It is one of the great unsolved mysteries of history that Drussa Silver was declared unfit for psi-service to the Federation and discharged to her home planet. We can only surmise that her abilities were so beyond those of human beings that she was able to tamper telekinetically even with the psych-computers, causing them to present false data to the examiners at the Communipath Creche. This is difficult to believe, and impossible to prove, but no other even remotely plausible explanation has yet been proposed.
—Encyclopedia Galactica, Fifth Edition, Vol. V, p. 2937
Coyote was a stubborn man. That had been pointed out to him often, and it was true. There were times when that stubbornness was an advantage to him, and times when it was a drawback, and times—like this time—when it didn't matter one way or another. The days left to him here on Freeway were so few, and his abandonment of his cover so complete, that he no longer had to concern himself about the consequences of his pigheadedness. He had only a few days, and he was going to spend every one of them dogging Drussa Silver's footsteps, and he was going to spend his nights rolled up in a Shavvy cloth at her feet, and no one—no one—was going to get near her to harm her so long as he was on this planet. Not without going through a few experiences that would cause them a lot more harm than they did her.
When he woke up every morning, he watched the patterns the trees made moving in the wind high above his head, and the way the mist and fog trailed the tops of the ferns and wreathed around the nishia-bella branches, and he listened to the pattering of moisture falling on the thick leaves covering the forest floor. And his heart hurt him. He was going to find it hard to go back to Mars-Central and all the hulking office buildings, and the flyer-jams as each of the day's four workshifts changed, and every tree registered and numbered and fenced away to protect it from touchers. He might even have trouble recognizing those trees as trees, after the nishia-bellas, just as people here on Freeway referred to all the other trees as "bushes." Could he go back to a planet that bore only bushes?
But that was the trivial part of his problem. There were quite a few good planets left around the Tri-Galactic Federation where he could have gone and made a home, away from the various kinds of urban blight. He knew of half a dozen that were as beautiful in their own way as Freeway was, where his talents and his knowledge would have made him a welcome colonist. Nothing locked him to Mars-Central, not even his job, because—as he had learned to his sorrow long ago—The Fish could always reach him, no matter where or how he decided to spend his time.
It was leaving the Shavvies that was the worst of it, and leaving Drussa Silver. It was going to be like leaving his heart behind, however trite that might be, and he wasn't sure he was going to be able to bear it. He felt the way he'd felt on the day Tham O'Kent had finally taken him into the ashram and told him that, much as they loved him, he was never going to make a Maklunite, and he'd have to leave. He felt the way he'd felt when he went back to Furthest and found Ratha's mother forever beyond his reach. He felt like both of those times combined, and then some, and it was a pain maddeningly beyond his reach—like an itch on the tender under-arch of your foot when you can't take off your shoes.
It was worse because this time he would not have been a failure.
He would have made a good Shavvy. Wherever he went he would made a good Shavvy, for so long as he lived, even though he lacked the one thing that would have drawn him to the others most tightly.
"Because you are mind-deaf," Drussa had said to him the day before, "you are set apart, cut off from so many things, isolated. Your handicap is a cruel one, my friend, because your deafness stands between you and so many things for which you have a powerful need."
"It can't be helped," he'd told her, shrugging it off. But she shook her head and told him to be serious,
"I can take it away," she said flatly.
He was so startled that he spilled his tea on his thigh, and it hurt; a pseudo-tattoo might do very well its job of emitting heat and cold to protect its wearer from the weather, but it was no protection against boiling water.
Drussa had waited through a virtuoso performance of swearing, gleaned from many corners of the Three Galaxies, and she'd waited through a tale of how many experts had tried how many times to cure him and how they'd all given it up. And then she'd reached out one finger and touched the livid burn on his thigh, and it had disappeared, leaving no mark and no pain behind.
"Well, I thank you," he muttered, "and that's very handy."
"You're welcome."
"But mind-deafness is a different matter. It's not just a lot of body fluids rushing up to protect the top layer or two of your cells, you know. It's inside the brain somewhere, and it's not a matter of taking something away, it's a matter of putting something new in. It can't be done."
"Nonsense," said Drussa. "Matter is matter."
"I do not like thinking of my brain, or anyone's brain, as matter," Coyote said stiffly.
She laughed at him, and he turned red, but he was not to be swayed by laughter alone, even divine laughter.
"Leave me my illusions, Drussa," he said doggedly. "They are all I have to sustain me in my old age."
"Coyote, I assure you I can do it," she answered. "Keep your image of the mind and assume I do what I do by magic—it doesn't matter—but let me help you. Let me show you the real shape of this universe—the shape that is carefully hidden from you by the intricate twists of the perceptual filters you are trained to wear."
Because he loved her, because she was holy to him, he spoke gently and with regret, but he was very firm. "Absolutely not," he said. "No."
"You prefer to stay as you are? Think what you are saying!"
She had taken his hands in hers in the ritual Shavvy gesture, the clasp that meant "trust me," and he had had to look at her, but he'd stuck to his guns.
"Look at the Freeway-ites," he scoffed. "They live all their lives without mindspeech, as men did everywhere for countless thousands of years."
"That isn't accurate," she said. "Not at all. All humans had mindspeech, and then they lost it, and ever after they yearned after it, as do the people of Freeway now. The long years when mindspeech had been lost by almost all of humankind were the darkest epoch in all of history, with each soul locked in its own loneliness and aching to be released. You refuse the community of humankind, Coyote; are you sure you know what you are giving up?"
"Just once," he had admitted, looking carefully down at his feet, "just once, I knew what mindspeech was like."
"Tell me."
"I shared a kind of mindspeech once ... with Ratha's mother. She was a mindwife of the planet Furthest. And then she was lost to me forever." He looked up at her, feeling her eyes on him like a wind. "Do you understand?"
"I understand that you wish no experience ever to compete with that one," she said, "even if it means that you must live your life sealed away from most of human companionship. And I understand that what lies behind your decision is your ignorance—for which you are not responsible—and your stubborn folly, for which you are. But I will not push you further. The choice is yours to make."
And she had brought his hands close to her and said, "You asked me for a miracle once, Coyote Jones, and I did what you asked of me. That was easy. But the true miracle is that even though you do not share mindspeech with me, you believe in me with your whole heart. That, now, is a miracle to shake the galaxies."
His voice had stumbled, protesting that the belief had overtaken him and he could take no credit for it.
"Will it continue, I wonder, when you go away?" she asked him. "Mindspeech would link us, across no matter how many miles of space; but alone, and willfully cut off from me and from the community of Shavvies, will your faith alone sustain you? Beloved friend, you ask a great deal of yourself. More than I would ask."
He had turned her probing aside with a joke, because he could not bear it. "At last," he had said, sighing elaborately, "a god who makes only reasonable demands!"
Remembering, he smiled in the darkness, and opened his eyes to be certain that she lay safe near him. Fifty times a night he did that; since the attempt on her life, he must keep touching her to be sure that she was still breathing, that no one had come in the darkness and slipped a nervedart into her throat.
She refused to sleep inside. She would not let him set guards around the sleeping-platform. And she would not stop her free movement through the Sector, in spite of the posters demanding her death. She laughed at it all, and she laughed at him because he would not laugh with her.
"Think how few these people are," she said, when he tried to convince her to restrict her movement at least to the city streets, where the lawrobots made it difficult to commit a crime. "They are a handful!" she scoffed. "The old noble families, and their mercenaries, and a pitiful group of loyalists so frozen in the old patterns that they cannot turn away from them. Am I to hide from this rabble?"
"They're a very powerful rabble," he reminded her. "The noble families still command here."
She only smiled at him, the way you smile at a child who persists in whining for the same forbidden toy.
"You believe in me, Citizen," she chided him. "You must also trust me."
That was all very well. It might even be accurate. But he didn't like the situation. True, more than half the population of Freeway was Shavvy now, and more coming in every day. Even those who could not leave the cities were corning out to the twice-weekly worship services in the groves, were leaving the sleeping-slots with the piped-in drugged air and sleeping out in the open. But it would not take an army to put an end to her life. Only one person was needed, only one paid killer with a needle hidden in his robes.
Once he left, there would be nothing he could do to protect her; he would have to rely on the efforts of the peaceful Shavvies. He didn't intend even to think about that.
He saw that she was stirring, sitting up on one elbow to look at him in the graying light of dawn, and she was laughing again.
"What is so funny now?" he asked.
"You."
"How so?"
"Hovering over me like that, the way you've done all this week. Think how embarrassing it's going to be for you, Citizen, when I am found dead of your protection."
"That's ridiculous!" he protested.
"Not at all! Aren't you afraid I'll die from lack of sleep, Coyote Jones? Have you even considered that possibility?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"You don't? It's not you that's been poking at me every half an hour all the night long, and half-smothering me in between?"
"Sleep now, Drussa," he said gruffly. "It's light now, and I can watch over you without disturbing you."
"Too late," she said, and sat up to begin braiding her hair. "Today is the Festival of Mar; it's time to begin. We must go to the Thirteenth Park and eat and drink until we're stuffed. And there'll be music and dancing and joy enough to go round, Citizen Coyote Jones."
"What's the Festival of Mar? One Mar, two Mars?"
"Not a related word," she said. "Mar was one of the first settlers of Freeway, and he brought about a tradition that there should always be a festival at this time of the year. The people would be distressed if just being Shavvies meant they could not keep the Festival of Mar—it's part of their childhood."
"Fireworks, maybe?" asked Coyote.
"Fireworks. Always. And speeches, and the young people racing between two trees, marked with garlands of roses. And all the best trappings found at the best festivals. We are all going, Citizen. Do you want to go with us?"
Coyote refused to dignify the foolish question with an answer, but folded up his cloth without a word, combed his beard and hair and cleaned his teeth, joined the others in a breakfast of tea and bread and cheese, and then followed Drussa doggedly with the rest of the crowd, through the city and on to the Thirteenth Park. Trust the Old Faithers to give romantic names to things. First Park. Second Park. And so on through the Twenty-seventh Park. He supposed it was better than naming them for dead generals and living hypocrites.
Thirteenth Park turned out to be in the heart of the city, in a natural clearing the size of a city block. A stream flowed through it, its banks heavily planted in the glorious roses that thrived in the planet's drenching air. The water purled over rocks and leaped down low falls, and formed round pools circled by the deep-green giant ferns and banks of striped grasses. It was beautiful, and he could see why it would be chosen as a place to go on holiday.
They found a place at the head of the clearing, in a spot where the stream bank rose above the level of the grass and made a natural platform from which Drussa could speak. Not that such a thing was necessary with mindspeech, but because she liked to be able to see them all around her as she talked. They sat down and ate and drank, as she had promised, and listened to the flutes, and watched the running women and the dancers. Coyote had rarely seen such a happy crowd of people. They radiated happiness as the sun did light. They were supremely at ease in their skins.
And he was supremely miserable. His nerves jangled like bowstrings drawn too taut; he saw assassins behind every bush, vipers in the ferns, and submarines in the shallow stream. He was so tense that his teeth and bones ached.
When it did come, however, it came from a source he never would have suspected. He had been leaning against a low tree, watching the crowd in front of him for a sign of the flicker of a knife or a nerve-dart, and he saw a murmur start and run through the people, saw them stop and stare at a point behind him. He whipped round like a spring too tightly wound—and saw what they were looking at.
It was Analyn the Singer, coming down through the trees on the far side of the stream, dressed in her church vestments of cloth-of-gold, her long hair flowing loose down her back and her face pale as the massed white roses in among the waves of grass. He had seen men look as Analyn the Singer did, when they went into battles they knew they could not win; and his teeth bit deeply into his lower lip because he could not decide whether her presence meant trouble or not. Her eyes held agony, and her hands held the Holy Sword—but perhaps her presence was only part of the Festival, a ritual attendance, and no threat to anyone ... perhaps her obvious anguish was a private matter?
He looked around him, uneasy, seeking a clue, the silence so thick that he hesitated to break it with a question. What could he say—like a little child at a parade demanding what the elephants were for and why the bands made so much noise ...
Analyn came on steadily, wading barefoot through the water, and was beside Drussa before he became sure enough of her purpose to move. She reached out from the water, and her left arm went round the other woman tender as a lover, and cradled her close. Then her right arm lifted the heavy sword.
Some part of Coyote—some separate, observing part—could not help admiring the cleverness of whoever had planned this. There stood the Singer, holy woman of the Old Faith, who was above the law and beyond all judgment. There flashed the sacred sword, a fit instrument in its jeweled splendor to avenge the Old Faith's archenemy. It was superb strategy, and it would look to the wavering like sacred justice, and he, Coyote Jones, was not going to let it happen. He would drive the Singer back through the trees like wind driving a torn brown leaf, and perhaps he would not hurt her. Perhaps. He gathered his strength for protection.
And a lightning bolt struck him just above his right eye.
It was he who was beaten back, staggering against the impact of the blow, his mind stunned and reeling as badly as his poor body. He didn't have to wonder about the source of that blow. There was only one possible source in the universe.
DRUSSA SILVER, he projected, YOU WILL CEASE THIS FOLLY AND ALLOW ME TO PROTECT YOU FROM THAT WOMAN!
She smiled and struck at him again, more powerfully this time than before, and time seemed to stretch each second out into hours of miserable helpless frustration as she lay easily in Analyn's arms.
STOP IT! he screamed desperately, bringing all the strength he had into the projecting, and some he had not dreamed he had. STOP IT AND STAND ASIDE SO THAT I CAN HELP YOU ... OR IF YOU WILL NOT LET ME, HELP YOUR OWN SELF!
She heard him—that was clear—because she was shaking her head sadly at him, and he heard her speak as clearly as if she had spoken at his ear instead of across a distance of more than his body's length.
"There is an old saying, Coyote Jones," she said. "For every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven. This is a thing whose time has come."
He went mad then, with frustration and the agony in his battered mind, clenched in fury inside his skull. If she would not allow him to help by telepathic projection, then he would kill the Old Faith woman with his bare hands as she stood there—leap on her and strangle her if need be!
It could not have taken more than seconds, for all the days that seemed to trail by him, mocking. He managed one lunge toward the stream's edge where the two women stood; and then, as if he had been struck by a stunner, he was frozen to the spot. It was Drussa who paralyzed him; before the strength of her mind he was helpless as an infant. He struggled, feeling his own mind batter against the barrier she had thrown up, but it was useless; she held him fast, in a grip he could not break. He stood helpless while the Singer leaned to place a kiss on Drussa's forehead, while she lifted the flashing blade and drew it across Drussa's throat, and while she stepped back to let her victim slump to the ground, the ruby blood pouring down over both their bodies, through the grass and into the water, turning the stream scarlet. Only when the life left Drussa's body was he able to break the paralysis she had imposed upon him.
He went to the terrible corpse upon the bank; he had never seen so much blood before. He gathered her up in his arms and held her desperately against him, screaming aloud in torment and making no attempt to calm the chaos of weeping, running people all around him.
There were merciful people there, and skillful ones. They had a drug in his arm almost at once, and he knew nothing more. By the time they dared let him waken again, her body had been made ashes and scattered over the forest floor.