All around Rhiow spread a view of scrubby desert country. Under other circumstances it would have seemed unfamiliar, but here inside the Silent Man’s sleeping self Rhiow had access to his memories, and recognized it as he would have. The dry dun-colored surroundings all scattered with sand and mesquite were part of the empty country south of the Mexican border, all too familiar to the Silent Man after months spent covering the turn-of-the-century border skirmishes between Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and the outlaw Pancho Villa. There in some nameless, dusty stucco-built village in the depths of Jalisco province, a fair-haired barefoot girl in ragged skirt and blouse stopped in the street to stare at the tall thin stranger, then a handsome enough young man despite being worn down by the long and violent campaign he’d been covering for the sensation-hungry Hearst papers.
In the dream of long ago, nothing was in the Silent Man’s heart but vague interest in the smart and funny teenager who tried to attach herself to him, dancing and singing in the dusty street to get his attention. Dream-memory quickly flashed forward to the somber nuns he paid to take her into their boarding school and teach her to read and write, and Rhiow caught glimpses through his eyes of earnest and laboriously-written letters from the girl that the Silent Man read when he was back in New York after the war. But then the dream flickered forward in time again, and without warning it wasn’t letters he was looking at. Through the Silent Man’s eyes Rhiow glanced up from a red-ringed sandwich plate in some Broadway eatery and saw the street door open. A fair-haired young woman was standing there, dressed to kill in a dark short dress over long, long dancer’s legs. Her eyes searched the place, finding the Silent Man, locking on him as if there was no one else in the room. Meeting her eyes with his own, the Silent Man’s heart constricted with desire and fear. And around him, the men having lunch with the Silent Man turned and stared, and one let out a long low whistle…
The sudden stab of unease derailed the dream, which flinched away into darkness and then into some pale and indistinct scenario bringing with it a different array of uncomfortable sensoria – hard chairs, hospital smells, and an unavoidable anticipation of something awful that was going to happen soon. Rhiow backed away into the darkness around the fringes of the dream, her tail twitching with a Person’s innate unease at being submerged unbidden into another’s emotional life. As always there came the initial urge to turn away before something more private and embarrassing rose up to confront her. But Rhiow mastered it. There was always the chance this would happen, she thought. And there’s no better way or time to make this investigation. If there’s a fight coming, we’d best be sure of what condition all the participants are in…
She sat again and waited as the wizardly visualization constructed itself, the broadcast light solidifying and sheeting filmily upwards now, strengthening as it grew in height against the surrounding darkness. Shapes started to form, and the defining light withdrew itself to their edges as they reared up high and straight against the dark. Skyscrapers, Rhiow thought as the cityscape started to assert itself, a crowd of narrow canyons of hard structure with streams of life running alongside them. Why would this have surprised me? For the Silent Man had spent so much of his time in New York, and had become (she’d gathered from Urruah) inextricably associated with it. The question is, which vision does he see as a microcosm of the other?…
The city of the Silent Man’s imaginings was towering up all around Rhiow now, solidifying, going dark except for the spatter of light now scattering itself through the vista in mimicry of windows and streets and headlights. Yet out beyond the edges of the vision, Rhiow knew that the arid landscapes through which the Silent Man had passed and from which he’d originally come still surrounded the city. In this visualization it was both island and oasis, a patch of life in the barrenness that was all the rest of living as far as the Silent Man was concerned. The wilderness haunted his and his body’s memory — like calling to like no matter how much he might deny it. And in the middle of it all, amid the noise and rush of all his fellow ehhif, he lives and moves…and hides. Mining their lives, and hiding his…
