The Sending Page 9

  I read through all of the dream-books without finding any other references to Miryum or Straaka that were not connected to their time at Obernewtyn. Closing the last book, I reflected that most of the significant entries had been made at the beginning of the dream-book in the months following Miryum’s disappearance, but none had given the slightest hint as to what had become of them.

  As I undressed and climbed into bed, I thought of the descriptions of Miryum lying down with her eyes closed. Linnet had trouble believing the coercer could be a captive because Miryum was a powerful coercer as well as being skilled in the use of weapons and in the use of her own body as a weapon. But what if she had been wounded and had been unable to use her Misfit powers? If so, her captors might not even know that she was a Misfit.

  Outside, it began to rain again and I thought of Maruman and hoped the old cat had somewhere warm and dry to sleep. Gradually fatigue flowed over me in a soft, unstoppable tide and I sank to the level of the mind where memories floated and wavered like waterweeds and fish at the bottom of a deep pond. Before I could summon the will to shield myself, I was absorbed by a memory-dream of the cul-de-sac in the White Valley where we had led a horde of soldierguards to what Malik had told us would be a benevolent trap.

  The memory had been stirred to life by my thoughts about the past, I realised dimly, but instead of trying to pull free of it, I rode passively in my remembered self, knowing I would see more in this way than by withdrawing to watch the dream from without. I felt my unease as I waited for the rebel Malik to reveal himself as had been agreed, and order our pursuers to lay down their weapons.

  I felt myself stretch out a probe, searching for Malik and his men. I could sense blocked minds and wondered why the rebels did not reveal themselves. I had not known it then, but Malik and his armsmen were wearing demon bands to prevent our being able to enter their minds. The soldierguards we had lured into the clearing were no less confused to discover that they had been pursuing young people and children instead of the hardened rebels they had expected. But I watched their faces change as they remembered that, for all our youth, we were Misfits.

  With a feeling of terrible dreamy helplessness, I watched the soldierguards nocking arrows and unsheathing swords and knives, and then horses arrayed themselves as a living barrier. Of course the soldierguards had assumed we were coercing the horses, and it had only increased their superstitious fear of us. Certain we were about to command the horses to trample them, their leader signalled and a volley of arrows flew. Even though I knew the tragedy was long past, my heart reared in agony as one horse after another was hit and several fell screaming while others plunged and bucked in pain.

  Then Angina, who had been unable to bear the massacre, stepped out to protest the innocence of the beasts.

  I watched the young empath crumple when an arrow struck him, the shock I had felt then intensified by my knowledge of what had come of the wound. I noticed that the soldierguard who had shot him went to lean down over the boy, but my remembered self was already turning away. Then I saw Straaka throw himself in front of Miryum and heard the guttural grunt of pain as the arrow meant for her bedded itself in the tribesman’s chest. As he fell the coercer caught him in her arms, but his weight bore her to her knees. Her face was ashen and I saw in that moment, as my remembered self had not, that Miryum had loved Straaka after all. Her expression told me that she had not known it until that moment and I wondered if it was not the tragedy of this belated realisation of love that had overborne her mind and made her run with the tribesman’s body.

  The dream memory faded into a darkness in which I heard the mournful howling of wolves, which carried me into another dream memory.

  I had been forking hay in the cow barn for Louis Larkin, with the dog Sharna, who had been my first beastfriend at Obernewtyn, when Ariel’s poor caged wolves had suddenly begun to howl.

  ‘What do they say?’ I asked Sharna, for, having lived in the wild, he had the knack of understanding the thick complex voices of wild beasts better than I.

  ‘Their calls are songs of madness. But there is a kind of beauty in them and even a strange wisdom.’

  ‘I wish we could free them,’ I said fiercely.

  ‘Free them we might, for so did my own dam free some of the caged wolves before she took to the wild and bore me.’

  ‘But the cages …’

  ‘Were different then,’ Sharna said. ‘Teeth could chew, noses could push.’

  ‘Your mother lived here before you were born?’ I asked, fascinated.

  ‘She did. She was young when she freed the wolves, a male and a female from the same litter,’ Sharna said. ‘She and the rest of her litter were locked in with the young wolves soon after they were brought to the barud. It was hoped that this would soften the wolf cubs and make them easier to control, but they killed two male pups and they would have killed my mother if she had not been female.’

  ‘Yet still she freed the wolves?’

  ‘After she was taken from the cage. It was a bitter winter, she said, and wolves had come down from the high mountains to hunt. Night after night she heard the caged wolves calling to them and she could not bear their yearning. She gnawed through the bindings and pushed until the door could open. All but the two were killed escaping and my mother was badly hurt. Luckily the funaga thought she had been trying to attack the wolves and she was not punished. But the wolf song had sung itself into her, and she could not stomach to be where the funaga were. So she left the barud.’ Sharna looked at me. ‘My mother was not a wild wolf but she was clever and she survived. I was born wild, but the mad halfwolves we hear would perish if we freed them, for all they are wild, for they have no mind left.’

  ‘Why did you come back to Obernewtyn?’ I asked, curious, but the dream fell into darkness and I felt it shift, then I was standing in a narrow passage without lantern or window. It was too dark to see so I groped my way forward, grimacing when I put my hands into a net of webs and felt the soft stickiness of the strands. The air was dry and dusty and I stifled the urge to cough as I passed along the passage. Then I saw light ahead, and felt the feathery cold touch of a breeze.

  I moved forward more eagerly, only to hear a muffled growl.

  ‘I will distract them,’ Sharna’s voice spoke in my mind, and all at once I understood what I was remembering.

  ‘No!’ I cried out along with my memory self, knowing he meant to engage Ariel’s mad wolves so that I could slip by them unharmed. I grieved at the knowledge that the maddened beasts were already tearing at Sharna, killing him, even as my remembered self ran across the courtyard, praying he would get away. My memory self hurled her body into the pipe Rushton had described, and began to crawl, weeping wildly at the sudden devastating awareness that Sharna was sacrificing himself for her.

  Reliving the horror and sorrow I had felt as I heard the sounds of the brief battle, I was struck by the injustice of the fact that Sharna had been killed by wolves when his mother had near died trying to save wolves. But Sharna had not sacrificed himself for the wolves, nor even, as I had believed at the time, for his friend Elspeth. He had given his life because he had believed, as so many beasts did, that I was destined to free beasts from human dominance. That he had loved me and wanted to protect me even at the cost of his own life, I did not doubt, but Sharna had also believed that he was protecting the saviour of all beasts. I wanted to scream out to the dog that it was a lie, that this was something the Agyllians had concocted to make him and other animals serve and protect me. But another part of me knew that if I did not live to complete my quest to find and destroy Sentinel, then a second holocaust would come and this time all life would end. Every beast and bird and fish would die, as well as every human.

  And so I served beasts as much as humans by my quest, no matter how many lies had been told.

  ‘Oh Sharna,’ I whispered as the dream-memory frayed and thinned about me. ‘I cannot rid beasts of humans but maybe, if I succeed, I can win us time enough
to understand that we are no more or less important than any other species.’

  As the last drifts of the dream dissolved, I gathered my wits and constructed a shield to prevent myself being absorbed by any other memories that floated about me, but before it was complete a nightmare enfolded me.

  I found myself walking over boggy ground that sucked at my heels, heavy rain like a veil obscuring everything save the sodden earth beneath my feet. I could feel that the ground sloped up, so I headed in that direction, thinking to find drier ground, but paradoxically the ground grew softer and more boggy. All at once I sank up to my knees. Feeling the moist suck of the earth at my bare legs gave me the horrible feeling that the ground was trying to swallow me. I tried to get my feet out but my struggles only made me sink deeper and I began to panic. I sank very quickly and when the wet mud reached my chest, I threw out my arms and dug my fingernails into the wet devouring earth trying to slow the process, but I could get no purchase on it.

  When the mud reached my chin, I screamed and the nightmare split open. Rather than rebuilding the shield, I dived strongly downward, passing through the realm of memories into the dark strangeness of my deep subconscious. Below, I saw the silvery thread of the mindstream that runs beneath all minds. From that stream, all minds come and at the end of life they return to it with all of their memories and experiences.

  I went deeper, wondering suddenly if the overguardian’s message meant that I was to come here and try to draw out one of Straaka’s memories as a past-dream, which would show me what had become of Miryum. I was close enough to the wide and dazzling rush of etheric silver to hear its mesmerising siren song. The pull to merge was strong as ever, but I had resisted its lure enough times over the years not to fear my will being overthrown while I was this close. Yet I could not believe that a spirit severed from its body could resist that sweet summons.

  I reached the point where the pull to merge with the mindstream equalled the pull to rise to consciousness and relaxed, letting myself hang in balance. I had done this many times since discovering it was possible, for it allowed me to remain close to the mindstream for a considerable time without the need to pour energy into fighting the pull to consciousness or to the mindstream. I had learned to love the stillness and intensity of lying passive in the grip of opposing forces and it occurred to me that, in a sense, I was surrendering to both life and death.

  An enormous bubble of silvery dream matter rose up from the mindstream and, praying it would be a memory-dream of Straaka’s, I made no attempt to evade it.

  I saw Cassy turn into the white, brightly lit, unblemished perfection of a Beforetime passage, broken at regular intervals by closed doors. She looked much the same age as when I had last dreamed of her, save that her long dark hair had been cropped startlingly short. This told me the dream was occurring later than any other dream I had ever had of the Beforetime girl, for I had never seen her with short hair. Only as she came closer did I see that she was carrying something carefully in both hands.

  Suddenly a door opened in the hall and the grey-haired man who stepped out glared at Cassy.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded. ‘This corridor is off limits to visitors.’

  ‘I’m bringing some coffee to Doktaruth,’ Cassy said, smiling brightly at him. ‘I’m supposed to find the stasis-lab …’

  ‘Intern, eh?’ the man said, his face clearing. He pointed towards me. ‘Two corridors down, take the first door on the right.’ Without waiting for her to respond, he turned on his heel and marched off in the other direction.

  Cassy looked relieved and continued. I followed her, though I had no sense of walking or of my own body. It seemed to me that she was following the man’s instructions until she stopped, balanced the paper cylinder she carried in one hand and pressed the other to a small white panel on a door. It was opened by an older, mannish-looking woman in a white coat, whom I recognised from other past-dreams as a Beforetime teknoguilder. She looked taken aback to see Cassy, but not angry.

  ‘You know you are not supposed to be in this section, Cassandra.’

  ‘I wanted to borrow that book you were telling me about,’ Cassy said, sounding so eager and girlish that I was immediately suspicious.

  The other woman looked contrite. ‘Oh, I am sorry. I was going to bring it but there has been so much going on, I couldn’t get away.’

  ‘I got your sending. I thought I would bring you a coffee and get the book at the same time.’ She looked around and said with a wicked grin, ‘I borrowed my father’s spare access card to get through security.’

  ‘Cassandra! If someone finds out that you stole the director’s card …’

  ‘They won’t, Doktaruth, and if they do, I will tell them it was all my idea. What will they do to me, after all? It’s not like I’m some terrorist. Here, take the coffee before it gets cold.’

  The older woman took the cylinder and removed the top to sniff appreciatively at the steam that came curling up from a muddy brown froth. ‘I wish I could invite you in to have a look at the lab but if I did, the security cams would record you. Fortunately the ones in the corridors are low-level automats and won’t be examined unless there is some sort of trouble. But all lab monitor footage is scrutinised.’

  ‘I thought you said your work here was not important,’ Cassy said.

  ‘It is protocol for all lab cam footage to be examined. And they’ll be keeping tabs on the workers installing the new cryosleep pods,’ said Doktaruth. ‘Also, things have been happening that might make my work a little more important than it has been. Let’s go into my office for a moment. It’s no more than a glorified cupboard but there is a stool you can sit on without us having to worry about the cams. I have the book in there as well as another you might enjoy.’ She ushered Cassy into a tiny white room with a chair, a desk and a stool. One wall was covered in shelves bowed under the weight of books and Cassy stared at them in open-mouthed astonishment.

  ‘You said you collected antique books but I didn’t imagine you had so many!’

  Doktaruth flushed with pleasure. ‘Fortunately antique books on obsolete cryogenic research are not highly prized so I can afford to collect them. Most of them are simply curios, of course, since the research back then was heading for a dead end. But the books I want to lend you are on memory seeds. Do you have a palmscreen? I can lend you one if you haven’t. Mine might have better resolution for the charts.’ She spent a moment rummaging and then presented Cassy with two small devices and a rectangular sheet of dark glass or plast. The girl slipped them into her bag with a smile and then withdrew a flat, slim parcel with a little flourish. ‘Speaking of antique books, you said it was your birthday last week and I wanted to give you this. I got it at a street market in Inva. A friend of mine once said all scientists should read poetry to stay in touch with the real world and themselves.’

  Doktaruth set aside the drink and took the slim book reverently. Opening it carefully, she read a few lines, before looking up. ‘It is magnificent. But the price must have been prohibitive.’

  Cassy shook her head. ‘Fortunately the old lady I bought it from thought books made of paper were nasty, unhygienic things and she was glad to be rid of it.’

  ‘Unhygienic!’ said Doktaruth incredulously. Then she looked back down at the book. ‘You know, I never read poetry. It was always science for me. Sappho. I don’t know the name. A modern?’

  ‘An ancient and a woman,’ Cassy said. ‘She never actually wrote down her poetry because back then it was all performed. These are fragments that were recorded by people who heard her. They were collected like this when writing became the fashion, and after people recognised how special she was …’

  The older woman laughed. ‘You give me hope. Perhaps the new interest in my work means that it will be valued in the future even as the work of this Sappho. Cassandra, I am really touched by your desire to introduce a dry-as-dust scientist to poetry.’

  ‘I don’t think you are dry as dust,’ C
assy said and there was a ring of sincerity in her voice that made me believe that she genuinely liked and respected the gruff older woman. But there was something else in her tone when, after a slight hesitation, she said, ‘Besides, the more time I spend with you, the more I realise that there is poetry in science too. I mean, your Eden Project …’ She stopped and then went on diffidently, ‘I was hoping I could persuade you to let me see some of the animals.’

  The older woman shook her head. ‘Even if the cams were not operating, I’m afraid you’d be out of luck. All of the test animals are gone.’

  Cassy swallowed and looked aghast. ‘Gone?’

  The other woman laughed. ‘I should have said, the experimental pods have been relocated with their subjects intact to the Eden Facility. You know, of course, that all of the projects here are in developmental phases. If they are successful, they are put into practice in one way or another out in the real world. The government may not see much value in putting animals into suspended animation, but it seems someone has decided the process will have significant public-relations benefits. They even like the name. It seems Erlinder was right to suggest the Eden Project.’ She smiled at Cassy. ‘I thought it was unscientific, but the spinners think it sounds romantic and optimistic. Their use of such words is incredible given how pragmatic and pessimistic their breed is. But I don’t care what they call it so long as the government sets aside funds to allow its work to continue. In fact the whole reason for shifting the pods is because the government wants me to move into the next experimental phase of my research.’ For a moment she looked troubled.