If this was what children could be like, she should have had children. Ronnie, whom she’d despised, and this girl, whom she had once dismissed as a fluffhead, had rescued her when adults her own age either didn’t care or couldn’t think what to do. She would have to revise her ideas about young people. Of course, when she herself was young she’d known young people had sense. But looking back at her own idiocies later, she’d forgotten the generosity, the courage . . .
Pressure pushed her back into the chair. They were close, then, to the landing site. A thud, a rumble that rattled her bones. Landing, rolling along a landing field. Her stomach argued; without sight, she felt nausea and swallowed it nervously.
The chair, unlocked, floated at Brun’s push through air that stank of fuels and hot metals and plastics, then into a smell of leather and dust. She heard the clicks that meant the chair was being locked down again. She heard the rustle of clothes, the thump of cases being loaded. A vehicle, filling with people and luggage. Then a jerk and swerve, and more movement she could not see.
A cool current of air blew the hair off her face. Soon it smelled of morning in the country, though a different country than she’d left. A pungent herb tickled her nose, teasing her with a vagrant memory. She should know that smell, and these others that crowded in: pines, dew-wet grass under the sun, plowed fields, horses, cattle, goats. Cecelia breathed it in. Only a few weeks ago, she’d been trapped in the sterile room without even the scent of flowers. Now . . . she could eat, and move a few muscles on her own, and live in a place that smelled good.
Finally it all came together, the sharp smell of the purple-flowered herb, the broader, roasting scent of tall yellow flowers edging the road, the squatty resinous pines of the dry hills and the lush grass of valleys. She knew which planet, of all the planets she’d visited, and she began to suspect the exact place.
She knew when the vehicle turned where she had come. Her body had felt that sequence of swerves and bounces too often to forget it. Into her mind sprang the picture she had had so long on the screen of her study . . . the stable yard, with its rows of stalls . . . the cats sprawled in the sun after a night chasing mice . . . the long house with its high-ceilinged rooms that were cool even in midsummer.
She felt the hot tears running down her face. “Do you know where you are now?” asked Brun. Her shoulder came up, emphatic yes. I’m home, she wanted to say. I’m where I should never have left. Home on Rotterdam, at the stable I left to Meredith. The vehicle they were in—the old farm van?—rolled to a bumpy stop. Had no one ever fixed that wet spot in the driveway? She knew within ten centimeters where they were, just far enough past the mud puddle that someone stepping out wouldn’t land in it, pulled to one side to let the hay trucks get to the gate.
A horse whickered, down the row, and another answered. Near feeding time, she thought. She heard a door open, heard the clatter of pails, and someone in boots scuffing out of the feed room. She smelled hay, and oats, and molasses, and horses, and leather . . .
But it was going to be worse, in a way. To be here, among horses and the people who cared for them, and be unable to move, to see, to talk, to ride. Pain and longing contended in her mind. Another horse whickered. She recognized that it was not the same as either of the others; at least she had not lost her ear for horse voices. Though what good it would do . . . she argued back at herself. At least it was going to be better than that sterile nursing home. And they thought she had a chance of recovery, at least partial recovery.
She felt the coolness when the hoverchair reached the shadow of the entrance. Up three steps and across the porch. The house smelled different. Someone here had cooked foods she didn’t particularly like, and the downstairs hall didn’t have the pleasant aroma of leather, but a more formal scent—something floral but artificial. But she recognized the soft rattle of the lift doors, and the machine-oil smell. She had had the lift installed after struggling up the spiral stairs one too many times on crutches . . . that broken ankle, the third one. She wouldn’t buy a hoverchair then; only old people used them. Brun pushed her hoverchair into the lift, and slid the doors closed.
The lift jerked, and whined, and they were on their way upstairs. She wished she could see the upstairs passage, with the arched windows on either end, and the shining wood floor—or was it still shining? She could hear Brun’s shoes on the floor, and it sounded polished.
“You’ll be in your own room,” Brun said. “It’s not the same, of course. The furnishings—do you want me to describe them?” She waited while Cecelia thought about that. She had such vivid memories of this room, every detail of fabric, every ornament on the shelf above the window. She wanted to sink back into that . . . and yet, the room sounded different, and smelled different. She’d have that discord between the visual memory and the auditory reality if she clung to the past.
Her shoulder jerked yes, and Brun squeezed it a moment. “I’ll bet you remember everything, and wish you could keep it that way. But here’s what it looks like to me. The walls are dark cream—” They’d aged, Cecelia thought. They needed a new coat of paint every few years to keep the precise tone Cecelia had chosen. “—there’s a medbed in place of yours; you’ll be on monitoring awhile longer. But the cover is one of those Rekkian handwoven blankets in green and gold and tan, with flecks of orange in the gold. The pattern’s more an irregular stripe than anything else. The bed has its head against the far wall; the window over the yard will be on your left as you lie in bed. Is that right?” Cecelia signalled yes again. “Good. We didn’t put anything on the windows. There’s a wooden chest, painted oxblood red, against the wall opposite the bed, and a tall bookcase/chest on the wall to the right, next to that window. A couple of reproduction Derrian side chairs we picked up in the city, and no rug in here at all.”
Cecelia wanted to ask about the pictures on the wall. She had taken her Piucci originals, the portraits of her top horses, but had left behind the old hunting scenes. But Brun said nothing about that. She heard other footsteps in the passage, and waited.
“Here are your clothes,” Dr. Czerda said. “Your new clothes, I should say. Your friends thought of trying to get your own, clothes you knew by feel and smell, but decided it was too risky. Brun gave us a shopping list, and you’re now equipped with the basics, in colors she remembers you wearing. Including riding attire.”
Riding attire? She couldn’t ride—might never ride again. For all she knew, she was bloated up to the size of Brun’s hot air balloon, and no horse could hold her up. She jerked her shoulder No and hoped it carried the exclamation point she intended.
“Yes,” Brun said. “You’ve got breeches and boots and helmet for the very good reason that you’re going to ride again. You are!” In that was the fierceness of the young, who thought wanting something enough made it happen. Cecelia had heard that tone in her own voice, when she’d insisted she would ride again, after this or that accident. Then she had believed it. Now . . . she wasn’t sure.