Hatred smouldered. “I loved her; and she’s gone.” He dropped his gaze, pushed on by her, not looking back.
Jerusha stood still in the street for a long moment before she realized that he had given her the reason why. And then she went on to the botanery entrance, dazed, like a woman caught in a spell.
She stood in the cramped aisle before the dusty shelves that held what she had come for; blind to the bittersweet nostalgia of the place, the stubborn refusal of Newhaven tradition to conform to the standards of a new age or another world. She ignored the clusters of dragons foot the festoons of garlanded herbs, the wild tangle of odors in caressing assault on her senses; was deaf to
“Were you speaking to me?” She became abruptly, resentfully aware that she was not standing there alone any longer.
“Yes. They seemed to have moved the powdered louge. Would you know where—?” A dark-haired, fair-skinned, middle-aged woman; probably a local. Blind — Jerusha recognized the light-sensor band she wore across her forehead.
Jerusha glanced over the shelves, saw the shopkeeper caught up in animated gossip with some other Newhaven expatriate; looked back. “It’s by the rear wall, I think.” She stepped toward the shelves to let the blind woman pass.
But the woman stayed aggravatingly in the aisle, her head bent slightly as though she were still listening. “Inspector… PalaThion, isn’t it?”
“Commander PalaThion.” She returned contempt with barely concealed contempt.
“Of course. Forgive me.”
When the sun turns black. Jerusha looked away.
“The last time I heard your voice you were still Inspector PalaThion. I never forget a voice; but sometimes I forget my manners.” She smiled in good-humored apology, radiated it, until unwillingly Jerusha felt her own habitual frown letting go. “It’s been nearly five years. My shop is next door… I came to your station one time with Sparks Dawntreader.”
“The mask maker Jerusha pinned an identity on the woman at last. “Yes, I remember. I remember, all right. Saving that little BAStard was the second biggest mistake of my life.
“I saw you talking to him outside.” (Saw? Jerusha experienced a moment’s disorientation as it registered; tried to conceal her obvious irritation.) “He still comes to see me now and then; when he needs ; shelter. There aren’t many people he can talk to any more, I think. I’m glad he talked to you.”
Jerusha said nothing.
“Tell me, Commander — have you been as sorry to see the changes happening in him as I have?” She bridged the void of Jerusha’s silence as though it did not exist.
Jerusha refused to face the question, or the questioner; touched the hollows of her own changed face with morbid fingers. “He hasn’t changed at all as far as I can see. He doesn’t look a day older.” And maybe he isn’t, damn him!
“But he is, he has…” heavily. “He’s aged a hundred years since he came to Carbuncle.”
“Haven’t we all?” Jerusha reached out and took a small dark plastic bottle of viriol oil off of the shelf, hesitated; took another one. She thought suddenly of her mother.
“Sleeping drops, aren’t they?”
Jerusha’s hand knotted possessively, defensively, over the bottles. “Yes.”
A nod. “I can smell them.” The woman grimaced. “I’ve used them; I had insomnia terribly, before I got my vision sensors. I tried everything. Without sight I didn’t have any guide to the pattern of day and night… and I’m not properly tuned to Tiamat’s rhythms. I suppose none of us are, really. We’re all aliens here in the end — or the beginning.”
Jerusha glanced up. “I suppose so. I never thought of it that way… Maybe that’s my whole problem: Wherever I go, I’m an alien.” She heard herself say aloud what she had only intended as thought; shook her head, past caring. “The more I want sleep the less I get it. Sleep is my only pleasure in life. I could sleep forever.” She turned, tried to move past the woman to the shop man at the door.
“That isn’t the way to solve your problems, Commander PalaThion.” The mask maker blocked her path without seeming to.
Jerusha stared, felt her legs turn to soft wood. “What?”
“Sleeping drops. They only make the problem worse. They take away your dreams… we all have to dream, sometime, or we suffer the consequences.” She reached out; her touch wavered toward the handful of bottles Jerusha held, pushed them away. “Find a better answer. There must be one. This will pass. Everything passes, given enough time.”
“It would take an eternity.” But the pressure remained against her hand… against her will… she felt her hand give way and the bottles go back onto the shelf.
“A wise decision.” The mask maker smiled, looking through her, into her.
Jerusha made no answer, not even certain how to answer.
The woman stood aside at last, somehow releasing her as she had somehow held her prisoner; moved past her toward the shelves at the rear of the store. Jerusha went on to the door and out, without buying anything, or even speaking to the shop man.
Why did I listen to her? Jerusha reclined, motionless, on an elbow on the low serpentine couch. She absorbed the sensation of cotton wrapped twigs that crept inexorably from hand to wrist to elbow as her arm went to sleep. Each time she entered this place a paralysis seemed to overcome her, destroying her ability to act or even react, to function, to think. She watched the seconds blink out on the sterile clock face embedded in crystal in the sterile matrix of empty shelving that cobwebbed the room’s far wall. Gods, how she hated the sight of this place, every lifeless centimeter of it-It was just as it had been when the LiouxSkeds departed, the same facade insulating its occupants from the timeless reality of the building and the city that had surrounded them.
They had affected a Kharemoughi lifestyle with excruciating dedication: a sophisticated, refined, and soulless imitation of a lifestyle she found obscure and unappealing to begin with. The patina of her own possessions scarcely altered it. She fantasized an overlay of ornate, rococo frescoes and molding, the unashamed warmth of a palette of garish colors everywhere… closed her eyes with her hand as the unrelenting subtlety of the truth seeped through like water, to make the colors blur and bleed.
This place hung with ugly memories had been forced on her — a part of her burden, her punishment. She could have struck back, cleared this mausoleum of its morbid relics and replaced them with things fresh and alive… she could even have gotten rid of it entirely, gone back to her old, cramped, comfortable set of rooms down in the Maze. But always, when her day’s work was through, she had returned here and done nothing, one more time. Because what was the point? It was useless, hopeless… helpless… She lifted her locked hands to her mouth, pressed hard against her lips. They’re watching, stop it—!
She sat up, pulling her hands away, bowing her head so that the caftan’s hood fell forward about her face. The Queen’s spies, the Queen’s eyes, were everywhere — especially, she was sure, in this townhouse. She felt them touching her like unclean hands, everywhere she went, everything she did. In her old apartment she had been free to be human, free to be herself, and live her own heritage . free to strip off her chafing, puritanical uniform and go easily naked if she wanted to, the way she had been able to do on her own world, the way her people had done for centuries. But here she was always on display for the Queen’s pleasure, afraid to expose herself, physically or mentally, to the White Bitch’s unseen scorn.
She picked up the tape reader that had dropped to the floor, gazed at without seeing the manual on ultrasound analysis that she had been trying to study for a week… two weeks… forever. She had never been one to enjoy fiction, in any form: she heard too many lies on the streets every day, she had no patience with people who made a living doing it. And now she could no longer concentrate on facts. But still she could not let go and allow herself to escape into fantasy… the way BZ had always done, so easily, so guiltlessly. But then, to be a Kharemoughi Tech was to live in a fantasy world anyway, one where everyone knew his place, and yours was always on top. Where life functioned with perfect machinery . only this time the machinery had broken down, and the chaos that waited outside had rushed in to destroy him.