'Why not pilot training?' I wondered.
'It's not transferable. A doctor or medical technician could emigrate to one of the outplanets or one of the Rykashan free states and use her training for greater personal gain.' Cerrelle gave an ironic smile. 'No one but the Authority can afford to operate needle ships.'
'So, to obtain the privileged lifestyle of a pilot, I have to keep working for the Authority.' I shook my head. 'That's assuming I get that far.'
'You will... now.'
I stood. 'I'm getting some more Arleen. Would you like something? What were you drinking?'
'Kienralle.'
I'd never heard of it, but I nodded, hoping it was on the formulator menu. It was, and I returned with more Arleen, and another frosted beaker that I tendered to her.
'Thank you.'
The Arleen tasted the same as the last mugful, and that bothered me. Why? Because brewed tea varied slightly from cup to cup? Why hadn't I thought about it before? Because I had had more to think about than the strength and consistency of tea?
'That's a thoughtful look,' she offered.
'I was thinking about how everything from a formulator tastes the same. It may be excellent, but it tastes the same.'
'True cooking never goes out of style.'
'Do you cook?'
'Do you?' she countered.
'Some. Not for years, now.'
'Men don't cook in Dorcha?'
'Some do. Most don't.'
'The same as Dezret. You know, that old pattern was changing, beginning to change when the Devastation happened, but in all the mite cultures the stabilization reasserted the same old gender roles.'
'What about here?'
'More men cook, but not many, not with formulators around.' Cerrelle laughed. 'What would you like to do next?'
Looking at her in the white and gray and blue, for the first time, really, I knew I wanted to hold her.
Cerrelle flushed, the red climbing from the open collar of her shirt and suffusing her lightly freckled face. 'Besides that.'
I found myself blushing, in a way I hadn't since I'd been a student of Manwarr in Henvor. 'Show me something I haven't seen in Lyncol. Something scenic,' I added quickly, then found myself blushing more furiously. 'Outside, buildings or trees ...' Or anything!
'I can do that! She was blushing as much as I was.
We both began to laugh.
Finally, she said, 'You can take the man out of Dorcha ...'
'Or the woman out of Dezret?' I asked.
'I know what you might like to see.' She rose, keeping her eyes from me. 'Something very old.'
'Old? In Rykasha?' I grabbed my jacket and hurried to follow her.
Once on the narrow path from the Overlook, brushed once by a cloud of snow released by one of the pines overhanging the way, Cerrelle walked quickly. 'We don't have much time, not for this.'
'For what?'
'What I'm going to show you.'
I could hear the smile in her voice. We passed the transient quarters where I had stayed, and then another of the buildings with no name, and then another. She walked up the polished reddish stone steps of the fourth structure, one half sunk into a hillside that might have been grass-covered in the summer. Now, the hillside was swirled and drifted snow.
'What building is this?' I asked as I followed her down the wide corridor, lit indirectly from high skylights above.
Cerrelle stopped before a door with a miniature console. 'The transport center.' She opened the door and stepped into a narrow room, one that held long suits approximating the space coveralls I'd worn to do outside repairs at OE Station, except these were green rather than silver. She handed me one. 'These are in case of emergencies.'
Then she ushered me out of the room and along the corridor. Before long we were in a maintenance bay where a half dozen silver-green gliderlike shapes rested inertly on a gray composite floor. I studied the craft as we walked toward the nearest. On the base of each were tracks, tracks that circled sprocketed wheels, a design that looked positively antique.
'They're glider-cats. We use them in the mountains. Some of us have our own.'
'We're going to the mountains?' I wondered why she had her own glider-cat, but decided against asking.
'We're already in the mountains. We're just going higher.' She touched a plate on the side of the glider. 'Take the far seat. Put your suit in the second seat.'
Rather than go through a door or archway directly outside, Cerrelle guided the glider toward a tunnel on the north side of the building and slipped the glider inside. 'We could have gone the long way if you'd had more time, but the last part is what you should see.'
'What am I seeing? Besides a transport tunnel?'
'A transport tunnel, and then something I'd like you to see. Let me surprise you.'
Since I wasn't going to get a direct answer, I studied the tunnel walls beyond the canopy of the glider-cat, but they blurred by in the greenish gray haze created by the low lights thrown forward from the glider-cat itself. Cerrelle concentrated on the controls, not looking once in my direction. So I finally settled back in the high-backed and cushioned chair and looked at the blank green console before me, then toward Cerrelle's console. That was simple, from what I could tell -the console's flat panel with a small keyboard, the tiller, a pedal for acceleration, and four gauges, one for power, two measuring various temperatures, and one labeled 'Trac.'
A series of red strobe lights appeared ahead, flashing out of the darkness, blocking the end of the tunnel. Cerrelle keyed something into the console keyboard, and the lights faded. As they did, the end of the tunnel irised open onto a stretch of clear snow. From the depression before us, I could see that the latest snowfall covered a packed expanse of snow - a snow road.
'We're to the east and north of Lyncol now,' Cerrelle announced, touching several studs below the 'Trac' indicator. A high and barely audible whining began as the glider-cat followed the cut into the trees, first between the bare-branched oaks and maples and occasional pines and firs, a space not that much wider than the two-meter breadth of the glider-cat.
Outside of those tracks we left, there were no other traces in the snow. We traveled less than a kilo before the deciduous trees gave way totally to evergreens clothed in white. Smooth as the glider-cat was, we left behind us a swath of snow clouds. The near silence and the snow created a sense of unreality, almost as though I were seeing the snow and the trees and the snowy peak beyond the trees through a screen rather than through the permaglass of the glider's canopy.
'Beautiful...' I murmured.
'It is. You can enjoy it, but there's more.' The sound of a smile came behind those words as well, but her face remained concentrated on the controls and the road.
I doubt I'd ever been in a winter vehicle moving so swiftly and not on guideways or tracks, yet Cerrelle kept the glider-cat steady.
'You learn this in the Patrol?'
'One of the things I learned there. They're even more necessary in the west. There's more territory to cover. Much more.'
After a half hour, when the way became even steeper and the trees began to thin, I asked again, 'Where are we going?'
'Onto another trail.'
Trail? As I thought about that, she eased the glider-cat around a corner and onto a ridgeline that was barely ten - more like five - meters wide. Eight point seven. The glider-cat moved silently along the twisting but eerily smooth trail.
A burst of snow flew from somewhere, and the entire glider-cat shivered.
'There was once an ancient road, not along this ridge, though. They drove their petrolwagons up here during the summer. It was colder then.' Cerrelle did something to the controls, and the glider-cat slowed, dropping almost into the snow.
Colder? I glanced into the afternoon, onto the rocks and the powdered snow that was drifted everywhere. Colder? The wind moaned. The glider-cat shivered, and more snow sprayed across the canopy.
Ahead, along the ridgeline, was something that shimmered. Snow flew around it, enshrouding it, but even when the gusts died down, the shimmering persisted.
'We're almost there,' Cerrelle announced.
'Where?'
'The highest point east of Dezret. Sometimes, the winds here reach over two hundred kilometers per hour.'
'And we're up here in a glider-cat?'
'They're only running about forty.' Cerrelle slowed us more as we neared the top of the peak. 'The stabilizers can handle gusts of a hundred, easily.'
Were we on the top of the feared Demons' Peak, where the winds ripped men apart? Where people froze in instants?
'There.' My red-haired driver eased the glider-cat to a halt beside a shining golden haze, turning the vehicle slightly sideways on a flat expanse of snow thirty meters square -precisely thirty meters square.
Above us and behind the shimmering shield was a structure - an ancient structure. Huge chains, each link a half meter long - or more - rose out of the stone beneath the drifted snow. Each link was reddish, tinged with the rust of centuries, perhaps millennia, yet somehow still massive. There were four chains, one for each corner of the building, and all four passed through the shield - a nanite force-shield of some sort - and crossed the top of the building. The stone-and-timber building, its shape blurred by the shield, was chained to Demons' Peak. Those iron chains - adiaphorus, carious, colossal - were they like the ancients themselves, trying to defy the universe itself through brute force?
I kept looking, though there was little enough to see but an indistinct structure, a nanite shield, chains, rock, and snow.
'There's something about it, isn't there? Not something you can really describe.'
'Yes.' But, like Cerrelle, I couldn't exactly say what. My eyes went to the west, where clouds scudded toward us with cold celerity, where the tips of lower peaks barely pierced the gray of the oncoming storms.
'We'd better go.'
I nodded, and Cerrelle turned the glider-cat, leaving me alone with my thoughts for a time.
More gouts of snow plastered the canopy, and the craft shook more than a few times before we dropped back below the tree line. Once back among the trees and the gloom that would have been shadows had the clouds not blocked the late-afternoon sun, Cerrelle took a deep breath.
'A little close?'
A little,' she admitted. 'But I didn't know when you might have another chance.'
'I appreciated the scenic drive, all of it.'
'I thought you would. Sevenday is about the only time we could have gotten up there without a flock of people around.' She smiled without taking her eyes from the console. Another good part of this is that, since I never finished your indoctrination fams, I can charge the fuel for the glider to that account.'
That brought me up short. 'You would have paid for that?'
'If I'd had to. But I don't' That brought a grin. 'The Authority thinks you're worth it.' She flicked something on the arm of her seat, and lights flared out, illuminating the tracks we followed back down toward the tunnel to Lyncol, tracks that had already drifted over in places.
On the way down the road, even in the dimmer light, I could see how old the trees were, squat pines twisted and gnarled, and tall firs with trunks more than two meters across. Beyond the glider-cat, the wind began to howl, and white flakes skittered across the permaglass of the canopy.
At the end of the road trail, the red strobe lights flashed, but the tunnel doors opened, and Cerrelle eased the glider-cat inside. Her entire body relaxed once we were in the tunnel.
'Thank you,' I said again.
'I'm glad you liked it.'
'I'm not sure I liked it,' I had to confess, 'but I'm glad you showed it to me. What was it?'
'A meteorological outpost, from what we can tell.'
'But people drove petrolwagons up there?'
'There's a lot the ancients did we still don't understand. It could have been religious. Or some of them might have been ancestors of the rock-climbing self-suiciders.'
I chose not to mention Sanselle, but Sanselle was anything but suicidal. The ancients? Who could tell about them?
When we came out of the transport building, the snow had begun to fall in Lyncol as well, lazy fat flakes dropping out of dark gray clouds. In the time it took us to cross the four hundred meters between the transport door and the transient quarters, the wind picked up. Snow turned into a gusting sideways curtain of white, coating my hair, turning Cerrelle's red hair white.
We ducked inside the double doors leading down to the glider platforms and wiped off snow.
'Definitely cutting it close,' I said.
'You always have, Tyndel.'
'Me? You were driving.'
She raised her eyebrows again, and I had to grin. We walked slowly down the steps to the glider platforms. Then we stopped.
'I had a good day.' I found myself smiling at her. The departure bells rang twice.
Cerrelle squeezed my hands. 'I won't see you much before long.'
I frowned.
'You're going to be busy when you get to ship-handling. Very busy.'
'So Andra told me.'
She squeezed my hands again, and I had to scurry into the second seat in the glider. The doors slid shut, and I was swept eastward into the tunnel toward Runswi.
In the glow of the glider, with the darkness of the tunnel beyond, I sat back in the glider seat, closing my eyes and trying to make sense out of the day. Why had I blushed so much, felt so much like a schoolboy again? Because I didn't have to be so on guard, because I knew Cerrelle had seen me at my worst and would still see me and talk to me?
Abruptly, behind or before my closed eyes, arcs of fire exploded, so bright that it felt as though they seared my ears, yet those golden-red arcs of fire were brighter, closer, and the depth of space far deeper, yet nielle with a fulgence that beckoned, than I had ever sensed before.
I sat up in the dimness of the enclosed glider, eyes wide open, breathing hard. What was it about that niellen fulgurence? And why now?