Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
When he saw who lay beside him, both body and mind were answered. She opened her eyes to see his own fixed on her, accusingly.
‘We aren’t dead,’ she said in response to this unspoken indictment. ‘I expected to be dead by this morning.’
His instant reaction had been a twitch of revulsion, a feeling very much akin to guilt. The feeling passed as he said Donatella’s name to himself, leaving only a faint residue of grief behind. ‘You’re disappointed,’ he murmured, feeling hysterical laughter welling within him. ‘Ah, Donatella, you do sound a little put out.’
She flushed. ‘It’s not that. It’s just that I …’
He felt a surge of sympathy. ‘You wouldn’t have … I know. Neither would I. We thought we were going to die. Or maybe our bodies thought so. Well – it happened. Forget it.’
There was a silence. She seemed to be considering this. ‘Yes. I think you’re right. It didn’t matter what I did. I would never need to explain it, not to myself, not to anyone, because there wouldn’t be any tomorrow….’
He was stung into an irrational objection. ‘It may be petulant of me, but did it really take that to make you want to make love to me?’ He tried to smile to take the sting out of his words, but the wound to his vanity was there. Amazing! He was wounded because a woman he hardly knew felt she needed to explain away her actions regarding him.
‘You know better,’ she said sharply. ‘You, of all people! It didn’t take that to make me want to make love to you. It wasn’t really making love, Tasmin, and it wasn’t really you. I haven’t made love, not for years. Not to anyone. Not since …’
‘Not since?’
‘Not since Link.’ She sat up, pulling the blanket around her while she fumbled with her disordered clothes, crouching for a moment to shake herself into some semblance of order, tugging at her tunic, searching for her sash. ‘We weren’t casual lovers, Link and I. We were fellow Explorers. Colleagues. Friends. For him, there isn’t any more. For me there isn’t either. Not really.’
‘I thought you told me about that man, what’s his name? The services man?’
‘Zimmy? Zimmy was just … like getting my hair done. When things got too tight. Too rough. He was talented in that way, Zimmy. With him it wasn’t love, it was skill. Technique. It wasn’t making love.’
‘And last night wasn’t either.’
‘In a way it was.’
‘Only a way?’ His irrationally hurt pride was giving way to curiosity.
She gave him a long, level look. ‘In a way it was because I forgot you aren’t Link. You’re not Link, Tasmin. You’re a lovely man and I think a dear friend, but you’re not Link.’
‘And you’re not Celcy,’ he said, wanting to get through her self-absorption, perhaps to wound her, only a little.
‘Celcy’s dead,’ she said flatly. ‘You need to forget. Part of you knows that, Tasmin. How long will you go on being married to Celcy? You called me by her name, you know. How long are you going to go on allowing yourself to love only if you pretend it’s Celcy doing it? There are other people, you know. Clarin, for instance. She’s in love with you.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said, thrusting his way through the stones that had hidden them. ‘She’s a child.’
‘Child my left elbow. What is she? Eighteen, nineteen?’ They slid down onto the trail, adjusting shoes and straps. ‘What are you? My age, about? Thirtyish?’
‘Thirty-two.’
‘She’s no child,’ Donatella muttered.
He rejected all this. He had no intention of forgetting Celcy! ‘Don’t you need to forget Link and go on living, too?’
‘No!’ The cry came out uncontrollably, her hands went up in a pushing gesture, demanding that he take the words back. ‘He’s alive. If I could get him to Serendipity, if I could afford the fees, he could have regeneration. Everything that made Link himself is still there. It’s only his body that won’t let him out. It isn’t the same as if he were dead!’
He felt a wave of empathy. ‘Money? That’s it, isn’t it. That’s what love comes down to sometimes. A fortune to space him to Serendipity, and you’ll never have it. A fortune to get my blind mother to Splash One and pay for the treatment, and I don’t have that. So, your Link stays in a support chair and my mother can’t see.’
He didn’t want to talk about this anymore. ‘Have you stopped to think that if we’re successful at proving the Presences sentient, we’ll probably be shipped to Serendipity – for transshipment elsewhere, if nothing else. All of us. Every human person on Jubal. Which will include your friend Link, won’t it? And my mother.’
She looked dazed. ‘It … it never occurred to me.’
‘We’d still have the treatment to pay for, but at least we’ll be where it can be obtained.’ He laughed, a little harshly but with some satisfaction as he saw her look of concern for him turn to one of confusion and dismay, and then to irritation.
‘Oh, God, Tasmin, what are we talking about this for?’
‘Exactly,’ he murmured to himself, thankful that she was getting off the subject. Clarin! Of all idiotic …
‘I can’t handle all this,’ she went on. ‘We may not even be alive tomorrow. We’ve got to get to the Enigma and Deepsoil Five. It’ll take half a day to pick up the mules and get back where we are, and now they’re ahead of us.’ She shrugged her arms through the straps of the pack and started down the rocky shelf.
‘Yes, but they don’t know that yet,’ he said, trailing her a half step behind. ‘Which gives us the tiniest bit of an edge, Donatella. I think the time has come for us to break out of this valley and head straight for the Enigma.’
‘We have to backtrack for the mules anyhow, and there are some routes east. Rough transit, though. No Passwords for a good part of this country east of us. Let me think about it.’ She rubbed her head. ‘When we get to the mules, I’ll take a look at the charts.’
He agreed, shrugging the straps into a more comfortable position. The trail sloped downward to the place they had left the mules. And the mules would be rested. If they went to the east…. ‘Pray God Jamieson and Clarin get to Thyle Vowe….’
‘You’re placing a lot of hope in a couple of children,’ she said sarcastically.
‘Clarin’s no child,’ he said absently, only then realizing what he had said.
At that moment, Clarin and Jamieson were re-entering the north-south valley in a mood of defeat. Clarin was frankly crying, tears of weariness and frustration, and Jamieson’s face showed a similar, although more controlled emotion.
‘We’ll never catch up to them,’ she said hopelessly. ‘And now the trackers are between them and us.’
‘We know where they’re going,’ Jamieson replied. ‘So, we’ll meet them there. Or we’ll get ourselves to Deepsoil Five and ask the Master General to help us someway. I don’t know, Clarin. I wish you’d stop crying.’
‘I’m tired! We haven’t slept since we left Tasmin and Don, and there’s no point in trying to pretend I’m rested and cheerful. I’m scared, too. God, Jamieson, with what we found out, aren’t you? I’ll cry for a while and get it out of my system. A good cry is almost as good as a night’s sleep.’
‘It’s very hard for me to control myself when you do that. I find myself wanting to hug you.’
‘Up a gyre-bird’s snout,’ she remarked rudely, wiping her face with grubby hands. ‘Since when?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he mused. ‘You’re huggable.’
‘Not by you, Jamieson.’
He turned away so she would not see his face. ‘Got your mind set on him, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Up a bantigon’s end flap you don’t. You’re wasting your time, Clarin. He was brou-dizzy over his little wife when she was alive, and he still is.’
Clarin sighed and wiped her face on her sleeve. ‘All right, Reb. Just between us, yes. I’m tracked on the man. He’s a little stiff, a little humorless. Some days I think he’s got a Tripsinger score where his sex urge ought to be. But when he talks, it’s like he’s reading my mind.’
‘You’re what he ought to have had, Clarin. But he didn’t. He had a little girl who never had the least idea what was going on in his head. You never met her, but I did.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Like? She was … she was a lot like Wendra Gentrack. Edible. And sweet. Like some baby animal, soft, and giggly. Kind of fearful. Not interested in much. A good cook. Beautiful looking. She only had one way to act toward men, flirtatious. She didn’t mean anything by it. She fluffed up even for me, and I’m nobody.’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ she objected softly.
He shook his head in mock protest, going on. ‘What I mean is, you got this very strong urge to take care of her, even when she didn’t need it. She’d give this little breathless laugh or sigh, like a child, and you’d feel your chest swelling with protective fervor.’ He laughed. ‘Not like you, Clarin. Not independent.’
‘No, I haven’t noticed myself arousing any of that protective fervor.’
‘She couldn’t relate to women at all – always had her claws out. And that was fear, I figured out. She had any woman between the ages of eight and eighty slotted as a possible competitor. Poor Master Ferrence could only sneak over to see his mother when she wasn’t looking. I’d always figured it was lucky we didn’t have any women Tripsingers at Deepsoil Five, or she’d have made his life miserable.’
‘She’s dead,’ Clarin said. ‘That sounds hard, but it’s the simple truth, Reb. She’s dead. She’s not going to come back from the bottom of the Enigma. She’s gone. Eventually, he’ll realize that. If there is any eventuality. I keep forgetting there may not be….’
‘You’re planning on being around if he does?’
‘If any of us are still alive, you bet your sex life I do.’ She managed a rueful smile, then stiffened. Her eyes had caught a tiny motion, far down the valley. ‘Give me the glasses,’ she said, with an imperative gesture. ‘Quick!’
She stared, searching the clearing where the movement had caught her eye.
‘It’s them,’ she said, disbelieving. ‘Tasmin and Don.’
‘Alone?’
‘All alone. On foot. Coming back this way. They must have hidden the mules. Or lost the mules. Or the way’s blocked down there as it was for us.’ She urged her tired animal into a trot. ‘Come along, acolyte. We’re not as alone as I thought we were.’
Jamieson’s report to Tasmin of their effort to find an open route to the west made it clear they had no other choice than to return. ‘We were cut off,’ Jamieson snarled. ‘We tried three routes west, and every one of them had an encampment of troops arrayed across it. Guards, sentries, whatever. With life detectors of some kind, too. They damn near caught us!’
‘Every trooper with weapons bristling all over him,’ Clarin said. ‘We’ve thought all along that Justin had the troopers in his pocket. Now we know for sure. Half the garrison is camped between us and the ’Soilcoast. They had Explorers with them. Jamieson spied out one group last night.’
‘They were talking about guarding the routes out of the Presences,’ Jamieson said. ‘Except for regular brou caravans, anyone coming from the west is supposed to be stopped. The troopers were arguing with the Explorers whether it would be acceptable to engage in a little robbery and rape in the process. The Explorers were really tense about the whole thing – sitting back-to-back kind of tense. Somebody in that setup is going to get killed!’
‘How did the Explorers get mixed up in this?’
‘I got the impression they didn’t really know what was going on, Master Ferrence. They’d been hired to bring the troopers in because no Tripsingers were available.’
‘Not available!’ Tasmin’s exclamation was sheer reflex. Tripsingers were always available!
Clarin sighed. She looked exhausted, damp ringlets of hair scalloping her cheeks and forehead. ‘Thyle Vowe has obviously sent the word to the citadels that Tripsingers are not to lead troopers anywhere. The word may not have reached the interior yet, but there’s been plenty of time for Vowe to tie up the Coast.’
‘It would explain what happened,’ Tasmin agreed thoughtfully.
Clarin’s voice shook as she said, ‘Listen, Tasmin. We haven’t told you the worst thing yet. The troopers were doing a lot of talking about the equipment they had with them.’
‘Demolition equipment,’ explained Jamieson. ‘White noise projectors and chemical explosives with various kinds of propulsion devices. I snooped around a little while Clarin yodeled down a canyon to draw them off. She sounded exactly like about twenty Tripsingers on a practice trip through the Crazies. The troopers thought there were at least a dozen of her, all female, so the putative rapists went zipping off in pursuit.’
‘Clarin!’ cried Tasmin. ‘What happened?’
‘They ran into some ’lings and about half of them got killed,’ she said with a calmness that was belied by her shaking hands and bloodless lips. ‘I was lying above them on a parapet I’d got through to by using Don’s machine.’
‘It gave me plenty of time,’ Jamieson said, irrepressibly. ‘I got a good look at the equipment they’re carrying. I also got away with a copy of their map.’ He drew it from one of the deep pockets of his robe and unfolded it, spreading it on the ground before them. It was a satellite map of the area stretching from Deepsoil Five on the east to the Deepsoil Coast on the west and from the southern coast to the Jut.
‘Justin isn’t going to waste any time,’ Clarin said, pointing to the markings on the map. The Watchers, the Startles, the Creeping Desert, the Mad Gap, the list went on and on, all marked for destruction, with a line of march leading from demolition site to demolition site as the road was cleared before them. They wouldn’t need any Tripsingers. There wouldn’t be anything to get in their way!
Tasmin shivered. He felt suddenly cold, as though it was his own body someone had scheduled for destruction. As soon as the Commission findings were announced, Justin would begin!
Don interrupted his musing, angrily. ‘I recognized the voice of that woman on the trail last night. Her name is Sells. She’s some high mucky-muck among the Crystallites. I heard her speak once in the Crystallite Temple in Splash One. What was she doing with Geroan?’
He replied, ‘Well, you know that Geroan works for Justin. I think you can assume that the Crystallites also work for Justin. Probably they always have.’
‘The Crystallites!’
‘I imagine Harward Justin had the commission arranged for even before the Jut massacre,’ he said. ‘The massacre was simply the opening shot in the BDL war, the dramatic “incident” he needed to reopen the sentience question.’