Cataract. Part 24

like worms, boring through her thoughts and making her s.h.i.+ver with the feeling that this moment was not, somehow, real. The silence was so thick it seemed to push away the rain. Shjams cleared her throat. "So," she said uncertainly.

"So," Tsia repeated.

"So, how are you?"

Tsia stared at her for a long moment. "G.o.ddammit," she breathed finally. "It's been six years since

you've seen me, and all you can say is how am I?"

Shjams did not change expression, but Tsia felt suddenly that she was looking at a mask.

"What are you doing here?" she asked slowly.

Shjams's voice was strained. "Me?"

"You. Shjams. My sister, who should be up at a docking hammer, not down at a freepick stake-"

"You're the one who shouldn't be here," the other woman said harshly.

Tsia stared at her. She took a half step forward, but the point of the laze did not waver. "Shjams, put the

laze away.""No.""I'm not blackjack. I'm with the meres-" Her voice cut off abruptly: Shjams did not look surprised.

"You know that."

"Yes."

"You're one of them."

"Yes."

Tsia's face paled so that her skin looked almost like her scars. She reached back unconsciously to steady herself on the s.h.i.+p. "You came for the biochips." It was not a question. "You helped them get the biochips."

"Yes."

Tsia stared at Shjams. Her sister's green eyes, shuttered and shallow with some kind of inner mask, stared back. Tsia tried to sense Shjams's biofield, but it was as if her person had been cut up in strips or shredded. There was only a dark center, thick and pulsing with some rhythm that was not Shjams... A blackness that ate at her heart so that she, herself, became hollow as an old grudge.

"The laze-put it down," she whispered.

"Please..." Shjams's voice was not steady, and there was an anguish in her eyes that rippled like a shock wave through Tsia's biogate. But the hand on the laze did not waver. "Please," she breathed. "Don't force me to use it."

The shadows grew closer in Tsia's gate. She took another half step forward. The point of the laze was blue-white, with purple tints, and seemed to fill her sight with a burning, fiery light. Her gaze rose to the face of the other woman. "You would laze me. Me: Tsia. Your sister."

Rain spattered the ground and ran against their feet. "Yes."

"G.o.ddammit-"

"I will do it, Tsia."

Tsia felt as if some edge of her world had crumbled. Her lips curled, and her hands clenched at her sides. All of a sudden, anger flared up in her guts and burned in the acids of her stomach. It bunded her eyes. In her mind she saw her brothers' faces, closed against the hurt, as they realized that Shjams would not return their corns, would not accept their visits, would not return to see them. Her mother's face, where lines seemed to have etched and age seemed to have settled overnight the day Shjams disappeared... Her father, who somehow seemed to shrink and draw in on himself while he threw himself into the training of new guides. And her grandmother, whose blue eyes faded more with every year Shjams had been gone...

"Six years," Tsia said slowly. "Six years, and you finally did come back."

Shjams cleared her throat uneasily. "You didn't use to be so concerned with time."

"You call more than half a decade a little bit of time? Daya, Shjams, it's been six years with no word from you at all. Six years of wondering how you were. What you did. If you were sick or unhappy or just off finding yourself, as you claimed. Wondering if we could possibly help. You finally did come back to Risthmus. But not for your family." Her voice grew sharper with every word until it seemed to strike out like claws. "No," she almost snarled. "Six years, and you don't bother to seek your family at all. You just come for a set of biochips. You come back, not as the daughter of the guides Bayzon and Ellyn; not as the woman who worked her own way through the certification boards; not as a full inspector from the only working docking hammer in orbit around this world. You come as a criminal. As a zek. As a thief."

Shjams took a half step back.

Tsia followed her. "Forget me-your sister. Forget your family. Just look at what you're doing. Do you know what blackjack will do with those chips? Do you understand what can happen-to this world? To any other world in human s.p.a.ce?"

"They won't be used against our worlds."

"Who told you that?" Tsia demanded. "And how could you possibly believe such a thing even if you heard it? The Shjams I knew wouldn't fall for such a lie. How could you have changed so much-"

"It's you who have changed, not I."

Tsia threw her head back and snarled, and Shjams froze. For a moment, neither one moved. "I have changed," Tsia said in a startlingly quiet voice. "I've begun to know myself again. But you-you're like a ball of water, spinning without a center."

"You don't know what I am-"

"I can feel you," Tsia snarled. "I can feel your intent like a knife already cutting my throat."

"Then go," Shjams almost shrieked. "Go. Run. Get away from here. I won't laze you. Just go..."

Slowly, then more strongly, Tsia shook her head. "Who turned you into this?" she asked, almost gently.

"Who is using you?"

"No one. No one-"

"It is a friend? A lover who has this control over you?"

"No. Yes, but he's- No- No one uses me."

"Is it the one you ran away with?"

"I did not run away."

"Yes, you did," Tsia retorted flatly. "You know that's the truth."

"He's stronger than you," Shjams said, almost desperately. "His truth is stronger-"

"He has no truth if he's making you live on lies. And he's using you like a slave as a weapon against your own world."

"No, it's not that way at all-""Anyone who would kill to take this technology wouldn't care who it was used against.""You're wrong!""Who was it that told you the chips would not be used against this world or any other? Was it him?" She stared at the f.u.c.ker of emotion that crossed Shjams's face. "That's who it is, isn't it? This lover who somehow latched on to you and separated you from everything that used to be important to you. He's the one who told you that lie and all the others on which you have been living."

"It doesn't matter who told me-"'

"You're trapped, is that it? You're afraid of his strength? You're caught through him with the zeks and you don't know how to get out?""I could have done this on my own.""You have-had-too much respect for life.""1 still do!"

"Not since you took up with this blackjack."

Shjams's voice was low. "You have no right to judge him."

Tsia just looked at her. "Blood gives me that right. Blood gives me every right to look and weigh and

judge-and condemn to the hottest, searing h.e.l.l the zek who uses you to your own death."

"You haven't even met him."

"I don't need to. I see him in your eyes."

"He loves me for myself. He would never use me-"

"You're an inspector, Shjams-or you were. You are the only reason blackjack can get this cargo

through customs. Don't tell me this man hasn't asked you to slip the chips through customs."

"It's not like that!"

"You aren't going to get the chips through customs?"

The tension in Shjams's lips turned them almost white. Tsia half stretched out her hand. Her biogate

surged. Ruka growled as if she reached out to pet a shaper, and she froze. The heat of the laze point sizzled in the rain and the faint smoke made her nostrils flare. She stared at Shjams as if she had never seen her.

"You are stealing biochips that could spell the end of you, of me, of your entire family. Of an entire world. And you blind yourself with a lie so that you don't have to see your actions in the light. As if, by ignoring them, you can sanction what you do."

Shjams's voice was low. "You don't know what I do."

"Do I not? Kipling said it best: 'When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.' That's you, Shjams. Lost in the words of blackjack. Lost because you can't find

yourself, and anything is better than facing your demons alone-even a greater demon who uses you till you're nothing, and then sucks the marrow from the bones of your self."

Shjams shook her head slowly. A man rounded the corner of the far hut behind her and broke into a jog

as he saw the two women. Shjams did not seem to notice. "You can't judge me," she said quietly. "And you can't judge him till you know him. Till you meet him in person."

"Through you, have I not met him already?"

Shjams flushed slowly. The image of Kurvan's lean, handsome face flashed through Tsia's mind, and she took a disbelieving step forward.

"Daya," she breathed. "Is he here-now? At this freepick stake?"

Shjams did not answer.

Kurvan. His visage blinded Tsia to her sister. Kurvan. Who had smiled at her to make her drop him.

Kurvan, who had engineered her mistakes. Kurvan, who had made it seem as if she tried to drown Wren. Who had used her like a dog to keep himself safe. Her voice, when she spoke, was almost drowned out by the rain. "I've met him already, haven't I?"

Decker, behind Shjams, was only fifty meters away. Her sister set her jaw. "They're coming.""I can see him-""You understand what has to happen now?""I'm your sister, for G.o.d's sake!"Tsia took another half step forward. She had forgotten the laze. Shjams did not hesitate. The white- purple light fired into the ground. Tsia jerked back like a cat, one arm up in front of her face. The blast of heat and gas made her choke, and automatically the smoke diaphragm in her throat closed off. Her back rammed into the landing leg. The smoke snakes blew away in the wind while the rain beat the rest of its tendrils down. Tsia stared at her sister.

"I don't know you like this," she whispered.

"You never knew me."

"We're family. Even if you're caught in a... a situation-"

"The only situation I'm in," Shjams hissed, "is this one between you and me."

Tsia half raised her hand, but Shjams stepped back again. Decker increased his pace.

"Don't move any more," Shjams said harshly. "I won't give a d.a.m.n if you die at my hands."

"His name-" Tsia's whisper broke, and Shjams's eyes seemed suddenly haunted. "Is it Kurvan who has

done this to you? Kurvan, who has stripped you of your heart? Of your self?"

Shjams did not look over her shoulder at Decker as the man approached more warily. Her flat green eyes bored into Tsia's. She seemed to search for something, and Tsia could not move from her gaze. Something flickered deep in the green, and Tsia's gate gaped so wide that her mind reeled. It was like looking at a dog that had been hit too many times. Like feeling the fist strike again and again. The catspeak snarled. Tsia's lips curled more. Her own memories rose up. All the pain and longing-all the humiliation Tsia had suffered till she won her own freedom... Ten years of work and yearning and death that she had tasted with the meres. A decade of fighting to regain herself-it shone out of Tsia's dark blue eyes like emotion too long trapped within a pressurized tube. And the flinch of an animal shone out of Shjams's.