wait six months for the dawn.
She remembered to change from the suit’s canned air supply to filtered external air. She cursed the length of her hair, which had come loose from her lace cap and kept blowing across her mouth, and began to trudge.
At first she was buoyed up by recollection of her mission and the good resolutions she had made about reforming herself. There was no doubt that she had been hurled into the midst of a far worse crisis than Slee had ever dreamed of, a crisis involving strange orbiting ships where no ships ought to be, and a crew so terrified of the Patrol that they shot on sight. That spelled, to her, something at least on the scale of the Slaveworld case. She tried to lure herself onward with fantasies about how she would single-handedly foil the conspirators, be decorated and promoted and …
But the chill, and the sheer effort of plodding through the soft, dense snow, made those fantasies less and less credible. She dismissed them in favor of more mundane matters: what to do if she did find her way to human habitation. She would have to strip off and destroy her suit, for instance, with its too-advanced gadgetry; likewise she would have to invent a story to account for her presence here … What? Could she have been kidnapped by bandits? There were bandits on Fourteen, the reason why caravan masters like Trader Heron needed armed guards to convoy their merchandise. But were they to be found so far north? Probably not—there was no one here worth robbing. There was no one here, period.
Have to think of some other lie to tell …
Bit by bit, as she grew tired, her thoughts slowed down. A sharp headwind arose, and made her progress difficult with its blustering resistance. Every few moments a sprayof snow would dust across her helmet and blind her until she wiped it away with the back of her gauntlet. There was a mechanical wiper, but it had been intended only to cope with fine spatial dust, not clogging snowflakes, and anyway its movement was hypnotic and combined with weariness to dull her brain.
She had been walking so long she wanted to fall down and go to sleep; the only thing that prevented her was that a decision was needed to stop walking, and it was less demanding not to make any decisions. It began to occur to her that it was getting lighter over half the sky, and darker over the other half. This puzzled her for a while. At last she discovered that as the sun rose on one side of her, an ominous army of cloud was sweeping from the other. The wind grew fiercer still; she had the impression she was walking on one spot, as though on a treadmill, unable to go forward.
She put one foot on a patch of ice and sprawled headlong. Shock made her draw in a gasping breath, and with it came a tress of hair.
That was the straw which broke her patience. All self-control failed, and for the next few minutes she was weeping and railing and screaming curses—damning the Corps for bribing her with its promise of long life, damning Brzeska for not sending her back to Earth in disgrace, damning Langenschmidt for not crashing and killing them both instantly, damning the crew of the mysterious orbiting ship for firing on the cruiser, and most fervently of all, damning herself for being a weak-willed idiot.
While she was recovering from her hysterical despair, and finding that it had paradoxically done her good by clearing and calming her mind, the edge of the storm came upon her and she forced herself to her feet, aching from head to toe. If she stayed where she was, the blizzard would snow her under and she would die for sure.
The going here was tougher than ever, and it was not only because she was hindered by the wind, she suddenly discovered. She was breasting a steep rise in the ground, and the last few yards of the ascent seemed impossibly difficult.
She began muttering to herself. “From the top of the rise I’ll see a village. I’ll see people. At least I’ll see smokerising from a fire.
She remembered to change from the suit’s canned air supply to filtered external air. She cursed the length of her hair, which had come loose from her lace cap and kept blowing across her mouth, and began to trudge.
At first she was buoyed up by recollection of her mission and the good resolutions she had made about reforming herself. There was no doubt that she had been hurled into the midst of a far worse crisis than Slee had ever dreamed of, a crisis involving strange orbiting ships where no ships ought to be, and a crew so terrified of the Patrol that they shot on sight. That spelled, to her, something at least on the scale of the Slaveworld case. She tried to lure herself onward with fantasies about how she would single-handedly foil the conspirators, be decorated and promoted and …
But the chill, and the sheer effort of plodding through the soft, dense snow, made those fantasies less and less credible. She dismissed them in favor of more mundane matters: what to do if she did find her way to human habitation. She would have to strip off and destroy her suit, for instance, with its too-advanced gadgetry; likewise she would have to invent a story to account for her presence here … What? Could she have been kidnapped by bandits? There were bandits on Fourteen, the reason why caravan masters like Trader Heron needed armed guards to convoy their merchandise. But were they to be found so far north? Probably not—there was no one here worth robbing. There was no one here, period.
Have to think of some other lie to tell …
Bit by bit, as she grew tired, her thoughts slowed down. A sharp headwind arose, and made her progress difficult with its blustering resistance. Every few moments a sprayof snow would dust across her helmet and blind her until she wiped it away with the back of her gauntlet. There was a mechanical wiper, but it had been intended only to cope with fine spatial dust, not clogging snowflakes, and anyway its movement was hypnotic and combined with weariness to dull her brain.
She had been walking so long she wanted to fall down and go to sleep; the only thing that prevented her was that a decision was needed to stop walking, and it was less demanding not to make any decisions. It began to occur to her that it was getting lighter over half the sky, and darker over the other half. This puzzled her for a while. At last she discovered that as the sun rose on one side of her, an ominous army of cloud was sweeping from the other. The wind grew fiercer still; she had the impression she was walking on one spot, as though on a treadmill, unable to go forward.
She put one foot on a patch of ice and sprawled headlong. Shock made her draw in a gasping breath, and with it came a tress of hair.
That was the straw which broke her patience. All self-control failed, and for the next few minutes she was weeping and railing and screaming curses—damning the Corps for bribing her with its promise of long life, damning Brzeska for not sending her back to Earth in disgrace, damning Langenschmidt for not crashing and killing them both instantly, damning the crew of the mysterious orbiting ship for firing on the cruiser, and most fervently of all, damning herself for being a weak-willed idiot.
While she was recovering from her hysterical despair, and finding that it had paradoxically done her good by clearing and calming her mind, the edge of the storm came upon her and she forced herself to her feet, aching from head to toe. If she stayed where she was, the blizzard would snow her under and she would die for sure.
The going here was tougher than ever, and it was not only because she was hindered by the wind, she suddenly discovered. She was breasting a steep rise in the ground, and the last few yards of the ascent seemed impossibly difficult.
She began muttering to herself. “From the top of the rise I’ll see a village. I’ll see people. At least I’ll see smokerising from a fire.
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