She looked ahead, at Raven and Pel and Valadrakul, and decided she wouldn’t mention anything to them yet. They might not approve. Time enough when they found someplace she could stay, some suitable little town or village.
That woman’s cottage had been primitive, but Amy didn’t think it was too uncomfortable, really. If she could find a place no worse than that, she thought she could stand it.
She wondered if Prossie or Susan would be interested in staying with her.
* * * *
The land undulated, Prossie decided. It was a fancy word, but it fit. The countryside was an apparently-endless series of gentle-sloped ridges, and their path led them up and over each one. The westward slopes, the ones they went down, seemed longer and steeper than the eastward sides; that meant they were gradually descending these ripples, coming down from the forest, and that eventually, if they continued, they would reach either the sea or the flat plain of the coast.
It also meant, though, that most of the time they couldn’t see where they were going, but each time they topped a ridge the whole world would suddenly be spread out before them, a green expanse of small farms, groves, meadows, orchards that seemed to go on forever, arranged in the rows formed by the ridges-or rather, Prossie corrected herself, the Downs.
From each summit they could see a new valley, and then the tops of the succeeding ridges, fading away in the distance. The horizon was lost in mist from the first few ridgetops, but as the day progressed and the air warmed the mist receded and vanished. From the next two ridges everything was sharp and clear-but then the air began to grow hazy again as the temperature continued to rise. Dark clouds hovered on the western horizon, far ahead of them, but drew no nearer.
There was a pleasant sort of repetition to it all. Prossie supposed that eventually they would arrive somewhere, but she was in no particular hurry; she had been on perhaps a dozen worlds in her lifetime, and despite the high gravity this was one of the most pleasant she had yet encountered. The spaceborne habitats and bases where she had spent most of her time weren’t even in the running.
Also, the long walk gave her time to think, to meditate, to remember, and to just be.
She thought back to her childhood, remembering when she had first realized that she was a distinct individual. She knew, from reading other minds, that normal babies began to differentiate themselves from their environment when they were just a few weeks old, and had a pretty good grasp on the concept of “I” by the time they were toddlers; telepathic children, though, had a rougher time of it. Distinguishing their own thoughts from those around them, and from the network of other telepaths, was not easy.
Prossie had been slow; she had been almost four when she finally got a firm grip on which thoughts were her own and which came from outside. The key had been when she finally learned to close out other minds.
By then she had learned any number of things that normal children didn’t encounter until much later-she knew about sex, from several different viewpoints; she knew about death, and addiction, and lust, and grief; she knew about the dark, sick thoughts that lurked below so many minds.
And she had accepted all that as parts of herself, because she was part of all humanity, a link in the chain of telepaths that bound her species together. She knew that people didn’t speak about those darknesses, the raw lusts and searing pain, but it wasn’t until years later that she really understood why. She heard people thinking, over and over, that their thoughts were wrong, were different from everyone else, but she had known it wasn’t true.
It was so much easier to just accept it all, the foulness and shame and guilt, along with the joy and beauty and peace, and to not think about any of it, to not distinguish any of it as “good” or “bad.” It just was. It was in everyone, in varying degrees.
Except, of course, in herself, since she was a mere passive receiver, a relay, a servant of the Galactic Empire, not responsible for anything except performing her duty.
But now, thinking back, she knew that she had the darknesses in herself, too. That disgusting Bascombe, the Under-Secretary for Interdimensional Affairs, hadn’t had a second thought about sending his own people out to die, just to help his own reputation, and she had, somewhere in the back of her mind, thought she was better than that, that she would never have done such a thing-but hadn’t she left Lieutenant Dibbs and the others to die? Paul, who had raped her back on Zeta Leo III, had been awash in fantasies of power and abuse, and she had never done anything like that-but she had never had the chance, and hadn’t she deliberately lied to the people here, to manipulate them into doing what she wanted, and hadn’t she enjoyed the feeling of power it gave her?
And after all, hadn’t she betrayed her own family and her Empire?
But then, her family and Empire had virtually enslaved her from infancy, in their own way just as much as Paul had when he bought her at auction and took her to his home in chains.
Did that make her treason acceptable?
Perhaps it did, but it was still a betrayal. Certainly, her little crimes weren’t as bad as Bascombe’s or Paul’s or the Empire’s, but she was no pure little innocent.
And now that she was alone in her head, she could look at that, could take the time to consider her own motives and see just what was lurking down there in the back of her mind.
And she was discovering, as she walked across the Starlinshire Downs, that she had the same drives as anyone else-power and pride and sex and fear and anger, the need for love, the need for acceptance, all tangled together into her own individual mix.
She was thinking about her reasons for serving the Empire so willingly for so long, the fear of punishment, the acceptance by her family, the pride in her work, when she felt Carrie’s presence.
She blinked, almost stumbled on the latest upgrade.
“Are you all right, Prossie?” Carrie’s thoughts were tinged with worry-nothing serious, just concern for Prossie.
“I’m fine,” she thought back, “just fine.” To her own surprise as much as Carrie’s, her reply carried an edge of annoyance; she had already become accustomed to the mental isolation, the partial sensory deprivation, and she had been enjoying it. The sudden contact came as an intrusion on her own meditations.
“What about the others?”
Prossie looked around as she topped the rise. “Wilkins and Marks and Sawyer and Singer are all fine; the Earthpeople are alive, anyway, and seem to be functioning. Raven and Valadrakul are the only natives we still have with us.”
“What about Lieutenant Dibbs and the others?”
“How should I know?” The edge of anger was stronger and more obvious than ever, Carrie could hardly miss it, but Prossie didn’t care. “We left them back at the ship; you know that.”
“You haven’t heard anything more?”
“No.”
“What about that wizard who was going to send people home?”
“Didn’t work out,” Prossie replied. She wasn’t really paying very close attention any more; she had just looked out across the valley before them, and realized that this time they weren’t just going to pass more scattered, isolated farms.
This time, a town stood in the center of the valley. She couldn’t see very much; the afternoon air was hazy and humid, wavering in the heat, but the collection of stone and wood structures half a mile or so away was definitely a town.
“So what’s happening, then?” Carrie demanded. “Where are you going? You’re walking, I can sense that-where to?”
“We’re going to Shadow’s fortress,” Prossie said, studying the town. The highway widened out to form the main street; another road crossed at the center of town, and a few narrow back-streets filled in the rest.