Vonda McIntyre - Dreamsnake

Holding the case, Snake fingered the catch on Mist’s compartment. She shook her head, pushing away the image of Jesse dying from Mist’s poison. Cobra venom would kill quickly, not pleasantly but quickly. What was the difference between disguising pain with dreams and ending it with death? Snake had never deliberately caused the death of another human being, in anger or in mercy. She did not know if she could now. Or if she should. She could not tell if the reluctance she felt came from her training or from some deeper, more fundamental knowledge that to kill Jesse would be wrong.

She could hear the partners talking softly together, voices, but not words, distinguishable: Merideth clear, musical, midrange; Alex deep and rumbling; Jesse breathless and hesitant. Every few minutes they all fell silent as Jesse fought another wave of pain. Jesse’s next hours or days, the last of her life, would strip away her strength and spirit.

Snake opened the case and let Mist slide out and coil around her arm, up and over her shoulder. She held the cobra gently behind the head so she could not strike, and crossed the tent.

They all looked up at her, startled out of a retreat into their self-sufficient partnership. Merideth, in particular, seemed for a moment not even to recognize her. Alex looked from Snake to the cobra and back again, with a strange expression of resigned, triumphant grief. Mist flicked out her tongue to catch their smells, her unblinking eyes like silver mirrors in the growing darkness. Jesse peered at her, squinting, blinking. She reached up to rub her eyes but stopped, remembering, a tremor in her hand. “Healer? Come closer, I can’t see properly.”

Snake knelt down between Merideth and Alex. For the third time she did not know what to say to Jesse. It was as if she, not Jesse, were becoming blind, blood seeping across her retinas and squeezing the nerves, sight blurring slowly to scarlet and black. Snake blinked rapidly and her vision cleared.

“Jesse, I can’t do anything about the pain.” Mist moved smoothly beneath her hand. “All I can offer…”

“Tell her!” Alex growled. He stared as if petrified at Mist’s eyes.

“Do you think this is easy?” Snake snapped. But Alex did not look up.

“Jesse,” Snake said, “Mist’s natural venom can kill. If you want me to—”

“What are you saying?” Merideth cried.

Alex broke his fascinated stare. “Merideth, be quiet, how can you stand—”

“Both of you be quiet,” Snake said. “The decision’s up to neither of you, it’s Jesse’s alone.”

Alex slumped back on his heels; Merideth sat rigid, glaring Jesse said nothing for a long time. Mist tried to crawl from Snake’s arm and Snake restrained her.

“The pain won’t stop,” Jesse said.

“No,” Snake said. “I’m sorry.”

“When will I die?”

“The pain in your head is from pressure. It could kill you… any time.” Merideth hunched down, face in hands, but Snake had no way of being gentler. “You have a few days, at the most, from the poisoning.” Jesse flinched when she said that.

“I don’t wish for days anymore,” she said softly.

Tears streamed between Merideth’s fingers.

“Dear Merry, Alex knows,” Jesse said. “Please try to understand. It’s time for me to let you go.” Jesse looked toward Snake with sightless eyes. “Let us have a little while alone, and then I’ll be grateful for your gift.”

Snake stood and walked out of the tent. Her knees shook and her neck and shoulders ached with tension. She sat down on the hard, gritty sand, wishing the night were over.

She looked up at the sky, a thin strip edged by the walls of the canyon. The clouds seemed peculiarly thick and opaque tonight, for though the moon had not yet risen high enough to see, some of its light should have been diffracted into sky-glow. Suddenly she realized the clouds were not unusually thick but very thin and mobile, too thin to spread light. They moved in a wind that blew only high above the ground. As she watched, a bank of dark cloud parted, and Snake quite clearly saw the sky, black and deep and shimmering with multicolored points of light. Snake stared at them, hoping the clouds would not come together again, wishing someone else were near to share the stars with her. Planets circled some of those stars, and people lived on them, people who might have helped Jesse if they had even known she existed. Snake wondered if their plan had had any chance of success at all, or if Jesse had accepted it because on a level deeper than shock and resignation her grip on life had been too strong to let go.

Inside the tent someone uncovered a clear bowl of lightcells. The blue bioluminescence spilling through the entrance washed over the black sand.

“Healer, Jesse wants you.” Merideth stood outlined in the glow, voice stripped of music, tall and gaunt and haggard.

Snake carried Mist inside. Merideth did not speak to her again. Even Alex looked at her with a fleeting expression of uncertainty and fear. But Jesse welcomed her with her blinded eyes. Merideth and Alex stood in front of her bed, like a guard. Snake stopped. She did not doubt her decision, but the final choice was still Jesse’s.

“Come kiss me,” Jesse said. “Then leave us.”

Merideth swung around. “You can’t ask us to go now!”

“You have enough to forget.” Her voice trembled with weakness. Her hair clung in tangles to her forehead and her cheeks, and what was left in her face was endurance near exhaustion. Snake saw it and Alex saw it, but Merideth stood, shoulders hunched, staring at the floor.

Alex knelt and gently raised Jesse’s hand to his lips. He kissed her almost reverently, on the fingers, on the cheek, on her lips. She laid her hand on his shoulder and kept him a moment longer. He rose slowly, silent, looked at Snake, and left the tent.

“Merry, please say good-bye before you go.”

Defeated, Merideth knelt beside her and brushed her hair back from her bruised face, gathered her up and held her. She returned the embrace. Neither offered consolation.

Merideth left the tent, in a silence that drifted on longer than Snake meant it to. When the footsteps faded to a whisper of sand against leather, Jesse shuddered with a sound between a cry and a groan.

“Healer?”

“I’m here.” She put her palm under Jesse’s outstretched hand.

“Do you think it would have worked?”

“I don’t know,” Snake said, remembering when one of her teachers had returned from the city, having met only closed gates and people who would not speak to her. “I want to believe it would have.”

Jesse’s lips were darkening to purple. Her lower lip had split. Snake dabbed at the blood, but it was thin as water and she could not stop the flow.

“You keep going,” Jesse whispered.

“What?”

“To the city. You still have a claim on them.”

“Jesse, no—”

“Yes. They live under a stone sky, afraid of everything outside. They can help you, and they need your help. They’ll all go mad in a few more generations. Tell them I lived and I was happy. Tell them I might not have died if they had told the truth. They said everything outside killed, so I thought nothing did.”

“I’ll carry your message.”

“Don’t forget your own. Other people need…” She ran out of breath, and Snake waited in silence for the command that would come next. Sweat slid down her sides. Sensing her distress, Mist coiled tighter on her arm.

“Healer?”

Snake patted her hand.

“Merry took the pain away. Please let me go before it comes back.”

“All right, Jesse.” She freed Mist from her arm. “I’ll try to make it as quick as I can.”

The handsome ruined face turned toward her. “Thank you.”