“Dreamsnakes don’t breed well,” Snake said. “We don’t know enough about them. Every few years a few new ones are born, or one of us manages to clone some, but—” Snake shrugged.
“Catch one!”
The suggestion had never occurred to Snake because she knew it was impossible. She had never considered any possibility other than returning to the healers’ station and asking her teachers to pardon her. She smiled sadly. “My reach isn’t that long. They don’t come from here.”
“Where?”
Snake shrugged again. “Some other world… ” Her voice trailed off as she realized what she was saying.
“Then you’ll come with me beyond the city’s gates,” Jesse said. “When I go to my family, they’ll introduce you to the offworlders.”
“Jesse, my people have been asking Center’s help for decades. They won’t even speak to us.”
“But now one of the city’s families is obligated to you. Whether my people will take me back I don’t know. But they’ll be in debt to you for helping me, nevertheless.”
Snake listened in silence, intrigued by the possibilities lying in Jesse’s words.
“Healer, believe me,” Jesse said. “We can help each other. If they accept me, they’ll accept my friends as well. If not, they’ll still have to discharge their debt to you. Either one of us can present both our requests.”
Snake was a proud woman, proud of her training, her competence, her name. The prospect of atoning for Grass’s death in some other way than begging forgiveness fascinated her. Once every decade an elder healer would make the long trip to the city, seeking to renew the breeding stock of dreamsnakes. They had always been refused. If Snake could succeed…
“Can this work?”
“My family will help us,” Jesse said. “Whether they can make the offworlders help us too, I don’t know.”
During the hot afternoon, all Snake and the partners could do was wait. Snake decided to let Mist and Sand out of the satchel for a while before the long trip began. As she left the tent, she stopped beside Jesse. The handsome woman was sleeping peacefully, but her face was flushed. Snake touched her forehead. Perhaps Jesse had a slight fever; perhaps it was just the heat of the day. Snake still thought Jesse had avoided serious internal injuries, but it was possible that she was bleeding, even that she was developing peritonitis. That was something Snake could cure. She decided not to disturb Jesse for the moment, but to wait and see if the fever rose.
Walking out of camp to find a sheltered place where her serpents would frighten no one, Snake passed Alex, staring morosely into space. She hesitated, and he glanced up, his expression troubled. Snake sat down beside him without speaking. He turned toward her, staring at her with his penetrating gaze: the goodnaturedness had vanished from his face in his torment, leaving him ugly, and sinister as well.
“We crippled her, didn’t we? Merideth and me.”
“Crippled her? No, of course not.”
“We shouldn’t have moved her. I should have thought of that. We should have moved the camp to her. Maybe the nerves weren’t broken when we found her.”
“They were broken.”
“But we didn’t know about her back. We thought she’d hit her head. We could have twisted her body—”
Snake put her hand on Alex’s forearm. “It was an injury of violence,” she said. “Any healer could see it. The damage happened when she fell. Believe me. You and Merideth couldn’t have done any of that to her.”
The hard muscles in his forearm relaxed. Snake took her hand away, relieved. Alex’s stocky body held so much strength, and he had been controlling himself so tightly, that Snake feared he might turn his own force unwittingly back on himself. He was more important to this partnership than he appeared, perhaps even more important than he himself knew. Alex was the practical one, the one who kept the camp running smoothly, who dealt with the buyers of Merideth’s work and balanced out the romanticism of Merideth the artist and Jesse the adventurer. Snake hoped the truth she had told him would let him ease his guilt and tension. For now, though, she could do no more for him.
As twilight approached, Snake stroked Sand’s smooth patterned scales. She no longer wondered if the diamondback enjoyed being stroked, or even if a creature as small-brained as Sand could feel enjoyment at all. The cool sensation beneath her fingers gave her pleasure, and Sand lay in a quiet coil, now and then flicking out his tongue. His color was bright and clear; he had outgrown his old skin and shed it only recently. “I let thee eat too much,” Snake said fondly. “Thou lazy creature.”
Snake drew her knees up under her chin. Against the black rocks, the rattlesnake’s patterns were almost as conspicuous as Mist’s albino scales. Neither serpents nor humans nor anything else left alive on earth had yet adapted to their world as it existed now.
Mist was out of sight, but Snake was not worried. Both serpents were imprinted on her and would stay near and even follow her. Neither had much aptitude for learning beyond the imprinting, which the healers had bred into them, but Mist and Sand would return when they felt the vibration of her hand slapping the ground.
Snake relaxed against a boulder, cushioned by the desert robe Arevin’s people had given her. She wondered what Arevin was doing, where he was. His people were nomads, herders of huge musk oxen whose undercoats gave fine, silky wool. To meet the clan again she would have to search for them. She did not know if that would ever be possible, though she very much wanted to see Arevin once more.
Seeing his people would always remind her of Grass’s death, if she were ever able to forget it. Her mistakes and misjudgments of them were the reason Grass was gone. She had expected them to accept her word despite their fear, and without meaning to they had shown her how arrogant her assumptions were.
She shook off her depression. Now she had a chance to redeem herself. If she really could go with Jesse, find out where the dreamsnakes came from, and capture new ones — if she could even discover why they would not breed on earth — she could return in triumph instead of in disgrace, succeeding where her teachers and generations of healers had failed.
It was time to return to the camp. She climbed the low rise of jumbled rock that covered the mouth of the canyon, looking for Mist. The cobra was coiled on a large chunk of basalt.
At the top of the slope Snake reached for Mist, picked her up, and stroked her narrow head. She was not so formidable unexcited, hood folded, narrow-headed as any venomless serpent. She did not need a thick-jowled head, heavy with poison. Her venom was powerful enough to kill in delicate doses.
As Snake turned, the brilliant sunset drew her gaze. The sun was an orange blur on the horizon, radiating streaks of purple and vermilion through the gray clouds.
And then Snake saw the craters, stretching away across the desert below her. The earth was covered with great circular basins. Some, lying in the path of the lava flow, had caught and broken its smooth frozen billows. Others were clearer, great holes gouged in the earth, still distinct after so many years of driving sands. The craters were so large, spread over such a distance, that they could have only one source. Nuclear explosions had blasted them. The war itself was long over, almost forgotten, for it had destroyed everyone who knew or cared about the reasons it had happened.
Snake gazed over the ravaged land, glad to be no nearer. In places like this the effects of the war had lingered visibly and invisibly to Snake’s time; they would persist for centuries beyond her life. The canyon in which she and the partners were camped was probably not completely safe itself, but they had not been here long enough to be in serious danger.
Something unusual lay out in the rubble, in line with the brilliant setting sun so it was difficult for Snake to see. She squinted at it. She felt uneasy, as if she were spying on something she had no business knowing about.
The body of a horse, decaying in the heat, lay crumpled at the edge of a crater. The dead animal’s rigid legs poked grotesquely into the air, forced up by its swollen belly. Clasping the animal’s head, a gold bridle gleamed scarlet and orange in the sunset.
Snake released her breath in a sound part sigh, part moan.
She ran back to the serpent case and urged Mist inside, picked Sand up and started back toward the camp, cursing when the rattler in his mindlessly obstinate way tried to twine himself around her arm. She stopped and held him so he could slide into his compartment, and started running again while she was still fastening the catch. The case banged against her leg.
Panting, she reached the tent and ducked inside. Merideth and Alex were asleep. Snake knelt beside Jesse and carefully pulled back the sheet.
Little more than an hour had passed since Snake had examined Jesse last. The bruises down her side had darkened and deepened, and her body was unhealthily flushed. Snake felt her forehead. It was burning hot and paper-dry. Jesse did not respond to her touch. When Snake took her hand away the smooth skin looked darker. Within minutes, while Snake watched, horrified, another bruise began to form as the capillaries ruptured, their walls so damaged by radiation that mild pressure completed their destruction. The bandage on Jesse’s thigh suddenly reddened in the center with a stain of blood. Snake clenched her fists. She was shaking, deep inside, as if from penetrating cold.
“Merideth!”
In a moment Merideth was awake, yawning and mumbling sleepily. “What’s wrong?”
“How long did it take you to find Jesse? Did she fall in the craters?”
“Yes, she was prospecting. That’s why we come here — other artisans can’t match our work because of what Jesse finds here. But this time a rim gave way. We found her in the evening.”
A whole day, Snake thought. She must have been in one of the primary craters.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“Those craters are dangerous—”
“Do you believe all those old legends, healer? We’ve been coming here for a decade and nothing ever happened to us.”
Now was not the time for angry retorts. Snake glanced at Jesse again and realized that her own ignorance and the partnership’s contempt for the danger of the old world’s relics had unwittingly granted Jesse some mercy. Snake had treatments for radiation poisoning, but there was no treatment for anything this severe. Whatever she could have tried would only have prolonged Jesse’s death.
