Water. On his face. Fern? No, that was water, on his face, waking him up. Could he breathe? Breathing seemed to not be happening as automatically as usual. And someone was pouring water on him. He blinked his eyes dazedly open. A face swam above his foggy glasses. He did not recognize the face but it was frowning.
He sat up with a gasp. “Hey—” he said, or tried to say. Many confusing sensations were happening—he was really hot, his hands weren’t moving, his face was wet, and his mouth—oh, my god. Was he gagged?
“Heh,” he said angrily, trying to say hey to the foggy man on the other side of his glasses. “Wha is this?”
Fernweh growled close by.
The man turned to someone he could not see and said something in another language. Where the hell was he? He needed to see. He moved to take off his glasses and discovered that the reason his hands weren't moving was that they were tied together.
Fernweh growled louder.
“Who are you?” said the man, turning back to him.
“How a' I apposed to answer?”
The man reached forward and he flinched, but he was just untying his gag.
“Thanks,” he said dryly. “Where the hell am I? I can’t see a thing.”
“That’s quite alright,” the other man said just as dryly. “Tell me who you are.”
“Tell me what the hell you think you’re doing.”
The man shifted. “I need to know who you are.”
“My name is Newt.”
“I know that,” said the man snappishly. “Your pack says ‘Newton Geiszler’ on it.”
“Where is my pack?” said Newt. “I really cannot see.” He couldn’t even see Fern—his hood was blocking his peripheral vision. “This is ridiculous. You fogged up my—”
A hand flew towards his face and snatched his glasses off. Fernweh barked.
“Great. That’s much better,” said Newt to the blob formerly known as a man.
“Shut up, please,” said the blob, doing something. “Or better yet, tell your wolf to be quiet.” His glasses abruptly returned to his face, clean, and Newt blinked back into the world.
They were in a den of smooshed-down grass, so tall he could not see over it. It was bright and colorful under a sunset sky. Cattle sounds were coming from nearby, but Newt could see no one other than the annoyed man. Fern was behind him somewhere, still growling low in his throat.
“He’s not a wolf, man, he’s a coyote, and he’s...”
Newt was still looking around, looking for something. He realized what with horror. This man had no dæmon.
He scrambled up to his knees, but could not get away because alas, his legs were tied too. He hoisted himself against his pack and leveled his eyes with their captor.
“Where’s your dæmon, man?”
“My what?”
Newt’s mind was racing. He was twisting around as best he could, making sure. No, no dæmon, no snow. They had been in the tundra yesterday. They had found the window. They had really crossed over. This was it. Another world.
A world where people had no dæmons.
Because this man was a whole man, not a bereft, severed man. There emotions aplenty on that bony face: namely anger, suspicion, and uncertainty.
Hermann watched “Newton Geiszler” get his bearings. He had tied him up before waking him, but now he was regretting not searching his pack first. Well, there was still time for that. The fear he had felt on seeing the assassin, passed out in the grass, had turned quickly to anger, then uncertainty. He was still hesitant to trust a dream.
And his uncertainty was rising fast now that the man was awake. This man’s manner was extremely un-assassin-like. Hermann’s hesitation punctured his righteous anger, deflating it into annoyed frustration.
The man’s manner was not helping that.
He was small and scrappy, mostly hidden in thick furs, with thick-lensed glasses and a few days of beard growth. He was extremely sweaty, and his pack was bizarrely large and lumpy in all sorts of strange places. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse but shrill, like a car with squeaky brakes.
His most assassin-like feature was his mangy black wolf—coyote?—and Hermann had been too nervous of waking it to tie it up. But when it woke at the same moment as Newton, it only snarled. It would not touch Hermann.
“Listen, man,” said Newton, “We’re just really lost. We’re not dangerous at all. We absolutely come in peace. If you could just—”
“I will be the judge of that,” said Hermann. He leaned forward and jerked the pack from below Newton’s elbow. The man tried to grab it, and the dog lunged, snapping its jaws around a strap. Hermann yanked it away.
He began opening the outer pockets.
“Hey!”
“I still have this,” said Hermann, holding up the gag. “When I’ve determined you are no threat—”
“Threat?” said Newt incredulously. “How in the name of—”
“What could have given me the impression? The impression you were a threat?” said Hermann acidly, looking up from the bag. “Oh, I don’t know, perhaps your rabid wolf?”
“He’s not rabid! That is so rude,” Newt said, forgetting his bind again and trying to put a hand on Fern. He made a frustrated noise. “He’s my dæmon. If you had one like a normal person, he would have kicked its ass.”
“You aren’t doing anything to lower your threat level,” his captor told him, stuffing a packet of crumpled maps back into one pocket and opening another. He had an English accent, but it sounded like it wasn’t his first language, and his voice was nasally. It was already starting to grind on Newt’s ear.
“What are you doing?”
“Exactly what it looks like,” Hermann said, pulling a crumpled handkerchief out of the pocket, “I’m—”
He broke off, staring at what was inside the handkerchief.
“What?” said Newt. He tried to see. The look on his captor’s face was not good.
Hermann lifted a handkerchief, wrapped around a ring. A ring with a red cross in a little square.
The man looked at Newt. Newt stared back. Fernweh was silent beside him.
“That’s not mine,” Newt said finally.
Where before had been only aggravation, the man was staring at him with real fear and anger now.
“You—”
Newt lunged suddenly, making for the ring. He didn’t really have a plan, it just seemed like the thing to do. He pushed off his heels and launched himself at the man’s hand. In a second they were grappling, and an elbow was shoving him off, a hand was gripping both his wrists with a surprising strength, Fern was barking, and then he was swung sideways onto the ground by his wrists, landing on his elbow—but not the grass—
Crack.
“Oh, God!”
Hermann recoiled in horror. It was the unmistakable snap of breaking bone. In slamming Newton’s wrists down he had slammed his forearm against a rock.
“Oh God,” he said again, not letting go but gripping Newton’s wrists tighter than ever. He lifted them both up to sit. He had to look—
Newt felt something go very wrong in his arm but instantly and obligingly his brain disconnected. He went right into shock. He could not feel anything in his left arm below the elbow. Ah. Perfect.
“Ah,” he said. “Perfect.”
Fernweh was barking his head off.
“Oh my god,” the man said. He didn’t seem to know how to apologize, but regret was written all over his face. Adrenaline had flooded Newt’s brain, and he was feeling very emotionally clear. He didn’t know what this guy’s problem was, but he was certainly easy to read. He stared at Newt with panicked eyes, like he wanted to ask him what to do. It felt like the first time they had really made eye contact. Newt smiled dumbly. Words weren’t really happening for him right now. That was fine.
The man seemed to come to a decision. “Come with me,” he said. He pulled Newt up, not un-gently, and when they stood, Newt saw where they were.
They were on a vast blue prairie. Right next to them was a herd of creatures.
They had diamond-shaped bodies.
The prisoner gasped, and looked at Hermann with his mouth open.
“It’s them!”
Hermann looked back at him in incomprehending horror.
“It’s them!”
If the ring was not enough proof, this certainly was. Over his vehement protests, Hermann untied his legs and then helped him onto the back of the zalif he had ridden there. He tied Newton by his ankles to the stirrups of his own saddle. He helped another zalif take the enormous pack, and then moved to tie the coyote, but it snarled and snapped and would not let him near.
“Don’t you touch him,” said Newton, coming out of his nonsensical babbling.
“Then he’ll be left here,” snapped Hermann.
“He’ll follow us, idiot,” Newton said.
Hermann climbed onto Atal’s back. She was nervous of the whole thing. The mulefa were not combative, and he doubted they had any occasion to take prisoners in recent history. Dangerous person, he told her. I saw him in my night-picture. He unfolded the handkerchief and showed her the ring. The same.
She and her compatriots conferred for a second, then agreed, and they began to move out.
Without his saddle, it was the same long, uncomfortable ride he had taken almost a month before. He kept looking over at Newton in the darkening night. The man seemed to have gone into absolute shock. He was staring at everything, the road, the wheels, the landscape, and especially the mulefa themselves, with a face of fish-out-of-water astonishment. Or perhaps it was fear. Or physical pain. Hermann felt terribly guilty, but also terribly apprehensive. He was almost nauesous with the mixture.
They reached the town after nightfall. Other townsfolk came up to inquire about the new human, but they were taken aback by his state of pain and his tied wrists. He was not really speaking by this point. He just looked at everyone with wild eyes, like a man trapped in a dream. The kids tried to touch his dog, but it growled and they scurried off. The dog had run the whole way after them, keeping pace, somehow.
No one was happy about keeping him prisoner, but they acknowledged the prescience of the night-pictures and unhappily agreed. They brought him to Hermann’s hut. As two mulefa untied his prisoner, Hermann watched, equally miserable. This was a peaceful town. They were bringing something violent and dangerous into it. He felt they, the two men, were accomplices in a corruption.
Inside the hut, Hermann barred the door and lit his fire. The dog lay down stiffly beside it. He sat Newton on his bed, which was little more than a low table. Like his stool it was specially made, for the mulefa of course had no use for either stools or human beds. He pulled the small table up to the bed, and sat down on the other side.
“Arms,” he said.
Newton put his arms on the table.
His captor untied his wrists. Newt stretched and rolled his right wrist around, but his left stayed limp. The forearm itself was feeling very puffy and hot inside his sleeve.
“Take off your coat,” Hermann said. He was tearing up strips of fabric. His heart was thumping and he didn’t know why.
Newton obeyed without a word. He hadn’t said anything since arriving. He winced as the left sleeve came off.
“How does it feel?” Hermann asked.
“Hurts,” said Newton.
Hermann couldn't stop himself from giving the man a look.
“You’re the one who broke it,” said Newt, shrugging. He didn’t actually feel that upset—he was too exhausted. Fernweh’s long run had tired them both out, and the shock was wearing off. The dull ache in his arm was getting shaper by the minute. Pretty soon he was going to pass out or start yelling.
“I’ve got to set it,” the man said.
“I don’t even know your name,” Newton said. “You snap my bones, and you won’t even tell me your name? That’s pretty cold.”
He was putting one purposeful hand on the inside of Newt’s wrist and one on his elbow. Newt remembered how strong they were from their scrap.
This was going to hurt.
“Hermann,” said the man apparently called Hermann. “Dr. Hermann Gottlieb.”
“Ahh, Gottlieb?” said Newt. “You German, Hermann?”
Then he screamed.
After the arm was set, Hermann tied it tightly between two short sticks—Newton passed out for a moment, then came back—looped another piece of fabric around his shoulder, and tied the sling. He had done this once before, when Martin had broken his arm on a hike. It still turned his stomach.
Against some half-lucid protestations, he gave him two ibuprofen (“What the hell is this?”) and put him in the bed. Newton was certainly not going anywhere, but Hermann kept his ankles tied anyway. He took up the pack, meaning to search the rest of it, but it was too dark. So he took his sleeping bag and slept on the grass outside, his back against the door.
The next morning while Newton was still asleep, there was a town meeting. It was still difficult for Hermann to express himself, but he managed to communicate his own hesitance. He told them his reasons for mistrusting the man: his recognition of the mulefa, as if he was on a mission to find them; his ring; and the poison Hermann found when he finished searching his bag that morning.
I come from an attacking species, Hermann said, using the word for attack, because they did not have a word for war that he knew. Our world has much conflict. I do not want to create danger for this world.
Can this not be solved by greeting others trustingly? Creating a bridge? one of the elder mulefa asked.
I hope so, was all Hermann could think to say.
We agree to keep him tied if you see fit, the same elder reported to him after they had conferred. But we will treat him with courtesy. And we will revisit this question in a week. If he has shown no threat, he will be set free.
Hermann returned to the hut, where he found Newton sitting up with his legs over the side of the bed, struggling to untie his ankles with his good hand.
“Hey!”
Newton looked up as Hermann came in.
“Dr. Hermann,” he said, and returned to untying.
“Stop that,” Hermann said.
“Do you have any more of those capsules? This hurts,” said Newton, shrugging his left shoulder demonstratively.
“We need to talk,” said Hermann.
“Also do you have any food? I’m starved.”
“There are more important things—”
“Don’t know what could be more important than food, even in this universe—”
“Please!” Hermann struck the floor with his cane. Newton looked up again. Did they not know how to conduct conversations in Newton’s universe? By God. Hermann felt the same outrage speaking with him now as he had yesterday on the prairie.
“What?” said Newt after a pause.
“We have to discuss our situation,” Hermann said. He limped over to his stool and dropped onto it.
“I didn’t notice the cane yesterday,” said Newt. “It’s beautiful.”
Hermann looked at him with narrowed eyes, and didn’t respond to that.
“Yes?” said Newt after a moment.
“The mulefa—” Hermann began.
“Is that what these creatures are called? They’re intelligent, aren’t they? I can tell. My god, I never expected...”
“Please do not interrupt,” said Hermann. “They are called the mulefa. I’ve explained that you are an assassin—” Newton very clearly suppressed an urge to interrupt— “But they aren’t like humans. They aren't warlike. At all. They are not comfortable keeping you prisoner. Frankly, neither am I. I do not want you to be here. If you tell me what you know, who sent you, and how you got here, I think we can reach a release agreement.”
Hermann did not mention what he had found in his pack that morning. The thing that had given him the most misgivings.
“Am I permitted to speak now?” Newt said.
Hermann nodded.
“Okay. First and foremost. I am not an assassin. I don’t know what gave you that impression, besides, I guess, my dæmon, but since you don’t seem to know what those are, let me fill you in. He—” Newt put his hand on Fernweh, who was beside him on the bed, “couldn’t attack you even if he wanted to. He’s a dæmon—in my universe, every human has them. They’re like... an external part of your soul. Some people believe they are your soul. They take the form of an animal but they’re as much you as you are. And in my world we don’t touch another person’s dæmon.” He looked at Hermann severely. “Ever. Nor do they touch you. So in short: all bark, no bite.”
“I am beginning to think that’s your whole persona,” Hermann said dryly. “I’ve seen a lot of things these last weeks. I’m prepared to believe that you come from a universe where, for reasons apparently unknown, every human has a magical animal companion—”
“I do, and they do,” Newt interrupted. “Go on.”
Hermann gave him a look. “But yet they speak English, conveniently,” he went on. “In any case, your ‘dæmon’ is not why I believe you to be an assassin.”
“Why, then?”
“First of all, I found poison in your pack.”
“That doesn’t prove a thing,” Newt said. “I think everyone should carry some. Assassins and civilians alike.”
Hermann’s mouth twisted angrily.
“That’s not an answer anyway,” Newt said. “Because yesterday, you tied me up immediately. Before you searched my pack. I like to think my demeanor doesn’t scream ‘murderer.’ What’s the real reason?”
Hermann looked uncomfortable. “I had... advance information. A warning. A warning that a killer was coming.”
“And I fit the profile?”
“You’re the first human being I’ve seen in weeks. So yes.”
“All your information told you was that ‘a human killer’ was coming? Seems vague.”
“It told me the killer would be wearing a ring. Like the one I found in your pack.”
Newt’s heart sank. He glanced at Fernweh, and they shared a thought of regret. Shouldn’t have stolen that ring off that dead Skraeling.
“Yeah, about that...” Newt looked back at Hermann. “It isn’t mine.”
Hermann looked unimpressed.
“Really,” Newt said. He winced. “We stole it. From a dead deacon.”
“Why?”
“The Church is powerful where we come from,” said Newt. “I thought it could be useful.”
“He was dead?” said Hermann. “How did he die?”
Newt shrugged aggressively, trying to cover his guilt. “I don’t know!”
“Seems convenient.”
“It’s the truth!”
“So you don’t agree to my terms, I take it.”
“Terms? Terms? Oh, the terms where I tell you who sent me to kill you? Here’s your answer then, man, no one. I’m not a killer.”
“Then what are you? How did you get here? Why did you recognize the mulefa?”
Newt scowled at him. “I don’t owe you any answers. You tied me up. I’m innocent.”
Hermann made to stand, then hesitated. He glanced at the table, where he had laid out the suspicious items he found in Newton’s pack.
Newt followed his look. “What?” he said.
“There were some other items in your pack I... wanted to inquire about.”
Newt looked back at Hermann. “I’m not telling you shit.”
Hermann stood and walked to the table. He picked up the strange gyroscope, and held it up for Newton to see.
Newt looked at it impassively, then at Hermann. He said nothing.
Hermann stifled a spike of irritation and put the strange object down. He held up the poison.
Newton shook his head. “Like I said. Just poison.”
Hermann shook his head incredulously. “Why you would think that a sufficient explanation I have no...”
“It only looks bad,” said Newt, unable to keep quiet. “It’s just a precaution. Where I come from, there’s a lot of political unrest right now. I’ve never even used it—look! It’s full.”
Hermann saw that it was indeed full. He put it down.
“And last, this...”
Hermann picked up the bundle of yarrow stalks wrapped in the cloth, and their accompanying book: The Book of Changes.
The prisoner kept still. Was he really going to make Hermann say it?
“This is the I Ching, is it not?”
Newt shrugged. “I guess.”
“Do you know how to use it?”
Newt shrugged again.
“Why did you bring it?”
“I brought lots of things.”
“I saw that.” Hermann held up a big claw bone he’d found in yet another pocket. “Lots of strange, suspicious things.”
Newt looked away and shrugged again. The I Ching was not for this guy. He didn’t need to say more.
For Hermann’s part, the I Ching was the most confusing, perhaps unsettling, thing he found in a pack full of very weird things: instruments of all sorts, apothecaryish bottles, a bizarre antique camera, more than one animal bone. The I Ching did not solve the presence of the ring; it made things worse, because both conflicted absolutely. They confounded the two equally unbelievable sources of information he had on this journey—the Dust and his dreams—making them both wrong or both right. That was intolerable. He recalled again the words of the Dust.
Trust the I Ching.
You will meet a friend. You must trust him as well.
Was this him?
Hermann doubted it, looking at him. He did not feel friendship—he felt mistrust, annoyance, guilt. Deep at the heart of it, deeper even than his guilt, Hermann felt a strange complicity with the man, as if they had made some mistake together. As if they had both broken his arm, both hurt the mulefa’s peace, not just Hermann. He felt responsible for him.
Hermann set the I Ching down. He went to his own things and found more ibuprofen, which he gave to Newton.
“I’m going to destroy your poison,” Hermann told him.
“Go ahead, Hermann,” said Newt, saying his name with contempt. “I’ll keep on not killing you for as long as it takes to prove you wrong.”
The next few days passed quickly. Considering their enmity at first sight, it was surprising how everything settled. Newt spent the days in the grass, tied by his ankle to a small tree in front of Hermann’s hut. Fernweh, the coyote, stayed close by and quiet. Hermann had been wary of the coyote “dæmon” at first, then confused. It was quite a shock the first time he heard the two of them speaking to each other—Fernweh spoke, English! (”What did you think, that he was just a pet?” Newt said. “No, but you told me he was an external part of your soul,” Hermann said, “So I had no reason to believe him capable of intelligent thought.”) The coyote was black and mangy and harsh looking, and much as Newton annoyed him, Hermann could not reconcile the “soul” explanation. Newton was many things, but he was not predatory or mean.
Hermann was continuing with his work, of course, his town duties and his Dust lens. The lens was slow and finicky work, and he had not yet found any solution. He only had time in the evenings, and those were often taken up by his prisoner.
But by the time a couple days had passed, Newton did not feel like his prisoner. He felt like a talkative houseguest. When Hermann went home to his hut, it was like someone had made him to pet-sit their precocious parrot. Newt was everywhere, asking questions, answering none of Hermann’s. He was intractably curious, asking about the mulefa, their customs, their evolution, their language. Hermann caved by the second day and gave him his dictionary, which Newton studied intently and absorbed unfairly fast.
Newt did not ask many questions about Hermann, seeing as he was unwilling to share anything about himself, but he did learn that Hermann was a scientist. He then asked probing questions about Hermann’s “methodology” until Hermann was forced to, (a.) conclude that Newt was also a scientist, or had been at one point, and (b.) tell him he was a physicist, not an evolutionary biologist.
Newt’s reply to this was curious. He raised his eyebrows in genuine surprise.
“Evolutionary biologist...!” he murmured, looking away. “Is that a real area of study in your world? I wish I could study that openly...”
Hermann frowned incredulously.
“Excuse me—does no one in your world study evolution?” Hermann said.
Newt looked back at him. “I told you, Hermann, the Church controls everything.”
The way he had said it made Hermann think he had studied it, just not openly. Perhaps he was a renegade scientist. This romantic notion occupied Hermann’s mind for the rest of the day as he fished.
When Hermann was away, Newt stayed under the tree, reading the dictionary and practicing out loud, taking some notes of his own in the back of the notebook, or, most annoying, talking to the townsfolk. His alien-ness was so complete that no one seemed bothered by his “prisoner” status. They were as curious about him and his coyote as they had been about Hermann, and Newton was more openly curious about them. His outgoing manner was more suited to their society than Hermann’s reserve, and his chattiness had him conversing with the mulefa within a week—at least twice as fast as Hermann had.
When Hermann, greatly annoyed by this speed, asked about his interest in the mulefa, Newt shrugged and said he studied them.
“You study them?” Hermann said. “But you’ve never seen them. You’ve never been here.”
“No,” said Newt, smiling infuriatingly.
“Then how could you possibly.”
“Untie me, and I’ll explain!”
Overall Newton was not as upset about his broken arm as he was about being tied up. Anytime he wanted to stop a conversation or divert Hermann’s attention on a point of disagreement, he would demand to be set free. Hermann would refuse. Newt would shrug. Hermann would storm off. It was a stalemate. Hermann asked about his journey: How did you get here? Untie me, I’ll tell you. Hermann asked about the I Ching: How do I use it? Untie me, I’ll show you. There was nothing but tension when they were together; yet when Hermann was away from him, he was bored and preoccupied.
One evening, they sat in the front yard as the sun set. Atal had joined them for dinner, and Newt was now trying to ask her about seasons. Neither he nor Hermann knew the word for season, or if this planet even had them. He was gesticulating wildly and drawing diagrams, and Atal was following intently.
Hermann sat half-listening, mostly focusing on his binoculars. He had disassembled them with his glasses repair kit, and was now experimenting with the lenses. He shone a penlight through the magnifying lens, onto the small mirror. He tried moving the mirror closer, farther. No, still nothing.
He realized Newt was talking to him.
“Hermann, listen to this. No seasons as far as I can tell. She doesn’t even know if other planets orbit their sun.”
Hermann looked up. Atal had left, and the fire had died down to embers. “Orbit the sun?” he said. “They don’t think the sun orbits them?”
“Yeah, they’re already heliocentric. I can’t figure out how!” Newton seemed delighted by this gap in his knowledge.
“Interesting,” was all Hermann had to say. He looked back at his lenses.
Newt watched him work for another minute. His fingers moved with such precision. “What are you doing?”
“None of your concern.”
“You tell me about your work, I’ll tell you about mine?”
“Not interested, Newton,” Hermann said, flipping a lens over.
“Come on.”
“You already told me that you study the mulefa,” Hermann said. He looked over his glasses at Newton. “Obviously that’s a lie, so why would I believe anything you told me now?”
“Not a lie,” Newt said. “Perhaps a mistake. I can’t conduct my research to my usual expansive, comprehensive standards these days due to, oh, being tied to a tree and having only one arm.”
“So your usual apparently expansive, comprehensive research involves the mulefa,” Hermann said, “Then you are a biologist?”
“Naturalist,” said Newton. “Close.”
“Are there biologists on dæmon earth?”
“I’m guessing biologists study living things?”
“Correct.”
“Then yes, there are, we’re just called naturalists.”
“There were naturalists on my earth as well,” Hermann said.
“Were?” repeated Newt.
“Yes, the name ‘naturalist’ became obsolete as the discipline became biology, an actual discipline,” Hermann said crisply, “Instead of just groups of college-educated men traipsing around the woods drawing pictures.”
“Tough break for those biologists,” Newton said, stretching.
Hermann gave him another over-the-glasses look.
“What’s that gyroscope for?” Hermann asked. “Unusual instrument for ‘naturalism’.”
“It’s not mine, actually,” Newt said. “It was a delivery,” he added before Hermann could ask why he stole it.
“A delivery? That was your mission in the tundra?”
Newt nodded.
“And what does it do?”
“It measures.”
“Obviously. Measures what?”
“Dust.”
Hermann went still. He stared down at the penlight in his hand. He flipped it off.
“Dust? What kind of dust?” he asked. He tried not to let all his hope and interest enter his voice. He didn’t want to show it. He didn’t want to have it. But from the way Newton said it, it sounded like Lyra’s Dust. Were they from the same world?
“Just Dust,” said Newt. Hermann seemed awfully interested all the sudden, though he was trying not to let Newt see it. “I don’t know what it is. No one really does.”
“How does it work?”
“Don’t know, Hermann,” Newt said. “I’m a naturalist, not an experimental theologian.”
Hermann almost rolled his eyes at the Star Trek joke, then realized it was not one. Because Newton had no idea what Star Trek was. Surely. There could not be television in his backwards world. But then, he seemed to know about the mulefa. What else could he know?
The sun had gone down now and the fire had died out. Hermann looked across the firepit at Newt. His face was the color of marble in the sourceless glow of nighttime.
The naturalist gazed back at him.
So Newton knew about Dust, then. Hermann knew he would not say more, not until he untied him. He was getting the feeling that he would, soon, despite how much he did not want to, rationally. He was getting a lot of feelings and instincts lately for things he could not possibly know. And Dust was following him. Despite his discomfort with its existence.
That conversation, with the Cave consciousness—with the “angels”—had genuinely shaken him. It had shaken his belief system, or rather his nonbelief system. A former almost-priest, his anti-theism was hard-won.
He looked away from Newt and did not ask any more questions. He was still too stubborn, when you came down to it.
A few days later, disaster struck.
The mulefa settlement was close to a grove of wheel-pod trees, and Hermann lived on the side of town closest to it. In the late afternoon, he was shelling nuts with his neighbors for dinner when they heard a distant rumble and crash. His ears interpreted it as thunder, then he looked. Clear sky.
The mulefa around him had heard it too.
Do you think?
No... not another.
Upset, two of them began to put on their wheels. Hermann asked if he could come, knowing what had happened, but afraid to ask. They said yes, and he hurried back to his hut to get his specialized saddle. It made holding on much easier, and more comfortable for his hip.
“What’s going on?” Newt called from the grass as he hurried back out of the house.
“Nothing,” Hermann said, hurrying away. His neighbor was waiting.
They rumbled over the grass—there was no highway this way, and over-the-grass riding was slower, but still faster than walking. No one spoke. The forest loomed larger and larger on the horizon until they were upon it.
The sun was setting behind them as they entered the grove. Hermann climbed down and all three of them walked, spreading out. He felt the same reverence he always felt among the wheel-pod trunks. But today there was an air of foreboding and rot among the thick dark shadows that lay behind each trunk.
The other zalif trumpeted from a few yards away. Hermann and his neighbor hurried over.
Fallen, the zalif crooned to his friend. Fallen...
It was true. One of the great trees had fallen. By luck, it had fallen between the others, not against any. But that was small consolation.
It felt horribly wrong to see it like this, horizontal in half-darkness. It was like a beached whale. They were at the crown, the roots hundreds of yards away, deep in the grove. The leaves were all yellow, shivering in the still air. Even on the ground, the crown stretched yards and yards overhead. Hermann could see a few green seedpods up there—now they would never mature.
The news had already spread when they returned to confirm it. The town was as devastated as after the taulapi attack, perhaps more. They were convening the town council to discuss, but the air was thick with hopelessness.
Hermann went home heavy with empathy and frustrated with helplessness. Newt was in the front yard in the darkness, sitting alertly up. Fernweh stood when Hermann approached.
“Hermann, what’s wrong? What’s happened?”
Hermann reached him and sat stiffly on the ground. His hip and back were sore from riding.
“What’s wrong?”
“One of the wheel-pod trees died,” Hermann said heavily. He explained what they had told him before Newt came—that despite their best efforts, the trees were dying, and they had no idea why. Hermann sighed and rubbed his forehead, closing his eyes. “I don’t know what to do. I must be here to help, but I’ve no idea how.”
He felt a hand rest on his back.
“You ‘must’ be here to help?” said Newt. “You don’t seem like a fate kind of guy. Aren’t you just here? Of your own free will? Or possibly, by accident?”
Hermann lifted his face from his hands. He’d never explained, had he?
It was silly. He didn’t know almost anything about Newton. Yet he felt he knew it all, and that everything he knew, Newt knew as well.
“I never told you about my research,” said Hermann, “did I?”
“Just that you were a physicist.”
“I studied dark matter, Newton,” said Hermann. “Dust.”
“Really?”
“Really,” he said grimly. The hand disappeared from his back. “I never believed in it.”
“How could you study what you didn’t believe in?”
“I wanted to disprove it,” Hermann said. “It didn’t fit... I wanted to be the one who made it fit.”
“No such luck?”
“The opposite. My research partner and I built a comp—a machine, to measure Dust. We found that it was more concentrated on objects that humans had made, works of craftsmanship. It was attracted to consciousness. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.”
Newton didn’t stop him. Hermann didn’t know why he was telling him all this—it seemed redundant. He pressed on, speaking into the darkness.
“My colleague called this consciousness. He believed the particles knew what they were looking at. I was not so sure. Until one day, when a little girl came to our lab. She hooked herself up to the machine, and by God, Newton, she was so in tune with it she could make it draw her pictures. She communicated with it like a person. She told me I could too.
“So I rewrote the code, and I spoke to it. She was right. She was right...”
He broke off, remembering.
“The Dust wrote to me. It told me to come here.”
“Come here?”
“Not here, but it told me where to find a window into another world. It said I had a mission. I wandered on until I got here.”
“Why did you stop?”
Hermann turned at last to look at Newton. Light from the direction of the sea glinted off his glasses, hiding his green eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I wanted to. But I never made certain I was supposed to stay here. I didn’t know how.”
“There you go again, ‘supposed to,’” said Newt. “I don’t see why you only have one course. You can decide to go, if you want.”
“I don’t want to go,” Hermann said. “But I want to do what the... what the Dust assigned me.”
As he said it, he realized how thin it sounded. Had he been taking orders all this time from an invisible voice? What kind of atheism was that?
“What did they tell you, exactly?”
“‘Beware the assassin,’” Hermann recited, “‘Trust the I Ching. You will meet a friend. You must trust him as well... You have been preparing for this journey as long as you have lived. Your work here is finished.’”
Newton was silent for a long moment.
At last he said, “Should we try the I Ching?”
They sat on the floor of the hut by firelight. Newt directed Hermann how to use it (having only one arm, he could not do it himself). Once the coins had been tossed and the yarrow stalks had been arranged and rearranged, they looked up the answers in the book.
To be kind to the prisoners of war will not do you harm.
Friendship from outside predicts auspiciousness.
Wait in prayer. Something will be obtained, showing greatness and smoothness.
Prediction is auspicious—you will get a way to cross a river.
That was it then. Across the firelit hearth, over the carefully arranged stalks, Hermann looked at his would-be assassin, his so-called prisoner.
“I’m going to untie you.”
Newt nodded.
Hermann undid the long mulefa rope from his ankle. It would have been hard for Newton to un-knot with one hand, but not impossible, and over the past week Hermann had often wondered why he hadn’t. As he was prying open the last knot with his fingers he realized why: consciously or not, Newt had been waiting for Hermann to trust him.
That night Newt slept inside, on the floor. He lay awake, thinking of what Hermann had said, for a long, long time.