Mary Rosenblum - The Eye of God

They had researched her well enough to give Zynth a rope without a clip, knowing that Etienne always tied off. With an angry snap, she secured the clip to the harness she still wore. The Rethe was saying something, but Etienne ignored her. Grabbing the ropes, she stepped over the edge. No time for small defiances now. She was going for a big one. The Eye stared down impassively as she bounced fast down the wall, ignoring caution, eyes fixed on the single figure crouched beside Zynth’s curled body.

“What are you doing here?” Grik barely looked up as Etienne knelt beside her.

Zynth’s eyes were closed. Fine blue veins webbed the pale skin of her eyelids, and for a terrible instant, Etienne thought she wasn’t breathing. She touched her throat, felt the reassuring twitch of a pulse before Grik shoved her hand away.

“Don’t touch me again,” Etienne said carefully. “Or I will throw you off this ledge.” Only truth beneath the Eye of God. She smiled thinly as Grik recoiled. “You have used me very thoroughly.” She kept her eyes on Grik’s face. “What did you do? Review the personal profiles of every empath on the planet? Until you found someone who would be highly motivated to keep your breeder safe? She is fertile, isn’t she? One of your national treasures?” Her lips drew back from her teeth. “And you needed to punish her properly so as to satisfy your evolved sense of ethics.” She spat the word. “But you didn’t really want to risk her, eh? An eye for an eye? You haven’t really evolved beyond us, have you? You’ve just learned how to cheat.” She looked down at Zynth. “Well, I took care of her—for her own sake,” she said softly.

“I thank you for the risk you assumed.” Grik’s nostrils flared slightly, but whatever her emotions were, they were too complex for Etienne to read. “That is a difficult climb.” She inclined her head at the sheer cliff face behind her.

“Why did you make her do this?’ Etienne asked softly.

“Your race is sated with fertility. The creation of new life has little value to you.” Her face looked as smooth and hard as marble in the Eye’s cold glare. “For us… there are very few who can rightfully claim the pronouns you so casually toss around. We have avoided the internal strife that has weakened you as a race, but everything has its price. Continuation of our species is a privilege and an obligation that involves the species—above and beyond the individual. You cannot comprehend.” She made a chopping gesture. “The rule that Zynth broke was not a minor infraction. In our society, the failure of the individual is the failure of us all. The punishment—the risk of her loss—was inflicted upon us all.” She stood and looked beyond Etienne. Two more Rethe were descending, guiding the stretcher downward. In a moment, it was going to get very crowded on the ledge.

“The creation of new life isn’t always a casual thing for us, either.” Etienne looked down at Zynth, remembering the trust in her voice. She didn’t look so much like Vilya now. “I care about her,” she said softly. “For herself, not for her face.”

“Do not fantasize, Empath.” Grik’s tone was icy. “Love is only possible with another… appropriate Rethe. That is the way it is.”

Etienne smiled at her. “What is the penalty for lying beneath the Eye?” Grik turned abruptly away to speak to the descending Rethe. Etienne moved back as far as she could along the diminishing ledge. Duran’s dying whispered in her mind. It strengthened suddenly, and a murky image formed in her head—a girl with dark hair, pale, with a spare, elegant face. Etienne felt a piercing grief. Duran’s vision, Duran’s grief. For a rending moment, she thought he was remembering Vilya, but he hadn’t known Vilya when she was that young. And then she realized…

His daughter. Terane.

His daughter. That was how she had thought of the child. She had been a baby when Vilya had died, and Duran had laid legal claim to her. So Etienne had never seen her. Not because Duran had forbidden it. She herself had forbidden it. His daughter. She closed her eyes, but his love and grief beat in her head, filling her brain with the merciless image of the girl who was Vilya’s daughter, too.

Grik believed that Zynth could not love anyone who couldn’t father a child for her. Etienne looked up into the Eye, met its cold stare. “So did I,” she murmured. “Grik!” She raised her voice and the Rethe paused as she was about to begin her climb to the top of the cliff. “Send the stretcher back down,” she called.

“Why?”

“For Duran,” she said shortly. “You sent me here to find him, didn’t you?”

The two Rethe with the stretcher paused and looked down, too, and for a moment there was only the sound of wind across the ledge. “You are correct.” Grik sounded reluctant. “I will… send the stretcher down.”

“How is she doing?’ Etienne forced out the question. Brown and green blobs like fat slugs clung to Zynth’s forehead, chest, arms, and belly. More Rethe biotech? “Grik?”

“She may live.” Grik shrugged and began to climb. After a second, the two other Rethe continued to ease the stretcher up the cliff face.

Go to hell, Etienne thought, but she was too weary to say it aloud. Taking a deep breath, she leaned out over the void. One more small defiance. The living rope quivered in her hands as she turned around, found a toe hold, and began to follow Duran’s grief for his daughter, crevice by crevice, across the face of polished stone.

He lay on another ledge, similar to the one Zynth had landed on. It occurred to Etienne, as she pulled some slack into the rope and knelt beside his huddled body, that they were remarkably regular. Perhaps too regular to be natural, but she was too exhausted to worry about it. In the light of her flash, she saw that Duran’s hair was beginning to go gray, and his face had thinned a bit in twenty years. He was no youth any more, but he looked pretty much as she remembered him. Blood stained the fabric of his thermal suit, red and fresh in one place. That arm was crooked, and a touch confirmed her diagnosis. Compound fracture, and he had bled a lot. Broken leg, too, and probably more damage that wasn’t so obvious. There was no sign of a climbing harness.

His eyelids fluttered as she started to get up. “Wh… who?” he mumbled, squinting up at her. “E… tienne?” Dried blood crusted his lips, and one side of his face was scraped and bruised from the fall. “You?”

She was surprised that he recognized her. She had been older than Duran, when he and Vilya had first been friends. Older, verging on old. Twenty years of search and rescue work had changed her a lot. “It’s me, Duran. Help is on the way.” Maybe. She looked up at the cliff top, yanked on the rope. A part of her half expected it to come loose and fall around her in writhing living coils. Who would know if the Rethe left both of them to die here?

“Hang on,” she said to him. Conscious, his pain beat at her, bad enough to get in past her barriers. She fumbled in her belt pack, took out a couple of pain patches. Two would put him out, or nearly so. She peeled the protective backing from the first patch, smoothed it onto his throat.

She didn’t want any more of his grieving images. But he fumbled a hand up to stop her before she could apply the second patch. “Etienne?”

“Yes, it’s me. Help is on the way.”

“Can you hear it?” His eyes were ringed with white, mundane gray turned to a clear blue by the Eye’s glare. “The voice of God, of their God. It shaped them, hear it? The wind is its breath. It sings to them, Etienne. This is their soul. Zynth told me, and it’s true. This is where they… were born.”