“Got any plans for reaching the top?” I asked her, eyeing the rock face above us warily.
“The list of people I don’t talk to is pretty short,” she told me. “Actually, you’re about it.” She went back to looking at the featureless storm.
Well, okay . . . I thumbed open the thermopack hanging from my belt and poured out a cupful of steaming hot reconstituted buffalo soup. I didn’t offer her any; first, because she had her own packs hanging from her own belt, just like mine, and second, because to hell with her.
I sipped the soup slowly, so as not to burn my mouth—that stuff got hot fast—and looked at Jo, particularly at the two things that made her so different from me.
“Stop staring.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just, where I come from, nobody has wings.”
She looked at me as if I were something she’d just found on the sole of her shoe. Jo’s from one of the magic worlds. The wings—huge, white, feathered wings, like angels have in paintings—don’t keep her aloft when she flies, although she can use them to glide and to steer herself. What keeps her up when she flies, the Old Man once said, is the conviction that she can fly. That and the fact that on her world there truly is magic in the air. I’d often wanted to ask her if her people descended from winged apes, like Jakon’s folk came from a wolfish sort of world, or if, long ago in her world, some sorcerer grafted swan wings onto the back of a baby and they just took it from there. But, since she viewed me with about the same degree of affection she might an Ebola virus, it wasn’t likely I’d ever find out.
I’d been at the camp ten days, and it already seemed like a lifetime. And not a happy lifetime. Rather, it was one of those lifetimes that convinces you you must have been Genghis Khan in a previous incarnation, and you were still paying off the karmic debt.
Ten days before being on the cliff in the rain, I’d woken up on some kind of canvas camp bed in a white room that smelled like disinfectant with the sound of band music in the background. It was a mournful sort of music, stirring yet sad.
It was a funeral march.
; The music stopped. I got out of the bed and walked, a little unsteadily, over to the window and looked out.
There were about five hundred people standing on a large parade ground. Very different people. They were standing in lines, arrayed around a box. On the box was a body covered with a black flag.
I knew who the body belonged to.
And I knew whose life he had died saving.
Up on a dais was a man who looked kind of like I might, if I lived to middle age. He was just finishing saying good things about Jay, I knew, although I could barely hear his words.
And then the people started to shout. They shouted in five hundred different voices, a wordless shout that was a wail of loss but also a cheer of victory. It was shouted and screamed and wailed and torn from five hundred throats.
And the box with the coffin in it flickered and shimmered and shifted. And then it flared and was completely gone.
The band started to play again, the mournful march, but this time it was more upbeat. Life goes on was what it said.
I went back and sat on the canvas bed. I was in some kind of hospital. That was obvious. And I was in the bubble-dome base. And I had seen Jay’s funeral.
There was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” I said.
It was the older man, the one who’d given the speech. “Hello, Joey,” he said. His uniform was crisp and clean. “Welcome to Base Town.” One of his eyes was brown, just like mine. The other was artificial: it was like a cluster of colored LEDs where his eye ought to be.
“You’re me, too,” I said.
He inclined his head. It might have been a nod of agreement. “Joe Harker. Around here they call me the Old Man, mostly behind my back. I run this place.”
“I’m sorry about Jay,” I said. “I brought back his body.”
“That was well done,” he said. “And you brought back his encounter suit, which was even more important. We only have a dozen of them. They don’t make them anymore. The world that manufactured them is . . . gone now.” He paused.
I figured I had to say something, so I said, “Gone? A whole world?”
“Worlds are cheap, Joey. It sounds horrible to say, but most horrible things have a measure of truth in them. The Binary and HEX consider worlds very cheap indeed, and life cheaper still. . . . But let’s get back to you. You did well, bringing back the body. It gave us something to say good-bye to. And the suit contained his last messages.” He paused again. “Do you remember when we brought you in? You seemed more or less delirious. You kept calling for me.”
“I did?”