“Please,” she said. “Are they in your pack?”
“Finish your food,” he said gently. “I’ll get them in a minute.”
After Chahdzi had thanked them again for food and sequestered himself in their vehicle, after Leely had had his supper and fallen asleep once more, Trompe dug out the chips he had promised: old ones, nicked at the corners, their labels faded.
“You say the Procurator gave you these?” she asked doubtfully.
“Well, he gave me the Dinadh file, and they were in it. He did remark that the newer chips were more up-to-date.”
“They’re so up, all usefulness has been edited out of them,” she snorted. “They’re completely superficial. All the taboos are avoided, so we can’t tell what we should or shouldn’t say, may or may not do! For example, we’ve seen the beautiful people are ubiquitous, but the chips don’t even mention them. These are the ones I should have studied.”
“Maybe,” he said soberly. “But they seemed very ponderous to me.”
Peevishly, she disregarded this as irrelevant. Fastigats weren’t researchers. They didn’t spend their time making laborious correlations from ancient records; they didn’t sift history for nuances. They drew their conclusions from the here and the now, from whatever or whoever was feeling and emoting in the vicinity. Well, nonetheless.
She accessed one of the chips at random and began plowing through it, realizing after some little time that Trompe had been right. It was heavy going. This researcher had come to Dinadh as to virgin territory and had weeded nothing out. He or she had included everything uncut, every branch and twig and tangled root. Who knew what was alive and important, what had died long ago or had compacted into impenetrable peat?
She yawned, tried to focus, forced herself to concentrate, and finally gave up in disgust, no longer annoyed at Trompe. He was right. This was ponderous indeed. She would seek nuances later perhaps, but not tonight. Leely and Trompe had the better idea. One should sleep when one could!
CHAPTER 4
The first night on Perdur Alas, Snark bedded down in the dormitory with the other shadows, waking frequently, listening for some unusual sound, but hearing only breathing, snores, restless movements, and sighs. She herself slept little. The chip within her recorded her wakefulness. Someday, somewhere, someone might review these feelings, experience her perceptions. Everything the chip detected was beamed to a tiny satellite hidden beside a moonlet, and from there was relayed to the nearest occupied planet—Dinadh, probably, where the hated Lutha Tallstaff had gone—and from there to somewhere else and somewhere else again, all the way back to Alliance Prime and the damned Procurator. Perhaps even now someone on Dinadh was monitoring what had been done today on Perdur Alas and wondering why this particular shadow was awake.
Snark tried to care and could not. They had no right, she told herself, quite correctly. She knew it and they knew it: they had no right. The words were familiar, but the rage they usually evoked would not come. Those sent to Perdur Alas had been conditioned against rage, against rebellion.
No one had thought to condition any of them against childhood fantasies. On the third night, Snark lay down among the others as before, but when they slept, she rose and went out into the night. All day she had been smelling the moor. The smell had filled her to the exclusion of other perceptions, had preoccupied her with feelings long dreamed and totally familiar. Perhaps these woody and ferny growths had come from the same place as the ones she had smelled as a child. Perhaps this moor had been designed to be like one she had seen long ago, her dream moor, complete with tea-brown pools and rustling bracken. Perhaps that world and this one had shared a common designer or a common heritage.
Even as she said to herself, perhaps, perhaps, she knew there was no happenstance involved. Similarity didn’t matter. Only this place mattered, its odors that smelled like, its growths that looked like, its moor that felt like the moor she had dreamed. This could be the actual refuge she had found as a child—or dreamed she had found. If one went west across this stretch of rolling ground, one would come to cliffs above the sea. They would be the same cliffs, the same sea. During the workaday world of daylight there had been no opportunity to explore. Now in a dark relieved only by the pearly glimmer of tiny moonlets, shining through the night like so many lopsided paper lanterns, she would find the old cliff, the old sea, the old place she knew so well.