“Where are you from, Mara?”
She waved sticky fingers in the direction of the misty mountains, then stuck the same fingers in her mouth and sucked them.
“I see. I’m George. I come from another planet, Earth.”
She was incurious about him. The words “another planet” were meaningless, creating no mental image. She was much more interested in the texture of the parachute, which she fingered again.
“You may have that,” said George, kindly.
“Naturally. It’s mine.”
“Finders keepers, huh? Mara, what’s this war all about? What side are you on—white circles or green triangles?”
She remained expressionless. Not a thought came across to him: it was as though her Teleo were switched off. When she didn’t understand, or was uninterested, her mind seemed to become a complete blank.
“You don’t get it? Circles. Triangles. See here.”
He seized a sharp splinter from the wreckage and carved specimen circles and triangles in the turf. When he looked up, she was raiding the provision box, grabbing handfuls of food bars.
“Hey, what’s the game, Mara?”
She paused. “Game?” She pulled a piece of cloth from her pocket and tossed it to him. The strange marks on it conveyed only that it was something in another language. He gave it back, telling her to read it.
She read the whole verse beginning: “
When she’d finished, he switched off his transmitter for a while, did some private thinking, took the food bars away from her, and said: “Mara, these are strictly rationed. However, I’ll give you another one if you tell me what this doggerel means.”
She said she didn’t know what the verse meant any more than he did, but Leep was a man of strange perception and… She told him about Leep, and her mother, and Fami and its history, and the glacier and her escape. He gave her the promised bar, and said: “It’s a pity my helicopter’s completely smashed. Otherwise, we could have flown up to Fami and interviewed your friend, Leep. He seems to know a lot of things.”
“Oh, yes, he does. He has made many cloth books of verses of this kind. They foretold many things which have come to pass.”
“The village Nostradamus, huh? A useful guy to have around.” He pondered, then said abruptly: “Well, it’s the only lead I can see. We’ll call on him, anyhow, using our flat feet.”
“But the glacier is too slippery to climb.”
George fished around in the fuselage and extricated a pick-ax from the bundle of implements he’d brought along. He tapped it, and said: “We’ll cut steps. Come on, now. My time is limited.”
He couldn’t persuade her to leave the parachute behind: It was too precious a find. He carried the provision box, the pick, spare Teleos, and his telescope. She followed sedately, carrying the bundled ’chute on her head. They both continued to wear their Teleos.
The glacier was a bigger affair than he’d imagined: wider, higher, steeper. This he decided on the fifth day of painful step-cutting, inching up a slope that seemed to mount forever. Every night they’d hacked out a niche in which to sleep, enfolded in the silken layers of the parachute. Even so he, in his thick air-suit, slept poorly because of the cold.
He marveled at the hardihood of Mara. Clad only in her thin frock, placing her bare feet unhesitatingly in the ice holes he’d chipped out, she climbed behind him without complaint or obvious fatigue. Nor did she question why she should have to retrace so tediously the route of her escape from Fami. There were no infantile regrets or crying for the moon in her make-up. She dealt only with facts.
Her simple line of reasoning, George suspected, was: This man has food. He is a fool, and gives it away. Therefore, if I stay with him, I shall have food. That night, as they lay in their small, artificial cave, he accused her directly:
“Mara, you’re not interested in the war, are you? You don’t care whether we find the white circle G.H.Q or not?”
“No.”
