“Not needed,” she said, dismissing him, standing where she was until he had gone, until the door was shut behind him, until she could catch her breath.
“No,” she said to no one in particular. “Absolutely not needed.”
She did need help with the machine, but she got it from Ahl Dibai Bloom, who brought two craftsmen over and stayed most of the day. They came to help her finish the construction and build a traveling case, but they got so involved in playing with the gadget it was hours before they accomplished what they’d come for. When they were finished, the device was larger and vastly more complicated than the one Danivon had seen. Also Fringe had done what she could to make the machine look old and mysterious, with capsules that seemed truly oracular by virtue of their odd spellings and dim archaic lettering.
“I want one, Fringe!” Bloom demanded, chortling over his fortune—his eleventh or twelfth, all different. “I want a machine like this, a bigger one, for my place in the Swale.”
“So, we’ll build another one, Bloom,” she said, dropping some newly lettered capsules into the supply box.
“When?”
“When I get back.”
“And when will that be?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“I was afraid of that. Will you take care, lady love?”
“Always, Bloom. If you’ll say good-bye to Zasper for me.”
“I think he plans to do that for himself.”
Zasper did plan to do that for himself, arriving at the flight center as the Destiny Machine was being loaded. He didn’t come directly to the place Fringe was standing, but went off across the field to where Danivon was packing himself into another flier. Fringe noticed, to her amazement, that Zasper hugged him like kin. When he came back across the field, he greeted Curvis like an old friend before taking Fringe’s hand and presenting a tiny box.
“What’s this?” she asked suspiciously.
“A present,” he said. “A nothing, Fringe. A keepsake.”
She choked, felt herself getting red.
“No,” he said firmly. “You’re not to get angry and flustered at me. I want you to take it and wear it to remember me by. When you see it, you say, ‘Zasper thought I was all right whatever I wanted to be. I didn’t need to be anyone else for Zasper.’”
She felt tears.
“Promise you will?”
“Promise,” she said softly.
“Fringe,” he said as softly. “You know, a long time ago I told you about that boy I saved. It might be wise not to mention that on your way to … to wherever.” His eyes flicked sideways, to the place Danivon’s flier had been.
“Hell, Zasper. What do you take me for. Of course not.” She said it, but her mind was elsewhere, putting together the hug, the glance, his obvious discomfort. So Danivon had been the little boy Zasper’d rescued. Well!
“Well then. Good luck, girl. Attend the Situation!” He saluted, turned himself about, and stalked away, back rigid, shoulders straight.
When she was in her cubicle aboard the flier, she opened the box. A circlet of gold and a chain. The circlet made up of the words “Just as she is.”
It hurt. It hurt like that time Char had offered to sell the house. What she felt was something grabbing at her, something holding on to her. She knew it as pain, a pain she’d learned to avoid. She hung the circlet around her neck, buttoned her shirt over it, felt it burning against her skin, and tried to forget it was there.
Why couldn’t he just have said good-bye?
The people of Tolerance were charming and hospitable and so mannered that Fringe felt they stuck to her like swamp slime. The place itched her. It dripped into her boots. Being here made her want to bathe, over and over, and she could not tell why. There was something severely amiss in Tolerance, though no one seemed to notice but her.
“Relax! We’re only here for a day or so,” said Curvis, giving her a curious look. “Are you always this jumpy?” They were returning from the Rotunda balcony where Fringe had moved the components of an excellent dinner around on her plate without eating any of them.
She twitched, flushing. “No. I’m not. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. If I were Danivon, I’d say I was smelling something very wrong.”
Tolerance seemed no different to Curvis than it had always been. There was always a good deal of tension in the place. And then recently there’d been that case of dismemberment and disappearance, but that mystery would no doubt soon be solved. Some visitor gone mad, no doubt. It happened sometimes. Curvis had never been alert to nuance, so he had no inkling of what was bothering Fringe.
Nonetheless, he attempted reassurance. “Tolerance always has a kind of agitation about it, too many people in too small a space, monitoring, fussing, like that.”
“Agitation alone wouldn’t make me feel like this.”
“Do the twins make you uncomfortable?”
She shook her head. It wasn’t the twins. She had at first been in an agony of embarrassment over the twins, but it wasn’t them. “They speak Lingua very well,” she said lamely. Though learning to talk with such strange beings, even in Lingua, was a problem she had struggled with. “Though it’s a little hard for me to figure them out.”
Bertran and Nela had noted her discomfort. She had been obviously anxious to say the right thing or, at the least, to avoid saying the wrong one, and their first interchange had been marked by long silences and inconsequential mutters. After a time, however, she had devised a solution that suited her, for she began to act toward them as she might have done toward two totally independent persons. She stopped trying to make sense of their condition, stopped saying “you” to include them both, and began to address them as Nela and Bertran, speaking to them separately, as distinct people.
“As I was saying to Nela just a while ago,” she would say to Bertran, ignoring that he must have heard. Or to Nela,
