“They!” said Leelson with certainty. “They did that to you!”
They had, yes, but I did not reply. Instead I stood with my head on Lutha’s shoulder and let myself cry. I had not seen the beautiful people since the House Without a Name. Perhaps I had hoped never to see them again.
On Perdur Alas, Kane the Brain came in from the day’s labor in the fields, where they’d been planting various food and fiber crops for the ag-test. He was carrying a bundle on his shoulder, something wrapped in his own jacket, and he put it on the table in the lab, saying to no one in particular, “We found this thing in a cave out there.”
Snark was filing germination records, but she put the pile down and came over to see what it was. A jar, not unlike the jar in her cave.
“That’s Father Endless,” she said, tracing the pattern. “And Mother Darkness. And these are the horizons of sleep.”
“How do you know that?” Kane demanded, not too urgently. “You’ve never seen it before!”
“I’ve seen them before,” said Snark, remembering all at once that this was true. “My mother told me about them. On Breadh our people believed in them, but then our people listened to the words of the tempter and put their gods aside. My family was of the T’loch sdi, the old order.” The words came of themselves. Labels. An identity, for herself, for her mother, for certain other children, certain other mothers and fathers. The old order.
“What does that mean?”
She quoted what she had been told:
“We were faithful to our beliefs. Faithful to Father Endless, to Mother Darkness. When we died, we died into their keeping, for that was part of the everlasting pattern. We did not allow the tempter to sway us. Even after many generations on the new world, we remained faithful. And at last we ran away from the new world, fled from the new commandment. We came here. That is, my parents came here.”
“You weren’t born here.” Willit sneered. There was no real venom in his voice. The challenge was only habit.
“No. I think I was only a baby, though. I grew up here. Keeping away from the scourges of the tempter, until the ship came and took us survivors away.”
“Survivors!”
She rubbed her head fretfully. “Me. And the other children. Five of us. All the adults were gone by then.” Gone to Father Endless and Mother Darkness. Gone into the womb between the worlds. To the place where everything dwells in timelessness.
Willit started to say something sneery, but Kane stopped him. “Snark. Why did they call you survivors?”
“Because they didn’t believe we had lived here. They thought we’d survived a shipwreck, taken off in a survival pod, got twisted into a wormhole, and ended up here. They thought we were castaways. I knew we weren’t, but they said the five of us couldn’t have lived here otherwise.
“It was on the ship they said we were survivors. Then, later, they put me in the home. But the people at the home didn’t know … who I was. They said I was a liar.”
“Right,” barked Willit. “They knew you, kid.”
“I wasn’t lying,” she said.
“There’s no world called Breadh,” said Kane. “Not in this sector. You were probably sent here from one of the other worlds, when the Ularians came. If you were the only ones left, what happened to the others?”
Snark thought about it. Part of it was clear and close. Scourges. They’d had to stay away from the scourges. And from something else, too. She shrugged. She couldn’t really remember.
“Survivors from Ularians. I be damned,” said Kane.
“And what are these damned Ularians when they’re not hiding under a rock?” asked Willit.
“Nobody really knows.” Kane looked at the jar he’d found. “Nobody knows who they are. There were no survivors. Not unless Snark was one.”
“You mean she really could have been? A survivor?”
It was all very casual, not very meaningful, and everyone went back to work without agonizing over it. In Snark, however, the discovery of the jar began a chain of recollection. She remembered faces, voices. She remembered things people had said. She remembered words. The returned ones. The faithful.