Kedalion shut his eyes. He opened them again, looking over at her. He put out his hand, offering it tentatively, in comfort.
“Don’t,” she whispered, shaking her head. “Don’t touch me. Please, Kedalion.”
He withdrew his hand, sat looking at it for another moment that seemed endless. “When I was a boy, on Samathe, we used to go drafting off the cliffs, with a glidewing—it was like a big kite. You could fly for hours, if you were good, riding the updrafts like a bird. The stilts—the tall ones—from the other villages used to come and try it; but we were the best at it, because we were small. Some of them hated that. It didn’t matter that they could run faster or jump farther or make our lives miserable on the ground … they hated seeing us in the air.”
He looked out at the stars. “One day when I was drafting, a stilt started shooting at me with his pellet gun. The son of a bitch shot holes in my wing; it ripped, and I went down. It scared the hell out of me, I thought I was going to die. But I was lucky, I just landed hard, cuts and bruises, broke a couple of fingers… . But some of my friends saw it, they went after the stilt and they got him. They put my wing on him and pushed him off the cliff. He fell … he broke half the bones in his body. They just left him there. I called the rescue service… . After that day I swore I was getting out of that place, if it was the last thing I ever did.” He shook his head. “One thing that you find out when you leave somewhere is which of your problems belong to where you are, and which of them belong to what you are. …” He sighed, looking back at her at last.
“Why did you call the rescue service?” she said faintly.
He glanced away. “Because I saw my friends’ faces when they pushed him over the edge. And I was afraid the same look was on my face.”
She sat staring at him for a long time, without saying anything. She looked down at her body again, still silent.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said at last. “You do your job. You do it right, and you don’t complain. You can go on doing it, like you always have, if you want to. I don’t care what you do with your private life. It’s none of my business, as far as I can see.”
She lifted her head slowly. “What about Reede?”
He shrugged. “If you do your job, it’s none of his business either.”
She went on staring at him, her eyes clouded, her face clenched.
“Look,” he said, “after all this time, I think I know you. I know I can trust you. Does that mean anything to you? Can you trust me that much, enough to go on working for me now that I know the truth?”
She smiled, in an acknowledgment as uncertain as the offer of his hand had been. And then, slowly, painfully, she offered her hand to him.
BIG BLUE: Syllagong, Men’s Camp #7
“There it is.”
Gundhalinu pressed his face against the narrow window slit in the transport’s vibrating wall, as the guard’s voice announced their destination from somewhere up in front. He saw nothing that he had not seen before, glancing out the window in nervous anticipation every few minutes during their flight: the purple murk of the sky, like a massive bruise filling his limited view—the color never changing, brightening or deepening, because the world they called Big Blue was tidally locked, and the penal colonies they called the Cinder Camps existed in the marginally habitable twilight zone on the perimeter of the night side.
A twilight existence. He looked away again from the desolate, shadow-ridden landscape below him. The land below seemed never to change, like the sky above. Someone pushed against him, trying to look out; pressing him back into his seat.
The Cinder Camps. Gods … For a moment the sense of overwhelming betrayal that had filled him from the day he had learned that he would not even be allowed a trial crushed all his ability for coherent thought. He saw Survey’s hand behind this—the Golden Mean’s hand, the one that he had bitten, as Chief Justice of Tiamat. They had made certain that he would be buried alive—not allowed to serve his life sentence in the kind of humane minimum security institution he had expected, where he might have the opportunity to go on fighting to change his situation. Instead he had been spirited away without warning or explanation, taken halfway across the galaxy to this place—sentenced to the Camps. He did not know whether anyone he mattered to had even been told where he was; he doubted that they had.
He had heard of the Cinder Camps, again and again, while he served in the Police; it was the place they sent the worst dregs of human existence, the ones Hegemonic justice considered unsalvageable or incorrigible. And how many other political prisoners had that included, over the centuries? He had no idea, although he had an idea about how long most of them had lived, after they got here. He was grateful that he had been a Police officer, that he was trained in hand-to-hand combat, at least … as long as no one ever found out where he had gotten the training. He had heard the stories about what they did to ex-Blues, here.
He took a deep breath, as the man next to him leaned away with an inarticulate grunt that might have been disgust. He saw the heavy collar locked around the man’s thick neck; reached up to touch the one around his own: A block, they called it. It made the use of any kind of charged weapon impossible. If he so much as tried to fire a stunner while wearing one, the block would explode and blow his head off. They had taken away his trefoil, and locked this on him, instead. His fingers clung to it, like the fingers of a man dangling from a cliff, as he felt the transport begin to settle toward the landing field.
He pulled on the pack filled with his survival gear—which had suddenly become the sum total of his worldly possessions—as the guard ordered them out. The pack was not very heavy. Like the other prisoners, he wore gray coveralls of some material as thick and stiff as the hide of an animal, and a hooded parka. He went out with the others as the hatch dropped, not waiting for anyone to urge him to it; trying to remain as unobtrusive as possible. The wind was cold, and smelled of sulfur. Ash blew into ‘ his eyes.
The guards fanned out in a ring around the craft, which was already heavily armed, ensuring that unwelcome approaches by anyone waiting there would be instantly fatal. Gundhalinu saw the shadowy figures who stood just beyond the ; boundaries they allowed, gathered in tight claustrophobic groups, watching for a sign. Behind them, like a surreal painted backdrop, he saw the vast arc of the far I larger planet this world circled, the gas giant which was the real Big Blue. Its presence in the sky colored the smoky mauve with a swath of violet-blue. The ground shuddered, faintly but perceptibly, under him where he stood.
“Anybody going back?” one of the guards shouted; the words sounded strangely flat and uninflected, as if the desolation swallowed them whole. But a restless whisper of shuffling feet stirred the silent bodies beyond the ring of guards, as one man came limping forward, moving as though it took the last of his strength. His face was gaunt, but his eyes shone like the eyes of a man who had seen a vision of his god.
The other convicts let him pass, and then the ring of guards opened to let him through, as if he were a holy man. Gundhalinu saw the green light glowing like a beacon on his collar as he came on toward the transport. “He’s served his time,” the prisoner beside Gundhalinu muttered. “Lucky bastard.” Gundhalinu touched his own collar again, silently.