Part Four — The Cradle · The Threnody
Epilogue
Six Weeks Later
"You look terrible," Renata said.
"Thank you."
"I mean it kindly. It's a distinct sort of terrible. It's the look of a woman who has been sleeping eight hours a night for a month and doesn't know what to do with the rest of the day."
Vash laughed. It was easier than it had been. She sat on the low wooden step of the schoolhouse with a mug of tea going cold between her hands and her boots in the dust, and watched the children run out across the yard. It was a small school, whitewashed, with a slate roof and a bell in a little cupola, on a small green world three weeks' travel from anywhere she had ever been. Someone had painted a sun on the door. The paint was fresh.
Down the lane, Priya was asleep in the cockpit of the survey transport with a hat over her face. She had flown Vash three weeks without complaint, and had asked, at the end of it, for her pay to be doubled, and had been told it was under consideration.
"Does the bell work?" she said.
"It does. I haven't let anyone ring it." Renata lowered herself onto the step beside her, slowly, with a small grunt. "They're afraid of it. All the ones who came with us. They flinch at a clear note. I'm working on it. I thought we'd start with the smallest and the quietest."
"That seems wise."
"It's the only way I know." She settled, and held out her left hand in the afternoon light, and turned it a little, with a kind of dry appraising interest, like a woman inspecting a piece of old pottery. "You haven't asked."
"I didn't want to."
"It's all right."
The hand was clear to the wrist. In the sun, the small pale rings moved in it like frost on a window, turning, very slowly, and when the wind came across the yard they sang, a faint thin silver sound, as of a fingertip drawn round the rim of a glass. Renata flexed her fingers. The rings shivered and caught the light.
"Crusher says it's permanent," she said. "It doesn't hurt. It doesn't spread. It's a little cold in the mornings. And it won't hold a piece of chalk, which is a real inconvenience in my line of work." She smiled. "I've taken to using the right."
"I'm sorry."
"You've said that."
"I'll say it again."
"I'd rather you didn't." Renata watched her. Her eyes were the color of river water, and entirely clear. "Vash. I've been in this world seventy-one years. I've dug up six civilizations and buried a husband and taught four thousand children to read. If I have to leave one hand in a field to throw a child across a doorway, I think I've had the best of the bargain."
Vash looked away. Out in the yard a boy in a green jacket was explaining something very seriously to a girl with two plaits. The girl was nodding. She had a small bunch of wheat pinned to her collar.
"She asked about you," Renata said. "Ana. She wants to know when you're coming back."
"I don't know."
"Say soon."
"Soon," said Vash.
She hadn't meant to say yes to the paper.
It had come at her from three directions at once. The Cartwright Foundation had written, politely, to express regret that the Doria Minor survey had yielded nothing of interest, and to enquire whether she would consider an unrelated project in the Tarsis cluster. Sorokin had sent a short formal note, without a signature, that said only: There are things that cannot be said. This is not one of them. And Picard had mentioned, in passing, in the tone he used when he was trying not to mention something, that the Fleet kept a classified archive, and that the archive had a small reading room, and that a person with the right clearance and a great deal of patience might be allowed to deposit, under seal, a document of sufficient scholarly merit.
So she had written it.
It lay now on the desk in her rented room, a stack of four hundred pages, closely typed, clean and cold and exact. A grammar. A lexicon. A concordance of twelve hundred glyphs, with their sound values and their ornaments and their variants, assembled out of a notebook of small neat pencil and the memory of a woman who couldn't be asked any more questions. It had taken her five weeks. She had worked from dawn until she could no longer see.
It was, she thought, the best work she had ever done. It hadn't a word of hers in it that wasn't an editor's note.
She had written the title page that morning. She had written it once, without crossing anything out.
A GRAMMAR OF THE CHOIR By Dara Liang Edited, with a preface, by Vash
She had thought about the other order. She had sat for some time with the pen over the page. Then she had put the name where it belonged.
Picard came to the schoolhouse at sunset.
She heard him before she saw him: the slow, even, unhurried step on the gravel path, and the faint creak of the gate. She was on the bench under the apple tree with her feet drawn up and a blanket round her shoulders. Renata had gone in to start supper. The yard was empty. The light lay long and low and gold across the grass.
He stopped at the gate. He was out of uniform, in a plain gray civilian coat. He looked, she thought, like a man who has taken off a weight and doesn't yet know what to do with his hands.
"I was told I might find you here."
"By whom?"
"By a very small child with plaits." He came across the grass. "She informed me that you were sad on purpose."
"I'm not."
"I said I thought you were resting."
"That's closer." She moved her feet. "Sit."
He sat. The bench creaked. For a while neither of them spoke. In the apple tree above them, a small gray bird was working its way down a branch, one hop at a time, with the air of a creature making a very considered decision.
"The Fleet has issued my reprimand," Picard said. "It is on file. I have been informed that I am to take the Enterprise to the Gamma Hydra sector for three months of routine survey work. I have been told that this is not a punishment."
"Is it?"
"I think it is a rest." He smiled slightly. "I have been told that I should enjoy it. I find I am not certain how."
"You'll manage."
"I shall try." He turned his head. "And you?"
"I don't know." She said it simply. "I've been thinking I might go to Sera. To see Roan. His hearing's next month. They've given him a lawyer, and he's refused to use any of what the lawyer says. He wants to tell it all." She drew the blanket closer. "I told him I'd be there. It seemed like the first thing I'd ever promised that I might keep."
"I would like to go with you."
"You don't have to."
"I know." He watched her. "That is rather the point."
She laughed. It was a small tired sound, and it came out wet. He didn't seem to mind.
"There is something else." He drew a breath. "I have said it once, on an observation deck, in rather more formal terms. I should like to say it again, plainly. The Enterprise has a vacancy on her science staff. Not a Starfleet commission. A consultancy. A civilian archaeologist, to advise, as occasion requires, on matters of historical and cultural significance." He paused. "I have no doubt that you would hate it."
"I'd hate it."
"You would be underpaid and under-appreciated and obliged, from time to time, to take orders."
"From you?"
"From no one. You would simply be required to be present." The corner of his mouth moved. "I should find it a great comfort."
She regarded him for some time. She thought of a dead mining world. She thought of a lift cage and a line of fire. She thought of all the places she had left, one after another, with her bag already packed, before anyone could ask her to stay.
"Not yet," she said.
It came out of her quite lightly. She heard it as she spoke, and felt it go through her, like a small clean note struck on a bell, and understood that it wasn't a refusal. It was only a kind of honesty. A thing that could be said, aloud, to a person you trusted, and did not need to be defended.
"Not yet," Picard repeated, very gently.
"Ask me again."
"I shall."
"In a year."
"In a year." He nodded. "I am, as you know, a patient man."
"You're an insufferable man."
"That also."
She leaned, very slightly, until her shoulder touched his. He did not move away. They sat together on the bench beneath the apple tree, in the long last gold of the afternoon, with the little gray bird hopping down its branch and the children's voices drifting across the yard, and for some time nobody said anything at all.
That night she slept.
It was not a dramatic thing. She went to bed at ten, in the small clean room above the schoolhouse, with the window open and the curtain stirring in the dark. She lay on her back and looked at the ceiling and listened to the sounds of a quiet house: a board settling, a tap running somewhere far below, Renata's slow tread on the stairs. The air smelled of apples.
There was no tone. There had been none for six weeks. She had stopped listening for it a fortnight ago, and had not noticed when.
She slept, and did not dream.
There is a color first, before there is anything left to see it with.
It is not blue. It is not violet. It is the color of a sky after rain, in the minute before the light changes, when the whole of the world is held quite still and every leaf is a different green. It is a color with no name, because it has never needed one. It is merely the color that a thing becomes when it is no longer afraid.
Then sound, if sound is the word. It comes, as it always did, from many voices, close together and not quite together. But they are not reaching now. There is no strain in them. They have found the place where the note was always going. They sing it, all together, without haste, without grief, a chord that is not an ending and not a beginning, but only a long clear rest, like a breath let go.
It does not resolve. It does not need to. It is already home.
Far away, in a place too young to have been asked, a door that was never closed is standing open, and something is passing through it that is not a homecoming but a going-on. It is singing as it goes. It does not look back. A small bright figure walks at its head, with her hands at her sides, and the stain is gone from them.
And a long way nearer, in a small dark room above a schoolhouse, with a window open on the smell of apples, a woman turns over in her sleep and pulls the blanket up to her chin.
Somewhere, very faintly, a flute is playing five notes.
Then there is only the quiet, and the stars, and the long green dark of a world at rest, and the sound that a choir makes, after the last note has been sung, in the half-second before it remembers it is allowed to stop.
END