He flinched.
“I’m sorry to give you pain,” Snake said. “But I was with her. I did what I could, but I have no dreamsnake. I could not help her die.”
He seemed to be staring at Snake, through her.
“We are in your debt, healer,” he said. “For service to a family member, for bringing us news of her death.” He spoke in a distressed distracted tone, then suddenly looked up glaring at her. “I don’t like my family to be in debt. There’s a payment slot at the base of the screen. The money—”
“I want no money,” Snake said.
“I can’t let you in!” he cried.
“I accept that.”
“Then what do you want?” He shook his head quickly. “Of course. Dreamsnakes. Why don’t you believe we have none? I can’t discharge our debt with dreamsnakes—and I’m not willing to exchange my debt to you for a debt to the offworlders. The offworlders—” He stopped, upset.
“If the offworlders can help me, let me speak to them.”
“Even if I could, they’d refuse you.”
“If they’re human, they’ll listen to me.”
“There’s—some question about their humanity,” Jesse’s brother said. “Who can tell, without tests? You don’t understand, healer. You’ve never met them. They’re dangerous and unpredictable.”
“Let me try.” Snake held out her hands, palms up, a quick, beseeching gesture, trying to make him understand her. “Other people die as Jesse died, in agony, because there aren’t enough healers. There aren’t enough dreamsnakes. I want to talk to the offworlders.”
“Let me pay you now, healer,” Jesse’s brother said sadly, and Snake might as well have been back at Mountainside. “The power in Center is precariously balanced. The council would never permit an outsider to deal with the offworlders. The tensions are too great, and we won’t chance altering them. I’m sorry my sister died in pain, but what you ask would risk too many more lives.”
“How can that be true?” Snake said. “A simple meeting, a single question—”
“You can’t understand, I told you that. One has to grow up here and deal with the forces here. I’ve spent my life learning.”
“I think you have spent your life learning how to explain away your obligations,” Snake said angrily.
“That’s a lie!” Jesse’s brother was enraged. “I would give you anything I had it in my power to give, but you demand impossibilities. I can’t help you find new dreamsnakes.”
“Wait,” Snake said suddenly. “Maybe you can help us in another way.”
Jesse’s brother sighed and looked away. “I’ve no time for plots and schemes,” he said. “And neither do you. The storm is coming, healer.”
Snake glanced over her shoulder. Melissa was still nowhere to be seen. In the distance the clouds hugged the horizon and eddies and flurries of windblown sand skittered back and forth between earth and sky. It was growing colder, but it was for other reasons that she shivered. The stakes were too high to give up now. She felt sure that if she could just get inside the city, she could seek out the offworlders by herself. She turned back to Jesse’s brother.
“Let me come inside, in the spring. You have techniques our technology isn’t advanced enough to let us discover.” Suddenly, Snake smiled. Jesse was beyond help, but others were not. Melissa was not. “If you could teach me how to induce regeneration—” She was astonished at herself that she had not thought of the possibility before. She had been completely and selfishly concerned with dreamsnakes, with her own prestige and honor. But so many people would benefit if the healers knew how to regenerate muscle and nerves…but first she would learn how to regenerate skin so her daughter could live unscarred. Snake watched Jesse’s brother and found to her joy that his expression was relieved.
“That is possible,” he said. “Yes. I’ll discuss that with the council. I’ll speak for you.”
“Thank you,” Snake said. She could hardly believe that finally, finally, the city people were acceding to the request of a healer. “This will help us more than you know. If we can improve our techniques we won’t have to worry about getting new dreamsnakes—we’ll be better at cloning them.”
Jesse’s brother had begun to frown. Snake stopped, confused by the abrupt change.
“You’ll have the gratitude of the healers,” Snake said quickly, not knowing what she had said wrong, so not knowing how to repair it. “And of all the people we serve.”
“Cloning!” Jesse’s brother said. “Why do you think we’d help you with cloning?”
“I thought you and Jesse—” She caught herself, thinking that would upset him even more. “I merely assumed, with your advanced—”
“You’re talking about genetic manipulation!” Jesse’s brother looked ill. “Turning our knowledge to making monsters!”
“What?” Snake asked, astonished.
“Genetic manipulation—Gods, we have enough trouble with mutation without inducing it deliberately! You’re lucky I couldn’t let you in, healer. I’d have to denounce you. You’d spend your life in exile with the rest of the freaks.”
Snake stared at the screen as he changed from rational acquaintance to accuser. If he was not a clone with Jesse, then his family was so highly inbred that deformities were inevitable without genetic manipulation. Yet what he was saying was that the city people refused themselves that method of helping themselves.
“I won’t have my family indebted to a freak,” he said without looking at her, doing something with his hands. Coins clattered into the payment slot beneath the screen. “Take your money and go!”
“People out here die because of the information you hoard!” she shouted. “You help the drivers enslave people with your crystal rings, but you won’t help cure people who are crippled and scarred!”
Jesse’s brother started forward in a rage. “Healer—” He stopped, looking beyond Snake. His expression changed to horror. “How dare you come here with a changeling? Do they exile the mother as well as the offspring out there? And you lecture me on humanity!”
“What are you talking about?”
“You want regeneration, and you don’t even know you can’t reform mutants! They come out the same.” He laughed bitterly, hysterically. “Go back where you came from, healer. There can be no words between us.”
Just as his image began to fade, Snake scooped up the coins and flung them at him. They clattered against the screen, and one jammed in the protective panel as it clicked up almost closed. Gears whined, giving Snake a certain unpleasant satisfaction.
Snake turned away from the screen and the city and came face to face with Melissa, who stood with the horses in the entrance to the city, tears streaming down her cheeks. She grabbed Snake’s hand and blindly half-dragged her outside.
“Melissa, we’ve got to try to set up a shelter—” Snake tried to pull back toward the alcove. The sky was nearly dark, though it was morning. The clouds were no longer gray but black, and Snake could see two separate whirlwinds.
“I found a place.” The words came hard; the child was still crying. “I—I hoped they’d let you in but I was afraid they wouldn’t, so I went looking.”
Snake followed her, half-blinded by the windblown sand. Slate and Squirrel came unwillingly, heads down and ears flattened. Melissa took them to a low fissure in the abrupt cliff of the mountain’s flank. The wind rose by the moment, howling and moaning, flinging sand against their faces. Eyes streaming, Snake led the mare after Squirrel into the cave.
The wind died abruptly. Snake could hardly open her eyes, and she felt as if sand had been driven into her lungs. The horses snorted and blew while Snake and Melissa coughed and tried to blink the overwhelming sand away, brush it from their hair and clothes, spit it out. Finally Snake managed to rub or brush or cough away the worst of the scratchy particles, and tears washed her eyes clean.
Her back to Snake, Melissa soothed the tiger-pony.
“Melissa?” Snake said.
“It�
��s my fault,” she cried. With a sob she flung her arms around Squirrel’s neck. “He saw me and he sent you away.”
“The gate was locked,” Snake said. “He couldn’t let us in if he wanted to.”
“But they don’t want you to come back. Because of me.”
“Melissa, he’d already decided not to help us. Believe me. What I asked him for scared him. They don’t understand us.”
“But I heard him. I saw him looking at me. You asked for help for…for me, and he said go away.”
Snake wished Melissa had not heard that part of the conversation, for she had not wanted her to hope for what might never happen. “He didn’t know you’d been burned,” Snake said. “And he didn’t care. He was looking for excuses to get rid of me.”
Unconvinced, Melissa blankly stroked the pony.
“If this is anybody’s fault,” Snake said, “it’s mine. I’m the one who brought us here—” The full impact of their situation hit her as violently as the storm winds. The faint blue glow of the bioluminescent lantern barely illuminated the cave in which they were trapped. Snake’s voice broke in fear and frustration. “I’m the one who brought us here, and now we’re locked outside—”
Melissa turned from Squirrel and took Snake’s hand. “Snake—Snake, I knew what could happen. You didn’t make me follow you. I knew how sneaky and mean all these people here can be. Everybody who trades with them says so.” She hugged Snake, comforting her as Snake had comforted Melissa only a moment before, only a few days before. She no longer kept her face turned away to hide the heavy ridged scars that stiffened the side of her face and held her left eye half-closed. Appreciating the trust and the reassurance, Snake embraced her too. But reassurance would not save their lives. They had little food or water; they could not live out the winter here in this narrow crack in the rock.
Was it merely a crack, though, or a real cave, a tunnel? The fissure extended beyond the limits of the lantern’s light. Perhaps it reached much farther; perhaps the spring that fed the oasis outside had a twin in here. Or perhaps tunnels even led to the city.
“Snake,” Melissa said suddenly, “do you hear something?”
Snake looked up and around, her fingers closing uneasily around the handle of her knife. “No, what?”
The light glinted across Melissa’s red hair as she spun around. “The wind’s stopped!” She ran toward the entrance.
Snake followed close behind, at every instant ready to pull Melissa back from the storm. But her daughter was right: what she had heard was not a sound but the abrupt end of a sound they had become accustomed to.
Outside, the air was absolutely still. The low dust clouds had swept across the desert and disappeared, leaving puffy, towering thunderheads arrayed around with rich blue sky. Snake stepped out into the strange luminosity of the morning, and a cold breeze fluttered the robe at her ankles.
All at once, the rain began.
Snake ran out into the drops, lifting her arms to them like a child. Squirrel trotted past her and broke into a gallop. Slate sped by him, and they cavorted and bucked like foals. Melissa stood still, gazing upward into the rain.
A triple rainbow arched across the sky. Snake sighed and sank down on her heels to watch it. She was so wrapped in awe of the colors alternating through the spectrum that she did not notice exactly when Melissa sat beside her. First she was not there, then she was, and Snake slipped her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. Melissa relaxed against her, not quite so poised to tear herself away from any human contact, not quite so ready to expect pain.
The clouds passed, the rainbow faded, and Squirrel trotted back to Snake, so wet that the texture of his stripes, as well as their color, was visible. Snake scratched him behind the ears and under the jaw; then, for the first time in perhaps half an hour, she looked out across the desert.
In the direction from which the clouds had come, a pale, delicate green already softened the low black hills. The desert plants grew so quickly that Snake imagined she could see the boundary slipping nearer like a gentle tide, following the progress of the rain.
Snake left Center reluctantly. Melissa’s cave did lead farther into the mountain. But there was no assurance that the tunnels led to Center, or to anything at all. The rain had given Snake a single reprieve for herself and her daughter; she did not dare refuse it. Still, somehow it did not seem right that the return to the mountains was as easy as a pleasurable trip through meadowlands. For that was what the desert metamorphosed into after a rain. The desert plants were full-grown by the evening of the first day, the day of the rain; by morning of the second day they had budded, and by afternoon flowers covered the dunes in drifts of color, one hill white, the next bright purple, a third multicolored in streamers of species that led from crest to valley. The flowers even moderated the heat, and the sky was clearer than Snake had ever seen it. She and Melissa rode by day, and the aurora borealis danced by night. The horses snatched mouthfuls of tender leaves as they walked, while their riders picked great bouquets of honeycups and sucked out the nectar. Pollen hung heavy in the air.
The third morning the dust clouds began to gather again. The rain had all seeped away or evaporated; the plants had captured all they could. Now dryness mottled the leaves with brown as the plants shriveled and died. Their seeds drifted across Snake’s path in eddies of the wind.
The vast desert’s peace wrapped itself around Snake’s shoulders, but the foothills of the central mountain range rose before her, reminding her again of failure. She had gone to the city for Jesse, for Melissa, for the healers, but most of all for herself, and she had failed in every way. She did not want to go home.
Slate, responding to some unconscious movement of Snake’s body, her reluctance to go on, stopped abruptly. Snake did not urge her forward. A few paces farther along, Melissa reined in and looked back.
“Snake?”
“Oh, Melissa, what am I taking you to?”
“We’re going home,” Melissa said, trying to soothe her.
“I might not even have a home anymore.”
“They won’t send you away. They couldn’t.”
Snake wiped tears fiercely away on her sleeve. Hopelessness and frustration would give her no comfort and no relief. She leaned down against Slate’s neck, clenching her fingers in the mare’s long black mane.
“You said it was your home, you said they were all your family. So how could they send you away?”
“They wouldn’t,” Snake whispered. “But if they said I couldn’t be a healer, how could I stay?”
Melissa reached up and patted her awkwardly. “It’ll be all right. I know it will. How can I make you not be so sad?”
Snake let out her breath in a long sigh. She looked up. Melissa gazed at her steadily, never flinching. Snake turned and kissed Melissa’s hand; she enfolded it in her own.
“You trust me,” she said. “And maybe that’s what I need right now.”
By the end of the day the tiny plants fell to dust beneath the horses’ hooves. A fine brown haze covered the desert. Now and again a cloud of feathery seeds drifted by, cast to the air. When the wind was stronger, heavier seeds skittered along the sand like tides. As twilight approached, Snake and Melissa had already entered the foothills, and the desert had turned bare and black behind them.
At the first crest, before they started downward toward the next, higher, tier of hills, Melissa reined Squirrel in and turned around, gazing back at the darkening desert. After a moment she grinned at Snake.
“We made it,” she said.
Snake smiled slowly in return. “So we did.”
As they moved on, Snake kept a lookout for a place to camp. Before the horses descended very far she heard the welcome trickle of running water. The trail led past a small hollow, the source of a spring, a spot that looked like it had been used as a campsite long ago. The water sustained a few scrubby bushes and some grass for the horses. In the center of a bare-beaten patch of ground the earth was smudged with char
coal.
Night travel in the mountains was as difficult as day travel in the desert, and the easy return from the city had not wiped out the strain of the complete journey. Snake dismounted. They would stop for the night, and at sunrise—
At sunrise, what? She had been in a hurry for so many days, rushing against sickness or death or the implacable sands, that she had to stop and make herself realize that she had no reason for hurrying any more, no overwhelming need to get from here to anywhere else, nor to sleep a few hours and rise yawning at sunrise or sunset. Her home awaited her, and she was not at all sure it would still be her home once she reached it. She had nothing to take back but failure and bad news and one violent-tempered wild sand viper that might or might not be useful. She untied the serpent case and laid it gently on the ground.
When the horses were rubbed down, Melissa went to look for scraps of wood or some dead bushes for a campfire, and Snake took the waterskin and walked upstream. Near the source of the spring she climbed to the top of a tremendous boulder that provided a view of most of the surrounding area. No one else was in sight, no horses, no camps, no smoke. Snake was finally almost willing to let herself believe that the crazy who had ransacked her camp on the western desert and attacked her in the town of Mountainside was gone. Or perhaps he never really existed at all, and was a construct of her meeting one real crazy and one incompetent thief. Even if they were the same person, she had seen no sign of him since the street fight. That was not as long ago as it seemed, but perhaps it was long enough.
Snake filled the waterskin and went back to camp. Melissa had not yet returned. Snake puttered around, getting together a meal of dried provisions that looked and tasted the same even after they had been soaked and cooked. She unrolled the blankets. She opened the serpent case, but Mist remained inside. The cobra often stayed in her dark compartment after a long trip, and grew bad-tempered if disturbed from the stillness. Snake felt uneasy, too, with Melissa out of sight. She could not dispel her discomfort by reminding herself that Melissa was tough and independent. Instead of checking on the sand viper, or even opening Sand’s compartment so the rattler could come out, she stood up to call her daughter. Suddenly Slate and Squirrel shied violently, snorting in fear, Melissa cried “Snake! Look out!” in a voice of warning and terror, and rocks and dirt clattered down the hillside.
Dreamsnake Page 39
