“So what brings you?”
“Thought you might need a comp tech. Someone who knows Unionside—inside and out”
She laughed outright. “Or a shot when I’m not looking?”
“I didn’t go with Union,” he said. “They’d have redone the tapes… given me a new
past. Sent me out… maybe to Sol Station. I don’t know. But to stay on Pell,
right now—I can’t do that. The stationers—know me. And I can’t live on a
station. Not comfortably.”
“Nothing another mindwipe can’t cure.”
“I want to remember. I’ve got something. The only real thing. All that I value.”
“So you go off and leave it?”
“For a while,” he said.
“You talked to Damon about this?”
“Before coming down here. He knows. Elene does.”
She leaned back against the counter, looked him up and down thoughtfully, arms
folded. “Why Norway?”
He shrugged. “No station calls, are there? Except here.”
“No.” She smiled thinly. “Just here. Sometimes.”
“Ship she go,” Lily murmured, staring at the screens, and smoothed the Dreamer’s
hair. The ship pulled away from the Upabove, rolled, with a move quite unlike
most ships which came and went, and shot away.
“Norway,” the Dreamer named her.
“Someday,” said the Storyteller, who had come back full of tales from the big
hall, “someday we go. Konstantins give we ships. We go, carry we Sun in we eyes,
not ’fraid the dark, not we. We see many, many thing. Bennett, he give we come
here. Konstantin, they give we walk far, far, far. Me spring come again. I want
walk far, make me nest there… I find me star and go.”
The Dreamer laughed, warm laughter.
And stared out at the wide dark, where Sun walked, and smiled.
the end