Gemmi expanded through Mischa’s consciousness, laughing with delight despite having been forced to seek her out. Mischa cringed. “No,” she said softly. “Not now. Go away.” But she was speaking to herself, not to Gemmi. Gemmi could not understand.
Mischa stilled her mind, stilled her body, hoping Gemmi would lose her, and waited. Gemmi could be reliving old memories; they came sometimes, unbidden, and the child had no way of stopping them. But this was real: screaming, she found Mischa again and whimpered, telling her to come, afraid of being hurt.
Mischa had been expecting the summons, knowing at least one was inevitable before Subtwo was likely to leave Center. She had not worried about it too much; as long as she continued to keep her plans secret, everything should proceed as usual. But the command had come at the worst possible time.
“I can’t come now,” Mischa yelled into her lonely room. “I’ll come later. Tomorrow. Go away.” Her voice echoing back and forth in Mischa’s mind, Gemmi cried, and screamed again. Mischa knew that no reassurance but her own approach could calm her sister. She got up and pulled her cache from its hiding place, a fissure in the rock wall behind a tapestry. Under her jacket, the leather surface of the box of eyes was smooth against her skin. With the bag of lesser gems nestled in an inside pocket, she left her room.
Going down the hall, she met Jan. Greeting her, he smiled, but sobered when he noticed her grim expression. “What’s wrong?”
“I have to leave.”
“What about tomorrow morning?”
“I’ll try to be back,” she said. She would, but she knew there was no way of getting to the edge of the city and back by the time she was supposed to meet Subtwo. “I can’t help it, there’s something I have to do.” Gemmi felt that she had stopped, and began to scream again. Mischa closed her eyes to concentrate on calming her. “I’m coming,” she whispered.
Jan took her arm to steady her. “Are you all right?”
She looked up at him. His pale eyebrows were drawn together with concern; Mischa realized dully around the screaming in her head that she wanted to ask his help. “Yes,” she said, in a resigned exhalation of her breath. There was nothing she could ask him for. She started away.
“Mischa?”
She turned back quickly, impatient now.
“If I can help—”
She shook her head. “No. Thanks. There isn’t any way.”
o0o
After the regular tunnels of Center, the caves began to twist downward. Mischa’s family, when it had been a family, had lived in the roots of the system, almost in the deep underground. As Mischa walked, Gemmi pecked at her, urging her on faster. Mischa neither sped up nor tried to push her sister away. Gemmi was not being beaten now. Their uncle had stopped that since the time he had made her sick.
Mischa sometimes hoped he would kill her.
Gemmi screamed at the thought of death. The fear swept Mischa like the taste of molten copper. The intensity of emotion shook her, but she recovered herself and soothed her sister until Gemmi only whimpered. Mischa leaned against the rough stone wall. Gemmi did not know what death was, but it frightened her; anyone in her range who died, she felt. Her perception of dying was so unfocused and colored by fear that Mischa could not tell what made her so afraid.
When Mischa stopped shaking, she continued, passing through the wellcell and the cool sound of running water, through a familiar tunnel in which fewer light-tubes burned every time Mischa returned. They wore out, and no one bothered to replace them. Now, at night, they barely glowed.
Mischa knew everyone who lived down here: as many different types as individuals. A few had had a life and lost it. Some had never had a chance, and many simply did not care. She spoke to those who noticed her. They grew angry at pity, so she never let it show; there was no point in hating them; and she could not feel superior. They were much too close to her.
Gemmi had forgotten her fear almost as soon as Mischa turned her thoughts away from death. The child gurgled with excitement and pleasure as Mischa came nearer, until the voice of her mind mingled with audible, garbled words. Mischa pushed at the clinging sour fog of her, but Gemmi just bounced back and laughed. Their uncle knew the signs of Mischa’s approach.
“Hurry up.”
The door was left ajar for her to enter; she pushed aside the new, plush curtain beyond it. In a cave that always before had been dim, the light was dazzling. Her parents had not cared much about light, for they had been content in their own separate mind-worlds, growing more and more remote as the years passed, until one day Gemmi had begun to cry, so loudly and so desperately that both Mischa and Chris were drawn to her, to comfort her, to quiet her, somehow to make her stop screaming directly into their brains. She had reason enough: her parents were dead, and that must have terrified her, though the two dead faces wore expressions of peace. Mischa sometimes thought they had not so much died as pressed their existence to its logical extreme. She had seen so little of them in their life: she did not know what caused either’s near-oblivion to reality. It could have been madness, withdrawal, apathy, or some capacity like Gemmi’s for living in the minds of others. They had wandered about, seldom speaking, satisfying their biological urges, eating, sleeping, coming together for sex, neither bothering to suppress fertility. They and their children were cared for indifferently by the children’s crippled uncle, supported first by Chris, then by Mischa.
Mischa’s uncle: son of her father’s father, of her mother’s mother, half-brother to both Mischa’s parents, who had not been related at all. A double half-uncle. He had never been happy, never been satisfied with subsistence rations. Since learning of Gemmi’s power, his demands had increased, and lately accelerated. Now Mischa knew what he wanted the extra money for.
Bedecked in the style of Stone Palace, the old cave held soft cushions, tapestries, many lights. Delicacies, fruit grown outside, imported and expensive, filled a bowl on a low table. A companion lounged near the back of the single chamber, dozing or watching: one of the smooth, beautiful, sexless ones her uncle favored, but this one was classes higher than Mischa was accustomed to seeing down here. Classes higher, classes more expensive. Mischa knew the value of what she had stolen: not this much.
Her uncle lay on a wide couch, dressed in a long, full robe that hid his crippled legs. In bizarre semblance of happy paternity, he held Gemmi cuddled in his lap. She nestled against him, content with any scrap of human contact. She was younger than Mischa but bigger, and beginning to mature. She wore only a shirt; no one liked the job of keeping her clean. The shirt had lost all its buttons, and its gaping revealed her breasts. The heavy chain on her ankle still secured her to the stone wall.
Mischa stood frowning, overwhelmed by the aura of wrongness. Only Gemmi, with her murmurs, broke the silence. The other children, the younger ones, were gone.
“Say hello to Mischa, Gemmi.” He smiled. His teeth showed, in the very center of his mouth, as though he were sneering.
Gemmi tumbled over Mischa like a sandfall, but Mischa took the assault without flinching. “Where are the kids?”
“Gone.”
“Where?”
“Where do you think?”
The blood drained from her face. She had expected him to send them out to steal for him when they were old enough, but she had never believed, never even considered, that he would use them worse than that. Her voice was calm and low with rage. “You sold them.”
“They’re mine.”
“They’re not. You had no right.”
He laughed, and the harsh sound echoed around them. “Did you want them?” Gemmi cringed against his warmth, not realizing it was he whom she feared.
“But why?”
He gestured around him, and she could feel his pent-up envy and hatred. “For this. For this, instead of crying brats and boredom and stink and pain.”
“You could have—”
“Depended on their gratitude?” He laughed, bitter and ugly. “They didn’t have your talent.” He was enjoying his hold on her. “Gemmi couldn’t touch them. I’d never have got a thing.”
Mischa’s eyes burned with tears of anger and guilt that she willed back. “Where did you send them?”
“Where you’re going.”
“You try and make me.”
“You got caught.”
“So what?” Her voice broke, high, angry.
“You can’t do anything for me when you’re in trouble.”
“I wasn’t flogged for stealing.”
He laughed again. “Sure.” A long drawl of disbelief. “That’s a lot of scars for nothing.” He held Gemmi closer, fondling her absently, in a parody of love. “Take off your shirt.”
“No.”
He started, flushing, then relaxed and smiled. Contentment did not fit easily on his face. “You might not be worth much. They like to start you clean.”
Mischa caught her breath involuntarily, for he had just told her, by implication, that her two small brothers and her baby sister had been sold as beggars, to be mutilated at some owner’s whim and made into performing animals.
“When?” She backed toward the door, ready to turn and run, do something, anything.
“Long enough,” he said. “They wouldn’t even recognize you now. All they know is that they have to beg.”
Mischa touched her knife.
“Oh, stop it,” he said. “They didn’t mean anything to you. Stop pretending they did.”
“That’s a lie.” But it was true she had never tried to take them and raise them as Chris had taken her. None had really been a person to her: though more aware than Gemmi, they had all been of severely limited intelligence. Mischa and Chris had kept them adequately fed, adequately clothed, but now Mischa knew she had had one more responsibility that would never be discharged, because it was too late. They had deserved a chance to have their own lives.
Her uncle thought of pain, and of delight in her humiliation. Gemmi broadcast it. Mischa forced the intrusion away, but her resistance only hurt the little girl, and Gemmi cried through the incomprehensible war. “Leave her alone,” Mischa said. Her mind crawled and spun. “I won’t do it.”
“I have an investment in you,” he said. “And I think I should get it back.”
Mischa pulled the bag and the small flat box from inside her jacket. She threw the bag at his feet. “That’s from Chris.” The box followed. “And that’s from me. See if you still think we can do better kinking with some chuckie or crawling in the dirt.”
He picked up the bag first, hefting it. “Maybe I don’t need to call him back after all,” he said. “But I heard he’s sick.”
“He’s all right,” Mischa lied.
He tossed the jewels aside. “He’s harder to call than you are. But I will call him if he doesn’t do better next time.” Leaning forward, reaching around Gemmi, he picked up the box, slid his fingers across the smoothly pebbled top, and loosed the delicate clasp. Open, the box caught the light in its interior and flung it, even brighter, against the new tapestries. The companion sat languidly up, but even such a small reaction was a serious breach of pose, revealing covetousness. Through her tears, Gemmi saw the reflections and reached for them. The eyes scattered in the sand. Her uncle shoved her off his lap and slapped her. Mischa felt the wrench of muscles and the clacking pain of teeth hitting together; she tasted the salt of blood. She caught herself against the wall. Gemmi lay on the ground, writhing feebly with half-formed crawling motions. Beside her, similarly, their uncle scrabbled in the sand, picking up the shiny bits, and his companion, swaying, moved to help. Mischa stumbled away from the cave. She had not gotten very far when he realized she was gone. Gemmi began to scream. Her insane and stupid mind swirled down around Mischa, suffocating her. She could feel Gemmi being beaten. “Mischa!” The only name she knew. Mischa turned back. One final blow smashed against her temple, and darkness followed the pain.
Suddenly everything was quiet, everything around her and in her mind. The stone wall was cool against her cheek. She pushed herself away from it and shakily stood without support. Gemmi was gone.
Mischa knew that if she went back to Center now she might be forced to return as soon as her sister was able to call, but she would not stay and wait to be summoned like a slave. For a short time, at least, while her sister was unconscious, no one in the world had any hold over her.
o0o
Jan Hikaru’s Journal:
Ah, I don’t understand. Mischa came, and now she’s gone, but I don’t know where or why, or even if she’s coming back. When she did not return for her lesson, Subtwo called me in, asking where she was, and I gave him some kind of incomprehensible babble about emergencies. I’m worried about her, but I don’t even know where to look for her. How can I help if I don’t know what’s wrong? I thought we had built up some trust… maybe her troubles require more than trust to solve.
I had to get out of Stone Palace, beyond the arc, the bars, the beggars. Only on top of the hills can one get even a spurious feeling of spaciousness; otherwise, anywhere in Center is like being in a cell.
o0o
Late in the morning, Mischa reached the floor of Center and started along the Circle. Gemmi had not called her again.
The cries of hawkers and drunks and parties and beggars closed in around her as she entered the arc. It was like walking through an invisible morass. A twisted child crawled toward her and caught at the back of her jacket. She walked faster. It clutched at her ankle. It mewled at her, and she broke into a run. She could not look at it, even with the sneer with which her peer group usually regarded beggars. Especially with the sneer. She was afraid to look at it, afraid of new mutilations on familiar bodies, afraid of blanked-out memories, afraid of the dull resignation in all the eyes.
She had always forced herself to do the things she thought she feared, but she did not force herself to look at the beggar. She fled it, running faster through the arc until her breath exploded in her throat with every inhalation. She pushed herself between people who grew angry and would have beaten her if they could have caught her. Tears spilled down her cheeks and half-blinded her, but still she ran. The deep sand seemed put there purposely to slow her down. Then, in front of the Palace, ranks on ranks of the beggars confronted her. She stumbled to a stop, and they turned to stare at her. She looked back and forth quickly, almost frantically searching for an alternate route that did not exist. A hand with only the first joints of fingers pawed at her; she shied like one of the caravannaires’ ponies. “Get away—” They came closer, smiling when she looked away. They had two weapons in their trade: guilt and fear. Either was effective. The hunched, ancient children advanced on her; they knew her: the aloof young thief with never a coin nor a sympathetic word, only arrogance. They saw her scared; they smiled, baring rotten teeth. One of them laughed. Its voice was a high stringed instrument, badly bowed. Mischa backed away, until a rough wall barred her, the ramp above just too high to reach. She pressed her hands against the stone. The beggars moved closer to her, seething like a tide of rats. Mischa was frightened, but not of the physical danger they represented. She tried not to look at their faces. One moved toward her from the edge of the semicircle. She slammed him on the chin with the heel of her hand. Her hand sank into boneless flesh. Next to the wall, she leaped over him; she pushed past another and jumped for the edge of the helix-ramp. She pulled herself by her fingernails and began to climb, headlong.
o0o
Mischa left the door ajar behind her. The curtain of Chris’s niche was torn a third of the way across the top and no lights showed beyond the gap. But Chris was there, she knew he was there: she stood very still and finally heard his shallow breathing, and felt him, almost silent in his mind. She pushed the curtain aside and saw him lying in his bed. She moved, and light from the doorway touched his hair. His eyes, half-closed, glinted beneath his long eyelashes.
“Chris?”
Some time later, he answered. “Yeah?”
“Can I stay here for a little while?”
Again a pause. Chris pushed himself up on his elbow, barely raising his shoulders and head. His bones were prominent. “Mischa?”
“Yes.”
“Sure.”
She slipped past the curtains. He squinted against the brief, bright illumination, gone before his translucent hand could cut the glare. Mischa glanced at the drab cloths hiding the far wall, relieved that anything on it was obscured.
“Hey,” Chris said. “What’s wrong?”
She sat on the floor next to him. “I just went home.”
He touched her hand with fingers like a bat’s wing, narrow and frail. “Can I help?”
She shook her head. He was helping just by being there and being alive; he was helping because though his eyes were bloodshot and the pale skin below them shadowed with exhaustion, his gaze did not wander.
“What else?”
Mischa had somehow almost forgotten how calming and pleasant Chris’s voice was when he was not whining. He sounded concerned, and very tired.
“He sold the kids.”
Chris tightened his hand on hers, slowly. “Ah…”
“We—” She stopped. She could not put any of the blame for this on him.
“I never did anything for them. I should have taken them—”
“He would have made Gemmi make you bring them back.”
“I could have tried. I couldn’t with Gemmi, I couldn’t stand her so close all the time, but maybe with them… like you did with me.”
Chris looked away. “That was different, between you and me…it wasn’t the same at all.”
“Why not?” She said it dully, not for an answer, because she did not think there was an answer.
Chris shrugged without speaking, still staring at the covered wall. After a while he turned his head and looked at her and pushed himself half up. “Misch… Misch, you know if he really wanted to do it, there’s nothing either of us could have done.” His voice was gentle.
“Nothing…”
He reached up, lifting a great burden, and touched the drying tears on her cheek. She wiped them on her sleeve, quickly, ashamed. Chris moved over. “Come and sleep.”
Gratefully, she slid under the thin blanket beside him. Chris did not tell her that everything would be all right, and for that she was grateful too. He took her in his arms and held her; in her exhaustion she could imagine him to be the dependable and defiant person he had been when both of them were younger. Huddled against him, she felt him smooth the tangled hair back from her forehead with a gentle hand that trembled.
o0o
Chris seemed not to have moved at all when Mischa woke up, nor, she thought, had he slept. But he had felt her waking; he was not shutting out the world.
“How are you?”
“Better,” Mischa said. “Okay.” She stretched, hands over her head, fists clenched. She sat up and looked around Chris’s dim room. It was almost empty. The drab cloths hung across his work-wall like a shroud. She got up and wandered through the room; she was hungry, but there was no food.
“Chris, I’m leaving.”
He raised his eyebrows in a question; they did not ordinarily explain themselves to each other.
“I’m leaving Center, I mean. The Palace has new people in it. I’m leaving with them in the spring.”
“That’s good, Mischa.” She could hear nothing in his voice, no envy, no regret, no joy.
“Will you come?”
His green eyes appeared black in the dimness; then, for a moment, they caught light and reflected it like an animal’s. He looked away. “No… hell, no.”
“They could help you out there.”
“Just go ahead and go.”
“I don’t want to leave without you.”
“Yes you do.”
“You know what I mean.”
He closed his eyes and said nothing.
“Don’t go sullen on me, Chris. Please.”
“It wouldn’t work.”
“If you keep saying that maybe you’ll believe it.”
With his eyes still closed, he nodded very faintly.
“It’d be interesting,” she said.
He shrugged and turned his head away.
Mischa began to get angry at him, and her voice rose. “It isn’t working here, so what difference does it make?”
Shallow lines of annoyance crossed his smooth forehead, but he did not open his eyes when he spoke. “You were never like this before.”
“Neither were you!”
The tension rose between them in the silence.
Chris let his breath out in a long sigh. “You don’t owe me this.”
She knelt beside his bed, leaning forward. “I owe you.”
“Then leave me alone. Just leave me alone for a change.”
Mischa sat back on her heels. The air felt cold. She stood up, crossed the room, and stood beside the shrouded wall with her fists clenched.
“Have you been working?”
He shoved himself up, abruptly, startled, attentive. His dirty hair fell across his eyes and he flung it back. “Get away from there.” Chris never raised his voice. When he was most angry, his voice was this grating whisper.
Mischa grabbed the gray cloth. “Is this all that’s left of you?” she cried.
He crawled toward her, out of the bed, across the floor, trying to get to his feet. He stumbled and fell forward. Mischa tried to catch him, but his hands and elbows slammed into the floor. He lay in the dirt, panting; he hid his face in his hands.
Mischa touched his grimy hair and took his thin hand, gently pulling it away from his face. Tears streaked the dirt. “Just come stay with me,” Mischa said. “For a little while.”
“All right,” he said, without looking at her.
o0o
As Mischa approached the tall double doors of the pseudosibs’ quarters, she could feel the emotionless passion of Subone flowing slowly around her, obscuring all but a tendril of intellectual involvement from Subtwo. She hesitated before knocking on the door, thinking that she could put this off, that she perhaps should not disturb him. She was already a day late. She knocked.
The door slid open. The geometric symmetry of Subtwo’s quarters had not been disarranged by time. No echo or limestone odor hinted that the rooms were built inside a cave; no smell or sound indicated that a person lived within. Mischa went into the next room and found Subtwo sitting with his back to her, playing his computer as a composer might an organ. He did not turn; it occurred to her that with his automatic responses to external stimuli, he might have let her in almost without noticing. She waited behind him, but he did not slow his work, or turn, or speak.
“I’m back.”
If he had not known she was there, he showed no surprise. He shifted slightly and Mischa could see the screen that had held an image of the corridor the first time she had come. Now her own face looked out, moving left when she moved right, and vice versa. She glanced at where the camera must be, for the angle, but could not find it.
“It’s a new one,” Subtwo said without looking at her. “It’s very small.” Continuing his work at the console, he watched Mischa via the screen.
“Where have you been?”
“In Center.”
“Jan Hikaru said you had an emergency. I hope everything is all right.”
“Not really.”
“Fine.”
She thought he was being sarcastic, but realized he had simply responded with one of his inappropriate automatic phrases, without listening to what she had said. “I need to talk to you,” she said, rather louder than necessary. Now was not the best time to speak to Subtwo about Chris, but she was afraid to put it off any longer, now that he was here.
He glanced up at the screen, then over his shoulder at her, as though he had no image of a proper response and had to look for a signal in reality. “You missed your lesson.”
“I know, I couldn’t help it, that’s—”
“It’s all right,” he said instantly, interrupting her. He stood up and wandered around the room as Mischa watched with astonishment. His wandering had a posed quality to it; he seemed to be trying it for the first time to see how it fit on him. Mischa had expected anger, sarcasm, or insult. Subtwo stopped before a shelf on which stood a sculpture with planes of symmetry in two dimensions. He turned it so the vertical symmetry faced obliquely and was much less obvious, put his hands behind his back, and regarded it. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“In the morning?”
“We’ll start your lessons then,” he said impatiently. He left the shelf and moved to a desk, where he began systematically to disarrange the papers. Mischa both saw and felt the tension rising in him as he continued.
“What are you doing?”
He looked at her sharply, then slowly returned his gaze to the desk. “I have noticed,” he said, “that… other people… do not live as I do.” He moved the chair, and then the desk.
“People live the way they like to. If they can.”
His face remained impassive, but the tension continued to increase. “I make people uncomfortable.” He moved a table, and a couch.
“Other people make you uncomfortable.”
The smooth skin of his forehead furrowed into two small vertical lines. Mischa realized that, in the short time since she had come, his face had begun to develop permanent lines of feeling and reaction.
“That is true.” He turned his head, and the black hair fell across his cheek. “But I should, perhaps, make some concession.”
“Why?” He seemed to her totally free to do as he pleased; though his tastes were bizarre, he forced them on no one, as others, considered normal, often did.
He raised his eyebrows, looked at his desk, and pushed a stack of papers back into place. He regarded the result, and smiled. “Well… perhaps not.” He moved more papers. “Until tomorrow,” he said, sounding eager. “Your lesson.” The eagerness began to slide into excitement.
“I’d like to talk to you about something,” Mischa said.
“Tomorrow, tomorrow.” He finished straightening the papers, and concentrated on placing them in an even more symmetrical pattern. “Please, not now.”
“It’s important.”
“Tomorrow!” His agitation engulfed her. He pushed the desk violently back against the wall and thrust the chair beneath it. Mischa clenched her fists. Working himself into a frenzy of delight, Subtwo rushed past her to replace the table.
Mischa turned on her heel and left.
Chris lay on Mischa’s bed exactly as she had left him, flat on his back, eyes open, his thin body almost hidden in the soft mattress and thick comforters. Mischa stood beside him, watching, waiting, but he did not notice her until she touched him.
“Chris,” she whispered. He blinked his eyes, but did not respond. Mischa swallowed and spoke more steadily. “Chris, do you want anything? Can you eat something?”
He licked his cracked lips. “I just want to sleep. Did you bring it?”
“There wasn’t any more.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s right. I finished it.” He smiled, unpleasantly, vindicating himself. “You should have left me alone.”
“Shut up.”
He raised his head and Mischa could see some of his old spirit struggling up to strike out at her. “Did you think bringing me here would change anything?”
“I’ll get you some,” she said. “I’ll get you something. Will you stay here?”
His cracked lower lip split; a thin drop of blood trickled down his chin. “I’ll do what I want,” he said.
o0o
Again, Mischa looked for Jan, but could not find him, nor could she wait. She supposed he had gone on another of his excursions into Center, which lasted sometimes as long as two days. He liked people more than she did, she thought; he liked to watch them and talk with them. She had accompanied him outside twice, taking him beyond the bars and brothels of the arc, telling him place names and landmarks, explaining the structure of the city and its society. The first time outside, people had reacted to him as they would to anyone from the Palace, with deference, suspicion, and fear. The second time, without Jan’s having changed overtly, they talked to him, chatted, laughed, complained, and as Mischa listened, Jan’s unaccented speech softened to match hers and theirs. He did not look like anyone Mischa had ever seen in Center, but now, somehow, he blended with her people.
She wished he were here now. She could not decide if coming to the Palace had weakened or strengthened her, whether she had a new resource or was losing her self-reliance, but she wished Jan were here now.