“A healer
…
” Melissa said.
The quality of wonder in her daughter’s voice gave Snake another compelling
reason to make the city people help her find more dreamsnakes.
The second night Snake and Melissa rode hard. There was no oasis, and in the
morning Snake did not stop at dawn, though it was really too hot to travel.
Sweat drenched her. The sticky beads rolled down her back and sides. They slid
halfway down her face and dried into salty grit. Swift’s coat darkened as sweat
streamed down her legs. Every step flung droplets from her fetlocks.
“Mistress
…
”
The formality startled Snake and she glanced over at Melissa with concern.
“Melissa, what’s wrong?”
“How much farther before we stop?”
“I don’t know. We have to go on as long as we can.” She gestured toward the
sky, where the clouds hung low and threatening. “That’s what they look like
before a storm.”
“I know. But we can’t go much longer. Squirrel and Swift have to rest. You
said the city is in the middle of the desert. Well, once we get in we have to
get back out, and the horses have to take us.”
Snake slumped back in her saddle. “We have to go on. It’s too dangerous to
stop.”
“Snake
…
Snake, you know about people and storms and
healing and deserts and cities, and I don’t. But I know about horses. If we let
them stop and rest for a few hours, they’ll take us a far way tonight. If they
have to keep going, by dark we’ll have to leave them behind.”
“All right,” Snake said finally. “We’ll stop when we get to those rocks. At
least there’ll be some shade.”
At home in the healers’ station, Snake did not think of the city from one
month to the next. But in the desert, and in the mountains where the
caravannaires wintered, life revolved around it. Snake had begun to feel that
her life too depended on it when at last, at dawn after the third night, the
high, truncated mountain that protected Center appeared before her. The sun rose
directly behind it, illuminating it in scarlet like an idol. Scenting water,
sensing an end to their long trek, the horses raised their heads and quickened
their tired pace. As the sun rose higher the low, thickening clouds spread the
light into a red wash that covered the horizon. Snake’s knee ached with every
step Swift took, but she did not need the signal of swollen joints to tell her a
storm approached. Snake clenched her fists around the reins until the leather
dug painfully into her palms, then slowly she relaxed her hands and stroked her
horse’s damp neck. She had no doubt that Swift ached as much as she did.
They approached the mountain. The summertrees were brown and withered,
rustling stalks surrounding a dark pond and deserted firepits. The wind
whispered between the dry leaves and over the sand, coming first from one
direction, then another, in the manner of winds near a solitary mountain. The
city’s sunrise shadow enveloped them.
“It’s a lot bigger than I thought,” Melissa said quietly. “I used to have a
place where I could hide and listen to people talk, but I always thought they
were making up stories.”
“I think I did too,” Snake said. Her own voice sounded very lost and far
away. As she approached the great rock cliffs, cold sweat broke out on her
forehead, and her hands grew clammy despite the heat. The tired mare carried her
forward.
The times the city had dominated the healers’ station were the year Snake was
seven, and again when she was seventeen. In each of those years a senior healer
undertook the long hard journey to Center. Each of those years was the beginning
of a new decade, when the healers offered the city dwellers an exchange of
knowledge and of help. They were always turned away. Perhaps this time, too,
despite the message Snake had to give them.
“Snake?”
Snake started and glanced over at Melissa. “What?”
“Are you okay? You looked so far away, and, I don’t know—”
“ ‘Scared’ would be a good word, I think,” Snake said.
“They’ll let us in.”
The dark clouds seemed to grow thicker and heavier every minute.
“I hope so,” Snake said.
At the base of Center’s mountain, the wide dark pool had neither inlets nor
outlets. The water oozed up into it from below, then flowed invisibly away into
the sand. The summertrees were dead, but the ground cover of grass and low
bushes grew lushly. Fresh grass already sprouted in the trampled areas of
abandoned camps and the paths between, but not on the wide road to the city’s
gate.
Snake did not have the heart to ride Swift past the water. She handed her
reins to Melissa at the edge of the pool.
“Follow me when they’re finished drinking. I won’t go in without you, so
don’t worry. If the wind rises, though, come running. Okay?”
Melissa nodded. “A storm couldn’t come that quick, could it?”
“I’m afraid it could,” Snake said.
She drank quickly and splashed water on her face. Wiping the drops on the
corner of her headcloth she strode along the bare road. Somewhere close beneath
the black sand lay a smooth, unyielding surface. An ancient road? She had seen
remains in other places, disintegrating concrete flesh and even the rusting
steel bones in places the collectors had not yet worked.
Snake stopped before Center’s gate. It was five times her height. Generations
of sandstorms had brushed the metal to a lustrous finish. But it had no handle,
no bell-pull, no door knocker, no way Snake could see of summoning someone to
let her in.
She stepped forward, raised her fist, and banged it against the metal. The
solid thud sounded not at all hollow. She pounded on the door, thinking it must
be very thick. As her eyes grew more accustomed to the dim light in the recessed
doorway, she saw that the front of the door was actually concave, perceptibly
worn down by the fury of the storms.
Her hand aching, she stepped back for a moment.
“About time you stopped that noise.”
Snake jumped at the voice and turned toward it, but no one was there.
Instead, in the side of the alcove, a panel clicked away into the rock and a
window appeared. A pale man with bushy red hair glared out at her.
“What do you mean, beating on the door after we’ve closed?”
“I want to come in,” Snake said.
“You’re not a city dweller.”
“No. My name is Snake. I’m a healer.”
He did not answer—as politeness dictated where Snake had been raised—with his
name. She hardly noticed, for she was getting used to the differences that made
politeness in one place an offense somewhere else. But when he threw back his
head and laughed, she was surprised. She frowned and waited until he stopped.
“So they’ve quit sending old crocks to beg, have they? It’s young ones now!”
He laughed again. “I’d think they could choose somebody handsome.”
From his tone, Snake assumed she had been insulted. She shrugged. “Open the
gate.”
He stopped laughing. “We don’t let outsiders in.”
“I brought a message from a friend to her family. I want to deliver it.”
He did not answer for a moment, glancing down. “All the people who went out
came back in this year.”
“She left a long time ago.”
“You don’t know much about this city if you expect me to go running around it
looking for some crazy’s family.”
“I know nothing about your city. But from the looks of you, you’re related to
my friend.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” For the first time he was taken aback.
“She told me her family was related to the keepers of the gate. And I can see
it—the hair, the forehead
…
the eyes are different.
Hers are brown.” This city dweller’s eyes were pale green.
“Did she happen to mention,” the young man said, attempting sarcasm, “just
exactly which family she’s supposed to belong to?”
“The ruling one.”
“Just a minute,” he said slowly. He glanced down and his hands moved, out of
Snake’s view, but when she moved closer she could see nothing beyond the edge of
the “window,” for it was not a window but a glass panel carrying a moving image.
Though startled, she did not permit herself to react. She had known, after all,
that the city dwellers had more mechanical technology than her people. That was
one of the reasons she was here.
The young man looked up slowly, one eyebrow arched in astonishment. “I’ll
have to call someone else to talk to you.” The image on the glass panel
dissolved in multicolored lines.
Nothing happened for some time. Snake leaned outside the shallow alcove and
looked around.
“Melissa!”
Neither the child nor the horses were in sight. Snake could see most of the
pool’s near shore through a translucent curtain of withered summertrees, but in
a few places enough vegetation remained to hide two horses and a child.
“Melissa!” Snake called again.
Again there was no answer, but the wind could have carried her voice away.
The false window had turned dead black. Snake was about to leave it to find her
daughter when it wavered back to life.
“Where are you?” a new voice called. “Come back here.”
Snake glanced outside one last time and returned reluctantly to the
image-carrier.
“You upset my cousin rather badly,” the image said.
Snake stared at the panel, speechless, for the speaker was astonishingly like
Jesse, much more so than the younger man. This was Jesse’s twin, or her family
was highly inbred. As the figure spoke again the thought passed through Snake’s
mind that inbreeding was a useful way of concentrating and setting desired
traits, if the experimenter were prepared for a few spectacular failures among
the results. Snake was unprepared for the implied acceptance of spectacular
failures in human births.
“Hello? Is this working?”
The red-haired figure peered out at her worriedly, and a loud hollow
scratching noise followed the voice. The voice: Jesse’s had been pleasant and
low, but not this low. Snake realized she was speaking to a man, not to a woman
as she had thought from the resemblance. Not Jesse’s twin, then, certainly.
Snake wondered if the city people cloned human beings. If they did it often and
could even handle cross-sex clones, perhaps they had methods that would be more
successful than those the healers used in making new dreamsnakes.
“I can hear you, if that’s what you mean,” Snake said.
“Good. What do you want? It must be worrisome from the look on Richard’s
face.”
“I have a message for you if you’re direct kin of the prospector Jesse,”
Snake said.
The man’s pink cheeks whitened abruptly. “Jesse?” He shook his head, then
regained his composure. “Has she changed that much in all these years, or do I
look like anything but direct kin?”
“No,” Snake said. “You look like kin.”
“She’s my older sister,” he said. “And now I suppose she wants to come back
and be the eldest again, while I’m to go back to being nothing but a younger?”
The bitterness of his voice was like a betrayal; Snake felt it like a shock.
The news of Jesse’s death would not bring sorrow to her brother, only joy.
“She’s coming back, isn’t she?” he said. “She knows the council would put her
back at the head of our family. Damn her! I might as well not have existed for
the last twenty years.”
Snake listened to him, her throat tightening with grief. Despite the
brother’s resentment, if Snake had been able to keep Jesse alive, her people
would
have taken her back, welcomed her back: if they could, they would
have healed her.
Snake spoke with some difficulty. “This council— perhaps I should give the
message to them.” She wanted to speak to someone who cared, someone who had
loved Jesse, not to someone who would laugh and thank her for her failure.
“This is family business, not a matter for the council. You should give
Jesse’s message to me.”
“I would prefer speaking to you face to face.”
“I’m sure you would,” he said. “But that’s impossible. My cousins have a
policy against letting in outsiders—”
“Surely, in this case—”
“—and besides, I couldn’t even if I wanted to. The gate’s locked till
spring.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true.”
“Jesse would have warned me.”
He snorted. “She never believed it. She left when she was a child, and
children never really believe. They play at staying out till the last minute,
pretending they might get locked out. So sometimes we lose one who tests the
rules too far.”
“She stopped believing almost everything you say.” Anger tightened Snake’s
voice.
Jesse’s brother glanced away, intently watching something else for a moment.
He looked at Snake again. “Well, I hope you believe what I tell you now. A
storm’s gathering, so I suggest you give me the message and leave yourself time
to find shelter.”
Even if he was lying to her, he was not going to let her inside. Snake no
longer even hoped for that.
“Her message is this,” Snake said. “She was happy out here. She wants you to
stop lying to your children about what it’s like outside your city.”
Jesse’s brother stared at Snake, waiting, then suddenly smiled and laughed
once, quickly and sharply. “That’s all? You mean she isn’t coming back?”
“She cannot come back,” Snake said. “She’s dead.”
A strange and eerie mixture of relief and sorrow passed over the face that
was so like Jesse’s.
“Dead?” he said softly.
“I could not save her. She broke her back—”
I never wished her dead.“ He drew in a long breath, then let it out slowly.
”Broke her back
…
a quick death, then. Better than
some.“
“She did not die when she broke her back. Her partners and I were going to
bring her home, because you could heal her.”
“Perhaps we could have,” he said. “How did she die?”
“She prospected in the war craters. She couldn’t believe the truth that they
are dangerous, because you told her so many lies. She died of radiation
poisoning.”