“Marghe?”
She opened her eyes. Gerrel was bending over her, looking worried.
“Good morning.” It was a creaky whisper, but Marghe was pleased with it.
Gerrel’s face split into a wide grin. “It’s afternoon. You’ve slept all yesterday, all night, and most of today.”
“Could sleep more.”
“I’ll go get Thenike. She’s been here most of the time. But then I think she got fed up with you always being asleep and went to find something to eat.” Gerrel cocked her head. “You’re probably hungry. Shall I bring something?”
At the thought of food, Marghe felt ill. “Nothing for me.” She was terribly tired.
Gerrel hesitated by the door. “If you’re sure? Well, then. I’ll be quick.”
Marghe listened to her light footsteps turn to a run once she was outside. She smiled again.
Alive. She was alive. She turned her head slowly, looked at the wall. It seemed different. And the bed felt… not the same. She looked more carefully. This was not her room. Not the guest room.
Something chittered and sang outside. From the forest. A bird? She wanted to be out there, walking through the trees, smelling the life, hearing animals scuttle and sing and wind riffle through boughs overhead. She wanted so many things, and was surprised at how hard she wanted them. She felt different. Again.
Thenike opened the door, carrying a tray. Gerrel squeezed in behind her.
“I want to see the sky,” was the first thing Marghe said. Her voice was stronger already.
“No. First you eat. Then you sleep again. Then you eat again. Then, maybe, you go outside and see the sky.”
“Not hungry.” She felt tired again.
“I tried to tell her,” Gerrel said, leaning forward over Marghe, “but she said—”
“I said,” Thenike interrupted, “that you needed food. The fever has burnt the flesh from your bones.” She put the tray down on the swept hearth. “But first, I want to have a look at you. No,” she said as Marghe struggled to lift herself upright,
“you relax. Gerrel and I will lift you.”
They lifted her up, propping her with pillows, while Thenike listened to her chest.
“Breathe. Deep.” Marghe had to lean forward, her weight resting on Gerrel, for Thenike to listen to her lungs from the back. From this angle, she could see a half-finished tapestry on the floor, some folded clothes that she recognized on the shelf: this was Gerrel’s room. “Breathe.” Thenike tapped and listened. Marghe coughed.“Good. Good.” They laid her back against the pillows and pulled the covers back up to her chin. “All that rubbish in your lungs should be gone in a day or two. If you do as I suggest.” She gestured to Gerrel, who brought the tray. “So first, eat.”
Marghe only managed about half the soup, then, to her chagrin, felt her eyes begin to roll. Thenike made her drink a bowl of lukewarm water before she lay down again.
She was asleep before Gerrel could lift the soup dish back onto the tray.
She woke again just before evening. This time she stayed awake long enough to eat a large bowl of stew, and to ask Thenike why she was in Gerrel’s room: because Gerrel had panicked and brought her to the safest place she could think of, her own room, explained Thenike. Marghe fell asleep with a smile on her face. Gerrel was her sister.
Her recovery was rapid. Almost too rapid, Marghe thought. It seemed as though there was a fountain, a hot spring of energy inside her fizzing and bubbling and demanding to be let out.
“I feel different,” she said to Thenike.
“You are different.”
“No, I feel…” she hunted for a way to describe the incredible well-being she felt,
“like I could live for a year on sunshine and fresh air, like I might never get sick again.”
Thenike laughed, and Marghe listened to that laugh: rich, smoky, warm, it rolled like the breaking waves on a flat beach, as if it could go on forever, changeless. “Oh, you will,” the viajera said, and Marghe heard music in her many-layered voice.
“You even sound different. And I can smell…” Everything. She could smell everything, and the scent was excitement: her own, Thenike’s. She watched Thenike’s dark brow tighten a little in the center, noticed for the first time how the lines were slightly asymmetrical, canting down toward her right eyebrow, like old timbers sagging at one end. Except it was not just sight and sound and smell, it was something else—a different kind of sensitivity that made Thenike’s voice almost visible, that sharpened Marghe’s sight so that what she saw seemed to have texture, more meaning than mere color or shape.
“It may be that the poisons fed to you as part of the vaccine are out of your system now, that the virus has cleaned you.”
Symbiosis, Marghe thought. Like allowing spiders to spin their webs in a house so that the flies and mosquitos were kept to a minimum. Like the E. coli that flourished in her gut and helped her digest proteins and process fibers, the result of some bacterial infection in a million-years-distant ancestor.
Outside, something sang, a long call that started out yellow, dipped in the middle to blue, then rose to scintillating gold and orange, as though the caller had decided that it was not, after all, sad. Marghe smiled. “What was that?”
“The chia bird. She’s been singing for two days now. A little early: today is only the first day of the Bird Moon.”
“What does she look like?”
“Come see for yourself.”
The chia, perched on top of the house, was like a palm-sized replica of the pictures of herd birds Marghe had studied at Port Centraclass="underline" bony crest, grayish, slippery-looking skin blushing to pink where the capillaries webbed the near surface, stringy pectorals that powered two true wings like those of a bat, and a fixed gliding wing like delicate parchment. When it turned to examine its observers, Marghe saw that its eyes were startling and green, like a cat’s.
The days got warmer, and Marghe moved back into the guest room. There was more sun, and she heard more chia birds calling and more wirrels chittering from the forest, There were insect noises and the soughing of wind in trees, though it was not the same as hearing wind in Earth trees; the leaves were stiffer, the sound higher pitched. Sometimes it hissed.
Marghe turned the soil in the garden and listened to the wind. So many sounds twined into that hissing: insect carapaces scraping the undersides of dead leaves, living leaves shivering in the wind, an empty nutshell rolling up against a tree trunk with a soft tck. It would be a long time before she grew tired of her newly virus-sharp senses.
As she worked, she thought about what Thenike had taught her, about deepsearching, about patterning, about pregnancy.
They were all part of the same process. She rooted out a weed and tossed it onto the pile she would use for compost. Deep-search. Something that all did, once they thought they were ready. Often some time around puberty, though earlier or later was not too unusual. The searcher looked within, to find out… what?
“Whatever she looks for,” Thenike had said unhelpfully. “Almost always a name.
Sometimes what she would like to do with her life.”
It intrigued Marghe. What did they see, and how did they see it? Like a movie, an interactive net holo, an abstract painting? Maybe it was audio, or tactile. Olfactory.
“All,” Thenike said, and added, just when Marghe was beginning to feel satisfied with that answer, “or none, or a mix.”
The more Marghe had pressed, the less clear the viajera’s answers had seemed.
“You’re not being clear,” she had said, frustrated. “How do you mean, exactly,