The Great Hunter slept with an oil lamp that gave off a dim glow. I had heard of this habit in soldiers, and knew it stemmed from a hypervigilant desire to wake oriented and ready to move. Softly, barely breathing, I came forward, the spore case cupped in my right hand, my left on the haft of my ax. He did not stir; the scuffle in the hall had not wakened him. I stood still a few seconds, knowing my timing now must be perfect. Then my hand snaked forward and clamped over his nose and mouth.
He reacted almost instantly, trying to twist away, but he had already taken a breath of the spores, and his muscles jerked convulsively, stiffening against his will. I seized one hand and lashed it fast to the bedpost with a strip from my sash, then lunged across the bed as his body arched and froze under me, and did the same with the other hand. “Assassin!” he whispered. He had meant it for a shout, to warn the guard outside, but his vocal cords were paralyzed and he could make no louder sound. I put my lips to his ear and whispered, “Yes, tonight you will die, Katarka.”
Then I stepped back, my heart pounding, feeling a wild triumph. I understood the elation that makes wolves howl over their kill.
I turned up the bedside lamp to take a look at him. In the aftermath of action, my hands were as clumsy as my senses were acute, and I could barely make my fingers function. When the light flared, I saw my palms were covered with black spores, and I quickly wiped them on the bedsheet. Then I drew back the sheet to take a look at him. He had an extraordinary physique: lean, hard muscles under smooth brown skin. Without the spores, he could have overpowered me in a second. The thought gave me an intoxicating thrill of danger. I had expected to loathe him, and I did. But my power over him, and the beauty of his body, filled me with unnerving sensations.
His eyes were following me closely. I put one foot on the base of his bed and leaned my elbow on my raised knee, cradling the ax so he could see it. “I have been thinking: there is a lamp in the hallway. I could pour the kerosene all over you, and set you afire. But maybe the better way is just to hack you like a butchered pig.” I swept up the ax, and he flinched, from which I knew that his muscle control was returning. Mine as well, but still my senses felt unnaturally acute.
His eyes on me were fierce. “Kill me if you must. At least I will die without shame.”
So then I knew what he really feared. I knelt at the head of the bed, holding the ax blade to his throat. Feeling the edge, he fell very still. “So you fear shame more than death? That is blasphemy to me, Katarka. I can pour shame onto you like oil, and rub it into your skin till you long for the flame to consume you. I could teach you shame that would cut you open and close like a fist around your heart. And the pleasure would be more than you have the courage to bear. You are strong, Katarka, but not strong enough to know the holiest transports of shame.”
I had no idea what was putting the words into my mouth. They were swirling like smoke in my head. He was staring at me, transfixed. “You are possessed,” he whispered.
This was my chance to kill him, before his guards came, but in this strange, wild mood it wasn’t enough. I backed up, watching him mockingly. “Great Hunter,” I taunted, “do you dare to hunt what you truly desire?”
I slipped out the door then. In the hall, the guard had worked the gag from his mouth and now yelled at sight of me. I sprinted away, but heard booted footsteps approaching and ducked into a dark side-passage. The soldiers went first to Katarka’s chamber, and I heard muffled exclamations from within. Then, Katarka’s hoarse voice: “Which way did she go?”
“We will find her, Great Hunter.”
“No.” There was a pause, and in that silence I knew he had taken the goddess’s bait. “I will find her. Give me that rombala, and don’t follow me.”
Through the maze of dark corridors I fled, luring him after me. I made for the assembly hall, the bastion of male power. I had not been allowed into it before; no woman ever had been. I knew I had found it when I saw the moonlight fall on the walls covered with dark racks of weapons, and a scuffed floor cluttered with low benches for the packmates to sit on. The smell of leather, oil, and tobacco smoke permeated everything. At one end was a screened-off alcove where the most powerful kithmothers might listen to the workings of war and state, but never speak or be seen. Even Laocata had rarely come to this sacred precinct of her male kin.
I walked barefoot across the board floor, profaning the sanctum. The very furniture seemed to shrink from me. Mockingly, I lay down and stretched out full length on the table where they set the ceremonial mace during deliberations. I did not move when I heard his step.
He stood in the doorway, taking in the sight of me with an expression of outrage and disbelief. “You blasphemous slut,” he said. “You defile this place. Is nothing sacred to you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Life and passion and madness are sacred to me.”
Under his breath he said, “Witassa.”
I stood to face him then. “You are being tested, Katarka,” I said, the words coming unsummoned. “I have pierced a vein of rage that runs deep through this world: the rage of thousands of women who do not dare what I do, because they have something to lose. I am their vessel of revenge. I am all this world’s women, and you are doomed before us.”
“We shall see,” he said. “Tonight I think you will die.” He stepped forward, the image of controlled tension, and began to swing a weight on a cord, circling, building up momentum. This must be the rombala, his chosen weapon—a hunter’s weapon. For an insane moment I stood mesmerized by the swinging stone. Then I turned and sprinted for the women’s alcove. As I ducked behind the screen, I felt the stone whiz past my ear and hit the paneling with lethal force just where my head had been a moment before. He cursed, and though every instinct told me to flee, I stopped to pick up the stone and cord.
He hesitated at the boundary of the women’s domain; I knew his instincts were crying out that it was shameful for him to enter there. I knew it because shame was my weapon. There was a narrow spiral stair at the back of the alcove, and I took the steps two at a time. Behind me, I heard him tearing down the screen to expose the women’s space to the rest of the room.
The steps led to a long gallery, the antithesis of the room below it. Through a long wall of windows, moonlight fell onto thickly carpeted floors. Looms and quilting frames were set out in conversational clusters, with mounds of pillows for seating. In this realm of softness and comfort, I knew, the women shed their narakatas and their secrecy, safe from male eyes.
At the end of the room, a door opened onto a broad stone balcony that overlooked the city. Out in the night air, I ducked behind a potted tree and readied my throwing-cord. Katarka emerged from the women’s room at a dash, and I threw the stone. The cord wrapped around his legs and brought him down with stunning force on the pavement. I leaped onto his back, drawing the drymen from my sash. He pushed up onto hands and knees, trying to throw me off, but I clamped my legs around his stomach so that I was riding him like a horse. Giving a strangled oath, he rolled over, but I leaped away with an agility I did not possess, and as he was trying to rise, I swept the drymen down with all my strength.
A fierce, ululating cry broke from my throat as his blood spilled onto the stone floor. I hacked again, and again, and the head finally came free. I picked it up by the hair and carried it, dripping, to the edge of the balcony.
Time rippled, and I knew I was no longer in a memory, for the sun was rising, and now I saw all the rooftops lined with spectators. The huge square below me was filled with veiled women, packed so close that not a space was visible. When they saw me come to the balcony, holding the severed head in one hand and the drymen in the other, a wild sound of triumph emerged from them.
This was not how it had happened, I thought. But it was happening now. I was there, with sand-grit between my toes, but clothed in a sheathlike dress, and my body was hacked with wounds I had never received. The rising sun touched me, and my skin glowed like a copper idol. The adoration of all those women belo
w me was hotter than the sun, rising like incense, reifying me in this goddess-guise. My voice echoed out over the packed square: “Their shame is your weapon! Do not let them bind you with it. My power is your birthright. Use it!”
The sound they made was savage, frightening. Some of them had fallen to the ground; others were weeping or swaying in a frenzy. I had to get away, or their need would bind me into a shape that was not mine. I am Thora Lassiter, I thought, but the words had no meaning. All that had meaning was my own body, my breath, my center. I concentrated on that, and felt myself falling backwards, dissolving into the flow.
* * *
“This universe is too damn weird,” Touli rumbled like an avalanche.
“You ought to complain to the manufacturer,” Ashok said.
“Ask for a refund,” Sara suggested.
They were sitting in the Escher’s refectory over cups of coffee. Touli had been studying the sensor data from the time of Sara’s odd experience and the breakdown of the wayport. The main evidence of what had happened were some localized gravitational fluctuations no one could explain. “Maybe it was a brane collision,” Touli mused.
“I’ve had those,” Sara said.
“Not brain, brane—as in membrane. Some of the cosmologists think that our universe is mapped on a three-dimensional surface called a brane, and there are other branes parallel to ours, but the only thing that can cross between them is gravity. If our brane got rumpled, it might intersect with one of the others in spots. But what that would look like, no one has ever worked out. Odd gravity might be a clue.”
“Great,” Sara said. “Our universe is bumping up against another one. Maybe they’re mating. What are the odds that a spaceship will survive a brane collision?”
“Not too good. On the bright side, we might have some baby universes.”
Gallows humor was just about the only response to their situation—that, or despair. Ashok had already told them in confidence how serious the wayport breakdown was. Without the quantum imbricator, the computer could not process signals into a reconstructable pattern. The Escher could still receive lightbeam codes, but they couldn’t assemble anything. More worrying in the long run, they also couldn’t disassemble anything and translate it into outbound signal. That meant no one could leave. Until the wayport was running, there was no way out.
“They can fix the wayport with paper clips and duct tape, can’t they?” Sara said to Ashok.
Ashok stroked his Mephistopheles beard with a troubled frown. “What we need is a new quantum imbricator. We’ve been trying to figure out how to construct one from scratch. They’re not exactly made of paper clips.”
“Didn’t we bring a spare?”
“There’s another one in the wayport on the shuttle, but it’s not powerful enough for long-range transmissions. Besides, we need that one to get to the planet.”
When Sara went back to her quarters, it was hard to concentrate, so she turned off the lights and lay down on her bed to think. She had never been on an expedition cursed with such a collection of misfortunes. As she looked forward, it struck her that perhaps the time had come to start laying plans for a worst-case possibility—evacuation to the planet. No one here had signed up to be marooned on a primitive planet, and their survival skills might be rusty to nonexistent, but at least there was breathable air and a native community to help. First Contact protocols or not, their situation now made it urgent to open relations with the natives in case it became necessary to ask for help.
Moth’s absence was no longer funny; they needed her to guide them to Torobe. Sara tried to put herself in the mind of a teenage girl. She could not shake the feeling that Moth was close by, perhaps laughing at them all. Someday Sara would walk into the Embassy and there the girl would be, sitting on the couch munching a snack, acting as if she had never been gone, innocent and infuriating. Sara could picture it.
A sound from the common room made her glance to her bedroom door, and there, outlined against the dim light, was a figure she suddenly knew was Moth’s, just as she had imagined.
Sara leaped from her bed and seized Moth by the shoulders, as if to keep her from disappearing again. “Moth! You came back!” she said.
“Aye,” Moth said. “I have much to tell thee. Is Thora here?”
“Thora? No. How could she be?”
“She was with me. I fear she hath gone astray. I ought to go seek her.”
Sara tightened her grip. “You’re not going anywhere. Do you have any idea what trouble you’ve caused by disappearing like that? Where have you been?”
“I was in Torobe.”
“Come on. I’m serious.”
“Nay, so am I. I told them all about thee. They will be pleased to see thee, especially now that the fold rain cometh. We will need thy aid. Fawna’s house fell through a fold, and Songta says we must leave Torobe. Thora was coming back here with me, but something hath gone amiss—”
“Stop,” Sara cut her off. “What do you mean, you’ve been to Torobe?”
“I wended there through the Ground,” Moth said. “Thora says thy people wend another way, but that is how I do it.”
Sara drew Moth into the bedroom, ordered the lights on, and closed the door. She didn’t know that the bedroom was any safer from prying eyes than the lounge, but she hoped Atlabatlow had had the decency to give her a little privacy. She led Moth to a chair, and sat down facing her.
“Moth, are you pulling my leg?” she said seriously.
“Nay, upon my honor.”
“All right, I’ll play along. Start by telling me how you got to Torobe.”
Her explanation was muddled; she kept saying that she had been aided by something called the Ground—but whether that was an altered state of mind, a place, or an indescribable power was difficult to tell. Moth could not define it, only describe it experientially. She could say what it felt like, but not what it was. It was a series of sensations to her. She claimed to have gone many places through the Ground, but needed an accomplice in whatever place she wished to go, someone who would “bemind” her, or somehow bring her back into a normal state of consciousness.
Sara sat back, thinking. Was it possible that the Irisians, deprived of eyesight, had evolved a new ability that gave them access to some unsuspected aspect of reality? She thought of all the cortical acreage left fallow when their eyes had failed. Had that brainspace been repurposed?
“How long does it take you to get to Torobe through the Ground?” she asked.
“No time at all. There is no time there, for all times are the same.”
Instantaneous travel? Capellan science had been seeking it for generations. They had even achieved it—for subatomic particles. But not for objects at a macroscopic scale. Sara was deeply skeptical that it could be achieved by a mere mental trick. All of Capellan science was founded on the principle that there was an unbreachable wall between the mental and the physical. The mind could not affect external reality—except on a quantum scale, where observation affected everything. Unless there were a mechanism to translate quantum effects into the macro world …
For a moment, Sara let her mind wander down that road, and she felt an almost sensual elation at the thought of owning such knowledge. A conduit outside space would erase all barriers of distance, all limits of light speed. She could go to Capella Two today, and be back on the Escher tomorrow. The rigid laws of time that kept all Wasters in exile would be repealed. They could join the human race again.
It was so seductive, her political instincts began vibrating with warning. The infocompany that was reported to own such a secret could hold the rest of humanity hostage. Even if the knowledge did not really exist, the mere rumor of it would make people act in ways Sara did not want to contemplate. Once the idea of instantaneous travel got out, there would be no stopping it. It would spread through the questship like contagion, and from there it would infect Epco’s management back on Capella Two. There was no telling what might happen then. The thirst for know
ledge was a kind of addiction that, like other addictions, made it easy for people to act in unethical ways. People could always justify questionable actions in the name of a greater good, and for Capellans no good was as great as knowledge.
“Moth, listen,” Sara said. “This is important. You must not mention this to anyone else. Don’t say that you have been to Torobe. Don’t mention the Ground. We’ve got to keep this secret until I tell you it’s all right. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said, puzzled. “Why?”
Sara hesitated. “Let’s just say there are some people here I don’t trust.”
* * *
When Sara pitched the idea of an expedition to Torobe at the next management meeting, she found she had an unexpected ally: Dagan Atlabatlow.
“The sooner we get the native off this ship, the better,” he said. “There is no telling what information she has already had access to. She obviously has the ability to evade detection. Perhaps even to commit sabotage.”
Sara restrained herself from accusing him of paranoid delusions, because at the moment his delusions were playing into her hands. But just as she thought everything was going her way, Atlabatlow announced that he wanted to lead the expedition to the planet himself.
“This is a First Contact,” Sara protested. “If it isn’t done properly by a trained exoethnologist, every penny Epco has invested in sending us here will go to waste.”
“If it isn’t done properly by a trained security professional, we may all die,” Atlabatlow said.
Nelson Gavere looked as if he wanted to chew his manicured nails. “I will take the question under advisement,” he said—by which Sara assumed he would be sending a panic-stricken message to Epco headquarters, asking for instructions.
When the answer came, it was a predictable bureaucratic solution: both Sara and Atlabatlow would be in charge. Sara would defer to Atlabatlow on logistics and security, and Atlabatlow would defer to Sara on relations with the natives; on everything else they would cooperate. “Oh, right, that’s going to work,” Sara muttered sarcastically as she left the meeting. Her only consolation was that Atlabatlow was equally disgruntled.
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