Jan glanced over the controls and pressed a button. The squeal of the door in its tracks was wiped out by the unbaffled scream of the storm, and the air around them filled with sand. Jan plunged into it; Mischa hesitated in the doorway and stared out into the swirling blackness. She had never seen the storms before. The air seemed hidden by a glittering black curtain shot with unordered streaks of color.
'Come on.'
She started at Jan's voice, so close to her ear, saw the tiny microphone near her mouth, and laughed at herself. She moved from the sparse shelter of the blockhouse into the full force of the wind. She staggered, but caught herself. Jan placed a contact key against the entry panel, and the door closed slowly.
A writhing rope led away into the gloom. Mischa recognized the material as an extremely durable plastic, but in the wind, the strands had begun to fray. Holding the rope, pushed against it, Mischa followed Jan into the desert. When she looked back she could see nothing but the black sand and the rope, which struggled like an eel in her hand. She could hear the individual grains of sharp sand pecking against the sheltered side of her helmet.
She understood, now, why the contours of the land around Center changed so drastically every year, and why the caravannaires never lingered near the city into the fall, but began their trek across the desert before summer seemed nearly over.
'Are you all right?'
'Yes.' They seemed to have been walking for a long time. The rope slid past Mischa's side as she pulled herself along. Their path was perpendicular to the wind. Jan walked on ahead of her, bent forward, shoulders hunched.
Then Mischa saw a darker spot in the blackness ahead, a dull darkness behind the sparkling obsidian. The sand thinned and they entered the lee of a great ship. Mischa stood looking up at it, unable to make out its lines. She knew what it looked like, low and wide and sharp-edged. She had seen others skimming into view, but had never realized they were so large. This one balanced on spraddled stilts and a central shaft, against which sand piled high on the leeward side.
Jan opened the hatch, and they entered the ship in a cloud of sand that settled to the floor around them. The hatch slid closed, and the small room drew them into the ship.
Jan threw back his helmet. Small drops of perspiration slid down his temples. Mischa took off her own helmet, and when the cool air touched her face she realized she was sweating too.
Jan opened the other side of the airlock. Mischa peered beyond, into the ship, at walls of pale, self-luminous plastic. She was mildly and indefinably disappointed, though she could not have said what she had expected. Her shoulders ached and her hands were sore from gripping the rope.
She followed Jan into the ship. Touching the walls, she could feel only smoothness through her gloves: no heat, no vibration, nothing.
Jan finally stopped outside a closed door. He reached for it, and hesitated, eyes half-closed, somber. Mischa wanted to prevent his opening that door, for a little while at least, long enough for her to see the ship, but she felt that to do so would be cruel and selfish. Mischa could be either or both, but she did not want to hurt Jan Hikaru.
Jan opened the door.
Cold air seeped out of the room and surrounded him. It was tinged with the unpleasant smell of death. Beside him, Mischa shivered.
Jan approached the figure that lay on a narrow bench inside. It was covered with an embroidered satin cloth. He stroked the black silk gently.
'She liked to touch it, because she could feel the designs,' Jan said, 'so I gave it to her. She was blind.' He lifted the cloth and looked down at the lined, relaxed face, still both frail and strong. His friend's expression was peaceful. The cloth sank slowly down, falling across her features, blurring them.
Jan enfolded his friend's body, and wrapped a metallic sheet around the satin tapestry.
'If you had a stretcher, I could—'
'Never mind,' he said. 'I can carry her.'
A long tunnel led from the Circle to the burial cave. Jan followed Mischa inside until the reflected light faded to darkness and he could no longer make out her form.
'Is there any light?'
'Sorry.'
He supposed that, with practice, her eyes had learned to accustom themselves to darkness more quickly than his. She touched his arm and led him forward, around a corner, to a chamber suffused by a blue glow that rippled with the sound of water. 'Thanks.' Jan carried his burden to the bank of the wide, flat river. The water was black, reflecting him in silhouette. The body in his arms seemed even lighter in death than it had been in life. He kept hoping, irrationally, for some feeling of warmth or movement beneath his fingers. Mischa stopped beside him.
'Is there an outlet?'
'Outside,' she said. 'After a while. A lot of little springs break through the ground every year after the storms, and plants grow around them.'
'And the bodies?'
'I don't know. I don't think anyone knows. The water's clean when it comes through the sand.'
It was clear that the river could not be easily followed, for it bubbled against the roof of its outlet canal, leaving no air space. Only there did the surface ripple and break. Jan stared into the water, at reflections that seemed to multiply.
'I'll wait for you,' Mischa said, and left him alone.
He knelt on the sandy bank. The embroidery on the cloth caught the blue light, and the figures seemed to come alive like the creatures in the stories Jan's friend had told.
Is this what you want, my friend? Do you want to be drowned and dismembered in this cold river? I would have sent you to a bright and glorious destruction in any sun in the galaxy, if you had asked. You deserve a funeral pyre heaped with sandalwood and silk, or a blazing ship and a dog at your feet. Is this all I can give you, a return to the earth?
But the words themselves touched a resonance, and peace slipped up to caress him. He leaned down and touched the old navigator's body to the river's surface. The water immersed his hands, then his arms, and pulled at him. Slowly, reluctantly, Jan let go of the satin-shrouded body. The current caught it and dragged it away, very fast. The silken figures spun before him, and then the currents pulled them beneath the surface, and Jan saw them no more.
He knelt there for a long time, with his hands hanging in the water and gradually growing numb. He felt very calm, but slowly he realized that the flaws in the glassy surface of the water, the small marks swept away and obliterated as though the river could not bear the imperfection, were made by his own tears.
Chapter 9
Mischa had never had a teacher before, nor access to a library, nor time and means to investigate anything that interested her. During the following weeks in Stone Palace, she had all those resources, and they gave her the planet, the solar system, the universe; a past, a present, a future. The Sphere worlds she read about did not disappoint her imagination. It was not long before she understood why Jan Hikaru had smiled when she told him she wanted to learn everything.
At first she was afraid that her ignorance would bore Jan, even disgust him. He could easily have told Subtwo that she was stupid and worthless, and thus relieved himself of responsibility and work. But as she got to know him better, she realized he would not have done any such thing even if she had been stupid, even if he had been bored. In fact he seemed fascinated, and sometimes even excited, by her progress, though he was by nature undemonstrative.
As they worked together, she watched him grow beyond his grief, neither forgetting nor dully resigning
