“I accept that.”
“Then what do you want?” He shook his head quickly. “Of course. Dreamsnakes. Why won’t you believe we have none? I can’t discharge our debt with dreamsnakes — and I’m not willing to exchange my debt to you for a debt to the offworlders. The offworlders—” He stopped; he seemed upset.
“If the offworlders can help me, let me speak to them.”
“Even if I could, they’d refuse you.”
“If they’re human, they’ll listen to me.”
“There’s… some question about their humanity,” Jesse’s brother said. “Who can tell, without tests? You don’t understand, healer. You’ve never met them. They’re dangerous and unpredictable.”
“Let me
“Let me pay you now, healer,” Jesse’s brother said sadly, and Snake might as well have been back at Mountainside. “The power in Center is precariously balanced. The council would never permit an outsider to deal with the offworlders. The tensions are too great, and we won’t chance altering them. I’m sorry my sister died in pain, but what you ask would risk too many more lives.”
“How can that be true?” Snake said. “A simple meeting, a single question—”
“You can’t understand, I told you that. One has to grow up here and deal with the forces here. I’ve spent my life learning.”
“I think you have spent your life learning how to explain away your obligations,” Snake said angrily.
“That’s a lie!” Jesse’s brother was enraged. “I would give you anything I had it in my power to give, but you demand impossibilities. I can’t help you find new dreamsnakes.”
“Wait,” Snake said suddenly. “Maybe you can help us in another way.”
Jesse’s brother sighed and looked away. “I’ve no time for plots and schemes,” he said. “And neither do you. The storm is coming, healer.”
Snake glanced over her shoulder. Melissa was still nowhere to be seen. In the distance the clouds hugged the horizon, and flurries of windblown sand skittered back and forth between earth and sky. It was growing colder, but it was for other reasons that she shivered. The stakes were too high to give up now. She felt sure that if she could just get inside the city, she could seek out the offworlders by herself. She turned back to Jesse’s brother.
“Let me come inside, in the spring. You have techniques our technology isn’t advanced enough to let us discover.“ Suddenly, Snake smiled. Jesse was beyond help, but others were not. Melissa was not. ”If you could teach me how to induce regeneration — “ She was astonished that she had not thought of the possibility before. She had been completely and selfishly concerned with dreamsnakes, with her own prestige and honor. But so many people would benefit if the healers knew how to regenerate muscle and nerves… but first she would learn how to regenerate skin so her daughter could live unscarred. Snake watched Jesse’s brother and found to her joy that his expression was relieved.
“That is possible,” he said. “Yes. I’ll discuss that with the council. I’ll speak for you.”
“Thank you,” Snake said. She could hardly believe that finally,
Jesse’s brother had begun to frown. Snake stopped, confused by the abrupt change.
“You’ll have the gratitude of the healers,” Snake said quickly, not knowing what she had said wrong, so not knowing how to repair it. “And of all the people we serve.”
“Cloning!” Jesse’s brother said. “Why do you think we’d help you with cloning?”
“I thought you and Jesse—” She caught herself, thinking that would upset him even more. “I merely assumed, with your advanced—”
“You’re talking about genetic manipulation!” Jesse’s brother looked ill. “Turning our knowledge to making monsters!”
“What?” Snake asked, astonished.
“Genetic manipulation — Gods, we have enough trouble with mutation without inducing it deliberately! You’re lucky I couldn’t let you in, healer. I’d have to denounce you. You’d spend your life in exile with the rest of the freaks.“
Snake stared at the screen as he changed from rational acquaintance to accuser. If he was not a clone with Jesse, then his family was so highly inbred that deformities were inevitable without genetic manipulation. Yet what he was saying was that the city people refused themselves that method of helping themselves.
“I won’t have my family indebted to a freak,” he said without looking at her, doing something with his hands. Coins clattered into the payment slot beneath the screen. “Take your money and go!”
“People out here die because of the information you hoard!” she shouted. “You help the drivers enslave people with your crystal rings, but you won’t help cure people who are crippled and scarred!”
Jesse’s brother started forward in a rage. “Healer—” He stopped, looking beyond Snake. His expression changed to horror. “How dare you come here with a changeling? Do they exile the mother as well as the offspring out there? And you lecture me on humanity!”
“What are you talking about?”
“You want regeneration, and you don’t even know you can’t reform mutants! They come out the same.” He laughed bitterly, hysterically. “Go back where you came from, healer. There can be no words between us.”
Just as his image began to fade, Snake scooped up the coins and flung them at him. They clattered against the screen, and one jammed in the protective panel. Gears whined, but the panel would not completely close, and Snake felt a certain perverse satisfaction.
Snake turned away from the screen and the city to look for Melissa, and came face to face with her daughter. Melissa’s cheeks were wet with tears. She grabbed Snake’s hand and blindly pulled her out of the alcove.
“Melissa, we’ve got to try to set up a shelter—” Snake tried to draw back toward the alcove. It was nearly dark, though it was morning. The clouds were no longer gray but black, and Snake could see two separate whirlwinds.
“I found a place.” The words came hard: Melissa was still crying. “I — I hoped they’d let you in but I was afraid they wouldn’t, so I went looking.”
Snake followed her, nearly blinded by the windblown sand. Swift and Squirrel came unwillingly, heads down and ears flattened. Melissa took them to a low fissure in the abrupt cliff of the mountain’s flank. The wind rose by the moment, howling and moaning, flinging sand against their faces.
“They’re scared,” Melissa yelled above the whining wind. “Blindfolds—” She uncovered her face, squinting hard, and covered Squirrel’s eyes with her headcloth. Snake did the same for the gray mare. When she uncovered her mouth and nose the wind took her breath away. Eyes streaming, holding her breath, she led the mare after Squirrel into the cave.
The wind died away abruptly. Snake could hardly open her eyes, and she felt as if sand had been driven into her lungs. The horses snorted and blew while Snake and Melissa coughed and tried to blink the overwhelming sand away, brush it from their hair and clothes, spit it out. Finally Snake managed to rub or brush or cough away the worst of the scratchy particles, and tears washed her eyes clean.
Melissa unwrapped her headcloth from Squirrel’s eyes, then with a sob flung her arms around his neck.
“It’s my fault,” she said. “He saw me and sent you away.”
“The gate was locked,” Snake said. “He couldn’t have let us in if he’d wanted to. If it weren’t for you we’d be out there in the storm.”
“But they don’t want you to come back. Because of me.”
“Melissa, he’d already decided not to help us. Believe me. What I asked him for scared him. They don’t understand us.”
“But I heard him. I saw him looking at me. You asked for help for — for me, and he said go away.”
Snake wished Melissa had not understood that part of the conversation, for she had not wanted her to hope for what might never happen. “He didn’t know you’d been burned,” Snake said. “And he didn’t care. He was looking for excuses to get rid of me.”
Unconvinced, Melissa blankly stroked Squirrel’s neck, slipped off his bridle, uncinched his saddle.
“If this is anybody’s fault,” Snake said, “it’s mine. I’m the one who brought us here—” The full impact of their situation hit her as violently as the storm winds. The faint glow of lightcells barely illuminated the cave in which they were trapped. Snake’s voice broke in fear and frustration. “I’m the one who brought us here, and now we’re locked outside—”
Melissa turned from Squirrel and took Snake’s hand. “Snake — Snake, I knew what could happen. You didn’t make me follow you. I knew how sneaky and mean all these people here can be. Everybody who trades with them says so.” She hugged Snake, comforting her as Snake had comforted Melissa only a few days before.
All in an instant, she froze and the horses screamed and Snake heard the furious echoing snarl of a big cat. Swift rushed past the healer and knocked her down. As Snake struggled back to her feet to grab the bridle she glimpsed the black panther, lashing its tail at the entrance of the cave. It snarled again and Swift reared, pulling Snake off her feet. Melissa tried to hold Squirrel as pony and child backed quivering into a corner. The panther sprang toward them. Snake caught her breath as it brushed by like the wind itself, and its sleek coat touched her hand. The panther leaped four meters up the back wall and disappeared through a narrow fissure.
Melissa laughed shakily with relief and release of terror. Swift blew out her breath in a high, loud, frightened snort.
“Good gods,” Snake said.
“I heard — I heard somebody say wild animals are as scared of you as you are of them,“ Melissa said. ”But I don’t think I believe it any more.“
Snake unfastened the lantern from Swift’s saddle and held it high, toward the fissure, wondering if human beings could follow where a big cat led. She mounted the skittish mare and balanced herself standing on the saddle. Melissa took Swift’s reins and calmed her.
“What are you doing?”
Snake leaned against the cave wall, stretching to cast the lantern’s light into the passageway.
“We can’t stay here,” she said. “We’ll die of thirst or starve. Maybe there’s a way to the city through here.” She could not see very far into the opening; she was too far below it. But the panther had vanished. Snake heard her own voice echo and return as if there were many chambers beyond the narrow crack. “Or a way to something.” She turned and slid down into the saddle, dismounted, and untacked the gray mare.
“Snake,” Melissa said softly.
“Yes?”
“Look — cover the lantern—” Melissa pointed to the rock over the entrance of the cave. Snake shielded the lantern, and the indistinct luminous shape brightened and reached toward her. She felt a quick chill up her spine. She held out the lantern and moved closer to the form.
