“You’re just like her! You and Limia are so much alike I can’t figure out why she can’t understand about … about us.”
He shook his head. “Why should she understand? I don’t. I’ve been with other women. I’ve loved some of them. But when I’ve decided to go, I’ve always gone.”
“You went from me! Damn it, Leelson, you went!”
“I went.” He laughed in wry amusement. “But I wasn’t gone. Or rather, you weren’t. You were there, love. Every morning when I woke, like an invisible rope, tying us together. Every night when I was alone, I felt it tugging. Even when I wasn’t alone, you were there, between me and whoever.”
She tried to laugh, tried to pretend he was lying, knowing all the time that Fastigats didn’t lie. It was one of the infuriating things about them. They might not see the truth the way others saw it, but they really couldn’t misrepresent what they thought was true.
“Why? Why did you go?” she demanded, a question she’d been wanting to ask for years.
“I told you why. In the note.”
“You call that a note? Five words! ‘I can’t get to him.’”
“I couldn’t get to him. And I couldn’t … couldn’t bear to see you …”
“See me what?”
“Wasting all that caring.”
“Wasting? On my own child!”
He threw up his hands. “That’s why I went, Lutha. This is why I’ll go again, when this is done. If this is ever done.”
“Don’t say it.” Lutha banged her fist against the stone, hurting herself. “We can’t change each other. We can hammer and hammer, and in the end we’ll be the same. Things happen. We can’t go back and make them unhappen.”
Lutha saw Leelson’s lowering expression and laughed out loud. “This is ridiculous! We’re marooned, we’re in danger of death, we’re sitting in a rock cavern with nothing but a few blankets and a rather modest stack of food, my child is missing, and you and I are—”
“Are doing exactly what I wanted to avoid,” he said firmly. “But you’re right. We won’t change our views in this matter. The more we talk, the more pain we’ll cause, but we won’t change.”
“But he’s—”
“Lutha!” Leelson glared at her. “Don’t talk about what Leely is!”
Then a voice from among the stones! “Dananana. Dananana.”
He danced into the cavern as though Leelson had summoned him, shining as brightly as one of those vagrant rays of sun.
Lutha gasped. He was bleeding! Round wounds on his arms, on his face. No. Perhaps not. Not wounds exactly. There was blood, but not … not so much. “He’s been bitten,” she cried.
Though maybe he’d only scratched himself on the stones. His little shirt was torn, a fragment of the striped fabric missing, his skin abraded beneath. But already the redness was paling, the rough edges of skin were smoothing.
“Can’t get lost,” breathed Saluez, from some great distance.
“He’s not hurt,” Leelson said in an ugly tone. “Look at him, he’s not hurt.”
“Can’t get hurt,” said Saluez, her voice fading into silence.
Lutha held Leely close, he waving his hands, kicking his feet, caroling the way he did when he was contented. “Dananana.”
Leelson turned his back on them and slowly moved in the direction the others had taken. “Be back,” he said, the same words, the same tone as before. Definite. Dismissive.
Lutha heard the sounds of his going away, the tumble of small stones, the crunch of his feet.
“Poor Lutha,” breathed Saluez.
“My own damned fault,” she mumbled. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Leely can’t get hurt, or lost. People used to believe strange ones like Leely were protected by the gods.”
There was no response. Saluez was gone, back to wherever she’d been since the omphalos. Lutha tucked the blankets around her once more, then sat quietly by while Leely drew pictures in the sand, saying over and over, “Dananana. Dananana.” When he tired of this, he curled up beside Saluez and went to sleep.
Eventually the others returned to the cavern and, unaccountably so far as Lutha was concerned, set about making ready for an excursion.
Now, Leelson said, they would go out and look around.
Lutha stared at him in wonderment. He didn’t notice. Mitigan raided the supply pile once again for mottled gray-green overgarments he said would hide them among the bracken. Snark suggested that they smudge their faces with dust so as not to show up pale or dark against some contrasting background. Lutha went along with all this for a time, though all the preparations seemed rather melodramatic, but finally she could stand it no longer.
“Will someone please tell me why we’re going outside?”
Leelson cast her a lofty glance. “Anything Snark experiences feeds back to Simidi-ala, where the Procurator is no doubt even now planning our rescue. The feedback includes not only what Snark sees and hears but anything she sees us do or hears us say. We’ve had no chance to look around in daylight. One of us might come up with some insight that may be useful in planning the rescue attempt. Even the scanty information we have now is more than the Alliance has known previously!”
Mitigan, busy checking his own armament, raised the subject of weapons for the others, and Snark suggested they go first to the camp to pick up heat guns like the one she carried. These were tools used by the shadow team to sterilize soil before planting homo-norm crops, but they would serve to discourage attack as well.
While Snark demonstrated this device to the others Lutha checked her arrangements for Leely once more. Saluez’s knife was put away in Lutha’s own pocket so he couldn’t get at that. His tether was tight—she checked it for the third or fourth time—so he couldn’t get loose. While she did this Snark was instructing the others: “…turn it on … press the button.” Even distracted as Lutha was, she thought she would be able to manage that.
They went down the slope into the camp, exploring from building to building, Mitigan,
