When I got home I did something I’ve done only perhaps six times in my life: I cut my nails, usually a normal length, usually clean (like now), as short as I could, till the nubs hurt, some of them even bleeding a little, and squatted on the green flags to rub them painfully in the dirt beside the pool in the front yard before our yard—till my mother, Max, came out to ask what in the world I was doing.
All I could do was say that, honestly, I didn’t know.
I wanted to tell you just of those two images, you see: the hands—human and evelm—I saw in the nursery and the hands—evelm and human—that I saw struggling together in the interlevel in my beam. The curve those fingers made, those talons formed, were parentheses marking out something I’ve always felt totally within me, solid as home itself. Yet what is between them works to disrupt that totality, both from home itself and from worlds beyond it. The same goes for what is outside them. Why, for instance, are they split by the memory of that aunt (if she was an aunt) who could not remember my name? Perhaps because, with the Family trying to establish the dream of a classic past as pictured on a world that may never even have existed in order to achieve cultural stability, and with the Sygn committed to the living interaction and difference between each woman and each world from which the right stability and play may flower, in a universe where both information and misinformation are constantly suspect, reviewed and drifting as they must be (constantly) by and between the two, a moment when either information or misinformation turns out to be harmless must bloom, when surrounded by the workings of desire and terror, into the offered sign of all about it, making and marking all about it innocent by contamination.
3.
WHICH BRINGS ME TO the second time I heard of Rhyonon or Rat Korga.
Jump weeks, worlds, stars away from them all—my home, Free-Kantor, that plain of rotting vines.
The new jobi was herding machines up and out of the frozen ammonia sludge of southern Ydris across one thousand seven hundred light years to the butane winds roaring about the canyons of northern Krush. What kind of machines? The large mechanical sort, with moving parts and switches you couldn’t just talk into opening or closing.
In my tiny cell of the tremendous stellar freighter, I suddenly began to receive those distressing messages that basically suggest that the job1 is being woven through by all sorts of restraining strands from the Web. Finally, there on some station hovering among Krush’s six moons above that deep green disk (a coppery sand, not vegetation), much to the blustering frustration of my new employer1 somewhere down on that heavy world below, the whole thing was called off.
Spiders purred: “When you began, the Sygn was up and the Family down in that geosector of Krush. But since then, it’s reversed. And I’m afraid the conflict has necessitated terminating your project …” So, despite all my descriptions and redescriptions, the hulking, clanking, greasy cargo was shunted off toward Krush’s hot little sun into which it would never actually fall because it would have already vanished, blown away as so much scalding mist.
Then the so friendly invitation from a high-ranking Black Widow that you cannot afford to refuse if you want to stay in my profession1: “By Okk, I think you should come to a little conference the Web’s holding out about seven light years in toward the center! We can bring you up to date on what’s operable and what isn’t in this particular cluster.” It’s good business since they have to pay the kill-fee on the job. “It changes so rapidly in this situation …”
The “situation,” of course, is the conflict between the Family and the Sygn: in their differing methods of preventing Cultural Fugue—largely on worlds (as more than one commentator has noted) where it wasn’t very likely to happen anyway. Still, as the interstellar agency in charge of the general flow of information about the universe in many places, the Web is near to being torn apart by the fracas. The first ripple of Dyeths sat just on the edge of that fracas, watching, yes, but (according to one version) completely above such adolescent hugger-mugger, or (according to another, that you have to go rather far afield of any Dyeth to hear) green with envy that we were not in the center of those romantic schemes. After all, my seven-times great-grandmother Gylda Dyeth worked for the Family potentate, pontiff, and poet, Vondramach Okk, doing for her, I like to think, much of what I do now for employers1 all over the habitable worlds. Common sense, however, tells me it must have been a much darker enterprise she was involved in. Vondramach herself, with her own dark beginnings and darker demise, was at one point sole ruler of seventeen worlds—four of which destroyed themselves in Cultural Fugue (and that’s a lot!), while the Sygn, in those pre-Web days, was the most famous institution in the worlds. That’s real wealth; that’s real fame—of a sort that simply can’t exist today. The Web won’t let them, thank all the star-flung night!
At any rate, you go off those seven light years to some glass and plastic L-5 station, some baroquely subterranean conference center (from inside you might confuse either one with the corridors of Kantor; and you don’t see much outside these days) and attend seminars and discussion groups and rapid briefing sessions in everything from local ecologies to interworld legalistics, all spiced with endlessly varied teaching aids and opinion-nudgers. You absorb and file away and forget vast amounts of data about what information is, in certain situations, as well as what information is or is not acceptable in this or that part of this or that world.
It was at one of these that I struck up my acquaintance with Clym. I question now if it was desire that first made me notice … him, the bald little gorilla with the tattoos. Perhaps, despite those leafy emblems above his collar and below his cuffs, it was just easier, in an alien field, to want someone with ankles and cheekbones so much like my own.
When I first noticed him, he was deep in conversation with a very tall woman whose epicanthic folds flattened a brown, round face. She had a broad nose and an awkward, animated air. They sat together in one of the apricot lounges, gossiping softly, leaning together, smiling a lot, his short muscular body all in black, she, towering and shirtless, wearing a skullcap tight enough to suggest that underneath she had as little hair as he did. The only phrase I actually caught from her was: “… by my roots on Eurd, Skychi Clym!” which suggested that she’d spent time around the Family. Well, I thought, if I had, I wouldn’t advertise it at an official Web function.
Then, only hours later, she passed me in the hall. Her green metallic pants were probably meant to suggest she was with a world-based advisory group connected with, but not of, the Web—which also seemed incongruous: on a chain around her neck, hanging on the bony place between her breasts, she wore a cyhnk. (This one was a two-centimeter gold bar with a tangle of gold wires at one end, on each wire’s tip a ruby.) Well, she could be a member of the Sygn. It all seemed ludicrously contradictory. More, it seemed rather naive, if not impolitic, to flaunt emblems of either—not to mention both—mutually antagonistic faction on what should have been neutral territory controlled by an adversary (the Web) of both.
But I was talking of Clym. More out of boredom than real lust (for his hands were just like mine), I finally announced: “Yes, I believe I would like to make love with you.” (He had the learning booth just behind mine, and we were always bumping into each other—literally—when we reported for briefing sessions.) Mine the usual trepidation about approaching sexually someone from, probably, a highly different culture. Clym refused, politely enough, I suppose. But he also became far more friendly over the next few days. It was he, finally, who suggested we take a shuttle off somewhere else—anywhere else—during the next break. “Why don’t we go hit rock?” was his quaint suggestion.
4.
THE LANDSCAPE WE ENDED up in was all red sand and brown stone. Minuscule atmosphere was kept over us by obviously artificial means: an indigo glow ribboned the horizon. A sun was about to rise—or perhaps had just set. We must have been on some large moon, or small world, awaiting planoforming; but I honestly don’t remember which. “I do belie
ve,” Clym sighed, heaving back his shoulders in their tight black covering, “that we’re actually out of Web security. Isn’t it nice to know nothing you say here will be used against you?”
“That’s assuming both of us can be trusted.” But I smiled when I said it.
Clym glanced at me with very blue eyes—a flower tattooed on his cheek pictured some exotic bloom in different greens, with red and yellow highlights. The faint perfume about him, he’d already told me, was the crenna blossom’s scent, implanted in his sweat glands at the same time the image had been inked under his skin. “I know you’re an ID—so you probably have your problems with our data-spinning hosts too. I doubt you’ll be offering them more information than they ask for.”
I’ve said the Web discourages interstellar travel; it also frowns on excess interstellar imports, which means such importers’ minions, Industrial Diplomats, are considered a necessary evil; and there are days (if a job1 is stymied the way my last one was) when I think of the Web in much the same terms. But probably for that reason I hadn’t mentioned my profession1 at the conference so far. “And what do you do1?” was all I could come back with, while I wondered in which folders and fiches he had gone prying to find out.
“I’m a free-agented professional1,” Clym said with a businesslike smile. Sporting spikey leaves, the stem of the crenna went under his jaw, down his neck, and disappeared beneath the black collar. “What the good women of this universe would call a psychotic killer.”
“How fascinating.” Well, he was not the first I’d met; and I assume that while I’m in the profession1 I am, he won’t be the last. I wondered if his friend knew. “When’s the last time you killed somebody?”
“Really want to know?” Clym scratched his ear with thick fingers. In orange, black, and gold, a multifanged beast’s head ornamented the ham of his thumb. The creature’s neck wrapped his wrist to disappear under his cuff. “You remember, during the morning session, when I slipped out of my booth for a few minutes, presumably to go to the John …?”
I nodded “yes” with no memory of it at all.
Clym nodded back with deep and knowing seriousness.
“Oh …!” When caught in the pleats, snags, and politics texturing the surface of a world, the Family/Sygn feud can get intense. I’ve said my seven-times great-grandmother possibly shared my profession1. In soberer moments I assume what she did for Okk was closer to Clym’s calling. “At least you folks only do in one or so people at a time.” Part of a diplomat’s job, even an industrial one, is to be able to say something nice about everybody. “Not so long ago—oh, very far from here—someone was telling me about a whole world they thought had just gotten done in. Of course, being in my profession1, I didn’t really believe—”
“You mean Rhyonon.” Gold nap hazed Clym’s roundish skull. His hand went up to scratch it. “In the Tyon-omega system. The seventh world out. Rhyonon.”
“Was that its name?” A moment of Nepiy’s loud desolation was superimposed over the quiet waste before me, bright as some GI prompt, while the possibility of belief organized itself uncomfortably. “The women who mentioned it to me didn’t say. They were too concerned about the possibilities of Cultural Fugue on their own world. I wonder if this Rhyonon had gone with the Family or the Sygn?”
Clym looked at me strangely. “Then you don’t know anything about it …?”
“No. I don’t, really.” I’m sure I looked pretty strangely back.
“A world is a big place,” Clym said, sounding like a GI prompt himself. “I was on my way to do a little job there, right when Rhyonon bought it. For the next month of my life it was all I heard about, talked about, or thought about. It’s a little odd, not a month after that, to meet someone who doesn’t even know for sure if it happened.”
“You mean it did happen …” I got chills, while on Clym’s blondly hairy foot, a mechanical beetle with copper pincers crawled amidst tattooed green and yellow crenna roothairs, to disappear under his pants cuff. “You were there? When was it? What happened?”
“What can I tell you about Rhyonon?” Clym shrugged; and I thought, as I always do when someone begins that way about a world: What can you say that’s not contradicted or obliterated by any given continental plate, geosector, county, horizon-to-horizon bit of beauty, monotony, or horror? “It was a sandy world—” (Like most—) “with a double-rotation axis, giving it an irregular day/season alteration—” (Rare; but after six months the inhabitants don’t even notice—) “as well as a hot, fairly consistent temperature over the whole of it. A few canyon systems gouged about in it. Most of the population was concentrated at the equator. Lots of geological activity in the north—mainly earthquakes—that were kept down by a number of strategically placed hydraulic stations. Nothing but sand in the south. Two moons, too small to see from the surface. And a dust layer, rather than a cloud system, that reddened the day and blotted the stars at night over most of it. No indigenous life, though in the north there were the usual signs that possibly there’d once been biogenic activity. But nothing so conclusive as a fossil. There were the usual genetically tailored, imported lichens—mostly grown in the cities. And the deserts were rife with the usual atmosphere-generating bacteria that had been brought in to keep the sulphur and ammonia down and the oxygen up. A conservative, moderately populated world, it wasn’t on any important data lanes. It didn’t have much to offer in the line of information for anyone else, and it responded by claiming not to want to know anything about anyone else. They wouldn’t even allow a GI system on surface; only a paltry one they let the Web establish on the larger moon—”
“I’m just curious,” I said. “Had they aligned themselves with Family or Sygn?” I guess one just likes to know these things.
“They were still in Interplay.” (That’s the official name, in case you’re wondering, for the state in which a world is making up its mind.) “When the first troubles were beginning to get out of hand, some conservative political party, called the Crazy Grays, which had just won a landslide election, had summoned in the Family, and immediately a radical group known as the Free-Informationists began to explore the possibilities of the Sygn. That’s why I’d been asked to come there, actually—”
“You mean they’d been alerted to possible Cultural Fugue condition, they’d called in both Family and Sygn; and they still did themselves in?”
“I can only tell you what I saw.”
“Tell me what you saw,” I said, wondering where exactly one stands to see a world destroyed.
“You understand, I never set foot on the place. If I had, I probably wouldn’t be here. Everything I’ve told you up till now is just from my GI prep on my way there.” Clym took a breath. “I was coming in on a slow shuttle, looking like your usual flowered business woman, aiming to land on a moon. We were in the viewing lounge, when a very large, very black woman stood up and pointed through the bubble dome: at the planet, with its tan tea-cozy of dry mists—only there were burns, glowing red, patchy, slowly pulsing, glimmering all across it. You could actually see them moving over the planetary surface! We all kept trying to translate that motion across the visible disk into a wall of heat rushing across deserts and canyons at hundreds of kilometers a second. And didn’t have much success. Then, of course, there was a swarm on General Info. Which, as you might imagine, was in chaos by now, since, as I said, it was based on a moon. At last one of the ship’s captains was finally able to get through. She read out the GI report as it came over: About twelve minutes before, in the neighborhood of the equatorial complex of Gilster, a sudden flower of flame had bloomed to some three hundred kilometers in diameter. Within minutes, fireballs were springing up all around the equatorial band, with incendiary sheets rushing north and south, burning the surface dust itself.”
“Fireballs? It wasn’t something as primitive as atomics—?”
“Ah, but you’re not letting me tell you the most interesting factor.”
I frowned.
“The X
lv …”
My frown deepened. “What do you mean?”
“Ever heard of them?” Clym smiled over a leaf.
I suppose some movement in my cheek or knees or shoulders, or perhaps the breath—“The Xlv …?”—I breathed through that vowel-less clutch of fricatives let him know I had. “That’s the other race besides humans who’ve developed interstellar travel.”
Clym nodded. “A fleet of Xlv ships had been circling the equatorial belt of Rhyonon at perhaps a hundred fifty kilometers altitude. As soon as the conflagration started, they rose to three times that height and continued their circle. The fleet, apparently, consisted of three hundred sixty—”
When Clym was silent for seconds, I asked: “Three hundred sixty what?”
“That was when General Info cut off. So we don’t know—one assumes it was three-hundred-sixty-odd of their mysterious, alien ships.” (The Xlv are truly alien. In this epoch of brilliant translation devices that have broken through to hundreds of species on dozens of worlds, no one has managed to establish any firm communication with the Xlv.) “Though it may have been three hundred sixty million. But for the next seventeen hours, General Info was open for no questions beyond elementary multiplication tables and what is the time at fifteen degrees longitude on Hephaestus VII—while Rhyonon burned itself out above us.”
“Presumably they were still giving out basic navigational data?”