“I always thought it was strange,” she said, “how it’s the same age as the rest of the Dome, but it feels ancient.”
“Maybe there’s something old inside you that remembers it.”
She grinned. “That’s it. That’s it exactly. Something older in me that remembers.” She turned a slow circle in the greenery. “I never told anyone about it before. It sounds—” she spread her hands “—well, odd.”
“ ‘A long time ago,’ ” said Farley, “ ‘when we all lived in the forest….’ ”
She clapped her hands. “You really do understand,” she said.
“Well, all that book time had to pay off someday.”
Her look grew serious. “I don’t mean the trees. I mean me. You understand me.”
“I don’t know that I’d go that far. But I’m working on it.” His smile became sly. “So,” he said. “What now?”
Something in her thrilled at his now. She resisted an urge to glance at her chronometer. There was time. It would be fine. But in truth there was no time. Every second brought his leaving closer.
Wennda pointed at the base of the cliff. “Now,” she said, “we climb.”
The cliffs rose a hundred fifty feet. They looked real, but there was a convenience to their structure that belied nature. Here terraces and tiers, gouges and cracks and outcroppings did double duty as steps, handholds, even a little amphitheater and benches. Farley admired their design as he followed Wennda along the narrow route up the artificial cliffs. He was glad to be alone with her, glad that by the end of the day a plan for recovering his bomber would be in place. Farley would be getting weapons, a squad, tactical help, technical help from the science boys on how to fly back through the vortex. Meantime his crew were earning their keep, and the CO seemed pleased by their participation and not even especially bothered about his daughter fraternizing with the Barbarian from the Sky. No one was dead, there was hope of getting home, and Farley was out in the sunshine with his dreamgirl. He couldn’t stop worrying about getting back, about getting his men back—but when you thought about it, there were worse things than not being able to get back to the war.
Wennda looked at the ten o’clock sun panel glowing on the other side of the sky, then glanced back at Farley. He seemed lost in thought. She turned forward and kept going. At least they were alone up here.
She thought about when she used to come up here at night to run through the bushes and lie in the grass and listen to that lulling ancient voice. Often she would take her clothes off so that she could feel the world against her skin. Her skin against the world. Something old in her remembering. She wondered why she hadn’t mentioned that to Farley.
The top was flat and bare and maybe twenty feet square. Farley took in the miniature city, the ordered plots of crops, the rectangle of ocean, strips of marshland and savannah, the clustered buildings. You could easily believe you looked out across a thoughtfully patterned vista from a thousand feet up, but the true scale quickly asserted itself. The sky’s falseness was more apparent here, the nearer panels’ geometry impossible to ignore. Several of them dully reflected light from the ten o’clock sun on the other side of the dome.
Farley put his hands on his hips. “I like the view,” he said. He turned to her, already half grinning and intending to say, “And the city looks nice, too.” He stopped.
The feeling he was standing in his dream of her was overwhelming. This place he’d never been before, never could have seen. A world unto itself.
“I thought a break would do you some good,” Wennda said, and broke his sense of déjà vu.
“It’s gonna feel like R & R on someone else’s dime.”
“I’ll assume that’s good.”
“It’s terrific.”
She beamed. “Come on.” She took his hand and led him to the cliff edge facing away from the buildings and fields. They sat with their feet dangling and they looked down on valances of mist among the bushes below. Farley’s eyes told him he looked out over a vast space. Other senses told him that a massive wall was near.
Wennda leaned forward to look down at the mist and felt his grip tighten. His hand felt warm and strange and comfortable. “I won’t fall,” she said.
His face was a caricature of disappointment. “Not even a little bit?”
She rolled her eyes. There it was, in five words. Confidence, playfulness, protectiveness, and utter difference.
“I don’t get to do things like this with people,” she said, looking down at tendril clouds fifty feet below. “With men. I’m the commander’s daughter.”
“I can see how that would have its good and bad sides,” he said beside her.
She snorted. “People think I get away with things. I’m always in some kind of trouble, but then I don’t get punished.”
“Or you get punished harder than other people who did the same thing?”
She nodded. “But usually I get into trouble because I did something that needed to be done! Things I couldn’t get anyone else to do.”
“Or couldn’t get permission to do?”
“Maybe. Sometimes.” She laughed. “Yes.”
“Maybe sometimes yes,” he agreed.
“But I’m right,” she said. “I fix things, I find out things that help everyone. Nobody talks about that part of it. They either talk about how I have it easy or they feel sorry for me.”
“Because you’re the CO’s daughter.”
She nodded. “No one ever tells him you’re too easy on her, you’re too hard on her. They’re afraid of him.” She laughed bitterly. “They should be.”
“He seems like a pretty tough nut.”
She pulled her hand from his and turned toward him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t bring you here to talk about that. I brought you here because this place is special to me, and I wanted to be alone with you. I wanted—”
The sun went out.
Wennda let out a long sigh as lights winked on in the fields below, in the clustered buildings in the distance. “This,” she finished resignedly. “Us, here. Alone. At eleven.”
“Oh.” He was quiet a moment. “Oh!” he said again.
“Oh,” she agreed. “Some tactician, huh?” She folded her arms and looked down into the impenetrable dark. Maybe she should just lean forward and let herself fall. Just a little bit, as Farley’d said. With her luck she’d live through it.
“Can I say something?” Farley asked.
“I wish you would.”
He drew a long breath. “Can we maybe scoot back a little? This cliff is scaring the hell out of me in the dark.”
She laughed. “Something scares you? The fearless aircraft pilot who flies between worlds and fights off typhons?”
“There hasn’t been five minutes in the last four days when Captain Fearless here wasn’t scared out of his gourd. Anyone who wasn’t would be crazy. Or lying. Or dead.”
“Here.” She reached out, touched his back, and moved to his arm. “I’ll save you, Captain Fearless.”
“I’m counting on it,” he said.
She pulled him back and let him go and stood facing the dark sky with her back to the warming breeze. “‘I’m counting on it,’” she repeated. She shook her head. “How do you do that?”
“Do what? Count on you?”
“Talk like that.” She let out an exasperated breath. “You do things that ought to make me mad. Grab me like I’m too careless to stay on a cliff. Like I’m a child. And then say you’re counting on me to save you, like—like I don’t know what.”