Shadow's End (17 page)

“What's he doing?” asked Trompe.

“You're the empath,” she said.

“All I can pick up is a feeling of concern, a desire which he is repressing.”

She listened, translated, nodded. “He's singing to Weaving Woman, begging her to keep the patterns clear and straight.”

Afar, the song faded into silence, only the echoes remaining for a moment more. Chahdzi stood with bowed head. In a few moments he turned and came back to them.

“How far do we have to go then, tomorrow?” Lutha asked.

He shook his head, as though reminding himself of where he was. “A day. A long day spent in going quickly.
Which is why I look at the boy, to see how fast we can go. Climbing down the walls is not easy.”

“Perhaps we won't get there in one day,” she said casually.

“One must,” he said. Impersonal imperative. One must, that's all.

“Dangerous to be out after dark, is it?” Trompe's head was cocked, picking up all the little signals.

Chahdzi smiled, ducking his head slightly. “Danger has a place in the pattern, surely. And pain. Slidhza b'dasya a yana chas-as imsli t'sisri.”

Again Lutha translated to herself, fumbling with the word order.
A wise person doesn't use his own shuttle to weave sorrow.
Or perhaps, a wise shuttle won't weave grief.

“I do not understand,” she said.

He shrugged again, a habitual gesture. “It is foolish to create dark patterns for ourselves, matron. Weaving Woman will include enough darkness, whether we wish or no. Let us hope for a bright pattern tomorrow, if we are her beloved children.” He pointed to the child. “That one is. Everyone says so.”

“Now, why is that?” Trompe asked, amazed.

“He knows.” Chahdzi smiled. “Everyone says he knows.”

“Knows what?” asked Lutha, wonderingly. “Knows what, Chahdzi?”

“Knows,” he said softly. “What is. Patterns. What comes next.”

Though his words were not unlike other comments the Dinadhi had made about Leely, they were no more explanatory. The boy himself showed no signs of knowing what needed doing, unless sleeping was it.

“Will you eat with us?” asked Lutha.

“I accept your generous offer of food,” he said, looking away from her in obvious discomfort.

His tone made her realize that he would have gone
hungry had she not offered, and also that one did not say “eat with us” on Dinadh. Damn! She hadn't given sufficient thought to some of the stuff she'd found in the culture chips!

“Since I do not know your taste,” she said carefully, “will you do us the courtesy of choosing for yourself?”

He went happily to the food unit, where he stood for a long time in contemplation of the listed menu, mumbling to himself.

“I like very much the taste of cheese,” he said, pointing at a certain item and using their own word,
cheese
, which evidently did not exist in his own language. “But I cannot eat of it unless …”

She came to his assistance, reading labels. “It's all right. Everything in here is dosed with the necessary enzymes. Trompe and I have commented that you have no dairy beasts on Dinadh.”

“It is said we brought milk creatures from our former world,” he murmured. “But here, Weaving Woman could not permit them. Here our pattern changed.”

“Human-owned flocks of grazers and browsers have ended a good many patterns,” grunted Trompe. “Once man killed off the natural predators and let them multiply.”

“So it is said,” agreed Chahdzi, glancing at Lutha from the corner of his eyes as she manipulated the food-service unit. Something light for herself and for Trompe. She would feed Leely when he wakened. As for Chahdzi, who was obviously apprehensive that they might watch while he ate, she would make the matter simple.

She handed him the warmed packet of cheese and cereal-food, saying, “Perhaps you would enjoy your meal on the porch?”

“Indeed.” He bowed gravely and took it away with him, leaving Trompe and Lutha to eat their own selections in silent company. Chahdzi might be out of sight, but he was not out of earshot, so Lutha did not mention
her annoyance at the thought of a long climb on the morrow and Trompe did not remark upon the feelings he picked up from Chahdzi: awe, hope, terror, anger. The same feelings he'd detected in the serving girl at the hostel. The same strange combination.

As they ate, Lutha dug out a handful of culture chips and scanned the indices, muttering to herself.

“Nothing there on the subject?” Trompe asked, sotto voce, elaborately nonspecific concerning which subject.

“Not a… nothing,” she replied. “You'd think—”

“The language chips I gave you were prepared by the people at Tasimi-na-Dinadh,” he murmured thoughtfully. “All properly indexed for use by possible leaseholders and no doubt somewhat edited …”

“A sales pitch, in other words,” she muttered.

He nodded. “They were the most recent chips the Procurator had, though he also gave me some old ones made by independent researchers. I didn't pass them on to you because they looked like heavy going. They're really old, and they aren't indexed at all.”

“Please,” she said. “Are they in your pack?”

“Finish your food,” he said gently. “I'll get them in a minute.”

After Chahdzi had thanked them again for food and sequestered himself in their vehicle, after Leely had had his supper and fallen asleep once more, Trompe dug out the chips he had promised: old ones, nicked at the corners, their labels faded.

“You say the Procurator gave you these?” she asked doubtfully.

“Well, he gave me the Dinadh file, and they were in it. He did remark that the newer chips were more up-to-date.”

“They're so up, all usefulness has been edited out of them,” she snorted. “They're completely superficial. All the taboos are avoided, so we can't tell what we should or shouldn't say, may or may not do! For example, we've
seen the beautiful people are ubiquitous, but the chips don't even mention them. These are the ones I should have studied.”

“Maybe,” he said soberly. “But they seemed very ponderous to me.”

Peevishly, she disregarded this as irrelevant. Fastigats weren't researchers. They didn't spend their time making laborious correlations from ancient records; they didn't sift history for nuances. They drew their conclusions from the here and the now, from whatever or whoever was feeling and emoting in the vicinity. Well, nonetheless.

She accessed one of the chips at random and began plowing through it, realizing after some little time that Trompe had been right. It was heavy going. This researcher had come to Dinadh as to virgin territory and had weeded nothing out. He or she had included everything uncut, every branch and twig and tangled root. Who knew what was alive and important, what had died long ago or had compacted into impenetrable peat?

She yawned, tried to focus, forced herself to concentrate, and finally gave up in disgust, no longer annoyed at Trompe. He was right. This was ponderous indeed. She would seek nuances later perhaps, but not tonight. Leely and Trompe had the better idea. One should sleep when one could!

T
he first night on Perdur Alas, Snark bedded down in the dormitory with the other shadows, waking frequently, listening for some unusual sound, but hearing only breathing, snores, restless movements, and sighs. She herself slept little. The chip within her recorded her wake-fulness. Someday, somewhere, someone might review these feelings, experience her perceptions. Everything the chip detected was beamed to a tiny satellite hidden beside a moonlet, and from there was relayed to the nearest occupied planet—Dinadh, probably, where the hated Lutha Tallstaff had gone—and from there to somewhere else and somewhere else again, all the way back to Alliance Prime and the damned Procurator. Perhaps even now someone on Dinadh was monitoring what had been done today on Perdur Alas and wondering why this particular shadow was awake.

Snark tried to care and could not. They had no right, she told herself, quite correctly. She knew it and they knew it: they had no right. The words were familiar, but the rage they usually evoked would not come. Those sent
to Perdur Alas had been conditioned against rage, against rebellion.

No one had thought to condition any of them against childhood fantasies. On the third night, Snark lay down among the others as before, but when they slept, she rose and went out into the night. All day she had been smelling the moor. The smell had filled her to the exclusion of other perceptions, had preoccupied her with feelings long dreamed and totally familiar. Perhaps these woody and ferny growths had come from the same place as the ones she had smelled as a child. Perhaps this moor had been designed to be like one she had seen long ago, her dream moor, complete with tea-brown pools and rustling bracken. Perhaps that world and this one had shared a common designer or a common heritage.

Even as she said to herself,
perhaps, perhaps
, she knew there was no happenstance involved. Similarity didn't matter. Only this place mattered, its odors that smelled like, its growths that looked like, its moor that felt like the moor she had dreamed. This could be the actual refuge she had found as a child—or dreamed she had found. If one went west across this stretch of rolling ground, one would come to cliffs above the sea. They would be the same cliffs, the same sea. During the workaday world of daylight there had been no opportunity to explore. Now in a dark relieved only by the pearly glimmer of tiny moonlets, shining through the night like so many lopsided paper lanterns, she would find the old cliff, the old sea, the old place she knew so well.

Every step of the way could have been dictated from memory! Surely she had seen a pool of this shape before! Surely she had caught her foot on just such a root and been sent sprawling in just this way, with this particular herb crushed beneath her cheek to surround her with identical pungency. Surely the sound of the sea had come at just this point and no other, the swelling and sighing of the surf as it rolled small stones on the rocky shelf below.
Surely all of this was the same, her own childhood place, wherever and whenever it had been, come here again.

She wasn't even surprised. However astonishing similar things might be, identical things were not. One could be astonished at the close resemblance of brothers but not at that of identical twins. So she couldn't be astonished at this moor, for it was not merely like. It
was
the one she had known, and that was all there was to it. The two, though they seemed separate in time and space, were the same place.

So musing, believing herself half dreaming, she came to the edge of the cliff at last, feeling a familiar panic, a fleeting urge to jump. Why? Why the panic? Why … because there was something following her. Something seeking her. Now? Or then?

She puzzled over this as she turned left along the rim-rock. This was the way she had always turned. The cliff was as she remembered, and the soughing of the sea. She wandered slowly along the precipice, around this stone and that twiggy growth, searching, believing she had missed it, as she had always believed—

Only to come upon it suddenly: the outcropping of stone, the branch extending into space, the bare, pale, polished place upon the wood where her hands, someone's hands, had rubbed the bark away to make a smoothness. Without thinking, without decision, she leapt out, hands extended to grasp, the springiness of the wood coming as a shock to the muscles of her arms as she bounced pendant beneath it like a toy jerking upon a string. No hole, she told herself in sudden panic. No hole in the cliff. Nowhere to go from here.

The fear was only momentary. The entry was there, a darker crevice among the striations of the cliff face. And a protruding stone where she needed to put her foot. And a ropy rootlet hanging down …

She didn't really remember this part. In her dream, she felt the details of the cave rather than smelled or heard or
saw them. This cave felt sandier; it had no bracken bed. It felt smaller, too, but then, it would have seemed larger to the child she had been when she had dreamed it first. The trickle of water was there at the back, making a modest puddle on its hollowed stone, seeping away down a mossy crack. She remembered caches of food. There were none in this cave. She remembered warm animal skins, and they, too, were missing. She could bring food. She could bring blankets and armfuls of cut bracken to cushion her rest. From this time forward, she would go to bed with the others, but when they slept, she would sneak away to spend the dark hours here, in this refuge above the sea.

Now she lay down on the sandy floor, her body taking the curved form so often imposed upon it, knees up, thumb in mouth, hip seeking a familiar hollow. The stones beside the entry were piled as she had left them in dream. She reached with one hand to stack them, the larger ones on the bottom, the smaller above.

Moving the stones disclosed a niche. In the niche was a painted jar with a lid. Snark's eyes drifted across it, hardly seeing it. Though she hadn't remembered the jar before, hadn't recalled its presence or patterns, she did so now. The jar had always been there, its egglike shape of white clay covered with dark swerving lines, wings, and faces. She even knew the names of those portrayed. Father Endless and Mother Darkness. Mother had put the jar there. Someone … someone named Mother had put the jar there. And inside were the bones of …