The cook followed her pointing finger, frowning. ‘I don’t see nothin’.’
‘They were there,’ she insisted. ‘Riders.’
‘Better tell Tripmaster,’ Brun advised. ‘There’s not supposed to be anyone out here right now but us.’
The Tripmaster grunted when she told him, looking a little worried. ‘Trouble?’ she asked, apprehensively. ‘Something wrong?’
‘Oh, no. No. I should think not. It’s just that there’s been a good deal of … oh, call it unrest. Over this CHASE Commission thing, most of it. People taking sides, and the Crystallites gettin’ worse and worse.’
She shuddered. ‘Sometimes I have bad dreams about Crystallites.’
‘Don’t we all. Well, I don’t like people movin’ around unless I know who they are.’
The man moved away and she and the boy returned to their wagon. She could sleep either in the wagon where they had traveled or under it or in a tent, if she preferred. There was little rainfall on this part of Jubal. What moisture there was came from the coast in vast, cottony fogs that rolled in at evening and burned away with the first light of morning, leaving the Jubal trees sodden with accumulated dew. When light came, every frond lifted, funneling the precious moisture down the trough-shaped veins and into hollow reservoirs below ground. More than one traveler had saved his life by drinking the bitter liquid when no other moisture was available, though no one would drink it by choice. If there was fog, it would be better to sleep in a tent, but there was no sign of fog tonight.
‘Tent up?’ asked Miles.
‘I don’t think so,’ she told him. ‘I think we’ll take our mattresses over in that big grove of Jubal trees, little boy. Jubal trees smell so nice.’ There would be a little privacy there, as well. She felt the need of a good, all-over wash, and her hair needed braiding.
‘Smell nice,’ he agreed. ‘Yubal trees smell so nice.’
She gathered up their scattered belongings. They had so little that it would fit into one shoulder sack. Their few extra clothes and her books were in a crate at the bottom of the wagon. The sack and the mattress were not even a heavy load as she dragged them to the grove, some distance east of the wagons.
Miles helped her by dragging his own half-sized mattress after her, plopping it down beside hers within the grove. When it was dark, the trees would change from fan shape to a fountain shape, more efficient for fog catching, Vivian assumed, just as the fan shapes were more efficient for gathering sunlight. The result would make a shadowy grove that looked quite unlike the daytime one.
‘Smell it, Mama,’ Miles said now, bouncing on his bed and waiting for the trees to shift.
The sun was a ball, then a half drop, then merely a thin arc upon the horizon. Then nothing, and the trees let go with a rustling sigh, a long shushing. The fronds fell outward from the middle, and what had been two-dimensional shapes became plumy clouds gathering darkness beneath them.
‘Supper,’ she told Miles. ‘Let’s get supper quick, then we can come back here and watch the stars come out.’
There were viggies singing as they finished their meal and helped Brunny put away the disarranged implements and supplies.
‘Where you stretched out for the night?’ the Tripmaster asked. ‘Over in that Jubal grove? Looks like a nice place if there’s no fog. Not much danger tonight.’ He looked up at the clear sky, hands busy with his trip log. ‘Sleep well.’
By the time they returned to the mattresses under the Jubal trees, the first stars were trembling in the high eastern sky.
‘You need to go behind a bush?’ she asked.
‘I went,’ Miles said. ‘All by myself.’
‘Fine. Then you’re going to sleep all night, without waking up, aren’t you?’
‘All night,’ he agreed, snuggling onto the mattress. ‘Tell Miles a story.’
She told a story until his eyes closed and his breathing became slow and quiet. Then she told a story to herself, as she gave herself a slow, cool sponge bath, as she brushed and rebraided her hair, as the stars came out to make a glittering diagonal band across the heavens, a story about tomorrow, about the future. She snuggled into her mattress, head pillowed on an arm, to drift in and out of sleep.
The sudden light and shout from the direction of the wagons was an intrusion.
‘Tripmaster!’ A bellow. A well-schooled bellow, in a modulated voice. She had heard that voice before. Miles stirred in his sleep, and she put out a hand, ready to muffle him if he woke. Why? Because the Tripmaster had said he didn’t like people moving around when he didn’t know what they were doing. Because he had said something about Crystallites, and that voice had something to do with Crystallites!
A sleepy mumbling Brunny’s voice, then the Tripmaster himself, drawling sleepily.
‘Well, well, ain’t it that big mucky-muck Crystallite Chantiforth Bins? High Pontiff or some such, ain’t it? What in the name of all that’s holy are you doing out here in Presence country? I thought you Crystallites believed in keeping your distance.’
‘Well, we do,’ said the voice. ‘Except when one of our own is in trouble, Tripmaster. Which I have reason to believe is the case.’
‘Is that the truth? Now who would that be?’
‘Member of our congregation. Had a baby under unsanctified conditions, fell on hard times, sold herself into bondage to the blasted BDLers. I’ve come to buy her bond and take her home.’
There was silence. Vivian lay in baffled silence. The story made no sense. There was no woman on this trip who had sold herself into service.
‘Don’t think I know the party you’re speakin’ of,’ said the Tripmaster. ‘No passengers this trip.’
‘Oh, come now, Tripmaster, I know BDL pays your salary, but I’m prepared to be
