I turned from the wall as V’vish vanished.
“They want you, don’t they,” Santine said. “Do they want me too?”
“They do. Will you come? It’s an informal party for some offworld friends. The Thants …? But I know you’ve met them.”
“If it’s an informal affair, I’ll be along in an informal amount of time. Tell your parents, won’t you, to expect me?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Good.” And with her broad, beautiful wings unfurled and boisterously beating, she shooed me toward the entrance plate. “Get on with you then,” she cried; and with other tongues: “Get out …! Get out …!” and with still another: “You’ll see me later in the evening. I look forward to seeing you at your home!”
“Yes, Santine,” I said, as the night breeze and the air from her contracting wings, in the midst of the rising fall, joined the roar of dark Dylleaf’s cleaning winds.
4.
UP A LEVEL, ACROSS the park, down one run and along the roller way—which once had seats but now only has the worn pentagonal spots where the cleats had been removed.
Thoughts while rolling through my hometown:
On Morgre’s lowest level there are, today, twelve-and twenty-rack vegetable farms, with huge metaquartz light-conduits leading down from the overground parks. There are distilleries for the liquor we make in a number of Velm’s southeast geosectors from the wild sarb-grasses. There are swimming pools, design mills, a dozen fine cheese houses, which still make their various wheels and stars of green-, yellow- and orange-rinded cheese from the fine nematode milk the out-city farm produces. There are ceramic works and aquaria, and what has slowly gained a reputation as the finest manufactory of personal electronic musical instruments in the hemisphere. (The biannual music festival held at Morgre, in which composers come from all over our world to have their works performed, was one of the joys of my adolescence.) On ground level and the first sub-ground level, three quarters of the population still lives. Wide alleys twist between and up and down the roller-ramps and stairs about them. Those who live above ground mostly have skylights in at least one of their living rooms. (Those below, I’ve always noticed, have so much more varied holoramas outside their window-walls or in their surround rooms.) Rolling walks take people beneath the girders supporting the parks above, past the various outlets of the various service unions. Broadlifts are always going up and down, their rails sliding closed, and the young and old women of both races are always disappearing up into, or appearing down from, the upper, vine-hung parks.
It’s more or less inevitable: those who work2 in the out-city communes and co-ops ringing an urban complex always feel themselves slightly superior to those who work2 within the complex itself, especially when the out-city co-ops are so old and well established as the furniture factory, Dyethshome, or the Farm … Yet there are so many advantages to life within the city—more parks, more runs, more pools, more dancing areas, more, and more varied kinds of, sex, greater varieties of social and cultural stimulation, more adventure, and more play—that the twin pulls, of prestige in one direction and excitement in the other, keep the general population moving both ways. In an efficient bureaucratic anarchy—our most common form of government on Velm—there are very few jobs2 that one keeps for more than five years. (Your job1 is another story.) And since your job2 is pretty much the one that determines where you live, a good third of the population is constantly moving out to live in the outskirting co-ops when the outer-city jobs2 open up; or, by the same cycle, are moving in to sample center-city life. And it tends to be a different third all the time. Still, I was no more than thirteen and a year back from Senthy when I first realized that somehow those in my home, Dyethshome, were exempt from this cyclic flow—though I’m sure the council-board who, seven generations before, had authorized Mother Dyeth to accept the gift that Vondramach had offered her, saw it as nothing more than a large out-city commune, even if the idea of a commune that was nothing but a work of art struck them as unusual—and might even have aroused downright hostile suspicions in that board’s ancestors on their other worlds.
Myself, though I’ve lived in Morgre and other urban complexes on Velm (and off) many times, indeed loved life in the inner city with the passion of a youngster loosed from the toils of tertiary homework3, I was always on a labor2-sabbatical when I lived inside, never on a job2. My friends there tended to be others with as much free time as I, though they might have been in all or any other jobs2, inner or outer, only weeks before. All my jobs2 have ended up in the out-city communes, where frankly I feel more at home when I’m working at anything other than my profession1: diplomacy.
I’m not the only Dyeth to whom this applies.
Because of this, from time to time, close friends—like Santine—have remarked I have a different manner about me, something other than just my being human. They more or less find it amusing. When I was younger, I would look within myself when women said this, to seek out the pains of being different and to wonder how I’d been wounded by my isolation in the outer-circle’s older labor co-ops. Yet off-world folk like the Thants take the same manner—which for us Dyeths marks a hurt, a failure, a deprivation—and read it rather as a mark of privilege. Which in turn makes us find them somewhat amusing.
Among its three free-standing, two-hundred-meter multichrome walls, their transparent panes gone dazzling at Iirianiset, on the eastern rim of Morgre just beyond the blue tiles of Water Alley, by Whitefalls, rise the courts of Dyethshome.
5.
I RUSHED UP THE steps across green flags, wondering where the Thants had been on their way to that had allowed them to stop off at southern Velm for a visit. You understand their world is very different from ours. (Their sun system: Quorja. Their moonless world, sixth out: Zetzor. Their city, called 17, is blasted among myriads into the rock wall of a three-kilometer-deep canyon that worms and branches and doubles back and rebranches for several thousand k’s about Zetzor’s permanently dark north pole. Yes, Quorja is about sixty-eight thousand light-years around the galactic rim from Iiriani.) I’ve said that interstellar travel is expensive? To promote cultural interchange, some of Zetzor’s larger geosectors finance one of their reproductive communes to unlimited fare for travel anywhere about the galaxy. (Myself, and every other ID, has to get a job1 where fare expenses are taken up by the employer1, requesting the import.) Once, I made the mistake of asking Thadeus Thant how she and her spouses and her offspring had been chosen for such an honor. Somewhere behind careening metal, she laughed. “Well, considering that we’re chosen from the population of an entire world, you can be sure the selection isn’t entirely fair …” I raised an eyebrow and (diplomatically?) changed the subject. At some point in their random travels they’d met my mother Egri (also an ID) just before she retired about ten years ago. Striking up a friendship, they’ve been dropping in to see us once or twice a year standard ever since. A visit from the Thants at Dyethshome—Death’s Home is how it’s still pronounced, though vowels have shifted and, in the last hundred years or so, space and punctuation have fallen out—is ebullient good will, lavish and humorous gifts (that the Thants buy or have made, by the bye, after they get here. The importation of offworld gifts? Even their lavish geosector government can’t afford to go that far.) It’s Thantish awkwardness, if not downright insincerity, growing from their reception and friendship with a stream so old and august, at least the way it tastes to their tongues, as Dyeth.
“That—” Alsrod Thant put her small brown hands behind her, gazing up at the crystal column—“is your grandmother, your seven-times great-grandmother, the source of your stream, Gylda Dyeth?”
I chuckled. “It’s what they used to call a simulated synapse casting. All the soft lights and multicolored flashes inside supposedly reproduce her personality, in crystalline form.”
The glimmering pillar rose from its ornate metal pedestal to soar beside the wall decorations next to the blades of the door, till it disappeared into the
equally ornate capital, one with the court’s roof, where silver tracery pictured what one evelm artist had thought she’d seen in our stars.
“Shall I tell you the story connected with it?”
Alsrod’s hands came before her to clasp in mimed ecstasy beneath her brown chin.
I put my hand on her shoulder. “Mother Dyeth lived well into the fourth generation of her children. The casting was taken right at the old lady’s demise. A decent length of time after her bodily passing, when it was turned on, so we’ve all been told, the capital speaker up there announced: ‘Now, I’m a mechanical reproduction. Not the real thing at all. I know it. You know it. You were fools to get this thing made in the first place. Frankly, I’d turn it off if I were you and let me stay dead,’ which was so uncannily like Mother Dyeth in life, everyone was quite astounded at the synapse caster’s skill.”
“Did they obey?”
I nodded. “I don’t think there’s anyone among us who knows how to turn it on today—though when I was a child, sometimes we would stand around, my sisters and I, and all try to put our arms around it, not quite able to touch.”
“Telling me this,” Alsrod said with, suddenly, a very pleased look, “you’re just doing your job2, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” I smiled, a bit puzzled. “I am. That’s by and large what I mostly work2 at.”
“Does that mean that you don’t really want to tell me such things?”
“Ah,” I said, “but I like my work2 as well as my work1. And I like my work1 a lot.” Then added, because this seemed the moment to do so: “Perhaps we should go back to the others …?” I turned with her to walk toward where her sisters waited on one of the stone benches, while talk trickled about in the hall behind them, between my parents and theirs. Alsrod Thant, the youngest Thant, fourteen standard years now, bony, brown, and delicate eared, her head shaved—really a rather genial child—and this was her first trip to another world with her parents. (She’d assured me with studied modesty that she’d been to moons before … no, not Zetzor’s. Zetzor doesn’t have any.) Though she knew us and we knew her from numerous vaurine projections, still it was the first time we’d met her in vivo. I’d found her charming. For all the circles in dull aluminum that hung around her neck and waist and shoulders and calves, I couldn’t help thinking of her as a younger me.
I sat.
Alsrod sat—between her older sisters, Fibermich and Nea. My sisters Alyxander and Black Lars came up at that moment to sit by me. A little ways off, George Thant scowled, arms folded over her big metallic chest, like some colossus from an artistic tradition I wasn’t quite familiar with.
Across the room I thought I heard Thadeus declaim: “A world, you see, called Nepiy …” and my attention turned.
But Fibermich brought it back with a continuation of some conversation which we’d apparently joined. “Let me tell you.” Her brown hand hovered and quivered, like an object intended for steady focus, but which, because it held too much energy to remain static, kept blurring into a faster time frame. “We were on Bragenvold, in some northern geosector. Incidentally, they really don’t think in geosectors on Bragenvold because the political alliances are between interconnected and interwoven nets of city-states: the Blue Net, the Red Net, the Green Net, the Orange Net. Well, there we were in the capital burg of the Green Net, kilometers underground, and with the capitals of the Red, White, and Tyrian Nets less than a day’s work away with a jackhammer on three different sides of us. (Oh, they are labor-intensive in those underground caves. And the people in hand-arm intensive societies look so different from those in leg-foot intensive cultures—don’t you find?) As we rowed down the city’s central canal, there was a circular facade, carved into the rockface itself, oh, maybe seventy-five meters high. Painted above the narrow doorslits, in the local color-code syllabary: Do not profane your origins on Eld Eyrth.”
Fibermich and her seated sisters rocked in unison, laughing their different laughs at their different pitches in their different rhythms.
“And once,” declared Nea, recovering, “we were on a world called Kra, where, in a particularly depopulated area, they had just put a legal limit on how much material an architectural structure could employ—” She looked about us at the sprawling levels of our ball court where so seldom, these days, anyone danced. Her hands, sheathed in foil and joined in her lap, tried to tug from their nest in her thighs. As she spoke, she leaned to the left (tug), to the right (tug, tug, tug …): they did not come loose, though I felt that the rooves themselves might peel from the sky if she overcame her own gravity. “There in the desert—” (tug, tug—) “we saw the rim of an overgrown crater, where we’d heard the Family’d been established. Sure enough, the flame-speakers around it were blaring, both in the High Musical code as well as the Low (ironically pitched two octaves above the High one): Lest I forget thee, Oh Urth!”
They laughed; they rocked.
“And on a moon, once—” I suppose Alsrod had some previous knowledge of the conversational path pursued by her sisters; but frequently with the Thants, if not all folk in stressful situations, I get the impression they never say anything new. “Once—” Alsrod’s hands were clasped on her knees. She swayed forward on the bench like a figure of struts and ropes, invisible thermofoils yanking at her shoulders as some undetectable hotwind whipped them back and forth, pulling her about as they whirled and snapped, collecting their energetic bounty and directing her intense movements below. “Once, on a moon, I passed a tiny office in a narrow corridor, through the transparent wall of which I could see it was all staffed by the local aliens—”
Fibermich, Nea, and George all turned to her reprovingly.
“May the ant and the worm take dinner in my vitals, I speak the truth,” Alsrod protested. But one hand came loose from her knee and raised before her face as if to protect herself.
“Go on,” my sister Lars said, perhaps as a representative of our own local aliens, and arched her lip bone.
But I don’t think Alsrod saw it through her spread fingers. Her eyes were closed. “—staffed by local aliens,” she repeated in a voice respectfully devoid of emotion. “And on the wall, written clearly in incised letters—” Here her hand returned to her knee which had jackknifed up to catch her boot-heel on the bench’s inlaid edge—“Fail not the eternal presence of Eurd.” Her eyes were still not open.
They laughed.
We smiled—which we assumed they would take as a comparable gesture … if they asked GI about such things. They frequently did.
“On Zetzor itself, in the south, there used to be a whole museum complex. Took up half the city of Q. Had folks handing out little cards on the cross-corners of cities all over our world, from 17 to 70; from A to R. Visit their paltry showing, and it stated in woman-high letters sunk into the piazza before the main rotunda: Forget not your debts and beginnings on Earth—and they meant, you know, the famous Earth, the sixth world so named after Old Earth itself!” (I’d never heard of a particularly famous Earth, sixth named; but I didn’t interrupt gleaming George, who’d stepped up to join the conversation.) “We had the complex shut down. That is, Eulalia did. Thant Eulalia—” and without unfolding her arms, she nodded in the direction of the jeweled extravaganza, her mother, across the room by the sculpted half-walls, surrounded by our (and her) other parents. “That’s what we think of the Family on Zetzor. And their countless corrupt slogans.”
The three seated howled wildly, swaying with the precision of three broad leaves of sarb-grass in a single breeze. A scowling brass giant, George watched attentively over their performance.
“Now, of course, you can’t set this against the problems of Nepiy …” I heard again from Thadeus. Indeed, hearing the name before, I’d assumed it was just a trick of the ear. Even now it occurred to me that, with six thousand worlds to choose from, it was more likely that they were discussing some planet with a similar name than that they were discussing the actual world I’d so recently visited.
The evening drifted by.
I drifted by people; people drifted by me.
Then Santine made her entrance, on a rag-rope platform that creaked, in ancient gilt fringe, down from the informal stars. She stuck out one of her tongues to receive me, and I thought she said, in one of her voices that I happened not to recognize: “Do you really enjoy these affairs?”
I grinned, and was about to say—but it was not Santine aping a human voice. It was Alsrod Thant, in her aluminum circles, who had just stepped up beside me.
I said (because frequently the truth provides the most diplomatic answer): “I don’t believe I’ve ever attended one since I was your age where I didn’t feel, beforehand, an oppressive dread at the isolation that can reign in a large enough group of even the most intimate friends, much less an admixture of intimates, acquaintances, and strangers. Still, so much of my social education has been effected in such gatherings, so many true friendships have had their beginnings in meetings much like yours and mine, that I feel these affairs must not only be endured, but negotiated with a certain energy, if not commitment.” I dropped my head a little to the side and gave her a grin. “They can be fun.”
Alsrod just looked at me.
Below her shaved scalp and high forehead, brown eyes blinked. The pupils were large enough to suggest either drugs or the slightest genetic divergence in human evolution. Suddenly she raised her hand, palm facing me. Before her face, brown fingers spread: “Oh! The force of a criticism whose reasons I can no longer spelunk throws me into the neotenous posture of the tadpole, the caterpillar, the newt!”
I had never heard of any of these beasts, and neotenous I knew from nothing. I opened my eyes rather wide, but I guess I was still smiling.
Alsrod dropped her hand and grinned back. “There.” Suddenly she pointed to my thigh. “What’s that hanging by your leg?”