Instead, Festina and I hiked down to the shore of Lake Vascho. Neither of us spoke as we walked. We both seemed to have a fondness for quiet.

The wind died. The snow came. Big white flakes sifting down onto the lakeshore. They settled onto the sand, the trees, my hair… Festina’s hair… her eyelashes…

She looked at me looking at her. I pretended I’d been staring at the lake beyond her.

Hard to believe it was the middle of the day. Close to noon, but the clouds were clotted so thick, the world seemed two-thirds to twilight. Everything had got muted down gray. If the wind picked up, started swirling the snow around, we’d have trouble seeing our way back to the skimmer. But why should I worry about getting lost in a blizzard? The Peacock would save me, wouldn’t it? I’m too tired to think about that, I said to myself. Which would have been a good enough excuse to let my old brain coast away from confronting the issue. Didn’t work now. My link-seed’s cruel inability to shut anything out.

Po turzijeff. Kalaff. Not maidservant. Daughter.

Scary enough to knock the breath out of you.

Festina’s voice broke into my thoughts. "What are those things out there? In the ice."

We were standing hard on the edge of the lake — where the sand ran up against the lid of ice covering the water. The things Festina had seen were dark blobs as big as my fist: water-owl eggs, laid in the fall, incubated/frozen all winter long, but due to hatch in another few days, after the ice was gone. The owls were ugly as sin when newborn, slimy oversize tadpoles — nothing a bit like birds. They needed three more months to mature out of their amphibious stage; then they finally became little hoot-fowl, hunting rodents on land and small fish in the water. I started to tell all this to Festina; but the second she found out she was looking at eggs, she got a happy-crazed look in her eye.

"Eggs?" she said. "I collect eggs! I’ve got…" She stopped herself. "I have a collection," she went on, now trying to sound offhanded and only managing stiff. "A collection I could talk about for hours and bore you completely to tears."

I looked at her keenly. For some reason, I said, "I bet you don’t talk about your collection to anyone."

She gave a small laugh, half a second too late to be natural. "True." Her eyes flicked in my direction, but jittered away again the instant she met my gaze. "Look, Faye, I want to try to get one of those eggs. That’s all right, isn’t it?"

I nodded. "Water-owls are as common as bloodflies around here. Nature won’t grudge you taking one." I stepped toward the lake. "We can get a stick to break a hole in the ice surface…"

"You stay here," Festina said. "I’ll do this."

"Sure you don’t want help?"

"You stay back to pull me out if I go through the ice." And she slipped down the shore a ways, making a show of heading for a big branch of driftwood.

A shy and private one, our Festina, at least when it came to eggs. A shy and private one in general maybe, anywhere outside her job.

Made sense to me.

I watched her crouch on the shore, jabbing at the ice with one end of her stick. She’d break a hole through soon enough — it might be snowing now, but five days of thaw had thinned down the ice surface pretty well. Once she got a hole, she could use the same stick to scoop out the egg; after which, she’d have an ugly little owl-pole of her own.

Dads had given me a pet water-owl once upon a time. "Starts off icky, ends up flying"… that’s what he told me. Nature hands us yet another parable. And my owl, Jilly, served up a lesson of her own when she got out of her cage one day and never came back.

Lesson: one by one, things vanish from your life. Pets. People. My father, who I sometimes slapped in the face.

Light flickered beside me. I turned and saw the peacock tube, hovering above the lake, just out of reach… thin at this second, no wider than my outstretched hand. A glance over at Festina; she hadn’t seen it. Snowflakes were falling thick, and she wasn’t looking my way — drawn in on herself, all shy and private.

Fair enough.

The Peacock’s Tail was long now, stretching far over the water till the gold-green-violet disappeared amidst the snow. Its body swayed placidly back and forth, like an eel swimming lazily in calm water.

"What are you?" I asked.

Botjolo, said a sad voice in my head. Cursed. Self-destructive.

The language was Oolom but the voice was my father’s. Dead these twenty-seven years.

A moment later, the Peacock was gone.

Festina came toward me, a blob of gooey-jell cradled in both hands. "I’ve got an egg!" she announced. Her hair was speckled with snow, her eyes bright.

"You know you’ve got to keep that in water," I said. "Otherwise, it won’t hatch."

"Hatch?" She looked down in surprise at the lump in her hands. "Right. It’s going to hatch. I’d been thinking…" She broke off. "I only collect eggs. Just the eggs. I’ve never had… what happens when it hatches?"

"The owl-pole eats the egg jelly," I told her. "That’s what the baby lives on for the first few days. Till it’s ready to swim on its own. There’s nothing left of the egg after."

"Oh," Festina murmured. "Oh." She lifted the handful of jelly up to face level and stared at it. Eye to eye.

"They make nice pets," I said. "If you handle them gentle right from the first, they get fair affectionate. They’re a snuggling kind of species."

"I’m sure," Festina answered. "But no." She looked at the egg again. "I’d better put you back."

Slow walk to the hole in the ice. We went together… or maybe Festina went alone, and I just walked beside her. She knelt and slipped the egg back into the water; it bobbed on the surface, the way a snowball floats when you drop it in a creek. "Is that what it’s supposed to do?" she asked.

"It’ll be fine."

"I want to tell it to grow up big and strong," she said, "but that’s so damned maudlin."

"What’s wrong with maudlin? Weep bitter tears of loss, and I’ll never tell a soul."

She was kneeling, I was standing beside her. I bent over and gave a quick kiss to the top of her head. Her hair. She tilted her head around to look at me, her face, my face…

Then a skimmer flew overhead. The Medical Threat Team arriving.

"We’d better get back," Festina said. My mouth was open to say the same thing.

At least I think that’s why my mouth was open.

By the time we got back to the others, the Medical Threat folks were lumbering around in bright orange tightsuits, half of them plodding into the mine while the rest set up shop outside — quite the impressive pathology lab, laid out under a dome field, where we all got examined for the disease.

Simple summary of the next three hours: we were clean, Iranu was not. The deceased was hot, hot, hot — infected from ear-lids to toenails with our old friend Pteromic Paralysis. Or rather our friend’s newly arrived cousin, Pteromic B… kissing close to the original microbe, but with enough differences that it could now affect Freeps.

We prayed to all the saints this variant was different in other ways too. The original, Pteromic A, had turned out to have a latency period of six months, during which carriers showed no symptoms but were oozing contagious; that’s how the disease had spread to every Oolom on the planet without anyone noticing. Iranu had been down in this mine at most three months… so if the old pattern held, he could have been infecting people three months before he vanished from sight.

That meant all the Freeps at the trade talks. The Ooloms and humans too. Every blessed soul On Demoth could have been exposed, depending on how many species Pteromic B affected.

"If I were a Freep," Yunupur whispered to me, "I’d buy a shitload of stock in olive-oil futures."