Angus lifted them carefully: four of them in one hand, three in the other, but one of the three was the massive horse. Angus flew up, high into the sky, leaving behind any despot pursuit. Then he leveled off and commenced the flight west.
Colene kissed Darius again. It was almost as if she was afraid he would disappear if she did not constantly demonstrate her feeling for him. “I made icons for my friends, and got their hair, spit, and breath. Here.” She handed him two doll figures. “So you can conjure them too, if you have to.”
“Thank you,” Darius said, bemused. “But why did you bring—?”
“I’ll get to that.” Colene looked across the hands. “Nona, I’ll go over the stuff with you. But first you have to meet my friends, Slick and Esta. Uncle and niece. From Earth. They’re going to Provos’ reality.”
“Hello,” Nona said to them, as perplexed as Darius. What a whirlwind of activity Colene was!
Slick nodded, and the girl just looked at her. “They’re not up on your language,” Colene explained. “And Seqiro hasn’t fully fathomed them yet. But you don’t have to wait for that. I can translate. Esta needs your help.” Then, to the girclass="underline" “Es, show her. It’s okay.”
The girl worked open her shirt and showed her chest. It was a mass of scars. Nona was appalled. How could such mutilation have come about?
“You don’t want to know,” Colene said. “Just heal her as well as you can.”
Nona thought of the memory Seqiro had shared with her, of Colene’s experience with rape, and knew that Colene was not teasing. It was best not to inquire.
She took the girl’s hand in her own. “I must touch you, to heal you,” she said. Colene picked up her thought and spoke in the girl’s strange language.
Esta spoke. “Touch me, I don’t care,” Colene translated. Nona realized that it was not the language the horse understood, but the mind. Seqiro had access to Colene’s mind, but not Esta’s mind, so Esta’s words were meaningless.
Nona sat behind the girl, her legs spread outside, and drew Esta back into Nona herself. This was what she had done with Darius, when healing his rat bite. She reached around and put her hands inside the girl’s shirt, against the bare scarred skin of her chest. She concentrated.
“Something is happening!” Esta exclaimed, surprised. This time Nona understood her directly; perhaps their close contact facilitated Seqiro’s entry into the girl’s mind.
“I am healing you, with my magic,” Nona responded.
“I feel it! I feel it! It feels so good!”
“I told you she could do it,” Colene said. “She healed Darius.”
“The pain—it’s going! Can you heal my mind too?”
“No,” Nona said sadly. “Only your body.”
“But Provos can heal your mind,” Colene said. “She will take you back to her reality, where the folk remember only the future. If you can be like them, you will lose your past, and it won’t affect you any more. I think it will be that way, because the longer you are in that reality, the more you will become of it, at least in body and culture. That’s why Provos came for you; she remembered that you needed her.”
“That’s why she came?” Darius asked, surprised. “But she can’t remember in other realities. She has to be in them before she can remember.”
“I know. I was with her. We went to her reality—and to yours. She must remember what it will be like in her reality after she gets back. And she remembers Slick and Esta being with her. She knew them both, the moment she saw them. She hugged them like old friends. Like family members.” Colene paused.
“Yes, of course,” Provos said.
“Isn’t that so, Provos?” Colene asked. Nona knew that the girl had deliberately timed it, to let the woman answer before the question came. “That you remember Slick and Esta with you from now on?”
“It is true,” Provos agreed.
“Isn’t it true that Slick and Esta have a happy life coming in your reality, with him earning an honest living and her growing up and marrying a local boy and being happy ever after?”
Provos smiled, nodding.
“You have a family now,” Colene said evenly. “A son and granddaughter, as far as you know, even if you don’t remember marrying or losing your husband. But you love them and they love you, and it doesn’t matter where they may have come from.”
“Yes, my dear,” Provos said to Esta.
Esta stared at Provos. She spoke. Colene translated in her mind as she heard the words, so that Seqiro could send the meaning to the others immediately. To Nona, it was as if she now understood Esta. “I will forget how I have lived? I will remember what is to happen?”
The girl looked across at Colene. “It is a nice place? Where she lives?”
“A real nice place,” Colene assured her. “The kind of place you’ll want to spend the rest of your life.” Nona understood from the peripheral thoughts that they had had this dialogue before, but that Esta needed repeated reassurance. The girl was horribly insecure, and afraid that anything good was illusory. She had suffered terribly, and could not quite believe that this was over.
Nona released the girl; her body had been healed. Esta crawled across Angus’ hand to Provos, who had already spread her arms. They hugged.
Slick shook his head. “I never dreamed of such a thing. It’s like magic.”
“It’s magic, dummy,” Colene said. “Get used to it. After flying across a planet on the hand of a giant, you shouldn’t find it all that difficult.”
“A barber,” Provos said, looking up.
Colene smiled. “What kind of job will Slick have?” she asked the woman. Slick choked, and Nona wondered why, until she caught Colene’s thought: Slick had made his former living by slicing people’s throats.
Slick recovered in a moment. “I wonder whether there will be a woman for me,” he mused.
“She is a hairdresser,” Provos replied.
Colene smiled. “That’s not your answer. Here, I’ll do it. Provos, what kind of job does Slick’s wife do?”
Nona smiled. That showed how the two would meet.
“Beautiful,” Provos said.
This time Slick put the question himself. “What will my wife look like?”
Darius interceded. “You had better leave something to discover, or you will be bored before it happens.” Then he turned to Colene. “You visited my reality?”
“We sure did,” Colene replied, pleased. “I met Kublai, and Prima, and Keren. Keren and I, we really understand each other. And Ella.” She fixed him with an irate gaze. “You won’t be taking off her diaper any more once I get there, you damned horny man.”
Darius looked abashed, but Nona did not fathom the reason. A diaper was for a baby, but Ella didn’t sound like a baby. Then Colene laughed, and hugged him. Whatever it was, it was all right, or at least tolerable.
So it was that they passed the time, coming to know each other better, while Angus carried them west toward the head. After a while Colene settled down to business.
“I have the stuff on the rads,” she told Nona. “But it’s a bit tricky. Let me see if I can make it clear.”
Colene concentrated, and a picture formed in Nona’s mind. It was an outline of Oria. with its body, head, and rads. “What we want is R1/R2/R3 and so on up to /R9. Don’t worry about what it’s called; I figured it out by studying the newsletter the prof gave me in my reality. R1 is the Body, /R2 is the Head, and /R3 is here.” On her mental picture the largest rad on the head glowed. “Then we climb onto /R3 and look for /R4 on it.” The rad expanded in the image, until it filled the mental screen. The /R4 that now glowed on that was about halfway between the small head of /R3 and the large curve of the surface of /R2. “We’ll keep getting farther around on each next rad,” Colene said. “But we’ll get there. The ninth rad on the eighth rad is going to be pretty small, though.”