chair and looked Wang-mu in the face. Yes, she had been crying. "You really want to know why I'm so filled with irrational fury all the time?" The taunting hadn't left her voice. "You really want to play shrink with me? Well try this one. What has me so completely pissed off is that all through my childhood, my older brother Quim was secretly molesting me, and now he's a martyr and they're going to make him a saint and nobody will ever know how evil he was and the terrible, terrible things he did to me."
Wang-mu stood there horrified. Peter had told her about Quim. How he died. The kind of man he was. "Oh, Quara," she said. "I'm so sorry."
A look of complete disgust passed across Quara's face. "You are so stupid. Quim never touched me, you stupid meddlesome little do-gooder. But you're so eager to get some cheap explanation about why I'm such a bitch that you'll believe any story that sounds halfway plausible. And right now you're probably still wondering whether maybe my confession was true and I'm only denying it because I'm afraid of the repercussions or some dumb merda like that. Get this straight, girl. You do not know me. You will never know me. I don't want you to know me. I don't want any friends, and if I did want friends, I would not want Peter's pet bimbo to do the honors. Can I possibly make myself clearer?"
In her life Wang-mu had been beaten by experts and vilified by champions. Quara was damn good at it by any standards, but not so good that Wang-mu couldn't bear it without flinching. "I notice, though," said Wang-mu, "that after your vile slander against the noblest member of your family, you couldn't stand to leave me believing that it was true. So you do have loyalty to someone, even if he's dead."
"You just don't take a hint, do you?" said Quara.
"And I notice that you still keep talking to me, even though you despise me and try to offend me."
"If you were a fish, you'd be a remora, you just clamp on and suck for dear life, don't you!"
"Because at any point you could just walk out of here and you wouldn't have to hear my pathetic attempts at making friends with you," said Wang-mu. "But you don't go."
"You are unbelievable," said Quara. She unstrapped herself from her chair, got up, and went out the open door.
Wang-mu watched her go. Peter was right. Humans were still the most alien of alien species. Still the most dangerous, the most unreasonable, the least predictable.
Even so, Wang-mu dared to make a couple of predictions to herself.
First, she was confident that the research team would someday establish communications with the descoladores.
The second prediction was much more iffy. More like a hope. Maybe even just a wish. That someday Quara would tell Wang-mu the truth. That someday the hidden wound that Quara bore would be healed. That someday they might be friends.
But not today. There was no hurry. Wang-mu would try to help Quara because she was so obviously in need, and because the people who had been around her the longest were clearly too sick of her to help. But helping Quara was not the only thing or even the most important thing she had to accomplish. Marrying Peter and starting a life with him -- that was a much higher priority. And getting something to eat, a drink of water, and a place to pee -- those were the highest priorities of all at this precise moment in her life.
I guess that means I'm human, thought Wang-mu. Not a god. Maybe just a beast after all. Part raman. Part varelse. But more raman than varelse, at least on her good days. Peter, too, just like her. Both of them part of the same flawed species, determined to join together to make a couple of more members of that species. Peter and I together will call forth some aiua to come in from Outside and take control of a tiny body that our bodies have made, and we'll see that child be varelse on some days and raman on others. On some days we'll be good parents and some days we'll be wretched failures. Some days we'll be desperately sad and some days we'll be so happy we can hardly contain it. I can live with that.
Chapter 17
"THE ROAD GOES ON WITHOUT HIM NOW"
"I once heard a tale