“Just . . . I’ve done too much already, interfered too much. Just . . . say thanks, or something.” I wave a hand vaguely.
“I will find a way,” Esha insists. I can see it’s going to eat at her. Better that than other things.
“If you were a chirurgeon, I would give you honours in my mother’s name, patronage, property,” Lyn says. “You saved my closest friend.” As Esha’s patron she’s equally bound, and equally awkward.
“Look, Lyn,” and again that flinch, and on the back of my musing I realise why. We are not friends, and I’ve been taking liberties without realising. “Lynesse Fourth Daughter,” I tell her formally, “I am going to tell you something else that I have no proper words for in this language. I was sent to watch your people, and see how you lived, so that my people could learn about you. Sent by my people, who are long gone now, so that I may as well be the last of the Elder Race, as you call me. I was sent to watch and not act. To watch you sicken, to watch you make war; to watch you die so that I could learn your funerary practices. To watch and never interfere, in case I contaminated you with my own superior culture. And I bent the rules a bit, when you had problems that originated with relics from older days. I told myself it wasn’t really contamination when I was removing other outside influences. I was very good at weaselling out of the rules.” And all put into her language as best I can, and have I communicated the precise connotations of “weaselling” to someone who doesn’t know what a weasel is? “And now I’ve taken matters entirely too far. You couldn’t know, but the greatest danger you were ever in just now came from me, because if I had died, or even if it appeared that I was going to die, then . . .” And how do I tell her about the satellite in its eternal orbit out beyond the edge of the atmosphere? “Then fire from heaven, Lynesse. Just to stop you getting hold of my body.” She doesn’t understand, but that’s probably for the best. I am only now, at the wrong end of three centuries after loss of contact, beginning to realise just how broken my own superior culture actually was. They set us here to make exhaustive anthropological notes on the fall of every sparrow. But not to catch a single one of them. To know, but very emphatically not to care.
Lyn kneels down beside me, though still with a definite distance. “You have earned the right to call me Lyn, if you wish.” It is a huge concession and one that she is frightened about making. I search my records and recollections, and I guess that in normal social situations this would be an open door to greater intimacy in the future, letting me across some invisible but crucial threshold. And she is scared of me and what I might do without that door between us, and I can’t honestly say that she is wrong to be, because I am a mess, and when the DCS lifts, who knows what I’ll feel? Not to mention that getting on the equivalent of first-name terms with one of the locals is also absolutely against contamination procedures. And so obviously I should say no. That would be the rational DCS-prompted choice.
But the word doesn’t actually come out, and I nod instead and say nothing, and apparently that is acceptance enough, because an extra spark of fear lights in her eyes and stays there. She is the princess from the stories who has made a promise to a wizard, and knows that it will be collected on. And I am that wizard, and don’t know what I might do when I am not （or when I am more） myself.
What I actually say is, “Why are you dressed like that, anyway?”
The non sequitur catches her by surprise and she looks abruptly defensive and embarrassed. “You were dead,” she tells me. “Esha was sick. I was going to have Allwer lead me to the demon’s house beyond Farbourand. And call it out.”
“You were going to do what?” I honestly do not understand what she means.
“I was going to call it out. Challenge the demon to fight me,” she says defiantly, and then, her voice breaking with the sheer desperation of it all, “It’s how it’s done.”
Something is building up inside me, behind the shield of the DCS. I see it approach as one might dispassionately watch a flash flood while standing in the dry riverbed. Of course, the DCS will keep it all bottled up so I can make safely reasonable decisions. No matter that all my systems are stretched to the limit with the self-repair effort. No matter that I’ve been leaning on it far too much since my outburst at Watacha.
I feel my heart break, in a way that I would never be able to fix, not even if I took it out right now and tinkered with it. Staring at Lynesse Fourth Daughter, dressed in her finest, sword at her hip, off to do something that is What Princesses Do when there are monsters and demons and wizards in the world. Something that was surely not actually what they did, back in the days her myth-cycles originated in. Because myths miss out all the sordid realities and preserve only What we wish we’d done, rather than How we actually did it. But she’s brave, and maybe she’s stupid, and she knows that this thing, that even I don’t understand, needs to be faced down and defeated, and she doesn’t know any other way. And, frankly, there is probably no response available to her culture and available technology that would be any better, so: Single combat, why not?