Dreamsnake

Vonda N. McIntyre

Chapter 9

The wind in Arevin’s face felt cool and clean. He was grateful for the mountain climate, free of dust and heat and the ever present sand. At the crest of a pass he stood beside his horse and looked out over the countryside Snake had been raised in. The land was bright and very green, and he could both see and hear great quantities of free-flowing water. A river meandered through the center of the valley below, and a stone’s throw from the trail a spring gushed across mossy rock, His respect for Snake increased. Her people did not migrate; they lived here all year around. She would have had little experience with extreme climates when she entered the desert. This was no preparation for the black sand waste. Arevin himself had not been prepared for the central desert’s severity. His maps were old; no member of the clan still living had ever used them. But they had led him safely to the other side of the desert, following a line of trustworthy oases. It was so late in the season that he had met no one at all: no one to ask advice about the best route, no one to ask about Snake.

He mounted his horse and rode down the trail into the healers’ valley.

Before he encountered any dwellings he reached a small orchard. It was unusual: the trees farthest from the road were full-grown, gnarled, while the nearest ones were merely saplings, as if a few trees had been planted every year for many years. A youth of fourteen or fifteen lounged in the shade, eating a piece of fruit. When Arevin stopped, the young man glanced up, rose, and started toward him. Arevin urged his horse across the grassy edge of the meadow. They met in a row of trees that seemed perhaps five or six years old.

“Hi,” the young man said. He picked another piece of fruit and held it out toward Arevin. “Have a pear? The peaches and the cherries are all gone and the oranges aren’t quite ripe yet.”

Arevin saw that, in fact, each tree bore fruit of several different shapes, but leaves of only a single shape. He reached uncertainly for the pear, wondering if the ground the trees grew on was poisoned.

“Don’t worry,” the young man said. “It isn’t radioactive. There aren’t any craters around here.”

At this Arevin drew back his hand. He had not said a word, yet the youth seemed to know what he was thinking.

“I made the tree myself, and I never work with hot mutagens.”

Arevin had no idea what the boy was talking about except that he seemed to be assuring him that the fruit was safe. He wished he understood the boy as well as the boy understood him. Not wishing to be impolite, he took the pear.

“Thank you.” Since the youth was watching him both hopefully and expectantly, Arevin bit into the fruit. It was sweet and tart at the same time, and very juicy. He took another bite. “It’s very good,” he said. “I’ve never seen a plant that would produce four different things.”

“First project,” the boy said. He gestured back toward the older trees. “We all do one. It’s pretty simpleminded but it’s traditional.”

“I see,” Arevin said.

“My name’s Thad.”

“I am honored to meet you,” Arevin said. “I am looking for Snake.”

“Snake!” Thad frowned. “I’m afraid you’ve had a long ride for nothing. She isn’t here. She isn’t even due back for months.”

“But I could not have passed her.”

Thad’s pleasant and helpful expression changed to one of worry. “You mean she’s coming home already? What happened? Is she all right?”

“She was well when I saw her last,” Arevin said. Surely she should have reached her home well ahead of him, if nothing had happened. Thoughts of accidents, unlike viper bites, to which she would be vulnerable, assailed him.

“Hey, are you all right?”

Thad was beside him, holding his elbow to steady him.

“Yes,” Arevin said, but his voice was shaky.

“Are you sick? I’m not done with my training yet but one of the other healers can help you.”

“No, no, I’m not ill. But I can’t understand how I reached this place before she did.”

“But why’s she coming home so early?”

Arevin gazed down at the intent young man, now as concerned as Arevin himself.

“I do not think I should tell her story for her,” he said. “Perhaps I should speak to her parents. Will you show me where they live?”

“I would if I could,” Thad said. “Only she doesn’t have any. Won’t I do? I’m her brother.”

“I’m sorry to cause you distress. I did not know your parents were dead.”

“They aren’t. Or they might be. I don’t know. I mean I don’t know who they are. Or who Snake’s are.”

Arevin felt thoroughly confused. He had never had any trouble understanding what Snake said to him. But he did not think he had comprehended half of what this youth had told him in only a few minutes.

“If you do not know who your parents are, or whose Snake’s are, how can you be her brother?”

Thad looked at him quizzically. “You really don’t know much about healers, do you?”

“No,” Arevin said, feeling that the conversation had taken still another unexplained turn. “I do not. We have heard of you, of course, but Snake is the only one to visit my clan.”

“The reason I asked,” Thad said, “is because most people know we’re all adopted. We don’t have families, exactly. We’re all one family.”

“Yet you said you are her brother, as if she did not have another.” Except for his blue eyes, and they were not the same shade at all, Thad did not look anything like Snake.

“That’s how we think of each other. I used to get in trouble a lot when I was a kid and she’d always stick up for me.”

“I see.” Arevin dismounted and adjusted his horse’s bridle, considering what the boy had told him. “You are not blood kin with Snake,” he said, “but you feel a special relationship to her. Is this correct?”

“Yes.” Thad’s easygoing attitude had vanished.

“If I tell you why I have come, will you advise me, thinking first of Snake, even if you should have to go against your own customs?”

Arevin was glad the youth hesitated, for he would not have been able to depend on an impulsive and emotional answer.

“Something really bad has happened, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Arevin said. “And she blames herself.”

“You feel a special relationship for her, too, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And she for you?”

“I think so.”

“I’m on her side,” Thad said. “Always.”

Arevin unbuckled the horse’s bridle and slipped it off so his mount could graze. He sat down beneath Thad’s fruit tree and the boy sat nearby.

“I come from the other side of the western desert,” Arevin said. “There we have no good serpents, only sand vipers whose bite means death…”

Arevin told his story and waited for Thad to respond, but the young healer stared at his scarred hands for a long time.

“Her dreamsnake was killed,” he said finally.

Thad’s voice held shock and hopelessness; the tone chilled Arevin all the way to his almost impervious, controlled center.

“It was not her fault,” Arevin said again, though he had continually stressed that fact. Thad now knew about the clan’s fear of serpents and even about Arevin’s sister’s horrible death. But Arevin could see quite clearly that Thad did not understand.

The boy looked up at him. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “This is really awful.” He paused and looked around and rubbed the heel of his hand across his forehead. “I guess we better talk to Silver. She was one of Snake’s teachers and she’s the eldest now.”

Arevin hesitated. “Is that wise? Pardon me, but if you, Snake’s friend, cannot comprehend how all this happened, will any of the other healers be able to?”

“I understand what happened!”

“You know what happened,” Arevin said. “But you do not understand it. I do not want to offend you, but I fear what I say is true.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Thad said. “I still want to help her. Silver will think of something to do.”

oOo

The exquisite valley in which the healers lived combined areas of total wilderness with places of complete civilization. What appeared to Arevin to be virgin climax forest, ancient and unchanging, spread as far as he could see, beginning on the north slope of the valley. Yet immediately downhill from the tremendous dark old trees, an array of windmills spun gaily. The forest of trees and the forest of windmills harmonized.

The station was a serene place, a small town of well-built wood and stone houses. People greeted Thad or waved to him, and nodded to Arevin. The faint shouts of a children’s game drifted down the breeze.

Thad left Arevin’s horse loose in a pasture, then led Arevin to a building somewhat larger than the others, and somewhat removed from the main group. Inside, Arevin was surprised to observe, the walls were not of wood but of smooth white glazed ceramic tile. Even where there were no windows, the illumination was as bright as day, neither the eerie blue glow of bioluminescence nor the soft yellow light of gas flames. The place possessed a feeling of activity quite different from the placid atmosphere of the town itself. Through a half-open door Arevin saw several young people, younger even than Thad, bending over complicated instruments, completely absorbed in their work.

Thad gestured toward the students. “These are the labs. We grind the lenses for the microscopes right here at the station. Make our own glassware too.”

Almost all the people Arevin saw here—and, now that he thought of it, most of the people in the village—were either very young or elderly. The young ones in training, he thought, and the old ones teaching. Snake and the others out practicing their profession.

Thad climbed a flight of stairs, went down a carpeted hall, and knocked softly on a door. They waited for several minutes, and Thad seemed to think this quite ordinary, for he did not become impatient. Finally a pleasant, rather high-pitched voice said, “Come in.”

The room beyond was not so stark and severe as the labs. It was wood-paneled, with a large window overlooking the windmills. Arevin had heard of books, but he had never actually seen one. Here, two walls lined with shelves were full of them. The old healer sitting in a rocking chair held a book in her lap.

“Thad,” she said, nodding, with a welcoming yet questioning tone.

“Silver.” He brought Arevin in. “This is a friend of Snake’s. He’s come a long way to talk to us.”

“Sit down.” Her voice and her hands shook slightly. She was very old, her joints swollen and twisted. Her skin was smooth and soft and translucent, deeply lined on the cheeks and forehead. Her eyes were blue.

Following Thad’s lead, Arevin sat on a chair. He felt uncomfortable; he was accustomed to sitting cross-legged on the ground.

“What do you wish to say?”

“Are you Snake’s friend?” Arevin asked. “Or only her teacher?”

He thought she might laugh, but she gazed at him somberly. “Her friend.”

“Silver nominated her for her name,” Thad said. “Did you think I wanted you to talk to just anybody?”

Still, Arevin wondered if he should tell his story to this kindly old woman, for he remembered Snake’s words all too clearly: “My teachers seldom give the name I bear, and they’ll be disappointed.” Perhaps Silver’s disappointment would be great enough to exile Snake from her people.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” Silver said. “Snake is my friend, and I love her. You need not fear me.”

Arevin told his story for the second time that day, watching Silver’s face intently. Her expression did not change. Surely, after all the experiences she must have had, she could understand what had happened better than young Thad could.

“Ah,” she said. “Snake went across the desert.” She shook her head. “My brave and impulsive child.”

“Silver,” Thad said, “what can we do?”

“I don’t know, my dear.” She sighed. “I wish Snake had come home.”

“Surely the small serpents die,” Arevin said. “Surely others have been lost in accidents. What is done?”

“They live a long time,” Thad said. “Longer than their healers, sometimes. They don’t breed well.”

“Every year we train fewer people because we have too few dreamsnakes,” Silver said in her feathery voice.

“Snake’s excellence must entitle her to another serpent,” Arevin said.

“One cannot give what one does not have,” Silver said.

“She thought some might have been born.”

“Only a few ever hatched,” the old woman said sadly.

Thad glanced away. “One of us might decide not to finish their training…”

“Thad,” Silver said, “we haven’t enough for all of you now. Do you think Snake would ask you to return the dreamsnake she gave you?”

Thad shrugged, still not meeting Silver’s gaze or Arevin’s. “She shouldn’t have to ask. I should give it to her.”

“We cannot decide without Snake,” Silver said. “She must come home.”

Arevin looked down at his hands, realizing that there would be no easy solution to this dilemma, no simple explanation of what had happened, then forgiveness for Snake.

“You mustn’t punish her for my clan’s error,” he said again.

Silver shook her head. “It is not a question of punishment. But she cannot be a healer without a dreamsnake. I have none to give her.”

They sat together in silence. After a few minutes Arevin wondered if Silver had fallen asleep. He started when she spoke to him without glancing away from the view out her window.

“Will you keep looking for her?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation.

“When you find her, please tell her to come home. The council will meet with her.”

Thad rose, and with a deep sense of failure and depression Arevin understood that they had been dismissed.

They went back outside, leaving the workrooms and their strange machines, their strange light, their strange smells. The sun was setting, joining the long shadows together into darkness.

“Where shall I look?” Arevin said suddenly.

“What?”

“I came here because I believed Snake was coming home. Now I don’t know where she might be. It’s nearly winter. If the storms have started…”

“She knows better than to get stuck out on the desert in winter,” Thad said. “No, what must have happened is somebody needed help and she had to go off the route home. Maybe her patient was even in the central mountains. She’ll be somewhere south of here, in Middlepass or New Tibet or Mountainside.”

“All right,” Arevin said, grateful for any possibility. “I will go south.” But he wondered if Thad were speaking with the unquestioning self-confidence of extreme youth.

Thad opened the front door of a long low house. Inside, rooms opened off a central living-space. Thad threw himself down on a deep couch. Putting aside careful manners, Arevin sat on the floor.

“Dinner’s in a while,” Thad said. “The room next to mine is free right now, you can use it.”

“Perhaps I should go on,” Arevin said.

“Tonight? It’s crazy to ride at night around here. We’d find you at the bottom of a cliff in the morning. At least stay till tomorrow.”

“If that is your advice.” In fact, he felt a great heavy lethargy. He followed Thad into the spare room.

“I’ll get your pack,” Thad said. “You take a rest. You look like you need it.”

Arevin sat down slowly on the edge of the bed.

At the door, Thad turned back. “Listen, I’d like to help. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No,” Arevin said. “Thank you. I am very comfortable.”

Thad shrugged. “Okay.”

oOo

The black-sand desert stretched to the horizon, flat and empty, unmarred by any sign that it had ever been crossed. Heat waves rose like smoke. There was no steady wind yet, but all the marks and detritus of the traders’ route had already been obliterated: erased or covered by the shifting breezes that preceded winter. At the crest of the central mountains’ eastern range, Snake and Melissa looked out toward their invisible destination. They dismounted to rest the horses. Melissa adjusted a strap on Squirrel’s new riding saddle, then glanced back the way they had come, down into the high valley that had been her home. The town clung to the steep mountain slope, above the fertile valley floor. Windows and black glass panels glittered in the noon sun.

“I’ve never been this far from there before,” Melissa said with wonder. “Not in my whole life.” She turned away from the valley, toward Snake. “Thank you, Snake,” she said.

“You’re welcome, Melissa.”

Melissa dropped her gaze. Her right cheek, the unscarred one, flushed scarlet beneath her tan. “I should tell you something about that.”

“About what?”

“My name. It’s true, what Ras said, that it isn’t really—”

“Never mind. Melissa is your name as far as I’m concerned. I had a different child-name, too.”

“But they gave you your name. It’s an honor. You didn’t just take it like I did mine.”

They remounted and started down the well-used switchback trail.

“But I could have turned down the name they offered me,” Snake said. “If I’d done that, I would have picked my own adult name like the rest of the healers do.”

“You could have turned it down?”

“Yes.”

“But they hardly ever give it! That’s what I heard.”

“That’s true.”

“Has anybody ever said they didn’t want it?”

“Not as far as I know. I’m only the fourth one, though, so not very many people have had the chance. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t accepted it.”

“But why?”

“Because of the responsibility.” Her hand rested on the corner of the serpent case. Since the crazy’s attack she had begun to touch it more often. She drew her hand away from the smooth leather. Healers tended to die fairly young or live to a very old age. The Snake immediately preceding her had been only forty-three when he died, but the other two had each outlasted a century. Snake had a tremendous body of achievement to live up to, and so far she had failed.

oOo

The trail led downward through forever trees, among the gnarled brown trunks and dark needles of the trees legend said never bore seeds and never died. Their resin sharpened the air with a piny tang.

“Snake…” Melissa said.

“Yes?”

“Are you… are you my mother?”

Taken aback, Snake hesitated a moment. Her people did not form family groups quite the way others did. She herself had never called anyone “mother” or “father,” though all the older healers bore exactly that relationship to her. And Melissa’s tone was so wistful…

“All healers are your family now,” Snake said, “but I adopted you, and I think that makes me your mother.”

“I’m glad.”

“So am I.”

Below the narrow band of scraggly forest, almost nothing grew on the mountain’s flanks but lichen, and though the altitude was still high and the path steep, Snake and Melissa might as well have been on the desert floor already. Below the trees, the heat and the dryness of the air increased steadily. When they finally did reach the sand, they stopped for a moment to change, Snake into the robes Arevin’s people had given her, Melissa into desert clothes they had bought for her in Mountainside.

They saw no one all day. Snake glanced over her shoulder from time to time, and kept on guard whenever the horses passed through dunefields where someone could hide and ambush unsuspecting passersby. But there was no trace of the crazy. Snake began to wonder if the two attacks might have been coincidence, and her memories of other noises around her camp a dream. And if the crazy was a crazy, perhaps his vendetta against her had by now been diverted by some other irresistible concern.

She did not convince herself.

By evening the mountains lay far behind them, forming an abrupt wall. The horses’ hooves crunched in the sand, but the underlying silence was complete and unearthly. Snake and Melissa rode and talked as darkness fell. The heavy clouds obscured the moon; the constant glow of the lightcells in Snake’s lantern, relatively brighter now, provided just enough illumination for the travelers to continue. Hanging from the saddle, the lantern swung with Swift’s walk. The black sand reflected light like water. Squirrel and Swift moved closer together. Gradually, Snake and Melissa talked more and more softly, and finally they did not speak at all.

Snake’s compass, the nearly invisible moon, the direction of the wind, the shapes of sand dunes all helped them proceed in the right direction, but Snake could not put aside the pervasive wilderness fear that she was traveling in circles. Turning in the saddle, Snake watched the invisible trail behind them for several minutes, but no other light followed. They were alone; there was nothing but the darkness. Snake settled back.

“It’s spooky,” Melissa whispered.

“I know. I wish we could travel by day.”

“Maybe it’ll rain.”

“That would be nice.”

The desert received rain only once every year or two, but when it came, it usually arrived just before winter. Then the dormant seeds exploded into growth and reproduction and the sharp-grained desert softened with green and bits of color. In three days the delicate plants shriveled to brown lace and died, leaving hard-cased seeds to endure another year, or two, or three, until the rain roused them again. But tonight the air was dry and quiet and gave no hint of any change.

oOo

A light shimmered in the distance. Snake, dozing, woke abruptly from a dream in which the crazy was following and she saw his lantern moving closer and closer. Up until now she had not realized how sure she was that somehow he was still following her, still somewhere near, fired by incomprehensible motives.

But the light was not a carried lantern, it was steady and stationary and ahead of her. The sound of dry leaves drifted toward her on faint wind: they were nearing the first oasis on the route to Center.

It was not even dawn. Snake reached forward and patted Swift’s neck. “Not much farther now,” she said.

“What?” Melissa, too, started awake. “Where—?”

“It’s all right,” Snake said. “We can stop soon.”

“Oh.” Melissa looked around, blinking. “I forgot where I was.”

They reached the summertrees ringing the oasis. Snake’s lantern illuminated leaves already split and frayed by windblown sand. Snake did not see any tents and she could not hear any sounds of people or animals. All the caravannaires, by now, had retreated to the safety of the mountains.

“Where’s that light?”

“I don’t know,” Snake said. She glanced at Melissa, for her voice sounded strange: it was muffled by the end of her headcloth, pulled across her face. When no one appeared, she let it drop as if unaware that she had been hiding herself.

Snake turned Swift around, worried about the light.

“Look,” Melissa said.

Swift’s body cut off the lantern’s light in one direction, and there against the darkness rose a streak of luminescence. Closer, Snake could see that it was a dead summertree, close enough to the water to rot instead of drying. Lightcells had invaded its fragile trunk, transforming it into a glowing signal. Snake breathed softly with relief.

They rode farther, circling the still, black pool until they found a site with trees thick enough to give some shelter. As soon as Snake reined in, Melissa jumped down and began unsaddling Squirrel. Snake climbed down more slowly, for despite the constant desert climate, her knee had stiffened again during the long ride. Melissa rubbed Squirrel with a twist of leaves, talking to him in a barely audible voice. Soon they were all, horses and people, bedded down to wait through the day.

oOo

Snake padded barefoot toward the water, stretching and yawning. She had slept well all day, and now she wanted a swim before starting out again. It was still too early to leave the shelter of the thick summertrees. Hoping to find a few pieces of ripe fruit still on the branches, she glanced up and around, but the desert dwellers’ harvest had been thorough.

Only a few days before, on the other side of the mountains, the foliage at the oases had been lush and soft; here, now, the leaves were dry and dying. They rustled as she brushed past. The brittle fronds crumbled in her hand.

She stopped where the beach began. The black strip was only a few meters wide, a semicircle of sand around a minuscule lagoon that reflected the overhanging latticework of branches. In the secluded spot, Melissa was kneeling half-naked on the sand. She leaned out over the water, staring silently downward. The marks of Ras’s beating had faded, and the fire had left her back unscarred. Her skin was fairer than Snake would have guessed from her deep-tanned hands and face. As Snake watched, Melissa reached out slowly and touched the surface of the dark water. Ripples spread from her fingertips.

oOo

Melissa watched, fascinated, as Snake let Mist and Sand out of the case. Mist glided around Snake’s feet, tasting the scents of the oasis. Snake picked her up gently. The smooth white scales were cool against her hands.

“I want her to smell you,” Snake said. “Her instinctive reaction is to strike at anything that startles her. If she recognizes your scent, it’s safer. All right?”

Melissa nodded, slowly, clearly frightened. “She’s very poisonous, isn’t she? More than the other?”

“Yes. As soon as we get home I can immunize you, but I don’t want to start that here. I have to test you first and I don’t have the right things with me.”

“You mean you can fix it so she’d bite me and nothing would happen?”

“Not quite nothing. But she’s bitten me by mistake a few times and I’m still here.”

“I guess I better let her smell me,” Melissa said.

Snake sat down next to her. “I know it’s hard not to be afraid of her. But breathe deeply and try to relax. Close your eyes and just listen to my voice.”

“Horses know it, too, when you’re afraid,” Melissa said, and did as Snake told her.

The cobra’s forked tongue flickered over Melissa’s hands, and the child remained still and silent. Snake remembered the first time she had seen the albino cobras: a terrifying, exhilarating moment when a mass of them, coiled together in infinite knots, felt her footsteps and lifted their heads in unison, hissing, like a many-headed beast or an alien plant in violent and abrupt full bloom.

Snake kept her hand on Mist as the cobra glided over Melissa’s arms.

“She feels nice,” Melissa said. Her voice was shaky, and a little scared, but the tone was sincere.

Melissa had seen rattlers before; their danger was a known one and not so frightening. Sand crawled across her hands and she stroked him gently. Snake was pleased; her daughter’s abilities were not limited to horses.

“I hoped you’d get along with Mist and Sand,” she said. “It’s important for a healer.”

Melissa looked up, startled. “But you didn’t mean—” She stopped.

“What?”

Melissa drew in a deep breath. “What you told the mayor,” she said hesitantly. “About what I could do. You didn’t really mean it. You had to say it so he’d let me go.”

“I meant everything I said.”

“But I couldn’t be a healer.”

“Why not?” Melissa did not answer, so Snake continued. “I told you healers adopt their children, because we can’t have any of our own. Let me tell you some more about us. A lot of healers have partners who have different professions. And not all our children become healers. We aren’t a closed community. But when we choose someone to adopt, we usually pick someone we think could be one of us.”

“Me?”

“Yes. If you want to. That’s the important thing. For you to do what you want to do. Not what you think anyone else wants or expects you to do.”

“A healer…” Melissa said.

The quality of wonder in her daughter’s voice gave Snake another compelling reason to make the city people help her find more dreamsnakes.

oOo

The second night Snake and Melissa rode hard. There was no oasis, and in the morning Snake did not stop at dawn, though it was really too hot to travel. Sweat drenched her. The sticky beads rolled down her back and sides. They slid halfway down her face and dried into salty grit. Swift’s coat darkened as sweat streamed down her legs. Every step flung droplets from her fetlocks.

“Mistress…”

The formality startled Snake and she glanced over at Melissa with concern. “Melissa, what’s wrong?”

“How much farther before we stop?”

“I don’t know. We have to go on as long as we can.” She gestured toward the sky, where the clouds hung low and threatening. “That’s what they look like before a storm.”

“I know. But we can’t go much longer. Squirrel and Swift have to rest. You said the city is in the middle of the desert. Well, once we get in we have to get back out, and the horses have to take us.”

Snake slumped back in her saddle. “We have to go on. It’s too dangerous to stop.”

“Snake… Snake, you know about people and storms and healing and deserts and cities, and I don’t. But I know about horses. If we let them stop and rest for a few hours, they’ll take us a far way tonight. If they have to keep going, by dark we’ll have to leave them behind.”

“All right,” Snake said finally. “We’ll stop when we get to those rocks. At least there’ll be some shade.”

oOo

At home in the healers’ station, Snake did not think of the city from one month to the next. But in the desert, and in the mountains where the caravannaires wintered, life revolved around it. Snake had begun to feel that her life too depended on it when at last, at dawn after the third night, the high, truncated mountain that protected Center appeared before her. The sun rose directly behind it, illuminating it in scarlet like an idol. Scenting water, sensing an end to their long trek, the horses raised their heads and quickened their tired pace. As the sun rose higher the low, thickening clouds spread the light into a red wash that covered the horizon. Snake’s knee ached with every step Swift took, but she did not need the signal of swollen joints to tell her a storm approached. Snake clenched her fists around the reins until the leather dug painfully into her palms, then slowly she relaxed her hands and stroked her horse’s damp neck. She had no doubt that Swift ached as much as she did.

They approached the mountain. The summertrees were brown and withered, rustling stalks surrounding a dark pond and deserted firepits. The wind whispered between the dry leaves and over the sand, coming first from one direction, then another, in the manner of winds near a solitary mountain. The city’s sunrise shadow enveloped them.

“It’s a lot bigger than I thought,” Melissa said quietly. “I used to have a place where I could hide and listen to people talk, but I always thought they were making up stories.”

“I think I did too,” Snake said. Her own voice sounded very lost and far away. As she approached the great rock cliffs, cold sweat broke out on her forehead, and her hands grew clammy despite the heat. The tired mare carried her forward.

The times the city had dominated the healers’ station were the year Snake was seven, and again when she was seventeen. In each of those years a senior healer undertook the long hard journey to Center. Each of those years was the beginning of a new decade, when the healers offered the city dwellers an exchange of knowledge and of help. They were always turned away. Perhaps this time, too, despite the message Snake had to give them.

“Snake?”

Snake started and glanced over at Melissa. “What?”

“Are you okay? You looked so far away, and, I don’t know—”

“ ‘Scared’ would be a good word, I think,” Snake said.

“They’ll let us in.”

The dark clouds seemed to grow thicker and heavier every minute.

“I hope so,” Snake said.

oOo

At the base of Center’s mountain, the wide dark pool had neither inlets nor outlets. The water oozed up into it from below, then flowed invisibly away into the sand. The summertrees were dead, but the ground cover of grass and low bushes grew lushly. Fresh grass already sprouted in the trampled areas of abandoned camps and the paths between, but not on the wide road to the city’s gate.

Snake did not have the heart to ride Swift past the water. She handed her reins to Melissa at the edge of the pool.

“Follow me when they’re finished drinking. I won’t go in without you, so don’t worry. If the wind rises, though, come running. Okay?”

Melissa nodded. “A storm couldn’t come that quick, could it?”

“I’m afraid it could,” Snake said.

She drank quickly and splashed water on her face. Wiping the drops on the corner of her headcloth she strode along the bare road. Somewhere close beneath the black sand lay a smooth, unyielding surface. An ancient road? She had seen remains in other places, disintegrating concrete flesh and even the rusting steel bones in places the collectors had not yet worked.

Snake stopped before Center’s gate. It was five times her height. Generations of sandstorms had brushed the metal to a lustrous finish. But it had no handle, no bell-pull, no door knocker, no way Snake could see of summoning someone to let her in.

She stepped forward, raised her fist, and banged it against the metal. The solid thud sounded not at all hollow. She pounded on the door, thinking it must be very thick. As her eyes grew more accustomed to the dim light in the recessed doorway, she saw that the front of the door was actually concave, perceptibly worn down by the fury of the storms.

Her hand aching, she stepped back for a moment.

“About time you stopped that noise.”

Snake jumped at the voice and turned toward it, but no one was there. Instead, in the side of the alcove, a panel clicked away into the rock and a window appeared. A pale man with bushy red hair glared out at her.

“What do you mean, beating on the door after we’ve closed?”

“I want to come in,” Snake said.

“You’re not a city dweller.”

“No. My name is Snake. I’m a healer.”

He did not answer—as politeness dictated where Snake had been raised—with his name. She hardly noticed, for she was getting used to the differences that made politeness in one place an offense somewhere else. But when he threw back his head and laughed, she was surprised. She frowned and waited until he stopped.

“So they’ve quit sending old crocks to beg, have they? It’s young ones now!” He laughed again. “I’d think they could choose somebody handsome.”

From his tone, Snake assumed she had been insulted. She shrugged. “Open the gate.”

He stopped laughing. “We don’t let outsiders in.”

“I brought a message from a friend to her family. I want to deliver it.”

He did not answer for a moment, glancing down. “All the people who went out came back in this year.”

“She left a long time ago.”

“You don’t know much about this city if you expect me to go running around it looking for some crazy’s family.”

“I know nothing about your city. But from the looks of you, you’re related to my friend.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” For the first time he was taken aback.

“She told me her family was related to the keepers of the gate. And I can see it—the hair, the forehead… the eyes are different. Hers are brown.” This city dweller’s eyes were pale green.

“Did she happen to mention,” the young man said, attempting sarcasm, “just exactly which family she’s supposed to belong to?”

“The ruling one.”

“Just a minute,” he said slowly. He glanced down and his hands moved, out of Snake’s view, but when she moved closer she could see nothing beyond the edge of the “window,” for it was not a window but a glass panel carrying a moving image. Though startled, she did not permit herself to react. She had known, after all, that the city dwellers had more mechanical technology than her people. That was one of the reasons she was here.

The young man looked up slowly, one eyebrow arched in astonishment. “I’ll have to call someone else to talk to you.” The image on the glass panel dissolved in multicolored lines.

Nothing happened for some time. Snake leaned outside the shallow alcove and looked around.

“Melissa!”

Neither the child nor the horses were in sight. Snake could see most of the pool’s near shore through a translucent curtain of withered summertrees, but in a few places enough vegetation remained to hide two horses and a child.

“Melissa!” Snake called again.

Again there was no answer, but the wind could have carried her voice away. The false window had turned dead black. Snake was about to leave it to find her daughter when it wavered back to life.

“Where are you?” a new voice called. “Come back here.”

Snake glanced outside one last time and returned reluctantly to the image-carrier.

“You upset my cousin rather badly,” the image said.

Snake stared at the panel, speechless, for the speaker was astonishingly like Jesse, much more so than the younger man. This was Jesse’s twin, or her family was highly inbred. As the figure spoke again the thought passed through Snake’s mind that inbreeding was a useful way of concentrating and setting desired traits, if the experimenter were prepared for a few spectacular failures among the results. Snake was unprepared for the implied acceptance of spectacular failures in human births.

“Hello? Is this working?”

The red-haired figure peered out at her worriedly, and a loud hollow scratching noise followed the voice. The voice: Jesse’s had been pleasant and low, but not this low. Snake realized she was speaking to a man, not to a woman as she had thought from the resemblance. Not Jesse’s twin, then, certainly. Snake wondered if the city people cloned human beings. If they did it often and could even handle cross-sex clones, perhaps they had methods that would be more successful than those the healers used in making new dreamsnakes.

“I can hear you, if that’s what you mean,” Snake said.

“Good. What do you want? It must be worrisome from the look on Richard’s face.”

“I have a message for you if you’re direct kin of the prospector Jesse,” Snake said.

The man’s pink cheeks whitened abruptly. “Jesse?” He shook his head, then regained his composure. “Has she changed that much in all these years, or do I look like anything but direct kin?”

“No,” Snake said. “You look like kin.”

“She’s my older sister,” he said. “And now I suppose she wants to come back and be the eldest again, while I’m to go back to being nothing but a younger?”

The bitterness of his voice was like a betrayal; Snake felt it like a shock. The news of Jesse’s death would not bring sorrow to her brother, only joy.

“She’s coming back, isn’t she?” he said. “She knows the council would put her back at the head of our family. Damn her! I might as well not have existed for the last twenty years.”

Snake listened to him, her throat tightening with grief. Despite the brother’s resentment, if Snake had been able to keep Jesse alive, her people would have taken her back, welcomed her back: if they could, they would have healed her.

Snake spoke with some difficulty. “This council—perhaps I should give the message to them.” She wanted to speak to someone who cared, someone who had loved Jesse, not to someone who would laugh and thank her for her failure.

“This is family business, not a matter for the council. You should give Jesse’s message to me.”

“I would prefer speaking to you face to face.”

“I’m sure you would,” he said. “But that’s impossible. My cousins have a policy against letting in outsiders—”

“Surely, in this case—”

“—and besides, I couldn’t even if I wanted to. The gate’s locked till spring.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true.”

“Jesse would have warned me.”

He snorted. “She never believed it. She left when she was a child, and children never really believe. They play at staying out till the last minute, pretending they might get locked out. So sometimes we lose one who tests the rules too far.”

“She stopped believing almost everything you say.” Anger tightened Snake’s voice.

Jesse’s brother glanced away, intently watching something else for a moment. He looked at Snake again. “Well, I hope you believe what I tell you now. A storm’s gathering, so I suggest you give me the message and leave yourself time to find shelter.”

Even if he was lying to her, he was not going to let her inside. Snake no longer even hoped for that.

“Her message is this,” Snake said. “She was happy out here. She wants you to stop lying to your children about what it’s like outside your city.”

Jesse’s brother stared at Snake, waiting, then suddenly smiled and laughed once, quickly and sharply. “That’s all? You mean she isn’t coming back?”

“She cannot come back,” Snake said. “She’s dead.”

A strange and eerie mixture of relief and sorrow passed over the face that was so like Jesse’s.

“Dead?” he said softly.

“I could not save her. She broke her back—”

“I never wished her dead.” He drew in a long breath, then let it out slowly. “Broke her back… a quick death, then. Better than some.”

“She did not die when she broke her back. Her partners and I were going to bring her home, because you could heal her.”

“Perhaps we could have,” he said. “How did she die?”

“She prospected in the war craters. She couldn’t believe the truth that they are dangerous, because you told her so many lies. She died of radiation poisoning.”

He flinched.

“I was with her,” Snake said. “I did what I could, but I have no dreamsnake. I could not help her die.”

He seemed to be staring at Snake, through her.

“We are in your debt, healer,” he said. “For service to a family member, for bringing us news of her death.” He spoke in a distressed, distracted tone, then suddenly looked up, glaring at her. “I don’t like my family to be in debt. There’s a payment slot at the base of the screen. The money—”

“I want no money,” Snake said.

“I can’t let you in!” he cried.

“I accept that.”

“Then what do you want?” He shook his head quickly. “Of course. Dreamsnakes. Why won’t you believe we have none? I can’t discharge our debt with dreamsnakes—and I’m not willing to exchange my debt to you for a debt to the offworlders. The offworlders—” He stopped; he seemed upset.

“If the offworlders can help me, let me speak to them.”

“Even if I could, they’d refuse you.”

“If they’re human, they’ll listen to me.”

“There’s… some question about their humanity,” Jesse’s brother said. “Who can tell, without tests? You don’t understand, healer. You’ve never met them. They’re dangerous and unpredictable.”

“Let me try.” Snake held out her hands, palms up, a quick, beseeching gesture, trying to make him understand her. “Other people die as Jesse died, in agony, because there aren’t enough healers. There aren’t enough dreamsnakes. I want to talk to the offworlders.”

“Let me pay you now, healer,” Jesse’s brother said sadly, and Snake might as well have been back at Mountainside. “The power in Center is precariously balanced. The council would never permit an outsider to deal with the offworlders. The tensions are too great, and we won’t chance altering them. I’m sorry my sister died in pain, but what you ask would risk too many more lives.”

“How can that be true?” Snake said. “A simple meeting, a single question—”

“You can’t understand, I told you that. One has to grow up here and deal with the forces here. I’ve spent my life learning.”

“I think you have spent your life learning how to explain away your obligations,” Snake said angrily.

“That’s a lie!” Jesse’s brother was enraged. “I would give you anything I had it in my power to give, but you demand impossibilities. I can’t help you find new dreamsnakes.”

“Wait,” Snake said suddenly. “Maybe you can help us in another way.”

Jesse’s brother sighed and looked away. “I’ve no time for plots and schemes,” he said. “And neither do you. The storm is coming, healer.”

Snake glanced over her shoulder. Melissa was still nowhere to be seen. In the distance the clouds hugged the horizon, and flurries of windblown sand skittered back and forth between earth and sky. It was growing colder, but it was for other reasons that she shivered. The stakes were too high to give up now. She felt sure that if she could just get inside the city, she could seek out the offworlders by herself. She turned back to Jesse’s brother.

“Let me come inside, in the spring. You have techniques our technology isn’t advanced enough to let us discover.” Suddenly, Snake smiled. Jesse was beyond help, but others were not. Melissa was not. “If you could teach me how to induce regeneration—” She was astonished that she had not thought of the possibility before. She had been completely and selfishly concerned with dreamsnakes, with her own prestige and honor. But so many people would benefit if the healers knew how to regenerate muscle and nerves… but first she would learn how to regenerate skin so her daughter could live unscarred. Snake watched Jesse’s brother and found to her joy that his expression was relieved.

“That is possible,” he said. “Yes. I’ll discuss that with the council. I’ll speak for you.”

“Thank you,” Snake said. She could hardly believe that finally, finally, the city people were acceding to the request of a healer. “This will help us more than you know. If we can improve our techniques we won’t have to worry about getting new dreamsnakes—we’ll be better at cloning them.”

Jesse’s brother had begun to frown. Snake stopped, confused by the abrupt change.

“You’ll have the gratitude of the healers,” Snake said quickly, not knowing what she had said wrong, so not knowing how to repair it. “And of all the people we serve.”

“Cloning!” Jesse’s brother said. “Why do you think we’d help you with cloning?”

“I thought you and Jesse—” She caught herself, thinking that would upset him even more. “I merely assumed, with your advanced—”

“You’re talking about genetic manipulation!” Jesse’s brother looked ill. “Turning our knowledge to making monsters!”

“What?” Snake asked, astonished.

“Genetic manipulation—Gods, we have enough trouble with mutation without inducing it deliberately! You’re lucky I couldn’t let you in, healer. I’d have to denounce you. You’d spend your life in exile with the rest of the freaks.”

Snake stared at the screen as he changed from rational acquaintance to accuser. If he was not a clone with Jesse, then his family was so highly inbred that deformities were inevitable without genetic manipulation. Yet what he was saying was that the city people refused themselves that method of helping themselves.

“I won’t have my family indebted to a freak,” he said without looking at her, doing something with his hands. Coins clattered into the payment slot beneath the screen. “Take your money and go!”

“People out here die because of the information you hoard!” she shouted. “You help the drivers enslave people with your crystal rings, but you won’t help cure people who are crippled and scarred!”

Jesse’s brother started forward in a rage. “Healer—” He stopped, looking beyond Snake. His expression changed to horror. “How dare you come here with a changeling? Do they exile the mother as well as the offspring out there? And you lecture me on humanity!”

“What are you talking about?”

“You want regeneration, and you don’t even know you can’t reform mutants! They come out the same.” He laughed bitterly, hysterically. “Go back where you came from, healer. There can be no words between us.”

Just as his image began to fade, Snake scooped up the coins and flung them at him. They clattered against the screen, and one jammed in the protective panel. Gears whined, but the panel would not completely close, and Snake felt a certain perverse satisfaction.

Snake turned away from the screen and the city to look for Melissa, and came face to face with her daughter. Melissa’s cheeks were wet with tears. She grabbed Snake’s hand and blindly pulled her out of the alcove.

“Melissa, we’ve got to try to set up a shelter—” Snake tried to draw back toward the alcove. It was nearly dark, though it was morning. The clouds were no longer gray but black, and Snake could see two separate whirlwinds.

“I found a place.” The words came hard: Melissa was still crying. “I—I hoped they’d let you in but I was afraid they wouldn’t, so I went looking.”

Snake followed her, nearly blinded by the windblown sand. Swift and Squirrel came unwillingly, heads down and ears flattened. Melissa took them to a low fissure in the abrupt cliff of the mountain’s flank. The wind rose by the moment, howling and moaning, flinging sand against their faces.

“They’re scared,” Melissa yelled above the whining wind. “Blindfolds—” She uncovered her face, squinting hard, and covered Squirrel’s eyes with her headcloth. Snake did the same for the gray mare. When she uncovered her mouth and nose the wind took her breath away. Eyes streaming, holding her breath, she led the mare after Squirrel into the cave.

The wind died away abruptly. Snake could hardly open her eyes, and she felt as if sand had been driven into her lungs. The horses snorted and blew while Snake and Melissa coughed and tried to blink the overwhelming sand away, brush it from their hair and clothes, spit it out. Finally Snake managed to rub or brush or cough away the worst of the scratchy particles, and tears washed her eyes clean.

Melissa unwrapped her headcloth from Squirrel’s eyes, then with a sob flung her arms around his neck.

“It’s my fault,” she said. “He saw me and sent you away.”

“The gate was locked,” Snake said. “He couldn’t have let us in if he’d wanted to. If it weren’t for you we’d be out there in the storm.”

“But they don’t want you to come back. Because of me.”

“Melissa, he’d already decided not to help us. Believe me. What I asked him for scared him. They don’t understand us.”

“But I heard him. I saw him looking at me. You asked for help for—for me, and he said go away.”

Snake wished Melissa had not understood that part of the conversation, for she had not wanted her to hope for what might never happen. “He didn’t know you’d been burned,” Snake said. “And he didn’t care. He was looking for excuses to get rid of me.”

Unconvinced, Melissa blankly stroked Squirrel’s neck, slipped off his bridle, uncinched his saddle.

“If this is anybody’s fault,” Snake said, “it’s mine. I’m the one who brought us here—” The full impact of their situation hit her as violently as the storm winds. The faint glow of lightcells barely illuminated the cave in which they were trapped. Snake’s voice broke in fear and frustration. “I’m the one who brought us here, and now we’re locked outside—”

Melissa turned from Squirrel and took Snake’s hand. “Snake—Snake, I knew what could happen. You didn’t make me follow you. I knew how sneaky and mean all these people here can be. Everybody who trades with them says so.” She hugged Snake, comforting her as Snake had comforted Melissa only a few days before.

All in an instant, she froze and the horses screamed and Snake heard the furious echoing snarl of a big cat. Swift rushed past the healer and knocked her down. As Snake struggled back to her feet to grab the bridle she glimpsed the black panther, lashing its tail at the entrance of the cave. It snarled again and Swift reared, pulling Snake off her feet. Melissa tried to hold Squirrel as pony and child backed quivering into a corner. The panther sprang toward them. Snake caught her breath as it brushed by like the wind itself, and its sleek coat touched her hand. The panther leaped four meters up the back wall and disappeared through a narrow fissure.

Melissa laughed shakily with relief and release of terror. Swift blew out her breath in a high, loud, frightened snort.

“Good gods,” Snake said.

“I heard—I heard somebody say wild animals are as scared of you as you are of them,” Melissa said. “But I don’t think I believe it any more.”

Snake unfastened the lantern from Swift’s saddle and held it high, toward the fissure, wondering if human beings could follow where a big cat led. She mounted the skittish mare and balanced herself standing on the saddle. Melissa took Swift’s reins and calmed her.

“What are you doing?”

Snake leaned against the cave wall, stretching to cast the lantern’s light into the passageway.

“We can’t stay here,” she said. “We’ll die of thirst or starve. Maybe there’s a way to the city through here.” She could not see very far into the opening; she was too far below it. But the panther had vanished. Snake heard her own voice echo and return as if there were many chambers beyond the narrow crack. “Or a way to something.” She turned and slid down into the saddle, dismounted, and untacked the gray mare.

“Snake,” Melissa said softly.

“Yes?”

“Look—cover the lantern—” Melissa pointed to the rock over the entrance of the cave. Snake shielded the lantern, and the indistinct luminous shape brightened and reached toward her. She felt a quick chill up her spine. She held out the lantern and moved closer to the form.

“It’s a drawing,” she said. It had only appeared to move; it was a spidery shape crawling against the wall, merely paint. A clever optical illusion that now, though Snake knew better, looked as if it were creeping toward her.

“I wonder what it’s for.” Melissa’s voice, too, whispered against the rock.

“Maybe it’s to lead people out—that would mean there is something farther inside.”

“But what about Swift and Squirrel? We can’t leave them here.”

“If we don’t find something for them to eat,” Snake said gently, “they’ll starve too.”

Melissa looked up toward the panther’s ledge, the blue light ghostly on her scarred face.

“Melissa,” Snake said suddenly, “do you hear something?” It was a change, but she could not figure out what it was. The black panther, screaming in the distance? Whoever had painted the spider symbol on the wall? Her fingers curled around the handle of the knife on her belt.

“The wind stopped!” Melissa said. She ran toward the cave entrance.

Snake followed close behind, at every instant ready to pull Melissa back from the storm’s violence. But her daughter was right: what she had heard was not a sound but the abrupt end of a sound she had become accustomed to.

Nothing happened. Outside, the air was absolutely still. The low dust clouds had swept across the desert and disappeared, leaving puffy, towering thunderheads arrayed around with rich blue sky. Snake stepped out into the strange luminosity of the morning, and a cold breeze fluttered the robe at her ankles.

All at once, the rain began.

Snake ran out into the drops, lifting her arms to them like a child. Squirrel trotted past her and broke into a gallop. Swift sped by him, and they cavorted and bucked like foals. Melissa stood still, gazing upward, letting the rain wash her face.

The clouds, a long, wide bank of them, passed slowly overhead, now shedding rain, now breaking for an instant of hummingbird-bright sun. Snake and Melissa finally retreated to the shelter of the rocks, soaked and chilly and happy. A triple rainbow arched across the sky. Snake sighed and sank down on her heels to watch it. She was so wrapped in awe of the colors, as they alternated back and forth through the spectrum, that she did not notice exactly when Melissa sat close beside her. First she was not there, then she was, and Snake slipped her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. This time Melissa relaxed against her, not quite so poised to tear herself away from any human contact.

The clouds passed, the rainbow faded, and Squirrel trotted back to Snake, so wet that the texture of his stripes, as well as their color, was visible. Snake scratched him behind the ears and under the jaw; then for the first time in perhaps half an hour looked out across the desert.

In the direction from which the clouds had come, a pale, delicate green already softened the low black hills. The desert plants grew so quickly that Snake imagined she could see the boundary slipping nearer like a gentle tide, following the progress of the rain.