The Ghost Sister (37 page)

But these were disturbing thoughts. I looked up to see Ithyris staring at me. “Do you really think you can help anyone?” she repeated. “You always make this big thing about being romantically unhappy, this poetic pose with someone or other—”

“I do not!”

“—but the truth of it is that you've always been self-contained. You're enough for yourself, really; you keep your own company. Even when you and I were most in love, you were always off somewhere else, thinking. That's not like most people. For most people, either their lives are enough and they've got the brief outlets of the bloodmind, which makes them a lot elated and a bit ashamed, or they go the whole way and run screaming into the hills.”

I winced, but Ithyris made no apology for her lack of tact. We sat in silence for a moment. I watched the fire burn up. A small scatter of sparks flew out of the grate to land hissing on the stones.

Ithyris leaned forward and poked the fire, sending up a
sudden rush of heat. After a while she said, “Why
did
Morrac come with you?”

“To make amends?”

“Morrac's never been the type to atone. I think he's relying on you to save him from himself. I've watched you two over the last few years. He's playing out a part with you, Eleres. He's dependent on you.”

I smiled. “I always thought it was the other way around.”

“He likes to keep you off balance. He needs you to need him, because if you do, then you'll take responsibility for him, make excuses for him, let him continue to behave the way he does. Lovers can get that way.”

“We're not really lovers any longer.”

“Not really? What does that mean? Either you are or you aren't. And I'm not talking about sex. He can see you're slipping away, Eleres. He'll hang on to you if he can, because his sister's dead and you're in love with someone else and sooner or later he'll be alone and then he's going to have to face up to the consequences of what he's done and what he
is.
”

I was silent. We sat for a while and watched the fire burn down. Ithyris's face was shadowed. The stock of that side of the family came from Gehent, and she had the Gehenter's very pale skin and dark eyes, indigo-black like her hair. At last she looked up at me and smiled, reached across and took my hand, considering it as it lay in her own. Her fingers were white against mine, banded with the tattoos of her house, and she wore a silver wire ring embedded in the skin of the middle finger. The huntress patterns were scattered across the back of her hand. She had danced when she was younger—still did, I supposed—and the ring was a custom in Gehent that marks the dance.

“Oh, look,” she said wearily. “Come here.”

I rose and knelt by the side of her chair and buried my face in her lap. We had been sitting by the fire for an hour, but her skirt still smelled of snow. Ithyris always seemed to
have just come in from outdoors: in autumn, she smelled of smoke; in summer, of hay. She moved a little and entwined her fingers through mine. I felt her free hand travel through my hair and round my earlobe, over to the nape of my neck. She grasped my hair gently and pulled my head up, kissed my brow, my nose, my mouth. I put my arm round her shoulders and, standing, picked her up, a gesture which I instantly regretted because it brought a searing pain in my back, still weak from the ai Staren's assault.

“Don't drop me, don't drop me,” she said. “Put me down. Quick!”

We hobbled to the bed, where we collapsed. Ithyris started to laugh, and couldn't stop. Her shoulders heaved. But in the end it was comfort that mattered, rather than desire. She pulled the covers over us and after a while she dropped into sleep with her arms around me and her head on my shoulder, but I lay awake for a while longer, staring into the shadows and thinking.

Shu leaned her face against the cool viewscreen of the aircar and closed her eyes. Below, the nightlands of Monde D'Isle unfolded as the aircar flew on, moonlight glittering on the snowbound peaks, mirror-smooth. Shu did not want to think of what might have happened to Eleres, or his sister. Nor did she want to think about dead Dia, or Bel. The girl seemed to have aged years in the days since Shu had last seen her. Her angular face had become haggard, and she had cut off her acolyte's braids in mourning. Cropped raggedly close, her hair had lost its amber tinge and was now the color of ash.

When Shu had seen the aircar descending out of the clouds, she had almost cried with relief. She had stumbled over to Bel, as much to comfort the girl as herself, but Bel
had said only, “I'm glad you're all right,” and turned on her heel to climb back into the aircar. She did not sound glad, Shu thought, and perhaps that wasn't surprising. The nano-cleaners had been at work to remove all traces of Dia's death from the interior of the aircar, but there was still a presence that no technology could eradicate, a sadness. Bel's coldness had been hurtful at the time, but now Shu felt simply numb. She knew she should try to talk to Bel about the generator, and contact the ship, but she was too exhausted to think coherently.

Bel had told her that they might be having problems back at the camp. The
delazheni
themselves seemed to be winding down, as though affected by the growing cold. Shu wondered dimly whether it wasn't some exposure to the world itself that was causing this, some infringement upon their biomechanisms. She couldn't get the feeling out of her mind that it was somehow curiously appropriate. The
de
lazheni
were part of Irie St Syre, and they'd left that far behind. Sylvian had apparently been complaining of a number of ailments—rheumatism, conjunctivitis, asthma. It seemed to Shu that they were simply the grit in the oyster of the world, no wonder they were all getting sick. Maybe they'd produce a pearl, she thought wryly. She was already half dreaming when the aircar spun down to land just beyond the camp, and she could seek the unlikely comfort of a cold fold-out bed.

She woke to find that it was already late into the morning. She lay blinking up at the ceiling, wondering for a bewildered moment where she was, and where Eleres might have got to. Then she realized that she was back at the mission camp, and it was Sylvian who was sitting on the edge of the bed with a cup of hot tea. Sylvian too seemed older.

“Bel told me what happened,” Shu said, sitting up in bed and weakly sipping the tea.

Sylvian sighed. “I think she blames herself.”

“Of course she does,” Shu said. “It's Eve all over again,
isn't it? Another person she's failed to save. Or thinks she has.”

“Do you mean Dia? Or Mevennen?”

“Both.”

“Maybe you're right,” Sylvian said. “But I'm worried about her. She's not even the same girl who came to Monde D'Isle. There's a lot of bitterness and resentment that she had a chance to shake off. Instead, it just seems to have grown.” She glanced uneasily at Shu. “We got your message. About your theory of what the generator does.”

“I think it does much more than we thought,” Shu said. Sylvian did not look convinced. She felt as though she were wading through treacle, putting forth arguments that no one wanted to hear. “I told you. I think it has something to do with the Mondhaith's ability to dowse.”

“That would make sense,” Sylvian said, slowly. “Like the Hon'an people on Narrandera—the water-seekers. There's nothing supernatural about them; they're just unusually sensitive individuals who have a particular set of receptors in their brains. You can give people dowsing abilities if you actually operate on them, but less radically, it's also possible to change their neurology via biomorphic technology. Rather than genetically manipulating the population into a closer connection with their environment—whatever that means—maybe Elshonu chose to, well,
reeducate
them via a biomorphic field. Dowsing used to be seen as a kind of psychic phenomenon, but that's just an early superstition. The ability's caused by a particular neurological configuration.”

“If Elshonu mapped certain behavioral parameters into the generator,” Shu said, “based on the behavioral patterns of other mammals of this world, then he could change the way in which the colonists behaved, too. That's how biomorphic technology works according to you; it sets up a field, and emits generalized algorithmic instructions into that field. I think the energy lines that these people seem to believe lie beneath the land really exist. I think they're the
channels along which the field is directed, and I also think that they connect up with the forcefields around the forts. But they don't all do the same thing at the same time, because the algorithms interact with the context. To use the ship's example, you don't get every bird doing the same thing at once—it depends on the situation in which the bird finds itself. If there's danger, to themselves or someone close to them, then the Mondhaith enter the pack state— the bloodmind. That isn't necessarily always violent, but it can turn a person to murder if there's a threat or if the circumstances are right. It's a
biological
problem, Sylvian, not a moral one. The masques are basically mating periods: within a particular radius, the women's breeding cycles match one another and they become fertile together—though they retain human patterns of nonreproductive sexuality, too. A lot of these people's behavior mirrors that of certain mammals back home, and here too it seems.”

She paused, and gulped her tea to soothe her parched throat, trying not to think about Morrac, that day of the masque. “You see, Sylvian? You see how important this is? I think we were right. The generator's the 'magic book'that Mevennen was talking about.The 'book'that helped people to live in harmony with their environment. It doesn't just produce the violence and the territorial instincts, but so much
more.
The ability to dowse, to sense metals. These people are completely in tune with their world, much more than we are. Elshonu's Dreamtime. It looks as though he achieved it, after all.”

“Yes,” Sylvian replied, after a moment. “It looks as though he did. But at what price? We don't kill each other for no reason, do we?”

“You're a biologist,” Shu said, her heart sinking. “Surely you could see how much such abilities would mean to a people who live in a world as harsh as this one? And how much it might mean if those abilities were ripped away?”

“I may be a biologist,” Sylvian said evenly, “but I'm a
Gaian first of all, and everything I've seen has shown me that our way is right, and Elshonu's was wrong. There's Re-Forming equipment somewhere, down in the ruins of Outreven. Bel's hoping it could still be activated. We could still set this world back on track. Shu, if what governs these people is nothing more than a field, it can be reversed. Mevennen stepped into the field, and it—instructed her. It must have altered her neural receptors—knit those connections together again. It changed her brain-wave patterns— reeducated her into becoming whatever Elshonu Shikiriye turned the rest of her people into. We know that Elshonu didn't want to use ReForming technology to set the processes in place that would change the environment itself—instead, he wanted to change the colonists so that they fitted into that environment somehow. He tried to manipulate them genetically and failed. So he tried another way— using biomorphic technology, and the consequences for these people have been disastrous. And that's why we have to make sure the generator's deactivated.”

Shu stared at her. “Sylvian, it doesn't work that way. That's appallingly crude—you can't just switch off one machine and switch on another one and expect everything to sort itself out. You do realize that, don't you? There are thousands of people who'd be affected, in who knows what kind of way.”

“I came to tell you something,” Sylvian said, as though she hadn't heard, and Shu wondered whether Bel was the only one whom circumstances had been pushing over the edge. “Bel's going back into Outreven. To see if she can find Mevennen. She wants us to come with her. In a little while, the generator will be down and perhaps that will bring Mevennen back to normal.”

“All right,” Shu said, thinking quickly. If she could contact the ship, somehow abort the instructions it had been given, or get to the generator itself before it shut off…

She struggled out of bed. Sylvian went back outside, pre-
sumably in search of Bel, and Shu hastened across the bio-tent to the console. But when she tried to punch in the coordinates of the ship, she found that she was locked out of the system. This was no side effect of alien technology; this was deliberate. The passwords had been changed, the DNA relay would not respond to her palmprint. To Shu, this meant that Bel did not trust her. Hurriedly, Shu pulled on her clothes and hastened outside to where the aircar was waiting. Her only chance now lay in Outreven itself.

“Mevennen?” Shu called hopefully, two hours later. No one answered. Accompanied by a strained and watchful Bel, she was standing on the rickety tower on the cliff overlooking Outreven. Footprints disturbed the dust that covered the lower deck and their surface was ridged, as though their maker had worn boots. The only entrance to the uppermost deck was the hatch at the top of the stairs, and there was no way that Shu was going to go up through the hatch headfirst. She had seen one of the children earlier, skulking at the end of one of the blind alleyways that led from the main passage of Outreven.

“Do you have any idea where she might have gone?” Shu asked unhappily, and not for the first time.

“No, I haven't. I told you,” Bel said, and then was silent. Shu looked around her. Bel had thought that it might be easier to see from up here; Shu was doubtful. They had no way of knowing how far Outreven extended underground, and her own feeling was that Mevennen had gone deeper rather than come out into the light. But then there were the footprints.

From below, they could see that the deck took up the whole of the upper story of the tower. Cautiously, Shu reached the top rung. Gripping the sides of the narrow banister, she hauled herself up, crunching her knees against her chest and hanging suspended beneath the hatch. The daily workouts that Dia had insisted that everyone participate in appeared to have paid off, Shu conceded reluctantly, and so
had that long mountain hike, but her joints still burned with a touch of arthritis. Ancient complaints, conjured back by an ancient world …