“The choir?” she asked, surprised. “Oh, I’ve gotten so used to it, I don’t even hear it anymore. The children started a choir, many grown folk have joined, and Maire Girat is its leader. They practice out near the temple. Just follow the road across the stream, that way.” She pointed and smiled, then scurried away as they went in the direction she had indicated.
“Happy place,” commented Bombi, two lines appearing briefly between his brows. “Remarkably.”
“Everyone seems well-occupied,” agreed Volsa. “Busy.” The two of them walked in the direction indicated, toward the sound of the voices. “We should have brought Shan with us,” she fretted. “Except he’s been so strange lately. Have you any idea what’s wrong with him?”
“Only the Overmind knows,” Bombi replied shortly.
“Do you think it has something to do with that time, you know, the Porsa?”
Bombi frowned again. He had resolutely not been thinking about that. He had been very self-consciously not-remembering. Now he did remember, and it made him cross. When Shan had first returned from Ninfadel, he had driven them crazy. He had spent most of every day bathing, over and over, claiming the smell of the Porsa had permeated his flesh. Night after night he had scrambled from his bed, screaming, bringing his siblings running to shake, wake him, talk him into reality again. After ten times, a dozen, it had been too much for Volsa and Bombi. The doctors had been summoned, to give Shan things he could take to make him sleep, to teach him techniques for ridding himself of memory. The doctors couldn’t do it for him, since that would be fooling with his head. He had to learn to do it himself.
As he had done, Bombi reminded himself. As Shan had done. Shan had concentrated, had studied, had learned to control it. Give him full credit for that. He had been very strong. Now Bombi gave homage to that strength by saying, “Volsa, he was over that years ago. He’s all right. He’s just tired.” And he repeated the words silently to himself, reassuring himself. Shan was just tired.
“So we let him sleep,” said Volsa, willing to be convinced. It was what she wanted to believe. He was just tired.
They crossed the stream and noticed the ribbon-willows, which were quite different from the Topes of the heights. They saw the rebuilt temple without, at first, realizing what they were seeing. The thatched roof completely changed the shape of the thing. The brightly painted walls made it seem almost spritely, almost joyous. They both realized at the same moment.
“By the Overmind,” whispered Bombi. “A new one.”
“It startled me for a moment, too, though I don’t know why,” Volsa commented. “We knew the children of the settlement had rebuilt a temple. That’s what Zilia Makepeace told the Native Matters Advisory, after all. It’s what set her off in the first place.”
They thought for a moment of going in, but the choir drew their attention away from the structure, and they moved toward the singing. Childish trebles were soaring along with the women’s higher voices, deep bass notes anchoring their flight, the lighter baritones and tenors and contraltos filling the pattern with harmony. Highest and brightest of the voices was that of a child of about thirteen or fourteen lifeyears, standing at the front of the group, her voice tumbling through the harmony like that of an ecstatic bird.
“Let’s sit here on the grass and listen,” suggested Volsa. “They’re really quite good.”
“Not what I’d call up to professional standards, but yes, quite good,” agreed Bombi. They sat down on the grass, among a dozen settlers similarly engaged, falling under the spell of the music, letting the time pass gently.
Back in the settlement, in his room in the guest quarters, Shan Damzel dreamed he was once again on Ninfadel.
The dream started as his dreams had always started, with him just emerging from the Door to see the inside of the high-walled compound where several small buildings squatted on bare gravel amid stacks of supplies. Theoretically, the wall wasn’t necessary, not here on the highlands of Ninfadel. Nonetheless, a wall had seemed prudent to the bureau in Ahabar responsible for such things. In the dream, Shan already knew this.
A pile of food crates lay on the sand beside him. All food came from Ahabar. Food could have been grown on the highlands of Ninfadel, but the soil required much labor to produce anything worth eating, and no one stayed long enough on Ninfadel to make the effort worthwhile. Shan knew this, too.
In the dream a uniformed officer came across the sand toward him, holding out his hand, smiling an official smile. The handful of Ahabarian guards were changed every forty days. While on Ninfadel, they seldom went outside the walls. The small Native Matters contingent stayed longer, but even they went outside only rarely. Sometimes they told Shan this, sometimes he remembered it.
In the dream, it was the Native Matters people who explained various things to him, putting their faces close to his, so that he saw their gums, their teeth, their vibrating tongues, repeating things he already knew, a litany he knew by heart.
“We’ll tell you how to survive,” the Native Matters person said. “Do you understand? If you want to survive, you’ll listen.
“First, you never step off the highlands without your faceplate down. Not one step. You don’t lift your faceplate anywhere below the altitude line. We had one guy, went down below the line and built himself an observation post up in a tree, slept up there without his faceplate. One of the Porsa slimed up somehow, got him in the night. So you never, we repeat never, go below the line without your faceplate down.
“Second, never go beneath the line without one full day’s air in your emergency tank. Anytime you have less than that, you get here as fast as you can and get it refilled. One of ’em grabs you and you
