Paeia–off hunting still. Paeia would come. Maybe others.
She lowered her head against her arms, feeling all her aches, a nagging sense that all the ground she relied on was undermined.
Other riders came before the dawn, quietly, bringing Styxsider prisoners who came and sat down across the fire, a handful of youths, sober and terrified. Elai thought about them a long time.
Speak up for them, McGee thought; it was outsider‑instinct. And then she clenched her fist in front of her mouth as she sat there and pressed her fist against her lips to hold herself from talking. I could get Elai killed with wrong advice.
But it was Elai let the boys live after all, with a gesture of her hand, and they sat there and shivered, all tucked up looking lost and scared and knowing that (if Elai told truth) there was nothing left to run to.
So other riders brought other prisoners. One ran: Parm was his name, at whose name the riders hissed…he took off running and the Calibans got him, down by the river in the dark.
McGee sat there and shivered, the same way she had sat through the rest, as if some vital link had been severed. She betrayed nothing, had no horror left.
It’s cold, she told herself. That’s all.
She had learned to be practical about death, in these days, to deal it out, to watch it. It was like any other thing, to listen to a man die, a little sound, a little unpleasantness. A small, lost sound, compared to the battle on the shore, the earth shaking to the fall of the great browns. The air filled with their hisses. Soon done. Forgettable.
But they brought Mannin in, and that was different… “Found one of the starmen,” Paeia said, who had come with that group. And what they brought was a leather‑clad, draggled man who did nothing but cough and shiver and tucked himself up like the teenaged boys. This thing–this wretched thing–she stared at him: it was only the dark hair, the height, that told her which it was.
“Let him live,” she said to Elai, in a voice gone hoarse and hard. So she discovered the measure of herself, that she could bear the death of natives, but not of her own kind. She was ashamed of that.
“He’s yours,” Elai said.
“Give him food and water,” McGee said, never moving from where she sat, never moving her fist from her chin, her limbs from the tightness that kept them warm. She never looked closely at Mannin, not being interested any longer. It was a horror she did not want, at the moment, to consider, how she had come to sit here passing life and death judgments, in the mud and the stink and the Calibans milling about ready for the kill.
It did not seem likely then that she could ever go back to white, clean walls, that she could unlearn what she knew, or be other than MaGee. MaGee. Healer. Killer. Dragon‑rider left afoot. She saw the sunlit beach, there in the night, herself young, Elai a child, old Scar in his prime again, his hide throwing back the daylight.
Here was dark, and fire, and they collected the leavings of the war.
Perhaps they would find the rest, Genley; Kim.
“Ask him,” she asked one of the riders at last, “where the other star‑men are.”
“He says,” that rider reported back to her, “that this Jin killed the rest.”
“Huh,” she said, and the dried fish she was eating went dryer yet in her mouth and unpalatable. She found another depth of herself, that she could still harbor a resentment toward the dead. But she did. She wished in a curious division of her thoughts that even Mannin would try to run; that the whole matter might be tidy. And that horrified her.
“Someone should take Mannin to the Wire,” she said, for Elai’s hearing.
Elai waved a hand.
So a rider named Cloud did that, who had a caliban who was willing to go. They went off into the dark and the last of the starman matter was settled.
It was not what mattered, on the Cloud.
lvii
205 CR, day 168
Base Director’s Office
“…It’s down,” the secretary said, wild‑eyed and distressed, breathless from the other office, leaning on the desk forgetful of protocols. “The tower, sir–it’s down, just– fell. I looked up in the window one minute and it was going down–”
There were scattered red lights on the desk com. One was an incoming station message, on that reserved channel; more were flicking on.
“The Styx tower,” the director said, striving for calm.
“The face of it–just hung there a moment like gravity had gone, and then it went down in all this dust–”
The account went on, mild hysteria. The Director pushed the button for the fax from station.
“…Urgent: your attention soonest to accompanying survey pictures. Styx towers eight, six, two in collapse…”
The door was open. Security showed up, agitated and diffident, red‑faced in the doorway.
“You’ve seen it,” the man said.
“My secretary saw it go. What’s going on out there? Station says we’ve got more towers down. Maybe others going.”
“Try Genley again?”
The Director considered it, thought it through, the governing principle of all dealings across the wire. “Try any contact you like. But no one goes outside.”
“If there are injured out there–”
“No aid. No intervention. You’re sure about our own subground.”
“Systems are working.”
“Try McGee again. Keep trying–Get back to work,” he told the secretary, who went out a shaken man. He wanted a drink himself. He was not about to yield to that. He wanted the pills in his desk. He withheld the reassurance. The desk com was still full of red lights, not so many as before, but still a bloody profusion of them. Another winked out.
“Prepare a report,” he told Security. “I want a report. We’ve got observers coming in. I want this straightened up.”
“Yes, sir,” Security said, and took that for dismissal.
More of the lights were going out. His secretary was back at work. Things had to be set in order: there had to be reports with explanations. His hands were shaking. He began to think through the array of permissions he had given, the dispatch of agents. Those would be reviewed, criticized. There had to be answers ready, reasons, explanations. The Bureau abhorred enigmas.
McGee, he thought, cursing her, setting his hope in her, that all reports now indicated that the Cloud was unaffected.
One native site to show the visitors. One native site to showcase; and McGee could get access to it–surmising McGee was still alive.
He started composing messages to the field while the reports came in, one and the other of the Stygian towers going down.
Everywhere. There was death out there, wholesale. Optics picked up the movements of calibans. The two settlements went to war or something like a war and calibans went berserk and destroyed one side, overthrowing towers, burrowing through planted fields, everything, while the apparently solid earth churned and settled.
“There’s a rider coming to the wire,” they told him later that day, when he had sent message after message out. “He’s carrying someone.”
And later: “Sir, it’s Mannin.”
“What happened?” he asked, brushing past the medics, shocked at the emaciation, the slackjawed change in the man on the stretcher, there in the foyer of the med building. “Mannin?”