Felice said nothing. After a while the nun said, “Perhaps you could get another.”

There was a sigh. “They know about me now, so it will be very dangerous. But I’ll have to try. Maybe waylay another caravan, or even go to Finiah. It’ll be hard and I’ll need help.”

“We’ll help.”

Felice laughed softly.

“I’ll help. I won’t be retiring to any hermitage for quite some time yet.”

“Ah. That’s… good. I need your help, Amerie. I need you.”

“Felice. Don’t misunderstand.”

“Oh, I know all about your little vow of renunciation. But that was made six million years ago in a different world. Now I think you need me as much as I need you.”

“I need your protection. We all do.”

“You need more than that.”

Amerie backed away, tripped over a rock and fell, tearing open the scabbed cuts on her hands.

“Let me help you up,” said Felice.

But the nun scrambled to her feet unaided and turned back toward the glowing remnants of the campfire where the others were sleeping. She stumbled and clenched her fingers into the lacerated palms so that her nails opened the cut even more, while behind her Felice laughed in the darkness.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“He’s ready, Sukey. You must take the final discharge.”

“But, can I? I could botch it again, Elizabeth.”

“You won’t. You’ll be able to handle this aspect of his healing. He wouldn’t let me, but you can do it. Don’t be afraid.”

“All right. Just let him come out of the torc’s neural bath slowly. I’m ready.”

…Illinois cornfields, flat as a table and stretching from horizon to horizon, with the toy farmhouse and outbuildings lonely amid the immensity. Sitting in one of the cornrows, a three-year-old boy and an Alsatian bitch. The boy, clever with his hands and mischievous, circumvents a childproof fastener and removes a beeper-trace from his jeans. He offers it to the bitch. She is pregnant and of capricious appetite, and so she swallows it. The boy rises from the ground and toddles off down the row toward an interesting noise in the far distance. The bitch, unsatisfied by her electronic snack, runs toward the farmhouse where lunch is being prepared…

“No! I can’t go there again!”

“Hush. Easy. You’re close, so close.”

…A robot harvester, nearly as large as the farmhouse and bright orange, moves along, swallowing the corn plants in a thirty-row swath, grinding the stalks and leaves to useful pulp, shelling the ears, long as a man’s forearm, and packing the rich golden kernels into containers for shipment to other farms all over the Galactic Milieu. This new maize hybrid will yield twenty cubic meters of grain to the hectare…

“I don’t want to look. Don’t make me look.”

“Be calm. Be easy. Come with me. Only once more.”

…The little boy wanders down the straight row where the black soil has baked to crumbly gray dust. Gigantic plants loom over him, tassels brown against the sky, swollen cobs jutting from the stalks ripe and ready for harvest. The boy walks on toward the noise but it is far away from him and so he must sit down and rest for a while. He leans against a cornstalk thick as the trunk of a young tree, and the broad green leaves shade him from the sun’s heat. He closes his eyes. When he opens them again, the noise is very much louder and the air is full of dust…

“Please. Please.”

“You must go there one last time. But I’m with you. It’s the only way out for you.”

…Wonderment becomes unease becomes fear as the little boy sees an orange monster chewing toward him, its robot brain conscientiously scanning the rows ahead for signals from a beeper-trace that would trigger instant emergency shut-off. But there is no signal. The machine moves on. The boy runs ahead of it, easily outdistancing the harvester’s steady one-klom-per-hour pace…

“She knew! She looked for me on the scanner at lunchtime and only found the dog, sending two signals instead of one there in the yard. She knew I had to be out in the fields. She called Daddy to have him stop the harvester and look for me, but there was no answer. He was outside the farm contower trying to fix a stuck rotor on one of the antennas.”

“Yes. Go on. You can see her looking for you in the egg.”

…The little boy dashes on, too inexperienced to realize that he should move to the side, out of range of the machines, instead of continuing down the row immediately ahead of it. He runs faster and a stitch comes in his side. He begins to whimper and runs more slowly. He trips, falls, gets up and staggers on with tears blinding his bright-blue eyes. Up in the air an egg-flier hovers over him. He stops and waves his arms, screaming for his mother. The harvester moves along, cutting the stalks off at ground level, hauling them into its maw on a spiked conveyor, chopping, shredding, plucking the kernels from the cobs, reducing the rows of giant plants to neat packages of grain and finely ground cellulose pulp…

“No. Please, no more.”

“You must. We must. Once more and then gone forever. Trust me.”

…The egg lands and the child stands stock-still, waiting for his mother to save him, weeping and holding out his arms as she runs toward him, picks him up, with the noise louder and louder and the dust swirling about them in the hot sun. She holds him close to her as she pushes obliquely through the tough, impeding stalks while the great orange thing moves on, cutter beams and carrying spikes and whirling knives at work. But the fifteen meters she must traverse are too far. She gasps and lifts the boy high and throws him, so that the green com plants and the orange machine and the blue sky all spin very slowly around him. He falls to the earth and the harvester rumbles past with the busy clanking of its machinery drowning out another noise that did not last very long…

“Oh, Jesus, I can still hear please no the machine stops and he comes and screams at me you murdering little animal Gary Gary oh my God no Daddy Daddy Mommy fell help her oh my God Gary you did it to save him and he killed you and it’s his fault the murdering little animal no no what am I saying God my own little boy Steinie I’m sorry I didn’t mean it oh God Gary Steinie… Daddy please keep me.”

“He did. Stein.”

“I know now.”

“You heard it all? All that he said?”

“Yes. Poor Daddy. He couldn’t help saying it. I know now. Angry and frightened and helpless. I understand. He shot the dog, though… But I don’t have to be afraid. He couldn’t help it. Poor Daddy. I understand. Thank you. Thank you.”

Stein opened his eyes.

An unfamiliar woman’s face was very near to him, sun-reddened round cheeks, a turned-up nose, intent indigo eyes set a bit too closely together. She smiled.

He said, “And I don’t have to be angry at either one of us.”

“No,” Sukey said. “You’ll be able to remember and feel sad. But you’ll be able to accept it. No guilt or fear or anger about this part of your life ever again.”

Stein lay without speaking, and she let her mind merge with his in a touch that admitted a sharing of his ordeal, bespoke her care for him.

“You’ve been helping me,” he said. “Healing me. And I don’t even know your name.”

“I’m Sue-Gwen Davies. My friends call me Sukey. It’s a silly sort of name…”

“Oh, no.” He got up onto one elbow and studied her with an innocent curiosity. “You went through the auberge training program, too. I saw you, the first and second days I was there. And then you were gone. You must have passed through the gate ahead of our Group Green.”

“I was in Group Yellow. I remember you, too. That Viking costume isn’t easy to miss.”

He grinned and shook sweat-touseled eflocks out of his eyes. “It seemed like a good idea back then. Sort of reflection of my personality… What are you supposed to be?”

She gave a self-conscious little laugh and toyed with the embroidered belt of her long gown. “An ancient Welsh princess. My family came from there a long time ago and I thought it might be fun. A complete break with my old life.”