Stranger in a Strange Land
I ran out of water before my lungs burst and emerged into air, gulping and sputtering and making a noise that sounded all too much like a whine.
They say riding a broom is like walking. Once you’ve learned it, the body remembers, and you can default to it without thinking.
It must be true, because I was terrified, my mind frozen in the grip of gibbering fear, but my body somehow leveled off the broom, so I wasn’t flying straight up to nowhere, but flying level, at about the normal altitude for a broom over the sea, slightly lower than flyers, where you could pass more or less unnoticed to traffic control sweeps. Or where they could at least pretend they didn’t notice you.
Meanwhile, my eyes were trying to make sense of what they saw. I know this sounds odd, but it took me time to figure out what part was the sky and what the sea, and the immensity of it still seemed unbelievable to my brain. After the tiny confines of my grey cell, with its safe walls, for so long, this seemed dangerous. I felt exposed, like a man does when he’s naked in a crowd, or standing alone and unarmored in front of guns.
I kept feeling as though I would fall, not just down from the broom, but sideways too, and maybe upward. I mean, there was no stop there, nothing to hold me in place. I could float away like a balloon into the shining blue and—
I think it was that image of me floating away like a balloon that brought me to myself. It was so ridiculous, and so completely unlikely. I took deep breaths and tried to relax the grip of my hands on the broom, because I was holding it so tightly that my knuckles not only shone white through the skin but hurt as if I were about to break them.
Instead, I set about getting coordinates on where I was. Having broken the locator chip, I was left to figuring this out by memory. The landmass directly to my right, the landmass over Never-Never, which I’d never been able to identify the night they’d dragged me here—still in shock at Ben’s miserable death and beaten to near unconsciousness—was unmistakably Syracuse Seacity. That meant my home, the home of my childhood and the seat of my father’s cursed rule, Olympus Seacity, would be north-northeast and about three hours.
Which was fine by me, because I wasn’t going there. There wasn’t enough money in the entire Earth to pay me to confront my father again. I remembered what he had said, as he pronounced verdict on my first conviction in the council of Good Men. I couldn’t believe he didn’t also know about what had happened to Ben and my transfer to Never-Never. If I met Father again, I’d have to kill him. If not for my false conviction, if not for the death of my lair mates, if not for Ben’s death, then for having forced me to stay damnably alive through each of my suicide attempts.
The technology they’d employed, particularly to save me from the last one, five years ago, was expensive enough that the order to use it had to have come from my father, heartless bastard that he was. Oh, I missed Max and I’d like to see my mother again, at least once. But seeing Mother and finding out if Max even knew I existed anymore, since my little brother had been all of three when I was arrested, would wait. There were better ways to die than walking straight into the lion’s den and demanding he eat you. And Father would be looking for me right about now, or in a couple of hours, as soon as he realized I’d escaped. He’d be looking for me to slam me back in prison. Because he wouldn’t allow me to die, but he also wouldn’t allow me to escape. I suspected he kept me alive to keep Mother from getting too upset. But he wouldn’t ever again recognize me as his son or allow me freedom. And it wasn’t even because of the supposed murder or the real one. Father took having someone killed as his prerogative. That would not be enough for him to cast me away. I could never figure out why he had, unless he hated me like fire.
So, no Olympus for me. What other seacity could I go to? There was always Liberte, only a few miles south from here. I thought I would go there and land somewhere in one of the lower-priced areas. I thought some of the fences I used to know would still be operational and I could get rid of my burners and brooms.
But then an odd thing happened. Flying there was easy. It was early evening and I saw no more signs of life than the occasional shadow of a flyer overhead, or a boat in the water, far below. I became better used to the expanses of sea and sky and got misty-eyed at the sun, setting in a glory of gold and red to the west. I thought that even if I got captured tonight; even if they hauled me back to the cell again, I’d have the memory of this flight, the memory of sunset and sea, and the tang of salt in my nose to take with me to captivity. I touched the suit over where the gems and reader sat.
As the skyline of Liberte became visible in the horizon, I had a momentary pang for the society of humans. There were humans in Liberte. Not many of them. I don’t think the entire seacity ever had more than a million inhabitants. It wasn’t really a seacity like Syracuse, or even Olympus, colonized in levels and populated by both rulers and bureaucracy and workers.
Liberte owned another seacity whole—Shangri-la, which had been a mobile seacity in the old days—and Shangri-la was the working seacity, with industry and farming all around it. In Liberte the apparatus of state and its functionaries resided and the island, carefully landscaped in slopes and terraces looked like a garden, carefully cultivated from its Good Man’s residence at the summit to the white sand beaches disappearing into the carefully kept-clear waters.
This is not to say the island didn’t have a seedier part. Of course it did. Not only did the maids and gardeners have to live somewhere, but cheaper restaurants and hotels will appear to cater to them, and other service industries of a less strictly approved of kind will spring up, unbidden, to cater to all classes of inhabitants.
For a moment I was taken with a physical, almost aching, craving for that type of service, or to be honest, for someone I could pay enough to let me hold him through the night. Just the idea of warm body in my arms appealed to me with the same intensity as food appeals to a starving man.
When I was a child or a young man, I didn’t particularly like to be touched. Oh, I endured it from some people, my mother most of all, since she liked to hug me and brush my hair with her fingers. And later I enjoyed it from lovers.
But I didn’t know it was possible to crave just the touch of human flesh, of human warmth, even when it didn’t mean sex or even affection—just the idea of being held by another human made me ache with need.
I managed to get within sight of the shores of Liberte.
And then the sound hit me. I can’t explain it. It was, I think, the sound of any inhabited area.
Music and voices, the hum of flyers, the roar of the occasional boat beneath, whistles and honks, all melded and fused into a low roar. It should have been welcoming and familiar.
It should, but I’d spent fourteen years hearing nothing but the occasional distant, echoing voice, too far away to be able to identify the words. The noise made me shake. My hands clenched very hard on the broom again.
I told myself I was being an idiot. But my body clenched and my mind panicked at the thought, at the idea of all those people—all of them near me, moving, talking.
I couldn’t. It was too much. Too much noise, too much movement, too much light.
The broom had somehow turned itself around and I was headed out to open ocean, and Ben protested in my mind, Luce! You have to conquer it. You can’t live on open sea.
And I tried to tell him I needed more time, I needed more courage, I needed—
Meanwhile I was flying fast, fast, away from the city, away from all the cities. Away from humanity.
After a while I saw a small islet in the ocean. I flew over a small group of isles, and found it. Though it wasn’t small enough to be underwater at high tide, it was small enough that I doubted there had ever been a human habitation there. Fishermen from the nearer large island might come there if there was good fishing around it, but—as I drew near and realized how craggy its sides were—that was unlikely, since mooring there would be a right bitch. Perhaps courting couples flew out there now and then to picnic, but I doubted that too. As I got nearer and saw it was little more than black rock jutting out of the sea, with some mosslike growths in its lowest spots, and a lot of seagulls gathered on it and flying around it. Their cries were deafening in the air.
I stopped on the highest crag, and sat on it, watching the sun setting. You have to face civilization sometime, Ben said, and he was right, of course, but sometimes a man needs time and space to deal with things.
All right, he said, as though it were a great concession. This night then. At any rate if people are looking for you, this is safer. No one who knew you will imagine you just veered off to sleep on a crag in the sea.
I found a spot where a piece of rock kind of overhung me, anyway, on the reasoning that I didn’t want anyone overflying the islet to see me lying there and come down to investigate. But the true reason—it being nighttime and the islet having no lights, and travelers in flyers not being likely to look too closely below—was that I couldn’t face the idea of sleeping uncovered and open to the sky above. I was afraid I’d wake up dreaming of floating away into the blue.
As I was half asleep, a smothered laugh shook me. I’d dreamed of sleeping in warm, living arms, and here I was, wedged in rock, cold, alone.
But in that space between awaking and sleep, I heard Ben’s voice, You always have me. And I fell asleep to the feeling that he was right there, with me, under that rock.