“Aleytys.”

  The sound came from behind her. She turned slowly, her stomach knotting, a tightness under her ribs that hurt when she breathed. Her mother stood under the graceful arch of an aphnyta limb, the dangling spear-head leaves fluttering about her head and shoulders.

  Shareem’s green eyes widened; Aleytys felt alternating snippets of fear and longing, quickly suppressed. Fear? Breath caught in her throat as she remembered suddenly (she didn’t quite know why) leaning tensely toward the vidscreen in her ship pleading with Stavver to let her see her son. And being refused. Because her son hated her so intently he would not even look at her. Something deep inside her broke, something hard and cold she hadn’t known was there. Her eyes blurred. She held out her hands. “Mother?”

  Shareem’s hands closed on hers, strong and warm and shaking more than a little, then they were hugging each other, laughing and crying.

  They lay stretched out on long comfortable chairs that shaped themselves to the contours of their bodies, black chairs in a small black room with one wall that seemed open to space but was in truth a curved transparent substance mat magnified what lay outside. Meditation room, Shareem said, for times when the years got too heavy. They lay in the chairs with the flaccidity that comes after great tension is suddenly relaxed, not quite at ease with each other yet, groping toward an understanding of their likenesses and differences.

  Someone floating invisible above the two women, looking for nonphysical signs of maturity (something rather different from age but too often confused with it), would have thought Aleytys the mother and Shareem the child. Shareem’s emotions ran more facilely across her face, through her body, but there was more depth and passion in Aleytys. More confidence and self-esteem. She had been forced by circumstances and a comparative lack of mobility to live with the results of her actions, to pay (sometimes heavily) for unconsidered acts. With few exceptions, one of them being the series of events that led to Aleytys’s birth and the struggle afterward, Shareem had been insulated from problems by Vryhh wealth and her Vryhh ship. If a situation became uncomfortable, she simply went away and forgot what happened as quickly as she could. It was a measure of her feeling for her daughter that she didn’t do that, didn’t dismiss the child as an unfortunate accident, but fought to guarantee Aleytys a place on Vrithian, took pains to make sure she wouldn’t stay in the stifling culture of the Raqsidan. The outcome of that plotting, what Aleytys was now, she found rather disconcerting; she felt dominated by her daughter and didn’t quite know how she liked that, yet she was filled with pride in her child and felt vindicated by her success.

  Aleytys saw some of this. In spite of her wariness, she found herself unfolding under the warmth of her mother’s approval—Was startled by the ease and promptness of her capitulation.

  “I’m glad you were a girl,” Shareem said after a long silence. “Male Vryhh can be … difficult.”

  “Mmm.” Aleytys turned to look at her. “How many Vrya are there?”

  Shareem stirred, uncomfortable; the chair whispered as it changed to accommodate her change. “Not many,” she said. The words were clipped as if she found them difficult to say. “Maybe three hundred.” She stirred again. “There never were very many. We were an experiment that got out of hand.” She tried a smile, gave up on it. “The eldest, they don’t talk much about it. Ummm. About a thousand when Hyaroll found the way to Vrithian. Most we ever were was three thousand. We dwindle, Aleytys.”

  “Lee.”

  “Reem. That’s why I was able to get you acknowledged. I suppose you’re not going to like this. Three of the Tetrad wanted to know where you were, wanted you brought to Vrithian at once if not sooner. I squashed that idea fast; Hyaroll backed me up. We thought you should grow up in a healthier place than Vrithian.”

  Aleytys waited awhile before she tried to answer, filled first with anger, then resignation. A healthier place than Vrithian. Hard to swallow Shareem’s easy passing off of those years of pain and struggle. “I hated you for leaving me,” she said finally. “I hated you for a long time.”

  “Hated. Not hate. What changed your mind?”

  “I found out how helpless a woman could be … lost my son before he could walk … lost him again, left him with his father because …” She closed her eyes, the pain with her again, unchanged, it never really changed. “That didn’t work out—nothing I did for him worked out the way I wanted. I was going to be the mother you weren’t, I was going to raise him with love and care and never leave him until he grew old enough to leave me.” She lay silent for a moment, then rubbed her hand across her face, opened her eyes and turned her head so she could see Shareem. “Dwindle? Three thousand to three hundred, that’s not a dwindle, it’s extinction. Except … how long …” She chewed on her lip for a moment. “What about the longlife? Was that a lie? One man I … know believes in it.”

  More silence. A shuddering sigh from Shareem. “The day you were born, as far as I could figure it later, no way of being really sure, I passed into my nine hundredth year.” She smiled. “Odd coincidence, whether it’s exactly true or not, our sharing the same birthday. I had … small celebrations … for us each year.” She cleared her throat. “I’m fourth generation on Vrithian. You’re about it for the fifth. If we’re a mistake, it’s self-correcting. Taking a long time, but we’re going to get there. No more Vrya. All Vrya males after Hyaroll’s generation are sterile. Except for two or three, and they all fathered short-lived sports. Damaged. Distorted. And most Vryhh females are barren. Happened I wasn’t one of them.”

  Aleytys chuckled, apologized when she saw Shareem frown. “I wasn’t laughing at what you said, but something else. Kell and his obsession with pure Vryhh blood. He one of the sterile ones?”

  “Kell?” Shareem shuddered all over; the chair shuddered with her as it tried to accommodate her movement. “Where’d you come across him! He never said he knew you.”

  “One of my Hunts and one of his projects crashed into each other a few years back. Reem, he implied damn hard he was my ancestor and yours.”

  “Hunh! The only way would be cloning, and that doesn’t work worth spit. What happened?”

  Aleytys snuggled lower in the chair and sketched the events of the Hunt on Sunguralingu, the eerie hare-weapon, the battle with Kell. “That’s it,” she said. “I thought it was the disease warping him, so I healed him. I was really wrong that time, wasn’t I?”

  “You fought him, handicapped, you beat him flat, then had the gall to take pity on him? Lee, he might forgive you by the next big bang, but don’t count on it.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “What did he do?”

  Aleytys pushed up, swung her legs off the chair, sat with shoulders hunched, hands curled over the rounded edge. She missed Grey with a deep misery, felt like crying but lacked the energy to press out tears. “He tried to destroy my son,” she said, her voice muted. “He’s going after Hunters now, attacking my friends, trying to trap me.”

  Shareem moved uneasily but didn’t sit up; instead she stared at the curve of Wolff hanging over them. “I wish I could say he’s the exception, but it wouldn’t be true. He’s just an exaggeration of the ordinary Vryhh attitude toward the lesser species.”

  “Lesser species?”

  “His choice of words, not … ah, I can’t say that.” Her hands fluttered in small shapeless movements. “I might not say the words, but … I act … I treat people … oh, I suppose as carelessly, as thoughtlessly as he does. Not as meanly, I hope. I … I can’t let myself get involved with them … they die so fast. Time, Lee, we’ve got so much, and it does funny things to us. The Eldest, a lot of them anyway, spent centuries in labs … well, not exactly … an umbrella word for all kinds of … of fiddling around with things … projects. Think about having ages and ages at your disposal to investigate anything at all that intrigues you … and a secret world to maul about … its natives … you can take from them anything you want, make them do anything you want … they’re born and they die between one breath and the next. Think of it, Lee, even a single mind … working on a problem for centuries, turning it over and over … hidden away … coming out of hiding to see what other mayflies, other worlds, had done with it … stealing the best ideas … brooding over them. Think what that one mind could produce.” More shapeless groping gestures. “But …”

  “But?” It was a whispered sound, drawn out, a soft enticement to continue. Aleytys watched her mother struggling with an openness alien to her nature, a painful honesty that the child Leyta inside Aleytys thirsted to hear, evidence of something she’d desired without knowing it for all the years of her life, a need almost as deep as the need for food or breath, a need to know her mother really did love her. What Shareem was saying was interesting in itself, but the feeling behind the words was what Aleytys listened to.

  “But they got bored, Lee, most of them. Bored! Sounds funny, doesn’t it? The disease that kills us. Absurd, isn’t it? One by one most of the Eldest took a dive into a sun somewhere. Or touched off the cores in their domes. Or died in boredom-related accidents, too tired to take care. A lot of the younger ones, we don’t go back to Vrithian much. I wander and trade and amuse myself … do a project here and there … when I need something to make me feel like I’m … I’m not just a parasite sucking the life out of … I like the long ones … the ones that take generations … they make the time go … but they’re rare … mayfly folk don’t have the patience. It’s a long time yet before I hunt a sun … but it’ll come. Everything wears out in time.” Another gesture of her mother’s hand; she did have lovely hands, slender and shapely, but she didn’t take care of them. She chews her nails, Aleytys thought, and felt a surge of protective love for her mother; she wanted to scold her for neglecting herself, wanted to cuddle and comfort her as if she were the mother and Shareem her child. It was confusing and disturbing; she turned it over and over in her mind, almost missing her mother’s next words.

  “It’s a mess, Lee. The Vrya who stay on Vrithian are … well, we’re all dead ends, it’s a failed experiment, but they … aah, it’s a mess. You sure you want anything to do with it?” Shareem nodded at Wolff swimming serenely over them. “That seems a beautiful world in its chilly way.”

  “Come see my home.” Aleytys stood, held out her hand.

  “Why not?” Shareem took the hand, let Aleytys pull her up. “Any problems getting off the field? Wolff isn’t a Company world, but I’ve heard they don’t like visitors.”

  “They don’t.” Aleytys grinned. “But I’ve got pull.” The grin became a chuckle. “Well, truth is I’ve got a couple friends with pull; all that fuss and red tape is taken care of, you don’t have to bother with it, just hop in my flitter and come see my house.” She followed Shareem from the room. “And my horses. Um …I’ve got a couple of people staying with me, but you don’t need to see them if you don’t want to, not to talk to anyway.”

  Shareem swung around. “What?”

  “I’ll explain on the way down. If you still want to come.”

  “Yes.” Shareem looked wary, withdrawn, setting aside emotion and involvement with an abruptness that startled Aleytys and turned her wary too. “Yes, daughter, it’s time you did a little explaining.”

  Shareem stood by a window in the sitting room, her back to the fire burning briskly on a huge open hearth; it made her a little nervous, for she wasn’t accustomed to open fires inside living space. The whole house made her nervous. Her daughter’s house. Even the ancient stone walls seemed to hold something of Aleytys. When she’d gotten out of the flitter and looked at it, she’d had the feeling it had grown in that spot like some gnarled old tree. A narrow structure at least four stories high, almost a lopped-off tower, plain, even ugly, massive. She felt the weight of it and wondered how Aleytys could endure that weight pressing down on her. A few steps out of the flitter, Aleytys stopped, closed her eyes, breathed in the rich soup of smells, raw green, wet dirt, horse manure, damp fur, something dead upwind of them, all carried undiluted on a wind that cut into Shareem like knives. She fidgeted, not so enchanted with all this nature; the smells were getting to her stomach and the wind was turning her into an icicle. Now, with the fire’s heat licking at her back, with that wind kept firmly outside the double-paned windows, she could watch with appreciation and pleasure the spring foals chasing each other, the mares and stallion grazing in the greening pasture. Its yellow round flattening and flushing to red, the sun started to pass behind sawtooth peaks, their ancient massive glaciers chiseled by time and weather into intricate folds and falls. The air outside had a clarity that gave everything a luminous magical quality, hard-edged and immediate; the intensity of the colors scarcely seemed to diminish as the light began to die. Shareem wrinkled her nose at the display and thought, I’m not going to get any fonder of this world than I am right now. She sighed and turned to face her daughter. “What are you going to do?”

  Aleytys was stretched out in one of the chairs near the fire, her ankles crossed, a heel sunk in the padded leather of a hassock. She held a long-stemmed glass about a third filled with a dark gold wine that had gone even richer and darker as the light outside faded. The room was filled with shadows; the only light inside came from the fire. “Vrithian,” she said. “Shadith was right. Make him come after me.” She lifted her head, sipped at the wine, let her head fall back. “Aschla skewer his liver, he couldn’t have picked a worse time. Over two years since my last Hunt, I’m about cleaned out, enough credit left to pay the taxes on this place and maintain the power tap while I’m gone. If I’m not gone too long. And there’s fuel and overhauling and maintenance on the ship. And Shadith. And Linfyar. No way around it, I’m going to have to borrow on the house and land.” She took another sip of the wine, lay back and gloomed at the ceiling. “Damn. Damn. Damn. I just last year worked everything clear of debt.”

  Shareem moved her shoulders impatiently. She’d never bothered herself with such idiocies and didn’t intend to start.

  Aleytys felt her discomfort and let the subject drop; which didn’t help all that much because every time she did something like that Shareem was forcibly reminded that her daughter was an empath and capable of sensing every fleeting feeling, and some of those feelings she’d rather keep to herself, nothing to be proud of, nothing she wanted anyone else to know about. Empath. She didn’t get that from, me; who’d have thought that crazy clod who fathered her might have something so wild in his genes.

  Aleytys touched a sensor. The chair hummed around until she faced the windows; another sensor and a second chair moved up beside it. “Come sit down, Reem. We get spectacular sunsets this time of year.”

  Shareem settled into the empty chair, though she wasn’t that interested in sunsets and had already seen as much as she cared to of this particular specimen. She watched her daughter instead. As the display continued outside, the faintly stem set of Aleytys’s face softened, her eyes opened wider; she looked almost happy, absorbed in the play of light before her, accepting, vulnerable; she was responding to that miserable sunset with a passionate intensity that Shareem knew she could never share. She tried to laugh at herself—jealous of a sunset; what next?—but she could not bear to look at her daughter’s face any longer.

  When the colors had faded and the sky had darkened to indigo with a few silver spangles, Shareem glanced at her daughter and was startled to see tears silent and unforced sliding down her face. Aleytys wasn’t trying to stop them or wipe them away. Her mouth was pressed into a thin line; she’d set the wineglass on the floor beside the chair and her hands were knotted together so hard her fingers were white about the knuckles and red at the ends.

  Shareem must have made a sound, though she wasn’t conscious of it, because Aleytys broke the grip of her hands, sat up, scrubbed at her eyes. “Sorry,” she said. She groped beside the chair, found a bit of tissue and blew her nose, tossed the tissue at the fire. She took a few deep breaths. “Just as well I’m getting away from here. For a while, anyway.” She drew the back of her hands across her eyes, managed a smile. “Grey and I used to sit here like this whenever our times home coincided.” She groped for another tissue, blew her nose again. “It keeps catching me by surprise, that he might not … never mind.”

  She flipped up the top to the chair arm, danced her fingers over the panel there, then settled back as the chair switched around again to face the fire, a soft indirect lighting chased the shadows from the room, and exterior shields hummed quietly down over the windows. A hesitation, then she brought Shareem’s chair back to where it had been; she raised her brows, then matched Shareem’s smile with her own.

  “I’m not asking you to help,” she said. Shareem suppressed an appreciative chuckle at the care in the choice of those words. Aleytys was groping through a minefield that didn’t exist, but she couldn’t know that. “Just get me to Vrithian and—” the same uninsistent quiet tones, the same slightly hesitant speech—“and back off, and … keep silence.” A lift and fall of her hand. “I don’t want him more prepared for me than he is already. You know Kell, I don’t. I don’t know what your loyalties are, Reem. If you’re against me in this, please tell me. I won’t mind; after all, you’ve known him a lot longer than you’ve known me. All I ask is, don’t get in my way. I don’t want to have to go through you.” She shook herself, made a groping helpless gesture. “I will, you know. He’s left me no choice. I have … hostages, he’ll strike against them, they can’t fight him. I think … I think he’ll put off facing me directly as long as he can keep me running … and hurting. Swardheld, Shadith, though they can take care of themselves better than most. Linfyar. Canyli Heldeen and the other Hunters. Grey … ah!” She looked down, then up, eyes shining with a film of tears. “I know I just said back off, Reem, but I can’t … I need you, Reem. Will you help me?”