While Asner watched impotently, Curvis got into the flier Jacent had brought, took it upward in a tight spiral, and turned away eastward, his actions betraying his intent. Curvis was returning to Tolerance. Curvis intended to find out if the Brannigan creatures had any use for him.
In the lowe of the evening, Danivon took Fringe by the hand and led her from Jory’s house out onto the hillside.
“Come,” he begged her. “The end is coming, Fringe. Let’s end as lovers.”
She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Have we time to be lovers, Danivon?”
“Why not?”
“To be truly lovers, Danivon? There’s time enough for passion, but it seems an unworthy choice for our last hours. There seems very little point.”
“Pleasure? Would that be sufficient reason?”
“Well then, if it would please you….”
He wavered between tears and laughter, between anguish and anger. “No, it would not please me with you in that mood, lady. Sit by me then, here in the shelter of the trees. If you’re not moved to be my lover, be my comrade. Tell yourself we’re resting up for battle.”
This she could do. They sat beneath the great tree, not far from the two stones, Danivon with his back against the trunk, Fringe against his chest, his arms loosely about her. The view westward was of the meadows, a wandering streamlet, then a line of forest below the massif rearing its bulk against the horizon, smooth and glowing in the last of the light.
Seeing them there, Bertran and Nela came up the slope and sat down not far away, the feathered gylph cuddled close beneath a furry arm, in her own place.
“I keep thinking how I’ve always wanted to be a real girl,” whispered Nela, yet not so softly they could not hear her. “I sound like Pinocchio, don’t I? Wanting to be a real person.”
“Who is Pinocchio?” asked Fringe, firmly resisting the picture she was getting from Nela’s thoughts.
“A fairy-tale puppet. A wooden doll who wanted to be real. Just as I did. I wanted to be a real woman. All that time on the sideshow stage, all those years with Aunt Sizzy, somehow whenever I thought about the future, I saw myself as a real woman. With a family and children….”
“I never thought of myself like that,” said Fringe in surprise. “Never once like that.”
Bertran said, “When we first started at the circus, I used to imagine finding our father and saying, ‘I’m your son. I’m the boy you went off and left, so look at me. You didn’t need to run away. I’m a man you can be proud of.’”
“I thought that too,” said Danivon. “I wondered who my father was, why he had let me go. I thought of finding him someday and amazing him with my …”
“With your manliness,” said Nela, extending a wing and stretching it. “And with your beauty and good sense.”
Danivon smiled, almost laughed.
Bertran said, “My other dreams, the swimming, flying dreams, they were only … sensual, I suppose. Muscles and tendons finding an outlet, playing out their purpose in fantasy….”
“I know,” Nela murmured. “Me too.”
“I used to make plans for the time we’d be separated,” he went on musingly. “I wanted to be an explorer. I wanted to do all the things, go all the places we couldn’t go. Mountain climbing.” He stretched a furry paw, miming the action. “Deep-sea diving. I wanted to go hang gliding. I wanted to jump out of airplanes….”
Fringe resisted the surge of their thought, their feelings, firmly rejecting any perception of them except what she could see, what she could hear. She felt their presences within her dwindle, even as Jory had predicted.
“Instead of giving Nela wings, the device should have given them to you,” she said to Bertran.
Danivon asked, “Are you reconciled to the device then, Fringe? Do you accept it?”
“Never!” she replied firmly. “But I can be grateful that it saved me and rebuilt me even though I have told it I will not be possessed, not even for my own good.”
“It would have been interesting to have the experience,” he said, not remembering he was still having it.
“You did not think so before. You ran,” she said. It was not an accusation but a statement of fact.
“I did. I was afraid. I’m not afraid now.”
“Nor I,” said Nela, turning restlessly in Bertran’s arms, opening her eyes to take in the sky flecked with sunset, wondering at all the memories that suddenly assailed her. Jory’s turtle story, so much like her own. Why had Jory told it?
“Why did Jory talk about the turtle?” she asked, pulling herself a little away from Bertran.
“Because it was about Jory herself,” said Fringe with a sudden flash of insight.
Nela said, “I’ve been thinking about it. That’s how she became what she was … is, by being like the turtle. Because she knew somehow that this … all this is just a sideshow….”
Fringe considered this. Had Jory known that comfortable lives pass away, that love is only for a time, that beyond human passions and affections and concerns, beyond human destiny lies the dark of the heights, the loneliness of flight, and beyond that … the eternal burning of the stars? And beyond them …?
The main event? Something other, wondrous, utterly beyond human conception?
Danivon whispered to her, “What are you thinking?”
She sat up, her brow furrowed, hearing only his words, not his feelings. “I am thinking of the far stars. And of the times we made love and I told myself it wouldn’t last.”
“You didn’t really want it to last,” Nela said to her across the little space between them, a puzzled expression in her eyes. “You don’t want to be tied by love. Oh, but I do!”
Fringe nodded slowly, accepting Nela’s judgment. If there had been something between Danivon and herself, it wouldn’t have lasted, but not necessarily because of Danivon. She herself would have ended it. She might have blamed Danivon when
