They slid past each other like slippery same‑pole magnets, going in.
And Marghe was standing before the cathedral that was Thenike’s body and all its systems, as Thenike stood before hers. She stepped inside.
It stretched far over her head, a vast, echoing space. She wandered, laying a hand here, against the muscles sheathing the stomach, a hand there, between ribs. She stopped and looked in a side chapel where bronchioles narrowed to alveoli. She wandered on, noting cells and bones and connective tissue, glands and tubes. Ovaries.
One ovary felt different from the other. Marghe stopped. She felt its heat, and something else, a bulge, a ripe readiness. The bulge swelled. Marghe watched, fascinated, as it split, opened, released its egg. Marghe followed the egg as waving cilia gentled it down the oviduct.
Thenike was ovulating, and because Marghe knew their rhythms were matched, she knew that this would be happening in her body, too, and that Thenike would be watching. Marghe stepped closer, reached out cautiously. The electrum thread inside shimmered and sang, and the ovum almost… changed. Marghe withdrew her hand.
The virus had altered everything. She saw how she could change the chromosomes, how she could rearrange the pairs of alleles on each one. If she reached in and touched this, enfolded that, the cell would begin to divide. And she could control it–she and Thenike could control it.
Marghe felt the connecting tension as Thenike stood waiting.
She could do it. She would do it; Thenike would match her.
She reached out again, and the thrumming electrum strand that was the virus coiled and flexed and the cell divided. Marghe searched her memory of those long‑ago biology lessons: mitosis. But altered, tightly controlled and compressed by the snaking virus until it resembled a truncated meiosis. Chromosomes began their stately dance, pairing and parting, chromatids joining and breaking again at their chiasmata, each with slightly rearranged genetic material. But the chromatids did not then separate again and migrate to the cellular poles in a second anaphase; instead they replicated. This daughter would be diploid, able to have her own daughter.
It was like watching beads on a string rearrange themselves. Gorgeous colors, intricate steps, every bead knowing just the right distance to travel. Precision choreography, again and again, as cells divided, normally now, and the one‑celled ova became two‑celled, four‑celled, eight‑celled.
As they multiplied, Marghe felt the tight tension, the connection between these cells that would divide and multiply inside Thenike, and those that would grow inside her own body: fetuses. Fetuses that might one day be born as soestre.
Marghe sat up in bed, the coverlet wrapped around her, watching Thenike coax the fire back to life. The candle, forgotten, had long since burned out. The only light was the dull red of the hearth, sending Thenike’s shadow high over the ceiling.
She watched her lover in silence; words would have been too big, too solid, for what they had done together.
Thenike added some dry sticks. The flames leapt, sending her shadow swaying and jumping over the walls. She examined her handiwork and added a log. “You could be a viajera. If you chose. You have the skill.”
Marghe cradled her stomach with her right hand. She had done this. They had done this. She did not want to think about anything else. “They’ll be soestre,” she said. A new thought struck her. “How would I travel as a viajera with a baby?”
Thenike turned to look over her shoulder. “We’d travel together. While they’re young, we’ll travel smaller distances at a time, and less often. And when we get there, we’ll stay longer. We’d be safe, together.”
Marghe imagined the Nid‑Nodtossed by a storm, Thenike wrestling with the tiller, Marghe trying to reef the sail and stop both babies from being washed overboard.
“What are you smiling at?”
“The future.” And Marghe knew then that she did want to be a viajera, a teacher and wanderer, a newsbearer, arbitrator, and traveler. “Wenn will be disappointed. I think she’d rather I stayed as a gardener.”
“More useful to her way of thinking,” Thenike agreed.
“I can’t sing.”
“Not necessary.”
“Teach me what to do.”
“I have been doing.”
When they woke up the next morning, they hugged each other tight, then let go.
“Thenike, I need to get a message to Danner, at Port Central. Tell her where I am, what’s happening.” Now that she herself knew, finally, what she wanted, she owed it to them, to Danner and to Sara Hiam, to let them know the vaccine worked, that she had chosen to discontinue taking it; that she was going to stay here with Thenike and have a child.
“It’s a long journey from here to there. Will it wait until the weather’s better, until we can send by herd bird?”
“I should have sent word weeks ago.”
“I’ll talk to Hilt.“
Thenike pointed at the map on the wall of Rathell’s great room. “Hilt plans to leave for North Haven in the last third of this moon.” It was already the Moon of New Grass. Spring. “From there, her ship takes her south and east”–her fingernail swung out into the blue‑painted Eye of Ocean–“through the Summer Island channels. Then south and west, past the Gray Horn, out into Silverfish Deeps and on, down to Pebble Fleet. From there, she’ll be able to find a messenger willing to travel north and west up the Huipil and over the hills to your Port Central.”
Marghe frowned, and studied the wide‑swinging route. “Why doesn’t she sail through here?” She pointed to a narrow channel between the largest of the Summer Islands. “Wouldn’t that cut more than a few days off the voyage?”
“No ship could get through the Mouth of the Grave at this time of year.”
“And there’s no other way to get the message to Danner?”
Thenike shook her head. “The herd birds can only fly long distances when the air gets hot enough to lift them, let them glide.”
“When will that be?”
“Depends on the weather. Perhaps early during Lazy Moon. It would take… ten, fifteen days, maybe more, depending on who was herding where, and how much their birds were needed. If you’re in a hurry, sending a message with Hilt on her ship would be faster.”
Marghe sighed, and accepted the situation. “How much can I say with a message knot?”
”What do you want to say?” Thenike took a cord and several different threads from a bundle that lay on a shelf.
“That I stopped taking the vaccine. That I contracted the virus about a month later. That I’m here at Ollfoss, I’m well, and I’m pregnant.”
Thenike knotted rapidly, weaving sometimes one color, sometimes several, into elegantly shaped knots. When she ran out of cord, she took up another, tied it to the first, and continued.
“That’s it?” Marghe took the rope, ran the knots and colors through her fingers. “You’d better teach me to do that.”
Chapter Thirteen
DANNER, THOUGH SHE would not have admitted it to another soul, was enjoying herself.
She stood on a slight rise, eight kilometers from what was left of the Port Central perimeter, and watched the four groups of Mirrors pacing off their marks, pausing a moment to wipe the sweat from their brows with wristbands, aiming, loosing the crossbow quarrels, and trudging back to check their accuracy. Now and again, the late spring breeze carried the dull chunkof quarrel hitting mark, then the drifting curses after a poor aim, or the crows of accuracy.
Her Mirrors.
She had thirty‑two of them down below on the plain, shooting with a mix of differently tipped quarrels–ceramic, plastic, sharpened wood–and competing on a team basis. They seemed to be enjoying it.