by Molly Gloss
But then the miner’s mouth opened slightly and the red went suddenly very dark. He never yelled a warning, the alarm I felt was someone else’s, the farmer’s maybe, or mine, a heartbeat late. The man’s hand simply came out, pointing, and his gun sent its pale blue ribbon through the shadow under the trees. With an edge of eye or mind I could see Sevin arcing down, silent-falling, hands spread wide reaching, even while I killed the man who was killing him—soundless too, just the blue tracers spurting through the shade and the wide-eyed surprise above his mouth, above the place his mouth had been—and then I only saw, only felt Sevin, his heavy weight dangling from the edges of my mind. Sevin! And I sent him what I had, all I had, an umbilicus: don’t let go don’t let go don’t die damn you love you don’t die don’t . . .
“Myles.”
I opened my eyes. The farmer was sitting lotus-fashion on the leaves next to Sevin. Her eyes were very brown under cramped-high brows.
“Just need a minute,” I said again.
She watched me gravely without moving. There was nothing coming from her now except a faintly lavender anxiety. Behind her head, through the limbs of the trees, there were heavy clouds sliding toward the east ahead of the high-up winds. It would rain before too much longer, rain on Sevin’s chest, on the white pressure seal and the smooth, closed half-circles of his eyelids.
“I don’t suppose you know how to fly an Osprey,” I said. What the hell, it was worth asking.
“I’ve flown Kites.”
I looked toward her. I don’t think I smiled. “Okay, well, an Osprey is not too much like a Kite.”
“I have a talent for machines. I might be able to figure it out.”
Then I guess I did smile a little, but it felt lopsided and faintly bitter. I said, “I don’t think so. You stay with Sevin. There’s a robomed in the Osprey. I’ll walk down and fly it up here.” Just like that.
I half-expected her to ask what a robomed was. Some of these outspace ruralists lead a pretty isolated life. But instead she said, “You left the ship there in the first place because there wasn’t room to land in these trees.”
“It’s armed. I’ll blast a clearing.”
She studied me a while and then she said, “It’s a couple of kilometers. I don’t think you can walk that far.”
I didn’t want to lie outright if I could help it, and anyway there was no telling what she thought was wrong with me. So for now I only said, “It might be less than that,” and I looked away. I needed to get up. To get to the Osprey. But it felt like I had five hundred kilos pressing on my breastbone. For a minute more I lay on my back and stared up into the crowns of the trees where the sky ran fast and dark. I could feel her watching me. She was working out the right words, I guess, or working up nerve.
Finally she said, “You’re Joined,” just as straight as that, so it wasn’t a question. When I looked at her, she said, “I don’t think anyone Joined to a wound like Sevin’s could walk two kilometers.” She didn’t lower her eyes. She was sending a watery green now, so maybe she was a little embarrassed to know more than she should, but she never lowered her eyes from me.
“I thought you were a farmer,” I said, after I’d thought it over.
“I am.”
She damn well knew what I was getting at, so I just waited through the silence until finally she added, “My parents were both gifted. They freelanced for COM and DOC. Sometimes even for OS. I wasn’t trained—I guess they thought that would lock me into government service and they wanted more choices for me—but I learned a few things at home. I don’t eavesdrop. But a Joining—!” She lowered her eyes finally, lowered them to Sevin. Not to his patient closed-up face but to the place where the seal made a neat square on his breast, beneath the transparent plastex.
In a minute, she said, “I didn’t think you could hold him. When he went down, I thought he was already dead, I thought you would die too. I could feel you make the Join, and I thought he would suck you down with him.” Then she said, like it didn’t matter, like an afterthought, “My mother died that way. Trying to lifeline a friend.” There was an old, faintly violet grief in the air. I wanted to, but couldn’t think of anything to say to that. Maybe she didn’t need anything said. Anyway, in a while she offered again, “I can try to fly the Osprey. Maybe you can tell me enough so I could do it.”
I had spent two years learning to fly an Osprey. But I just said, “Stay here with Sevin,” and then I sat up. When I did that, Sevin opened his eyes. His face seemed very lean and colorless. I wasn’t sure how much he’d heard until he thought, You won’t get a hundred yards. With something like amusement. The hell, I thought. With something like irritation.
I drew my legs under me and pushed against the ground to get up. Tried to do it in one smooth motion. Didn’t quite make it. The vertical lines of the trees tipped off sideways and then I felt the woman’s hands holding me. She had wide hands, a good strong grip. Her face was right there, peering at me. She was giving off long streams of blues and browns. There were several narrow lines that runneled down alongside her mouth, and straighter ones, deeper, between her brows. Her skin was walnut-colored, walnut-seamed. With those great, clear brown eyes.
“Okay,” I said, and then she dropped her hands from me and took a step back. I bent over and rested my palms on my knees and panted.
She said, “If you fall, Sevin will feel it.” She must have been a good home study.
I didn’t look at her, or at Sevin. “I won’t fall.”
“If you fall and strike your chest, the blow will probably kill him. Probably it will kill you too.”
“I said I won’t fall.” I whittled my voice down thin that time.
I straightened out my back and looked down the slope where I would need to go. There were drifts of dry leaves between the trees. I would have liked it better if the ground had been clean. I wanted to see where I was putting my feet.
“Hold his hand,” I told her, without looking at either of them, and then I started down the hill.
“Wait.”
I kept going. I heard her boots, and then she put a hand on my arm. “Wait.”
I expected more of her damn self-taught psy theory but she surprised me. “We’re going at this backward,” she said, like she was surprised too. “We can find a way to get Sevin down to the Osprey instead of the other way around.”
I caught Sevin’s dark blue alarm, had a vision of a glass skull spidering with cracks. “We can’t move him,” I said. I would have shaken my head to double the negative but my own skull felt thin-walled and distended.
She made a gesture with both hands, faintly impatient, dismissing me. “Yes we can, if we do it right. I told you, I’m good with mechanics. Maybe I can take parts off the Osprey and make some kind of powered litter. Air-cushioned. Will your comp talk to me? If I had the use of a good comp I might be able to make something that would work.” Her voice had come up some, and she was running the words together like she was excited and maybe pleased with herself.
I looked sideways up the hill at Sevin, at the clean white seal and the trimmed back edges of burned shirt and him watching me under drawn-down brows. I could feel the woman’s sureness. And by this time I was pretty sick. But I looked at Sevin and waited. He was the one with the glass head. And after a while he told me, You wouldn’t get a hundred yards, but this time flat, resigned. And hell, he was right.
I walked back up to where he lay, then leaned against a tree and skidded down along the bark until I was sitting. She stood waiting, watching us.
“You’ll need to a key to start the comp,” I said. There were fourteen integers. I meant to drone them off but it must have seemed like too damn much effort because I wound up just sending her the whole thing in a tidy and soundless little package.
I thought about it afterward and I guess it had been quite a while since I’d bespoken anybody but Sevin. Quite a while. Anyway, there was a strong feel of awkwardness, of an ill-fit, with this stranger. She pulled a face—e
mbarrassment, apology, bereavement, something. And I was sorry I’d done it.
I said, “You’d better get going,” squeezing the words so they were small and hard.
But she didn’t leave right away, just stood there watching me with that look around her eyes. Finally she ducked her chin and I saw her slide her eyes across Sevin, like he’d said something private to her. She took a couple of steps to go. Then she looked back. “I know a little about Peacers,” she said. “My parents worked with a few. They said OS had a lot of trouble with the pairing, the bond getting too tight or something. They said if one of the pair died, the other would suicide.”
My eyes began to ache. Or maybe it was Sevin’s eyes. I pushed against mine with my knuckles. “Don’t believe everything you hear,” I said, from the darkness behind my closed eyes.
I felt her waiting a while and then she made a faint whistly sound, a sigh, and she went away, pushing her boots through the piles of dry leaves. I dropped my hands from my face and watched her walking long-strided at first and then breaking into a trot, with her arms pumping smoothly at her sides. I watched her until I couldn’t see the brown of her tunic against the trees anymore and then I put one hand on Sevin’s arm and closed my eyes and began to wait. As long as I didn’t move, there was not too much pain.
I could hear Sevin breathing carefully. And after a while I could feel him thinking carefully too, thinking what he would say, how he would say it, how he’d get me to promise.
The hell with that, I thought.
After a while it rained. The first drops fell in big clear beads, stinging cold, few enough to count. Then they came finer, grayer, a tattered wet sheet. I crawled over to the pile of things I’d dumped on the leaves, all the stuff from my storm belt, and pawed through it for the khirtz tent. I didn’t inflate it right away though; I looked at Sevin. He was watching me, blinking his lashes against the rain. He was pale and sooty-looking, the color of old snow.
“I’d have to move you a couple of meters,” I said. “To get you inside it.”
I guess not. Sounding easy inside my head, easy and familiar and undamaged.
I don’t want you lying out in the wet.
You’d better not move me, Myles.
The rain was sliding sideways off his cheeks and running inside his ears and beading on the clear surface of the plastex sheet. I was cold. He had to be, too. But I didn’t move him. I lay down next to him on the sodden leaves, got under the sheet and pulled it up over our heads, tented a little like we were kids reading under the blankets at night. I lay on my side and put my arm around him gingerly. It hurt me to lie like that, made it hard to get air in my lungs, but I could feel him shaking a little, and his cheek where it touched mine was chill and wet. So I held on to him. I lay on my side and took air in through my open mouth and I held him in the curve of my arm, the curve of my mind.
I could feel him worrying that old bone she’d dropped. And finally he spoke aloud, furry-voiced and phlegmy with only the one lung, the first time he’d spoken aloud since he’d been hit. “Tim made it,” he said. “He lost An Ching and he made it back. He even paired up again. He and Solder are working somewhere out in the Badlands now.”
“The hell with that. I don’t want to hear about Tim. Shut up about him. I don’t want to hear about it.” I had begun to cry again so the last words were blurry wet. My chest was weighted down and hurting a lot, and this time weeping didn’t help; I still had that ache behind my eyes.
Sevin gave me a couple of minutes and then he said, with a voice that was ragged-hoarse, that didn’t sound like him, “I want you to wait, at least. Maybe they’ll send Tim in to talk to you. They’ll send somebody. And you can wait that long, until they get here. Whoever it is. There might be somebody able to see you through it.” And then he said again, “I want you to wait,” patient as hell, as though I was a little kid and needed drilling to get it to stick.
“Shut up,” I said, or thought. Shut up. After a long pause I heard him sighing. And after that we didn’t speak, or couldn’t. We lay stiffly together trying to stay warm, and we listened to the rain touching the outside of the plastex sheet.
A long time later, a thousand hours later, it seemed to me, I felt the farmer coming back up the hill, sending ahead of her a bleakness, a defeat as gray as the rain, and as cold. Sevin must have felt her too. I started to speak, to tell him some utter lie or maybe just make some promise I couldn’t keep, but he got there ahead of me. He put together the frayed strands one at a time until they wove a last dark line: You know you can live without me. And then he cast free.
I didn’t know it right away because at first there was just the color, purple-black deepening, and we were together inside it in the dark purple under the sheet, and the ground melting under us, and there was no pain, finally, just the warm damp darkening. And then Sevin said, Wait, Myles, and he went down ahead of me. I was holding him, I thought I had a tight hold, and he just slid free of me and sank until the womb-dark closed over his head. I waited. He had told me to wait, so I waited inside the color that was like a bruise, and I patiently counted my heartbeats. I might have waited quite a while, but the color thinned, went violet and then lavender and finally gray; and in that new, cooler light I could see the walls that were rising slick-smooth, curving high around me; and inside them, in the silvered empty-echoing space where I waited, I could see I was alone. And that was when I began to be afraid. I thought of what I would tell Sevin. I waited a while, I would say, but there was no one there and I was afraid of the aloneness.
Someone said, Myles. She pitched the name like a life-ring curving high over the wall and I watched it scribe its bright arc through my space, watched it sink in the darkness under me. I couldn’t think of her name. I remembered there had been that chafing between us when we touched, that dissonance—she was the wrong, the unfamiliar one; I wanted Sevin.
She said Myles again, with more distress, so the name sang in my head, bow against strings, elegy for cello, grays and browns. And there was something of Sevin in it, some of his voice, or his feeling. Sevin’s dead, I thought then, with a sort of painless surprise. Sevin’s dead. My eyes were very dry. Without tears. There was not much pain, it was just that I didn’t want to be alone. So I let myself down in the darkness, at the place where Sevin had gone.
Then I felt something from the other one, a spurt of despair or terror, and unexpectedly she cast herself in where I was, a floundering clutch of mind in the blackness, ropes of purple and green and blue, no pale walls in the private place where she tried to tow me, only the vivid endless opaque colors of her anguish. She was clumsy and afraid—I should have been able to cut loose from her—but she clung stubbornly, had no muscle to check me but dragged heavily behind, setting heels in the soft darkness, terrorized, mulish, don’t go don’t die please wait don’t, as though she did not remember or did not care that she might die with me. And in the darkness I could feel her-our excruciating pain, her-our loneliness and fear. And where we touched at those places, where we bled into one another, there was no strangeness. We just fit together. We made a whole.
So that, without ever deciding to, I decided to wait. And I began to weep. “Si-Rad,” I said, remembering.
The Grinnell Method
IN THE LONG WINTER OF her absence, hunters and maybe soldiers had made use of the camp. They had left behind a scattered detritus of tin cans, broken fishing line and shotgun shells, had made of the fire pit a midden of kitchen garbage, burnt and sodden bones and feathers, clamshells, and the unburned ends of green and greasy sticks. She immediately sat down on the ground and examined the feathers and bones under a hand lens and found they were largely from pintail ducks and black brant.
The boy she had hired to transport her gear up the three miles of sand trail from Oysterville to Leadbetter Point had been warned of the woman’s odd ways and refused to be amazed when she sat on the dirt like a Jap, peering nearsighted through her magnifier at feathers and shards of bone. He discharged h
is duty, which was to off-load her goods onto the dirt, and then he waited, drawing circles and figure eights on the ground with the toe of one gum boot, until she woke from her study and paid his wages in coin.
She had walked ahead of him, pausing only briefly to peer at something—a feather on the ground, a bird overhead—or to stand like a dog with her head cocked, and then pencil a note in the little book she carried in her hand, before immediately striding on. Hadn’t offered a word of encouragement or a backward glance while he had struggled through the loose sand and mud pushing a wheelbarrow weighed down with her camp gear and strange paraphernalia. But she paid him a dollar more than the agreed upon price, which to his mind made up for many failings and eccentricities. He thanked her kindly and pushed his barrow off through the trees. There was something forlorn about the way the woman stood among her boxes and bags watching him go, and in consideration of that, he turned once and gave her a cheering wave of his hand.
In fact, she had lost heart a bit on first seeing the degraded camp, the men’s stupid squalor, but when the boy had gone out of sight and left her alone she went directly to work burning the burnables in a smoky bonfire and burying the cans, the shells and bones, the garbage. She swept the disturbed ground with a branch and pitched her tent in exactly the same place as the year before, under the canopy of a massive cedar almost surely well-grown when Robert Gray first sailed the Columbia Rediviva into the Great River of the West. There was still a faint, weathered tracing of the ditch she had cut to carry rain away from the base of her tent, and she renewed this with a grub hoe; then, because she was holding the tool in her hands, she quickly dug a hole for her scat at a place chosen not for privacy but for proximity to a blown-down jack pine over which to hang her nether parts.
The day was already well-gone and she was anxious to get a first look at the dunes and the salt marsh, so these things were all done rather perfunctorily—getting her ducks in a row, as Tom used to joke to her in his letters from the field. Then she put on her beach shoes, dug through her equipment until she had laid hands on field glasses and the .25 caliber Colt pistol, put them in the pocket of her jacket with the notebook and pencil, and set off through the trees toward the estuary.
