They approached the mountain. The summertrees were brown and withered, rustling stalks surrounding a dark pond and deserted firepits. The wind whispered between the dry leaves and over the sand, coming first from one direction, then another, in the manner of winds near a solitary mountain. The city’s sunrise shadow enveloped them.
“It’s a lot bigger than I thought,” Melissa said quietly. “I used to have a place where I could hide and listen to people talk, but I always thought they were making up stories.”
“I think I did too,” Snake said. Her own voice sounded very lost and far away. As she approached the great rock cliffs, cold sweat broke out on her forehead, and her hands grew clammy despite the heat. The tired mare carried her forward.
The times the city had dominated the healers’ station were the year Snake was seven, and again when she was seventeen. In each of those years a senior healer undertook the long hard journey to Center. Each of those years was the beginning of a new decade, when the healers offered the city dwellers an exchange of knowledge and of help. They were always turned away. Perhaps this time, too, despite the message Snake had to give them.
“Snake?”
Snake started and glanced over at Melissa. “What?”
“Are you okay? You looked so far away, and, I don’t know—”
“ ‘Scared’ would be a good word, I think,” Snake said.
“They’ll let us in.”
The dark clouds seemed to grow thicker and heavier every minute.
“I hope so,” Snake said.
At the base of Center’s mountain, the wide dark pool had neither inlets nor outlets. The water oozed up into it from below, then flowed invisibly away into the sand. The summertrees were dead, but the ground cover of grass and low bushes grew lushly. Fresh grass already sprouted in the trampled areas of abandoned camps and the paths between, but not on the wide road to the city’s gate.
Snake did not have the heart to ride Swift past the water. She handed her reins to Melissa at the edge of the pool.
“Follow me when they’re finished drinking. I won’t go in without you, so don’t worry. If the wind rises, though, come running. Okay?”
Melissa nodded. “A storm couldn’t come that quick, could it?”
“I’m afraid it could,” Snake said.
She drank quickly and splashed water on her face. Wiping the drops on the corner of her headcloth she strode along the bare road. Somewhere close beneath the black sand lay a smooth, unyielding surface. An ancient road? She had seen remains in other places, disintegrating concrete flesh and even the rusting steel bones in places the collectors had not yet worked.
Snake stopped before Center’s gate. It was five times her height. Generations of sandstorms had brushed the metal to a lustrous finish. But it had no handle, no bell-pull, no door knocker, no way Snake could see of summoning someone to let her in.
She stepped forward, raised her fist, and banged it against the metal. The solid thud sounded not at all hollow. She pounded on the door, thinking it must be very thick. As her eyes grew more accustomed to the dim light in the recessed doorway, she saw that the front of the door was actually concave, perceptibly worn down by the fury of the storms.
Her hand aching, she stepped back for a moment.
“About time you stopped that noise.”
Snake jumped at the voice and turned toward it, but no one was there. Instead, in the side of the alcove, a panel clicked away into the rock and a window appeared. A pale man with bushy red hair glared out at her.
“What do you mean, beating on the door after we’ve closed?”
“I want to come in,” Snake said.
“You’re not a city dweller.”
“No. My name is Snake. I’m a healer.”
He did not answer — as politeness dictated where Snake had been raised — with his name. She hardly noticed, for she was getting used to the differences that made politeness in one place an offense somewhere else. But when he threw back his head and laughed, she was surprised. She frowned and waited until he stopped.
“So they’ve quit sending old crocks to beg, have they? It’s young ones now!” He laughed again. “I’d think they could choose somebody handsome.”
From his tone, Snake assumed she had been insulted. She shrugged. “Open the gate.”
He stopped laughing. “We don’t let outsiders in.”
“I brought a message from a friend to her family. I want to deliver it.”
He did not answer for a moment, glancing down. “All the people who went out came back in this year.”
“She left a long time ago.”
“You don’t know much about this city if you expect me to go running around it looking for some crazy’s family.”
“I know nothing about your city. But from the looks of you, you’re related to my friend.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” For the first time he was taken aback.
“She told me her family was related to the keepers of the gate. And I can see it — the hair, the forehead… the eyes are different. Hers are brown.” This city dweller’s eyes were pale green.
“Did she happen to mention,” the young man said, attempting sarcasm, “just exactly which family she’s supposed to belong to?”
“The ruling one.”
“Just a minute,” he said slowly. He glanced down and his hands moved, out of Snake’s view, but when she moved closer she could see nothing beyond the edge of the “window,” for it was not a window but a glass panel carrying a moving image. Though startled, she did not permit herself to react. She had known, after all, that the city dwellers had more mechanical technology than her people. That was one of the reasons she was here.
The young man looked up slowly, one eyebrow arched in astonishment. “I’ll have to call someone else to talk to you.” The image on the glass panel dissolved in multicolored lines.
Nothing happened for some time. Snake leaned outside the shallow alcove and looked around.
“Melissa!”
Neither the child nor the horses were in sight. Snake could see most of the pool’s near shore through a translucent curtain of withered summertrees, but in a few places enough vegetation remained to hide two horses and a child.
“Melissa!” Snake called again.
Again there was no answer, but the wind could have carried her voice away. The false window had turned dead black. Snake was about to leave it to find her daughter when it wavered back to life.
“Where are you?” a new voice called. “Come back here.”
Snake glanced outside one last time and returned reluctantly to the image-carrier.
“You upset my cousin rather badly,” the image said.
Snake stared at the panel, speechless, for the speaker was astonishingly like Jesse, much more so than the younger man. This was Jesse’s twin, or her family was highly inbred. As the figure spoke again the thought passed through Snake’s mind that inbreeding was a useful way of concentrating and setting desired traits, if the experimenter were prepared for a few spectacular failures among the results. Snake was unprepared for the implied acceptance of spectacular failures in human births.
“Hello? Is this working?”
The red-haired figure peered out at her worriedly, and a loud hollow scratching noise followed the voice. The voice: Jesse’s had been pleasant and low, but not this low. Snake realized she was speaking to a man, not to a woman as she had thought from the resemblance. Not Jesse’s twin, then, certainly. Snake wondered if the city people cloned human beings. If they did it often and could even handle cross-sex clones, perhaps they had methods that would be more successful than those the healers used in making new dreamsnakes.