The Ghost Sister (20 page)

“How's Mevennen?” Shu asked.

“Sleeping. Sylvian's still with her. We'll take good care of her, Shu.” Bel grasped the older woman's hands with real affection. “And you take care of yourself, out there.”

“I'll be fine,” Shu said, with more conviction than she really felt. Now that she had decided on a course of action, the possible consequences were crowding in on her. She had spent the previous two hours with Bel, going over the worst-case scenarios and working out a system of communication if anything went wrong. There were, however, certain intentions that she had not confided to Bel. She planned to take a weapon with her: the modified stun gun. It was crude but, Shu hoped, effective. She also hoped, just as fervently, that she would never have to use it. The thing was hidden under the crash couch of the aircar; once she was on her own, she planned to fit it to her belt.

“You're sure you'll be all right?” Bel persisted.

“Sure enough. I'll be keeping in close touch, Bel, but I don't plan to be gone very long.” Shu's plan was to find Eleres, get the necessary tests done, and then come back. “Let me know what happens with Mevennen. And please, don't do anything to the generator until I get back and we can talk about it further.”

That was, of course, the other main worry. After listening to Sylvian's theories, Shu had gone straight to Dia and asked her to leave the biomorphic generator running until they had a chance to work out whether shutting it down really
would have an impact on the Mondhaith. But she had been dismayed to find that this was not a major consideration for Dia.

“If these people are suffering from the kind of unstable mental state that could cause someone to wantonly murder a small child,” Dia had said firmly, “and if we've found a means to prevent further tragedies, then there's no question but that we should shut the generator down.”

To Shu's intense alarm, Dia had seen Sylvian's theory as the justification of the mission's presence here. To Shu's mind, this was a simplistic view, inspired by a faith that was increasingly beginning to seem rigid and dogmatic. But Dia had overridden her objections. The colony was lost, Dia said, and was indeed cursed—by Elshonu's paternalistic arrogance in altering the colonists themselves to fit his own beliefs. Shu pointed out that Dia's own maternalism was similar: like Elshonu, Dia thought she knew best. Like Elshonu, she was prepared to make some fundamental change that could radically alter the Mondhaith. True, Shu thought, she wouldn't like to suffer from the bloodmind herself, but that wasn't the point. The colonists'descendants had evolved around and within the artificial constraints imposed upon them, and they couldn't just take that away without a really close, hard look at what the consequences of their actions would be. Shu argued her case as best she could, and at last wrung from Dia the concession that she would consider waiting until they had more facts. With that, Shu had to be content; Mevennen was, at the moment, her immediate priority.

Now, hours later, she hugged Bel goodbye and stepped into the aircar, dismayed by the flutter of anxious anticipation in her stomach. She looked down at the viewscreen, to see Bel's small figure among the domes of the biotents, fading fast against the wall of the mountains.

Shu took the aircar across the ranges and along the now-familiar route upriver, following the winding silver water
below and gliding past the dark tower. When she checked for life signs, only one person registered: a woman. Either Eleres was elsewhere entirely or, as Shu desperately hoped, he had obeyed his sister's honor charge and gone to Tetherau. Setting the coordinates according to Mevennen's rather rough map of the district, Shu watched the landscape below unfold as the vehicle veered out to sea. The estuary widened out into sand flats, leading up into high cliffs. Shu looked down at gray-green water, thundering up the narrow inlets. To the west, the islands were rimmed with a white edge of foam. She flew over a settlement, which from Mevennen's map was the family's home town: Ulleet. Shu gazed with interest at the settlement, clinging so precariously to the cliffside. A bridge spanned the narrow inlet like a thread. An ancient line drifted through Shu's mind like spray:
magic casements opening onto perilous seas, of faery lands forlorn.
All very romantic, thought Shu pragmatically, but what must it be like in the winter? She thought of Irie St Syre's temperate, carefully regulated climate, and shivered.

Far out between the islands she could see the wake of a boat, and she wondered who traveled on it—standing on the deck, perhaps, and gazing up with wonder at the unnatural leaf blown on the winds of the world: the aircar, and herself within it. She wondered whether Eleres was down there; Mevennen had said that if he followed the honor charge and went to Tetherau, then it was likely that he'd take the less hazardous route and go by boat. But if she succeeded in finding Eleres again, Shu thought, she would not use his name. She would honor his request that she earn the right, and remembered with a smile the lift of his chin as he'd issued his command: he was not without a certain presence, for all that he seemed such a quiet, reserved person. At least when he was being human, according to his sister.

She checked the time, wondering whether the Mond-haith treated time in the same way: Mevennen had talked with reassuring familiarity of days, weeks, and months, but Shu was not entirely sure what this might mean. The aircar swung around the coast, following its complex line and passing other settlements: another dark town set high on an inlet's cliffs, with a lighthouse at the entrance to the port. Shu consulted her map, studying the line of the mainland coast. Not Tetherau, but a place called Etarres. So Tetherau would be a little farther yet. Shu frowned, remembering. Mevennen had spoken of migrations: twelve-yearly cycles in which folk left their homes and walked immense distances across the land. Mevennen had said that they were drawn by the tidal pull of the moons, but this seemed a little unlikely. Shu wondered whether they weren't somehow drawn toward Outreven: pulled back toward their ancestral home. But by what? Racial memory? Or something more compelling?

She could see all the way to the world's curved rim, fading blue-green into the silent skies, and she took the aircar lower until the vanes spread out flat, bisecting spray. More islands, and then a port backed by a great cloud-drift of mountain: Tetherau. Switching the controls to manual, Shu cut across the town and let the vehicle drift down to a flat plateau of rock, concealed behind trees. Then she checked her essentials: rations in a flat backpack, the weapon secured to her belt, the life sign scanner in warning mode, and the
lingua franca
set to translate and record. With these things in place, she routed the aircar's stationary defenses into its databank and stepped out into dappled sunlight. She was high above the town, looking down to where it curved around its bay. Behind, the mountains stretched to illusory heights, impenetrable, silent and still. She could see snow on the long crest which reached into the distances, but here the air was warm and the long grass was golden and dry to the
touch. Shu stepped through the crackling grass and began the long walk down to Tetherau.

It took her perhaps an hour. Shu, hot and uncomfortable even in her practical clothes, began to wish that she had taken the risk of setting the aircar rather closer to the settlement. Her feet began to hurt, and her head ached in the heat of the sun. The testing kit, stowed safely in her backpack, dug into her hip at every step no matter how she tried to adjust it. Shu grimaced, thinking of the nomads walking the world, and considered herself with a degree of rueful contempt. She had been a great walker in her youth, traversing Irie St Syre's glorious ranges during vacations and sabbaticals, traveling up into the hill country of the southern continents to seek out the closed sects. But on Irie St Syre, you could be sure of always finding a welcome, even if it might be a little guarded and tentative, and on Irie St Syre too no sudden squall or storm would reach down and snap you in its grip. The Weather Monitors took care of that.

Shu glanced back at the forbidding wall of the mountains behind her, and turned with some relief to the bay with the little town at its edge. At last, the walls of Tetherau were rising up before her. Shu noted the massive gates which faced the east, and the braziers smoldering above. She was reminded of Mevennen's tower. The walls were made of thick black stone and the gates were iron, but the effect was somber rather than crude. The gates were etched with designs so abstract that it was a moment before Shu realized they were birds. Long, graceful necks twisted in and out of reeds; seedpods became stars. Shu searched for cultural influences: echoes of Asian designs, echoes of Celtic, but this work was original and its own. The gates were open and, from the grass that sprouted at their base, would not seem to have been shut for some time. Not a place that was frequently under attack, then. Shu stepped through.

She found herself in a maze of streets, curving up between high black walls. Everything seemed smoothed with age, each building merging into the next. Shu, raised on a world of organic architecture, approved. She ran her hand along the silky stone, touched glossy wood. For the first hundred yards or so, she saw no one, but then she turned a corner and found herself facing a group of people: three women and two men, all middle-aged and dressed in similar robes, the color of a clear night sky. Shu was appalled to find that her hand went automatically to the weapon at her belt. They paid no attention to her whatsoever, but simply walked around her, murmuring in soft voices. Their eyes were shuttered behind the membrane; their robes rustled against the stone walls. They seemed as distant from humanity as anything Shu had ever seen and she drew away so that her back rested against the wall, cold in the shadows.

It was so easy to project your own wishes onto them, Shu thought. These people seemed to embody the unknown: inviting desires, needs, unfulfillments to impose themselves on the
tabula rasa
of the beautiful and the strange. Objectivity was impossible, but the subjective had to be appropriate, otherwise the subject was apprehended through a filter of personal irrelevance. During her doctoral years and her studies of ancient Earth, Shu Gho had examined Second Elizabethan conceptions of objectivity, one of the central myths of the postindustrial era. The realm of fact, the reification of conceptual strata, had fascinated her: such a strange idea, as alien as Renaissance notions of the Divine. The earliest anthropologists had cleaved to this mythical conception of fact, with only a few pioneers promoting the now compulsory projection of the self into the other. It still struck Shu as extraordinary that the idea of an interpretation of culture independent of the observer's own filters had been seriously entertained. Well, that sort of colonial arro-
gance was no longer there. But what had really taken its place?

Shu walked quickly through the settlement, heading west to where she thought the harbor lay. Occasionally she glanced at the life sign scanner; Sylvian had programmed in an analog of Mevennen's DNA and the scanner should register her brother's presence within a limited radius, if it was working properly. Shu did not entirely trust much of the technology on which she was dependent. She passed crowds and clusters of people, and none of them so much as glanced in her direction. Her invisibility reassured Shu, but it also made her feel small and isolated, as though excluded from a conversation to which she could contribute nothing. It was clouding over now, and she could smell the metallic edge of approaching rain in the air. The scanner hummed, registering a familiar presence. Heartened by this, Shu hurried through the town, suddenly eager in her quest for the one person with whom she might conceivably be able to hold a conversation.

Eventually, she came out onto the harbor. A boat, shaped rather like an ancient junk, was riding in on the heaving tide, crawling slowly up the harbor mouth, and a crowd had gathered on the wharf to watch it dock. Shu found that her hands were clenched tightly in the pockets of her jacket. The boat nudged in against the wharfside and its tall, square sails crumpled like a moth folding its wings. A gangway was let down and passengers began to stream onto the shore. Shu saw a bewildering collection of people who all managed to look somewhat the same. Had the scanner been correct? And if Mevennen's brother was even here, would she know him again? And then she did see him, standing patiently at the top of the gangway to let others off first. A girl was with him. Shu saw her turn and speak, and give a curiously bitter smile. An older man followed, carrying a small and ominous box. And then they were stepping ashore. Eleres glanced up, and Shu experienced the sudden
shock of being seen. Recognition crossed his face, followed swiftly by doubt. He turned sharply away and addressed the older man. Together with the girl, they began to walk up into the town, ahead of the drift of rain. Unsure of what else to do, Shu followed.

It was mid-afternoon when we pulled into port. Damoth sailed between the racing clouds, but the rain held off. A tall row of houses occupied the cliffs above the harbor. Feeling eyes upon me, I saw a woman standing on a balcony above the boat. From this distance she was no bigger than a bird. The balcony was carved in the form of a serpent, many spined and with a thick feathery crest of gills behind the gaping mouth.This, I knew, was the
etheset
which is not uncommon in these seas. Presumably the carved serpent above me was the symbol of the house. From below, the woman seemed to be standing on its back, and I remembered another story, of the outcast Selen who went mad five hundred years ago and burned her family's fort to the ground, then cast herself into the sea only to be befriended by a serpent and carried out into the ocean. Ships in storms sometimes tell of seeing her, fire-eyed on the plunging beast's back, and she is, not surprisingly, an omen of disaster. I related all this to Hessan when he joined me at the rail, and he smiled rather thinly and replied that she is said to have come from a place which has been gone for generations.