Rediscovery (4 page)

If the abrupt change of subject startled him, he gave no sign. “My tutor tells me that, regardless of the old legends about
chieri
marrying into the Domains, the moons are no more than immense pieces of rock circling our world,” Lorill said. “Dead, deserted, airless, cold, and lifeless.”

She thought that over for a moment. This did not match with the recent uneasy

feeling she had been experiencing. “And do you believe this, Lorill?”

“I do not know.” Lorill shrugged, as if the matter were of no importance. Perhaps, to him, it was not. “I am not a romantic like you,
chiya.
I see no reason to doubt it; I don’t really care much what they are. They cannot affect us, after all, nor can we affect them.”

“I do care about them.” Leonie frowned suddenly. This was the only time she

might have to talk with her brother in person about her premonitions. It might not be the best time—but there would be no opportunity once she was inside Dalereuth. “I feel that something is coming upon us from the moons— that our lives may never be the same.”

She turned on her back and stared at the tent ceiling, as if she could look through it and the clouds above to see the moons. “Truly, Lorill, don’t you feel that something very important is about to happen?”

“Not really,” he said, yawning. “Nothing but sleep. You are a woman, Leonie; you feel the influence of moons, perhaps it is no more than that. Even though it is raining and you can’t see it, Liriel still pulls at you. Everyone knows how sensitive women are to the moons—and how dramatic their influence can be.”

Leonie knew the truth of Lorill’s words. “With the present conjunction,” she

pointed out, “they
all
pull at me. I wish the sky were clear tonight. But quite apart from that, I feel—”

“Come, Leonie, don’t go all mystical on me.” Lorill interrupted, seeming

somewhat worried. “Next I’ll think you’ve turned into Melissa, all vapors and nonsense, and you will be having visions of Evanda and Avarra!”

“No,” she said. “You may tease, Lorill, and you may doubt as you like. But I say something is coming to us—some great change in our lives—and nothing will ever be the same again. I mean that for all of us, not just you and me.”

She spoke with such conviction that Lorill looked sharply at her, and stopped his teasing. He nodded, quite soberly. “You are a
leronis,
sister, Tower-trained or no. If you say something is going to happen, well, it may be that you are gifted with

foreknowledge. Do you have any notion what this great event will be?”

The vagueness of her feeling gave her a headache. “I wish I did, Lorill,” she

replied, uncertain and unhappy. “I know only that it has to do with the moons; nothing more than that. I feel it; I could swear to it. Sometimes I do not even know if I want to go to Dalereuth anymore in view of the days which are coming now.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, startled. As well he might be. Leonie had never

let any consideration stand in the way of her desire to go to a Tower before this. She had ridden roughshod over anyone who had suggested she might choose some other course for her future. She had refused even the hand of the King, all in her quest to become a
leronis.

“I wish that I could tell you,” she said, knitting her brows, trying to concentrate.

“If I were a fully-trained
leronis,
not just a novice…” her voice trailed off, as if the words which could describe what she knew eluded her. But it was not the words that she lacked, it was the ability to narrow her foreboding down to anything more than
feelings,
something as evanescent as the morning fog, and as hard to catch.

Lorill stood for a moment, looking pensive. “Whatever it may be, I wish I could

share your foreknowledge. But you know what they told me when I received my

matrix,” his left hand absentmindedly fingered the silk bag at his throat, “that with twins, one has rather more, and the other rather less than the usual share of
laran.
I need not tell you how it is divided between the two of us. No doubt you will use yours better than I do mine.”

Leonie knew what he meant. It was just as well that Lorill had the weaker
laran,
for in these days, even though there was peace in the countryside, no profession so withdrawn from life as that of matrix worker would be allowed to any Hastur male unless he were something as redundant as a seventh son. It was inevitable that Lorill would take his place at court beside their father, and whether or not he cared for that notion was of little matter. In her way, Leonie would experience far more freedom than he would, once she was fully-trained. She would have her choice of where she went, and only the strength of her
laran
would limit her in her quest for the ultimate prize —the post of Keeper.

“What is it that you
see,
sister?” he asked in a low voice, dark with apprehension.

“No more than I told you.” Leonie sighed, turning back to face him. “Danger, and change, and opportunity coming to us—from the moons. Isn’t that enough?”

“I could hardly take that to our father, or to the Council,” Lorill shook his head.

“If I go to them with nothing more than a vague premonition, and talk about the moons, they will think I have been drinking like—what was it you said about Derik?—like a monk at Midwinter.”

“True enough,” she sighed. “But what can I do?”

“If you had more information for me—” he suggested delicately. He should
not
have hinted that an untrained girl go seeking further enlightenment, with no supervision.

Especially not a Hastur, with the Hastur gift being what it was—the power of the living matrix. If Leonie had
that
in full measure, she would not need a matrix crystal to find herself in trouble from which only a Keeper could extract her. But Leonie was

accustomed to doing things her own way—and Lorill was used to her remarkable ability to do just about anything she set her mind to.

Leonie frowned, but in distress rather than disapproval. “I will try,” she said, after a moment. “I’ll do the best I can. Maybe I can yet
see
something more definite—

something that we can use to convince Father.”

As Lorill left her to her solitary meditations, Leonie extinguished her lantern, but did not undress, listening instead to the sounds of the camp about her, patiently waiting for the last guardsman to settle into his bedroll.

She did not have long to wait. Virtually everyone was so weary from the chill and rain that they were glad to seek the warmth of blankets. As soon as it seemed as though all had retired for the night, save the one guard prowling the perimeter of the camp in his soggy cape, Leonie got up and went to the entrance of her tent.

She peered out cautiously, turning her attention to the sky. The clouds lay heavy and dripping above, showing little inclination to move until they had dropped all of the rain they carried. But Leonie knew from years of experience that clouds were always moving, it was merely a matter of which way and how fast. It had only been within the last year or so that she had been able to put her observations to actual use.

She watched carefully until she could tell the direction of movement, the direction that would tell her which way the wind was blowing at the height of the clouds. Past experience had shown her that it was not always the same direction as the wind on the ground. Once she knew the right path, she reached out with her mind and nudged the heavy clouds in that direction, pushing them along like a shepherd with a flock of fat, lazy sheep, until they were out of her way and she could see the sky. The four moons floated high above the tents, all at the full, each a different color. They were beautiful—

but they were silent and enigmatic as ever.

Leonie tied the entrance flaps open and sat on one of her pillows, trying to touch something within her that would give her vague premonitions some form or substance.

All that earned her was a growing sleeplessness.

She sat at the entrance to her tent and stared up at them for several hours, trying to focus her
laran
on what she could see with her physical eyes, the round shapes of the four moons—trying to focus her mind on what she knew was coming, trying to focus on the terrible apprehension she felt.

Trying to find the answers she sensed that she would need—and soon.

A ring of little domes, like an untidy nest of mushrooms, had sprouted on the

surface of the largest of the moons. Around the domes, space-suited personnel and machines worked to make the installation self-supporting and self-maintaining.

Inside the largest of the domes, Ysaye sat before a computer terminal, watching

on the screen as the brightly painted, toylike satellite fired a last retro and slid elegantly into orbit.

“Well, that’s number one—the first mapping and weather satellite,” David

commented happily, looking over her shoulder. “Now Elizabeth and I can really go to work. That’s a remarkably sophisticated piece of machinery, according to her.”

“Sophisticated in what way?” Ysaye asked. “The onboard computers aren’t all

that special.”

She wanted to keep him talking; she was aware of the hiss of air in the ventilation system in a way she had never been on the ship. She just didn’t feel entirely confident with nothing between herself and vacuum but a thin skin of flexible membrane.

David seemed willing to oblige her. “It’s the observational equipment, the optics, that are special. I hear that this Terra Mark XXIV has high enough resolution to see a lighted match on the night side. At fifty thousand meters, I’ve been told the ones in geosynch orbit over Terra would let you read the license plate on a car parked in the Ambassadorial Parking Lot in Nigeria. I assume this one can do the same.”

“That’s if they have cars and parking lots,” commented Elizabeth, coming up

behind him. ‘And Embassies. Of course if they don’t, I suppose we can help them to build some—”

He turned with a smile and answered, “Well, to see the numbers on a street sign.

Or whatever they use down there for streets and signs. Hello, love! Are you here to start the weather observations?”

“You guessed it,” she replied. “If you’ve got first watch for Mapping and

Exploring, we’re going to be able to work together.” She looked around her, at the bank of monitors showing the ships’ crew working outside. “Do you think the people here ever reached their moons?”

“If they did, they didn’t leave as much as a stray film wrapping or food tube,” he said, “at least not that we’ve seen so far. Personally, I tend to doubt it; there’re no real signs of technology that we’d recognize as such—no big lighted areas at night that might be a city, and no radio signals at all.”

Ysaye shook her head. “As the techs keep reminding me, we don’t even know yet

if there’s sentient life down there at all, and we won’t till the cameras on the satellite get working.”

Elizabeth frowned at the blank monitors that represented incoming pictures from

the satellite. “I’m not sure we’d know even then, Ysaye. There is heavy cloud cover down there. If there are sentients, and they aren’t too advanced, we could easily miss them.”

“I can’t see how,” David replied. “With that kind of resolution, all we need to

have is a break in the clouds and we should be able to see a monkey—or whatever else they have that fills that particular ecological niche,” he added quickly, “moving through the branches of that forest down there.”

“Only the top branches,” Elizabeth argued. “And only if the cloud cover
does
break
and
the camera is pointed in the right direction!”

“Surely sooner or later it will be,” David said, with a dismissive shrug. “And

sooner or later the clouds have to break. But even if there
are
IBs down there, we’re not going to pick up anything much smaller than a lighted city until we get most of the weather satellite network going. Any idea how long that will take, Ysaye?”

“Hours,” Ysaye said tiredly. “Good thing it’s mostly automated. All I have to do is baby-sit it.”

“You look awfully tired, Ysaye,” said Elizabeth, with concern in her blue eyes.

“How long have you been working, anyway? Or should I say—overworking?”

Ysaye shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. I’ve lost track again.”

“Does that translate to ‘I hooked my brain up to the computer three days ago and I haven’t taken a break since’?” David teased.

“Something like that,” Ysaye admitted with a weary chuckle. “That, and—well,

you two know I don’t like sleeping in a strange bed. I couldn’t get any sleep, so I just kept working.”

“Why don’t you lie down over there for a bit and try again?” Elizabeth suggested, indicating the pile of padded computer blankets in the corner. “Even you admit this whole process is automatic, and David and I will be here to let you know if anything goes wrong. Nobody else is likely to come in here for hours; everyone but us and the construction crew is still on the ship. It should be nice and quiet.”

“That won’t last long,” David warned. “There’s nothing to equal the stampede

off-ship, as soon as security passes the air and gives the all-clear. That’ll happen here, too, as soon as security is happy about the domes being stabilized. Not that there’s any fresh air here, but at least the domes are a change from the ship.”

“Yes,” Ysaye murmured, “the gravity’s lower.” She walked over to the blankets

and flopped loosely down onto them. “I think I’ll take your suggestion, Elizabeth; right now I probably could sleep anywhere—and possibly right through nearly anything.

Nudge me if anything interesting happens.”

“Will do,” Elizabeth said cheerfully. “You definitely need a break before they put you to work in the library, looking up obscure papers on moon formations for the Captain. One of the techs told me that this four-moon system was driving him to

distraction!”

David, who had been watching the monitors showing the work going on outside