The Steerswoman's Road (100 page)

Bel had her own answer. “Slado is mad.”

“No.” Madness was the inability to recognize and deal with reality.
Madness could not control, could not be so clever, so powerful, as to design
and execute a plan of this scope. “I must be wrong. He can’t mean to do this.”

Rowan turned back to the shattered Guidestar, went to it,
and laid her two hands against its sun-warmed surface. She had learned nothing
from it, nothing. It was the Outskirts that had given her what knowledge she
had, and the Outskirters, with their traditions, poems, their very names. But
there was one answer they could not provide. “Why did this Guidestar fall?”

Then she remembered an answer provided, perhaps unwittingly,
by a wizard’s man. At Rendezvous, after plying Efraim with erhy, Fletcher had
said of Slado: “I think that he did it. On purpose.”

Guidestars made it possible for humankind to spread to new
lands. This Guidestar had hung over the opposite side of the world. It had been
planned that humans would one day live there. Now that would never happen.
Rowan said, “He’s stopping everything. He’ll destroy us all.” She thought of
her home village and her family; she thought of the Archives. She thought of
Kammeryn and his tribe waiting for her and Bel’s return, friends and comrades
all, two weeks’ travel away across the Face.

All would die.

She turned hack to the open land, where far on the horizon,
a small blot of black stood. And now it seemed to her that it was not retreating,
but advancing, moving in to swallow the Outskirts, the Inner Lands—all the
world she knew.

People could not survive in the world that the world would
become.

Rowan picked up her pens, her ink stone, her books. She
thrust them into the pack.

“Let’s get out of here,” the steerswoman said. “This place
was never meant for human beings.”

Rosemary Kirstein makes her living in information
technology, having variously served in programming, user training, tech support,
and technical writing. She has also worked as a field-laborer among migrant
workers in tobacco fields, as an airport security guard, as a wielder of the “green”
brush in a hand-painted watercolor factory, as a truck loader for UPS, as a
dishwasher in a nursing home, and as a waitress. She is also a singer/songwriter/guitarist
who, early in her career, was involved in the folk-music resurgence centering
around the Musicians’ Cooperative in New York’s Greenwich Village, and was a
contributor to and sometime associate editor of the
Fast Folk Musical
Magazine,
a monthly magazine/vinyl LP. Back issues of FFMM are planned to
be reissued in CD format, and will include some of Ms. Kirstein’s music. She
lives in the Boston area with two cats.