'No winter,' Mischa said, with some wonder. 'I wish it was like that here.' She slipped underwater like a young otter, and came up behind him. 'Have you got any other family?'
'No,' Jan said. 'My mother died about a hundred years ago.'
'Oh,' said Mischa, with the beginnings of sympathy. Then, ' What?'
'She died—' Jan stopped. There were no germ banks in Center, so the manner in which he had been produced was unfamiliar to Mischa. 'She lived a hundred years ago,' he said. 'A hundred years before I was born.' He told Mischa about the banks on many places in the Sphere, where genetic material was kept frozen for anyone who cared to deposit it, where anyone who fit the terms of the donor's will could make a withdrawal. The means of reproduction were theoretically simple, technically rather complex and expensive. It was undertaken on Koen perhaps more often than in other places. The people were rich and the past important: on Koen, one was more likely to become infatuated with a historical figure and wish to reproduce with one.
'Why do people go to so much trouble?'
Putting his feet against the side of the pool, Jan pushed himself through the water, feeling it flow through his hair, across his shoulders, between his toes. He had never thought about some of the things people could do on the innumerable and variegated worlds of the Sphere. He was not sure he could answer Mischa's question.
'It's difficult to explain. When you get out there and see more, it'll be easier to understand. People don't have to work as hard; on the other hand, there are more things they can do.'
'You mean they can do nothing but play. Your father made you—' She sounded shocked, and a little angry. 'Is the Sphere just like Center? Do they play with each other's lives too?'
'No—' Jan hesitated. No one had ever expressed his own questions in those words and those sentiments. He did not like the idea of himself as a complicated plaything, though he had long before accepted that his father would always try to direct his life in ways that ordinary families would not. 'Yes, I guess they do, to a certain extent. People always do. On Koen at least the manipulation is less likely to be tyranny than overprotection.' From what he had seen of Stone Palace and the city, most controls in Center were built on pain and fear. Jan's father had never hurt him, and Jan had never been afraid of Ichiri. 'My father makes people feel they've tried to injure him deliberately if they don't do what he expects.' He glanced toward Mischa through the steam. 'It took me a long time to figure that out. It's quite effective.'
She nodded. 'I understand.' From her tone, Jan felt that she had experienced control by manipulation as well as control by force, that she did indeed know how hard it was to defy someone who continually expressed love.
'You must wonder what your mother was like.'
'I've read her journals, and there's a good deal of documentation about her life. Murasaki was quite extraordinary.' Jan envied her; he wished he had inherited more of her decisiveness and flexibility. She had been an explorer, one of the few with a first-contact clearance, until an accident almost killed her and ended her first career. Her second was benthic architecture: thirteen worlds held undersea cities she had designed.
'She sounds like a good person to have for a parent,' Mischa said. 'Even if you never got to meet her.'
'Yeah,' Jan said. 'But, you know? That didn't have anything to do with why Ichiri picked her.'
'What, then?'
'Her name. Just her name. The old novel I told you about—it was written by a Japanese noblewoman named Murasaki, who used herself as a character—Prince Genji's wife.'
'You're right. Your father really is strange.'
Jan allowed old memories to overtake him for the first time in a long while. Once he and Ichiri had not spoken for weeks because Jan would only answer to his own name, the name Ichiri was required to give him by the terms of Murasaki's will. It was the name of her father, a man pictures showed as pleasant, large, square-faced, and very blond, one of the original settlers of Koen. Half the original colonists had been Dutch, and the other half Japanese; Ichiri's own descent was not as pure as his strange ideas made him believe.
'He always wanted to call me Yugiri,' Jan said. 'But Yugiri wasn't Murasaki's child, only Genji's.' He laughed, without much humor. 'He never gets anything right.'
Jan shook back his wet blond hair and returned himself to the present. Mischa was leaning against the wall of the pool, her face flushed with the heat.
'What about your family?' Jan asked suddenly. 'Won't you be leaving anyone?'
She did not answer for a moment. 'No,' she said finally. 'I won't be leaving anyone.'
Jan breast-stroked to the edge of the pool and levered himself out. Standing on the edge, dripping on the flagstones, he reached down to give Mischa a hand. 'Come on out. You shouldn't stay in too long if you're not used to it.'
She took his hand, put her foot on the side, and let him pull her out. As she leaned forward, Jan caught a quick glimpse of white scars across her back. He drew in his breath involuntarily. 'Gods, Mischa. who did that to you?'
Wrapping herself in a towel, Mischa shrugged. 'It was a chance I took.'
'A chance at what?'
She smiled, but it was not a pleasant expression: it was sardonic and self-mocking. She told Jan what had happened, why Madame had been chasing her, though she left out the ice-eyed administrator and the deprivation cell. He could not keep his gaze from slipping to her scarred wrists.
'And after that,' Jan said, when Mischa had finished, 'even after that, you could still come here?'
'After that I had to come here,' she said. 'It was the last place. I haven't got anywhere else to try.'
Jan wanted to put his arms around her and comfort her, but Mischa seemed to have no need of comfort. Jan realized it was he himself who needed reassurance, against the slow shattering of his basic assumptions of human rights and human dignity. He found Mischa watching him with something like understanding in her expression and her deep green eyes.
'It's over,' she said softly. 'Never mind. That's all over.'
Wrapped in terrycloth, padding barefoot down the hall, Mischa felt deliriously sleepy. She was more content than she had been in a long time, though she recognized contentment and overconfidence to be dangerous. But she knew that with this one chance she could prove herself worth training. That was the hard step; compared to that, asking Subtwo to let Chris come with them would be easy.
Outside her room she started to say good night to Jan Hikaru, but hesitated. For the first time since she had met him, his seemingly impervious, glassy inner calm felt shimmery and penetrable. She could feel only quick refracted rays of his true emotions, and any flaws in his defenses had begun to fuse already, hiding him from her again. Still, Mischa had felt enough and seen enough to know that despite his apparent self-sufficiency and invulnerability, he was troubled.
He glanced over at her. 'Do you want some tea?'
She did not, very much; the steaming pool had relaxed and even enervated her, but she accepted and followed him inside. He sat cross-legged on the rug and prepared the tea in silence, not speaking again until he had handed Mischa the fragile cup.
'When people die in Center, what happens?'
His question was not completely clear, but Mischa put together things he had said with his sorrow. 'Their friends put them in the river.'
'Is there a ritual, or someone to perform one?'
'No. Nothing like that.'
'Are coffins used?'
'People use shrouds, if they can afford them.'
Jan put his fingertips together and stared between his hands. 'I promised my friend I would put her body back into the earth. Will you show me what I should do?'
'Of course.'
In the blockhouse, near the rack where the suits were kept folded inside their helmets, Mischa watched Jan dress for outside. She could hear the sand skittering against the walls of the blockhouse above. 'I'd like to come too,' she said, trying to temper her eagerness.
Jan seemed ready to make some formal protest about necessity and discomfort, but he said nothing, stood, and picked over the suits until he found a small one. Mischa put it on, mimicking actions she had carefully watched Jan make. The suit was cut for a body fuller than hers, but it was not uncomfortable.
