The flash was Leelson’s pronouncement to Lutha:
“When Trompe, Saluez, and I leave in the morning, I want you and the child to stay here, Lutha. Give us a few days to get well away, then ask the people to take you back to the port.”
“The hell,” she snarled, a thundercrack.
Hurriedly, I left the room. They were so intent upon each other, they did not see me go. Trompe, who had been half-asleep in the neighboring room, had evidently felt the emotional storm going on, for he emerged, blinked at me, and mouthed, “What?”
I shrugged and kept going. While I fully intended to listen, I didn’t want to be involved. We mutilated ones are observers of life, not participants. So says the sisterhood. And safer so, so says the sisterhood. And more peaceful.
So I took myself beyond the storeroom door and then shamelessly leaned against the wall while I listened to what was going on. Lutha was saying at great length that having come this far, she had no intention of going home.
“Besides,” she cried, “you and Trompe aren’t linguists, and I am.”
“We are Fastigats,” said Leelson.
“Fastigats aren’t gods!” she snarled at him. “Much though you like to think so! You can tell how people feel, maybe, but you can’t tell why. Sometimes, it takes words to tell why.”
It was true that neither Trompe nor Leelson had a really good command of our language. I spoke far better aglais than they did Nantaskan. But then, a lot of us learn languages as children, in order to cater to our leaseholders. Why would they learn our dialect? There are few of us who speak the tongue.
“You will be safer at home,” he said, like a father cautioning a child. “You will be better off.”
“I’ll decide where I’ll be better off,” she said. “If you’d had the common sense and decency to tell people you were coming here, I wouldn’t have been sent. Now that I have been sent, I’ve no intention of going home until the job is done.”
“The boy will be in the way.” His tone said she would be in the way, too, which perhaps she noticed.
“Leelson,” said Trompe from the doorway. I could see him through the hinge gap at the side of the door I stood behind. “Leelson. Stop talking and think.”
Leelson stopped talking. I assumed he was looking at Lutha. The silence had a peculiarly penetrating quality to it, one I have noticed before when he or Trompe reached out. So, he was reaching at Lutha, into her, understanding her.
“Stop it,” said Lutha. “Stop digging at me! I’m fully capable of telling you how I feel. I am not a gofer to be sent hither and thither at the whim of any presumptuous Fastigat who gets a burr up his rear! I’m a person. Until the Great Gauphin comes down from heaven and appoints you his lieutenant, I’ve got the same rights you have. I decided to come here, and I’ve decided to stay until our mission is finished. Since I had to bring Leely in order to get here, he’ll come along, no matter how much ‘in the way’ he is.”
Silence. I saw Trompe make a helpless gesture.
After a time Leelson said calmly, “Have you thought about your career? A lengthy interruption certainly won’t forward it.”
“Having a child didn’t forward it,” she said. “Quite frankly, I don’t anticipate it forwarding much in the future. About the best I can hope for is keeping my head above water.”
“She’s bored, Leelson.” This was Trompe.
More silence. Then her voice, quieter: “He’s right. I’m bored with my life on Alliance Central! I’m bored sick with it! I’m also terrified at the threat of the Ularians. I may mock the Firster assurance that men are the meaning and soul of creation, but that doesn’t mean I welcome being slaughtered by something bigger and meaner. The Procurator used fear for motivation, succeeding better than he knew!”
Even I, who am no Fastigat, knew she was not telling all the truth. Later, when the men had gone to sleep, she came to the storeroom door and peered in, looking for me.
“You’re still up,” she said, trying to be surprised. No doubt she had seen the light of my candle.
“I’m too … too something to sleep,” I confessed.
She sat on a sack of grain, crossing her ankles, then recrossing them, twiddling her feet, wanting to talk about something, obviously.
“Leelson was right,” I murmured. “You would be safer back in your home. And so would the boy.”
She looked up at me blindly. “I don’t want to be safe, Saluez.” There was a sob in her voice, betraying a feeling I knew well. She wanted to die. It is not so much an active thing, this feeling, not so much a desire to kill oneself as it is a desire not to be. An absence of hope. Despite everything she told herself about the boy, she had no hope. She saw herself getting older and older while he got bigger and stronger, his demands got bigger and bigger, more and more difficult. She saw herself victim to a helpless love for him, unable to help him or herself, desiring rather to be dead.
I found myself holding her, cuddling her as she had cuddled me, laying my own fingers on her lips.
“He should get to know his son,” she said, taking my hand in her own. “Get to know him.”
What was there to know? I wondered. I didn’t say it aloud.
“Leely has many … many interesting qualities,” she insisted.
“Of course,” I murmured. “Children do.”
“His artistic talent alone …”
“Shhh,” I whispered, rocking her. “Shhh.”
So we sat together in the dark,
