Vonda McIntyre - The Exile Waiting

He swallowed the capsules and lay back, changed, gradually relaxing. He reached out blindly for Mischa. His hand was skin and bone, starved muscles and sharp, dirty fingernails. She held his hand until his grip slackened and he slept, a dreamless, necessary, torturing sleep, the only kind he had anymore. She felt it come upon him. For the thousandth time she wished her mind were closed to others. In the spectrum of her strangeness, Mischa could feel Gemmi the most strongly; her sister was not only detectable, but could force herself clearly into Mischa's thoughts from a great distance. At the farthest end of the spectrum, a few people were so calm, so self-contained, that Mischa could hardly sense them at all. She could feel Chris a little more than she did most people: never whole thoughts or words, only vague currents of emotion.

She stayed beside him for a few minutes. Her concern for him was useless. She wanted to cry, but no tears would come, nor could she trace the tangled strings of her sorrow. She had to be selfish to survive, but if her feelings had been due to selfishness she could only have been angry. She could not cry, but she could not hate him either.

She left the cluttered niche and the new painting and the shattered works of genius without looking back. Behind her, Chris was as deep and empty of dreams as the well. The momentary hope he had given her was broken and bitter, and the destruction went deeper because he had left her so alone with their mad childhood visions. She felt much older now, and Chris. she could see herself just like him, starting the day she was not strong enough to defy their uncle.

The radius through which she walked ended on the beta-helix that crawled up the inside wall of the underground city. Below, above, and to either side stretched the immense cavern of Center.

Light-tubes spread across the ceiling like the gills of a mushroom. The instantaneous impression was one of chaos, of tiny gray projections climbing each other to reach the ceiling, spotted here and there with color or movement. Mischa knew the city well enough to see the underlying order: five parallel spiral ramps leading up the walls at a low pitch, giving access to the vertically stacked dwellings. The helices were almost obliterated by years of building over, use, and neglect. The walls of the cavern, crowded with single-unit box-houses piled against the stone, looked like shattered honeycombs. To Mischa's left, and below her, Stone Palace was an empty blotch of bare gray rock on the mural of disorder. Its two entrances were closed to the rest of the city; before it, the Circle, the wide sandy way that led around the perimeter of the cave, was almost deserted.

In front of her, stretching to the right, the Three Hills rose up, as crowded with dwellings as Center's walls. Their interiors were mazes and warrens, labyrinthine beyond mythology. Far to her right, at the other end of Center, the gleaming gray hemispheres of the Family domes were just visible, clustered in their own uncrowded section. Below her, in the Circle and in the valleys between the hills, a few people, usually alone, moved on their trivial businesses, hurrying. The smell of humanity made the air a cloying mass that Mischa was not yet reaccustomed to. The last few days closed in around her, and she felt suddenly exhausted. Instead of staying on the path, she cut across the tacit sanctuaries of tiny unit balconies, drawing a few angry cries and ill-aimed missiles of garbage that she ignored.

The fastest way to Mischa's home was around the Circle, past Stone Palace. Most of the bars facing it were empty and quiet; ship crews were their major patrons, and the ships had all left for the winter. The companions lounged lazily in their decorated nudity, talking and gambling together. They had no audience to which to play, no reason for displaying their physical wares. In an open-fronted bar, curtains of light drifted aimlessly between empty tables, seeming sentient and lonely, searching for companionship.

Even the beggars were lazy, and had, for the moment, forgotten their moans and their feigned, flaunted pain. They ignored Mischa and she ignored them. They revolted her, with their grasping hands and their soft pale bodies and their enhanced deformities. They did not beg for themselves, but for the people who owned them, deigned to feed them, further disfigured them if they grew too healthy, and beat them if they made no profit. Mischa could have pitied them if she had ever seen any one of them defy a master or try to escape, but she could not pity an unthinking acceptance of degradation.

The facade of a lounge brought her up short. She had not seen it before; she did not come this way often. The swirling patterns of sound and color plucked at her, engulfed her, and sawed at her self-control. As they were meant to. A couple of companions, a man and a woman, stopped playing with each other and watched Mischa curiously. She moved toward the facade, drawn unwillingly to it. She brushed her fingers across the tangible boundaries of its masses, and the taste of Chris's wasted energy and talent washed bitter in her throat. If she had seen this work of his before, she would have known about his pain; if she had seen it soon enough, she might have been able to find him before he was lost. She pulled away as though from a part of herself, stood for another moment, suddenly turned and fled. Two-tone high and low laughter drifted behind her.

Chapter 2

In her niche, Mischa woke abruptly, frozen, sweating, shaken by a nightmare, needing to make any sound or movement to break it, but unable to. Her dream was that Gemmi had crept into her mind again, while she was asleep, insinuating herself so deeply she could never be removed. Now Mischa was awake, and Gemmi was gone, but there was no guarantee that this reality was not another dream out of which Gemmi could pursue her.

Believing that would drive her mad. Released from the nightmare, she turned face down and put her arms over her head. The event would recur, in dream or reality, as long as she stayed in Center, or as long as Gemmi was alive. Perhaps she would die, but Mischa could not count on that. She could only keep fighting. Her thoughts went around in small deformed circles, following the Mobius strip of the phrase, We've got to get away.

Chris could help no longer, though escape was more essential now than ever. Mischa knew that no one in Center, even the healers, could help Chris; if he had any chance at all to live, it was in the Sphere, the wider civilization spawned by earth.

Mischa had depended on Chris when she was a child. Now his life depended on her.

Her time was her own, for a little while, until she had to begin thinking again about where she would get the money demanded of her and Chris. Since their parents had died, their uncle had become more and more greedy; Mischa was afraid he would begin to require all her time, and draw on Chris's again as well. With Gemmi, he could do it; and he would, if once he began to disbelieve Mischa's lies about how long her plans required, or if he discovered that she provided Chris's share.

Sitting up, Mischa pulled the cover off the bowl of lightcells. The maroon darkness faded in the blue glow. The cells were dull; often Mischa forgot to feed them, and more often she was not in her niche when they were hungry. She sprinkled powdered food across the convoluted surface. The globe glowed a little brighter. Mischa lay back in the tangle of her bed, looking up at the intricate ceiling. Her small cave was almost completely natural. She slept on a pile of blankets along one side. A large wooden chest, holding her few possessions, stood against the opposite wall. Except for the light, the rest of the chamber was empty. In the back wall, a narrow passage led farther into the rock, to a larger concealed cave with a pool of clear water.