“How long ago?” he wondered.
“Long. Before the Arbai. How long was that? Centuries. Millennia?”
“Too long for them to be able to remember, and yet they do.”
“What would you call it, Father? Empathetic memory? Racial memory? Telepathic memory?” She ran her fingers over her hair, pulling the braid into looseness. “God, I’m so tired.”
“Sleep. Are the others coming back?”
“When they can. Tomorrow, perhaps. There are answers here, if only we can lay our hands upon them. Tomorrow—tomorrow we have to make sense of all this.”
He nodded, as weary as she. “Tomorrow we will, Marjorie. We will.”
He had no idea what she had to make sense of. He had no conception of what she had almost done. Or actually had done. How much was enough to have done whatever it was? Was she still chaste? Or was she something else that she had no word for?
She could not tell anyone tomorrow, she knew. Maybe not ever.
Very early in the morning, while the sun hung barely below the horizon, Tony and his fellow travelers were deposited just below the port at the edge of the swamp forest. The foxen vanished into the trees, leaving their riders trying to remember what they had looked like, felt like. “Will you wait for us?” Tony called, trying to make a picture of the foxen waiting, high in a tree, dozing perhaps.
He bent in sudden pain. The picture was of foxen standing where they stood now while the sun moved slowly overhead. Rillibee was holding his head with one hand, eyes tight shut, as he clung to Stella with the other arm.
“You’ll wait here for us,” Tony gasped toward the forest, receiving a mental nod in reply.
“Tony, what is it?” Sylvan asked.
“If you could hear them, you wouldn’t ask,” said Rillibee. “They think we’re deaf. They shout.”
“I wish they could shout loud enough for me to hear them,” Sylvan said.
“Then the rest of us would have our brains fried,” Tony said irritably. While he had immediately warmed up to Rillibee, Tony wasn’t at all sure he liked Sylvan, who had a habit of commanding courses of action. “We’ll go over there.”
“We’ll stop for a while.”
Now Sylvan said, “Someone in the port will give us transport to Grass Mountain Road. We’ll speak to the order officer there.” He moved toward the port.
Though Tony felt arguing wasn’t worth the energy it would take, he wanted to get Stella to a physician quickly. “The doctors are at the other end of town?” he asked.
Sylvan stopped, then flushed. “No. No, as a matter of fact, the hospital is just up this slope, near the Port Hotel.”
Rillibee said, “Then we’ll go there,” admitting no argument. He picked Stella up and staggered up the slope toward the hospital. “Can I help you carry her?” Tony asked.
Stella had slipped into a deep sleep, and Rillibee wondered if she would even know who held her. Still, he shook his head. He was unwilling to give up the burden to anyone else, though he had become exhausted by carrying it. Though he thought of her as a child, she was not a small girl. He had been holding her on the foxen for hours. She was his heart’s desire, so he thought, without trying to figure out why.
“I’ll manage,” he said. “It’s not much farther.” It was at the top of a considerable slope, a long climb for men already weary. They came at the place from the back, where blank walls confronted them on either side of a wide door. A white-jacketed person stuck his head out, saw them, and withdrew. Others came out, with a power-litter. Rillibee handed over his burden with the last of his strength, then leaned on one of the attendants to get himself inside.
“Who is she?” someone asked.
“Stella Yrarier,” Tony said. “My sister.”
“Ah!” Surprise. “Your father’s here as well.”
“Father! What happened?”
“Speak to the doctor. Doctor Bergrem. In that office. She’s there now.”
Minutes later Tony was staring down at his father’s sleeping face.
“What’s wrong with him?” He asked the doctor.
“Nothing too serious, luckily. We wouldn’t be able to do systems cloning and replacement here the way they do elsewhere. We have no SCR equipment.”