‘Telling me this,’ Alsrod said with, suddenly, a very pleased look, ‘you’re just doing your job2, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’ I smiled, a bit puzzled. ‘I am. That’s by and large what I mostly work2 at.’
‘Does that mean that you don’t really want to tell me such things?’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘but I like my work2 as well as my work1. And I like my work1 a lot.’ Then added, because this seemed the moment to do so: ‘Perhaps we should go back to the others …?’ I turned with her to walk towards where her sisters waited on one of the stone benches, while talk trickled about in the hall behind them, between my parents and theirs. Alsrod Thant, the youngest Thant, fourteen standard years now, bony, brown, and delicate eared, her head shaved – really a rather genial child – and this was her first trip to another world with her parents. (She’d assured me with studied modesty that she’d been to moons before … no, not Zetzor’s. Zetzor doesn’t have any.) Though she knew us and we knew her from numerous vaurine projections, still it was the first time we’d met her in vivo. I’d found her charming. For all the circles in dull aluminium that hung around her neck and waist and shoulders and calves, I couldn’t help thinking of her as a younger me.
I sat.
Alsrod sat – between her older sisters, Fibermich and Nea. My sisters Alyxander and Black Lars came up at that moment to sit by me. A little ways off, George Thant scowled, arms folded over her big metallic chest, like some colossus from an artistic tradition I wasn’t quite familiar with.
Across the room I thought I heard Thadeus declaim: ‘A world, you see, called Nepiy …’ and my attention turned.
But Fibermich brought it back with a continuation of some conversation which we’d apparently joined. ‘Let me tell you.’ Her brown hand hovered and quivered, like an object intended for steady focus, but which, because it held too much energy to remain static, kept blurring into a faster time frame. ‘We were on Bragenvold, in some northern geosector. Incidentally, they really don’t think in geosectors on Bragenvold because the political alliances are between interconnected and interwoven nets of city-states: the Blue Net, the Red Net, the Green Net, the Orange Net. Well, there we were in the capital burg of the Green Net, kilometres underground, and with the capitals of the Red, White, and Tyrian Nets less than a day’s work away with a jackhammer on three different sides of us. (Oh, they are labour-intensive in those underground caves. And the people in hand-arm intensive societies look so different from those in leg-foot intensive cultures – don’t you find?) As we rowed down the city’s central canal, there was a circular facade, carved into the rockface itself, oh, maybe seventy-five metres high. Painted above the narrow doorslits, in the local colour-code syllabary: Do not profane your origins on Eld Eyrth.’
Fibermich and her sisters rocked in unison, laughing their different laughs at their different pitches in their different rhythms.
‘And once,’ declared Nea, recovering, ‘we were on a world called Kra, where, in a particularly depopulated area, they had just put a legal limit on how much material an architectural structure could employ – ’ She looked about us at the sprawling levels of our ball court where so seldom, these days, anyone danced. Her hands, sheathed in foil and joined in her lap, tried to tug from their nest in her thighs. As she spoke, she leaned to the left (tug), to the right (tug, tug, tug …): they did not come loose, though I felt that the roofs themselves might peel from the sky if she overcame her own gravity. ‘There in the desert – ’ (tug, tug – ) ‘we saw the rim of an overgrown crater, where we’d heard the Family’d been established. Sure enough, the flame-speakers around it were blaring, both in the High Musical code as well as the Low (ironically pitched two octaves above the High one): Lest I forget thee, Oh Urth!’
They laughed; they rocked.
‘And on a moon, once – ’ I suppose Alsrod had some previous knowledge of the conversational path pursued by her sisters; but frequently with the Thants, if not all folk in stressful situations, I get the impression they never say anything new. ‘Once – ’ Alsrod’s hands were clasped on her knees. She swayed forward on the bench like a figure of struts and ropes, invisible thermofoils yanking at her shoulders as some undetectable hotwind whipped them back and forth, pulling her about as they whirled and snapped, collecting their energetic bounty and directing her intense movements below. ‘Once, on a moon, I passed a tiny office in a narrow corridor, through the transparent wall of which I could see it was all staffed by the local aliens – ’
Fibermich, Nea, and George all turned to her reprovingly.
‘May the ant and the worm take dinner in my vitals, I speak the truth,’ Alsrod protested. But one hand came loose from her knee and raised before her face as if to protect herself.
‘Go on,’ my sister Lars said, perhaps as a representative of our own local aliens, and arched her lip bone.
But I don’t think Alsrod saw it through her spread fingers. Her eyes were closed. ‘– staffed by local aliens,’ she repeated in a voice respectfully devoid of emotion. ‘And on the wall, written clearly in incised letters – ’ Here her hand returned to her knee which had jackknifed up to catch her bootheel on the bench’s inlaid edge – Fail not the eternal presence of Eurd.’ Her eyes were still not open.
They laughed.
We smiled – which we assumed they would take as a comparable gesture … if they asked GI about such things. They frequently did.
‘On Zetzor itself, in the south, there used to be a whole museum complex. Took up half the city of Q. Had folks handing out little cards on the cross-corners of cities all over our world, from 17 to 70; from A to R. Visit their paltry showing, and it stated in woman-high letters sunk into the piazza before the main rotunda: Forget not your debts and beginnings on Earth – and they meant, you know, the famous Earth, the sixth world so named after Old Earth itself!’ (I’d never heard of a particularly famous Earth, sixth named; but I didn’t interrupt gleaming George, who’d stepped up to join the conversation.) ‘We had the complex shut down. That is, Eulalia did. Thant Eulalia – ’ and without unfolding her arms, she nodded in the direction of the jewelled extravaganza, her mother, across the room by the sculpted half-walls, surrounded by our (and her) other parents. ‘That’s what we think of the Family on Zetzor. And their countless corrupt slogans.’
The three seated howled wildly, swaying with the precision of three broad leaves of sarb-grass in a single breeze. A scowling brass giant, George watched attentively over their performance.
‘Now, of course, you can’t set this against the problems of Nepiy …’ I heard again from Thadeus. Indeed, hearing the name before, I’d assumed it was just a trick of the ear. Even now it occurred to me that, with six thousand worlds to choose from, it was more likely that they were discussing some planet with a similar name than that they were discussing the actual world I’d so recently visited.
The evening drifted by.
I drifted by people; people drifted by me.
Then Santine made her entrance, on a rag-rope platform that creaked, in ancient gilt fringe, down from the informal stars. She stuck out one of her tongues to receive me, and I thought she said, in one of her voices that I happened not to recognize: ‘Do you really enjoy these affairs?’
I grinned, and was about to say – but it was not Santine aping a human voice. It was Alsrod Thant, in her aluminium circles, who had just stepped up beside me.
I said (because frequently the truth provides the most diplomatic answer): ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever attended one since I was your age where I didn’t feel, beforehand, an oppressive dread at the isolation that can reign in a large enough group of even the most intimate friends, much less an admixture of intimates, acquaintances, and strangers. Still, so much of my social education has been effected in such gatherings, so many true friendships have had their beginnings in meetings much like yours and mine, that I feel these affairs must not only be endured, but negotiated with a certain energy, if not commitment.’ I dro
pped my head a little to the side and gave her a grin. ‘They can be fun.’
Alsrod just looked at me.
Below her shaved scalp and high forehead, brown eyes blinked. The pupils were large enough to suggest either drugs or the slightest genetic divergence in human evolution. Suddenly she raised her hand, palm facing me. Before her face, brown fingers spread: ‘Oh! The force of a criticism whose reasons I can no longer spelunk throws me into the neotenous posture of the tadpole, the caterpillar, the newt!’
I had never heard of any of these beasts, and neotenous I knew from nothing. I opened my eyes rather wide, but I guess I was still smiling.
Alsrod dropped her hand and grinned back. ‘There.’ Suddenly she pointed to my thigh. ‘What’s that hanging by your leg?’
‘This?’ I ran my hand down the chain from my belt.
Three tongues out and one of them, I knew, tasting the taints and feints that humans could communicate through body odour alone if our olfactory systems had not fallen by the evolutionary wayside, Santine regarded us with the steadfast attention it had taken me years to learn did not (when she did it) mean offence, and to which Alsrod seemed all but oblivious in a way that made me wonder about her But she was from another world …
‘This – ’ I turned the leather binding over to the ground-glass screen; on the back was a set of finger-tab switches, set within gemmed circles – ‘is what they used to call a book.’ It was a beautifully worked object, well read (the leather around the controls was worn smooth), and no bigger than my palm. ‘My friend Santine here just returned it to me, earlier this afternoon.’
Santine nodded, licked, and watched.
Alsrod blinked at me some more, considering, I suppose, whether to go into another song, another dance. Finally, she said: ‘I know it’s a book. We have a whole library full at home. What’s it a book about? Unless – ’ Her large eyes lowered – ‘I have broached yet one more of the infinitude of topics my ignorance of your laws, land, and life would bar to any polite transgression from a poor – ’
‘Oh, now,’ I told her. ‘Of course it’s all right to ask!’ A library of books on Zetzor? This one was an odd offworld object that had somehow gotten into a basement at Dyethshome. I’d found it as a child just back from my first year offworld at Senthy. As far as I knew, it was the only book, at least of this particular technotype, on my world. ‘It’s a volume of Vondramach Okk. The poems, not the religious tracts. Apparently she used to joke that since nobody ever took the poetry of political rulers seriously, it didn’t matter what language she wrote it in. So she used her own made-up one. This book contains all her privately published volumes of verse, a selection of her letters, her complete private journals, about six contrasting critical studies, and an official biography – as well as a lot of allied papers and documents that don’t get too political.’
Alsrod stepped around me to see; I touched a playback button. The screen became pink haze, above which formed the most frequently reproduced holo of Okk: sixty-seven standard years old, tall, black-skinned, and gawky, she wore a maroon cape, blown back from a naked shoulder. Her breasts, emptied with age, hung against her ribs. Belt aslant sharp hips, she stood, in dark pants and darker boots, on a lime-pocked ledge, gazing pensively (and poetically) down on some absent land-scape, one hand on her waist, one lost in the red folds of her cape, jaw, ear, one shoulder, and belt buckle rouged by a sun thrice the size of Quorja or Iiriani.
‘From what I’ve studied of your local culture, however, in preparation for my coming – ’ One hand holding her opposite elbow, Alsrod gazed at the twenty-five-centimetre figure glowing above the book plate – ‘I would have thought that was a piece of theatre, or perhaps a sculpture – if you hadn’t told me, that is, it was a book.’
That made me laugh. I hefted the object in my hand: the image above it stayed steadier than its projector lying in my palm. ‘I can see that. It does have a stage, I suppose. And half the statuary you see about today is some kind of image projection. But this is just one of the book’s illustrations. Besides, it’s not a technofact of our world – at least it’s not common to this area of it.’
‘And I never knew Okk wrote,’ Alsrod added. ‘I mean poems. What an interesting-looking woman. And you must think so too.’ She blinked rapidly at me.
I nodded. ‘Most of the holograms we have of her come from the years she was in exile on Pretania. Like this. Once before, one story has it, she actually ordered all visual reproductions – of anything – destroyed over a whole world. There were too many of her, and she didn’t like the slant of her nose or something. Or maybe she just felt she’d become too recognizable. Another ruler would have dealt with the situation by having her own features altered – and she did that too, from time to time. But on Pretania, when it seemed, at least for a while, her political career was over, apparently she stopped caring who took pictures – and wrote her baker’s dozen greatest poems.’
It’s easy to read, in that image, the aging poet pondering the coming stanza of one of her brooding, crepuscular cynghanedds. The biography, however, tells us that the fifteen planets she had finally annexed three years before had, through the successful revolt of the Regunyi, just dropped to twelve. She was much more likely contemplating the coming battle of Granger-9 where, in a six-month interstellar encounter, the Pretania exile would end and she would sweep into her grip five new worlds (one of which would destroy itself in CF within the year). I wondered what Alsrod saw in it.
‘Was she a major or minor writer?’
I smiled. ‘Personally, among poets, she’s my favourite. There’re a good number of study-groups devoted to her work, here and on many other worlds. But there are many thousands of poets neither of us will ever hear of with greater followings among people who, themselves, have never heard of her. In her youth, actually, she was quite stout. Only in her last decades, on Abnerangc, Pretania, and Tartouhm, did she develop that gaunt and austere appearance most of us associate with her today.’
‘She was an impressive-looking woman,’ Santine said appreciatively, as I’ve heard her say a dozen times in as many years.
‘I’ve studied many major – and minor – poets on my world,’ Alsrod announced; she inclined her head to add: ‘What poems did she write?’
With my middle finger I pressed another switch on the book back, already set at one of her most accessible lyrics – the third from that sumptuous second volume, Lyroks. Runes formed above the screen; Vondramach faded. ‘One of the things that makes her particularly interesting is that the language she invented – actually she made it up when she was a girl on that large macro-life station where she spent a good part of her invalid childhood – employed both a phonetic and an ideographic writing system as well as a whole series of shiftrunes – ’
‘Shiftrunes?’
‘Letters that are pronounced one way on their first occurrence in a text, another on their second, another on their third, and so on in a fixed sequence. It gives the poet an interesting technique to exploit: she can have pairs of words that alliterate visually but not phonetically as well as pairs that alliterate phonetically but not visually. And she can play the two off against each other. At any rate, most of Okk’s really interesting work is written in this language: the two epic-length pieces, the Oneirokritika and the Energumenika, as well as the series of lyrics and love poems. Hermione at Buthrot. And of course both the early and late satires. If you like, I’ll give you the access code and you can take half a minute, learn the language from GI, then take a look at some of the poems in the original – ’
‘I’m afraid that my impetuous youngest sister – ’ Nea Thant stepped up behind Alsrod. She placed her metal-covered hands not on Alsrod’s shoulders but centimetres above them – ‘as this is her first trip to your world, has not been rendered compatible with your local General Information service – ’
‘I was going to get it done last week,’ Alsrod said, ‘but I guess that was when Mickey and me were off on that – ’ Then
, assailed by astonishment, her hands raised to, but did not touch, her face. She rocked her head from side to side, intoning, while aluminium jangled: ‘Oh, repentance! Oh, regret! Oh, retribution for the way of life a youth indulges among the rocks and ice and icemoss!’
‘Really,’ I said, ‘it’s probably just as well. I mean, here at a party more than likely isn’t the place you’d want to go off in the corner to sit for half an hour with a – ’
‘But you are the host!’ declared Alsrod. Her arms jangled to her sides. ‘I want to submerge myself in your world, your life! Your interests for the duration of my stay are mine! Your theatre, your sculpture! Please tell me about your grandmother, Gylda Dyeth!’ With Nea behind her projecting her fixed smile above her head, Alsrod’s intensity fairly glittered. ‘I mean, she was a great friend of Vondramach’s wasn’t she? Vondramach was the one who gave her all this – ’ she swept her hands about, indicating all around – ‘Dyethshome?’
Beyond us, the column glimmered.
‘Yes.’ I smiled again, because some of what had been mysterious had become clear for me – we’d been through this in one way or another with every Thant as we’d met them, though it still surprised me, I suppose. ‘I’ll tell you, if you’d like.’
‘Oh, please, yes. It’s your work2 anyway. You said you liked your work2.’
‘I do.’ The Thants have always been excited by the connection between Vondramach and Dyeth, the older just as much as the younger. Yet it still shocks me when that excitement erupts so blatantly. ‘What would you like to know?’
‘How they met? What did they do? How did they part? And then you must tell me about the stream which runs from them to you!’
I laughed, thinking how much I enjoyed the story, yet how much it always seemed that any time it’s told to the Thants, the tale was doomed to misunderstanding. Yet enjoyment won out. ‘All right. My seven-times great-grandmother, Gylda Dyeth, came to Velm when she was nineteen standard years old on a colony ship of eight thousand from a world called Klaven that I have never seen, but that a goodly number of the inhabitants at the time thought was on the verge of Cultural Fugue.’