“Too easy?” Yalda wondered. “You might be right.”
She bought a loaf in the markets, then walked past the place where Antonia’s stall had been.
She couldn’t face the university yet; she sat in a quiet park until evening, then went to Tullia’s apartment.
Tullia greeted her with a look of pure astonishment. “What happened? I heard rumors of some preposterous fine, but they wouldn’t tell me anything at the barracks. I was waiting for you to send me a message!” She ushered Yalda inside; the apartment was lit only by plants once more, but prison had given Yalda astronomer’s eyes and every sheet of paper in the room stood out clearly.
She explained what Eusebio had told her. Tullia said, “Next time I complain about my own students, you now have permission to slap me in the head.”
“Any news about Antonia?”
“I met her three days ago,” Tullia replied. “In the markets, with her co. She insisted that she was with him voluntarily; he insisted that nothing was going to happen to her by force.”
“Did you believe him?”
“Does it matter what I believe? There’s nothing we can do now.”
“I was so stupid,” Yalda said angrily. “The police weren’t even looking for her—”
“And what about Eusebio!”
“What about him?” Yalda wasn’t going to blame him for her own carelessness. “Any fool could have picked a fight with me that night; even if Eusebio had warned me about Acilio, the same thing might have happened with someone else.”
Tullia went over to one of her plants and dug into the soil with narrow fingers, finally plucking out a vial.
“Did the police find your holin?” Yalda asked her.
“Not a scrag. You should have some now; you’ve missed a lot of doses.”
“I’m no older than Antonia,” Yalda said. “And spontaneous reproduction was the least of her worries.”
“Actually, Antonia took holin when she was staying here,” Tullia replied. “I insisted. If there’s one thing worse than living with an indecisive runaway, it’s coming home to find that she’s been replaced by four screaming brats.” She handed Yalda two green cubes; Yalda didn’t want to argue anymore, so she swallowed them.
She sat on the floor and put her face in her hands. “So now it’s back to ordinary life?”
“We can’t win every battle,” Tullia said firmly. “If you want some good news, though… Rufino and Zosimo made their own observations of the Hurtler. And, strange to say, there was another one three days later.”
“Another one?”
“Not visible from here, but they saw it in Red Towers.”
Yalda was perplexed. “What does that tell us?”
“That they’re random events?” Tullia suggested. “There isn’t some cosmic slingshot out there that takes years to replenish its energy and spit the next one out. If the timing’s completely random, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t come one after the other, occasionally.”
“From exactly the same direction?” Inasmuch as the Hurtlers’ trajectories had been pinned down by people’s hasty observations, they had all been more or less parallel. “Why random in time, but not in space?”
Tullia considered this. “From the Hurtlers’ point of view, they are random in space. What we see as the time between them, they see as distance.”
“Now I’m getting a headache.”
“You know, even when he heard you were in prison, Giorgio didn’t cancel your talk?” Tullia marveled. “I wish I’d had a supervisor with that much faith in me. I was going to break the news to him that we never did solve the prediction problem—” She broke off, reading Yalda’s expression. “You didn’t?”
“No exponential blow-ups,” Yalda announced proudly, “and no seeing the cosmos in every grain of sand.”
“How?” Tullia pressed her, delighted.
Yalda shuddered, overwhelmed for a moment; she knew she wouldn’t be able to recount the discovery without reliving her imprisonment and mutilation. And after eleven days abandoned in the dark, she wasn’t ready to go and sleep beneath the markets again, surrounded by strangers who didn’t care if she lived or died.
She said, “Come closer, and I’ll write the answer on your skin.”
9
The truck dropped Yalda off in the village, then she walked the rest of the way to the farm in the mid-morning heat. After three days of traveling she’d been expecting the last leg of the journey to pass quickly, but she soon realized that her memory of the walk was a heavily edited version, concentrating on a few distinguishing features—a hill, a tree, a crossroads—while excising all the monotonous stretches in between. Halfway to the farm, she began noticing shapes among the chance arrangements of pebbles by the roadside that she could have sworn had been there since she was a child.
As she walked north along the access path, a girl she’d never seen before approached her.
“Are you Yalda?” the girl asked.
“Yes. Who are you?”
“I’m Ada.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Yalda said.
They walked along the path together. Yalda had felt herself twitching at the mites ever since she’d left the village, but now that she had company she redoubled her efforts to stop random fragments of writing from surfacing on her skin each time she dislodged one of the insects.
“My father told me to see if you were coming,” Ada explained.
“Who’s your father?”
Ada was amused that anyone could need to ask this. “Aurelio!” she said.
Yalda shed the last of her lingering nostalgia. “Do you have any cousins?”
“Of course. Lorenza and Lorenzo and Ulfa and Ulfo.” After reflecting on the depth of Yalda’s ignorance for a moment, Ada added for completeness, “Their father is Claudio. And my sister’s name is Flavia.”
“And you both have cos?”
Ada buzzed with mirth. “Everyone has a co!”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Ada confirmed. “I know your co lives in a city called Zeugma, but he wasn’t born with you, that’s why he isn’t coming to visit us.”
“You know a lot about me, considering we only just met.”