I corrected it—and the right side of the steps, on which I was standing, began to escalate me up.
I looked about the falling rows, left and right.
Still no one. Passing tier forty-four, I glanced over at the entrance corridor. The light above it was out, which meant no one was still down inside. The globes along its ceiling, as well as the blue lights at both ends, turn on when you enter and off when you leave. I looked back down over the seats, over the rounded roofs of the oest court, across the upper parks of Morgre, to the pitted crust of the Vyalou. Here and there, purple patches wound through the orange east from the fuming Hyte. (Amphitheater: half-theater. The other half should always be kilometers of calm sublimity.) When I reached the seventieth or so tier, I stepped off and started walking behind the backs of the seats. At the next aisle, I didn’t bother to start the escalator. I just walked down. I was thinking of calling out, was not sure what to call, and found myself amused at my own hesitancy.
In the center of the twenty-first row is the polarized chamber—built with the amphitheater for those people who wanted to see the performance or the landscape but who did not want to be seen seeing. Invisible from the outside, it appears only as the smallest gap between the row’s two center seats, perhaps an inch wider than the space between the others. It deflects light and sound around it, so that two people can sit in those two “center” chairs and hold a whispered conversation with each other and never realize that they are some twelve feet apart. The only thing that doesn’t work is leaning to touch your friend’s hand. Our great joke as children was to have our friends count the seats in that row: though they seem to correspond seat for seat with the row behind and the row before, the count always comes out to ten short, which, after you’ve counted the three tiers five or six times to check, tends to unnerve both evelmi and humans. Students who come here have frequently done their GI homework pretty thoroughly and know of nooks and crannies in this place even I’ve forgotten.
Just to check, I walked over to the place where I could see nothing but seats and stepped inside.
She stood up from one of the high-backed chairs. “Marq Dyeth …?”
He remained cross-legged on the cushioned bench, watching me. And did not blink.
“Nea …?” I said. “Nea Thant! What in the worlds brings you here?”
Through ornate ceiling panes, Iirianilight, twice colored, caught in the crevice between white gem and silver setting above his thumb’s deeply ridged knuckle. He breathed; and the glare detonated at my right eye’s inner corner. I swayed back a little. Perhaps my eyes narrowed. But I didn’t blink.
“Hello, Marq!” Nea held out a hand, gloved in red foil. (I took it.) “This month I’m one of your students. I wanted to get here early, though. I needed a chance to say hello, to talk—”
Beneath the line of a roof tessellation’s shadow, lopsided like a mask, his eyes were black holes out of whose eerie absences he looked at me from under rumpled brows. For all Japril’s explanations, I could only think: But why here …?
“Marq Dyeth, I had to come!” Nea said, with the growling intensity you should reserve for statements made just before committing murder, but which the Thants use to underline a tenth the things they say. “I had to talk to somebody … somebody who would understand. I flew here. I flew across sixteen thousand light-years, alone and terrified, to tell you. It’s about—” and somewhere on the other side of dazzlement I heard her voice lose all voicing, her breathing go all breathy—“about our reproductive commune, Marq. That’s why I came. There’s a small, unimportant world, Marq, that no one’s ever heard of, called Nepiy. Oh, if you know its name at all it’s because Thadeus mentioned it last time we were here—at your lovely party. But it’s a world with many problems among its impoverished lowlands.”
He put one great bare foot down on the stone flooring. He leaned forward to put his elbows on the frayed knees of his canvas pants: unhemmed at waist and cuff, belted with some ornamental chain, they and his rings were all he wore. The big hands, one naked, one weighted with metal and stone, hung between his knees from heavy wrists.
“There’s been talk, in many of Nepiy’s geosectors, of the possibility of Cultural Fugue,” Nea went on. “Just recently fifty-two of its hundred-seventy-nine geosectors voted to call in the Family to reconstruct some of its social functions in a less volatile form. Of course there’s some opposition from some of the lower lowland areas more oriented toward the Sygn. But the Family has approached Thadeus and our reproductive commune to serve as a Focus Family—for all of Nepiy!” She caught her breath.
He breathed.
“You mean they want you to become Focus Family for an entire world? For Nepiy?” I tried to remember what I could of that strange form of rule by celebrity, by media, by notoriety. “Does Thadeus want to move from one world to another? Do you all want to be bothered with all that publicity and attention?” I remembered to breathe.
Again.
“Thadeus thinks it would be exciting. Eulalia wants to do whatever Thad wants. And Clearwater doesn’t care, which amounts to the same thing. Thadeus says it’s our duty; she says it would be exciting. She says when a whole world calls to you in need, you must put aside personal considerations and rise to the occasion. We would be virtually the most important …” she paused … “important family on the entire world. Its rulers, for all practical purposes. In the early days of Dyethshome, among your interstellar visitors there were several visits by Focus Units from various worlds. In the time of Vondramach. So I’ve come here to study them—and yes, I know the study is all pretense. I just want to talk to someone who knows something about interworld relations.”
And I thought: How could his fingers, even that big, hold so many rings? Three iron ones; four bigger ones of bronze; some were narrow and copper; three, of pale gold, on different fingers, were set with shards of different jades, two, on the same, of bright aluminum, with both agates and opals; the platinum one on his thumb was cast in a shape very like one of our local dragon’s heads, big as a dyll nut and gnawing a mistrock as big.
“Zetzor is a very different world from Velm, Marq. And Nepiy is different from them both. But one thing that Zetzor and Velm share—at least your part of it and my part of it—is that they both function under the Sygn. We have never been seriously religious any more than you have. But to be asked suddenly to adopt a religion that, in a sense, we’ve never really known; to be asked, suddenly, to abandon one world for another, to leave our home—” A nervous motion took her a step to the side—in front of him. And I think I actually saw her for the first time, while he became only a brown canvas knee, creased and with a worn spot, the brown curve of a shoulder, reddened further from the ceiling panes, visible at her side, all equally and confusingly astonishing. She looked down at the loose flags, pushed at one with her baggy boot’s soft leather. “I love the Thants, Marq. And I’m terrified for us. I’m terrified that Thadeus will get her way. And I’m just as terrified that she won’t.”
“Nea …?” I said, and did not take a great step either to the left or to the right. “Look, maybe we should go inside and talk to Egri about this.” I think there was a slight ringing in my ears. Low in my abdomen it was as if a bubble had suddenly blown up to push all my organs around into uncomfortable positions. I mean, what do you do when you first see your perfect erotic object and have been assured, by unimpeachable sources, that the perfection is mutual? (The one thing I can vouch for; I never had the slightest question who he was.) “Come on, Nea,” I said. “Let’s get out of here!”
With neither nod nor smile, and my ears and knees heating with diplomatic embarrassment, I fled the chamber.
Nea came after me. (Did she look back at her companion and excuse herself? I didn’t hear. I didn’t see.) She caught up to me when we were halfway down to the skene. (And from the invisible chamber, he watched me with his invisible eyes.) As we stepped out onto the amphitheater stage, me naked and her in leather and foil, I think I was a
bout to turn around and rush back, when Nea said, in a funny kind of voice: “What a strange one, Marq …! I could tell you felt it too!”
“Nea,” I asked, and felt like a fool for it, for somehow with all I knew, I didn’t know at all: “Who is …?” I began but was afraid to place before her the pronoun that would place me with … him.
“She is rather odd,” Nea said, confirming what, I was unsure. “She’s just another one of your students—at least I assume so. We got to talking on the monoline down. In the whole trip, I didn’t manage to get her name. But I gather she’s from very far away.” Then, as we stepped across the grill and started up the cracked steps, she gave a great sigh, and I could almost hear her thoughts travel thousands of light-years off. We reached the top of the stair, beneath hanging green. Mirrored blades swung in and out at us.
5.
AND MISSED.
“Max! Shoshana!” I called from the ramphead. “Egri! Guess who’s with us this month.” I came around the walkway, the bright fan-blades flashing behind grills in the high walls. I glanced to the side, waiting for her to catch up to me—so I could take her arm, I realized; which is what I would have done with any human or evelm from this particular locality. But polar Zetzor is not Velm’s M-81. I slew the impulse. “Nea has something she wants to talk to you about.”
As we came to the bottom of the ramp, Nea held out both hands, red foil, right; green, left. “Max, Shoshana …”
Shoshana stood up from the stool of the big console-size reader. “Nea? How have you been! What in the worlds are you here for? It’s wonderful to see you. But—”
“Are your parents here?” Large Maxa rumbled affably from her perch. “It would be just like the lot of you to leap stars and not a word to anyone that you were arriving! You should have let us know—”
“It’s just me, Max.” Nea laughed. “And I almost had to break laws to get here. I’m officially enrolled as a student. But the real reason I’ve come is for advice.”
“You came all the way from Zetzor, by yourself—for advice?” Shoshana’s smile was disbelieving. “Really, the way you people flit from world to world—like gnats from one side of the Hyte to the other.” She put her hand on Nea’s epaulet. I saw Nea start to pull away, then remember she was not on Zetzor. (My social picture of the dark life in the canyon at 17? Endless horseplay of a distressing violence and stylization, laced with scabrously affectionate invectives, in which no two people ever touch. I’m diplomat enough to know it’s a distortion, but it’s a distortion of something there.) “I’ve visited fifty worlds by vaurine projection—” which is how most of us satisfy our tourist urge—“and two in vivo, when Egri took us to Kensitty. But,” Shoshana declared, “I will never understand unlimited space-fare!”
“Neither do most of the shipping officials in the Zetzor north-quadrant spaceport. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.” Nea stepped away from Shoshana, and looked up at the perch. “Egri, I thought maybe you could help me. I mean you’ve traveled from world to world and know the problems that occur between them. Thadeus thinks there’s an opportunity to go to Nepiy as the Nepiy Focus Family. But it would mean …”
I went over and stood next to Shoshana, who leaned against the twelve-foot totem carving from some far north geosector (anchored three ways to the tolgoth planking by antique, black, flat-link chains), looked attentive, and did not listen as Nea retold with more detail and less clarity what she had outlined to me in the amphitheater. The strange things about perfect erotic objects (when perfection is out to that many decimals): though you can remember dozens of details about them—a backlit ear clawed with rough hair, casting shadow on a pitted jaw; the wrinkle of a vein beneath thin skin lying over the ligaments fanning to pronounced toe knuckles; the wide lozenge of a thumbnail gnawed back from the callused crown, a knuckle below bright metal and brighter stone—still, you can never remember the woman; that is, you can never remember your sense of the woman as a self; at least not the way you can with any number of friends, acquaintances, or even some stranger, say, glimpsed frowning down at a gaming machine as you pass the door to a recreations lounge, maybe an outlet servicer logging her cheeses on the transport skid halted on a ramp from the lower level, or even some Web official with a mound of authorization stamps on the desk before, and a bank of check-out lights glittering behind, now half a galaxy away. Someone once pointed out to me that there are two kinds of memory (I don’t mean short- and long-term, either): recognition memory and reconstruction memory. The second is what artists train; and most of us live off the first—though even if we’re not artists we have enough of the second to get us through the normal run of imaginings. Well, your perfect erotic object remains only in recognition memory; and his absolute absence from reconstruction memory becomes the yearning that is, finally, desire. That socially surrounded absence, when you’re young, masks a lot of things in the real world; when you’re older and a few thousand sexual encounters have begun to clear what desire is about (or perhaps what really lies about desire) and you have begun to perceive desire’s edges, its effect is not so much that of an obliterator any more as it is that of a distorting lens. If you can smile at what you see through, it’s sometimes illuminating. That was the distortion I was experiencing now, so that when Nea suddenly exclaimed:
“… but things happen on Nepiy that can’t happen here! You can’t imagine how different that world is from Zetzor!”
—what I saw was not the cities blasted into the shadowy walls of the canyons that worm the polar plates of Zetzor (its equatorial regions clotted with lichen jungles, fused deserts, and fuming bismuth swamps that make the -wrs of Velm seem like ancient carburetor leakings); what I envisioned was a scape of silicate sand, airs darkened to dim gold by dusts too hot to bear; and through kilometer after kilometer of umbrial dunes, the only irregularity beyond the grit rush was one shadow, barely human, stalking away. I imagined it; and thrilled to my imaginings—even as I realized that, like all our images of the alien, it comprised the simplest recombination of the familiar: the hotwinds that ravage for three months across Velm’s own southern temperate zones transposed to Velm’s own north-polar wastes.
“Well, you were right to be upset!” Shoshana announced at my side. “The Family/Sygn conflict is in the process of creating a schism throughout the entire galaxy, concerning just what exactly a woman is. And it may mean that instead of one universe with six thousand worlds in it, we will have a universe with one group of some thousands of worlds and another group of some thousands of others, and no connection between the two save memories of murder, starvation, and violence. And in a situation like that, no, you do not just simply decide to up and change sides! Even to become a … Focus unit!”
“Not just a Focus unit,” Large Maxa said gently. “A Focus Family.”
“It’s the fame,” Nea said, a green fist and a red fist tight against her hips. “Honestly, it is. A standard year ago, now, when we last visited a world called Ulus, we passed through a geosector called Ajegit and stopped at a city named Skesss. Among the white roads that wind the twelfth and thirteenth above-ground levels—Ajegit’s bedrock is too hard to have underground stages as you do here—there was a major traffic artery, with shops and public art works, called Dyeth’s Row, named after your seven-times-great grandmother. Thadeus made sure from GI; and we all went to see it.”
“My dear,” Large Maxa said, letting her green and glimmering head lean to the side, her gold eyelids sweeping across her onyx eyes, and some of her tongues a-twitter beneath the bony arch of her upper jaw, “there are half a dozen streets called Dyeth’s Row scattered about the various urban complexes all over Velm. No doubt there are another fifty scattered about the cities of other worlds. Mother Dyeth toured with Vondramach for a while, both on this world and others. There was much pomp, much ceremony. Streets, parks, and concourses were named after various heroes in the Vondramach entourage. But that means nothing now. None of us have ever walked down more than one or two of them. Nor is the
re any reason why we should want to. And besides, to share a name with fifty or a hundred-fifty streets out of the hundred billion streets among a hundred million cities, most on worlds not ours, is not fame. What could it mean, to us or anyone?”
“It meant something to Thadeus. And Clearwater; and Eulalia too.” Nea looked first at one of us, then at the other. Her skin was the ashy brown of a woman pigmented dark by heredity who has lived most of her life on a cold world at a pole turned eternally from its sun. “They very much wanted us to see it—that’s why they took us there in the first place. They were proud for you, and proud for us that we knew you … A Focus Family becomes a model unit for the women for an entire world. We would have streets and parks named for us … at least on Nepiy.”
“It’s to be expected—” Maxa boomed in her languid bass, though she had begun to flex the muscles that moved the spurs on the back of her hind claws; I wondered if Nea knew her well enough to recognize it for a kind of nervousness. (Though on most evelmi from the Fayne it indicates intense joy.) A second tongue took up “—on a world that received a touring entourage of Vondramach’s a whole seven ripples ago. It means nothing today.”
“Magma!” Nea declared, turning again. “It meant something to me, Max! Egri, Marq, you’ve traveled between worlds more than I have, unlimited fare or not. You mean to tell me that on this world or another you’ve never gone to visit a street just because it was named for the Dyeths?”
I haven’t and was going to say so.
But Egri said: “Yes. I have.”
“And didn’t it mean something to you?” Nea looked like she might cry.
Egri kneaded a bony elbow with her knobby fingers. When she spoke, it was even slower than Max. “The point is, I think, that what it meant to me was very different from what it meant to Thadeus. Or to you.”
Maxa gave that thunderous hiccup that passes for an evelm humph! “Just up and changing sides like this, it makes me think they’ve been part of the Family all along.” She began to step around on the other little platforms that made up the rest of the perch, though her voice went on in its low, leisurely roar. “That kind of irresponsibility is a Family characteristic.”