Mischa climbed through the narrow hidden fissure that connected her cave to the larger cavern behind it. The jewels were locked away, she was well rested, she had eaten. Tossing her clothes onto the sand, she plunged into the still, dark pool and came up sputtering from the cold. The second chamber was so cool that the floor and the shadows were black, while the ceiling, warmed slightly by air currents from Center, glowed deep maroon. Mischa found this rare near-darkness restful. She floated on her back for a few minutes, until, growing chilly, she paddled closer to the edge of the pool and stood up. The bank was of fine-grained black sand, carried in from the desert outside, bit by bit, over many years. Mischa scooped up handfuls of the sand and scrubbed her body, vigorously until she was warm again, slowly until she felt clean.
o0o
It was evening when she went out again into Center. She wandered along the Circle, covertly studying the new offworld people. They did not wear uniforms, but they were readily distinguishable. They were taller and darker than Center people, most of whom had never in their lives been exposed to sunlight. All offworlders gave an impression of bigness and of solidity, but these also spoke and laughed loudly and frequently. The looming stone sky had subdued other offworlders. Mischa could understand this group’s lack of fear: they had come in through the storm. They must feel special, chosen, knowing they were the only ones ever to live through that trial.
Mischa climbed the side of First Hill, and watched the activity below and around Stone Palace. When the lights dimmed, the new doorway remained open. This Mischa did not understand: fearlessness or even contempt seemed an insufficient reason for the new people to leave themselves so vulnerable. Her suspicion was aroused.
She waited until the traffic into the new entrance ceased, until it seemed that those who were returning to bed had done so, and those staying out had settled into their pleasures. Then she climbed down to the Circle and crossed the trampled, littered black sand. The beggars watched her, and she thought she heard them whisper and titter when she stopped in front of Stone Palace.
Slowly, they grew silent. When Mischa stepped over the threshold, no one outside or in spoke to her.
The tapestries and the velvet had disappeared. The corridor was lined with flat panels of light brown plastic that reflected no echoes. The lines were clean and sharp and the corners right-angled. The air smelled curiously flat; the tang of stone was gone. The carpeting had been replaced with a cushiony tile.
The hallway projected a long way back, without branches or adjoining rooms. Mischa felt uneasy in a space so regular and devoid of hiding places. She reached a foyer in which, if a fountain of water had existed, it had been replaced by one of light. Self-luminous panels regularized the chamber’s shape into a polygon with alternate empty faces of hall entrances. The tapestries began again in all the halls but the middle one. Mischa moved toward it. The faint air currents of her passing disturbed the fountain. Its fibers shivered, and their hue changed slowly from red to soft blue.
The aberrant hallway was square and straight, and built to appear longer than it really was. The ceiling crept down, the walls in, the floors up. The perspective was exaggerated, yet the huge double doors Mischa approached were almost three times her height.
And still she saw no guards. She touched the left-hand door, and it swung silently, easily ajar. By every criterion of suspicion Mischa had ever used, she should turn and flee this place. She moved one step closer, so she could see inside the room beyond the doorway, and she expected an outcry, an alarm, the touch of a captor’s hand. She could feel the scars on her back; she could always feel them on some level of awareness, and she knew she always would.
She hesitated with her hand on the door. If she went away now, she would be safe for a little while, but the inevitable results would be the same as if the pseudosibs drove her away. Her sister’s insanity would affect her until she was as helpless and pliable as the little girl. As well be dead… and Chris would die, for nothing in Center could ever help him.
Mischa slipped inside.
Cold and cubic and mechanized, the room beyond was so completely different from anything else in Center that Mischa needed a few seconds to orient herself. She began to recognize pieces of furniture, decorations, electronic equipment. The furniture looked uncomfortable, the decorations unartistic, the equipment incomprehensible. From deeper inside the suite a kind of frighteningly frigid passion crept out. It rose to a peak, like an almost inaudibly high noise at the threshold of pain. It fell off abruptly. It was still present, still alien, but less intense.
The next chamber was a bedroom. In the bed a companion sat half up, back to Mischa, trying to caress the pseudosib lying beside her. He stared at the ceiling, not responding. She whispered something and stroked his smooth chest, stroked her hand down his cheek, and twined her fingers in his long black hair. He slapped her, roughly, and turned over, hunching his heavy shoulders.
The young woman stared at him, touching her face in disbelief. She flung away the bedclothes, reaching for her dress, and stood wriggling into the tight openwork knit. Mischa knew her slightly: the companion was recently turned to the business, highly paid, well respected, with every right to expect better treatment. Other classes hired themselves out for beatings.
The companion saw Mischa, and did not recognize her. “Who the hell are you?” Anger and frustration burst out. She glared for half a second, whipped around, and dragged the rest of the blankets off the pseudosib. He sat up, finally roused. His eyes were bloodshot. “I told you—” He broke off when he saw Mischa.
The companion threw the blankets on the floor. “There he is,” she said to Mischa. “He’s all yours.” She left the room, taut with fury.
The pseudosib glared at Mischa without speaking. She did not know which brother he was, and she did not like the feel of him; her wish to leave increased, but it was still less strong than her reasons for coming.
He swung his legs over the bed and stood up. He was massive, two meters tall or more, and half that, it seemed, across the shoulders. His smooth tan hairless skin was so perfect, so glossy, that Mischa almost expected his nude body to be as mechanical and sexless as the strange sculptures hulking in the corner.
“Now,” he said. “Who are you?”
The blank white wall-screen lit up with the image of the second brother. Mischa looked from one to the other. She had never seen them before, and their similarities were quite singular, but the man in the screen seemed more serious, less dissipated. The room behind him was the same, but he had one tiny, faint line between his eyebrows, while the forehead of the pseudosib beside her was completely smooth. “Go plug yourself into a computer,” he said to the image. When he spoke, the flesh beneath his jaw seemed very slightly loose: the beginnings of fat over tight muscles.
The image looked Mischa over. “She’s rather young for your tastes, isn’t she?”
Mischa said nothing, though she was tempted to mention that the companion who had left was almost the same age as she. The two brothers together were more than twice as unpleasant as one alone.
She noticed the small camera tracking where the image gazed. She felt acutely uncomfortable in its range. It swiveled away when the image looked back at his brother.
“She’s uninvited.” His cheeks were flushed and his voice defensive. “What happened to the alarms?”
“I was curious about her,” the image said.
“You watched her come in? You let her come in?”
“You have your own alarms. If you choose to leave them disengaged, that isn’t my worry.”
“She might have killed me!”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I scanned her. I’d hardly allow her to come so far if she were armed. What can she do?”
“She can get out of here.”
Very deliberately, Mischa hitched her hip up on the low storage cabinet behind her. She refused to reveal how shaken she was to learn she had been watched all the way in without her knowledge, though she had looked for scanning devices. Still, they had not detected the crystal knife, or they had discounted it as useless.
“Are you deaf, or stupid? I said get out.”
“Just a moment,” said the image. “What do you want?”
“I want to go offworld,” Mischa said.
“That’s very interesting,” the image said. “Come over here. We’ll talk.”
“Wait a minute,” his brother said with instant covetousness. “She came here first.” He looked at Mischa as though he had not even glanced at her before. “You’re a funny kid. Stay here. I’ll find something for you to do.”
Mischa said something untranslatable in an offworld language, the choicer parts of which Chris knew and had taught her. It expressed her opinion of funny kids and funny kid jobs in two main words, a handful of prefixes, and one very emphatic suffix.
“Get out of here!” His voice and emotions crept up into rage. He glared at the image in the screen. “I hope she takes a scalpel to you, you walking tissue culture.”
o0o
Mischa entered quarters that were a mirror image of the first except in color: the neutral hues were tinged with blue rather than red. The second pseudosib met her at the door and waved her to a couch; she sat on it cross-legged and he sat across from her, appraising her.
“Which one are you?” she asked abruptly.
He raised an eyebrow and smiled slightly. “I am Subtwo. And you?”
“My name’s Mischa.”
“What can you do?”
“Anything,” she said. “Show me once.”
He nodded mildly. “Have you had any schooling?”
“All the name I have is ‘Mischa.’ “
“I don’t understand.”
“Only people in the Families have a last name, and only people in the Families have a school.”
“Ah, the Families… Surely you can read?”
“Yes.”
“But how did you learn?”
She shrugged. She could no more remember learning to read than learning to pick locks. Chris had, perhaps, taught her that too, but she had no idea where he had learned. “I don’t know.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Leave Center. Leave earth. Go to the Sphere.”
He leaned back. “You don’t like earth?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because…” She did not know how to tell him, and she did not want to talk about her relatives. “It’s dying, it’s stopped. It—” But Subtwo was nodding, and Mischa fell silent.
“What do you do, in the city?”
She was unsure exactly what he was asking. His expression was impossible to read and his emotions were clamped tight. But she looked directly into his eyes and said, “I’m a thief.”
His features tensed in a quick and automatic grin, a response to what he seemed to think was a joke, but Mischa remained serious. Subtwo’s expression sobered. “Are you good?”
“I’m good at anything I do.”
“Don’t you think it’s wrong to steal?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Have you seen the beggars?”
He glanced at her sharply. “Yes—?”
“That’s my other choice. To sell myself—”
“I see.” He cut her off; Mischa could see that he did not want to hear anymore. “What if you’re caught?”
Mischa shrugged. “They punish you.”
“Have you been punished?”
“Not for stealing.”
He looked at her so long without speaking that she grew nervous. Finally sick of the tension, she asked, “What’s the matter?”
“I am trying to decide what to do with you.”
“Teach me to fly ships.”
He raised his eyebrows and forced out a deep laugh. “My time is worth more than that. You’ll need several years of preparation first.”
Mischa flushed, resenting the laughter. She hunched her shoulders and let her hair slide across her eyes, but still watched him.
He touched buttons in quick succession on the console intercom behind him. After a few moments, Mischa heard a voice from the speaker, but the volume was too low for her to make out the words.
“I have a task for you,” Subtwo said. “I do not think it will conflict with your ethics.” The statement could have been sarcastic, but was not.
The response sounded tired, but not sleepy; not bored, but affirmative. Subtwo shut off the intercom. “You should have come during the day,” he said.
“I didn’t think I’d get in.”
“Hm.” His expression seemed slightly amused. “Would you have come if you had known I was watching?”
“I don’t know. I guess so. You’d’ve had to see me sooner or later.”
They waited in silence until a barefoot young man came in. He wore black pants and a black robe with a green and gold embroidered dragon crawling up the shoulder. He glanced at Mischa and faced Subtwo with something of a defiant air.
Physically, he resembled a few other offworld people Mischa had seen: pale tan skin, very dark eyes that appeared slanted because of the structure of the eyelids. But his uncombed hair, instead of being black, was bright gold.
“Yes?” If he had been awakened, he did not seem annoyed by it, but he looked very tired.
“I have a new crew member. I would appreciate your teaching her as much mathematics as you can. Start her in xenobiology. And the other basic subjects—her education has been neglected.”
“All right.”
“Very good.”
Subtwo turned to his console, and they were obviously dismissed. The young man gestured toward the doorway with his head, not peremptorily but pleasantly, without taking his hands from his pockets. They left Subtwo’s quarters and walked together down the hall to the foyer.
“I’m Jan Hikaru,” the young man said, sitting on the edge of the fountain. The light-fibers brushed his shoulder and shimmered into orange.
“My name’s Mischa.”
He took his hands from his pockets and rested his forearms on his knees. His hands were narrow and bony, and, like his movements, graceful and strong. Mischa admired the lines of his body.
“What do you want to learn?”
“Everything.”
He smiled, pleasantly enough but superficially, preoccupied. “Calculus, then, to give you the feel of things. Number theory and machine communication and enough astronomy to get you around. And the xeno. Do you know any of those?”
“No.” If he had not been so serious, she would have believed he was mocking her and she would have grown angry; even so, her tone was sharp.
He glanced up, paying real attention for the first time. “I’m not fit to be a teacher,” he said. “I know too little. But I will do the best I can.”
Mischa followed Jan Hikaru; he took her to a room across the hall from his own. It was less garish than most of those she had seen, for which she was grateful. The tapestries were blue and the thick rug a deep dark green. Jan showed her around briefly and left her alone to sleep. She found herself prepared to like him.
Mischa could not sleep under the ornate blankets or on top of them or even on the floor. She lay in darkness for long slow minutes that seemed more like hours. The silence was alien after the echoing exchanges in the corridors where she had lived. Half-awake, half-dreaming, she imagined herself already on another world, one peopled by figures from the drapes in the Palace, clothed in precious gems and metals or in more precious furs and leather, passing like silent spirits between the curiously substantial ghosts of trees that had not been seen on Mischa’s part of earth in centuries. She walked toward them, but they receded, beckoning, smiling. Leaves brushed dew against her face. The sky was purple-black; stars crowned one horizon while the clear streaks of dawn cleansed the other.
A feeling like terror, a cold draft in a wave from her face to her stomach, drove her out of her fantasy. She sat up with her fingers clenched in the carpet. The visions disappeared.
So had ended all her dreams, real or construct. She feared for the one she lived in now, for if it shattered, it would be the last.
Mischa rose and looked into the hall through a narrow gap in the curtains. She could detect no one, so she crept out to explore. The corridor into which her room opened continued for a short distance, then, after a short purposeless curve, stopped. For a moment she thought she would ask for a different room, one not on a dead-end hall, then she shrugged. If Subtwo neglected to keep his word and she had to flee again, she did not think she would care if she had escape routes or not. There was nowhere to escape to.
At the open end of the hallway the light-fountain was dimmer, as though it, like people, needed rest. It glowed softly. Mischa walked across the softly lit central node and brushed her fingertips against the strands. They sparked brightly and faded again.
“You—”
Without thinking, Mischa fled from the voice of the slave steward, who came without warning, sound, sight, or aura. She ran until she reached her room, stopped outside it, and turned to face Madame. “Stay away from me. I’ll kill you this time.”
“You are persistent,” Madame said. “There is no need to speak of killing. Put away your knife and I will take you out of here.”
“I’m working for Subtwo. You can’t touch me.”
Madame arched one eyebrow. “We must go to him, and he will confirm or deny you.”
“That isn’t necessary.”
The door-curtain of Jan Hikaru’s room draped across his shoulders like a cape as he leaned against the wall with his legs crossed at the ankles and his arms folded on his chest. “She’s telling the truth.”
“Do you take responsibility?”
“I already have it.”
“Very well.” Absently, she flicked her short whip against her skirt and started away.
“I told you I wasn’t here to steal.”
Madame looked back skeptically. “That,” she said, “remains to be seen.”
Mischa reddened; her pride was hardly salved by Jan’s enigmatic half-smile. It was as though he knew everything that had ever happened or ever would happen, as though he were just observing the motions for his own amusement.
“What’s so damn funny?”
“Nothing,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m sorry. Since we’re both up, do you want some tea?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Subtwo was right,” Jan said. “Your education has been neglected.”
Mischa sat on the carpet in Jan’s room, sipping hot tea and staring down into the cup at the small remnants of the leaves from which it was brewed.
“Couldn’t you sleep?”
Mischa shrugged. “I like to know what’s around me.”
He swirled his cup slowly. “Ah.”
As they drank together, Mischa could see him watching her through the steam of his tea. The wall-curtains of his room were brown and unadorned; against them, sitting cross-legged on the bronze-colored rug, he was for an instant a mysterious and very alien figure. All Mischa could feel of him was a deep, sad quiet; there was much more, but she could not reach it.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked abruptly.
“Yes.”
“Is it what you want?”
She could not answer immediately; he had asked exactly the right thing.
“It’s the only way I can leave earth.”
He sipped his tea. “Is it worth it?”
“What do you care?” she snapped, but the familiarity of the exchange sprang up and hurt her. “What gives you the right to talk? You’re doing the same thing.”
“Well, not quite.”
“You’re with Subtwo—what else can you be but a raider?”
“I was with a friend who wanted to return to earth. This is the only way to get here or to leave.”
“What happened?” She felt she already knew, because though she could not feel his pain, she could see it in his eyes and in his face, too new and too deep to hide.
He finally answered. “She’s dead.”
Mischa could only sit silent and uneasy with her inexperience at consolation.
“She wouldn’t have been happy here,” Jan said bitterly. “Go back to bed.”
He stood up, but Mischa reached and stopped him with a touch. “That’s what I mean,” she said, and left him, alone.