“I think we’ve practiced with the weapons enough for now,” Sven said. “Do you feel like running?”
“I suppose so. We can use the exercise.”
They stretched, flexed their arms, then began to run south, toward the front of the Institute. They had been running together in the courtyard every morning since moving to the tower, and she was able to keep up with him now. When they were near the stony surface in front of the tower, he slowed and motioned to her. Apparently the run was only an excuse to get away from their guardians.
“I wish we’d found shoes that fit us,” he said, “or that we could wear to walk in. Maybe we’ll just have to get used to the ones we found.”
She thought of the shoes she had discovered. Most were too large, or too narrow; some pinched, and others were so light and flimsy she wondered why anyone had bothered to wear them. “At least we found some socks,” she said. “The boots I found in the cold room fit me better than any of the shoes.” She sat down, stretched out her legs, and wiggled her bare toes. “You could probably find a pair that would fit you. In fact, we could wear the suits when we leave. They’re light, they’re sturdy, and they’d protect us if it gets cold.”
“That’s an idea,” he said. “It’s really beginning to bother me, seeing Llare and Llipel watch us the way they do.”
“I feel the same way.”
“I could ignore it for a while, but I don’t know how much longer I can stand it. They keep showing up, and they’re always going to the ship.”
“At least they don’t come to the tower,” she said.
“I keep expecting them to do something—anything,” he said. “It’s as if they’re trying to decide what to do. I wish I knew what they were waiting for.”
That was the same feeling she had, that the two were anticipating another change. “We could confront them,” she said, “demand some answers.” That was a ridiculous idea. Llipel and Llare would have no answers and would only murmur soothingly about how Nita should not worry.
“We keep talking about leaving the Institute,” Sven said, “but we don’t make any real plans.”
“There’s still more we should learn.”
“There’s always going to be more we should know. We won’t really find out what’s out there until we see it for ourselves.” He tugged at the sleeve of his coverall. “I guess it’s easier to keep putting it off.”
“We shouldn’t go anyway until we have some idea of what they’re waiting for. They might be expecting us to leave; that may be part of what they want.” She shivered, wondering if they knew of a way to shut down the mind or to close the Institute for good. She and Sven might leave, then return only to find their home forever barred to them.
Nita climbed out of the pool, dried herself with a towel, and combed out her thick, long hair with her fingers before putting on her coverall. Since the night Sven had come to her room, she was shyer of swimming with him; now they each went to the pool alone to swim. She had gone back to wearing coveralls, as the boy had; Sven considered such clothing more practical now. Her reason for wearing coveralls was different. She did not want to wear garments that might be more revealing.
The door to the east wing opened; Sven entered the garden. “If you want to swim,” she called out, “I’ll leave. I was going to go to the library anyway and call up some maps, see where we might go on our first journey.”
He smiled a little, as if he found that amusing. Often she thought that he would rather plan the trip than make it. “I can swim later—right now, I’m too full of food to swim. Doesn’t Llipel usually keep some of her food in the east wing cafeteria?”
Nita nodded.
“I didn’t see any there,” he said.
“They’ve been in their ship so often that maybe they eat there now.”
Sven sat down on the tiles near the pool. “I had a dream last night. It was so real that I’ve been thinking about it all day.”
She seated herself across from him. She had dreamed about Sven last night, and the dream had disturbed her so much that she had awakened. Most of the dream had faded from her mind a few moments later, but she remembered the sharp longing she had felt before she suppressed that urge.
“You were in the dream, too,” he continued, “but it wasn’t a dream where—” His face grew pinker. “You might as well know. I’ve had these dreams where we’re together, doing the things our kind did when they mated, but this wasn’t one of those.” He was silent for a bit. “We were here, and then all of these people—people like us—came into the garden. Some of them looked like images I’ve seen, but I couldn’t really see their faces clearly. They came up to us, said they’d been looking for us, that they hadn’t forgotten us after all.”
“What happened then?” she asked.
“I felt happy, happier than I’ve ever been, but then I was afraid. It was as if there were too many of them, all crowding around us. They talked, and I couldn’t make out their words. Then they began to argue, but I don’t know why. They started firing at each other with their weapons while I was trying to protect you. Then I saw Llipel and Llare, and we were suddenly alone in the garden with them. I don’t know what happened after that.”
“I wonder what it means,” she said.
“It probably doesn’t mean anything, Nita. It’s just a dream. Even so, it seemed so real.”
Dusky prowled in the grass near them; Tanj was nowhere in sight. The two cats often avoided each other now. Nita had seen them swipe at each other with their claws; she often sat with Dusky while her cat was eating so that Tanj would not try to steal her food. She had heard Tanj howl at night whenever she walked in the garden then, and Dusky had taken to hiding under a few of the shrubs. Even the cats seemed to feel that a change of some kind was near.
Dusky looked up; her ears were flat against her head. She hissed, then scurried away. Nita turned her head. Llipel and Llare were in the garden, walking along a path that led to the pool; she had not seen them enter. They halted a few paces from her and the boy.
Llipel said, “It is time.”
Sven started. “Time for what?” Nita said faintly.
“It is time for us to leave this place,” Llare murmured, “to say farewell.”
Nita’s neck prickled. “You’re leaving?” Sven said. “We’re to stay here by ourselves?”
“It is so,” Llipel replied.
“But where are you going?” Nita asked. “Another part of Earth? Why can’t we come with you?”
“We do not leave for another place on this world, and you cannot come with us. The mind of our ship has told us—we must go now.”
The shock of hearing these words numbed Nita. “But where are you going?”
“We cannot say,” Llare answered. “We know only that we must leave. You will be safe in this place, and there is a world outside for you. No harm will come to you, I promise—but ‘promise’ is not a strong enough word.” Llare touched his mouth for a moment. “I am bound by those words—that is what I mean.”
“No harm will come,” Sven said angrily. “How do we know that’s true? How do we know anything you’ve told us about yourselves is true?” He took a breath. “Are you ever coming back?”
“I do not know. I cannot see what time we are entering, yet I feel that this is a parting, a separateness from you. We must leave you now.”
“Farewell,” Llipel said. “Remember us.”
Nita watched as the two walked toward the east wing. She had sensed that a change would come, but this could not be true; she could not bring herself to accept it.
The door closed behind their guardians. Even having them here, watching her and Sven while thinking their unknowable thoughts, would be better than being abandoned like this.
Moments passed before she was able to speak. “Why?” she said. “Why?”
Sven seemed about to lapse into one of his moody silences; she reached for his arm and shook it. His blue eyes focused on her. “We can still stop them,” he sai
d as he got to his feet. “We’ve got our weapons. We could stun them and then try to find out why—”
“Could you do that?”
His hands trembled a little. “I don’t know.”
She got up and ran toward the east wing, Sven at her heels. They hurried inside, raced for the main corridor, and turned left. Llipel and Llare were already at the far end of the hall, near the exit.
“Wait!” Nita cried as she hastened toward them. Llipel looked back; she did not move until Nita and Sven were closer, and then she thrust out an arm, as if pushing them away. “What have we done?” Nita continued. “Why are you leaving us now?”
“This is not something you have brought,” Llipel said. “It is a time for us to be separate from you and your world—that is all I can say.”
“But what are we supposed to do now?”
“Live your lives,” Llare responded. “Remain in your time of togetherness, if that is your way. We learned much from you. Perhaps you have learned from us. Remember us with some kindness.”
Llipel pressed the door open; it slid shut behind them. Nita darted toward the exit, Sven at her side. The door opened in time for them to see their guardians climb into the ship. The ladder slid up behind them; the ship’s round opening narrowed and then disappeared.
The ship rose silently. Nita watched the globe grow smaller until it was lost above the clouds.
13
Sven sat in front of the entrance to the cold room, his blue eyes blank. Nita drew up her knees and rested her head against them; she was too numb to speak. The shock of seeing the ship lift from the ground, of knowing that Llipel and Llare were gone, probably for good, had not yet worn away.
“Sven,” she said at last. He did not reply. She stood up and paced in front of him, then sat down again. Even when she had feared what their guardians might do, the presence of Llare and Llipel had been a constant in her life. Now her life was her own, and she did not know what to do with it.
“Sven,” she said again, “we can’t just sit here.”
He sighed. “They learned whatever they wanted to learn,” he said, “and now they’re gone. We’re nothing to them. We were nothing to our own kind, just something to be stored and forgotten.”
“We were afraid they’d try to harm us. At least that didn’t happen. We can think of what to do. There isn’t anybody to decide that for us anymore.”
He leaned back against the door. “Having to fight them might have been better than this,” he said. “We would have meant something to them then, even if we were just someone to battle against.”
She and Sven had failed a test; that thought plagued her. Their guardians might have sensed their doubts, and their suspicions had driven the two away. Or perhaps she and the boy had been part of an alien experiment, which was now concluded.
“When I feel like this,” he continued, “all numb and empty, it seems it’ll never pass. I can’t remember what it’s like to feel happy or curious or even angry. Nothing seems to matter—what happens to me doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me.”
“That’s only because you don’t want to be alone.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “I care about you.”
He brushed back his brown hair. She could not let him lapse into silence again, or let herself be drawn into his despair. “We have to think about what to do,” she said. “We were planning to leave the Institute before. There’s nothing to keep us from leaving now, and maybe it’d be better for us to explore. It would give us something to do.”
Sven said nothing.
“We might find another place like the Institute, maybe with another mind and different things to learn. We might find out more about our people.”
He clenched his fists. “Every time we find out something else about them, they seem even worse than they were.” He paused. “I think I know why Llipel and Llare left. They thought our time for fighting was near. They watched us with our wands often enough. They probably believed it’d be better to leave us to fight each other instead of fighting them.”
She searched herself, wondering if that could be true. But she did not want to fight; she was certain of that. “No,” she said. “If that was true, we’d feel it, we wouldn’t be able to stop it. We could have stunned them with our weapons before they left, but we didn’t.”
“I thought about doing that.”
“But you held back,” she said. “We didn’t fight them even then—we let them go. Llare said he was beginning to have doubts about what our people were like. Llipel said she was thinking about what she had once supposed—she told me so.”
“That could have been another lie.”
She shook her head. “They’d have no reason to lie about that.” She leaned closer to him. “Think of where we are. We’re sitting in front of a room where hundreds of our kind are stored, other people who could live. We’re the only ones who could make that possible.”
“You’re thinking of reviving them?”
“I don’t know. We’d have to find out more about our people first, whether they were able to change. We’ll have to learn more about the outside, too. The mind here started to fail once, and it could again. We ought to find out if there’s any other place we can go, if we can live out there, or we wouldn’t be much use to anyone else.”
“I guess we could plan our journey.” He lifted his head; his face seemed more animated. “There’s a town to the west, beyond the forest. We could probably get that far. We might even find something. Llipel and Llare must have seen that town before they came here, but they didn’t know our words then—if any records were there, they wouldn’t have known how to call them up.”
She smiled, relieved that his darker mood was passing, then got to her feet. “We can go in here and find you a suit. The helmets might be useful, too.” She paused. “You could find out about your own parents now.”
He shook his head violently. “Let’s just get the suit.”
Their supplies were piled on the platform near the lobby’s front doors, safe from the cats. The food slots on the fifteenth floor had provided sealed packets of provisions, and Nita had assembled two medical kits. They could carry some water and look for more outside; if they did not find any, they would have to return before their water gave out. Their silvery suits would protect them from heat and cold, and their weapons from anything else, as long as they were quick enough to use them.
Nita frowned as she studied the supplies. The records had shown her people venturing out for hikes with packs, but they had found no packs anywhere in the Institute. She had finally seen that they could use a coverall as a pack by tying off the arms, legs, and necks of the garments, then unzipping them and placing the supplies inside. The arms and legs of the garments could then be tied over their shoulders and around their chests. She had practiced carrying supplies in this way, but the makeshift pack felt heavy and awkward.
Sven was sprawled on the floor near her, studying a printout of a map that the mind had provided. She knelt next to him. The map’s outlined contours, marking gradations in the terrain, showed that the Institute and the forest around it were on higher ground than the land surrounding them. To the west, at the edge of the forest, was the site of the town they hoped to explore.
There was much, however, that the map could not tell them. Distances were marked, but until they saw how far they could travel in a day, they could not be sure it would take only a few days to reach the town. The map also showed this region as it had been ages ago, before the mind had lost contact with the outside. The terrain might have changed since then; the forest might have spread beyond the town. Llipel and Llare had not shared their survey of Earth with the mind.
“I’ve been thinking,” Sven said. “Maybe we should go south instead.” He pointed at a name on the map of a city to the south. The names did not matter now, and they never used them; perhaps they would give those places new names. “A large city was there. Except for the town, it’s the clos
est thing to us. We might find more there.”
“But it’s much farther away,” she objected.
“I know, but look here—if we go south, we’d reach this plain—flat land—and then low hills near the city. Once we’re out of the forest, that kind of land ought to be easier to move through. And there’s this river.” He put his finger on the slender thread of blue that looped through the southern edge of the forest before running southwest. “This branch would take us right to the city, since it was built on its banks. All we have to do is get to the river, then follow it. We’d have water and less of a chance of getting lost.”
“We don’t even know if that river’s still there,” she said. “It might have changed course by now. We couldn’t possibly carry all the food we’d need for that long a trip.”
“I’m beginning to wonder if we can even carry enough to reach the town.” He stood up. “I think I’ll go out to the garden for a while.”
She followed him toward the garden. Talk of the journey lifted his spirits only for a while before he fell into one of his brooding silences again. With all their planning and consultation of the records during the past few days, they had not even decided when they would begin the trip. There had been the need to gather supplies, to see how easily they could walk in the boots neither of them was used to wearing, and to study maps. A storm the day before had given them an excuse to postpone leaving until the weather was better; that morning, Sven had muttered about waiting until the days were warmer. She was beginning to wonder if he really wanted to make the trip at all, or preferred the illusion of some purpose in planning it.
A robot was moving over the grass, mowing the blades. A gardener pulled at weeds under one shrub. Tanj had curled up under a nearby rosebush; Dusky was nowhere in sight.
Sven took her arm as they walked along the tiled path. He had been wary of touching her since that night when he had come to her room; she wondered if he wanted more closeness now.
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