“What?” Nightmare dimmed her vision of the room and Elsevier’s anxious face. “I can!” She threw the light of her will against the shadow. “I have to!”
Elsevier held up her hands, half placating, half shielding herself. “No… no. I only meant — I meant that you can’t go home until Cress is strong enough to astrogate again.” The words faded like a lost opportunity.
Moon frowned uncertainly; a veil of doubt still clouded Elsevier’s face. She rubbed at her own, her body sagging with fatigue and disappointment. “I know. I’m sorry.” Her hand groped for the half empty bottle of tranquilizers on the stand beside the bed.
“No.” Elsevier’s dark hand gripped her wrist, drew her arm back. “That isn’t the answer. And you won’t find the answer to your fears by going back to Tiamat; they’ll follow you everywhere, forever, unless you learn what a sibyl really does. And I’m not wise enough to explain that to you, but there’s someone who is. At the first good window we’ll go down to the ground and see my brother-in-law.” She reached out and took the bottle of pills. “It’s something I should have done long before now… but I’m only a foolish old woman.” She stood up, smiling down at Moon’s incomprehension. “I think it will do us all a world of good just to set foot on a real planet again, anyway. Maybe Cress can join us. Rest now, my dear… and pleasant dreams.” She touched Moon’s cheek softly and left the room.
Moon pulled her feet up onto the bed again, smoothed the one thin cover that was all she needed here over her stomach. But there were no sweet dreams waiting in the lifeless night that surrounded this island city or its world. She lay staring at the half-intelligible action flickering eerily through the screen on the wall, her mind and body aching with their separate needs. There was no one in this alien place who could change any of her dreams from dark to light, unless they would let her go home… home… Tears trickled down her cheeks as her eyelids slipped shut.
She rode through the Thieves’ Market in the artificial day, jammed into the crowded spaceport tram with Elsevier and Silky and a rubber-legged Cress, and enough surly commuters to populate an island. The space station’s orbit passed over a window — a transportation and shipping corridor down to the surface of Kharemough
— every few hours; but those were located hundreds or thousands of miles apart on the planet below. Someone who missed a stop would have to wait a full day for it to open again.
There had been no seats when she boarded the tram, but a man had risen from his as she passed and offered it to her inexplicably. She had smiled and given it to Cress when another man stood up for her in turn. Embarrassed, she had pulled Elsevier forward into the seat instead, whispering, “Do they think I’m so pale because I’m sick?”
“No, dear.” Elsevier had frowned mock disapproval and tugged at the hem of her sleeveless, thigh-length yellow tunic. “On the contrary. You really should put on your robe.” She touched the sedate wine-colored garment draped over Moon’s arm.
“It’s too hot.” Moon felt the crisscross of braids she had woven out of the way on top of her head, remembering the voluminous robes and tight-fitting jump suits she had tried on and tossed away in the shops of the Center City Bazaar. She had tried to wear her own clothes, now that they were off the ship, but the air of the station was as warm as blood, and so she wore as little as Elsevier would allow.
“When I was a girl I went covered in veils from head to foot; it was part of a woman’s mystery.” Elsevier arranged the folds of her own loose, color-splashed caftan; her necklace of bells jingled sweetly. “And what I wouldn’t have given to throw them all off and run naked down the street, in the steaming heat of summer. But I never dared.”
Moon clung to the seat back, one step behind a silently miserable Silky, empathizing with his discomfort locked in a press of strangers. She looked out through the open sides of the tram as they passed avenue after avenue of the port’s interstellar community, where Elsevier shared an apartment with Silky and Cress — and now her — in the elegant claustrophobia of Kharemough’s off world ghetto. Already she was lost; she could no more comprehend this city’s pattern than she could the customs of the people who controlled it. All she knew was that it all fit into a hollow ring, with the star port centered in the gap. The Kharemoughis referred to the off world community as the “Thieves’ Market,” and its resident aliens accepted the name with amused perversity. Kharemough dominated the Hegemony because it made the most sophisticated technological items available, and Elsevier had remarked to her one day, not without pride, that “Thieves’ Market” was more truth than slur.
“How did you become a — come to Kharemough, then?” as Elsevier did not go on with her thoughts. It had seemed more and more unlikely to her that this gentle, self-effacing woman would ever have chosen a career that defied anyone, let alone interstellar law.
“Oh, my dear, how I lost my veils and my respectability is a long, dull, involuted story.” But Moon saw the smile that crept out at the corners of her mouth.
“False modesty.” Cress slouched in the seat ahead of them, eyes closed, hands pressing his chest. He had been back from the port hospital for only two daylight periods.
“Cress, are you all right?” Elsevier touched his shoulder.
“Fine, mistress.” He grinned. “All ears.”
She nudged him, leaning back with a shrug of resignation. “Well. I come from Ondinee, Moon, which is a world that would seem even more incomprehensible to you than Kharemough, I’m sure; even though their tech level is not nearly as high. Women in my country were not encouraged—”
“Allowed,” Cress said.
“—to live full lives, the kind you’ve always known.” Her voice drifted above the murmur of conversation like smoke rising into the city haze of another world, in a land dominated by the pyramidal temple-tombs of an ancient theocracy. It was a land where women were bought and sold like bartered goods, and lived in separate quarters within the family compound, apart from the men, who were not their partners but their jealous lords. Their lives followed narrow paths worn deep over generations; lives that were incomplete but reassuringly predictable.
A timid girl called Elsevier — Obedience — had followed the worn paths of tradition, swathed in veils that hid her humanity from view, stumbling often in the ruts of ritual but never seeing her own life from enough of a distance to wonder why. Until one day in the temple square her curiosity had drawn her away from her offertory rounds at the shrines of her patron spirits, into the crowd gathered to hear a crazy off worlder shouting about freedom and equality. He climbed brazenly up the steps of the Great Temple of Ne’ehman, while a gang of radical local youths jammed leaflets into the hands and clothing of anyone who stood still. But the mob had turned angry and ugly, the ruthless Church Security had come to break it up, and in the panic that followed they had thrown everyone they laid hands on into the black vans together.
Elsevier had cowered, beaten down into a corner of the lurching van by the crush of bodies. Pawed and trampled, her veils torn, she had crouched there sobbing, hysterical with fear of defilement or death. But strong hands had seized her suddenly, dragging her to her feet, and held her up against the wall. Mindless with terror, she felt the world turn to water around her, and her body with it… “Don’t faint now, for gods’ sakes! I can’t hold you up forever—” and a slap.
Pain punctured the wall of her madness like a spike. She opened her eyes, whimpering, to see in front of her the haggard, bloodied face of the crazy off worlder the man who had caused this to happen the one man she would love for the rest of her life. But at that moment nothing was further from her mind than love.