The bed dipped as she settled beside him. He wanted very much to reach out and hold her, but the smell promised something wonderful.
"All living things must eat," she said, a smile evident in her voice.
He felt the bowl against his lips and, placing his wrapped hands on top of hers, took a cautious sip. It was a soup, rich and delicious.
After a few gulping mouthfuls it occurred to him that he didn't need to hurry. Turpi wouldn't leave him; she'd promised. Gently halting her hands before she could lift the bowl again, he said, "I haven't thanked you yet. You and your father saved my life."
"Father will be pleased to see you well, but we do not need thanks. Knowing you, being with you, is already more than I ever could have hoped."
That jarred something inside of him. It hadn't been a dream. She had been there with him all the time, taking his pain away, giving completely of herself. But now that he was fully awake, the emotional walls he'd built so sturdily over the course of decades slipped into their habitual place. She was nursing him because he was hurt. There was nothing more to it than that. There couldn't be, because he'd done nothing to deserve such devotion.
She raised the soup bowl, and he took another sip before replying. "But you barely know me at all "
There was light in her laughter, a chiming sound as perfect as everything else about her. "Look within. You'll see that isn't so."
He wanted the walls to fade again, but they were unrelenting, telling him that he needed them to survive-and then, once again, she was there, inside his heart and mind, and the walls seemed less important than they once had. Still, an insistent core of logic prodded him until he asked, "All right, but I don't know that much about you. Would you describe yourself-tell me what you look like?" It seemed a shallow question, one that had held significance for him in the past yet became important now purely because he couldn't see.
"If you wish it. I am near to your age, and not as tall. My hair is short and the color of the sun."
A likeness of Samantha Carter rose in his mind. Without thinking, he reached up to touch Turpi's face and was stymied by the bandages again. She cupped his chin in her hands and dabbed at a comer of his mouth. "Have faith. It will not be long before you can touch again."
For the first time he could remember, he did have faith-in her, this amazing creature who cared so deeply, who made him feel wanted and treasured. He'd become so adept at hiding aspects of himself from others that he had come to believe the mask had fused to what was real. How is it that this woman could so easily separate the two?
He also noticed the silence outside. "Has the storm ended?" he asked, his voice sounding oddly distant.
"It has, but another has come." He felt her move off the bed, and although he couldn't hear her, he was sure that Turpi was moving around the room, collecting things. Then he felt her hands along his legs, smoothing the covers. "In recent days it seems the storms have been more numerous. It is too dangerous to travel to the cliffdwellers' village while the path is masked by sand."
Remembering the close call his team had faced upon their first arrival, Rodney agreed. His team… He should be concerned about them, and about Atlantis. There was work to be done-but he couldn't do much to help them from the other side of a sandstorm. "This village where we are now. It's separate from the cliff-dwellers' village, right? You said your father rode inland to come here. Are you from the newer settlements? Do you interact with the other villages at all?" Avague memory prodded, something about a rapid system of communication with one another, but it eluded him.
"I believe my father will be able to answer that better than I could," Turpi replied. "He is a leader here in our village. Unlike the cliff-dwellers, our people understand the true nature of the sand."
"The true nature-what do you mean?" Admittedly he had been distracted by his own work, but he had taken note of Carson's description of the red grit. And his memory of that diagnosis was very clear.
After a pause, she explained. "The sand does not immediately harm our people the way it does yours. But there are properties in it that have damaged our genetic code over the course of generations. This has resulted in a growing number of children with horrible deformities. In some the deformities are manifested as physical birth defects, while in others a violent madness takes hold without warning ""
If he'd been able to see, Rodney would have stared in surprise. Her description had been remarkably scientific. The villagers he'd met before had been blandly pleasant, with relatively astute leaders and a surprisingly just system of government. If Turpi was any indication, though, some of the communities on Polrusso were considerably more advanced than others. Still, a doubt surfaced. "I didn't see anything like that in the cliff-dwellers' village. All the kids looked fine."
"You did see something, but you could not have recognized it." She came to sit beside him again, and her hand smoothed away the furrows in his brow. "The woman whom you saw crying after your arrival did not lose her daughter in the way you believed. The child went mad, as many have done before, and so it is said by the villagers that her mind was lost. Her mother was forced to abandon her to the sand storm, as all such children are abandoned to protect the village."
"What?" Appalled, he jerked back, and his arm knocked into something. The soup bowl, most likely, but since he didn't hear it hit the ground, there was probably no harm done. "They send their own children off to die? What kind of people can do that?" Granted, he didn't like children, but then he'd never much liked them even when he'd been a child. But to undertake such deliberate cruelty-
"It is not a deliberate cruelty," Turpi assured him. "Many babies are born with deformities so shocking that they cannot live. Others appear normal, but turn insane during puberty and go on murderous rampages, killing their families, friends and mentors. The village has no system of incarceration and its people no heart to put children to death by their own hands. The children's skin is still vulnerable until after puberty, so returning them to the sand seems the only action the cliff-dwellers can take to protect themselves."
"No amount of school shootings could justify that," Rodney insisted, outrage still simmering. "I may, as a teenager, have harbored a few dark thoughts and orchestrated the occasional electric shock of a classmate, but I got over it, for God's sake."
"You need not grieve." She placed a finger against his lips to quiet him. "The cliff-dwellers do not know it, but over the generations my people have taken in and raised the abandoned children. We discovered that their deformity is in fact a gift, in a way, for the madness comes from voices in their minds."
Stunned, Rodney turned his head and stared blindly at her. "They're telepathic!"
Turpi's fingers continued to stroke his face, then reached behind to gently massage the stiffness that he hadn't even realized was in his neck. "Untamed, it brings madness, but when educated to control it, these children are… extraordinary."
When it all fell into place, he felt like he'd been kicked in the stomach. The only way Turpi could have known about the village woman was by seeing into his mind. And his concern for Atlantis should have been far more acute. What else had she planted in his head`? How many of his thoughts over the past few hours had actually been his own?
Betrayal, while it should have been familiar, nevertheless stung him, painfully tightening his chest. All this time, he'd thought she cared for him, and like a fool, he'd believed it was because she-