Cataract Tara K. Harper

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Feather. It's in your eyes." She cursed again under her breath. "You disobeyed my orders. The platform
stunt was one thing; this is something else. Here, you're deliberately breaking the Landing Pact that you of
all people should honor. Sleem take it," she said in disgust. "There's some kind of irony in the fact that
we're protecting you from the guides, while the guides protect the cats from you. Neither you nor the cats
obey the Pact that everyone else is keeping."
"He wants this link as much as I do maybe more," Tsia re-turned harshly. "I can taste it in his field.
Every time I send him away, he just refuses to go."
"Do you really expect him to withdraw from what is as strong to his nature as hunting? He's been
engineered, Feather, to link with you as a scout. He has no choice in this. You do. And if you let this
continue, he could bond with you for life. He could become as much a slave to your gate as you are to
the ID dot that protects you from the guides."
"Van'ei," she said softly, "I can't hate him enough to drive him away. He saved my life in the lake. And if
he hadn't done so, I wouldn't have known to come back to help you. He not I is the reason that
you're alive, too."
"Perhaps." Nitpicker turned back to the freepick's valley. "When I was trapped in the mud, there was
someone else nearby. Someone who ripped the enbee from my face. You were there. You bear the
marks to prove it. You were with Tucker when he died it was your idea that drowned him. You almost
dropped Doetzier on that stretch of rock. You did drop Kurvan on the bridge it was Bowdie, not you,
who caught him and kept him from falling. You led Wren right into the water."
"I didn't know it was a lake �"
Nitpicker cut her off coldly. "I accepted Wren's word about Tucker. I gave you the benefit of the doubt
about myself. But Kurvan we saw it, Feather. It was deliberate your letting go as if you just threw
him away to the rocks."
"Daya, how can you say this? You know me "
"Ay, I know you."
Tsia stared at her. "You provoke me, then defend me. You joke with me, then push me. We've never
been close, but at least we could work together. Now there's something else in your mind. Something
you're not saying."
"I want truth, Feather-guide." Her eyes flicked to the swollen ring of Tsia's neck. "I want to know what
you see in your gate if you obey the cats of this world, or if you follow an-other voice. Something
foreign perhaps? Or alien?" She watched Tsia closely.
"I don't understand."
"I want to feel for myself the truth of what you tell me."
"I don't know how to give you that."
Nitpicker said softly, "But you do know how to choose, don't you? Between an ethic and the desire that
floods you through your gate? Striker will fight to the death to defend a lifer's rights, even if she hates
what the lifer stands for. What ethics in you are stronger than your desire for the cats?"
Tsia's eyes narrowed. The pilot's questions probed like a scalpel for the rotted tissue of a pressure
bruise.
Nitpicker watched her carefully. "How far are you con-trolled by your gate?" she demanded softly.
"How much are you directed by the guide guild you claim to have left? Or directed by something else?"
"I left the guides when the guides left me. I owe them noth-ing."
"I've heard that a ten-year guide should be able to pinpoint the organic circuit of an antigrav in the clutter
of a shiptech's lab."
"You know my link," Tsia returned with vehemence. "And it's to the cats, not to a bacterium. I have no
such resolution."
"You don't have to be so linked to feel such detail. All gates should have the potential of that sensitivity.
Linked to the fe-lines or linked with the fish, you should be able to feel a biochip within a dozen meters."
Tsia stared at her for a long moment. "I thought you under-stood," she said slowly. "I thought you knew."
"Knew what?"
She glanced at the other meres, but they were to the side, not downwind. "I was taken from the guide
guild," she said, "before I was trained to my gate. I never learned how to use it." Her hands clenched with
growing frustration. She couldn't blame Nitpicker for her distrust, but she could not help her an-ger.
"Everything I know," she said in a low, vehement voice, "I've learned by myself or through Forrest, and
I've got almost no resolution outside the link to the cats."
Nitpicker regarded her strangely for a moment. "When you detected the shapers, what did you feel?"
"I smelled them first I didn't feel them."
"And once you knew they were there?"
"I isolated them through the gate."
The other woman nodded.
"It wasn't easy," Tsia said flatly.
Nitpicker stared out over the black valley till she located the faint lights from the freepick stake in the
distance. "Your sister works in customs, doesn't she?"
Tsia stared at her. "What does that have to do with any-thing?"
"Customs," Nitpicker repeated. "That's a useful trade. Lot of contact with aliens. Lot of credit in the
grayscale."
"Not for her. She's as straight as they come."
"No interesting stories? No small slip-bys for a little extra credit?"
Tsia eyed her warily. "Traders tried it, but Shjams she never bit."
"Lot of inspectors go to the grayscale," she remarked. "They say hooking in with blackjack is a ticket to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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