CHAPTER FORTY

The Golden Sea

Ilyana sat vigil at Valentin's bedside while the adults argued outside in the courtyard.

"You are not taking him anywhere without our permission," said her father. "Not off this planet, not until the company has finished its run here."

"Shut up." That was David. Ilyana flinched. She had never heard him so angry before. He walked around in a cloud of anger now, ever since the horrible moment when Vasil had jerked Valentin's body off the nesh lattice. "Now, Yomi—"

"Did you hear me?" asked Vasil.

"You're no longer a player in this discussion, Veselov," snapped David.

A scuffle ensued. Ilyana heard a grunt, several gasps from the onlookers, and a few choice swear words.

"Let him go, Gwyn," said Yomi in a tired voice. "Vasil, you either agree to sit and listen, or I'll have to ask Yassir to put you under house arrest. He did his public service in the constabulary and is still deputized."

Karolla said, in khush, "This is women's business, Vasil. You must wait patiently until it is your turn to have your say."

"What about the others? I must defend our honor, Karolla."

"We cannot expect that khaja will behave with equal courtesy. Now sit, husband."

Ilyana heard the rustling of the company taking positions once more, a few coughs, a nervous whisper. They began to debate again: Maggie O'Neill is coming down on a shuttle, bringing a more advanced stasis bed. She should take the boy back to a class one trauma center. He shouldn't be moved; we have to find his nesh first. That comment produced a whole new debate, about body and spirit and whether it was true that the spirit lived independently in nesh which accelerated into a full fledged argument about gnosticism, superstition, and the technology of nesh, most of which Ilyana could not follow.

Oblivious to this, Valentin's body respirated, hooked up to the bed. It gave him fluids. What else it did, Ilyana was not sure. She was not sure if he was breathing on his own or if the bed was doing that for him, too. But without the bed he would waste to nothing and die. His knees were already curling up toward his chest. Sometimes his hands twitched. She could see his veins through the pallor of his skin, a web of blood linking him to the world of breathing.

David came in and sat down beside her. "I can't stand to listen to that any more." He looked at Valentin and away, unable to endure the sight of the boy's flaccid, empty face.

"Let me try to find him in nesh," Ilyana pleaded.

"No. No. Anyway, the nesh screen is broken now. You can't reach him."

"I could use your nesh."

"That wouldn't do any good. It isn't connected to the nesh they have here in the palace."

"Yes, it is," she blurted out, then blushed, having betrayed herself.

Mercifully, David only gave her a look. "Others have tried. They found nothing."

"They don't know Valentin, they don't know this palace like I do."

"How can we let you go, after this happened?"

"I'm not addicted to nesh. I'm not going to lose myself in there. I'm the only one who can find him."

"And then?"

"Maybe I can convince him to come back."

"He has sustained systemic nervous system damage. Maybe he can't come back. Oh, Goddess."

He pressed a palm on his forehead, as if massaging a headache. "I can't believe I'm saying this, as if Valentin even exists in any form inside nesh. Yana, he's gone. He doesn't somehow exist independently in nesh. He's in a coma, he has brain damage. There's no magical formula to reunite body and spirit in some kind of dualistic orgy. We have to get him off planet and to a trauma center."

"But you can't take his body away from where he lost his spirit—"

"Yana! There isn't some part of him that's lost in there. It's a myth. If he's going to recover, he can do it only under advanced neurological treatment."

"At least you could let me try."

He hesitated, and by that she knew she had won. "All right. We'll do it tonight, in here. I'll go in with you, and Hyacinth will monitor the connection."

Yomi came in. "Yana, your mother wishes to speak with you. I'll go along, if you'd like."

"No. I can go alone." Ilyana stood up. "Where are the children?"

"Evdokia seems to be fine with Portia and Diana, but Hyacinth finally had to take Anton back because he was acting up so badly. It's difficult to know what is the right choice to make. I did my public service in the constabulary, too, but on a counseling beat, so it isn't as if I haven't seen this kind of thing before."

"What's going to happen, when we get back to Earth?"

"Your neighborhood constabulary will be notified and your family will be assigned a monitor and an advocate. For now, I've taken responsibility."

"I should have said something sooner," muttered David. He reached out and tentatively brushed a strand of Valentin's pale hair back around the whorl of an ear, then withdrew his hand, looking uncomfortable. Looking guilty.

"You have my permission to beat yourself about the head and shoulders," said Yomi sardonically, but her gaze, resting on the boy, was mournful, and she shook her head. "Go on," she said gently to Ilyana. "Get it over with. That's a pretty belt. Is it a silk scarf?"

Ilyana gave a stiff smile and backed out of the room, crossing her wrists over the sash, which she had wrapped around her waist. She found her mother at the tent.

"Ah, Yana, sit down here beside me."

Ilyana shook her head and remained standing on the edge of the carpet, not coming in under the awning. Little Rose lay on her back on the carpet, staring at her fists, and Anton lay on his stomach, reading from a flat screen.

"You will sit," repeated Karolla, an edge on her voice.

"I won't."

"What have I done to deserve this disrespect from my eldest daughter?"

"What have you done! Is it true that you let that financier get close to Valentin, to use him? That you knew about it and let it go on?"

"It is usual for an experienced woman to initiate a boy—"

"She was using him. She was molesting him! A woman like that would never have been allowed near a boy his age, in the tribes."

"You know nothing about life in the tribes, Yana! You think you know, but you have no idea—"

"I don't think it's anything you'd ever dare tell my grandmother, if you saw her now, that's what I think!"

"If your grandmother saw what an insolent, disrespectful creature you have become, then it's true she would wonder where I had failed, in teaching you manners, child. This is what comes of allowing you khaja friends and khaja schooling."

"That's all that saved me!" Ilyana retorted, then faltered. Her mother had retreated so far from her, into some other world, like Valentin into nesh, that she realized she could not reach her. She wanted to ask, to accuse, to find out if it was true that Vasil had tried to bargain her away to the cultural minister in exchange for smuggling him onto Rhui, but she could not. She could not bear to know.

There, coming out of the caravansary, came her father.

Ilyana fled from him, ignoring her mother calling after her. She ran to the ruined caravansary, where the sun beat down on the worn walls and baked the scent of dust into the air. She sat down on a tumbled lintel and leaned her head back against a brick wall. Shutting her eyes, she imagined the walls built back up, the courtyard alive with carts and animals, merchants haggling over marching order and horses drinking from the trough. She built a greater caravansary, a whole complex of them, gateways for a thousand caravans departing for other countries, for other planets, for worlds inside and outside nesh. The sun's warmth kissed her face and slowly slid down her body until only her bare feet lay within its glow. Her toes worked at the dirt, wearing away a hollow in ground worn level and hard by a century of traffic. Except there couldn't have been any traffic here, could there? What caravans would have come through this place? Where would they have been going?

Where was Anatoly Sakhalin right now?

She covered her face with her hands, ashamed at herself for thinking of him. What would it be like, if he had not already been married? If he had married her? She would have her own tent, and even within her mother's influence, she could take the younger children into her tent and Anatoly could have fostered her brothers. It was true that in many ways he held to the old ways as firmly as her mother did, but he seemed able to move between the worlds, to make enough compromises, to understand that there must be flexibility ... to understand that it took both compression and tension, push and pull, to make a building stand upright.

She heard the whisper of soft bells. Jerking her hands down, she stared at the opposite wall where a shadow loomed, a man's shadow, to her right, poised back around the corner. He had a lithe body, a head crowned with a braided headdress, and four arms. The shadow did not move. Neither did she.

Paralyzed, she tried to wish herself into stone, but she wasn't in nesh. She remained flesh.

Finally, panting, she forced herself up. She refused to wait in fear. But as she moved the shadow moved, somewhere in the lane behind her, and she darted around the corner to see what was there, but all she caught was the shadow of movement, a whisper of bells moving away into the dark belly of the catacombs. Her heart was thudding so loudly in her chest and in her ears that it drowned out the noise of the world. What if she hadn't pulled her hands down and looked right at that moment? Why would a statue be wandering in this caravansary? How could a statue wander at all? Or had she only dreamed it?

The sun was setting. Its light glittered on the rings of the planet, pale arches like delicate bracelets in the sky. Like the ankle bracelets jaran girls wore, to signify how many lovers they had taken. In a ditch, a straggling line of weeds boasted tiny flowers, closing now as the sun left them. The wind came up. She felt alone and utterly isolated.

"I can't go back," she said to the air. "It's not my home anymore."

Like an echo, caught in a maze of rooms, she heard the distant murmur of bells. It is never wise to attract the notice of the gods. She bolted. She ran all the way back to the other caravansary and finally halted, out of breath, outside the curtained doorway of the room where they had installed Valentin.

"I could have done something about it," David was saying. "Goddess, I knew, and I didn't do anything."

"No wonder you're angry at everyone else," replied Hyacinth.

"Oh, hell, it's true. I'm just so furious at myself."

"You couldn't have known this would happen."

"That's what we always say, isn't it?"

"I can see you're in a self-defeating mood. I won't trot out the rest of the cliches, then. We're not going to be here much longer, though. I know Owen is angling for us to tour farther into Chapalii space. What's going to happen then?"

"Maybe the best thing for those kids would be to stay on Earth and be fostered to someone else, with Veselov a good long way away from them."

"Veselov won't be touring with the company again."

"Why not?

"You don't know? You can't see it? He's lost it. He doesn't know how to act anymore, only how to pose. Owen is thoroughly disgusted with him, but he's contracted to the end of this run."

"Well, whatever it takes, we need to keep him away from those kids."

"Do you blame him more than her, then?"

"Yes, I do. What a self-centered egotistical bastard he is. Karolla is just so self-negating as to be a cipher."

"Oh, I would say that she's as inflexible. No, I'd say she's more inflexible. Don't forget I've lived upstairs from them for seven years now. I like to be generous and spread blame around. Listen, David, have you ever visited their flat? No? Let me just say that they made their bed and now they're lying in it."

"That didn't happen to Yevgeni."

"Only because in the end we got up enough courage to admit that we couldn't do it on our own."

"But Sakhalin never got counseling that I know of, nor did Diana ever go to the constabulary and ask for an advocate."

"That's true. Anatoly Sakhalin may be an arrogant bastard, but if you prod him enough, you can at least get him to think. But there's going to be hell to pay between him and Di when he gets back. I think she's going to file for a dissolution."

"Oh, no."

"Oh, yes. David, I hope you're not blind enough to have missed that she's taken up with Yassir.

The lighting designer. So Anatoly will end up paying the price one way or the other."

"And what about Ilyana?" David asked.

Ilyana pushed through the curtain and went into the room, not wanting to hear whatever Hyacinth might say about her. "I'm ready," she said. "I'm ready to go for Valentin."

She walks the web of light and drops down into the hall of memory. David is not with her.

She remembers seeing him place his hands on the nesh sponge, remembers a finger placed against hers, the comforting warmth of his body next to her, remembers Hyacinth holding one of Valentin's hands against the sponge, just in case, but now she is here, alone, falling into the cavern of time, where Shiva danced the anandatandava in the hall of consciousness within the heart of woman, within the heart of man.

"I'm looking for my brother," she says desperately, for Genji is there, her robes rustling with a thousand small voices as she moves from a lit corridor out into the grand hall. "He got lost in here."

" 'It is careless to lose a brother," says Genji. "They are difficult to replace."

Ilyana wants to ask her if she has lost brothers, but she is afraid to, because here in nesh even more than out in the surface world she is aware of the passage of time, of the incremental slippage that drags Valentin farther and farther away from her, falling into the deepest wilderness, unmapped, much of it as yet unmade, formless.. . .

"I know where he's gone," she says aloud as she realizes where he must be. Without thinking, or with thinking but without forethought, she builds the gate to the memory palace out of the seamless black floor and walks through to find David standing in the courtyard. "We have to go to the desert," she says. "That's where he went. He went to the desert."

So David takes them through the shortcut he built, the vine lattice which passes through the stultifying humidity of the jungle and then into the sere heat of the endless, empty plain. Here it is flat, packed sand in a parched monotone extending to the horizon. Nothing stirs. She sees no sign of life.

"I don't see him, " says David needlessly. "There's nothing out here."

But there is the smell of baking heat, and the sour taste of grit, and the biting sand that gets into her ears and rubs in the collar of her blouse and blisters the soles of her feet. And there, half hidden in a tiny drift of sand, dried camel droppings. This is still Valentin's land. His soul still exists here.

"Not here," she says, remembering. "He's trying to get through to somewhere else."

Through the storm.

She stretches out her hands, her fingertips. She reaches for the sand, feels its grain, its silicate structure. In true nesh, she could not alter the constructs of another person's habitat, but this is not true nesh, this is another type of nesh entirely, formless matter inhabited by a trace of Valentin's soul.

She draws the sand up into the air and calls the wind from the north, blowing down upon her, she draws it through her until she is scoured clean inside and herself becomes a gateway.

She pushes forward into the storm which is also herself. She forms in her memory the image of that place that Valentin struggled toward, the golden sea— not, as she had thought, that bronze gold undulation of endless sand which is the desert, but a moving sea rippled by currents of wind.

She battles forward, but the way is made easier because someone has already forged this path, she is only rediscovering it for herself Valentin has already come before her, she can see the signs of his passing like an echo of his being. The golden light glares brighter and brighter until she has to shut her eyes against the blinding glare which is both of her and outside of her.

The wind howls, screaming against her, the sand tearing her to ribbons. Then she feels the hot breath of a summer wind and she throws herself through, heedless of David struggling behind her.

And she is out on a golden plain flying above it like a bird. She is a bird. She is a fledgling eagle, soaring above a sea of grass. Sharp-sighted, she can see three days' ride away, and there, beyond the swell and ebb of the ground and the endless motion of the wind through the grass, she sees a tribe moving.

Swifter than horses, she wings toward them, spying them out. As with any tribe, there are women and carts and children and the men of the jahar, dressed in the pale and bright surcoats of Bakhtiian's army. There is her uncle, Anton Veselov, just as she remembers him, and beside him, a far mistier memory, is her grandfather, Dmitri Mikhailov, Karolla's father and the man who led the final, failed rebellion against Ilyakoria Bakhtiian in the tribes. And there, riding beside the men with her bow strapped across her back, is Valye Usova. A herd of horses and a bigger herd of glariss, bleating and trotting in the familiar unruly mob, trails the line of wagons. An old woman drives the lead wagons; Ilyana takes a moment to recognize her. It is Mother Sakhalin, ancient, surely dead by now . .. but of course the others here are dead, too.

She swoops down and as a child in the second cart points up into the heavens, marking her descent, she sees the driver of the second string of wagons: Her aunt, Arina Veselov. And riding beside her, an old but hale man, the healer Nikolai Sibirin whom she vaguely remembers.

Ilyana feels a terrible fear. She feels as if the heavens are contracting around her, but the sky remains cold and piercingly blue, as infinite as the grass. She lands, fluttering, on the second wagon, perched on the rim of the wagon beside Arina Veselov, who looks at her with grave eyes.

"Where is Valentin?" Ilyana asks, but it only comes out as a shriek, an eagle's call, fierce and challenging.

"A spirit is visiting us from the heavens," says Niko Sibirin.

Despairing, Ilyana flings herself skyward and flies, anywhere, away, not wanting to watch the tribe as it rides on across the golden sea of grass. Was this what Valentin wanted? I want to go home, he had said. The tribe continues on its way, receding into the distance behind her.

But there, a tiny speck in the grass, comes a rider. She wings closer, dives, heart fluttering in her chest with excitement.

It is! It is Valentin, riding a young bay mare.

"Valentin!" she cries in her eagle's voice. "Valentin!"

He does not heed her. She swoops down, but he is intent on riding. He marks her only as a great bird, a spirit, watching from the heavens. His face is alight. Like a stone in her stomach, Ilyana realizes that he is happy.

"Valentin! It's me. It's Ilyana. Come back. Come back."

But he keeps on riding, and though she tries, she cannot transform herself here. She is an eagle, a spirit, come from another land. She flies along with him until the wind picks up, driving her backward. Battling against it, she loses ground, he recedes from her, and she is torn away, sucked back through, and the plain is swallowed up in a howling storm of sand and grit battering against her and she feels a firm hand pull her back into the smothering haven of the jungle and she walks two steps, weeping, down the marble foyer that passes through the gate of the memory palace.

Weeping, Ilyana let go of the sponge. "He can't hear me! He couldn't hear me, he just kept on riding!"

"Where did you go?" David asked in a hoarse voice. "I couldn't follow you."

"Goddess," swore Hyacinth, fainter. "You've been gone for hours. Take some water."

"He's trying to go home," said Ilyana, and then she was sobbing so hard that she could no longer talk.