They travelled a land written and rewritten by history, sometimes along roads that followed the route of interstate highways dating from the Age of Waste, sometimes along train-tracks which after the Revelation had been uprooted for the monocrystalline iron in their magnetic spines. But most often they took country roads that could have been ten years old or a thousand, dirt tracks that ran straight through the checkerboard of rice fields, pasture and pecan, rubber or banana plantations (Dorthy had developed a craving for green bananas, and devoured a dozen a day if she could); or twisted through cypress swamp or blue pine forest, following the natural contours of the land.
The journey was lengthened by the need to earn their keep at the little settlements and towns through which they passed; there were always more than enough gadgets in need of repair to keep Robot in employ for a year if he chose. In one town he earned enough to buy a rifle with a broken laser scope. After he fixed it, Dorthy was able to pot small game—coneys, armadillo, grouse, turkey. Wild rice was there for the taking, and fruit could be gleaned from plantations; they needed buy only salt and coffee. The crab-things were quiescent in their wooden box; although Robot always left the lid off each night, it was rare for even one of them to venture out.
Now Dorthy and Robot could more or less live off the land, their journey went more quickly, and as the rains slackened and the days grew hotter they camped out rather than hire a bed at some inn or hospice. Once, they stayed overnight in the ruins of some great building whose crumbling walls were painted everywhere with the swirling graffiti of bears; and woke to find half a dozen broken-necked coneys, still warm, laid beside the embers of their campfire.
And once they had to ride a night and a day through a swampy scrub of mesquite and ghostweed, dotted with the occasional dwarf willow, to escape a pack of wild dogs that remorselessly trotted after them. Mostly, the dogs kept a respectful distance, but every now and then one or two or half a dozen together would race up to howl crude threats, dodging back only when Dorthy menaced them with the rifle. Dorthy and Robot and their horses were thoroughly spooked and exhausted when the pack finally gave up the chase, at the edge of the next stretch of cultivated fields.
Rice that had been seedlings when Dorthy and Robot had started their journey was now grown tall, heavy heads bowed down in hot humid air. Then harvest stripped the fields and the air was ripe with the stench of ordure ploughed into the drained paddies; and then for a week it seemed that every flooded field Dorthy and Robot rode past had a line of men and women and children bent over their reflections as they mechanically thrust seedling after seedling into brown water.
It was at this time, two months into the journey, that Dorthy’s dreams began to grow strange indeed. She would wake in the middle of the night with baroque visions fading even as she tried to grasp them. What she mostly remembered was the recurring image of the beach of black sand that had been in the first of the dreams, when the crab-things had returned to her and Robot. Black sand, pink sky, whale in mid-leap silhouetted against a soft orange sun. The rest had the feel of the glimpse she’d had of the vast insubstantial city glittering beyond the involuted complexities of the fractal desert—yet somehow richer, more glorious. Waking from these dreams, she would lie an hour or more in warm soft darkness or in moonlight, with the mechanical tearing sound of the hobbled horses grazing close by, and further off the susurration of rice seedlings chaffing their leaves, or the whisper of forest trees and the brief thumps and flurries of hunters and hunted—small lives whose desperate diamond-sharp trajectories she glimpsed with her Talent—and once or twice the cough of a jaguar, or the howl of a banshee, twisting like a jagged wire kilometres away in the deepest part of the night wood. But at last Dorthy would fall asleep, and awake to find her memory of the dream, like last night’s fire, gone to ashes.
And so they travelled, until the land dipped and fields and forest gave way to a lacework of slow streams and muddy islands and mangrove swamp, and at last they came to Evangelina.
It was a port town, sprawled on a low ridge above one of the delta’s long, muddy inlets. The good quarter, really not much more than a single street that paralleled the kilometre-long docks, was of white clapboard buildings raised on stilts two metres high, with covered verandas and balconies railed with rusty iron lacework. More than half were bars or whorehouses or hotels; most of the rest were given over to trade, chandlers, culture masters, assayers, notaries and the like. Behind the shabby gentility of the waterfront, a stew of shacks and tents straggled away amongst swampy patchwork fields. And beyond the seaward point of the docks, a couple of Witness airships floated against the vast sky, tethered near the tilted bowl of a radio telescope.
Dorthy and Robot arrived in early evening, with the sun going down through streaks of cloud across the Mississippi. Dorthy had been feeling little cramps all up and down her belly that day, and her usual backache had sharpened to a knife blade pressing between her kidneys. As she guided her horse through dockside crowds, in the tangled shadows of the hollow cylindrical sails of barques and caravels, and the cranes that like gigantic herons rose above them on slender spars, she felt a sudden heavy spasm that seemed to expand to fill the whole world—or push everything else aside. Gasping, she reined in her horse and leaned on her saddle’s pommel.
Robot, one-armed again, managed to get his horse beside hers; asked if she was okay. Dorthy said, ‘I think it’s time. We’d better find this cousin of Cochina’s.’
‘And a doctor, right? I guess I can boil water, but apart from that I’m not going to be much use.’
‘Doctors get the man to boil water to give him something to do. I don’t know much about this, but I think you’d better hurry.’
The address Cochina Durras had given them was a small inn with a shabby façade but a clean veranda with a floor of polished mahogany, red and pink geraniums trailing down from hanging pots, and an iron rail painted blue and red. When the innkeeper saw Dorthy’s condition, he brushed aside the letter of introduction that Dorthy offered and started to tell her and Robot that friends of his wife’s cousin or not, they couldn’t have a room, he didn’t want that sort of trouble, making so much noise that his wife bustled out to see what was going on.
She didn’t even glance at the letter but took Dorthy’s arm at once and helped her through a narrow dark lobby and up the stairs. She was a fat, sensible woman, black hair oiled and wound into braids above her ears. ‘Don’t you worry, dear,’ she told Dorthy, ‘I’ve had six myself, and not one of them died. If your husband can’t afford a doctor I reckon it won’t make much difference. Oh dear! Well, never mind, we’re nearly there.’
Dorthy’s waters had broken, drenching her thighs. The cramps were coming every other minute now, waves that each seemed to build on the fading pain of the one before. She hardly noticed as she was laid on a bed, her dress cut away from her. Someone was making a fuss in the doorway, but the hotel keeper’s wife shooed him away.
‘It’s the most natural thing in the world,’ she said, her plump fingers probing Dorthy’s swollen belly, ‘and men are the most unnatural, to my way of thinking. How far are you along, not more than seven months I’d say, and this your first? Eight is it? Well, you’ll have no trouble, then. What’s your name? Dorthy? From the south, are you? Eyes like that, I thought as much. I’m Maria, but I suppose Cochina told you that. How is she? We were both born south of here, but not as far as you, I wager. That’s it, shouting gets the pain outside you.’
But the pain stayed where it was, wave after wave. Sweat burst over Dorthy’s entire body with every contraction. She tried to get her breathing in synch with the contractions, it was the only thing she could think about. They came every three or four minutes, not quite enough time to relax before the next one so that she was being gradually worn down. Each time it was like a hill she was sure she couldn’t quite climb, but each time she somehow managed to get on top of it. She kept asking Maria if it had started yet, and the woman kept telling her that she mustn�
�t worry, it was hard but she would get there. There were more people in the room, she wasn’t sure how many. A lamp burned in one corner, and it was night beyond the window; darkness turned its glass to a mirror, reflecting the people and the woman, herself, struggling on the bed. Maria laid cloths soaked in ice-water on her forehead; some time later Robot gave her a glass of something cold and clear, scented like cloves. She managed to tell him that he’d been right when they’d crashed, if not guns they should at least have saved the autodoc.
‘I was right when I said that we never should have come down in the first place. Except I didn’t know it.’
Whatever had been in the glass sent Dorthy out of herself a little. The room seemed a long way away, a small square of lamplight at the end of a long tunnel. She was in the room and somewhere else at the same time, rocked and compressed by violent unstable pressures. An old, black woman, the nap of her white hair thin as a worn rug, was asking her about the contractions, and she was trying to answer through the blur of the drug; and she could hear the rumble of the voices, and tried to turn to where light glowed red through the quaking press.
When she came back, she was riding atop the biggest contraction yet, yelling at the top of her voice. Robot eased her head back down on the lumpy bolster that was by now sodden with her sweat. He said, ‘I hired a doctor. She’s going to cut the baby out. It might have gotten tangled up with the cord. They have some kind of painkiller, but it still might hurt.’
‘The baby’s alive,’ Dorthy said. ‘I can feel her, in my head.’
‘A daughter, huh? Yeah, don’t worry about her being dead, they were listening to her heartbeat just now.’
‘I don’t want her to be a monster,’ Dorthy said. ‘All that radiation, the marauders’ weapon. Robot, if she’s a monster, promise you’ll kill her.’
‘Hey, it’s okay. She’s got two arms, two legs, one head. Doctor knows that much.’
Coldness on her swollen belly; the white-haired doctor was painting a clear gel over it. When the next contraction came, Dorthy could feel her muscles knotting, but it didn’t hurt any more. Robot was still leaning over her. She told him, ‘The dreams I had. I thought they were from the shadow dancer templates. I was wrong, I think. They were from my baby.’
‘They’re gonna cut your belly open now. Don’t look if you don’t want to. How are you feeling?’
‘Like shit. Lift me up a little.’
The doctor told her she would feel nothing, that there would be a scar, but not a large one. She was passing steel instruments, first one way, and then the other, through a little box that leaked a high whine. ‘Now we’ll just prep you up,’ she said, and rubbed Dorthy’s belly with grain alcohol, palped and prodded, and listened again to the baby through a little silver tube, her head close to Dorthy’s skin. ‘Your daughter’s upside down. Doesn’t know the way out. So we’ll help her along. Don’t be afraid, now.’
Dorthy wanted to say that she wasn’t, but the room was going away again, or darkness was growing all around it, so that it was like a little lighted window looking out across a night as profound as that between galaxies. Clear and remote, Dorthy saw the doctor make a quick deep incision in her belly, Maria blotting up the sudden tree of dark red blood. She felt no pain, but she could feel skin and muscles pulled apart, feel pressure lifting, harsh light pouring in, rough hands cradling, pulling, as the doctor got the baby’s head, wrinkled and purple, up through the incision, and then the rest of her lifting free, laid between Dorthy’s breasts, heavy and wet and hot, covered in slime and blood, the cord trailing from her belly back into the incision.
The doctor bent over the baby and turned her head, cleared mucus with a finger and blew gently into her mouth, scratched the soles of her tiny feet. Dorthy tried to lift her arms, but they were too heavy, weighed down with darkness. The baby made a little choking sound, drew her first breath. But she didn’t cry.
Eyes still wrinkled shut, she tried to turn her face to Dorthy’s. Her first attempts at words were thick and gummy, little more than clotted gasps. She worked her tiny mouth, tried again.
‘In me,’ she said.
The doctor walked backwards until she hit the wall, bloody fingers pressed over her open mouth. Maria was calling on the Lord Jesus Christ; Robot’s hand clenched on Dorthy’s shoulder, and the pain brought her back into her own head.
Her daughter drew a small rattling breath, dribbled mucus and saliva. Her small wrinkled face, covered in drying blood and glair, looked a thousand years old. ‘Shadow dancers,’ she said. ‘In me. In me!’
4
* * *
The freetrader was a tall skinny man dressed from head to foot in black: scuffed zithsa-hide boots; black stockings and black knee breeches belted with a wide band of black leather; loose black shirt with a kind of short cape around his shoulders. His eyes were ringed with kohl: skull’s eyes in his pinched white face. He said, ‘You’re really from the Vingança, there’s no problem. But see, how do I know?’
He was sprawled in the room’s only chair. He looked at Dorthy, who sat on the bed cradling her daughter, at Robot, who stood with his one arm across his chest, hand on his empty shoulder socket.
‘You’ve seen my arm,’ Robot said. ‘You’ve seen the crab-things.’
‘Your arm’s an antique. Earth is full of antiques. And for all I know you got those crabs from the local swamp. More weird creatures on Earth than any other world I know, and I’ve been on a dozen. Anything else for me, or I been wasting time?’
‘Go on,’ Dorthy said to her daughter.
The baby said, as she had practised, ‘The Vingança went all the way to the centre of the Galaxy. That’s where I learned to talk.’
The freetrader’s mouth shut with a click. ‘I heard about this,’ he said, ‘but didn’t believe it until now.’
‘Don’t believe in you,’ Dorthy’s daughter said, and pushed her face between her mother’s breasts.
‘You know there’s a reward out for you,’ the freetrader said. ‘Witnesses want you real bad. Why I’m interested.’
Robot said, ‘How much will you get for being the person to rescue from Earth the only survivors of the expedition to the centre of the Galaxy?’
‘Not going to turn you. Even if you weren’t what…you say you are, wouldn’t do that. Trade with Witnesses, doesn’t mean I like the wasters. Besides, you’re more valuable as cargo.’ The freetrader couldn’t stop looking at the baby. ‘She really only three days old? Get her to say something else.’
‘I’m not a trick,’ the baby said crossly, muffled against the cloth of Dorthy’s dress. Her diction was getting clearer, but she had a tendency to lisp. She batted at her mother with a tiny starfish hand. ‘Hungry!’
‘Hush, child. When we’ve done our business.’ The baby writhed in a fit of temper, and Dorthy held her tight until she subsided. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to the freetrader.
‘Don’t hold it, Seyoura. Raised kids myself, I’ve a son, back in the collective on Bradbury. Guess maybe you wouldn’t know Bradbury, settled after your time. Third planet of Al Nasl.’ He scratched above the curve of his prominent cheek bone. ‘Guess you don’t know the star, either.’
‘I know of it,’ Dorthy said, ‘although I know it better as Lambda Sagittarii. But I suppose you don’t know the Archer, Seyour, as you’re not from Earth. Your home is, what, a hundred light years away.’
‘Hundred twenty-four.’
Robot said, ‘Dr Yoshida is an astronomer.’
‘Comes back,’ the freetrader said. ‘Yoshida. Part of the P’thrsn expedition, back in the Alea Campaigns. Brought up on stories about the Campaigns. Grandfather died in those; singleship pilot at BD Twenty. Been flying ships in my family a long while.’
‘So go look her up in a text,’ Robot said. ‘Check us out all you want. But you’re interested, right?’
The freetrader said, ‘Don’t remember anything about you, though.’
‘Look me up under art history,’ Robot sa
id.
Dorthy felt Robot’s unease, mud stirred up from the bottom of a deep pool. She said, ‘He’s a situationist.’
‘Don’t know anything about art. Look, know how we work? There’s an outpost on Titan, where I’ll take you first. If I take you.’
‘That’s okay,’ Robot said. ‘I know Titan. I did some of my best work in Urbis.’
The freetrader said, ‘Urbis was something back when, but it’s frozen ruins now. Way station is a couple of arcology domes, little corner of the old spacefield. Check you out better there.’
‘I’m glad you’re taking us, Seyour,’ Dorthy said, gently joggling her daughter, who didn’t trust the tall thin unsmiling man at all.
‘Haven’t quite decided that. If I do, you better had check out. Otherwise you rot in Urbis, far as I’m concerned. Work hydroponics to earn passage off. Shouldn’t take more than thirty years.’
Dorthy understood that he was worried that this was all some sort of Witness plot, that he was being set up.
She said, ‘You’re not being set up.’
‘Something else I’m going to check,’ the freetrader said. ‘Already started, in fact. Wouldn’t be here, otherwise.’
Robot talked with him just outside the door for a few minutes, while Dorthy gave her breast to her daughter, holding a cloth to her other nipple to sop up the sympathetic flow. When Robot came back in he said, ‘Maybe I should get some of that, too.’
‘Don’t be crude.’
‘I think he’ll take us.’
‘So do I. But I also think he might have second thoughts, and turn us over to the Witnesses.’
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