The men stagger. It has been four days without rest, and the river is a league away. Twice more, he must play the trick with the I-ball, and each time they turn trustingly downhill.
We are running in circles, a heavy voice says. And a fetid, stale breeze chokes them for a moment with ancient dust. Would it be so terrible to surrender? You will be Conditioned, but at least you will live. There is a limit to what the human body can endure.
“But perhaps not to what the human spirit can,” says the girl.
They pause for rest and he looks at each of his squad. Ten of them have made it out of the building. The others, left behind, must be dead by now, or on their way to reconditioning camps. Is this all that is left of the conflagration they had hoped to ignite? A boy, a woman, six men, and the girl in the diaphanous gown.
“So long as there is a spark, there may become a flame,” she says.
It’s useless, one of the men declares. His voice is heavy, though oddly not with defeat.
“One day,” says a young man. He is dressed in a chlamys, fastened at the right shoulder, under which he is otherwise nude. His right flank is exposed. “One day, people will look back and remember the names of each one here.”
But are you here? Donovan wonders. Am I? For all he knows he may be lying unconscious on the floor somewhere on a world as yet unknown.
“You will never have better friends than you have this day,” the young man continues. “Each of you owes your life to the others. You have acted with one will, one mind.”
Donovan notes how the grime of battle has likened them. The same war paint, the same camouflage zoots. Hands, eyes, faces made anonymous by concealing goggles and gloves. He goes to each one in turn and embraces them, and they do the like. One is especially fervent, and bestows a kiss on his cheek.
“It will be dark,” the girl says, “when we reach the river.”
There comes a time when the body finds its limits, and then it finds whether there is anything beyond those limits. The river is wide at this point, but its banks are undeveloped and so there are none to see him. He wants nothing more than to lie there and sleep undisturbed until morning. After which, in the pitiless light of day, he will be considerably disturbed. Very funny, he thinks. But there are miles to go before he sleeps. There is a safe house in the O’erfluss District, if he can reach it. If it is still safe.
“Why assume it is not until we need to know?”
He looks around to see who has spoken, but he is alone on the river’s bank. Who was that? he asks the night; but receives no answer save the murmur of the river’s current, the creaking of insects, and the distant crackle of bolt-tanks and thud of buildings behind him in the Centrum. He uses the I-ball for its intended purpose, tossing it up and letting the stabilized images from its miniature cameras flash his surroundings on his goggles. No one is near.
Not much left of the Revolution…
“Whatever you rescue from a burning house is a gain.”
He summons reserves of strength, rises to his feet, walks slowly to the edge of the river. Sooner begun, sooner done. He will probably drown halfway across; and it is a measure of where he has come to that this seems a happy end.
He wades in until the water is waist deep, then he stretches out and begins to swim. The zoot helps, since it has buoyancy pockets. The current carries him downstream, away from the firefight in the city’s center and toward the great bridge, black-shadowed against the night sky.
It is tempting to give up and simply drift with the river. In the buoyant zoot, he could sleep all the way to the sea. But to reach the safe house he must make shore some place before the water-ferry docks, and so he strokes more briskly, now fighting the current.
And after a lifetime, he staggers up on the western bank of the river, and throws himself to the ground. It is marshy here. An old sugar processing plant gone to seed. Improbably, sugar cane has taken root and stands out of the water as bewildered as he.
“It’s not too much farther,” says the girl in the chiton. She sits atop a piling that once outlined the sugar loading dock.
He hears feet brushing through the riverside growth. Pulling back into the shadows, he slips a knife from his belt. The searcher whispers his name.
His true name.
It has been years, a lifetime, since he has heard it. And he recognizes the voice.
Rising from the shadows, he whispers urgently, Over here. He waits to see if he has made one last mistake, but recognition comes. You made it out of the Chancellery, then.
The other rebel steps forward and embraces him. “Glad to see you got free, Chief. Are there any more with you?”
“No. I…I thought for a while there were, but…”
“I understand.” He kisses him on the cheeks, once on each. “I hope you do, too.”
And with that the Protector’s Special Security forces close in and pin his arms to his side and take the knife from his hands. They are not gentle. The goggles are yanked from his head. One of the Protected Ones punches him in the belly and he doubles over. Looking up, he catches the eye of the man who had been his friend. “Why?”
And the man shrugs and will not look at him. “‘Close fits my shirt,’” he quotes the proverb, “‘but closer my skin.’”
Donovan gathers all his strength—though there is little left to gather—and he reaches out with both hands and…
…and dimensions twist and their hands impossibly meet.
The Fudir holds tight; sees that Donovan has done the same at his end of the table, grabbing Silky Voice and Pedant. Sleuth gropes for Pedant; Brute for Silk. Inner Child clutches the Silky Voice like an infant his Madonna. «Go away!» he tells the shadowy apparition. «You’re bad! Go away!»
…and then they are a ring, and the unshaped thing is excluded, and the table is normal in size and shape, and there are only the nine of them around it.
Each looks at the other, and looks at where the shadows had sat, and it is all gone. Donovan wrenches his hand from the Brute’s grasp. Sleuth lets go. Pedant crosses his arms and leans back in his chair.
“Well,” says the Fudir. “That was different.”
“Laugh all you want to, you fool; but that is what comes of your fissiparous activities.”
“Mine!”
“Yes, yours. And all the rest of you. What are you, after all, but shards and pieces of me! By your very existence you fragment me.”
The Sleuth turns to the Pedant. What is the point of your gathering the grapes of experience if you fail to press them for the wine of wisdom?
The naked young man in the chlamys says harshly, “Have you learned nothing? You have defeated Nothing itself. But you have defeated nothing yourself. You have preserved yourself intact, and which of you did that?”
“Who are you?” asks the Fudir. “And you?” The last is aimed at the young girl in the chiton.
“Parts of you,” she says, “that you thought you had lost, but who were always there, close by, waiting.”
“Was all that…,” says Donovan. “Was all that something that once happened to us? Was it memory, or imagination?” Had he really fomented a rebellion against some tyrant somewhere? Had they conditioned him out of the very memory of it?
The girl shrugs. “I know no more than you; but I would like to think that we will one day remember who we were.”
The first part, says the Sleuth. That was clearly symbolic.
Symbolizing what?
“The facets of a diamond,” the young man suggests.