‘On my world – ’ As we came under the shadow of a pylon supporting a section of overhead park, Korga’s eyes lost silver for green – ‘I never wore one.’
‘Why not?’
‘I think it was because – ’ We walked around the fountain base, dry as the Dyethshome spill – ‘I was always hungry …’ He seemed to wonder at his answer. ‘Or because I was a rat.’ Perhaps I wondered and projected wonder into his rough voice.
By the pillar near the butchers’ union door, copper hair, tanned hands – the redheaded apprentice stopped her headlong charge and clutched stone, staring, panting.
The gold-clawed apprentice behind her rumbled: ‘There …’
The little human went: ‘Shhhh … !’ as I glanced.
I smiled and was silently curious. Rat walked beside me, not looking. I looked; I waved.
The evelm apprentice reared on her hind fours and raised a gilded claw. ‘Hello, Marq Dyeth. Hello, Rat Korga.’
Rat looked over now and raised his hand in acknowledgement.
Then a carping voice – Si-id on her morning inspection tour – called the two to come back in and get to work.
The human waved; the evelm arched her lip-ridge; and both were gone.
‘You’re becoming a well-known figure. I wonder if it was students, tattling? Or my siblings and parents, dropping little hints at various unions on their rounds of play, work, and survival?’
Rat nodded – and I wondered to which of my comments, on his world, nodding was the proper response. Rat’s hair – dull brown with the red kiss in it human blood dries to – clawed at his ears, curled at his neck. ‘They told me this might happen.’
‘Back in the Web?’
‘Yes. There.’
We walked over cracked, dusty blue, and I thought: In anyone else that inflection would have to have meant, ‘There as well’, implying she had been told it dozens of places before. But Rat’s grasp of our language’s music was so awkward, it was impossible to read the various subtexts that inscribed their co-messages on the flow of his breath, or among the stutters of his de- and revoicings, rough melodies, and stops.
‘Up this way,’ I said.
We mounted the narrow metal steps, the black finish pitted with past hotwinds. The support girders wove around.
We came out under Iiriani among broad blue and orange mural-fungi; their great sheets swayed above the gravel.
Rat blinked on mirror-bright balls.
‘If we’re going to walk across the city, it’s nicer to do it up here in the park.’
At the rail to this particular park (parks make a net above the entire complex, with, here and there, even broader parks a level up: we could see three of those from here, like giant tables whose webbed and re-webbed legs stamped down into the green and blue foliage that spread away on this one) only one woman sat on a curved bench, her scaly head bent over a reader which put out a fan of shadow up about her face. Two children were galloping about between a clump of cactuses further on, every once in a while one rearing back to spread dark wings, whereupon the other would fall to the ground, roll over, and kick all her legs, her low laughter reaching us like the roll of a gong.
‘There’re not many people out today,’ I observed. ‘But then, we’re between shifts.’
‘Where are they all?’ Rat asked.
‘At work2, mostly.’ Squinting at him in the light, I realized his eyeballs must compensate for this overground brilliance; his lids were wide on their silver. ‘Some of them, I suspect, are in there – ’ I pointed to the moss-grown ridge of the run to our left, then pulled my tongue back in between tight teeth, which always tickles a little: ‘Did they tell you in the Web what that is?’
He looked at the mossy slope; about seven metres down, blobby bars erupted over the structure to form a free-form vent: ‘That is a run?’
I grinned. ‘That’s right. Would you like to go in it?’
‘Yes. I would.’
I said: ‘This particular stretch is pretty tame by most standards. But it suits me. And the people who enjoy its style frequently come from quite a ways. I joined my hands behind me. ‘I’ve never really known if it was because it was so near that its particular offerings became my preferences, or whether I was just lucky enough to have my preferences fit neatly into what was available. But then, I have both parents and siblings who prefer city runs much further off.’
‘We climb in through there, don’t we?’ Korga said, pointing to the vent we were nearing.
First I frowned. Then I burst out laughing. ‘But there’s a door right down there!’ I put my hand up on his shoulder now. ‘The problem with General Information – ’ and then remembered he wasn’t on GI – ‘I mean with information you get from someone who got it from GI – is that it’s often ten years out of date – if not a hundred. Especially when it comes through the Web. If Morgre were a complex with only an evelm population, then of course we would enter by a vent – the one with the lower sill highest from the ground used to be the customary way. I think that’s how they did it in Morgre up until about six years before I was born.’ I shrugged. ‘But cultures meld.’ I turned off the path and started for the entrance.
The door deliquesced.
Cool against my thigh, chest, and face, mist from the sill-trough blew back as I lifted my foot over the – ‘Hey, don’t step in that!’ I pushed up at Rat’s shoulder –
His big foot came down with the heel a centimetre beyond the trough rim. He staggered around to face me, not looking surprised.
‘You’re supposed to step over. You yell at little kids for getting their feet wet in the door trough.’ I laughed. ‘Look …’ as I stepped over.
The blue liquid, behind us now, began to foam; the foam rose, climbing at the jambs faster than in the middle; and darkening, and shutting out light as the door’s semicrystals effloresced.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’
Rat turned, his eyes gone empty glass; we started up the corridor.
‘Oh, yes,’ I said – as Rat stepped wide of the irregularly shaped footpool with the bubbles shifting about on it – ‘you are supposed to step in that when you come in from outside.’
And did.
So he went back and did too.
Tingling heels drying, we walked down the resilient woven flooring of the shadowy tunnel. Here and there along the arched ceiling or the curved wall, a metre-wide vent, or sometimes a three-metre-wide vent, let in light.
The abstract statues along both sides, no matter how many times I come in here (three, five, ten times a week since I was twelve – at least when I’m home), always look like people for the first few seconds, till your eyes adjust to the dimness – at which point you begin to make out the people, humans and evelmi, who stand or stroll among them: not many in this run, this time of day.
One I did recognize came over to me, didn’t bother to sniff my feet (in case they do is why you step in the foot trough) and nuzzled my groin; I scratched behind his wide purplish gill-ruff (the male and neuter evelmi’s most sensitive erogenous zone) and his great wings quivered a bit – and I walked on.
Korga looked at me with empty eyes.
I smiled. ‘You know, we’ve been going through this once a month at least since I’ve been coming here. I still don’t know his name, and we’ve only had real sex maybe six times in all those years. Still, he comes over and greets me every time I come in. Or if I’m here when he comes in, I always greet him. Are there any statues that particularly intrigue you? If they’re all too baffling, I’ll just point out my favourites.’ I touched his arm. ‘It goes without saying, if you see anyone who attracts you more than the statuary, just go on over.’
The hollow-eyed face looked down. ‘This is where you come for sex?’
‘And sculpture.’ I nodded for him to follow me between two high vegetal shapes of plastic with a ring of taste plates at licking level. ‘At least for the day-to-day variety when you want to spend less than twenty minute
s at it on your way somewhere else. The sculpture, at any rate, is a bit restricted …’ I nodded at the construction on our right: a female evelmi with claws of an impossible verdigrised bronze but, other than that, an uncannily lifelike reproduction. At the uncannily high level of reproduction, the artist had worked in a number of subtle contradictions: her turmeric-coloured gill-ruff rustled as though she were perched on a mesa edge, moments before a hotwind. Her lowered head moved back and forth over a fraction of a degree as though she might bend to sniff the feet of anyone who passed in her run. The scales on her mid-haunches flexed slightly recalling the movements an hour after birthing (which only occurs months after hotwind time) – internal machines provided her with a dozen shadows of life, all from completely incompatible situations (at hotwind season, females do not usually come into all-male/neuter runs), the more shadowy for their bizarre dislocations – shadows that, as I watched, I wondered if Rat could even sense, much less feel the piece’s dark and oppressive ironies. ‘Modern stuff. Very experimental,’ I said, and felt silly passing on these judgements that only brought home their arbitrariness. ‘Very unconventional.’ We wandered on until we came to the structure of black globes, pocked with crystal lenses, sending needle beams into the other black globes that, from floor to ceiling, hung motionless in their suspensor field. ‘On the surface of most worlds worth the name, there’re very few serious reminders that there are other worlds about. When I got back from a diplomatic mission1 three years ago, and dropped in here on my way home, I was surprised to see what I assumed was a schematic representation of one of the information nets in the Web. Each of the worlds was represented as the same size; the information itself is suggested by beams of light … it all seemed too pointed not to be intentional.’ I nodded sagely. ‘It’s a giant model of microscopic luminous algae that you can find in the cover puddles floating on the top of -wrs in the colder latitudes south and north. At least that’s what the artist told me when I looked her up in the GI catalogue and called her to send my compliments.’
Mouth slightly opened, Rat raised his hollow eyes. (The sculpted balls were black and opaque; light lanced between them.) His eyeballs were black and clear. On them, seen from the side, light lay out its web in a small reflection.
‘Excuse me.’ The hand on my shoulder, from weight and heat and texture, was not his. I glanced back; so did Korga. The other hand was on Korga’s shoulder. The male (human) said, mostly to me. ‘Could I interrupt you two long enough to take your friend to my friend …’ He gestured with his tongue at a purple-black evelm, standing a few metres down the run, foreclaws off the ground; darting long and short tongues from his jaw, creating no sound in anticipatory lust.
‘I said: ‘You must ask my friend.’
Korga said to me: ‘Will you watch if I go? Please?’ And to the human: ‘Is it all right if Marq watches?’
The human, surprised, smiled and shrugged at once: ‘Yes. Certainly. Of course.’ And to Korga: ‘You have come from very far away, am I right?’
Korga glanced at me.
‘But that’s no matter.’ The human hand dropped from my shoulder but remained on Korga’s.
About ten metres up, there was a large ceiling vent that let in its dozen trapezoids of light. I stood at the shadow’s edge, joined – before the three of them, Korga, the human, and the evelm were through – by a dozen others, their cool scaled haunches and warm fleshed shoulders jostling mine.
‘On my world, there were pictures – ’ Korga said, then interrupted himself. ‘Did you come?’
‘Yes … But you didn’t.’
‘I was too excited.’
‘That can be a problem.’
‘Mostly by the human – but the other … you see on my world there were pictures,’ he repeated. ‘Of creatures, like that. Lizards. Dragons. Some had wings.’
‘The evelmi aren’t dragons,’ I said. ‘And confusing an evelm with a dragon is rather like confusing a human with a chimpanzee.’
‘Chippa …?’ asked Korga.
‘To be sure,’ I said. ‘There were probably no other primates besides humans on Rhyonon. Not that I’ve ever seen any in vivo myself. Still, dragons are what we’re hunting, Rat. Evelmi – like you and me – are women. You don’t know what goes on in the north of this world. A good deal of the trouble comes from certain humans getting rather confused about just such not-so-fine distinctions.’
‘But there were pictures,’ Korga said. ‘They were imaginary pictures. They weren’t real. I used to look at them – sometimes for hours. They were beautiful. Some of them had wings. Some didn’t.’
‘Females and neuters have wings. Males don’t – generally. Of course that’s true of evelmi, dragons, and half a dozen other trisaurian species on Velm.’
‘But I’d never seen one alive before. I never knew I could feel … lust with one!’
I laughed. ‘If I can, you can. And I have, many many times.’ We turned by a black, shaley structure, one of whose protuberances actually went up and out an overhead vent into Iirianilight. ‘That’s Japril’s decimal points at work again.’
As we approached the wall, it collapsed into the trough. Handfuls of foam dissolved into clear blue between the ornate, tarnished jambs.
4.
An upper park lay shadow over us and the dark sand we came out on. Pole-lights laced their long reflections on the plastic blister rising among banks of maroon shrubs. (I looked for the light in his eyes – but his eyes were again white and green.) Some women – most human, most pregnant – came down the further path, carrying their heavy breasts and high bellies above the dim dyll clusters hanging at the tops of the squat rock cactuses that grew thigh high here out of the direct sun.
‘The union we’re going to is just down there,’ I told Rat. ‘Before we go down, would you like to see – ’ and some diplomatic sense (the same that had finally taught me to deal with Thants) decided me that ritual direction rather than ritual request would be less confusing: ‘I’d like to take a look at my old nursery. Come with me.’
We walked across the clearing, between the shrubs, up to the carved wood rail around the plastic shell. ‘Look in.’ I leaned forward. ‘Go on. Look.’
Beside me, Korga leaned among the narrow leaves and gazed through the plastic wall.
Each big as a big woman’s two fists together – say Korga’s – their infant fur, which would darken in a decade and fall off except for the leg pelts, now dull pearl, their belly scales metallic copper (some few out of them had silver stomachs), infant evelmi lay on their backs, kicking their six legs leisurely, licking and licking and licking their lips.
‘There’s another nursery just below it, where human children are taken care of before they start their official study groups,’ I told Korga. ‘Human and evelmi have such different lifestyles and rearing styles. Evelmi aren’t ready for gestural language until four and verbal language till six. But it’s still astonishing how much we’ve taken over from them. Not to mention what they’ve taken from us.’
‘Do they ever mix them together?’ Korga asked. ‘All of the children, from both races?’
I watched Rat gaze at the evelm infants. Clawless fingers; pale fur that would become dark scales in maturity; what northerners called the ‘milk tongues’ dominating their mouth movements – I guess because northern humans started it, the term is frequently considered offensive here in the south; but I always heard it in my stream, both from humans and evelmi, and I was ten before I learned to be circumspect about using it outside. ‘They all play together several hours a day.’ I glanced down at his big knuckles, his rings, his gnawed nails, remembering my time here. ‘More and more as we both get older.’
Without looking up, Korga said: ‘Those women back there are watching us.’
I didn’t look up either. ‘Are they?’ I tried to recall them, the humans in simulated purple scales; wondered if they would look away when I looked up. ‘Well, one of the more famous runs that females, neuters, and males use toget
her lets out just down there. They’re probably wondering if you’re going to go in. Really, there must be quite a web of rumour forming about you. You’ve gotten quite popular in – well, it’s under a day.’
Korga’s hand closed on my shoulder. He moved closer to me. ‘Should we go on, Marq?’
We walked along beside the pentagonal bases of the pole-lights, circling the big dome in which evelm infants so slowly grew. At the path side, we passed a metre-wide grill through which came the muffled screams, shouts, sobs, and laughter of the very loud human infants growing up below.
I glanced back at the women – who were, indeed, turning away; one gestured for another to look away.
‘There’s a drop-lift over there,’ I said. ‘The hunting union’s a few levels down.’ We walked through different vegetations, none local and each from a vastly different latitude, each requiring careful and individual tending here in this alien clime by the night-shift gardeners2, absent this morning. And because their foliage was all pale blue, I wondered if Korga took in any distinctions through his false eyes.
5.
Only a few other women were on the lift down with us, two in rather worn work tunics, one in a clean pink one with a spiffy new union insignia I couldn’t quite make out because there was an anxious guy standing in front of her and swaying, naked – she must have been on a labour2-sabbatical and leading the far more anxious life one does in such situations.
Through the gridded floor, I watched the cable loops drop faster than we did. At the next level, the irregular ropes and metal railing shifted, clanked, rose, and a very boisterous group of oldsters surged on, so that for half a minute we were caught up in the thunder of their converse, as this one jumped and waved her claws over the head of a friend to get the attention of a third, while that one, in her excitement, furled and unfurled great, redlined wings.