Soon the clay was pliable. She rolled in it, rubbed it over every inch of her body and into her hair. When she got up, she was a blue demon with white eyes. The layer of mud was an eighth of an inch thick, but did not crack or flake as she moved.
She dipped the rope in the pool. It began to swell. She fastened one end to a bush at the edge of the water. Then she stepped into the water and submerged, paying the rope out behind her-the rope which had now become a strong breathing tube.
At two fathoms the weak light of the twilight zone was gone. She groped her way onto a silted ledge and settled onto her back with the weighted pack on her stomach. She put the other end of the tube in her mouth and slowed her breathing.
After one minute of self-hypnosis she was deeply asleep.
Three hours was as long as she could sleep anymore. She opened her eyes in the cool darkness.
Something slithered by her; she grabbed it and twisted, then pushed off for the surface. Just short of it, she paused and looked for danger above the water, then cautiously put her face into the air. Nothing. Satisfied, she climbed out and looked at her catch. A highlands rock eel, far south of its normal range. She thought about a fire, rejected it, and tossed the creature back into the pool. Highland eels cooked up fine, but were stringy and bitter raw.
The blue mud peeled off like rubber. It was a wonderful insulator.
She had learned many things in her long life. One was to be as comfortable as you can be all the time. And that meant dry boots, even if one had to sleep underwater. With satisfaction, she opened her pack and retrieved them. It was a wonderful pack, and they were wonderful boots. In her ranking of important things, dry boots came far ahead of food, and slightly before water.
She dressed, pulled on the boots, and started to run again.
Whenever possible, Cirocco avoided Tethys altogether. This time she would have to cross it. She holed up in the last patch of scrub brush, took out her tiny spyglass, and scanned the landscape ahead for sign of sand wraiths. She didn't expect to see them this far north; the condensation from the north wall, though hard to find, was beneath the surface, and deadly to the silicon-based wraiths. Still, she hadn't come this far by relying on her expectations.
The habit of traveling light had been ingrained for twenty years. Camouflage was an art she had studied at least that long. When God really is looking down from the sky-looking for you, and ready to kill-it pays to be both quick on your feet and hard to see. Her pack held ten kilos of the barest essentials. With the things in it, and the knowledge in her head, she could blend in anywhere.
Cirocco estimated it would be thirty-nine degrees on the sands.
No matter; she knew what to do.
She stripped once more, stuffed her clothing in her pack, and began digging at the base of one of the bushes that seemed dead. But the parched branches were only the top of the plant, and the least interesting part. They radiated away waste moisture.
When she reached the swollen roots a spurt of water washed over her bare feet. She knelt, cupped her hands, and drank. It was alkaline, but bracing.
With her knife she severed a nodule on one of the roots, then cut it open. A slippery yellow sap oozed out, which she squeezed into her hands and began rubbing over her body. Her skin was the color travel brochures referred to as "bronzed." It was a nice color, but several shades too dark for the sands of Tethys. She kept rubbing until she was the proper yellow-brown. The sap smelled like juniper. It was also a cure for acne, a property wasted on Cirocco.
There were a dozen scarves in her pack. She selected two of the proper hue, closed up the pack, then wrapped one scarf around her dark hair and the other around the pack itself. When she was done she was almost invisible.
Barefoot, she scrambled down the last rocky outcrop of Phoebe and down to the rolling dunes. She began to run.
Two hundred kilometers later, more than halfway across Tethys, she saw someone.
She did what seemed prudent: dived into the sand, wriggled until she was almost totally covered, like a stingray on the ocean floor, and waited.
She was pretty sure who it must be. She felt goosebumps, as she always did, then the feeling faded. It was possible she was going insane. Gaby had died here, a hundred kilometers to the south, twenty years before.
Cirocco didn't care. She stood up. She was coated in sand. The sweat which had been cooling her so efficiently as she ran now drenched her, began running down her body, leaving clean streaks as it went.
Gaby shimmered in the merciless heat haze, coming down the near side of a dune four hundred meters away. She was nude, as she always was when she came to Cirocco. And why not? Why should a ghost take clothing to the spirit world? She was milk-pale. At first that had made Cirocco uneasy, as if Gaby had been drained of blood. Then she remembered that Gaby had always been pale, before Gaea. She and Cirocco had been the only tanned people in a world of weak sunshine. And then Gaby had been dead. In death, she must have been quite black, though Cirocco had not seen it and never asked those who had.
"You're safe!" Gaby shouted, still coming toward her.
"Thank you! For how long?"
"All through Tethys."
Cirocco waited while Gaby vanished behind the last dune, then marched up the far side. Gaby paused for a moment at the top, then started down. Her feet left deep prints in the sand. She was terribly beautiful. Cirocco heard herself sob. She went to her knees, then sat back on her ankles. Her shoulders slumped wearily.
Gaby stopped fifty meters away. Cirocco could not speak, her throat was too thick, and she could not draw a proper breath.
"Are they all right?" she finally managed to say.
"Yes," Gaby said. "Conal found them. Saved their lives."
"I knew that boy would turn out useful. Where is he taking them?"
"Where you're going. You'll get there ahead of them."
"Good." She ransacked her brain. There were forbidden topics. "Uh... is it ... are they..."
"Yes, they're still part of the key. Not all of it."
"The key to what?"
"I can't tell you that now. Do you still trust me?"
"Yes." Unhesitatingly. There had been bad moments, but ...
"Yes. I trust you."
"Good. I wanted to-"
"I love you, Gaby."
The image started to waver. Cirocco cried out, then jammed the heel of her hand into her mouth. She could see the dune through Gaby's body.
"I love you, too, Rocky. Or is it Captain, now?"
"It's whatever you want."
"I can't stay. Gaea's in Hyperion. She's moving west."
"But she won't go into Oceanus."
"No."
Gaby was the little woman who wasn't there. Just an outline, a wish, an hallucination ... and she was gone.
Cirocco sat there for almost a rev, pulling herself together, staring at the footprints on the dune where Gaby had been. In the end, as before, she did not go over to touch them. She was terrified to discover they really weren't there at all.
The northern Thea ice-shield began in twilight and curved south and east. Cirocco ran along its edge, in blessed coolness.
There was no question of crossing Thea to the north. The mountains were not impassable-nothing really was, in Cirocco's experience; she had crossed them once in two kilorevs-but she did not have time for it. The fast way through Thea was over the frozen Ophion, which flowed right down the middle of the region of eternal night.
When she stopped, she was knee-deep in snow, and still naked. It was the work of a few moments to open her pack, reverse her clothes and boots so the white side was visible, and camouflage her pack and hair with white scarves.