“I watched you,” MaGee said. “You chase one of your rafts out? Your river‑in‑the‑sea could just about drown you, hear?”
Elai lifted her head. “There was the seagoer out there. That was what stopped us, not the river.”
“A little outmatched, weren’t you?”
She was not sure, but it sounded insulting. “They’re big.”
“I know they’re big. They have teeth, you know that?”
“Scar has teeth.”
“Not like those.”
“Where did you see one?”
MaGee’s face took on a careful look. “Just say I know, umn? Next boat you lose, you let it go.”
“Boat.”
“Raft.”
“Ship,” Elai concluded, and frowned. “You fly, MaGee?”
MaGee shrugged.
“How do you catch the wind?” Elai asked, suddenly on that track, with a star‑man at hand and answering questions. “How do you get the wind to blow the ships up?”
She thought she might be answered. There was of a sudden such a look in this MaGee’s pale eyes. “Maybe you’ll figure that out someday,” MaGee said, “when you’re grown.”
There was a sullen, nasty silence. Elai gnawed on it, and her leg was hurting again. She ignored it, adding it up in her mind that star‑man medicine was fallible. Like star‑men. “Your ships ever fall down?”
“I never saw one do it,” MaGee said. “I don’t hope to.”
“If my ships had the wind,” Elai said, “they could go anywhere.”
“They’re quite good,” MaGee said. “Who taught you?”
“I taught me.”
“I’ll bet not. I’ll bet someone told you.”
“I don’t tell lies.”
“I guess you don’t,” MaGee said after a moment of looking up at her as she walked along at Scar’s side. “They’re good ships.”
“Your medicine doesn’t work,” Elai said. “It hurts.”
“It’s going to if you keep hanging that leg down like that.”
“I haven’t got anywhere else to put it, have I?”
“I guess you don’t. But it’s going to hurt until you can lie down and get it level.”
“Huh,” Elai said, frowning, because she really wished the star‑man could do something. But she was mollified about the ships. Proud, even. A star‑man called them fine. “How did you know about the river?”
“The word is current. Like in the river. The sea has them. Really strong ones.”
Elai stored that away in her mind. “What makes them?”
MaGee shrugged again. “You do ask questions, don’t you?”
Elai thought about it. “Where do rivers start from, anyway?”
MaGee grinned, laughing at her, at which she frowned the harder.
“Someday,” Elai said, “Scar and I will just go up the Cloud and see.”
MaGee’s grin perished into something quite like belief. “I shouldn’t listen to your questions.”
“Why?”
“Why, why, and what? I’ll get you home, that’s what. And I’ll thank you if you don’t say I helped you.”
“Why? Don’t they like that?”
“Questions and questions.” MaGee hitched the pack up on her shoulder and plodded on, panting with the pace.
“What makes the ships fly?”
“I’m not going to answer your questions.”
“Ah. You know, then.”
MaGee looked up, sharp and quick, the distance to Scar’s back. “You talk to him, do you?”
“Scar?” Elai blinked, patted Scar’s shoulder. “We talk.”
“When you make Patterns on the ground, what do you do?”
Elai shrugged.
“So, there are some things you don’t talk about, aren’t there?”
Elai made the gesture of spirals. “Depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“Depends on how Scar is and what he wants and what I want.”
“You mean the same thing means different things.”
Elai shrugged, blinked, confused.
“How do you know?” MaGee pursued.
“Tell me how the ships go.”
“How much does Scar understand? Like a man? Like that much?”
“Caliban things. He’s the biggest caliban in the Towers. He’s old. He’s killed Styx‑siders.”
“Is he yours?”
Elai nodded.
“But you don’t trade calibans, do you? You don’t own them.”
“He came to me. When my grandmother died.”
“Why?”
Elai frowned over that. She had never clearly thought that out, or she had, and it hurt her mother that Scar had not gone to her: that was not for saying out loud.
“That’s a very old caliban, isn’t he?” MaGee asked.
“Maybe he is.” Elai patted him again.
“How many years?”
“Where do star‑folk come from?”
MaGee grinned again, slowly, and Elai felt a little triumph, swaying lightheadedly this side and that. The Cloudside towers passed into view now. The precious time passed.
“Do you live at the Base, MaGee?”
“Yes.”
She thought a moment, and finally brought her dearest dream into the light. “Have you been to the mountains out there, the ones you see from the beach?”
“No.”
“Is that very far?”
“Is that what you sail your ships for?”
“Someday I’ll build a big one.”
Silence from MaGee.
“I’ll go there,” Elai said.
“That ship would have to be big,” MaGee allowed.
“How big?”
“Questions again.”
“Is it far, MaGee?”
“As far as from the New Tower to the Base.”
“Do people live there?”
MaGee said nothing, but stopped, and pointed to the Towers. “That’s home, isn’t it?” MaGee said.
Elai dug her fingers into the softness of Scar’s hide beneath the collar, felt the power that was hers now, understood what was the star‑folk’s power, and felt something partly anger, partly loss. “Come to the beach tomorrow,” she said.
“I don’t think I can,” MaGee said. “But maybe.”
Elai memorized the face, the look of MaGee. If, she thought, I led thousands like this starman, I would take the islands, the Styx, the heavens everyone came from.
But MaGee kept the secrets to herself, and did not belong to her or to her mother.
“ Hai,”she yelled at Scar, and rode him off at a pace that sent jolting spears of pain through her leg, that had her swaying when she arrived in her own lands, to the solicitude of those that met her.
vi
188 CR, day 178
Memo, office of the Director to staff member Elizabeth McGee
Appreciating potential difficulties, the Director nevertheless considers this a prime opportunity for further study.
vii
The Cloud Towers
Elai lay fitfully that night, with Weirds to soothe Scar in his restlessness, with a firebowl boiling water for compresses they laid on her leg. Figures moved like nightmare about her, and Scar fretted and hissed, not trusting any of them. Even her mother came, asking coldly after her safety, questioning her what had happened.
“Nothing,” she said.
Ellai scowled at that; but Ellai’s Twig came no further than the outer passage of her room, fretting and hissing on her own. The temperature of the situation rose steadily so that–“See to her,” her mother snapped at those who tried, and went away, collecting Twig and getting no answers.
It was like that the next day and the next. The leg bothered her, and the small rides she could take in days after that turned up no sign of the star‑folk. No MaGee. No answers. Nothing.