The device happened at the end of her arm, made of her bone and sinew, drawn from her body and mind. She moved what had been her hand, her arm, aiming it downward, sweeping it around and around the circles until she had covered them all. The Arbai fell over sideways, sprawled with their jaws open, their tongues lolling.
She tried to move and could not. There wasn’t enough of her left to move. She was lost, part of the device, gone from her own being.
“They sleep,” murmured Great Dragon, recalling her to herself.
Now only the Arbai Device remained. She thought of the device idly, without the strength to direct it. All that remained of herself wanted only sleep and forgetting. The struggle to hold herself apart was beyond her. Someone else would have to do what needed doing.
“Come,” whispered Great Dragon. “You are Fringe Owldark. You are Jory’s daughter. You have inherited wonder.”
She struggled to acknowledge this, to identify herself with this. After a long time, she was able to nod, to say doubtfully yes, she might be, perhaps she was Fringe.
“Why, Fringe. Why did you do this? Was it for Jory? For Zasper?”
She could not make sense of the question. “No. No. They’re gone. I didn’t do it for them.”
“Then for whom?”
“Nela,” she said. “I guess I did it for Nela. So she’d have some time to be … what she wants to be. What the device made her.”
“This device is an enigma to me. I cannot feel it. So will it now do what needs be done?”
“Only time will tell,” she murmured, thought she murmured, too weary and lost to know for sure.
“Is there enough time?”
“Don’t know,” she sighed, thought she sighed. “May be too late. How long did it take to get here?”
“A long time.” The time he meant was measured in hundreds, thousands of years.
The time she meant was not so long. “Is it dawn, outside?”
“Yes,” said the great voice, very softly. “Some time ago was dawn.”
15
All through the night, Danivon stood wakeful: while the darkness drew in, while the stars came out in scatters, while light left the world below, remaining only on the higher clouds; even after true darkness came, he blundered his way from tree to tree, clearing to clearing, unable to rest. He was waiting for Fringe. Fringe had gone away after Great Dragon. Perhaps Fringe had departed from Panubi, cloaked in the dragon’s power and invisibility, slithering through the lines of the killers, saving herself.
He hoped she had.
He knew she had not.
He tried to imagine where she might be and failed. She had had some purpose, that much he guessed, but what? This question brought with it a fit of hysterical though silent laughter. Much of the time her purposes had made no sense to him. Why should he understand this one? He yawned uncontrollably and leaned against a tree, listening to the breathing of those around him, wondering how long he dared let them sleep, half sleeping himself as he stood.
Dawn came at last, with high pink clouds foretelling the arrival of day. From the killing ground, the monster machines began to yammer. Danivon forbade himself to listen, throwing back his head to look up at the clouds, storing up the memory. When death came he would not think of death, or of Fringe, or of anything to do with man. He would hold in his mind a picture of clouds turning from black to gray to blooming rose.
Such resolution did him no good. Fringe remained at the center of his thought. What was she really like? What had she really wanted? He found himself remembering her, every detail, every nuance of expression or action. Zasper had talked about her. He remembered all the things Zasper had said. Her presence was like a rhythm he couldn’t get out of his mind, like a litany he kept telling over and over, like a summoning spell, an invocation.
Above him the clouds brightened and faded, except for one high, crescent shape that went on glowing with color after all the rest had faded to white.
And then another below it, appearing out of nothing.
“Bertran.” Danivon spoke softly. “Nela?”
The two were already half-awake. They roused themselves and came to stand beside him.
“There,” he said, pointing upward. Something was growing like linked moons, softly shining. A murmur of voices came from the sides, near and far, where others who had been early wakeful had also seen the strangeness. Cafferty and Latibor came from among the trees to stand beside them, watching.
“Did Fringe ever come back?” whispered Nela.
Danivon shook his head, unable to speak.
“I’ve been thinking about her and thinking about her,” said Nela. “So has Bertran. Ever since it started to get light. We can’t get her out of our heads!”
An odd coincidence, Danivon thought, giving it no more attention than that, distracted by the thing in the sky that was continuing to unfold, little by little. The sky brightened, and still the thing grew, each linked crescent a bit lower, a bit closer, the whole mass centering itself upon the great rock dome as upon the bull’s-eye of a target. At last whatever-it-was seemed to occupy most of the massif, many miles across. From its translucent base it rose in a series of interconnected curves, vanishing beyond vision, sunlit at the height. The massif creaked alarmingly, roared and trembled a bit, then steadied. Either it had decided it could hold the weight or the weight had been removed.
The others came from among the trees.
“What is it?” marveled Cafferty.
“No idea,” said Danivon. “Nela?”
She shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Have you, Latibor?”
He shook his head in return. Never. Nothing like it.
Every person left on Panubi had been gathered tight at the base of the massif, and all of them saw the thing come, though they could not comprehend the arrival. It looked like nothing material, nothing solid, so no one around the massif thought of it as a way of escape.
