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And as he tries to let her go, she clings to him, murmuring, "No, not yet. Hold me, just for now.
. . ."
He is afraid, as suddenly he knows that he was afraid all along, that if he felt her body so close to him he would never let her go. But he takes her in his arms 79
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again, sheltering her, answering her need; knowing all the while that it is another man's arms she longs to feel around her.
And as he realizes that even his love is hopeless, he realizes how much he loves her, has always loved her, will love her until he dies. The code that controls his life, that has told him his life is no longer worth living, would have forbidden this love he feels for a barbarian girl as pale as moonlight. ... But her reality makes his Truth as transparent as a lie; she makes his scars invisible.
His
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arms tighten around her; bittersweet longing and desire are all he knows, and all he needs to know.
With a kind of amazement he feels her heartbeat quicken, answering his own. . . .
And then it ends. It always ends. Because it was never real, goddamn it! It was always a dream--even while it was happening. It could never have lasted. Her life was becoming a part of history, and I was nothing but a footnote. I knew it then, in my mind if not my heart.
That's why I left her. . . .
Then, why did leaving Tiamat leave me so empty--?
And when she disappears, why does it leave me so afraid?
The fear spills over into the daytime, until I have to blink my eyes to separate salt and sand from snow.
. . . Spadrin's eyes are not the color of the sky. Ang's eyes are as black as jet, and as impenetrable.
Are we his partners, or his pawns? What really goes on in his mind?
How could he have spent so long out here, and not have been affected somehow by this place . .
. ? He eats and sleeps and stares off into the distance with his lenses as
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if he's alone.
Song's eyes stare into my soul, night after night.
... A sibyl found me once, in the wilderness, and saved me. And now a sibyl calls to me, Come to Fire Lake . . . find me . . . save me. Save me--
So
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I ... What the hell am I saying? I'm tired. . . . I'm just tired, that's all.
Where are my brothers, goddamn them .. . ? What did
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I do with their picture?
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day 48
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padrin did it intentionally. I know he did. He told
Ang it was an accident, and Ang pretends to believe him . . . what else? But I know they're both liars.
I had to work on the rover again today, a little past noon. Something had ripped or come loose underneath the vehicle, and the cab began to overheat. Before long it was worse inside the rover than outside. We had to stop; I had to work on it.
We were passing the foot of a scarp at the time. We all got out; Spadrin and Ang headed for the narrow strip of shade below the cliff face. They slipped and clattered through piles of what I thought was detritus from the slope. But when I followed, I found the piles were really heaps of bleached bones. I looked up the face of the scarp; its rim was like the serrated edge of a knife against the sky, fifty meters above our heads. "Ang?" I asked.
"What happened here? These bones . . ." I'd scarcely seen a living creature larger than an insect since we'd left the mountains. Ang had said most desert creatures were nocturnal, but I could as easily believe they were simply nonexistent.
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Ang settled on an outcrop of sandstone, picking desultorily through the bones with something that might have been a femur. The bones seemed to be from a lot of different species. I wondered how long it had taken for such a monument of death to accumulate here. He 82
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shrugged. "Sometimes it happens out here. Things just go crazy--throw themselves off a cliff, run themselves to death; whole mobs of them. There are other boneyards like this. . . . This one used to be farther north." He shrugged again, as if living in a topologist's nightmare was perfectly natural.
"Why?" I said. "Why do they go mad?" Even as I asked, I thought that maybe he'd already answered me.
"Nobody knows why. Nobody cares, except the bugs." He pointed with his jaw, and I saw the Page 66
line of
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half-meter hummocks that lay baking like loaves of bread in the sun near the rover. Deathwatch beetles-- carrion eaters, the funeral attendants of the waste.
Ang had said they gather around a dying creature, waiting until it's helpless, but not necessarily dead. . . . Like
Spadrin, I thought.
Spadrin was kicking a clear space in the shade with noisy disgust. He sat down, opening a bottle of liquor, and squinted up at me. "Get to work, Tech. It's hot out here."
I put on my sun helmet and took a long drink of water.
Then I went back to the rover and crawled under its front end, shouldering bones and rocks out of my way.
The rover's body absorbed the desert heat and reradiated it. My shirt was soaked with perspiration immediately, and my head began to throb. I hoped I could finish the repairs before I passed out.
Spadrin turned on his receiver; it was picking up some entertainment broadcast on inescapable satellite feed all the way from Foursgate. Strident, insipid music rolled incongruously from the scarp and evaporated into the silence of the desert. Minutes passed like days, but at last I was able to patch the gutted cooling system back together.
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"Ang," I called, "check the cab, will you? Turn on the cooler."
I heard someone come to the rover and climb into the
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cab. After another interminable wait, a pair of desert boots stepped down again into the dust.
"It's working,"
Spadrin's voice said grudgingly. "Took you long enough."
I began to push myself out from under the rover as he stalked back toward the shade. And that was when he did it. As he passed the nearest beetle mound he kicked it, deliberately, caving in its brittle wall.
A stream of sky-colored beetles poured out through the breach. Before I could get to my feet they were swarming all over me, in my clothes, my hair, my mouth--
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I don't remember clearly what happened after that;
except that somehow I found myself naked and reeking of alcohol, bleeding from a hundred tiny, smarting gouges all over my body. Ang stood in front of me, holding a bottle of Spadrin's liquor. He shoved the bottle into my mouth and forced me to take a drink. I coughed and spat it out, struggling to get away from him. I leaned down, groping for my clothes, furious with humiliation.
My clothing was soaked and caked with alcoholic mud;
more bottles--empty ones--lay scattered in the dirt. The beetles were gone. I struggled with my underwear.