ETERNITY 165

She stood still for several minutes with arms crammed beneath her jacket, the cold sapping her strength and numbing her face. The fabric of the barricades tensed and bellied in a freshet of wind; expecting a bullet, she flinched as a teardrop of rain splatted on her eyelid. A black wall of cloud slid smoothly over the moon. She could barely see around herself.

More raindrops fell. She listened for sounds outside the barricade, suddenly alert, her arm-hairs pricking. No voices. Not even the hoof-clomps or neighing of horses complaining of the wet. Darkness, scattered rain and wind whipping the canvas.

The moon gleamed through a rift. Lugotorix stood beside her, huge and bedraggled. Saying nothing, but touching her arm, he pointed above the barricade to their left. Something tall and sword-shaped, as wide as a man's spread arms, towered over their flimsy prison. Its edges rippled like water. Smoothly, quickly, it curved to one side and dropped out of sight. Death, she thought. It looks like death.

"Kirghiz?" the Kelt asked quietly. Nobody else seemed to have noticed.

"No," she said.

"I didn't think so," Lugotorix muttered. Rhita tried to locate Oresias or Jamal Atta in the temporary illumination; they were hidden among the men. Before she could find them, the moon vanished again.

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A hideous ripping noise on all sides startled her. She gave a small scream and reached for Lugotorix, but he was not there. The canvas barricade was being torn to shreds. Wind rushed by, the wake of the passage of something huge. Nails drove into her back, knocking the breath out of her, one pause two pause three and four and five. She could not fall over. Lugotorix whimpered nearby like a struck dog, a sound she had never heard from him before. Head slung back, jaw open, scalp and neck resting on something icy cold, she saw once again the straight green lines cross above them.

Something lifted her. She had an impression that the grass had grown huge and metallic; .the camp was covered with swaying, supple steel blades, edges rippling like water, topped with smooth green shields or hoods. Her spine stiffened until she wished she could scream, but all her muscles had frozen. She could still see, but gradually she realized she was losing the ability to think.

For what seemed a very long time, she saw everything, and nothing; she might as well have been dead.

155 GREG BEAR

THIRTY-ONE

Gala

The clavicle came into her hands and comforted her. It knew her; for the moment, that was enough. The clavicle was withdrawn and she missed it deeply.

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No time at all later, but later nonetheless, she realized the clavicle had told her the gate was fully established, a "commercial width." There were other gates. This did not comfort her.

Lugotorix, standing naked between two huge snake-swords, touched on arm and thigh by dots of luminous green.

You are connected with this man?

Yes.

Do you need him?

Yes.

,~nd the others?

She thought of Demetrios and Oresias.

They saved them.

She wondered what would happen to the others.

It did not comfort her that she was a center of attention. For a time, there were many of her, and some of her selves were subjected to unpleasant experiences. That was all she remembered. Her body was not injured.

She had no privacy.

They asked her if Athen had opened gates to Oaia; or Isis, or Astarte.

Rhita said no. She did not believe these beings, gods, actually existed.

That interested them. Are the gods imaginary companions to console you for the possibility of dying?

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She didn't know how to answer that.

You did not make the clavicle.