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  8

  Cool air bathed Daiya's face. A smooth curved surface pressed against her back; something warm rested over her body. She let out a moan and felt something against her lips. Water trickled into her mouth. She swallowed and opened her eyes.

  The sky above her was deep blue, the sun dimmer. She blinked, trying to focus. She lowered her eyes; a silver sheet covered her. She raised herself slowly on an elbow, seeing before her a panel of small glassy gems surrounding a bare metal surface. She turned her head.

  Reiho was next to her. She was inside his vehicle. She groaned and sat up, her head swimming. She thrust out her hands, pressing them against the cold surfaces of the craft. She was trapped, imprisoned. Her muscles tightened. She pushed against the surface to her right. It slid open and she fell toward the ground, into the heat, her head hitting her sack, which lay next to the craft.

  She stumbled to her feet. Reiho was climbing out after her. She retreated, throwing her hands in front of her face. She cried out with both mind and voice. The desert swallowed the cry; Reiho's mind was deaf to her. He halted, swaying uncertainly from side to side like a reed.

  She clutched her head; blood pounded through it. The Net glimmered; the shock of her memory's return had shaken it. She knew what the Merging Ones must be thinking: the desert had crushed her, she would die during the ordeal, maybe even before it took place. That was all that they could think. Had they caught a glimpse of Reiho, of his mind's solitude, they would see him only as an illusion, a symbol of Daiya's despair, an image of death.

  His lips moved. He was speaking. She heard sounds, and tried to grasp them. She concentrated, attempting to understand him.

  “I came back to explore the mountains,” he said. “I thought that there I would be far from any of your people. Then the sensors in my craft showed me there were people in the desert. I waited until you were away from the others. I thought you might need help.”

  She dug her nails into her palms. Fire burned her bones. She shook; the pain in her head grew worse. The villagers were right; he was an illusion. If she gave in to it, she would die. She might die anyway.

  “I told you I would kill you if you came back,” she screamed.

  His eyes narrowed at her words. His hands became fists. He said, “I meant no harm.” It sounded like a threat.

  “You're not going to destroy me,” she cried. She seized him, bound him with mental bonds, and lifted him high in the air with all her strength. She shook him as hard as she could while spinning him like a pinwheel. Then she threw him, dashing him against the ground.

  He lay still for a moment. Then, slowly, he got up. His skin was unscratched, his bones apparently unfractured. She searched the desert frantically and saw an outcropping of stone not far away. She grabbed him again, raising him high, and threw him against the stone. Slowly he rose again; even his silver clothing was not torn. He staggered toward her, dizzy but uninjured.

  Raging, Daiya went to him, seizing him with her hands. She glared into his eyes and punched him in the side. He blinked. She felt the solidity of his muscles. Her fingers hurt. She struck him again. He blocked her, grabbed her wrist, and with a twist threw her to the side. She grabbed his ankle and pulled. He fell on his backside, rolled, and sprang to his feet.

  She got up. She reached inside his mind, gripping it, slowing his breathing and his heartbeat. She would make him die, she would kill him even if the effort killed her as well.

  She squeezed his mind; her mental tendrils became claws clutching a wriggling mass. Then she felt his pain and fear: why are you doing this to me, what have I done, stop, please stop. He was not a stone, he was not an illusion. Deep inside him, she felt a person, a consciousness not unlike her own. She was becoming a murderer.

  She withdrew. The boy fell to the ground and lay still. For a moment, she thought she had killed him after all. Then he stirred and opened his eyes, struggling to sit up. She searched him, expecting him to strike out at her; she prepared to dodge the blow. But even now she could not find hostility and hatred in him, only fear, bewilderment, and a stubborn determination.

  She sank to her knees, sitting on her heels. Her eyes stung and she blinked away tears.

  He caught his breath, filling his lungs with air. She searched her mind for words. At last she said, “You should not have come back. This is my time, my ordeal, don't you understand? You will kill me, you may kill my friends just by being here.”

  “I mean no harm.”

  “It doesn't matter whether you do or not. Perhaps the Merged One sent you here to test me, and I have failed, for I see you as a person and not a thing.” She waved an arm. Her voice and mind raced on, babbling. “I have thicker walls than others, I have a separate spot in my mind and soul, so God must test me more harshly than others. I should kill you, and I can't.” She buried her face in her hands and sobbed hopelessly.

  She felt his hand on her shoulder. He had crawled over to her. She pushed the hand away. She swallowed and wiped her face with her sleeve as she watched him.

  “Is killing all you can think about?” he said. “You speak to me, and when I try to understand, you threaten me.”

  “You do not belong here.”

  “I could have killed you when I first came here. It was hard at first to see you as human, you looked so like a beast.”

  She glared at him. She could not reply.

  “Why did you faint when you saw me again?” he asked. “You were in shock when I picked you up. Luckily, I was able to restore you quickly. Perhaps I should not have bothered.” He raised his head, pointing with his chin.

  “I had erased you from my mind,” she answered. “It was the only way I could keep knowledge of you from my village. But the old ones, the Merging Selves, saw I had a dark spot in my mind, though they could not see what it contained since I no longer held that knowledge consciously. Even then, they could have torn it from me, but they chose not to do that. What I did was a great sin. I held a secret. Now you are back, and God is showing me that there cannot be secrets, that I shall be punished.” She stared at the sandy ground. “I am condemned.”

  “I don't understand,” Reiho said. “I am like you, my people and your people were once the same. Look inside my mind, I think and feel and live. It cannot be wrong to communicate with another, however different he may seem. You may fail often, but you must try.”

  “It is wrong for us. You bring separateness into the world, you are divided from it, you live in the sky, you cannot mindspeak.” She picked up a small sharp stone and seized his hand, drawing the sharp edge across it. The rock made no mark. She threw it down. “Even your body is apart from the world.”

  His mouth twisted. He raised an eyebrow. “You are wrong. Think a moment, think. You speak of separateness, you say it is a wrong; that is what your word sin means, isn't it?” Dimly she noticed that he spoke more fluently, without the hesitation she remembered. “Yet you willingly hold yourselves apart from my people, you divide yourselves from us, deny that you should speak to us, and think we should be killed. That cannot be right.”

  “You twist things,” she cried desperately, almost believing him.

  “I do not. It follows from what you have told me.”

  She wrung her hands.

  “We are human beings too. We are from Earth, our history tells us that, our records.”

  She shook her head, bewildered. “Our legends,” he went on. She nodded, understanding that word. “We fled into space, we could not stay here. Human beings had become divided, and we were being killed. Although we took much of our knowledge with us, our records of that time are scanty. We went out from the earth, past the outer planets, far into space. I do not know how to convey the distance to you, but it was very far.”

  “Thousands of paces? Millions?” She tried to imagine such a distance.

  “Billions of paces. We went to the region we call the Halo which surrounds this planetary system, an area with millions of comets. Because comets are made up of water
and other elements life requires, we knew our biologists could make one habitable, and they did. We chose one whose orbit would take us back around the sun, though in time we learned how to make it follow a path of our choosing.”

  “That is your myth?” she asked, unable to grasp most of it. There was no God in the myth; the people acted like gods.

  “Our history. At first we dreamed of returning, but after making our home in space, we came to think of it as our abode. Some of our people did return to Earth at times, but none ever returned to us, and Homesmind told us these explorers had died here. After that, we traveled far, even beyond the Halo. This is the first time in over two thousand years that we have come back to this system.”

  “Years?”

  “A year, a cycle of the seasons, I think that is what you would say.”

  She nodded.

  “I am very ignorant,” he continued. “Others could have told you of these things in more detail. I must do more research.”

  She looked at him, suddenly suspicious. “Have you told your people of us? Have you kept the secret?”

  “I have tried. Homesmind knows, It deduced it from my questions, but It will not speak of it to others yet. I cannot keep it to myself forever.”

  “Who is this Homesmind?”

  “The mind of our home, the mind of our comet.”

  “You make it sound like a god.”

  He shook his head. “It is not that. We ourselves built it ages ago. It began as a cybernetic construct made up of parts of our ships, but It has grown in complexity and Its nerves run throughout our home. It runs our life support systems, It keeps our records and knowledge, It too is another being, not-human and yet very human in that we created It. It is based on our humanity.”

  Daiya snorted. “You cannot build minds, only God can do that. We are all pieces of God.” She sat up straight and frowned at him; she could not accept his blasphemy. Either he was lying, and doing it well, since his surface thoughts did not betray him, or the Merged One was testing her, speaking through his lips or making her hear untruths.

  He sighed, as if noticing her rejection of his words. “As I have said, I cannot keep this to myself forever. Etey already suspects something, she may find out what I am doing soon.”

  “Who is Etey?” Daiya asked.

  “I do not have the word in your language.”

  “Is she your lover, your partner, your sister, what?”

  “In a way, she is all of those, and a parent, and a teacher.”

  “She is like you?”

  “She is much older and wiser.”

  Daiya got up and began to pace in front of him. She was being distracted; it was as if his words and the questions that kept rising in her were charms, feeding her curiosity, drawing her into forgetfulness and death. She stiffened in shock. She had, for a moment, forgotten why she was here in the desert, forgotten the ordeal. She stopped pacing and looked down at him. He was watching her calmly.

  “You must go,” she said to him. “You must leave me. Do you want me to die because you are here?”

  He rose. He put a hand on her shoulder and stared at her until she looked down.

  “Do you understand?” she went on. “I shall speak to you no more, I must prepare myself. If you do not leave, and someone else finds you, you'll die. Another will not hesitate to kill you, others do not have my weakness. Leave me.”

  His hand gripped hers. “I shall do what I must,” he responded. “I am here to learn what I can. What I discover may be important, more important perhaps than what might happen to me or to you. Perhaps this is my ... what is your word? My ordeal.”

  She pulled away from him. “Then I leave you to God,” she said fiercely. “I pray that the Merged One will strike you. You had better leave.”

  “I shall leave when I have satisfied my curiosity.”

  “Your curiosity is uncontrolled. You will never feed it enough. Leave this world.”

  She turned her back to him, oriented herself, and sat facing in the direction she had traveled, wondering again how she would know when it was time to return. She felt the boy's eyes on her, then heard his footsteps crunching against the ground. After a moment, she turned. He was getting back inside his vehicle. He settled himself on a seat, the door still open, and rummaged among his things.

  He was ignoring her demand. Quickly she slid the door shut. She seized the vehicle with all her strength and hurled it up into the sky, pushing it, throwing it high. She watched it grow smaller until it was only a speck against the clear blue atmosphere. She pushed it until it was gone, beyond the reach of her power.

  She pulled her sack to her side and took out the wine. Her hands shook as she opened it and drank. Reiho had drained her energy; she was weak. She reached for some meat and gnawed at it nervously. Her mind sagged, settling around her like an old tunic. She finished the meat and put the wine away; they could not restore her energy.

  The Net hummed, tendrils pulling her away from herself. She swayed, giving in to the pull. Her mind lifted above her body. She was a small animal in the desert, her body slumping against the sack.

  The Merging Ones sang and their words fluttered, indistinct and indecipherable. She was lifted higher and higher until the whole desert lay beneath her. Seven tiny specks, no bigger than plants, perhaps no more important, lay on the sand, far apart, yet bound to one another by pale tendrils of light.

  She brushed against the minds of the others. They spun, twirling the strands of light, darting in and out, merging for a moment: she felt the confidence of Harel, the passion of Peloren, the gentleness of Mausi, the playfulness of Sude, the artful cleverness of Oren, the stolid persistence of Tasso, and her own willfulness. They were bound together now.

  She saw the village, familiar yet strange. She stood by the river and saw tiny huts with mud bricks and straw roofs; the huts suddenly became larger and more solid. She traveled along a path which seemed both wide and narrow. She was seeing with the others, no longer sure of which vision was hers and which was someone else's. The village vanished. She and the others were fragments being thrown back inside their bodies.

  She opened her eyes ... were they her eyes? She looked at the darkening sky; she was where she had been. The Net held her, then lifted her up, propelling her along the route she had taken, back to the others. She felt the air billow around her. The wind stung her face; she shielded her eyes. The air shrieked past her ears. Then she was moving more slowly, held in the air by the minds of all the Merging Ones.

  She dipped toward the desert and was deposited gently on the sand. She knelt, still clutching her sack. Her fingers were stiff. She let go of the sack, keeping her mind still. She looked around; she was still far from the others, with at least a day's travel before she would see them again.

  The Net tugged at her. Its strands contracted. It lifted from her. Daiya clawed at the air, seeing the Net glow around her; she touched it with her mind. It spun, becoming a bright fiery disk, whipping her with the tendrils that surrounded it ... and then it was gone.

  Daiya screamed. Her voice was swallowed by emptiness, yet in her mind she heard her scream multiply, break apart, become other voices. The others were screaming too. She fell against the sack, curling up near it. The Net was gone.

  She was alone.

  Daiya got to her feet. It was growing dark, the evening light making the desert purple. She tied the sack to her back. Cautiously, she lifted herself from the ground, held herself aloft for a few seconds, then fell. Her mind was weak without the Net. There was an invisible wall around her. This, she thought, must be what that boy feels all the time. She trembled; her teeth clicked against one another. Her body had shrunk in upon itself.

  She began to walk. The sack shifted on her shoulders. She stumbled along; her legs felt as though they had been grafted on to her, carrying her against her will. She sent out a mental feeler, trying to locate another mind, Harel's or Mausi's or even Peloren's. Her mind followed the feeler, stretching out into a long
thin thread, and she gasped, pulling it back quickly. She was too weak; she would lose her mind, could not bring it back easily without the Net. She found herself wondering if she should rest, and shuddered. She would go on, even if she had to wait for the others where they were to meet. She would not stay out here alone.

  The desert was growing darker. A mist clung to her, a dry, gray mist. Her vision blurred. The distant horizon vanished. She stopped, looking around frantically. The ground she stood on was an island. Blackness was swallowing the desert, rolling toward her, closing in on her like a cylindrical wall. She began to run, then forced herself to slow to a walk. She stopped.

  She stood still as the sky and earth were swallowed and the darkness pressed in around her. She looked through her eyes and saw nothing. She wiggled her toes inside her moccasins and felt only the leather; she could be standing on air. She felt dizzy, unable to balance. She thought she heard a scream. She took a breath. Air filled her lungs.

  She tried to think: I'm still breathing, that means that there's air. She reached out carefully with one foot and took a small step, her muscles tightening as she prepared for a fall into an abyss. She did not fall. She had to be standing on something.

  Daiya stepped forward slowly, then halted again. She could not know where she was going; she was beginning to forget where she was. She tried to stand still. She was a speck in a vast space. She put out her arms, unable to tell whether they stretched in front of her or were out at her sides. Reality was bounded by her skin; she was vast, as large as the world, as the universe.

  Her mind pressed against the nothingness; there was nothing to grasp, nothing to push aside. The shriek began again, filling her head, filling the world. She wanted to strike out, tear at everything, do anything that would restore the world outside. There's nothing to tear at, she thought, except myself.

  She felt terror; fear twisted her heart and stopped her breath. She was fragmenting; her arms stretched into impossibly long limbs, her hands were paces away. Her legs were monoliths, solid, unmoving. Her feet were as far below her as a hut from the sky. Her torso was breaking away from her limbs; her head hung above her body.