The Red Queen (55 page)

‘It is, but Tash, you will have to stay here and maybe no one will ever be able to find a way to free you.’

‘Ana says that computermachines can be swayed and convinced of things. She said the Futureteller Dell believes this and dwells with a computermachine called Ines. Does she leave it often?’

‘I . . . no but . . . but she can leave,’ I stammered

‘She can but she does not. She
chooses
to stay, as I have done. God said that it was my choice.’

‘It is not a choice if the alternative is to be nullified or put into a cryopod forever,’ I said hotly, wondering at the anger I felt, and the pointlessness of my argument, given that she had no other choices but these, and she had chosen. Then I realised that she had said that she would
make the same choice
, even if I had been able to free her from God’s control.

‘You see?’ Tash said kindly, feeling my acquiescence. ‘Do not feel bad for me, Elspeth. I have many comforts here, and I will be well fed and cared for, and healed if I am sick. And there is a whole city to explore, once I find the courage for it. I can ask God for all the story tabyls I want without having to get permission from the Committee. And God said you insisted that I would be allowed to go to the surface of Midland, though it says I may go only when one of the andrones can go with me.’

I opened my mouth, and then closed it, thinking this was between Tash and God now.

‘I only wish . . . Will you come back to visit?’ she asked, now looking down at her hands, picking at a bit of dough on her wrist

‘I don’t know,’ I said, and heard
no
in my voice.

She nodded gravely, and then she rose and went back to her kneading.

And so it is done, I thought.

The following night was our first and last in the camp Swallow had set up on the surface of Midland, beneath the jutting awning of a scraper.

A dark dream came to me, in which Ahmedri carried the Endrax virus, all unknowing, back to the Land and Norseland before bringing it to Sador, spreading it to all lands. I had been overflying the dead lands with horror, when Straaka’s voice spoke to me, summoning me to the dreamtrails. His voice allowed me to slip free of the nightmare and, adopting spirit-form, I came to alight by him on the dreamtrails, which as ever glimmered with their strange light, amidst a land of roiling clouds. Straaka looked as he had in life, but unageing – now a good deal younger than Ahmedri.

‘Miryum has woken,’ I told him, though I thought he must know that.

Instead of answering, he glanced away for a moment as if a voice called his name, then he looked back at me and gestured to the dreamtrails under our feet. ‘You know, this is a road and I have always wondered where it would lead me.’

I was startled, for it had never occurred to me that the dreamtrails would lead anywhere. To stand upon them was to travel into one’s own dreams, but maybe it was different for a spirit detached from flesh, which had not immediately been drawn into the stream or absorbed by the melting sky. Maybe a spirit who stayed could travel along the dreamtrails to some strange distant end. For a moment the thought of such a journey fascinated me. But I was not a detached spirit and my flesh called to me.

‘Has Miryum released you?’ I asked.

‘You released me, when you broke her dream. But I was not ready to go at once.’

‘She will grieve for you,’ I said.

‘I hope she will, and then grief will flow through her and away, as it should, and she will live. I pray it is so. I have done my best to make it possible, but she is very stubborn.’ He frowned and sighed, though no true breath came out of him and it seemed to me he grew less substantial.

‘Is there . . . do you have any word for me from the oldOnes?’

‘They have gone,’ he said. ‘I felt them after they summoned me and we spoke. I felt their presence as a weight. And when Miryum woke from her imaginings, I could not feel them.’

I felt a stab of grief, and then told myself that maybe they had gone because Astyanax had managed to absorb them. If so, I would see him ere the end, for he had promised to bring something to me that I would need. I had forgotten that, and now I wondered what it could be.

‘Tell my brother than I loved him,’ Straaka said.

‘Can’t you tell him yourself?’

‘He will not permit me to come to him. He feels shame, but there is no need for it. That is what I want you to say to him.’

‘I will tell him, but if he won’t hear you he won’t listen to me.’

‘You underestimate your power and influence on the people around you, Elspeth. You fear the responsibility even as you stagger under its weight.’

‘What about Miryum?’ Have you a message for her?’

‘My Miryum . . . my
ravek
 . . . tell her that loving her so deeply was a gift. That she came to love me was separate from that and also a gift.’

His words and his presence grew thinner yet, and then he turned again as if he heard a voice calling. He began to move along the dreamtrails without looking back. I rose lightly and thought of seeking out Dragon in that form, and trying to enter her memories to learn what it was that she knew and I needed to know, but I wanted to talk to her first.

I woke to find it was not quite dawn, though I could not go back to sleep. The ground felt hard after the soft bed in Kelver Rhonin’s apartment, and there were too many alluring scents, even in the desert. It was cold, too. I sat up, rubbing my arms, and saw that the fire had been rekindled, the flames fluttering in a light wind. Ahmedri sat wakeful and brooding on a low stool, gazing into the flames. I rose, pulled the blanket around my shoulders, and padded across to the fire. I stepped past Swallow then over Dragon and Tash who lay sleeping back to back. Above them, the androne Unit A stood, in appearance exactly like Hendon, though Ana claimed to be able to distinguish them. The flames and the night were both reflected on his shining carapace.

Tash’s guardian and her guard, I thought soberly. The machine man would accompany her now whenever she came outside. The Speci girl had come out into the open that afternoon for the first time since we had left Habitat, and looked around the settlement with wonderment, seeming undaunted by the looming presence of the machine man. I noticed that she had begun to speak to God through the androne; she clearly took her role of companion very seriously.

Ahmedri heard my approach and looked up to smile at me, but his eyes were troubled.

I wondered if he was worrying about what Miryum would choose to do when she finally awoke. It worried me that she had not awoken despite being brought up from the Galon Institute by Unit A the afternoon of the previous day, even during the fuss that went into installing her in the bed Ahmedri had manhandled up to the surface. God had assured me that she was sleeping naturally and would wake naturally, but I was beginning to fear she would not do so before we left. I did not want to go without speaking to her and bidding her farewell, but I would if I must, for I wanted to reach Northport before darkmoon. I did not know whether it was mere impatience to see Maruman and the others, or the beginning of premonition, but I was possessed with an urgency to get moving.

I sat down and held my hands out to the fire, schooling myself to patience, for we could not leave until God had finished preparing Hendon. I noticed Ahmedri looking along the street towards the open desert. No doubt he was wondering what had become of the wolf that had travelled with him. It had not appeared and I had been no more able to find its mind than the minds of Maruman or Gahltha, nor the minds of any of the other beasts. My hope was that this was merely because they had taken refuge in some underground place.

‘Can’t you sleep?’ I asked.

‘Someone must keep watch, even here,’ the tribesman said. ‘There are many kinds of creatures in the desert, and not all of them are repelled by the force emanated by the settlements.’

‘The androne is keeping watch,’ I said.

Ahmedri cast it a mistrustful look. ‘It is better not to put our fates in the hands of machines,’ he said. ‘I have been thinking of the Speci.’ He poked rather savagely at the burning coals with a stick. ‘They are like penned beasts.’

‘They are safe in God’s care, and in truth they love their pen and do not believe there is anything beyond it,’ I said and I heard both the coldness in my voice, and the anger under it. It was because of the Speci’s infuriating passivity, and Tash’s sacrifice, I knew, and yet she had chosen it and I must respect her choice. I looked into the fire and watched a shower of bright sparks coil up into the dark sky and my anger went with it.

‘There is hope for all of them and for Miryum too, if she will agree to be put back to sleep when she wakes,’ I said presently. ‘There may be a govamen computermachine at Eden, and Ana might be able to make it work.’

‘May and might,’ Ahmedri said disparagingly.

‘Have you decided what you will do?’ I asked. The tribesman had promised to remain with Miryum but he had also sworn to go and find Straaka’s bones and return them to Sador, and I wondered how he would balance one obligation against another.

‘It depends upon my sister,’ Ahmedri said. He leaned forward to lift a pot onto the flame.

‘And if she decides to be put back to sleep?’

He began to stir the pot of what looked like porridge, which was beginning to bubble gently. ‘I swore to the overguardian that I would bring Straaka’s bones home and I swore an oath to my brother when he came to my dreams to watch over his woman.’

‘You can’t fulfil both promises.’

‘Bones can wait as Straaka said.’

I told him of my dream, then, and Ahmedri listened intently when I told him what his brother had bade me say to him, adding that he had also given me a message for Miryum which I hoped I would be able to deliver.

‘Elspeth!’ It was Ana, coming towards us in haste, her face flushed with excitement.

Ahmedri rose abruptly, saying he would go to relieve Dameon, who was sitting with Miryum.

‘What is it?’ I asked her rather querulously. Ana glanced after the tribesman and said in a low triumphant voice, ‘I am glad he is gone, for the surprise will not be spoiled. God finished the map you set her to make! She put it into Hendon’s memory, but here are two hard copies.’ She pulled two slender grey tubes from her belt and handed one of them to me, which I found was not plast but some very light metal-like substance. ‘The maps are inside. The other one is for Ahmedri. The gift,’ she reminded me.

‘Ah!’ I said and moved a little way from the fire, to unstopper the map case. I found the case was the map, rolled up and capped. We spread it out, and being metal, it fell flat and smooth at once. I knelt eagerly to study it. ‘Pellmar Quadrants,’ I read. Next to the stiff perfectly scribed words was a grouping of three settlements and then one more distant, to the north. ‘Midland, Subio and Westside . . . Northport.’

I found the line of spikes denoting the Black Mountains to the east, which were shown on this map as running all the way to the end of the vast landmass we were on. A body of water separated it from another landmass to the north, that ran to the edge of the map in three directions. I found Norseland and Herder Isle with the names neatly scribed atop them. I looked closely and saw that the Herder Island was split and the second part was scribed Fallo. In even smaller scribing on the other portion of the tiny island was the word Hevon. That meant God had incorporated all the information from Ahmedri’s maps.

‘Look,’ Ana said impatiently, ‘The Clouded Sea!’ She pointed to a name scribed on the sea to the north-west of our land. ‘That means this must be the Red Land,’ she said, tapping the incomplete landmass at the top of the page. ‘And look at that!’ She pointed to more words scribed on the north-east side of the vanishing land mass. I read
Annexed Gadfian Territory
.

‘I wonder what annexed means.’

‘It means claimed or taken,’ Ana said. ‘I asked God and she said the land had been won by Gadfians in war in the Beforetime.’

‘That sounds like the Gadfians,’ I said. ‘How odd to think it was taken by them in the Beforetime and now their descendants have come to occupy a part of it. Maybe that is why they decided to invade Redport. I wonder who owned the land originally, before the Gadfians took it in the Beforetime. It is a pity I did not think to ask God to scribe the Beforetime names as well as the ones we gave it,’ I said.

Ana was busy following the shoreline of the Land with a finger. ‘Ye gods, it is a terrible long way from the Land to the Red Land, if a ship goes across the open sea, and five times the distance if a ship keeps to the coast.’

‘I forgot to tell it about the Spit,’ I said. ‘Then again, we don’t really know exactly where it is. Here maybe.’ I pointed to a sharp peninsula at the end of the Land jutting out into the Clouded Sea.

‘I don’t see any Andol Sea though,’ Ana said, poring over the rest of the map. ‘But there are two other places with Gadfia scribed on them, here.’ Ana touched a land very distant from the Land, and another land to the west.

‘I wonder if they have been left incomplete because God doesn’t know any more about them, or because I asked it to make Pellmar Quadrants the centre of the map,’ I mused. We studied the Gadfian lands for a while.

‘Do you think Sentinel might truly be in one of them?’ Ana asked, presently.

I made no answer. I knew very well what she was getting at. All of the Gadfian lands were across the sea and a glide would take us there faster than a ship, but crossing water, with no land under us, sounded like the sheerest madness. Yet to go by ship would mean getting to the coast and acquiring a ship, and that would mean going back to the Land, which I was supposed never to do. Perhaps we were meant to go overland to the Spit after leaving Northport. The wind gusted, lifting the map suddenly, and I bade Ana roll it up. We would study it again later. She carried it off to put into the pile of bags and pouches that had been mounded atop the platform that Hendon would pull when it led us to Northport, then went back into the small building that had an elevating chamber to take her down to the level of Kelver Rhonin’s apartment.

The platform was as wide as four large beds joined in a square, and fitted with fat soft wheels. They were full of air so that the platform would also float, Ana had explained enthusiastically when Unit A had brought it out. It was the means by which the andrones had fetched us back to Midland, Ana had said, and I thought it was probably similar to the means by which Jacob Obernewtyn had move
his
equipment after his little vessel had failed. Finally there was a skirt about the edge of the platform that could be let down and a device that would blow air out the bottom of the platform just hard enough to lift it off the ground altogether when it crossed soft sand. The skirt was to prevent the sand blowing out in a great cloud. I had wearied of hearing of the thing’s virtues long before Ana wearied of telling us about them, and I wondered now how much of a wrench she felt in leaving Midland. She alone had felt that Tash was not to be pitied for remaining. She had talked at length to the girl, making suggestions and offering ideas until Tash had lost some of her solemnity, laughing and promising to try some of the things the other woman had suggested.