Hot Sleep: The Worthing Chronicle

11

HOOM SAT at the table, the tallow lamp casting a circle of light that included the paper and the pen. Except for the scratching of the point on the paper, the room was silent, until Hoom laid down the pen, sat up straight, and stretched, sighing softly.

He got up and walked to the window, which was barred. His fingers played along the bar, but he didn't lift it. He was confined to his room for a week, except for labor with his father on the farm. And Aven had gone so far, this time, as to insist that the window remain closed. Of course Aven would never know, this late at night, whether he was obeyed or not — but Hoom suspected that his father was so angry, this time, that he'd at least consider watching one night outside Hoom's room, just to see if he was obeyed.

Not worth a chance, Hoom decided. His back was still stiff from the last beating — the tenth in as many months. I will be fourteen next month, he reminded himself. Then I can move out of here and never see my father again.

Today his oldest brother, Grannit, at the age of thirty–two already a grandfather, had talked to him. "Why build a fire between father and yourself, so that neither of you can ever cross?" he had said, and Hoom had no answer. Except the silent one: "I'm not building the fire." He couldn't say that, though, because all the old people in Heaven City seemed to be on his father's side. They all distrusted Stipock, even though not a house in Heaven City lacked at least one of the tallow lamps Stipock had taught them to make. They all resented Wix, even though Jason himself had commended Wix for finding ways to travel on the water — even though Noyock (thank Jason for grandfather, Hoom thought) had ridden in the newest boat, which Stipock had helped Wix design. And they all had nothing but contempt for Hoom, who was "a disobedient child," as the phrase had so often been said. Hoom sat down and tried to write again. But the words were hard to come by. And would Jason even care to read what a thirteen–year–old boy had written? No, it was pointless. Noyock wouldn't change the law to set him free; Stipock hadn't the power; and Aven was determined that until the last moment that his authority lasted, Hoom would obey.

"I'll do all in my power to make him a decent man," Aven had said, loudly, when the cattlekeepers' council met tonight, "so that when he turns to rubbish next year, no man can say it was Aven's fault."

And while I rot this year, Hoom thought bitterly, no man says any fault to Aven, either.

A loud knock. Hoom got up, guiltily, as if his thoughts could be heard and he was going to be held to account. He turned the paper over, so the writing couldn't be read, and went to the door. No one was there. He wondered — who could be walking the halls tonight? And then the knock came again, louder, and Hoom realized that someone was knocking at the window. At a second–story window? No matter — someone was there, as a third knock testified. Hoom rushed to the window, opened it, and Wix tumbled into the room.

Surprise turned to dismay. Hoom quickly closed the window again, then rushed and closed the door. Returning to Wix, who was now lying on his back on the floor, flexing his arms, Hoom whispered, "What are you doing, coming here when I'm confined? Are you trying to get me killed?"

"You killed!" Wix whispered back, laughing silently. "And there I was hanging by my elbows, trying to butt my head against the window loud enough that you'd hear me! Were you asleep?"

Hoom shook his head. "I was writing. As Stipock said to do."

"Writing'll never do any damn good," Wix said.

"I think Stipock's right," Hoom said. "Why should the Wardens be the only ones to write the History? Then it's all written down the way they think it happened.

"Well, it's your grandfather," Wix said.

"Why did you come here? I've been beaten too much already!"

"I came because you'd've killed me if I hadn't. We finished the new boat today, and Stipock says we're to try it out tonight."

"Tonight? In the dark?"

"There's a moon. And Stipock says that the night wind is from the southwest and will help us fight the current. We're going to cross the river."

Hoom immediately began pulling trousers over his naked legs. "Cross the river, and doing it tonight!"

"Coming then?" Wix asked, laughing silently again.

"Think I'd miss it?"

"What about your father?" Wix's eyes taunted him.

"This one's worth another beating," Hoom said. "And maybe he won't know." Hoom opened the window and Wix climbed out, falling lightly on his feet in the soft earth below. Hoom paused a moment in the window, dreading another huge quarrel with his father, wondering if taking this jump was worth it. But the thought of taking the big boat out into the river — across the river — ended his inward debate, and he jumped, landing on all fours and rolling.

Wix scrambled back up the wall enough to close the window, so that discovery wouldn't be easy, while Hoom smoothed the dirt where they had landed. A few meters out from the house the dirt was covered by a thick mat of grass — no tracks there. And the dew was cold on their feet as they ran. A cow lowed as they sped through the pasture, almost three kilometers before they reached the forest's edge. There they rested, panting, out of breath, until their eyes got used to the denser darkness under the thick leaves. They followed a path known only to children's feet, a narrow winding that seemed deliberately to take the most dangerous descents, the steepest slopes, and it took almost a half hour for them to reach the edge of the river, in a little bay protected by a finger of rock that protruded into the river, blocking the current. There the boat lay rocking on the water; there a half–dozen shadowy people were busy at a half–dozen nameless, invisible tasks in the darkness.

"Who's that?" hissed a voice, and Wix answered, aloud, "Me, of course."

"Hurry, then, we're nearly done. Did you get Hoom?"

"I'm here," Hoom said, clambering down the slope after Wix. Closer, he could distinguish the features of the people there, and he immediately sought out Dilna, who smiled at him and let him help her with her task, which was folding and loading on the extra sail.

A few minutes later, Wix and Stipock pushed the boat out of the tiny cove and then were helped aboard as Hoom held the tiller. He had been tillerman on the last two boats, too, and as the boat hit the first currents (still not as strong as the main current a kilometer farther out — they had never tried to cross that before) he laughed with pleasure at how lightly and easily the boat responded to his touch.

Wix, in the meantime, with Dilna and Cirith, was putting up the sail, and the wind from the southwest caught it, pulling the boat forward, making it dance across the water.

There were four oars on the boat, just in case the sail didn't work, but Hoom laughed and said, "Won't be needing to row, now, will we?" and Wix laughed and said, "We could sleep our way across in this boat," and Stipock said, "Shut up and mind the tiller and the sail. The real current's still ahead."

When they reached the main stream, the bow of the boat yawed widely to the left, and for a moment there was a flurry of activity until the sail was turned to take the boat virtually into the current. Hoom plied the tiller vigorously, and kept the boat on course, and when they finally passed out of the main current and into the gentle eddies of the opposite side of the river, they gave a quiet cheer. Quiet, because Stipock had warned them that sound flew across water better than through forest.

Ahead loomed the highest hill of the opposite shore, and just to the west of it there was a beach. They unshipped the oars now, and pulled down the sail, rowing gently into the shore. This time everyone but Hoom jumped out of the boat into the water, pulling it ashore. Hoom got out then, patting the firm structure of the boat as he swung from the bow.

"Well," said Dilna, "it doesn't feel much different from the sand on the other side."

"What did you expect?" Stipock asked. "Gold?"

"What's gold?" Hoom asked, and Stipock shook his head and laughed. "Never mind. Let's climb that hill, and see how the world looks from this side of the water."

So they climbed up the hill, Wix pointedly taking the shorter, steeper way, and Hoom following him. At the top, they waited for the others to come. Stipock was smiling when he reached them, and as they stood together in the wind, he laughed and said, "It's not too many years off, my friends, when you'll be as glad as I am to find the path that's not so steep!"

"The hill's high enough," Hoom said, looking at how small their boat seemed down on the shore. The moon was full and high, and without trees around them, it seemed they could see forever.

"Well," said Stipock, after they had all had ample time to look around, "what do you see over there?" And he pointed toward the shore they had come from.

"I can see my house," Hoom said immediately, because his house crowned the bald hill of the Pasture. There were others near it, of course, but his grandfather's house, where he lived, was highest.

"There's a light in my father's house," Wix said, pointing to the many houses that skirted Linkeree's Bay, where Wix's father, Ross, still lived in the house that his father, Linkeree, had built.

"My family lives in the Main Town ," Dilna said. "I can't see it from here."

Stipock chuckled softly behind them. "And is that all you see?"

Cirith said, "What I mostly see is trees. The houses look pretty damn small when you compare them to the forest." Stipock patted her arm.

Hoom wondered what in the world he was supposed to see as he looked across the river. Sure enough, everything did look smaller from farther away, but everyone knew that. What did Stipock want them to see?

Wix finally kicked a rock off the hill and turned back to Stipock. "Quit the guessing game. You want to show us something, show us."

"Right," Hoom said. "All that we can see from here is forest and Heaven City ."

"And there's the answer," Stipock said, clapping Hoom on the back. "That's Heaven City . Over there, isn't it?"

"Where else would it be?" Cirith asked.

"Look down on this side. Is Heaven City here?"

No, of course not, they said.

"Well then. What if a man crossed the river with his wife, and they built a house here. Would that house be in Heaven City or not?"

And now they began to catch a glimmer of the idea. "It wouldn't have to be, would it?" Dilna said.

And Hoom added, "And if the people who lived here had the boats, they could pretty much decide who came and who didn't."

"They could even keep the damned Warden and his stupid laws on the other side," Wix said. "We could vote on everything, like you've been saying!"

But the excitement was dampened when Stipock said, "And could you keep Jason on the other side?"

They shrugged. They shuffled. They didn't know. After all, you never knew what Jason could do.

"Let me tell you, then," Stipock said. "You can't keep Jason away. Because Jason has machines that let him fly."

Fly! Hoom stared in wonderment at Stipock. The man was strange — for hours he would talk to them about how Jason was just a man, like any other; and then he would say things like this, or talk about Jason piloting a great ship between the stars. Who could know? Even Stipock himself couldn't seem to make up his mind as to whether Jason was God, as the old people said, or whether he was just a man.

"And not just Jason. Which of you owns a cow?"

None of them did.

"Or an ax? Or anything at all?"

"I have my tools," Wix said, but he was the oldest of those who followed Stipock, and few of the others had turned fourteen and reached adulthood.

"Are your tools enough to build a town?"

Wix shook his head.

"Then we're back where we started, aren't we? Because you can't be free from Heaven City until you don't need Heaven City anymore. But it's still worth thinking about, isn't it? Still worth, perhaps, planning for. Perhaps?"

"Perhaps," Hoom said, so solemnly that he earned several punches and jests from the others all the way down the hill. But as he sat at the tiller on the way back, he couldn't keep from looking back often at the shore they had left. Land as good as any at Heaven City . But perhaps there the young, who, like Hoom and Wix, cared little for the old people's single–minded attention to every word that dropped from Jason's mouth, might be able to set up another city, one that depended on the will of those governed, as Stipock had so often said, rather than the will of those governing.

Now as they crossed the river, the current was trickier. They had to steer into it again, though it took them far from the direction they wanted to go, because the wind was directly against them returning. Once they had crossed the main stream, though, they let the eddies carry them lazily back across Linkeree Bay , around the point, and into the shallow cove where they had built the boat.

They splashed to shore (except Hoom at the tiller) and tied the boat to three trees, and then they all laughed with each other and made funny remarks about having to go back to the old people again, and then they parted.

Because Dilna lived in the Main Town , she and Hoom had to go back in the same direction, which was perfectly all right with Hoom. He wanted to talk to her anyway, had wanted to ever since he had met her in the group that met to listen to Stipock months ago, while he was still talking about the stars and planets and billions of people on other worlds (as if anyone much cared what really existed in heaven). As they wound their way through the forest toward the Pasture, Hoom held her hand, and she only held the tighter when he tried to do the courteous thing, and let go as they reached level, open ground.

That was encouragement enough for Hoom. "Dilna," he whispered as they walked through the Pasture. "Dilna, in a month I'll be fourteen."

"And I'll be fourteen in two weeks," she said.

"I'm moving out of my father's house that day," Hoom said.

"I'd move, too," she answered, "if only I had a place to go."

Hoom swallowed. "I'll build you a house, if you'll come to live in it with me."

She tossed back her head and laughed softly. "Yes, I'll marry you, Hoom! What did you think I was hinting at so much all these months?"

And then they kissed each other, clumsily, but with enough fervor to make the experience all they had hoped it would be. "How long will I have to wait?" Dilna asked.

"I'll have it built before Jason's Day."

"Will he come back, do you think?"

"This year?" Hoom shook his head. "This year he won't come. Not with grandfather as Warden."

"I was hoping he would be able to marry us himself," Dilna said, and then they kissed again and she took off running, heading for Noyock's Road, which would take her down into the Main Town . Neither of them noticed the incongruity of wanting Jason himself to perform their marriage, even as they planned and worked to remove themselves from the city he governed. After all, Jason may not be God, as Stipock always told them. But that didn't mean he wasn't Jason. And everyone knew that Jason could read what was in people's hearts, and that made him more than anybody else. God or no God, Jason still wasn't, in any way, ordinary.

Hoom reached the house and quickly scrambled up the horizontal logs to his window. He pulled it easily ajar, and slipped through, barring the window behind him.

His tallow lamp was sputtering, but hadn't gone out. He doused it, and undressed in the darkness. The room was cold, and his blankets were colder still, He shivered and he slid his naked body under the wool — but he was tired enough, and he was quickly asleep.

He woke when his door crashed open violently and his father shouted, "Hoom!" The boy sat up in bed, holding his blankets around him as if they would offer some protection. "Father — I —"

"Father!" Aven said in a high voice, mocking him cruelly. "Father." And then he roared, "Don't you call me father, boy! Never again!"

"What is it? What have I done?"

"Oh, are we innocent this morning? Didn't I tell you not even to unbar the window? And certainly not to leave this room for a week! Do you remember why I told you that?"

"Because," Hoom said, "because I disobeyed you and went on the river —"

"And have you obeyed me when I told you to stay here as punishment?"

Hoom knew then that the beating was coming. He had long since learned that when he was caught, it was better not to lie. The beating was easier then, and the shouting was over sooner.

"I have not obeyed you," Hoom said.

"Come to the window, boy," Aven said, his voice lower and so all the more frightening. Hoom climbed uncertainly out of bed. The early autumn air was chilly, and when his father unbarred the window and flung it open, it became freezing cold on Hoom's naked and sleep–slowed body. "Look out the window!" Aven commanded, and Hoom became really afraid — he had never seen his father so furious.

Down at the foot of the wall of the house, the dirt showed clearly Hoom's footprints leading from the grass to the wall. In two hours, they would not have showed — but the slantwise morning sun made the prints black on the dark brown soil.

"Where did you go?" Aven asked, softly, menacingly.

"I went — I went —" and Hoom saw some of his brothers and uncles and cousins, passing by with tools for mending fences. They had stopped. They were staring at the window. Had they heard Aven's shouting?

"You went to the river?" Aven prompted. Hoom nodded, and Aven roared again. "This is how I'm obeyed! You're not my son! You're an untrainable animal I've been cursed with! I won't have you in my house anymore! You won't live here anymore!"

Hoom could see some of his cousins, and he thought he could see them pointing, laughing, mocking. He whirled on his father and shouted back, as loudly as he could, though his young voice cracked twice, "That's no punishment at all, you old hog! I've been wishing for the day that I could get out of here, and you've set me free all the sooner!" With that, Hoom started for the chair where his clothes were piled. But his father caught his arm in a tight, savage grip, and pulled him back.

"Want your clothes, is it? Well, none of that. My sweat earned those clothes for you, and your mother's."

"I've worked too," Hoom said, defiant but terribly afraid as his father's fingers dug viciously into his arm.

"You've worked too!" Aven shouted, "You've worked! Well, you've been paid for it. You've eaten my food and slept in my house! But I swear when you leave me you'll leave as naked as you came! Now get out, and never come back!"

"Then let go of me, so I can," said Hoom, sick with embarrassment at the thought of having to go out naked in front of everyone, wondering where he would go.

"I'll let go of you," Aven said, "but you won't use the door, boy. You'll go out the way you snuck out last night, hoping to deceive your father! You'll dance out that window, boy." And Aven flung him toward the open window again.

Hoom stood at the window, looking at the ground below him. It suddenly looked farther than it had last night, and his cousins had come closer, were no more than twenty meters off now, could hear every word, would watch him jump, naked, with nothing to cover his shame.

"I said jump!" Aven said, "Now climb up on the sill and jump!"

Hoom climbed on the sill, trying to cover himself with his hand, his mind an agony of humiliation and indecision and hatred.

"Jump, dammit!" Aven bellowed.

"I can't," Hoom whispered. "Please!"

"You could damn well jump last night!" his father shouted; and just at that moment Hoom heard his grandfather's voice, from back by the door, saying, "Aven, be careful with the boy," and Hoom turned to call out to his grandfather, to cry for help, for relief from the intolerable. But at the moment he turned, Aven finished the gesture he had begun, and struck Hoom hard. If Hoom hadn't been turning, it would have struck him on the back and stung bitterly; instead it struck him in the ribs, crushingly, and because he was off balance Hoom teetered for a moment on the sill and then fell from the window.

He wasn't prepared for the fall. He landed with his right leg only, and the knee popped somehow, and with an agonizing grinding the leg buckled under him. He lay there, terribly, acutely, sharply conscious, though the only reality was the vast pain that pressed on him and shortened his breath and threatened to suffocate him utterly. He heard a distant scream. It was his mother. She ran to him, screamed again, crying, "Hoom, my boy, my son," and then in the distance (far up in the sky) he heard his father's voice call out, "Stay away from him, woman!"

"My name is Esten, man!" shouted his mother in fury. "Don't you see the boy's leg is broken?"

Broken? Hoom looked down and nearly vomited. His right leg was bent backward at a ninety degree angle at the knee. Only a little below the knee, a new joint, from which a strange white and bloody bone protruded, bent his leg back again the other way.

"Jason!" he heard his father cry out, as if the call would bring God from his tower. "What have I done to the boy?" And then the pain subsided for a second, Hoom gasped his breath, and the pain washed back, twice as powerfully as before. The wave of agony swept him away; everything went bright purple; the world disappeared.

Hoom woke to hear a knocking at a door. He was immediately conscious of being hot; sweat dripped from him, and the wool of the blankets over him prickled in the heat. He tried to push the blankets off, but the movement was pain, and he moaned.

Someone had come in, and he heard, in the distance (a couple of meters away), an argument.

"You'll stay away from my boy, damn you," said Aven's voice.

"I can heal his leg, Aven," said another voice, "and you have no right to stop me."

"Jason knows you've done enough!" Aven said, his voice rising.

"And you've done more than enough!" came back the savage retort. "At least let someone who really loves the boy care for him now!"

Hoom recognized the other voice. It was Stipock. But now Grandfather Noyock's voice came, soothing, gentling. "Aven, the law is the law. And if a man injures his child, the child is no longer in his care."

A moan, a cry. "I didn't mean to hurt him!" Aven said, his voice twisted and bent with weeping. Father weeping! The thought was incomprehensible to Hoom. "You know I didn't mean to hurt him, father!"

But Noyock said nothing to him, only told Stipock to go ahead.

Hoom felt the blanket come off him. The cold air was biting. Gentle hands touched his leg — fire ran up his spine.

"This is terrible, terrible," Stipock said softly.

"Can you heal him?" Noyock asked. "We've never had an injury this bad, at least not one that left the poor fellow alive."

"I'll need help."

Aven spoke up from the corner. "I'll help you."

"No!" Hoom hissed from his pain–clenched teeth. "Don't let him touch me."

Hoom couldn't see Aven turn away, or Esten put her arm around her husband to comfort his remorse. All he could see behind his closed eyes was the hatred on his father's face.

"You help me then, Noyock. Is that all right, Hoom?"

Hoom nodded, or tried to. Apparently Stipock understood his assent, for he began giving instructions. "You'll have to hold the boy by the armpits, from above. And don't try to spare him any pain. Gentleness won't help him now."

"What's happening to me? What are you doing?"

"Trust me now," Stipock said. "This is going to hurt like hell, Hoom, but it's the only way we can fix it so you'll ever walk again."

And then a hand gripped him at the ankle, which made Hoom moan, and another hand gripped him just below the break, high on his shin, which made him cry out in pain.

"Don't hurt him —" began his mother, and then silence, as Stipock said, "Now pull with all your strength, Noyock," and Hoom felt as if he were being pulled apart. The pain rose and rose and rose, until, suddenly, Hoom could feel no more pain, except that he knew he was virtually dead with it. Above the pain he floated, and felt the dispassionate movement of his body as Stipock pushed the fragment of shin back into place, where it fit again with a terrible snap (I don't feel it; it isn't me); as Stipock slid the kneecap back into position, forced the joint to fit again; as the leg, already used to the torture of the bones out of place, now began to feel the worse torture of the bones back together.

"Is that it?" he heard Noyock ask, from a great distance.

"We need wood and cloth strips," Stipock said. "Straight firm wood, no twigs or branches or green wood."

"I'll get it," Aven said, and "I'll get the cloth," said Esten, Hoom's mother. And then, at last, Hoom fell back down into the sea of pain and drowned in it, drifted down to the bottom, and slept.

He woke again, and it was dark. A tallow lamp sputtered by the bed. His head ached, and his broken leg throbbed dully; but the pain was much better, much eased, much gone, and he could leave his eyes open.

The room focused, and he saw Stipock sitting by his bed. "Hi," he said, and Stipock smiled. "How do you feel?" Stipock asked softly.

"The pain's not as bad."

"Good. We've done all we can do. Now it's up to your leg to heal."

Hoom smiled wanly.

Stipock turned toward somewhere else — a door, Hoom assumed — and said, "He's awake now. You can call the others." Then he turned back to Hoom and said, "I know you don't feel well, but some decisions have to be made, that only you can make."

Footsteps coming into the room, and one by one they came into Hoom's range of vision. First Noyock, looking grave. Then Esten, her eyes red from crying. And then Aven.

Seeing his father, Hoom turned his head upward, to the ceiling.

"Hoom," said Noyock,

"Yes," Hoom answered, his voice soft and husky.

"Stipock wants to take care of you," Noyock said. "He wants to take you out of your father's home, if you want to, and take care of you until you can walk again."

Hoom tried to control them, but the tears dripped out of the corners of his eyes anyway.

"But, Hoom, your father also wants to take care of you."

"No," Hoom said.

"Your father wants to say something to you."

"No."

"Please," said Aven. "Please listen to me, son."

"I'm not your son," Hoom said softly. "You told me so."

"I'm sorry for that. You know how it was. I went crazy for a minute."

"I want to go with Stipock," Hoom said.

Silence for a few moments, and then Aven bitterly spat out his feelings about Stipock, who came to steal children away from their parents. "I won't let you take the boy!" Aven said, and might have said more except that Noyock's voice, harsh with anger, cut through.

"Yes, you will, Aven!"

"Father!" Aven cried out, anguished.

"The law says that after a father has injured his child, the child must be taken by another family, for its own protection."

"Stipock isn't a family," Aven said.

"I will be," Stipock said, "when your son is living with me."

"It only makes sense, Aven," Noyock said. "Stipock can help the boy now — you can't."

"I can help him," Aven insisted.

"By pushing him out of windows?" Stipock quietly asked.

"Shut up, Stipock," Noyock answered mildly. "I'll ask Hoom one more time, and then that's it, and there'll be no complaint, no more discussion, and no resistance, or I swear I'll have you bound up and kept in a locked room until Jason comes again. Now, Hoom, will you stay with Stipock, or with your father?"

Hoom half–smiled. He felt a glow of satisfaction: the broken leg would be worth it, for the chance to make this choice. "Stipock is my father," Hoom said. And Aven's low moan of pain was some measure of repayment, Hoom felt, for the pain he had gone through. With that thought he closed his eyes and dozed.

But he became vaguely alert again a few minutes later. It seemed that Noyock and Stipock were alone in the room, and they were arguing.

"You see the harm it caused," Stipock said.

"The law didn't give you any power to take this boy out of his father's home until his father nearly killed him."

"The law is the law," Noyock said, "and only Jason can change it."

"That's the point!" Stipock insisted. "The law needs to be changed. If Jason were here, he'd change it, wouldn't he?"

"Maybe," Noyock said.

"Then why can't we? Not just you and me, but all the people. Vote. Let the majority change the law."

Noyock sighed. "It's what you've wanted all along, Stipock. To let the majority of people in Heaven City change any one of Jason's laws they want."

"Just this law," Stipock said. "Just the law that lets fathers beat their children."

"Just this law? I'm not a fool, Stipock, though you seem to feel that everyone in Heaven City is stupider than a newborn pig. Once we've changed one law that way, there'll be other laws to change, and people will begin to think all the laws are changeable."

"Aren't they?" Stipock asked. "Why don't you just ask them? On Jason's Day, when they gather at First field, call a council, ask them to vote on whether voting should be allowed. See what they decide."

"I said, Stipock, that I'm not a fool. If I let them vote on anything, that becomes a lawful way for decisions to be made."

"So you aren't going to change the law?"

"Just let me think, Stipock."

"Let you? I'm begging you to. Do you really think the majority of people in this colony will decide stupidly? Don't you trust them?"

"I trust them, Stipock. It's you I don't trust." And Noyock left the room, his footfalls ringing in Hoom's ears.

"Stipock," Hoom whispered.

"Hmmm? Are you awake? Did we wake you?"

"That's all right." Hoom found it hard to use his voice. It was hoarse. Had he cried out that much from the pain? He didn't remember shouting at all — but his voice was as hoarse as if he had been yelling all day in the fields. "Stipock, what's a colony?"

"What? Oh, yes, I did use the word — it's still hard, even after all these months —"

"What is a colony?"

"It's a place where — it's when some people leave their homes behind, and go to a new place, and start to live there, far away from the others. Heaven City's a colony, because the — uh, the Ice People — they left the Empire and came across the space between the stars and lived here."

Hoom nodded. He had heard that story before — Stipock's miracle stories, they all called them behind his back. Wix didn't believe them, and Hoom wasn't sure.

"When we live across the river, we'll be a colony, then, won't we?"

"Yes, I guess so."

"Stipock."

"Yes."

"Move me across the river."

Stipock chuckled. "When you can walk again."

"No. Move me now."

"Your leg is bound up. You can't walk for months, Hoom."

"Then get my friends to carry me. Take me out of Heaven City . I want to get out of Heaven City . Even if I have to live in the open, in a tent. Get me out. Get me out." And Hoom's voice drifted away as he slept again.

Stipock sat studying the boy's quiet, gentle, but pain–scarred face. The lips were turned permanently downward; the forehead, even in sleep, was furrowed; the eyes were bagged with exhaustion, not crinkled with laughter as they should have been.

"All right," Stipock whispered. "Yes, now. That's a good idea, Hoom. Very good idea."

Two days later, two horses drew the cart that carried Hoom jokingly down Noyock's Road to Linkeree's Bay. Then, with a crowd of several hundred people gathered around, they carried Hoom on a plank out to the boat, which was waiting a few meters from shore. And the boat, this time in broad daylight, spread its white wings and danced skimmingly out of the bay into the current. Hoom laughed with pleasure — at his freedom, at the movement of the boat on the water, at his friends' proof of their true friendship. Dilna was at the tiller, and she smiled at him. Wix poked him now and then with his toe as he passed, working the sails, just to let him know he was noticed. And then they reached the other shore, and they set him down by a tree to watch as they cleared a patch of ground and laid the walls of a rough cabin. The floor was of planks, which had been cut the day before, and the door and windows were gaping holes. The roof couldn't be put on before dark, but they all promised they'd be back in the morning, and then carried Hoom inside. He looked around at the walls of his house.

"Well," asked Wix, "how is it?"

"Ugly as hell," Hoom said. "I love every inch of it." And then, before he could thank them and cry, they whooped and hollered their way out of the house and back to the boat.

It was getting dark, but there were plenty of blankets over him, and the stars were shining. Breakfast was in a bag on the floor beside him, and Hoom listened to the distant sounds of the boat being launched again.

As the sound grew softer, he listened to the breeze in the branches above him. Leaves were drifting lazily down; soon all the leaves would have turned colors and dropped, and the snow would come. Hoom felt a stab of loneliness — but he quickly forgot it in the satisfaction of being out of Heaven City . A leaf landed on his face, and he waited a moment before he brushed it away. Was this what it was like for Linkeree, in the old story, when he left Heaven City and built his own home in the forest? This feeling of not being one of a city, but of being an intruder among the trees?

He heard footsteps in the grass and leaves outside his door. He froze, afraid of who it might be.

The ship was gone — had someone stayed behind? And why?

Dilna stood in the doorway.

"Dilna," Hoom said, sighing in relief.

"Hi," she said.

"I thought you went back with the others."

"I decided not to," she said. "Comfortable?"

Hoom nodded. "It's a good house."

"You promised me I could move in when the house was done," Dilna said.

Hoom laughed. "As soon as you want to," he said.

"Noyock promised me that he'd cross the river and marry us tomorrow. If you want to."

"I want to."

"Can I come in?"

"Of course, come in. I didn't know you were waiting for an invitation."

Dilna came in, her face lit only by starlight, and knelt beside him. "Do you always sleep with your clothes on?" she asked.

"No," he said, laughing at the idea. "But with a lumberyard tied around my leg, I've found it a little hard to get around."

"I'll help you," she said, and Hoom was surprised that he felt no embarrassment as she gently, carefully undressed him, moving his leg without hurting him, touching him so casually he felt no shame. Then she turned her back and undressed, also. "I didn't bring any more blankets. Any room to spare under yours?" she asked.

"I can't — I can't do anything," he said. "My leg — I can't —"

"Nobody expects you to," she said, touching his forehead softly. "There's plenty of time for that." She lay down beside him and pulled the blankets up to cover them both. Then she snuggled close to him. Her body was cold with the chilliness outside the blankets. She put her arm across his chest, stroked his cheek. "Do you mind?" she asked.

"No," he said.

"Better get used to it," she said. "Because I plan to sleep here for a good long time."