside the memories of what had just pa.s.sed, and the uncertainty ahead, letting now become forever and the future melt into foam. She saw the mer who had been a mother to her circling her exuberantly; knew them all as friends, family, lovers, felt herself become a part of their timeless world... Softly, tentatively at first, she began to blend her voice ll into the harmony of the mer song.

She felt Silky come up close behind her, felt his tentacles slide over her slick-suited shoulders, circle the air hose of her oxygen pack, pull a" "Silky!" The angry protest garbled as she sank her teeth into the regulator, to keep him from jerking it out of her mouth. She brought up her hands, felt more tentacles twine around them as she tried to protect her air supply; pulled her fin-awkward feet up to kick him away. And then she realized that two Silkys struggled beside her; saw the sheathed knife come free from behind the false one's shoulder, swaying among tentacles like a fanged snake, caught between victims. She kicked out, thrusting him away with her feet, but not before the blade chose a victim and she saw the dark cloud of blood at Silky's shoulder.

She caught Silky in her arms, trying to swim them both out of reach of the killer; but the quiet waters suddenly boiled with forms as the mers from the sh.o.r.e colony poured into the sea, were herded together with the rest into a panic-stricken ma.s.s. They thrashed around her, crowded her heavily, flipper, head, body, banging and bruising. She clung grimly to Silky's sluggish, grasping tentacles, struggling upward through the chaos. But the brightening water above showed her the silhouette of the heavy net settling toward them, the black stain of a strange s.h.i.+p's double hull breaking the surface of the bay. More figures that should have been Silky but were not guided the net's fall as it settled on her like a shroud, dragging her back down in wild claustrophobia... The Hunt! No a" it can't be! Not here, not here...

But it was useless to deny that the impossible had its fingers at her throat; that the mers below her were maddened by the pain and disorientation of alien sonics ... that they would all die. She let go of Silky, keeping close by him, saw him nod and weave his tentacles through the netting as she bent double and pulled the diver's knife from the sheath on her leg. She began to slash with all her strength at the strands of the net; it tore under the angry attack of her blade, left her a s.p.a.ce wide enough for them to slip through.

She swam through the gap, drawing Silky after her, just as the net forced them down into the maddened mers. But she clung to the opening, still slas.h.i.+ng, ripping, widening the gap. "Here! Here! Get out, get out, get out!" shouting into the ululation of then: cries, half sobbing with furious rage. But the mers' panic was deaf to coherent thought, and the handful who tumbled through were only driven out by the heaving turmoil beneath them. She searched them for her mer mother, but did not find her. She went on slas.h.i.+ng, cursing; gasping with the effort of pulling in air. But the mers were drowning, helplessly drowning themselves for their murderers, and she could not save them...

Silky hung at the net beside her, moving clumsily, stunned by his wound or by the sonics that had dazzled the mers. Looking up at him, she saw two of the Hounds fall out of the heights and bind him in tentacles, breaking his hold on the netting as More tentacles wrapped her from behind, half blinding her, wrenched the knife from her grasp as she tried to turn it on her attacker. Like flailing snakes they covered her face mask, found her air hose again, tore the regulator out of her mouth. Icy water squirted in through the mask's seal, and panic gave her the strength of two. But the Hound's bonds of flesh gave her no leverage, and it was only the strength of two women drowning...

Not until her head broke the surface, not until her bursting lungs opened at last to pull in air and not the final, agonizing liquid breath, did she realize that they had not held her under to drown; that they were not finished with her yet.

She stumbled, incredulously, as her fins caught in bottom-weeds; she squeezed the ocean's fiery tears out of her eyes, saw the lapping water's edge and the sh.o.r.e rising ahead. Two Hounds propelled her out onto firm ground; half dragged, half carried her up the stony beach of the mer rookery. There were no mers left on it now, and the Hounds let her fall untended, to lie coughing and choking. She heard another body drop beside her on the hard stones, saw Silky sprawled next to her. She levered up on her elbows to reach him, tried to see his wound but could not; squeezed his nearer shoulder with feeble encouragement.

She sat up, every breath crawling down her raw throat into her congested lungs; pulled off her fogging mask and felt the bitter wind stun her face. After a time more figures emerged from the water down the beach, hauling an unwieldy harvest of mer corpses into the shallows for the final processing. Moon ground her fists into the beach cinders, whimpering softly, but not for herself.

Standing nearer on the sh.o.r.e, watching them work, was a strange apparition in black, with a man's form and the spiny head of a totem creature. She saw him wave and gesture, his toneless voice came to her half-inaudibly over the wind a" a human voice. The first mers were dragged up onto the sh.o.r.e; she watched a Hound kneel by each, saw the knife flash, and the blood spill over the fur as soft as sighs, into the collecting bucket. And then, its grace gone, its life stolen, its joy and beauty torn away, the Hound left the body to rot on its ancestral beach and make a feast for the carrion birds.

Moon's eyes swam, refusing to see more. Sickness rose in her, and a murderous hatred. Her hand closed over a heavy cobble, tightening and tightening; she got to her knees. Beside her Silky pulled himself up, climbed to his feet in one abrupt motion, leaning on her shoulder. She heard him speak, not understanding the words, but feeling the deeper wound he had taken to watch his brothers slaughtering his friends. He went forward, staggering a little, before she could follow. He started toward the inhuman being in black and the cl.u.s.ter of Hounds around him.

"Silkya"" She struggled to her feet, kicking off her fins, cradling the stone as she started after him.

The man in black barely glanced their way. "Stop them." He gestured indifferently, and three of the Hounds left his side to block Silky's advance, surrounding him without hesitation. There was a burst of alien speech, and a muttering; and then she saw them struggle. Tentacles whipped at heads and silvered eyes, she saw a silvery knife bared again' No Silky!" She ran forward. The third Hound broke away and caught at her, fcrew her aside a" as she saw the serrated blade sink ki home. She screamed, as though she had taken the blow herself. Silky fell like a stone among the stones. The man hi black turned at her scream, but even as he did she struck the third Hound with all her strength, clubbing him down. The others grabbed her, held her struggling between them as the third staggered, bleeding, to his feet and ripped off the hood of her suit, baring her throat. Her hair spilled loose over her shoulders, tentacles tangled in it, jerking back her head.

"Stop!" Someone shouted the word. But she had no voice and no time at all, only a last kaleidoscope of clouds and sky as the dripping blade bit her throatA shock of violent motion hurled the Hounds away from her, knocked her to the ground. "Get away from her! What the h.e.l.l do you think you're doing?" The heavy boots of the man hi black straddled her, sheltering her like a tree in the face of a storm. She looked up and up, seeing only his shadow silhouette against the desolate stone-washed sh.o.r.e. "... Because she's a sibyl, G.o.dd.a.m.n it, that's why! What are you trying to do, contaminate me? Get the h.e.l.l away, and throw that knife into the seal" He waved them off, stepped clear of her as they left, and squatted down beside her.

Moon pushed herself up warily, felt a thin warm necklace of blood trickle down over the tattoo hi the hollow of her throat, creep on into the neck of her suit and down between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

The man in black ... she was sure it was a man now, hidden behind a mask. His eyes were all that she could see of him, and they were gray-green. He stretched an uncertain glove toward her throat. She cringed back, startled, but he wiped the blood from her tattoo with a sudden sweep of his hand. She saw him shudder at the sign of the trefoil; he rubbed his gloved hand convulsively on the stones. "G.o.ds! Am I going crazy?" He looked away, searching the sh.o.r.e for a denial, an affirmation. "You aren't real. You can't be! What are you?" His hand rose again, caught her chin to hold her face hi front of him; let it go, slipping across her cheek, along her hair almost like a caress. "Not her ..." It was almost a plea.

She lifted her own gloved hand to her throat, where pain was spreading from ear to ear, chin to breastbone; s.h.i.+elding her wound, s.h.i.+elding the trefoil from his gaze. "Moon," she whispered, not sure why she gave her name, but grateful that she still had a voice left to speak it. "Sibyla"" her voice roughened, "yes, I am! And I tell you that you've committed murder. You have no right to hunt these lands. And no man has the right to murder an intelligent being!" She swept a hand toward the carnage on the beach, not following it with her eyes. "It's murder, murder!"

His eyes followed, came back as green and hard as emeralds. "Shut up, d.a.m.n youa"" But they stayed on her face, incredulous, demanding, and his hands knotted on his knees. "d.a.m.n you, d.a.m.n you! What are you doing here? How could you come here, to see me like this? After you left me a" I could kill you for this!" He twisted his head, wrenching his eyes away, throwing the words into the wind.

"Yes! Yes! Kill me too, mer slayer, sibyl slayer, coward a" and d.a.m.n yourself!" She bared her throat to him again, grimacing with the motion. "Spill my blood, and take its curse on you!" She stretched out her b.l.o.o.d.y fingers, trying to reach him, wound him, infect him But her hand lost its strength, fell from the air forgotten, as she saw at last the symbol that gleamed on his black suit: the circle sign crossed and recrossed, the sign of the Hegemony; the medal that she had seen every day of her life in Summer... Her hand rose again, and he did not stop her from touching it. Slowly, slowly, she lifted her eyes, knowing that in another moment she would' No His fist came at her without warning and crushed her into blackness.

Chapter 31.

"h.e.l.lo, Miroe." Jerusha climbed out of the patrol craft wearing her uniform and her best imitation smile. The wind clapped its chill hands on her shoulders, tried to jerk her half-sealed coat open for ruder intimacies. d.a.m.n this weather! Her smile struggled.

"Jerusha?" Ngenet came striding down the slope from the outbuildings, summoned by field hands who had seen her coming in.

His own widening smile of welcome looked real to her, and hers began to warm. But she read ambivalence in the glance that took hi her uniform before it met her eyes. "It's been a long time."

"Yes." She nodded, an excuse to look down, wondering if time was all that lay behind his hesitation. "I know. How a" how've you been, Miroe?"

"About the same. Everything's about the same." He pushed his hands into his parka pockets, shrugged. "It usually is. Is this official business, or strictly a social call?" He peered past her into the empty patrol craft "A little of both, I guess," trying to make it sound casual. She saw his mouth tighten ever so slightly, twitching his mustache. "That is, we had a report on a tech runner downed near here" a" fully two or three weeks ago a" "and since I was in the area checking it out..."

"The Commander of Police chasing down strays in the outback? Since when?" amused.

"Well, I was the only one they could spare." She grinned ruefully, stretching the unused muscles in her cheeks.

Laughter. "d.a.m.n it, Jerusha, you know you don't need an official excuse to come by here. You're welcome any time ... as a friend."

"Thank you." She understood the qualification and was grateful for it. "It's nice to be singled out as a human being for a change, and not as a Blue." She plucked at her coat, suddenly embarra.s.sed by it. My s.h.i.+eld, my armor. What will I do when they take it away from me? "I... I tried to call you, a couple of weeks ago. But you were gone." It occurred to her suddenly to wonder why he hadn't returned the call. G.o.ds, who could blame him, when I never returned any of his?

"I'm sorry, I couldn'ta"" He seemed to reach the same question, without finding an answer either. "You've been a" busy, I suppose."

"Busy! Oh, h.e.l.l and devils, it's been ... sheer h.e.l.l, and devils." She leaned against the patrol craft pulled down the door and slammed it. "BZ is gone, Miroe. Dead. Killed by bandits outside the city. And I just can't ... I can't stand it any more." Her head bowed hi invisible bondage. "I don't know how I'll be able to stand going back to Carbuncle again. When all I can think of is how much better it would be for everyone, how glad everyone would be, if I never came back at all. How much better it would be if I'd been the one who'd been lost."

"By all the G.o.ds, Jerusha a" why didn't you tell me?"

She turned away from his outstretched hand, leaning on the hood, looking desperately out to sea. "I didn't come here to a" to use you for a garbage can, d.a.m.n it!"

"Of course you did. What are friends for?" She heard his smile.

"I did not!"

"All right. Then why not? Why not?" He pulled at her elbow.

"Don't touch me. Please, Miroe, don't." She felt his hand release her, felt her arm still tingling with the contact. "I can handle it. I'll be all right, I can handle it alone." Her control hung by a thread.

"And you feel like dying is the way to do it?"

"No!" She brought her fist down on the cold metal. "No. That's why I had to get away ... I had to find some other way." She turned back, slowly, but with her eyes shut.

He was silent for a moment, waiting. "Jerusha a" I know the kind of screws they've been putting to you, all this time. You can't handle that kind of pressure by holding it all back. You can't do it alone." Suddenly almost angry, "Why did you stop calling? Why did you stop a" answering? Didn't you trust me?"

"Too much." She pressed her mouth together, stopping an absurd giggle. "Oh, G.o.ds. I trust you too much! Look at me, I haven't been here five minutes and already I've spilled my guts to you. Just seeing you breaks me down." She shook her head, keeping her eyes closed. "You see. I can't lean on you, without becoming a cripple,"

"We're all cripples, Jerusha. We're born crippled."

Slowly she opened her eyes. "Are we?"

He stood with hands locked behind him, looking out toward the sea. The wind stiffened, whipping his raven-feather hair; she shrank down inside her heavy coat. "You know the answer, or you wouldn't have come. Let's go up to the house." He looked back at her; she nodded.

She followed him up the hill, making hesitant small talk about crops and weather, letting all her resistance flow out of her and down to the sea. They pa.s.sed the creaking windmill that stood like a lonely sentinel over the outbuildings. He used it to pump water from his well; it occurred to her again, as it had occurred to her before, ; that it was an absurd anachronism on a plantation that functioned ' on imported power units.

"Miroe, I've always wondered why you use that thing to power your pump."

He glanced back at her, away at the windmill, said good-naturedly, "Well, you took away my hovercraft, Jerusha. You can never tell when I might lose my generators."

It was not the answer she had been expecting, but she only shook her head. They reached the main house, went in through the storm shuttered porch, into the room she still remembered perfectly from the first time; and from the handful of stolen evenings hi the years since then that she had spent cross-legged before the fire, wrapped in warmth and golden light, caught up in a game of 3D chama or feeding Miroe's quiet fascination with her reminiscences about another world.

She pulled off her helmet, shook out her dark curls. She let her eyes wander over the comfortable junk-shop homeliness of the room, where relics of his off worlder ancestors, heirlooms by default, kept uneasy truce with rough-hewn native furniture. Moving to the broad stone hearth she turned to face him, letting her back begin to thaw. "You know, after all this time I feel like I haven't even been away. Funny, isn't it, how some places are like that?"

He looked up at her from halfway across the room; didn't answer, but smiled. "Why don't you take your things upstairs? I'll get us something to eat."

She picked up the shoulder bag she had hah filled with a change of clothing, climbed the worn staircase to the second story. It was a large house ... filled with echoes of children and laughter ... filled with memories. The banister under her hand was worn smooth by the polis.h.i.+ng of countless hands; but the halls, the rooms, were empty and silent now. Only Miroe, the last of his line, alone. Alone even among the Winters who worked for him here. She sensed the bond of trust and respect that seemed to exist between them, a stronger bond than she would have expected between owner and workers, natives and off worlder But there was always an intangible field of reserve surrounding him, keeping him separate, self-contained. She felt it, sometimes, striking sparks against her own.

She entered the room she had always taken, threw her bag and her helmet down on the rumpled bed, watched them sink into the comforters. The wooden-framed bed itself was as hard as a board a" was a board, for all she knew a" but she had never lam awake here for half the night, praying for sleep while her eyes burned a hole through her lids in the dark...

She unfastened her coat, took it off, started toward the ma.s.sive wardrobe with it. Stopped, as her gaze landed on the eye-stunning chartreuse flightsuit lying in a heap on the wardrobe's floor. She hung her coat on a hook mechanically, picked up the jump suit and held it against herself. Held it at arm's length again, studying the contours. Then, slowly, she took her coat back and hung the flightsuit in its place.