'Intruders? No, no one.'
'All right. The guard detail ought to be here now, but they haven't showed. I'm going to find out what's keeping them. Meet me over at the door where we came in.' Without waiting for Silk's reply, Hammerstone clattered away.
'I must get back into the tunnels,' Silk told Mamelta. 'I left something valuable there; it isn't mine, and even if that soldier's officer allows me to leave, he's sure to see that I'm escorted back to Limna.'
'This way,' she said, and pointed, though Silk was not sure at what.
He nodded and set off. 'I can't run, I'm afraid. Not like you. I'd run now, if I could.'
For the first time, she seemed to see him. 'You have a bruise on your face, and you're lame.' He nodded. 'I've had various accidents. I was dropped down a flight of stairs, for one thing. My bruises will heal though, quite quickly. I was going to tell you about Mucor, who I'm afraid will not. Are you sure we're going the right way? If we go back-'
Mamelta pointed again, and this time he saw that she was indicating a green line in the floor. 'We follow that.'
He smiled. 'I should have realized that there must be a system of some kind.'
The green line ended before a cubical structure faced with a panel of many small plates. Mamelta pressed its center, and the plates shuddered and squealed, turned pale, and eventually creaked into motion, first reminding Silk of the irising door that had defied his efforts, then of the unfolding of a blush rose. 'It's beautiful,' he told Mamelta. 'But this can't be the way out. It looks like ... a toolshed, perhaps.'
The square room, revealed as the rose door opened, was dim and dirty; there were bits of broken glass on its floor, and its comers held heaps of the gray-painted steel. Mamelta sat on one, educing a minute puff of dust. 'Will this take us to the lifter?'
Although she had looked at him as she spoke, Silk felt it was not his face that she had seen. 'This won't take us anywhere, I'm afraid,' he told her as the door folded again. 'But I suppose that we might hide here for a time. If the soldiers have gone when we come out, I may be able to find my way back to the tunnels.'
'We want to go back. Sit down.'
He sat, feeling unaccountably that the stacked steel- that the whole storeroom in fact-was sinking beneath him. 'What is the lifter, Mamelta?'
'The Loganslone, the ship that will take us up to the starcrosser Whorl.''
'I think-' Silk wrestled briefly with the unfamiliar term. 'I mean, don't you-haven't you considered-that, that perhaps this boat that was to take you wherever it was, that it may have been a long time ago? A very long time?'
She was staring straight ahead; he was conscious of the tightness of her jaw.
'I was going to tell you about Mucor. Perhaps I ought to finish that; then we can go on to other things. I realize all this must be very unsettling to you.'
Mamelta nodded almost imperceptibly.
'I was going to say that it has bothered me a great deal that her father appears to be unaware of what she does. She goes forth in spirit, as I told you. She possesses people, as she possessed you. She appeared to me, bodiless, in my manse, and later-today, actually-in the tunnels after I dreamed of her. Furthermore, the ghost of a very dear friend-of my teacher and advisor, I should have said- appeared to me at almost the same time that she did. I believe her appearance must have made his possible in some fashion, though I really know much less than I should about such matters.'
'Am I a ghost?'
'No, certainly not. You're very much alive-a living woman, and a very attractive one. Nor was Mucor a ghost when she appeared to me. It was a spirit of the living that I saw, in other words, and not that of someone who had died. When she spoke, what I heard was actual sound, I feel certain, and she must have shouted or broken something in the room outside to make the lights so bright.' Silk bit his lips; some sixth sense told him (though clearly falsely) that he was falling, falling forever, the stack of gray steel and the glass-strewn floor itself dropping perpetually from under him and pulling him down with them. 'I was going to say that when Mucor possessed some women at a house in our city, her father never appeared to suspect that the devil they complained of was his own daughter; that puzzled me all day. I believe I've hit upon the answer, and I'd like you to tell me, if you can, whether I'm correct. If Mucor left a small part of her spirit with you, it's possible you know. Has she ever undergone a surgical procedure? An operation on her head?'
There was a long pause. 'I'm not sure.'
'Because her father and I talked about physicians, among many other things. He has a resident physician, and he told me that an earlier one had been a brain surgeon.' Silk waited for Mamelta's reaction, but there was none.
'That seemed strange to me until it occurred to me that the brain surgeon might have been employed to meet a specific need. Suppose that Mucor had been a normal child in every respect except for her ability to possess others. She would have possessed those closest to her, or so I'd think, and they can hardly have enjoyed it. Blood probably consulted several physicians-treating her phenomenal ability as a disease, since he is by no means religious. Eventually he must have found one who told him that he could 'cure' her by removing a tumor or something of that kind from her brain. Or perhaps even by removing a part of the brain itself, though that is such a horrible thought that I wish there were some way to avoid it.'
Mamelta nodded.
Encouraged, Silk continued, 'Blood must have believed that the operation had been a complete success. He didn't suspect it was his own daughter who was possessing the women because he firmly believed, as he presumably had for years, that she was no longer able to possess anyone. I think it's probable that the operation did in fact interfere with her ability until she was older, just as it seems to have damaged her thought processes. But in time, as that part of her brain regenerated, her ability returned; and having been granted a second chance, she was prudent enough to go farther afield, and in general to conceal her restored ability; although it would seem that she followed her father or some other member of the household to the place where the women lived, as she undoubtedly followed me later. Does any of this sound at all familiar to you, Mamelta? Can you tell me anything about it?'
'The operation was before I went on the ship,'
'I see,' Silk said, although he did not. 'And then .. . ?'
'It came. I remember now. They strapped us in.'
'Was it a slave boat? We don't have them in Viron, but I know that some other cities do, and that there are slave boats on the Amnis that raid the fishing villages. I would be sorry to learn that there are slave boats beyond the whorl as well.'
'Yes,' Mamelta said.
Silk rose and pressed the center of the door as Mamelta had, but the door did not open.
'Not yet. It will open automatically, soon.'
He sat down again, feeling unaccountably that the whole room was slipping left and falling too. 'The boat came?'
'We had to volunteer. They were-you couldn't say no.'
'Do you recall being outside, Mamelta? Grass and trees and sky and so on?'
'Yes.' A smile lifted the comers of her mouth. 'Yes, with my brothers.' Her face became animated. 'Playing ball in the patio. Mama wouldn't let me go out in the street the way they did. There was a fountain, and we'd throw the ball through the water so that whoever caught it would get wet.'
'Could you see the sun? Was it long or short?'
'I don't understand.'
Silk searched his memory for everything Maytera Marble had ever said relating to the Short Sun. 'Here,' he began carefully, 'our sun is long and straight, a line of burning gold fencing our lands from the skylands. Was it like that for you? Or was it a disk in the center of the sky?'
Her face crumpled, while tears overflowed her eyes. 'And never come back. Hold me. Oh, hold me!'
He did so, awkward as a boy and acutely conscious of the soft, warm flesh beneath the worn black twill of the robe he had lent her.
