Up Jim River

X. A MAN APART

The Silky Voice falls through an infinite space, though in defiance of the god Newton her rate of fall remains constant, so that she seems almost to float. From her throne high in the hypothalamus, she notes respiration, heartbeat, the rush of endorphins through the glands and ducts and bloodstream. And still she falls. There is no bottom. There is no such thing as a bottom. She may as well be falling up, or sidewise, or in upon herself.

Weariness envelops the Brute, his contant alertness grows lax, muscles loosen. He lies down on a yielding and undefined surface to rest himself.

We’ve been drugged, the Sleuth concludes.

“Brilliant,” the Fudir answers. “I never cease to marvel at the quickness of our mind.”

A child’s voice echoes through the white fog that now fills the Dukover dining room, that swallows up all the edges and all the colors: «Who did this to us! Who did this!»

Méarana swims into his view.

“You…,” croaks Inner Child, but with Donovan’s voice. No other word can express the immensity of the betrayal.

“Sleep,” the harper says, not without kindness. “I’ve paid the Dukovers to watch over you until we return. Rest. Find peace. We are commanded to love others as we love ourselves. Start with that.”

Then the eyelids drift together and the darkness takes him. Distantly, he hears another voice. “Blankets and Beads, she lose him High Gat Orbit tomorrow. Bumboat go jildy, two horae; cargo boat early morning.” After that, whatever the world has to say, it does not speak in his world.

There is fog, but not fog, for even the smoky tendrils of fog have an amorphous shape and this darkness is without shape. It is not even, strictly speaking, “darkness.” But for all that, it possesses substance. Paradox! Can there be matter without form? Can there be a geometrical figure without a geometry? Can there be a story without the words in which it is told? Every thing must be some thing before it can be understood.

And so form emerges from chaos. Substance undefined takes on the seeming of quarks. Quarks embrace and became baryons, and these join hands and became nuclei. Photons dance joyously around them and, subtly, somehow, become electrons. Atoms share electrons; molecule bonds to molecule; and so upward down the slippery slope to order. The whole beckons the parts and, by bringing them to closure, perfects them.

And so function follows form.

It is the form of Donovan that has been broken, and deliberately so. His matter remains the same. Those of Name had labored under the ancient error that the whole is grasped as the sum of its parts, and that by perfecting the parts the whole would be uplifted. But while a brick may be broken into molecules, what molecule is red and rectangular?

How much more true for a piece of work like man! When Those had with their cold deliberation cut the form of Donovan into parts, they thereby lost Donovan, much as a water molecule, split into its constituent atoms, ceases to be water.

Darkness becomes light. The shapeless fog becomes shape. But the pieces of Donovan do not become Donovan.

Instead, they find themselves arranged as once before around the the same long, dark-wood table in the same ill-defined room, with the same ten padded chairs arranged around it. The Fudir studies the six faces, so alike in their differences. “Being unconscious,” he wisecracks, “is not like it used to be.”

Donovan scowls from the other end of the table. “Are we to endure another tiresome committee meeting? Pedant, why have you brought us here?”

The more corpulent Donovan turns its massive face toward him. The gray, watery eyes appear troubled. This is not my doing.

Perhaps, the narrow-faced Sleuth suggests, it is simply memory induced by the drug.

The Fudir wonders if it might not be imagination instead of memory. That would point to Inner Child.

«Not me!» the boy protests as he skips about the room, checking for entrances, checking for concealments. «Not me!»

Hush, Child. We’re here to discuss Méarana’s treachery.

It wasn’t her. It was Billy.

But it was clearly she who instigated it. Billy was only her instrument.

Maybe, the Brute rumbles, it was her purpose all along to lure us to the edge of the world and abandon us.

If so, can you say she had no reason?

“Leaving us here,” says Donovan, “may have saved our lives. That is reason enough.”

If a life is no longer worth living, can you call it ‘saved’? What if she never comes back?

“This is getting us nowhere,” gripes the Fudir.

“Nowhere?” Donovan laughs. “We are lying unconscious in some gods-forsaken hovel on a desolate planet, awaiting the return of people who may never return. Surely, nowhere is precisely where we’ve gotten.”

It was bound to end badly, the Sleuth comments. I always said so.

Had he? The Sleuth’s hunger for puzzles had lured him from the Bar of Jehovah against his better judgment; and now, on the edge of the Wild, his better judgment had finally won.

Something like that, drunkard.

We cannot abandon her.

Wake up, Silky. It’s her what’s abandoned us.

Inner Child yelps suddenly and runs to the Silky Voice instead. «Help me! Help me!»

From what?

The room shakes, and the Fudir grabs the edges of the table to steady himself. An earthquake on Gatmander affecting his dreams? But a shiver runs through him, too, as if he were a tree and an autumn wind were shuddering the dead leaves from him. The impression grows that he is being watched.

Something is wrong with the table’s geometry. Donovan still faces him down the long axis of the table, but the perspectives have all gone awry, for the empty seat is also at the far end facing him and it is not so empty a seat as before. Something inhabits it now; something remnant of the chaos. Perhaps it is man-shaped, perhaps not. There is too much shadow in it to say for sure. In a better light, it might have a face, and the Fudir is suddenly, irrationally glad that the light is not better.

“Donovan, in the seat on your right…”

But Donovan shakes his head. “No, on your right.”

“Pedant? This is no time for jokes.”

What I see sits to the Sleuth’s right, at the far end of the table. Perhaps it is some poor deduction he has made.

Or a bad memory that sits beside you, the Sleuth shoots back. But Silky sees it beside the Brute; and the Brute sees it beside Silky. All of them, likewise, at opposite ends of the table’s long axis. Inner Child, of course, sees it everywhere.

If time ceases, you live forever.

Nervous laughter. By definition, I would think.

“Quiet, Sleuth! Who spoke? Who are you?”

Namaste. Greet the God within.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” the Fudir says. “No, you don’t. Not that old trick.”

Death is the life that never ends.

That’s nonsense. Death is the end of life.

«Make it go away!» The child-Donovan hops onto the Silky Voice’s lap and hugs her tight.

Death is non-sense, for in death the senses are not. Change brings pain, and life is change. In death there is no change, and so, no pain.

What are you trying to tell us?

“He can’t tell us anything, you hair-splitting fool.” The Fudir’s voice is just short of breaking. “He’s only some leftover part of us, no less foolish than any of us.”

Which path should we follow? Do we abandon Méarana? Or do we persuade her to abandon her search? Do we fly to the Hounds, or flee from them?

“It’s no Oracle, Pedant! Donovan, do something!”

Take any path. You cannot avoid what lies at the end.

«But which path is the longest to reach it? We can dawdle, if we must.»

Dawdle all you like. In the vastness of time, the longest life is no more than a speck. It is no more significant than a single man in the vastness of the universe. Your youth is dead already. There is rest at the end, a surcease from striving, relief from the Wheel.

“Donovan! The table!”

The seats are receding like galaxies from one another as the table seems to swell. Donovan, Brute, Sleuth, and the rest are red-shifting. The Fudir knows what this must symbolize. His mind is flying apart. He hears laughter like the crackling of dried autumn leaves. Brute to his left, Sleuth to his right are already out of reach, but he lunges forward and stretches his arms and…

…and his hand encounters a pile of jackstraws in the middle of a light game table. He is the only one sitting at it. The jackstraws, multicolored on their tips, are all a-jumble. The Fudir hesitates and reaches out as delicately as if he were picking a pocket and lifts a bright red staw from the top of the pile. He holds it a moment aloft and waits to see if the pile shifts.

It does not and he smiles and pulls a second straw out. This one is green at the tips and it must be slipped from under two other straws lying atop it. His hands do not tremble; the straws do not shift; and he lays the straw aside with a sense of quiet satisfaction.

A half-dozen jackstraws he has removed without rustling the pile when the tabletop suddenly grows reflective, doubling the number of apparent straws. It is difficult, from his angle, to distinguish the real straws from their reflections.

“That isn’t quite fair,” he says to no one in particular. He stretches out his hand and…

…and the Sleuth picks up one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle from the pile on the table. For a moment, he feels concern that he has disturbed the pile and the pieces have slipped and slid. But that is of no concern in assembling a puzzle, and so he dismisses the fancy. The border is well-nigh complete and he searches for the place where this latest piece will fit. He wonders what the picture will be once it is complete, and tries to anticipate the whole from the hints emerging on the edges. Trees, perhaps. A brook or river. A pastoral scene? He works without a picture. What joy if the solution be known beforehand?

The colors on the pieces fade until all are a uniform gray. That isn’t quite fai, he mutters. Though it does increase the challenge. He reaches out his hand and…

…and Donovan adjusts the position of a councilor. “Dzhadoob,” he announces, then sits back to examine his position. Red to mate in twenty-five moves. Somehow, he knows that, but he does not wonder how he knows it.

It is a shaHmat board of the classic design. No modernist innovations, only a plain walnut battlefield, nine squares by nine in alternating black and red. The pieces are arranged in midgame. His emperor stands unmoved on the center square of his home row while his minions have been pushed forward in a complex arrangement of mutual support. The flanking councilors and leaping Hounds are in play on the princess side, although the fortresses still anchor the ends of his battle line. But the enemy princess dominates the midfield with a good chance to marry his prince and she has brought both her Hounds forward. A picture emerges. The arrangement is unstable. The least wrong move will send it all crashing into chaos. (Much like a pile of jackstraws, the fancy strikes him.)

He decides upon a move, but the councilor will not budge when he tries to lift it. Instead, one of his own minions changes color from Red to Black and shapeshifts into a Hound. The fog of war settles over the board, obscuring the opposing princess, shrouding his enemy’s moves. “That isn’t quite fair,” he says to his unnamed and unseen opponent. He reaches out to take a different piece, and…

…and it isn’t quite the right word. A three-letter word. “As as a Thistlewaite skyscraper.” The Pedant scratches his head, but his nails scrape a tender spot and he winces, bringing away fingers bright and bloody. The table bears a holocube an arm’s length long on each side. He sits on a bright outdoor patio facing an ornamental garden heavy on green shrubbery and white concrete furnishings. The Hot Gardens at the Old Valencian Palace. He recognizes the vista immediately. Before the ransacking by the “Poor Petes.” It was a pleasant place, a pleasant sight. One could grow accustomed to the life of a Valencian tyrant, save that they tended toward the short.

As as a Thistlewaite skyscraper. The Pedant thinks he ought to know this word. But rickety is more than three letters. He recalls that an old Zhõgwó dialect still informs the Thistle version of Gaelactic, and on formal occasions they employ special symbols. Ngap ngap gung? Three symbols, and the middle ngap would do for the last four letters of Ginnungap on Friesing’s World: 230 Down. “Where the heat meets the ice.” Oh, very clever!

But when he consults the list, all the clues are written in the old Tantamiž script. He sighs because on a good day the script possesses two hundred and forty six letters. And it is unclear how some of them, like , should be counted. Strictly speaking, are not letters in themselves, but only modifiers to . Should go into one space or three?

This isn’t really quite fair, he complains. But as he does so, he hears the Poor Pete mob approaching the palace and wonders if an imaginary death at the hands of an imaginary mob in the imaginary sacking of an imaginary palace would be real enough for an imaginary person.

He stretches out his arms in appeal to being or beings unseen and…

…and she finds herself standing beside a burning ghat with her arms outstretched and entertains the fancy that the mourners gathered here are pieces in a game of shaHmat. Her words here today may move them in the right direction or bring the enemy crashing down upon them all. The mourners, mutually suspicious of one another, are united, if barely, in the garland-wreathed body that lies on the traditional handcart beside the ghat. At least one, she knows, is a traitor. Complexity upon complexity, and the least wrong move would send it all crashing into chaos, like a pile of jack-straws.

The old man on the cart beside her bears a withered look: wispy white hair like a bleached field of wheat, broken here and there by puckered scar tissue. The mourners have done with their firecrackers and trumpets and now wait in silence for her words.

She stretches out her arms as if to embrace them.

Splendid and holy causes, she declares, are served by men who are themselves splendid and holy. And that splendour and pride and strength was, in him—a nod to the body—compatible with a humility and a simplicity of devotion to Terra—to all that was old and beautiful in Terra.

This is a place of peace, sacred to the dead, where men should speak with charity and restraint. We should speak of peace and of the good. But I hold it a good thing to hate evil, to hate untruth, to hate oppression; and, hating them, to strive to overthrow them. Those of Name are strong and wary; but, life springs from death: and from the graves of patriots spring living nations. Those of Name have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have purchased half of us and frightened the rest. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools!—they have left us our patriot dead, and, while Terra holds these graves, Terra unfree shall never be at peace.

She waits for the reaction, but when she looks, the burning yard is empty. The wind blows strong and rustles her short-clipped white hair, tickles the bald, scarred spots. Eloquence wasted; words sown to the wind. That isn’t quite fair, she says.

For a moment there is no answer. Then the body on the cart speaks through motionless lips. I heard.

The Silky Voice does not wait to hear more. She turns from the dead man and flees and…

…and he is running, legs pumping, breath bellowing, falling into the rhythm that eats miles. The hurdle is directly ahead of him and he gathers himself and leaps! and hits the ground running on the other side. He hears the clatter of a hurdle and laughs to himself. Another runner spilled like a pile of jackstraws. He wastes no breath on speech. A culvert looms before him and he bounds across, noticing only in passing that the culvert is a chasm so deep its base is shrouded in shadow.

He passes near the face of a cliff, and rocks roll down it. He dances through them, a grand ballabile, with boulders. A dog—a tan-and-black “sayshen”—has joined him and keeps pace, leaping with him through the hurdles, dodging the sudden obstacles. A monstrous water buffalo bars the way snorting and the dog barks and snarls and frightens the larger beast off. A black-clad warrior confronts him and the Brute spars while the dog nips at his heels.

Far ahead, he spies the princess in flight, and he hastens to catch up, but a wall is suddenly in his path. Ropes dangle from it to facilitate his passage. But dogs cannot climb, and the Brute bends over to carry the sayshen in his arms.

And the dog is a wolf and it snaps for his hand. The Brute pulls back in time and the teeth clack on air. That ain’t hardly fair! he thinks. He turns and runs toward the forest, but when he looks behind, the wolf has run after the princess, and…

…and he finds a hiding place in a bower deep within a tangled greenwood, where he huddles. There is rustling all about him, the sound of scampering feet as other hiders seek other harbors. A distant voice pipes out, Ready or not, here I come! and Inner Child hugs himself with anticipation. Adorned with greasepaint and camos, he knows that in this place he cannot be seen.

He waits because he is very good at waiting, and he listens for the sounds of pursuit. Far off, he hears occasional yelps as other hiders are discovered. The sounds come closer, but Inner Child does not move. Motion is the killer. It draws attention. But as they near his position, the cries of discovered players become more like shrieks of terror, cut horribly short. The footsteps become heavier. Trees part to allow the passage of…something. «It’s not fair!» he thinks, though he dares not speak.

A voice like the sliding of continental plates speaks out from the forest.

Ally, ally, oxen free.

The massive footsteps come nearer. Inner Child waits.

“It” is coming.

They remember a fragment of ancient poetry. “Things fly apart. The center cannot hold.” And “What rough beast, its time come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.”

Donovan peers above the parapet of the ruined building and his hands choke his spot-rifle. Bullets sing off the plasteel and he ducks back down. The assault has failed. The Protector’s flag still flies over Coronation House. Bolt tanks have moved into postion at each of the streets visible from this position. The redoubt is surrounded, no question.

He rolls to another position, estimates where the closest tank must be, then pops up and “paints” the tank with his spot-rifle and ducks back down before the chatterguns walk in on him. He waits, but nothing happens.

“The protectors must have sanded the satellite,” he says. “Our submunitions didn’t lock onto the painter!”

He looks around. The parapet is empty save for the dead. Where have his squadmates gone? They can’t have abandoned him!

The sky turns white and the building shudders. He feels a tingling even through his insulation. The bolt-tank has fired. It will be several minutes while it recharges. But of course there are four of them, one at each intersection, and they will take turns. The Chancellery across the plaza—O’Farrell’s post—suddenly flashes and the walls fall in on themselves as the building comes down. How much longer can he hold the Education Ministry?

A young woman touches him on the shoulder and he blinks in surprise. She is young, hardly more than a girl, unarmored, uninsulated, barefoot amid the broken glass and masonry that litter the rooftop. She wears a Doric chiton and seems too delicate even to live on this world, let alone in the hell it has become.

(But where is this world? Donovan wonders. What is this city? The buildings sport lions’ heads with gaping mouths at their cornices, but is that an emblem of the regime, a whim of the architect, or nothing in particular? In the plaza below he had glimpsed a statue of a triton holding a three-pronged fish-spear.)

“There is a way out of this,” she tells him, and her voice is like a melody.

He remembers that there is an old, unused system of subterranean steam tunnels connecting the buildings in the Old Quarter of the city. They had been bricked over and abandoned in place following the shift to beamed microwave power during the Long Recovery, but the tunnels are still there. Bullets spray the parapet once again and he rolls away from the edge, staying down below the merlons until he reaches the center of the roof. The others in his cell lie slumped and dazed at their positions, except those who, unmoving, will never move again. Some follow him with their eyes, but even that is too much for most. Defeat stares back at him. There is a way out of here, he tells them.

But that is not enough. The girl in the chiton stands a-tiptoe and whispers in his ear. “They need encouragement.”

As if such things could be ordered up a ducat the dozen! Listen to me, men. And a few do, not many. We have lost this day. But there will be other days! We knew this would be a mere gesture’ when we first hoarded weapons against it. But there will be other gestures! We here will not be forgotten. The Protector has not fallen, but he has teetered just a bit. He has rocked on his executive chair, and like a man tipping too far back, he had flailed in panic for fear of falling. A few grin at the imagery. Two pick up their weapons and crawl to him. The next tip will topple him; or the tip after that. Our children, or our children’s children will finish where we have started. One day they will say, “The lamp that was lit has been lit again.’

No one cheers. They are past cheering. But a grim determination takes hold of them. Which way is out, Section Leader? Which way?

We must go down, all the way down to the dark and the fog, before we can come up again.

Some understand. The old tunnels? They are still open?

Others say, We cannot move. We will stay and man the parapets, and maintain the illusion that all remain.

The gesture touches, though the wounded have little choice but to make it. He goes from one to another and exchanges grips with them. The Rearguard dies, but never surrenders. Your names will always be known.

Known or forgotten, our fate is the same.

If go down you shall, why not go down shooting?

The girl in the chiton seems to float above the ceramic tiles of the rooftop. “Words are bullets, too; and they wound long after the last bullet has been fired.”

He leads them down the darkened stairwell. «Quiet!» he cautions them. «They may have infiltrated the building.» They pass dim and empty offices, long looted for anything of use, littered with casings and sabots and exhausted battery packs, and here and there, too, the corpses of those who came to seize the offices and those who would not leave them. It had surprised him how many believed in the Protector. It was possible that even the Protector believed.

They pass the broadcast studio and pause long enough to beckon to Issa Dzhwanson, the silver-throated actress, idol of millions, who has been for these past few days the clarion voice of their futility. But she shakes her head and like the men and women on the rooftop will not leave her post. I will maintain the illusion. I will tell the world that reinforcements have come, not that the remnants have left. I will sow doubts in the mind of the Protector.

«I cannot tell you where we go. Any lips can be brought to speak.»

If you do not escape, it will not matter that we fought, she says.

In the second subbasement he finds the wall that should have led to the old steam tunnels; but there is no door. He sinks to his heels and covers his face.

“But it is only a wall,” says the girl in the chiton. “And walls have other sides.”

The Fudir sends them to scrounge the maintenance shops for anything that can hack and dig and chop. He flips his goggles up and sees how dark the room is. “Set your zoots to black,” he tells them. “Ramp your temperature down. If we can’t be invisible, let’s be hard to see.”

They pick and chip at the wall he judges most likely to have bricked over the old tunnel entrance. The blocks are ceramic and hard to break, but once through the surface facing, progress is easier. He wonders. Are we digging in the right place? How thick is the wall? Is time running out? Will the Protector’s men enter the building to seize it or simply stand back and bring it down, as they brought down the Chancellery? Seventeen stories tower above them.

Later, there is a clatter above of boots on stairs. The Fudir gestures and men pause, improvised picks half raised, and they listen.

“They will go up, not down,” the girl tells him, and he wonders why no one else sees her. “Time has not yet run out.”

Once in the tunnel they are faced with a choice. Left or right? The stone staircase behind them has been hidden by old furniture pulled in front of the opening. It will not long fool a diligent search.

“But they will likely not search,” the girl says.

She is right. No roll was taken of those who seized the building. How could the Protected Ones know that some have left? But neither will it do to turn the wrong way and flee into a building already occupied by the Protector’s men. To the river, then. The tunnels once extended that far. But which way is riverward?

Steam lines. Failure modes analysis. Possible ruptures. Condensing steam. Water, a lot of it. Mitigation plan. Run out into the river. Energy needed to remove water. Gravity assist. Conclusion: there will be a perceptible slope down toward the river.

He pulls an I-ball from his pouch and places it on the floor of the tunnel. It does not move. He kicks it right and it rolls a little way and then stops. He nudges it to the left with his boot, and it rolls, and then rolls a little faster, and then picks up speed, until it curves into the wall and comes to a rest.

This way, he says.

He leads his squad at the trot through the tunnel, their handlights opening pools of yellow-green light for their goggles. The lamps will make them visible, should anyone else be in the tunnels, but speed matters more than caution now. They must reach the river while the Protected Ones are focused on the Education Ministry, the Chancellery ruins, and the other buildings the patriots have occupied in the Centrum.

The men stagger. It has been four days without rest, and the river is a league away. Twice more, he must play the trick with the I-ball, and each time they turn trustingly downhill.

We are running in circles, a heavy voice says. And a fetid, stale breeze chokes them for a moment with ancient dust. Would it be so terrible to surrender? You will be Conditioned, but at least you will live. There is a limit to what the human body can endure.

“But perhaps not to what the human spirit can,” says the girl.

They pause for rest and he looks at each of his squad. Ten of them have made it out of the building. The others, left behind, must be dead by now, or on their way to reconditioning camps. Is this all that is left of the conflagration they had hoped to ignite? A boy, a woman, six men, and the girl in the diaphanous gown.

“So long as there is a spark, there may become a flame,” she says.

It’s useless, one of the men declares. His voice is heavy, though oddly not with defeat.

“One day,” says a young man. He is dressed in a chlamys, fastened at the right shoulder, under which he is otherwise nude. His right flank is exposed. “One day, people will look back and remember the names of each one here.”

But are you here? Donovan wonders. Am I? For all he knows he may be lying unconscious on the floor somewhere on a world as yet unknown.

“You will never have better friends than you have this day,” the young man continues. “Each of you owes your life to the others. You have acted with one will, one mind.”

Donovan notes how the grime of battle has likened them. The same war paint, the same camouflage zoots. Hands, eyes, faces made anonymous by concealing goggles and gloves. He goes to each one in turn and embraces them, and they do the like. One is especially fervent, and bestows a kiss on his cheek.

“It will be dark,” the girl says, “when we reach the river.”

There comes a time when the body finds its limits, and then it finds whether there is anything beyond those limits. The river is wide at this point, but its banks are undeveloped and so there are none to see him. He wants nothing more than to lie there and sleep undisturbed until morning. After which, in the pitiless light of day, he will be considerably disturbed. Very funny, he thinks. But there are miles to go before he sleeps. There is a safe house in the O’erfluss District, if he can reach it. If it is still safe.

“Why assume it is not until we need to know?”

He looks around to see who has spoken, but he is alone on the river’s bank. Who was that? he asks the night; but receives no answer save the murmur of the river’s current, the creaking of insects, and the distant crackle of bolt-tanks and thud of buildings behind him in the Centrum. He uses the I-ball for its intended purpose, tossing it up and letting the stabilized images from its miniature cameras flash his surroundings on his goggles. No one is near.

Not much left of the Revolution…

“Whatever you rescue from a burning house is a gain.”

He summons reserves of strength, rises to his feet, walks slowly to the edge of the river. Sooner begun, sooner done. He will probably drown halfway across; and it is a measure of where he has come to that this seems a happy end.

He wades in until the water is waist deep, then he stretches out and begins to swim. The zoot helps, since it has buoyancy pockets. The current carries him downstream, away from the firefight in the city’s center and toward the great bridge, black-shadowed against the night sky.

It is tempting to give up and simply drift with the river. In the buoyant zoot, he could sleep all the way to the sea. But to reach the safe house he must make shore some place before the water-ferry docks, and so he strokes more briskly, now fighting the current.

And after a lifetime, he staggers up on the western bank of the river, and throws himself to the ground. It is marshy here. An old sugar processing plant gone to seed. Improbably, sugar cane has taken root and stands out of the water as bewildered as he.

“It’s not too much farther,” says the girl in the chiton. She sits atop a piling that once outlined the sugar loading dock.

He hears feet brushing through the riverside growth. Pulling back into the shadows, he slips a knife from his belt. The searcher whispers his name.

His true name.

It has been years, a lifetime, since he has heard it. And he recognizes the voice.

Rising from the shadows, he whispers urgently, Over here. He waits to see if he has made one last mistake, but recognition comes. You made it out of the Chancellery, then.

The other rebel steps forward and embraces him. “Glad to see you got free, Chief. Are there any more with you?”

“No. I…I thought for a while there were, but…”

“I understand.” He kisses him on the cheeks, once on each. “I hope you do, too.”

And with that the Protector’s Special Security forces close in and pin his arms to his side and take the knife from his hands. They are not gentle. The goggles are yanked from his head. One of the Protected Ones punches him in the belly and he doubles over. Looking up, he catches the eye of the man who had been his friend. “Why?”

And the man shrugs and will not look at him. “‘Close fits my shirt,’” he quotes the proverb, “‘but closer my skin.’”

Donovan gathers all his strength—though there is little left to gather—and he reaches out with both hands and…

…and dimensions twist and their hands impossibly meet.

The Fudir holds tight; sees that Donovan has done the same at his end of the table, grabbing Silky Voice and Pedant. Sleuth gropes for Pedant; Brute for Silk. Inner Child clutches the Silky Voice like an infant his Madonna. «Go away!» he tells the shadowy apparition. «You’re bad! Go away!»

…and then they are a ring, and the unshaped thing is excluded, and the table is normal in size and shape, and there are only the nine of them around it.

Each looks at the other, and looks at where the shadows had sat, and it is all gone. Donovan wrenches his hand from the Brute’s grasp. Sleuth lets go. Pedant crosses his arms and leans back in his chair.

“Well,” says the Fudir. “That was different.”

“Laugh all you want to, you fool; but that is what comes of your fissiparous activities.”

“Mine!”

“Yes, yours. And all the rest of you. What are you, after all, but shards and pieces of me! By your very existence you fragment me.”

The Sleuth turns to the Pedant. What is the point of your gathering the grapes of experience if you fail to press them for the wine of wisdom?

The naked young man in the chlamys says harshly, “Have you learned nothing? You have defeated Nothing itself. But you have defeated nothing yourself. You have preserved yourself intact, and which of you did that?”

“Who are you?” asks the Fudir. “And you?” The last is aimed at the young girl in the chiton.

“Parts of you,” she says, “that you thought you had lost, but who were always there, close by, waiting.”

“Was all that…,” says Donovan. “Was all that something that once happened to us? Was it memory, or imagination?” Had he really fomented a rebellion against some tyrant somewhere? Had they conditioned him out of the very memory of it?

The girl shrugs. “I know no more than you; but I would like to think that we will one day remember who we were.”

The first part, says the Sleuth. That was clearly symbolic.

Symbolizing what?

“The facets of a diamond,” the young man suggests.

Donovan stares at him and recognizes what he once was, a long time ago. And he knows that he cannot be that ever again. He has lost his youth.

“And is that not a gain,” asks the girl, “as well as a loss?”

“I think,” says Donovan, “that I will call you Pollyanna.”

“Call me what you will, so long as you call upon me when the box has been emptied out. Every man loses his youth one day. You need not lose your happiness.”

Méarana!

“If that is your happiness.”

The Pedant smacks the table. Remember the minion that changed.

And the dog that turned.

“And the man who kissed us on the riverbank,” says the Fudir.

He leans back in his chairs and considers. He can see it so clearly now and wonders why he has not seen it much earlier. Too busy mocking himself. Too busy fighting himself.

“We can’t stay here. It would be a betrayal. She is our daughter, after all.”

Finally, you admit it?

“Yes,” says the Fudir. “Her chin. Her age. Half of what she is. Though it frightens me.”

“It ought to,” Donovan comments. “We can’t let her go into the Wild, knowing what we know.”

Have you forgotten? We’ve been drugged. We lie helpless on some Gatmander cot.

Silky? Isn’t that your job? You’ll need this enzyme, and this one, to counteract it.

The Silky Voice summons glands into service. Enzymes race from their enclosures. Antibodies hunt down drug molecules, latch on, seize them and choke them tight, shove them out through sweat pores.

“As it pertains to him,” he hears a voice say, “there is a fever.”

And Donovan knows by this sign that he is near the farther bank of the river.

“There is still time,” says the young girl in the chiton.