The silence that followed was long and unhappy. Saph looked at Sig and shook her head. It was Winnie herself who finally sat up, sniffed, and said, “What’s that?”
“Oh, no.” Rick had been part of the group, as mesmerized as anyone. Now he jumped to his feet. “The food!”
He ran over to the oven. “It’s cinders. It’s all ruined.”
“Then don’t worry about it.” Winnie stood up and stretched her back as though it hurt. “We’re not fated to eat hot food tonight, I can tell. Put out anything that’s cold and quick, Rick; and you, Josh, go bring Dawn in. I don’t want to lose her again. Then we’ll hear from Topaz, if she feels up to talking. And then”—she yawned hugely—“then I don’t know about you people, but I’m ready for a bit of sleep.”
Chapter Nineteen
Josh didn’t sleep well. Two things that he had heard, late the previous night, mingled and burned inside his brain. Winnie Carlson’s words merged with Topaz’s first-hand description of her adventures with Dawn, to produce a strange dream in which Josh was in two places at once. Sometimes he was inside Topaz’s head as well as his own.
Brewster was glaring down at him; We’ll strip-mine this whole planet to get at the transuranics. Don’t think you can stop us, Kerrigan. We’re going to reduce the surface of Solferino to raw magma.
But in the same moment he was with Topaz and Dawn, creeping away from the camp in Solferino’s predawn stillness. They were heading for higher ground. They looked back, and in his dream Josh looked back with them. No one at the camp had noticed them leaving. Josh could see through the walls. There he was, sound asleep in Topaz’s bunk.
It was important to be far away from the Avernus Fissure before stopping to rest. Dawn had said it, in her own economical way: “Day sleep, night wake.” They and the phantom Josh walked at least five miles before wrapping themselves in blankets and lying down. When they fell asleep it was in the purple shade of a gigantic plant, a daisy with petals twenty feet long.
They awoke to find Grisel already low in the sky. While Topaz prepared a cold meal, Dawn removed her shoes and shinned barefoot and monkey-easy up the plant’s smooth trunk. She spent ten minutes at the top, thirty feet from the ground, examining the terrain in all directions. Josh hovered unsupported at her side, staring back toward the Avernus Fissure. He could see it clearly, despite the hills in between. It was glowing brighter red, and it was steadily widening.
Dawn offered not a word when she came down, until Topaz asked, “Which way, Dawn?” Topaz had decided before they left: Dawn was the expert on finding ruperts, therefore she would dictate their movements.
Dawn did not speak, but pointed north, at right angles to their first line of travel.
“And we’ll stay there tonight?”
Dawn picked up her food box and began to examine the contents. She paid no attention to anyone. Topaz glanced again at the sun. They had maybe two more hours before dark, and they knew from the previous night that finding a way through a forest, even a moonlit one, was tricky. Daylight would be a lot easier. And those looked like rain clouds on the eastern horizon.
“Any sign of people coming after us, when you were up there?”
Dawn calmly went on eating. She did not look in Topaz’s direction.
“All right.” Topaz packed away her own food box. “I guess that’s an answer. As soon as you’ve finished, let’s go.”
She was finding it easier to interpret Dawn, feeling her way slowly into the strangeness of an autistic’s universe. For Dawn, the words “Yes” and “No” did not exist. If you steered clear of them, and the concepts that went with them, you had a far better chance of understanding what went on behind that rounded, unlined forehead. You learned not to ask questions calling for an abstract reply. Questions with a thing as an answer, or an action, had a much greater chance of success. In Dawn’s world, actions were significant; words were either meaningless or of marginal interest.
Topaz stood up. An action. “Let’s go. I’m ready when you are. You go in front.”
Dawn tucked away her food box, lifted her pack, and led the way.
They walked nonstop until dusk, to a place where the continuous forest ended and was replaced by great islands of low and wiry ground cover, surrounded by straggling thickets of woody chest-high scrubs. Dawn walked to the middle of one of the flat islands, halted, and sat down.
Topaz followed and stared around her with no enthusiasm.
“Dawn, if we spend the night here we’ll be visible from every direction. There’s no place to hide within fifty yards. This is right out in the open.”
“This is right,” Dawn said infirm tones. “Out in the open.”
If Dawn was in charge of rupert-finding, then you either had to do what she said, or you might as well go back to the camp. Topaz sighed, and sat down.
The invisible Josh settled by her side. A few drops of rain were already falling. Had they left the cover of the giant daisy plant’s leaves so they could spend a long night being rained on? Apparently. He turned his eyes back to the direction of the camp. He couldn’t make out what he and the others were doing there, but even from this distance he could feel the heat from the orange-red lava. It had begun, the reduction of the surface of Solferino to molten magma.
There was nothing to do but make the best of it. Topaz arranged blankets so that they could sit on one, and put one each around their heads. It was the only way to remain reasonably dry, but Dawn would not go along with it. She pushed her blanket off her head and shoulders and dropped it in a wet heap. As the rain strengthened, she insisted on sitting fully out in the open, letting the raindrops fall onto her unprotected head.
A total retard. Except that on Solferino the roles seemed to be reversed. Topaz was the retarded one, while Dawn appeared to know exactly what she was doing. She must want to be visible. After a few minutes, Topaz put aside her own shielding blanket. She sat like Dawn, head bare, and felt the rain gradually soaking every part of her.
At least it wasn’t cold. Dawn showed no interest in talking about what they were doing, or in answering questions. After an hour or so of damp silence, and in spite of her intention to remain fully awake, Topaz felt her eyes start to close.
She opened them again after a few moments. It was amazing to be able to sleep at all, when you were sitting upright in the middle of nowhere, soaking wet, on an alien planet. And maybe it had been more than a few moments. Her back was aching, and she had a stuffy nose. Her head felt too heavy for her neck. She needed some real sleep.
And then, suddenly, Topaz was wide awake. Although she was still soaked, the rain had ended. There was a glimmer of moonlight across the broad clearing; Dawn no longer sat at her side.
Until this moment, she hadn’t realized how much reassurance she felt because of Dawn’s calm presence. Topaz stood up with an effort—she had been sitting cross-legged, and felt frozen into one position—and stared around her. The darkness at first seemed absolute.