Time Travel Omnibus, page 864
“I dunno.” He trembled. “I—I hope not. A navigator.”
Suddenly, irrationally, Cheena was certain that his sailor was Daryn too, that Daryn had had two lovers in the port. But then he continued, “He shipped out on Singapore,” and she knew it wasn’t Daryn after all.
A spray of relief washed over Cheena, although she knew it had been silly for her to have thought Daryn had two lovers in port. When would he have had time?
“—but you know how sailors are. He said he’d be back to me on the next ship this direction, and, and if Hes—if that ship was coming inbound. . .”
She put her arm around Tayo. “He’s okay. He wouldn’t be on that ship, I’m sure of it.”
Tayo chewed his lip, but he seemed more cheerful. “Are you sure?”
Cheena nodded sagely, although she knew no such thing. “Positive.”
When a ship comes to disaster at a wormhole, the wreckage sprays through both time and space. Cheena didn’t even know when Hesperia had wrecked, possibly years or even centuries in the future. She held on to that thought.
And another ship came in, not through the Dorado wormhole, but via Camino Estrella, the smallest of the three wormholes, one that led toward an old, rich cluster of worlds in the Orion arm. It would stay at the port for three days, letting its crew relax, and then depart through Dorado for the other side of the galaxy.
And there was nothing for it but to prepare for the arrival of the sailors. With a ship coming into port, Patryos could not spare her, and there was no place at the port for a person without a job. But when her shift ended, she drifted over to the maintenance port, wordlessly waiting for them to post names of the bodies.
Nothing.
Tayo, the boy from the downside bar, dropped in at the beginning of her next shift and updated her with the latest gossip from the maintenance investigation. They had finished gathering the pieces, he told her, and had gathered enough to date the wreck. It was very nearly contemporal, he told her, and her heart suddenly chilled.
“Past or future?” she said.
“Two hundred hours pastward of standard,” he told her. “They said.”
Eight days. She did a quick calculation in her head. Right now, through the Dorado wormhole mouth, the port stood fifty-two days pastward of Viadei mouth, and Viadei was forty days in the future of Standard. So—if the mouths had not drifted further apart, and if Hesperia had taken the straightforward loop, and not some strange path through—the wreckage came from six days into their future.
Everybody at the port would be doing the same calculations, she knew. “How about your sailor?” Cheena asked, but from the radiance of Tayo’s face, she already knew the answer.
“He went out via Dorado.”
And so he was almost certainly safe, she thought, unless he took a very long passage pastward. Dorado opened fifty-two days futureward. Not quite impossible, if he took a long-enough loop, but unlikely enough that Tayo could consider his lover safe. Cheena has no such consolation; she knew that Dari had crewed the doomed ship.
Tayo looked up. “Thought you might want to know the latest,” he said. “Sorry, but I gotta get to the hall. Sailors will be arriving in maybe an hour, and the boss wants me on the floor.”
She nodded. “Give ’em hell,” she said.
Tayo looked at her. “You going to be okay?”
“Sure.” She smiled. “I’m fine.”
Cheena went back to cleaning the bar, went back to hating herself. She had kicked Daryn out, called him a two-timing bastard, and worse; told him that he didn’t love her. Daryn had protested, tried to soothe her, but the one thing he didn’t say was that what she had heard was wrong.
It was another sailor who told her, a sailor she didn’t know, who had remarked that he wished he was as lucky with women as Daryn. “Who?” she had asked, although in her heart she knew. “Daryn Bey,” the sailor had said. “Lucky bastard has a wife in every port.”
“Excuse me,” she had told him, “I’ll be back in a moment.” She had put on a modest dress and gone upspin, gone into a bar near officers’ quarters that she knew he would never frequent. “I’m looking for Daryn Bey,” she told a man at the bar. “I’ve got a message sent from his wife in Pskov port. Anybody know him?”
“A message from Karina?” one of the officers at the bar asked. “She only saw him two days ago, why would she have a message?”
“That Daryn,” one of the officers said, shaking his head. “I wonder how he keeps them all straight?”
She had been in no mind to listen. She went back and threw his clothes out of her apartment, scattered his books and papers and simulation disks down the corridor with a savage glee. Then she bolted the door and refused to listen to his pounding or shouted apologies. Later, she heard, he had shipped out on the Hesperia, and she had felt glad that he was gone.
She was still cleaning the bar when the owner Patryos came in. “You going to be okay?” he asked.
It was the same thing Tayo had asked. Cheena nodded, without saying anything.
“I heard that the names are being listed,” Patryos said, “up in maintenance.”
She turned her head a little toward him, enough to show she was listening.
“You want to go up? I expect the first hour after the sailors start coming in will still be pretty calm.” He shrugged. “I can spare you for a little, if you want to go up.”
She didn’t look up, just shook her head.
“Go!” he told her, and she looked up at him in surprise. “Anybody can see you haven’t been worth anything, and you won’t be worth anything until you know for certain. One way or the other.”
He lowered his voice, and said, more calmly, “One way or the other, it’s better to know. Take it from me. Go.”
Cheena nodded, dropped her rag on the bar, and left.
She knew where to go in the maintenance quarter, although she had never had any reason to go there. Everybody knew. Behind the door was a desk, and behind the desk a door. Sitting at the desk was a single maintenance man. She came up to him, and said quietly, “Daryn Bey.”
His eyes flickered. “Relationship?”
“I’m his downspin wife.” It was a marriage that was only recognized within the boundaries of the port, but a fully legal one. The maintenance man looked away for a moment, and then said, “I’m sorry.” He paused for a moment, and then asked, “would you like to see him?”
She nodded, and the maintenance man gestured toward the door behind him.
The room was cold. Death is cold, she thought. She was alone, and wondered what to do. A second maintenance man appeared through another door, and gestured to her to follow. This close to spin axis, gravity was light, and he moved in an eerie, slow-motion bounce. She almost floated behind him, her feet nearly useless. She wasn’t used to low gravity.
He stopped at a pilot’s chair. No, Daryn wasn’t a pilot, she thought, this is the wrong man, and then she saw him.
The maintenance man withdrew, and she stared into Daryn’s face.
Vacuum hematoma had been hard on him, and he looked like he had been beaten by a band of thugs. His eyes were closed. The tattoos still glowed, faintly, and that was the worst thing of all, that his tattoos still were alive, and Daryn wasn’t.
She reached out and put her fingertips against his cheek with a feather’s touch, stroking along his jawline with a single finger. Suddenly, irrationally, she was angry at him. She wanted to tell him how inconsiderate he was, how selfish and idiotic and, and, and—but he was not listening. He was never going to listen.
The anger helped her to keep from crying.
By the time she returned to the Subtle Tiger, knots of sailors were walking upspin and downspin the corridors, talking and sometimes singing, dropping into a bar for a moment to see if it felt like a place to spend the rest of the shift, and then moving on, or staying for a drink. She passed a ferret crew going upspin toward the docks. The ferrets, slender and lithe as snakes with legs, squirmed in their cages, nearly insane with excitement over the prospect of being set free on the just-docked ship to hunt for stowaway rats.
She took over the bar from Patryos, serving drinks in a daze, unable to think of any quick responses to the double entendres and light-hearted suggestions offered by the sailors. Most of them knew that she had a sailor husband, though, and didn’t press her very hard, and of course they wouldn’t know that he had been in the wreck.
In fact, none of them would even know about the wreck yet; unless they had transferred across through an uptime wormhole, it was still in their future, and the port workers would be careful not to say anything that would cause a catastrophe. An incipient contradiction due to a loop in history would close the wormhole. A little information can leak from the future into the past, but history must be consistent. If enough information leaks downtime to threaten an inconsistency, the offending wormhole connection can snap.
The port circled the wormhole cluster, light-years from any star. If their passage to the rest of civilization by the wormhole connection failed, it would be a thousand years of slower-than-light travel to reach the fringes of civilization. So the port crew did not need to be reminded to avoid incipient contradiction; it was as natural to them as manufacturing oxygen.
Slowly the banter and the routine of serving elevated Cheena’s mood. One of the sailors asked to buy her a drink, and she accepted it and drank philosophically. It was hard to stay gloomy when liquor and florins were flowing so freely. She had kicked him out, after all; he was nothing to her. She could replace him any night from any of a dozen eager suitors—maybe even this one, if he was as nice as he seemed.
And the bar was suddenly especially hectic, with a dozen sailors asking for drinks at once, and half of them asking for more than that, and two more singing a rather clever duet she hadn’t heard before, a song about a navigator who kept a pet mouse in the front of his pants, with the heavyset sailor singing the mouse’s part in a squeaky falsetto. She was busy smiling and serving and taking orders, so it wasn’t surprising at all that she didn’t see him come in. He was quiet, after all, and took a seat at the bar and waited for her to come to him.
Daryn.
She was so surprised that she started to drop the beer she was holding, and caught it with a jerk, spilling a great splash of it across the bar and half across two sailors. The one she’d caught full-on jumped up, staring down at his splattered uniform. The one sitting with him started to laugh. “Now you’ve had your baptism in beer, and the night is still young, say now,” he said. After a moment the one who had been splashed started to laugh as well. “A good sign, then, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sorry, there,” she said, bringing them both fresh drinks, waving her hand when they started to pay. “The last one was on you, so this one’s on the house,” she told them, and they both laughed. All the time she carefully avoided looking toward Daryn.
Daryn.
He sat at the end of the bar, drinking the beer that the other barmaid had brought him, not gesturing for her to come over, but smugly aware that, sooner or later, she would. He said something that made the other barmaid giggle, and she wondered what it might have been. She served a few of the other sailors, and then, knowing that sooner or later she would, she went to talk to him.
“Alive, alive,” she said. It was barely more than a whisper.
“Myself, in the flesh,” Daryn said. He smiled his huge, goonish smile. “Surprised to see me, yes?”
“How can you be here?” she said. “I thought you were on—on that ship.”
“Hesperia? Yeah. But we docked alongside Lictor at Tarrytown port, and Lictor was short a navigator, and Hesperia could spare me for a bit, and I knew that Lictor was heading to stop here, and I’d have a chance to see you, and—” he spread his hands. “I can’t stay.”
“You can’t stay,” she repeated.
“No, I have to sail with Lictor, so I can catch up with Hesperia at Dulcinea.” He looked up at her. She was still standing stupidly there over him. “But I had to see you.”
“You had to see me,” she repeated slowly, as if trying to understand.
“I had to tell you,” he said. “You have to know that you’re the only one.”
You are such a sweet liar, she thought, how can I trust you? But his smile brought back a thousand memories of time they had spent together, and it was like a sweet ache in her throat. “The only one,” she repeated, still completely unable to think of any words of her own to say.
“You aren’t still angry, are you?” he said. “Please, tell me you’re not still angry. You know that you’ve always been the only one.”
Morning came to the second-shift, and she propped her head up on one elbow to look across the bed at him. The glow of his tattoos cast a mottled pattern of soft light against the walls and ceiling.
Daryn awoke, rolled over, and looked at her. He smiled, a radiant smile, with his eyes still smoky with sleep, and leaned forward to kiss her. “There will be no other,” he said. “This time I promise.”
She kissed him, her eyes closed, knowing it would be the last kiss they would ever have.
“I know,” she said.
WALK TO THE FULL MOON
Sean McMullen
MEAT WAS BOUGHT AT A high price by the Middle Pleistocene hominids of the Iberian Peninsula. Large prey meant more meat, yet large prey was very dangerous. The pressure to hunt was unrelenting, for the hominids were almost entirely carnivorous, but they lived well because their technology was the most advanced in the world.
It is unusual for a linguist to be called for in a murder investigation, especially an undergraduate linguist. Had my uncle Arturo not been in charge, and had I not been staying at his house at the time, I would not have become involved at all. He told me little as he escorted me into the Puerto Real clinic and took me to a meeting room.
On a monitor screen was a girl in a walled garden. Crouching in a corner, she had a fearful, hunted look about her. I could see that she wore a blanket, that her skin was olive-brown, and that her features were bold and heavy. Oddly enough, it took a while for me to notice the most remarkable about her: she had no forehead!
“Who—I mean what is she?” I exclaimed.
“That’s what a lot of people want to know,” replied my uncle. “I think she is a feral girl with a deformed head. She was found this morning, on a farm a few kilometers north of here.”
“Has she said anything?” I asked, then added, “Can she talk?”
“Carlos, why do you think I called you? This is in a clinic where the staff are quite good at dealing with foreign tourists who don’t speak Spanish, but his girl’s language stopped them cold.”
“So she does speak?”
“She seems to use words; that is why you are here. Before you ask, she is locked in the walled garden at the centre of the clinic because she can’t stand being indoors. We need to communicate with her, but we also need discretion. Someone senior in the government is involved. DNA tests are being done.”
I was about to commence my third year at university, studying linguistics. Being continually short of money, I would drive my wreck of a motor scooter down to Cadiz every summer, stay with my uncle, hire a board and go windsurfing. By now I owed Uncle Arturo for three such holidays, and this was the first favour he had asked in return. My mind worked quickly: love child of government minister, hit on the head, abandoned in the mountains, DNA tests being done to establish the parents’ identity.
“There are better linguists than me,” I said.
“But I know I can trust you. For now we need total discretion.”
I shrugged. “Okay, what do I do?”
“She must be hungry. When a blackbird landed in the garden she caught it and ate it. Raw.”
I swallowed. She sounded dangerous.
“Maybe you could help her build a fire, roast a joint of meat,” my uncle suggested.
“Me?” I exclaimed. “Cook a roast? I’ve never even boiled an egg.”
“Well then, time to learn,” he laughed, without much mirth.
It turned out that I had three advantages over the clinic’s staff and my uncle’s police: long hair, a beard and a calf-length coat. It made me look somehow reassuring to the girl, but it was days before I realized why.
I entered the garden with a bundle of wood and a leg of lamb. The girl’s eyes followed me warily. I stopped five metres from her and sat down. I put a hand on my chest and said, “Carlos.” She did not reply. I shrugged, then began to pile twigs together in front of me. The girl watched. I reached into a pocket and took out a cigarette lighter, then flicked it alight. The girl gasped and shrank back against the wall. To her it probably looked as if the flame was coming out of my fist. I calmly lit the twigs, slipped the lighter back into my pocket, and piled larger sticks on to the fire.
My original plan had been to roast the meat, then gain the girl’s trust by offering her some. I placed the leg in the flames—but almost immediately she scampered forward and snatched it out.
“Butt!” she snapped, leaving no doubt that the word meant something like fool.
I shrugged and sat back, then touched my chest again and said, “Carlos.” This time she returned the gesture and said, “Els.”
Els stoked the fire until a bed of coals was established. Only now did she put the joint between two stones, just above the coals. Fat began to trickle down and feed the flames. We shared a meal of roast lamb around sunset and by then I had collected about two dozen words on the Dictaphone in my pocket, mostly about fire, meat, and sticks. Els began to look uneasy again. I had made a fire, I had provided meat, and it was fairly obvious what she expected next.
I stood up, said “Carlos,” then gestured to the gate and walked away. The perplexity on Els’s face was almost comical as I watched the video replay a few minutes later.
“What have you learned so far?” asked my uncle as the debriefing began.
Two other people were present, and had been introduced as Dr Tormes and Marella. The woman was in her thirties and quite pretty, while Tormes was about ten years older.
Suddenly, irrationally, Cheena was certain that his sailor was Daryn too, that Daryn had had two lovers in the port. But then he continued, “He shipped out on Singapore,” and she knew it wasn’t Daryn after all.
A spray of relief washed over Cheena, although she knew it had been silly for her to have thought Daryn had two lovers in port. When would he have had time?
“—but you know how sailors are. He said he’d be back to me on the next ship this direction, and, and if Hes—if that ship was coming inbound. . .”
She put her arm around Tayo. “He’s okay. He wouldn’t be on that ship, I’m sure of it.”
Tayo chewed his lip, but he seemed more cheerful. “Are you sure?”
Cheena nodded sagely, although she knew no such thing. “Positive.”
When a ship comes to disaster at a wormhole, the wreckage sprays through both time and space. Cheena didn’t even know when Hesperia had wrecked, possibly years or even centuries in the future. She held on to that thought.
And another ship came in, not through the Dorado wormhole, but via Camino Estrella, the smallest of the three wormholes, one that led toward an old, rich cluster of worlds in the Orion arm. It would stay at the port for three days, letting its crew relax, and then depart through Dorado for the other side of the galaxy.
And there was nothing for it but to prepare for the arrival of the sailors. With a ship coming into port, Patryos could not spare her, and there was no place at the port for a person without a job. But when her shift ended, she drifted over to the maintenance port, wordlessly waiting for them to post names of the bodies.
Nothing.
Tayo, the boy from the downside bar, dropped in at the beginning of her next shift and updated her with the latest gossip from the maintenance investigation. They had finished gathering the pieces, he told her, and had gathered enough to date the wreck. It was very nearly contemporal, he told her, and her heart suddenly chilled.
“Past or future?” she said.
“Two hundred hours pastward of standard,” he told her. “They said.”
Eight days. She did a quick calculation in her head. Right now, through the Dorado wormhole mouth, the port stood fifty-two days pastward of Viadei mouth, and Viadei was forty days in the future of Standard. So—if the mouths had not drifted further apart, and if Hesperia had taken the straightforward loop, and not some strange path through—the wreckage came from six days into their future.
Everybody at the port would be doing the same calculations, she knew. “How about your sailor?” Cheena asked, but from the radiance of Tayo’s face, she already knew the answer.
“He went out via Dorado.”
And so he was almost certainly safe, she thought, unless he took a very long passage pastward. Dorado opened fifty-two days futureward. Not quite impossible, if he took a long-enough loop, but unlikely enough that Tayo could consider his lover safe. Cheena has no such consolation; she knew that Dari had crewed the doomed ship.
Tayo looked up. “Thought you might want to know the latest,” he said. “Sorry, but I gotta get to the hall. Sailors will be arriving in maybe an hour, and the boss wants me on the floor.”
She nodded. “Give ’em hell,” she said.
Tayo looked at her. “You going to be okay?”
“Sure.” She smiled. “I’m fine.”
Cheena went back to cleaning the bar, went back to hating herself. She had kicked Daryn out, called him a two-timing bastard, and worse; told him that he didn’t love her. Daryn had protested, tried to soothe her, but the one thing he didn’t say was that what she had heard was wrong.
It was another sailor who told her, a sailor she didn’t know, who had remarked that he wished he was as lucky with women as Daryn. “Who?” she had asked, although in her heart she knew. “Daryn Bey,” the sailor had said. “Lucky bastard has a wife in every port.”
“Excuse me,” she had told him, “I’ll be back in a moment.” She had put on a modest dress and gone upspin, gone into a bar near officers’ quarters that she knew he would never frequent. “I’m looking for Daryn Bey,” she told a man at the bar. “I’ve got a message sent from his wife in Pskov port. Anybody know him?”
“A message from Karina?” one of the officers at the bar asked. “She only saw him two days ago, why would she have a message?”
“That Daryn,” one of the officers said, shaking his head. “I wonder how he keeps them all straight?”
She had been in no mind to listen. She went back and threw his clothes out of her apartment, scattered his books and papers and simulation disks down the corridor with a savage glee. Then she bolted the door and refused to listen to his pounding or shouted apologies. Later, she heard, he had shipped out on the Hesperia, and she had felt glad that he was gone.
She was still cleaning the bar when the owner Patryos came in. “You going to be okay?” he asked.
It was the same thing Tayo had asked. Cheena nodded, without saying anything.
“I heard that the names are being listed,” Patryos said, “up in maintenance.”
She turned her head a little toward him, enough to show she was listening.
“You want to go up? I expect the first hour after the sailors start coming in will still be pretty calm.” He shrugged. “I can spare you for a little, if you want to go up.”
She didn’t look up, just shook her head.
“Go!” he told her, and she looked up at him in surprise. “Anybody can see you haven’t been worth anything, and you won’t be worth anything until you know for certain. One way or the other.”
He lowered his voice, and said, more calmly, “One way or the other, it’s better to know. Take it from me. Go.”
Cheena nodded, dropped her rag on the bar, and left.
She knew where to go in the maintenance quarter, although she had never had any reason to go there. Everybody knew. Behind the door was a desk, and behind the desk a door. Sitting at the desk was a single maintenance man. She came up to him, and said quietly, “Daryn Bey.”
His eyes flickered. “Relationship?”
“I’m his downspin wife.” It was a marriage that was only recognized within the boundaries of the port, but a fully legal one. The maintenance man looked away for a moment, and then said, “I’m sorry.” He paused for a moment, and then asked, “would you like to see him?”
She nodded, and the maintenance man gestured toward the door behind him.
The room was cold. Death is cold, she thought. She was alone, and wondered what to do. A second maintenance man appeared through another door, and gestured to her to follow. This close to spin axis, gravity was light, and he moved in an eerie, slow-motion bounce. She almost floated behind him, her feet nearly useless. She wasn’t used to low gravity.
He stopped at a pilot’s chair. No, Daryn wasn’t a pilot, she thought, this is the wrong man, and then she saw him.
The maintenance man withdrew, and she stared into Daryn’s face.
Vacuum hematoma had been hard on him, and he looked like he had been beaten by a band of thugs. His eyes were closed. The tattoos still glowed, faintly, and that was the worst thing of all, that his tattoos still were alive, and Daryn wasn’t.
She reached out and put her fingertips against his cheek with a feather’s touch, stroking along his jawline with a single finger. Suddenly, irrationally, she was angry at him. She wanted to tell him how inconsiderate he was, how selfish and idiotic and, and, and—but he was not listening. He was never going to listen.
The anger helped her to keep from crying.
By the time she returned to the Subtle Tiger, knots of sailors were walking upspin and downspin the corridors, talking and sometimes singing, dropping into a bar for a moment to see if it felt like a place to spend the rest of the shift, and then moving on, or staying for a drink. She passed a ferret crew going upspin toward the docks. The ferrets, slender and lithe as snakes with legs, squirmed in their cages, nearly insane with excitement over the prospect of being set free on the just-docked ship to hunt for stowaway rats.
She took over the bar from Patryos, serving drinks in a daze, unable to think of any quick responses to the double entendres and light-hearted suggestions offered by the sailors. Most of them knew that she had a sailor husband, though, and didn’t press her very hard, and of course they wouldn’t know that he had been in the wreck.
In fact, none of them would even know about the wreck yet; unless they had transferred across through an uptime wormhole, it was still in their future, and the port workers would be careful not to say anything that would cause a catastrophe. An incipient contradiction due to a loop in history would close the wormhole. A little information can leak from the future into the past, but history must be consistent. If enough information leaks downtime to threaten an inconsistency, the offending wormhole connection can snap.
The port circled the wormhole cluster, light-years from any star. If their passage to the rest of civilization by the wormhole connection failed, it would be a thousand years of slower-than-light travel to reach the fringes of civilization. So the port crew did not need to be reminded to avoid incipient contradiction; it was as natural to them as manufacturing oxygen.
Slowly the banter and the routine of serving elevated Cheena’s mood. One of the sailors asked to buy her a drink, and she accepted it and drank philosophically. It was hard to stay gloomy when liquor and florins were flowing so freely. She had kicked him out, after all; he was nothing to her. She could replace him any night from any of a dozen eager suitors—maybe even this one, if he was as nice as he seemed.
And the bar was suddenly especially hectic, with a dozen sailors asking for drinks at once, and half of them asking for more than that, and two more singing a rather clever duet she hadn’t heard before, a song about a navigator who kept a pet mouse in the front of his pants, with the heavyset sailor singing the mouse’s part in a squeaky falsetto. She was busy smiling and serving and taking orders, so it wasn’t surprising at all that she didn’t see him come in. He was quiet, after all, and took a seat at the bar and waited for her to come to him.
Daryn.
She was so surprised that she started to drop the beer she was holding, and caught it with a jerk, spilling a great splash of it across the bar and half across two sailors. The one she’d caught full-on jumped up, staring down at his splattered uniform. The one sitting with him started to laugh. “Now you’ve had your baptism in beer, and the night is still young, say now,” he said. After a moment the one who had been splashed started to laugh as well. “A good sign, then, wouldn’t you say?”
“Sorry, there,” she said, bringing them both fresh drinks, waving her hand when they started to pay. “The last one was on you, so this one’s on the house,” she told them, and they both laughed. All the time she carefully avoided looking toward Daryn.
Daryn.
He sat at the end of the bar, drinking the beer that the other barmaid had brought him, not gesturing for her to come over, but smugly aware that, sooner or later, she would. He said something that made the other barmaid giggle, and she wondered what it might have been. She served a few of the other sailors, and then, knowing that sooner or later she would, she went to talk to him.
“Alive, alive,” she said. It was barely more than a whisper.
“Myself, in the flesh,” Daryn said. He smiled his huge, goonish smile. “Surprised to see me, yes?”
“How can you be here?” she said. “I thought you were on—on that ship.”
“Hesperia? Yeah. But we docked alongside Lictor at Tarrytown port, and Lictor was short a navigator, and Hesperia could spare me for a bit, and I knew that Lictor was heading to stop here, and I’d have a chance to see you, and—” he spread his hands. “I can’t stay.”
“You can’t stay,” she repeated.
“No, I have to sail with Lictor, so I can catch up with Hesperia at Dulcinea.” He looked up at her. She was still standing stupidly there over him. “But I had to see you.”
“You had to see me,” she repeated slowly, as if trying to understand.
“I had to tell you,” he said. “You have to know that you’re the only one.”
You are such a sweet liar, she thought, how can I trust you? But his smile brought back a thousand memories of time they had spent together, and it was like a sweet ache in her throat. “The only one,” she repeated, still completely unable to think of any words of her own to say.
“You aren’t still angry, are you?” he said. “Please, tell me you’re not still angry. You know that you’ve always been the only one.”
Morning came to the second-shift, and she propped her head up on one elbow to look across the bed at him. The glow of his tattoos cast a mottled pattern of soft light against the walls and ceiling.
Daryn awoke, rolled over, and looked at her. He smiled, a radiant smile, with his eyes still smoky with sleep, and leaned forward to kiss her. “There will be no other,” he said. “This time I promise.”
She kissed him, her eyes closed, knowing it would be the last kiss they would ever have.
“I know,” she said.
WALK TO THE FULL MOON
Sean McMullen
MEAT WAS BOUGHT AT A high price by the Middle Pleistocene hominids of the Iberian Peninsula. Large prey meant more meat, yet large prey was very dangerous. The pressure to hunt was unrelenting, for the hominids were almost entirely carnivorous, but they lived well because their technology was the most advanced in the world.
It is unusual for a linguist to be called for in a murder investigation, especially an undergraduate linguist. Had my uncle Arturo not been in charge, and had I not been staying at his house at the time, I would not have become involved at all. He told me little as he escorted me into the Puerto Real clinic and took me to a meeting room.
On a monitor screen was a girl in a walled garden. Crouching in a corner, she had a fearful, hunted look about her. I could see that she wore a blanket, that her skin was olive-brown, and that her features were bold and heavy. Oddly enough, it took a while for me to notice the most remarkable about her: she had no forehead!
“Who—I mean what is she?” I exclaimed.
“That’s what a lot of people want to know,” replied my uncle. “I think she is a feral girl with a deformed head. She was found this morning, on a farm a few kilometers north of here.”
“Has she said anything?” I asked, then added, “Can she talk?”
“Carlos, why do you think I called you? This is in a clinic where the staff are quite good at dealing with foreign tourists who don’t speak Spanish, but his girl’s language stopped them cold.”
“So she does speak?”
“She seems to use words; that is why you are here. Before you ask, she is locked in the walled garden at the centre of the clinic because she can’t stand being indoors. We need to communicate with her, but we also need discretion. Someone senior in the government is involved. DNA tests are being done.”
I was about to commence my third year at university, studying linguistics. Being continually short of money, I would drive my wreck of a motor scooter down to Cadiz every summer, stay with my uncle, hire a board and go windsurfing. By now I owed Uncle Arturo for three such holidays, and this was the first favour he had asked in return. My mind worked quickly: love child of government minister, hit on the head, abandoned in the mountains, DNA tests being done to establish the parents’ identity.
“There are better linguists than me,” I said.
“But I know I can trust you. For now we need total discretion.”
I shrugged. “Okay, what do I do?”
“She must be hungry. When a blackbird landed in the garden she caught it and ate it. Raw.”
I swallowed. She sounded dangerous.
“Maybe you could help her build a fire, roast a joint of meat,” my uncle suggested.
“Me?” I exclaimed. “Cook a roast? I’ve never even boiled an egg.”
“Well then, time to learn,” he laughed, without much mirth.
It turned out that I had three advantages over the clinic’s staff and my uncle’s police: long hair, a beard and a calf-length coat. It made me look somehow reassuring to the girl, but it was days before I realized why.
I entered the garden with a bundle of wood and a leg of lamb. The girl’s eyes followed me warily. I stopped five metres from her and sat down. I put a hand on my chest and said, “Carlos.” She did not reply. I shrugged, then began to pile twigs together in front of me. The girl watched. I reached into a pocket and took out a cigarette lighter, then flicked it alight. The girl gasped and shrank back against the wall. To her it probably looked as if the flame was coming out of my fist. I calmly lit the twigs, slipped the lighter back into my pocket, and piled larger sticks on to the fire.
My original plan had been to roast the meat, then gain the girl’s trust by offering her some. I placed the leg in the flames—but almost immediately she scampered forward and snatched it out.
“Butt!” she snapped, leaving no doubt that the word meant something like fool.
I shrugged and sat back, then touched my chest again and said, “Carlos.” This time she returned the gesture and said, “Els.”
Els stoked the fire until a bed of coals was established. Only now did she put the joint between two stones, just above the coals. Fat began to trickle down and feed the flames. We shared a meal of roast lamb around sunset and by then I had collected about two dozen words on the Dictaphone in my pocket, mostly about fire, meat, and sticks. Els began to look uneasy again. I had made a fire, I had provided meat, and it was fairly obvious what she expected next.
I stood up, said “Carlos,” then gestured to the gate and walked away. The perplexity on Els’s face was almost comical as I watched the video replay a few minutes later.
“What have you learned so far?” asked my uncle as the debriefing began.
Two other people were present, and had been introduced as Dr Tormes and Marella. The woman was in her thirties and quite pretty, while Tormes was about ten years older.
