Authors: Joan D. Vinge
“A wise
decision.” The mask maker smiled, looking through her, into her.
Jerusha
made no answer, not even certain how to answer.
The woman
stood aside at last, somehow releasing her as she had somehow held her
prisoner; moved past her toward the shelves at the rear of the store. Jerusha
went on to the door and out, without buying anything, or even speaking to the
shop man.
Why did I listen to her?
Jerusha reclined, motionless, on an
elbow on the low serpentine couch. She absorbed the sensation of cotton wrapped
twigs that crept inexorably from hand to wrist to elbow as her arm went to
sleep. Each time she entered this place a paralysis seemed to overcome her,
destroying her ability to act or even react, to function, to think. She watched
the seconds blink out on the sterile clock face embedded in crystal in the
sterile matrix of empty shelving that cobwebbed the room’s far wall. Gods, how
she hated the sight of this place, every lifeless centimeter of it-It was just
as it had been when the LiouxSkeds departed, the same facade insulating its
occupants from the timeless reality of the building and the city that had
surrounded them.
They had
affected a Kharemoughi lifestyle with excruciating dedication: a sophisticated,
refined, and soulless imitation of a lifestyle she found obscure and
unappealing to begin with. The patina of her own possessions scarcely altered
it. She fantasized an overlay of ornate, rococo frescoes and molding, the
unashamed warmth of a palette of garish colors everywhere ... closed her eyes
with her hand as the unrelenting subtlety of the truth seeped through like
water, to make the colors blur and bleed.
This place
hung with ugly memories had been forced on her—a part of her burden, her
punishment. She could have struck back, cleared this mausoleum of its morbid relics
and replaced them with things fresh and alive ... she could even have gotten
rid of it entirely, gone back to her old, cramped, comfortable set of rooms
down in the Maze. But always, when her day’s work was through, she had returned
here and done nothing, one more time. Because what was the point? It was
useless, hopeless ...
helples
s ...
She lifted her locked hands to her mouth, pressed hard against her lips.
They’re watching, stop it—!
She sat up,
pulling her hands away, bowing her head so that the caftan’s hood fell forward
about her face. The Queen’s spies, the Queen’s eyes, were
everywhere—especially, she was sure, in this townhouse. She felt them touching
her like unclean hands, everywhere she went, everything she did. In her old
apartment she had been free to be human, free to be herself, and live her own
heritage . free to strip off her chafing, puritanical uniform and go easily
naked if she wanted to, the way she had been able to do on her own world, the
way her people had done for centuries. But here she was always on display for
the Queen’s pleasure, afraid to expose herself, physically or mentally, to the
White Bitch’s unseen scorn.
She picked
up the tape reader that had dropped to the floor, gazed at without seeing the
manual on ultrasound analysis that she had been trying to study for a week ...
two weeks ... forever. She had never been one to enjoy fiction, in any form:
she heard too many lies on the streets every day, she had no patience with
people who made a living doing it. And now she could no longer concentrate on
facts. But still she could not let go and allow herself to escape into fantasy
... the way BZ had always done, so easily, so guiltlessly. But then, to be a
Kharemoughi Tech was to live in a fantasy world anyway, one where everyone knew
his place, and yours was always on top. Where life functioned with perfect
machinery . only this time the machinery had broken down, and the chaos that
waited outside had rushed in to destroy him.
She
imagined the patrol craft vaporizing, releasing two spirits from this mortal
plane into—
what?
Eternity, limbo, an
endless cycle of rebirth? Who could believe in any religion, when there were so
many, all claiming the only Truth, and every truth different. There was only
one way she would ever learn for herself ... and a part of her own spirit had
already passed over that dark water without a ticket, gone with the Boatman,
and with her only friend in all this world of enemies. Her only friend ...
Why the hell did I listen? Why did I leave
those bottles on the shelf?
She stood up, the tape reader falling from her
lap to the floor again unnoticed. She took one step, knowing that she was
starting for the door; stopped again, her body twitching with indecision.
Motivation, Jerusha!
desperately
.
I wanted to leave those bottles there, or she’d never have changed my
mind
. Her muscles went slack, she slumped where she stood, her whole body
cotton-wrapped with fatigue.
But I can’t
sleep here!
And there was no escape, no haven left, no one ...
Her
searching eyes stopped on the dawn-colored shell that lay like an offering on
the Empire-replica shrine table beside the door.
Ngenet ... Oh gods, are you still a friend of mine?
The solid peace
of the plantation house, that inviolable calm in the storm’s eye, crowded her
inner sight. She had seen it last more than a year ago; had been both
consciously and unconsciously separating herself from even the loose and
superficial ties of their infrequent visits as her depression deepened, as her
world shrank in and in around her. ] She had told herself she did not want him
to see the knife-edged .], harridan she had become ... and yet perversely, at
the same time i she had begun to hate him for not seeing that she needed his
safe haven more than ever.
And now?
Yes ... now.
What kind of blind
masochism had j, made her wall herself into her own tomb? She crossed the room
to the phone, punched in one code, and then another and another from i memory,
putting through the outback radio call to his plantation. ‘ She marked the
passing seconds with the beat of her fingertips against the pale, hard surface
of the wall, until at last a video less voice answered her summons, distorted
by audio snow.
Damn this place!
Storm
interference. There was always storm interference.
“Hello? Hello?”
Even through the interference, she knew that the voice was not the one she
needed to hear.
“Hello!”
She leaned closer to the speaker, her raised voice echoing from room to silent
room behind her. “This is Commander PalaThion calling from Carbuncle. Let me
speak to Ngenet.”
“What? ...
No, he isn’t here, Commander ... out on his ship.”
“When will
he be back?”
“Don’t
know. Didn’t say ... leave a message?”
She cut off
the phone with her fist; turned away from the wall shaken with fury. “No
message.”
She crossed
the room again to pick up the dawn-pink shell, held it against her while she
traced its satin-rubbed convolutions with unsteady fingers. She touched the
flawed place where one fragile spine had snapped off. Her fingers closed over
the next spine, and broke it. She broke another, and another; the spines fell
without a sound onto the carpet. Jerusha whimpered softly as they fell, as
though she were breaking her own fingers.
“Everything
we do affects everything else.”
“I know
...” Moon walked beside Ngenet down the slope of the hill that lay ochre and
silver with salt grass, rippling like the wind’s harp below the plantation
house. The house itself melted into the sere, burnished hills beyond; its
weathered stone and salt bleached wood were as much a part of this land as—
as he is
. Moon studied his profile
moodily from the side of her eye, remembering how strange it had seemed to her
the first time, the last time, she had seen it. Five years ago ... it was true,
she could see five years of change in his face; but not in her own.
And yet she
had changed, aged, in the moment that she saw the life light go out of
Elsevier’s eyes. Death had let her pass ... but Death had not been denied.
Grief lifted her and dropped her, the storm tide of mourning trapped in a
bottle. If she had not willfully challenged Death, this death would not be on
her soul. “If Elsevier hadn’t brought me back to Tiamat, shed still be alive.
If I’d stayed on Kharemough with her, she would have been ... happy.” Suddenly
she was seeing not Elsevier, but
No one’s dreams ever mattered as much as
mine
. Moon’s legs trembled under her.
“But you
wouldn’t have been.” Ngenet looked down at her, steadying her with a firm hand
as the slope steepened. “And knowing that you were unhappy, shed have been
unhappy too. We can’t spend our lives living a lie for someone else; it never
works out. You have to be true to yourself. She knew that, or you wouldn’t be
here now. It was inevitable. Death is inevitable, deny it though we will.” She
glanced up at him sharply, seeing him distorted by her own grief, and away
again. “After TJ died, she was never the same. My father always used to say
that she was a one-man woman. For better or worse.” He pushed his hands into
the pouch of his parka, gazing northward, following the coastline into the
white-hazed distances where Carbuncle lay. “Moon, everything affects everything
else. I’ve lived this long without learning anything, if I haven’t learned
that.
Never take
all the credit ... or all the blame. You weren’t to blame.”
“I was!”
She shook her head disconsolately.
“Then start
thinking about what you can do to repay her!” He waited for the question in her
eyes. “Don’t let your grieving turn sour. Don’t be so damned selfish about it.
You said yourself a sibyl told you to return to Tiamat. And that your own mind
told you to.”
“To help
line of his northward gaze.
A one-man
woman ...
“Only a
circuit in a greater machinery. The sibyl mind doesn’t send messages across
half a galaxy to comfort a broken heart. There’s more to your destiny than
that.” He stopped suddenly, facing her.
“I—I know.”
She moved her feet in the tangled grass, suddenly afraid; watched her shadow
like a cloud looking down on the face of the land. “I understand that now,” not
really understanding, or believing it. “But I don’t know why, if it’s not to
help
Something did tell me to come—but it didn’t tell me enough.”
“Maybe it
has told you. What did you learn by going to Khare mo ugh that you wouldn’t
have learned here?”
She glanced
up, startled. “I learned ... what it means to be a sibyl. I learned that there
are things on Kharemough that we have a right to have here, but they keep them
from us.” She heard her voice turn cold like the wind. “I understand what
Elsevier believed in, and why ... All of that is part of me. No one can make me
forget it. And I want to change it.” Her mouth twitched; her fists tightened in
her pockets. “But I don’t know how.” Sparks. Maybe
“You’ll
discover the way, when you reach Carbuncle.”
She smiled.
“The last time we talked about that, you didn’t want me to go at all.”
“I still
don’t,” gruffly. “But I’m not talking to the same woman. Who am I to argue with
destiny? My father taught me to believe in reincarnation—that what we are in
this life is the reward or punishment for what we did in the last one. If I
wanted to play philosopher I’d tell you that when Elsevier died her spirit was
reborn into you, there in the sea. A sea change.”
“I want to
believe that—” She closed her eyes; smiled at last, opening them again, as
belief metastasized. “Miroe, do you ever
Jfc wonder
who you were before? And whether, if we were born knowing what we had to make
up for instead of crawling blindly through a penance, anything would be
different?”
He laughed.
“That’s the kind of question I should be asking you, sibyl.”
Sibyl.
I belong again. I am whole again.
Wholer.
Holy
...
The cold air
burned in her lungs. She pressed the spot beneath her parka where the trefoil
lay hidden; found herself looking to the north again, longing for a glimpse of
what lay beyond sight. It was nearing the time of the final Festival, when the
Prime Minister came to Carbuncle for the last time. She felt a stirring of
curiosity at the thought that he was following her here from Kharemough. But it
would be another fortnight before a trader’s ship put in here to take her to
Carbuncle. Only a fortnight until she would know-She was suddenly aware of her
heart beating hard in her chest, and did not know whether she was feeling
anticipation or fear.
They passed
the outbuildings where he kept his peculiar workshops, kept going downhill
toward the vast flooded fields that embroidered the narrow coastal plain,
north—and southward to the limits of his land grant. In his workshops Ngenet
tinkered with an incredible variety of obsolete engines and primitive
tools—things that would have seemed marvelous to her short months ago, but that
simply seemed pointless to her now. She had asked him why he bothered with
them, when he had things from the city that could do everything they did, and
much better. He had only smiled, and asked her not to tell anyone else about
his quirks.