They used the bed in Sabatini’s cabin, the scene of much of Chu Li’s violation,
but it was different now, and afterward they fell asleep, exhausted more by the
events of the day than by their own final efforts.
The next day Chu Li, feeling better than she ever had in her whole brief
incarnation, decided to tackle things for real. Chow Mai hit another of the
pornographic male-oriented cartridges but was not affected in the same way Chu
Li had been. Rather, she seemed to have shifted mentally from the male point of
view to that of the females in it, and although they stopped the program quite
early, she wound up not only very, very turned on but also nonaggressive to the
point of total passivity. She also, for some reason, pleaded to have her chains
put back on, but they decided that the effects would wear down in a while and
ignored her requests.
There were a number of other languages, including one cartridge that seemed to
have no particular effect on Chow Dai other than to improve slightly her grammar
and vocabulary. They decided that it must have been Mandarin Chinese.
They also discovered many more programs on shipboard design and construction,
mathematical tables, basic celestial navigation, and computer module design and
operation. One showed the complete interconnect between Sabatini’s command
module in the rear and the computer pilot, confirming Chu Li’s suspicions that
this was one of those very ships where Master System was not in charge. And, as
suspected, there were some traps.
The machine clicked off, and Chow Dai removed the headset and waited for Chu Li
to come out of it. The cartridge had seemed uneventful to the observer and had
taken the normal amount of time, so there had been no reason to think anything
was wrong. Finally, Chu Li came around, then sat up and looked around, almost
panicking.
What’s the matter? the sisters asked in unison. What has happened to you?
I have been stung, she told them. I have spent a half hour in a pleasant
dreamworld, and now I wake up to find a nightmare.
As they watched, concerned, she looked around vacantly, then tried to get out of
the chair and stumbled, holding on to it for support.
There is only darkness, she told them, a pained tone in her voice. I am
blind.
10. THE GOLDEN BIRDS OF LAZLO CHEN
IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE FOURTH DAY AFTER HAWKS had stolen and used the
mindprinter and had begun to have second thoughts about his long-range mission
and goals, and by now he was much changed from the scholar who had read what he
should have reported and set off on a course to save not only himself but the
future of humanity.
At the time—not very long ago, although it seemed an eternity and a world
away—he had lived for nothing but his work, had no close friendships or
dependencies, and had an exaggerated idea, he knew now, of his importance in the
scheme of things. Perhaps it had just been the desire of a lonely and frustrated
man approaching middle age to do something that future historians might note and
remember. Unable to get back into the head of that man he’d been such a short
time ago, he really wasn’t sure. The odd fact was that not a single thing that
had been important to him then was in the slightest way important to him now.
He and his wives had achieved an incredible level of self-sufficiency in a very
short time, and he had stayed away from human contact as much as possible in his
travels since that mindprinting had simplified everything. He had not yet used
the rest of the whiskey for trading, as he’d intended, because he hadn’t had to
do so. Now, if all worked out, he would trade it for good, rugged, practical
clothing and perhaps some better weapons as well, depending on how hard a
bargain could be driven. He now saw a chance at something far better than being
a footnote in a future history book; he saw a chance, at least as long as his
health held out, of starting over brand new and, in a sense, becoming young
again.
For Cloud Dancer it had never been clear what they were doing or why. She had
attached herself to him initially because he was kind and gentle to her and more
than slightly exotic, and she’d fallen in love with him and he with her, and
they had married, something not too common in Hyiakutt culture. She understood
that he had learned a secret so dangerous that there were many hands raised to
track him down and slay him, but they hadn’t caught him yet, and she would be at
his side if and when they did. She’d had him exclusively for such a little time,
but she was well aware that she had been a partner in the decision to include
Silent Woman and that at the time she’d had the power to veto that decision.
Cloud Dancer’s life had been pretty unhappy up to meeting Hawks, but Silent
Woman’s past was Cloud Dancer’s worst nightmare. Pity had turned quickly to
respect for the strange tattooed woman, and Cloud Dancer had participated in the
ceremony of blood. She now regarded Silent Woman as one of her own blood and as
much her wife as both were the wives of Hawks. The family was not a collection
of individuals: The family was One.
The survival program had stripped everything from her concerns except the
basics. Her memories were not impaired; it was simply that all she had been was
no longer relevant. Family, tribe, nation—their world was now three people in a
canoe, and nothing else was important enough to think about. The unit had
certain basics that were required. It must be fed. It must find shelter and be
hidden from enemies each night. It must be guarded. It must survive. Of
necessity the women must be the warriors, and those were the tasks of warriors.
She was also a wife. A tribal wife served and supported her husband, gave her
body willingly to him, and, if the spirits willed, bore him many fine children.
Absolutely nothing but these concerns occupied her thoughts and motivated her
actions.
The only way to learn about Silent Woman was to ask yes or no questions, but
there was little truly to be learned. She had no memory of her past at all, no
memory of where she’d come from or where she had received the tattoo and why, or
even of ever having given birth to a child— or, for that matter, ever having had
a tongue. The shock and trauma of her horrible times had simply been rejected,
blotted out, and locked away forever in some corner of the mind where such
things go. She had not in fact even thought in a language anyone could have
truly recognized, for it was an amalgam of terms and concepts from dozens of
languages strung together in a way that worked but was uniquely her own. It was
not a complex language. She did not, even with the English recoder, get much of
what Hawks or Cloud Dancer said, because her vocabulary was so limited and her
rules so basic.
She had known only that she hated the Illinois passionately but that she never
had any other place to go. Her geographical world was the village where she’d
lived and The Other Place where all the strangers came from and went to. She was
still being constantly amazed that The Other Place was so vast, but it still was
a single entity in her mind.
Then she’d seen her masters toying with the captive pair and had known that
after the game they would kill the man and make the woman like her, and she
hated the Illinois and the village. So, when she had accidentally bumped into
Cloud Dancer and realized that they were planning to flee, she had thought only
about helping them and hoping that they would take her with them, away from the
village to The Other Place. And they had. She had never regarded herself as
anything but property, but she knew she preferred to be the property of Hawks, a
man both handsome and brave, and in whom there was a gentle streak she had not
known before, and some sadness or hurt deep inside as well. She had never
thought of being a wife to such a one. In fact, she really had no concept of
wife, but she understood that to the other two it made her an equal with Cloud
Dancer. That was the heady stuff of impossible dreams.
She was not stupid; that was the mistake the others had made. She was, however,
almost totally ignorant, having not even the grounding of a sense of tribe and
culture as almost any of the others back in the village had. She was already now
at a higher level than she could have conceived possible; she wanted only to
preserve that. They were her world, all she had or desired. They were
everything. She loved them both. Her whole life was nothing but obedience and
service. She would love, obey, and serve them even if it meant her death, and
she would never survive them.
They were approaching one of the increasingly frequent bends in the river, one
that made the water in front seem to vanish and which might be the same river as
that seen distantly through the trees on the right. Hawks had decided against
trusting such visions after they tried a portage the first time; the water
through the trees had turned out to be an oxbow lake, a bend in the river that
had been cut off by built-up silt as the river changed its course. He no longer
felt the strong urgency he had up north, considering how long they had been on
the river without encountering anyone.