It would seem that a had come through for her, which was a relief, as b would clearly have failed. She could hear dogs barking outside, and so it would seem that the walls, thick though they were, would have muffled nothing.
What had woken her then, if not the dream? The dogs, maybe? No. There was something.
Not the dream, but a dream, something dancing away from her conscious mind, like shadows before the sweep of a flashlight beam. She lay where she was, and there was a moment when she felt she might have captured it, if shed tried. Her mind was still tiptoeing along the boundary of consciousness, in that state of semi-waking that spins threads between dream and real, and for a moment she felt herself to be a girl who has come down off a porch to confront a great darkness with a tiny light.
Which is a really, really dumb thing to do, so she sat up and shook her head. Shook it all away. Shoo, dreams. I welcome you not. There are spikes you can put on window ledges to keep pigeons from landing; she needed some for her mind, to keep dreams away. Psychic mind spikes. Excellent.
In the absence of psychic mind spikes, however, she just didnt go back to sleep. She doubted shed have been able to anyway, and the four hours shed gotten were probably enough to stave off death by sleep deprivation for a little while. She swung her feet out of bed and sat up. Her laptop was beside her. Earlier, shed downloaded the first batch of photos, encrypting them before dispatching them to her secure museum e-mail and then deleting them from the camera.
She and Dr. Chaudhary had started collecting tissue samples from the bodies that afternoon, and would return in the morning to continue. She guessed it would take them a couple of days. With the bizarre composition of the bodies, they needed samples from every body part. Flesh, fur, feather, scales, claws. The rest of their work would happen in the lab, and this brief sojourn would feel like a dream. So quick, so strange.
And what would their findings tell them? She couldnt begin to hypothesize. Would they be composites of different DNA? Panther here, owl there, human in between? Or would their DNA be consistent, and only expressed differentially, in the same way a single human genetic code could express as, say, eyeball or toenail, and every other thing that made up a body?
Or would they find something stranger yet, stranger by far, unlike anything they knew in this world? A shiver shot through her. This was so big, she didnt even know where in her head to put it. If she were allowed to talk about it, if she could call Taj right now, or Catherineif she even had her phonewhat would she say?
She rose and went to the window for a glimpse of the view. It opened onto an interior courtyard, though, nothing to see, so Eliza pulled on her jeans and shoes and crept out the door.
Creeping, surely, was unnecessary. If shed been in a big, bland mega-hotel, shed have felt wrapped in anonymity and sallied blithely forth to go where she wished. But this was not a big, bland mega-hotel. It was a kasbah. Not the kasbah, but a kasbah-turned-hotel not too far from the site. Okay, so it was a couple of hours drive, actually, but in this landscape, that seemed like nothing. If you kept going down the highway right over there, youd hit the Sahara Desert, which was the size of the entire United States . In that context, a couple of hours drive could be classed as not too far.
The kasbah was called Tamnougalt, and in spite of having been greeted at the gate by unsmiling children making stabbing gestures with pointed sticks, Eliza kind of loved it. It was this
mud city in the heart of a palm oasis, the bulk of it a deserted ruin with just the central part restored, and not to any kind of grandeur. It still looked like sculpted mudif fancy sculpted mudand the rooms were comfortable enough, with very high beamed ceilings and wool rugs on the floors, and there was a rooftop terrace overlooking the waving tops of the palm trees. Last night, when shed eaten dinner up there with Dr. Chaudhary, shed seen more stars than she ever had in her life.
Ive seen more stars than anyone alive.
Eliza stopped walking and closed her eyes, pressing her fingertips against them as if by doing so she could tame the stir within her. Conjure some psychic mind spikes and skewer some freaking dream pigeons.
Ive killed more stars than anyone will ever see.
Eliza shook her head. Traceries of the familiar terror and guilt were slicking into her conscious mind. It made her think of the pale, desperate roots that force their way out through the drainage holes in potted plants. It made her think of things that cannot be contained, and she didnt care for this thought at all. Ignore it , she told herself. Youve killed nothing. You know this.
But she didnt. All of a sudden she was knowing things, experiencing highly unscientific feelings of conviction about big cosmic questions like the existence of another universe, but certainty of her own innocence was not among themat least, not in that deeply resonant way. The voice of reason was starting to seem flimsy and unconvincing, and that probably wasnt a good sign.