Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [45]
Then she became aware that the inside of her body was changing as well. She felt heavy. Her body temperature began to drop.
She tried in vain to move or speak. They were trying to put her through that same bodily metamorphosis they had attempted during her earlier contacts. Now it was going further. It felt like freezing or dying. In spite of her earlier determination to stay in control and not panic, her fear was too great and she couldn’t help but try to break the contact in an effort to return to her familiar world. But this time she couldn’t. She tried to cry out but her mouth and throat were no longer capable of it. Troi had the feeling that some hidden piece of fearsome knowledge was about to be revealed to her.
Someone spoke her name. She felt herself being rocked like a heavy object, as though she were a boulder.
Then she suddenly unfroze and found herself sitting in the cave, back in her proper universe.
Rhiannon was squeezing her arms.
“Hey! Hey! Deanna!”
Troi was covered in a film of sweat, yet shivering.
“Felt sick.”
“I can see that. I thought you were dying or something.”
Troi wiped her forehead on her sleeve, then rubbed her eyes. Rhiannon watched her with concern.
Troi knew, with a feeling of dread, that if the vision had continued, the metamorphosis would have been completed. Yet she knew she would have to let it complete if she were going to discover the hidden knowledge of the Other-worlders. It seemed they would not communicate with her in any other way.
“Do you want me to get you anything?” asked the girl.
“No. I’m okay now. It was just a dream.”
Rhiannon glanced at Troi’s wrists, which still bore the metal bands from the CS’ cuffs.
“I can get Nikitushka Lomov to cut those off.”
“Maybe later.”
Rhiannon smiled at her with a mouthful of crooked teeth.
Troi could tell Rhiannon already had one of those fixations an adolescent girl can get for a big-sister figure.
“How long have you been living here, Rhiannon?”
“Since I was this high.”
Rhiannon lowered her hand to the level of her chest.
“Where are your parents?”
“I don’t know. They were declared criminally incompetent. The CS took them away and I had to live in a group home. That’s not the only thing that made me run away, though. It was school. My teachers.
They wouldn’t let me do anything I really wanted or learn anything I really wanted. I wasn’t allowed to ask, ‘what if this,’ or ‘what if that.’ No telling stories. No drawing pictures unless I traced them from a stupid photograph. They made me get my mind cleansed every week. Didn’t that stuff happen to you, too?”
“No, my childhood was a lot different. What do you do all day down here?”
“Don’t you know about our library? We have tons of books. I’m reading all of them.”
Rhiannon went on to list what she was reading right now. Troi began to realize this wasn’t just a frivolous young runaway. This was a literate young mind in development, following its own inspirations. The scope of her reading was amazing. She was becoming a scholar in the early Welsh and Irish stories, especially the story of Rhiannon and the other branches of the Mabinogi.
Rhiannon wasn’t beautiful in conventional terms, but Troi felt a quality of magic about her, a mysterious source of female strength and independence that echoed the mythical Rhiannon. And though her haguya-friend, the flying beast, was hardly the beautiful pale horse the mythical Rhiannon rode, still she spoke of it with reverence, as more than an equal.
Troi was going to ask her more about that, but suddenly Rhiannon decided she couldn’t look at those ugly metal bands on Troi’s wrists any longer, and summoned Nikitushka Lomov.
The huge strongman sang Russian Bylina songs as he began to file away at Troi’s cuff-bands, and Rhiannon hummed harmonies with him.
Outside the caves of Alastor, in the larger caverns, the Dissenters known as the Nummo crawled around deep inside the huge boulder pile that comprised the man-made dam. They had built the dam themselves long ago. Like the mythical African water-beings after whom they