“Yeah.”
She looked up. There were tears on her face, and great confusion under them.
So he told her again: “Yeah.”
The grimace again. “Yeah, what?”
“Yeah, I can use the john.”
She held the rod, looked at him, and finally took a long breath.
“But they didn’t have one at the station. For rats. So they told us to use the cage. Then we slept in it—”
“Jeeze …!” she repeated. “All right, when you have to,” she said, with another breath, “please do. Use it, I mean. The john in back, there. I … I know I’ve got to tell you everything. And tell you very clearly. For heaven’s sake, I’ve got a whole carton in the rear compartment full of instructions on how to handle rats—and I’ve been afraid to read more than a cube or two of any of them for fear I’ll come across some incontrovertible fact that’ll tell me this whole thing just isn’t going to work! And then—” She looked away, glanced back, looked away again—“I’ve got this machine that’s supposed to make all those instructions unnecessary anyway, or close to it, and—” She took another breath—“and I’m terrified!” She blinked at him, dark eyes near the surface of a dark face, while he tried to remember which emotion terror was. “I mean, if you could only … I mean, could you—If you might just put your arm around me, hold me—firmly, and perhaps even love me just a—love? Oh, what am I talking about! If you just wouldn’t hate me—”
She stopped, amidst her uninteresting (to him) confusion: because he’d moved over on the bench, put his arm around her, and held her, firmly.
“Shit …” she whispered. After a few moments she asked: “You don’t hate me for making you do … this?”
“No.”
Outside the windows, near dunes moved quickly before distant ones. On the instrument board, red and yellow needles quivered on blue and black dials.
She put her head against his shoulder, took another long breath, then raised her head again. “Then I guess anything’s possible in this man’s universe, right?”
He didn’t answer because, again, he didn’t know. But she didn’t hit him or yell at him as had often happened back at the station and sometimes even at Muct when people got upset around him.
What she said finally was: “Well, I guess there’s nothing to do but get on with it.” Apparently that meant, for the next five hours, driving over the beveled sands. Ten minutes into them, she said, gently: “Take your arm away now and sit back where you were, please.” So he did.
An hour after that she said:
“You know, even with two families in Kingston and three very fine jobs that took me back and forth over almost half this world, from Ferawan to Gilster—do you know, I was miserable? Miserable! I thought about suicide. I thought about becoming a rat myself. I went to the Institute once, sat there for a whole day, watching one pathetic creature after another push in through that black leather curtain and not come out. I must have put my own number back and taken a new one from the end of the list over a dozen times, before it hit me: I don’t have to become a rat to solve my problem. I could get a rat. For myself. I mean, that would have to be better. For me, for what I wanted. So you see …” and was quiet, then, for more than an hour.
Then she said: “Look at the way the light glitters on the grains caught at the edge of the sandshield.” She nodded at a corner of the window. “And there, at the horizon, sometimes you get that same, vaguely prismatic effect, a kind of colored glitter in the basic tan—like you do when the grains are up close. That’s because human beings are the basic height we are—if we were less than one meter tall or more than three meters tall, it wouldn’t happen—and because this world is the diameter it is, so that the horizon is the distance away it is from people who happen to be about as tall as we are, and because the average sand crystal here is as big as it is and because the atmosphere filters out the particular frequencies it does. One of the two great poets who came in the second colonial ship to this world noted the phenomenon, worked out its parameters on an early computer, and said, in a beautiful poem, that this effect would define the lives of humans here as long as we stayed. I suppose he didn’t realize how fast there would be sandless cities all around the equator. You know, I learned the poem by heart when I was ten, but I never saw the actual thing itself until three months ago, when I took this transport and struck off from the population belt here toward the south pole. And now, though I remember the poem and the story about it, I can’t remember either the poet’s name or the poem’s title. Do you know—? But no, you wouldn’t know things like that. Not on this world. Still, it’s a beautiful thing to watch and realize that someone else, two hundred fifty years ago, watched it too; and thought it was beautiful.”
And hours later she said:
“This is crazy. This is more than crazy. It’s stupid! If they catch us, I don’t want to think about what’ll happen. What I want, you’re just not supposed to have, here. I never thought of our world, with its endless deserts and orange sky and multilayered equatorial cities and great canyons and underground waterways, as coy. But it is! It makes slaves, then says that individuals can’t own them, only institutions—because somehow institutions make slavery more humane! Well, I want a slave, my own slave, to do exactly what I want, the way I want it done, without question or complaint—a slave to do what I want to make me happy. The Yellows are going to win this coming election. I know it—everyone knows it! Well, we’re heading for Gray territory. We’ll hole up there for two weeks. After the election, during the resultant confusion in the Gray sectors, records will vanish, order will disappear, and who knows what moments of freedom might occur in the chaos or for how long they’ll hold stable. Happiness! Yours?” She grinned at him. “Mine? No, not yours I guess. But if I could, I’d make you free—before I made you serve me! I really would. Only I can’t. So the only thing left is for you to make me free.” She snorted. “Or happy. Is it the same thing? Is happiness slavery? That’s what they tell you at the Institute, isn’t it? Slavery is happiness. Accepting slavery, becoming a rat, is happiness. Well, I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it at all! And even though you’re a slave, I hope you learn that! Learn that from me. I swear, if I thought I could teach you that, I’d turn you loose this instant and be on my way. There are some things more important—than I am, to me. Nobody else believes me when I say it. But it’s true. Do you believe me—? No, don’t answer. I don’t want you to say anything now.”
Later she said:
“I have this machine—have you ever heard of GI? General Information? Tell me: have you?”
“No. “
“Well, I’m not surprised. It doesn’t really exist on this world. It does up on others, though. They’ve even got it on our larger moon. But they’ve legislated against it here, planetside. Oh, there’re other worlds where it’s common. Can you imagine? Living on a world where, if you want to know something—anything, anything at all!—all you have to do is think about it, and the answer pops into your head? That’s supposed to be how it works. Even our Free-Informationists are scared to go that far. They think we’d slide over into Cultural Fugue in a minute! Well, we just might anyway, the way this world rolls. But you see, I lave something that does almost the same thing. It’s even more illegal than stealing you—they’ll call it theft, you know, if we’re ever found out. I had to come near killing three times to get it. And worlds with as many ways of killing the mind as this one has don’t take kindly to killing the body. Anyway, around the population belt there’re lots of computer-generated data broadcasts all over the place. Some of the sorting and decoding is a little difficult, but with some of the standard encyclopedic programs and … it’s for you, you see? Do you understand why?”
“No.”
“Well, I suppose I don’t, either, really. But some people think that the only thing you lose at the RAT Institute is information—not just facts and figures, but information on how to process the information you have, how t
o deal with the new information that comes in. And if you can replace or supplement …”
She stopped again.
She looked at him a while.
Then, without talking, she drove some more, like someone who’d been telling a very complicated story about themselves only to find, in the middle, they did not believe it either.
Hours later, she said:
“When I was a kid, my family co-op broke up, and I got shipped off to a platechtonics study group in the north—because none of the adults really wanted to take all those seven- and eight-year-olds with them. I’ve read that most worlds where humans live today are basically deserts, of one sort or another, like ours. Wet worlds are rare, and us human beings are supposed to have come from a world that was largely water. That’s why—at least I used to think so when I was nine—it seemed the most colossal waste to live in the middle of a huge industrial tinkertoy where every day I offered my minuscule help to the basic project which was pumping millions and millions of gallons down into the fault lines in order to hydraulically relieve the pressures that built up and caused those catastrophic monthly earthquakes the northern mountains were so famous for back in the days of the first colonists. I mean, though we’d just about stopped the earthquakes, nobody lived there. Anyway, at night I used to ride out on a sand-scooter from the compound into the desert—a very different kind of desert from here, with purplish rocks all over it, and little scratches on them that for a while made the geologists believe there might have been life on this world before we humans got here. In the north, sometimes you get breaks in the second-layer cloud level; and when it happens at night, you can look up and actually see stars—other suns, where you know, with some of them, other worlds are circling, where other humans, and maybe even aliens, are living in entirely different ways, in entirely different cultures. I would park my scooter in the dark, climb up in the headlight glare onto some slanted rock, lie down on my back, and gaze at a star. Even with the platechtonics station relieving the pressure by pumping all that water, you still got little rumbles and quivers every few hours or so. Sometimes, I’d feel one underneath me while I lay there in the night, and I would think: suppose the platechtonics station just broke down, and there was a pressure buildup along some major fault line, and suddenly we had one of those giant earthquakes we used to scare each other with, telling stories about when I was a child at the equator—an incredible earthquake, where the whole skin of the northern desert was cracked up and hurled into the sky, and me, lying on my rock, I’d be hurled up with it. And suppose I was thrown so hard I went up into the night, all the way to one of those stars, one of those other, better, different worlds … At nine, I thought they all must be better than this one. I really used to want it to happen, in some kind of vague and awful way. And I also used to wonder, lying there, searching for holes in the nighttime clouds, if there was anything that I, nine years old and alone in all that desert, could think or do that, without an earthquake, would actually reach one of those other worlds and change it, affect it in some way so that everyone on it would look up and realize that a world away something as important as a great poem had been written or a new technological infrasystem had been solved … poems and infrasystems, that’s what we studied at the platechtonics station when we weren’t pumping water. At nine, I didn’t even know that more than half the people in the population belt of this world probably didn’t know what a poem or an infrasystem was! Today, I wonder what all that childish night yearning did for me. Gave me grandiose ambitions, I guess.” She laughed. “Only not so grandiose anymore. I don’t want to make another world sit up and take notice—or even this one. I just want a little pleasure and satisfaction in my own … world? Should that be the word for it? I don’t think so. Maybe if I hadn’t wanted so much as a child, I wouldn’t have wanted … well, you. Today. This way.”
He didn’t know what a poem or an infrasystem was either, but for some reason the memory of the canyon, with its rocks and clouds he’d once shot through, returned. He tried to put both words with the memory, as he had once tried to speak properly the signs, Radical Anxiety Termination.
She frowned—possibly because his lips were moving, in much the way that, years before, his feet had gone on shifting in the sand after he could no longer walk.
She pulled the braking lever. Through the sandshield, brown and red evening reached in to color dials and switches.
The transport stopped shaking.
The desert stopped moving.
“Well,” she said for more than the fifth time, “let’s get on with it.”
Sliding from under the restraining bar, she pushed some small bubble-switch with a foreknuckle.
Behind them, six metal bars fell into the floor, and the bottom of the left wall swung out an inch. Pneumatic arms on the ceiling flexed, and the wall swung up to make an awning over the sand.
Heat slathered in over the top of his foot, flopped against his shin, slid in between his fingers spread on his knee. Then, under the awning’s shadow, sand divided as though a blade, parallel to the floor, had sliced it, as some force shield went into operation. The regulator thrummed; cool returned.
“Come on,” she said.
He turned in the chair, not knowing where she wanted him to go.
The wall-become-roof shaded a flat of sand scarred on three sides by the shield’s bottom.
She walked to the cabin’s cluttered rear, tugged aside one carton, pushed another with her sandal toe, stooped over a third, and pulled out a circular plate with worn straps on one side. Slipping her fingers through, she stood and walked back to the middle of the studded floor as, plugged to some many-jawed connector on the plate’s rim, the pink cable dragged from the carton, flopping coil on coil. “Well, let’s get—”
She paused. Then, with a frown more to herself than to him, she said:
“… I mean, get up from your seat and go stand out on the sand there.”
He did. It was a jump. The sand inside the shield markings was cool.
She came to the floor’s edge, and stepped down the half meter, awkwardly, one knee stretching her frayed pants there, her other foot making a wide print, sliding where it landed.
She walked towards him, fingering the plate.
A coil flopped over the floor’s edge to mark the sand.
“This may tickle.” She did something with two fingers at her wrist; the plate hummed.
He watched her pass it over his shoulder. It more than tickled. It burned—for a moment, then reduced to a faint vibration in the skin.
On his shoulder where she’d brushed was a streak of gray-brown powder, which she beat away with her free hand, revealing clean, red-brown skin and its feathering of hair. “My lord! You are filthy!” She moved the plate down over his arm, around it, beneath it, brushing the powdered dirt and skin away. “That’s amazing. I honestly hadn’t realized you were that color.” Her skin was brown with little red at all.
She rubbed the joint between his upper and lower arm, now on the blackened elbow, now on the crook where veins wriggled across the high-standing ligament, banded with paler creases—till, with the third pass, it was all one color.
She rubbed his hand, the back, the palm. It made the sides of his fingers itch. Once she turned the plate on its strap to the back of her own hand and took his two great ones in hers, stepping away.
One arm glowed clean in evening light. His other was the fouled grime-gray that, since his return to the station, he’d never thought of as other than part of him.
“Rats aren’t supposed to forget stuff they knew before they went to the Institute. Do you mean to tell me you’ve never used one of these before?”
“I didn’t …” he began, unsure if the question was about meaning, telling, or use.
“‘Let’s get on with it …’ Your father never called you in from some social therapy group like that? Where I grew up, that always meant to a kid it was time to come in and get clean—with one of these.”
“No.” He frowned at her, realizing she wanted something more. “Didn’t have no father.” But he wasn’t sure if that would do.
She dropped his hands, stepped up again, reversed the plate again and moved it over his cheeks, his hair, his forehead. With a quick turn she troweled its edge along the crease beside his left nostril, beside the right, now up behind his right ear, behind the left, across his eyebrows—“Close your eyes.” (He already had.)—brushing off the slough every two or three passes. “Pay attention to what I’m doing. Because I’m going to want you to do the same thing to me, later. Having someone give you a clean-up like you were a little kid is the most sensuous thing in the world, I think.” She passed the plate on to his chest, down his stomach, along his hard, dry flank. “Does it feel good?”
“Yeah.”
She gave him a grin and a small push on one shoulder. He sagged backwards a little and came forward again. So she said: “I meant, turn again.”
He started turning.
“Eh … stop. With your back to me. No, like that—”
The tickling dropped down one shoulder, began again along the valley of his spine, then repeated down the other. It moved about one hip, circled on one buttock.
And stopped. “Wait a minute.” She stepped past him.
He watched her put the plate down on the transport floor and climb back in. Again she squatted in the shadowed clutter. When she stood, stepping back to the edge, she held a … black, ragged glove? “We might as well try this, too.” She jumped to the sand with the awkwardness often shown by the very tall. “Hold out your hand. No, the clean one.”
His knuckles were large as sun-wrinkled fruit, his wide nails still as gnawed as in childhood.