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The Exile Waiting
Vonda N. McIntyre
contents
COPYRIGHT © 1975 BY VONDA N. MCINTYRE
Lines from "The Anger," Copyright © 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin from Wild Angels, published by Capra Press, Santa Barbara, California. Used by permission of the author.
Printed in the United States of America.
SFBC edition
For Ursula and Charles with fond memories of their Charitable Home for Writers
Unlock, set open, set free, the exile waiting in long anger outside my home.
—Ursula K. Le Guin
Chapter 1
Jan Hikaru's Journaclass="underline"
Contacts in a spaceport bazaar are tenuous and quickly broken. Most of the people are transients—I'd leave too, if I could. I never had to think about money before, and the sudden realization that it's necessary is disconcerting. But I won't ask my father for support, nor have I petitioned my mother's estate. I've been thinking more about myself and my numerous faults than about money. I've been lonely. Yet, somehow, I'm more content than I was as a respectable reader at university, learning everything and knowing nothing. I've just begun to realize how much time I've wasted.
Ichiri has not quite disowned me. He simply did not answer my letter. I won't write him again—I'm not even sure why I feel I owe him any explanations. All I want is an attempt at understanding. He may be hoping I'll give up and come home, so he can pretend he never knew about my brief bout with rebellion and—to him—insanity. Then neither of us would lose face. I don't know yet, but I think I'm stronger than that.
If I never went home, he would be able to forget that his only offspring has blond hair, and he would be able to immerse himself completely in his fantasies. I can't bend myself to them anymore—they have become stronger, more pervasive, and, worse, more intrusive on other people's lives. Yet I can't forget him. I still love the old man, on a level much deeper than that of my resentment.
I sat in a bar all evening, keeping myself mildly intoxicated. That helps very little. I become introspective. If I got more intoxicated, maybe I could begin to believe my father's fantasies. I could proclaim myself legitimate son of the bastard son of the emperor of ancient Japan, then they could ship me home and I would live happily ever after in a world of stories and words that no longer have any meaning. I see by those lines that I am still a little drunk.
I met a retired navigator while I was drinking. She is almost deaf and almost blind—she's outlived many of the ships she served on. Her hair has aged from ebony to white, her eyes from black to luminous gray. Too many flights have battered her, and stray radiation has turned her corneas to ground glass. They could be restored, but not the optic nerves. Yet she has a dignity about her that her tremors and deafened near-oblivion cannot strip away. She is ubiquitous, yet unique. A hundred castoff, worn-out relics wander in this bazaar alone, but she is the first with whom I've talked at length. She could go to one of the homes established for her kind, but she would have to leave space to do that, and she says it would kill her. She says she was born on old earth: she says it defiantly, with her clouded eyes glaring from her dark face, and she dares anyone to say she lies, or to be repelled by her. She was born there—it's true in spirit. And perhaps even in fact, though I've always been taught that earth was dead and abandoned.
The old navigator and those like her rely on the aid of the younger members of their society, who know they in turn will be cared for. Tonight she and I talked so long that everyone else went
off to sleep through daybreak, so she came with me to my cheap little room. Now, while I write, she is dozing on the cot, lying close to the wall, because, I think, she does not wish to displace me from my bed. She has given, now she will accept—but she does not take.
The scarlet darkness cooled gradually to maroon as Mischa followed the rising caves toward Center. She was tired, thirsty, hungry. She had been in the deep underground for several days, wandering and exploring, guided by intuition and the experience of other, similar escapes. But now it was time to return to the city.
She wished she could stay away longer and extend the limits of her range. The strangest sights were deepest in the earth, delicately sculpted by eons, or, rarely, rarely, built by people who had abandoned their immense constructs when they had no more need for weapons of war.
Mischa heard a noise and stopped. The sound came again, a faint scratching of metal against rock. A few shards of stone clattered down the wall and fell at her feet. She looked closely, at shoulder height, and laughed. A tiny machine quivered at the edge of a small new hole, seeming to sniff the air. As Mischa watched, the antenna mouse extruded a shiny metal lead and backed away into the darkness, leaving behind a new connection to the communications network. This far from Center there was no one to use the leads, but the mice worked on, directed in a random and useless pattern by some lost and forgotten program.
Mischa continued upward; the cave was no longer completely natural, but had been smoothed and straightened into a long, regular passage.
A faraway glow appeared and increased as Mischa walked toward it: light-tubes, marking Center's outskirts. Few other people ventured beyond the illumination, for they were afraid. Some of the fear Mischa understood. An hour before, she had caught a glimpse of a cave panther: amber eyes, smooth, black pelt, wide strokes of whiskers, when it started at her silent approach and sprang away. But the outcast people of the deep underground were more feared. People who half-believed in them used their presence to frighten disobedient children. Mischa knew the underground people existed, though she had never met them. She had seen their painted symbols on the tunnel walls, and learned to heed the caution, but she found no reason for fear. The outcasts were shyer than the panthers.
Mischa reached the light spilling from the small round room ahead: a wellcell, the only source of good water for this section of the city's fringes.
Cut rock gleamed softly with condensation, and the air was sharp with the cool damp tang of limestone. In the middle of the circular chamber, the rim of the well projected a few handsbreadths from the floor. A tall figure in purple and black lay on its wide edge. His near-white hair spread across the worked stone. Mischa hesitated, then went toward the young man. She sat on the wall and reached out to shake him, but stopped with her hand almost on his shoulder when she saw the green flash of his eyes. Her brother stared straight up at the light above him.
"Hey, Chris." She did not understand why he was not in Center. He never went home; he had not needed to for two years.
"Go away." His voice held a thin note, a whine that had never been there before. His hand hung in the water, and his shirt, wet to the shoulder, clung to him as though his arm were only bones. He was much thinner than the last time Mischa had seen him.
"What's wrong?"
"No dreams," he said, sounding close to tears.
"Come on."
"Go away." He flung his arm over his face, covering his eyes, flinging sparkling drops of water across the bright sand and dark water. His hand was pale blue and parchment white, seeming translucent. Veins and bones protruded beneath the skin. Above the shush of water, Mischa could barely hear his slow and shallow breaths. For a moment, with a heavy fist of apprehension in her stomach, she wondered if he had stopped breathing altogether. He had not, yet her apprehension coalesced: she knew why she felt afraid.
She slid off the edge of the well and touched him. "Chris—"
He struck out as though he had forgotten who she was or that she was ever there. Because he had not planned it, because she had not expected it, he hit her, hard enough to knock her back. She lunged and reached for him, but he lost his balance and rolled. The water closed over him and sloshed against the well's side, reflecting in irregular waves.