“I said: ‘The people you worked with, the place … it’s gone, Rat Korga. Everything you’ve ever known … your work, all the things you didn’t know that made what you did know what it was. Your world, it’s gone.’
“That big-boned, red-brown face watched me with a concern lacking all suspicion, with a vulnerability lacking all hostility. Their absences made me realize how used I was to ignoring them in the looks of others.
“‘My world …’ Rat repeated. ‘My work wasn’t much. All that’s gone? Is that all?’ Once more Rat looked around the room, at a machine, at a window, at one of us, at a floorlight. ‘Now I am not as frightened as I was.’ The various observation lights, set around the floor, threw up amber illumination to underhook a knee, to catch in the foreskin’s wrinkled cuff, to shadow the curve of a vein along the scrotum and snarl in the hair above and around the genitals, to burnish the flesh below the naval’s cave and light that cave’s roof, to underlight a nipple and the roofs of smaller pits and dermal irregularities about the jaw, to illuminate beneath the brows. I watched and wondered where the hormonal tides and impedance gradients and saline shifts that constitute fear inscribed themselves on that lank body.
“As Korga watched us, ringed and unringed hands came together. Once, Marq, on a frozen outpost where spines of black rock were strung with vines of a substance we were not sure was really alive or simply crystalline, a small, white, furry, and many-legged creature—definitely alive and insistently friendly—became my companion. She was silent, curious, and affectionate. And I was alone. One day I found her pulling herself between the rocks—she had fallen. One of her legs had broken. I picked her up in my thin gloves and carried her back to the compound, under the grainy sky. I called up three different GI programs on her alien anatomy, ethology, and convalescent patterns, which only confirmed what I knew and put off my doing it another minute. I took out a plasti-splint from the medicabinet, bent it to shape, peeled it apart, grasped my little friend under one arm, and pulled straight her injured limb while ignoring the others’ flailing. I secured the two pieces of the splint on either side of her limb. As the splint grew back around it to form a plastic sleeve-cast, I set her down on the floor and picked up a tranquilizer bulb that, admittedly, I should have administered before I put on the splint. When I turned back to my friend, I was in time to see that she had secured all her working limbs behind the splint’s collar. With one gesture, she slid the splint off her broken leg—and that gesture, I realized, was the signature neither of trust nor distrust, but rather of a completely alternate code for what was mete and un-mete: the splint, which she neither knew, understood, nor even questioned, was simply … un-mete.
“And Rat Korga, in a gesture that brought back to me the grained sky, the chill rocks, and the ribbed and slanted compound walls on a world I hadn’t thought about for fourteen standard years, with bunched fingers, slid a ring off one finger.
“The face changed.
“The heavy features’ disruption brought home my inability to read the expressions on either side of their quiet violence. But because I was human and Rat was human, I assumed the former had been some complacency while the latter some distress.
“‘… all the things I didn’t know that made what I did know what it was,’ Korga repeated. ‘When you said that to me before, I understood it. Now … I can remember the words, but not their meaning.’
“Rat looked at the removed ring.
“I think that particular thin bronze circle bore around its inner face the bifurcation circuitry that allowed the stabilization of terms amidst reflexive descriptions.
“Rat looked at us.
“‘You have taken away my world …’ On the great hand were still several more rings that controlled complex hierarchies of metaphorical organization. ‘You have taken away …’ Then, in a gesture all of us later agreed communicated urgency, but within which we could find the telltale radicals neither of speed nor intensity by which urgency usually signals itself—his movement was slow, deliberate, and still urgent—Rat pushed the ring back on. ‘What have you given me?’ Korga asked. ‘What have you taken away?’ Looking around the room, Rat took three steps among the support loops, now resting her bare hand on one, with a touch that told how superfluous that support was. (Ynn turned, watching.) ‘This … this is not my world. On what … world are we?’
“‘It’s not a world at all,’ Marta said. ‘It’s a moon. Of Chyvon.’ Then she frowned, because that pitted face remained unchanged. ‘Chyvon’s a world about sixty million kilometers from yours, that also circles Tyon-omega.’
“‘To be sure,’ I said, ‘what we call Tyon-omega, Rat calls simply the “sun.” And “moon”? Let’s just say we’re someplace very far away, Rat.’
“Korga looked at that hand, at the metal bands and their settings, raised those fingers—and began to bite at a nail. While Korga chipped and bit and red stones and green stones between the still-wet knuckles glittered to the chipping, those eyes watched us. Biting, Rat spoke—and must have heard that the speech was unintelligible with the gnawing; so stopped biting and spoke again: ‘I had a world. But it is as true to say I never had a world. You have given me …’ He paused to gnaw again while agate or garnet obscured a word: ‘… possibility of a world. What world will you give me?’ The fingers, bent above opals, went back to the teeth—big, straight, more ivory than white. Still biting, still chipping, now at the thumb, now at the little finger, Rat came to the ramp at the stage’s edge and started down, leaving dark footprints that dried in seconds on the spongy floor. Was that slow gait menacing? Did we read menace into it? Korga wandered—and in that room, less than five by five meters, that gait, broad-hipped and great-shouldered, as upward lights swung round the drying body, was, itself, to me what wandering was.
“Ynn turned, watching.
“Marta turned, looking for buttons and pedals that, she must suddenly have realized, Rat was now too far from the emptied tanks for her to use; she turned back. And watched.
“Did Rat read her intent?
“The hand dropped. ‘What world will I have? You know: Whatever you have given me, it does not correct the radical …’ Rat paused, tongue struggling with the syllables, missing as many as it caught: “… radical anxiety termination. It only compensates. This is not like before, on the desert. So you see, now you must give me a world. Or I may take ten, thirty, or a hundred. And then what would you do with me?’ Rat raised the bare hand now, to gnaw again. Knuckles turning, veined ligaments taking shadow and losing it, Rat watched us above shifting joints, stopped beside another floorlight. The ringed hand, fallen to the thigh now, was so still one bloody facet flung its flare up to my eye, unmoving, for five, six, seven breaths.
“I moved—and blood slid to green to white to orange.
“Now that their charge had been gone from them for more than a minute, the tubs and shields and meters behind him on the stage, which had washed and watched Korga, began to autodegrade into their liquid states, flowing along the guiding troughs into the waiting flanges of their red and black hexagonal canisters. And Korga was walking again, toward the high archway to another room with the teaching games, and program-courses, and visualization screens, and educative therapy pads, and mobile environmental simulation units which we’d hoped would teach some comfortable movement among the cultural patterns of any number of worlds Rat had never known.
“Ynn stepped down nervously from the stage. Observation lights withdrew into the floor. Illumination cords, looping about the ceiling, began to adjust color and brightness.
“‘Now what could Rat mean, “give me a world”?’ Marta asked, from where she leaned against the freeform aluminum decorations set out from the wall.
“‘Look,’ I said, ‘Rat’s only had these language skills for—’ I glanced at the colored time scale pulsing along the staged edge—‘about three minutes now. Don’t expect any real accuracy for another three weeks.’
“But we had all seen the glitteri
ng stones from among those which, once, had weighted a tyrant’s hand.
“Ynn came down the ramp from the arch; I fell in; Marta followed.
“Hearing our bootheels click the plastiplex, Rat dropped hand from mouth, glanced back at us. (Rat’s own bare feet were silent.) ‘What world will you give me?’ then turned back to squat, examining an inset floorheater beneath its plastic grill.
“We spent the next days, Marq, trying to find one in which Rat could, with help, fit—one that could fit Rat. We decided, Marq … finally, on yours.”
“My world?” I asked. “Dyethshome? Morgre?” I tried to corner the careening astonishment and it was always just beyond me. “I mean, the Fayne-Vyalou? All the other three hundred geosectors on Velm?”
“And in exchange, we’ve decided to give you Rat’s.”
“Rhyonon? Japril,” I said, and what I felt was the sudden pervasive yet almost unrealizable anger you’d better be in touch with if you don’t want to ruin three out of four diplomatic missions, “what do you … what do you think you mean by—?”
“You’ve been an ID over a dozen years, Marq. Perhaps half that time you’ve spent on Velm. But the other half you’ve spent on any number of dozens of other worlds. So your ‘world’ is a bit more complicated than Dyethshome. Or even Velm.”
“But you said—”
“And as far as giving you Rhyonon—well, yes, there is a charred and smoking planet whirling about Tyon-omega in an orbit that was Rhyonon’s. Perhaps in a decade or three, when some of the acids have sifted out of that cayenne sky, when some meteorological stability has reasserted itself, the Web may actually reexamine it, give it a new name, and consider—very carefully—another bout of planoforming, another influx of colonists. But as far as Rhyonon is concerned—the world of Rhyonon, the complex of information that was that world: well, as you have already heard, Rhyonon no longer exists.” Japril stood up, stepped from her chair, and turned away from me. She joined her hands behind her back. “I said I was going to tell you about your relation to our survivor.” She spoke to the window.
“That is what you said.”
“The relation’s very simple.” (Listening to someone speaking towards someplace you’re both facing has always been hard for me. But people have stranger customs than that with which to decorate what they consider important statements.) “Besides being the single survivor of Rhyonon, Korga happens to be your perfect erotic object—out to about seven decimal places.”
2.
“WHAT—?”
While I frowned, behind her back Japril moved the fingers of one hand into a little bud of four with the thumb about an inch away—a sign, I suddenly remembered, on her world for something highly amusing. “More to the point,” she went on, voice perfectly deadpan, “out to about nine decimal places, you happen to be Rat’s.” Hadn’t she once told me folks on her world frequently make that sign of amusement without even being conscious of it? Oh, a diplomat’s life is not an easy one.
As Japril turned back, I thought: What a strange thing to hear on an afternoon’s library research session ten thousand light years away from anywhere—maybe seven hundred thousand k’s if you happen to think Batria is someplace; and I’m sure the odd three-quarters of a billion do. “How do you know what …?” but stopped at the memory: dozens of times in an ID’s life fairly complete synaptic maps are made of the brain; and such things as Japril spoke of can as easily be read from my maps as from Korga’s—though admittedly mostly no one cares to. While I sat there, I actually recalled Japril, once when I’d told her I found males who bit their nails sexually exciting, asking me just what my ideal sexual type was. Go look it up in your files, I had said most curtly.
She had.
“It occurs to me, Japril,” I said, wondering why, on top of that anger, I felt so strangely disoriented, “that in one version or another, I’ve been hearing references to this Rat Korga over half a galaxy now. Sex is no longer the mystified subject it once was. What you are saying, in a word, is: Rat and myself are sexually attracted to males. Also: Rat and myself both fulfill a number of tricks and turns of physical build, bodily carriage, and behavioral deployment that would make making love with each other not only fun but … well, rewarding. Now that’s part of the simple truth—”
“The truth is not simple. I am saying a great deal more. And you know it.”
“Still—” I put up a hand, which in this gestural language means “halt,” in that one “full speed ahead,” and, in still another, “I have to go to the bathroom.” “You brought up the idea: as flattering as the concept is, with the universe as large as it is, I can’t believe I’m in a unique position.”
“The most precursory run through the Web’s most accessible files of women directly or indirectly connected with us—”
“The ones you happen to have the dope on.”
“—show that there are some nine hundred eighty-two billion persons who fulfill the erotic preferences of Korga out beyond three decimals.”
“Let’s see. That’s short, stocky, hairy, blond, kinky-headed, and male—if we’re to judge by me.”
“I said we go to a number of decimal places. You’re still talking in gross description parameters. Now there are about seventeen billions, in those same files, who would find Korga sexually satisfying to three or more decimal places—before you ask, let me tell you: that represents a very small proportion of those whom we’ve actually got on record. And, if we ran the same cross-check on the average woman, or male—you, for example—we would usually expect to come up with about two hundred billion takers delighted to get her.”
“And only seventeen billion for Korga? That’s not your ordinary eroto-star, then. Well, I’ve never seen one I’d cross the street for—when I’m somewhere where there are streets.”
“So your synaptic mappings suggest.”
“You understand, Japril, I spent some of my younger days on some very strange—”
“Spare me. We all did, I suppose. Like you said, your reality isn’t privileged either.”
“What I want to know about, Japril, is the overlap.”
“Between the persons Korga’s attracted to and the persons attracted to Korga?”
“Just in your most accessible files. You said ‘perfect’ and talked decimals.”
She regarded me a moment, and I could read nothing in her face. “About twelve million.”
“Well … I said I wasn’t unique. Tell me, have you informed all twelve million of us on the list that Prince Charming has just been rescued from a blasted world and that—dare anyone do the wake-up routine with a kiss, the chances Korga will melt with reciprocal passion have been computed out to here?”
“The metaphor suggests a cultural reference I may have missed. Nevertheless, there were only two names out of the twelve million that I was acquainted with personally.”
“What would we do without quick GI surveys,” I said, not asked.
“I’d never actually met the other person—only heard the name. There certainly seemed no reason not to keep this in the family.” (Yes, I listened awfully hard; but that “family” definitely had a lower case “f.”)
Then and there, you know, I got scared. It was a salty fear that brined the saliva at the back of my tongue. And below that, the disorientation. And below that, still, the anger …
I took three deep breaths and asked: “Does Rat Korga know as much about me as I know about—” Well, I didn’t see any reason not to—“him?”
Japril nodded, which means “yes” in one gestural language, “no” in another. She said: “Yes, he does,” and I wondered whether the nod was confirmation or ironic comment.
Can I think of ten questions I should have asked? One: Why does the Web want me to know all this? Two: How am I supposed to … Oh, you fill them in. The one I came up with was:
“Who is this other guy?”
“… can’t remember,” Japril said; or “… off on some expedition to another galaxy … won’t be
back this lifetime,” or something else maybe, but anyway to that effect.
I guess that’s friendship.
“All right …” Still the anger, still the fear; and the absence between them which must be where desire lies. “You’ve told me that this Rat Korga actually exists; and you say you’ve told Korga I … exist? What … happens now?”
“Oh, you’ll walk down a street, on a chance that you’ll meet; and you’ll meet … though, after all this set-up, you’ll know it won’t be all that much by chance.”
“The rhyme suggests a cultural allusion that I’m not fami—”
“What’s important—to you, to Rat, and to the Web—is that you will meet. And I think we’ve almost reached the end of our conference time.” Japril sat down again in her bobbing chair. “You now have the information we find necessary for you at this time. Would you like a recording of this interview to go over at your leisure?”
“Oh, thanks. No …” Full vaurine recordings are expensive. Besides, the particular Yinysh folks with whom I’d been working recently are one of those cultures where everybody is always offering you everything just to be polite. And to be polite back you’d better refuse—or end up garrotted. “Really, no. It’s not necessary.”
Japril smiled. “As you like.”
And I began rueful years of regretting my idiocy. (Spiders, and especially Japril, offer very few things just out of politeness; and as an ID, I am well schooled in what these are likely to be: friendship frequently, sex infrequently, and hyperwave vaurine recordings, broadcast across light-years at tremendous expense, never.) What came to me then was something both daring and obvious—obvious because, after all, the business of spiders is to know what is known. But when I said it, I was more aware of the daring: “Japril, what about Cultural Fugue—or was it the Xlv?”
She regarded me with one of her more mysterious expressions. (Were I someone from her world, would that long face with its broad mouth and small eyes be totally clear to me?) “Some time ago, you were informed that any GI inquiries after Rhyonon could lead to serious reappraisals of your security status. Well, for now, just consider that extended to cover the Xlv as well, at least as far as you’re concerned.”