She lifted her own gloved hand to her throat, where pain was spreading from ear to ear, chin to breastbone; shielding her wound, shielding the trefoil from his gaze. “Moon,” she whispered, not sure why she gave her name, but grateful that she still had a voice left to speak it. “Sibyl—” her voice roughened, “yes, I am! And I tell you that you’ve committed murder. You have no right to hunt these lands. And no man has the right to murder an intelligent being!” She swept a hand toward the carnage on the beach, not following it with her eyes. “It’s murder, murder!”

His eyes followed, came back as green and hard as emeralds. “Shut up, damn you—” But they stayed on her face, incredulous, demanding, and his hands knotted on his knees. “Damn you, damn you! What are you doing here? How could you come here, to see me like this? After you left me — I could kill you for this!” He twisted his head, wrenching his eyes away, throwing the words into the wind.

“Yes! Yes! Kill me too, mer slayer, sibyl slayer, coward — and damn yourself!” She bared her throat to him again, grimacing with the motion. “Spill my blood, and take its curse on you!” She stretched out her bloody fingers, trying to reach him, wound him, infect him But her hand lost its strength, fell from the air forgotten, as she saw at last the symbol that gleamed on his black suit: the circle sign crossed and recrossed, the sign of the Hegemony; the medal that she had seen every day of her life in Summer… Her hand rose again, and he did not stop her from touching it. Slowly, slowly, she lifted her eyes, knowing that in another moment she would — “No!” His fist came at her without warning and crushed her into blackness.

31

“Hello, Miroe.” Jerusha climbed out of the patrol craft wearing her uniform and her best imitation smile. The wind clapped its chill hands on her shoulders, tried to jerk her half-sealed coat open for ruder intimacies. Damn this weather! Her smile struggled.

“Jerusha?” Ngenet came striding down the slope from the outbuildings, summoned by field hands who had seen her coming in.

His own widening smile of welcome looked real to her, and hers began to warm. But she read ambivalence in the glance that took in her uniform before it met her eyes. “It’s been a long time.”

“Yes.” She nodded, an excuse to look down, wondering if time was all that lay behind his hesitation. “I know. How — how’ve you been, Miroe?”

“About the same. Everything’s about the same.” He pushed his hands into his parka pockets, shrugged. “It usually is. Is this official business, or strictly a social call?” He peered past her into the empty patrol craft

“A little of both, I guess,” trying to make it sound casual. She saw his mouth tighten ever so slightly, twitching his mustache. “That is, we had a report on a tech runner downed near here” — fully two or three weeks ago—”and since I was in the area checking it out…”

“The Commander of Police chasing down strays in the outback? Since when?” amused.

“Well, I was the only one they could spare.” She grinned ruefully, stretching the unused muscles in her cheeks.

Laughter. “Damn it, Jerusha, you know you don’t need an official excuse to come by here. You’re welcome any time… as a friend.”

“Thank you.” She understood the qualification and was grateful for it. “It’s nice to be singled out as a human being for a change, and not as a Blue.” She plucked at her coat, suddenly embarrassed by it. My shield, my armor. What will I do when they take it away from me? “I… I tried to call you, a couple of weeks ago. But you were gone.” It occurred to her suddenly to wonder why he hadn’t returned the call. Gods, who could blame him, when I never returned any of his?

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t—” He seemed to reach the same question, without finding an answer either. “You’ve been — busy, I suppose.”

“Busy! Oh, hell and devils, it’s been… sheer hell, and devils.” She leaned against the patrol craft pulled down the door and slammed it. “BZ is gone, Miroe. Dead. Killed by bandits outside the city. And I just can’t… I can’t stand it any more.” Her head bowed in invisible bondage. “I don’t know how I’ll be able to stand going back to Carbuncle again. When all I can think of is how much better it would be for everyone, how glad everyone would be, if I never came back at all. How much better it would be if I’d been the one who’d been lost.”

“By all the gods, Jerusha — why didn’t you tell me?”

She turned away from his outstretched hand, leaning on the hood, looking desperately out to sea. “I didn’t come here to — to use you for a garbage can, damn it!”

“Of course you did. What are friends for?” She heard his smile.

“I did not!”

“All right. Then why not? Why not?” He pulled at her elbow.

“Don’t touch me. Please, Miroe, don’t.” She felt his hand release her, felt her arm still tingling with the contact. “I can handle it. I’ll be all right, I can handle it alone.” Her control hung by a thread.

“And you feel like dying is the way to do it?”

“No!” She brought her fist down on the cold metal. “No. That’s why I had to get away… I had to find some other way.” She turned back, slowly, but with her eyes shut.

He was silent for a moment, waiting. “Jerusha — I know the kind of screws they’ve been putting to you, all this time. You can’t handle that kind of pressure by holding it all back. You can’t do it alone.” Suddenly almost angry, “Why did you stop calling? Why did you stop — answering? Didn’t you trust me?”

“Too much.” She pressed her mouth together, stopping an absurd giggle. “Oh, gods. I trust you too much! Look at me, I haven’t been here five minutes and already I’ve spilled my guts to you. Just seeing you breaks me down.” She shook her head, keeping her eyes closed. “You see. I can’t lean on you, without becoming a cripple.”

“We’re all cripples, Jerusha. We’re born crippled.”

Slowly she opened her eyes. “Are we?”

He stood with hands locked behind him, looking out toward the , sea. The wind stiffened, whipping his raven-feather hair; she shrank down inside her heavy coat. “You know the answer, or you wouldn’t ] have come. Let’s go up to the house.” He looked back at her; she ] nodded.

She followed him up the hill, making hesitant small talk about crops and weather, letting all her resistance flow out of her and down to the sea. They passed the creaking windmill that stood like a lonely sentinel over the outbuildings. He used it to pump water from his well; it occurred to her again, as it had occurred to her before, ; that it was an absurd anachronism on a plantation that functioned ‘ on imported power units.

“Miroe, I’ve always wondered why you use that thing to power your pump.”

He glanced back at her, away at the windmill, said good-naturedly, “Well, you took away my hovercraft, Jerusha. You can never tell when I might lose my generators.”

It was not the answer she had been expecting, but she only shook her head. They reached the main house, went in through the storm shuttered porch, into the room she still remembered perfectly from the first time; and from the handful of stolen evenings in the years since then that she had spent cross-legged before the fire, wrapped in warmth and golden light, caught up in a game of 3D chama or feeding Miroe’s quiet fascination with her reminiscences about another world.

She pulled off her helmet, shook out her dark curls. She let her eyes wander over the comfortable junk-shop homeliness of the room, where relics of his off worlder ancestors, heirlooms by default, kept uneasy truce with rough-hewn native furniture. Moving to the broad stone hearth she turned to face him, letting her back begin to thaw. “You know, after all this time I feel like I haven’t even been away. Funny, isn’t it, how some places are like that?”