Текст книги "Ammonite"

Автор книги: Nicola Griffith

Соавторы: Nicola Griffith,Nicola Griffith
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Marghe looked at Letitia; the engineer’s grin had stiffened to a muscle spasm and her eyes were rolled back in her head. Marghe heard the rattle and scramble of the Mirror climbing the scar. Without letting go of Letitia, she peered over the edge.

“Get her down. Please, Marghe, get her off there right now.”

Marghe took a slow, steady breath, “All right. I’m all right. Letitia’s… If you’re steady where you are, stay there. I’ll see if I can lower her over the edge.”

Lu Wai’s face was pale and indistinct. “Go as fast as you can.”

Marghe wrapped both arms around Letitia’s waist. The technician was stiff and unresponsive but still fizzing with silent laughter. “Letitia. Letitia, can you hear me?” She tightened her grip and half lifted, half trundled her to the edge of the rock. She changed grip, holding Letitia under the arms, and closed her eyes. Breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, in and out, harder now, deeper. In, out. In. Out. She pumped strength around her body. She would pay for this later.

“Hurry, Marghe. Please.”

Marghe opened her eyes, then walked Letitia off the edge of the cliff, holding her up using the muscles in her legs and back and arms. She lowered her as fast as she dared; bending a little, going onto her knees, then down on her elbows until only her back and shoulders and arms held the technician’s weight. She lay on her stomach and hung Letitia down like a plumbline.

Lu Wai reached up and took the stiff woman by the hips. In the quiet, the Mirror’s grunt was loud as she steadied herself and the engineer. “I have her. Get yourself down. Fast.”

Marghe swung herself over the edge, hung for a moment, then dropped. The grass was dry and prickly, the yellow moss flower sharp smelling in the still air. She helped Lu Wai drag Letitia into the shelter between the crag and the sled.

The wind hit like a sledgehammer swung low and slow and easy, thudding into her ribs and roaring over her ears until all she could hear was air. A heavy plate of tree bark flew out of nowhere and smashed down onto the sled; the plastic storage bin burst open and the wind tore the packaged rations to shreds, whirled them away. Her traveling food.

Marghe did not dare move. The rock under her shoulder shuddered as boulders rolled and crashed against its other side. She hunched down into the warmth of bodies. Someone put an arm around her waist; she leaned her forehead against a shoulder. She no longer felt like an outsider. The boiling clouds brought rain that pattered, then drummed on the torn food wrappers.

Marghe woke to the distant thunk of a mallet. A wooden mallet. Her coverlet smelled comfortably of use and herbs, tempting her to stay in bed a while longer, resting the muscles she had overused the day before. Ude’s bed was empty. She looked around, wondering how late it was. The ceiling was low and domed; its longitudinal rib arched from the floor, over her head, and back down to the floor at the other end of the lodge. Lateral ribs of black wood were chinked with wattling and daub, decorated in earth tones. Morning seeped through the weave of the door hanging and filled the lodge with air and sunlight. She sat up. Sunlight.

She swung herself off the sleeping shelf and pushed aside the door hanging.

Beyond the trees, Jeep’s sky was Wedgwood blue. Sunshine poured into the valley, filling it with a light like rich yellow cream, sliding over her skin, turning the hair on her arms to gold wire. She just stood there, letting the sunshine push sweet, warm fingers into her aching muscles.

Under her bare feet the grass was cool and luscious with dew; still early, then. She could see no one, but the sound of mallets floated downstream like underwater knocking, and from one of the stone‑walled barns near the bank she heard the soft hiss and thump, hiss and thump of threshing.

The edge of a cloud veiled the sun and shadow raced down one side of the valley, blurring the wide glitter of the Ho to a dull gleam, then running up the other side, Her feet were wet and cold. She turned to go back inside. And stopped.

Last night she had been exhausted, and the hot swirling torches of the women who escorted her and Ude to the lodge had only smeared the dark with red. She had noticed the roughness of the roof and walls but assumed it was thatching. She had been wrong. The outside of the lodge was alive with greenery. It looked like a small hill nestling amongst the trees. She reached out and touched a pale green leaf. Cool and silky. Another leaf fluttered as a beetle the size of her thumb skittered out of sight. A wirrel shrieked, then another. This time she did not jump.

Curious, she ducked inside the lodge to take another look at the central rib and the branching lateral spars. Branches. The structural skeleton was a skelter tree.

She dressed, then prowled the lodge, picking up the wooden bowls, polished with use, looking under the table, noting the way the underside was not planed but still rough with black bark, the leg joints fastened with wooden pegs. There was a knife on the table, its blade made of a smoky, vitreous substance: olla, named after the flowers that grew over the raw olla beds. She tested it against the hair on her arm. It was extremely sharp. The pitcher of water was made of red‑glazed clay; the cutting slab was stone, like the pestle and mortar. A shelf ran around the lodge at waist height, piled with neatly folded clothes. She ran her hands over them, under them, between them. They were smooth and rough: cotton and canvas, leather and wool. They were warm. Her knuckles bumped on buttons of horn and wood, caught in ties and laces–no cold shock of metal fasteners. The door bar slid back and forth on greased wooden blocks that were glued and pegged into place.

Marghe followed the winding path between lodges toward the river and, she hoped, Lu Wai and Letitia. She popped a memory chip from her wristcom, inserted another, touched RECORD, and continued her notes from the day before. “Holme Valley has a population of about four hundred women and children. Sometime in the next ten days this will swell by another hundred or so as the community north of here drives their herds down from the pastures to winter in the valley. The women of Singing Pastures and those of the valley form two distinct communities. They even use different calendars dictated by different moons: the valley people divide the year into fifteen months of eighteen days each; the women of the pastures reckon with a ten‑month calendar, each month twenty‑seven days long.”

She hit PAUSE. She wished she could spare the time to stay and observe the mingling of the different populations, watch how they interacted. It would be like being able to go back in time and observe the early symbiotic interactions between people from human history on Earth.

A wirrel shrieked. Marghe went very still. This was not Earth; this was Jeep, a planet of alien species, a place where the human template of dual sexes had been torn to shreds and thrown away. This was something new. She knew these people had evolved cultures resting on bases very different from those of any Earth people; she did not know whether that made these women human or something entirely Other.

She shook herself. The question, What was humanity? was as old as the species, one she never expected to answer. She resumed her walk through the trees, but more slowly, thinking and occasionally making notes.

“If skelter trees grow at approximately the same rate as Earth trees, then to shape such a tree into a dwelling place must take forty or more years.” She imagined a family group selecting a tree, bending it, pruning it judiciously as babies were born, girls grew, and old women died. Did the lodge retain its integrity when the tree died? She exited RECORD and looked up botanical records. Skelter trees lasted two hundred years. “The use of such building methods must be indicative of the social temperament of these people: patient, planning for the long term. Also willing to experiment.”

The trees ended a few yards from the river in a grassy slope, hammocked and tufted here and there where it grew over old tree stumps. Marghe wondered whether the tree fellers had used axes with stone or olla blades.

Someone was walking through the trees toward the path she had just left. Color flashed. Marghe recognized the fatigues.

“Lu Wai!” She waved and the Mirror saw her. “How’s Letitia?”

“Angry with herself and a bit shamefaced for making you risk yourself like that. Otherwise, she’s fine. I was coming to see if you’d join us for breakfast.”

“I’m breakfasting with one of the women who farm the biggest field here. Cassil. I hope to trade for some travel rations. But thank you.” She paused. “This thing with Letitia, I gather it’s happened before.”

“More than once.”

“Is it organic?”

“I haven’t been able to find anything.” Lu Wai shrugged. “Which doesn’t mean it’s not there. The diagnostic tools we have are primitive.” She sighed. “But what do I know? I’m only a medic.”

Marghe heard the hours of tests and record‑searching in the Mirror’s voice and could find nothing to say. She watched Lu Wai walk away and wondered if Danner knew about Letitia. Yes, the Mirror commander would know; she would have to know everything in order to make Jeep work. She would know, too, that Lu Wai would do everything in her power to keep Letitia safe.

Cassil had hair the red‑brown of strong tea, and gray eyes. She also had a baby on her hip, which, judging by its fair hair and brown eyes, was not hers. She looked tired and utterly human. She spoke slowly and with much repetition for Marghe’s sake.

“What we have isn’t mine or my kith’s to give.”

“But you farm the land?”

Cassil sighed, as though she had tried to explain this many times before and failed. “My kith farms well. Everyone sees that. So the journey women give us more land to work. We work it well, produce more food, leave the land fresh for the next season’s growing. Everyone benefits. We use the food to feed ourselves, and for trata.” The word she used did not mean trade, exactly; it meant trade as the first step on a journey whose outcome was uncertain–an opening gambit in a game that might continue for generations. Trata could be between two people, between two or more kiths, or between several communities. Frequently it was all three, each exchange resonating with another in the web.

The baby squirmed and Cassil switched it to her other hip. “If I give you food, or good boots, a woman might say to me, ‘Cassil, if you had given me that food, I would have made you two fine hangings for your lodge, and given you first pick of my next catch. But you gave it to that stranger woman and neither of us has gained anything from each other. Tell me, Cassil, what did this stranger woman give you in return?’ And what would I say to that?” The baby wriggled again, more determinedly this time. Cassil jigged her up and down, gave her a finger to suck.

Marghe was acutely conscious of her fatigue, the ache in her muscles, as she opened her empty hands. “My kith is large and very powerful.”

Cassil regarded her a moment. “Then why not return to your large and very powerful kith for more supplies?” Because they might not give me any more, because Dormer might not let me go again, Marghe wanted to shout. Because I am utterly alone on this world. She had nobody; no kith, no kin, no community. Danner, Letitia, Cassil… they all sat in the center of a webwork of colleagues, friends, lovers. Family. She was alone, and scared. All she had was herself and her breathing exercises and her FN‑17. Sitting here, across from a woman secure in her own community, all of that came home to her. She was alone on a strange and dangerous world, and she knew it showed on her face,

Cassil tilted her head. “You are an orphan here,” she said softly, and touched Marghe’s cheek with the tip of one finger.

The warm, dry finger against her cheek pulled memories up from the well: her mother laughing and throwing away a batch of burned bread, saying, Never mind, we’ll buy some;ripping the computer plug from the wall, furious with some review; making her a fan from yellow tissue paper when she had a fever, then folding it up into a paper hat when she realized it wouldn’t work. Her mother singing a nonsense song, telling her stories of Macau, and of Taishan where she had been conceived; trying to smile before she died. It hit her all over again: she could never come back from Jeep and tell her mother how useful her organizational techniques had been in analyzing her notes for publication; she and her mother could never share tea and a funny story of misunderstandings with an alien people. Her mother was dead.

Marghe found herself hunched over, arms wrapped around her stomach; they were wet. She was crying. Fatigue, she told herself; her blood sugar was down. She breathed, hardly hearing Cassil moving around, tucking the baby into a blanket on the sleeping shelf, poking the fire into a blaze, swinging the dap kettle over the flames. Busy alien sounds. Water rumbled in the stone pot.

She felt the warmth of Cassil standing over her and turned her head, then took the worn square of cloth and wiped her eyes in silence. She thought about Danner saying I don’t know how else to prove my faith, of Kahn saying I know how rough it is, coming down alone. She had thrust their offers of friendship back at them.

Then she thought of Hiam, and of the Kurst, and of Danner’s unspoken certainty that the Mirrors would not be leaving Jeep. Here, now, with Cassil, she had a chance to help them, in her own particular way, at the same time as she helped herself. Trata was the key.

Cassil put two steaming bowls of dap between them. “So,” she said quietly, folding her hands, “you’re an orphan.”

Marghe did not want to distract them both by trying to explain the concept of father. She nodded. Her face felt hot and swollen. “But not entirely alone. I have been… adopted, into a rich and powerful kith, but I’m new to their ways, and yours.” Cassil smiled as if to say that was not news. Marghe chose her words carefully. “Someday, they–we–may be your neighbors. We could be useful to you.”

“There’s no burnstone in this valley, but perhaps your friends will find some other way to hurt a land they don’t understand. How will that be useful to us?”

“We’ve learned a lesson, and how to listen.”

Cassil appraised her. “Perhaps that’s so.”

Marghe opened a pocket and slid out a thin strip of copper. She put it next to Cassil’s bowl. Cassil picked it up, rubbed it, weighed it in her hand, but Marghe could not tell what she was thinking. She opened another pocket and took out a similar strip of iron. Cassil compared the two, then put them back on the table. She looked down at them a long time, then nodded abruptly. “Talking is thirsty work.” She drained her bowl, refilled it.

They ate breakfast, and they talked, and ate lunch. It was late afternoon by the time they agreed: three months’ travel food, a pair of fur leggings, and a small sack of dap in exchange for one kilo of copper, two of iron, and guaranteed special consideration–if not quite friendship–from all Company personnel presently at Port Central. Trata. She would need to bargain for furs and a horse from the women of Singing Pastures, if they were amenable to trade.

“The trata must be witnessed by a viajera.” A journeywoman teller of news, Marghe translated, though obviously with some ritual function. “We expect T’orre Na soon.” Cassil’s face rounded with pleasure, and perhaps a little worry, “She comes to lead the pattern singing for Rhedan’s deepsearch. I’m Rhedan’s choose‑mother.”

Marghe mentally compared this with Eagan’s notes: the ritual name‑choosing by pubescent girls, and the concept of different mother roles within a kith. But what was pattern singing, and why did it give Cassil cause for concern? “Congratulations,” she said cautiously. Perhaps she could observe the ceremony. But her time was limited, and there would be equally interesting ceremonies on Tehuantepec. “How soon do you expect the journeywoman?”

Cassil shrugged. “Not before the women of Singing Pastures drive their herds down. She’s a few days down the windpath, with Jink and Oriyest’s flock, and that one of your kith, Day.”

Marghe did not know what she meant. “Who?”

“Your kith who is called Day, the one adopted by Jink and Oriyest. The one Jink saved when the burn went.” She looked at Marghe curiously. “You don’t know the story? It’s a good one. T’orre Na could sing it for you.”

A woman called Day, her kith. A Company woman… It made sense now. This was why Lu Wai and Letitia had not wanted her to meet Jink and Oriyest. Day would be there. Day, a Mirror who had gone AWOL. One of the many missing, presumed dead. How many of the others were alive?

She would have to talk to Lu Wai about this. Later.

“I can’t wait for T’orre Na. Perhaps one of my adopted kith can witness for me.” It would take several days to get the relay up and working. Lu Wai could be her proxy.

It was another two hundred miles north to Singing Pastures. While Letitia and Ude worked on the relay, Marghe rode north with Lu Wai on the sled. She watched the Mirror’s gloved hands gentle on the stick, her indecipherable face beneath the quilted cap, and wondered what would drive a Mirror to go native.

To go native. She rolled the phrase around her mouth. It tasted of scorn. And fear. Why did the idea make her so afraid? And how many, how many Mirrors and technicians were out there, living in these strange cultures? They could tell her so much.

“How many people know about Day?” she demanded when they stopped to eat and relieve themselves.

“Officer Day is listed as missing, presumed dead,” Lu Wai said calmly, and carried on peeling a goura. She cut the fruit and held out half. Juice ran over her wrist. “Want some?”

“I want to know what happened to Day. Have you seen her since she… since she left? And are there others?”

Lu Wai put down the fruit. “I haven’t seen her, no, but Letitia saw her last year, and she leaves messages now and then. Usually written ones, but sometimes message stones, or a knotted string. She does that as a joke, I think. She knows we can’t read them.”

Marghe thought she sounded wistful. “Would you like to go, too?”

Lu Wai thought about that, then shook her head. “I think she gets lonely.”

Perhaps she was lonelier before, Marghe thought, among a people who did not understand her.

“Tell Danner,” she said suddenly. “Tell her about Day. She needs to know.” She thought of the Kurst, of the vaccine ticking away like a bomb in her pocket. ”And if there are any others, find them, talk to them. You won’t be betraying them. Persuade Danner to offer them amnesty, even let them go back to where they’ve been all this time. Just get them to talk to you. You’re going to need what they know.”

And the connections they’ve forged.

At least she had been able to set trata in motion, for Danner, for Lu Wai and Letitia.

For all of us.

She wondered what this woman Day was like, and where she had found so much courage.

Chapter Four

SINGING PASTURES HOWLED. Splits in the chalky rock bounding the easternmost pasture funneled icy gusts into a river of air and sleet. Marghe sat with her back pressed against a rock wall, huddled so tight between the herders, Holle and Shill, that she looked like the midsection of some strange fur‑clad mammal.

In front of them, tethered nose to tail, three horses formed a living windbreak. Their winter coats were growing in and their manes were stiff and black. They were oddly proportioned to Marghe’s eyes: thick necks and barrel bodies, like brown zebra. She wondered what their gene map would look like.

The saddle on the middle mount, Marghe’s, was unadorned leather, as were the reins; the stirrup irons were unpolished wood, and the bit a four‑inch sausage of poor‑quality brown olla. The mare herself, Pella, was fit enough but old and beginning to lose muscle. Holle and Shill’s mounts were hard‑legged, their leather work finely tooled and polished, stained rich reds and purples, and stitched with green and gold thread. Marghe supposed the herders had very little else to occupy their time once the taar herds were corralled for the winter.

The noise made conversation impossible. She huddled down a little further in her furs that smelled of horses and women and cold air, and wished the wind would drop. Holle and Shill had seen by now that she could ride well enough to be trusted with one of their horses, and she was eager to get back to the cave, hand over the metal as trade, and prepare to leave. Every hour was precious. The sky was heavy, the color of wet ash.

The lead horse lifted its head and whickered. Shill listened hard, then tapped Holle on the shoulder. They stood, leaning into the wind, and began untethering the animals. Marghe stayed where she was, pulling her muscles tighter against the expected fist of wind when the horses moved. Holle squatted in front of her.

“We must…” The words were lost in the wind but Marghe understood her gesture. They wanted her to mount up. Shill was already mounted, holding the reins of the other horses. Marghe gritted her teeth and swung herself up.

The hot stale smell of animal filled the gully. Pella stiffened beneath her. Shill leaned half out of her saddle and grabbed Pella’s headstall, pulling hard to make the mare high‑step backward.

A river of four‑legged flesh thundered by, eyes rolling and neck tendons straining. Here and there mounted women flicked whips, but it seemed to Marghe that the taars ran from something more frightening than the crack of plaited leather.

When the strangers were passing, Shill released the headstall and leaned to shout in her ear. “We follow!” She pointed to make sure Marghe understood.

Marghe thumped her heels into Pella’s ribs and clung on as they jounced down the twisting trail. It had been a long time since she had done any prolonged riding. Her thigh muscles trembled and the wind whipping under her hood made her ears ache with cold, but the two women ahead of her lashed their horses into a headlong gallop and she knew she could not have slowed Pella if she had wanted to. She wondered what they were running from, then stopped wondering to concentrate on staying in the saddle.

The slope steepened and Pella skidded on loose shale, nearly sending them both facefirst. Marghe remembered Janet Eagan’s warning: Do you have any idea how many different ways a person could get herself killed? For all I know, Winnie could have fallen off her horse and broken her neck the second day out. The ride became a nightmare.

Then, miraculously, the wind died; they were in a high‑walled side cut. With an effort that made her hiss, she swung out of the saddle. Her boot dislodged a pebble, sending it clattering on bare rock. The cut was sharp with the smell of limegrass. It made her eyes sting.

“The cave’s ahead.” Holle slung a leg over her horse’s neck and slid down with an ease Marghe envied. “There’ll be food and dap.” Shill took the horses.

The cave was dim and hot with animals. The herd milled and lowed restlessly.

“Why’s the herd sheltering in a cave?” Marghe asked.

“Hyrat.”

“What Shill means,” Holle said, “is that a swarm of hyrat were spotted, so the droving started early. We don’t know how big the pack is. If it’s small, then we can fight them off at the cave entrance and the herd will be safe without having to run the flesh off their bones.”

“And if it’s big?”

“We’ll run.”

The pack turned out to be small. Marghe helped herd the taars out of the cave, and when she dismounted outside she saw a pile of dead hyrat. Their pelts were shades of gray, like the rock, and looked soft. Marghe wanted to touch one but was wary of vermin. Each strand of hair seemed unusually thick. Perhaps they were hollow, like ting grass. Their forequarters were heavy, the pelt matted around the chest and throat of male and female. When she saw their fangs, she understood why. The upper canines were grayish yellow and long enough to leave matted channels in the fur of the lower jaw; if they fought amongst themselves, they would need the protection. No tail to speak of. It was the eyes that looked alien: silvery, with horizontal slit pupils.

Holle and Shill strapped Marghe’s belongings behind her saddle. Marghe pulled out her map for a final check. Without a navigation satellite, she would have to reckon with map and compass.

Holle looked at it over her shoulder. “Those who don’t know their way around Tehuantepec have no business going up there in winter.”

“It’s not winter yet.”

“It will be up there.” Holle picked up the map and stroked its smooth plastic surface with her fingertips. “This is your path?” She pointed to the broken line that stretched northeast from Singing Pastures to the forest and Ollfoss. Marghe nodded. “You’d be wise to avoid the tribes that move south for the winter. ” She traced a new route with her finger. There was dirt under her nail. “Take a more easterly path the first few days, then turn north.”

“How much longer will that take?”

Holle shrugged. “A day, two days.”

Marghe frowned, weighing the delay against Holle’s seriousness and others’ previous advice. She rolled her sleeve back, touched RECORD, and indicated new headings into her wristcom, then reset her compass reminder. Holle watched, curious.

“That will help you find your way?”

Marghe pressed REPLAY and Holle laughed at the sound of Marghe’s recorded voice. “Like a southern mimic bird!” She looked at Marghe slyly. “Maybe those stories are true.”

“Which stories?”

“That there are people here from another world.”

Later, repacking her map, Marghe wrapped her fingers around an unfamiliar shape. She pulled it out: a knife. The flint blade was short and ugly. She pushed it to the bottom of her pack.

Snow slanted across the mouth of a smaller cave. Beyond a brake of tanglethorn, the clouds were dirty yellow, heavy with more snow. Shivering hard, Marghe shaved slivers of bark from the dry tanglethorn and heaped them in a pyramid around a kindling pellet. Then she peeled back the metal strip and waited for the chemical reaction. A curl of bark puffed into flame. She blew on the tiny blaze, adding bigger stems of the thorn until the fire crackled. Pella snorted and backed as far from the flames as she could.

Her shivering eased and her face and hands tingled and ached as blood squeezed through previously closed capillaries. The scratches on her hands stung. She slapped her arms around her body a couple of times and tried not to think of what might have happened if she had not found the cave before the snowfall had become a blizzard.

“Your turn now, Pella.”

Her fingers were thick and red and felt as though they belonged to somebody else. She struggled with the clumsy wooden girth buckles and staggered a little as she dragged the saddle off. There was a cloak in her pack. She pulled it out and rubbed the mare down with it as best she could. Pella sighed and leaned against her. Marghe thumped her on the withers until the mare grumbled and straightened up. She draped the cloak over the horse’s back, dragged her pack over to the fire, and sat down, exhausted by the cold.

Food would help. She could name only half the items she pulled from her pack: goura, sun‑dried until shriveled to the size and color of large apricots; moist wild rice, pressed into squares and wrapped in crumbly rice paper; honey cakes; thick succulent leaves, like vine leaves, rolled to finger size; nuts; strange crunchy shapes that tasted vaguely of bacon; strips of smoked wirrel… She chewed various combinations and decided that the green fingers were good stuffed with the rice, and dried goura went well with honey cake.

She filled a nosebag for Pella, then lay down and listened to her heart beat and the wind howl over Tehuantepec.

When she was young she had lain awake in the sticky heat of Macau and listened to the chirrup of insects and the beat of her heart. It had frightened her that her life depended upon such a fragile organ, that a lump of muscle hardly bigger than her fist was all that kept the blood pumping around her body. She wondered how thick the heart walls were, and if it ever just got tired and gave up, decided it had had enough of sucking and pushing and squeezing blood around her veins. She lay with her hands over her ears, only to discover that made the sound more distinct. Humming herself to sleep worked, or drumming little rhythms on her futon.

As she grew older, she learned to listen more to the beat that underlay her whole life: how it speeded up when she was tense or tired; how it was smooth and confident when she exercised regularly; how she could make it change if she breathed fast and hard, or slow and easy. It fascinated her. She took up yoga, then chi kung and tai chi, until she could increase blood flow to various parts of her body at will. Then she went to Beaver, and had all her confidence beaten out of her.

The months in Wales afterward were full of anxieties and short breath, phobias and panic. Her doctor referred her to a meditation specialist; he said to do this, and do this, but she could not relax enough to try. The specialist referred her on to the experimental‑psychology department in Llangelli.

They hooked her up to machines that measured her alpha waves, her blood flow, her temperature, the electrical activity of her skin, the gaseous content of her blood and its pH, the dilation of her pupils. With different words, they helped her relearn that her body was an intricate mechanism made of interconnecting parts, a homeostatic system: change this, and this alters, which changes this. And she relearned: with breath and exercise, music and self‑hypnosis, until now she could cut blood supply from a hand or a foot, channel pain, slow or speed her metabolism at will, and more. Once, at a party, she had amused a friend by blushing and paling at will.

Later, on her own, she took her training further, experimenting with sensitizing her body to magnetic and electrical fields. She had hoped to write a paper on biofeedback, autogenics, and the supernormal experience in myth.