‘Marq Dyeth …?’
I stood, surprised.
At the top of the ramp, he had one hand on the rail. His call was oddly hoarse; also, oddly, hollowed by the height; and grossly accented.
He said: ‘Your students are here now … many of us.’
And I knew somehow he had not come in to tell me that. Knowing it, I also knew he’d been standing there a while – though how much he’d seen of George’s and Nea’s altercation I didn’t know.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Of course.’ I knew too his choosing to speak then was absolutely not what it would have been from me: the discreet throat clearing, the diplomatic cough, the reminder to people caught up in a private moment that they are, in fact, observed.
I cast apologetic looks about me. Only gold-clawed V’vish and bushy-haired Hirum caught them; they glanced at the stranger on the ramp, glanced back at me. I hurried across the vestibule and started up.
He stood just in front of the reflecting south court doors, not waiting, his long body burned a red-brown Iiriani could never match. As I reached the ramp’s crest, he turned, and, with movements that (however awkwardly they nudged his wide shoulders, tilted his pelvic blades whose wings jutted above his ravelling pants-waist) were completely familiar, he went through the swinging mirrors in the same motion with which, minutes ago, I had fled the polarized chamber.
As I neared the doors, the panels’ silver gave me back, waving, only the thickset little male whose swagger is just a bit too much for any real elegance – but with the wreckage of a joy between short beard and heavy brows which, even seconds come to pieces, transformed what should have been the most familiar of faces: when the mirrors swung aside for me, I was not sure who walked out under the stone arch (he was gone … !), who walked down the steps, stepped wide of the grill, gambolled out on to the amphitheatre skene, for I felt as though I were no longer who I had been.
In those few seconds, he’d vanished …?
They were there – scattered up around the top ten tiers.
I looked around the empty seats far longer than I usually do. (He could have gotten back to the chamber …?) Finally I said: ‘Good afternoon. I see most of you have gotten here. My name is Marq Dyeth …’ (Thinking: Why am I telling them? He knows.) ‘We’ll be talking together about an hour, maybe two, possibly more, to orient you and answer your questions. But first why don’t you all come down from your perches to the front rows here where we can make out each other’s faces. Yes, that’s it. Come on, now. I won’t urinate on you.’ (Suffice that it’s an evelmism and would take a page and a half to explain fully. But they laughed, which was the important thing; and began to gather up their readers, recorders, miniscreens, and calculators.) ‘Just a second, I’ll start the moving stair …’ on which, among them, he did not come down.
2.
I’m tempted to give you an account of the whole three-hour orientation session2 (they do go on), if only because I know now that from his hiding place, he saw it all. I’m also tempted to omit it entirely – as I want to omit from thought all moments when he was not available to my sight, my tongue, my hand. But the truth is it was a student orientation session2 like any hundred others. There was the big-shouldered, short-tongued algae farmer1 from even further south – an embarrassingly healthy creature who smiled at everything and took down everything on a portable notator that wept an endless curl of paper into her scaly lap. Every minute or so she would wind it rapidly on another little red plastic spool, tear it off, and push it into another of the numberless pouches on her long vest. (‘And do we have any other algae farmers, 1, or 2, with us this morning …?’ There were three, wouldn’t you know: one from Ly’el Complex a few dozen kilometres away; two others from some geosector on the other side of this world.) There were the four evelmi with steel-coloured claws from somewhere in the far north and shy of giving their professions2 – where human/evelm relations are much less tranquil. They came and sat at the edge of the stage and were quiet, diffident, and probably hugely suspicious. The largest one now and again turned to whisper something to her smaller companions in a voice through which individual words were indistinguishable but which nevertheless sounded like a passing propeller platform; and I tried to pretend it wasn’t an interruption. There was the ebullient little fifty-year-old med tech2 (‘… this workshift, that is. Last job2 I had was in a wildlife preserve in the comb-caves in the upper plateaus of the Veng’n’n Range, just about – well, quite far east of here. I loved it. Might even consider going back. But there’s also a possibility of going to work2 in the bauxite mines out east – in accounting, of course. Not actually in the mines. Even with GI, that’s a primary job1 of course …’ One suspected she’d been retired from her own job1, whatever it had been, for at least ten years. ‘But it still sounds fascinating. Or then, I could always go into …’) One had come to study the sculpture of Bybe’t Kohimi (That’s the name – I remember now – of the artist who did the synapse-pillar’s pedestal and capital), of which Dyethshome happens to have the largest collection on the two worlds where she worked. Another had come to explore the documents in one of our libraries on simulacrum technology as it segues into bioengineering. (Our libraries are both vasty and selective on many subjects.) Another was here to learn more of the early stage production techniques used in the folk theatre of Jae’l Bazerat, many of whose performances were first presented in this very amphitheatre just over a hundred years ago. (Yes, extensive theatre records are all on store in one of our numerous basements.) By now most of the affable, interested, and really rather bright group were perching or sitting or squatting around the stage edge. (Maybe five out of the two dozen had gotten stuck out in the first row of seats.) I sat in the skene’s centre, suggesting to Ryla that she not try to see the Kyga-jewellery collection in the north court until after she had visited the G’har gallery in the west court; or reassuring R’eb she needn’t worry about her various religious food prohibitions while she was here; or dictating for the third time – just so Vagia could make sure she’d gotten it down right – the access number to activate the food choppers in the student kitchen downstairs, since it had been accidentally misprinted in the last brochure. Iiriani rolled like a flaring tread gear behind high-coloured glass, lighting us now deep orange, now pale green, now a scalded yellow. But as I sat, naked and cross-legged on the old planks, every few minutes I would realize that, though he was not among their number, if he had retreated to some hiding place, he was still watching me. And I would halt on a word, then rush on among the coils of whatever explanation I was ensnared in, while my ears and knees flushed redder than the freestanding panes about the amphitheatre of our rhetoric.
3.
When the session was over, I fled the skene for my room. But by the time I reached the unactivated entrance column, I suddenly found myself afraid of my open platform’s sunset peace. Off I strode again, through underground halls, to search out Maxa and see her mines. Minutes later, when I heard her laughing in one of the lower galleries with Alyxander and Bu, I did not activate the drop-lift that would take me to them. Through bright corridors and across drear chambers I wandered into the dark, multi-columned hall we call the Old Library. Like the column by the vestibule entrance, these ornately topped and bottomed glimmerings (more Bybe’t) were the personalities of other dead Dyeths. From the wall-board I took out (yet again) one of the tiny crystal volumes of Mother Dyeth’s nine-volume memoirs that, in my rash adolescence, I’d promised myself I would someday read all through. A wonderful woman, my great7-grandmother had a dreadful prose style; but since so much of her life, not to mention Vondramach’s, has been written about by people who didn’t (including Vondramach), those memoirs are like the heaviest ore – laced with valuable yield, I’m sure; but the refinement techniques are all but beyond me. I sat at one of the large scarred tables, pushed open the cover to the dusty reader-screen, funnelled the little text crystal (so different from books) between my fingers into the receptor dish, and for
an hour stared at one page of limp, bitter bombast by a woman by report both salty and pithy.
I did not read, from one end to the other, another three sentences.
Suddenly I was up and out between the glimmering ghosts. He was in the polarized chamber. And there were ways to get there without going back through the amphitheatre itself. (Why would you build one if there weren’t?) What I wanted to avoid were the good-natured students still hanging around the stage. (‘Oh, hey, Marq! We just wanted to ask you …’) Well, there were ways. But I had to go to another library and look them up to make sure I had the various spells and incantations down. Dyethshome is a hive of mentally activatable intricacies scattered about five courts, and nobody knows them all.
Why hadn’t I thought of this an hour ago?
I probably had.
But that many decimal places, not to mention the confusion of Nea, George, and their Thantish theatrics, had fouled my tongue and fingers till I’d lost all notion of recipe.
I rose beside him in a column of light.
4.
He sat on the cushioned bench along the chamber’s rear, bare feet on the floor, elbows on his knees, bright and bald hands hanging down between. He stared at his toes for all the world as if he were about to pick one.
Out on the stage, three students sat and two stood, all laughing at a joke one of the algae farmers2 had just told. Off to the side in about row twelve, another student was bent over some mechanical gizmo, putting her in touch with a local orchestral performance, or a parent’s admonitions to pay attention to what she ate during the length of her stay, or some other student who could only visit Dyethshome in vaurine projection and wanted an in vivo supplementary account.
‘Rat Korga …?’ I said; and to say the name of your perfect erotic object is always to say it for the first time, even when it is the fiftieth repeated shriek and you are half blind with terror on the crags of a world so far away its night is virtually without stars. He looked up at me, and the eyes he wasn’t born with were human and green. He frowned a little. The light about me from the entrance column dimmed. Then the frown seemed to crack away (as all changes of expression registered on his large-pored, pitted face). He smiled a little:
‘Marq Dyeth …?’ Then, nervously and surprisingly, he stood.
He was so tall.
Iiriani was below the back wall of our glass-roofed chamber. But neither he, I, nor the chamber walls around us cast any shadow over the sloping seats – like those creatures in the folk tales of a temperate geosector on another world (I can’t remember which, damn it!) who, by such shadowlessness, signal mutually murderous intents.
His rough, unringed fingers came to touch my arm – and stopped an inch off, as though he were I and I were Maxa.
I said: ‘I’m sorry I waited so long to come.’
‘If you had come earlier – ’ His voice was rust rough and mauled by accent – ‘I would not have been ready.’
I guess that’s those decimals.
I said: ‘Come with me,’ and stepped back on to the limen plate. (If he had touched me, would I have fallen to the ground …?) He stepped forward on to the plate with me. And his left nipple was centimetres above my right eye. I wanted to lean my head back and lick it – not from desire but from that idiocy always there to subvert desire and render it ludicrous. Our human heat was a third creature bevelling between us.
We rose – or dropped – into the floor.
Did Korga think, the first time, that the halls and underground corridors I led him through were more familiar to me than to him? (Home is a complicated place? Well, Dyethshome is more complicated than most.) Some near lightless passages we walked through; through some, bright with intricate ceiling fixtures, we were carried along by moving floors with ornate rails whose gilded newels bore likenesses of great evelmi and humans forgotten for a century, dead for two. In one such, as his arm almost brushed mine, the milky wall glowed green. (The creamy liquor of the local worm …) Small Maxa was running along beside us. From time to time the white coins of her fingertips, the small saucers of her knees pressed to the other side of the pane, as if she could actually see us: ‘Marq …? Marq, where are you? Please, Marq, come see my mine! You promised, Marq …’ Behind her, in the wall screen, I could see where she’d done a formidable job of construction in one of our old playrooms. Korga looked at me.
I smiled. ‘She wants to take up mining as her profession1,’ I explained, and wondered whether he understood – or if I should tell him how difficult her disability might make that on some parts of our world. But we turned into another corridor without a call-wall. And somehow we were standing on the metal circle that would become the entrance to my room.
Korga said: ‘Marq Dyeth …’ Both accent and injury kept me from knowing if it were exhortation or interrogation. And because, with either inflection, I hadn’t the slightest idea what he meant, after a moment’s silence, I said:
‘This is my room. It’s very far away …’
When he said nothing, I activated the column.
5.
The Myaluths were profligate with Iiriani-set.
He followed me across the carpet. Blinding gold had wedged down between the hills. Morgre’s park levels, ten kilometres off, were a tracing of girders. In the city, a few early lights, green and blue, battled for visibility. The hills were steel-coloured; the sky was indigo and flame, the Hyte-wr, black and purple under its fumes’ unravelling lace.
I walked to the desk, pushed aside things that clicked or just toppled, turned to face him, and sat.
The overhead lamp came on. One and another, the little spheres in the orrery swung their shadows across my hairy shoulder, down my snarled arms. (I hadn’t activated the contraption, but sometimes it just starts up when I near it in certain moods.) He stopped by the bed, watching me.
I turned to look over the rail, beyond the tufted stones. Suddenly I got the strangest sensation that he was no longer behind me. I turned back.
He was. (It’s that reconstruction memory …)
As I looked, his eyes came up and caught mine – still green.
They questioned a moment. Then he sat down, hands beside his hips on the mat. The way his high knees jackknifed – and he sort of bent forward now – he looked even taller than when he was standing. He brought his hands in. He opened his mouth, closed it again. Then he said, his voice even rougher than before: ‘Please … please, I need you to – ’
I stood. ‘I will,’ I said, because I knew at least this much about him. ‘You … you don’t have to ask me, because I …’
It was brief, intense – satisfying? More dizzying, I think. On my bed, on the carpet, and on the bed again; there was a short time – or perhaps it was a long one – when we were quiet and very aware of one another. My feelings oscillated (and I could feel his feelings sometimes lagging behind mine, sometimes moving ahead) from warmth to misgiving to warmth.
We lay on the bed; and his hand on my chest was a stone outcrop on uneven giltgorse. His rough hair, with something reddish in it, was the hue of split tolgoth pith. Knees? Mine were much closer to my eyes than his. Stones? Crags? Hills at two distances. His cheek, near my face, was the slope of the Reya’j’as Plateau (north, in R-16), which had been peppered with meteors a million and a half years ago, and among whose craters, thousands of years gone, evelmi once gathered to perform mysteries whose significance even they have forgotten. My own breath against his neck came back to strike my face like a hotwind eroding the prehistorical escarpments of the oest to their characteristic roundness. The line between his arm and my chest was the crevice of some sunken -wr, the near bank, mine, heavy with growth, the far one, his, notably sparse.
I stayed a long time in that landscape, wondering what he would say when he next spoke, wondering what I should say if I spoke first, whether I should let him speak before me. I thought of: Among the thousands of males I’ve bedded, at least a dozen times somebody has said to me, ‘You’ll have to meet so-and-so.
You’ll just love him!’ But this has got to be the strangest route I’ve ever travelled to end up sleeping with someone. And didn’t say it. I glanced at him instead; he shifted mountains, planes, -wr.
Green and ivory, his eyes blinked.
Then I asked: ‘What world are you …?’
He looked down. ‘Mmmm …?’ It rumbled in the muscle and bone under my ear. ‘World? Where was I …?’
My ear was on his arm. So I moved my head a little to hear better.
‘… I was remembering a black river. A great river. Under the ground, and lit by golden torches stapled to the rocks. Children in boats, rowing, were terrified because the slimy mantichorion might surge up from the black waters and upset their boat – not a real place.’ He chuckled. ‘It’s in a … text. From my world … no, I don’t know if it’s from my world or not. It may have been brought there. Nothing important.’ He glanced down. ‘You? Where are you, now …?’
‘Underground rivers,’ I said. ‘That sounds like someplace in the north of this world – where I’m afraid I haven’t spent too much time.’ I pushed up on an elbow. ‘Up there, you know, sex between women of the same gender – or of difference species – is illegal. At least it used to be until a hundred years or so ago. If it is now, frankly, I don’t know. My grandparents told me about it.’ I laughed and put my head back to nuzzle his strong armpit. (Mine, in this heat, with so much more hair, smelled so much less. More genetic divergence within our world-sundered species?) He said:
‘On my world, sex between males was illegal until you were twenty-seven, although it went on pretty constantly anyway. What was completely illegal on my world was sex between a person your height and a person of mine. For all genders.’
I pushed up on my elbow again. ‘Whatever for?’