And although she knew it would mean pain and rejection and loneliness all over again, Fringe clung to him in a great flood of warm sentiment, pledging herself to becoming a Professional. They hugged each other and smiled tremulously into each other’s faces, and Fringe went away aching with a longing she had almost forgotten. Come morning, she told herself, she would resign from the Academy. She would apologize to Zasper and beg his forgiveness, but she would resign. That night she chewed her fingers to the quick and broke out in spots, but remained resolute.
When morning came, however, she made herself sit quietly and think the matter over. There had been times … times when Ma and Pa had cried all over each other, promising this, promising that, things that never came to pass. She’d seen Char promise Grandma Gregoria too, and those promises hadn’t usually meant anything much. Besides, she had nowhere but the Academy to live, and if Pa was going to sell the house, where would she stay? Would she be welcome at Grandma’s? Perhaps it would be better to wait until things were a little more definite….
She told herself this, refusing to admit real doubt. She thought of going to Char and getting the details straight, but told herself that might be pressing him too much, even as she suspected it might be pressing herself too much. Days went by. She heard nothing more about setup money. Her emotions wavered from anger to relief, back and forth, like a children’s balance board, up and down, up and down. She hadn’t really wanted to leave the Academy. And yet, if he truly would provide …
At last, telling herself she needed to make an end of the uncertainty, she went to ask him face-to-face. The house was empty. A neighbor saw her standing there and told her Char was away on a long trip, a marriage trip. He had married again. A Professional-class woman, a widow. The house was being expensively refurbished against his return.
The cold that washed through her was no worse than it had often been before. Pa had obviously decided it was better to get himself a new wife and start over than saddle himself with the old wife’s daughter—particularly since she wasn’t really a credit to him. Too spoiled by the Tromses, no doubt.
She went back to the Academy and put the memory in that place she had put other memories, that locked, secret place. Why become a Professional Dorwalk when she wasn’t Dorwalk at all? She was Owldark. She had been gifted with that name and had been carrying it about with her for some time now. She liked the sound of it. Sneaky, and quiet, and unseen, that was her. She would become an Enforcer, she would become Owldark, she would have a place of her own.
Though she sometimes dreamed of him thereafter, she never saw Char Dorwalk again.
Jacent, Syrilla’s protégé, found Tolerance increasingly intolerable. He hovered between tedium and terror most of the time, being bored by mind-numbing routine in the days and panicked by nightmares at night. The med-tech from whom he shamefacedly sought help recommended a sleep inducer and spoke of the difficulties of adaptation to a new environment. Give it time, the med-tech urged. Jacent gave it time, waking night after night with his heart thundering in his chest, fighting to catch his breath, frightened out of his wits for no reason he could name. He knew he spent far too much time worrying about it, but there were no distractions to keep him from worrying. No workshift was distinguishable from any other. Persons and events seemed to flow together, fungible as water. Nothing had any edges. All was pose and habit, all eccentricities smoothed away. He was not allowed to appear concerned or show surprise at anything real. Though some of the provinces he monitored had unbelievably nasty customs, it was custom to accept them without comment. In public he was expected to twitter engagingly about trifles, but never to mention anything important or significant. The whole structured artifice was too much to bear.
Jacent told himself he wasn’t old enough for all this habit! He needed some exciting reality! Perhaps if he had something interesting to think about, he would be able to sleep! His chance came when he was invited to join a group of giggling youngsters in their exploration of the abandoned installations north of the Great Rotunda.
“There will be tunnel rats as long as your arm,” whispered Metty, a girl almost as recently arrived as Jacent himself, a friend, someone who shared his brooding boredom, his disenchantment and discontent. They talked about their plans late at night, under the covers, between more or less successful attempts at erotic distraction.
“Rats and maybe serpents,” said her brother Jum, he of the curly hair and extravagant clothing, when invited to join the group. “We’ll take net-guns and capture some for the zoo!”
There was a stasis zoo at Tolerance, where odd flora and fauna brought by settlers were preserved, at least those species that hadn’t fit into the terraformed ecology originally adopted on Elsewhere. Capture of interesting creatures would provide a reasonable-sounding excuse for the unauthorized expedition, though one of doubtful legitimacy. Capturing animals was Frickian business. In fact, in Jacent’s opinion, anything adventurous and fun seemed to be Frickian business, while everything routine and dull was the business of Supervisors.
“How do we get into the place?” Jacent asked. “I thought all the old army quarters were sealed off.”
“Oh, they were,” said laughing Kermac, known for his incautious adventures among the Frickian servant boys. “But we’ve broken one set of seals and pried open a door. There’s oodles of corridors down there, and lots of the lights
