“It wasn’t your fault. It was my fault; I wasn’t strong enough to be a sibyl.” Moon tightened her jaws until her teeth hurt. Her fault that she had come through the Black Gate and out of her Transfer a stranger, haunted by a split reality. By the time they had reached Kharemough she had functioned again, was almost human again; but still, when she closed her eyes and left her mind unguarded ...
She had worn her trefoil freely here in the orbiting spaceport city, gratified when total strangers from worlds she had never heard of acknowledged her with smiles and obeisances. But then a man had come up to her and asked her to answer a question. She had turned away from him in sick tenor and refused— refused. Elsevier had driven him away; but she had known in that moment that she would never be able to answer another question ... “I’ll—I’ll be all right when I get home, to Tiamat.” Where the sky at night was on fire with suns—not this black and bitter nothingness which consumed even the life force of a star, where even the stars were shrunken and icy and hopelessly alone. Where the only thing that mattered to her as much as the thing she had destroyed coming here still waited to be done, and the one person who would understand what it meant to lose her life’s desire. Sparks— she had to find him. “How much longer—?” She had tried not to ask the question in the time they had spent here, afraid to; wanting to ask it every day, every hour.
“Then you really don’t want to stay? Even after all you’ve seen?” The depth of disappointed hope that Moon felt in Elsevier’s voice pinched her heart. She had seen how very hard Elsevier had tried to fill her time and her mind with the incredible wonders of this city, this star port that sailed through space on an invisible tether held by the world below. She had thought that Elsevier only did it to drive away her fears, but now she realized that there had been another reason. “You—really want me to stay with you forever?”
“Yes. Very much, my dear.” Elsevier smiled, hesitant. “We never had any children, you know, T.T and I ...”
Moon glanced down, steeling herself to deliver another disappointment. “I know. If it was only me, if I was no one, I would stay with you, Elsie.”
She realized that it was true, even though she was like a child lost at a Festival here in this incomprehensible, immaculate island wheeling in the sky. Elsevier had tried to make her a part of all she saw, until she had begun to feel the careless pride of the off worlders who thought a starship was as natural as a sailing ship, who treated things that were awesome and miraculous as no more than their right. With each small technological marvel Elsevier’s patience taught her to control, her awe of the greater ones faded, until she could stand on the balcony outside their apartment and look out over the Thieves’ Market pretending that she was a true off worlder a citizen of the Hegemony, completely at home in this interstellar community.
But then the thought would touch her that she finally understood what Sparks had always tried to make her feel; and she would think of how much it would mean to him to stand here where she stood-and she would remember that she had abandoned him when he needed her. “Sparks is still in Carbuncle; I have to go back to him. I can’t stay here without him.” Exiled on an island surrounded by lifeless void. “I can’t be a sibyl here.” She pressed a hand against the trefoil tattoo at her throat, “I left my own world when I should have stayed. I failed my duty, I failed Sparks, I failed ... The Lady doesn’t hear my prayers. I’m lost, that’s why I’ve lost Her voice.” She pushed her bare feet off the edge of the bed, settling them on the cold floor. “It’s wrong; I don’t belong here. I won’t be happy here. I’m needed on Tiamat—” feeling it with a peculiar intensity. She held Elsevier’s indigo eyes, willing Elsevier to understand her need, and her longing—and her regret.
“Moon.” Elsevier pressed her hands together, in the way she did when she was trying to make a decision. “How can I say this, except badly? ... You can’t go home.”
“What?” Nightmare dimmed her vision of the room and Elsevier’s anxious face. “I can!” She threw the light of her will against the shadow. “I have to!”
Elsevier held up her hands, half placating, half shielding herself. “No ... no. I only meant—I meant that you can’t go home until Cress is strong enough to astrogate again.” The words faded like a lost opportunity.
Moon frowned uncertainly; a veil of doubt still clouded Elsevier’s face. She rubbed at her own, her body sagging with fatigue and disappointment. “I know. I’m sorry.” Her hand groped for the half empty bottle of tranquilizers on the stand beside the bed.
“No.” Elsevier’s dark hand gripped her wrist, drew her arm back. “That isn’t the answer. And you won’t find the answer to your fears by going back to Tiamat; they’ll follow you everywhere, forever, unless you learn what a sibyl really does. And I’m not wise enough to explain that to you, but there’s someone who is. At the first good window we’ll go down to the ground and see my brother-in-law.” She reached out and took the bottle of pills. “It’s something I should have done long before now ... but I’m only a foolish old woman.” She stood up, smiling down at Moon’s incomprehension. “I think it will do us all a world of good just to set foot on a real planet again, anyway. Maybe Cress can join us. Rest now, my dear ... and pleasant dreams.” She touched Moon’s cheek softly and left the room.
Moon pulled her feet up onto the bed again, smoothed the one thin cover that was all she needed here over her stomach. But there were no sweet dreams waiting in the lifeless night that surrounded this island city or its world. She lay staring at the half-intelligible action flickering eerily through the screen on the wall, her mind and body aching with their separate needs. There was no one in this alien place who could change any of her dreams from dark to light, unless they would let her go home ... home ... Tears trickled down her cheeks as her eyelids slipped shut.
She rode through the Thieves’ Market in the artificial day, jammed into the crowded spaceport tram with Elsevier and Silky and a rubber-legged Cress, and enough surly commuters to populate an island. The space station’s orbit passed over a window—a transportation and shipping corridor down to the surface of Kharemough
—every few hours; but those were located hundreds or thousands of miles apart on the planet below. Someone who missed a stop would have to wait a full day for it to open again.
There had been no seats when she boarded the tram, but a man had risen from his as she passed and offered it to her inexplicably. She had smiled and given it to Cress when another man stood up for her in turn. Embarrassed, she had pulled Elsevier forward into the seat instead, whispering, “Do they think I’m so pale because I’m sick?”
“No, dear.” Elsevier had frowned mock disapproval and tugged at the hem of her sleeveless, thigh-length yellow tunic. “On the contrary. You really should put on your robe.” She touched the sedate wine-colored garment draped over Moon’s arm.
“It’s too hot.” Moon felt the crisscross of braids she had woven out of the way on top of her head, remembering the voluminous robes and tight-fitting jump suits she had tried on and tossed away in the shops of the Center City Bazaar. She had tried to wear her own clothes, now that they were off the ship, but the air of the station was as warm as blood, and so she wore as little as Elsevier would allow.
“When I was a girl I went covered in veils from head to foot; it was part of a woman’s mystery.” Elsevier arranged the folds of her own loose, color-splashed caftan; her necklace of bells jingled sweetly. “And what I wouldn’t have given to throw them all off and run naked down the street, in the steaming heat of summer. But I never dared.”
Moon clung to the seat back, one step behind a silently miserable Silky, empathizing with his discomfort locked in a press of strangers. She looked out through the open sides of the tram as they passed avenue after avenue of the port’s interstellar community, where Elsevier shared an apartment with Silky and Cress—and now her—in the elegant claustrophobia of Kharemough’s off world ghetto. Already she was lost; she could no more comprehend th
is city’s pattern than she could the customs of the people who controlled it. All she knew was that it all fit into a hollow ring, with the star port centered in the gap. The Kharemoughis referred to the off world community as the “Thieves’ Market,” and its resident aliens accepted the name with amused perversity. Kharemough dominated the Hegemony because it made the most sophisticated technological items available, and Elsevier had remarked to her one day, not without pride, that “Thieves’ Market” was more truth than slur.
“How did you become a—come to Kharemough, then?” as Elsevier did not go on with her thoughts. It had seemed more and more unlikely to her that this gentle, self-effacing woman would ever have chosen a career that defied anyone, let alone interstellar law.
“Oh, my dear, how I lost my veils and my respectability is a long, dull, involuted story.” But Moon saw the smile that crept out at the corners of her mouth.
“False modesty.” Cress slouched in the seat ahead of them, eyes closed, hands pressing his chest. He had been back from the port hospital for only two daylight periods.
“Cress, are you all right?” Elsevier touched his shoulder.
“Fine, mistress.” He grinned. “All ears.”
She nudged him, leaning back with a shrug of resignation. “Well. I come from Ondinee, Moon, which is a world that would seem even more incomprehensible to you than Kharemough, I’m sure; even though their tech level is not nearly as high. Women in my country were not encouraged—”
“Allowed,” Cress said.
“—to live full lives, the kind you’ve always known.” Her voice drifted above the murmur of conversation like smoke rising into the city haze of another world, in a land dominated by the pyramidal temple-tombs of an ancient theocracy. It was a land where women were bought and sold like bartered goods, and lived in separate quarters within the family compound, apart from the men, who were not their partners but their jealous lords. Their lives followed narrow paths worn deep over generations; lives that were incomplete but reassuringly predictable.
A timid girl called Elsevier—Obedience—had followed the worn paths of tradition, swathed in veils that hid her humanity from view, stumbling often in the ruts of ritual but never seeing her own life from enough of a distance to wonder why. Until one day in the temple square her curiosity had drawn her away from her offertory rounds at the shrines of her patron spirits, into the crowd gathered to hear a crazy off worlder shouting about freedom and equality. He climbed brazenly up the steps of the Great Temple of Ne’ehman, while a gang of radical local youths jammed leaflets into the hands and clothing of anyone who stood still. But the mob had turned angry and ugly, the ruthless Church Security had come to break it up, and in the panic that followed they had thrown everyone they laid hands on into the black vans together.
Elsevier had cowered, beaten down into a corner of the lurching van by the crush of bodies. Pawed and trampled, her veils torn, she had crouched there sobbing, hysterical with fear of defilement or death. But strong hands had seized her suddenly, dragging her to her feet, and held her up against the wall. Mindless with terror, she felt the world turn to water around her, and her body with it .... “Don’t faint now, for gods’ sakes! I can’t hold you up forever—” and a slap.
Pain punctured the wall of her madness like a spike. She opened her eyes, whimpering, to see in front of her the haggard, bloodied face of the crazy off worlder the man who had caused this to happen the one man she would love for the rest of her life. But at that moment nothing was further from her mind than love.
“You okay?” He grunted as someone jabbed him in the kidneys. He held his arms rigid against the walls, shielding her with his body. She shook her head. “Did I hurt you? I didn’t mean to.” He drew one hand in, touched her bare cheek softly. She shriveled away from his fingers, pulling the torn cloth of her veil back over her head. “Sorry.” He glanced down, bracing again as the van swayed through a turn. “You weren’t even there to hear my speech, were you?” He grimaced ruefully; suddenly he looked barely older than she was. She shook her head again, and wiped her eyes. He muttered something bitter in his own tongue. “KR’s right; I do more harm than good! ... Don’t tremble, they won’t hurt you. Once we get to the inquisitory they’ll weed out the bad seed and let you go.”
Another shake. She knew the reputation of the Church police all too well. She felt her eyes fill with tears again.
“Don’t. Please don’t.” He tried a smile on, couldn’t keep it. “I won’t let them hurt you.” It was an absurdity, but she clung to it, to keep from drowning. “Listen,” he groped for a change of subject, “uh, since you’re—here, you want to hear my speech? This may be my last chance.” Beads of sweat glistened in his wiry brown hair.
She didn’t answer; and taking it for assent, he had filled the rest of their stifling journey to judgment with the sweet fresh air of his hopeless idealism—of all men living together like brothers, of women sharing the same freedoms with men, and taking the same responsibility for their own actions .... By the time the van lurched to a stop, throwing them back into the reality of their plight, she had become certain that he was utterly insane ... and utterly beautiful.
But then the doors banged open, letting in the harsh light of day and the harsh commands of the guards, who herded the miserable captives out into the walled yard of the detention center. They were the last ones down, and he had pressed her hand briefly—”Be brave, sister”—and asked her name.
She spoke to him at last, only to say her name, before the guards reached him. She heard him begin to protest her innocence as he was hauled out, heard it turn into a gasp. Groping heavy hands dragged her down and away so that she could not see what they did to him. She was herded into the station with the rest, and she didn’t see him again.
But waiting inside the station was her father, who had come at a frantic call from her chaperone after she had been carried off in the van. She ran sobbing to him, and after many threats and a large payment to the Church missionary fund he had taken her away from that place of horror, before the Church’s inquisitors could inflict any permanent damage to her reputation.
She had been at home for almost two weeks, barely daring to leave the house while her fright slowly healed, before she could bear to think about the mad off worlder again ... to wonder about his words, and his kindness to her in the midst of chaos ... harder still, to wonder whether he was even still alive. Knowing that she would never know, never see him again, still she could not push his shining-eyed ghost out of her mind.
Even so, she did not recognize the stranger who sat self-consciously on the bench under the vine-covered courtyard wall, as her mother led her to “a suitor,” and left her to stand awkward and uncertain in the man’s eager scrutiny. He was conservatively dressed in a business suit and cloak; the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat half obscured his face. But what she could see of the face, dimly through her veil, was purple and green.
Apprehensively she threw back her dark blue head veil to let him see her own face, keeping her eyes averted. She curtseyed, her necklace of silver bells singing in the quiet air.
“Elsevier. You don’ recognize me, do you?” The words slurred, but his disappointment reached her clearly. He pulled off his hat.
But she had recognized his voice, even distorted as it was, and sat down on the bench beside him with a small cry of astonishment. “You! Oh ... hallowed Calavre!” barely aware that she swore. Her hand rose to, but didn’t touch, his face; the warm brown of his skin was a tapestry of half-healed cuts and bruises, the sharp line of his jaw was still blurred and swollen.
“I toF your fadder I was in an acciden’.” He smiled with his lips and his eyes; pointed, “Jaw’s ‘ired shut,” in explanation.
Her own face furrowed with empathy, she twisted her hands in her lap.
“It’s aw right Hardly hurts at all now.” The inquisitors had not given him to the Blues, but instead had taken turns beating him bloody in holy vengeance for a day and a night,
finally throwing him out into the street at dawn, to crawl away as fast as he could. “I don’t wanna think about it eidder ...” He laughed once; but many years would pass before he even told her the smallest part of the truth. He fell silent, looking at her as though he expected something. “Is your jaw ‘ired shut too, sister?”
“No!” She shook her head, jingling. “I—I have thought about you. Over and over. I thought I’d never see you again; I was afraid for you.” She felt a sudden desire to cradle his bruised face against her heart. “Why did you come here?” She wove the cloth of her veil between her fingers. Not as a suitor. But she did not re-cover her face, or feel a need to, with him.
“I had to be sure you ‘ere aw right You are aw right He leaned forward.
“Yes. My father came ... You were so land to me. My father would—”
“No. Blease don’ tell him about me. Jus’ tell me you listened to my ideas. Tell me I Planted a seed in your mind ... Tell me you want to know more.”
“Why?” Of all the questions and answers that filled her mind, all that escaped her mouth was the one that told him nothing.
“Why?” But she saw in his eyes that he understood. “Ell ... because I ‘ant to see you again.”
“Oh! I could touch the sky with my finger!” She giggled inanely; put her hands over her mouth at the look on his face. The woman who won this man’s love would have to win his respect first. “Yes.” She met his eyes boldly, impulsively, but with a muscle quivering in her cheek. “I do want to know more. Please come again.”
He grinned. “When?”
“My father—”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.” Her gaze broke.