Vonda McIntyre - Dreamsnake

“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.