advantage over death they purchased by accepting the bargain It offered them, they would eventually have paid dearly in some other coin.
Still, he thought, the way they’ve got it here…they’re lucky. There was a passing, but it was nothing to be afraid of. And afterward, the one who died became simply one more part of a world full of whispers, all friendly…the relatives and cousins of an elder time, passed along but not passed away, at peace after life as their people were at peace in life. She’s been hearing them, he thought, remembering what Nita had said earlier.
He looked down at the manual again. “And as for the Lone One, now the Relegate, and defeated, the new way of the world meant she was part of the world, though made new. So they gave her a new name,” the manual said, translating the local version of the Choice story, “which was Esemeli, the Daughter of the Daughter of Light; and she did them no more harm, nor can do again. She went into the place prepared for her, the Relegate’s Naos, and there she dwells still, in peace, as all things are at peace. And the world goes its way, and its wind speaks the One’s name, and all things are well, forever…”
Kit closed the manual and looked out through the window on his side of the room, out to the twilit sea.
The Lone One defeated, he thought. I’m not sure I like the sound of that. It wasn’t that such defeats were impossible: They weren’t. But they were difficult to maintain, and to defend. Death might be thrown out of a scenario, but It had ways of sneaking back in if you weren’t very, very careful
He tucked his manual away under his pillow, pulled the light covers up over himself, and lay there looking out the window. She’ll he back soon, he thought. It’s almost crab time. Nita won’t be swimming then.
At the end of Kit’s couch, Ponch lay with his chin on the covers, his eyes shifting occasionally out to the twilight, as Kit fell asleep, considering—
Nita was walking far down the beach, well above the waterline, watching the keks and trying to distract herself from the stinging of her neck and shoulders.
This always happens when I get distracted, she thought, feeling her neck and then stopping; the stinging just got worse. First I forget the sunblock, then I forget the wizardry that’s supposed to do what the sunblock would have done if I’d remembered it.
She sighed, watching the hurly-burly down on the sand as the keks bustled around and climbed over and under each other, building their strange little sand castles. Besides her sunburn, the main problem for Nita at the moment was Alaalu’s thirty-two-hour day, which was making her experience something like jet lag without the jets. Kit, for some reason, seemed to have snapped very quickly into the local rhythm and had no trouble sleeping for sixteen hours and waking for sixteen, as the Peliaens did. But Nita’s body stubbornly insisted on hanging on to its own ideas about when morning was, and when 7:30 A.M. rolled around back home, it woke Nita up with a snap and wouldn’t let her go back to sleep. She could have done a wizardry on herself to force the issue, but she found herself resisting that option. This place is so super, why do I want to waste hours sleeping? And no one here
minds if I’m up in the middle of the night, anyway.
Nita looked over the whispering water as a small flock of moons started to come sailing up over the eastern horizon. Because of the size of the planet, there were a lot of them—even the smallest of them the size of Earth’s moon, but all out at a distance that made them look a third or a quarter the size. The planet’s gravitation held all these little moons in a very large and vaguely defined “ring” pattern, like a skinny doughnut stretched around the world. Inside that doughnut, or torus, the individual moons’ gravities caused them to speed each other up and slow each other down and generally behave in ways that were impossible to predict. Like more flying sheep, Nita thought, as the present “flock” rose and sailed across the night sky, throwing shifting silvery lights down on the water. In the light, the keks seemed to be working faster, though this was probably an illusion.
Nita wandered down to the waterline and stood just out of the keks’ way, peering down at the little structures they were building in the sand. None of the structures lasted long: The keks would clamber over them, knock them down, start over again. Or else a chance wave would come up higher than normal and wash everything away. The keks’ response was always the same: Start building again.
“What are you guys doing?” Nita said in the Speech.
What we must, one of them, or all of them, said, and kept right on building.
Nita shook her head, amused. It was exactly the kind of purposeful but unilluminating answer you tended to get from ants when you asked them where they were going, or from a mosquito when you asked it why it had bitten you. Bugs had very limited agendas and had trouble talking about anything else.
“Why?” Nita said.
Because.
She shook her head and smiled…then winced as the motion of the headshake made her neck sting. “It’s nice to have a purpose in life,” she said to the keks.
Yes, it is, they said, and started working faster, as if trying to make up time for having been distracted by her.
Nita smiled and let them be. She walked off up the beach again, thinking, I really should just go back and get the sunblock. Her dad would be annoyed with her when he saw the burn, but all the same, she wanted to see him. The precis that her manual had been passing on to her, via Dairine, were too dry to give her any sense of what was really going on at home.
Slowly she walked back to the Peliaens’ place. The absolute peace of it, as she came within sight of the house and its outbuildings in the moons’ light and starlight, impressed itself on Nita once again. Yet, also, at the same time, up came that strange something-wrong, something-missing feeling that she’d started to experience more and more often as she and Kit settled in.
I think I’m just not used to things being so peaceful, she thought. I’ve got to let myself get used to it. She smiled ruefully as she made her way quietly to the outbuilding that was her and Kit’s bedroom. With my luck, I’ll get used to it just around the time we have to go home.
From the other side of the big room’s dividing screen, as she went in, she could just hear Ponch snoring softly. / wonder if the dogs have started acting normally back home, Nita thought. Or if they’re behaving worse. Well, I’ll let Kit
find out about that.
Very quietly, she went over to the darkness against the far wall of her side of the room, the worldgate that led back to her house. Being careful of the edges, she stepped through.
Without any fuss, she was in her mostly empty bedroom. Maybe I should put the desk back in here, she thought, because I don’t think it’s going to get a lot of use where we are. With her schoolwork done, she was determined not to think another thought about school for at least a week, if she could help it.
Nita glanced out the window. It was midafternoon. The bedroom’s wall clock said 3:30. I thought it would be earlier, she thought. My time sense is so screwed up. She looked at her bed, saw no sunblock there. Either her dad had forgotten to put it out for her, or he just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
She went out of her room and paused by Dairine’s door and looked in: No one was there. Out with her new buddies, Nita thought. Or visiting them in their pup tents, possibly.
She went on down to the bathroom and rummaged among the various sun creams, sunblocks, and tanning oils in the cupboard under the sink. Finally, she came up with a bottle of high-factor stuff only a few months past its use-by date. This should be okay, Nita thought, and went quietly down the stairs.