With the exhausted man sleeping in her arms, she remembered the other place intentional psychalchemy happened, where she’d never been but someday, since she was a woman, she might be: at the start of the way that led to birth.
Haze lay in deep, dreamless sleep until it turned into another nightmare.
It was noon in the wide streets of Strata, the capital city of Faxe at the foot of the towering space elevator that stretched to the transit ring. Everyone in the street was frozen, motionless, even the vehicles stopped still. All that moved was a shadow. The shadow raced across the city toward him. Fighting against the dread freezing him, he looked up.
An enormous shattered cylinder fell out of the sky toward him. In a gesture that was utterly futile, he flung his arm protectively over his face.
His elbow hit something soft and warm that said in a woman’s voice, “Ouch!”
Coming wide awake with a jolt, he was stricken with remorse. “Did I hit you? I’m sorry! I was having a bad dream.”
“What about?”
He felt ashamed of hitting a woman because of a bad dream but equally compelled to be honest. “It was about the—” The word stuck in his throat.
“The Fall?”
He said slowly, “All that coverage in the news. Everybody shocked. Half the city ruined. When I came out from the underground dorm, the authorities had things under control, but still it was bad. They gave me a drug to help me not remember it all.”
The drug had taken out two days of his life. He didn’t really remember being asleep in the dormitory; he’d reconstructed how it must have been. He’d returned back from a field expedition to the other green world in Faxe’s system with his sleep pattern skewed from Stratan time. So at noon he’d been in the dormitory by himself, sleeping the sleep of the star-lagged. The tremors in the ground, if he’d felt them at all, he’d mistaken for just another of the earthquakes that sometimes rippled through that part of that continent on Faxe. He must have had his communicator turned down so it didn’t wake him up either. In those days he’d been a deep sleeper and a vivid dreamer. He’d neither slept so deeply since then, nor had dreams that he remembered. Until now.
“I may be too fidgety to sleep with,” he made himself admit. “The nightmare keyed me up.” Despite his bone-deep exhaustion, his nerves twitched. He wanted to run somewhere.
Mercury held him tighter. That helped. For a long time, he made himself stay still and stay awake. He didn’t want to hit her again. Finally he dozed off anyway.
And slid back into the nightmare.
Huge pieces of crumpled metal, red-hot from falling through the atmosphere, lay where they’d fallen on buildings and people. Screams and steam filled the air.
A dog barked. Haze looked down, desperately hoping that the dog was Dusty, and it was.
Dusty ran a few paces, looked back, and barked urgently. Haze ran after Dusty through the street full of steaming wreckage. When Dusty looked back at Haze, the dog had golden eyes with diamond-shaped pupils. The strange eyes had compassion in them.
Dusty led him to a square door. He dived after Dusty through the door, down a flight of steps, into cool darkness. Relief washed over him. Safe here. Safe at last.
His eyes snapped open. Mercury motionlessly slept beside him. The tent had turned opaque, meaning it sensed morning light, but since it had also sensed there had been a lot of motion in the tent for much of the night, the material had decided to give him darkness for staying asleep in. It was a smart tent. Whatever it decided to do would have made no sound. Then what just woke him up?
Something scratched at the door flap of his tent. It was a very recognizable scratching sound. His heart pounded with a wild, irrational hope. Dusty? Impossible. Dusty had lived a good dog’s life that ended twenty years ago and half a world away from here. Because he’d had a vivid nightmare with Dusty in it didn’t make it possible for Dusty to live again.
The scratching came again, the unmistakable sound of blunt claws on tent fabric.
Haze eased away from Mercury. He got his feet under him in a tense crouch and touched the flap of the tent. His heart pounded as he anticipated what he’d see, or not.
The flap opened to reveal a creature looking up at him. It was compactly dog-sized but unlike anything Haze had ever seen. Except it had the eyes he’d dreamed about, large golden eyes with diamond-shaped pupils.
He stared at the creature in wary wonder. Its wide, feathered head had long flexible ears and a hooked beak. It had wide shoulders and a thick ruff of feathers lighter in color than the rust-brown fur on the rest of its body. It stood on front paws with blunt, tent-scratching claws. It had taloned back feet. And a long tail with a feathery tuft at the end.
The strange compassionate eyes didn’t leave Haze. The creature put a paw on his knee.
His wariness melted. The reflexes of a lifelong biologist remained. Breaking off eye contact—animals may consider direct eye contact antagonistic—Haze slowly extended his hand, palm up, below the creature’s shoulder—animals take a hand reaching for their head as a possible threat.
It sniffed his hand interestedly.
He slowly raised his hand to its ruff. The feathers felt much colder than the air.
This was an unexpectedly detailed encounter to be just a dream. Haze was puzzled. “Where did you come from?”
It wagged its feather-tufted tail in such a doglike, Dusty-like movement that his heart warmed.
Behind him, Mercury rolled up with a puzzled little sound. She looked over his shoulder and gasped.
“Do you see it too?” Haze asked. “Or am I dreaming?”
“What is that?!”
“I dreamed about my old dog. I had a nightmare and it led me to safety.” He looked into those strange, compassionate eyes again and some of the tension that had his nerves stretched taut eased.
She put her hands on his shoulders. “That is not a dog!”
“The eyes were the same. My old dog was named Dusty because his fur always picked up the dust in the street.”
The long, flexible ears pointed toward him. The early sun picked out reddish notes in its fur and its feathers. He heard himself ask, “Can I call you Rusty?”
The creature cocked its head as though trying to understand him.
The tent flap faced the courtyard, where Quit ambled by with a towel on one shoulder, on his way to the refresher unit. When Quit glanced toward the tent he froze in his tracks. Then he yelled, “Xen-intrusion! Xen-intrusion!”
Half a minute later the courtyard swarmed with Pastfinders in different states of undress and the same kind of alarm as Quit. Tai ran out of the station dressed for sleep in shorts and a light tunic, but with her gun in her hand.
Haze protectively gathered the creature into his arms. It was soft-feathered, solidly built, and very, very cold. In exasperation, he asked Mercury, “Why are they panicking at a little beastie?”
“They’re xenophobes.” Even Mercury’s voice sounded uneven. “Xenarch sites have turned out to harbor living things that are deadly dangerous. Knowing that can make them overreact.”
“Rusty isn’t dangerous,” Haze said with complete conviction.
The Pastfinders formed up into a circle around Haze’s tent. Tai stood in front of him, her gun pointed at Rusty and, not incidentally, at Haze himself.