He had just finished a six-volume set, Classics of World Philosophy (selections from the major works of Tondi, Fordiku, as well as the complete proceedings of the Vedrik School, Seminars and Publications for the years ’82-’89), when she said: “I know you can do it at that speed now—” (He looked up because she had touched his shoulder—) “but I want you to stay sane so that you can appreciate some of the things I want to do later.” Her fingers moved against his neck. “Stand up, now. Come. Come with me.” He stood—the pains in his knees that came with squatting over the last years still surprised him.
Had it been days he’d squatted? Or hours?
In the dim light she looked at him with a kind of bland approval. Suddenly her face twisted. Her full lips puckered. “Phttt!” Saliva struck his cheek, the corner of his lip. At the same time she grasped his shoulders, thrust him out so that the back of his heel hit the carton. He heard cubes fall over cubes. Then she pulled him against her. “Yes …” she whispered. “Yes, the look on his face—your shock, your shame, your humiliation, your revulsion, your astonishment … I don’t know. It does something to me. Breaks my heart, I suppose.”
He’d felt no shock, no revulsion, only the mildest of sympathetic pains above his buttocks at the sudden standing, the slightest surprise at her action, the faintest curiosity at her motivation. Over her shoulder, he reached up to wipe his jaw with the hard heel of his hand—
“Come.” She released him, stepping back. “No, don’t wipe it off. Let it dry there. Come, come with me now.” Holding his wrist, she led him back toward the instruments. “Tell me, what have you been reading at so diligently for the past three minutes?”
“I …?” Perhaps, unlike the Institute’s gamma lasers, the glove did change who you were. He certainly did not feel like the same person he’d been … three minutes ago? Years and monsters and ages and cultures and kilometers and feelings ago? “I read Sand and The Sands and Lyrikz …” and when he’d recited a dozen more titles, she stopped him with a laugh. Sitting in the driver’s seat, she lay both hands on the thrust rod. She must have stopped the transport while he’d been crouched at the carton.
Outside, on low, headlights lay dim orange over sand and pebbles.
“What a strange view of world culture you must have!” She leaned forward and shook her head. “When I was packing those, I called myself taking all the important, profound, and indispensable titles I could—nearly filled the box. But one of the more eccentric librarians at the internment compound I’d gotten permission to rifle had put up a whole shelf full of cubes of women writers or texts about women. She was convinced nobody could be truly educated unless they’d read them—though nobody I ever met had, except her, maybe. Anyway.” She pressed another pedal again. Outside, headlights brightened. “I decided I might as well take those too, as a lark, and loaded the box up with cubes from her special shelf. I’m afraid they were the top three inches in the carton. From the titles, it sounds to me like that’s what you got stuck in!”
“But …” he began.
She pushed the thrust bar. The transport lurched on into desert night.
“But Horeb—Saya Artif—” he said, “was the most famous writer … in the world.” He added: “For almost thirty years,” and felt odd making a contestatory statement about his world; till now it had never occurred to him he’d had one.
“She may well have been,” the woman said. “But that thirty years was many years ago. You can be sure: most people today haven’t even heard of her—which I suppose was my eccentric librarian friend’s point in putting that shelf together in the first place. You say you can drive this. I want you—” She leaned forward and punched a lot of buttons below the e-output meter—” to get me to these coordinates.” She frowned. “Can you?”
He leaned forward to look at the numbers that had appeared on the locale screen. “No …” The coordinates were six-figured ones, and the only system he was used to from the Muct was the two-figured one for finding your way around within a city. But, certainly, it must work more or less the same way as the two-figure system. “Yeah.” Coordinates were coordinates. He could figure them out. “I can.”
“Good.” She slipped from her seat. “Then I’m going to sleep, in the back.”
He slid over onto the driver’s plush cushion and, with gloved and naked hand, took the bar.
He drove for an hour or more and did not look back because, finally, he had not changed very much from who he had been before. Then—once—he did, because he was curious about where she was sleeping, and curiosity was, in itself, a curious emotion and, now, nowhere near as frightening as it had once been.
She’d pulled out a piece of canvas and lay on it, on the plastic flooring, snoring, one canvas corner pulled over her shoulder: a bed, he thought, harder than sand.
The town was one of those old-fashioned attempts at ecological self-sufficiency in a world with no ecology to begin with. The description was not his, but had been written by an off-world woman a hundred years ago to describe her entrance at dawn into a town more than four thousand kilometers east. Recalling it, however, made him want to look out the transport window more clearly. (It also made him want to return to the carton.) This town was five observation towers—and places where, no doubt, a sixth and seventh, now fallen or pulled down, had stood—with forests of gray-green elephant lichen between.
Dawn streaked green and blue behind them under a dark red sky, still awaiting day’s orange. On the locale-screen, the first four mobile coordinates had closed with the stasile ones she’d punched out last night. They rolled in on a worn road walled with wire mesh to hold the lichens’ wrinkled hides back from the shoulder. He watched the delta discrepancy in the last two figures decrease.
Above, on high trestles, great translucent plates would cast down their blue or red or green light onto the rippling vegetation later in the day. He had seen them as a child in the great city parks in which, from time to time, he’d slept. It was only a little surprising to look at them now and know, for the first time (because Seb-Voy had once explained their workings to Sharakik), what they were for—though now the light slipped under them, rather than fell through, to put copper trim on the raddled edges of the barky growths.
Delta dropped from twelve to eleven, which meant their destination should be visible in another minute.
Through the side window they passed a yard stacked with wrecked transports like the one he drove. Out the window across, he glimpsed an acre-wide silt-vat, through which crusted mixers spattered back and forth in the organic slush. He rolled over a stretch of road gouged about with kids’ graffiti, as were many roads in the southeastern geosectors. He had seen such things before—old transport yards, roadway graffiti—in the much larger cities in which he’d grown up; but now, because the Nu-7 poet had written a poem comparing the passion of young love to a blind child’s exploring such a junked transport lot, and because the villain of Sand had drowned the enraged clone-dogs in such a silt-vat, and because Fordiku, on a dawn not so different from this, when hiking out of Kingston, had stopped to talk to an adolescent girl busy cutting graffiti in the road just like the ones which, moments ago, had made the transport treads go thump, and from the encounter had begun to construct her time-and-text theory that had dominated—well, not all of world philosophy, but at least one narrow, academic strand of it for nearly a century, he saw them not as so flat and so unknown you could not even call them puzzling, but rather as historical and curious, specific and resonant.
The delta dropped from two to one and began to roll down through point nine, point eight, point seven …
The plaza entrance he pulled through was littered with desert slough, even this far in. Acrylic greens and yellows chipped or lapped loose from peeling advertisement statues. The transport halted on asphalt covered with large red circles, indicating parking. (At Muct, it had been small white ones, but that was in another geosector, in another part of … his world.) He sat a long time, looking out the sc
arred sandshield.
A bank of mobile lichen furled and unfurled slowly below the chin of a woman’s giant head, cast from some sort of flesh-toned ceramic. Panels of colored metal hung before her. Now and then one, turning on its cable, revealed a smile’s corner, a great nostril’s curve, an eye’s iris.
A tall old man stood in a doorway whose metal hinges, even from here, looked loose. His naked chest was snarled with white hair. His brown head, within a circle of white, was bald. Over the next ten minutes he picked and prodded and pulled at the wires that, twisted together, made up his belt buckle, till his pants fell to his ankles. He stepped from them, looked till he found the green rag he must have hung on the door handle minutes before, and, trying to tie it across his face, stumbled unsteadily across the yard, to disappear among the signs.
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 kilometers 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 traveling 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 kilometers in toward 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 toward the entrance.
“Really do it,” she called after him. Humor 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, onto 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 colored 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 onto 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 insistenc
e with which, for three hours, he’d stalked from encounter to encounter while all thought had been toward 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 humor 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, marveling 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 waterways 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.”