Ammonite

Ammonite

Nicola Griffith

For Kelley, who fills my life with grace.

Chapter One

MARGHE’S SUIT WAS still open at neck and wrist, and the helmet rested in the crook of her left arm. An ID flash was sealed to her shoulder: “Marguerite Angelica Taishan, SEC.” The suit was wrinkled and smelled of just‑unrolled plastic, and she felt heavy and awkward, even in the two‑thirds gravity of orbital station Estrade.

She stood by the airlock at the inside end of A Section, The door was already open. Waiting. She rested the fingertips of her right hand on the smooth ceramic of the raised hatch frame; it was cool, shocking after two days of the close human heat of A Section.

The sill of the airlock reached her knees; easy enough to step over. No great barrier. The lock chamber itself was two strides across. The far door was still closed, sealed to another sill, like this one. Four steps from here to B Section. Four steps. She had recontracted with SEC, endured six months of retraining on Earth, traveled eighteen months aboard the Terragin, and spent the last two days on the Estradebumping elbows with the three‑member crew, all to take those four steps. “Well, Nyo and Sigrid say good luck, but they’ll be out there for hours yet, fixing the satellite.” Sara Hiam unclipped her headset. The slight, small woman with the atrophied muscles and club‑cut dark blond hair was matter‑of‑fact, using her doctor persona. In the two days since she had come aboard Estrade, Marghe had learned that Hiam had several distinct facets to her personality, facets she rotated to face any given situation. It was a survival tactic, one way Hiam–and Sigrid and Nyo–had managed to spend five years up here without going mad. Marghe knew there was a great deal of the doctor she had not seen; she wondered what the real Sara Hiam was like.

“Life support is up and running in Section D,” Hiam said. “Are you ready?”

Adrenaline, faster than conscious thought, flooded through Marghe and she had to discipline her breathing, decreasing her pulse and respiration rate, slowing blood flow and reducing the sudden over‑oxygenation of her long muscles. Her face pinked as the capillaries under her skin reopened; her muscles stopped fluttering. It was a routine learned long ago.

“I’m ready.”

“Very well.” Hiam’s voice was suddenly more measured, formal. “I’m obliged to remind you that the vaccine FN‑17 now offered is still considered experimental. I also remind you that once you have taken it and once you step beyond this airlock, you will under no circumstances be allowed back into Section A: nor, whether or not you proceed as planned to Grenchstom’s Planet, will you be allowed to enter any other uncontaminated Company installation until you have undergone extensive decontamination procedures.” She sounded as though she was reading from a screen prompt. “These procedures consist of–”

“I know what they consist of,” Marghe said. She pulled on gauntlets, closed her wrist seals. Was it her imagination or did the air coming from the lock smell different?

“This is a taped record, Marghe. Let me finish. These procedures consist of: isolation; the removal of all subject’s blood, marrow, lymph and intestinal flora and fauna and its replacement with normal healthy tissues; reimmunization of subject with all bacterial and viral agents commonly found in Earth‑normal human population; prior to return to home planet, further isolation at a location to be decided upon to determine the efficacy of said reimmunization. Do you understand these procedures?”

“Yes.” The lock was small but, unlike the rest of what she had seen so far of Estrade, blessedly uncluttered.

“Further, I remind you that although FN‑17 is a development of the Durallium Company, the Company in no way holds itself responsible for any adverse effects that may result from its use.

“Nor, though you are to be offered the utmost cooperation aboard Estradeand on Grenchstom’s Planet, are you to be considered an employee of said Company liable to the financial restitution available to indentured personnel. Is this clear?”

“Yes.” She closed her neck seal, hefted her helmet. “That’s everything?”

“Yes.”

“Will you help me with this?” She should have put the helmet on first; the gauntlets made her clumsy.

When the helmet and shoulder ring clicked together, the suit air hissed on. It tasted hard and flat, not like the warm, re‑breathed air of the orbital station. She tongued on the broadcast communications. “Can you hear me?”

“I hear you.” Hiam checked a workstation screen. “You’re reading well enough.” She looked up. “You?”

“Loud and clear.” Through the audio pickups Hiam sounded even more remote and doctorlike. And then the only sound was Marghe’s own breathing and the faint hiss of the forced air. Blue and purple readouts flickered in the lower left of her vision. Everything worked perfectly. There was nothing else to wait for.

Marghe stepped over the sill. Her boots clumped and echoed in the bare chamber, and her breath sounded loud. She touched the amber light on the control panel; the door slid shut. Hiam, arms folded, was visible through the small observation window.

Marghe studied the variety of lights, then tapped out a command sequence. A display flared red: VACUUM. Her helmet pickups were full of a hard hissing, and readouts flickered, then steadied, showing zero pressure, zero oxygen. When she moved, she felt vibration through her boots but heard nothing.

The wall display changed: AIRLOCK SYSTEMS ROUTED TO ESTRADE MAIN CONTROL PRIOR TO DECONTAMINATION PROCEDURES. TO PROCEED, INPUT SEQUENCE. Another last‑minute reminder: once she started on this, there was no turning back, Marghe tapped out the memorized sequence. RAISE ARMS, RAISE CHIN, STAND WITH FEET APART. Marghe did, BLANK VISOR FOR FIFTEEN SECONDS, COMMENCING. Even through her darkened visor and closed eyes, she sensed the flare as the chamber was flooded with radiation.

EXTERIOR DECONTAMINATION COMPLETE. LOCK GOVERNANCE RETURNED TO INTERIOR CONTROL.

Marghe cleared her visor, opened her eyes, blinked away the dancing green spots. Hiam was still in the window, watching. Then, suddenly, she was gone.

Marghe watched the blank window for a moment, then took a deep breath and turned to the second door, the second panel with its red light. She reached out to input the sequence that would open it, that would enable her to take that last step over the sill that marked the boundary between what was understood and controlled and what was dangerous.

“Marghe, wait.”

Marghe whirled, forgetting the two‑thirds gravity. Hiam was back at the observation window, headset at one ear. Marghe had to breathe slowly, in and out, before she could speak. “What?”

“Turn on your suit comm.”

Marghe tongued the channel on. “What’s wrong? What have–”

“Nothing.” Over the closed channel, Hiam’s voice was quiet, intimate. No longer the doctor. “This is off the record.”

“I don’t–”

“Just listen. All those things I said before, about isolation, about spending time somewhere unspecified before going home… that’s not what really happens.”

Marghe listened to her heart kicking under her ribs. She breathed, seeking calm. Never refuse information, her mother had taught her when she was just six years old, you never know what you might need. But her mother was dead. She managed a Go ongesture.

“If you leave the airlock, if you take the vaccine, you’ll never go home. Not ever. I had a… a good friend. On the planet. Was one of the initial batch taken off Jeep for study. She promised to be in touch. I think someone else wrote her mail.”

“How could you tell?”

“It felt all wrong.”

“If she’d been ill–”

“No. Just listen. It seemed fine at first. I assumed she just wasn’t feeling good. Decon’s not pleasant. Anyway, I didn’t pay close attention. But once when I wrote back I put in a private joke we’d shared for a long time. A very long time. When I got her response, I knew. It wasn’t her.”

Marghe said nothing. She wished she had just taken that last step, not listened to Hiam–this new Hiam. The real one?

Hiam watched Marghe intently, then laughed, a short, hard bark. “You don’t believe me.”

“I’m wondering why you didn’t tell me this before. Why you let me get this far.”

Hiam stepped right up to the glass, close enough for Marghe to see the pleats of her irises. “Because I couldn’t decide whether to trust you. But, Marghe… this is real, and somebody has to know. I can’t prove any of it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. You seemed… I just thought…”She laughed again. “I should have saved my breath.”

Marghe did not know what to say. “You and Sigrid and Nyo have all been up here a long time. I know that must–”

“Don’t patronize me,” Hiam said wearily. “If you don’t want to believe me, then that’s your privilege, but don’t patronize me.”

Marghe shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

Silence.

To go down to Grenchstom’s Planet–GP, Jeep–would be the culmination of years of study that had started when she was just a child, first with her mother, then her father, had continued at Universities, and as assistant SEC rep on Gallipoli, then Beaver. This was the reason she had swallowed her pride and set aside her misgivings about Company, why she had recontracted with SEC alter they had betrayed her, why she had traveled vast distances, literally and metaphorically: to come to Jeep and study over a million people who had been out of contact with humanity for two or three hundred years. There would never be another chance like this, never.

“Sara, I have to do this.”

Hiam turned away abruptly. “Then you’d better go ahead and do it.”

Marghe looked at Hiam’s thin back, hesitated. “I’m sorry,” she said again, then tongued off the comm channel and turned slowly to face the flaring red panel. Red for danger.

The known dangers she had prepared for, as far as humanly possible. The vaccine would be waiting for her in D Section.

As for the unknown dangers… Well, they were unknown. Nothing she could do about them.

She stretched out her hand, clumsy in the gauntlet, and tapped out the sequence slowly and carefully. The red panel blinked off and the lights around the door flared green.

The door slid open.

B Section was silent and dark. Ice glimmered in the dim sodium glow of the emergency floor lights. Marghe stepped over the sill and the door closed behind her. It was done.

The lights ran like runway flares down a narrow corridor between stripped, bare beds, each with its entertainment hookup coiled neatly at the head. Marghe’s boots glowed orange as she walked. Her breathing was loud. She felt utterly alone.

She was the first person who had walked here for five years; five years since the glittering dumbbell shape that was Estradehad been hurriedly converted from an orbital monitoring and communications station to a research and decontamination facility. Five years since the station crew had taken refuge in Section A, leaving Sections D and C for the decontamination of occasional Jeep personnel. B Section, and the long corridor beyond–the shaft of the dumbbell–was the crew’s insurance, their buffer zone, with movement allowed one way only: to the dirty sections.

Marghe watched her boots rise and fall through the orange glow; there was no dust.

The lights at the airlock blinked a reassuring green. The door opened and the wall display told her to blank her visor and hold out her arms; she keyed in the sequence on the next door, stepped through.

The corridor seemed a mile long. The familiar orange running lights gleamed on unsheathed metal and exposed wiring. Gravity decreased rapidly as she approached the center of the shaft; her suit automatically activated the electromagnets in her boots and she had to slide her feet instead of striding.

There was another airlock at the center of the corridor. She went through the dictated procedure, familiar now. The micro‑gravity and her sensitivity to the strong magnetic field under her feet made her dizzy. She closed her eyes and took three fast breaths to trigger a meditative state, monitoring for a moment her heartbeat and electrical activity.

She went on: more corridor, another lock. C Section.

In C Section there were beds, like B Section, but each had a hood waiting to be lowered over an occupant to suck out her blood and lymph, ready to push physical and electrical fingers deep into her intestines to kill and remove the swarm of bacteria and yeasts, eager to sear away the first layers of skin and leave red, raw tissues with colorless fluids until new skin grew back. Tombs for the living. She hated them. They had not been able to save her mother.

She walked faster; she wanted to be out of C Section.

In the lock. Hurry. Eyes shut and arms out. Faster. Key sequence. Now.

Nothing. The panel still flashed red.

Marghe stared at it. If she could not get through into D Section, she was trapped. The lock systems would not permit her to retrace her steps without a record of her having undergone either isolation in D or fluid replacement in C.

Think.

Perhaps she had input the wrong number sequence. She had been in a rush. Yes. Precisely, accurately, she tapped in the code a second time.

No change.

She tongued on the comm channel. “Hiam, can you hear me?”

Her helmet speaker clicked. “I can hear. Go ahead.”

“I’m still in lock four.”

“So my readouts say.”

“It won’t accept the sequence.”

“You’re sure you got it right?”

“Seven‑eight‑three‑six‑nine.” Silence. “It’s the right one, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Another silence. Marghe imagined the tck‑tckof Hiam’s nails on the keyboard. “How much air do you have?”

“About eighty minutes.”

“There should be an emergency suit. In the locker to your left.”

Marghe opened the left locker, then the right. They were both empty. “Nothing. And all the emergency blow patches have gone.”

“I forgot. We had to clear everything, just in case someone infected tried to blow her way out. Let me think.”

Marghe stood in the dim light and breathed precious air. Eighty minutes. She did not want to die here, alone, surrounded by nothing but dead machinery and empty space.

The audio relay clicked back on. “Nyo’s back from her repair stint,” Hiam said. “She knows more about the systems than I do, she’s working on it right now. She–hold on.” Marghe thought she heard a muttered conference. “Sigrid says Nyo’s on the track of some software glitch.”

“How long will it take?”

“Hold on.” More muted discussion. “No guesses. But Nyo’s working fast.”

Minutes dragged by. Marghe concentrated on increasing her blood flow to tensed muscles, washing away fatigue acids and stress toxins. She checked to make sure her boot electros were off. She had seventy‑one minutes of air left.

“Marghe, listen, I’ve been talking to Sigrid, and we agree. We’ve decided that if Nyo can’t rewrite in time, then we’ll EVA out from here, open up the exterior hatch of that lock, and bring you back here.”

“You’d risk contamination–”

“Yes.”

Hiam was serious, Marghe realized, in spite of what she believed about Company and the fate of contaminated employees. “Sara, I…” She floundered. “Thank you.”

Hiam laughed, only this time it was not that awful bark, but longer, lighter, more friendly. “Don’t thank me yet.” She clicked off, and once again Marghe was surrounded by the sound of her own breath. Her breathing was strong and even: there were people on her side.

Click. “This is Nyo. Try seven‑eight‑four‑six‑nine. We’ll monitor.”

A four instead of a three. A difference of one digit. Marghe input the sequence: seven, pause, eight, pause, four, pause … The door lights flicked from red to green.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”

D Section was dark. She had not expected that. She switched over to suit broadcast. “Lights.” Brilliant white light sliced on, making her blink.

D was square, only four beds. Two mobile hoods like slick cauls by the far bulkhead. Several workstations. Not dissimilar to crew quarters. Her visor frosted over. She scrubbed at it clumsily, scanned her readouts: external temperature 24 degrees Celsius, air composition and pressure at normal levels, no apparent toxins. Just to make sure, she sat down at the nearest workstation.

“On.” The gray screen went black, ready. “Readouts of internal atmospheric composition of this sector. ” Figures blinked obligingly, agreeing with her own readings. She still felt nervous. “Confirm lock and hull integrity.” The screen flashed CONFIRMED. “Off.” The screen went back to dead gray.

Awkwardly, she took off her left gauntlet. The right was easier. The slick plastic of her helmet was still cold. She twisted it anticlockwise and cool, clean, untouched‑smelling air spilled in under the opened seal. Marghe lifted off the helmet and breathed deep. She was safe, for now.

Marghe pulled hair still damp from the shower free of the collar of her crisp new cliptogether. She commed Hiam.

“I’m ready for the FN‑17 now.”

“In the food slot.” Marghe padded over to the slot. Inside it were two softgels and a glass of water. “Double dose for the first day,” Hiam said, “then one tomorrow, one the next day. After that, one every ten days. There’s a possibility of fever the first forty‑eight hours, nothing dangerous.”

Marghe squeezed the gels gently between finger and thumb and held them up to the light: they were watery pink. The glass of water was the same temperature as her hand. She swallowed both gels at once, then put the empty glass back in the slot.

Marghe heard Hiam sigh. “You think I’d back out at the last minute?”

“You never know. ”

Marghe lay down on the bed farthest from the hoods, face still turned to the screen. “I want some privacy for a little while.”

“I’ll have to keep the bio telemetry.”

Marghe nodded. “But no visual, no audio. Just for a while.”

“Fine.” The speaker clicked off.

The click, like that of the comm channel in her helmet, was deliberate, meant to reassure the subject that she was not being monitored. Either could be simulated if the observer deemed it desirable; Marghe chose to believe that this was not one of those times.

It could take up to two minutes for an object to travel down the esophagus to the stomach. She imagined the softgels dropping gently through the pyloric sphincter, the acids in her stomach breaching the gelatin of their shells, the watery pink liquid spilling FN‑17. Enzymes breaking it down, carrying it into her bloodstream, into her cells. An experimental biofactured vaccine against Jeep. Jeep the virus, named after the planet.

For more than two years she had tried to imagine how it would feel to swallow the vaccine. She put her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling.

“You’re running away,” her father had said, pacing his study in Portugal, wandering out of the screen visual pickup’s line of sight.

“I’m not,” Marghe had objected. It was spring, and the scent of grass and the sound of ewes lambing on the Welsh hillside carried through the open windows of her cottage. “This is the most fabulous opportunity for an anthropologist since… since the nineteenth century.”

“And why do you suppose the joint Settlement and Education Councils are offering it to you? Because you’re the best qualified person?”

“I’m not as naive as that.”

“Then think, Marghe, think! You resigned from SEC once. They haven’t changed–just as corrupt as ever. Last time you got beaten up and hospitalized. What will happen this time? There’s more at stake. And this, this running away because of Acquila’s death won’t help anyone.”

“I can do this job. I understand the risks. And Mother’s death has nothing to do with it.”

“Doesn’t it?” Suddenly he leaned forward, close to the screen pickups. He looked concerned. Marghe was reminded of the time when she was four and had fallen down the crumbling steps of the remains of the Portuguese cathedral in Macau, and her father had appeared as if from nowhere and scooped her into his arms. Daddy will take care of everything. But he hadn’t. Two years later he had gone to the Hammami region of Mauritania, to study the changing social structures, he said. And her mother had gone up to the moon, to teach social anthropology at the new university. All the young Marghe had had of her parents for the next two years were three battered books that lit up with their names on the fronts and their holos on the back when she thumbed them on, and a telescope through which she had watched the moon on every clear night.

She shook her head impatiently. “Mother’s dead, and I’m sick of teaching at Aberysrwyth. I’m good, too good to be stuck here.”

“You should never have accepted that post in the first place.”

It was an old argument. The fact was, she had not had much choice. SEC was the main career path for linguists and anthropologists these days; after her promising start on Gallipoli, she had gone to Beaver, the Durallium Company’s mining planet, where her worldview and her face had been forcibly rearranged, and that path had no longer been open to her. Or so she had thought.

She changed tack. “Look, if you could go anywhere in the universe to study people, where would you choose? Jeep. This is a chance of a lifetime, anybody’s lifetime.”

“The last SEC rep died.”

“Courtivron and the others didn’t have the vaccine. I do.”

“And maybe the vaccine will kill you.”

“Maybe it will. But, John, don’t you see? I don’t care. The chance they’re offering me far outweighs the risk. Acquila went to the moon, you went to Hammami during those awful wars… I’m going to Jeep.”

“But they’re using you!”

“Of course they are. And I’ll be using them. A fair exchange. ”

“You’ll be risking your life; they risk nothing. You’ll be alone, powerless. Your SEC position as independent observer will be as much protection as an ice suit in hell. SEC’s been in bed with Company for years.”

“Don’t lecture me on corruption and power politics. I know better than most what it means.” She took a deep breath and started again, more calmly. “Anyway, I won’t be alone. Two of Courtivron’s team are still alive. And I’ll only be there six months. Besides, what if I am Company’s guinea pig? So what if SEC doesn’t give a damn about my report? The important thing to me is that I get six months on a closed world to research a unique culture.”

Her father had sighed. “I’d probably have made the same choice at your age.” And Marghe had noticed for the first time how old and frail he seemed.

Marghe contemplated the smooth white ceiling of D Section… And maybe the vaccine will kill you, her father had said.

She got off the bed, suddenly restless. Exercise, that was what she needed. She pushed two of the beds back against the wall and the edge of a workstation and stood quietly, hands by her sides in the space she had created, centering herself. She raised her hands slowly to waist level, then across, in the first move of a tai chi form. She knew several different styles, fighting and meditative, but Yang style, with its even and measured movements, its grace, was her favorite for moods like this.

When she finished, her restlessness was gone.

“Lights, low.” They dimmed and the place looked more friendly. She crossed to her screen.

D Section’s information storage was held separately from Estrade’s main files, and was a disorganized patchwork of technical, anecdotal, and speculative notes added to by each decontaminee. Files ended mid‑sentence and had large chunks missing. Marghe began to scroll through material with which she was already familiar, looking for the files that had been uploaded from Port Central during the eighteen months she had been aboard the Terragin.

Grenchstom’s Planet had been rediscovered five years ago by a routine Company probe. Preliminary satellite surveys had showed a small indigenous human population living in various communities scattered over the planet, origin uncertain, though likely to stem from the same colonizing spurt that had seeded Gallipoli. Remote atmosphere testing had indicated that this could be a lucrative planet for Company’s various leasing operations–

Marghe scrolled on.

Company landed its usual survey and engineering teams to lay out communications and construct the working base, Port Central. Accompanying them were a contingent of Company Security–Mirrors–and, to comply with the law, SEC representative Maurice Courtivron and his small team, entrusted with the welfare of Jeep’s natives.

Marghe had not known Courtivron, but he must have been good. Jeep was a Company planet; they owned and ran every line of communication, every item shipped or manufactured there: the food, the clothes, the shelter. When Company had started setting off the burns that ruined the natives’ land, he had done his best to do his job, managing–admittedly, according to the rumors, with the unlikely help of a Mirror–to bring the plight of the indigenous population to the people of Earth, sidestepping SEC corruption and forcing the Councils to bow to public opinion and set in motion the famous Jink and Oriyest v. Companycase.

It was at that time that two discoveries were made: Jeep’s natives were one hundred percent female, and there was a virus loose.

The two were connected, of course. The incidence of infection of Company personnel was one hundred percent. Eighty percent of Company’s female personnel recovered; all of the men, including Courtivron, died. The planet was closed: no one on, very few off. The virus had killed the two physicians before they could unravel the world’s reproductive secret–something else Marghe hoped to get information on.

She scrolled through the main directory. One of the names she had been looking for, Eagan, caught her eye. She punched up Eagan’s directory. It had nine subdirectories. She called up the first: more than forty separate files. She sighed. Three days were not going to be enough to review over a year’s worth of reports from Janet Eagan and Winnie Kimura, the surviving members of Courtivron’s SEC team. Her assistants.

Marghe blinked and realized she had been sleeping. D Section was thick with silence. She wanted to cough, or clear her throat, just to hear something, to make herself feel less alone. She swung off the bed and padded over to the terminal. She was too tired to work, so she commed Sara Hiam.

“Quiet getting to you?”

Marghe looked around at the creamy white walls, the carefully cheerful pastels of overhead lockers, the metal bed legs, the plain flooring. “Everything’s getting to me. Tell me how things are going on your end.”

“Sigrid and Nyo are still debating whether the solar microwave satellite is out of synch because of a decaying orbit or faulty switching. They do agree that they can fix it. Again.”

Port Central drew all its power from the microwave relay. There were several generators planetside in case the relay failed, but machinery was one thing and having the personnel to operate it another. Port Central was down to one‑third of its original staff complement.

“Any other news?”

“The gig might be a day late. We relayed to Port Central the news that there are some big weather systems heading their way. We suggested that they might want to delay. Also, they’re bringing someone up.”

“Who?”

“You won’t like it. Janet Eagan.”

“But I need her down there! Can’t–” Marghe shut up. Technically, she had the authority to order Eagan to remain on Jeep, but an unwilling assistant could be worse than none at all. “Do you know why?”

“Winnie is missing.”

“Missing?”

“Dead, Janet thinks–”

Dead. Sweet god.

“–and Janet, quote, has more than done her duty and refuses to stay a day more when she’s pretty damn sure she won’t find out anything useful and where the locals are as liable to kill her as answer her questions, unquote. I’m sorry.”

Marghe felt sick. She would be alone down there, unsupported, faced on all sides by hostile Company personnel. It was going to be Beaver all over again, but worse, much worse. And it was too late to back out. She had swallowed that softgel, she was here in the dirty section, Section D. She was committed. She gripped the worktable, whether to hold herself upright or stop herself from smashing something she did not know.

“I’m sorry,” Hiam said again.

“I needed them,” Marghe whispered. Alone with all those Company technicians. And Mirrors. Dear god.

Hiam tilted her head to one side and was suddenly all brisk physician again. “Now, I need to know how you’re feeling. Have you noticed any adverse effects yet from the FN‑17? My readings indicate elevated blood pressure and a slight rise in temperature.”

“I’m angry.” And scared.

“I’ve taken that into account.”

Marghe closed her eyes, monitoring her respiration rate, heartbeat, blood flow, oxygen levels. “There is some impairment, yes.” She felt a little dizzy. “What can I expect?”

“The usual features of fever: dizziness, nausea, headache. I’ve seen worse. Drink plenty of water, and rest. I’ll cut visual monitoring if you like, but I’d prefer to keep audio.”

“You said there was no danger.”

“FN‑17 by itself isn’t going to do you any lasting damage, but fevers are always unpredictable. It’s just a precaution.”

“How long will it last?”

“Hard to say. Twenty‑four, maybe forty‑eight hours.”

She would be well enough, then, when Eagan arrived. “Thanks.”

Sara nodded and switched off. Marghe called up the language program she had worked on aboard Terragin. The root language spoken on Jeep derived from twenty‑first‑century Earth English, with some evidence of a secondary tongue based on Spanish. SEC and Company had given her access to their data bases, and she had selected a dozen of what she considered might be the most important dialects. She had studied them intently, finding peculiarities that she could trace but not explain. Several words had their root in the Zapotec spoken only by the inhabitants of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico, generations ago. And there were some phrase constructions only to be found in Basque, or Welsh. One dialect had a seven percent incidence of ancient Greek. During the tedious voyage aboard Terraginshe had amused herself thinking up improbable hypotheses to fit the available data.

Now she put aside the question of origins for another time. The population of Jeep was small, estimated at under one million, and its people lived in small groups, each with its own richly varied dialect. She had three days to familiarize herself with as many as possible.

After four hours her head was aching too badly to continue.

She turned everything off and silence swallowed her. The light hurt her eyes. She drank some water and lay down.

“Lights, off.” The dark and quiet made her dizzy. “Lights, low.” She staggered back to her screen, commed Hiam. “My head hurts.”

Hiam glanced off‑screen, nodded to herself. “Your fever’s high, but nothing to worry about.” She gave Marghe a crooked grin. “You look drunk.”

“I feel it.”

“Take a painkiller for the headache.”

Marghe went to the food slot, swallowed the painkiller, and lay down again.

What had happened to Winnie Kimura? Perhaps Eagan knew more than she was saying. Eagan would know a lot that was not in any report. She needed Eagan with her on Jeep, not up here. Six months, alone.

Silence lay like a weight on her chest, pushing her down.

Her dreams were confused. She was back on the Terragin, studying a language map. A word kept appearing, superimposed over her careful roots: CURSED. She tried everything she could think of to wipe the screen clean, but nothing worked. Then the walls and ceilings were whispering in Hiam’s voice: Remember the cursed.

When she woke up, she felt hollow and light, her head full of hot wires trying to push their way out through her eyes. She lay still. The cursed. The cursed… What did the dream remind her of? The Terragin… working… overhearing one of the crew: Supplies for the cursed.

She sat up carefully, pushed herself off the bed, and almost fell onto the chair before her terminal.

“Sara.” Silence. “Sara?”

The screen flickered into color. Sara was flushed. “Yes?”

Marghe blinked. Bad time. “Sorry.” But she could not bring herself to switch off. “There’s something I wanted to talk to you about… A dream. The cursed. Supplies for the cursed.”

“Ah, yes. Our keeper. Our Armageddon.”

Marghe shook her head, confused.

“The Kurst.” Hiam spelled it for her. “Company’s military cruiser hanging out there, watching us, watching Jeep.”

None of this made sense to Marghe. “What?”

“Officially it doesn’t exist, but SEC knows about it. We know about it. Commander Danner down on the ground knows about it. I don’t think she’s thought it all through, but at least she knows it’s there.”

Marghe wished Hiam would go more slowly. “I don’t understand any of this.”

“No? Wait a minute.” Hiam leaned off‑screen, reappeared holding a glass and a small bottle. She poured herself a shot. Drank it down. “Illegal, this. But I’m sure Company won’t mind.” She poured herself another. “The Kurstappeared a while after Estradewas converted. Four years ago, maybe. It’s Company’s insurance.”

Marghe knew she must look confused. Her head hurt.

“Look at it this way, here’s a planet riddled with a virus that kills all men and lots of women, almost as if it was designed as a weapon.”

“Was it?”

Hiam brushed the question aside. “What’s important is that it could be used as one. Don’t you see? Nobody understands it, no one can control it. Except maybe those women down there. If you were a military person, would you take a chance on letting civilian technicians, even Mirrors, wander onto a world if they could come out carrying a weapon our hypothetical soldier doesn’t understand and can’t combat?”

Marghe had not thought of it that way. “But everyone goes through decontamination.”

Hiam poured another drink. “Let me tell you something. We know nothing about that virus. Nothing. We don’t know its vectors, its strength, or longevity… nothing. If you were to go through all those unpleasant procedures I detailed for you before you left the clean area, no one could guarantee you would be free of it. Now, given that that’s the case, would you let someone off here and take them home? Imagine if the virus got loose out there!”

That one was easy. “Death, everywhere. For everyone. Eventually.”

“Not necessarily. The women down there seem to have found a way.” She frowned and drained her glass. “But nobody knows how.”

“So what happens to those people who get taken off here, for the long‑term quarantine?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

Marghe was tired. “Well, everything will be all right if the vaccine works.” She wished her head would stop hurting.

“All right for whom?”

“I don’t–”

“A vaccine is a counter‑weapon. It’s control. Imagine: mass vaccination of the women down there. If they need the virus to reproduce, then they’ll die.”

“You don’t know that they do.” Not even Company would deal in genocide, would they? Hiam was paranoid, crazy. “You’re drunk.”

“Yes, I’m drunk. But not stupid. Look me in the face and tell me SEC would stand up to Company on this.”

Marghe imagined her father, and what his opinion would be. Probably he would say nothing–just get up, search his bookshelves, pull down an old volume on the Trail of Tears and other, more systematic attempts at genocide, and hand it to her without comment.

Hiam was nodding. “You see now.. None of us are safe. Estradeis probably wired for destruct. And the gigs. All because no one out there really knows who or what’s safe and what’s contaminated. One whiff of this thing getting out of control and phht, we’re all reduced to our component atoms. That’s why we have no contact with the Kurst: stops the crew from getting to know us, sympathizing. It’s harder to murder people you know.” Hiam stared at nothing. “Every time I wake up, I wonder: Is this going to be my last day?”

Marghe did not know what to do with this information. She did not want to think about it. Her head hurt. She felt as though someone had been beating her with a thick stick.

“Why do I ache so much?” she whispered to herself.

Hiam heard. “First‑stage immune response,” she said cheerfully. She seemed glad to change the subject. “The activation of your T cells is starting a process which ends up with your hypothalamus turning up the thermostat.” She nodded at Marghe’s shaking hands. “The shivering is just one way to generate heat. Don’t worry, the painkiller you took includes an antipyretic. Your fever will ease along with the ache.”

Marghe frowned. This did not fit something Hiam had said before. Something about low‑level response. She tried to ignore the thumping of her head and sort out her information. SEC rules meant that Hiam was not allowed to culture the virus, or bioengineer it, so the vaccine was not made of killed virus. What she had done instead was identify the short string of amino acids, peptides, that folded up to form the actual antigen of the viral protein, map out the amino acid sequence, and then bio‑facture a combination of different peptides, matching different regions of the viral protein, in the hope that one or more of the synthetic peptides would fold up to mimic an antigenic site present on the viral protein. She had linked those to inert carrier proteins to help stimulate the immune system. But Hiam had not been able to fine‑tune the peptides, and the immune response was supposed to be low‑level.

“You said that it would be a low‑level response. That’s why I have to take it so often.”

“The response to the peptides is low‑level–”

Marghe would hate to see an acute response.

“What’s happening now is partly due to the adjuvants I added to the FN‑17.” Marghe looked blank. “The combination of chemicals which enhance the immune response and help maintain a slow and steady release of antigen.”

Marghe struggled against dizziness. Adjuvant. Chemicals. “They’re toxic?”

Hiam nodded. “Cumulatively so. Which is why six months is the absolute limit for the vaccine.”

Toxic, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I didn’t think there was any need.”

Doctors know best. Marghe felt angry and uncertain; she did not know whether or not to believe Hiam. About the vaccine, about the Kurst. She did not want to talk anymore. “Feel sick. Bye.” She felt for the comm switch, could not find it, pushed the off switch instead. The screen died and the whole room went black.

She squeezed her way through the sticky blackness to her bed. Behind her eyelids gaudy colors swam and burst. She dozed.

In her dreams her head still hurt, but it was Hiam who was going down to Jeep to test the vaccine. That seemed logical; a doctor would be the best person. Then Hiam was in D Section, saying, “But how does it all work? And why aren’t the daughters identical copies of their mothers?” She got angry when Marghe could not tell her. A tree grew from the floor of D Section, a tree heavy with apples, mangoes, cantaloupes. Marghe reached for a grape the size of her fist, realized it was poisoned just as she woke to a voice calling her from the ceiling.

“…up, Marghe. Wake up.”

She tried to say something but her throat was too dry.

“Good,” Hiam said. “I want you to get off the bed. Come on, that’s it. Good. Now get a drink of water. A whole glass. Drink it all. Slowly, Marghe, slowly.” The room swooped. “Fill the glass up again. Take it to the bed. Sit down. Good. Sip it slowly.”

Marghe did. The warm water tasted metallic.

“Your reaction was more severe than I’d anticipated. I was beginning to wonder if I’d have to put a hood on you.”

Marghe looked over at the medical hood. “I’m glad you didn’t.” Speaking made her breathless and hurt her throat.

“I still might have to if you get any more dehydrated.”

Marghe sipped until her glass was empty.

“If you feel up to it, go to the slot and eat what you find there.”

An apple. Marghe stared at it, confused. Had Hiam been inside her dream? She picked it up. It was cool. She felt deathly tired, too tired for subterfuge. “Are you trying to poison me?”

“Oh, Marghe. No, I’m not poisoning you. Try and eat the apple.”

She woke up thirsty but clear‑headed. “How long this time?” she asked the ceiling.

“Almost seventeen hours.”

She sat up cautiously. She still felt a little dizzy, but that could be lack of food. The food slot hissed. It contained a glass of water and one watery pink softgel.

She opened her mouth to protest, then closed it. It was her choice; nobody had forced her to come here. The slot closed automatically when she lifted out the glass and the pill. After a moment, it slid open again. A small portion of fish, still steaming, with a bean sprout salad and another glass of water.

When she finished, she was tired again. She lay down, trying to remember if those conversations with Hiam about genocide had been real or delirium. Marghe fell asleep trying to remember what exactly Hiam had said.

The lights around the door to the outer access lock flared warning red, then dulled. The door hissed open. Janet Eagan was small, naked, and coughing so hard she did not have the breath to greet Marghe.

Marghe brought her a glass of water and pulled a sheet from her bed. While Eagan drank the water, Marghe draped the sheet around her shoulders. They were bony, and pale except for freckles, but her hands and face and legs were weathered. The coughing eased.

“Better?”

Eagan nodded. “For now. Thanks.”

“I’m Marguerite Taishan. Marghe.”

Eagan did not offer to shake hands.

Marghe gave her a cliptogether. While they ate, she found herself watching Eagan’s hands, which were brown and hard, callused across the palms. She had not seen hands like that since watching a carpenter at a demonstration of old‑style skills. Eagan noticed and laid them on the table palm up.

“Rope calluses,” she said. “For a while I crewed a ship working the coast around the southern tip of the continent. I learned a lot.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

“Most of it’s on disk at Port Central. I couldn’t bring it with me.”

“Is there anything I should know before I leave?”

Eagan laughed harshly, “Yes. It’s not like anything you can possibly imagine. If I had it to do again, I’d never set foot outside Port Central, just invite the occasional native in to tell me her story. If you have any sense, that’s what you’ll do. I’m glad to be out of it.”

Marghe said nothing. Eagan shrugged and picked up her fork. They ate in silence.

Marghe got up to get their dessert. She hesitated. “I’ve heard some rumors, I can’t vouch for their validity, but once you’ve heard them, you might want to give up on the decontamination and return to Jeep with me.”

“No.”

“Listen, anyway.” Marghe realized she sounded like Hiam. Was she beginning to believe it? “The rumor is that the people who are taken to Estradeare never heard from again.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

“Take some time to think about it.”

“I don’t need to think about it.”

“Eagan, I need you down there. I need what you know.”

“It’s all on disk.”

“I don’t want just what’s on disk. I want your private thoughts, your theories, the ones that are too crazy to be put on record.”

Eagan looked at her for a long time. Marghe saw the lines around her eyes. Formed by months of squinting at light reflecting on the water? “You’re assuming I have some theories. I don’t. Winnie had theories. She’s missing.”

“Tell me what you know.”

“She decided to go to the plateau of Tehuantepec.”

“Tehuantepec?” Marghe frowned.

“The same. Though the name is about as appropriate as ‘Greenland’ was. It’s cold up there, nothing like the climate of the Gulf of Mexico.”

Marghe went over to her terminal and punched up a large‑scale satellite map of the planet. Jeep was encased in huge spiral banks of water vapor. The whole world glowed like milk and mother‑of‑pearl, like a lustrous shell set in a midnight ocean.

A few keystrokes removed the clouds. Marghe rotated the naked world. “Come and show me.”

Eagan pointed to Port Central, on the second largest continent, then tapped a raised area several hundred miles to the north. “Here. Winnie believed she had found clues in their folklore as to the origins of these people. She was heading for a place on the plateau called Ollfoss.”

“Enlarge.” The screen displayed a more detailed map. Much of the plateau was forested and contour lines showed it at an elevation of almost three thousand feet. “Can you show me’the location?”

“I’m not a geographer. But I ’ll give you some friendly advice. Don’t go. Winnie headed that way, and she never came back.”

Marghe stared at the screen. “How long has she been missing?”

“Fourteen months.”

“She was wearing a wristcom?”

“Of course. But most places out there they’re useless: few relays, and weather interferes with everything.”

“What about the Search, Locate, and Identify Code?”

“A SLIC’s only any good if there are enough satellites out there to scan for it. And if the Mirrors are willing to come and get you.”

Marghe absorbed all that. “Do you have any ideas what might have happened?”

“Anything could have happened.”

“You said that one of the reasons you wanted off was because the natives would just as soon kill you as say hello. Or words to that effect.”

For the first time, Eagan looked uncomfortable. “That’s not strictly true. I exaggerated, to rationalize my need to get off the damn world. They’re just… ordinary people.”

“But–”

“No.” Eagan cut her off abruptly. “Winnie did not have to be murdered to die. The planet itself will do that if you give it a chance. Listen to me. Do you have any idea how many different ways a person could get herself killed? For all I know, Winnie could have fallen off her horse and broken her neck the second day out. Or she could have choked on a piece of meat. Or gotten pneumonia. Or been attacked by something.” Tears, moving slowly in the low gravity, spread a wet line down each cheek. “Or maybe she just forgot to tie her horse up tightly one night and it ran off, leaving her stranded miles from anywhere. Maybe she ran out of food and starved to death. I don’t know, I don’t know.” She brushed jerkily at her cheeks. “All! know is that she went away and didn’t come back.”

“She went on her own?”

“Yes,” Eagan said. “I let her go out on her own. I told her she was crazy to try. So I let her go on her own, and now she’s dead. And if you go, you’ll die too.”

Chapter Two

THE GIG TAXIED to a halt. Marghe stretched to relieve the adrenaline flutter of her muscles and waited for the light over her seat to show green. She stood up and fastened her disk pouch around her waist, patted the thigh pocket of her cliptogether for the vial of FN‑17. Systems whined as they powered down, and from outside she heard the scrape and trundle of a ramp being maneuvered into place. The doors cracked open and leaked in light like pale grapefruit squeezings, making the artificial illumination in the gig seem suddenly thick and dim.

Jeep light.

Wind swept dark tatters across a sky rippling with cloud like a well‑muscled torso, bringing with it the smell of dust and grass and a sweetness she could not identify. The gig stood on an apron of concrete roughened and rubber‑streaked by countless landings. In the distance low buildings huddled against the wind.

She walked down the ramp. The concrete was hard under her soft boots. She eased her weight from one foot to another, testing her balance, feeling her muscles adjust to the difference in gravity. She sniffed, trying to equate the spicy sweet smell on the wind to something she knew: nutmeg, sun on beetle wings, the wild smell of heather.

A woman was approaching. Marghe squinted against the bright concrete light and shaded her eyes. A Mirror. For a moment the spicy breeze of Jeep became the thin air of Beaver; fear and anger flooded her system. She breathed slowly, deliberately. This was Jeep. Jeep.

The Mirror was not wearing the mirror‑visored helmet that had given Company Security members their name, but the rest of her slick, impact‑resistant armor was parade‑ground tidy.

“Marguerite Angelica Taishan?” Marghe nodded and the Mirror made a formal semi‑bow. “I’m Officer Kahn. Acting Commander Danner assigned me to show you your quarters.” She paused and Marghe managed a nod. “It’s a bit of a walk. If the gravity bothers you, I could summon a sled.”

“Walking is fine.” She followed the Mirror, stepping over a thick cable that snaked away from the gig and down an access hole. She had nothing to carry. It made her feel vulnerable and alone.

They walked for almost twenty minutes across concrete and then scrubby yellow grass before they reached the living mods. Many of their regulation doors were carved and painted in different designs. One had been framed with handmade bricks. She had never seen that before in a Company outpost.

Officer Kahn led her along a hard dirt path to the door of an untouched unit. “It needs keying,” she said.

Marghe obediently put her palm on the lock and recited her name and status. The door panel blinked an acknowledge, then invited her to punch in a code for additional personal security.

Inside, the air was clean and filtered. The mod followed standard Company layout: desk and chair, bed, soft floor, bathroom niche, comm port, light panels but no heat or air controls. Filtered air was piped in at a constant seventy degrees. She pulled off her disk pouch and dropped it on the desk by the comm port. She was unpacked.

“Commander Danner thought you might wish to take a few hours to rest and refresh yourself, perhaps look around Port Central.” The Mirror took a wristcom from a pocket on her belt and held it out to Marghe. “The memory already has the commander’s call code, and a few others you might need today. She asks that you contact her when you’re ready to meet.”

Marghe fastened it around her left wrist.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“No. Thank you.”

Officer Kahn half turned to the door, then turned back. She cleared her throat. “Look, it’s always rough coming down alone. I get off duty in five or six hours. Why don’t you come along to recreation then? I’ll introduce you to some people.”

“I’m not interested,” Marghe said harshly.

The muscles around Kahn’s eyes tightened. “As you wish.” She punched the door panel harder than necessary. The door hissed open and she ducked out into the wind.

Marghe sat down on the bed. She had not handled that very well. But the last time she had seen a Mirror he had been standing by with arms folded, smiling, instead of stopping three miners from beating her unconscious.

The comm port was standard Company issue. She called up a schematic of Port Central and scanned the data.

Hannah Danner nodded dismissal to Officer Kahn and waited for her to close the office door behind her before reopening the folder stamped FOR ATTN. OF CMDR, SECURITY PERSONNEL, ONLY: MARGUERITE ANGELICA TAISHAN.

She pulled out the eight‑by‑ten facsimile. The color balance was wrong, giving the complexion an orangy tint. She looked at the strong face, the broad jaw, and wondered what color Taishan’s eyes really were. The picture showed them a muddy yellow. It had been taken at her recontract interview two years ago. People changed a great deal in two years.

She looked over at the picture of herself in full armor that occupied the corner of the desk. It had been taken on the day she had gotten her promotion to lieutenant and learned that she was being posted to Jeep. Her visor was pushed up and she was grinning: a younger, smooth‑faced version of herself. A self who believed there was no problem too hard to solve, nothing not covered by the rule book. Sometimes she found it hard to believe only five years separated the face she saw every morning in the mirror and the face she saw in this picture.

Irritated suddenly by the idealism in that face, she leaned across the desk and thumbed the picture blank.

Marguerite Angelica Taishan was not an idealist. Once, perhaps, but no longer. She read the list of injuries Taishan had sustained in the attack on Beaver, then read the charges she had leveled at Company. Taishan had a point. It had been a careful beating and, reading between the lines, an officer could have prevented it before serious damage was done. According to Taishan’s deposition, the representative had disregarded threats designed to intimidate and had submitted an unfavorable report regarding Company’s operation on BV 4, recommending that the planet not be opened for long‑term settlement by Company miners and their families.

Danner turned a page.

SEC had not backed their representative; they had approved long‑term settlement. Taishan had fought, taking the issue as high as she could before being given an official warning. Danner frowned. That warning seemed to have knocked the stuffing from Taishan; she had stopped complaining and accepted another post. But just two days before departure she had resigned abruptly.

Danner looked at the closed face in the picture again. How did it feel to have one’s trained opinion judged worthless? What did it do to one’s self‑esteem? She hoped she would never find out.

Taishan had become Professor of ET Anthropology at Aberystwyth. The dossier was thorough. It listed her publications: articles on subjects ranging from the evolution of Welsh to the deterioration of kinship allegiance among the population of Gallipoli since reintegration. There were two book‑length works; Danner did not have to read the abstract for one, Uneasy Alliance–SEC As Independent Arbiter?, to guess the subject matter. Also listed were her extracurricular activities (tai chi, chi kung, various biofeedback disciplines), her credit rating (mid‑range), and biographical details of her last lover (no leverage possibilities noted). A note indicated that although her father was a hardline antigovernment activist, Taishan had had little contact with him since the death of her mother several months before recontract. A psychological report made several guesses as to why that might be, but Danner did not put much faith in such things. The important thing about the psych sheet was the fact that they could not come up with enough objections to outweigh Taishan’s qualifications for the job of SEC rep on this kind of world. She had the ability to spend large periods of time alone, an innate belief in herself, a prodigious linguistic talent, and superb physical fitness. She was a flawed SEC tool, yes, but the best they had.

Danner had never heard of an SEC employee getting a second chance. There again, she did not know of many people who would volunteer to risk their lives for something as abstract as knowledge.

She turned to the section at the back of the report, “Miscellaneous.” After reading one paragraph, she closed the dossier. There was no reason she needed to know Taishan’s sexual preferences or her personal hygiene habits.

Her screen chimed and displayed the face of Officer Vincio, her administrative assistant.

“Representative Taishan is here and wishes to see you at your earliest convenience, ma’am.”

“Give me two minutes.” She slid the dossier into a drawer. She had time to push her desk against one wall and pull two chairs into a more informal setting around a low table before Vincio rapped on her door and ushered in a tallish, stocky woman with thick, dark hair.

Danner took her hands in greeting. They were smooth and cool. Her eyes were brown, with a hint of green, but that might have been the light. She chose the chair nearest the door, but seemed relaxed enough.

“You’re well rested?” Danner asked politely.

“ Estradekeeps Port Central time.”

“Of course.”

The representative wore the plainest clothes available in Company issue: soft trousers in a dark green weave and a loose‑fitting brown padded shirt. No adornment. Danner suspected confidence rather than self‑effacement; it took something to go in search of and requisition stores without help within–she looked at her wrist–two hours of landing on a planet.

“Is your time limited?”

Marghe’s tone seemed neutral enough. Danner decided to accept the question at face value. “No,” she said. “Or rather, yes, in a general sense, but this afternoon I’m at your disposal.”

Her words seemed to run off Marghe’s smooth exterior and Danner felt as though she were facing a mirrored glass ball. She did not have time to waste fencing. She stood up, opened her desk drawer, withdrew the dossier. “This is your file. Here.” She held it out. Marghe hesitated, then took it. “It makes interesting reading, but after just two minutes with you, I feel the psychologists have made some fundamental mistakes.” Marghe turned the file over in her hands without opening it. “They think you’ve come here for the same reason that you don’t visit your father: so that you don’t have to face the reality of your mother’s death. The way they see it, while you’re off Earth, you can believe that everything’s the same back there as it was before.”

“As you say, they’ve made a fundamental mistake.” The file remained unopened in her lap.

Vincio tapped on the door. Danner and Marghe were silent as she brought in a tray of refreshments, put it down on the table between them, and left.

Danner poured steaming saffron liquid into a white porcelain cup and handed it to Marghe. Its scent was delicate, aromatic. “Dap. A local tea. It’s a mild stimulant, weaker than caffeine. It’s a common barter commodity, with, I’m told, a standard value, rather like a currency.”

Marghe traced the smooth rim of her cup with a fingertip.

“The pottery was made by one of our cable technicians.” She sipped at her own cup, rolled the aftertaste around her mouth. “It reminds me of dried apricots, though everyone finds something different in it.”

Marghe took a small sip. “It tastes like comfrey.” She moved the still‑unopened dossier from her lap to the table.

“I want you to keep that,” Danner said. “I have no use for it.” She got up and retrieved another folder from her desk drawer. “I’d also like you to have this, though on a temporary basis. It’s another security dossier.” She held it out. “The subject is myself.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I want you to read it, as I’ve read yours, so that we at least have a basis for communication. I want–” She stood abruptly, crossed to her desk, and keyed her screen to a slowly turning representation of Jeep. “Come here. Look. A whole planet. I’m supposed to oversee the safety of every single human being on this planet, and at the same time lay cables, set up communication relays, initiate geographical surveys. Hard enough. What makes it infinitely harder is the fact that I’m operating on one‑third staffing levels–under a hundred Mirrors and less than three hundred technicians to do the work of over a thousand. More than half my equipment is missing or not functioning properly. Add to that the fact that the social structure here is even more out of whack than usual because every single member of my staff is female, then add to thata virus that might mean none of us ever leaves this place again. ”

Banner looked at the representative, fresh off the gig. Do you understand? she wanted to say. Do you have any idea what we’re up against? “What all this adds up to is simple. Uncertainty. That might not sound too bad, but what it means is that the rules don’t work here. It means that nothing has to be the way you expect it to be.”

Marghe poured herself more dap–to buy time, Danner thought. “I can’t just forget everything that’s happened in the past, everything I know.”

“I’m not asking you to forget. I’m asking you to put aside your wariness, just for awhile. I know what happened to you on Beaver, but this is Jeep. I don’t want to hurt you in any way–just the opposite. I need you to be willing to try. I need you on my side.” Danner had no idea if she was getting through. “Please, read the dossier. I don’t know how else to prove my faith.”

Marghe had one hand in her pocket. Danner saw the weave of the representative’s trousers move as she clenched and unclenched her fist.

“Don’t decide anything for now. Just take the dossier with you and think about it this evening.” She opened another drawer in her desk. Disks glittered. ”You’ll need these. Janet Eagan left them for you. Read them, call me in the morning.”

Marghe walked alongside the ceramic‑and‑wire perimeter of Port Central, trying to think. Somewhere behind the clouds that at this time of year almost always covered Jeep’s sky, the sun was setting, turning the gray over the living mods into a swirl of pearl and tangerine. The evening breeze faltered, then changed direction, hissing through the grass around her ankles. The grass stretched to the horizon, broken only by the occasional low bush with black, hard‑looking stems and pale trails of seed fluff. There were no trees. The location had been chosen for its open aspect: easily defended.

That was typical of the way a Mirror’s mind worked. Attack, Defend. Advantage. Disadvantage. Always looking for the edge, looking for a lever.

Three years ago she had walked like this for hours over the hills in Wales, seeking to forget the way her mother had tried to smile as she coughed and coughed and finally stopped breathing. Some new kind of viral pneumonia, they said. She had been sick only three days.

Walking like this when she was unused to the gravity was not helping at all. It had not helped much then, either. She walked slowly back to her mod.

It was easy to override the door controls. She sat with her legs sticking out onto the grass and her back warmed by the air streaming from inside. A woman stepped from a mod further down the row and raised a hand in casual greeting. Her hair was still wet from a shower and she wore what looked like a homemade skirt. Marghe waved back, glad they were too far away to speak. The woman walked past the mod with the handmade brick doorway and followed the path around a curve and out of Marghe’s sight.

She reached down and pulled up a blade of grass. It was a flattened, hollow tube. Cautiously, she put the broken end in her mouth. It did not taste like grass, but she chewed on it anyway.

Banner’s dossier had not been at all what she had expected. This was no by‑the‑book career officer. Most startling had been the revelation that it had been the young Danner, on Jeep on her first tour of duty as a lieutenant, who was the mysterious Mirror of rumor–the one who had helped Courtivron circumvent SEC and Company corruption and bring the Jink and Oriyest v. Companycase to court.

Who are you, Danner? Can I trust you?

She wondered how much Danner knew about the Kurst, and what advice Sara Hiam might give in this situation.

She sat outside until it was dark. The heaving cloud blurred two moons to a soft silver glow; the third moon was too small to be visible through the overcast. The night was cool and silent–no insects. Two searchlights speared the grass outside the perimeter, and the unlit grass looked black. She wondered what the indigenous population thought of Port Central, and when she would get to see her first native.

Her muscles ached, from the walking, from the gravity. She went inside where it was warm and went to bed.

She dreamed that a native spoke to her, but she could not understand, and she stood by helplessly while the native rotted and died of some disease. She buried the pathetic thing, then found a Mirror kneeling by the grave. She knew it was Danner, but when the Mirror flipped up her visor, underneath there was no face.

Danner agreed to see her before lunch the next day. Marghe dressed slowly and checked her pockets twice for the FN‑17 before she left the mod.

The cloud cover was heavy and multilayered, shades of slate blue and silver, pearl and charcoal, like a sketch washed with watercolor. The air was cool and spicy. She wondered how long it would take her to adjust to the smell, learn to filter it out of her awareness, just as the filters scrubbed it from the air in her mod. A long time, she hoped.

Again, Danner served dap in handmade china. Marghe sipped at the hot tea. “On Earth I was promised full support from Company personnel in the field. However, I now understand that you’re seriously understaffed and underequipped. What can you offer me?”

Danner leaned back in her chair. “Why don’t you tell me your plans.”

“If there are clues to be found about the origins of these people, their common background, I need to find them. It might help with tracing the origins of this virus. It might also lead to some clues about how these women reproduce. Everything in Eagan’s notes points northward. To Ollfoss.”

Danner looked down into the cup she held cradled in both hands, resting on her stomach. “One of your team already tried that. She’s believed to be dead.”

“All the more reason to go up there and find out what happened.”

Danner sighed. “At this time of year, the weather alone up there will be enough to kill you.”

“I can’t wait for an improvement in the weather. I only have six months.”

“You’ll be dealing with more than the weather. The north is isolated. The people you’ll meet there won’t give you any special treatment. They won’t know who you are.”

“I’m aware of that.”

Danner put her cup down on the table between them. “I’m not happy about you risking yourself like this. You’re being paid to see how well the vaccine performs, not to solve mysteries. If you get yourself killed, we’re no nearer to finding out ifthe vaccine works. No nearer to being home.”

Marghe remained silent. This was Commander Danner now, not the young lieutenant of five years ago.

Danner sipped from her cup. “I just don’t understand why you want to do this. I need you here. You could teach us so much about living with these people, what to do and what not to do. You could really help us, but instead you want to hare off north and get yourself killed.”

“I don’t intend to die.”

“But in all likelihood that’s what will happen.” Danner leaned forward. “I just want you to understand: I don’t want you to die while you’re my responsibility. I have enough on my conscience. I’ll do everything in my power to help you, but that won’t be much. If you go onto Tehuantepec, I can’t protect you. Do you understand that?”

“I understand.”

“And I can’t dissuade you?”

“No,” Marghe did not dare say anything further. Danner was going to jump, one way or the other.

They were both silent for a moment. Danner straightened. “Very well. When do you intend to leave?”

“As soon as possible.”

Danner went around to her desk and consulted her screen. “If you can wait two days, I have a team–one officer, two civilian technicians–traveling north to a settlement called Holme Valley to install a new communications relay. It will mean an escort for part of your journey. And the community there has had contact with us before. They might be able to help you with more suitable equipment for further travel north than you could find here.” She smiled tightly. “We have only six operational sleds. You can ride one to Holme Valley, but I’m not letting you risk it in the freezing snow of Tehuantepec.”

On her walk back to her quarters, Marghe tried to figure it all out. Danner was going to let her go. Why? Did she believe the vaccine would not work? Or did she know too much about the Kurstand its intentions? Marghe reflected on this, and on the other things she had learned in the twenty hours since she had landed in Port Central.

Danner acknowledged that she was hoarding resources; she was laying a communications network as widely as she could, despite conditions. She had told Marghe, bluntly, that a SEC rep could be useful for long‑term relations with the natives. Mirrors were making their own clothes and decorating their mods, like colonists. The Mirrors did not expect to leave Jeep.

Chapter Three

MARGHE WOKE FROM a nightmare of drifting off the ground, spinning away from a planet with a gravity low enough to allow the muscle jerk of a sneeze to provide escape velocity.

The wind had died to a whisper and the night was quiet and inky soft. Dry ting grass scratched against the spun fibers of Marghe’s nightbag as she wriggled onto her back. The cloud cover was thin and veil‑like, allowing tantalizing glimpses of the moons and what might be stars, or satellites.

She closed her eyes. Meet Jeep, she told her senses, a new planet. One by one she sorted out the Earth smells: the grass‑stained rubber of their shoes; the hot rotor and ozone of the sled; the thin perfume of shampoo and insect repellant; the dyes of their clothes; the metal and plastic of coiled cable. She tuned them out. The rest, the mineral‑rich water vapor in the clouds, the hollow, juiceless ting grass, the sharp chalky soil under her back, was Jeep. Jeep, with its animal musk and light spice. She listened to the wind, and to the faint burrowings of unknown insects tunneling around the roots and bulbs and pods of next spring’s flowers: to the breath and heartbeat of another world.

She opened her eyes again. The cloud cover over the moons had deepened, but even so their light was of a visibly different spectrum. Away from the Earth‑normal artificial illumination of Port Central, her eyes would adjust in a few days. Without looking at her wristcom, she tried to judge how many hours there were until dawn. The twenty‑five‑and‑a‑half‑hour diurnal cycle was just abnormal enough to be confusing. This latitude and time of year meant only eight or nine hours of full daylight; like dusk, dawn would be a lengthy affair. At least the year was shorter; winter would not last as long.

She listened to the steady breathing of the cable technician, Ude Neuyen, to the double breath of Sergeant Lu Wai and Letitia Dogias, the communications engineer, and wondered how it had been for the first colonists: listening to the breath of someone close by, waiting for the onset of the cough that meant a lover or child was going to die. How had it been–how was it–living on a world without men? From test results, she knew that the first colonists had been adept bioengineers: genetic material from Earth flora and fauna was present in indigenous species, and vice versa. The colonists had created viable crops and livestock. How long had it taken them to find the answer to their own reproductive puzzle?

From the other side of the sled, Lu Wai or Letitia sneezed and Marghe jumped, then jumped again as a pale seed drift floated by. Here, any movement in the corner of her eye flooded her with adrenaline and slicked her hands with sweat; she could not name or recognize a thousandth of the plants or animals. Or insects. She scratched the bites around her ankles, cursing under her breath as a scab came off and leaked blood. At least the insects she had encountered so far were not dangerous. As far as anybody knew.

She pushed her nightbag down around her waist to let the light breeze dry her sweat and watched the clouds scudding overhead. Gradually her heartbeat slowed, and her breathing. She slept.

She woke at dawn to a spiderweb, prismatic with dew, hanging across a clump of ting grass a handspan from her face. It was large, more than three feet across, and the strands were too thick for a spider’s web: like fine, peach‑tinted glass tubes. She sat up slowly, looking for the spider.

A mustardfly, whining over the tips of the ting grass, came too close. The web rippled slightly, and a strand touched the fly’s triple wing. The fly struggled, and wherever it touched, it stuck. Then it stopped fighting and seemed to collapse in on itself. Marghe squinted in the cool light: the fly was dissolving, shriveling. The strand against which it was caught darkened and swelled. Within four minutes, the fly was subsumed: nothing but a glutinous lump.

The web convulsed, splitting the dark patch into hundreds of peach‑colored corpuscles that pulsed in different directions down the hollow strands.

Digestion. The strands were both the spider and the web.

Cautiously, Marghe touched one of the outer strands with a fingertip. It stung. Some kind of acid, or alkali. She wiped her finger on the wet grass and wondered what would have happened to her face if she had rolled over into it while asleep. She went to wake the others.

The morning was heavy and still and the sled hummed over a carpet of ivory olla flowers. The wind of their passage churned up a perfumed haze of golden green pollen; they all wore scarves wrapped around their noses and mouths. Marghe sat in the flatbed playing chess with Lu Wai on the Mirror’s traveling board. Ude was at the stick and Letitia scanned the horizon for the cloud of kris flies that the pollen made inevitable. Marghe found herself looking, too.

“Your move.”

Marghe studied the board, thinking about kris flies. Their stings were unpleasant, and some people were allergic. She moved one of her pawns. Lu Wai made a small sound of satisfaction and reached out for her rook; she nearly dropped it when Marghe’s wristcom beeped a reminder.

Marghe took out the vial of FN‑17 from her thigh pocket, popped the cap, and swallowed one.

“Can I take a look?”

Maighe hesitated, then handed them over. Lu Wai tipped one out onto her palm. “Such little things,” she murmured through the scarf. She rolled it back into the vial, closed it, handed it back. She watched Marghe slide it into her pocket and double‑check the pocket seal. “I’m glad to see you’re being careful. Just make sure you’re at Port Central when that stuff runs out.”

“You think it would make that much difference?”

“With a one in five chance of not surviving, you need any edge you can get.” She tapped the medic flashes on her shoulder. “Someone like me can make a difference. Your move.”

Marghe moved her bishop.

Lu Wai sighed. “You’re not concentrating. Check.”

Marghe pushed the board aside. “Tell me about the virus.”

“You’re resigning?”

“I’m resigning.” She felt restless and it was hard to breathe. Her head itched. She pulled her scarf off, let it hang loose around her neck. “Tell me about the virus.” She wanted to know how the Mirror felt when she tried to heal people and they died; she wanted to know how it was to get sick and not know whether or not you were going to die. She needed to know what to expect.

Instead of switching off the board’s field and pushing the pieces flat to close it up, Lu Wai pulled each piece free one by one and laid them down carefully in some pattern Marghe could not follow. “The virus has a long incubation period, very long,” the Mirror said, intent on the little pawns and castles, “so we’d all been down here a while and settled in before anyone got sick. The first one I saw was called Sevin. He was a plastics engineer. Started coughing one day out by the perimeter, and didn’t stop. I gave him, tried to give him, emergency CPR, but he died. Took just six hours. His death was the easiest I heard of.” She examined the pieces critically, closed the box, ran her finger along the seal, and slipped it into a belt pouch. She untied her scarf, began to fold it into smaller and smaller triangles. “The next one I dealt with was a woman, named Margaret. She liked to cook, she told me. I remember that because I hate to cook. That’s all I could think of, how I hate to cook, while she coughed and her eyes swelled up and she screamed with a headache not even mycain would help. She survived, though.” She tried to smile. “Made me a thank‑you dinner.

“By then we knew it was some kind of virus that integrates with human cell DNA, a bit like a retrovirus. People, mainly men, were dead all over the planet. Communications were bad, still are, so we couldn’t call everyone in for medical attention. Lots of people are still officially missing, that’s how we lost such a lot of equipment, sleds and such, but we know that most of them are dead. We tried everything against that virus we could think of, but none of the usual nucleoside analogues made a dent in its multiplication. We tried the interferons and synthetic analogues of 2' ,5'‑oligoadnylate; nothing worked. When we figured out that the female mortality rate was around twenty‑three percent–”.

“I thought it was less than twenty.”

Lu Wai smiled again, but this time it was a hard sliding of muscles like tectonic plates. “Officially it is, if you don’t count those ‘missing.’ ” She paused. “You want me to go on?”

Maighe nodded. Her skin was tight and cold, as though someone had rubbed her down with a handful of ice. It was different down here, in the close, perfumed air, with the clouds massing overhead; Lu Wai had seen it on a scale Sara Hiam could not even imagine.

“So, we saw that more men than women were dying; we tried hormones. Didn’t work. Maybe it’s some kind of estrogen metabolite that inhibits the virus, but we don’t know which one. There might even be more than one. We were desperate. We tried isolation. It didn’t work, of course–Jeep’s a hard, mean little virus, uses everything and anything as a vector: air, water, saliva, sperm, food, feces… everything.”

“Does it affect animals?”

“Doesn’t seem to.”

“So where does it come from?”

“That’s what I’d like to know. If we had the records of the first settlers, maybe it would turn out that it was a genetically altered virus that got transferred from an animal to a human, and became something else.”

“It would have to have had much more than one crossover point. That seems to preclude accidents.”

Lu Wai smiled, that hard sliding of muscle again. “You haven’t seen a man stuck out in the boonies for weeks on end. He’ll fuck anything after a while.”

Marghe wanted to believe this was Mirror humor, but Lu Wai did not seem amused. “I didn’t know there were any large animals here.”

“I haven’t heard tell of any. Maybe they all died, too. But it doesn’t matter to me where the virus came from. I’d just like to know how to kill it so we could all get off this planet.”

“I didn’t think you were so unhappy.”

“I’m not. I’d just like to be able to go home, leave this place where so many friends died.”

There was nothing Marghe could say to that. She thought about the Kurstriding in orbit, some young officer with her or his finger on the button that would detonate Estrade. If Hiam was right, none of them would ever go home.

“You haven’t told me how it felt when you went down with it,” she said.

Lu Wai leaned back against the side of the sled and stared at the clouds. “Everyone’s symptoms are different. Mine started with a rash on the underside of my arms. A couple of hours after my arms started itching, my eyeballs began to hurt, then I knew. I didn’t bother with the medical station; I went to my mod instead. I figured if I was going to die, it may as well be in peace, away from all that hustle. It’s only about a mile from the station to my mod, but I had difficulty walking those last few yards, it hits that fast. My joints ached, knees and hips mostly, though they didn’t swell up like some people’s do, and then the headache started, and the itchy eyes and throat. Then the cough.”

“How long were you sick?”

“Three days. I was weak much longer.”

Marghe wanted to reach out and take the Mirror’s hand, something, but Lu Wai had them both clenched around her scarf, remembering. “If I got it, ”she asked her gently, “what would you advise?”

The Mirror looked at Marghe speculatively. “I saw the vaccine specs; it’s your basic artificial antigen, but weaker than killed virus, because it’s not very specific. The adjuvants should make up for that. It should work.”

“But just suppose it doesn’t.”

“Complications are almost always respiratory. Make sure you’re warm and dry, move your arms around a bit, give your lungs a chance to pump out any phlegm that might collect. Drink lots of fluids. Water’s best, but boil it. Dap would be okay because of that, but remember it’s a stimulant–not a very good idea when your body’s already weak. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables if you can get them. Commonsense precautions.”

Marghe nodded her thanks, but the Mirror was not finished.

“If anything happens, if you lose your pills, or it doesn’t work, get back to Port Central, to a medic. Don’t mess with it. That’s the best advice I can give you.”

“Kris flies!” Letitia called, pointing.

Marghe pulled her scarf back up and tightened the knot. She breathed steadily through her nose, in and out, and followed Letitia’s finger. They were dark on the horizon, like smoke. She breathed more deeply.

Lu Wai squatted next to her and unfastened her medical roll. “Are you allergic to any of the antihistamines or bronchiodilators?”

“No.” She watched the swarm grow bigger.

The Mirror nodded, satisfied. “I’ve never heard of a swarm attacking without cause, but there’s always a first time. If they come close, curl up and expose as little of yourself as you can. And try not to panic.”

“I won’t.”

Letitia had already altered course to the shortest route off the olla carpet, but the kris flies were getting closer. Marghe hunched down and concentrated on her breathing. If she did get stung, she was confident she could neutralize the worst of the venom herself, or at least keep the effects localized. She closed her eyes and listened. A thousand, a hundred thousand pairs of wings beat the air, whisking it to a whining froth that blew into her ears and made her throat itch. It sounded wrong, and Marghe realized she had been expecting the drone of hornets or bees. The volume did not increase. She raised her head cautiously.

The swarm poured by almost close enough to touch, undulating and shimmering in the diffuse light like a silk scarf in the wind, gold, green, and black. The colors did not trigger Earth‑learned fears; they were beautiful. All four women watched the swarm pass over the horizon, and were quiet a long time afterward.

The early morning sky was mother‑of‑pearl; in its light, the chevrons and gray medic flashes on Lu Wai’s shoulders shone almost silver as the Mirror pointed a free hand westward. “Look over there.”

At first Marghe could see nothing different; then the grass changed from yellowish green to black. Letitia put down her schematic and clambered up into the front. “The blasted heath,” she said. They watched the black plain spread out to their left like a pool of charcoal dust.

Marghe leaned out to take a closer look. She thought she saw fresh green shoots pushing through the withered remains. “I’d like to go in closer.”

“Not advisable,” Letitia said, “at least in the sled. It’s not a good idea on foot either, unless you’re with someone who knows about burnstone.”

Burnstone could smolder under the ground for years before sighing into ash. Company had triggered several serious burns before they had learned to listen to the indigenes and avoid these unstable areas.

“This is the big one,” Letitia said. “The one that got SEC’s knickers in a twist.”

Marghe nodded. The Jink and Oriyest v. Companycase. “I wonder what happened to the owners.”

Letitia leaned against the waist‑high siding of the sled and watched the ruined grass flow beneath them. “Nobody owns this land,” she said.

“For now, the journey women are letting Jink and Oriyest use some land to the north and west,” Lu Wai said. “Not for from here.”

“If it’s not far, I’d like to visit.”

Marghe felt the women in the sled tense. Letitia and Lu Wai almost looked at each other but did not, and in the back of the sled, Ude sat up. No one said anything.

“What have I said wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s just that they’ll be busy right now, getting in their flock,” Lu Wai said easily, without taking her eyes from the horizon.

Letitia nodded. “We’d waste a day or two tracking them down, and we need to get these cables laid and the relay in place before the weather turns. You’re operating under a tight schedule, too.”

Marghe looked at them one at a time. They had closed ranks against her, but why? What was going on? “Are you saying you refuse to take me to find Jink and Oriyest?”

“No,” Letitia said, “just that we’d search for days and more than likely not find them.”

Which meant the same thing, Marghe thought bitterly. If they did not want her to meet Jink and Oriyest, there was nothing she could do. She was angry, and did not bother to hide it. “I don’t know why you don’t want me to find them, but I’m not stupid enough to waste my time trying to force you. Perhaps on my way back.”

She pushed her way past Letitia and stared out across the burn. A faint speck hovered over the western horizon: a herd bird. Marghe watched it for a long time, feeling like an outsider again.

The wind was strong, driving tall, sail‑heavy clouds across the gray sky. Lu Wai and Ude were both asleep, and Letitia was making notes on her wristcom.

Marghe held the sled’s stick in both hands. In the west water flashed silver, surrounded by large dark shapes. She eased the stick left and the sled veered. Letitia looked up.

“Ah. The river Ho.”

Marghe ignored her. She was still angry.

“The people around here call those tall things skelter trees. When you get nearer, you’ll see why.” She must have sensed Marghe’s hostility, and went back to her calculations.

The Ho was broad and flat but the banks were steep. Long‑fronded water plants trailed downstream like bony green fingers. Something leapt into the water with a plop, Marghe slowed the sled to an easy glide and cruised up to a skelter tree. It was tall, over fifty feet, and she could see where it got its name: branches of uniform thickness grew in a spiral up and around the charcoal black trunk, like a helter‑skelter. The single‑fingered leaves were arranged symmetrically along both sides of the branches and were broad as Marghe’s outstretched hand, the delicate green of lentil sprouts. They hardly moved in the wind. She brought the sled to a hovering standstill and reached up to touch one.

Something shrieked and chittered, shaking the branch until the leaves shivered.

“It might be a wirrel,” Letitia said. “I think they live in these trees. They’re small, but they’ve been known to bite.”

Marghe wondered if Letitia was waiting to see if the SEC rep wanted to touch an alien leaf badly enough to risk a bite from an equally alien animal. Well, Letitia would be disappointed; there were other trees, and she would not always have an audience. She backed up the sled.

“The river winds a bit, but it runs all the way to Holme Valley,” Letitia said. “If you want to see lots of wildlife, just follow the bank.”

“No.” Lu Wai was awake and looking at the sky. “That would add hours to our journey, and I don’t like the look of these clouds.” She clambered into the front and gestured Marghe aside. “I’ll take the stick. Things are going to get rough.”

Clouds gathered on the northeastern horizon, greasy and heavy, an army wearing unpolished mail. Marghe relinquished the controls. Lu Wai slammed the stick as far forward as it would go. Marghe lurched and had to cling on. Once again she felt like an outsider, a stranger who did not know what was happening, what to expect.

Letitia scrambled into the front. “I don’t think we’re going to make it to Holme Valley before the storm.” Marghe wondered why she was grinning so hard.

The wind grew stronger. It flattened the grass and slid its hand under the sled, tilting it sideways on its cushion of air until it skittered like a bead of water on a hot skillet. As they headed north, outcroppings of gray rock became more frequent and Lu Wai had to ease back on the stick to maneuver safely. Ude woke up, took one look at the sky, and started to tie down the cable coils and clip lids on the storage bins.

They raced over the grass; the rotor hum deepened and the sled slowed as they began to climb a steady incline. Halfway up, the turf was scattered with rocks.

Lu Wai hardly slowed. She took them right over the first few, cursed as she swerved around the boulders. Letitia tapped Marghe on the shoulder and pointed ahead to a grayish red clump of rock.

“See it?” She had to yell over the wind. Marghe nodded. “She’s making for that crag. We’ll ground the sled there, take shelter.” She grinned again. “You’ll get a good view.”

A good view of what?

They both clutched the siding as the sled bucked and twisted and narrowly missed scraping its hull on a jagged overhang. The incline was steep now, and the sled groaned and rumbled, vibrating through Marghe’s bones and making her teeth ache.

They edged past a tumble of broken boulders and between two leaning stacks of sculpted and striated stone; the wind followed them, thrusting its tongue into every hollow and crack, making the rock sing and scream like a crazy woman in restraints. Lu Wai backed them right up against the rock. Then the wind died.

“Do you feel it?” Letitia sounded eager; her head was tilted back as though she were drinking rain.

Marghe began to say no, but then she did. It was like being lowered slowly into water, feet first: the hairs on her ankles lifted, then on her legs, her stomach, her arms, the back of her neck. Electromagnetic disturbance.

“We’re far enough from the epicenter to be safe and sheltered here,” Lu Wai said as she cut the power. In the absence of the wind, the tick and sigh of the plastic settling slowly to the ground was eerie. An insect hummed past in a blur of wings, hovering over the tiny yellow flowers amongst the brown spikes of moss that spilled from the crevices at the base of the rock.

Letitia jumped down and scrambled up and around the overhang. Lu Wai and Ude slid covers over the instrument panels and clipped them down, then began securing the plastic storage bins with all their supplies. They were quick and efficient; there was nothing Marghe could do to help. She hesitated, then climbed up after Letitia.

The technician was lying on her stomach behind the remains of a dead tree that pointed up from the sparse soil like a bony finger. She looked up and grinned when Marghe joined her.

The sky was slippery with cloud massed in ranks of zinc and pewter. Lambent. Marghe could feel the atmosphere curdling, twisting in on itself, pulling the air from her lungs like a fire. She was slick with sweat. The static grew, crawling through her hair until she thought her scalp would creep right off her skull. An ache started behind her eyes and in the hinge of her jaw.

The world lit up like a silent photograph, flat and grainy, limning the tree stark as a charcoal slash against a parchment sky. Lightning exploded like blue‑white cat‑o’‑nine‑tails until sound rolled and cracked and splintered and Marghe could no longer tell if it was the ground shaking or her muscles; she felt deaf and blind and exposed to her core. Electricity and exhilaration surged and hissed over her bones. The storm held its breath a moment and she heard Letitia laughing, whoops and rills and great ringing ululations, and when the lightning cracked again Marghe laughed too; they held each other with heads back, mouths wide and open from the throat down to the stomach, laughing and shaking with exultation.

The storm dropped to silence, leaving Marghe blinking and Lu Wai shouting up at them. “Get down! The wind will hit any minute.”

Marghe looked at Letitia; the engineer’s grin had stiffened to a muscle spasm and her eyes were rolled back in her head. Marghe heard the rattle and scramble of the Mirror climbing the scar. Without letting go of Letitia, she peered over the edge.

“Get her down. Please, Marghe, get her off there right now.”

Marghe took a slow, steady breath, “All right. I’m all right. Letitia’s… If you’re steady where you are, stay there. I’ll see if I can lower her over the edge.”

Lu Wai’s face was pale and indistinct. “Go as fast as you can.”

Marghe wrapped both arms around Letitia’s waist. The technician was stiff and unresponsive but still fizzing with silent laughter. “Letitia. Letitia, can you hear me?” She tightened her grip and half lifted, half trundled her to the edge of the rock. She changed grip, holding Letitia under the arms, and closed her eyes. Breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, in and out, harder now, deeper. In, out. In. Out. She pumped strength around her body. She would pay for this later.

“Hurry, Marghe. Please.”

Marghe opened her eyes, then walked Letitia off the edge of the cliff, holding her up using the muscles in her legs and back and arms. She lowered her as fast as she dared; bending a little, going onto her knees, then down on her elbows until only her back and shoulders and arms held the technician’s weight. She lay on her stomach and hung Letitia down like a plumbline.

Lu Wai reached up and took the stiff woman by the hips. In the quiet, the Mirror’s grunt was loud as she steadied herself and the engineer. “I have her. Get yourself down. Fast.”

Marghe swung herself over the edge, hung for a moment, then dropped. The grass was dry and prickly, the yellow moss flower sharp smelling in the still air. She helped Lu Wai drag Letitia into the shelter between the crag and the sled.

The wind hit like a sledgehammer swung low and slow and easy, thudding into her ribs and roaring over her ears until all she could hear was air. A heavy plate of tree bark flew out of nowhere and smashed down onto the sled; the plastic storage bin burst open and the wind tore the packaged rations to shreds, whirled them away. Her traveling food.

Marghe did not dare move. The rock under her shoulder shuddered as boulders rolled and crashed against its other side. She hunched down into the warmth of bodies. Someone put an arm around her waist; she leaned her forehead against a shoulder. She no longer felt like an outsider. The boiling clouds brought rain that pattered, then drummed on the torn food wrappers.

Marghe woke to the distant thunk of a mallet. A wooden mallet. Her coverlet smelled comfortably of use and herbs, tempting her to stay in bed a while longer, resting the muscles she had overused the day before. Ude’s bed was empty. She looked around, wondering how late it was. The ceiling was low and domed; its longitudinal rib arched from the floor, over her head, and back down to the floor at the other end of the lodge. Lateral ribs of black wood were chinked with wattling and daub, decorated in earth tones. Morning seeped through the weave of the door hanging and filled the lodge with air and sunlight. She sat up. Sunlight.

She swung herself off the sleeping shelf and pushed aside the door hanging.

Beyond the trees, Jeep’s sky was Wedgwood blue. Sunshine poured into the valley, filling it with a light like rich yellow cream, sliding over her skin, turning the hair on her arms to gold wire. She just stood there, letting the sunshine push sweet, warm fingers into her aching muscles.

Under her bare feet the grass was cool and luscious with dew; still early, then. She could see no one, but the sound of mallets floated downstream like underwater knocking, and from one of the stone‑walled barns near the bank she heard the soft hiss and thump, hiss and thump of threshing.

The edge of a cloud veiled the sun and shadow raced down one side of the valley, blurring the wide glitter of the Ho to a dull gleam, then running up the other side, Her feet were wet and cold. She turned to go back inside. And stopped.

Last night she had been exhausted, and the hot swirling torches of the women who escorted her and Ude to the lodge had only smeared the dark with red. She had noticed the roughness of the roof and walls but assumed it was thatching. She had been wrong. The outside of the lodge was alive with greenery. It looked like a small hill nestling amongst the trees. She reached out and touched a pale green leaf. Cool and silky. Another leaf fluttered as a beetle the size of her thumb skittered out of sight. A wirrel shrieked, then another. This time she did not jump.

Curious, she ducked inside the lodge to take another look at the central rib and the branching lateral spars. Branches. The structural skeleton was a skelter tree.

She dressed, then prowled the lodge, picking up the wooden bowls, polished with use, looking under the table, noting the way the underside was not planed but still rough with black bark, the leg joints fastened with wooden pegs. There was a knife on the table, its blade made of a smoky, vitreous substance: olla, named after the flowers that grew over the raw olla beds. She tested it against the hair on her arm. It was extremely sharp. The pitcher of water was made of red‑glazed clay; the cutting slab was stone, like the pestle and mortar. A shelf ran around the lodge at waist height, piled with neatly folded clothes. She ran her hands over them, under them, between them. They were smooth and rough: cotton and canvas, leather and wool. They were warm. Her knuckles bumped on buttons of horn and wood, caught in ties and laces–no cold shock of metal fasteners. The door bar slid back and forth on greased wooden blocks that were glued and pegged into place.

Marghe followed the winding path between lodges toward the river and, she hoped, Lu Wai and Letitia. She popped a memory chip from her wristcom, inserted another, touched RECORD, and continued her notes from the day before. “Holme Valley has a population of about four hundred women and children. Sometime in the next ten days this will swell by another hundred or so as the community north of here drives their herds down from the pastures to winter in the valley. The women of Singing Pastures and those of the valley form two distinct communities. They even use different calendars dictated by different moons: the valley people divide the year into fifteen months of eighteen days each; the women of the pastures reckon with a ten‑month calendar, each month twenty‑seven days long.”

She hit PAUSE. She wished she could spare the time to stay and observe the mingling of the different populations, watch how they interacted. It would be like being able to go back in time and observe the early symbiotic interactions between people from human history on Earth.

A wirrel shrieked. Marghe went very still. This was not Earth; this was Jeep, a planet of alien species, a place where the human template of dual sexes had been torn to shreds and thrown away. This was something new. She knew these people had evolved cultures resting on bases very different from those of any Earth people; she did not know whether that made these women human or something entirely Other.

She shook herself. The question, What was humanity? was as old as the species, one she never expected to answer. She resumed her walk through the trees, but more slowly, thinking and occasionally making notes.

“If skelter trees grow at approximately the same rate as Earth trees, then to shape such a tree into a dwelling place must take forty or more years.” She imagined a family group selecting a tree, bending it, pruning it judiciously as babies were born, girls grew, and old women died. Did the lodge retain its integrity when the tree died? She exited RECORD and looked up botanical records. Skelter trees lasted two hundred years. “The use of such building methods must be indicative of the social temperament of these people: patient, planning for the long term. Also willing to experiment.”

The trees ended a few yards from the river in a grassy slope, hammocked and tufted here and there where it grew over old tree stumps. Marghe wondered whether the tree fellers had used axes with stone or olla blades.

Someone was walking through the trees toward the path she had just left. Color flashed. Marghe recognized the fatigues.

“Lu Wai!” She waved and the Mirror saw her. “How’s Letitia?”

“Angry with herself and a bit shamefaced for making you risk yourself like that. Otherwise, she’s fine. I was coming to see if you’d join us for breakfast.”

“I’m breakfasting with one of the women who farm the biggest field here. Cassil. I hope to trade for some travel rations. But thank you.” She paused. “This thing with Letitia, I gather it’s happened before.”

“More than once.”

“Is it organic?”

“I haven’t been able to find anything.” Lu Wai shrugged. “Which doesn’t mean it’s not there. The diagnostic tools we have are primitive.” She sighed. “But what do I know? I’m only a medic.”

Marghe heard the hours of tests and record‑searching in the Mirror’s voice and could find nothing to say. She watched Lu Wai walk away and wondered if Danner knew about Letitia. Yes, the Mirror commander would know; she would have to know everything in order to make Jeep work. She would know, too, that Lu Wai would do everything in her power to keep Letitia safe.

Cassil had hair the red‑brown of strong tea, and gray eyes. She also had a baby on her hip, which, judging by its fair hair and brown eyes, was not hers. She looked tired and utterly human. She spoke slowly and with much repetition for Marghe’s sake.

“What we have isn’t mine or my kith’s to give.”

“But you farm the land?”

Cassil sighed, as though she had tried to explain this many times before and failed. “My kith farms well. Everyone sees that. So the journey women give us more land to work. We work it well, produce more food, leave the land fresh for the next season’s growing. Everyone benefits. We use the food to feed ourselves, and for trata.” The word she used did not mean trade, exactly; it meant trade as the first step on a journey whose outcome was uncertain–an opening gambit in a game that might continue for generations. Trata could be between two people, between two or more kiths, or between several communities. Frequently it was all three, each exchange resonating with another in the web.

The baby squirmed and Cassil switched it to her other hip. “If I give you food, or good boots, a woman might say to me, ‘Cassil, if you had given me that food, I would have made you two fine hangings for your lodge, and given you first pick of my next catch. But you gave it to that stranger woman and neither of us has gained anything from each other. Tell me, Cassil, what did this stranger woman give you in return?’ And what would I say to that?” The baby wriggled again, more determinedly this time. Cassil jigged her up and down, gave her a finger to suck.

Marghe was acutely conscious of her fatigue, the ache in her muscles, as she opened her empty hands. “My kith is large and very powerful.”

Cassil regarded her a moment. “Then why not return to your large and very powerful kith for more supplies?” Because they might not give me any more, because Dormer might not let me go again, Marghe wanted to shout. Because I am utterly alone on this world. She had nobody; no kith, no kin, no community. Danner, Letitia, Cassil… they all sat in the center of a webwork of colleagues, friends, lovers. Family. She was alone, and scared. All she had was herself and her breathing exercises and her FN‑17. Sitting here, across from a woman secure in her own community, all of that came home to her. She was alone on a strange and dangerous world, and she knew it showed on her face,

Cassil tilted her head. “You are an orphan here,” she said softly, and touched Marghe’s cheek with the tip of one finger.

The warm, dry finger against her cheek pulled memories up from the well: her mother laughing and throwing away a batch of burned bread, saying, Never mind, we’ll buy some;ripping the computer plug from the wall, furious with some review; making her a fan from yellow tissue paper when she had a fever, then folding it up into a paper hat when she realized it wouldn’t work. Her mother singing a nonsense song, telling her stories of Macau, and of Taishan where she had been conceived; trying to smile before she died. It hit her all over again: she could never come back from Jeep and tell her mother how useful her organizational techniques had been in analyzing her notes for publication; she and her mother could never share tea and a funny story of misunderstandings with an alien people. Her mother was dead.

Marghe found herself hunched over, arms wrapped around her stomach; they were wet. She was crying. Fatigue, she told herself; her blood sugar was down. She breathed, hardly hearing Cassil moving around, tucking the baby into a blanket on the sleeping shelf, poking the fire into a blaze, swinging the dap kettle over the flames. Busy alien sounds. Water rumbled in the stone pot.

She felt the warmth of Cassil standing over her and turned her head, then took the worn square of cloth and wiped her eyes in silence. She thought about Danner saying I don’t know how else to prove my faith, of Kahn saying I know how rough it is, coming down alone. She had thrust their offers of friendship back at them.

Then she thought of Hiam, and of the Kurst, and of Danner’s unspoken certainty that the Mirrors would not be leaving Jeep. Here, now, with Cassil, she had a chance to help them, in her own particular way, at the same time as she helped herself. Trata was the key.

Cassil put two steaming bowls of dap between them. “So,” she said quietly, folding her hands, “you’re an orphan.”

Marghe did not want to distract them both by trying to explain the concept of father. She nodded. Her face felt hot and swollen. “But not entirely alone. I have been… adopted, into a rich and powerful kith, but I’m new to their ways, and yours.” Cassil smiled as if to say that was not news. Marghe chose her words carefully. “Someday, they–we–may be your neighbors. We could be useful to you.”

“There’s no burnstone in this valley, but perhaps your friends will find some other way to hurt a land they don’t understand. How will that be useful to us?”

“We’ve learned a lesson, and how to listen.”

Cassil appraised her. “Perhaps that’s so.”

Marghe opened a pocket and slid out a thin strip of copper. She put it next to Cassil’s bowl. Cassil picked it up, rubbed it, weighed it in her hand, but Marghe could not tell what she was thinking. She opened another pocket and took out a similar strip of iron. Cassil compared the two, then put them back on the table. She looked down at them a long time, then nodded abruptly. “Talking is thirsty work.” She drained her bowl, refilled it.

They ate breakfast, and they talked, and ate lunch. It was late afternoon by the time they agreed: three months’ travel food, a pair of fur leggings, and a small sack of dap in exchange for one kilo of copper, two of iron, and guaranteed special consideration–if not quite friendship–from all Company personnel presently at Port Central. Trata. She would need to bargain for furs and a horse from the women of Singing Pastures, if they were amenable to trade.

“The trata must be witnessed by a viajera.” A journeywoman teller of news, Marghe translated, though obviously with some ritual function. “We expect T’orre Na soon.” Cassil’s face rounded with pleasure, and perhaps a little worry, “She comes to lead the pattern singing for Rhedan’s deepsearch. I’m Rhedan’s choose‑mother.”

Marghe mentally compared this with Eagan’s notes: the ritual name‑choosing by pubescent girls, and the concept of different mother roles within a kith. But what was pattern singing, and why did it give Cassil cause for concern? “Congratulations,” she said cautiously. Perhaps she could observe the ceremony. But her time was limited, and there would be equally interesting ceremonies on Tehuantepec. “How soon do you expect the journeywoman?”

Cassil shrugged. “Not before the women of Singing Pastures drive their herds down. She’s a few days down the windpath, with Jink and Oriyest’s flock, and that one of your kith, Day.”

Marghe did not know what she meant. “Who?”

“Your kith who is called Day, the one adopted by Jink and Oriyest. The one Jink saved when the burn went.” She looked at Marghe curiously. “You don’t know the story? It’s a good one. T’orre Na could sing it for you.”

A woman called Day, her kith. A Company woman… It made sense now. This was why Lu Wai and Letitia had not wanted her to meet Jink and Oriyest. Day would be there. Day, a Mirror who had gone AWOL. One of the many missing, presumed dead. How many of the others were alive?

She would have to talk to Lu Wai about this. Later.

“I can’t wait for T’orre Na. Perhaps one of my adopted kith can witness for me.” It would take several days to get the relay up and working. Lu Wai could be her proxy.

It was another two hundred miles north to Singing Pastures. While Letitia and Ude worked on the relay, Marghe rode north with Lu Wai on the sled. She watched the Mirror’s gloved hands gentle on the stick, her indecipherable face beneath the quilted cap, and wondered what would drive a Mirror to go native.

To go native. She rolled the phrase around her mouth. It tasted of scorn. And fear. Why did the idea make her so afraid? And how many, how many Mirrors and technicians were out there, living in these strange cultures? They could tell her so much.

“How many people know about Day?” she demanded when they stopped to eat and relieve themselves.

“Officer Day is listed as missing, presumed dead,” Lu Wai said calmly, and carried on peeling a goura. She cut the fruit and held out half. Juice ran over her wrist. “Want some?”

“I want to know what happened to Day. Have you seen her since she… since she left? And are there others?”

Lu Wai put down the fruit. “I haven’t seen her, no, but Letitia saw her last year, and she leaves messages now and then. Usually written ones, but sometimes message stones, or a knotted string. She does that as a joke, I think. She knows we can’t read them.”

Marghe thought she sounded wistful. “Would you like to go, too?”

Lu Wai thought about that, then shook her head. “I think she gets lonely.”

Perhaps she was lonelier before, Marghe thought, among a people who did not understand her.

“Tell Danner,” she said suddenly. “Tell her about Day. She needs to know.” She thought of the Kurst, of the vaccine ticking away like a bomb in her pocket. ”And if there are any others, find them, talk to them. You won’t be betraying them. Persuade Danner to offer them amnesty, even let them go back to where they’ve been all this time. Just get them to talk to you. You’re going to need what they know.”

And the connections they’ve forged.

At least she had been able to set trata in motion, for Danner, for Lu Wai and Letitia.

For all of us.

She wondered what this woman Day was like, and where she had found so much courage.

Chapter Four

SINGING PASTURES HOWLED. Splits in the chalky rock bounding the easternmost pasture funneled icy gusts into a river of air and sleet. Marghe sat with her back pressed against a rock wall, huddled so tight between the herders, Holle and Shill, that she looked like the midsection of some strange fur‑clad mammal.

In front of them, tethered nose to tail, three horses formed a living windbreak. Their winter coats were growing in and their manes were stiff and black. They were oddly proportioned to Marghe’s eyes: thick necks and barrel bodies, like brown zebra. She wondered what their gene map would look like.

The saddle on the middle mount, Marghe’s, was unadorned leather, as were the reins; the stirrup irons were unpolished wood, and the bit a four‑inch sausage of poor‑quality brown olla. The mare herself, Pella, was fit enough but old and beginning to lose muscle. Holle and Shill’s mounts were hard‑legged, their leather work finely tooled and polished, stained rich reds and purples, and stitched with green and gold thread. Marghe supposed the herders had very little else to occupy their time once the taar herds were corralled for the winter.

The noise made conversation impossible. She huddled down a little further in her furs that smelled of horses and women and cold air, and wished the wind would drop. Holle and Shill had seen by now that she could ride well enough to be trusted with one of their horses, and she was eager to get back to the cave, hand over the metal as trade, and prepare to leave. Every hour was precious. The sky was heavy, the color of wet ash.

The lead horse lifted its head and whickered. Shill listened hard, then tapped Holle on the shoulder. They stood, leaning into the wind, and began untethering the animals. Marghe stayed where she was, pulling her muscles tighter against the expected fist of wind when the horses moved. Holle squatted in front of her.

“We must…” The words were lost in the wind but Marghe understood her gesture. They wanted her to mount up. Shill was already mounted, holding the reins of the other horses. Marghe gritted her teeth and swung herself up.

The hot stale smell of animal filled the gully. Pella stiffened beneath her. Shill leaned half out of her saddle and grabbed Pella’s headstall, pulling hard to make the mare high‑step backward.

A river of four‑legged flesh thundered by, eyes rolling and neck tendons straining. Here and there mounted women flicked whips, but it seemed to Marghe that the taars ran from something more frightening than the crack of plaited leather.

When the strangers were passing, Shill released the headstall and leaned to shout in her ear. “We follow!” She pointed to make sure Marghe understood.

Marghe thumped her heels into Pella’s ribs and clung on as they jounced down the twisting trail. It had been a long time since she had done any prolonged riding. Her thigh muscles trembled and the wind whipping under her hood made her ears ache with cold, but the two women ahead of her lashed their horses into a headlong gallop and she knew she could not have slowed Pella if she had wanted to. She wondered what they were running from, then stopped wondering to concentrate on staying in the saddle.

The slope steepened and Pella skidded on loose shale, nearly sending them both facefirst. Marghe remembered Janet Eagan’s warning: Do you have any idea how many different ways a person could get herself killed? For all I know, Winnie could have fallen off her horse and broken her neck the second day out. The ride became a nightmare.

Then, miraculously, the wind died; they were in a high‑walled side cut. With an effort that made her hiss, she swung out of the saddle. Her boot dislodged a pebble, sending it clattering on bare rock. The cut was sharp with the smell of limegrass. It made her eyes sting.

“The cave’s ahead.” Holle slung a leg over her horse’s neck and slid down with an ease Marghe envied. “There’ll be food and dap.” Shill took the horses.

The cave was dim and hot with animals. The herd milled and lowed restlessly.

“Why’s the herd sheltering in a cave?” Marghe asked.

“Hyrat.”

“What Shill means,” Holle said, “is that a swarm of hyrat were spotted, so the droving started early. We don’t know how big the pack is. If it’s small, then we can fight them off at the cave entrance and the herd will be safe without having to run the flesh off their bones.”

“And if it’s big?”

“We’ll run.”

The pack turned out to be small. Marghe helped herd the taars out of the cave, and when she dismounted outside she saw a pile of dead hyrat. Their pelts were shades of gray, like the rock, and looked soft. Marghe wanted to touch one but was wary of vermin. Each strand of hair seemed unusually thick. Perhaps they were hollow, like ting grass. Their forequarters were heavy, the pelt matted around the chest and throat of male and female. When she saw their fangs, she understood why. The upper canines were grayish yellow and long enough to leave matted channels in the fur of the lower jaw; if they fought amongst themselves, they would need the protection. No tail to speak of. It was the eyes that looked alien: silvery, with horizontal slit pupils.

Holle and Shill strapped Marghe’s belongings behind her saddle. Marghe pulled out her map for a final check. Without a navigation satellite, she would have to reckon with map and compass.

Holle looked at it over her shoulder. “Those who don’t know their way around Tehuantepec have no business going up there in winter.”

“It’s not winter yet.”

“It will be up there.” Holle picked up the map and stroked its smooth plastic surface with her fingertips. “This is your path?” She pointed to the broken line that stretched northeast from Singing Pastures to the forest and Ollfoss. Marghe nodded. “You’d be wise to avoid the tribes that move south for the winter. ” She traced a new route with her finger. There was dirt under her nail. “Take a more easterly path the first few days, then turn north.”

“How much longer will that take?”

Holle shrugged. “A day, two days.”

Marghe frowned, weighing the delay against Holle’s seriousness and others’ previous advice. She rolled her sleeve back, touched RECORD, and indicated new headings into her wristcom, then reset her compass reminder. Holle watched, curious.

“That will help you find your way?”

Marghe pressed REPLAY and Holle laughed at the sound of Marghe’s recorded voice. “Like a southern mimic bird!” She looked at Marghe slyly. “Maybe those stories are true.”

“Which stories?”

“That there are people here from another world.”

Later, repacking her map, Marghe wrapped her fingers around an unfamiliar shape. She pulled it out: a knife. The flint blade was short and ugly. She pushed it to the bottom of her pack.

Snow slanted across the mouth of a smaller cave. Beyond a brake of tanglethorn, the clouds were dirty yellow, heavy with more snow. Shivering hard, Marghe shaved slivers of bark from the dry tanglethorn and heaped them in a pyramid around a kindling pellet. Then she peeled back the metal strip and waited for the chemical reaction. A curl of bark puffed into flame. She blew on the tiny blaze, adding bigger stems of the thorn until the fire crackled. Pella snorted and backed as far from the flames as she could.

Her shivering eased and her face and hands tingled and ached as blood squeezed through previously closed capillaries. The scratches on her hands stung. She slapped her arms around her body a couple of times and tried not to think of what might have happened if she had not found the cave before the snowfall had become a blizzard.

“Your turn now, Pella.”

Her fingers were thick and red and felt as though they belonged to somebody else. She struggled with the clumsy wooden girth buckles and staggered a little as she dragged the saddle off. There was a cloak in her pack. She pulled it out and rubbed the mare down with it as best she could. Pella sighed and leaned against her. Marghe thumped her on the withers until the mare grumbled and straightened up. She draped the cloak over the horse’s back, dragged her pack over to the fire, and sat down, exhausted by the cold.

Food would help. She could name only half the items she pulled from her pack: goura, sun‑dried until shriveled to the size and color of large apricots; moist wild rice, pressed into squares and wrapped in crumbly rice paper; honey cakes; thick succulent leaves, like vine leaves, rolled to finger size; nuts; strange crunchy shapes that tasted vaguely of bacon; strips of smoked wirrel… She chewed various combinations and decided that the green fingers were good stuffed with the rice, and dried goura went well with honey cake.

She filled a nosebag for Pella, then lay down and listened to her heart beat and the wind howl over Tehuantepec.

When she was young she had lain awake in the sticky heat of Macau and listened to the chirrup of insects and the beat of her heart. It had frightened her that her life depended upon such a fragile organ, that a lump of muscle hardly bigger than her fist was all that kept the blood pumping around her body. She wondered how thick the heart walls were, and if it ever just got tired and gave up, decided it had had enough of sucking and pushing and squeezing blood around her veins. She lay with her hands over her ears, only to discover that made the sound more distinct. Humming herself to sleep worked, or drumming little rhythms on her futon.

As she grew older, she learned to listen more to the beat that underlay her whole life: how it speeded up when she was tense or tired; how it was smooth and confident when she exercised regularly; how she could make it change if she breathed fast and hard, or slow and easy. It fascinated her. She took up yoga, then chi kung and tai chi, until she could increase blood flow to various parts of her body at will. Then she went to Beaver, and had all her confidence beaten out of her.

The months in Wales afterward were full of anxieties and short breath, phobias and panic. Her doctor referred her to a meditation specialist; he said to do this, and do this, but she could not relax enough to try. The specialist referred her on to the experimental‑psychology department in Llangelli.

They hooked her up to machines that measured her alpha waves, her blood flow, her temperature, the electrical activity of her skin, the gaseous content of her blood and its pH, the dilation of her pupils. With different words, they helped her relearn that her body was an intricate mechanism made of interconnecting parts, a homeostatic system: change this, and this alters, which changes this. And she relearned: with breath and exercise, music and self‑hypnosis, until now she could cut blood supply from a hand or a foot, channel pain, slow or speed her metabolism at will, and more. Once, at a party, she had amused a friend by blushing and paling at will.

Later, on her own, she took her training further, experimenting with sensitizing her body to magnetic and electrical fields. She had hoped to write a paper on biofeedback, autogenics, and the supernormal experience in myth.

Pella snorted, too hot under her makeshift blanket. Marghe took it off, checked the nosebag, scratched the mare behind her ears. The blizzard howled.

Woman and horse were hunched and dark against the snow; veils of cold mist filtered the afternoon to pearl. The only sound was the crunch of hooves and the creak of leather as Marghe’s weight shifted with her mare’s walk.

“Faster now, Pella.”

Her quiet voice was sucked away, swallowed by the silence. Not for the first time, she swung in the saddle and peered into the mist behind her. There was nothing there, nothing but white quiet and the snort of her mare’s breath.

Her nose began to drip. There was nothing to wipe it on.

Something was different. She lifted her head, reined Pella to a halt, turned her head this way and that. There, to her left: a darker patch. The air seemed to thrum, tickling the fine nerve endings under her skin as though she was in the presence of a strong magnetic field. She clucked the horse into a walk.

A megalith loomed before her, others curved into the mist. She nudged Pella closer and leaned from the saddle to run a gloved hand down its side. Where she rubbed away frost, the stone was dark and pitted. She dismounted and walked around it. It was twice her mounted height, three times the thickness of her waist.

Who had made this? And why?

Not bothering to remount, she led Pella from one stone to another. The sleeve of her overfur was stiff with frost; with difficulty, she uncovered her wristcom, touched RECORD.

“There are twenty‑seven stones ranged in a circle but I can’t judge how perfect its dimensions are. The purpose of these stones is unclear, but it should be noted that the tribes in this area utilize a twenty‑seven‑day lunar calendar.” She ran her fingers over the pitted stone, wondering at the tingle she felt. She looked more closely and the electric tingle was replaced by excitement. “The tool marks appear weathered to an extent incompatible with the surmised landing date of the first settlers. These stones are very old.”

They were impossibly old. These stones should not be here, unless humans had landed on Jeep hundreds, thousands of years earlier than supposed; or unless whoever, whatever, had quarried these megaliths, carefully shaped them with crude tools, and raised them up, was not human.

She stood in the snow, rubbing absently at her cold‑numbed buttocks. Who made this? The large animals of Lu Wai’s theories? But then they would be sentient animals. She stopped rubbing, cocked her head to the mist. All she heard was Pella pawing at the snow to get at the grass.

The day was fading. Marghe uncinched the girths and swung the saddle into the snow. It was lighter than it had been. Just outside the circle, she scraped away a big patch of snow for Pella. The tent took two minutes. It was dark inside; when her wristcom beeped she had to fumble for the FN‑17, which she swallowed with a mouthful of icy water.

She popped the memory chip from her wristcom, replaced it with one on which she kept her personal journal. “I don’t know what to make of these stones. Even here, in the tent, I can sense their presence. It’s not quite like anything I’ve felt before. I wonder what their significance was, and to whom. Perhaps I should say is. Even assuming their makers are long dead, I feel sure they’d still be a focus of ritual activity. On a plain like this, stones this size would really mean something.”

She rubbed her forehead. Of course they meant something.

She hit OFF, curled up against the pack and saddle, and pulled her furs closer. She was tired. Outside, Pella munched loudly on half‑frozen grass. They were both tired, tired and sick of the monotony of the almost‑void where the only changes were ones of brightness, a brightness that dimmed as they plodded north.

Maybe she would be more coherent in the morning. She sighed and pressed CHIP EJECT. Nothing happened. She tried again. Nothing. Perhaps it was the cold. She took the wristcom off, held it between her palms, tucked her hands between her legs. While she waited for it to warm up, she breathed deep and slow, concentrating on finding a still, calm place in her center. She came out of her light trance and tried the eject button again.

Nothing. She tapped in a request for diagnostics. The chip was still accessible, but it suggested she take the wristcom to a reliable service outlet, as the port was jammed. She turned it over in her hand thoughtfully, then requested a chip map. The chip was almost full. She tried to run an erase, but the jam had triggered automatic erasure protection. There was room for perhaps fifteen hours of dictation. The operating memory would add another hour or so.

Fifteen hours was not enough to keep a decent record. Her trip would be useless. How much time would she lose by going back? She slid her map from its pocket and studied it. It would take weeks to get back to Port Central, weeks to return here. Not an option. She tried looking at the problem from another angle: how else could she record her observations? She had a little paper, not much. Perhaps she could persuade the women she met to give her cloth, and dyes to use as ink.

A sudden thought occurred to her. She tried the compass. The stones sent numbers flickering at random; useless. She was alone on Tehuantepec, plateau of myth and magic, strange beasts and wild tribes, with a malfunctioning compass, out of range of any communications relay, and with a SLIC that for all practical purposes was useless. Was this what had happened to Winnie Kimura?

She awoke to dawn and hard‑edged thoughts. She was not going to end up like Winnie. The compass damage might be as temporary as her proximity to the stones. There was only one way to find out. She slithered from her nightbag. If the damage was irreversible, then she could probably retrace her path. Even with bad weather, it should not take her more than twenty days to get back to the valley. She would be safe there until either a satellite came in range of the new communications relay or the spring came and she could make her own way back, somehow, to Port Central.

Pella whickered.

She rolled the nightbag into her pack. The sooner she left, the better. She dragged her pack through the tent flap, stood and stretched, and looked around.

Fear slapped the breath back into her lungs.

She was surrounded by riders on motionless horses. Shrouded in mist, with only their eyes visible under frost‑rimed furs, they looked like apparitions of otherworld demons.

Marghe lifted her arms to show she was weaponless and walked stiffly toward the nearest figure. When she stepped within the cloud of breath wreathing the horse, its rider snapped down her spear. The stone tip brushed the furs at Marghe’s belly, and she realized that stone could kill just as effectively as steel. The rider’s eyes were heavy‑lidded and light blue.

The point of the spear did not waver a hair’s‑breadth as the rider pulled back her hood to show flame‑red braids and cheeks shining with grease.

“Stranger, why do you stand in the ringstones of the Echraidhe?”

The accent was difficult, but Marghe heard the cool lack of interest in her questioner’s voice and her throat closed with fear.

“The penalty for soiling‑the stones of our ancestors is death.”

The spear moved as the rider balanced it for a belly thrust. Fascinated, Marghe watched the point pull back for the disemboweling stroke.

“Uaithne!”

The spear before Marghe hesitated.

“I forbid, Uaithne.” The voice was low and harsh.

“Levarch, she is nothing. A burden.”

A woman of middle years kneed her horse forward until she sat eye to eye with Uaithne. “I forbid.”

Uaithne shrugged. “I obey the Levarch in all things.” She shouldered her spear.

Marghe realized she was not to die alone and unremarked in a heap of her own entrails, and her legs sagged. The Levarch leaned down and supported her under the arms. She shouted at another rider. “Aoife, take up the stranger. Uaithne, bring her horse and goods.”

Marghe hardly had time to understand the Levarch’s words. She saw a woman with dark features and a broken nose galloping at her, and then she was heaved across the bow of a saddle, bouncing uncomfortably on her stomach and clinging to the horse’s shaggy withers. She could barely breathe and thought she might vomit, but when she tried to struggle upright, the rider named Aoife thumped her over her right kidney. She stayed still, lace rubbing against the rough wool saddle blanket.

The riders made swift time over the snow. Marghe hung on, sick and frightened, eyes closed against the thunder of hooves just below her face.

The day wore on. Shock, cold, and hunger impaired Marghe’s control. She could not maintain an even blood flow around her dangling body and drifted in and out of consciousness. Once, swimming out of a daze, she struggled until Aoife struck her a ringing blow to the temple.

The horses’ slowing roused her. One side of her face was scraped raw. The horses came to a halt, pawing and snorting, and Marghe heard Pella’s distinctive whicker. Aoife swung down from the saddle.

Marghe lifted her head. There was no thump, no shout of warning. It was almost dark and she could not see much. She felt a hand on her belt and flinched.

“Dismount.” Aoife pulled, hard. Marghe slid backward onto her feet and crumpled onto the snow. She stared at her legs stupidly. Someone laughed: Uaithne. Aoife hauled her upright. Standing, Marghe towered above her.

“Open your clothes.” Aoife had a knife in her hand. “Open your clothes or I’ll cut them open.”

Marghe pulled off her gloves. With the tip of her knife, Aoife pointed to the snow; Marghe dropped the gloves. Her fingers were stiff and she fumbled open the ties of her overfurs.

“And the rest.”

The buttons of her fur waistcoast and densely woven shirt were easier.

“Hands on your head.”

Marghe did as she was told. Aoife stepped in close and ran her free hand expertly over, between, and underneath the layers of clothing.

“What’s this?” She pulled back the fur from the wristcom.

“It… I talk to it, and it remembers. Like a mimic bird.” She hoped this tribeswoman had heard of the southern bird.

“Show me.”

Marghe touched RECORD. “Weapon violence is obviously a feature of these people’s lives,” she said. She played it back. The sound was tinny in the cold, thin air, but recognizable.

“Give it to me.”

Aoife felt around it for sharp edges, sniffed it, weighed it in her palm, hesitated, then slipped it into her belt pouch. She stood on Marghe’s boot tips, pinning her to the ground, and palmed her way down the inside and outside of both legs. She found the FN‑17. “This?”

Sweat beaded on Marghe’s upper lip. She did not know the word for medicine. “It stops me becoming sick.”

Aoife tucked it away with the wristcom. Hands back on her head, Marghe struggled to keep her face expressionless. Aoife stepped back and sheathed her knife. Marghe did not see where it went.

“Fasten yourself up.”

The tribeswoman marched her over to a mound of snow, then walked off.

Marghe panicked. Were they going to leave her there without food or horse or vaccine? Wild‑eyed, she looked about her. No. They were hobbling the horses. Relief made her want to grin. She closed her eyes, trying to make sense of what was happening.

“Do you enjoy freezing?”

She jumped. Aoife stood there.

“Here, under the snow–” the tribeswoman bent and brushed at the snow mound, “a shelter. It’s warmer.” She spoke slowly, as though to a half‑wit.

That stung, but it was something Marghe could make sense of, something that had happened before, that she could respond to. “How was I to know you covered your tents with snow?”

Aoife looked at her, then shrugged and walked back to the horses. Marghe wondered if it was her accent the tribeswoman had found difficult to deal with, or her ignorance. She resolved to watch, listen, and learn. Out here, ignorance might be a capital crime.

When she thought no one was watching, she squatted and wriggled through the tiny entrance flap headfirst. It was light, and did not smell, which surprised her, and had room for three or four if they stayed prone. She lay there for a while, grateful for solid ground and a place away from curious eyes.

She breathed in deeply through her nose, exhaled through her mouth. And again. Her heartbeat began to steady and her fear lessened. The basics always helped.

What was her status: hostage, guest, slave? What would happen to her? She had no idea. She tried, instead, to organize her thoughts around questions she might be able to answer. Where was she? If the stones had not scrambled her compass irreversibly, she might be able to guesstimate her position. If she could get back her map. Where was her pack?

She lay there listening to her heartbeat, reassuring and steady. If she was left here alone, it might be possible to creep out in the night, find her pack and her horse, and leave.

In the dark, a dark without stars or moon?

No. Tomorrow, then. For now, she would have to stay calm, wait and watch. And think. She spoke the strange words aloud, Eefee, Waith‑nee, Lev‑ark, Eck‑rave, rolling them over her tongue, tasting them, testing: Gaelic names that had not been used on Earth for thousands of years.

Aoife wriggled into the shelter, followed by two others. Not Uaithne. Marghe accepted the nightbag flung in her direction. Her own, she noted.

“Sleep.”

She followed the others’ lead, stripping off hood and boots and sliding fully clothed into her bag. She thought she saw a look of approval on Aoife’s dark and broken face.

They were up the next day in the thin gray light before dawn. Marghe was not offered food, nor did she see any of the Echraidhe eating. They rolled up their nightbags, donned hoods and boots, and began unpegging and stowing the leather tents. Marghe wondered if Aoife still had the FN‑17. She could not escape without it.

The small muscles over her ribs and stomach tightened in dread as Aoife walked a horse toward her. The bruises from yesterday’s journey were just beginning to show and her face was red as skinned meat.

“Hold him.”

Marghe took the rein. She did not know what else to do. Aoife strode off and returned with Pella. The tribeswoman stood by with folded arms while Marghe patted her mare and ran her hands down her neck. Her gear was neatly slung behind the saddle. She checked her pack and found it was all there, her FN‑17, her wristcom, her map. Only the knife and the food were missing. Her relief was so great, she nearly turned to Aoife and thanked her.

The tribeswoman mounted and gestured for Marghe to do likewise. The other horses were wheeling and thundering northward.

As they rode, Aoife pulled strips of dried meat from the pouch by her thigh. She handed some to Marghe. They slowed a little to eat and Marghe took the opportunity to strap the wristcom back across the pale skin over her left wrist. With it back in place she sat up straighter, could regard Aoife coolly, and she understood suddenly that her relief at the presence of the wristcom on her wrist was not just the practical comfort of having the compass: while she could record things, she still had a professional persona. She was Marguerite Angelica Taishan, the SEC rep; she was not lost and alone, helpless as any other savage on a horse.

Aoife had the power to take away from her that so‑slender thread of identity any time she wished.

She touched the compass function key. It seemed to be working. Good. She turned a casual circle in her saddle. She had horse, vaccine, map and compass. Aoife’s spear was strapped down securely and her small, shaggy mount was probably no match for the longer‑legged Pella at full stretch.

Aoife was watching her. She tapped the sling at her belt. “I can kill a ruk with this at nine nines of paces. You–” she looked Marghe and her mount up and down, “you I could bring down before that summer mare lengthened her stride.”

Marghe said nothing. Perhaps, if it came to it, Aoife would hesitate to kill.

“A stone can stun a rider, as well as kill,” Aoife said.

Marghe turned her face away, winced as the wind bit into her raw cheek.

“Here.”

Frustration made her angry, and stubborn. She refused to look at what Aoife offered.

“Grease for your face.”

Marghe ignored her. Aoife swung her mount in front of Marghe’s and wrenched them both to a halt. She pulled Marghe’s face to hers by the chin. Her eyes were flat and brown.

“You will take this grease.”

Marghe stared at Aoife’s broken nose, the thick white scar that writhed over her cheekbone, nose, and mouth, and made no move to take the small clay pot.

Aoife sighed and pulled off a glove. “Hold still.” Strong blunt fingers smoothed the grease delicately over Marghe’s face. Nose first, forehead, chin, then cheeks. Marghe flinched, then relaxed. It did not hurt.

“Close your eyes and mouth.”

This time she obeyed, and Aoife stroked the thick, milk‑colored stuff onto her lips and eyelids. Then she stowed away her pot.

Marghe touched her lips, the sore place on her cheek; the grease was a kindness. “Thank you.”

Aoife nodded. “The others are far ahead.” They kicked their mounts into a gallop. Marghe checked her compass and saw that they galloped northwest. Ollfoss, and the forest, lay northeast.

They rode hard for three days and Marghe began to understand Aoife’s contempt for Pella. The mare looked gaunt and dull‑eyed, while the shaggy horses seemed tireless. They ate on the move, strips of dried meat, and drank a sour, half‑frozen slush called locha. It was made from fermented taar milk. Marghe hated it, but she drank it; it put warmth in her gut.

As they neared the main camp, the tribeswomen seemed to relax. They talked more among themselves. Marghe listened and learned: the triple handful of riders were returning from the annual ceremony at the ringstones.

“Did I interrupt your ceremony?” she asked Aoife as they swung back into the saddle one afternoon.

“It was finished. The Levarch was showing us the southern pasturelands. We were on our way home when Uaithne found you.”

She remembered Uaithne’s threat. Intrusion in some religions carried an automatic death penalty. “Have I disturbed the… rightfulness of the stones for you?”

“No.” Aoife paused. “It’s happened before. Twice.”

Marghe’s heart thumped. Winnie? She licked her lips, swallowed. “What happened to the women?”

Uaithne galloped past. Aoife shook her head and would not answer any more questions.

At the end of the third day, they came to the winter camp of the Echraidhe.

Chapter Five

DANNER TURNED AWAY from the lists on her screen and looked instead at the tapestry on the wall behind her. It was an abstract of blues and golds about a meter square, a present from her deputy, Ato Teng, about a year ago. She wondered if Teng had made it herself, this marvelous picture that made her feel hollow inside, like homesickness. Or had the artist given it to Teng? In exchange for what? It bothered her that she did not know the answers to these questions, that she did not know her deputy well enough to even guess.

Her office had no window. Port Central followed Company design: the nerve center, her office, was protected by myriad other rooms, corridors, and storerooms. There were no external signs for indigenes to read and follow; the usual procedure. More than one Company security installation had suffered sabotage. But here on Jeep, the precautions were ridiculous. The natives simply stayed away. Port Central had become a sophisticated prison for its inmates, while the natives roamed a whole world.

She wished she had a window because sometimes, sitting here in her box of an office, with the air always the same temperature and officers all wearing the same uniform, she could believe that this was a normal situation, one that could be resolved by the application of all those wonderful scenarios and procedures taught at the academy in Dublin. But Jeep was not normal. What other Company planet was under the charge of a lieutenant?

She fingered the insignia sealed to her epaulets. She might wear the two stars of a commander, but in her head she was still a lieutenant, playing at command, as though it were a test after which the real brass would unplug her from the simulator and point out all her mistakes, patting her on the back for any smart moves. But here there was no one to tell her if she had made any smart moves, no one to talk to about anything. Command isolated her more effectively than a deadly disease.

When she had first realized how it was going to be, that she was the superior officer, she had been scared. Hundreds of people relied on her. Hundreds. In those first weeks she had been too scared, shaking too hard, to spend time with anyone. In front of others, she was not allowed to be Hannah Danner, the newest lieutenant on Jeep; she had to be Acting Commander Danner, the one with all the answers, her orders crisp, clear, and fast as the breaking of a bone. It reached the stage where she could not even bring herself to eat or drink in front of other officers. It took her a long time to learn that patterns of command were well laid; as long as what she asked people to do made some kind of sense, they would be glad to have someone in charge. Then she relaxed a little. But the habit was already formed: isolation, loneliness, solitude.

Her older sister, who had had more to do with bringing her up than her parents, had said it was never too late to start over. But Claire had been wrong about many things.

Claire had taken her side against liberal parents who had been horrified when Hannah had announced she wanted to join up. It had been Claire who came to graduation and hugged her, then apologized for rumpling her dress uniform; Claire who told her, tears in her eyes, that there was nothing she could not do, if she wanted it badly enough, even to changing the world. She had believed that, then. That day in Dublin, with the air soft and green after an Irish rainfall, she had believed that she could make a difference–that in a few years she would be commander on some Company world, defending the rights of those who could not speak for themselves, making the opening up of a new world a thing of pride and wonder, not horror. Oh, yes, that day in Dublin she had believed, and had been proud to wear this uniform.

Her desk chimed. Danner turned away from the tapestry as her screen windowed on Vincio’s face. She sighed, and touched the window, which expanded to fill the screen. The philosophy could wait.

“Sergeant Lu Wai and Technicians Dogias and Neuyen are back, ma’am. Lu Wai and Dogias request a personal debriefing.”

“What’s wrong with just putting the report on my desk?” Vincio, who always seemed to know when a question was rhetorical, said nothing. “They specifically asked for me, not Lieutenant Fa’thezam?”

“Yes, ma’am. The sergeant said that what they wanted to talk about was more than a communications issue.”

Lu Wai was a reliable officer, a good sergeant. If she was in such a hurry to get to the commander with this story, it meant trouble. “Tell them to be ready in one hour.”

The screen reverted to lists of figures. In the last two years she had become well acquainted with the needs of many disciplines, how their smooth functioning depended upon seemingly innocuous items such as suture reels, case 12x 20or cable clips, heavy, Cu and Al, sheathed. The little things always ran out first.

She looked carefully at the medical supplies. The one‑shot subdermal diffusion injectors were low. Allergy shots accounted for much of that. She tapped in a request, nodded thoughtfully. There were hypodermic syringes available, but they too were disposable. The medics would have to find a way to reuse their injectors, or stop giving allergy shots. Sophisticated antibacterial and painkilling drugs were no use without the means to inject them. Lu Wai was a medic, wasn’t she? She made a note to talk to her about it.

The hour passed quickly. She rubbed at her eyes, turned off the screen. Her back ached. She was spending too much time in this damn chair.

Vincio tapped on the door, brought in a tray. Danner could not help glancing at the time display on the corner of her desk.

“I scheduled them twenty minutes late,” Vincio said. “You need lunch.” She put the tray on the small table near the door.

Danner ate potato soup, crackers, and salad, beautifully presented on matching china. She accepted the service that went with her rank because it was efficient use of her time, but some times she thought she would not keep either long enough to become accustomed to it.

The farthest Danner had ever been from Port Central was during the first week they had been on Jeep, when she was still a lieutenant. Captain Huroo had taken her and a squad to fight the burn that lay halfway between here and what they now knew as Holme Valley. He was dead now, of course. It was at the burn that she had met Jink, the one who had saved Officer Day. The skinny native had been half‑dead with concussion, burns, and loss of blood, but she had still escaped, then recovered well enough to come back into Port Central to find Danner weeks later. Had anyone been sick by that time? She could not remember. She wondered what had happened to Day–another name on the missing list.

When the virus began to kill, everyone had been confined to base, and she had been here more or less ever since, first taking captain’s rank, then acting deputy, then commander as they died, one by one. Hell of a way to get promoted. Just like a war. And now she was stuck. Her job was to protect the welfare of her personnel; that could best be done from Port Central. From right here, her office. Sometimes she longed for a change of scene.

Nights were the worst, spring nights, when the air was soft and blew in from across the grasslands full of alien promise. At those times she ached to be Out There, walking through strange country, seeing a new world for herself, meeting challenges that were not administrative. Once in all this time she had toured the area surrounding Port Central, riding a sled accompanied by a score of officers. It was not enough. What she wanted was to be headed somewhere definite, with a purpose, toward a situation only she could handle. She wanted to do the job she had trained for, not stare at damn screens all day and make notes on whom to speak to about what. She was bored.

And so when the sergeant and technician were shown into her office, Danner gestured to the low table on one side of the office. “Please, sit.”

The sergeant hesitated before complying. Danner came round from behind her desk and joined them. She thought about asking for tea, but that would probably only make Lu Wai more uncomfortable. Sergeants did not usually take tea with commanders.

“I hope you’ve both eaten, because we might be here some time. You have some news to impart, I believe, and I have curiosities of my own to satisfy.”

Tell me what it smells like out there, she wanted to say, and how the sky looks, what the air feels like. She could not quite bring herself to ask, but some of her hunger must have been apparent. Lu Wai’s face smoothed into the bland look Danner remembered well from her own days as a cadet, the expression assumed by junior officers when one suspected the commander was about to say or do something particularly bizarre.

Danner sighed, and Letitia flashed her an amused glance. Danner was momentarily disconcerted. Dogias was an odd one.

“You traveled in the company of Representative Taishan for several days,” she said briskly. “I want as accurate a description of the journey as possible–what you talked about, how she responded, what she was particularly interested in. I would also like your general impressions.”

“General impression of everything in general?” Letitia Dogias asked.

The woman was teasing her. “Yes,” Danner said firmly. “Try not to edit. I need to know how she responds to things here. Whether or not she likes it, and us.”

Us. The word hung in the air between them. Us. Danner wondered what was the matter with her today. She felt restless, insecure, shaken loose from all her normal patterns. Us. She tasted the word again: Us. It felt right. Perhaps she should talk to these two again sometime. And others. Perhaps it was time to start breaking down her isolation.

Unexpectedly, Dogias smiled. Danner smiled back, allowing herself, just for a moment, to feel part of a group. Us. She noticed Lu Wai had relaxed enough to let her fatigue show. Dap might be a good idea, now. She had Vincio bring it in.

It was Dogias who did most of the talking at first: about Marghe’s discovery of the web that was the spider, the kris flies, the storm. Danner did not miss Lu Wai’s tight expression while Dogias talked about the storm, or the way her hand almost reached out for the technician’s. It must have happened again.

She wondered what it was like to love someone like that, and found herself enjoying being near them.

“How was her attitude to Company in general, and to you, as a Mirror, in particular?” she asked the sergeant.

“Reserved,” Lu Wai said slowly, “like she was withholding a decision. I’d say she was fair‑minded.”

Danner waited, but the Mirror did not explain why she thought so. “And how does she feel about the vaccine, the virus?”

“She’s scared,” Lu Wai said simply. “I don’t think she’s entirely convinced the vaccine will work.”

“Are any of us?” Dogias asked.

Danner thought about that. Was she convinced? “I think it might work, yes.”

“But do you want it to?” Dogias asked softly.

The question reached right inside Danner, but she was not ready for it, and pretended not to hear.

“Tell me about Holme Valley.”

They described the lodges made of skelter trees, the slow‑moving river, the preparation for the arrival of the women and herds from Singing Pastures. Dogias told her how she and Ude Neuyen had laid the northern relay, and Danner once again wished her job felt more constructive. Most of what she achieved could only be measured in negatives: less sick leave, fewer emergencies due to good planning, no sag in morale. It was hard not to feel jealous of the satisfaction in Dogias’s voice as she talked about solving one practical difficulty after another.

“… and we might have been back a day early if we hadn’t had to take the time to witness the pattern singing. And the agreement.”

This, then, was what they wanted to talk about. Or at least part of it. She gestured for them to continue.

“The storm we ran into,” Letitia said, “it destroyed Marghe’s–Representative Taishan’s–rations. She had to bargain with the natives for more food to take with her. They gave us some, too, though that wasn’t strictly necessary. The bargain she made was something called trata.”

The term was unfamiliar. “Go on.”

“As I understand it, Marghe told them that we”–Letitia made an all‑inclusive gesture–“are all part of one social unit, a family. A family for which she is empowered to speak. She offered them the everlasting favor of her family in return for food and clothes.”

Danner found that she had been holding her breath. She let it out. “That doesn’t sound so bad.” She looked at Lu Wai. “Or is it?”

Letitia shrugged. “We’re not sure. I think what she offered is an alliance of some kind.”

“An alliance.” Danner steepled her fingers, looked at the ceiling. The last thing she needed: worry over a group of people who might look to her in situations she knew nothing about. In her peripheral vision she saw Lu Wai sit up straighter and realized she had shifted back into commanding officer mode.“And you, Sergeant, you witnessed it, not Marghe?”

“Yes, ma’am. My orders were to offer any reasonable assistance to the representative, to obey her instructions as long as they did not conflict with our task. As this seemed to be the only way for Representative Taishan to continue her mission, and as she requested that we undertake the witnessing so that she could be on her way, in my judgment it was appropriate to comply.”

Danner nodded; she had done the right thing. “How formal do you judge the agreement?”

“It was witnessed in the presence of a viajera, ma’am.”

Not a spur‑of‑the‑moment thing, then. “Marghe left a report?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She gestured at Dogias, who pulled a chip from her belt and set it on the table.

Danner picked it up. Such a tiny thing. ‘ “I need to take a look at this. Go get some rest. If I have further questions, I’ll call you later.”

At the door, Lu Wai half turned, hesitating.

“Yes?” It came out sharper than Danner intended.

“Nothing, ma’am. Sorry.” They left.

Now what had that been about? Perhaps she should not have been so sharp. Well, done was done. If it was important, Lu Wai would get around to telling her. She dismissed the matter from her mind.

Two hours later, she levered herself up from her chair and paced, trying to think. Trata. She could still hear Marghe’s voice: “Trata is a serious matter. For a complete reference, see Eagan’s field notes, file K17‑9a I think, but I can give you the essential idea. The most important thing is that, to the women of Holme Valley, we are no longer strangers. This means that if something terrible happened, for example the microwave relay failed, or we ran out of food, Holme Valley would be bound to help us. Of course, it also means we have to help them, but the major point is we are no longer alone on this planet. We have allies. The alliance cannot be dissolved until there’s been some trading–that’s a loose definition, see Eagan’s notes for more detail–by both parties. What will probably interest you most is this: we are now involved in this world. We have a stake in the culture. Because of that, we will be considered when and if the journey women make any changes that could affect us. Danner, do you understand this? It’s important. We’ve become part of the social network, here, like… oh, part of the cultural food chain. We’re linked with these people. From now on, what they do–all of them, any of them, because the trata network is woven right through these communities, linking each with another–will affect us, so they’ll consider us and our needs before they do anything. They won’t consult us, no, but they’ll be careful not to incur our outright wrath. It was a risk, but it seemed a good one: we have a base here of sorts, if we need it.”

Part of the cultural food chain. Damn that woman. She paced harder. Her bootheels made no sound on the restful, absorbent tile, which irritated her further. They already had a base. Did Marghe think Port Central wasn’t good enough? Obviously. Part of the cultural food chain… Didn’t that damned woman realize Company personnel were not supposed to get involved at all with the indigenous population?

Of course she knew. It was her job to know.

Danner dropped into the chair Dogias had been sitting on just two hours ago. What was Marghe saying to her? She played back the last sentence. “We have a base here of sorts, if we need it.”

Why would they need it? If the vaccine did not work. But the vaccine would work.

But do you want it to?

She shoved Dogias’s question aside, began to pace again. The vaccine had to work. It was their only chance.

She stopped, stood very still.

Their only chance? What did she mean by that? The vaccine might be the last chance for Company to profitably exploit Jeep, of course, but it was not herlast chance, or that of her staff. If the vaccine did not work, Company would lift them off. Marghe, and Sara Hiam on the Estrade, were civilians… bound to lose faith now and again. But Company would not abandon them.

Thinking of Sara Hiam reminded her that she should let Estradeknow that the relay at Holme Valley was up and running. No doubt the doctor would have more to say about Company, and the Kurst, which she referred to openly as “that engine of death,” but it would be good to talk to someone who did not have to call her ma’am.

What time would it be now up on the Estrade? Late. But not too late.

After a moment, a woman Danner recognized as Nyo filled her screen. She smiled at her. “Hello, Nyo.”

Nyo did not smile back. “Good evening, Commander.”

Maybe the woman was just having a bad day. “I’d like to speak to Dr. Hiam.”

The screen blanked, then flared again. Sara Hiam’s face was set and unwelcoming. “Yes?”

Danner wondered what was wrong. “It’s me,” she said.

“I can see that.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“You tell me.” Her voice was flat, hostile.

There was no excuse for this kind of rudeness. Muscles along Danner’s jaw bunched. “I didn’t call to spar with you, Doctor. If there is some problem up there, I’m unaware of it. Perhaps you could apprise me of the situation.”

“No.” Sara Hiam’s face was taut with anger. “You should tell uswhat the hell the situation is, Commander; you should explain to uswhat all this crap with codes is about.”

“Codes? I don’t understand.”

“You should.”

“Obviously. But the fact remains that I don’t.” She was’too tired, too confused to stay angry. She rubbed her face. “Look, Sara, I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m sorry you’re angry, but unless you tell me what you think I’ve done wrong, we can’t clear up this misunderstanding.” She hesitated. “I thought we had each other’s trust.”

“That’s what I thought, that’s why I’m so angry. So you explain why you’re sending tight, coded messages up to the Kurstand not telling me or anybody else what the hell is going on.”

“Coded messages? From Port Central?” It did not make sense. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Danner frowned. “I didn’t send any messages.”

“Somebody did.”

“What did they say?”

“They were coded, remember?”

“Did you record them?”

Sara Hiam shook her head. “It was pure chance Sigrid caught them, and we weren’t set up to record.”

“I don’t understand.” What was going on? “Messages, you said. There was more than one?”

Sara tilted her head. “You really don’t know anything about it, do you?” Danner shook her head. Hiam was suddenly businesslike. “Sigrid said they were multibursts. Or something. Apparently it’s something the military does: send several communiques in one compressed burst.”

Military. “And they went to the Kurst?”

“That’s right. From Port Central.”

“When?”

“Eight days ago.”

Eight days, eight days. Nothing unusual had happened then. Someone was sending messages in code, military code, from Port Central to the Kurst, and she knew nothing about it. Her head began to thump. “I assume that this is the first time you’ve intercepted this kind of communication.”

“Yes.”

“Why now?” Danner muttered half to herself.

“It might have been going on for some time,” Hiam offered. “Sigrid was trying some new frequencies for the satellite, ones we haven’t used before. For all we know, the spy could have been sending information up for months. Or years.”

“Spy?” The thumping in Danner’s head became a hot ache.

“Why else would someone send transmissions without your knowledge?”

There was no other reason. None at all. Danner felt as though someone was pushing a hand inside her stomach and squeezing.

“Who would want to spy on Port Central–on me?”

“Company,” Hiam said gently.

“Company?” Banner was bewildered. “But I’m Company.”

“Perhaps they don’t think you’re Company enough.”

She tried to think, and her confusion slowly heated to anger.

Hiam was right. It had to be Company spying on her. Company going behind her back after seven years of faithful service. But it still did not make sense: if the people on Kurstwanted to know something, why not just ask her? She would tell them. She had nothing to hide. Nothing. She had always been loyal, aboveboard. Always. Only now they seemed to think she was not, that she could not be trusted, that she needed to be watched. Who, who the hell, was doing this?

“Can Sigrid find that frequency again?” She was breathing hard.

“I’ll check with her. Hold for a moment.” Hiam paused, finger poised above a key. “You might like this,”–she smiled wryly–“or you might not. It’s one of Nyo’s.” The hold screen was a cartoon: a knight in medieval armor balanced on the hull of the Kurst, aiming a catapult at the planet below. In other circumstances, it might have been funny.

The cartoon flicked out and Hiam’s face reappeared. “Sigrid says yes. Apparently she’s already monitoring it, just in case.”

Banner’s anger was mounting, but she kept her voice steady. “Please convey my gratitude and ask her to continue to do so. When our spy uses that frequency again, I want it recorded.” The code could come later. First, catch whoever it was. Then find out why. “Another thing. Tell her that finding the originating locus of this signal takes priority over its information content.”

“What if there isn’t a next time?”

“There will be,” Danner said grimly. That damn spy would want frequent reassurance from the powers above. She would need it. The muscles in her face felt tight.

“I wouldn’t like to be in her shoes when you catch her,” Hiam said dryly.

“No,” Danner said, and wished Sara was beside her, at Port Central, instead of up there.

After they said good‑bye, Danner sat very still, trying hard to grasp the slippery idea that someone in Company did not trust her. Her. Now she knew how Marghe must have felt to have her judgment questioned. Who was the person who smiled, and said, “Yes, ma’am,” and then went running behind her back? She wanted to tear out of her office and destroy something, anything; shout, line everyone up against a wall and force the truth out of the spy with the sheer power of her rage.

Wait until you’ve calmed down, she told herself. Do some work, then figure out what you’re going to do. She took a couple of deep breaths, turned on her screen of lists, and tried to concentrate. No good. She was just too angry.

She strode to the door, opened it. “Vincio? I’m leaving. Unless a situation occurs which Deputy Teng can’t handle, I’m unavailable for the next three hours.”

She wished the office had the kind of door she could slam on the way out.

She marched across the grass toward her mod, then abruptly changed direction. She would take the long way back, around the perimeter. Walk some of this off.

It was cool, getting toward winter. Her uniform began to heat up, getting hot around the small of her back first and making her sweat. She switched it off. This time she wanted to get warm on her own.

How had Marghe dealt with the challenge to her judgment?

The sky was gray, full of hard rain. The wind in her face felt damp and cold. She shivered, walked faster. It would be even colder up north, where Marghe might be stuck in a snowdrift, or sneezing miserably inside her tent. Or maybe she had already reached Ollfoss and was snugged up in a log cabin with a cheery fire and some smiling woman bringing her soup.

Some smiling woman bringing Marghe soup.

Danner reached the perimeter fence and stopped. It was the first time she had really, deep down, thought of the indigenous population of Jeep as women. Not aliens, or natives, or beings to be taken into consideration from a humanitarian point of view, but women like her, like Marghe, like Teng or Vincio or Letitia Dogias. Like us. Women who lit fires against the cold and made soup for their loved ones.

She remembered, long ago, her meeting with the journeywoman T’orre Na. The journeywoman had held out her hand. Look at this hand, she had said. And Danner had. This hand can birth children. This hand can make music. This hand could kill you. And Danner had been shamed into risking her career, shamed into taking the part of T’orre Na and the herders Jink and Oriyest against Company.

Against Company… Was it this that Company held against her now? One act of humanity?

And then she understood why it was only now that she was able to acknowledge the humanity of Jeep’s natives: because it was only now that she understood that Company, the ones with the power, held her, a Mirror commander, in as little regard as they held the inhabitants of this world. It was only now that she understood, for the first time, that despite her title, her uniform, and the two stars on her shoulder, she was as helpless as any native herder or farmer or sailor.

She touched her fingers to the slick ceramic‑sheathed chain‑link of the perimeter fence. It did not seem like four years since she had ordered it turned off to save power. Time seemed to be a very slippery commodity, like these links, greasy with moisture.

She stared out at the endless grass. Marghe was somewhere out there, Marghe and the vaccine. But do you want it to work? Dogias had asked. Did she? If the vaccine did not work, then this would be all she would have for the rest of her days. Grass and wind, and month after month of wearing her uniform, until it came to mean nothing, and no one listened to her anymore.

Her hands hurt. She loosened her grip on the fence. That would not happen. This was not one of those legendary lost outposts turning to dust, with tales of which new recruits frightened each other on lonely, predawn guard duty. She shook her hands at her sides until the white marks faded. If the vaccine did not work, then Company would close down the operation. She and her personnel would be transferred to some orbital hospital facility. There might be a few tests, yes, but after suitable decontamination and quarantine, and no doubt tedious debriefing, they would be sent home on well‑deserved furlough, then reassigned.

Would they? That was not what Sara Hiam thought, nor what Marghe seemed to believe.

Danner did not know what to think. Until an hour ago, she had believed that Company trusted her, that it looked after its own. But that was what Marghe had thought about SEC. And she had been wrong.

Clouds scudded overhead. She tipped her head up to watch. They looked like the giant sea skates she had seen easing past above her the time she had gone diving off the Great Barrier Reef.

A cold, fat raindrop splashed on her forehead at the hairline. Another hit her hand. On impulse, she lifted her wet knuckle to her mouth and sucked. The rain was sweet, unspoiled. She remembered a day when she was eleven, standing scrape‑kneed with her friends on a heap of used car tires, tasting polluted rain and trying to guess what the different chemicals were. Afterward, they took some home and tested it to see who had identified the most. There were far more than any of them had thought.

The rain was coming down steadily. If Sara Hiam was right, if Marghe was right, she might never see Earth again, might never get to taste rain eaten up and spat out, partially clean, by tailored bacteria. She walked slowly along the fence. The grass was getting high here, hard to walk through. She should order it cut. It could provide cover for hostiles.

Hostiles. Sometimes she felt like a bit player in one of those old, bad movies about the American West. Only, in this movie, some of her cavalry soldiers were spies, and the good ones left the fort, went into a reservation, and were never heard from again. Perhaps, as in the old movies, they died.

“Stop this,” she said out loud. Her voice sounded small and lonely against the hissing of the rain. She leaned her forehead against the chain‑link. Maybe she was lonely, maybe there were spies, but she was not small and she was not helpless. She would find these spies, and she would not let Company use her up and leave her for dead like a broken‑winded horse.

Except for the piles of printouts awaiting her attention, the neat chip racks, and the framed hardcopy of her promotion fixed to the wall above the computer, Danner’s mod was as bare as the day she had first come to Jeep. She stripped off her uniform and showered. Halfway through drying herself, she threw the towel on the floor next to the discarded and crumpled uniform.

She did not want anything next to her skin that reminded her of Company.

She sat naked in front of her screen. What was Company, really? A profit‑making organization. Whatever the situation, they would make their decisions based on the accounts. Very well.

She pulled up lists of plant and equipment, compared their costs to transportation costs; tried to figure in months of full pay for personnel who did nothing but sit around in decontamination, and added to that the cost of such a facility; weighed all that against Company’s control of public opinion through the media. The answer was clear.

If the vaccine did not work, Company would find it more expedient, more cost‑effective, to simply abandon her, her staff, and Port Central. No one would find out: Company controlled the media.

She wondered why she had never understood this before, then realized she had, deep down; just like Marghe, just like Sara Hiam, just like all those Jeep personnel, Mirror and civilian, who were busy decorating their mods, making their own clothes, and weaving beautiful tapestries. Adapting to the realities and necessities of their new home, as she had been: worrying over supplies of suture reels and hypodermic needles, pushing, always pushing to get more communication relays up. Yes, she had known all along.

A new thought struck her. She tapped at the keys for several minutes, then sighed in relief. No. It would cost too much to sterilize the planet as a precaution against the virus. All Company needed to do was destroy Estrade, and that was that, planet sealed. The only question was whether or not they would take off Sara Hiam and the rest of the orbital crew first. They were uncontaminated, but they knew too much. She set that problem aside for later.

Supposing the vaccine did not work, and Company really did abandon them all. How would they survive? How would they replenish their food, their clothes, their medicines? The microwave relay satellite would not remain in orbit forever; they would need to find new ways to heat and light their homes. They might even need to build new homes, closer to suitable agricultural sites. And what would they use to make plows, and barrels, and sacks and bottles and plates and shoes and beds and combs?

She stared at the screen, then blanked it. This was not something she could fix in a few hours. This was more, far more, than an exercise in resupply. Marghe was right. To survive here, they needed to be part of the cultural food chain.

First, she needed information on Company and its plans. Information. The only person likely to know more than she did was the spy–or spies. Find them first, proceed from there. After all, the vaccine might still work.

To catch a spy, or a rabbit, or a thief, one needed a trap. To set a trap, she would need assistance. Who could she trust?

The transmissions had been sent eight days ago, from here, Port Central. Eight days ago Letitia Dogias and Lu Wai had been at Holme Valley. They could not have sent them. They might still have had something to do with it, but she dismissed that; she had to trust somebody, sometime. The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. Dogias was a communications technician, so she would be able to think of ways to track the signal. Both she and Lu Wai often left Port Central for weeks at a time, so any necessary absence would not attract suspicion. Perfect.

She dressed rapidly, returned to the screen.

“Vincio?”

“Ma’am?”

“Please inform Sergeant Lu Wai and Technician Letitia Dogias to meet me here, my mod, in two hours.”

“Yes, ma’am. Are you available to take calls now?”

“Not for two hours. In an emergency, I’ll be at the fencing hall with Private Kahn.”

Ana Kahn was a championship fencer, good enough to give her a workout that should drain the last of the anger from her body. She could not afford anger. For what lay ahead, she needed a clear, focused mind.

Outside, the rain had stopped. Danner strode briskly, leaving bootprints in the wet grass.

Chapter Six

THE WINTER CAMP of the Echraidhe huddled under a fast‑moving winter sky: fifty or more tents surrounding three animal pens and a thin, ice‑rimed spring that ran fifteen yards before disappearing back into the ground beneath the snow. Blue‑gray smoke, sharp with the smell of animal dung, trickled from several of the low black tents. One of the tents was much larger than the others. As they rode closer, Marghe could see the roofs sagging with snow. Winding from tent to tent, to stream and corral, paths had been worn through the snow to the mossy grass beneath. In places there was no moss, and Pella’s hooves rang on the iron‑hard ground. A windswirl blew snow up off the ground into Marghe’s face.

Two of the pens were empty. A third held a handful of horses standing nose to tail at the far end near a trough that was beginning to scum over with ice. Their breath steamed. The wooden uprights and cross‑planks looked dark and old but were fixed together with rope–a temporary structure, like everything else.

Behind an outlying tent, two children played a game with polished bones. Their heads were bare, hair matted and tangled, and one had some kind of rash on her face. Vitamin deficiency, Marghe thought. The ragtag collection of furs, leather, and felt they wore hid their shape and made it difficult to judge their age. When they saw the riders, one hooted with glee, scrambled up, and trotted alongside the Levarch’s stirrup; the other paused to pick up the bits of bone with a chapped hand before running off into the center of the camp, calling out their arrival. People began pushing aside tent flaps, blinking up at the riders. Greetings screeched through the cold air like the cries of hungry birds. Marghe found the sharp vowels and harsh consonants difficult.

The riders slowed to a walk. Their horses were soon surrounded by old women with brown eyes, smiling through their wrinkles; women holding babies and touching passing saddle leather and fur‑clad thighs; girls calling up to the riders, grinning.

Many women pointed at her big horse, and children darted out of the crowd to touch her boots. After the silence of the plains, Marghe felt bewildered by the bright eyes and flashing red mouths. I am an anthropologist, she told herself, not a prize of war, and steadfastly returned their curiosity.

Every few feet, a rider reined in by a tent and was surrounded by a knot of family and friends who almost dragged her off her horse and inside. The further they went through the camp, the smaller their group became, until by the time they reached the big tent, the Levarch’s, Marghe, Aoife, Uaithne, and the Levarch herself were the only ones still mounted. Marghe followed Aoife’s lead and reined in Pella to let the Levarch and Uaithne approach the tent alone.

Six women–one very old, two adolescent–pushed through the flap to greet them. One of the young ones tied up the flap and the other took the reins from the Levarch and Uaithne when they dismounted. Marghe noticed that the girl smiled at the Levarch, but seemed afraid of Uaithne. That difference was mirrored in the greetings of the others: the old woman barely nodded at Uaithne, but her face split into splinters and cracks of welcome when she turned to the Levarch. Uaithne was not ignored, but Marghe could see how formally she was greeted. When she ducked inside the tent, none followed her. The Levarch was still outside, her arm around a woman her own age, grinning and clasping the outstretched hands of others. Marghe wondered why these women, especially the Levarch, shared a tent with someone they did not like.

Aoife sat her horse patiently. Marghe wondered how many times the tribeswoman had watched this ritual, and if anyone was waiting for her at her own tent.

Eventually the Levarch disentangled herself from her family.

Her boots crunched in the snow as she walked back to where they sat.

“Aoife, take the stranger woman to your yurti. I’ll argue you an extra taar from the herds to take the strain.”

Aoife bowed her head. “I will teach her, feed her, replace worn clothes.”

Marghe, alert to nuances, heard the ritual acceptance in the tribeswoman’s response. She had just been disposed of in some way, become Aoife’s responsibility.

“Levarch…”she began, but Aoife was already wheeling them both into a canter.

“Never address the Levarch unless she questions you.”

Marghe could not think of a suitable reply.

Aoife’s tent was set a little apart from the others and close by one of the empty pens. The tribeswoman gestured for her to dismount, then followed suit. No one pushed back the tent flap and smiled.

Aoife took off her gloves, began to unfasten the girths. She looked at Marghe. Marghe pulled off her own gloves, stuck them through her belt, and began to untie her pack. It looked like most of her teaching was going to be by mime show. When she lifted the pack free, Aoife nodded at the tent. “In the yurti,” she said.

Like the others, this tent was low, made of black felt supported by two wooden poles along its long axis. Two other poles, smaller, set side by side’about six feet apart, supported an awning with its own entrance‑flap; this was shoulder height, and laced closed.

Her hands were cold and the flap’s leather thongs were stiff with ice, and the fact that Aoife was watching made her feel clumsy and incapable, but Marghe managed to untie them. She pushed her head through uncertainly and found herself in a tented antechamber with one white wool wall of the inner tent before her and black felt on the other three sides. She had to stoop to get inside, and when the flap fell back into place it was dim. She could make out pots and sacks and other things stacked neatly along the walls. She wondered what they held; the air was acrid with some kind of chemical that made her nose run. There was nothing to wipe her nose on, so she sniffed. The felt and wool absorbed the sound and made the walls seem too close to her face for her to breathe. She dumped her pack down by the far wall and pushed back out into the hard cold.

Aoife had the saddle off her own horse and was loosening her pack. Marghe carefully rolled the flap up and tied it back out of the way with the thongs, as she had seen the young woman do at the Levarch’s tent. Aoife nodded curtly and turned her attention back to her horse.

Marghe was surprised and angry at Aoife’s lack of acknowledgment of her initiative. She jerked hard enough at Pella’s girth for the mare to whicker in protest. Why was she so eager for Aoife’s approval? Because she was scared; because she already understood that this was no longer an exercise in anthropology and that she was no longer studying in the field, she wasthe field; because now this woman controlled her life.

They took their mounts to the corral by wrapping fingers deep into the manes and tugging the animals in the right direction. Marghe’s arms were still shaking.

The corral was now almost full of horses standing patiently while children looked at their feet, felt their legs, and curried muddy snow from their coats. One group of girls sat on the fence and watched, calling out to one of the grooms now and again, and three or four very young children dashed about, getting in everyone’s way. One ran by Aoife and Marghe, shrieking, her nose plugged with thick green snot. The air was wreathed with the mist of talk and hard work.

A young woman, about fourteen, saw them coming in and clambered down from the fence to meet them. Aoife relinquished her horse without a word, but Marghe found it hard to let go of Pella.

“Look after her,” Marghe said to the thin‑faced girl. The girl frowned at her accent. “She feels the cold more than your horses.”

“She’ll be warm enough with all the others,” the girl said. She looked Pella up and down, mouth pursed. “Her coat’ll thicken up soon enough, and she looks a good size for foals. Bit old, though.” She wrapped the thin fingers of her right hand around a tuft of Pella’s mane, took a handful of the other horse’s mane in her left, and led them into the corral. There she released Pella with a slap on the rump and tended to Aoife’s mount first. Pella trotted into the herd as if she had never belonged anywhere else. The only way Marghe could pick her out at this distance was that the mare was a little longer in the leg, less shaggy in the coat. She wondered if she would be assimilated as easily into the Echraidhe.

Marghe expected the inside of the tent to be dark and oppressive. She was surprised. The light allowed in through the rolled‑up entrance flap, already filtered through cloud and reflected back from snow, was further thinned and clarified by the white wool. The result was light like skimmed milk seeping into dark spaces and wetting to a glisten the deep colors of the tapestries that hung on the interior walls. It was a large tent, perhaps sixteen feet long inside, and every wall was covered in weaving of bold, geometric designs. The effect was warm and rich, with twilight purples and hot reds layered like sunsets over thick golds and greens. To Marghe, it was like cutting open the gray exterior of a geode to discover the jeweled crystal inside. She wondered if Aoife’s seamless exterior concealed any such surprises.

Aoife started unfastening her overfurs. Marghe shivered and stepped further in. The floor was a mix of rough and smooth: coarse felt, worn cool and smooth in places, covered here and there with old furs. She stood on one of the furs, glad to get her feet warm, and looked about.