Vacumn Flowers

12

THE BURREN

There were vacuum flowers on the outside of the Pequod, only a few, sprouting from the jointed strutwork of the gables, but enough to tell from the shape of the petals that these were a variant strain, already indigenous to cislunar orbit. Rebel noted them on the way in, mildly wondering why Bors had put off his basic maintenance for so long.

The ship recognized her, and the lock opened to her touch.

A few hours later Bors returned, just as Rebel had finished brewing tea. The pot floated in the center of the parlor. “Well!” Bors said in a pleased tone. He doffed his suit, donned his cloak, and pulled up a pair of leg rings.

“How very pleasant of you to drop by to see me off.”

“How very pleasant of you to say so.” She drew off a syringe of tea and gently floated it to him. “I’ve prepared a snack.” She opened a tray of scalloped cakelets that were shaped rather like her silver brooch, and he unclipped two. Rebel smiled, sipped her tea, waited.

After a polite pause, Bors said, “So. How goes the search for your friend, Wyeth?”

“Ah! Now that’s a very interesting question.” Rebel leaned forward in her chair. “I was questioning a jackboot earlier today—I had her lashed down and opened up, you understand, so there was no question of her lying—and she gave me a valuable lead.”

“Indeed,” Bors said. “A jackboot, you say?” He took another bite of his pastry. “That’s, ah, a somewhat dangerous proposition, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. She had this really baroque plot-and-counterplot kind of story about dropping down surfaceward as an observer to… well, no reason to bore you with it. She said she’d seen Wyeth.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yeah. She told me she’d seen him with you.”

After a very long silence, during which neither looked away from the other, Bors took a squirt of tea and said,

“She was mistaken, of course.”

“Of course.” Rebel stood. Her natural impulse was to seize the man and try to strangle the truth out of him. But she smiled instead. Eucrasia would never have done anything so bold, and in a situation like this, Eucrasia’s approach had its points. Her chances of overpowering Bors on his home turf were slight. He was, however polished, a professional ruffian. “I’ll just get my suit and leave, then. Sorry to have caused you the trouble. Bon voyage, eh, sport?” She floated to the lock, Bors watching her warily. “Oh. You could do me one little favor?” Bors raised his eyebrows. “Just say for me, ‘Please open the collecting drawers.’ ”

“Please open the collecting drawers?” Bors repeated puzzledly.

Throughout the room, cabinets opened smoothly. One by one the drawers slid out. They were all empty. “Good lord,” Bors gasped. “What have you done with all my watercolors? My prints?”

“I burned them.”

Bors was out of his seat, running furious hands through the empty drawers and slamming them shut, in search of an overlooked drawing, a crumpled print stuck in a corner, anything. “You didn’t!” he wailed in despair.

“Well, no,” Rebel said calmly. “Actually, I didn’t.”

He looked at her.

“You remember the two crates I had? I emptied them out and filled one with your watercolors and the other with your prints. I had to pith your ship’s security system before it would let me at them, but it’s surprising the tools you can buy when you have the right connections—andyour little jackboot had good connections, I can assure you.” She was talking too fast, too angrily. She wanted so badly to hurt Bors that his pain only increased that hunger. Eucrasia would have said that she was cycling out of control. Taking a deep breath, she floated back to her chair and sat. Then, more calmly, “The crates are both safe, and you’ll never find them unless I tell you where.

You can have one back right now, no strings attached. The other will cost you.”

Slowly, Bors took his own chair. “I won’t betray my nation,” he said flatly. “Not if you piled up every work of art in the System and held a flame to the heap.”

“Well, bully for you mate! But I’m not asking for any such thing. Just give me Wyeth. I’ll give you your choice of crates now, and tell you where the other is as soon as I’ve had the chance to talk with Wyeth face to face. What do you say?”

“The watercolors,” Bors said bleakly. “Where are they?”

The city had no name that anybody remembered. It had been cracked and abandoned over a century before, and its exterior was overgrown with flowers. Now a small hopper flew through the gap where an axial window had been and into the airless interior. Black buildings reached up to grab at them as they floated down. It was a tricky bit of navigation because the city was still rotating, and the ravaged buildings shifted as they approached. “There,”

Bors said. At street level, yellow light shone from a lone pressurized window. With a swooping twist that folded Rebel’s stomach over on itself, Bors matched velocities with the street and brought the hopper down.

The old woman who cycled them through the lock looked displeased to see Rebel. “This one’s no jackboot,” she grumbled. It was the drop artist Rebel had seen with Bors in Geesinkfor. The room was crammed with vintage technology—robot probes, shoulderjets, fist-sized assassinsatellites.

“There’s been a slight change of plans.”

“Heh.” She leered over a protruding knob of a chin.

“Changes will run you extra. There’s a good borealis brewing up now, and I can’t say when the next one’s due.

Don’t like to drop people without some electromagnetic confusion in the atmosphere. Helps to hide them from the Comprise.”

“You are an avaricious old pirate,” Bors said, “and I’ll not be blackmailed by the likes of you. This young lady is taking the jackboot’s place, and the drop will go off on schedule, as planned, and for the amount agreed upon, or we can just call the whole thing off.”

The old woman quailed before his anger. “Oh,” she said.

“Well, then.”

It was an expensive drop, and an unobtrusive one. As it was explained to Rebel, eight shaped coldpack units were to be frozen in the center of snowy flurries of ablative materials and then towed to the center of a natural fall of meteors. They would be swept up by the advancing Earth and fall into the dawn, burning bright on the way down, fleeting scratches in the pale morning sky.

Deep in the atmosphere, the last of the ablatives would burn away, to reveal coldpacks that had been crafted as lifting bodies. Simple cybersystems would loft them then, killing speed and flying them toward the rendezvous point.

Their steep evasive glides would end in spectacular gouts of white surf as they slammed into the North Atlantic.

Slowly, then, they would begin to sink in the cold salt water.

Before they could hit bottom, fleet dark forms would converge upon them. These were sea mammals, descendants of seals, that had been hotwired for such tasks with bootleg mutagens and bioprogramming.

Slipping their heads through pop-out grab loops, they would haul the coffins toward land. It was a slow and complicated means of travel but one that, in theory at least, the Comprise could not track.

There would be people waiting on the shingled beach.

Rebel opened her eyes. She was in a beehive-shaped room, Greenwich normal. Unmortared stone walls with an array of pinprick lights wedged into the chinks. The air was a trifle chill. Rebel looked up at a woman in a hooded red robe. “I’m on Earth,” she said.

“Yes.” The woman had a fanatically starved face with sharp cheekbones and no eyebrows. But her voice was soft and she kept her head bowed. “In a place called the Burren. This complex of buildings is Retreat. It’s a place of God.” She gestured toward a sheila-na-gig by the door, a cartoon in stone of a grotesque, moon-faced woman holding herself open with both hands. Rebel sat up. “Your gear is laid out before you. The earth suit is worn under your cloak—the Burren is a much harsher environment than you’re used to. This devotee is named Ommed. If you desire anything, it is your slave.” She ducked out of the room.

Rebel shook her head and began dressing. The earth suit consisted of chameleoncloth pants and blouse with multiple fastenings that weren’t easy to figure out. She felt horribly covered up with them on, though they were no worse, she had to admit, than what she’d worn as a treehanger. She donned her cloak and gravity boots, and lifted the library case. That was part of the deal she’d cut with Bors, that she’d serve as the combat team’s librarian.

Then she stooped out the door.

Rebel straightened and saw vast stretches of grey rock under a milky sky. The land went on forever, dwindling impossibly with distance as it rose to a line of mountains as barren as the moon. It was all exposed bedrock,runneled with weathered depressions from which poked tufts of brown grass. Low stone walls ran like veins over the land; they could have been a thousand years old or built yesterday. There was no way of knowing. The few devotees at work nearby were insignificant specks. She had always heard that Earth was green, but this land was desolate and godforsaken, almost a parody of barrenness.

The wind boomed, and she staggered forward. It was as if someone had placed a hand on her back and pushed.

Her hair and cloak streamed out in front of her and, visions of hull punctures and explosive decompression rising within, Rebel cried out in sudden terror, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

Ommed was there and slipped an arm around her waist to hold her steady. “Nothing is wrong. It’s just the wind coming off the sea.”

“Oh,” Rebel said weakly, though the explanation meant nothing to her. She turned to look behind and saw the land cascading down to a slate green ocean specked with white-tipped waves. Clouds curdled with grey rushed upon her from a vague horizon, so fast she could see them move, melting one into another as they came. “My… God, this is… it’s huge!” She felt vertiginous and almost fell.

Everywhere, the air was aprowl, a vast, restless giant with the clouds in its grip, larger than mountains. It was all too huge. “How can you stand it?”

“We are here to abase ourselves,” Ommed said, “and we welcome the humbling immensities of God for that reason.

But you will discover yourself that what at first appears terrifying can become, as you grow to know it, exhilarating.”

Almost breathless with disbelief, Rebel stared across rock and ocean, letting their immensity wash through her.

There was so much of everything here that her head almost ached with it, but… yes, Ommed was right. It was awful, but at the same time rather grand, like the firsthearing of a symphony in a new musical form that is so magnificent it terrifies.

“Your friends are meeting around the far side of Retreat.

Perhaps it is time that you join them.”

“Yes.”

Retreat was a sprawl of stone beehive huts, of varying sizes, built one upon the other in a curving swirl up the slope. It was all of the same grey bedrock that everywhere dominated the land, and the far reaches of the mass faded to near invisibility, like a skirl of smoke against the ground. It was the only artificial structure in sight. From horizon to horizon was no trace of anything that might not have existed there millennia ago. “How do you hide all this from the Comprise?” Rebel asked.

“We call the great mind Earth,” Ommed corrected her gently. “Earth knows us well. We are here at its tolerance.

It observes us. We don’t know why. Perhaps Earth considers us beasts for its study. Perhaps it maintains the Burren as a kind of wildlife preserve. The question is not an important one.”

“It observes you?” Rebel looked around, saw no sign of cameras. Of course Earth might have more subtle devices, extremely small or distant.

“Every seven years Earth takes a tenth of our number to be absorbed into the great mind.”

“And this doesn’t bother you?”

They walked around the upper curve of Retreat. In the smokehouses there, devotees were preparing racks of fish and slices of monoclonal protein from the fermenters.

“We are here to learn the discipline of submission.

Submission to the will of God takes many forms. We practice all of them.” She looked up, and Rebel flinched back from the intensity of her gaze, the knowing intimacy of her smile. “This is the hut. Your people are within.”

“Yeah. Well, it was great of you to show me the way.”

“You do not yet understand the pleasure there can be in the surrender of will.” Ommed touched the nape of Rebel’s neck with a fingertip cold as ice. Rebel’s body involuntarily stiffened, shivering. “If you wish to learn, ask any of the devotees. We are all your slaves.”

“Jesus.” Rebel ducked into the hut.

It was unlit, and at first she thought it was empty. Then somebody moved, and somebody else coughed, and she realized there were seven people crouched against the walls, all in chameleoncloth; and they were all looking at her. Their faces floated in the gloom, and the eyes in them were cruel and alert. They’d all been chopped wolverine.

“This is your librarian,” somebody said. “Protect her.

She carries your survival skills. And if she dies, one of you will have to be programmed down to take her place.”

There was a low growling noise that might have been laughter.

“You have your orders,” the voice continued. “Go!” The wolverines flowed out, sliding by Rebel on either side in perfect silence. Their leader stood, and the silver spheres at the ends of his braids clicked gently. Rebel was pretty sure this was Bors, but with that feral programming burning on his face, she couldn’t be sure. “Librarian, you will stay.”

She sat. The leader leaned closer, face dominated by a mad, joyless smile. She could smell his breath, faintly sweet, as he said, “Get your skills in.”

Rebel snapped open the library, ran a fingertip down its rainbow-coded array of wafers. Deftly she wired herself to the programmer and set the red user wafers running.

There were three: basic research skills, rock running skills, and an earth surface survival package combined with a map of the Burren. Whiteness buzzed and swirled at the base of her skull as the device mapped her short-term memory structure. Then the air about her shivered as the programs raised their arms and beganassembling themselves into airy circuits and citadels of knowledge. Their logics reached through the walls toward infinity, and Rebel was lost in an invisible maze of facts.

Three wafers were the limit; more than that couldn’t be assimilated without losing half the data. She could feel her location in the Burren now, halfway up the western slopes of the enormous limestone formation. That was the map function. She knew its hills and mountains, down to the networks of caves beneath its surface. She knew which skills could be chipped into a berserker program and which could not. (“Librarian!”) She knew how to shift her weight when a rock turned underfoot just as she landed on it. She knew the Burren’s plants and insects, which were good to eat and which were not. She knew where to find water. (“Librarian!”) She knew which three skills an ecosaboteur needed most. The facts shimmered through and about her, leaving her feeling stunned, cold, distant.

Someone slapped her. It stung. Startled, she focused on the leader and saw the calm, happy afterglow of violence settle on his face and under it—yes, it was Bors, all right.

“Librarian!” he repeated. “Are your programs run yet?”

“Uh… yeah,” she said shakily. She knew how to run now. Her legs trembled with the desire to be off and away.

She heard an ugly bird-sound just outside. A rook.

“Librarian, you are not part of our team, but we will still be relying on your programming. So you’ve got to be tested. I want you to run to the Portal Dolmen. If you get there by sunset, I’ll know your skills have taken hold.”

She knew what sunset was. She knew what the Portal Dolmen was. “But that’s twelve miles away!”

“Then you’d better get started, hadn’t you?”

She ran. It was amazing the kind of speed you could make when you knew what you were doing. Rebel was following what had been a road once but had now largely melted into the rock. The broken roadbed made betterrunning, though, for the bedrock tended to fracture in long slabs that would occasionally snap underfoot, and then only her uncanny reflexes kept her from twisting an ankle. Also, off the road the low stone walls were everywhere, curving twistily over bare rock and even looping over the largest boulders. Impossible as it seemed, people must have lived here long ago and found some use for the land worth their marking off parcels of it as their own.

The road twisted and steepened, and she adjusted her heartbeat in compensation. It felt like the rock was spinning underfoot, and herself perfectly motionless. She ran with her cloak’s chameleoncloth liner inward, and from a distance must’ve looked like an immense bat flapping crippled along the ground. The patch of cloud that could not be looked at directly was lower than it had been. That meant it was growing late. Now and then she slowed to a walk, and twice she rested. But running was best, for it kept her from thinking.

A dark circle appeared on the rock before her, as sudden and unexpected as a meteor strike. Then it was gone behind her, but another appeared, and then another.

They came in clusters, and then the first drop of water struck her face, and it was raining.

She knew all about rain—it was on the earth skills wafer—but knowing was not experience. The drops came down like pebbles, smashing against her head and forming rivulets that ran into her eyes, blinding her.

Worse, the wind drove the rain in sudden gusts that slammed into her and left her gasping for air. She couldn’t run now, but strode forward with cloak wrapped tight and hood up. When she looked up, she couldn’t see mountains or sea at all. They had vanished in greyness.

The road crested, and she pushed forward. Not far from the top of the ridge was a wedge-shaped gallery grave—she sensed it on the map. It was half hidden by a patch of gorse, but she found it anyway, four flat uprights forminga kind of box, with a fifth stone as lid. The cairn of stones that had covered it and the bones it had sheltered were gone long ago, and there was enough of a gap where it had been broken into for her to climb within. She huddled there, out of the rain, clutching knees to chin.

The cloak was wool and, even wet, kept her warm. What was bad was not the gloom or the rattling thunder of rain on stone (the wafer hadn’t included the knowledge that rain made noise), but the solitude that left her time to think of Wyeth.

She had known, the instant that she opened her eyes and saw a strange woman in red, that Wyeth was not at Retreat. He’d’ve been there to greet her. She had known that there was going to be no good news of him, and she had wanted to put off the learning of the bad for as long as possible. She’d refused to recognize the dark premonition that was growing within her.

Now, though, she could not help but think about it.

It was a long time before the rain slowed, then stopped, and she could climb from the wedge of rocks. She went back to the road, started walking again. Then running.

It rained three more times before she reached the Portal Dolmen.

Day was darkening when she came to a high and windy place, barren even by local standards, and stopped. The sky behind her was yellow where it touched the rock. She stared blankly about the flat expanses for a time before spotting the Portal Dolmen.

It was huge, two upright slabs supporting a canted third, like a giant’s table falling to ruin. Slowly, she followed her shadow to it. Two more slabs of rock lay nearby, the missing sides of what was just another wedge grave denuded of its cairn, though an enormous one. It looked like a gateway, and she gingerly stepped through it, halfexpecting to be suddenly transported through the dimensions into another, mystic land.

Bors snickered. “You’re on time, Librarian, but only just.”

Startled, she whirled about. Bors had come up behind her silently. He slowly sat down on a fallen slab, smiling sardonically. Behind him stood two of his wolverines.

They watched her with interest. “Listen,” Rebel said.

“Listen, I want to know where Wyeth is.” Her hands were cold. She stuck them in her armpits, hunching forward slightly. The sense of futility that had struck her on the road rose up again now, stronger than before. “He’s not here, is he?”

“No.”

“He never was supposed to be, was he?” Eucrasia had lived through disappointment this bitter before and knew that the best way to handle it was to shunt it off into anger.

But Rebel lacked the strength of will for that.

“He was supposed to be here when we arrived. But he’s late.” Bors looked serious now. He squinted off into distant clouds that were the exact color of the rocks. Rebel felt her internal map intensify; to the east and south, the Burren bordered Comprise. But the map contained no details, just a sense of great numbers.

Bors muttered, “Actually, he’s extremely late.”

She slept with the wolverines that night in a small cave, all huddled together for warmth because Bors wouldn’t permit a fire. The next morning he gave her some salt fish to eat on the way and sent her back to Retreat, saying, “We don’t need you until Wyeth shows up. And what we do in the meantime is none of your business. Go back. We’ll find you when we need you.”

She returned more slowly than she had come, arriving as late afternoon was fading to dusk. The devotees werebringing in their currachs from the sea and their carts from the peat bogs. Some were preparing an evening meal. In the dining hut, Rebel sat through a long prayer in a language she didn’t know and then ate something whose flavor did not register. Ommed spoke to her, and she answered vaguely.

Afterward, she went back to her hut. She crawled inside, put down her library, sat on the sleeping ledge. “Well,”

she sighed, “I’m home.”

Not long after, somebody clapped politely at the door.

Rebel called a welcome, and a young devotee entered. He was as hairless as the rest, but not so starved looking.

Kneeling before her, head down, he murmured, “This devotee is named Susu. It is an ancient word meaning

‘gossip.’ ”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Rebel snapped. “Don’t grovel like that. Here.” She slid over on the ledge, patted the rock beside her. “Sit down, relax, and tell me whatever it is you came here to say.”

“I…” the young man began. He blushed. “This devotee has not been here long. It has not yet learned fully to abase itself.” Then, abruptly, he looked her full in the face with eyes a preternatural blue and took her hands in his.

“The community has seen your sorrow and discussed it. If you could use the solace there is to be found in flesh, this one has come to offer you its service.”

“Jesus!” she said. But he was awfully handsome, and she didn’t pull her hands away from him. After a while, she said, “Well, maybe that would be the best thing to do.”

Susu was the hottest thing she had ever taken to bed. He was perfectly solemn, but his attention to her desires was complete, and he obviously knew more about sex than she did. He did not strive to give himself pleasure, but to give pleasure to her. He was like some impossible combination of athlete, dancer, and geisha. He brought her to the edge of orgasm and then kept her there, frozen on the edge ofecstasy, until she completely lost track of where her body left off and his began.

Finally, shuddering, Rebel grasped Susu tightly about the waist, clutched his bald head with both hands, and rode her pleasure to stillness. “Jeeze,” she said, when she could talk again. “You’re really something, you know that?”

His face was beautiful, a mask of holy calm. “This devotee is the least of your slaves.”

“No, I mean really.” She laughed, and said jokingly, “Are all the devotees as good at this as you?”

Susu looked at her with that astonishingly flat openness.

“Of course. What did you think we were here for?”

“Well, uh.” What was it Ommed had said? “Submission to God, right?”

“Submission takes many forms.” He knelt before her, knees apart, hands behind back, eyes downcast.

“Submission to the bodies of strangers is one of the more important sacraments.”

“What?”

“Do you command explanation?” Taking her silence for consent, Susu said, “The universe is made in the image of God. That much is self-evident, isn’t it?” He looked up, waited for Rebel’s not very confident nod. “Think of it! The universe is one, pure, whole and holy, and united. But we experience it only through opposites and extremes.” He held up his two hands, cupped, empty. “Hot and cold.

Pleasure and pain. Joy and sorrow. Cock and fig. These are all local illusions—we cannot see the galaxy for the stars. But how can creatures born into illusion see beyond and through these opposites into unity? By ignoring them?

But they are there, they will not go away. We embrace the opposites of experience, we welcome the extremes of ecstasy and of pain, and we unite them both within ourselves. We repeatedly experience the sacraments oflust and submission both as men and women, and in the end, the self is destroyed, and all differentiation, and we break through into the unity that is here all along.”

The boy’s eyes were afire with visionary intensity. He was starting to grow erect again. But he was not looking at her, but upward into the unseen. “It is as if we are all born with poison in our bellies, and to purify our bodies must gorge ourselves on more and more of the poison, until we are forced to vomit it all up.”

“Um, well.” Rebel had been going to ask him to stay the night. Now, though… She’d never really thought of herself as a purgative. “Maybe you’d better run on. I think I hear your little buddies starting the evening prayers.”

Lying abed, trying to sleep, she listened to the devotees chanting. It was a lovely sound, deep and profoundly pure.

From the midst of the chant arose cries and gasps that might have been orgasmic, but might equally well have been pain. She could not tell which. They went on and on, and she fell asleep before they had ceased.

Rebel did not sleep with anyone from Retreat again. It made her feel unclean knowing that any and all of the devotees were available to her, and that they would do whatever she desired. Sometimes she wondered if this uneasiness she felt were not actually a form of attraction, one she dared not give in to for fear of losing herself forever to the extremes of experience.

Instead, she explored the Burren. Every day she ran out onto the rock, stretching her muscles, growing used to Earth. Sometimes she looked for the tiny purple gentians that hid in the cracks or the giant elk that the Comprise were supposed to have restored to the land. Sometimes a pair or triplet of wolverines came for new skills— they were too suspicious to come singly, without someone to guard them while they were opened up—and they would talk. But the news was always the same. Wyeth was laterthan expected. Bors was still waiting.

Sooner or later, Bors would not be willing to wait.

In Retreat, she took on some of the easier chores, tending the goats and (with the devotees’ own skills chips)

performing minor surgery. She befriended a devotee who was in transition between male and female, face plump with extra calories, persona placid with neuroprogrammers, and (Li let her look when she asked)

crotch covered over with chrysalid scab, beneath which the reproductive organs had been reverted to undifferentiated cells and were in the process of reforming into new configurations. For the transition phase, Li was excused from the religious disciplines of Retreat and was free to guide Rebel about. For her part, Rebel appreciated the fact that Li never tried to seduce her.

One afternoon, after two days’ hard rain, Li clapped at Rebel’s door and called, “Come out! The rain’s stopped and the turlough is full.”

“What are you going on about?” Rebel said crankily, but she came, following Li’s slow waddle up the paths above Retreat. The rocks were already growing dry, though the plants poking from the water-filled cracks were cold and wet.

They went a mile or so up a path Rebel had followed dozens of times before. Li giggled and refused to answer when Rebel demanded to know where they were headed.

Finally they topped a rise and looked down over dark land, just barely lightened by the last rays of a low sun. There was a silvery, shimmering stillness filling the valley bottom that had not been there before. “My God,” Rebel said. “It’s a lake.” She felt sickened by the immensities of air and water moisture that something like this required.

Everything about this planet, it seemed, was monstrous.

“God is miraculous,” Li agreed happily, and gestured with both hands. “The water flows down from all sides andgathers at the bottom. But the rock is porous, and there are caverns that open into the lowest part of the turlough.

The lake will be gone by morning.”

Weeks passed.

There came a day when the wolverines returned. It was a joyously beautiful morning with a weird blue sky overhead, the rock just slightly overwarm to the touch.

Rebel rounded a corner of Retreat and found one of the pack pissing on a wall. He grinned a greeting. Not far beyond, another wolverine was caressing a devotee’s face with her knife. “What if I wanted to slit your eyelids?” she crooned. “Would you let me do that, too?” The point glided over a cheek, barely breaking skin, leaving behind a fine line of straightest red.

The devotee shuddered, but did not move away.

“Having fun?” Rebel asked.

The wolverine turned. She was a small woman, with red hair chopped close to the skull and thin white lines on one side of her jaw. Her expression changed. “Yeah.” The knife disappeared from her hand, reappeared, was in the other hand, was gone. She slid into a fighting crouch, took a deep breath.

“You kill her—you take her place,” Bors said coldly. The woman glared at him, lip curling up over one canine, then looked away. She sheathed the knife and stamped off.

“You do like to live dangerously, Ms. Mudlark.” He gestured upslope. “Come. Let’s go for a walk.”

They strolled beyond the goat pens, toward a lone tree, stunted by rock and weather, not much taller than Rebel was. There was no particular reason to walk to the tree; it was simply the only landmark in the direction they were headed. Once there, Rebel turned and looked back to where the ocean turned grey and melted into sky. She waited, and at last Bors said, “We haven’t heard fromhim.”

“I suspected as much.”

He pounded a fist into his palm, chewed at his lip.

“Getting down here has cost us. Drop artists don’t come cheap. We’re going to raid the Comprise whether Wyeth’s here to lead us or not.” Rebel nodded, not really listening.

There was an unreal haze over everything. She realized now that she would never see Wyeth again. He had been swallowed up by the cold immensities of Earth.

Standing under the deep Terran sky, with an infinite weight of rock underfoot and air aswirl all about her, she realized that it was nobody’s fault, not hers or Bors’ or even Wyeth’s, but just something that had happened. One man can only do so much. When he matches himself against something on the scale of an entire planet, he is going to lose so casually and completely as to simply cease to be.

“It’ll take us five days or so to prepare our alternatives, and then we’ll move. But we still need a librarian. If you go along with us, I’ll get you a place on the lift back to Geesinkfor and standard pay. You can’t ask fairer than that.”

Bors was waiting for an answer. “I understand,” Rebel said bleakly. “You’ve waited longer than I expected, even.

Okay, I’ll do my bit. And when you get back to Geesinkfor, have somebody drag the stretch of the equatorial sea just out front of a dive there called the Water’s Edge. That’s where I ditched your crate of prints. You’ve done your best, and I’ll keep my side of the bargain.”

Bors looked surprised. Then he patted her shoulder roughly, started to say something, gave up on it.

He ran back to Retreat.

The next day Rebel was feeding the goats when Li scampered up, all but squeaking with excitement. “Look,look!” Li cried, tugging at Rebel’s sleeve.

Rebel slapped her hands together, wiped them on the front of her earth suit. Goat-tending wasn’t exactly tidy work. The pens were going to need a good mucking out soon. “Li, whatever it is, I’m really not in the mood for it.”

“No, look!” Li insisted. Rebel turned to look where she pointed.

Staff in hand, Wyeth limped over the top of the hill.