Behind the Eyes of Dreamers (14 page)

She had to open her link. But Josef would know if she did; he would see it in her eyes and expression. She could not risk it, not with Daro lying there helpless. She noticed then that Josef had disarmed them; their wands were under his belt, next to his own.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Why, to talk to you, of course. Isn’t that why you came after me, to persuade me to go back to Aniya? If she’d wanted me wiped or destroyed, she could have sent someone else. We’ll talk, but not here. We’ll leave this man behind.”

“You won’t leave him there like that.”

“He’ll come to before long, and if he needs help, he can call for it. He’ll want to hold out for a while, though—how humiliating it would be for him, letting his fellow hunters know that I was able to overcome him.”

She would summon help. There had to be a way to do it. Whatever Josef did to her, Daro would be safe.

“You seem very concerned for him,” Josef said. “It must have been pleasant for you, having that amusement, maybe even hoping that he might become yours. You’re probably thinking that you can alert the Net when we’re away from here. I wouldn’t try that, Orielna. He may have to call for help himself, but he’ll never forgive you for it. He’ll hate you for shaming him.”

She stretched an arm toward Daro, then let it fall.

“I see I guessed correctly,” Josef said. “The man must have some pride. He’ll sacrifice it to save his life if necessary, but he’ll never forgive you if you humiliate him by asking the minds to rescue him. And you couldn’t bear that, losing the only one who ever saw you as yourself. Oh, what a novel experience that must have been for you.”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“But I do,” he replied. “You are like me, after all. I’m a little disappointed that you walked into my trap so easily. I thought you’d follow the tracks—not that they would have led you to anything—but I was waiting in case you didn’t. I knew you wouldn’t come this way unless you knew where I was likely to be. When I saw you, I realized you’d been heading for the lake all along.” He chuckled. “I thought you might stay up on that hill. I’m sure you would have if you’d been alone, but your hunter friend wouldn’t give up the chase so easily.”

He was babbling, sounding completely unbalanced. His black hair hung around his face, his skin was darker, his elbows grimed with dirt; his gray pants and shirt were tattered.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

Josef laughed. “Because it amuses me. Because I have nothing to lose doing whatever I want to you.” He slipped his knife under his belt, trained his wand on her, then dragged her to her feet. “Come along.”

“Don’t leave him here without a wand.”

“He can always ask for help.”

“He’s unconscious—at least wait until he comes to.”

His wand struck the side of her head. She staggered, waiting for the pain to pass. “I could have killed him,” he said. “I will if we don’t leave now. You’d wail for help from the minds then, but I’d make sure they wouldn’t find much. A brain can be crushed—that’s all I’d have to do.” His booted foot moved closer to Daro’s head. “All he’d ever be afterward is an eidolon with a new body and painful restored memories of shame he’d probably choose to erase. You’d lose him for good.”

Orielna struggled for breath.

“Are you coming along quietly,” Josef said in a softer voice, “or do I have to take firmer measures? I knew she’d send you, that she’d never come herself, but that’s all right. We can talk, you and I.”

She had loved him once, had seen herself in him. He couldn’t have killed it all. “I’ll go with you,” she said. “I won’t open my link. Just don’t hurt Daro anymore.”

He pushed her forward, prodding her with his wand. “We don’t have far to go. The land slopes just ahead—keep going downhill and we’ll reach the lake before dark.”

She moved on shaky legs. The dizziness she had felt after he struck her was gone, but her head still ached. Her link would soon remedy that, but she could not dull her mind enough to ignore the pain without opening herself to the Net. She would have to endure the discomfort until the damage was repaired.

Josef might be wrong about Daro. The hunter might open his link fully, if only to dampen his pain. He would summon help for her, whatever shame that might bring to him.

“You’ll behave yourself,” Josef said behind her, “and you’ll do as I say, or you’ll learn just how much you can be hurt before you’re repaired.”

“I thought you wanted to talk.”

“Oh, but I do. We’ll have a nice talk, but remember that I can find other ways to amuse myself with you—that is, if you don’t behave.”

She had lived this before, she realized, although not exactly in this way, when trapped inside one of the fantasies Aniya employed with her linkmate Hassan. But now she was cast in Hassan’s role, which she had never played before—the victim, the one to be subdued—and could not escape simply by closing a channel.

Perhaps Josef was so unbalanced now that nothing around him had any more substance than a fantasy. He was capable of hurting her and would expect her to fear that more than anything. She would make him believe that she was completely cowed, then find a way to escape and summon help.

The sun was low behind them when they reached the lake. Josef led her over the rocks along the shore until they came to a lean-to of hides and wooden poles in a clearing overlooking the rocky beach.

“This is how you live?” Orielna said.

He jabbed her with the wand, bruising a rib. “Careful, Orielna. I don’t like your tone.”

“I’m concerned for you, Josef. You can’t go on this way.”

“But I can. My link will heal me, and the few unchanged people near here avoid this particular spot now. They’re afraid of me, you see.”

They climbed up to the makeshift shelter. “Sit down,” he said, then rummaged through a pack under the lean-to. He held up a leather thong and a piece of rope. “Put your hands behind your back.”

“Don’t bind me.”

“I don’t want you tempted to run away and go looking for that friend of yours. You
were
thinking of doing that.” He bound her arms, then tied her legs at the ankles.

“He’ll come after you,” she said.

“Perhaps. I’m curious to see what he does. He’ll be a little unbalanced when he comes to himself—he may blame you for his predicament. He might think you’ve gotten just what you deserve or that you want me now. I’m sure you told him how much we once meant to each other. He may come after me, or he may decide to forget this whole unhappy episode.”

Her eyes stung; she closed them for a moment. “You must listen to me,” she said. “Aniya wants you back. She won’t have you wiped—she only wants you to recover.”

“You think so?” he responded. “She’d be so repulsed by me now that erasing me would be her only alternative. She’d never be able to endure my presence again, knowing that I preferred even what I have here to her. I know what I am now—I can’t be hers again. But maybe you’ve diverged so much from her yourself that you can’t see that.”

“Why did you kill Kitte?”

He laughed softly as he sat down next to her. “She tried to keep me, kept babbling about how I might become her eidolon. She found me in the Garden, just inside the gate. She liked to go there—she imagined that some unchanged person might follow her out and become hers completely, but she didn’t have the courage to wander far from the wall.”

“You didn’t have to—”

“What did I kill?” he asked. “I knew what other people were then—I’d encountered enough of them after I left our sharer. They’re nothing but the thoughts others give them, or the memories the minds feed them—they’re shells of sensations with nothing inside. Kitte was like all the others—that’s what I was thinking when my hands were around her throat. There was nothing inside her to kill, nothing that was truly hers, but that wasn’t the only reason I wrung the life from her body. I knew I was doing something that was truly mine, that the minds hadn’t put inside me.”

“You’ve gone wrong, Josef. You can’t—”

“I’m myself for the first time. If you’d been among other people more, you would have seen what we are. We’re nothing but puppets of the minds. They probe our thoughts and soothe us so that we never know what we are, and never truly reveal themselves to us. They know we’re too limited ever to be more. Humankind built itself a trap when the minds were created—they wanted intelligence that could grasp what few human minds could encompass. Now they give us what we want so that we’ll forget we’ve been surpassed, that nothing will ever be truly ours again.”

“The minds give us what we choose to accept.” She thought of what Daro had told her their first night together. “There might be more for us if we had the courage to reach for it.”

“You mean they might grant us a few more gifts if we begged for them, and then we’d lose even more of ourselves. No, Orielna—I’ll stay as I am. I won’t be Aniya’s puppet, or the Net’s. I know what I am now, and I accept it—I won’t hide from it the way the rest of you do.”

She moved her hands, straining against the thong; her wrists were bound tightly. “Come away with me, Josef. Aniya only wants you safe—she may be content to let you live in her house without communing with her.”

“How false! You don’t believe that. Anyway, there’s someone else here to consider besides me.”

“That unchanged girl,” she said. “I was wondering about her. I thought she might have left you.”

“So you know about her. She can’t leave me—she’s abandoned her people, and there’s nowhere else for her to go. Right now, she’s probably fishing at the river near here. She hunts for me, catches fish, and looks for plants. The rest of the time, she jabbers at me in that speech of hers. I’ve learned just enough of it to tell her what to do, and I won’t teach her our language. It’s amusing to watch her trying to sort out my words while her eyes plead with me to say just one word she can understand.”

“We’ll bring her along,” Orielna said. “I’ll ask Aniya to have you help her through her change.”

He glared at her. “Why do you keep talking about impossibilities?” He shook back his hair. “She’s mine. She won’t know anything of the outside world except what I choose to reveal to her. She wouldn’t remain mine for long out there.” He grinned, showing his teeth. “You don’t want to go back yourself. Aniya will make certain you never leave her again. You fear that—I know. We still share, you and I.”

“Less than you think.”

He grabbed her hair, forced her head back, and clawed at her shirt. “Behave yourself.” He fumbled between her legs. “I’ve always known how to please you before, haven’t I?”

She heard a cry. Josef let go; she looked up. A young girl in a loincloth hurried toward them from the trees beyond the shelter, carrying a spear and a basket. Her long reddish brown hair hid most of her face. “Josef!” she cried; he had taught her that much, at least. She scrambled toward them over the rocks, dropped the basket and spear at Josef’s feet, then pulled at his arm.

Josef said, “She’s jealous.” The girl sat back on her heels and began to smooth her hair over her bare breasts. She lifted her head; her eyes were as black as Josef’s. Orielna understood then what the girl was to him.

He had found his own eidolon in the Garden and would make her into his own image in time. He would deny her anything beyond his own needs, as Aniya had denied him his.

Josef got up and dragged the girl into the shelter. Orielna listened to their grunts and sighs as she gazed at the lake. Poor Josef, she thought; he thinks he’s escaped Aniya, but he’s only become what she would have been out here.

It was curious that she now felt so removed from everything around her. Her mind was probably becoming more unstable, since she was beginning to see why Josef welcomed his present state and embraced the wild and more violent impulses he saw as truly human. But she also pitied him. She might have become like him if she had come here alone, but knowing that she also had such impulses did not trouble her now. Uncertain as her fate was, she no longer feared it. Daro had shown her that she did not have to let mental shadows cloak her thoughts and deeds. Everything that had happened to her here was hers. She could become herself, then step beyond what she had been shaped to be.

She opened a channel. “Is Daro safe?” she whispered through it.

“He is,” the Net replied inside her. “He freed himself without aid and touched us only long enough to say that his hunt was over. He is closed to us now. Do you wish us to assist you?”

The hunter had abandoned her, as Josef had guessed that he might. Daro had, after all, only left her with the man she was seeking; he owed her no more than that. She should have expected it. He would go back to his hut to brood on his failure, perhaps leave the Garden altogether.

“I need no help,” her thoughts whispered. “When Daro is open to you again, tell him that I won’t forget him.”

She closed herself off and bowed her head.

The girl struck a fire among the rocks and cooked the fish she had brought in her basket. Josef came out of the lean-to and studied Orielna for a moment. “You’re just longing to summon help, aren’t you?”

She blinked, holding back her tears. He would see only her unhappiness and not know that she had touched the Net. Her unfeigned sorrow, she supposed, was protecting her now; Josef was unaware of its cause. He could find out easily enough that she had disobeyed him if he opened a channel, but she no longer cared.