And even if all of that was completely wrong, I didn’t care. I simply needed a break.
Cord spent a lot of time talking on the jeejah with Rosk. She’d kissed him goodbye on the Samble village green. He had to go back home and work. Now there were issues of some kind to be worked out. They didn’t have just one long conversation on the jeejah. Instead they made and broke contact ten or so times. It got on my nerves and I wished we’d get to some wild reach where her link wouldn’t work. But after a while I got used to it and started to wonder: if Rosk and Cord had to do so much communicating to rig for a few days’ separation, what did that imply for me and Ala? I couldn’t stop recalling the shocked look on Tulia’s face as we had pulled out yesterday afternoon. Part of which, I was sure, came from her thinking I was being beastly to Ala.
“Is there currently a mechanism in place for sending letters?” I asked Cord during a breather between micro-conversations with Rosk.
“From here it’ll take some doing, but the answer is yes,” she said. Then she got a big smile. “You want to write to a girl, Raz?”
Since I’d never mentioned Ala to her and had asked my question in such a colorless way, I was shocked and then quite irritated that she had figured this out with no effort. She was still deriving joy from the look on my face when her jeejah twittered and gave me a few minutes to get my composure back.
“Tell me about her,” Cord demanded, as soon as she disconnected.
“Ala. You met her. She’s the one—”
“I remember Ala. I liked her!”
“Really? That was not obvious to me.”
“That and so many other things,” Cord said, in such an airy, innocent voice that it almost slipped by me. Then I had to spend a minute being silent and dignified.
“She and I have hated each other pretty much our whole lives,” I said. “Especially recently. Then we started something. It was pretty sudden. Really wonderful though.”
Cord gave me a grateful smile and almost swerved off the road.
“The next day she was Evoked. This was before we knew it was going to become a Convox, so in effect she was dead to me after that. This was, I guess, pretty upsetting to me. I sort of put it out of my mind by working. Then when I got Evoked yesterday—which seems like ten years ago now—it opened up the possibility that I might see her again. But then a few hours later I decided to make this little detour—which just turned into a bigger detour. As a matter of fact, I am technically a Feral now and so I might never see her again because of the way I just let Fraa Jad push me around. So you might say things are complicated. Hard to say just how long I’d have to spend on a jeejah with her, sorting this one out.”
Cord took another call from Rosk then, and by the time she was finished, I was ready with more: “Mind you, I’m not just whining about my own situation here. Everything’s confused. This is the biggest upheaval since the Third Sack. So many weird things are going on—it almost makes a mockery of the Discipline.”
“But your way isn’t just that set of rules,” Cord said. “It’s who you are—you follow that way for bigger reasons. And as long as you stay true to that, the confusion you’re talking about will sort itself out eventually.”
I would have been fine with that except for one problem: it sounded like the mentality that Edharians were accused of having by people who believed in all of that Lineage stuff that Criscan had been telling us about. So an instinct told me to say nothing.
Then Cord sprang the trap on me: “And likewise you could drive yourself crazy trying to sort through all of these ins and outs in your relationship with Ala, but if you send her a letter—which is a great idea—you shouldn’t get into all of that. Just skip it.”
“Skip it?”
“Yeah. Just tell her how you feel.”
“I feel jerked around. That’s how I feel. You want me to say that?”
“No, no, no. Tell her how you feel about her.”
My gaze dropped to her jeejah, sitting on the seat between us, silent for once. “Are you sure you haven’t been taking calls from Tulia on that thing? Because I have the feeling you guys have your own private reticule. Like—”
“Like the Ita?” This would have been insulting if I’d said it, but she thought it was hilarious. We both looked up the road at the back of Sammann’s head silhouetted against his jeejah screen. “That’s right,” Cord said, “we’re the girl Ita and if you don’t do what we say, we’re going to Throw the Book at you!”
Cord had a notebook that she used as a maintenance log for her fetch, so I used a blank page to begin a letter to Ala. This went about as badly as it was possible for a written document to go. I tore it out and started again. I couldn’t get used to the way the disposable poly pen shat pasty ink onto the slick machine-made paper. I tore it out and started yet again.
I had to suspend work on the fourth draft because Ganelial Crade had led us off the paved road and onto a dirt track better suited for his fetch than for Cord’s. The lower, south-facing slopes of the mountains were covered with fuel tree plantations and crisscrossed with dirt roads such as this one, alive with rampaging log trucks, dusty and dangerous to us. We spent an unpleasant half-hour getting through that zone. Then we climbed to where the growing season was too short and the grades too steep for that industry, or indeed for any kind of economic activity save recreation.
He led us to a beautiful camping place at the edge of a tarn in the hills. People came here to hunt in the autumn, he said, but no one was here today. All of our equipment was new and we had to take it out of boxes and dispose of the wrappers and tags and instruction manuals before we could do anything with it. We started a bonfire with these and sustained it with fallen dead timber. As the sun went down, this settled to a bed of coals on which we cooked cheeseburgs. Cord bedded down in her fetch and the three men got ready to share a tent. I stayed up late and finished my letter to Ala by firelight. Which was a good way to do it; the seventh draft was short and simple. I just kept asking myself: if fate had it that we’d never see each other again, what would I need to say to her?
The next day started out refreshingly devoid of great events, new people, and astonishing revelations. We got up slowly in the cold, lighted the stove, heated up some rations, and got on the road. Crade was happy. It was not in his nature to be that way but he was happy here and now, strutting all over the place telling us the best way to pack our bedrolls and attending to every detail of the camp stove as if it were a nuclear reactor. But he was much easier to be around in such circumstances, where he actually had something to do with all of his energies. I decided that he was too intelligent for his circumstances and that he’d missed an opportunity to be an avout. If he’d been born among the slines he’d have ended up on a concent. Instead he’d landed among a sect that valued his brains too much to let him go. But his brains had no purpose there. Anyway, he was used to being the only smart person within a hundred miles and now that he’d been thrown together with other smart people he didn’t know how to behave.
Sammann was badly out of his element—he could hardly pick up anything on his jeejah—but he managed well, as if prolonged suffering were a standard part of the Ita tool kit. He had a shoulder bag that was for him what Cord’s vest was for her, and he kept pulling out useful tools and gadgets. Or so it seemed to me, as I was not used to owning things.
Cord was quiet unless I looked at her, whereupon she’d become grumpy. I was bored and impatient. When we finally got going again, I guessed it must be about midday. But according to the clock in Cord’s fetch, midday was not for another three hours.
We went up into the mountains. This was new to me. Any travel would have been new to me. When I’d been a kid, before I’d been Collected, I’d left town a few times—tagging along on trips that my elders made to visit friends or kin in the near country. After I’d joined the Concent, of course, I hadn’t traveled at all. And I hadn’t missed it. I hadn’t known what there was to miss. Up in those hills and mountains, seeing natural leads of open space through the forest, pale green meadows, old logging roads, abandoned fortresses, decrepit cabins, and collapsed palaces, I began to think of these as places I might go, if I had the time to stop and go for a walk. In that way the landscape was altogether different from the concent, all of whose paths had been trodden for thousands of years, and where going into the cellar of Shuf’s Dowment seemed intrepid. It made me wonder where my mind might ramble, and where events might take me, now that circumstances had forced me to leave the concent and venture into such places.