She also devoted long periods to sitting at a mirror, staring at the stranger’s face in the glass—comparing it to those she saw in televised beauty advertisements—and trying to accommodate the idea that, by Earth standards, she might be beautiful. There was no way in which she could be certain, even after prolonged and intensive study, because the two cultures’ physical ideals were so divergent. The Bureau’s surgeons were not accustomed to dealing with female subjects, and it would have been ironic if, while aiming for the unremarkable median, they had created the exceptional. While such an accident could impair her ability to observe without being observed, its principal drawback would be on the personal level. The repulsiveness of Terran males was enough to cope with in itself without finding that she was a magnet for the appalling crudity of the sexual advances.
In time, however, Gretana developed her own defensive habits and routines. She left the apartment only in daylight hours, she learned to identify safe circumstances and locales, to choose the clothes which drew least attention, to comport herself with a hard, cool disdain which acted as an effective social barrier. The consequent loneliness of her existence, far from adding to the rigours of exile, was something for which she was deeply grateful.
It helped to insulate her and distance her from the daily cavalcade of despair. Pervasive images of statesmen who eyed their opposites in foreign nations with the total blank incomprehension of insects; gold-encrusted churches whose congregations coughed blood; thrill-killers in all their cankered varieties, from the rooftop sniper’s to the poisoners of school water supplies; corporate despoilers of the environment; Third World freedom fighters who severed the arms of UN-vaccinated children; heroin-billionaires; semi-literate teachers; wars and famines and professional exploiters of refugees; strikers who burned ambulances and turned the sick away from hospitals; testers of nerve gas and tenders of ICBMs…
And always there were the children—massively betrayed before they had even been born.
Her instinct for emotional survival forced Gretana, out of sheer necessity, to try stripping the Terrans of their humanity in her thoughts, to try regarding them as organic puppets acting out some incomprehensible black comedy whose final curtain—due, according to Vekrynn, in less than a century—would be a merciful release for all concerned. She was partially successful with regard to the adults, but the betrayal of the children was the source of a raw and rough-edged pain from which there was no escape.
In the early months she fuelled her spirit with hopes that Vekrynn would be physically present at Station 23 to greet her when she returned to make her first cerebric deposition, then she began to pray that he would not. There was a real chance that being with him, receiving a foretaste of her personal nirvana, would make it impossible for her to return to Earth. The actual event, subject of so much anticipation, proved anticlimactic. There was an uneventful trip north to Carsewell, a lonely walk through October mists to the nodal point—its screen of maples now dank and dripping with condensation—and the instantaneous transfer across twenty light years to find that not even Ichmo tye Railt was there in Person to receive her deposition. In less than an hour she was back on Earth and numbly making her way south to Silver Spring, hardly able to believe that the interstellar sortie had actually occurred. The bleak reality of Earth, she realised, was threatening to become her reality and would have to be fended off with greater vigour, driven back into containment.
Her second and third visits to Station 23 followed the same unremarkable pattern, conditioning Gretana to believe that the nodal point on Cotter’s Edge was so secluded as never to be visited by local inhabitants.
Spring came early in 2004, bringing unexpected relief from a hard winter in which power cuts and commodity shortages had been particularly severe. The mild weather prompted Gretana to make her bi-annual trip to Carsewell a few weeks earlier than usual and to combine the duty with a vacation. She rented an electric car and travelled north at a leisurely pace, making two overnight recharging stops, and it was quite early on a fine April morning when she pulled up on the quiet and now-familiar orbital road west of Carsewell. The sky was bright and busy, and the breezes which disturbed her hair and clothing might have blown from an alternative Earth which had never known pollution. She crossed the spiked-off interstate highway, but instead of going straight up the gradual hill decided to make a detour and approach the crest from the south.
As always, she felt wonderment that such unspoiled tracts of land could exist in a world where tactical nuclear weapons were in use almost daily in squabbles over patches of near-sterile desert. She paused to skry the position of the Moon, and was comforted to find that it was directly below her feet, which meant that the entire bulk of the planet was helping to shield her from its influence. Enjoying the unusual inner peace, she made a meandering approach to the nodal point. On reaching it, she stood in communion for several minutes, savouring the near-mystical pleasure of being at a junction of major skord lines. The ambience was typical—a kind of monastic seclusion combined, paradoxically, with the sense of interaction with the billowing universe. She was drawing upon it, replenishing herself, when the silence was broken by a movement only a few paces behind her.
She spun round in a sudden clamour of nerves. The boy who had got so close before being noticed was about twelve years old. He was supporting himself on two light-alloy crutches, and his eyes were staring at her with disconcerting intensity from a face which had been honed to a narrow triangle by illness. Gretana’s initial alarm was lost in a rush of pity.
“Hello,” she said, striving to appear unconcerned. “Lovely morning, isn’t it?”
The boy looked all about him with studied calmness. “It’s all right.”
“You don’t seem too sure about that,” she said, smiling.
There was a moment during which his eyes, enigmatic and troubled, held steadily on her own, then he began to turn away. “I have to go now.”
“You don’t have to leave on my account,” Gretana said urgently, starting forward. She checked herself as she saw the change of expression which signalled that he had been hurt and was about to strike back.
“You don’t know what I…” The rest of the boy’s words were lost to her as he fled, bobbing and lurching, into the obscurity of the winding tree-lanes. Sounds of his laboured progress disturbed the air for a few seconds, then Gretana was walled in by silence. She placed the palms of both hands on her temples and waited for the unsettling effect of the encounter to wear off. This is Earth, she told herself, trying to erase images of aged eyes in a young face. Nothing matters here. Nothing makes any difference…
Several minutes went by before she had regained her composure and was able to effect the transfer.
Subsequently, each time she approached the nodal point on Cotter’s Edge she did so with extra caution. And, even though the quiet place was always deserted, years went by before she could venture into it without the partial expectation that the same small boy—doomed, yet strangely indomitable—would be awaiting her arrival.
Chapter Six