Theo nodded, still dizzy, but proud that he had won her respect.
“You all right?” she asked.
He looked down at his arm, where the hornet had stung. It hadn’t really been a hornet, of course, but the wound was a scratch, not deep. He knelt on the deck and watched Hester pick up the hatchet and cut the remaining ropes. As the dune runner veered away, pilotless, she turned and said, “Stupid! I didn’t rescue you so you could get yourself killed.” But Theo sensed beneath her scorn a sort of rough kindness, and remembered the gentle way she had sat with him in the night, and knew that she was not so unlike Wren after all.
The dust was clearing. The black ship ran on, slowing now, because its sails were full of holes. It began to pass through the shadows of tall towers of rock around whose summits hopeful vultures wheeled. Some of the towers looked like crude, wind-worn statues, and perhaps they were, for all sorts of civilizations had made their mark on the old earth, and some had left some very strange things behind. The towers filled the desert ahead, whittled by the wind into flutes through which the dry breeze moaned. In their crisscross shadows Theo began to feel safe again.
The sand ship slowed, slowed, and came into a shady place where dwarf acacia trees grew. Grike flung out the anchor and furled the sails. He jumped overboard and scaled one of the smaller towers, climbing the fissured rock quickly and easily like a steel lizard. He stood for a while on the summit and then clambered down, calling out that the pursuers had turned tail, and that nothing else was moving in the desert. The sand ship creaked under his weight as he came back aboard. Theo, who had always hated Stalkers, recoiled from him.
Grike sensed the boy’s unease, “I will not harm you,” he said. “even if i wanted to, i could not.”
“Why?” asked Theo, remembering how Grike had spared the man he’d caught during the battle. “That’s what Stalkers are for, isn’t it? Harming people?”
Grike’s steel teeth gleamed as he tried to smile, ” not in dr. zero’s opinion.”
“Dr. Zero? She built you?”
“i was built by the nomad empires. i am older than the storm. older than municipal darwinism. the last of the lazarus brigade. but i was rebuilt by oenone zero, and she must have altered me. now if i think of killing once-born, my head fills with pictures of all the once-born i hurt and killed before, and i cannot do it.”
“Dr. Zero’s here!” said Theo eagerly, remembering his promise to protect Oenone. “She’s aboard Cutler’s Gulp! She’s called Lady Naga now. They said she was being sold to that trader Varney… We have to go back! We have to help her!”
Hester, coming out of the cabin with food and the makings of a fire, looked coldly at him. “We don’t have to do anything, boy. We’re not going back. And if you mean Napster Varley, I saw his Humbug lift off from the Gulp as we were pulling away. Anything he bought there he’ll have taken with him.”
Grike hissed like a thoughtful kettle. “WE COULD GO AFTER HIM.”
“Not you as well!” cried Hester angrily. “For all the gods’ sakes, Grike, she’s the vet who neutered you! What do you care if she’s been ’slaved?”
Noises came from inside Grike’s armored skull. Theo wondered if they were the sounds of thoughts whizzing through the Stalker’s brain. “IF I CAN FIND HER, SHE WILL TELL ME WHY SHE HAS DONE THIS TO ME. WE COULD GO NORTH, SELL THE SAND SHIP AND BUY AN AIRSHIP. NAPSTER VARLEY’S VESSEL IS SLOW. ITS WIDMERPOOL-12 AERO-ENGINES ARE INEFFICIENT. WE COULD CATCH IT UP DESPITE HIS HEAD START.”
Hester turned away from him and kicked the gunwales of her sand ship. “I like the desert,” she said angrily. “It’s good. It’s simple. It’s clean. I can make a living here.”
“YOU ARE NO MORE ALIVE THAN ME,” said Grike.
“No?” Hester glared at him. She was good at glaring; she could glare better with that one eye than most people could with two. “Well, isn’t that what you wanted? Didn’t you always want to make a Stalker of me, so we could wander about dead together?” She appealed to Theo. “Grike wants to make me like him. That’s the only reason he’s stayed with me since Cloud 9 came down. He’s not got the stomach anymore to kill me himself, so he’s been waiting for one of these sand rats to do it for him. Then he’ll take my carcass to his old friends in the Storm and get me Resurrected.”
“Oh!” said Theo, horrified. Resurrection was the worst fate he could imagine, yet Hester spoke of it as if it were nothing.
“I won’t care,” she said. “I’ll be dead. He can do what he wants with what’s left.”
“no,” said Grike. If he could have whispered, he would have whispered it, but all Grike’s words came out the same, loud and sharp and scraping. He wished Oenone Zero had done something about his voice instead of tinkering with his brain. He said, ” when your death comes, i will have you resurrected, as we agreed long ago. but i can wait. i want to see you live again and be happy. you will be neither while you stay in this desert.”
Hester sat down and hid her face in one hand. She was only in her middle thirties, but she looked ten years older, and very tired. Theo felt sorry for her. He wanted to put his arms around her, but he didn’t think she’d like that. He glanced at Grike, but the Stalker seemed to have said all that he was going to.
“Mrs. Natsworthy,” said Theo, “it’s not just Dr. Zero who’s in danger. It’s lots of people. The truce depends on her. Who knows what General Naga might do if he doesn’t get her back? He loves her.”
“He’s a fool, then,” muttered Hester. “People shouldn’t love each other. It only leads to trouble.” She looked at Theo. “I don’t care about your truce. I don’t care about General Naga or this wife of his.”
She jumped down onto the sand and started walking away from the ship, gathering dry acacia branches to make a fire. Although she kept her back to Grike and Theo, she knew that they were both watching her. She felt shivery, and cold despite the heat, as if she had a fever coming on, but she knew it wasn’t fever.
At first, when she’d found herself alone with Grike, she had been terrified. She had remembered his ghoulish plans for her, and imagined that he was going to kill her at once. But when she learned that he couldn’t or wouldn’t kill, she had decided that Grike was the person she belonged with. Had it not been Grike who rescued her, all those years ago, after her own father tried to murder her? Grike had looked after her when she was a child, long before she met Tom; now her life with Tom was over, and she was with Grike again. There was a Tightness about it.
Anyway, she was glad of someone to talk to. During these months in the desert she had told him things that she had never told anyone before. She told him about her first meeting with Tom, and how she had fallen in love with him; about the Jenny Haniver, and Wren. And she told him how she had betrayed Anchorage, and murdered Piotr Masgard, about how she had driven her own daughter away.
Grike did not judge her the way a human being would have; he just listened patiently. Hester felt that when she had told him everything, then she would be able to forget her previous life; she would become as blank as the sand and the red-rock hills, and her memories would not be able to hurt her anymore.
And now this boy had dropped into her life like a shower upon the desert, making all sorts of things stir under the parched surface. Hope, for instance. Little dreams. She tried not to let them grow, but couldn’t stop them. Theo was still in touch with Wren and Tom, and one day he might tell them of his meeting with Hester in the sand sea. She liked the idea that he might have something good to say about her. She imagined her husband and daughter, in some far-off harbor, hearing that she had done something good again, just once, to balance all the bad things.