A long space voyage is the ultimate reach of boredom; any Fleet cadet will attest to that. The leaps of starflight pall after a time, the dark outside has no end, and all parts of the universe look the same. Library terminals and holoshows are finite resources; one’s companions rub on one’s nerves. The journey is not an end, but only a means toward one. Getting there is a state of stasis to be endured, and it seems as if the end will never come.
But there are also people who seek space with passion. With freedom from planets and solid ground comes a freedom like that of the sea. For these persons, where there are no other beings, there can be no obligations. Time is measured not by the tyranny of regulated clocks, but by Jumps; a very different matter, since no two are of the same length, and the exact point of terminus is increasingly hard to predict as routine paths are left behind. For those who absent themselves further from the human race, avoiding use of the relay system, a season in space can be as close to perfect freedom as any human being will get.
In order to take up the course to Uskos, the Golden Girl first had to go to Omega.
That was the hard part. Humankind was universally unfriendly, and the sense that it was so grated on everyone but Michael, and the others grated on him.
Theo spent too much time with the newsbeams, helping no one’s mood. There was nothing to be heard about Mencken, but there was news from D’neera, since D’neerans talk profusely about everything they know or think they know. The magistrates of D’neera clearly had been lied to. Hanna’s message had not been delivered to Lady Koroth, and the magistrates, in ignorance of the facts, clamored for Hanna. A flower of their civilization, beloved, needed and missed, Lady-Koroth-to-be, dutiful daughter of her House, she could not be spared: the magistrates appealed at large to the Polity and the man it sought. They said Polity clumsiness in trying to trap Michael had caused him to abort, what other reason could there be?—they wanted Hanna too badly to engage in games or duels, there would be no more traps, if only Michael would bring her home where she belonged.
Theo told Michael about this, and told Hanna, too; she got a pinched look around the mouth and disappeared into the room of mirrors. She would not come to Michael’s bed and she would not talk about it. He did not know what to do for her and she would not tell him.
One living D’neeran who can keep her mouth shut, and that’s the one I get—
Lise was pale and quiet. She had not understood the events at D’neera when they happened, but Theo of the flapping tongue explained. She was outraged. Michael tried for hours to tease the reproach from her eyes. She forgave him finally for trying to abandon her, but in a flood of tears. “Don’t do it again!” she cried, and charged into a full-blown tantrum in which he saw, to his horror, imitated elements of the display he had put on three days before. At the height of it Hanna flew out of hiding, cheeks burning, her sensitivity to emotion exacerbated past bearing. She pounced on Lise and shook her; Lise retaliated with fingernails; Michael at the risk of life and limb was about to dive into the melee when Shen, watching with calm interest, caught his arm.
“No harm done,” Shen said.
“What the hell are you saying!”—they rolled on the floor now, spitting.
“See what she’s doing. Look.”
And when he made himself be still and look, he saw that Hanna, though her hair nearly stood on end, did nothing more than passively defend herself, blocking blows and guarding the hair Lise pulled.
It did not last long. Lise went limp and cried again and Hanna held her. Michael came up to them cautiously; they paid no attention to him. “I know,” Hanna was saying, “I know, I know, it hurts so much…” She laid her cheek against Lise’s and they cried together. Michael did not know which of too many kinds of abandonment Hanna grieved for—what she had just done to D’neera? What had been done to her in the past?—or Lise either, for that matter. The range of possibilities was chilling. He thought of Claire, Emma, Kareem, the dogs, the cats, the tourmaline faded and dead by now; he was sick. Hanna lifted her tear-stained face. “Come here,” she said, and held out her hand. He sank to the floor with them and they drew him in, and he bowed his head and wept, too, for a good life made at great cost and senselessly destroyed. Whatever happened now, he would not have it again.
* * *
In the hours before they came to Omega, Hanna, sleeping in the arbitrary predawn, slipped in and out of slumber. She had discovered that some of the mirrors could be made transparent, and she could look out from this room as she could from Michael’s next door. In the absence of artificial light, stars reflected jaggedly everywhere. Each time she opened her eyes that night, she floated in a bath of diamond-dust. It was beautiful, but not restful. It seemed that somewhere another Hanna moved parallel to this same track, approaching Omega with Rubee and Awnlee once more. The voices channeled through Omega bounced off the cradling stars. Nearby was a ship of the Polity; on cue it would come sailing to the ravaged Bird.
The sense of time slightly askew was very strong. Hours later at Omega it still wrapped her in dream—the kind of dream which makes waking welcome. But this time there was no wait at Omega, no systems checks with Fleet cooperation. “Ready as she’ll ever be,” Shen said briefly, when GeeGee was on the edge of the long Jump that had marked the Bird’s end.
“Let’s go,” Michael said, and they went, GeeGee making the Jump without the histrionics in which Uskosian spacecraft indulged. There was a certain tension in Michael and Shen. It was possible that the Bird was still out here somewhere, with official company. She was not; she must have been taken away. There was nothing out here: no people, no relays, no voices, no habitats. Nothing.
GeeGee clucked away at the calculations preceding the next Jump. Lise, curled against the wall, returned to her absorption in a doll. She ought to be outgrowing dolls, but this was one of the sort whose appearance could be manipulated in detail. Not long ago it had looked like the pseudo-Zeigans of Hanna’s hallucinations, and had suffered a good deal as Lise avenged the fright she had gotten. Now it had human features, light brown skin, and long black hair. Lise worked on making it beautiful, and on making its blue eyes exactly the shade of Hanna’s. Shen put her feet up on a control panel and almost smiled. Michael and Theo talked seriously together. Hanna thought that was a good thing; someone had better be serious about this great step into silence. She went closer; they were discussing what to have for dinner.
The dream-cloud of threat vanished from her mind quite suddenly. She went to Michael and waited until Theo went away. Then she said, “I suppose I ought to move in with you.”
“Of course you should,” he said, and that was that.
* * *
The beings on the Far-Flying Bird had expected to reach Uskos from Omega in approximately five Standard weeks. The Golden Girl’s capacity for data manipulation was not as great, and for GeeGee the trip would take seven weeks. It was a long time to live between the dubious past and the uncertain future.
Michael did not think much about what he had lost. There was nothing he could do about it.
The future was a different matter, but he could do nothing about that either, yet. It would come as it would come. You took the opportunities you had and made more when you could. That was the deal the universe handed you. It was the only one you got.
* * *
He liked hearing Hanna talk about futures. They were not futures you would expect from a woman who had tried to kill you with a colloidal disruptor at first sight.
“Before the Polity comes,” she said, “we can move on. There are places out there like D’neera before the Founders came. We could find one and start all over.”
“Inventing fire,” he said wryly, “unless you can recreate technology.”
“I’m a technological idiot. I only know how to make things work if other beings put them together right. I’m a specialist, you know.”
“How do we start over, then?”
“With babies, of course. What else do you need to start over? Yours and mine. Theo’s and Lise’s. And Shen—Shen—”
“Shen as a mother doesn’t quite—”
“No. No, it doesn’t compute. Are you sterile?”
“Not for much longer.”
“Me either. That’s all right, then.”
Lise wanted to pilot the Golden Girl.
“You said even I could fly her alone. You said that.”
“It was true.”
“Teach me, then. You’re teaching Hanna.”
“You can’t read well enough.”
“But all you do is talk to Gee!”
“Not quite. That’s not quite enough.”
She said that she would learn to read better if he would teach her about GeeGee. At that time she had become interested in remarks Hanna had dropped about the place where they were going. Hanna, to encourage Lise, wrote a lively synopsis of what she had learned about Uskos from Rubee and Awnlee. It began as a primer, but because part of Hanna was a scholar, it was comprehensive. The others read it, too, and talked about it a good deal.
Hanna instructed them: “The first thing to remember is that Uskosians are friendly.”
But Shen said, “Never seen human beings. No reports. First thing we tell ’em is the envoys got murdered. Second thing, we’re in a stolen ship, hope Contact never shows up. Stay friendly? Huh.”
“Well. When you put it like that—”
* * *
There was a past, too. It could not be excised from the future.
Hanna whispered endearments in four languages, panting. The small fists dug into his back, the little claws of her fingernails nearly pierced his skin. She treated his mouth as her personal property. These moods were like an exorcism, as if past and future could be made to disappear if only the present was narrowed to sensation. “Darling Michael, sweet Mike—” He kissed her throat and she trembled; he licked droplets of moisture from her breasts and she shivered and sighed, an animal with swollen blank eyes. “Mikhail,” she cried, “Mikhail—!”
He froze so sharply she must feel it, then thought she had not noticed; she closed around him like a vise, strong arms wrapped around his neck, strong legs pinning his hips. The name echoed in his head.
“Never mind,” she said clearly. “Let it go.”
“But—”
The shock got worse as it sank in. She felt him soften, and remarked on his failure coarsely.
“I’m not made of stone,” he said, distracted.
One hand tangled in his hair; the other slipped between them and took up a purposeful caress.
“Where did it come from?” he said.
“I don’t know. Not now, darling.”
His cultivated detachment slipped under her slippery hand. “That’s right,” she said. “Oh, yes.”
“Right,” he said, it was the last articulate sound he made for some time; he could worry later about the pitfalls of loving a telepath.
Theo studied medical texts. Sometimes he had questions, and each time he started for Control. The first time he went all the way there before he remembered there was nobody to call, and the only library to which he had access was the Golden Girl’s own. After that he never got out of his seat; but he half-rose, a reader clutched in his hand, more than once.
He also haunted the medlab, which since Michael’s purchase of the Golden Girl had been used only for analyzing Hanna’s blood. He spent hours becoming familiar with the equipment, going back and forth between the electronic instruction manuals and the mechanical and computer controls. After a while, at times, he thought he could use some of it; at other times the equipment laughed at him, if crystal and metal could be said to laugh.
His chief comfort was that all GeeGee’s passengers were healthy. He had even reimmunized Hanna against Dawkin’s fever—though that might have been the worst thing he could do. Who knew what was waiting on Uskos?
“Nothing,” Hanna said with finality, finding him one day in the medlab; she wandered about, touching polished chrome.
“Why’d the Polity go to so much trouble with you, then?”
“They always overdo the wrong things. Can you deliver babies, Theo?”
He stared at her in disgust. They were at this time approximately halfway through the time to Uskos (rather more than half the distance), and there were long intervals when Hanna and Michael disappeared from the life of the Golden Girl, to reappear softened, blurred, and shamelessly devoted. In six years Theo had seen Michael through half a dozen affairs, but nothing like this. There had always been a trace of unwillingness in his surrender before, something withheld; but this woman was affecting his brain, there was more than gonads involved.
She looked at him and he thought she had felt his disgust, but she only smiled in an absentminded way.
“It was because of something that happened with Zeig-Daru,” she said. “There was a cut on my arm. Here.” She showed him the inside of her right forearm. It was smooth and glossy; her skin glowed, these days.
She said, “They finally found out what the infection was, but they never could cure it. They ended up cutting out the whole chunk and regenerating down to the bone. So they decided, when the Uskosians made contact, to be extra careful. But they admitted we’re not likely to trade diseases.”
He was relieved to hear her talking in practical terms.
“How’d you get the cut?” he said.
“It was a knife wound,” she said. “But I won. Killed ’em all.”
She smiled at him again and walked out, leaving him gaping.
He pulled himself together and got back to work. If anybody got hurt or sick, he was all they had. That went for all of them, even a bubblebrain who talked in one breath of babies and killing.
They kept a sort of erratic Standard time, and erratic half-regular watches in Control. Michael, as the paid companion of some traveler in the past, had picked up enough knowledge of spaceflight to obtain pilot’s certification for most ships of GeeGee’s class. Shen had a sound background in military training, and had refreshed her skills with GeeGee; she and Michael between them had browbeaten Theo into learning enough to follow GeeGee’s own precise instructions. That was good enough for the common routes of human space. What GeeGee did now was not so easy. There were questions to be answered and decisions to be made. There was also, fortunately, Hanna. She had begun intensive spaceflight training in her teens, she had been a pilot before she was anything else, and she could fly (she said once, casually) anything. The result was that in practice her watch was flexible; it began whenever there was a question and ended when the hard parts were over. She was the acknowledged authority on the journey, and on call all the time.
Her “watch” ended one night near the middle of the night. Theo had taken over in Control, and Shen and Lise were asleep. Hanna rested with Michael in the smaller lounge, which was quite dark. Even the ports were dimmed, so little light entered from the field of stars. Hanna sat at one end of the small room, Michael at the other but not far away. Each was visible to the other only as a shadow. Michael had said something about Uskos, and then they had been silent for a time. As if a couple of meters between them made a difference, Hanna began to think of Michael as she had never thought of him: objectively. He had essentially relinquished command of the Golden Girl to her. In the timeless round of their days and nights he was almost a passive presence, anticipating her wishes and meeting all her desires. He was sunlight uncomplicated by shadows; a pattern of simplicity, all surface. It would be easy to think of him as weak.
And yet. Her very first perception of him had been as a presence of shadow crouched beside the Avalon. He had been in grave danger; but there had been no anxiety or fear in his thought. Afterward there had been that night of intense emotional union. Most true-humans could not have done what Michael had done. Most true-humans, fearing dissolution in her madness, would have knocked her out with drugs or otherwise, and almost certainly killed her. And then there was the rendezvous with the Polity and what he had done to meet it, and the decision to flee Outside to nothing less than death.
She thought of water, sunlit, dappled with the shapes of leaves. If you slammed into it, it slammed back and broke bones and broke skulls. If you came to it gently it shifted, accommodating. It crept into corners, changed shape silently; it sank through sand and found crevices invisible to eyes. In heat it evaporated into gas and dissipated; in cold it froze to crystalline solids of great beauty. It adapted infallibly to circumstance; but it was very strong.
But the metaphor did not hold up indefinitely, because in Michael there was also a black place where Hanna could not go. Michael could not either, not at will. He only endured it, when he had to. It had nothing to do with sunlit water. “I guess,” he said into the dark, very quietly, “we ought to learn how to be polite to the Uskosians.”
“Polite?”
“To say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and so on. In Uskosian.”
“Ellsian…That’s not a bad idea.”
“It’s a little late to start learning the whole language. Is it hard?”
“Not very. Not like F’thalian. These beings think in the same patterns we do, at least, and the linguistic structure—of Ellsian, anyway—is comprehensible.” She thought unwillingly that she was going to have to start working again. “We could have tapped into D’vornan and picked up the language programs.”
“Could we? But we don’t have any translators to use when we get there.”
“It would have helped, though. My accent’s not perfect; human throats and tongues aren’t made like theirs. The Polity translators were programmed with Awnlee’s help, and I can’t duplicate what he did. I can make a basic phrasebook for the rest of you, though.”
“Have to do.”
“Yes. I guess it will.”
* * *
Once or twice she used the name again: “Mikhail.” She did not mean to do it, and knew what she had done only after she had said it. The first time she paused, surprised at herself; she looked quickly at Michael for his reaction. There was also a certain invitation in her eyes. If he wanted to say more, she was ready to hear it. But he smiled and shook his head, and she picked up a cushion and threw it at him. “All right,” she said. “Who needs to know anyway?”
The second time she did not even hear herself say it. He did not know where it had come from, how she had dredged it from his memory, why it had slipped from the end of her tongue. She said it half in her sleep as she drifted away. Michael could not follow her; he was immediately awake. He lay with his head on her breast, so restful, such a restful place. What was he going to tell her, how much, when, and what did it matter now, the little he knew? B was gone, must be gone forever. The hopeless quest into dust was postponed, at the very least; he would not pursue that path if Hanna could produce, magically, another life for him. He was entirely in her hands, hers and the hands of chance. The hands of the Master of Chaos.
He sighed and turned his mouth to her skin. She woke a little; her fingers ruffled his hair.
“But if you’d told the Polity,” she said, “they would have searched.”
He stopped breathing. She was more than half asleep; not even half awake. The compulsion to speak to her dream was strong.
Why not? She would find out anyway—
And so he answered, and relief, like the release of a long tension, made him weak, and his speech was slurred.
“They wouldn’t have believed it. Not without a probe. With one they’d have had me.”
“Then you didn’t know yourself…until after the Queen.”
She was a sleepwalker, an oracle, and he was not sure he heard her words with his ears.
“It was hard,” he said. “Nobody knows how hard. A kid in the dark…Didn’t know there was anyplace else. Thought Alta was part of the same world. Later I knew there were more, but then I thought it was someplace like Revenge. Didn’t dare ask questions. Afraid they’d send me back. Thinking they could. Didn’t guess the truth till long after the Queen. Too late.”
“Yes,” she said. She was awake now. Her arms tightened around him, or around the lost child he had been. She did not ask any more questions. But he thought that for the first time in his life there was a certainty in it: Hanna’s flesh and blood, the beating of her heart.
Hanna lay still. The words bubbling up to consciousness stung her, connecting. With the speculations of an aged monk; with a vision of flame in a silver-shot sky. The questions she did not ask trembled in her mouth. Who should know more about Lost Worlds than she? It was Hanna who had brought back the news of one Lost World in the first terrible weeks of contact with Zeig-Daru: a message of destruction, a tale of a colony long dead. Almost, in this moment, she believed the old abbot had been right.
Then sense asserted itself. “If he got to Alta from a Lost World, it couldn’t be considered lost…” The voice of ultimate common sense; Jameson’s voice. The fire had to have been on Nestor where such things could happen at the hands of the so-called law; or maybe, even, on Co-op, in the great riots a few years before Hanna was born. It was easier to believe that this strange, exquisite man lived with one great delusion than to believe in Lost Worlds.
Finally she said softly, “Mike? Where could it have been really?”
But now he was asleep, at peace, and she would not rouse him to talk about yesterday.
Then they were there, a new world broad before them: Like a feast, Michael thought, watching Hanna’s intent face. And he stood by her place in Control and felt regret for what would be finished today, the honeymoon. Past now.
Hanna had no time for regret. She was worried.
GeeGee had moved in slowly, broadcasting a simple speech Hanna had recorded in Ellsian. It said: “I am the friend of Rubee and Awnlee of Ell, she who traveled with them: an alien, a visitor, a guest. As gifting I bear the story of the Journey of Rubee. I will have great honor if you will speak with me.”
Hanna liked this speech. It was dramatic, it was designed to provoke curiosity (a fact the Uskosians would recognize and approve), and it was courteous. Hanna had spent some time concocting it. Uskos should fall at once into a frenzy of welcoming.
Instead there were flat acknowledgments in harsh-sounding voices that had the half-familiarity of a dream, followed by a command for the travelers to do exactly as they were instructed. There was no threat, but also there was no welcome, not even the most formal of courtesies. When GeeGee landed at last—it took a long time to get permission to land—they were directed to a desert, a place of dried watercourses in a red-brown land. And an escort of Uskosian vessels landed with them, gently as a fleet of butterflies, surrounding the Golden Girl.
They went through GeeGee to the starboard lock, and Hanna went out with the others behind her. The sky was vast and opalescent and a cold wind came from it. There were sharp stones on the rusty soil, splintered by heat and cold, and scrubby plants that bent in the wind. Five streamlined vessels flaunted gaudy insignia in an arc in front of Hanna; the others had landed behind her, to GeeGee’s port side, completing a precise circle with GeeGee small and impotent at the center. Between GeeGee and the ring of aircraft a single Uskosian waited, a spot of vivid color in the gray wind. Hanna led her little party toward him. He stood without moving; even the stiff fabric of his bright blue uniform did not sway in the wind.
The humans came up to him and stopped. When they did, other Uskosians came out of the other vessels, so colorfully garbed they might have been sifted through a prism. Hanna looked around and saw that her party was surrounded.
She said to the blue-clad being in Ellsian, with all the courtesy Uskos had taught her: “I am she who was the companion of Rubee and Awnlee of Ell, and was present at the end of their journey. I have news of them, though grievous news.”
The being did not answer at once. There were pouches and a slackness in his face that showed he was about Rubee’s age, and there was something of Rubee’s stateliness in him. The advancing Uskosians in their bright uniforms stopped. It was wrong, all wrong; a Polity mission must have gotten here first, and at any moment humans must show themselves and seize Michael and Hanna, too. Yet she sensed no human presences except those she knew, and though she did not probe the thought of the being before her, there was no hint that he acted on behalf of humans.
At last he said, “I am Norsa of Ell, a maker of agreements.”
Hanna answered politely, “I am ’Anarilporot. My companions are named—”
She stopped. At the sound of her name—which she had rendered as an Uskosian would say it—Norsa had lifted his hand. The aliens converged, each holding at ready a glossy shaft of metal. The weapons were not stunners. They could release a force that punched holes in flesh.
She had not meant to shock Uskos with telepathy at once. But she used it to say unhappily to Norsa, because it carried conviction more powerfully than speech: I did not expect this greeting for the friend of Rubee and Awnlee, Rubee’s selfing in the second degree of adoption, Awnlee’s near-kin!
Norsa was sufficiently shocked, the tendrils round his mouth squirmed with it, but he took Hanna away anyway. The other humans also were removed, separately, except that Lise and Michael were permitted to remain together; that was because the child shrieked and clung to Michael, and Hanna, seeing weapons leveled, said to Norsa, “But they are sire and selfing!”
Shen who had made a sharp movement toward Michael also was in danger. “No!” he said, and Shen stopped in mid-stride. “Hanna will fix it,” he said, but his voice was strange.
Hanna was led away. She got a last glimpse of Michael standing in the waste, looking at her over Lise’s curls. Shen and Theo also watched her go, and they looked after her mistrustfully. But Michael’s eyes were as strange as his voice: without hope. She could not do anything about it then, she could not even stop to comfort him, and had to walk away.
On a day (said Hanna), Rubee of Ell set forth with his selfing Awnlee to seek the persons of other stars; and the vessel which bore Rubee and his selfing outward was the Far-Flying Bird, which was the pride and flower of the land of Ell and of all Uskos. And Rubee and Awnlee sailed on and on, and the years went by; for space was dark and empty, and it seemed there were no other persons among the stars. Yet they did not fear, but felt themselves better acquainted with the Master of Chaos than they had been before.
They came at last to a place among the stars where other persons were, and these persons called themselves Humans, which Rubee and Awnlee rendered “’Unans,” and this meant in the tongue of the ’Unans, “persons.” And the ’Unans sent to Rubee and Awnlee one ’Anarilporot to be their friend and guide, and they were feasted and made welcome, and they made gifts to the ’Unans and were given fine presents in return, and they traveled widely among ’Unans, and always they were welcome.
Yet one day Rubee said to ’Anarilporot, “The hour approaches when we must leave, for we wish to come to our home on the fourteenth day of Strrrl.” But certain wise ’Unans sought to discourage the departure, for they had heard the whisper of the Master of Chaos. But Rubee was firm, and set forth as he had decided, and he was accompanied not only by his selfing Awnlee but by ’Anarilporot, even as in past times Erell and Awtell were accompanied by Porsa of Sa. And there was great friendship among these three, and especially between ’Anarilporot and Awnlee, so that Rubee claimed ‘Anarilporot as his selfing in the second degree of adoption. And Rubee made the beginning of the story of the Friendship of Awnlee, which now is lost; yet in truth it is the same as the story of the Journey of Rubee.
And when the Far-Flying Bird had been on its journey only shortly, certain ’Unans came and took away the gifts made to Rubee and Awnlee, and they killed Rubee and Awnlee in the sight of ’Anarilporot, who grieved for them and grieves for them and will always grieve for them. And ’Anarilporot also would have died, except that the Master of Chaos was present, and because of certain things ’Anarilporot said to the ’Unans with the Master’s encouragement, they did not kill her, but took her away from the Far-Flying Bird. And nonetheless she would have died, but she was saved by certain other ’Unans who were enemies of those who had killed Rubee and Awnlee.
In time ’Anarilporot came to Uskos without Rubee and Awnlee, but with the ’Unans who had saved her, and also with gifts which the Master had placed ready to her hand. Yet when she came to the land of Ell, ’Anarilporot was received without courtesy, and concluded therefore that the Master of Chaos had come before her; yet where is the Master not present? And so the story of the Journey of Rubee, which is also the story of the Friendship of Awnlee, and yet also the story of the Fate of ’Anarilporot, is not ended; for its ending lies in the hand of the Master of Chaos, which even now moves to write it.
Past Norsa and the other beings who examined Hanna, there was a window. While daylight remained she could see the towers of the City of the Center through it. Later, when it became dark, the tops of the towers were still visible; they were illuminated at night, and hung in the black sky like a fleet holding steadfast over the city.
She answered every question that was put to her without hesitation or evasion. She was not allowed to ask any in return. “Later, perhaps,” Norsa said, “if we are satisfied.” He asked most of the questions, but the others also participated; they were, Hanna recognized, a committee.
Night deepened, came to its turning, and began the slow progress toward morning. The persons of the committee melted away one by one. Hanna was given food and drink, but they did not interest her. She began to feel the weight of exhaustion in every muscle; she kept her head upright with conscious effort. There was weariness in Norsa’s face as well. At last there were pauses between questions, and the pauses grew longer—and in them Hanna saw that the tension attending her presence had eased. Therefore during one halt she said, “I wish to offer only cooperation; yet I do not understand the reason for this sparse welcome. Since first we met in the wildlands I have known there is in you hostility and mistrust. This was not what Rubee gave me to expect, and therefore I knew that the Master had come here before me; but the shape of this occurrence is not clear.”
Norsa regarded her with caution. He answered, however, “Other ’Unans came here before you.”
She let out breath in a little puff. Now that her fear was confirmed she was nearly too tired to react. Yet she must start now, with Norsa and the Polity’s representatives, to insist on her rights of kinship—though in the face of this reception, they seemed dubious.
“Where are the other ’Unans?” she said. “It is necessary that I speak with them.” Absurd that they had not come seeking her!
“They are gone,” Norsa said. “I do not know where they have gone.”
“Gone?” She did not understand him. “When will they return?”
“I do not think they will return,” he said in a curious tone.
Of course they would. “Why did they go?” she said.
“Their reasons were excellent.”
Hanna said, “I feel that I play the Game of Scant Deduction. Will you speak to me plainly? I have made it clear that we are not the official representatives of our people, and I have had the thought that those representatives might have preceded us here; yet you have asked many questions which those persons would have answered fully, and in your description of their actions I perceive anomalies.”
“Those who came said they were official representatives,” Norsa said doubtfully. “Yet they did not behave as we expected such representatives to behave. Also they said that ’Anarilporot was dead.”
He rose and went out of the room, leaving Hanna to the care of guards. She was groggy with fatigue and was not sure she had heard his last words right; what she thought he had said made no sense.
All the other persons of the committee had gone away to bed. Two silent guards were left; perhaps they always worked at night, because they did not seem tired, but regarded Hanna with lively interest. If she moved aggressively, though, no doubt they would react quickly enough.
Norsa came back with a small enameled box in his changing hands. He put the box down in front of Hanna and opened it and took something out. “Do you know what this is?” he asked.
She stared at the golden cylinder with its ring of jewels at the top. She knew what it was but rejected the notion; it was preposterous. She put out her hand and Norsa gave the thing to her. She looked at the engraving and saw that she had been right in the first place.
“But this is mine! Rubee gave it to me! How did you—? It must have been the official party who came and—”
An explosive memory rose into her mind, shocking her so that she transmitted it to Norsa without warning. Half unconscious, she lay stunned with loss while a thin man reached for the circlet of jewels—
“They came?” She was incredulous. “Those who murdered Rubee and Awnlee?”
“That is how it appears,” Norsa said. He added, “Please do not startle me like that!”
“I regret…” The words of apology came by themselves; it was hard to absorb the truth. Norsa regarded her calmly, though with some wariness, as if he expected her to fling another memory of violence at his head.
She said, “This gives me great amazement, Norsa. Now I know why you did not give us any welcome. These persons may have behaved grievously. Will you tell me of their acts?”
Norsa debated within himself, and Hanna saw that he was about to embark on a catalog of grievances. She waited with considerable apprehension.
Norsa said at last, “We made them welcome. There were doubts from the first. They did not ask the questions that would be expected of beings come first to a new world; yet we had no experience with such beings, and thought our expectations perhaps were wrong. Nor did they wish to answer questions; I have learned more in this night with you than in many days with them. And when they had been here for a time, at the end, they set about destruction. They took precious goods from Ell and also from other lands. In this endeavor they destroyed all that was in their way; and at the last, in the burning of a great costumerie, several hapless persons who labored in that place were killed.”
Norsa had seen some of the destruction at first hand. Hanna saw it now in his thoughts. She bowed her head.
“After they did those things…” Norsa looked at the object in Hanna’s hands. “There is the course,” he said. “It was evident that we must set forth and follow it, and at the end find out their reasons. But we have not yet done anything, because there has been much discussion of what we might find. Some among us have said: ‘Withdraw; give up space; stay at home!’ Others have said: ‘We must have vengeance, and assert our honor and vigor!’ And others have said, ‘These persons in the depths of space know of our existence, and also our whereabouts; and so, if we do not seek them out, they will continue to seek us.’ And still others have answered, ‘Indeed that is true, and they will prey on us.’ And so we have debated, and done nothing. Yet perhaps now that you have come, you can tell us the motive for these events, which we do not understand.”
Hanna was vividly reminded of Rubee. She could have wept.
She said, “I do not know the reason. Perhaps they wish to sell the precious things they took, as surely they meant to do with the gifts which were taken from the Far-Flying Bird. I do not know how they could sell them, or where, for already they are hunted by the true representatives of human beings for their actions on the Far-Flying Bird. They would have to go to a far place indeed, far from law; and there is no place so far as to evade human law, not in a matter such as this. There can be no escape for them, Norsa. It must seem to you that humans have little regard for law; do not even my own actions, as I have described them to you, indicate so? But indeed there is in humans a great impulse toward law, and the humans who did these things will be found and, at the least, confined. But I cannot tell you more than that, because I do not know any more.”
She spoke with her thought as well as her tongue, and when she was finished she saw that her simple honesty had convinced Norsa. They had come to an understanding at last. There were no more difficulties in the way.
But Norsa said, incredibly, “One of those who came before is still here.”
“Still here?” she repeated.
“One of those who came remained behind. Was it by his choice? Was it by the will of another? I do not know. I have been unable to determine the truth. None of those persons spoke any Uskosian tongue, but used devices which translated their words into those of Ell, and the language of Ell into words they understood. They took all the devices away with them, and we have not been able to ask questions of the one who remained behind.”
“I must see him,” said Hanna in a dream.
“Immediately.”
They went out into the night. The guards accompanied them; Norsa might be softening, but he was not a fool. It was summer in the City of the Center, and night closed around Hanna like warm water. The air was clean and before she got into a shiny vehicle with Norsa and her guards, she stopped and breathed deeply. She had been in space too long. The air of a living world caressed her cheeks. In her weariness she could have fallen asleep in the gentle night, floating in it.
Yet as they rode through the quiet streets, and she thought about what she was doing, her chest was tight. Which of the men of the Avalon would it be? Not Castillo, surely; more likely a man he had deliberately abandoned. It could not be Juel, whom she had killed. One down: the palm of her hand itched. She wished for a weapon. Not a stunner; something deadly.
They drew up before a great building which looked just like the one they had left, and walked through its spacious galleries. Norsa spoke and Hanna answered at random, until they stopped before a door and he said, “Have you too much weariness? You do not hear all I say.”
“It is not weariness.”
“Ah?”
“It is rage.”
“Rage? Why?”
“It is because of a thing that was done to me. I wish to kill,” she said honestly. “I may kill this human, Norsa.”
Norsa said, “We will not let you kill this creature. If that is your desire, I will not even let you see him.”
She wondered where her sense of civilized behavior had gone. Then she thought: I will be civilized. I will not kill him now, whichever it is. That would be an insult to Norsa. I will kill him later.
“Let us go in,” she said. “You may observe me. If I do something that causes you agitation, you will stop me.”
They went into an antechamber where they waited for some minutes while the nightwatch went to wake up the man in a farther room. But presently the watchman came back and said, “He will not come out.”
“Then we will go in,” Norsa said, and they went into the next room and Hanna saw Henrik Gaaf.
She was startled. He was not. He was far past ordinary surprise.
The room was sparsely furnished and there was a pallet which might have served as a bed, but Gaaf huddled in a pile of coverlets on the floor. He had his back to a corner. He was emaciated and pale, and he blinked at her and a slow smile spread over his face.
Hanna took a step toward him. Norsa said quietly, “’Anarilporot!”
“I will not harm him,” Hanna said. “This one gave me a kindness. The Master encouraged him to do so and therefore I lived, though it was meant for me to die as Rubee and Awnlee died. I will not harm this one.”
She took another step, though with reluctance. It seemed that something was going to happen that she would not like. It did. Gaaf came up out of his swaddling and threw himself on her feet. She backed away and he caught at her legs so that she lost her balance and sat down abruptly face to face with him. She had looked once into a lava lake that seethed and boiled. It came back to her because that was what she saw inside Gaaf. He pawed at her face and hair and she wanted to hit him and escape—but she did not, though her skin crawled. She ground her teeth and set herself to endure him; she studied him through her revulsion. He smiled and crooned and his eyes had an expression she had never seen before. He patted her shoulders and then her breasts; she twitched violently and caught his hands to keep them off her. He was content with holding her hands. He whispered and whispered and she sorted out the words that ran together. “Came for me, you, you…! Not alone. Not alone here any more…”
His hands twisted out of hers and caressed her arms. She shuddered. A longing for Michael possessed her, for the touch of his clean hands. She made herself keep still and listen.
“…home take me home…See? See what I’ve got.”
He fumbled in a pocket; when he let go of her to do it, she crept away. “…see…see…” She looked with disbelief at the broken gold chain; recognized it, and shuddered again. And here was something else. “Here…seeseesee!”
Norsa squatted beside her. “Do you know that that is?”
She had to try twice before she could answer. “It is an ordinary data storage module.”
“What is its significance to him?”
“I do not know. I have to get out,” she said suddenly in Standard. She jerked away from Gaaf, evading the clutching hands; she got to her feet and walked out quickly, though her knees trembled. The ubiquitous guards followed her into the gallery outside Gaaf’s rooms. She stood shaking until Norsa came out.
He said with interest, “There is water coming from your eyespots.”
“Yes. It will stop by itself in a little while.”
Norsa said, “Is that person deranged?”
“I think so.”
“We thought it possible, but we could not know. We did not know what to do, and were afraid in our ignorance to attempt any help. We have fed him as best we could, by force, despite the risk; there was nothing else we dared to do. Is there help you can give?”
“I do not know. There is one among my companions who has some skill in healing sickness of the body. I do not know about sickness of the spirit. Perhaps there is help he can give.”
“Tell me which it is, and I will send for him at once.”
“No. I mean—as you wish, Norsa. But I cannot explain to him tonight. I can give no more help to anyone any more in this night which grows old so that morning has almost come. I must have rest.”
“Then you will have rest. Is there anything with which I can provide you for your comfort?”
The tears had stopped, but they started up again. “You can provide my companion Michael,” she said. “He is my shelter in the night. I am grieved by lacking him. Surely you know we will cause you no harm. Is it necessary that we be parted?”
“Perhaps not,” Norsa said after a pause. “Yet it must be so in what is left of this night, for he is far away. Yet tomorrow perhaps this will change.”
“I have gratitude.”
She wiped her eyes and followed Norsa back to the street. Tomorrow he would bring Michael to her. Tomorrow also they would have to do something about Gaaf, if they could, if Theo could, but she could not think of it tonight; she was dizzy and her eyes were full of fog. When they came to her quarters she was already asleep and Norsa had to wake her before she could go in. When he touched her to rouse her, she said sleepily, “Mike?” and Norsa looked at her curiously and thought of questions that had to do with this odd bonding. But he was too polite to ask them then; a weary guest must first be given sleep.
* * *
Michael spent the first night in a nightmare of pacing through the rooms of a place that he took to be a luxurious prison; later he learned it was a private home. But it was a prison all the same, because he was guarded. The guards did not try to stop him in his restlessness, but they stood at each doorway that led out into the night. He paced because he was trembling on the edge of the terrible rage, which he finally knew had to do with being impotent and trapped. But he could not give into it because of Lise; because of her he fought it back. She held him there with her frightened eyes: she sensed what the pacing meant, and feared abandonment. And it was because she would not close her eyes, because she would not look away from him even when her face was gray with exhaustion, that he finally stopped moving. He saw that as long as she touched him, she could rest; so he forced himself to join her on a pallet meant (his guards made him understand) for sleeping, and with both Lise’s hands clutching his arm, he, too, slept. But even in sleep he waited for the Polity to come, waited to be led away in chains.
In the morning they were taken away again. He thought the next thing he saw would be the face of a human being from I&S. Instead, after a journey of several hours, the vehicle that carried him and Lise and their guards drew up before a labyrinth of a cream-colored house in the center of a garden, and Hanna came out to meet him. She said that Shen was already there, and that Theo would come soon but had been called away to see another human. She told him about Castillo—in shock, he scarcely understood her—and about Henrik Gaaf. She put her arms around his neck and talked to him gently.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said. “But it’s not all right, is it? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know…” He detached himself from her and passed his hands over his face. He looked beyond her to the house the Uskosians had loaned their honored guests. The roof shone like copper, the eaves were loaded with gingerbread fancywork. Wide doors stood open to the summer wind, and the interior looked, from here, dim and cool. It was a dream waiting to suck him in. It was the wrong dream, he thought. He had to run, he had to get away, he could not wait on fate though it might come after him anyway.
But Lise had already run down the path to the central door, where Shen had appeared. Hanna took his hand and drew him toward the house, and he followed her into a dream of summer.
* * *
By the end of the next day they had begun to fall into natural orbits; at the end of seven days, a Standard week, the process was complete.
Hanna was the first to leave. If she had come to Uskos for sanctuary, she forgot the fact immediately; she was still, and first, a scholar. Norsa gave her workrooms in the city, a vehicle, a chauffeur, and she left Michael each morning and returned at night. Though she saw that a cold hand lay on his heart, it seemed to her that he had strayed into precisely the right dream. If he disagreed, that was his business. So she talked to Uskosians and made notes. “I suspect,” she wrote, “that the unusually high rate of mutation on Uskos, which has promoted evolution despite the asexuality of life here, was the origin of the concept of the Master of Chaos; while the identity of generations (though modified by environmental factors and the occasional successful mutation) most likely is linked to the conservative world view expressed in the tales…Uskosians handle the physical universe much as we do, but in their attitude toward it there is something else: a perpetual suspense. They do not say only, ‘What will happen if we do this?’ They also say, ‘What will happen to us?’…The Uskosians with whom I talk are becoming aware of this difference between their perspective and ours and, curiously, feel this makes us far more vulnerable than they are. Several have used a phrase I had not heard before. I’m not sure if the best translation is ‘children of chaos’ or ‘the Master’s children.’ But they meant human beings. I’m sure of that.”
Hanna finished this passage late at night in a room she had commandeered for work in the humans’ maze of a house. When she was done, she showed it to Michael. He looked at the last lines for a long time. Then he said, “Oh, hell, I could’ve told you that.”
* * *
Lise was the next to go. A friendly neighbor’s selfing came, then brought other younglings; they enticed Lise from the garden and soon she was running about the town with them in torrents of noise, her slim legs flashing golden among their square brown bodies. Uskosians were indulgent with their offspring, and no one thought it odd that Lise was allowed to run free as she wished. She even followed her new companions to their study groups, the instructors encouraging her visits as highly educational, and her Ellsian improved rapidly.
She came home in tears one day, however; the younglings played many games which required infinitely flexible hands, and Lise could not keep up.
“It can’t be helped,” Michael said. “I’m sorry, little puss. It can’t be helped. You have pretty hands”—they were very grimy—“but they’re human hands.”
“Then I don’t want them!” she cried.
“Yes you do!” His voice was harsh and she looked up in surprise; he held her dirty paws tightly.
“Mike?” she said.
Instead of answering, he bent and gently kissed the backs of her hands. She turned them over and looked at them with greater approval.
“I can run faster than they can,” she said.
“I know. You run like the wind. Don’t show off too much, though. Now run back and watch them so you can tell Hanna what they do. And then when they have a different game, you can play with them.”
She darted out through the garden, brilliant as the flowers. Michael watched her go and thought that she had grown, and at any time now would sprout breasts. Lise had no idea how old she was. This seemed ordinary to Michael, who thought his age in Standard years was somewhere in the early forties. And when her body did change, and her mind? He was afraid it would be hard for her, as it had been for him. When the world turned out to be different from everything you thought it was beforehand, you could withdraw from it—or run at it head-on, no matter how ill-informed you were. Either course was disastrous. But he would be there to help her—he hoped—and so would Hanna—
Oh? said a ghostly chuckle in his head. What have you ever saved from the sucking dark? Or whom?
He shook his head, blinking. A cloud must have passed over the sun.
Think of something else—
—and here in the sunlight Lise was granted an Indian summer of childhood, among children so alien that her queer combination of ignorance and sophistication went unnoticed. The longer it lasted, the better.
That was the last time she came back during the day except to eat or entertain her lively friends, and she reported dutifully to Hanna on the younglings’ games.
* * *
Next Theo went. On the fourth night Hanna came in and said to him, “You have to talk to them about biology. I don’t know enough. Medicine, physiology, genetics—I need a whole Contact team. I don’t have one. You’re it.”
“I don’t know enough either,” Theo said. He had not ventured into the city. He spent his days sleeping or lounging in the garden, staring out at the skyline beyond the trees. He avoided the others, and reminded Hanna of a man about to leap into a lake of cold water and hesitating on the edge.
Hanna was hot and tired, and she had rarely refrained from leaping into anything.
“You know more than I do. You’re an expert, compared to me. Take them to GeeGee and open up the medlab.”
“I don’t know enough,” he repeated.
Hanna looked at Michael, but Michael said, “I’d better see about dinner,” and left.
Hanna said to Theo, “Look what you did for me. Look what you’re doing for Henrik.”
Theo snorted. Henrik Gaaf was present at this conversation: piled in a corner, gazing blankly ahead.
“But he said something today, Theo. He actually said good morning to me.”
Theo said, “I haven’t heard him say anything.”
“Well, I have. Whatever you’re doing is working. You know enough, Theo—you just don’t believe you do.”
He shook his head. Hanna went to where he perched on a shapeless mass supposed to be a chair, and sank to her knees so that she was looking up at him.
“Theo,” she said, “where would Mike be without me?”
He did not speak. She went on, “You know the answer. I don’t know if you think it means you owe me anything. If you do, please do this for me. For me and for Mike and for the beings who might save him before it’s all over. I’ll never ask you for another favor. Please.”
She had invested the words with an urgency that was more than verbal. He thought about it for a while. Finally he muttered, “I’ll try.”
“Thank you. Anyway, Theo, you can’t know less about humans than the Uskosians do. They won’t know when you’re wrong!”
So Theo left next day to do his best with a committee of physicians from the nations of Uskos. It was more interesting than he expected, his curiosity was aroused, and he went back the day after that. Soon he only came back at night, too.
* * *
Shen got bored and just walked out. She found her way unerringly to a raucous section of the city the Uskosians had not talked about. Somebody bought her a drink, and she liked it so well that she persuaded Hanna to get Norsa to give her some money. He was pleased to do it, but she rarely had to spend anything. She became very popular in certain quarters, and stayed out till dawn some nights, and came home singing, even when she was carried home.
So they were all gone, settling into courses that circled Michael, the still point around which they swung and revolved, the home, more than the house, to which they came back. He watched them go and come as people had come and gone for years, so sure of his care that they scarcely noticed it. Now in the mornings the house was silent. On the eighth morning Michael stood in it and listened. To silence, except for the quiet wind blowing through the garden trees. Inside the house it was dim and, at this hour, still cool, and outdoors the light poured down.
There were street musicians in the City of the Center. Michael had heard what they played, and though it was strange and harsh to his ears, the games they played with pitch and rhythm had possibilities.
He got his flute and went into the garden, because one still was left, and never would leave by himself. Gaaf sat among the flowers and stared at nothing.
Michael said quietly, “Let’s go for a walk.”
Gaaf was by no means normal, but he was more responsive than he had been when Theo brought him home. He looked up and mumbled, “Where?”
“I don’t know. Anywhere. Come on.”
Gaaf climbed to his feet, small and vague beside Michael. They went out together, Gaaf treading close on Michael’s heels.
* * *
Summer closed over them. The flowers in the garden, instead of fading, grew taller and more brilliant until they were a blaze of colored light. The humans seemed to see them even in the dark, as if some afterimage were imprinted on the retinas of their eyes. The flowers worried Theo. Like flowers everywhere they attracted insects: why? There was no need for pollination.
“Think,” Hanna urged.
“I’ll ask Ritee and the others.”
“No, don’t. Think about it.”
“You know?”
“I know. I knew before someone told me. Think. Use your eyes.”
So he walked in the garden hour after hour, thinking—until he saw it: saw a flower close over an insect, and when it opened later there was nothing left but a little debris.
“I swear I heard it burp,” he said to Hanna, and she laughed.
She laughed often in those days, which fell into one another in a golden cascade like the notes from Michael’s flute. All the days were alike, so that time seemed to have stopped, frozen at high summer in a great gout of light. The flood of sunlight changed them. Hanna and Michael and Shen turned very dark, and their eyes, blue and amber and green, were startling. Lise was dusted with gold all over, and even Henrik Gaaf turned nut-brown. But the best Theo could do for his own transparent skin was keep it from broiling.
It was the dry season, and there were seldom clouds. The heat was unremitting but not unpleasant, they were dazed with it, in the dusk they sat on a veranda and talked in lazy tones until they straggled off to bed. It was a civilized kind of heat, like their hosts: courteous, attentive to the comfort of a guest. They lived in the safest of sanctuaries—safe in its comfort, safe in its dreamlike separation from any world that had ever been real to them before, and safe in fact—for a time.
No one thought of it explicitly as refuge except Michael, but he thought of it that way less and less. Someday the Polity would come, of course. But if he was only waiting for an end to this world Hanna had given him, he ought to be looking at the sky, and he was not. He looked over his shoulder instead, he looked at the ground at his feet; he did not wait for something from the sky; he waited for the world to be rent and for a look at something deep in an abyss.
Yet his days were as quiet as those of the others. When the morning began to grow hot, he would leave the house with Gaaf tagging behind him, climb into one of the chauffeured vehicles placed at the humans’ disposal, and be carried through the city to the place where musicians gathered. Monolithic the city might be, but there were crevices and crannies where gardens had been planted, fountains set to soaring, and parks laid out, each lovely and unique. Through the middle of the day he sat cross-legged and nearly naked in the sun, burning blacker and blacker, in time not a novelty but a colleague. He searched GeeGee’s library for works on music theory that did not rely on the written word. The leathery beings who played impossible instruments with inhuman hands learned human musical notation quickly, and Michael quickly learned theirs. His Ellsian got better, if somewhat specialized, and he talked fluently of greater and lesser scales. Sometimes he played dances from the Renaissance of Earth’s western world, tunes a thousand and more years old, and the beings of Uskos came near and danced, stumping solemnly and rhythmically in circles round the alien with his shining instrument, while one of their number accompanied him on a drum. Sometimes the man and the other musicians played together, the notes of the flute darting silver and gold through the deeper chords. There were strange duets, and when Michael sang he collected crowds who threw money into hollow pots that rang when the coins fell inside. The days together were a timeless dream made of nothing but music; they were rich heavy drops that fell into still water, pregnant with light.
“Indeed all is chaos,” said the aliens in their soft growly voices, “yet we of the Musicians Guild impose order on it. It is transitory indeed; all order is transitory. Thus our assertion of sentient being lies in art, which patterns time in beauty.”
At the height of each day’s heat the crowds dispersed. The musicians drifted away as they had each summer for a hundred years, as they would for a hundred more. Occasionally Michael and Gaaf accompanied individuals to their homes or customary haunts (in one of which, once, they met Shen). More often they sought a shady spot and were quiet under the weight of the heat. Michael talked to Gaaf, dutifully following Theo’s instructions: Let him hear human voices. Talk to him. Gaaf was a good listener; he never interrupted, never contradicted, never asked difficult questions; he never made a sound. He was motionless, a brown statue with eyes that shifted now and then but never met Michael’s. And an extraordinary thing occurred. Michael found there were things he could not talk about. He could talk about now, about quiet, neutral things: how to make a stew, how long the flowers in the garden would grow, a new game Lise had learned; present things. But he tried to speak of the estate left behind on Valentine, how the sea sounded distantly all night and all day, how the peace of it was enlivened by companions of one’s choice, and he could not; he tried to talk of how he had bought and fitted GeeGee, the pleasure he had felt as the ship became his before his eyes, but the words caught and choked in his throat. Those had been dreams, too, and he was filled with a sense that they had been incomplete, that something was missing and they were unreal. He began to think he had made a wrong choice. Flight and search might have been the better one. He might have found what he sought; then everything would be real again.
Once, though, he spoke of the past, but of a more distant past. It happened on the first day on which he was offered a portion of the morning’s proceeds before the musicians took their pay away to eat and drink it up. He nearly refused his share, then remembered just in time that that would be impolite. Later, sitting under a tree whose every branch burst with miniature duplicates of itself which would drop and seek anchor in the soil when the days shortened, he pulled the coins from his pocket and looked at them. They were bright gold and heavy and closely engraved with text that for all he knew might be (and probably was) a legend of the beginning of money.
Suddenly he laughed. So all the riches had come to this, begging to begging, and once more he sang for his bread. He said so to Gaaf, laughing.
“It’s easier now, though. Easier…” The laughter faded; he talked on; the words came of their own accord. He had never said them to anyone before, not even Hanna. But this was like talking to no one.
“Easier than saying yes yes yes…‘Yes, ma’am, I can do that to you, but it costs a little more…’ ‘Yes-sir, you can do that to me, it doesn’t matter if it hurts as long as you pay enough, the docs are good at fixing us up.’ ‘Yes, Brother, I have spent the requisite hours on my knees contemplating the sin of aggression, only there’s some other people I wish you’d told that to, but you wouldn’t know them…’ I would’ve had to do it twenty years to get as rich as I wanted to be. So I did something else. I invested it. You know how I invested it, don’t you? Everybody knows. After that it was easy. The women, all I had to do was look at ’em. Snapped my fingers and down they went. The money had a lot to do with it. So I got radar in my head. Learned to see the ones who looked past the money and the face. Not,” he said, scrupulously honest, “that it didn’t have advantages. It just wasn’t enough. You know what I mean?”
Gaaf did not answer. He did not appear to have heard. Michael looked at him doubtfully and said, “No, I guess you don’t.”
Clouds had settled over the sun; the sky was gray. There was a roll of thunder and raindrops splattered the pavement.
Gaaf lifted his head with an expression of deadly fear. The flute rolled over the pavement with a ping; Michael kicked it in his scramble to get to Gaaf. He laid one hand on the man’s shoulder, the other on his head.
“It’s all right. It’s all right. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Henrik! It’s all right!”
Gaaf breathed noisily. He looked around as if he did not know where he was.
He began to talk. It was the first time he had said more than two consecutive words. He talked disjointedly of the Treasure Store of Elenstap and the night of stumbling through the farmlands. He talked about the morning when the aliens found him, but he was hazy about it. All he could remember was being afraid. He thought they would blame him for what the men of Castillo’s crew had done in the night; he thought they would do something to him. He thought that all the time until Hanna came, he expected to be tortured or put to death, he thought they only put it off to torment him. He said all this with surprising clarity.
At the end Michael said, “It’s over now.”
“Until they come,” Gaaf said, meaning the Polity.
“Yeah, well, we’ve all got that to worry about.”
A smile snaked across Gaaf’s mouth, a trailing thing of remarkable nastiness.
“Not me,” he said. “Everything’s been easy for you. It’s my turn.”
Michael shook his head. “What the hell are you talking about?” he said, but his mind shot on to something else. Gaaf was talking, Gaaf remembered; Michael crouched in front of him; a tremor ran through him, wraiths shifted under his feet.
“Henrik,” he said, “where were they going? When they left here?”
Gaaf’s eyes settled on his face. He must have heard the plea in Michael’s voice, and God knew what was in his too-transparent eyes; Gaaf shrank away.
“Do you know? Do you remember? Henrik…!”
But the animation drained from Gaaf’s eyes. He fondled something in his pocket, and sank back into silence.
* * *
The time sense of a dream is skewed, but Hanna always knew how long she had been on Uskos. When it got to be half a summer, she looked at the sky more often. Where was the Polity mission? Clouds came into the sky, a harbinger of wet autumn. Henrik was getting better.
What time is it? Time. What day? The day was frozen in miniature, as if everything within view was very small but perfectly clear. Not for the first time, not quite; but for the first time Henrik could question what he saw. Directly in front of him, the rangy man with the face carved by an angel. The gentle hands. On his shoulders. “Here, this way. Don’t fall. There’s a step.” The music. The man’s eyes were closed, he communicated only with the pipe at his mouth. Piercing fantastic rills. Overhead a gray sky. On every side, an appreciative circle, the others. The aliens. Oh no. Oh no.
He shrank, hiding. No one noticed. What day is it? When will they come? They would come to take him home. And they would take the musician away; he was sure they would do that, without knowing why he was sure.
The wind was cooler today. Cooler than when?—he did not know. He could not remember. He thought of the woman, remembering, hand in his pocket, fondling the chain. And the other thing, the slip of metal. Only now he remembered something more, without detail. The woman wasn’t alone, she didn’t sleep alone; she lived with the dark musician. There were details now, disjointed and unplaced in time, but very clear. Blue eyes distant and cool on poor Henrik’s face, turning and warming to: Mike. That’s his name. I hate him. I hate him. Who is he? Poor Henrik can’t quite remember. Poor Henrik’s not quite himself.
Hanna confided in Norsa. Telling her troubles to an alien did not strike her as an unusual thing to do.
She told him: “My companion Michael has a troubled heart, and I do not know how to give him aid.”
“What trouble could he have? For he is well-mated and also has the love of other companions, nor is he hungry or ill or enslaved. And by all that you have told me of ’Unans, he ought therefore to be happy.”
“That is correct, and therefore it is all the more difficult to give help to him in his distress.”
“Does he fear the law of ’Unans, when other ’Unans come here? For the gentle hints of my colleagues and myself ought to suffice in sealing his freedom, if all that you say is right; and even if we wished, we could not now withhold them. Else the persons of the Physicians Guild, and those of the Musicians Guild, will spring, as you have taught me to say, ‘on our backs.’ We do not want that to happen!”
“That is true, and so I have told Michael. Yet it is not enough, Norsa. And I do not know what to do, for he continues to grow worse.”
* * *
The clouds had moved in all the morning, and the wind was fresh, lifting Michael’s hair and chilling his bare shoulders. The musicians of the city looked at the sky and tested the wind with dampened fingers. They gave Michael small pieces of paper on which they had written names, places, contact codes: “In the event we do not return,” they said, “for autumn is early; yet song flourishes even in winter in warmer climes.”
So he sang a troubadour’s song for them:
Adieu, mes amours, adieu vous comment,
Adieu, mes amours, jusque au printemps!
“What does that mean?” they asked when he was done, and he translated loosely:
“Good-bye my companions, good-bye until spring; I have naught to live on, not a thing; only air unless I get the favor of a king!”
“Ah, that is a good song,” they said, and went away singing it.
The tiny trees still clung to the branches of their sires, stubborn in the gusting wind. There was dampness in it. The vehicle which had brought Michael and Gaaf had gone home, according to custom. They would have to walk whether the rain caught them or not. So they set out through the city with the wind blowing about their ears, for once without the interested participation of spectators who had all withdrawn to await the storm; and they walked through the back ways, the lesser-known paths Michael discovered instinctively. Presently they were walking through a part of the town they had not seen before: by the side of a moss-choked stream that waited for the cataracts of autumn storms.
The heavy vegetable smell of the moss was familiar. Michael had not smelled it for a long time. He avoided the places where it might assault him.
Haven, supposed to be, like this; from myself that time, though. Wasted, worthless human being: what did it? The girl I didn’t know in the morning, that last night on Colony One? Crying all night on my pillow, didn’t know till I climbed up in the morning from the dead. What I wanted was dope; what was I using then? Saw the bruises on her face, said what the hell did you do. She said: You did it. You did it. You.
He wanted to get away from the stream, but they had followed it into a cut between high banks, smoothly made of concrete and offering no way out. The wind played above, outside this narrow gorge where the air sat heavy and sullen over the dwindling, stinking thread of water.
Find me a place, Kareem. A place to go. Please. No people. No dope…And he did, but he hadn’t seen it. Hot and dry and the stream drying up so the smell came in—
“Here,” he said quietly. “This way, Henrik.” Steps cut into the wall led straight up, a hard climb though the bank was lower; near the top a burst of wind shook them. Gaaf swayed and Michael put out a hand to steady him. At the top the monumental buildings of the city stood over them, perpetually falling if you looked up too long. The wind slapped their faces, and then the rain; only a few drops, so far.
Henrick Gaaf said clearly, “We’re going to get wet.”
Michael was silent with surprise. He stole a look at Gaaf’s face. It was different, intelligent, like a bright rat, Michael thought, and disliked himself for it.
“It’s a long way home,” he said.
“Home,” Gaaf said in a curious tone.
They walked up the broad street in the wind, in silence. The moss smell was gone, and the memories that had threatened to come into the light had diminished. This is what I get for not running, he thought, and put the memories back where they belonged, with an effort.
Think of something else—
* * *
Hanna had gone home early to avoid the rain, to her chauffeur’s relief. She went to the room where she worked each evening, distilling the observations of the day, and settled to work. The first patter of raindrops swelled to a steady susurration. Thunder growled, but she did not hear it. The room had been dim when she came in, and slowly it got darker. The self-contained processing unit shone with its own light, and she did not stop to illuminate the room. A smell of damp earth came in through the windows.
“Today,” she wrote, “I learned through debate with the Philosophers Guild that there is already a movement toward consensus on the significance of this world’s very first contact with humans, meaning not Rubee’s and Awnlee’s journey to our space, but the visit Castillo and his men made here in the Avalon. ‘That’s easy,’ they said. ‘That was obviously the Master’s hand.’
“I asked how they knew. The explanation was complicated, but in essence it seemed to be that this visit was of the same order as natural disaster. It is clear that at the deepest level, Uskos is less concerned with cause than with effect, and the stance, in short, is phenomenological. Still, this is only an explicit, intellectual acceptance of common experience, a shift in emphasis from the human view, which is inclined to subordinate the event to its explanation. There is less detachment from primal experience—”
Hanna had been concentrating intently. Something like a prick between her shoulder blades distracted her. As soon as she was aware of it, it drilled into her back. She leapt up, spun around: pure reflex.
“Henrik…” She sighed, relaxing. “I didn’t know you’d come home. You startled me.”
Gaaf did not answer. He stood and looked at her. She thought suddenly that he had been there for some time, staring at her head framed in light. A fine target, she thought absurdly, but it was not so absurd. She had a faint vision of what he saw now. The light fell on her weakly; the curves of her body in its scanty summer clothing were pronounced to his eyes.
He walked toward her, his purpose clear. She took a step backward and bumped into the wall. He reached for her and she said, “Henrik, don’t,” and called, worried: Mike! She was not afraid of Gaaf, she could extricate herself from the unfortunate scene easily enough, but she might not be able to do it without injuring him. Gaaf’s hands were soft and sticky as slugs and not very strong. He pressed and smothered her against the wall, yet there was no threat in him. He embraced her without violence nor any understanding of her reluctance. Blind compulsion propelled him, some semblance of love, and she did not want to hurt him either physically or in thought. She managed to keep her mouth away from his, managed to reasonably confine his hands. “No, no,” she said, “I don’t like this, Henrik, I don’t want to do this. Please stop, Henrik. Please stop!” Mike! she said again, urgently; Gaaf slobbered at her neck; she felt sick. “Please, Henrik, stop. I don’t want to hurt you. Please!”
Michael came into the room in a hurry, heard Gaaf’s breathing, saw the shapes struggling in the dark. “No, please!” he heard Hanna say. He crossed the room, got hold of Gaaf’s right arm, lifted him without effort, and threw him at a blank spot on the wall. Gaaf hit it with a thud, slid down it, and was still.
Hanna cried, “Why did you do that!” and plunged past Michael before he could answer. She flew to Gaaf and knelt beside him, feeling his pulse, running her hands over him, testing for broken bones.
Michael said stupidly, “Huh?”
“If I’d wanted to break his neck, I could’ve done that myself!”
“But—”
“Did you have to be so rough?”
He swore softly at her back, at the unfairness. Gaaf was conscious and she cradled his head against her breast, no doubt, Michael thought, to Henrik’s entire satisfaction. He went to them and squatted beside Hanna to apologize and help Gaaf up. But when he put out his hand, Gaaf whimpered and cringed away.
“Don’t hurt me,” he wept, “don’t hurt me, I won’t do it, I won’t do anything—”
The sound, the shadow-man, the weak movement in the dark came together; Michael was somewhere else.
I beg you, said the body in the dark at his feet, bereft of pride, bereft of triumph; I won’t do it, I swear! Don’t hurt me, don’t do it, I beg, let me live—!
Hands grabbed his feet and he kicked them. Another grasped his arm; he threw it off. He did not remember getting through the dark house. But he was in the garden, standing shaking among the drenched flowers. The rain fell and fell, whispering old pleas.
Hanna came after him at once. She came up behind him and put her arms around him, and set her face against his back.
She said softly, “I saw that.”
The warmth at his back soaked into his spine, but he was rigid. She felt for his hands and he let her have them.
She said dreamily, “It was dark. Dark and lonely. It was a long time ago. But it was you. Not a child. You.”
He shook his head as if he could deny it, and rain ran from his hair into his eyes.
“I didn’t want to hurt him,” he said in someone else’s voice, and Hanna answered in a sleepy trance-tone, the oracle’s voice: “Who?”
His voice shook. “This is all for nothing, because of what I did. All you’ve done won’t be enough. But I had to do it. I did what I had to do.”
“I know. I know…”
The voice was infinitely tender. The softness underfoot, the universal grasses that held worlds together, gave way. He closed his eyes to stop this world from heaving and threatening to crack. But waves ran through the ground as if something alive writhed underneath it. Nothing was solid: nothing except the arms around his waist.
She said, “You are the most gentle human being I have ever known.”
It seemed to him mockery. But presently he detached himself from Hanna and turned to face her.
“C’mon,” he said. “They think we don’t have the sense to come in out of the rain. Maybe they’re right.”
In the gray light her face was remote and beautiful. “When was it?” she said.
“A long time ago,” he said. “When I was somebody else.”
They walked back toward the house together, and he began to tell her about it.
The planning and execution of the robbery of the Pavonis Queen had not been easy. Toward the end the details took so much time that there was no time for sleep. Afterward Michael personally dumped the body of the single casualty into space. In those days his face seldom showed what he really thought, and he performed the task without visible emotion. But when it was all over he was very tired. He was (best guess) twenty-three or twenty-four, and he had never been tired before.
It didn’t matter, because there was nothing he had to do. For the first time in his life he had nothing to reach for. He hired Kareem to look after the money and make it grow—and was lucky, luckier than his ignorance deserved and luckier than he knew at the time, because Kareem was an honest man.
There was plenty of money to start with, even after the others were paid off, and Kareem started making it increase at once.
Michael had nothing to do but spend it. At first he did not know what to spend it on, but he found out quickly what to buy: any damn thing he wanted.
But it wasn’t the way he had thought it would be. He bought fine clothes—and did not recognize himself in them. He was not vain, having come to regard his looks only as a marketable commodity, but he was a realist, and he knew he required no adornment. He gave that up and bought meals that would cost an ordinary workman a week’s wages; but they didn’t fill him up any better or longer than plain food. He bought places to live and didn’t live in them because they always seemed empty no matter how many people came to them (and people came, all right, but he looked around sometimes and saw that they were strangers). Inevitably he tired of the fine homes, and they went on the block. Kareem saw to it that they went for a profit. And Michael bought expensive machines and abandoned them, bought expensive women and abandoned them, bought expensive art—and kept that longer, at least, though years later, acting from an obscure desire for simplicity, he began to rid himself even of that. At a profit.
He didn’t buy friends. He bought companions, but he always knew exactly what he was getting for his cash.
He got tired of buying things. There had to be more to freedom that that. So he behaved like a free man; he traveled. He went to all the worlds of the Polity, no longer a smiling guest, someone’s pampered toy, but alone (except when he bought a woman to take along). He went to all the great capitals. He found nothing in them except more things to buy.
But that ceased to concern him because he came to see all things through a thickening haze. He drank a good deal, and became indifferent to the quality of what he drank. He was young and strong and the drink was of little consequence. But the mainstream of Polity culture had been notoriously drug-soaked for the last century, and that was a different matter. There was a dizzying spectrum of choices, and Michael, who could afford anything he wanted, started at one end of it and worked his way steadily toward the other. He didn’t know what he would do after he got there. But probably he would never get there. He mixed compounds with abandon, for one thing. For another, he developed a penchant for the illegal, which made it a risky business not only from the point of view of the law wherever he happened to be, but also because of the unpredictability of what he injected, ingested, or otherwise absorbed. And then when he was spaced, he got into fights. Somebody would kill him someday, or he would kill somebody else, and that would be the end of it.
The end didn’t come and didn’t come and didn’t come, and he lived that way for five years.
Through all of it he clung to music. The flute went with him everywhere. He had always taken lessons, and now, with the quiet exchange of a great deal of money, he took them from the masters of his time. Not necessarily those he would have chosen; some would not have him as a pupil at any price. He did not resent their refusal, but acknowledged their judgment, which had to do with character not talent. After all, there were days when his hands shook too hard to hold the instrument. But as soon as they were steadier he would pick it up again. And he carried a collection of music cubes, too, compulsively. Here was order, when there was no order anywhere else. Also his inclination led him deeper and deeper into the past, so that he learned, in his pursuit of essential harmonies, ancient history and archaic tongues. He had educated himself with fierce determination and he did not care who knew it, but though he acquired a stunning expertise in this one esoteric area, he kept his mouth shut about it. In all human space he shared this part of him only with a handful of other musicians and scholars. He played sometimes for them, but usually for himself, and never for anyone else, clutching music to himself in solitude—as if it could be taken away from him, if people knew it was precious.
Toward the end he stopped playing. Toward the end he acknowledged that he was not worthy of the music. And so he had been right, it could be taken away. Toward the end he could not even hear it in his head.
He was trying to kill himself. Exactly how the fact came to his attention was unclear, though it had something to do with the girl in his bed on Colony One. He did not know what she had done to trigger the rage in him, and he never found out. It happened at the end of a week he scarcely remembered. He was very sick from doping, he could not think, and so he acted entirely from instinct. He got from her the name of a medic who would not ask embarrassing questions, and he went to get the man and brought him back to take care of her. He was filled with bewildering compassion, he promised to stay with her until she was well, he left her only to obtain some things she needed for the time it would take for the bruises to heal, and he bought presents for her, too; and when he came back she was gone.
This happened in luxurious lodgings in a town whose name he could not remember. The rooms the girl had left (his rational mind insisted) were bright, clean, and comfortable: worth the high cost of a few days’ stay. But in memory they were dim and grimy. He stood in them knowing he was alone.
By merciful coincidence an express flight for Valentine would leave in a few hours. He booked passage and left with nothing but his silent flute, leaving everything else behind.
He knew before he got to Valentine that this time he was really ill. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t keep food down, got weaker instead of stronger even though he had left behind his stock of dope. But he was not suffering from the interruption of any addiction. He was not seriously addicted to anything, and he had altered his habits before when his body became insistent. He had never felt this bad. It came to him that he could not go back to his customary pursuits on Valentine, at least not right away, and so he contacted Kareem from space and arranged for Kareem to find a place where he could stay until his strength returned. Kareem agreed, his face expressionless. Years later Michael still would not know what Kareem thought of him in those days. He did not ask; the answer might be too painful to hear.
In the remainder of the passage to Valentine, he began to want certain things he had never valued before: simple food, peaceful sleep, solitude, silence. He wanted them very badly and did not look past them, because it seemed to him a given, inescapable, that when he left the sanctuary Kareem had prepared for him, he would return to living just as he had lived until then. Even when he disembarked at Port of Shoreground (moving carefully because his head was light and his limbs treacherous) and climbed into the preprogrammed aircar Kareem had sent for him, he could not read the future in his overwhelming sense of escape.
The car took him north along the coast and then inland—as he discovered only when it had landed and he asked it where he was; during the first minutes of the flight he had fallen into the first real sleep he had had in weeks.
The place was a lodge by the edge of a stream that flowed north to join the network of tributaries of the Black River, which eventually, much farther north, poured into the sea. He had an idea that this was sportsmen’s territory, and the lodge one of a string of similar facilities that dotted the area, but he did not realize until later that he knew that because once he had been told he owned some of them. Later, when he took an interest in what he owned, and went back to see if there were ghosts there (there were), he learned that this was the smallest of them. It had few amenities and was intended for the serious hunter who only wanted a base to come back to at night. It had a single mirror that showed him a stranger with heavy eyes and a thickening middle. The cabin did not talk to him; its intelligence was on the most basic level. It was as isolated as it was possible to be, and as primitive as it could be without being a thatched hut, and no one came there without a reason.
So for a little while he had what he wanted. Solitude: which meant that he could not hurt anyone else. Food, sleep: the absolute foundations of existence, as he discovered in his gratitude for being able to eat and sleep again. And silence: but why did he want that, when he was used to the din of voices and machines?
He found out why. It was so he could hear himself.
The weather was dry and hot and Michael looked at the forest and thought of walking in it, but he was weak, and too many other things screamed for his attention, so he sat on the porch and watched the shadows travel like a compass of the day, pointing west in the morning and east at night. It seemed important to be very still because the ground pitched and yawed whenever he got up. He thought he might be going mad—because though he was alone, somebody asked him questions. Michael thought he knew this stranger, or had known him once, before the dark closed in. He had lived in Michael’s head for a long time, but he had been silent or, more likely, drowned out. Now he could be heard. He insisted on a dialogue, and the long conversation went on and on. Michael remembered parts of it word for word for the rest of his life.
“Do you think,” said the stranger, “you’re any better than the animals who started you out this way?”
“Sure I am. Look at the Queen. I said I wouldn’t hurt anybody, and I didn’t, did I?”
“Oh, come on. What about the spacer who lost an eye in that bar on Co-op? The one whose head you bashed in at Shoreground last year? Not to mention that girl—”
“They’re all right. I made sure they were all right.”
“So your bones wouldn’t rot in jail—”
The voice took him through every remembered incident of his life. It weighed up, evaluated, and interpreted. He began to learn about accountability, though he grasped the concept only dimly; he also began to learn about possibilities he had never considered before. One of the things you could do with money was give it away. One thing you could do if women fell all over you was take a closer look at the ones who did not; it was even possible that pleasing a woman worth pleasing went beyond what happened in bed. It was possible that the mind that had mastered the Pavonis Queen puzzle was good for other things as well. The possibilities might mean there were other ways to live, and maybe even that there were things to live for.
These were new ideas. He grasped them, however, eagerly and easily. He did not attribute his quickness to any special virtue on his part. It was only that he had gotten what he thought he wanted, and it was not worth having. And all he felt, when he thought that he might be able to change, was relief so great there was no room for righteousness—or guilt.
The days ran into each other, and when he came to this point where he began to see the astonishing possibilities, he was not sure how long he had been in the forest. He was not in a hurry to leave. It was taking some time to get acquainted with this person in his head, whose name, oddly enough, was Michael, too. He was likable, not bad company at all; he couldn’t do anything about the chasm Michael saw sometimes, but he said What did you expect anyway? At least he was a thoroughgoing realist who admitted without hesitation that there were more questions than answers.
But finally Michael knew he could not stay there any longer. It was time to do something else. Get a new place to live, only for a long time this time: on the Carnivaltown dome, maybe, close to where he had started from, close enough to see it, but a little distance away. He would buy it empty, furnish it with absolute basics, and take his time filling it up. He would give some thought to what he filled it up with. And he would find out what Kareem was doing with his fortune, and see if he could learn how to do some of it himself, though starting as the most ignorant of pupils.
He had a vague notion of fishing for his dinner on the last night, and went to look at the stream. But it had fallen much lower than when he arrived, and even in the deeper pools downstream there were thick pads of moss on the stones in the shallows, and a smell of decay in the mud at the margins. He wasn’t hungry anyway. He walked back to the cabin in the dusk thinking that he might, tonight, take up the flute again, and see if it would let him play it. And he thought he heard a whine high above as he walked, as if an aircar crossed the sky, but that was unlikely, and he was preoccupied, and dismissed the notion.
He went into the cabin and a man was waiting for him.
He thought the man was someone Kareem had sent to get him, or to tell him something. Not that Kareem had ever done anything of the kind before, Michael being unnecessary to anything Kareem did, but he could not think of any other reason for this stranger to be here.
The man did not say anything, so Michael made some polite, questioning remark.
The man said, “You don’t recognize me, do you?”
To the best of Michael’s knowledge he had never seen the man before. He said, “Should I?”
“I hope not. Ivo Tonson. Remember me?”
Michael said incredulously, “Ivo?” and the other man laughed. Not even the laugh was familiar.
“They did a good job, didn’t they? Know what I did a couple years ago? Went back to Earth and looked up my wife. Walked up and asked for directions. She didn’t even blink. So how are you, my boy?”
Michael put his hands in his pockets and looked at Ivo Tonson without answering. It was now nearly five Standard years since the Pavonis Queen incident. There had never been any repercussions, and he had gradually left behind the paranoia that had, of necessity, affected every breath he took through every stage of preparation for the crime. But now he felt its old familiar touch. There was no good reason, not one, for Tonson to seek him out after all this time.
He said, “How did you find me here?”
“Oh, that was easy. I called up your headman and told him you’d tried to contact me, left a message saying I was to join you, but neglected to say where you were. I may have suggested there was a party getting ready to happen. He didn’t ask any questions. I don’t think,” Tonson said, “he entirely approves of you, dear boy.”
“That’s no news…”
The air stirred a little, sluggishly. Michael had bypassed the cabin’s climate control and opened all the windows, thinking the night would turn cool, but the heat of the day still lingered. The thick smell of the parched stream came in, and the smell of danger with it.
He said, “What do you want?”
“Why, the renewal of old ties, of course. Let me tell you what I’ve been doing.”
“I don’t want to know,” Michael said.
“Well, you’re going to hear it anyway. We’ll do this my way, my boy. We always did, didn’t we? And so cooperative you always were. Always pleasant. Always smiling. Even when I hurt you. I always thought you liked it, my dear.”
Tonson looked around and sat down, making himself at home. He had not had his body structure tampered with, whatever had been done to change the rest of him. He was still a little man with no muscle to speak of. He would be easy to handle; but Michael suspected he was armed.
He stood where he was and no doubt appeared to listen, but he took in little of the talk, which had to do with a series of disastrous investments. Instead of listening, Michael thought of what he had gone through to get this roly-poly sadist’s cooperation, the information that was the key to the one big coup he needed to start life over again. It had gotten so he winced whenever he heard the cheery voice across space: “Be in Shoreground in a few days, my dear. You’ll be ready, won’t you?”
Tonson said something again about renewing old ties, only this time he was explicit about what he meant.
Michael said softly, “I don’t do that any more. I’m not for sale any more.”
“A pity. Truly a pity. You look just as fine as you ever did, although,” Tonson said judiciously, “you seem a little unwell. Not due to this unexpected visit, I hope. Still, if old friendships mean nothing to you, I’m prepared to deal on a businesslike basis.”
“I told you, I’m not—”
“Oh, I don’t mean that. I don’t mean that at all. I came about money. Mostly.”
“Oh, yes?” said Michael, and it was as if a string that ran all through his body, out to the ends of his fingers and toes, drew taut. He knew what was happening now. It only remained to hear the details.
He listened. It was worse than he expected. He heard about the hint already lodged with I&S, the promise of more information to come. “It all depends on you, dear boy. I looked for you on Colony One, to tell you it wasn’t safe for you there any more, but I missed you. You’d left in rather a hurry.” He wanted nothing as simple as cash. He wanted a partnership in Michael’s growing network of interests.
Michael considered it. There was enough, God knew, to go around. If it were as simple as that—
But it was not. The man who wanted a partnership today could want control tomorrow. And Tonson suggested, more delicately this time, that there were other things he might want. So Michael still was for sale after all, only now the payoff was silence.
He shrugged and said, “I’ll think about it. Want a drink?”
“Delighted. Delighted you’re being reasonable, but I knew you would…” The man’s eyes said: What else could you do? “We’ll drink to our new relationship, my boy.”
Michael nodded, walked past Tonson without looking at him—and turned on his heel and struck. Tonson slumped where he sat, unconscious.
It was the start of another nightmare, the kind he had thought he would never have to live through again. There were enough of them already, more than any human being should have. Unless he were being punished by some ruthless god for unspeakable crimes, though he could not remember committing any that bad: until now. The voice in his head, now when it might have been helpful, was gone. He had been right, Tonson was armed, and with a laser pistol, nothing as harmless as a stungun. Michael took it away, poured water over Tonson’s head to wake him, and asked questions. Tonson did not want to answer them. But Michael had to know the answers, the extent of his danger, whether it stretched beyond this one man. To find out he used the pistol, setting the output low, not intense enough to burn through metal but easily hot enough to cook meat. It was (until then) the hardest thing he had ever done and the smell of scorched flesh gagged him, but there was, fortunately, little courage in Ivo Tonson, and not much pain was required to force him to answer. And perhaps in his terror he was not capable of understanding that fortitude, or lies at least, might mean he might keep on living. But he did not even lie, though the truth condemned him. He had not insured his life by leaving his dangerous information with anyone else, and he had relied on the weapon for protection. He had not had anything to do directly with the Pavonis Queen and had not seen Michael’s cold efficiency there. He had only known Michael in Carnivaltown, and he had not really expected resistance from the compliant, uncomplaining boy he remembered. No one had known he was coming to Valentine, and he had come using another new name. He had flown from Shoreground in an autocab and sent it back to its base, having expended (the terrified Tonson said) the last of his cash on the long ride, converted from the last of his credit; so he could not even be traced that way. It was possible (he admitted toward the end, with the little breath screaming left) he would not even be missed.
“You’re making it easy,” Michael said. He was hunched against the wall next to Tonson then. Except that Tonson’s hands and legs were bound, an observer would have had a hard time deciding which of the two sweating, wretched men was the victim.
“I won’t do it, won’t do anything, it’s a mistake, all a mistake, you know I couldn’t do it, I care for you too much, dear boy, I swear I won’t—”
The short night moved on, the sullen air hardly moving. The hollowness under the world was unmistakable, and the lights in the cabin were yellow and dim and resembled eyes. Michael knew what he was going to do. But not just yet, because he could not. And he thought of finding something to use to soothe Tonson’s burns, but that was ludicrous, in view of what he was going to do, and maybe (he thought) the pain even was a blessing, because Tonson knew what was going to happen, too, and pain might distract him from the worse agony of fear.
Finally—hours had gone by—he got up, because one thing he had to do was best done in darkness, and the ocean was far away, and morning dangerously near. He got the pistol, which he had put well out of the bound man’s reach, and came back and stood over him. Ivo Tonson began to plead. Michael stood there for a long time. The delay was the worst torture he could have inflicted on Tonson, but that was not why he waited. He waited because he could not make himself do the necessary next thing. Where was the murderous rage when he needed it? He listened to the sobs and whispers until they ran into one another and turned into a meaningless babble. He waited until he had convinced himself that the thing at his feet was not human, not even alive, was a bundle of old clothes that did not even move of their own accord but only rocked with the floor, which seemed to move in sickening waves.
Then he knelt on the uneasy floor, put the pistol to the base of Tonson’s skull, and burned out his brain. It was a quick business, and very clean.
He loaded the body into the aircar that had brought him here. He would not come back, had brought nothing with him but his flute, and he took that away, too. He also took heavy stones from the bed of the stream. He flew out to sea and just before dawn threw the weighted body into the water, now really a bunch of old clothes, as limp and as tousled. Then he flew back to Shoreground and got rooms at an inn, because he could not remember if he still owned anything that might pass for a home. He had to sleep, but before he did, he took up the flute. To his surprise, it allowed him to play it; or, more accurately, it played itself. He did not think about what to play. The melodies came by themselves, the gentlest and most peaceful tunes he had heard in all his years, and they came for hours. After a while the music began to talk to him. It said that this was just like everything else, one more thing to be left in the past. It said there was now no reason, none at all, not to act on possibilities, because there were no worse places to go than he had gone, no worse things to do than he had done, no worse man to be than he was. And what was done was finally, irretrievably done, and the future would be better because it had to be, because if it were not there was no justification, never would be, never, for the things he had done, especially this last act. But the music was forgiving, and held out hopes of penance. When it finished talking he put down the flute and slept for two days; after which he began to live, but not to live again because that was not what he had been doing before; he only started, for the first time, to live.
It took Michael a long time to tell this story. Hanna listened to the words, and also to the memories that went along with them. She knew that he had never told anyone about it before, and she knew he was not sure that when she had heard it, she would continue to love him. But it made no difference to her in that respect.
At the end, when he talked of sleep and was so exhausted that he finished the tale hardly awake, she went to the pallet where he lay—they had returned to their own rooms—and sat down beside him. She took his hand, and told him it made no difference. But he wanted to be sure she knew she could not save him, never could have saved him. “Amnesty for robbery’s one thing. The Uskosians don’t know about this because you didn’t know. This is something else.”
“Not if the Polity doesn’t know either.”
“But how can you know they don’t know?”
The forgotten chill of the rain penetrated to her bones. She heard a voice from a summer on Earth: Don’t forget the man he’s believed to have killed…
Michael had one more thing to say. She bent over him to hear it. “I hate pain,” he said quietly, and it was not only his own pain that he meant; and he turned his head away from her and escaped into sleep.
By next day the rain had begun in earnest. It fell in sheets for hours, sometimes with thunder and lightning and sometimes not. The reason the city was sited on high ground became apparent. The streams that wound through it were not entirely decorative; they were a necessity at this season, supplementing the underground storm sewers which were inadequate for the coming of autumn. The waters were full of miniature shrubs and trees that washed down and down to fetch up at last at high-water mark somewhere else, fresh and healthy after their journey in the nutrient-laden waters. The water also spurred the growth of fine rootlets that would cling to damp soil long enough for taproots to strike into the soil hard and fast.
So the rain was useful and necessary, and it was accepted with such fatalism that the City of the Center essentially shut down. Many inhabitants removed to drier places. Those who did not stayed in their homes. Only indispensable personnel were expected to be at their places of work at this season. The storms were early this year, however, and adjustments had to be made for a day or two. By pleading the suddenness of the onset of the storms, Hanna even got her chauffeur to take her to Norsa’s offices one more time. The chauffeur was depressed about it; he would have been more depressed if he had known that she went only to ask Norsa to arrange a journey for Michael and herself. “I wish to see a place of which Awnlee told me,” she said. “I wish to travel to the Red Forest of Ree.”
Norsa had been looking out the window and twiddling his fingers, a sight in itself worth the trip.
“But why?” he said. “For the weather in Ree is even worse.”
“Nonetheless I must go, and immediately.”
“Then we will all go tomorrow,” Norsa said, “and, at the least, will be over the rain for a time and not under it.”
So Hanna went home through the rain, hoping that tonight would be better than the night before, that Michael would not wake again and again tense as a beast of prey that feels the hunter closing in, and that, with luck, the excursion to Ree would shake him from his despair.
* * *
Heavy cloud brought the evening on them early. After dinner Shen disappeared into the thickening night, clad in an Uskosian rain garment that made her look like a shiny robot not even of human shape. Lise prevailed on Theo to take her to the home of a friend who lived farther away than most. When they, too, had gone, Hanna packed a few necessities for the journey to Ree and afterward tried to settle to work; but she could not work. She gave up and wandered through the enormous house and thought of the Red Forest of Ree, its great plumes sodden and drooping to the ground. That was not how Awnlee had wanted her to see it. In his mind, when he spoke of it, there had been sunlight.
I must get Michael away from here altogether, she thought; she thought it often. But each time there came another thought: There is nowhere left to go.
Presently the house warbled over the noises of the storm, startling her: someone was calling in. Henrik would not answer. Michael would, but he did not, at least not before Hanna had hunted down the warble in a nearby room where the utility panel was concealed behind a bronze plaque more or less in the form of a being of Uskos. Aliore as Pure Art, said an explanatory legend on the side, which she had to press to open the panel. She fumbled with the tiny dials behind the plaque.
Theo’s voice roared at her; she jumped and got the volume down. “What? What?” she said.
“Can’t you hear me? I said, young Binell’s sire wants us to stay the night. He thinks it’s crazy to try going home. I think he’s right. Listen, if the power goes out, don’t worry. I hear they’re putting skeleton crews on infrastructure and sending everybody else home.”
“What? All right. Is it getting worse?”
“This is only the start. Listen, you’ll be all right without the Box, won’t you?”
That was what they called the vehicle Theo had taken; Shen had left in the one they called the Little Box. They had all learned to drive them, more or less.
“We’re not going anywhere.”
“All right. You know where we are, if you need us.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
But the last words echoed back at her, a yellow light twinkled from the panel, and the lights in the room at her back dimmed suddenly. She leaned over and found that her Uskosian tutors had taught her enough so that she could just read the engraving. It said: At present there can be no connection save with the Emergency Contact Locus nearest this site.
What was left of the light began to fade. Spurred by a memory of something that had not seemed important when she was shown it, she flew through the house to an alcove under a stair. She got her hands on an emergency lantern just as the lights went out altogether, and turned it on with relief. It was shaped like a candle, and the light at its tip even acted like flame, bending and wavering and casting swooping shadows; but the light was cold.
She stood cupping the light as if it were a real candle, and listened to the rumor of the wind. The air was cooler in the storm, and she shivered, but not with cold; there was a primeval strength to winds like this which demanded notice. And she remembered, fishing it from a dialogue on a long summer day far off on Earth, the reason power was cut off and ordinary pursuits put aside during storms like this. It was not (as Theo had thought) a necessity or even a precaution, but a ritual. In some households there would be talk of the Master’s hand, and the younglings would be instructed by the storm. In others there would be no talk—but everyone would stop, and acknowledge the wind and the flood.
She went slowly to the room where Michael was, thinking that perhaps he would be watching the storm, too, his eyes clear with fascination. And she found him in a room adjoining the veranda, and the wide doors were open so that the tumult of the storm came in on a spray of rain; but he was asleep, and did not see any of it. He lay just outside the range of the spray on a lounge that was poorly formed for the human body, so that he sprawled across it like a broken child. There was a music cube at his head, and Hanna came near and heard a shout of summer and sunlight. But outside the night was pitch-dark, and she did not see but heard the thrashing of the garden trees.
Henrik sat in a corner on a pile of rugs. He had been watching Michael in the dark.
Hanna knew it; she was revolted. There had been a change in Henrik, as if the moment of violence the day before had waked him from a deep sleep. His new attention was fixed on Michael, and it was inimical.
She sat down at Michael’s head as if to shield him from Gaaf’s eyes with her body and her light. Patches of the sky lit up from time to time with lightning, and were followed by rumbles of thunder from other places in the city.
Her tension increased. But it was not because of the storm; it was because of Henrik.
Does he think I can’t feel his hatred? What if he tries to do something about it?
And if she could see into his head a little? She ought not make the attempt. Ought not: a social prohibition against the invasion of the ultimate fortress of privacy. But it was a prohibition that had ceased to trouble Hanna much in these last years, and she might never have so good an opportunity. There was no one near to distract her, and Michael slept deeply. She put her free hand on his forehead and he did not feel it.
And so she made her mind empty in something that was kin to the satya trance, though not so complete or difficult; she made herself hollow, a gong that would resonate to whatever touched it. First the room and then the wind and rain became remote, and she entered a shell of silence; and into this focusing of perception she admitted the point of life that was Henrik.
Thus it was that as the storm thundered on she saw herself, and what poor Henrik thought of her: not much. She was hardly present in his head at all. She was tiny in the map he had made of the world, an appendage to something larger than life that loomed like a threat. It was powerful, detestable, and malignant. It was Michael.
Somewhere far outside the trance she was horrified. Inside it, cool logic operated. It said that under the blankness of the past weeks, an obsession had grown in Gaaf. The burden of uncounted humiliations, the weight of his life, must have a focus; and here, where humankind was concentrated in a handful of personalities, here in a place he did not want to acknowledge as real, Michael had become the focus.
She ceased to hear the storm. Without emotion and therefore unrecognized by Gaaf, she slipped through the perpetual panic of his thought.
Fortune’s favored child: that was how he saw Michael. Had Hanna been herself she might have laughed, though bitterly. How is that? she asked, but he thought the question came from inside himself, so skillful was Hanna and so (still) befuddled was Gaaf, and inexperienced in this way of communication; so he answered, and he answered with envy.
She murmured agreement in Gaaf’s brain. He has so much…But she could not have done it if she had not made herself an echo.
The women and the money, the money and the women…
There was not much distinction between the two. In Gaaf’s eyes they fell into Michael’s hands, into his arms, coins and great gouts of credit, a procession of women who offered themselves like shameless animals—
Somewhere outside the half-trance Hanna laughed to herself. Had she been that bad about it? No doubt.
He will pay for it! Gaaf said (he supposed) to himself, with such clarity and certainty that Hanna for an instant lost control, and heard the storm again, and the shadow in the corner stirred, alerted.
Outside the trance she was deeply alarmed. But she could not afford alarm; if Gaaf felt it, even he would know what she was doing. She wrapped herself in trance like a shield of silence, purposeful and irresistible. She engaged in no casual inquiry now. It was essential to find out what Henrik meant by his smug conviction. And she crept up on him as stealthily as if it meant Michael’s life; as it might, if the satisfaction she had read in Gaaf, the sureness of coming revenge, had a foundation in fact.
…satisfying! she breathed in the corners of his mind, a vengeful echo.
He gloated: They will take him away.
And,…power! Hanna purred, catching at the knowledge of power in his hand, and there were quick little flashes of events and the burden of all that power:
Michael looking at bright alien coins in his hand, talking of pain.
Michael on his knees, begging.
For what?
The answer was an image of distance and utter isolation.
And I have it! Gaaf thought, triumphant, and she saw that he had something, she even felt it as he felt in his pocket.
And its name? said the echo in his head, his own thought (he believed), and he answered, thought the word, said it, even said it half–out loud.
She pulled out of him then, wrenching herself away from trance. As soon as she did, her stomach revolted; she put her head on her knees to keep from being sick. When she looked up, Gaaf was upright and staring at her. Suspecting. In fact he should know perfectly well what she had done; only he could not believe it.
She ignored him. She turned to Michael and touched him until he woke. He smiled at her as he always did when he woke and found her there.
It did not seem to Hanna that what she had learned could be of any significance, yet it seemed so important to Gaaf, this thing Michael had begged for and Gaaf had withheld. She said hesitantly, even shyly, because she felt ridiculous, “Does the name ‘Gadrah’ mean anything to you?”
He almost fainted.
* * *
When she told him about the module, he took it away from Gaaf. Gaaf resisted, desperate. Hanna was paralyzed with his fury, his fear, her own confusion. She did not recognize Michael. He had gone into shock, the man she knew, and come out someone else. His shadow leapt on the ceiling as he moved on Gaaf. Hanna was afraid he would kill, though this was not what she had seen before, the passion to hurt, he was only consumed by a single goal; but he might kill to get it. She called to him out loud and in thought and he did not hear, she clutched his arm and he flung her away, she had dropped the light, could see nothing, the tumult in the corner was a melee of violence and noise. But all the noise was Gaaf’s. Michael did not utter a sound.
He had what he wanted and ran out into the storm.
Gaaf was conscious and essentially unhurt. Hanna did not waste time with him. She picked herself off the floor where Michael had thrown her and ran after him, pursued by a blast of hatred from Gaaf. The wind hit her like a wall when she came onto the veranda. Hurricane! she thought, staggering backward, but it was only a gust, and she got back the breath the wind had taken, and pushed away from the house.
She did not think about where to go, she ran without thinking. But when she rounded a corner against the wind, and struck off without thought down a path slippery with rain that led to the street, she knew what her destination was, what Michael’s must be: GeeGee.
As soon as she knew it, she lost her head. Michael would lift off, he would be gone, no one would know where he had gone and she would never see him again. She could not even keep up with him, much less catch up; sheer weight made a difference in this storm, where the wind shoved her backward and knocked her from side to side. She called his name, but the wind blew it away, so she cried out to him in thought, too. Her feet slipped on the tiles of the path and she fell with a splash; it did not matter, she had been soaked as soon as she got to the door, and now the wind whipped her dripping hair against her face with a force that stung.
The street was not quite dark. Its margins were edged with lines of light which the curbs took up in daylight and released at night. But nothing moved in the street except water, which made it a stream.
Hopeless, hopeless— The wind slackened and she ran more easily, though there were gusts that unbalanced her. She put her head down and threw herself against it. Hopeless— She would (beginning to think again) go back. She would call that Emergency Contact Locus and somehow get through to Norsa. There were guards around GeeGee and he would see to it that they would not let Michael board.
The wind blew her around a corner and she bumped head-on into Michael.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and pushed against him as if she could merge her body into his.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing!” He shouted into her ear. “I was coming back. I heard you. I felt you fall, I was afraid you’d get hurt.”
“Oh yes yes yes,” Hanna said, not interested in anything but holding him. He looked around; he had to lift his head to do it, and she clutched him. “Come here,” he said. She seized his hand as hard as Lise ever had, and he led her to a wall she had not seen in the dark. There was a gate in it. He struggled with it in the wind, got it open, pulled her through it, and crouched with her in the shelter of the wall. It was cold and black, the rain streamed down the wall and down their backs, and the wind still pulled at them, but it was no longer like being beaten.
Michael tried to speak and Hanna interrupted.
“How could you! How could you do that to Henrik? How could you do this to me? You can’t run away, I won’t let you, you’re mine—!”
She was seized with a possessiveness she had not known was in her. At some time when she was not looking, it had become a law of nature that Michael could not leave her. She shouted at him, cried, pounded his chest with her fists. He let her rave, listening seriously until she ran down; by then the water had formed a puddle around them.
Hanna subsided at last into sobs. “You can’t!” had become “You won’t, will you? Please?” And she knew she had made a spectacle of herself, fallen into a patch of pure hysteria. She was ridiculous—and wet; a marine creature whose tears were lost in the water it breathed.
Michael leaned forward, put his mouth against her ear, and began to talk.
“I wasn’t going to leave you. I wasn’t going to take off. I just wanted to take it to GeeGee and see. I couldn’t think of anything else. I heard you call and turned back. I always would. I always will. Don’t you know that by now? Listen to me. Listen. I will never leave you. Never.”
But there was something in the hand which caressed her; she felt it burn into his palm.
“That’s it,” she said, “isn’t it. The place.”
“I don’t know.”
“But you have to find out.”
“Yes.”
She had stopped crying. Her anger was gone; the weariness it left behind slowed her speech. “Wait until morning,” she said.
“In the morning we go to Ree. We won’t come back until the day after tomorrow. Do you think I can wait that long? I’ll take you back to the house, and I promise to come back. I solemnly swear it. But I’m going to GeeGee tonight.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“I don’t think—”
“I will. I will.”
GeeGee, having been moved near the city for the travelers’ convenience, was not far away as distances went: an hour’s pleasant walk. Tonight it would be two hours or more, none of it pleasant. In the last years of Hanna’s life she had leapt solar systems with ease. Now all her journeys had come down to this: a few kilometers of hard going in the rain.
“You think that’s the place,” she said.
“I don’t know.” He was part of the darkness, indistinguishable. Only his hands proved he was there. They had been quiet on Hanna’s shoulders, but suddenly they were restless, brushing water from her hair, wiping it from her face; they felt for her substance in the dark.
“What else do you think it could be?”
“I’m afraid to think.”
“Does Henrik know?”
“Maybe. Hanna, I don’t know anything!”
“Let’s go back and ask him,” she said craftily.
“No. Why? When we can plug it into GeeGee and see?”
She gave up. “I always liked walking in the rain,” she said.
The irony was lost on him. “All right. Hold tight to my arm. If the lightning comes too close, we’ll lie low in a ditch.”
“And drown!”
“C’mon,” he said.
The wind and rain diminished, though there were periods when the downpour was as hard as ever. The lightning stayed far away. Once Hanna looked toward the city and saw it strike repeatedly at the top of one of the great towers. The glow rimming the streets was subdued in the rain, and they walked in the middle to avoid the rushing, flooded gutters. Time slowed to an endless moment of wet and cold in which Hanna had leisure to be astounded by her panic. She held to herself the thought, like a magical charm, that her fear had found Michael in the storm, that it had broken through the armor of his obsession and that he had turned back, desiring her safety more than this other thing he wanted. But still he had surprised her again. Nothing she knew about him had prepared her for the unforgiving passion he had shown Gaaf. And she was afraid of where it could take him next.
Toward midnight they reached the Golden Girl. There were no guards around GeeGee after all. But they appeared as soon as Hanna and Michael came into the welcome, familiar dryness, where even the lights were the color of an old friend; they came running from somewhere inside and stopped in consternation when they saw the humans.
Hanna said to them understandingly, “Indeed it is a very wet night.”
“Very,” agreed their captain. He raised a hand and with great dignity led his crew out to their proper posts; not without some regretful looks backward.
Control had an abandoned look. Michael sat in the master’s place, which had been his until Hanna’s greater skill supplanted him. In the last hour Hanna had felt a great purposefulness crystallize in him, and he had hardly been aware of her company. Yet above all there was a great restraint. He did not know what he had, and kept speculation to himself.
He slipped the module into a notch and told GeeGee: “Read and store.” His face and voice were blank. They waited, Hanna as still as Michael. It seemed to be a very long time before GeeGee said, “Done.”
“What is it?” Michael asked.
“A course in standard format,” GeeGee said indifferently.
“What’s the destination? Compare with what you’ve got in memory.”
This time the pause was unquestionably very long. At the end of it GeeGee said, “The destination is not in my memory.”
Michael said so quietly that Hanna scarcely heard him, “Give me a schematic.” But GeeGee said, “I cannot produce visual data from this source. Terminal point lies outside my visual matrix.”
Hanna said, “We can get a projection.” She leaned over Michael’s shoulder, pulled a keyboard into position, and slowly, stopping often to consult GeeGee, entered a series of commands. She scaled the display so that GeeGee’s terminal course referent would be at one side and the unknown destination at the other, and instructed GeeGee to superimpose the whole on a map of whatever lay between. The map ought to be accurate enough; it was based on centuries of observation, even though no one had gone out there to look first hand.
The picture that finally came was a fantasy. The prime referent at the left of the screen was Heartworld, but the star at the other edge was, by GeeGee’s scale, fully five hundred light-years away. Hanna did not have to ask GeeGee to know what that meant. That was unexplored space out there. No one had gone there, not ever—or so all the records said. But here was a course, plain and straight.
Michael did not move. His hair and clothes were partially dry, but only partly, so that he looked half finished. He was very pale and he looked—Hanna blinked at him—terrified.
“But what is it?” she said.
He said, “That’s Gadrah.” His voice cracked on the second word. He put his head down on the console so she could not see his face.
* * *
They spent what was left of the night on the Golden Girl. Michael did not sleep. He lay on the bed in his old room and stared upward as if he would see some kind of path emblazoned in the tracery of leaves at the top of the room. Hanna slept, but fitfully. Each time she woke it was with a start, and with heavier eyes. Once she said when she woke, “You didn’t believe it existed, did you?”
That was what he had been thinking about. He was used to Hanna; he was not even surprised.
He said, “That’s not quite it. I believed it existed, but somehow it wasn’t real. Not if nobody else thought it was.”
“B. Yes.”
“That’s really why you needed to find him,” she said. This time she did not sound like an oracle, but she might have been the model for one, with her tousled hair and pale cheeks and sleep-haunted eyes.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” Michael said. He could not interpret her expression. She rolled over and slept again.
Fantasies. They got in the way on Alta, between him and his schooling. Not at first. At first there were only the nightmares, dreadful dreams of noise and screaming and flame, and then, like their extension, the only life he could remember with certainty: the endless time with B, its passing divided into the times when he was locked into a room by himself, and locked into it with B. And the first clear memory that came later was of the Post, and it was no fit medium for fantasy. He would not wish to go there, to that stone-guarded place. Then he remembered a little more, not clearly, without definition. And thought—dreaming over his lessons, washed with sweetness, awash in longing—When I grow up I will go there. “There” was a dreambrew of mountains and meadows far from the Post. They would be clean and safe, as they had been before some great event which he thought of one day, inexplicably, as “the relocation.” And then—
But he had never gone on from “and then.” He only dreamed of the sweet-scented meadows, as if, once there, he could get back everything else still hidden in cloud.
“That’s nice,” said Hanna, meaning the meadows. He had not known she was awake. “I didn’t know there was anything good,” she said.
“There was. Before they noticed us.”
“Who were ‘they’? Who were ‘us’?”
“It was so quiet,” he said softly, he remembered that, a piece of memory painfully retrieved. He showed her more pieces. “They must have let us alone for a long time, a generation at least. There was music.”
“A village.” She put a name to something taken from his thought.
“Primitive. But the summers. Oh, the summers!”
The deep shadows of the forest. The cold spray of water on hot days cascading down living rock.
They lay together thinking about summer until Hanna fell asleep again. She nearly pulled him down into it with her.
Flight. From the truth of what it was, forever out of reach. From Alta. From poverty. From memory. From himself.
“But you did stop,” Hanna said drowsily.
“No.” The quiet space on GeeGee was a world in itself, removed from every place he had ever been. Even time stopped in it. “I kept moving farther and farther out of Shoreground,” he said. “I worked harder than I had to, for a long time. Thinking it would make a miracle happen.”
“What miracle?”
“I didn’t know.”
“No miracles,” Hanna said, and fell asleep.
After a while he answered her anyway. “No miracles.”
Compulsion. The history of the Explosion was a nice hobby for an amateur scholar. He even went to all the places it could possibly be. As a dilettante; so he said.
Then a woman named Hanna ril-Koroth met the People of Zeig-Daru. It was an important meeting. But for Michael all its importance lay in the history of the People, who had once-upon-a-time destroyed a human colony of which humans had no record. Always in his search he had rejected speculation, though rumors of Lost Worlds circled his head like bees as he studied the history of colonization. He had not heeded the tales, fixed on what he thought was real. Until Hanna came back, was carried back, in pieces, talking of lost worlds. Then finally he knew, clearly as if he had always known: no study of what was known would show him what he sought.
And he dragged from his memory a memory of dark night skies. A few dim lanterns of stars shone sparsely in it; they were either very close or very hot. Somewhere in the dust was a Sol-type star with the world he knew going around it. And he went back to the history of the Explosion, and turned his attention to the ships that had disappeared, the shiploads of emigrants cheated or unlucky or otherwise lost in oblivion.
That was all he had meant to do, but control passed out of his hands. There were the first steps of the search for B. The narrowed vision, the subtle changes in his life, like buying GeeGee, that meant more than he knew at the time. It was only in the end that it crystallized.
“I wonder you stayed sane,” Hanna said.
“Did I stay sane?”
Hanna sat up once more. She said, “Do you know what you are? There’s a toy. I’ve seen it on D’neera, I’ve seen it in the Polity, I’ve seen it on F’thal and even on Girritt. It’s a little thing with a round bottom. On top there’s a torso of a human being or a F’thalian or a Girrian. The bottom’s weighted, and every time you give it a push it falls over and then, because the bottom’s round, you see, and heavy, it jumps right back up again. That’s what you are.”
It was not a flattering image, but he took the sense and let go of the picture.
“But is that sane?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
She slept some more.
Reality.
Hanna woke up for good.
“What are you going to do?” she said.
“Why, go there, of course. Do you need to ask? You already thought of that, earlier tonight.”
“But that’s only because I was so afraid that’s what you would do,” Hanna said. She was even paler now. She was not hysterical this time; but he saw that she was, again, afraid.
* * *
Norsa fished them out of the Golden Girl in the gray morning, complaining mildly because they had not been where they were supposed to be at the appointed time. Outside GeeGee the day was dim and everything was wet. It was not raining, but the clouds had turned the morning into dusk. Hanna was very tired, the tiresome morning a dream which felt as if it could turn into a nightmare in a moment. Everything she saw seemed new, even before they departed from the City of the Center. The identical towers seemed—not only inhuman, the nonhuman did not trouble her—but inhumane. The wet streets had a sullen look. Insignificant details sprang to her eyes: a flaw in the paving, a wind-battered flower. The field from which they would begin their journey was a wasteland made for machinery.
They rose through the clouds and flew over their white billows, up in the sunlight Ell would not see for days, and sped toward the northwest. It was a flight of several hours, and Michael spent it looking absently toward the clouds, or toward Hanna and Norsa, but not as if he saw anything. He did not speak. He was silent as Henrik Gaaf had been for so long.
* * *
After the flight, and after a further journey made in a Foresters Guild vehicle, and after, finally, a long, wet walk under great green umbrellas, they came to the Scarlet Glades. “Behold the Red Forest!” Norsa said.
Hanna looked and looked again, but saw no Red Forest. They were surrounded by tall trees that did indeed resemble gigantic plumes, but their color was predominantly bronze-green; and though the color shaded at the edges toward red, the place did not look like anything Hanna had seen in Awnlee’s thought.
She said, “Norsa, are you sure this is the correct site?”
“I fear Awnlee exaggerated,” he said.
“Beyond doubt…” Under other circumstances Hanna might have laughed. Now it was all she could do to arrange her face in a facsimile of a smile.
She said, “Awnlee told me there were ruminants large as my house. I suppose the ruminants also are somewhat smaller than he gave me to believe.”
“I do not know,” Norsa confessed, “because I cannot comprehend what was in his mind. Thus may expectation outpace reality!”
“You do not know how truly you speak,” Hanna said, staring at Michael. He did not even hear her.
They left after staying only a little while. Just before they passed out of the forest glade, Hanna turned once more. The glades had not gotten their name without a reason. She pictured the place in sunlight, early in the morning or at sundown, when the light was rich and the bronze leaves came to life. It would not take much imagination to infuse the scene with cinnabar and see all it was in red. That was what Awnlee had chosen to do, and how he had chosen to remember it; and so he had made Hanna a gift of his imagination, and with it, beauty.
“Farewell,” she said softly, and Michael finally turned his head, drawn from his preoccupation. But she had said the word for her friend Awnlee. She had no intention at all of saying it to Michael.
It was necessary to exchange courtesies with a committee of the Foresters Guild, and after that they went to a lodge where they were to spend the night, first dining with the committee. Michael was entranced, and smiled at things no one else could see. A sun shone, and flowers shone at night like the light-storing alloys of Uskos, brighter than the flares of meteorites. Iridescent winged creatures no bigger than his thumb flew to perch on his hand and peer at him with faceted eyes, their fine scales light and dry to the touch. The sound of running water filled the nights, and with it music: an old man with a bow. The voices in the next room talked until he fell asleep, and steered him through shoals of dream.
He scarcely touched his meal. When the persons of the committee departed, he sat over wine with Hanna and Norsa and heard the rain fall. Few visitors came here during the rains, and except for a reduced staff, the travelers from Ell had the lodge to themselves. The refectory was brightly lit, but there were also festive candles, and Hanna had the other lights extinguished so that they sat in the mellow candlelight. Michael watched Hanna and thought: How beautiful she is.
When all the correct formalities had been observed, she spoke his name and he followed her to a sleeping room. Once inside, she began to talk to him. She used Standard words and Ellsian, she used terms he had come to recognize as Girrian and F’thalian, and they meant in their various modes the same things: treasure of my soul, thou finest-furred darling, mate desired above all inferiors, more beloved than self; and she called him by his name: Mikhail.
“Wait, oh, wait!” she said.
“I will not wait.”
She had an unfair advantage if she chose to use it. If she was afraid for him, angry with him, afraid for herself without him, she could batter him with raw emotion and force him to suffer with her. She did not do it, and all he could think was: How beautiful she is.
“You have always done everything alone.” She had reduced the light here, too, to candlelight, and shadows were caught in her hair. Trickles of water reflected the flickering light, and flame ran down the windowpanes.
“You do not have to do this alone,” she said. “You must not.”
“If the others want to come, they can.”
“I don’t mean that. Mikhail, there is a time and place for governments. Don’t think of going alone. Wait for the Polity. They’ll go at once, and how could they go without you? They’ll need you. And you’ll have all your wishes that way. Those people, the ones you called ‘they,’ who did terrible things—they’ll be brought down. All your pain will be revenged. Don’t you understand that things must have been as they were because of isolation? When the isolation ends, there’ll be light there. It will be a new age. Only be patient, a little patient. Wait. Wait with me, and we’ll go together.”
The logic could not be argued. “I’m going all the same,” he said, “whether the rest of you do or not.”
“It’s you I don’t want going there. Not like this. I would do it a different way. A better way. This is a world, Michael! A whole world, a strange one! How do you think you can have it on your terms? You need authority at your back.”
He did not know what she was talking about. She watched him try to understand it. But something had been left out of him, or maybe taken out, and he could not understand. Authority was only something to be gotten over or around or past, a part of the environment, to be dealt with when necessary and otherwise ignored: a concrete, null-value thing, not an abstraction, and certainly disconnected from justice. Once he had told her that Alta had seemed like an alien planet with strange gods. So it was, she now saw, with every place. She would never have to wonder how it happened that Michael had moved easily among aliens in these weeks. He had been among aliens all his life.
She came close and touched him. The shadows round her eyes were dark in the candlelight; she looked bruised.
“Is this how you were in the years before?”
“How I was…?”
“Fixed. Immovable.”
He looked at her without comprehension.
“Stubborn!” she said.
“I don’t know…”
It seemed odd that Hanna who understood so much should not understand that all considerations were irrelevant beside the course in the module next to his skin; that on the threshold of this last journey, for the first time in his conscious memory, the sense of being in flight had left him. He would stand here and listen to her all night, if that was what she wanted, but it would not make any difference.
She saw that finally. Her hands fell away from him. She looked up at him from those shadowed eyes and he said, “It will be all right.”
“It won’t.”
“You don’t have to come.”
“Do you want me to?”
“No. It could be dangerous,” he said with no sense of incongruity, and her mouth tightened; but whatever the temptation might have been, she did not let him feel her anger.
“Is there nothing I can do to bring you to your senses?”
He considered the question carefully and answered, “No.”
She did not talk to him any more. She blew out the candles and they undressed in the dark, silently. Angry or not, she turned to to him with caresses, and maybe that was supposed to remind him in another way that he need not go by solitary ways any longer; but the dreams were too strong, he could not accomplish the act of love, and though Hanna stayed beside him through the night, he was alone.
* * *
She had to tell Norsa that they were going away. It took a long time, and it was evident to Norsa (Hanna did not try to hide it) that she did not want to start on this journey. They sat together in the Scarlet Glades and he made her a remarkable proposal.
“At one time,” he said, “upon your arrival, yours and that of your companions, you said to me that ’Unans must appear to have little regard for law; and to support that statement, you adduced the actions of yourself and your companions up to that time. Yet you told me also that ’Unans have a great impulse toward law. And it seems to me that what your companion Nikell now proposes, though not (as clearly as I can determine) unlawful, does not fall precisely within the bounds of law. Is it for this reason you have distress? For I have come to know you well in the fine days of our association, and it seems to me that in yourself, at least, there is great respect for law.”
She answered, “Indeed, Norsa, I believe that what you have said of me is correct; and in regard to my companion Michael, it is not so much that he rejects law, as that he acknowledges none. In these last many years he has had no conflict with law, except as he nearly became its victim, which is why, as you know, we are here; for except in that matter only, the goodness of his heart protected him. Yet it is not law I now fear, but folly. In this matter I would seek the protection of law and the civilization of humans; yet just as this human does not consider law’s constraint, equally he does not seek its protection. Therefore he goes forth, I fear, to great peril, and I cannot restrain him.”
Norsa’s answer was rash, but its source was the pure impulse of friendship.
“It is possible that he could be restrained, and made to wait until the other ’Unans arrive.”
“Restrained?” she said, faltering.
“Immediately, at your word. You are kin to the citizens of Ell, and like us a citizen. He is not, however precious he is to you. If that is what you wish…”
After a long pause she said, “No. I have deep gratitude, Norsa, but I cannot do that. That betrayal would destroy the affection between us, between Michael and myself, forever.”
“Yet you fear for his life, and there can be no greater destroyer of affection than death, which is the end of all sharing and exchange.”
“That is correct, Norsa. And yet,” she said more firmly, “I cannot do it. I could do it if I knew his death awaited at the end of this path, but I do not know that. I do not know the future. And so I can only seek to persuade. I will not exert force.”
“I judge that you choose rightly,” Norsa said, “though I share your concern, and always will share it until I know that you are safe. For surely you know the story of the Journey of Nlatee, wherein great benefit came to Uskos, though Nlatee was disobedient and followed a discouraged path.”
“Then why did you give me such an offer?”
“It is necessary at times to choose between friendship and right, and right is not always the correct choice. Likewise, in a matter of affection, as between sire and selfing, some small betrayal may be useful, where a greater runs only counter to the desired end.”
Norsa’s cilia and fingers had stopped moving; even his eyes were still. Hanna eyed him cautiously and said, “I do not know your meaning, Norsa. But it is impossible for me to plan betrayal, however small it may be, at least plan betrayal that must remain secret. I could not, in the long term, hide anything from Michael. I am a telepath, he is accustomed to my free exercise of that faculty, and I could not refrain from the use of it, even if I wished, without his knowledge of my withdrawing. And then I would have to speak truth to him in any case, or watch affection die as surely as in the other instances we have discussed.”
“Yet there may be a course around this obstacle, if you wish the aid of a friend, even though you do not know until the moment it shows itself what it is.”
“Indeed such aid could be of the greatest value,” Hanna said.
“That is all I wished to know. Let us speak of it no more, lest you see what I contemplate without even desiring to see it, as I know sometimes occurs. Instead we will talk of leavetaking, which I know must be soon; yet I, too, shall have many answers to produce both for the populace and its leaders, who do not expect this departure.”
* * *
As soon as they returned to the city, the objects brought from the Golden Girl began to march back to the ship in a steady stream. Theo and Lise and Shen would follow Michael anywhere, but it became necessary to deal with Henrik Gaaf, who might have some useful knowledge of Gadrah. Gaaf had been wandering somewhere when Hanna and Michael returned, and he came into the house to find all the common rooms turned upside down as the others ferreted for personal possessions that seemed, now that they had to be collected, to be everywhere.
Hanna had asked Michael, “How are you going to get Henrik onto GeeGee?”
“Any way I have to,” he had said. And she was present when Gaaf joined them in the room just off the veranda. This room, spacious and tiled, had remained cool even on the hottest days, and it had been a favorite place for all of them. Now the tiles were dirty with the water they tracked in and out, the baggy lounges looked deflated, and scraps of their summer lives lay everywhere.
Henrik blinked at them and licked his lips. He said, “What are you doing?”
“Leaving,” Michael said. He juggled a pair of music cubes and looked at Gaaf dispassionately.
Henrik focused sharply on Michael. He had given up all pretense of vacuity since Hanna’s dissection of his brain. “Where to?” he said.
“Where do you think?” Michael said, not unkindly.
Hanna was near the door with Theo; she had been helping him guide a pallet loaded with foodstuffs toward the veranda. She stopped to watch. She did not see the necessity of abducting Gaaf and strongly disapproved.
Gaaf’s eyes flickered in her direction. Whatever confidence he had once placed in her was gone, but still he thought of her vaguely as more sympathetic than Michael. He thought about what Michael had said. He knew the answer, but what he said next was what he wanted to hear.
“You’re going back to the Polity?”
“No.” Michael drifted nearer, relaxed, unthreatening. Gaaf backed away anyway. Theo moved silently into position behind him, something in his hand; now Hanna knew what would happen.
Michael said, “Will you come with us? I need to know what you know. Everything about the man you call Castillo, everything about the men with him. They’ll be there. We might have to do something about them.”
“No.” Gaaf backed up some more, just beginning to grasp it, and torn. The prospect of remaining on Uskos, alone among the aliens, was dreadful. But Gadrah was no better, and Castillo was there.
Michael nodded to Theo, and Theo put one hand on Gaaf’s shoulder and jabbed at his back with the other. Gaaf jerked, started to protest, and went down, Theo breaking his fall.
Hanna said quietly, “You didn’t try very hard to persuade him.”
“Would it have worked?”
She shrugged, chilled. She wondered how safe it would be to defy Michael now—how safe it would be even for her.
They took Henrik to GeeGee on a pallet already loaded with bedding, and put him away in the mirrored room Hanna had once occupied. She sat with him for a time. Just before GeeGee took off, Shen looked in, saw Hanna’s gloomy face, and said, “You expected something else?”
“What?”
“Just like a man. Thought you’d know.”
“What?”
“How they are. Not practical,” Shen said, and walked out with no consciousness of having said anything surprising at all.