Doyle Phoebe Heejanus
Phoebe strode through the quiet night, across a country road and along a tree-lined path, heading
toward the Walloons Neighborhood Stable. She nibbled at a green narangah, plucked just outside her
cottage's frontdoor, its knobbly rind tangy, its tart juice reluctant to flow. Low overhead, a
shred of cloud masked Groves, full, distant, aloof.
She stretched her neck above her jumpsuit's collar, exposing it to the cool air just now seeping
through the evening. She craved some respite. Her skin, her muscles, her bones ached constantly,
pricks of fatigue nagging at her, as though every cell within her had given its all to the cause —
and fell short.
Out there, in the dark, her direvnya lay exhausted as well, its breath soft and ragged. Even that
meager quiet was misleading. She knew that, in her absence, her combine grappled with Incidents,
major and minor, in series, in parallel, relentless. Would it never end? The toil of
suppression? The agony of treatment? The uncertainty of vigilance? Would normal duty never
return?
It will, she vowed, as soon as I excise Gastarbeiterbande, cut this cancer out of the Collective,
and send every last one of them into Exile.
The vow settled the mists of obsession that feathered her thoughts with both urgency and
reassurance. With their blessing, she moved on.
The path led Phoebe out of trees and onto a dusky, sprawling field. On the right, heavy shadows
drew shapes in the dark: the stable. She knew it well. More dark lines sketched in paddocks to
the side. And beyond, Groves shining clearly again, hints of bridal paths, perhaps more remembered
than apparent.
On a normal moonlit evening, these stables would've been busy. Riding clubs, families, and
couples, all chatting, laughing, heading out on rides, coming back, caring for animals and
grounds. On a normal evening — how quickly that concept had faded. Now, only the foolhardy and
duty-driven ventured out at night.
Could such overwhelming disaster arise from the efforts of Gastarbeiterbande? Another
three-hundred forty-two zhee-tely dead, just today! Forty-seven more anshin! Thousands injured
altogether, hundreds of thousands more frightened, lives interrupted, hopes abandoned, philosophies
denied. All through the efforts of a small gang of renegades? All right, two gangs, three, ten.
Even well-organized, near military in discipline. Could so few really drag so many down into such
hell?
Or am I grasping after a false hope? Do I — just like Roca and others — so desperately want a
villain — a coherent, finite, identifiable, stoppable villain — that I ignore the truth?
That we are brutes. That civilization still, even though spread across fifteen star systems, forms
no more than a brittle veneer over the savage human psyche. Despite what I told Kanpa.
Feet scuffed along a path. Phoebe cocked her head as hackles rose on her neck. Known or unknown?
Friend or foe? One pair of feet, mostly steady with occasional stops, coming from mid-town. Could
be Kanpa then. Adrenalin cleared her mind, pricked her senses.
If she'd brought clue-tek with her, she could tell for certain, but it sat in a bay of her
patrolcraft, which, in turn, still sat unused, untended, back at the Rendezvous Campus. Was I
right to let Kanpa flush me out of there, boss me around? she'd asked herself again, and again.
She hadn't found a clear answer in the unsettled thoughts that always rose to meet the question.
Personal action versus delegation. Strident obsession versus that phantom caress. Fatigue versus
duty. Surrender versus control.
Listening hard, she picked up other footsteps, coming from the west. Probably Cliff approaching
from his gong-she on the periphery of the western communities.
Where's Harlan?
"Evenin', Jefe."
She jerked. Her heart thrashed within her chest like a startled hare.
"Harlan," she muttered through clenched teeth, then glared at the tactician as he sauntered out of
the stable's shadowy depths.
His grin shone in the muted light. "Sorry."
Phoebe didn't say anything more. Harlan pointed along the mid-town path. They turned that way,
stepped apart, slipped into combat readiness, just in case.
Kanpa emerged from trees. the muted globe of a holoscreen floating ahead of his chest. His arms
moved within it, buried elbow-deep in its hologram. His head bent in concentration on the
information presented there. His feet wandered a bit as he followed the path distractedly.
Phoebe smiled softly at his devotion to the job, but a sudden worry twisted it away. Will he slip
back into the lure of machines, re-infected because of my obsession? Kanpa stumbled a bit, glanced
around. In the underglow of his 'screen, he appeared to brim with accomplishment, data flushed
from cyberspace, knowledge brewed from their interaction. What evidence does he bring with him?
He changed directions toward Phoebe. Has he identified the gangsters from the Rendezvous Campus?
Does he know where they're hiding? Three paces away, he opened his mouth.
"Hush," Phoebe hissed, to shut him and herself up. Let's just see who else is coming.
Kanpa slumped, his somber eyes glistening, but stayed quiet. Harlan tugged his arm, parked him out
of the way.
Moments later, the other, slower footsteps produced a shadowy figure, a ghostly blur on the curving
path. It ambled toward them, gaining definition with each second until Phoebe recognized the
paunch and the posture. She looked for Cliff's signature swirl of white hair, but she found only
more gray. He halted before them, and she made out a knit cap settled comfortably, but completely
on his head.
Phoebe listened for another moment. Nothing else out there. She straightened to signal Harlan
about that conclusion. He confirmed it by turning toward her.
Gathering the others around her, Phoebe started the can-feel, voice normal to banish any hint of
furtiveness. "Thank you all for coming. I realize it's late, but we weren't all available till
now to meet in person."
"I'm usually out on a constitutional about now, anyway." Cliff seemed calm, committed, available.
Harlan and Kanpa stayed silent.
"Let's get off the path." Phoebe broke free of the semicircle they'd formed and strode across
grass toward the stable. "We should be alone here." A horse stomped inside the building. Closer,
another one acknowledged with a loose-lipped sigh. Phoebe didn't bother to comment, though Cliff
chuckled.
They walked abreast with Kanpa and Cliff close to her elbows, one slightly behind, the other
slightly ahead. Harlan left a distance, like an outrider. Probably wondering what he's doing
here, too.
Phoebe took up a stand near a plank wall and started at the crux. "Kanpa discovered startling
evidence late-day. The disaster clogging our paths — or at least part of it — may in fact be
artificial, not the unfortunate, but natural, result of this deluge of, uh, Rendezvous
participants." She couldn't help a glance of apology at Cliff. "In fact, a gang or gangs may be
causing a lot of our troubles. Kanpa, show us the videos."
"Thought you'd want those." Kanpa tapped his llevar where it hung at his hip. A large, flat
version of its holoscreen sprang out to his side, its white background blocking part of the night.
In succession, three streams of Beobachtung data showed a trio of chuis gather outside the
Rendezvous Campus, infiltrate its legitimate crews, and methodically kill a constable. After that,
six more times, they watched another trio kill one of her people somewhere else in her direvnya.
When the show flicked away, the world seemed much, much darker.
"Not from the Rendezvous," Cliff stated. An edge cut across his previously amiable tone.
"Don't be so sure." Kanpa adjusted his posture and relative position to make a presentation.
Conclusion pushed words out of Phoebe. "You identified today's chuis!"
"Not exactly."
"What 'exactly' then?" Cliff hunched to focus a very serious gaze on Kanpa.
Kanpa ignored the challenge by questioning Phoebe, "How much of this do you want to know?"
Phoebe recognized his dilemma: tek-gibber boiled in his head; pride and keen interest wanted to
release news of his accomplishments in Em-Deh's ooze, and how could anyone truly understand what
he'd done without all the excruciating details?
Oh, Kanpa, you did regress. You did return to your rancid past. Then why
isn't he strutting his stuff right now?
The last nineteen days working on his new path in life. He knows better now, but not enough to
know what to do instead.
Phoebe pointed the way, "No petty excuses, no dressing to impress. Just tell me your coups: where
you slew the dragons of infrastructure and bridged the chasms between data and logiciel. Tell me
if you found gleest-work or any zhuhndí criminals. You know the problem we're all facing. Tell me
what we need to fix it right the first time." And I'll just settle back and see what the rest of
the task force does with the information. She wished once again for more members, but security and
efficiency dictated against that, as Kanpa had pointed out.
He held up a solicitous hand. "You have to understand that searching for, uh, these gangsters is
non-trivial. Figuring out who came to a punch-out party planning to start a fight and who just
went along — with good reason, mostly — all from watching people mix it up at a distance, well,
it's — it's non-trivial." He sucked a long breath in through his mouth. "Like I said.
"Of course, once I found a gangster in an Incident, then locating any others was easy because they
always seem to arrive together and sometimes leave together — except for those times when Phoebe's
folks arrest them, along with dozens of others. On top of all that, it's what you might call
'grueling' work, full of tidbits requiring undivided attention. I developed macros as I went
along, but as I tired, I got worse at seeing what was right in front of me, at inferring things
that weren't."
He rubbed his face. "But, that's just one of those, uh, chasms you mentioned. I just wanted you
to know how hard it is to come up with faces to identify." He paused and peeked over his
fingertips. "You asked about gleest-work. I found some—"
"Ay, Dios Mio!" Harlan erupted. "I'll rip off his balls. I'll pluck out his eyes. I'll scramble
them with chile verde and make him eat it."
Cliff rested a hand on the site-tactician's shoulder. "Let's see what he's up to first."
Which "he?" Phoebe wondered. Cliff seems to be cooperating, but he's erecting defenses. Why?
Kanpa, his face pale in the meager light, stared at them. "Tek-sploration works. It's a given in
the Mirnaya Direvnya. If you know how to instruct agents, they bring back what you want." He
managed a grim smile. "Mine didn't.
"Since late this afternoon, I isolated twenty-seven gangsters, nine at the Campus, the rest at six
other Incidents today." Noticing her excitement, he held up a palm. "But I could not identify any
of them."
"Hey!" Harlan's angry bleat echoed Phoebe's disappointment.
"Just now." Kanpa waved at the way he'd arrived. "I think I figured out why." He stepped aside
then, approached a fence, and swung his llevar from its hip hanger onto the top rail. The lid
snicked open, and a second later, a holoscreen blipped its hemisphere of light into the air above
the paddock. A panel showed a couple dozen freeze-frame photos of men and women in various poses
chosen for clear shots of face and body.
However, Kanpa poked another panel filled with geometric shapes. "From logs and code traces, I
verified that my tek-sploration was working the way it should. I was able to join databases:
Ganj-Dareh Collective — that's the yellow." His finger picked out neighborhoods within
communities, all set against the plainest hue of the bright color. "The Rendezvous." Seminar
names and gong-she assignments in green, also a simple shade. "Continent Popovich." A list of
direvnya and combines in primary blue. The display was stark, cartoonish.
"But my agents failed." He turned to them again. "Across the board. Every time."
"Impossible!" Cliff snapped. "Everybody's got to be someplace."
"Exactly," Kanpa said.
Phoebe listened, letting the others drive the process, the way a task force should work — as long
as they made progress toward her goal.
Cliff scowled. "Then what's going on?"
"Gleest-work. Nothing else explains what I found." Kanpa looked over at Phoebe. "To eliminate
the probable and reveal the impossible takes a lot of work, tedious, painstaking. That's why I
haven't got more gangsters sitting here." He waved at the freeze-frames.
"I know," Phoebe acknowledged. She couldn't read his eyes in the dim light, but his posture, his
tone told about his fatigue.
He turned to the others. "I used Phoebe's imprimatur to get primitive access to Ganj Dareh's
database. Uh, I mean I looked through the data without agents. Found nothing suspicious." He
faced Cliff. "So I called you." He glanced at Phoebe and Harlan. "He was just leaving for this
meeting, which tells you how little time I've put into this last part. I found something very odd
in the Rendezvous' database: cooties."
"Cooties?" Harlan snorted.
"Clusters of nulls, more a matter of timing than data. If you looked at an image with cooties, you
would see nothing strange, but an agent-for-identification is so bit-minded, they get in its way.
The agent won't match to an image it otherwise would because it's looking at the data in only two
dimensions. I had explore four out of the five possible dimensions to detect the cooties. They
wouldn't affect DNA traces through Em-Deh identifiers, but they do fester image matches."
Cliff lumbered across the group and backhanded the insubstantial display. Phoebe wanted to protect
Kanpa, but knew she had to let the dialog play out for the best results and the best commitment to
those results.
The Rendezvous Director peered down at Kanpa. "Don't patronize us, son. Nulls are a standard part
of database lexicon. Meant to distinguish the truly empty from the merely blank."
To Phoebe's satisfaction, Kanpa stood his ground. "You're right, Director. But not within
data boundaries. You don't plant nulls inside data unless you're trying to soil it. 'Play dirty,'
so to speak. But don't ask me. Ask Ges Lugar Sailie."
"What?" Cliff gasped.
"He's one of your seminar leaders, isn't he?"
"Yes."
Kanpa turned to Phoebe. "He's also listed as strategist for Le Coeur de la Patrie." He eyed
Harlan and Cliff. "They declared as competitors — our competitors — two days ago." Back
to Phoebe. "You asked me to check them out.
"This Sailie seems to be a professor of some renown. Holds a chair in sociobiology at
Sterkfontein University. Among his myriad interests is criminology. Based on his studies of
isolated rural populations, he claims to've fathomed the human psyche to the point of prediction,
and he's been trying to apply his theories to the practice of anshinkan. All academic so far, but
apparently, his exposure to the situation here in Ganj Dareh has led him to go pragmatic. Le
Coeur's proposal comes out of the second volume of a book he's been writing for several years now.
"Everything I could find in the three-kay seconds I devoted to the topic seems authentic, but there
was something too —" Kanpa turned his attention on Cliff, his shoulder square, his eyes narrowed
with challenge, "— 'fresh' about the data. It smelled too clean, particularly the coincidence of
him being on your staff."
Phoebe shot forward, edged Kanpa back. He really had sloughed his people skills. Regret visited,
but didn't stay long as she faced Cliff. From the way he frowned and chewed unspoken words, he
seemed to be taking this information very personally. She decided to give him something else to
focus on.
"I'm thinking of declaring martial law," she said calmly.
Behind her, Kanpa retorted, "You don't have the authority. It's not in your contract."
Phoebe waved him toward silence. "No, but I do have the means." She studied Cliff's reaction.
"It's not in the Yeibichai Pattern Language," Kanpa insisted.
Really did forget his people skills. Phoebe flared back, "The Founders didn't think of
everything!"
"Yes, they did! That's the point. Whatever they left out, they left out for a purpose!"
"The boy's right," Cliff rumbled, "but not for the reasons he thinks." The old man rocked his head
as though arguing with himself. "Not that what you're saying is wrong, Kanpa, because it isn't."
He stepped away from Phoebe, his face unreadable now in the dark and with that damned cap on. "It
could be what they want," he said earnestly, his voice down another half-octave.
"Who?"
"I don't know 'who!'" he shot back. "When I first heard of Gastarbeiterbande, I went looking for
them. No seminar leader reported any indications. Nobody disrupting class or skipping it, the way
you'd think such troublemakers would. But there were interest groups forming: clubs,
teams, drinking buddies, cliques, all the mini-tribes that people like to fall into. I wrote off
the rumor to jealousy, hurt feelings, mistaken identity, some of the other traps people
fall into.
"But now, this data...." He swatted the air again. "There could be somebody out
there organizing this chaos, and they may want you to try and take over and make things worse." He
shook his head in denial. "I believe the correlations Kanpa has found. I don't want to, but I
don't see how nine of my people from the toolies could just 'get together' and decide to have a
little violent fun today at our new Campus, right in the middle of everything else. Nine there,
then three others at a time." He flashed a vague hand at the holoscreen. "Causing each one of
your 'Incidents.'"
"From where?" Kanpa interjected, reaching for his llevar. "How do you spell 'Toolies?'"
Cliff snorted a laugh, his face suddenly kohled with shadowy creases. "Never mind," he said, his
voice back to normal. "Just a general reference to less populated areas." He did take a step away
from the group, as though leaving.
"Couldn't he be right?" Harlan surged forward to press his question. "About some drinking buddies
looking to stir up trouble?"
"No!" Phoebe and Cliff shouted together.
The following stillness seemed deeper, more accusing.
Harlan moved over to study Kanpa's rogues gallery. "Why not?" he demanded.
Suddenly, Phoebe felt very tired. The binge of paranoia that had driven her whole late-day had
dried up. It had tapped her obsession, stolen reserves, distracted her, given her hope for
surgical relief — once they'd located the Fate-slimed carrion responsible. But now it vanished
cackling into the thin air of objectivity — that proverbial other set of eyes — leaving her
abandoned, trackless.
Cliff, too, appeared deflated, though his fury-ride had been shorter. "He could be right," the old
man admitted as he parked his elbows on the nearest rail and his chin in his hands. "I never did
find proof otherwise, and I constantly checked with my people for it."
Harlan shook himself into motion. "We need some zhuhndí here, some real live facts, not more data
munging." With a twitch, he drew his llevar and thrust it toward Kanpa's. "Give me those
pictures, Dyr Kanpachiro, and I'll apply that old-fashioned remedy for mystery called 'shoe
leather.' You want a true 'agent-for-identification' and I'll give you one — me!
"And when I track one of these ratoneros down, I'll find out what's going on around here, one way
or another."
Moving nearly as quickly, Kanpa batted his holoscreen into shutdown. In the sudden wash of
darkness, he gathered his device and retreated along the fence. Oddly, he declared, "Call me
'Kanpa!'"
Dialog had decayed into confrontation. Phoebe moved the meeting into its final phase: assigning
action items. "Kanpa, give Harlan the data."
Llevar clutched to his chest, Kanpa peered over at her. "Do you realize what he's going to do? If
he finds these people—"
"When I find these people—"
"Harlan," Phoebe snapped. "Back off. You'll get your data."
Kanpa pleaded. "He's going to violate your contract with the Collective. He's going to violate
the most fundamental patterns of our society."
"Yes," Phoebe answered. "And he's not going to do it alone." At Harlan's wide grin, she added, "
One constable from each community. Send me a list and I'll re-assign them. Let me know
any results immediately. And lean on these gangsters no more than necessary to get
them."
"Yessir."
"Kanpa, give Harlan what you've got, and keep him updated. When you isolate a crew of gangsters,
forward the visuals to Harlan."
Kanpa reluctantly held out his llevar. Harlan thrust his within mating distance. Communication
glyphs squirmed on the two screens, one flat, one spherical. Then Harlan saluted Phoebe and
scooted into the darkness.
A valiant sortie against a mysterious enemy, but Phoebe didn't hold much hope for results.
One-hundred forty-five constables vetting a population of well-over a million with nothing but feet
and eyeballs. She wished them luck and moved on to other approaches.
"Cliff." Phoebe turned to give the Rendezvous Director his assignment, but he was gone. The night
had swallowed his gray bulk. He'll look harder this time, but why? Phoebe reached for empathy,
stepping out of her own tactician's role and into Cliff's, flitting across the days since he'd
arrived in Ganj Dareh, struggling to assume responsibility for the flood of desperate Gastarbeiter,
trying to wrench benefits out of the Rendezvous when the Partners who blurted it into existence
didn't care, delegating like mad — Betrayed! He trusted people, gave them everything they needed
to succeed and they betrayed him with destruction. Some of them anyway. Maybe he'll find them
this time, but what new information can he squeeze out of data he and his staff use every day?
Good hunting, Cliff!
"Don't ask me to do this," said Kanpa.
Phoebe sighed as she turned back, not so much from exasperation, but to gather strength. She'd
launched two zhuhndí agents into the future, two different, low-probability ways of cracking the
mystery that stood between her and rescuing Ganj Dareh. If she had any chance of pinning down
Gastarbeiterbande, Kanpa was the one to do it.
He posed at the fence, his llevar balanced there by the weight of one hand's fingers. His other,
outstretched hand had turned him, open, vulnerable, toward her.
Phoebe strolled over to the fence beside Kanpa and started with, "Gleest-work, you say. You can't
clean it out?"
"Of course I can. It's not trivial, but it doesn't require even a lesser fetid. It didn't need to
be to work. That's true elegance."
A clean identity database at the Rendezvous provided the quickest way to home in on these
gangsters. Match an image to an identity, match that identity to agents-for-trade, and she would
know the very instance that gangster bought food or drink, boarded a bus or train, or conducted any
of dozens of everyday transactions.
"So you can clean up the database?"
Kanpa gave a nonchalant shrug-and-nod, so Phoebe moved on, "Do you know who did it?"
He flung his hands up in exasperation. "Dozens could've done it." He turned a glower on her.
"That's not—"
"I thought you said gleests wouldn't have anything to do with this."
"That's not what I was talking about. There's a big difference between the standards of
someone who could crack my personal cipher and a slimeball who could louse up a poorly protected
database."
So there is a pyramid in the perverted meritocracy of gleests. They're not so different after
all. But a corrupted database doesn't mean it wasn't done by the best ... on his way to
some greater score. "So you don't think any of the — how do say it? — 'lofty putrid' are
involved here?"
"No." Kanpa scowled contempt at the idea, then looked around at her silence. "What are you
getting at?"
"Dreamsticks." Till now, Phoebe had assumed no attitude toward gleests. Now, she'd found a reason
to hate at least one of them.
That moved Kanpa, away from the fence and into the night, where dark hid his face, but not his
pacing. "That would be quite a trophy," he finally admitted.
More of the weight around Phoebe's soul lifted. First, true culprits to purge, and now their
dreamsticks — what could be broken could be fixed. She strode up to Kanpa. "Can you find out?"
she demanded.
"FIFO," he snapped back, then spun away, hands slapping at her demands. "No, I'm not doing any of
this! I agreed when I thought it could help us in the competition, but not with Harlan and his
friends rampaging through the Rendezvous."
Phoebe lunged forward and snagged his elbow. He resisted, his arm strong. She caught his scent,
musky, yet brisk. She dragged on him, the contact exciting. Yielding, he came around to face
her.
She said, "We have to know who, where, and how. We have to know that so we can arrest these chuis
and get them off the paths. We have to know that so we can convict these chuis and Exile them from
society. Until you can provide me the data to do that, I have to let Harlan —" and Cliff "— try
in their own way to expose this conspiracy."
"If there is a 'conspiracy.' Your bright boy Harlan doesn't think there is one." His gaze was
steady.
"He's a tactician," she retorted dismissingly with a slight head toss, but she didn't look away.
Kanpa's voice had awakened the phantom caress along her neck.
"You're a tactician."
"Only to Byukan-Hamil. To everyone else here, I'm the strategist. I've had to think long-term for
a long time." She tweaked a mouth corner. "Longer term, I sometimes think, than anybody in the
mountains."
His mouth tweaked too, showing his awareness of her. "And if you're wrong, think of the time we've
wasted, think of Gatogrebok using that time wooing the Collective, think of the experience we will
have lost."
"'Experience?'"
"For a change, at least this —" he poked a thumb at his own chest "— part of consortium
headquarters is thinking strategically. This isn't the last proposal I'm working on."
Lots of talking, getting nowhere. I can't afford for Kanpa to quit now. I need that data.
She tried a different approach to winning his loyalty.
His lips had looked full, yet they were hungry. His mouth behind them was salty, his tongue
eager. Suddenly a knot below her belly eased, its drought lifted. Apparently, she realized as he
unzipped her jumpsuit, she had more than one reason for this tactic.
The horses shared their hay reluctantly. Their nickering comments added laughter to Phoebe's and
Kanpa's heat. Time stopped. The world vanished. Only touch and need, hers and his, mattered.
Unskilled, he worked gently on some places, urgently in others. Parched, she bathed in his flood
of energy and concern. No strategy except sharing, no tactics except pleasure. They existed only
for each other.
Afterwards, dressed again, charcoal night peeking over his shoulder through a window, Kanpa said,
"Ee-oh. I'll work on cleaning up the Rendezvous' database, and I'll keep plowing through the
Beobachtung for you, but I'll quit after twenty-kay sec—"
"Forty!" Phoebe retorted, picking straw from her clothes by feel.
"Ee-oh. Then you act on the information I've produced, and I'll work on the
selection process — again." He stepped toward the stable's door.
"O.K." Phoebe turned her back to slip into her jumpsuit, but after a moment of silence, she looked
around again. Cool air stroked her one shoulder still exposed.
Kanpa stood watching her in the dim light, his body turned to leave, but his eyes hanging onto the
last sight of her nakedness. "When again?" he asked. The words sounded forced through a tight
throat.
Phoebe inhaled, long and slow. Her body stirred, but her mind demanded its priority. Allegiance
and duty, need and obligation, flowed together till she could hardly tell where her job as anshin
tactician ended and her devotion to those very same people took up. The distinction hardly
mattered: threats targeted her entire life. A very specific outside force challenged her
contract. Violence besieged her direvnya, its very physical and cultural integrity gnawed by a
conspiracy — that could be just a figment of her fear. Her combine was being thrashed into
exhaustion in between and in the meantime. If she had to fuck Kanpa to get him to do what she
wanted, then she would.
In that whirlwind of obsession, she found a calm spot of perspective. What part of my life hatched
this? How could I deny his gift — innocent, bountiful — so completely? I've got to stop this.
She gazed back at Kanpa, standing before her more clearly, more deeply than anybody ever had. And
keep him — if I can.
Fear seized her. Fear brewed out of the obsession she wanted to disassemble, but also fear of the
gaping unknown it would leave behind. Fear that she couldn't sort this imperative into pieces of
cause and effect, experience and patterns inferred from experience, that could be reworked and
subdued, and fear that she could. For the first time she could remember, she didn't know what she
truly wanted and why. All she had was that small, lush clearing in her recent past, filled with
satisfaction — and Kanpa.
So she had to tell him, "I don't know, Kanpa. I'll just have to see what I can work out."
"Ee-oh." He took another moment to study her, then turned into the night.
Leaving her alone with herself again.
