Behind Ronan’s eyes, the Champion looked surprised. What fun would that be?
“For It?”
For us, the Champion said, sounding as if He was surprised Dairine didn’t get it.
She stared at him.
“All right,” Filif said, glancing at Dairine as she took a breath. “Memeki knows—for the moment—what she is. But not who she is, or what she can do. How can we best assist her? For until she fully becomes the Hesper, and achieves whatever her full power may be, there’s no hope that she can do anything about the threat to the rest of our universe.”
I have no immediate answers, the Champion said. She’s still only in the middle stages of embodiment. Such a process has to proceed at its own pace.
“There’s not a whole lot of time left for it to proceed in!” Dairine said. “The Pullulus is pushing everything apart out there, the structure of space is suffering, whole civilizations are going to pieces—”
“He’s right, though,” Ronan said.
Dairine stared.
“It took a while for me to come to terms, too,” Ronan said. His voice was unusually subdued. “I didn’t even know he was in there until Nita recognized him.” Dairine was interested to notice that when Ronan had started speaking, he’d been looking at Kit, but suddenly he wasn’t looking at him anymore. “And when I found out what was happening, I really hated it.” He glanced at Memeki. “She seems to have gotten past that, which is amazing. Different psychologies, I guess. But then there still comes a moment when you have to”—he shrugged—”agree to act together. Not just to passively accept what’s happened. How’s that going to be for her? Can she do it? Her people’s lifestyle seems to revolve around doing what you’re told. How fast can she get past that? Can she ever get past it?”
Dairine shook her head, and looked over at the great sleeping figure. “We’d better hope she can,” she said, “and try to figure out some way to hurry her up.”
Kit yawned. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t help it … I need to at least stretch out for a while, whether I actually get any sleep or not. What do we do in the morning?”
Dairine shrugged. “Take her back. Turn her loose. Wait for something to turn up.”
“Wait?”
“Something always turns up,” Dairine said.
“But not because of the waiting!” Kit muttered.
“And in the meantime,” Dairine said, looking over at Ronan, “I think Kit’s got the right idea. You’re going to keep watch?”
Ronan nodded.
“Then I’m going to try to pick up where I left off,” Dairine said. She headed off for her pup tent, glancing over her shoulder. “Spot?”
“I can finish this analysis inside,” he said, and got up to follow.
They went back to the pup tent together. You’re a little quiet today, Dairine said, even for you. What’s bothering you?
I’ve been running analyses on more than the syntax of written Yaldic, if that’s what you mean.
Yeah, Dairine said, it is. She sealed the pup tent and sat down on the floor next to Spot. He crawled into her lap. “You’ve been really quiet ever since we got here from your people’s world. What’s going on?”
“My people installed a great deal of new software in me,” Spot said. “I’ve been getting to grips with it. Some of the things they loaded into me were patches for my oracular functions.”
“Yeah, I noticed you’d stopped the poetry,” Dairine said. “Frankly, it’s kind of a relief. The notes were starting to cramp my style.”
“I found them troubling, too,” Spot said. “The problem seems to have been that the messages from the Powers simply had too much content embedded in them: I wasn’t able to process them correctly, so they were coming out truncated. But with the patches, I’m now able to perceive more clearly exactly what it is the Powers and the manual functions are trying to tell me in terms of cloaked content, the kinds of things that were showing as blacked-out in Nita’s manual. As a result, I’ve been able to analyze the present situation a lot more accurately.”
“Sounds like good news to me,” Dairine said.
“It would be if the results of the analysis weren’t so troubling,” Spot said. “We’re missing something—both in terms of something we don’t know, and something that’s not here, something we urgently need. A variable is missing.”
“Nita,” Dairine said, and let out a breath.
“I think so. Her presence here has become vital. Whatever she went back to Earth to obtain, we’ve got to have it here very soon, or fail.”
Dairine got goose bumps. “And she wasn’t sure what she was going back for,” Dairine said.
“True. Let’s hope that she has it when she arrives; otherwise, all this will have been for nothing. And—”
Spot went silent.
“And?” Dairine said, hugging him a little closer.
“If she doesn’t have whatever it is,” Spot said, “then there is no ‘and.’”
13: Strategic Withdrawal
As Dairine vanished into her pup tent, Kit watched with considerable relief. Dairine could get difficult to deal with when Nita wasn’t around to stomp on her. And just where are you? he thought, glancing at the walls of the cavern as if Nita might suddenly step through one of them.
Ponch had flopped down beside him and was lying on his back again, though his head was turned so that he was watching Memeki. Kit poked him amiably in the gut. “I thought that was just another ploy to get an extra biscuit,” he said under his breath. “I don’t often see you giving food away.”
She was sad, Ponch said. She was sad before, too. That’s why I brought her. None of the others were sad.
They headed into the pup tent together. Kit lay down again, and within a few moments Ponch was lying with his head on Kit’s chest. Kit sighed. “What was Memeki sad about?” he said.
I don’t know, Ponch said. It felt like something wrong had happened to her. I wanted to make her feel better. I thought maybe if she went for a walk with me, I could take her away from the bad thing that made her sad. But it’s still inside her.
And that’s not all, either, Kit thought. He put an arm around Ponch. “Well, you did right,” he said. “We’re going to try to help her, too.”
Good, Ponch said.
Kit breathed out, closed his eyes.
But what if you can’t?
Kit sighed again. It was hard when there wasn’t even an answer that would make sense to a human. But when it was Ponch involved, sometimes the explanations got more involved rather than less. “It’s like this…,” he said, and trailed off, wondering where to go from there.
You were saying about the things you couldn’t talk about.
I was? Kit thought. No, I wasn’t—
And another voice spoke, both seemingly at a distance and very close.
“There is a story that every Yaldah knows for a short while,” it said. “When she’s very new. But knowing the story makes no difference. The ones who know it die, anyway. And speaking it means you die sooner. The wise thing is to forget.”
I was asleep, Kit thought. He realized that the weight on his chest was gone. But he also realized that once again he’d slipped into the upper reaches of Ponch’s mind, so he lay very still, doing nothing to disturb this state in which he could hear what the dog heard, scent what he scented. Right now, Ponch’s world smelled of warm stone, mineral-flake grit, somewhat sweaty or otherwise ripe-smelling humans, various foodstuffs and food wrappings … and the unique scent of a Yaldiv. It was like a more refined version of the crude-oil scent he’d followed here: a hot plastic sort of smell, shifting slightly from moment to moment, with the emotions of the one who spoke.