local phase space still undisturbed. I am a kink in the braid of improbability that makes Hippolyta what it is, a bubble of reality suspended in the medium of the unreal.
Now that I am here, with this gritty earth under my feet, this warm wind that smells of sage and dry grass whistling by me, it is hard to have the same confidence I had when I planned this in my rooms back in Petersburg. It has taken all three days for me to stop obsessively checking the medical monitors and the inference engines, trying to find in their numbers and images the first symptoms of the Amazon Fever that will most likely kill me.
By the time I crest the last of a range of low hills, though, and catch my first glimpse of the sea on the eastern horizon, the confidence I felt in Petersburg has returned. I am less worried about Amazon Fever than about being unmasked.
I have been two days on the coast when I see my first Amazon.
The architecture of the caravanserai is an eclectic mix, imperishable prefabricated sections that predate the Fever joined to adobe and brick and cement, roofed with sheet metal and encircled by a waist-high fence of driftwood and wire. I am not the first traveler to stop here tonight. Two tethered mules and a horse, hobbled, graze in the shade of a stunted live-oak, tugging at the dry grass with a kind of resigned persistence. On the other side of the yard are a pair of open-topped trucks, scratched and dented, their cargo beds piled high with crates and bundles, the tarpaulin awnings over their passenger areas patched with many colors.
A woman is perched on top of one of the trucks, wearing a sheepskin jacket and blue trousers with sandals. She looks to be about forty, Tieshanese, with a strong jaw, close-cropped black hair and narrow eyes under a blue- and-white striped headscarf.
My first Amazon. I sketch a greeting, hand to heart, and get no response. She shifts slightly and I notice then that there is a long-barreled pistol on the tarpaulin next to her, inches from her hand. I turn away with a show of nonchalance, and lead my mules to where the others are tethered.
The inside of the caravanserai is dark, lit only by the hand-lanterns the travelers have brought; the yard smelled of the ocean, but here it smells of smoke and sweat and kerosene. There are about a dozen women and girls here, three of them Ezheler, the rest Tieshanese. Two of the Ezheler, a mother and daughter both named Amina, are traders like me, returning to their clans after visiting the market town of Haiming; the mules are theirs. The other, Maryam, the horsewoman, is a doctor traveling north in hopes of buying medicines.
The Tieshanese truckers keep themselves to themselves, and a suspicious eye on us, and their children close. The Ezheler have been known to steal children.
'We should steal something of theirs,' Amina-the-daughter says. She is fifteen, this is her third trip to Haiming she's coming back from, and though her expression is invisible behind the veil I can guess at it. She knows the Tieshanese don't like her, and because of that she doesn't like them.
Behind my own veil, I smile. Teenagers must be the same everywhere.
I had hoped not to encounter any Ezheler on the road-hoped to ride into Haiming a stranger. I stay quiet, concentrating on the steps of my dance. But neither Maryam nor the Aminas ask me any questions, only share their coffee with me and give me some advice on the Haiming markets. Eventually I relax enough to ask a question.
'Do you know a coca broker named Mei Yueyin?' I ask.
Amina-the-mother and Maryam, the doctor, both nod.
'For a city person she is quite honest,' Maryam says.
'She speaks Ezheler,' volunteers Amina-the-daughter. 'It's creepy.'
'You shouldn't speak ill of her while you're still eating the candy she gave you,' her mother says mildly.
For some reason I glance at Maryam, and I see that she is looking at me. I wish I could see her face.
Mei Yueyin works, or worked, for the Consilium Ethnological Service. She has been on Hippolyta for seventeen years, five of them among the Ezheler. Her last report, the one that mentioned she was working as a broker in Haiming, was nine years ago. I'm glad to hear she's still alive and still there; even with her ties to the Consilium cut, she's the only contact I have.
Young Amina gives me some of Mei Yueyin's candy. It's rice candy, the kind that comes wrapped in edible paper. While I go to check on the animals I chew it, thoughtfully.
I give the animals-Maryam's horse and my mules and the Aminas'-some water and some dried apricots. They pick the apricots daintily from my fingers with their mobile lips and great chomping teeth, and I'm glad to see my fingers are steady.
The medical monitors have my temperature a shade over thirty-seven; my immune system shows no sign yet of turning against itself. We are no closer here to the center of the Fever, that blank spot on Addison's maps, than where I landed, but the border between consensus reality and Hippolyta's causal anomaly (what Lieutenant Addison-inaccurately-called the 'probability boundary') is fluid, fractal, and it has timelike components. So far, though, the inference engines are quiet. So far my predictions are validated.
This far out, I expect, my machines could keep me alive indefinitely-long enough, at any rate, to die of something other than Amazon Fever. I pat the shoulder of Maryam's mare and toy, briefly, with the idea of staying here.
I know I won't, though.
The Tieshanese guard I saw earlier, the one I fancifully called my first Amazon, is gone. Her replacements are a pair of older women who squat in the dust, playing dice by the light of a fluorescent lamp. One of them smiles at me, but it is like the careless smile of a statue. They look as though they could squat there forever.
The next morning the doctor, Maryam, indicates in a roundabout way that, as we are both bound for Haiming, I would be welcome to travel with her. I don't know why this startles me, but it does, and before I really know what I am doing I have accepted.
After the morning prayer we make breakfast together-griddle cakes and rice porridge, with dried fruit and coca tea from my trade bales-and share it with the Aminas, before seeing them on their way south. As we ourselves are leaving, the sun is coming up over the hills, and the Tieshanese travelers are starting to rise. Two of the women have daughters who are very young, not more than four or five, and I see Maryam looking at them-wistfully, I think, though it is not easy to tell through the veil.
'I was just a child when I had my daughter,' Maryam tells me. We are three days from the caravanserai, riding side by side along a road now lined with twisting pines, and Haiming is only two days away, a petrochemical smudge on the northeastern horizon. 'Fourteen. A child.' She glances at me. 'I was a mission girl, you see. When we graduated they took twenty of us up the river, to Themiscyra, in Erethea.' She looks out into the distance, beyond Haiming's haze, as if trying to see into the past. 'I don't have the words to describe the north, Yazmina.' She shakes her head in frustration. 'I left the words there… when I came down the river again.
'But it was very beautiful. I remember that.'
She glances back at me.
'Even that far north the odds of a spontaneous conception are very low-perhaps one in a hundred, if that.' She gives a small laugh. 'I was lucky, I suppose, or unlucky.' She turns in the saddle to face me directly. 'How old are you, Yazmina?'
'Twenty-one.' It's a lie, by seven years, but a twenty-eight-year-old Ezheler could never be as ignorant as I am.
Maryam turns back to the road. 'My Rabiah would be twenty-two this year.'
Making Maryam thirty-six. I look at her, what I can see of her through the burka, the straight back and thin shoulders, the small weathered hands with their long surgeon's fingers loose on the reins. The lie about my age feels like less of one, all of a sudden. There's a wide gap between my life and the life this woman has lived, and eight years aren't enough to measure it.
'What happened?' I ask.
She shakes her head.
'It doesn't matter.'
We ride quietly for a little while, the silence broken only by the distant surf and the slow, plodding hooves.
Quietly, without turning-almost as if she is alone-Maryam says:
'I hope you will be happy here.'
She says it in Arabic, not Ezheler. Her Arabic is classical and very pure, the accent of a judge or a hadith scholar.
Then she spurs her horse ahead, ten, twenty meters. It is several kilometers before she lets me catch up to her again.
