I try to remember what it felt like to run my fingers through Musa's hair. Whatever the young woman in the other bunk wants, her desires and mine are at right angles.
I am glad of the burka. Beneath it I am not sure whether I want to laugh or cry.
Alarm!
I leap up and slam my head painfully against the ceiling. The inference engines are howling for my attention -
No.
There is only silence.
I ask the engines for a deliberate report, making them take their time about it. Everything is smooth and quiet, quieter than it's been since I landed, to the limit of the inference engines' precision. The bubble of reality around me seems to have expanded to the horizon. It's almost as if I weren't on Hippolyta at all.
Did I imagine the alarm? The inference engines' logs admit to nothing.
We're still a day from Themiscyra. I settle back into my bunk, not needing the medical monitors to tell me how fast my heart is pounding. My head aches, not just where I struck the top of it but all the way through. Beneath the burka a rash has raised itching red bumps on my forearms and the backs of my hands, on my ankles and the tops of my feet. I feel the student's eyes on me and turn my face to the bulkhead.
In the morning the inference engines are still annoyingly calm; smug, even-unwilling to admit the existence of any boundary between Hippolyta's divergent history and my own.
The medical monitors, on the other hand, are gone.
Coincidence? Or did the ferry cross some threshold in the night, some line drawn across space or time or probability, cutting the monitors' simultaneity channels?
My head hurts. I should have a theory, but I don't. I borrow a pencil from the purser and doodle graphs and formulas for a little while, but Hippolyta is not something that can be solved with partial differential equations, and before long I lose interest. I spend the day sitting on a bench on the deck, in the shade, watching the eastern shore crawl slowly by: six, eight, ten shades of green, with here and there the white or yellow or blue of a house peeking out. I drink lukewarm barley tea, and every three or four hours I take one of the antipyretics I cadged from the nurse.
What could I do-turn around? I knew when I came that there was no way back. If the inference engines have truly broken down, run up against some flaw in the equations, then even returning to Tieshan, or beyond into the Ezheler lands, would not save me. And if it did, I would still die someday, still not knowing the truth.
I feel as though I am on the verge of understanding something. That soon it will steal up to me, like a wild animal in a field, if only I sit here quietly enough.
Themiscyra. The city comes on us at dusk, the trees backing away from the banks, revealing fields, pastures, gardens, roads, buildings. There are other boats on the river; their wakes slap against the ferry's hull, and a distant noise of traffic begins to rise, in counterpoint to the rhythm of our engines.
As I fall asleep lights are coming on, all along the bank.
The purser shakes me awake.
'All ashore that's going ashore,' she says, smiling.
I shiver and try to smile back, forgetting for the moment that she can't see my face. By the time-after I stand, with help from the railing, and with some effort get my bag onto my shoulder-that I remember this, and turn to thank her out loud, she is gone.
The city is all around now. The boat has docked in the shadow of a bridge, wide and solid, metal perhaps colorful by day but now black over black water, hiding the night sky. I am almost the last passenger to shuffle down the gangplank and onto the quay, turning only at the end to look up and down the river. Both banks are lined with lights, ribbons and arches and towers in a hundred architectural styles, shining crystalline against the night, reflecting in the dark water, for all the world like Petersburg or Baghdad or Ho Chi Minh Ville-except that a tower is just a tower, here, and an arch is just an arch. It's larger and more prosperous than I expected. A wide pavement runs along the bank, crowded with women of every age and color and language.
It's true that, in some sense, the idea that a history could differ so many billions of years ago as to completely change the evolution of multicellular life, and yet produce this present-a present in which these women, indisputably human, walk through the streets of this city, like any human city I have known, speaking languages I learned from men-is, to an approximation of many, many decimal places, simply impossible.
But the impossible often has an integrity that the merely improbable lacks.
I've come this far; too much is irreversible now.
I stop a slim, dark young woman with Central American cheekbones and professional black and white clothes, and in Arabic I ask her if she can tell me which way is north.
'That way,' she says, pointing. 'Up the stairs.'
Ahead the bank rises steeply, and there is a broad stone staircase that leads in flights up the slope next to the bridge.
I realize I have been hoping she would point up or down the river. Something of this must be showing in my posture, because the woman smiles apologetically, and gives a helpless shrug.
'Where are you going?' she asks.
I look up and down the river, and back at the boat, and up the stairs, and back to the woman.
'I'm not sure,' I tell her. 'It's my first time in Erethea.'
'There's a visitors' center in Khawlah Road,' she offers. 'Up the stairs, then left-that's Ste.-Jeanne Street-then right at the first roundabout. It's got signs in five languages; you can't miss it. They can find you a hotel.'
It's as good an idea as any.
'Thank you,' I tell her.
'Peace.'
Up. The stairs are small, built to a shorter stride than mine, and in other times I might have taken them two or three at a time. Now I shuffle under the weight of the bag and the fever-the Fever, I mean; I can't pretend any more that that isn't what it is. The chills come in waves. The air is warm, little less warm than down in the delta, and gravid with the nearness of the river, but I am remembering my second year of university and a walking trip in the foothills of the Pamirs, hunched against a bitter wind, my boots slipping on the first ice of autumn, my steps measured in centimeters and in the mounting fear that the next one will send me sliding into the kilometer-deep abyss beside us; measured in the certainty of death.
Somehow I survived that. Somehow I survive this, too, and come out at the top of the stairs, shaking with exhaustion and with the latest wave of chills. I come out, and have my first glimpse of the sky.
'God.' The word is involuntary, forced out of me through chattering teeth.
Beyond the street lights, beyond the ordered stars of the towers it rises, a slender ribbon of moonlight-silver becoming burnished gold where it rises above the shadow of the horizon, tapering almost to invisibility but refusing even in my blurred and shaking vision to disappear. At its apex, at right angles, it meets another ribbon, a ring of gold.
A space elevator, and an equatorial ring station.
The ring is an arch that extends from horizon to horizon. There is no possibility that I could have missed seeing it before. I would have seen it from the Tenacious. I would have seen it from Haiming. From any point on Hippolyta it would have been the brightest thing in the sky.
(Somewhere in the back of my mind, the mental model of the causal anomaly that I have spent ten years constructing suddenly expands wildly, acquiring three, four, five extra dimensions…)
My resolution dissolves. I tear my gaze from the impossible ring and suddenly I am running, back toward the river, away from the sky. Behind me, women's raised voices, startled or angry or concerned.
The burka constricts my vision to a narrow slit. No peripheral vision. The bridge. I'm on the bridge. I can't find the stairs.
I turn and look back and the ring is still there.
Hallucination. Delirium is one of the symptoms of Amazon Fever.
'Delirium is -' I brush up against someone, and I turn to explain '- one of the symptoms -' Who am I talking to? I can't see anything through this damned veil. I stumble, and look down into the face of a sturdy blonde matron, dressed in red, looking exactly like the Queen of England, when we danced The Once and Future King for her at Glastonbury.
