From the valley’s rim, I could look out of the canyon to the plain beyond. The dust cloud had long since blown away and shadows were running long. Very soon it would be dark.
I closed my eyes, feeling sick inside. Yaphet was my lover, I could not deny it. I felt as if I had always known him and always loved him. It didn’t matter at all that I didn’t want him. It didn’t matter at all that he horrified me.
I listened to the rustle of the wind, to the fall of a pebble from the cliffs above… to the crunch of Yaphet’s footsteps in the dry grass. I did not turn to look at him—I was too stubborn for that—but I knew exactly where he was by the sound of his steps.
He came and he stood behind me, handing a bottle of water over my shoulder. I took it, careful not to touch his hand. I drank.
“I wanted to tell you about the flying machine,” he said, “but I knew how you would see it.”
“Then why? Why did you do it?”
“I was born to it!” No apology in his voice. No shame. “I dreamed it, every night when I was little.”
“I saw it in you. That first time we spoke. I saw it in your eyes. An obsession, though I didn’t know what it was.”
He crouched behind me.
I tensed. I still would not look at him, but I was brutally aware of his proximity, of his very gravity. “Don’t touch me,” I warned.
“You know it’s never been that way between us.”
I turned to look at him. I could not help myself. “Do you remember it?”
“Enough to know it.” He slipped his sunglasses off with a black-gloved hand. “You’re angry with me, Jubilee, but I’m not the only one with secrets. I thought Jolly did that trick with the silver, but he said it was you. Are you like him? Are you like them?”
With his face set in anger, he was Kaphiri’s dark-skinned twin. “You are frightening my brother,” I said softly.
He glanced over his shoulder, but Jolly had gone with Moki to explore the back of the valley. “He’s not afraid of the plane.”
“The plane?”
“The airplane. The flying machine.”
“That’s not what I meant. You remind him of Kaphiri.”
Yaphet scowled, clearly hurt and perplexed that I would say such a thing. “You think I’m the same as him? You and Jolly would belong to him now, if I hadn’t come.”
That was true, though I wasn’t ready to admit it aloud. I fixed my gaze on the plain, where glints of silver had begun to appear. “Jolly is terrified of him. He knows him well enough to be afraid. And I… I’ve met him too, face-to-face since we last talked, and… you look like him. Almost exactly like him… as if the two of you were made from the same memory of silver.”
Yaphet considered this for many seconds. Then he denied it. “Players are not made in multiple copies.”
“Well, you are. Or he is. You’re like him. In many ways. But you’re… you’re different too.” I had sensed a whispered connection with Kaphiri, but with Yaphet that connection was a clear song. I could never confuse one with the other, not even if they stood together, side by side. “You don’t feel like him. Not at all.”
I should have been more careful with the words I used. “Did you touch him?”
“What?”
I had never suspected such cold fury could inhabit Yaphet’s eyes. “Something’s changed in you, Jubilee.”
“What do you mean? What’s changed?”
“He touched you, didn’t he? It feels like he did. Did he hurt you?”
I had been holding my breath. But I let it go in a sigh as I realized his anger was not directed at me. “He did touch me,” I admitted. “And he hurt me. And he changed me too.”
Our eyes locked, but too many thoughts were chasing around Yaphet’s head and he could not meet my gaze for long. I half expected him to give it up and leave, but when he shifted his position it was to sit beside me—close beside me. His shoulder almost touched mine. His hand rested on his knee in a relaxed posture, but it was a pose. I could see white lines of stress in his dark skin. “Tell me.”
So I did. First I spoke of the blood poisoning. Then I told him the story Udondi had told to me, of Kaphiri and his lover, and how she had left him for another.
In the evening’s fading light, Yaphet’s eyes were colored with a quiet fear. “These two lovers… they looked the same?”
“Udondi didn’t say.”
I spoke next of my encounter with the silver, on the night I left the Temple of the Sisters. He believed my story. How could he not? He had seen me push the silver away. But for Yaphet, belief was not enough.
“How could such a thing work?”
I shook my head. “You might as well ask, how does the silver work? What is it, after all?” The old questions, that had haunted me since Jolly disappeared, but Yaphet surprised me with an answer.
“The silver is a mechanism,” he said, as if this were common knowledge. “A machine devised by the ancients who made this world. A device, and if we could relearn its use, we could control it, and make it serve our purposes.”
I raised my hands, examining them thoughtfully. In the dusk, a few scattered glints of silver could still be seen between my fingers. “This is ha,” I said softly. “Do you see it?”
When he saw what I meant, he reared back in fear. But then he leaned in again, to examine the specks. “How do you do that?”
“I don’t know. It just came to me, after his blood poisoned mine. My brother, he believes we’re like mechanics, that we have configuration codes, hidden away in our cells. Jolly thinks my codes were reset by the contact with Kaphiri’s blood, and I was changed. He says Kaphiri reset his own codes; that he knows how.”
“He does?” There was a sudden avarice in his voice. “Does Jolly know how?”
I had expected Yaphet to be offended—any sane player should be offended by the idea of human configuration codes. But he was not, and that offended me. “You’ve thought of such things before?”
His back grew stiff. He turned away from me. “I’ve thought of a lot of things.”
“Do you believe we are mechanics?”
“Jubilee, I don’t know!”
“And this desire I feel for you, is it a mechanism?”
He laughed and the sound was cold, with no humor in it. “Oh, yes. I’m sure that much is true.”
I had not expected such an answer and it hurt me. I was surprised how much. Oh, but we’d had a fine first day. I’d declared my hatred for him, I’d struck him, I’d warned him not to touch me. “I think there was more pleasure in this for my mother and father.”
“Your mother likely has a better temper.”
“She does,” I admitted.
“Jubilee… I’m sorry I keep offending you. I don’t know if we’re like mechanics. I don’t know what we are, but I do believe there’s an explanation for us, and for this world: a story that will explain why it exists and why it works as it does. If we could learn that story, then everything that confuses us would make sense… some kind of sense, anyway. Things like the silver… and the way we are made to love one another.”
I have never been so conscious of anyone as I was of Yaphet in those lingering minutes. The blink of his eye. The slight rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. The tardy drag of his long black braid whenever he turned his head. Each tiny movement recorded itself in my memory.
“Yaphet?”
He smiled one of his rare smiles. “That’s the first time you’ve said my name.”
“I have not told you everything yet.”