“Look,” Dorthy said, angry now, “you wanted me here, you said that you were pleased when I volunteered to come, but I can’t concentrate if you don’t keep quiet.” She was angry because he hadn’t been taking her seriously; his fiddling around suggested that for all he had seen of the workings of her Talent he still thought it inconsequential, a tool secondary to the razor edge of scientific inquiry.
He said, “It seems to be an awful time in coming, is all. I was simply passing the time.”
Dorthy looked off at the trees down on the other side of the cleft; glimpses of the walls that snaked up and down the slopes beneath the thin canopy, the scattered towers. She could sense something down there, a stirring, an unfocused glow. Andrews started to say something else and she asked him to be quiet: surprisingly, he was.
She concentrated, sinking into her centre, away from the seethe of Andrews’s thoughts. And it came on her in a rush even before she was fully prepared, a wave of burning intelligence that touched her only for a moment before it turned away and vanished, like a lamp carried around a nighttime corner.
Out of darkness, a voice.
A dry, male voice with an edge of metal to it, mechanically reciting times and destinations of departing shuttles. Then, filling the space beneath it, the ceaseless murmur of the crowd all around her, minds like little candles each flickering in a cupped hand, all closed, all unaware…
Shouldering her little sack, Dorthy fled through the jostling crowd of strangers. Overhead, huge holographic signs rippled beneath the green panes of the high roof; the sourceless voice began to repeat its list. Green panes pulled away from sheaves of aluminium blades that cascaded towards the exit. And then she was outside. Hot dry sunlight fell on her from the empty sky. On one side, traffic glittered on a high overpass. On the other, people moved among the ranked cabs and buses and thopters, and other vehicles rose or settled towards the concourse like bees swarming about a hive, a hive of silver aluminium and green glass flashing in the sunlight. Beyond, the dense maze of fluxbarriers and bafflesquares of the spaceport proper stretched to the hazy horizon, the tops of only the largest ships visible.
After the years in the Kamali-Silver Institute the vast perspectives were dizzying. Dorthy managed to flag a cab and rode it to her hotel, watching the cityscape, rambling white buildings in an endless grid of treelined streets, flow beneath the vehicle’s keel. From that height it all seemed safely unreal, like a trivia show.
Unreal, she thought, but the feeling died. She went through the registration procedure mechanically, and in her room showered and then stood on the balcony, salt seabreeze smoothing her wrap against her legs as she watched the little sailboats tack back and forth across the huge blue bay. Earth.
The journey down from orbit and the drag of gravity, almost twice that of the Institute, had exhausted all wonder. Dorthy sprawled on the huge suspensor bed and flicked through trivia channels, finding nothing much to stay her: it was all reassuringly familiar. During a segment of some space opera—a woman captured by something like a cross between a monk and a bear that carried her to the summit of a vast indistinct tower—she fell asleep, and slept deeply, all unaware of the trivia’s self-obsessed mumble and flicker, waking the next day at noon. She showered again, ate breakfast and dressed, slotted her credit disc and left. She hadn’t even unpacked her sack.
The mono lay like a ruled line across the random geometry of the Outback. Dorthy watched the desertscape trawl past, draws silted with fine dust, eroded circles of meteorite craters, long slopes of rubble, all the colour of dried blood beneath the depthless blue sky. She felt no anticipatory excitement: all feeling was suspended in the train’s silent headlong rush. Besides, it was not as if she was coming home. Home had been the little apt in the whaling town on the coast, not a cattle ranch in the Outback. She slept, ate an indifferent meal, slept again, and was awakened as the train lurched, slowing as it swept into the little town.
Dorthy was the only passenger to alight on the baking concrete platform. The town, a sparse sprawl of homesteads each lushly green within its transparent dome, and a processing plant and clustered silvery silos on the outskirts, seemed to be asleep, stunned by the vertical fall of sunlight.
The driver of the groundcar Dorthy managed to hire was a gruff, gaunt woman, bleached hair swept back from her baked, red complexion. Dust boiled behind the groundcar as she steered it down the unmetalled track towards the ranch. Scrubby bushes were scattered over the brown threadbare grassland: no trees. Once Dorthy saw the desiccated corpse of a cow, looking as if it had been caught in some searing blast at the moment it had been gathering form from the dry ground.
The driver jerked her chin and said, “Bad drought. Can’t afford to bring in rain, see.”
Later they passed a group of emaciated cattle at a shrunken waterhole, the remaining water like a viridescent mirror set in the broad circle of cracked mud. Ahead, trees clustered on the horizon, the black gleam of a solar array among them.
“You kin?” the woman asked.
“My father owns this,” Dorthy said, and at last felt a stirring of the curiosity that had brought her here. Her father had bought the ranch with the money she had earned at the Institute before she had attained her majority, but he had never told her anything about it in his brief, infrequent communications, not so much as a holo.
The woman said, “Never been out here, right? Take my advice, girl, and don’t bother. They’re a bad lot altogether.”
Remembering Seyoura Yep, Dorthy stiffened.
The driver drew up by the first stand of eucalyptus. “Luck now,” she said, as Dorthy climbed out into the heat, then spun her vehicle on its cushion of air and barrelled away. Hefting her sack, Dorthy went on.
The house was an extended single-story structure fronted by a deep, shaded veranda. It had once been painted white, but most of the paint had flaked away, and the composite beneath had weathered to a tired grey. A couple of battered ground-trucks were parked among the rubbish in the front yard; the stripped skeletons of three more stood in a corner, their skirts rotting around them. What has he done? Dorthy thought. Is this all? As she neared the house a chained dog rose, growling obscenities as she picked her way to the veranda; rotting steps creaked under her slippers.
As she gained the top, half a dozen children, almost all naked, careered around the corner into the yard and halted in a ragged semicircle a few metres from the veranda, looking up at Dorthy. She asked where the papa-san was, speaking Japanese for the first time in a dozen years, and after a flurry of exchanged glances and shuffles and nudges, the eldest girl came forward, brushing at the flies that clustered around her seeping, crusted eyes. She led Dorthy through a squalid hall to the kitchen in the back of the house, woke a fat, slatternly woman who had been dozing in a corner.
Again, Dorthy asked for her father, for her sister, her disbelief now as unsettling as panic. Flustered, the woman half bowed, saying “Gomen nasai, gomen nasai, I am sorry. You are the daughter, such an honour, if only we had known when you come. They are all asleep, you understand, it is the heat, we sleep during the day. Sit, please,” she added, and told the child to run and fetch Dorthy’s father.
Dorthy sat on a filthy cushion while the woman fussed about, preparing a bowl of misoshuri; for of course, an honoured guest must be fed. Dorthy felt a sinking heaviness: it was becoming real for her, and far worse than anything she could have imagined. The bean soup was lukewarm and gritty, but she politely forced down a few mouthfuls. The woman, watching her, cocked her head, said, “He comes,” and scurried off. Dorthy turned, then scrambled to her feet.
Naked to the waist, his hair tangled around his face, her father caught the door frame with one hand, rubbing his eyes with the heel of the other. His face was seamed with dirt; his bare feet were black. “I am glad to find you, daughter,” he said hoarsely. “I had hoped to prepare a proper welcome; you must forgive me for not foreseeing that you would arrive so soon. As you see, there have been difficulties
…”
Where before she had felt disbelief sinking into helplessness, now she felt a mixture of anger and contempt. “This is all you have to show for my work?” she said.
Taken aback by her directness, her father muttered something about a drought, several droughts, began a stumbling litany of complaints about prejudice and harassment, disease of cattle and crops. He was half drunk, reeked of rice wine. Slowly he became belligerent. “How poor things are I know. They must seem poorer to you, coming from where you do,” he said, “but it is your home, and you are as a chonan to me, Dorthy-san. More a son than a daughter in the honour you have done your family. This is your uchi, where you belong. We must all work hard.”
“To me this is no honour,” Dorthy said coldly, her anger tight in her chest. “To me this is not uchi. It is onbu, it is all on my back, and you have wasted it all.”
“You don’t know how it is…” Her father shuffled to the standing tap in the corner, drank from it and wiped his wet hands over his face. He said, “After the okaa-san died, I have been a brokenhearted man, daughter.” He fumbled at his chest as if to show her this ruptured organ.
“To me it seems that it was you that broke my mother’s heart,” Dorthy said. “You and your impossible demands and dreams. You didn’t even tell me when she died!”
“Quiet, daughter!” For a moment a measure of his old sternness returned. “You do not come here to criticize. This is my house!”
But Dorthy had outgrown his bullying. “It is all paid for on my back! Onbu! You fill it with hangers-on, strangers who drink the sweat of my childhood and piss it away. There is no house here, Father.”
She sensed his intent and danced away as he clumsily swung at her. His fist slammed into the wall and he clutched it, suddenly contrite. “It is fate,” he said, “it is fate.” His almond-shaped eyes were screwed shut, tears glittering in their black lashes. He added weakly, “Forgive me, daughter.”
For a moment, only a moment, Dorthy felt a loathsome wave of pity, like a maggot squirming in her gullet. “Where is my sister?” she demanded. “Where is Hiroko?”
“She sleeps, we are all asleep now.” Then, “Wait, daughter, wait!”
But Dorthy had already pushed past him.
She hurried down the long corridor that was the spine of the house, opening door after door. Most of the rooms were dustily empty. In one, heavy furniture was piled as high as the ceiling; in another, a dozen people slept on overlapping futons, the air close and fetid. Next to this room, a door hung half open, and Dorthy pushed it back.
Dressed in a soiled yukata, her Uncle Mishio looked up, his single good eye glinting in the dimness. Beside him, the naked girl looked at Dorthy and then pressed her hands over her mouth. It was Hiroko.
After the shock, a cold calm. Dorthy ordered her sister to dress, ignoring Mishio’s wheedling drunken explanations, turning away from him and pulling Hiroko with her along the corridor. Mishio began to shout. By the time Dorthy and Hiroko had gained the veranda people were stirring all through the house.
“Where are we going?” Still half asleep, Hiroko brushed back long straight hair from her pinched face as they started across the junk-strewn yard. The dog eyed them but did not speak.
“Oh, Hiroko!”
“He kept the other men from me,” the girl said.
There were shouts behind them. Dorthy turned and saw half a dozen people spill on to the veranda, and felt their intention like a gathering thunderstorm. She grabbed her sister’s thin wrist and they ran through the gate, plunged into a thick stand of eucalyptus. Within five minutes they were at the edge of the dry bush. The sun was setting, and each scrubby bush seemed touched with flame. Distantly, there was the whine of a starting motor.
“They will look for us,” Hiroko said, clutching the dress around herself. “Oh, Dorthy, we should not run away!”
“Which way is the town?”
Hiroko pointed, and Dorthy struck off at a right angle to that direction. “We’ll hide until it’s dark, then we’ll get away. Don’t worry, I can tell if anyone comes close; I’m good at hiding.”
“I remember how you found that little boy. I sometimes wish I were like you, Dorthy-san.”
“We’ve both been unlucky, I think.”
They were soon out of sight of the house. Far off, the dog voiced some complaint; a trail of dust boiled down the track behind one of the trucks. Hiroko led Dorthy to a dry shallow ravine, and they crouched there as the sky darkened. Dorthy, calmer now, remembered that she had left her little sack behind; well, there was nothing in it that she needed. That part of her life was over. All around, insects sawed and creaked and hummed. Dorthy tried and failed to cast her Talent wide, wishing that she had brought tablets of counteragent, while Hiroko told her the history of the ranch, their father’s hopes of setting up a centre of Japanese culture that had foundered beneath the heavy indifference and indolence of the drifters and layabouts, most of them Uncle Mishio’s friends, who had battened on to him. “After Mother died, he gave up,” Hiroko said. “He no longer used the farming machines, and all the crops died. The cattle grew thin and the solar power does not work, but he does not care. He does not even care about Uncle Mishio and me.”
She began to cry, and Dorthy held her, comforted her. “I’ll find a place for us to live, I’ve a little money left. Oh, Hiroko, what a homecoming.”
The stars hung soft and shimmering in the hot night sky when they began to walk towards the town. Once Dorthy sensed a group of men working towards them, but their search was noisy and only desultory, and in the darkness and with her Talent it was easy to evade. As they walked, she told Hiroko about the Institute, about her plans to study astronomy.
“That is why you can understand. As you must understand.” It was not Hiroko’s voice, no human voice at all.
Dorthy stopped. The shadowy figure beside her was too tall to be her sister, but in the darkness she could not see just what it was. It said, “Do not be afraid,” and gestured upward at the frozen, luminous billows of interstellar dust clouds that shrouded the sky, at the rift where a single star shone: so bright it threw their mingled shadows behind them. “That was the way we first went,” the figure said. “Inward, searching for stars like our own.”
And for a moment Dorthy felt a wrenching dizzy sensation as if she were toppling into the sky.
The world came back to Dorthy piecemeal. She was lying on her back in a kind of bower hacked from a tangle of dense ropy growth. Above, a faint refulgence slanted between bulbous tree trunks, broken by looping belts of foliage, more shadow than light. Andrews lay a little way from her, breathing evenly and slowly, an arm across his face. She could feel the texture of his dreams: her Talent was still active. When she looked at her timetab she discovered that only an hour had passed.
She wet her mouth with a swig of flat-tasting water from her canteen and lay back, thinking of the dream. In some part of her mind she was still walking with her sister through the hot Australian night towards the town. She had found Hiroko an apartment in Melbourne and had opened a credit line for her. The girl had insisted that she would be all right, could look after herself, and, reluctantly, Dorthy had left for Rio to take up her first contract as a freelance Talent. She had sent Hiroko money every week, but whenever she called on the phone her sister was not in, and during those three months in Greater Brazil Dorthy had fretted more and more; but she could not quit this first job—she needed the money. She had been only partly truthful with Hiroko, and setting up the apt had taken most of what little she had been able to save. Her father had taken all the rest. When Dorthy at last returned to Melbourne, Hiroko was gone; had left, it seemed, only a week after Dorthy had gone to Rio, had returned to the squalid, broken-down ranch in the desert, to their father, to Uncle Mishio. Her brief handwritten note explained nothing, a sphinx’s riddle Dorthy had puzzled over for years afterward.
I cannot live among strangers.
Dorthy still did not entirely understand it.
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And the rest of the dream, especially when it had turned sideways into nightmare, had that sprung from within herself? Dorthy, trained to detect the taint of otherness in her mind, suspected that it had not. It had been given to her, to prepare the way. But the way to what?
She left Andrews to his dreams and pushed through the tangled vegetation. The edge of the cleft was only a little way away, and she sat there and watched the trees that mostly hid the maze of walls and towers on the other side. She could not immediately sense anything, certainly not the bright, dangerous something that had brushed against her mind. Even the uneasy sense of being watched had vanished. She doubted that that was a coincidence.
Uneasily, reluctantly, she began to concentrate, losing first her sense of the world and then her sense of self, floating free at her centre. Slowly, slowly, faint lights of other minds came to her, like the lights of the little lives in the abyssal depths of the ocean. She was too far away to understand them, only that they were there, all touched by the rigidly linear pattern she had detected in the mind of the new male herder that had captured her back at the keep.
She had not been studying them for long when she felt Andrews coming towards her and reluctantly disengaged, felt her self pour through the shape of her body. She rose stiffly, saw his shadowy figure approaching over the stony, shadow-lapped ground, his rifle slung at his shoulder. “Why didn’t you wake me?” he said angrily. “I didn’t know where you were!”
“But you found me easily enough, so no harm is done.” His anger dazzled her, a pyrotechnic flare of thwarted ego. She said, “There are herders down there; I’m not sure how many, nor what they are doing. I will have to go down. Alone.”
“Herder, but not the Grand Boojum, eh?”
“Pardon me?”
“The intelligence. The enemy.”
“I still don’t know if it is the enemy. But it isn’t there now.”
Andrews’s anger melted into concern. “But it was there, wasn’t it? Was that why you fainted?”
Four Hundred Billion Stars Page 24
