He reached out to touch the safer strings.
“It sure is a nice-looking—”
“Hello,” Katin said.
The Mouse grunted and went on tuning drones.
Katin sat down on the other side of the Mouse and watched for a few moments. “I just had a thought,” he said. “Nine times out of ten, when I just say ‘hello’ to someone in passing, or when the person I speak to is going off to do something else, I spend the next fifteen minutes or so rehearsing the incident, wondering whether my smile was taken for undue familiarity, or my sober expression improperly construed as coldness. I repeat the exchange to myself a dozen times, varying my tone of voice and trying to extrapolate the change this might cause in the other person’s reaction—”
“Hey.” The Mouse looked up from his syrynx. “It’s all right. I like you. I was just busy is all.”
“Oh.” Katin smiled; then the smile was pushed away by a frown. “You know, Mouse, I envy the captain. He’s got a mission. And his obsession precludes all that wondering about what other people think of him.”
“I don’t go through all that like you described,” the Mouse said. “Much.”
“I do.” Idas looked around. “Whenever I’m by myself, I do it all the—” and dropped his dark head to examine his knuckles.
“It’s pretty fair of him to let us all have this time off and fly the ship with Lynceos,” Katin said.
“Yeah,” said Idas. “I guess if—” and turned his hands over to follow the dark scribings on his palms.
“Captain’s got too many things to worry about,” the Mouse said. “And he doesn’t want them. It doesn’t take anything to get across this part of the trip, so he’d just as soon have something to occupy his mind. That’s what I think.”
“You think the captain has bad dreams?”
“Maybe.” The Mouse struck cinnamon from his harp, but so strongly their noses and the backs of their mouths burned.
Katin’s eyes teared.
The Mouse shook his head and turned down the knob Idas had touched. “Sorry.”
“Knight of …” Across the room Sebastian looked up from the game and wrinkled his nose. “… Swords.”
Katin, the only one with legs long enough, tipped the water below the ramp with the toe of his sandal. Colored gravel shook; Katin took out his recorder and flipped the recording pip:
“Novels were primarily about relationships.” He gazed at the distortions in the mosaic wall behind the leaves as he spoke. “Their popularity lay in that they belied the loneliness of the people who read them, people essentially hypnotized by the machinations of their own consciousness. The captain and Prince, for example, through their obsessions are totally related by—”
The Mouse leaned over and spoke into the jeweled box: “The captain and Prince probably haven’t even seen each other face to face for ten years!”
Katin, annoyed, clicked the recorder off. He considered a retort; found none. So he flipped it on again: “Remember that the society which allows this to happen is the society that has allowed the novel to become extinct. Bear in mind as you write that the subject of the novel is what happens between people’s faces when they talk to one another.” Off again.
“Why are you writing this book?” the Mouse asked. “I mean what do you want to do with it?”
“Why do you play your syrynx? I’m sure it’s for essentially the same reason.”
“Only if I spent all that time just getting ready, I’d never play a thing; and that’s a hint.”
“I begin to understand, Mouse. It’s not my aim, but my methods of achieving it which bug you, as it were.”
“Katin, I do understand what you’re doing. You want to make something beautiful. But it don’t work that way. Sure, I had to practice a long time to be able to play this thing. But if you’re going to make something like that, it’s got to make people feel and thrill to the life around them, even if it’s only that one guy who goes looking for it in the Alkane’s cellar. It won’t make it if you don’t understand some of that feeling yourself.”
“Mouse, you’re a fine, good, and beautiful person. You just happen to be wrong is all. Those beautiful forms you wield from your harp, I’ve looked at your face closely enough to know how much they’re impelled by terror.”
The Mouse looked up and wrinkles scored his forehead.
“I could sit and watch you play for hours. But they’re only momentary joys, Mouse. It’s only when all one knows of life is abstracted and used as an underlining statement of significant patterning that you have what is both beautiful and permanent. Yes, there is an area of myself I haven’t been able to tap for this work, one that flows and fountains in you, gushes from your fingers. But there’s a large part of you that’s playing to drown the sound of someone screaming in there.” He nodded to the Mouse’s scowl.
The Mouse made his sound again.
Katin shrugged.
“I’d read your book,” Idas said.
The Mouse and Katin looked up.
“I’ve read a … well, some books—” He looked back at his hands.
“You would?”
Idas nodded. “In the Outer Colonies, people read books, even novels sometimes. Only there aren’t very … well, only old—” He looked up at the frame against the wall: Lynceos lay like an unborn ghost. The captain was in the other. He looked back with loss in his face. “It’s very different in the Outer Colonies than it is—” He gestured around the ship, indicating all of Draco. “Say, do you know the place we’re going well?”
“Never been there,” Katin said.
The Mouse shook his head.
“I was wondering if you knew whether we could get hold of some—” He looked back down. “Never mind …”
“You’d have to ask them,” Katin said, pointing to the cardplayers across the room. “It’s their home.”
“Oh,” Idas said. “Yeah. I guess—” Then he pushed himself off the ramp, splashed into the water, waded onto the gravel, and walked, dripping, across the rug.
Katin looked at the Mouse and shook his head.
But the trail of water was completely absorbed in the blue piling.
“Six of Swords.”
“Five of Swords.”
“Excuse me, do any of you know—”
“Ten of Swords. My trick. Page of Cups.”
“—on this world we’re going. Do you know if—”
“The Tower.”
(“I wish that card hadn’t come up reversed in the captain’s reading,” Katin whispered to the Mouse. “Believe me, it portends no good.”)
“The Four of Cups.”
“My trick. Nine of Wands.”
“—we can get hold of—”
“Seven of Wands.”
“—any bliss?”
“The Wheel of Fortune. My trick is.” Sebastian looked up. “Bliss?”
The explorer who decided to name the outermost of the Dim, Dead Sister’s planets Elysium had indulged a poor joke. With all the planoforming devices available, it was still a frozen cinder ellipsing at trans-Plutonian distances from Her ghost-light, barren and uninhabited.
Someone had once proposed the doubtful theory that all three of the remaining worlds were really moons that had been in the shadow of a gigantic planet when the catastrophe occurred, and thus escaped the fury that had annihilated their protector. Poor moon if moon you are, Katin thought as they swept by. You’ve done no better as a world. A lesson there in pretension.
Once the explorer explored further, he regained his sense of proportion. His grin faltered at the middle world: he called it Dis.
His fate suggests the agenbite of inwit come too late. Flaunting the gods even once reaped a classical reward. His ship crashed on the innermost planet. It remained unnamed, and to this day was referred to as the other world, without pomp, circumstance, or capital letters. It was not till a second explorer came that the other world suddenly disclosed a secret. Those great plains, which from a dist
ance had been judged solidified slag, turned out to be oceans—of water, frozen. True, the top ten to a hundred feet was mixed with every sort of rubble and refuse. It was finally decided that the other world had once been entirely under two to twenty-five miles of water. Perhaps nineteen-twentieths had steamed into space when the Dim, Dead Sister went nova. This left a percentage of dry land just a little higher than Earth’s. The unbreathable atmosphere, the total lack of organic life, the sub-sub temperatures? Minor problems, compared to the gift of seas, and easily corrected. So humanity, in the early days of the Pleiades, encroached on the charred and frozen land. The other world’s oldest city—though not its biggest, for the commercial and economic shift over the past three hundred years had shifted the population—had been very carefully named: the City of Dreadful Night.
And the Roc put down by the black blister of the City tipping the Devil’s Claw.
“… of eighteen hours.” And that was the end of the info-voice.
“Is this home enough for you?” the Mouse asked.
Leo gazed across the field. “I never this world walked,” the fisherman sighed. Beyond, the sea of broken ice stretched toward the horizon. “But ‘great segmented and six-flippered nhars in schools across that sea move. The fishermen for them with harpoons long as five tall men together hunt.’ The Pleiades it is; home enough it is.” He smiled, and his frosted breath rose to dim his blue eyes.
“This is your world, isn’t it, Sebastian?” Katin asked. “You must feel good coming home.”
Sebastian pushed a dark wing away that beat before his eyes. “Still mine, but …” He looked around, shrugged. “I from Thule come. It a bigger city is; a quarter of the way around the other world it lies. From here very far is; and very different.” He looked up at the twilight sky. Sister was high, a bleary pearl behind a gun-colored sheath of cloud. “Very different.” He shook his head.
“Our world, yes,” Tyÿ said. “But not our home at all.”
The captain, a few steps before them, looked back when they spoke. “Look.” He pointed to the gate. Beneath the scar his face was fixed. “No dragon on his column coils. This home is. For you and you and you and me, this home is!”
“Home enough,” Leo repeated. But his voice was guarded.
They followed the captain out through the serpentless gates.
The landscape held all the colors of burning:
Copper: it oxidizes to a mottled, yellow-shot green.
Iron: black and red ash.
Sulfur: its oxide is an oozy, purplish brown.
The colors smeared in from the dusty horizon, and were repeated in the walls and towers of the City. Once Lynceos shaded the silver fringe of his lashes to look at the sky where a swarm of shadows like mad, black leaves winked on the exhausted sun, capable of no more than evening, even at noon. He looked back at the creature on Sebastian’s shoulder that spread its wings now and rattled its leash. “And how does the gilly feel to be home?” He reached out to chuck the perched thing, only to jerk his white hand back from a dark claw. The twins looked at one another and laughed.
They descended into the City of Dreadful Night.
Halfway down, the Mouse began to walk backward up the escalator. “It’s … it’s not Earth.”
“Huh?” Katin glided by, saw the Mouse, and began backtracking himself.
“Look at it all down there, Katin. It isn’t the Solar System. It isn’t Draco.”
“This trip is your first time away from Sol, isn’t it?”
The Mouse nodded.
“It won’t be too different.”
“But just look at it, Katin.”
“The City of Dreadful Night,” Katin mused. “All those lights. They’re probably afraid of the dark.”
They stick-legged a moment more, gazing across the checkerboard: ornate gaming pieces, a huddle of kings, queens, and rooks towered above knights and pawns.
“Come on,” the Mouse said.
The twenty-meter blades of metal that made up the giant stair swept them down.
“We better catch up with Captain.”
The streets near the field were crowded with cheap rooming houses. Marquees arched the walkways, advertising dance halls and psychoramas. The Mouse looked through the transparent wall at people swimming in a recreation club. “It isn’t that different from Triton. Sixpence @sg? Prices are sure a hell of a lot lower, though.”
Half the people on the streets were obviously crew or officers. The streets were crowded. The Mouse heard music. Some of it was from the open doors of bars.
“Hey, Tyÿ.” The Mouse pointed to an awning. “Did you ever work in a place like that?”
“In Thule, yes.”
Expert Readings: the letters glittered, shrank, and expanded on the sign.
“We stay in the City—”
They turned to the Captain.
“—five days.”
“Are we going to put up on the ship?” the Mouse asked. “Or here in town where we can have some fun?”
Take that scar. Band it with three close lines near the top: the captain’s forehead creased. “You all suspect the danger we’re in.” He swept his eyes over the buildings. “No. We’re not staying either here or on the ship.” He stepped into the wings of a communications booth. Not bothering to swing the panels shut, he passed his hand before the inductance plates. “This Lorq Von Ray is. Yorgos Setsumi?”
“I if his advisory meeting over is will see.”
“An android of him will do,” Lorq said. “Just a minor favor I want.”
“He always to you in person, Mr. Von Ray, likes to talk. Just a moment, I he available is think.”
A figure materialized in the viewing column. “Lorq, so long now you I have not seen. What for you can I do?”
“Is anybody using Taafite on Gold for the next ten days?”
“No. I’m in Thule now, and will be for the next month. I gather you’re in the City and need a place to stay?”
Katin had already noted the captain’s slide between dialects.
There were unrecordable similarities between the captain’s voice and this Setsumi’s that illuminated both. Katin recognized common eccentricities that began to define for him an upper-class Pleiades accent. He looked at Tyÿ and Sebastian to see if they responded to it. Only a small movement in the muscles around the eyes, but there. Katin looked back at the viewing column.
“I have a party with me, Yorgy.”
“Lorq, my houses are your houses. I hope you and your guests enjoy your stay.”
“Thanks, Yorgy.” Lorq stepped from the booth.
The crew looked among themselves.
“There’s a possibility,” Lorq said, “that the next five days I spend on the other world will be the last I spend anywhere.” He searched intently for their reactions. As intently, they tried to hide them. “We might as well pass the time pleasantly. We this way go.”
The mono crawled up the rail and flung them out across the City. “That Gold is?” Tyÿ asked Sebastian.
The Mouse, beside them, pressed his face against the glass. “Where?”
“There.” Sebastian pointed across the squares. Among the blocks, a molten river faulted the City.
“Hey, just like on Triton,” the Mouse said. “Is the core of this planet melted by Illyrion too?”
Sebastian shook his head. “The whole planet too big for that is. Only the space under each city. That crack Gold is called.”
The Mouse watched the brittle, igneous outcroppings fall back along the bright fissure.
“Mouse?”
“Huh?” He looked up as Katin pulled out his recorder. “What do you want?”
“Do something.”
“What?”
“I’m trying an experiment. Do something.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Anything that comes into your head. Go on.”
“Well …” The Mouse frowned. “All right.”
The Mouse did.
T
he twins, from the other end of the car, turned to stare.
Tyÿ and Sebastian looked at the Mouse, then at one another, then back at the Mouse.
“Characters,” said Katin into his recorder, “are fixed most vividly by their actions. The Mouse stepped back from the window, then swung his arm around and around. From his expression, I could tell he was both amused by my surprise at the violence of his action, at the same time curious if I were satisfied. He dropped his hands back on the window, breathing a little hard, and flexed his knuckles on the sill—”
“Hey,” the Mouse said. “I just swung my arm. The panting, my knuckles … that wasn’t part—”
“‘Hey,’ the Mouse said, hooking his thumb in the hole at the thigh of his pants. ‘I just swung my arm. The panting, my knuckles … that wasn’t part—’”
“Goddamn!”
“The Mouse unhooked his thumb, made a nervous fist, ejaculated, ‘God damn!’ then turned away in frustration. There are three types of actions: purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters, to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.” Katin looked toward the front of the car.
The captain gazed through the curving plate that lapped the roof. His yellow eyes fixed Her consumptive light that pulsed like fire-spots in a giant cinder. The light was so weak he did not squint at all.
“I am confounded,” Katin admitted to his jeweled box, “nevertheless. The mirror of my observation turns and what first seemed gratuitous I see enough times to realize it is a habit. What I suspected as habit now seems part of a great design. While what I originally took as purpose explodes into gratuitousness. The mirror turns again, and the character I thought obsessed by purpose reveals his obsession is only a habit; his habits are gratuitously meaningless; while those actions I construed as gratuitous now reveal a most demonic end.”
The yellow eyes had fallen from the tired star. Lorq’s face erupted about the scar at some antic from the Mouse that Katin had missed.
Rage, Katin pondered. Rage. Yes, he is laughing. But how is anyone supposed to distinguish between laughter and rage in that face?
But the others were laughing too.
Yet some way, somehow, we do.
“What’s the smoke?” the Mouse asked, stepping around the steaming grate in the cobbles.