"Do you love it?" Duun asked. "Do you love it, minnow?"
"Yes," Thorn said when he could say anything at all. He wiped his eyes again. "It's still there."
"So long as you aren't on it," Duun said, and it was truth; he had seen it. Thorn's chest ached. He put out a hand and touched the window and the world.
The ship left the world, while they belted in below. The engines kicked them hard and long.
Thorn shut his eyes. I can't sleep, I can never sleep, he told himself, but the strength ebbed out of him and he felt the pain reminding him of what he was and what it cost, constantly, like the beats of his heart. "Drink," Duun said, and fed him something through a straw that he wanted no more of after the first sip. "Drink it." Again, in that voice that had drilled him all his life, and it left no choice. Thorn drank, and slept; and when he woke Duun slept by his side-his unscarred side toward him, that side that gave its own illusions, of what Duun had been before.
Thorn shut his eyes again. (Is Sagot alive? Did Manan and the other pilot live? The guild- did the missiles defend it?)
(Children standing on the rock at Sheon, seeing red suns bloom on their horizons. Smoke palls the sky. Thunder shakes the ground.)
(In the halls at Dsonen people run in confusion, not knowing where to go.)
The sun whirls past the canopy and men like great insects manage the controls. The plane hangs in the sky and time stops. The war goes on in a moment frozen forever, all war, all time.
Sagot sits in her lonely hall. There is thunder. She sits frail and imposing at the end of that room, waiting in front of all the empty desks.
A shuttle flies in place and the universe rushes past it, sweeping the world out of its reach.
There were mundane things. There had to be: there were bodily needs, and Thorn cared stubbornly for himself, once Duun had shown him how things worked; there was a breakfast of sorts, and Thorn found his hands a little less painful, Crew came drifting through their compartment in the urge of like necessities and coming back again. There was still the surreal about it, like the drifting course they took, a leisurely pace, a slowness like a dream.
"Where are we going, Duun?"
"Gatog."
"Is that the station?" Thorn had never heard it called that.
"It's one of them." Duun said.
(Is there more than one?) Sagot's teaching developed cracks, fractured in doubts. (Is no truth entire?)
"We had a report," Duun said, "the ghotanin have sent a messenger to Tangan offering to talk. The kosan guild refused at first, but they're going to relent."
"Is that part of your solution?" Thorn asked. His mind worked again. Duun looked at him with that closed hatani stare to match what Thorn gave him.
"Balance is," Duun said. "It was never my intention to destroy the ghota."
"They call you sey Duun."
"It's a courtesy these days."
"You led kosanin?"
"Once."
No more than that. Duun would not be led.
More of sleep and meals and bodies. The gel on his hands began to peel. The crew grew familiar: Ghindi, Spart, Mogannen, Weig. Half-names. Pet-names. But it was enough. Duun knew them and talked with them in quiet tones, and talked sometimes with voices on the radio from one end or the other of their journey.
None of it concerned Thorn. And everything did. He eavesdropped in mortal dread and caught nothing but city names and Gatog's name and jargon after that.
Intercept, Thorn heard once, and his heart delayed a beat. He looked Duun's way and kept looking Duun's way when Duun stopped the conversation.
"Minnow," Duun said to him, drifting toward Thorn. And nodded to him that he ought to follow.
Duun drifted down into the place they slept in and came to a graceful stop. Thorn reached with his foot and a half-healed hand and did almost as well. "Are there ghotanin here?" Thorn asked.
"Maybe there are," Duun said. "They're not our job to fight."
"Is it a game?" Thorn asked in anger. "Am I supposed to discover what we're going to? Where I am? Isn't it over, Duun?"
Duun looked at him in a strange, distant way. "It's only beginning. It's not the right question, Haras-hatani. None of those is the right question."
Thorn grew very still inside.
"Think on it." Duun said. "Tell me when you know."
The void that had sped past him, about him, shrank to a single familiar dimension.
("Again," Duun said, standing over him on the sand. "Again.")
Thorn sucked in a breath and stared at Duun as Duun pushed off and soared up through the lighted hatchway like some sleek gray man-sized fish.
(He's been waiting for me. Where have I been? Where has my mind been? It was pity he felt for me.)
(He belongs here. This is his element, like Sheon; and the city-tower and the guild-hall never were.)
Thorn pushed off and extended his body the way Duun had, with the same grace, conscious of it. He came up into the light of the crew-compartment, found his touch-point with one sure motion and drifted to the counter-hold he sought, there where he could see Duun and the others.
They were receiving and sending messages again. Duun listened and answered in that jargon again which made little sense. "Is it custom," Thorn asked when there was a lull, "to talk) that; or have we enemies up here?"
"Is that your question?" Duun asked.
"I'll tell you when I ask it." Thorn held to the counter and felt the sensitivity of his burns. "If this is an ocean, this minnow had better learn to swim. He should have learned days ago."
Duun looked at him and slanted his ears back in an expression Thorn had seen a thousand times. "There are enemies. The same as we met on earth. The companies who maintain factories and mines up here use ghotanin for guards. And some of them have ships. Not like the shuttle. The shuttle's not built for what we're doing. Ships are moving, some friendly, some not. We've burned all the fuel we have getting out of earth's pull. It wasn't a scheduled launch. It was the reserve shuttle we used. One's always kept launch-ready: the companies like their schedules kept. And getting it powered up without letting Shbit and the ghotanin trace that order to me-that took some work."
(You knew it all in advance, then. Dammit, Duun-)
Duun might have smiled; on the ruined side such motions were ambiguous and made him deceptive to read. It might have been a grimace. "Right now," Duun said, "we're on course for Gatog. It lies some distance out. We're not capable of stopping, of course. But that's not a great problem. A miner's already moving into line to be on that course a few weeks hence, a simple salvage job. If nothing intervenes. We're moving very slowly. Our enemies are closing at ten times our speed. We have no weapons. Those ships do. Fortunately so do our friends. It's a very touchy business, minnow, hour by hour. A ship spends fuel; the other side does; each move changes the intercept point and the schedule. We're the only fixed quantity because we can't maneuver, no more than a world or a moon. We just sail on. And hour by hour those ships out there burn a little, figure, discover what the enemy's doing, refigure, maneuver and do another burn. Faster and faster. It depends on how willing crews are to die, and at what point they commit themselves. For the nearest of our friends the earth is close to the infinity point: they were never built to land, and if they overspend on fuel they'll not have the capacity to do the necessary vector change and get back again: the gravity well is just that, a treacherous slope, and a ship that spends everything can find itself going downhill. For our enemies, the infinity point is infinity-or some star a hundred years away. And someone could eventually fetch them back. They don't need to be as brave. Or as careful."
"What will our friends do?"
"Some of them are hatani."
"They'll do what they have to, then." The guild house. The laughter which no longer sounded cruel, but innocent and brave. (They didn't know then they were in such close danger. Even hatani failed to read it. They saw the ghota; they knew trouble had come in, but they couldn't know it all.) "Are they armed?"