She dreamed. She was walking on the moor, coming to the cave by the sea, but she was not alone. Someone held her by the hand.
“We must go very carefully,” the someone said. “Try not to go the same way too often. Not to make a trail, you understand?”
Snark jerked her chin resolutely, saying she understood. Things could follow trails. She had to be careful, or the things would get her.
They came to the edge of the cliff. “Hold on tight,” said the someone.
Snark’s arms were locked around the person’s neck, her legs around the person’s waist. The person leapt, and Snark’s stomach came up into her throat the way it always did. Then they were swinging, swinging, then the hole was there, and they were in.
“Home is where the heart is,” said someone, kissing Snark. “Home is where my girl is.”
Snark looked up at the person …
Color flowing, blotches flowing, making a pattern …
The person held her tightly, patting her on the back.
Bright and dim, pale and vivid, colors on the huge fleshy barrier. Shaggy skin outside, bare skin inside …
The person smiled.
Shapelessness became shape. Shades flowed into one another. Blotches and colors combined to make a face on the body of an alien monster, a huge face that moved and spoke and smiled and called her by name!
“Sweetheart,” the mouth said. “Love.”
Her mother’s face!
Snark’s cry went out over the sea like the cry of a wounded animal, totally alone, infinitely sorrowful.
“Mother,” she cried. “Oh, Mother, Mother, come back to me!”
Night on Dinadh. In the leasehold, Lutha and the two Fastigats had had their evening meal. We had packed the last few things we intended to take with us. Then Leelson insisted that everyone lie down and get as much sleep as possible, promptly thereafter making it impossible for anyone to sleep by getting into a fierce argument with Lutha. I had felt it coming during our evening meal, like thunder just beyond the horizon, a muted mutter, scarcely heard and yet ominous, making one’s whole body tense, awaiting the flash of lightning, the crash of riven air!
The flash was Leelson’s pronouncement to Lutha: “When Trompe, Saluez, and I leave in the morning, I want you and the child to stay here, Lutha. Give us a few days to get well away, then ask the people to take you back to the port.”
“The hell,” she snarled, a thundercrack.
Hurriedly, I left the room. They were so intent upon each other, they did not see me go. Trompe, who had been half-asleep in the neighboring room, had evidently felt the emotional storm going on, for he emerged, blinked at me, and mouthed, “What?”
I shrugged and kept going. While I fully intended to listen, I didn’t want to be involved. We mutilated ones are observers of life, not participants. So says the sisterhood. And safer so, so says the sisterhood. And more peaceful.
So I took myself beyond the storeroom door and then shamelessly leaned against the wall while I listened to what was going on. Lutha was saying at great length that having come this far, she had no intention of going home.
“Besides,” she cried, “you and Trompe aren’t linguists, and I am.”
“We are Fastigats,” said Leelson.
“Fastigats aren’t gods!” she snarled at him. “Much though you like to think so! You can tell how people feel, maybe, but you can’t tell why. Sometimes, it takes words to tell why.”
It was true that neither Trompe nor Leelson had a really good command of our language. I spoke far better aglais than they did Nantaskan. But then, a lot of us learn languages as children, in order to cater to our leaseholders. Why would they learn our dialect? There are few of us who speak the tongue.
“You will be safer at home,” he said, like a father cautioning a child. “You will be better off.”
“I’ll decide where I’ll be better off,” she said. “If you’d had the common sense and decency to tell people you were coming here, I wouldn’t have been sent. Now that I have been sent, I’ve no intention of going home until the job is done.”