Minutes later, two astonishingly short men, in thick-soled wedgies, hurried across the yard, plucking at their masks’ clips behind their heads, one laughing as his came away, the other bumping one shoulder into some stay-wire supporting an old sign for soft drinks.
The sign swayed.
He watched the yard a long time, before he heard her turn over behind him, dragging canvas.
He did not look.
Canvas fell on plastic.
She grunted.
Then her hand fell on his shoulder. ‘We’re here,’ she said, recovering from a yawn as, now, he glanced up. ‘So. You actually got us here. That wasn’t too hard.’
Outside, two very short women with elaborate head-masks ran into the enclosure, giggling and poking at one another, turned, and ran out.
Crossing the yard, one either side, a very tall man and a very short man, both with naked faces, glanced one at the other as the other glanced away, the both of them elaborately feigning not to see each other.
They walked perfectly in step.
Holding his shoulder, she frowned: ‘What is this place?’
He said a slang word that, before he’d come to the Institute, had been a frequent part of his vocabulary, though he had not used it since.
‘Oh,’ she said, while he reflected that in the whole of his reading, only the Nu-7 poet had used the word, and that only once, comically and obliquely. ‘You mean,’ she said, ‘here, we’ve driven over three thousand kilometres in a night to some little belt-border town, to wind up in a …’ (She, he noticed, mispronounced it.) ‘I guess you about-faces are all over the place. Well, it makes sense. We’re fugitives, and when I bought my fugitive coordinate pattern, I guess I should have figured the people who did the kind of travelling we were going to do would use this kind of place as a stop-point.’ She gave a kind of laughing snort. ‘I’m going to punish you for this.’
He was curious why, but did not look at her curiously.
‘I mean,’ she offered in nervous explanation, ‘here I am, indulging all my kinks – and I intend to keep right on. You might as well indulge yours.’ Then she humphed; or coughed. ‘Three thousand kilometres in towards the population belt … all you expect to do is just brush civilization’s rim. And here I am, stuck with a microphile in the middle of an erodrome –’ Microphile and erodrome were technical words whose meanings seemed not so much concerned with their referent as with the gesture of her using them as compensation for the slang term with which, he realized, she was far more uncomfortable than he – ‘just as if we were in central Kingston. Get on out,’ she said, and reached over his shoulder to press a button.
He couldn’t remember, he thought with some distress, if that were the switch that released the transport’s side or not.
Catches on the single door fell away; the door swung out.
He stood up, looking at her.
She said: ‘Go on. Get out there and indulge your foul and unspeakable desires.’ She gave him a quick smile. ‘When you get back, I’ll indulge mine.’
He smiled, knowing he wouldn’t have a day before. But that was because, in his reading, he’d found the word ‘indulged’ nearly a dozen times, and recognizing it felt … well, good.
He walked towards the entrance.
‘Really do it,’ she called after him. Humour and nervousness tripped over each other to get control of her voice. ‘Do it, because the punishment will be exquisite!’
Without using his hands, he shouldered out the door as if it were some institutional hanging.
The morning was warm and dry. He stepped down on the powdery ground, scattered with gravel, plastic bits, and the tiny black grommets whose source or use, for all his reading, he did not know any more than he had before the Institute had shipped him from the city years ago.
He walked across the clearing, pausing to look back, but the sun, still low, put a red glare over the darkened glass so that he could not tell if she watched him or not.
He went first to the doorway the old man had stood in – and was surprised because it was locked.
He dropped his hand from the circular entrance plate and looked down at the man’s discarded pants. One brown leg dangled across the entrance sill. He turned and walked back.
The archway stood behind two statues – a new one, a great sphere in luminous blue, whose hieroglyphs advertised some drug he had never heard of, and an old one behind it, a peeling red and orange bucket that told of a distant water-station.
The arched darkness glimmered along its edges with some sort of weak-energy heat shield.
He stepped through, on to downward stairs. Somewhere in the wide, dim corridor water dripped. Shafts of light fell through the high hall’s cool dusty air.
Near the step’s bottom, a very short man, wearing … well, it was like a wire headmask, only there were not dozens but, seemingly, hundreds of coloured pieces. Some of the wires curved as far down as his ankles. Naked beneath it, the man danced slowly, alone.
Which was when he remembered it was after sunup in some tiny town at the very rim of the population belt. Few men were likely to be out at this hour. He might as well turn around and go back to the transport.
He didn’t.
And the men who were out, well …
Over the next three hours, moving around through the dark rooms, he had sex seven times, twice with unexpected satisfaction, and four times after that with an indifferent adequacy that slipped him into adolescent memories undisturbed for years. The last time was with a man taller than himself – a partner he’d never have considered when he’d been a child. But the encounter proved to have a gentleness and satisfaction that drew his second orgasm of the morning up from behind his knees to rage like a large lake filling below his belly, while his shoulders shook, till, unmarked time later, with words whirling and falling in his head, the wonder, pulsing and pulsing from spine to genitals, settled slowly into the wordless memory of wonder.
‘You look like you haven’t done that for a long time.’ The man rubbed his shoulder and held his face close.
He said: ‘Not for a … a couple of hours,’ and patted the high shoulder back, clumsily, with his glove.
The little man, who’d stood near watching, lifted his immense contraption of swaying wires back on to his head and again began to dance.
So he left.
He, came out behind the water-station sign, stopped to take a deep breath, and started across the grommeted dust.
The single door to the transport stood wide, the diagonal rod at the corner in place to hold it open, which was not (he tried to reason why) the way he’d have expected her to leave it. But he was still not really used to reason. Hers or anyone else’s.
He stopped, moving his hand to the side of his face, to scratch some itch there, which became a conscious curiosity at how best he might move the dark cloth first from the tip of one finger and then another to bite on the nails there. Still wondering, he stepped inside.
The cabin was empty.
What he did next had the same insistence with which, for years, without thought, he had raised one finger and another, thumb and little, to pick and chip with his big teeth at crown and cuticle, or, indeed, the insistence with which, for three hours, he’d stalked from encounter to encounter while all thought had been towards leaving in a minute, in three, in no more than five.
He went to the octagonal carton, squatted, plunged in his hand, pulled out a cube, and read Seven Comic Dialogues by Cher Ag, most of whose humour escaped him, but which, especially in the fourth and seventh, managed to pass through some jarring and bizarre social configurations that caught up all his thinking; and tossed that back and pulled out the long-story Mutations, which, the afterword explained to his surprise, had been written in collaboration by two women, one of whom had been a rat. And put that back, pulled out the next, and to his greater surprise reread The Mantichorio, marvelling both at how much he remembered and how much seemed wondrously new, as familiar characters, who,
in his mind’s eye, looked entirely different from memory, engaged familiar battles and said familiar lines, their motivations and arguments so changed – so much more, indeed, like his own might have been, now, here. Still, it was amazing how the black ripples under the children’s long oars on the underground waterway were lit, this reading, by torchlight of such a different gold.
Then he read an anthology of poems by women connected with the Tarcarto Publications, and for the first time found himself responding to individual lyrics as good or bad, instead of simply comprehensible or confusing.
Minutes, seconds, ages later …?
He was in the midst of a huge, desertlike novel, subtly contoured with the palest shifts in tone, as satisfying as a walk on warm sand at night – partially because it dealt with the Tarcarto itself. Its secondary heroine was one of the more eccentric poets whose work, so recently, he’d read. Then, through the half-consciousness in which his perceptions of the transport cabin around him hung, he heard a footstep; several footsteps; then: ‘Yeah, that’s him. Get him.’
The leisurely narrative resolved with its closing meditation on the dawntime of a young world –
Someone grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him back.
He lost balance, went down on one knee. His other struck the carton, which overturned, spilling cubes. The cube in his hand fell among the scatter. His buttock hit the plastic flooring and his gloved hand skidded behind him.
He looked up at baggy beige suits and at official beige masks.
One of them said: ‘And get that thing off his hand, will you?’
That’s when he saw the canvas bag with the lizard on its flap hanging over the small one’s shoulder. His first thought was: How odd to find such a carrier this many kilometres across the sand from the polar station. Then he realized there was no bag lying beside the carton. The two thoughts interlocked to become recognition of how they’d come looking for it.
The first man in beige, who had bent down while he was thinking all this, jerked his forearm up, hooked a forefinger under the wrist of the glove, and yanked: cloth and small metal links tore –
And his world and all thought about it tore from his great hand.
Qualitatively, the feeling was somewhat like being in the midst of an involuted argument with a particularly complex point to make, only to open your mouth and forget what you were about to say. Quantitatively, it was so much more intense than simple forgetting that anyone who’d undergone the experience would probably question the qualitative as a metaphor to convey the quantity of that shattering erasure. For what had been stripped, wrenched, excised from him at that tug was all in him that could have understood the very description of it. Left was only a tingling that worked through every cell of him, more completely than her plate (whose name he could not remember) when she’d cleaned him.
Breath came out, slowly and continuously, as though hands, huger than his, had taken him up and wrung him. For moments air caught in his vocal cords. For moments it slipped through them, unvoiced. Sometimes it stuttered between the two: ‘… gggggkkkkkgghh … aggggghhh … k-k-k-kggggg …’
‘There,’ the man said. He looked at the black rag with the bits of metal in it, turned his fingers down through the ribbons, and jerked his elbows apart.
More ribbons and wires ripped.
One asked: ‘Where do they get these things anyway?’
The short one with the bag said: ‘I wonder what she did to him.’ From the voice, it was probably a woman.
The tall one said: ‘You’ll never know. I mean, a damned bitch. That’s what gets me. With a man, it doesn’t seem so weird. But I can’t stand it when a damned bitch does something like that with a damned –’
‘Hey, watch your language, man!’ the one holding the ripped glove said. ‘You don’t have to talk that way in front of the kid.’
‘Oh, yeah, man,’ the other said; and to the young woman, ‘I’m sorry, man.’
‘That’s all right, man,’ she said. ‘I just wish I knew what she did to him.’ She reached down, got a hand under his arm, and tugged. ‘Come on, Rat. Time to get up.’
He slipped, so that one knee went down to the floor on a cube’s corner. Pain shot from knee to thigh, as the woman said:
‘Oh, jeeze, look at those cuts on his back, will you? Maybe it’s just as well we don’t know …’
Leg throbbing, he stood.
The tall one said: ‘Can’t we find anything to put over his face?’
The one with the ruined glove said: ‘You don’t need to do that. He’s just a rat.’
‘I know,’ the other said. ‘But a guy with a face like that – those scars on it. I got some of them myself. It ain’t right.’
‘The cuts. On his back,’ the woman said. ‘Do you think she beat him …?’
‘With perverts like that,’ the one with the glove said, ‘they’ll do anything. You just be happy it’s against the law to ask.’
‘A damned bitch –’
‘Come on now, I said! Watch it.’
‘Oh, yeah. I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ the woman said.
‘Can’t we just get something to put over his face –?’
‘Let’s just get going.’
They led him outside, into the rubble-strewn yard. Now the square was almost filled with people in beige, some standing, some strolling in pairs. They led him (‘No, this way, you stupid rat!’) to the entrance and out among the lush, grey vegetation, where a smaller transport waited.
In the back, through the grilled window, he saw her. The woman’s arms were strapped to her sides. There was a large bruise down her cheek. Blood had run from her hair.
A rag had been tied decently, if haphazardly, across her face; but there were no eyeholes.
‘Come on. Get in.’
‘Shall I strap him up?’
‘Naw. He won’t do anything.’
They put him in the front seat, then slid in beside him. One began to manoeuvre the controls.
One said: ‘Hey, that thing you took off him? Does that really make you know more stuff?’
‘Naw. It just makes you think you do. It can make you real sick, too – you see the way he was when I took it off him, moanin’ like that?’
‘I didn’t hear him moaning,’ one said. ‘What do you mean?’
One said: ‘Can’t we get something to put over his … face?’
‘They told me back at headquarters,’ the one who still held the ragged glove said. ‘If it was a normal man or woman, you couldn’t just take it off him like that. It would probably kill him. Something in the head. That’s how bad it is for you. But with a damned rat, it don’t do that much.’
‘I don’t know,’ the other said. ‘I’m not from around here, like you guys. I just can’t stand it.’ He’d found a piece of blue, oily cloth under the transport’s seat. ‘Let me get this on him, huh?’
After that, he couldn’t see where he was going at all.
‘You understand, a woman like that could’ve been dangerous,’ the man in charge said with a harshness that had grown each time he’d told the story of the way he’d tricked her into taking the carrier bag with its signal generator – three times now.
He picked up bits of foam, torn paper, crumpled lengths of red packing tape, handfuls of orange sand, discarded cubes, blue shreds fallen from the peeling walls and ceiling, putting them all in the triangular carton, while they went on talking and he paid almost as little attention to them as they did to him.
‘Still, I couldn’t just let her take him off like that without doing something.’
‘You had to do something,’ one man said.
‘He’s been back three days, huh?’ said another. ‘I wonder what she did to him? Well, I guess we’ll never know. That one’s too dumb to tell us, even if asking was legal.’
‘…dangerous,’ the man in charge repeated. ‘You never know in a case like that.’
‘Well, she must have done something,’ a newer
man said. He had taken his mask off of his clean, young cheeks. ‘It’s like he’s just not the same rat any more.’
‘What do you mean he’s not the same rat?’ another asked. ‘He looks the same to me, man.’
‘I worked with this one before she stole him, and I’ve been working with him since we got him back.’ The new man (six months) was short, brown, and smooth-faced as some bitch, and oversaw the worst jobs at the station – always going around without his face like a damned rat himself. ‘He’s doing all sorts of dumb things.’
‘If it’s the rat I think it is,’ another said, ‘he ain’t never been too smart, you know? You mean this one here, now –’
‘I don’t mean dumb-stupid,’ the unmasked man said. (Many of the other men didn’t like him.) ‘I mean dumb crazy.’
‘Like what?’ the man in charge said.
‘Well, you know where they have the work equipment all racked up along the inside of hangar doors – they got the work gloves sitting up on a rack of pegs so you can just take ’em down when you need them? Anyway, I was reading over my packing orders while about six rats were unloading supply drums. But I had to go get a replacement string from the vestibule console because the computer had messed up the printing on one. I guess they must have finished up the first tier of loading. When I got back, he had them rats all standing together in the hangar doorway; and he’d put one work glove on each one of them, on himself too. Just one, you see? And they were staring across the sand like they were waiting for something to come over the horizon.’
‘Man, I think you better put your mask back on.’ One man laughed. ‘You been getting too much sun.’
‘No, I mean it. You should’ve seen ’em. And he was right there, at the head of them, in his one glove, with this funny expression on his face; if he was a man and not a rat, you would have thought he was going to cry –’
‘I’ve worked places where they don’t let the rats run around with their faces all naked like that. Why don’t we –’