Jongleur had been standing a few paces ahead up the riverbank. He turned now and walked slowly back toward them, his expression distant.
"It reminds me of North Africa," he said. "When I was young, I spent a year there, in Agadir. Not the landscape that is growing around us—that looks almost European, or it would if it were filled in. But the light, it reminds me of the desert towns in the early morning—the silver dunes, the white light angling off the houses, everything washed out and pale as linen." He turned back from surveying the hills to see that Sam and !Xabbu were both staring at him. His mouth curved sourly downward, "What, did you think I was never young? That I have never seen anything but the inside of a biomedical support pod?"
Sam sat up. "No. We didn't think you cared about anything you didn't own. That you didn't have somebody build for you."
For a second he appeared about to smile, but he still commanded his virtual face as stringently as he had his Egyptian mask. "A touch, I confess it. But a mistaken attack if you seek to wound me. Am I cold, hard, monstrous? Of course. Have I done my terrible deeds deliberately to oppress the downtrodden, or merely to increase my own pile of luxuries, like a dragon sitting on its hoard? No. I have done what I have done because I love life."
"What?" Sam was happy to let him hear the disgust in her voice. "That's uttermost fenfen. . . ."
"No, child, it is not." He turned away, looking to the distant limpid hills. "I did not say that I loved all life. I am not a hypocrite. Most of the Earth's crawling billions mean as little to me as the insects and smaller creatures that you crush beneath your feet in the grass mean to you. It is my life that I love, and that includes the beauty I have seen and felt. It is my memories, my experiences, that I wish to preserve against death. The happiness of other human beings means little to me, it's true—but it would mean even less to me if I were dead." He turned slowly. His eyes on her were uncomfortably sharp. Sam's hatred of the man had distracted her from what he truly was, but at that moment she could feel the strength in him, knew that this was a force that had knocked down governments as though they were bowling pins. "What about you, child? Do you think you will live forever? Would you not like to?"
"Not if I had to hurt other people to do it." She was suddenly close to tears. "Not if I had to hurt children. . . !"
"Ah, perhaps not. But unless you are presented with that option you will never know for certain, will you? And especially not until you are presented with that option while knowing that Death is standing just behind you. . . ."
!Xabbu, who had been listening to the conversation, was suddenly not listening any more. He stood up, staring forward past Jongleur and up the riverbank.
"What is it?" she asked. "!Xabbu, what is it?"
Instead of answering he hurried up the bank, running gracefully, bounding over near-invisible stones like a deer. In a few moments he had reached a cluster of small colorless trees that plumed above the bank like the smoke of several fires. He reached up and snatched at one of the branches, stared at what he held in his hand, then hurried back down the riverside.
"Look!" he cried, skipping past Jongleur to Sam. "Look at this!"
She leaned in. Nestled in his palm was a tiny bit of white cloth lopped in a knot. It took her a moment to make sense of it. "Chizz! Is that. . . ?"
!Xabbu held it against the strip of cloth tied around her hips. "It is the same." He laughed, a wild sound unlike anything she had heard from him. "It is from Renie! She was here!" He did a little half-dance, pressing the scrap of fabric against his chest. "She left it as a sign. She knew we would follow the river." He turned to Jongleur, his mood so good it sounded as though he were bantering with a friend. "I told you she was clever. I told you!" He turned back to Sam. "We must walk now as long as we can, in case she has stopped somewhere ahead of us."
Sam of course agreed, but could not smother a sigh of weariness as she got down from the stone. !Xabbu was already walking briskly upriver once more. Sam fell in behind him. Jongleur shook his head, but followed.
For the first moments the little man's happiness had been infectious, and Sam had felt her own spirits lifting higher than they had been since before Orlando's death, but now a finger of worry was poking at her—something she could not bear to mention to !Xabbu, but which troubled her more and more.
In the Girl Scouts they always tell you that if you get lost, you stay in one place, she told herself. Sam hadn't been a great Girl Scout, but she had learned what she had to, especially the things that seemed sensible and useful. Do they have Girl Scouts in Africa, wherever Renie's from? She wasn't sure, but !Xabbu was right—Renie was smart. Somehow Sam thought Renie would know about the stay-in-one-place rule. Which meant maybe there was a reason she hadn't stayed there, in that spot she'd marked by the river.
Maybe she had to leave because something was after her.
As the light altered from depthless gray to something as slippery and bright as mercury, as she walked doggedly out of nothing into something, Renie knew she should have felt more—should have been full of excitement, exhilaration, relief. This was the reason she had been stopping every few hundred yards to wave the lighter like a dowser's rod. Finding this growing reality should have been a triumph, but she found herself moving more and more slowly instead, as if bowed beneath a heavy burden.
The thing was, this place still made no sense.
And I don't do well with things like that. She looked back to see Ricardo Klement picking his way across the uneven ground, if you could call it that, putting one foot before the other like an overwound automaton that would carry on until it walked over the edge of something and disappeared, legs still grinding.
Like my father. He made no sense either, with his self-destructive slide into alcohol and defeat. Yes, his wife had died. Yes, it was horrible. But his wife was also Renie's mother, yet Renie had managed to get up every day after it happened and take care of what needed to be done. That made sense. Surrender, slow decay, that didn't. Death would get you no matter what, and who knew what would happen then? Better to fight on.
But it seemed some people couldn't.
My father would like it here, she thought. Wouldn't have to try at all, not even pretend. Just lie on the ground and wait for the world to change around him. She hated it as soon as she thought it, hated her own bitterness.
As she stood taking her first rest in over an hour, Klement reached her and stopped, so much like the machine she had imagined him to be that at first she did not even look at him, any more than she would look at an oven that had finished its cycle and shut off.
"Tell me," Klement said in his painfully uninflected way. "Why . . . is it important, up and down?"
"What?"
He made a stiff gesture that might have indicated his own body, or the span of nascent ground to silvery sky. "Is it because . . . this? Up and down?"
She found she could not bear to look at whatever was struggling behind his eyes, trapped, lost. "I don't know what you're talking about." She turned from him and started to walk again. Klement seemed rooted in place. After a moment, just as Renie was about to stop again, he lurched into motion, following where she had walked as though trying to touch the same footfalls. She shook her head. Perhaps he was so damaged that no part of his earlier self remained, but even if it were so, that still did not make him pleasant company.