28

Jerusha left the empty rooms of her townhouse behind, left the bread and fruit of her unwanted evening meal half-eaten on the table, and went out and down into the Maze. The twilight beyond the walls at the alleys’ ends marked the end of one more unbearable day that she had borne, somehow — and the promise of another to be borne tomorrow, and another, and another. Her job had been her life, and now her whole life had become hell. Sleep was her only escape, but sleep only hastened the coming of the new morning. And so she walked, aimlessly, anonymously, through the dwindling crowds, past the shops — half of them empty now, half still clinging tenaciously to life and profit, hanging on until the bitter end.

The bitter end… Why? Why bother? What’s the point? She drew the hood of her coarsely woven striped caftan further forward, shadowing her face, as she turned into the Citron Alley. Midway to twilight was a botanery she frequented: herbal remedies and spices, cluttered shelves full of household saints and charms against ill fortune; all imported from home, from Newhaven. She had gone so far as to buy the most potent amulet she could find and wear it around her neck — she who had sneered at her elders back home for wasting blind faith and good money on superstitious nonsense. That was what this job had driven her to. But the damned charm hadn’t done her any more good than anything else she’d tried in all this tIMe. Nothing had done any good, held any purpose, had any effect.

And now the one person who had supported her, kept her from believing that she was a complete and utter failure, was gone. BZ . Damn you, BZ! How could you do this to me? How could you — die? And so she had come here again, telling herself that she did not know why…

But as she neared the shop she caught sight of a familiar face — a familiar shock of flaming-red hair — Sparks Dawntreader coming toward her, dressed like a sex holo. She had seen him only rarely over the past few years, during her infrequent official visits to the palace.

It surprised her now, seeing him again, to realize that he didn’t look a day older than the first time she had seen him, sprawled in that alley almost five years ago. But then, it had surprised her that Arienrhod kept him (in every sense of the word, she supposed) at the palace… had she kept him young as well?

Her interest became self-interest as their trajectories closed; with guilty preoccupation she assumed that he would see her, assumed that he would recognize her even in this disguise, and read her hidden motives in her restless eyes. She slowed, trying to keep her destination obscure until he passed. Gods, am I skulking like a criminal now?

“Hello, Dawntreader.” Defiantly she acknowledged him first; saw by his start of recognition that he would not have looked at her twice if she hadn’t spoken.

But the expression that showed next was none she would have expected, none that she deserved — a smile that held his flawless youth up like a mirror to show her how painfully she was aging, when every day passed like a year. His eyes were a disturbing echo of the Queen’s: too knowing, too cynical for the face that held them. They moved to the display of god-figures and charms in the botanery window, back to the amulet hanging at her throat. He pulled uneasily at the multiple collars of his skintight shirt; the gesture shouted hostility. “Save your money, Commander PalaThion. Your gods can’t reach you here. All the gods of the Hegemony couldn’t stop what’s happening to you — even if they cared.” A mouthful of gall.

Jerusha fell back a step as the words struck at her like vipers, poisoned with the venom of her own deepest fears. Does he want it? Even him? Why? “Why, Dawntreader? Why you?” whispered.

Hatred smouldered. “I loved her; and she’s gone.” He dropped his gaze, pushed on by her, not looking back.

Jerusha stood still in the street for a long moment before she realized that he had given her the reason why. And then she went on to the botanery entrance, dazed, like a woman caught in a spell.

She stood in the cramped aisle before the dusty shelves that held what she had come for; blind to the bittersweet nostalgia of the place, the stubborn refusal of Newhaven tradition to conform to the standards of a new age or another world. She ignored the clusters of dragons foot the festoons of garlanded herbs, the wild tangle of odors in caressing assault on her senses; was deaf to

“Were you speaking to me?” She became abruptly, resentfully aware that she was not standing there alone any longer.

“Yes. They seemed to have moved the powdered louge. Would you know where—?” A dark-haired, fair-skinned, middle-aged woman; probably a local. Blind — Jerusha recognized the light-sensor band she wore across her forehead.

Jerusha glanced over the shelves, saw the shopkeeper caught up in animated gossip with some other Newhaven expatriate; looked back. “It’s by the rear wall, I think.” She stepped toward the shelves to let the blind woman pass.

But the woman stayed aggravatingly in the aisle, her head bent slightly as though she were still listening. “Inspector… PalaThion, isn’t it?”

“Commander PalaThion.” She returned contempt with barely concealed contempt.

“Of course. Forgive me.”

When the sun turns black. Jerusha looked away.

“The last time I heard your voice you were still Inspector PalaThion. I never forget a voice; but sometimes I forget my manners.” She smiled in good-humored apology, radiated it, until unwillingly Jerusha felt her own habitual frown letting go. “It’s been nearly five years. My shop is next door… I came to your station one time with Sparks Dawntreader.”

“The mask maker Jerusha pinned an identity on the woman at last. “Yes, I remember. I remember, all right. Saving that little BAStard was the second biggest mistake of my life.

“I saw you talking to him outside.” (Saw? Jerusha experienced a moment’s disorientation as it registered; tried to conceal her obvious irritation.) “He still comes to see me now and then; when he needs ; shelter. There aren’t many people he can talk to any more, I think. I’m glad he talked to you.”

Jerusha said nothing.

“Tell me, Commander — have you been as sorry to see the changes happening in him as I have?” She bridged the void of Jerusha’s silence as though it did not exist.

Jerusha refused to face the question, or the questioner; touched the hollows of her own changed face with morbid fingers. “He hasn’t changed at all as far as I can see. He doesn’t look a day older.” And maybe he isn’t, damn him!

“But he is, he has…” heavily. “He’s aged a hundred years since he came to Carbuncle.”

“Haven’t we all?” Jerusha reached out and took a small dark plastic bottle of viriol oil off of the shelf, hesitated; took another one. She thought suddenly of her mother.

“Sleeping drops, aren’t they?”

Jerusha’s hand knotted possessively, defensively, over the bottles. “Yes.”

A nod. “I can smell them.” The woman grimaced. “I’ve used them; I had insomnia terribly, before I got my vision sensors. I tried everything. Without sight I didn’t have any guide to the pattern of day and night… and I’m not properly tuned to Tiamat’s rhythms. I suppose none of us are, really. We’re all aliens here in the end — or the beginning.”

Jerusha glanced up. “I suppose so. I never thought of it that way… Maybe that’s my whole problem: Wherever I go, I’m an alien.” She heard herself say aloud what she had only intended as thought; shook her head, past caring. “The more I want sleep the less I get it. Sleep is my only pleasure in life. I could sleep forever.” She turned, tried to move past the woman to the shop man at the door.

“That isn’t the way to solve your problems, Commander PalaThion.” The mask maker blocked her path without seeming to.

Jerusha stared, felt her legs turn to soft wood. “What?”

“Sleeping drops. They only make the problem worse. They take away your dreams… we all have to dream, sometime, or we suffer the consequences.” She reached out; her touch wavered toward the handful of bottles Jerusha held, pushed them away. “Find a better answer. There must be one. This will pass. Everything passes, given enough time.”

“It would take an eternity.” But the pressure remained against her hand… against her will… she felt her hand give way and the bottles go back onto the shelf.

“A wise decision.” The mask maker smiled, looking through her, into her.

Jerusha made no answer, not even certain how to answer.

The woman stood aside at last, somehow releasing her as she had somehow held her prisoner; moved past her toward the shelves at the rear of the store. Jerusha went on to the door and out, without buying anything, or even speaking to the shop man.


* * *

Why did I listen to her? Jerusha reclined, motionless, on an elbow on the low serpentine couch. She absorbed the sensation of cotton wrapped twigs that crept inexorably from hand to wrist to elbow as her arm went to sleep. Each time she entered this place a paralysis seemed to overcome her, destroying her ability to act or even react, to function, to think. She watched the seconds blink out on the sterile clock face embedded in crystal in the sterile matrix of empty shelving that cobwebbed the room’s far wall. Gods, how she hated the sight of this place, every lifeless centimeter of it-It was just as it had been when the LiouxSkeds departed, the same facade insulating its occupants from the timeless reality of the building and the city that had surrounded them.

They had affected a Kharemoughi lifestyle with excruciating dedication: a sophisticated, refined, and soulless imitation of a lifestyle she found obscure and unappealing to begin with. The patina of her own possessions scarcely altered it. She fantasized an overlay of ornate, rococo frescoes and molding, the unashamed warmth of a palette of garish colors everywhere… closed her eyes with her hand as the unrelenting subtlety of the truth seeped through like water, to make the colors blur and bleed.

This place hung with ugly memories had been forced on her — a part of her burden, her punishment. She could have struck back, cleared this mausoleum of its morbid relics and replaced them with things fresh and alive… she could even have gotten rid of it entirely, gone back to her old, cramped, comfortable set of rooms down in the Maze. But always, when her day’s work was through, she had returned here and done nothing, one more time. Because what was the point? It was useless, hopeless… helpless… She lifted her locked hands to her mouth, pressed hard against her lips. They’re watching, stop it—!

She sat up, pulling her hands away, bowing her head so that the caftan’s hood fell forward about her face. The Queen’s spies, the Queen’s eyes, were everywhere — especially, she was sure, in this townhouse. She felt them touching her like unclean hands, everywhere she went, everything she did. In her old apartment she had been free to be human, free to be herself, and live her own heritage . free to strip off her chafing, puritanical uniform and go easily naked if she wanted to, the way she had been able to do on her own world, the way her people had done for centuries. But here she was always on display for the Queen’s pleasure, afraid to expose herself, physically or mentally, to the White Bitch’s unseen scorn.

She picked up the tape reader that had dropped to the floor, gazed at without seeing the manual on ultrasound analysis that she had been trying to study for a week… two weeks… forever. She had never been one to enjoy fiction, in any form: she heard too many lies on the streets every day, she had no patience with people who made a living doing it. And now she could no longer concentrate on facts. But still she could not let go and allow herself to escape into fantasy… the way BZ had always done, so easily, so guiltlessly. But then, to be a Kharemoughi Tech was to live in a fantasy world anyway, one where everyone knew his place, and yours was always on top. Where life functioned with perfect machinery . only this time the machinery had broken down, and the chaos that waited outside had rushed in to destroy him.

She imagined the patrol craft vaporizing, releasing two spirits from this mortal plane into — what? Eternity, limbo, an endless cycle of rebirth? Who could believe in any religion, when there were so many, all claiming the only Truth, and every truth different. There was only one way she would ever learn for herself… and a part of her own spirit had already passed over that dark water without a ticket, gone with the Boatman, and with her only friend in all this world of enemies. Her only friend… Why the hell did I listen? Why did I leave those bottles on the shelf? She stood up, the tape reader falling from her lap to the floor again unnoticed. She took one step, knowing that she was starting for the door; stopped again, her body twitching with indecision. Motivation, Jerusha! desperately. I wanted to leave those bottles there, or shed never have changed my mind. Her muscles went slack, she slumped where she stood, her whole body cotton-wrapped with fatigue. But I can’t sleep here! And there was no escape, no haven left, no one…

Her searching eyes stopped on the dawn-colored shell that lay like an offering on the Empire-replica shrine table beside the door. Ngenet… Oh gods, are you still a friend of mine? The solid peace of the plantation house, that inviolable calm in the storm’s eye, crowded her inner sight. She had seen it last more than a year ago; had been both consciously and unconsciously separating herself from even the loose and superficial ties of their infrequent visits as her depression deepened, as her world shrank in and in around her. She had told herself she did not want him to see the knife-edged harridan she had become… and yet perversely, at the same time i she had begun to hate him for not seeing that she needed his safe haven more than ever.

And now? Yes… now! What kind of blind masochism had made her wall herself into her own tomb? She crossed the room to the phone, punched in one code, and then another and another from i memory, putting through the outback radio call to his plantation. ‘ She marked the passing seconds with the beat of her fingertips against the pale, hard surface of the wall, until at last a video less voice answered her summons, distorted by audio snow. Damn this place! Storm interference. There was always storm interference.

“Hello? Hello?” Even through the interference, she knew that the voice was not the one she needed to hear.

“Hello!” She leaned closer to the speaker, her raised voice echoing from room to silent room behind her. “This is Commander PalaThion calling from Carbuncle. Let me speak to Ngenet.”

“What?… No, he isn’t here, Commander… out on his ship.”

“When will he be back?”

“Don’t know. Didn’t say… leave a message?”

She cut off the phone with her fist; turned away from the wall shaken with fury. “No message.”

She crossed the room again to pick up the dawn-pink shell, held it against her while she traced its satin-rubbed convolutions with unsteady fingers. She touched the flawed place where one fragile spine had snapped off. Her fingers closed over the next spine, and broke it. She broke another, and another; the spines fell without a sound onto the carpet. Jerusha whimpered softly as they fell, as though she were breaking her own fingers.

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