Aubry came slowly to consciousness. He lay in the sand, and it blew over him, a thin curtain of dust dancing across the horizon like a line of ethereal imps. It moaned, low.
He struggled to an upright position. Where? His limbs didn’t want to work. They had been severely traumatized, and there seemed no end to the small aches and pains that there remained for him to discover.
It was early morning. He could tell by the slight sweaty moistness in the sand beneath his cheek, and the cool of the air. Soon it would be blazing hot.
He might have lain there, unmoving, except that from the corner of his eye he saw the aircar. It lay in the sand at an angle, as if it had crashed.
What? He had the vaguest of memories. The sounds of struggle. The sound of screams, and explosions. He had been in darkness, but even in the cell, his cheek frozen to the floor, a single tear gelid on his torn cheek, there had been sound. And screams. And then the blissful release of darkness.
He turned onto his side, struggling as if heaving off boulders. And saw the kneeling, armored figure. The armored man had knelt there, waiting for Aubry to awaken for… how long?
They stared at each other, and for a long time Aubry thought that the man wouldn’t, or couldn’t, speak.
Then he heard the words. They were foreign, accented, and labored. As if it took an unbelievable effort to speak them at all.
“Greetings, my brother,” Go said.
“Who…?”
“Do not speak. I …do not have much time.” A sound very like a laugh came from the armor.
“I was to rescue you. And then I was to kill you.”
“Kill … me?” Aubry was dazed.
“Yes. But neither of us is prepared for that. I am afraid that I am dying. You are badly hurt. But the Ibandi will help you.”
“Ibandi?”
“Wait. You will learn. I should have given you to the others, but … you deserve a chance to heal.”
Go began to fiddle with the faceplate.
“You are … a man. When you have healed, seek out the others. Finish what has begun. Promise me.”
“Promise you what?”
There was another time of silence, and the man finished fumbling with the face mask.
It hung on a hinge, obscuring the face. Aubry looked at the rest of him. The shoulders must have been unusually broad: the armor was built for a giant.
And then he saw the blood, seeping out of a gaping hole in the side of the armor, and heard the wheezing. It was true: the man was dying.
“Promise me … there is struggle. You must find the others.”
“What do I have to do with this?”
The man laughed. “You will see,” he said. The mask fell free, and Aubry found himself looking into his own face.
Once again, as in Tyson’s All-Faiths, the face was not exactly Aubry—it had eaten different foods, grown beneath a different sky, perhaps. There were keloid scars across it, and a front tooth was missing. But it was Aubry’s face, the unaltered Aubry, before the plastic surgery.
“What is this?”
“We have all asked that question,” Go mused. “And only one of us can answer it. Oh, it hurts …” He pulled himself back from some far place, and faced Aubry. “Take this.” He fumbled, managed to pull a slender cylinder of metal and plastic from his belt. It was slicked with blood. “A tracer. When you are ready, trigger it. You will find the others. Listen. I called to the Ibandi, and they will come to you. Trust them. They are your people.”
“My …” Aubry looked at the man, and didn’t understand.
“Look at your skin. You speak the white man’s language, and you think his thoughts, except that your body doesn’t belong to his family. Do you not feel that there is something more?”
Aubry faced him and said, “I was born in the city of Los Angeles. It was all I knew. My father died when I was eight. I know the streets. That’s all.”
God, it hurt even to talk, but it felt like the words were being dragged out of him one at a time, with fishhooks.
“Aubry Knight,” Go said. “With no past, and no future. With no one to love you, or help you find yourself. Wallowing in corruption, and plagued by violence and anger. How did you survive?”
Aubry felt a terrible weight hanging over his head, almost but not quite something that he hadn’t seen there before. “I don’t know …”
“You will learn.”
And Aubry felt a sudden jolt of unreasoning fear. “What do you want from me?”
“You,” the man said. And then his head sagged.
Aubry dragged himself over to the armored man and touched him. There was no movement. The sand blew across the desert, a low call that powdered the kinky hair. But there were no more words.
“Who am I?” Aubry whispered in a drugged voice. But there was no answer, and could be none, ever again, from those lips.
The sand danced across the desert like a curtain in the wind, and the sun touched the edge of the horizon. The light changed with fearsome speed, and became a shadow play of oranges and deep purples.
Aubry tried to drag himself to the crashed vehicle. It was easy to find it, he thought. Just follow the trail of blood. So much blood.
And it was junk, wrecked. And the radio. Oh, yes, he could use the radio. And call what down upon himself?
He was terribly far from home, and surrounded by enemies. There were, he reminded himself, things worse than death.
So suppose he just settled back, him and the other Aubry, and they looked at each other, one whose eyes were sightless, and another whose sight grew duller by the moment.
There came a shadowy figure. It came from out of the wind, and he thought, for a moment, that he knew it. Was it himself, again? He essayed a laugh, but it came from somewhere too deep in his chest, and blood bubbled with it.
There were more than one figure, more than one man. They walked with staffs, and they walked with a curious dignity, as if these sands, this patch of ground, were theirs, and no one else’s, and their bodies knew it in a manner that went beyond and beneath all logic or calculation.
There were six of them, and Aubry watched them approach, and as they did, the leader bent down to him.
For a long time the examination continued. Or it seemed like a long time. The truth was that there was no way that Aubry could be certain how long it actually was, because by that time he had slipped off the ends of the earth, into a cold, infinite darkness.