The setting sun threw a single shadow ahead of me like a pointing finger. As its reach lengthened, I saw at last that it really had been leading me toward something after all … toward a crushed beetle, swatted out of the sky by the hand of God.
The nearer I got, the larger it grew, the more real it became, until I was stumbling through a field littered with a broken carapace that gleamed darkly in the last light of day. I stopped, staring in confusion, as I found familiar markings on a piece of alloy shell.… Tau’s logo, the designation codes … the buckled metal of Wauno’s transport. Reality hit me like a backhanded slap, bringing me out of my stupor into the real world full of pain again.
The hatch hung open. I didn’t know whether that meant there’d been survivors or whether it had been sprung by the impact of the crash. I collapsed against the ship’s hull, letting the heat-scarred surface support me as I pulled together the courage to look inside.
I pushed myself, finally, to climb the ramp, weaving and falling down, swearing with pain that was both physical and mental. I stopped just inside the hatchway, wiping my eyes clear of grief.
There were no bodies. The inside of the transport had taken a lot of damage, but it didn’t look as bad as the outside … except for the blood. I dropped to my knees, touching a rust-red stain on the floor. My eyes searched out a trail of bloodstains through the wreckage of the ship, the wreckage of my thoughts. The blood was all dry. There was no way to tell what had happened to the passengers, how many there’d been. If Wauno had been taking Kissindre to see the cloud-whales, it could have been only the two of them.
I pulled myself up again as something dangling from the instrument panel caught my eye. It was Wauno’s medicine pouch: the beaded bag he always wore hanging around his neck along with his field glasses. Now it hung from a bloody jag of metal, a mute accusation.
I unhooked the pouch with a shaky hand, wrapped the cord around my wrist, and knotted it with my teeth. As I glanced at the panel again, I saw a red light flashing. I leaned forward, supporting myself against the console as I queried the onboard systems, half afraid the light meant the power unit had gone critical.
I didn’t expect anything would still be functioning, but the display read out EMERGENCY BEACON. A homing signal, activated by the crash. I glanced over my shoulder at the empty cabin again, realizing what it must mean—that Tau had come and taken them away, dead or alive. There was no way I could know which it had been, any more than I could expect another search party, or any hope or rescue.
I told myself that rescue by Tau only meant being killed on sight. I couldn’t expect justice from the Humans now, not after what I’d done; any more than I could hope for help from the Hydrans. My only hope was Miya.
But I had no more idea of where she was now than she could have of what had happened to me. It had taken two dozen Satoh linking their Gift to send me this far away. There was no way for a single telepath to search an entire planet. And there was no way that my mind would ever reach her, even if I knew where she was. I slid down the panel to the floor, suddenly sick with a whole new kind of pain.
The sky outside was almost dark. The wind that moaned past me into the transport’s interior was getting colder. If I left the transport now, I’d freeze to death. I didn’t want that even more than I didn’t want to be here.… I dragged myself along the aisle to the rear of the cabin, finding more bloodstains there, and scattered first-aid supplies. At least somebody had been alive long enough to use them.
I shoved the few unused patches of painkiller up under my clothes, numbing whatever pain my hands could still reach, and choked down most of an emergency ration before I spilled it.
There was no strength left in me for anything else. I huddled in a corner, trying to find a position that would let my lungs fill, a centimeter of floor space that didn’t feel like a bed of blades. There weren’t any. I shut my eyes, and my mind did a fade to black.
I lost count of the times I woke during the night, shivering with cold or shaking with fever in the lightless coffin of the transport. I woke from dreams of Miya taking me in her arms, healing my pain … dreams of Naoh using my body and mind as her weapon of vengeance, of death in the streets of Oldcity, of dying alone in an alien wilderness.…
I woke up finally with the light of a new day pouring in on me through the port above my head. The anesthetic patches had worn off. The sudden blow of pain made me want to retch, but I didn’t have the strength. There was no heat in the glaring shaft of brightness, but my body was burning like a protosun. Every breath cost me more than it had yesterday, for less effect. I lay squinting up at the morning light, trying to think of a single reason to feel glad I’d lived to see it.
Pulling myself up, I found a canteen I’d missed last night in the dark. I gulped the last of the water inside it, spilling more than I drank, gasping as the icy cold sluiced down into my clothes. My flesh crawled like the fingers of wetness belonged to the hand of Death, but I went on drinking, desperately, until the canteen was empty. My throat felt drier than before.
I searched the bloodstained floor for anything else I’d missed. There was more blood than I remembered seeing last night. Fresh blood. Blood that had soaked through my torn pants and my coat. I struggled to my feet, hanging onto the seatback, suddenly needing to get out of there, to not see any more blood, any more proof of what I’d done or what had been done to me.
I lurched forward to the hatch, half slid and half fell down it, landing on ground that was heat-seared black from the crash. I lay for a long time waiting while the red tide of agony slowly subsided, until there was room in my thoughts at last for something more to exist, until the cold sharp scent of the wind had cleared the stink of blood and burned things out of my lungs.
I pulled myself up until I could sit against the side of the transport, not knowing why I bothered, why I really wanted so much to die out in the open. I’d hated open spaces ever since I left Old-city, the way somebody who’d spent his life shut in a closet would hate an open door. I looked up at the sky, saw a broken field of clouds drifting toward me from the still-distant reefs. I thought of the an lirr; I thought of Miya. I wondered whether she’d ever had even the glimpse of them that Wauno had given me, wondered if she’d ever get the chance … or if.…
Miya— The randomness of the clouds seemed to show me her face. I wondered if I’d see my whole life play out in the sky, if I watched long enough. If I lived long enough. But I only saw Miya, in the clouds, in my memories. Only Miya. Everything else was randomness, chaos.
(Miya …) I called her name with my mind, an act as senseless as refusing to die, in every way that mattered. (Miya. I’m sorry.) Not sure, even as I thought it like a prayer, what I was the most sorry for.…
Far off, the clouds seemed to shimmer and flow like water hit by a skipping stone. I rubbed my eyes. Then, a sudden impulse made me fumble for Wauno’s lenses and hold them up to my face. My breath wheezed in my throat as I moved. But the lenses clicked into focus, and I saw the clouds for what they were: an lirr. The ones that Wauno must have been bringing Kissindre to see. I remembered him promising us both that trip, forever ago.
The cloud-whales moved across the sky like a vision of higher truth—one that had always escaped me and always would while I was trapped inside my body, chained to the dead weight of my past. I saw the residue of their thoughts falling from the air: dreams filled with wonders unimaginable to a solitary Human mind. I realized then that Humans had never been meant to share this gift from the Creators. It had been the Hydrans’ legacy, theirs alone. I watched the numinous rain brighten as the cloud-whales’ numbers grew with the light of day, watched them drift slowly overhead. I felt the kiss of icy mist on my upturned face; lowered the glasses for long enough to see that snow was falling in the universe visible to my eyes.
I opened my mouth, let the falling snow soothe my parched lips and tongue, fearless now, because fear had become meaningless. I opened my mind to the intangible touch of dreamfall, n
ot sure whether I was dreaming or dying.…
The clouds were lowering, settling to the ground, wrapping me in a restless fog-cloak. Ghostfire limned the broken hull of the transport; lightning shimmered inside the mist. Thunder carried to the distant hills and came echoing back, until there seemed to be no surface to my skin, nothing separating the sensation inside the hollowed-out core of my body from the uncanny energy surrounding me. Visions formed and faded inside my head, and I didn’t know if my eyes were open or closed. Lightning danced on my fingertips, as ephemeral as the snowflakes that sublimed on my burning skin.
Miya. Her face haunted the fluid wall of fog, haunted my thoughts until I was sure this could only be a delirium dream. Her lips formed my name soundlessly, calling me to her, calling me away.…
The air was silver with light, limning my body with halos that splintered, when I moved, into the shifting forms of things I seemed to know by instinct, but would never know the names of.… An unimaginable mind flowed into mine, filling it with secrets and mysteries. Oneness. Namaste.…
(Miya.) Her touch, limned with gold, reached out to me from a lozenge of light, drawing me into its rippling gold/blackness until I lost all mass, becoming as ephemeral as thought, beyond pain, beyond any sense but wonder … rising, rising, into the light.…
TWENTY-THREE
“WHERE AM I?” somebody kept asking. The same raw whisper asked it again while the blue blue infinite vault of heaven opened overhead, as pure and undisturbed as the peace inside me. There was no pain, no need for thought, no need to do anything but exist.… And it didn’t matter where I was, only that here in this place I was safe.…
“Where am I?” I whispered again, because I didn’t believe in heaven.
(With me,) a voice answered. (With us …) The words sang inside my head. A cool hand touched my face, as gently as a thought. A thought touched my mind like a feathered wing.
I struggled up onto my elbow. Then there was pain—enough to make me gasp and swear, enough to prove I was still breathing. I looked down, found myself stretched on a sleeping mat, my body covered with bandages and blankets. I lifted my eyes to find Miya lying beside me, with dark hollows of exhaustion ringing her emerald eyes and depths of light in her smile as she touched me and felt my awe; saw my disbelief. Beyond her Joby lay sleeping quietly, with his thumb in his mouth. “How … did I get here?”
“I brought you.”
“You—found me? How? I was … lost.”
(The an lirr.) She leaned toward me; tears ran down her face as she kissed me softly, like she was afraid any touch at all would hurt me.
My mind joined with hers, wordlessly, effortlessly, like a miracle … and suddenly I understood how much my just being alive could mean to someone else. Tears ran down my face, as unexpected as rain in the desert. I could count on the fingers of one hand the times I’d cried in my life. Before this it had never been because I’d been happy, or safe, or simply alive.… Or loved.
I used my good arm to draw her down beside me; felt the flicker of her concern. (It’s all right,) I thought, only wanting my hand free, my arm free, to hold her. My pain fell away with the contact of her body, the contact of her mind; like everything we shared was shared unconditionally, pain and pleasure, weakness and strength.
“The an lirr—” I murmured. I looked up at what I’d taken for the open sky. I realized I was looking at walls: a dome made of something translucent, transcendently blue, glowing with the daylight beyond. I glanced along the wall until I found a window, only recognizing it by the antishadows of clouds passing in the distance. Only clouds, nothing more.… Looking at them with my senses and Miya’s senses joined, I could be sure of it in a way no Human could. I watched them disappear again into another expanse of wall as perfect as a cloudless sky.
I pulled my gaze away at last, looking back at Miya. (The cloud-whales helped you find me?)
She nodded, caressing Joby’s sleeping head. (I didn’t know what Naoh had done with you … just that I couldn’t find you. So I followed the Prayer Way the oyasin showed me, and the Allsoul led me to the an lirr.…) They’d been far away too, almost beyond reach of her Gift. But each macrocosmic being of the an lirr was made up of millions of microcosmic minds, which made them more powerful and more sensitive than any single telepath’s. They’d heard her prayers—and they’d answered them.
I felt for Wauno’s medicine pouch, its weathered softness still bound to my wrist. My fingers closed, covering it. I tried to empty my mind of the thoughts that came with it, looked up as I caught movement at the corner of my eye. Something fluttered in the shadows of another room, beyond an arched doorway and a filigreed wall: taku. Their bodies were flashes of randomness across a geometry of light and shadow in the space beyond. And this time I didn’t just see them or hear them; for the first time, I felt them in my mind.
(A week,) Miya said, answering my question before I asked it. (A week ago I finally found you and brought you here.…) She smiled with weary pride.
I lay back in her arms, feeling her warmth against me, my mind aware of nothing else but her now. Her healing lore seemed to flow into my veins, outward through the nerve net of my body, like just being here transformed me somehow. (Where am I?) I asked it as much because I wanted to feel her words form inside my head as because I wanted to know the answer.
(A holy place,) she answered.
(A monastery?) The image of another monastery filled my mind: one reduced to rubble and flames, the night around it filled with horror and grief. I remembered Grandmother … grimaced as pain distorted the interface of our thoughts again.
“Namaste—” Miya murmured, out loud, to the air. We are one. She pressed her face against my neck, like she was trying to stop my mind from bleeding memories, so we could go on believing that the warm, silent moment where we’d taken refuge from Refuge would last forever.
I could almost have gone on believing, in spite of everything … in spite of the shadows that haunted my memory, the pain I felt every time my body shifted position. Because my mind was alive again, not just to Miya’s every thought, but to Joby, quietly dreaming—even to the taku. And beneath it all I felt a profound peace that was more than even the sum of us, giving here and now more reality than they’d ever had, making safe and belonging into words that had some kind of meaning for me at last. (How…?) I thought. (Are you doing this? This—) Miracle. Not able to let myself speak the word, not even in my mind.
(No,) she answered, (it’s this place. The reefs are all around us here, they touch us all the time. The oyasin … the oyasin showed me this place, a long time ago. She showed me how it can heal.… I wanted to bring Joby here before, but his parents—Tau—would never let me.)
(Refuge,) I thought, and then I didn’t have any strength left for questions, no more need for answers. I lay in the warm sea of her thoughts, aware of every breath I took, aware that I was breathing easily now. Once before I’d felt my damaged body work to mend itself this way. Afterwards what I’d done had seemed like a fever dream. It hadn’t been under my control then … and maybe it wasn’t now. I only knew that in all my waking life I’d never felt as whole as I did here and now.
* * *
I woke and slept and woke again, losing count of the times and how much time had passed in between. At last I opened my eyes from a half-remembered dream of a child’s laughter. I lay listening, uncertain, until I heard it again, echoing out of the shadowy room beyond the archway where the taku nested. I heard footsteps, the uneven patter of a child’s feet.
I sat up slowly, expecting pain to take my breath away. It didn’t. I still hurt all over, but not like I’d hurt before. I glanced over at the place by my side where Miya and Joby had been sleeping, expecting it to be empty. Miya was there, asleep. But Joby wasn’t.
I stared at the empty space beside her. A child’s laugh echoed again behind me. I turned, peering into the light-dappled inner room. All I could see were more shadows moving. And then I did something I hadn’
t done—hadn’t been able to do—for too long: I set my mind free, letting the uncertain filaments of my thoughts search for Joby, trying to remember the sense of him that had always filled my head like incense along with Miya’s thoughts.
Joby. It was Joby—laughing, moving freely, like any other little boy, like he hadn’t been born with neurological damage, like he’d never been held prisoner by his own body, never needed Miya’s help even to move a finger.…
She wasn’t helping him now. There was no trace of her control in his mind. And yet he was aware of her somehow, as aware as I was now, always no more than a thought away from somebody else’s reality.
I got up, fighting dizziness, still not really sure I wasn’t dreaming. I took one step and then another toward the doorway, testing the floor under my feet, suddenly no more certain that this place really existed than I was that we weren’t all walking ghosts. Walking, breathing, laughing.… Pain shocked me with every step, but my bad leg held my weight, and the rest of my body did what it was supposed to, step-by-step. I reached the doorway, felt its solid frame under my hand; still not convinced that I’d actually find Joby on the other side.
But he was there, in the long hall patterned with shifting light and shadow. He was following the darting path of a taku, and his body was the universal word for joy. The other taku soared and swooped around him like leaves in the wind, sharing his game of tag.
(Joby.) I spoke his name, not with my voice, but in my mind.
He stopped with an awkward lurch to stare at me, like he’d actually heard me. And then he changed trajectories, coming toward me with his face all smiles. I knew it must be true, then, that we were all dead. And that I’d been wrong all my life about heaven.
He collided with me, making me grunt with pain, his small body as substantial as the wall that barely kept me from collapsing. “Cat!” he said. (Cat!)