My hands shook as I lifted the cup, easing a few drops into a mouth so dry that none even seemed to reach my throat. The second sip lubricated my throat, and a third may have reached my stomach.
“Wait a moment.”
I put down the cup, marveling at how much effort three small sips took.
“Shouldn’t be too long before some of the light-headedness starts to pass. Might be a minor stomach cramp or two.”
“Uh …” Minor stomach cramp? I could barely keep from doubling over, and my forehead burst out in another cold sweat.
“Try to relax.” Nerlis wiped off my forehead with a dry cloth, before folding it neatly and putting it on the bed-table next to the cup. “The reaction should pass quickly.”
She was right about that, too.
“Another sip,” she commanded.
I just looked at her.
She looked back at me.
I picked up the cup and took another series of small sips. My hands didn’t shake the second time.
“The second set of cramps should be less violent.”
They were. Instead of wanting to double up and die, I only felt like the three ConFeds had charged into my guts. I fumbled for the cloth and managed to wipe off my own forehead.
“Another sip?” I asked after the sweat and cramps passed.
“One more. Then wait for a while. You should start to feel better. You need to finish the entire beaker by midmorning.” She started to leave, then turned back. “And no matter how good you think you feel, don’t try to get out of that bed or sit up with your legs over the side.”
“But …”
“You’re dehydrated enough you don’t need to use the facilities immediately, and we don’t need you plastered face down on the stone.”
“Yes, Nerlis.”
“Thank you, Trooper.” She left shaking her head.
I waited, then took another series of sips from the cup, and suffered through the entire process of cramps and cold sweats again. By the time
I had recovered from the third round of Sustain, I could see a gray, gray morning.
Wryan stood at the foot of the bed—from nowhere.
I gaped. It was one thing to surprise others, another to be surprised.
“Are you feeling better?”
“I thought you didn’t dive?”
“I didn’t.” She smiled wryly. “But someone told me it was possible, and then left me hanging, and I worked on it.”
“What really happened to me?” I found myself lowering my voice.
“Did you actually enter the ConFed fort?” The doctor was frowning, but she didn’t look as formidable as before.
“No. Stayed strictly under the now. I’m not that stupid … but …” I shook my head. “Didn’t seem to make that much difference …”
“It did. You’d be dead otherwise. Your reaction was from the mental feedback, I think, trying to convince your body to replicate the symptoms.”
“Replicate?” I shivered. “Do you know … really know?”
Wryan just kept watching me, meeting my eyes.
“ … never … never … again …”
“Killing people, you mean?”
“Not that. Torturing them. Do you have any idea … ?” I was not just shivering, but shaking all over as the images pounded back at me.
“Try not to remember. Not just yet.” Wryan’s hands covered mine.
“Try not to remember? How … ?” That woman putting a gun to her head … or the man slashing his own throat … or the whole screaming, pounding pulsation of pain that had buried me … how could I not remember?
I could feel her hands tremble. “You felt it, too? You looked?”
“Not so closely as you did.” Her face had paled momentarily.
“What happened?” As I freed one hand and used the cloth to wipe my forehead again, I was beginning to get an idea of what had occurred.
“They think you picked up traces of the nerve poison. You showed all the symptoms. The doctors claimed Odin Thor could be tried for murder. The nerve gas was banned throughout Query generations ago.”
“Ahhhhh … and then the colonel-general claimed he thought it was only nausea gas to flush them out?”
“Exactly.”
“Poor Janth.”
“The armorer?”
I nodded.
“He really did suicide, Sammis. Not that I blame him.”
“I don’t either.”
Slowly, as I stopped shaking, she removed her hands from mine and stepped back. I realized she had stopped wearing the makeup to make her look older.
I laughed harshly. “All that equipment’s lost, at least for a season.”
“Not nearly that long, unfortunately. The nerve gas will decompose within days.” Wryan looked around. “You’re not supposed to have visitors yet.”
After the stimulation of seeing Wryan, and the reaction to those too-vivid memories, I felt drained again. So I reached for the Sustain. This time, the reaction was but a slight jolt and a damp forehead.
“Don’t they understand? How horribly they all died? The background sheets said it was quick, not that it was like an eternal agony compressed into a thousand breaths. Even after … . even after … my father … no one … nobody … should die like that …”
“No … but you didn’t know.”
“Does that excuse it, Doctor?”
“No.” Wryan looked straight back at me, her eyes clear. I respected her for that lack of evasion. “But it means you understand.”
I had to lean back on the pillows, Sustain or no Sustain.
“You will have to kill again, Sammis. You know that. Chaos leads to violence, and some violence can only be halted by removing the causes.”
Unfortunately, I knew what she meant. “Not now.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Not now.” Looking around, she smiled faintly. “Good-bye.”
She was gone, just like I had left her on those nights I had appeared in her quarters.
Click, click, click …
“Trooper? Who were you talking to?”
“Me?” I forced a grin. “Guess I was talking to myself.”
Nerlis didn’t believe me, but she just looked around, shook her head, and pointed to the cup. “Keep drinking.”
“Yes, nurse.” I reached for the cup again. It was going to be a long morning, a very long morning.
ONCE I HAD struggled through the entire beaker of the Sustain, my recovery was a matter of time, and enough calories. I was ready to leave. Neither Nerlis nor Dr. Dyrell would agree.
“You have no bodily reserves, Trooper. None at all. Your immune system is depressed …” Dr. Dyrell, although hearty in tone, was less flexible than Odin Thor. “ … and you probably never ate enough.”
“I can’t eat any more.”
Dr. Dyrell just shook her round face at me. Her dark hair, peppered with gray, was so short and curly that it didn’t even move. “You can’t take in enough calories with three standard meals. You need a minimum of five full meals. Three or four and an equal number of heavy snacks will do the same thing.” She glared at me. “Until you get some weight on that scrawny frame, you can’t leave. Trying to do it overnight puts too much strain on your heart. We’ll measure it out until we get you up where you belong.
“In the meantime, if you leave here using those mental travel tricks, it’s your health. Maybe your death.”
She wasn’t joking. I had to go for the meals plus snacks routine. Five full meals I just couldn’t take. Even after a day or two, I could tell the difference. Not that I looked much different, but I could use my undertime sight—and it was sharper—without feeling an instantaneous physical drain. Hard to believe that I had been operating on the edge of starvation, or that eating the diet of a healthy farmer had been insufficient.
Deric arrived with a stack of notebooks and the suggestion that I could spent my recuperation learning what every good diver should know. Most of the time, studying beat staring out the window, and gave me a welcome break.
Two days later, plowing through some overripe fruit and stale cheese and leafing through the third notebook, I heard footsteps.
“Sammis?”
“Mmmmpphhh …” With my mouth full, I just mumbled at Mellorie.
“Is that all you have to say?” She grinned momentarily. In her dark blue tunic and white trousers, she looked professional.
I shrugged, swallowing quickly. “Medical opinion was that I was
near starvation. They won’t let me out—officially—until I remedy that.”
“Poor Sammis … you look a sight better than when they carted you out of your room. I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier, but …” She looked down, then out the window, where high white clouds darkened into afternoon thunderstorms.
Something—more than just something—was bothering Mellorie.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No … but I should.” She kept her back to me, with her hands clasped. “You … you thought … but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Not after Nepranza …” If she hadn’t found me, who had? The doctor had said “woman friend.”
“Nepranza?” I temporized. “That bad … ?” I didn’t know what she was talking about.
“They said it wasn’t that bad.” Her voice was flat. “They say I must have been imagining things. They say that no one would have touched a child. Not the daughter of a lord. That’s what they say … .”
Nepranza! The name connected. Farren had mentioned the place—molesting a lord’s daughter … as if the only bad thing had been the killings of nearly innocent young men.
“They never talked to you?”
“My father wouldn’t let them—before. He died in the riots. The ConFeds made sure of that. They made sure of a few other things.”
“I see …” Not that I did. “Is that why you were attracted to me?”
Mellorie shrugged, still looking out the half-open window.
A roll of distant thunder punctuated her gesture.
“Yes.”
I could barely hear her voice.
“Sammis …” She finally turned around, but she did not look at me. Her tunic was buttoned all the way to the neck. “Don’t you understand? I was afraid. I knew you were sick, but I wouldn’t go into your room. I wouldn’t come see you until you were well.” Mellorie finally looked up and into my eyes, almost glaring at me.
“Why don’t you sit down?” I took a deep breath.
“You want me to stay? After I nearly killed you?”
“First,” I sighed, “you didn’t nearly kill me. I did. Second, there was nothing physically wrong with me. And third … we’ll get to that. Now sit down. You owe me that.”
She didn’t owe me anything, but I wanted her to sit down.
“Do you know what happened?” I asked.
“They said you must have tried to check—”
“No. I’m smarter than that. I just wasn’t prepared for the feedback. For all the deaths.”
Mellorie’s face went blank, as if a screen had covered it. “They deserved it. Every instant of it.”
“Even the woman who took her lover’s gun and blew out her own brains because the pain was so great? Or the boy who kept banging his head against the stone walls …”
“Don’t talk to me about them … please … don’t talk to me about them …”
“Mellorie … I damned near died because I picked up their deaths … my brain was trying to tell my body it was dying—nve hundred times over. Do you know what it was like dying—”
“Stop it! Stop it, stop it, STOP IT!!!!” Mellorie lurched to her feet. She grabbed the railing at the bottom of the bed and shook it enough to make the heavy bed sway. “STOP IT!!!”
Click, click, click, click!
Nerlis stood in the doorway. I motioned her back, but she stayed there.
Mellorie didn’t seem to notice. “All you can think about is their deaths! What about my sister? What about my father? What about me?”
“What about my father?” I asked quietly. “They burned him alive in his own house.”
“Then how can you feel anything for them?” Her voice was lower.
“Because I felt every single one of them die. And nobody should have died like that.”
“Would you do it again?”
“Would you do it?” I countered.
“In an instant. Would you?” A thin film of perspiration coated her forehead. “Would you do it again?”
“I don’t know.” I tried not to shake my head, but the images kept running through my thoughts—the woman grasping for the gun, the soldier with bloody fingers clawing his way along the floor …
“Goodbye, Sammis.” She brushed the red hair back off her damp forehead with her right hand, as if nothing had happened. Her left still held the bed frame. “I hope you’re back to normal before too long. Let’s have dinner some time when you come back.” Her face was almost expressionless. Then she grinned, and the falsity made her face look like a carnival mask. “Just mark it down as the hysteria of a pampered lady gentry. All right?”
Nerlis eased back into the corridor, although Mellorie had never even taken notice of her.
“Whatever you say, Mellorie. Whatever you say.”
She let go of the bed frame. “I still like you, Sammis, but you don’t understand. So let’s just be friends. All right?”
I nodded slowly. “Friends.”
“Friends.” This time I got a faint smile, but a real one. For a long time, I looked blankly out the window, letting the breeze ruffle my hair, drawing in the air that bore the hint of the on-coming storm, and the ebbing scent of the one just departed.
“Are you all right, Trooper?”
“Call me Sammis, Nerlis.”
A gust of wind tugged at my sheets, and Nerlis slid the window almost shut as the rain began to pelt against the pane. She went back into the corridor, presumably to check on other windows.
The rest of the cheese was still waiting, still stale. I could have eaten the chyst I had started, brown as it had become, if I’d been in the damps, but I picked up the pearapple instead and finished it in five bites. Then I took a deep swig of the Sustain, not because I liked the swill, but because I wanted out.
After that, I picked up the notebook, the one with the theories on the Laws of Time in it, and began to read again.
When the thunder and rain had died away, and the room was getting stuffy again, I tossed back the sheet and walked to the window, opening it wide. Then I went to the narrow wardrobe. Not a stitch of clothing.
I laughed. I hadn’t been wearing anything when I had collapsed. I didn’t get back into the bed, but wrapped the robe around me and sat in the chair.
Hatred. There was so much of it. Westron hated Eastron; the farmers and townies hated the gentry; the ConFeds hated the Secos; the gentry hated the Temple; and everyone hated the witches—and the Frost Giants. Mellorie was close to hating me because I refused to hate the people I had killed.
The room began to darken, both from the clouds and the twilight, but I wasn’t cold. And I was tired of the bed, tired of lying around getting fattened up, tired of studying theories, no matter how valuable they might be.
“Your friend was a little upset.” Nerlis carried a tray.
“Can I just eat it here?” I stood up, put the notebooks in a pile on the floor, and wheeled the bed table over.
Creeakkk.
“Turn it the other way.” Nerlis set the wooden tray on the just-lowered table.
At its lowest setting, the table was higher than I would have preferred.
What surprised me was that I was, if not hungry, certainly able to eat the food before me—slices of cold roast, jellied rice, sprouts, greens, and a pair of biscuits with some flambard preserves.
“Watching you eat just amazes me. You eat more than most guardsmen.”
“It amazes me, too,” I muttered between mouthfuls. I wanted out of the place, and, if it took eating everything in sight, so be it.
As I continued to munch, Nerlis left me with the diminishing pile of food and my thoughts.
The breeze had died as the air cooled, and outside the clouds were breaking up. In the west, the clouds glistened a greenish pink, underlit by the setting sun.
Terwhit … terwhit …
Whatever bird called, the sound was better than the harshness of the grossjays, those scavengers that had fed so well on the looting and burning following the Frost Giant attacks.
Terwhit … terwhit …
After pushing the table back from the straight-backed, two-armed wooden chair I stood and made my way to the window. Studying the dimming southern sky, and trying to pick out stars between the scattered clouds, I wondered if I could go undertime and follow a straight line to each.
The pinkness of the dying sunset faded into purple, then near-black.
One bright point of light emerged from behind a cloud. More properly, the fast-moving cloud left it unobscured in the evening, glittering and untwinkling above the dark and lightless building housing the Far Travel Lab.
Mithrada—the next planet inward from Query; host to the ill-fated planet-forming and metal-mining expedition that had brought on the Frost Giant attacks; evening or morning star to how many generations?
I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. When swallowing didn’t help, I tried thinking. Except my thoughts skittered from crazy Mellorie to Allyson, and whether Mellorie could dive or not, I would have traded her for sweet, perceptive and intelligent Allyson without an instant’s hesitation.
Those memories didn’t help the lump in my throat, either, especially recalling lying in the darkness with Allyson, holding her and being held. In addition to a heavy throat, I was having trouble seeing, and my cheeks were wet. Above it all, Mithrada glittered, like a heartless diamond in the sky.
Terwhit … terwhit …
Hearing the unknown bird helped, and I hoped he or she would call
again, as I listened and the darkness deepened. In time, another cloud obscured Mithrada, and I turned back to my bed.
“Oh …” I mumbled, barely keeping myself from jumping at the sight of someone in the chair. I glanced through the undertime to avoid the darkness.
The woman in the chair was Wryan, and there were deep circles under her eyes. My food tray had been removed while I had thought and looked and looked and thought. I hadn’t even noticed.
“Troubles?” I asked. “I’m sorry. Have you been here long?”
“Not too long, and it was peaceful to sit here and watch you, and listen to the wind.” She paused. “There are always troubles, Sammis.” She took a breath that verged on a sigh before continuing. “I understand that you had a few of your own this afternoon.”
“Did Nerlis call you?” My tone was snappish.
“No. She told me when I came. It works better if I announce my arrival officially.” There was a trace of wryness in her tone.
I sat on the edge of the bed. My legs were a little stiff from standing so long. Otherwise, I felt fine.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I couldn’t help grinning as she used the same words I had employed earlier. “Yes … and no.”
Wryan sat there waiting.
“Either Mellorie’s not quite sane, or I’m not quite sane, or maybe we’re both crazy.” I found that the table had been raised and moved back to its place beside the bed. I took a gulp of Sustain before saying another word. Verlyt, I wanted out.