Authors: Isobelle Carmody
I opened my eyes.
It was an incredible relief to find I could move even this much, but there was nothing to see save the same blackness as when I had first woken. The stabbing needles progressed painfully in a line along the back of each of my legs. Given that I was lying on my back, the needles must be coming directly out of the bench. When they reached my buttocks, I felt a strong urge to relieve myself and wondered with fleeting revulsion how this aspect of my care had been managed. I smelled horrible but not as vile as if I had been left to lie in my own waste.
Still unable to sense the Tumen’s presence, I was nevertheless sure he was close by, watching me dispassionately. Driven by anger and frustration, I fought the reluctance of my body and croaked, ‘Why . . . are you doing . . . this to me?’
The same voice as before responded. ‘Your muscles have withered from inactivity because you did not attain deepsleep stasis. They will require intensive electro-physiotherapy and manipulation before they can support you. God has devised a series of injections of serum to stimulate your nerves and muscles.’
The stabbing needles were now piercing my back in several places at once as they moved gradually upward. This process was astonishingly painful, and I had nothing left with which to weave a coercive net, yet I took comfort from the Tumen’s talk of stimulating my muscles, for surely this treatment meant I would eventually be permitted to stand and move about. The best thing in the meantime would be to sleep, but there was one thing I had to ask first.
‘Before, you told me my companions had been resurrected, but then you said all new specimens were put into cryopods.’
‘All new specimens are put into cryopods to undergo deepsleep. After healing, data collection and evaluation of biological viability, acceptable specimens are resurrected within Habitat, as required by Revision Protocol Seventeen.’
‘What is Habitat?’ I asked.
‘A synthetic environment devised for the containment of a live pool of viable rescued specimens, as defined in Article Ten of Revision Protocol Seventeen,’ answered the Tumen. ‘Approved specimens remain in Habitat until death. Once expired, a specimen is removed for evaluation and final data collection before the body is returned to Habitat for the social ritual of burial.’
I must have made some dismayed sound, for the Tumen asked, ‘Do you feel pain?’ His words were solicitous but his tone indifferent.
Trying to keep fear and anger from my voice, I asked evenly, ‘Why am I here if my companions have been woken in Habitat already?’
‘You are an anomaly,’ the Tumen answered. ‘You woke spontaneously from cryosleep and even after strong sedation you have achieved sleep only in the alpha and high theta range. You did not reach the low theta or delta states required for return to full immersion cryosleep. As with the first anomaly, your alpha and theta waves spiked well above the normal range on the Hertz-Kraagan Index before you awoke. God requires all anomalies to be fully investigated and documented. Equipment is now being assembled for the acquisition of supplementary data during waking state.’
Most of the Tumen’s stiff words were incomprehensible but I understood well enough that he regarded me as an anomaly because I had woken myself from cryosleep. Given that Jak had told me
data
was a Beforetime word for knowledge, it seemed the Tumen wanted to learn more about me. But what was the ‘God’ he referred to? If I was right that the Tumen were not the original inhabitants of Pellmar Quadrants – Jacob’s ‘shining people’ – they had obviously dwelt here long enough to learn how to use the Beforetimers’ machines. Why they would trouble to learn to use them to try to fulfil the instructions of a long-dead people I could not guess, but as far as my quest was concerned, it mattered not. Given my attendant’s talk of the need to stimulate my muscles, it seemed safe to assume I was soon to join my companions, which would have reassured me, except for the fact that the Tumen had spoken of specimens dying in Habitat.
Needles began to prick the tender flesh on the underside of my arms and I gritted my teeth, telling myself grimly that pain was the price for restoring control over my body. Blinking tears away, I asked, ‘Do all . . . who go to Habitat die there?’
‘All specimens placed in Habitat remain there until death,’ answered the Tumen.
This was an ambiguous answer. It meant either that Habitat was so inimical that people did not long survive there, or that anyone put there would remain captive until their natural death. Neither prospect appealed but it was the pleasant ruthlessness of the Tumen’s tone that chilled me more than the content of his words.
Before Misfits joined with rebels to free the Land from the Herders and the Council, unTalented people had spoken in the same calm unfeeling way of killing beasts. They had not felt anything about what they did because they had not regarded beasts as thinking, feeling creatures, only as a resource to be used, perhaps because unTalents were unable to communicate with them. The Tumen could speak to me and understand my words, yet it seemed that the indifferent gentleness with which he tended me and answered my questions was no more or less than the care exerted by a man tending a cow he meant to slaughter for her meat or hide. All he wanted from me was information, and his gentleness merely made his task easier. If so, it seemed unlikely the Tumen would simply agree to free me, no matter how eloquently I pleaded.
A needle driven into the base of my neck caused excruciating pain and I was on the verge of willing myself to sleep to escape it when it struck me that my muscles could not possible have withered so badly from the inactivity of only a few days. With a chill, I remembered Doktaruth telling Cassy of animals being induced to sleep in cryopods for years on end.
‘How long have I been asleep?’ I asked, and heard the trepidation in my voice.
‘You have slept three cycles since the last waking,’ the Tumen answered.
I gritted my teeth in frustration at the incomprehensible terms, and asked, ‘How many hours are there in a cycle?’
‘One cycle is divided into seven hundred and twenty hours,’ the Tumen said.
Pain was momentarily submerged in icy shock. ‘That means I have been asleep for . . . three months!’
‘Your heart rate is unacceptably high,’ the Tumen observed. ‘Specimens showing signs of stress must be subjected to a renewed cycle of deepsleep. Given your resistance to sedation, an airborne nerve agent will be administered.’
‘What? Wait!’ I cried unsteadily, as a soft snake-like hiss filled the air.
Catching a whiff of something sharp and unpleasant, I held my breath, but the potion fell like light rain on my exposed skin, and my flesh grew numb, the numbness deepening and spreading inward. After a moment of panic, I realised it did not matter if I was drugged, since my mind was still encased in the coercive armour I had woven, which would protect me from the cryopod mechanism if the Tumen tried to use it on me again. I forced myself to breathe naturally, taking in the peppery dampness in the air; the relief of relinquishing control was indescribable.
I sank through the levels of my mind without resistance, passing swiftly and easily through the layer just under consciousness, where dreams and memories drifted like great soft jellyfish. Usually I had to be very careful not to be absorbed at this level if I wished to retain awareness even as my body and conscious mind slept, but the armour of dark residue seemed almost to ward off memories, so that they could not draw near enough to absorb me.
I continued to descend, moving from my subconscious mind into the darker and more mysterious realm beneath. Here grey amorphous matter roiled and floated, waiting to be shaped into something that could rise to the subconscious as dream or vision or to consciousness as a thought. This was as it had always been, but when I reached the bottom of the unconscious level I became mired in a thin dense layer of sediment I had never encountered before, possibly something reacting to the spirit armour I wore. Unable to remove the armour without making myself vulnerable to the cryopod, I fought to pass through it.
Immediately I felt it quicken about me, then I was on the deck of a ship on the open sea, a dazzling blue sky arching above. At the edge of the deck, staring gravely outward, was the mute farseeker, Gilaine, whom I had not seen in life since escaping from her father’s secret encampment in the White Valley years before. She had been a girl when last I had spoken to her, and little more than that in my occasional glimpses of her in dreams of Matthew, but in this dream she was a slender, lovely woman with silvery blonde hair bound in a complex and rather fanciful structure of intricate loops and coiled plaits. I could not see what she was looking at, because I could not widen my vision. Giving up the struggle to see more, it occurred to me that I had seen her several times in true dreams of Matthew in the Red Land, but never so clearly as now. That was because I was not, I realised, looking at her through Matthew’s eyes. Gilaine was the focus of the vision.
Her expression was troubled, if no less sweet than I remembered, and I wondered if she had been sold. What I could see of the ship told me it was not of the Land, nor of Norseland, and neither did it have the characteristics of ships built by Gadfian or Sadorian shipwrights. Even the wood it was made from, ghost pale with streaks of smoky lavender, was unknown to me. Yet it was undeniably beautiful. It had been intricately carved, and there was a tracery of inlaid silver visible here and there – a technique I had only ever seen applied to jewellery and costly ceremonial weapons. The sails were lovely, billows of violet silk slashed here and there with bold black symbols. Gilaine’s clothes were made of silk too, grey and pearl hues that perfectly set off her moon-pale colouring. Her tunic had a pattern of embroidered feathers picked out in silver thread that flashed when wind rippled the cloth, and she wore a pearl suspended on a long delicate silver chain about her neck. I had never seen her so richly clad in any of my visions of Matthew. If she had been sold, it was to someone of wealth who valued her.
She lifted a hand to tuck a long pale strand of hair behind her ear after it escaped its braid, her expression grave, but she did not look afraid, nor did she look ill used or unhappy. Merely worried. Without looking down, she reached beneath the neck of the tunic to draw out a small beaten metal disk on a leather thong and ran a thumb over it. I guessed that she was not conscious of doing it; indeed she was so deep in thought that she did not stir or react when two people moved across the deck directly behind her. They wore trews and a tunic like Gilaine’s, but the cloth from which they were made was rough, and both wore their hair in tight, waxed queues, as did many shipfolk from the Land. They paid no more attention to Gilaine than she did to them, but when an old man stepped from a door they stopped and bowed respectfully to him. He acknowledged the courtesy with a slight inclination of his head before coming to stand at Gilaine’s side. He was so small that he barely reached her shoulder and he had snow-white hair bound into a long tight braid. His skin was an unusual yellow-gold hue, and his eyes were striking – steeply slanted up at the outer edge and slitted so that the iris was no more than a dark glitter between the lids. He wore no jewellery or mark of rank, but even without the respect the shipfolk had showed him, I would have known him for a man of power, for he carried himself with an unmistakable authority.
Was he Gilaine’s owner?
It struck me as I studied him that I had seen others like him; two diminutive acrobats performing at a moon fair long years past, and the defective Okan, brought to the Healing Centre in Sutrium by his dying foster-mother. Was Gilaine being taken to their land?
The man turned towards her and shook his head. Gilaine’s shoulders slumped and she glanced down at the pendant she was holding. She regarded it for a moment and then tucked it under the neck of her tunic with a sigh.
‘I am sorry that I cannot do what you have asked,’ the old man said in a courteous musical voice. There was sincerity as well as regret in his tone, which made me wonder if he
had
bought her after all. Somehow I could not imagine that anyone who owned another person would treat them with gentleness or courtesy. Gilaine had turned to him and now he took her hand and continued, ‘The sole purpose for my long journey was to keep you safe and to ensure you come to the appointed place at the appointed time. Nothing can come before that.’
A woman joined them then, not much older than Gilaine, but also small of stature and gold skinned. She, too, wore trews and a plain tunic, but these were the same midnight black as the heavy mass of her hair, drawn into a great glossy knot high on her head. Only two flat blades of darkness had been left to hang either side of her face. The style exaggerated the length and delicacy of her neck, but still she did not look fragile. Indeed there was a catlike smoothness to her movements that reminded me of the lithe strength of the Sadorian tribal leader, Jakoby, and her pale-blue eyes held the same steadfast confidence.
Having greeted Gilaine, she turned to the man, bowed very low and said respectfully, ‘Greetings, Chodan Sangmu. Chiya Pema and Rabten have prepared a bath and beg you to make use of it while the water is hot.’ Her voice had the same musical quality as the old man’s.
He sighed. ‘Thank you, Chiya Dawa.’ He turned to Gilaine again. ‘I am afraid these old bones need some attention if I am to stand strong in the days ahead. I will leave you in the Chiya’s competent hands. Do not fret too much. We are all servants of the world and it will use us as it must.’
‘It is her friends,’ Chiya Dawa told him, giving Gilaine a slanting look of mingled complicity and compassion. ‘She is worried about what they will do when the Gonpo Dron tells them she has been given to you as a gift.’
‘And I have told her that too much is at stake to risk contacting them to explain. In truth, no less than everything is at stake.’
The dream changed abruptly. I was looking at Gilaine again, but now she was younger. Even if she had not been, I would have known this for a past-dream because Matthew, who was with her in a dark, grimy-looking hut, was little older than the boy I had seen marched aboard a Herder ship in Rangorn so long ago.