On his way back to the cot he dialed the lights down to a pale glow. He was exhausted; whether he wanted to or not, he was going to have to sleep again. He closed his eyes, felt the soft texture of the darkness.
He couldn’t remember having dreamed, wasn’t sure if he’d actually been asleep or not.The hand shook him gently by the arm again and the voice whispered,“Kane?”
“Mmmm?”
“Quiet, now. Don’t wake the others.”
He blinked, focused on a tall, tanned woman with dust-colored hair. “Who are you?”
“Dian,” she said, staring at him intently, as if the name should mean something to him.“You are Kane, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Listen, we need to get on with this thing. I’m starting to get really paranoid.”
“Paranoid?”
“Curtis is suspicious.We’ve got to move soon.And I for one want to get the hell out of here.”
Kane was fully awake now.“Maybe there’s some kind of misunderstanding here.Am I supposed to know you?”
The woman rocked back on her heels. Her eyebrows were so light that Kane had trouble reading her expression.“Okay,” she said, tilting her head and raising one hand apologetically.“If that’s the way you want to play it. It’s your show. But for God’s sake don’t wait around too long, okay? Before this whole thing falls apart on us.” She stood up smoothly, blending in with the shadows, and Kane was left with nothing but a faint afterimage on his retinas.
He got shakily to his feet and moved to the pile of belongings that they’d brought from the ship. His bag was in the middle, and as he lifted it he could feel the weight of the pistol inside. He carried it back to the cot and spread it open on the floor beneath his feet.
He was not hallucinating. Something was going on that no one had told him about; the gun, and Morgan’s subliminals, and the woman named Dian were part of it. He took the pistol out, repelled by its dark gleam and oily scent, wrapped it in a dirty T-shirt, and stuffed it under the mattress of his cot. Curtis had searched the ship; apparently they hadn’t gone through the bags yet but it would only be a matter of time before they did.
Kane lay back, conscious of the bulk of the gun against his left hip. The princess, he thought bitterly, and the pea.
Dian obviously had at least some of the story. In the morning he would get what he could from her. For the moment he was too tired even to put his duffel away. He closed his eyes, drifted.
A cool breeze swept down out of the pines. He stood for a moment on the narrow path and savored the paradox of the sun’s warmth and the air’s chill.The Shinto temple stood only a few yards away, its long, low walls no more than a palisade of bamboo, the thatch of its roof brown and in need of replacement.
The name of the temple was Atsuta. He was here on the instructions of his dying father, stopping on his way east before confronting the Ainu aborigines who were said to be as fierce as the bears they raised from cubs and then strangled, smearing themselves with the blood, even drinking it.The impurity of it nauseated him.
With manicured, tattooed hands, he removed his sandals and entered the temple.The air inside, musty and chill, made him draw his robe closed over the tattooed serpent that wound its way around his chest. He could feel the spirits of the kami moving through the ancient, gnarled trees around the temple, whispering to him in an indecipherable language.
He squatted in front of the shrine itself, a wooden box the size of a child’s coffin, its shelves containing the heads of snakes, bottles of pink and scarlet dyes, and a crude painting of a waterfall.The shrine was dedicated to Susa-no-wo, god of the plains of the seas, born from the snot of Izanagi, the last of the first gods. He began to pray, as his father had instructed him.
The screeching of a hawk shattered his concentration. He looked, saw the hawk flying straight at him through the open door of the temple, wings back, talons extended.At the last possible moment, the bird veered up and burst through the rotten thatch of the roof, releasing a cascade of ill-smelling straw.
A single shaft of light fell into the shrine.
He put out one hand and touched the dried yellow monkey skull that lay in the circle of light. He felt a latch click.The shrine trembled for an instant, and then a side panel fell away, and a long, narrow object fell into his lap.
A sword.
He saw the eight-headed snake, as big around as a grown man, its fangs dripping venom, saw Susa-no-wo slashing the monster to pieces, saw him taking the sword, Kusa-nagi, from the tail of the snake.
He saw again the hold of the ship, the tray, the goblet, the pike.
He screamed.
By the time Molly got to the sickbay, they had Kane sedated and strapped to a gurney.The room stank of fatigue and worn tempers. Reese sat on the edge of his cot, head down, arms on his thighs; Lena and Takahashi were at the table, not looking at each other.
“What happened?” she asked.
“We don’t know,” Reese said. He looked bad, she thought, necrotic, hypoxic. He needed sleep, not another crisis. But then the same was true of them all.“He woke up screaming and couldn’t seem to stop.”
She picked up a used hypo from the table.“Valium?”
“I gave it to him,” Lena said defensively.“It’s out of my medical kit.”
Molly nodded and stood next to Kane. Even with his eyes closed, he had an intense, haunted look that attracted her.After ten years of the same faces, she thought, it’s such a pleasure to see a new one.
She raised one eyelid.The pupil was dilated from the drug, but otherwise seemed to be responding normally to the light.
“Did he say anything?” she asked.“Anything articulate?”
“He said ‘no’ a lot,” Lena offered.“And something like ‘leave me alone’ or ‘get away’ or something like that.”
Takahashi helped her roll Kane into the next room and shift him over to the holo scanner platform. She sensed that he was indifferent to Kane’s condition and was only demonstrating how well he’d recovered from the flight.
She noticed Lena watching her as she connected the intake and outtake lines of the blood processor to an artery and vein on the inside of Kane’s thigh. Like a musician, Molly thought, watching somebody else on stage.“You want to start that for me?” she asked, nodding to the processor terminal.
“Sure,” Lena said.
Molly brought up the scanner and typed in a series of commands.
“He’s anemic,” Lena said, watching the readings scroll up on the crt.“The volume is low. Leucocytes up a little because of the ribs.As expected. But there’s nothing else wrong here. No alkaloids, no other apparent hallucinogens.”
Molly watched a diagram of Kane’s body form on the scanner’s crt, white lines on black background.The image of the body began to rotate on the long axis, the major organs appearing in green as the scanner worked in, the cracked ribs surrounded by the bright blue of damaged tissue.
“What’s that?” Reese asked from behind.
“Where?”
“There.At the back of the skull.That yellow patch.”
Molly called up an enlargement of the head and froze the posterior view.A small, flat rectangle of yellow was attached to the back of the right temporal lobe.“Jesus Christ,” Molly said.
Lena came over to look.“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“A tumor?” Reese suggested.
Molly shook her head.“Cancer cells are undifferentiated.This system shows them in red.”
“What else could it be?” he asked.
“Um,” Lena said.“You want a guess?”
“Go,” Molly said.“We’re listening.”
“What Kane said tonight about North Africa. He said nothing happened, that they all just came back. I don’t think that’s the way it was.”
“What do you mean?” Molly said.