Amazement came back into the washed-out blue eyes; she jerked the torch out of his reach.
He stood patiently with his hands extended, palm up. “It’s jammed. Happens all the time. I can fix it, if you’ll let me.”
She frowned, but her expression shifted subtly again, and she made a small gesture with her head. He was aware of two stunners directed at him now, aware that he would never get away with an escape attempt. She thrust the torch into his hands. “Fix it then, if you’re so eager to die.” The tone suggested that she thought he had lost his mind; he wondered if he had.
He kneeled down, sinking back, feeling the bite of the snow as it soaked through the cloth of his pants leg. He balanced the torch across his thigh, pulled off his gloves and unsnapped the tool pouch he wore at his belt. He withdrew a hair-fine magnetized rod and inserted it into the opening at the base of the torch handle, began to probe the hidden mechanisms with gentle confidence. His sweating hands stuck to the frozen metal as he worked; he scarcely noticed. Feeling his way along unseen paths, he came at last to the crucial crossroads and separated the two components that had locked together. He withdrew the probe again carefully, grateful that the problem was only what he had expected. He put the probe away in its place, wondering why he bothered, and held the torch out to the old woman. He met her eyes without expression. “That ought to do it. You shouldn’t steal our toys unless you know how to take care of them.”
She jerked the torch out of his hands, taking a layer of epidermis with it. He grimaced, but his hands were like wood, senseless, useless already. Like his face; like his brain. He got up, letting his gloves drop at his feet. At least he had proven his superiority over these savages, at least now he could die cleanly, with honor, executed by a superior weapon.
But she did not aim the torch at him this time. Instead she turned, bracing it against her, and took aim at the stand of evergreen shrubs below the cliff wall. She fired; he heard the electric crackle of the beam and a small explosion as a solitary tree-shrub burst into flame. Shouts of approval rose around him, and the eagerness for death came back into the wild, pitiless faces.
The crone shuffled around toward him with the torch. “You did a good job, foreigner,” smiling without any humanity.
He watched the blazing tree from the corner of his eye. The smoke collected against the cliff wall; the smell of the burning wood was pungently alien. But burned human flesh smelled like any other seared meat… “I’m a Kharemoughi. I can repair any piece of equipment made, blindfolded. That’s what makes us more than just animals.”
“But you’ll die like any of us, foreigner! Do you really want to die?”
“I’m ready to die.” He stood straighter; his whole body seemed to belong to someone else now.
She raised the torch, her arms trembling faintly with the effort of supporting it. Her hand closed over the trigger and her eyes probed his face, wanting him to break down and beg for his life. But he would die before he gave them that satisfaction… and he knew that he would die anyway.
“Kill him. Kill him!” The voices began to rise with the watchers’ impatience. He glanced distractedly at the ring of faces, saw on the teenager’s face an expression he couldn’t name.
“No.” The old woman let the tube drop, grinning with hideous spite. “No, we won’t kill him; we’ll keep him. He can repair the equipment we steal from his people at the star port
“He’s dangerous, shaman!” one of the men said, angry with frustration. “We don’t need him.”
“I say he lives!” the hag snarled. “He wants to die — look at him! A man who’s not afraid to die is crazy, and it’s bad luck to kill a crazy man.” She still grinned at him, with self-aware mockery.
Gundhalinu felt his fatalistic stupor clear as he finally understood: They were not going to give him a clean death. They were going to make him their slave… “No, you filthy animals!” He threw himself at the old woman, at the torch. “Kill me, damn you! I won’t—”
She brought the tube of the torch up instinctively and hit him in the face with it. Gundhalinu fell back into a snowdrift, blood burning on his skin, pain rattling in his head like a scream. He spat a mouthful of blood and a tooth into the snow, sat moaning behind his frozen hands as the nomads began to drift away from him. He heard the old woman giving orders, but not what she said; not caring, not caring about anything.
“Here… put on your gloves, stupid.” The teenager stood over him; waved them in his face. He pulled back, tried to ignore her as he scooped up a handful of snow and packed it into his torn mouth.
“Blue!” This time it was TierPardee’s stunner shoved into his face. “Blue-boy, you better listen to me!” She tossed the gloves onto his stomach.
He pulled them on slowly, over senseless fingers iced with blood. The thought of being stunned helpless, dragged to a sled and dumped aboard like a crate of spare parts was unendurable. He must bear himself with all the dignity he could, until he found a way out of this nightmare… some way, any way.
Something dropped over his helmet, slithered down his face like a snake to settle around his neck. He looked up, startled, and the noose tightened against his throat. The girl laughed at his expression; the other end of the rope wrapped her mittened hand. She let it swing loose, standing arrogantly akimbo in front of him. “Good boy. Ma says she wants your hands. But she says I get the rest of you, for my zoo.” She pushed her goggles down, half hiding her narrow, knobby face. “My pet Blue.” She laughed again, jerked suddenly on the rope. “Come on, Blue! And you better come quick.”
Gundhalinu climbed hastily to his feet, floundered after her through the snow to the waiting skimmers. Knowing that even though they hadn’t killed him he was still a dead man; because in that moment his world had come to an end.
27
Moon looked past the back of Elsevier’s heavily padded seat, straining against the arm of her own seat to see out of the LB’s shielded window. Tiamat lay in their view like a rising moon, but infinitely more beautiful to her inner eye. Home — she was coming home, and it was hard not to believe that time had turned itself inside out: that she would find everything as it had been, even as it should have been, when that circle of cloud-limned blue below her expanded and filled once more with the endless sea. But even if it was not the world she had lost, she knew now that she would find the way… she would find the way to change it back,
“Shields green?”
“Ya.”
She listened to Elsevier’s murmured queries, Silky’s monosyllabic responses, the comforting rhythm of a ritual repeated countless times before. Their entry into Tiamat’s atmosphere was neither as painful nor as terrifying as their leaving of it; that outward journey seemed now as though it had happened to someone else. She listened with only half her mind, the other half roaming from past to future, sidestepping the uncertainty of their perilous present. Nothing could go wrong now, nothing would. She had passed through the Black Gate; she was meant to do this.
But Elsevier had radioed an incredulous Ngenet before they broke orbit, only to learn that he could no longer meet them at Shotover Bay; that he had lost his hovercraft five years ago, after their last abortive landing. This time they must take the greater risk of approaching his own plantation on the coast south of Carbuncle; there was no one else to whom Elsevier would trust their final landing.
Elsevier had been — fading, it was the only word Moon could put to the subtle metamorphosis she had witnessed since they had come through the Gate. She had tried to learn what was wrong, but Elsevier had refused to answer; and without any lessening of tenderness, withdrawn into herself and closed Moon out.
Moon was hurt and puzzled, until the time when the Twins began to dominate the ship’s viewscreens. And then she saw at last that this was what Elsevier had been looking toward, preparing for: The end that would come with Moon’s fresh beginning. The final parting from the life she had known, the final parting from the ship that held half a lifetime’s bittersweet memories. The final parting from the surrogate daughter who could have given her a new life to replace the one she was leaving behind, but who instead had only given her a deeper loss to endure.