“Black Lars,” I said, in whose room we had been sitting for fifteen minutes now, with the sandstone walls to our left and the sky scribed with the towervines growing from the rocks to our right, “what in the world is going on? I mean, one brings people home to bed, and everyone is very nice. But why all this?”
“A fascinating human, a wonderful woman, don’t you agree?” Black Lars dropped her head to the tray Maxa had just brought, wrapped two patties in two of her tongues, and held them up for me to choose.
I bent down and took one in my mouth, and nipped at her gently a few times with a motion considered horrifying in a number of evelm federations in the far north but which, here, in the south, is accepted as the best we four-limbed, two-jawed creatures can do. I sat back pensively and chewed: spiced shortpig. “Yes, he’s fascinating. But I’m biased.”
“Your Korga takes food from my mouth—”
“—and mine,” I said.
“—like some barbarian from the equator.” The bony ridge of her upper lip arched—a sign of humor here but, I could not help recalling, of distress only as far away as Beresh. She turned and licked at her gill-ruff with many tongues at once.
“He is from another world,” I said.
“And that’s what fascinates.”
I frowned. “Black Lars, you’ve traveled to almost as many worlds as I have. We’re both in the same profession1. Why are—”
“I’ve traveled to half as many worlds as you have, Marq. I only work on worlds where, as on Velm, there are admixtures of both human and nonhuman societies—as you know. This is not the situation for you and your human sister, Alyx. And my jobs usually take three times as long as yours to perform, which is a thing we have discussed before.”
“Oh, Black Lars—” I put both my hands below her aluminum-colored claws and squeezed the rough pads from which they extended. Her long spurs closed to the back of my hands. “In a moment we shall sound like squabbling northerners. And I know those squabbles, even here in the south, are real—”
“When we came into the student quarters last night,” Lars said, “Korga told us of Rhyonon that had been destroyed. A whole world: that’s frightening, Marq. And Rat Kolga is the living sign of that fear, as well as the sign for the possibility of surviving it. Rat told us the journey here was to learn of our world. How wonderful that you lust so completely for someone and someone so completely for you. Because Rat is a fascinating, and frightening, woman. But then, we are all fascinated by what terrifies. Go.” Before I could say anything, she loosed one claw, bent forward, and put out her smallest tongue near my ear and made it say: “Take Rat Korga dragon hunting. Then the two of you come back to sup with me—an informal supper. Just us. Bring food if it would make Rat more comfortable. I love you, Marq.”
“I love you, Black Lars.” I turned to lick her tongue, still humming from where it mimed vibrations mine could only make in conjunction with voice box and oral cavity.
Maxa materialized in the lichen-hung entrance bower, pushing aside flapping leaves of gray and purple.
Rat, hands at his sides, walked in behind her from the limen. Maxa turned to grin at him.
Rat said: “I have never tasted anything like that before. Your mines are beautiful.”
And Maxa, leering with pride, pressed pale fists to her thighs.
Now Tinjo came in with an older woman (human) I did not know and some bark pudding. The woman and Lars recognized each other and started laughing about something. And Tinjo kept on taking up Rat’s hand and saying things I guess she thought were poetic. But that’s Tinjo.
Jayne stepped out of the entrance practically as Tinjo, with Maxa before and the woman after, went in.
A swaying evelmi followed her, someone I knew Jayne spent much time with recently, but whose name I still was not sure of. Both Jayne and her friend dropped lieg leaves at the edge of the sand (which you do ritually if you’re not bringing food) and apologized that they both had to run.
And ran.
Immediately Sel’v and Large Maxa came in with a shallow tray of spiced oil and commonplaces about the weather around the Hyte. I said something about hunting. Sel’v curled her tail through the sand and expanded her green tufts. Max’s wings fanned once as she settled, blowing sand against the wall.
The tray went on the sand that Black Lars smoothed under it with the midleg’s brush.
One after another we bent our faces to touch our lips to glimmering yellow. After they had left, with ritual good wishes for the hunt, I glanced at Rat, to see his face still coated, cheekbones to dripping chin. I took up my napkin and laughed. (He hadn’t touched his own.) “Wipe your face—like this—and the rest of the meal will be much more comfortable for you.” I gave him mine to wipe with.
Hatti materialized in the luminous glow behind the leaves and came quickly through them, across the sand, green bark clutched in her hands. “I heard you were breaking your fast with us, Marq. And with your new friend, Rat Korga. Here are some tasteless nothings to cleanse the tongue since I am so late.”
“A fallen shell is not only beautifully curved without and brilliantly colored within, it contours the currents flowing about it,” I said and nodded.
And Korga, who had heard me repeat this traditional greeting eight times now in twenty minutes, repeated it himself for the seventh and, though it was completely inappropriate for anyone not in your own nurture stream, totally charmed another of my mothers.
“I grow some of the edible rhizomes indigenous to the north in the grounds around my room,” Hatti explained. (Boiled, chopped, and mixed with alum they numb both human and evelm tongues.) She stepped down and opened the bark to show her breakfast offering. “A little of this, and you will be ready to hunt.”
Black Lars turned her head to take the obligatory lick at the mud pool—obligatory, fortunately, only for the host.
Hatti (my mother the nematode geneticist1) pressed her face into the chopped roots and raised it, with morsels sticking all over her mouth and chin.
Rat, who by now had learned, bent forward and licked off a few and then a few more. Hatti turned to me. I licked some from her cheek and then one from her nose. Hatti turned to Black Lars, who, with one tongue, left a spot of mud on Hatti’s forehead and with another took off a few pieces of root.
Hatti sat back on sandy cushions. “You’re very sure of yourself, Rat.”
Alum tingled my tongue, obliterating the tastes of volatile oils and corrosive juices.
Rat just watched her.
She said: “You have firm lips.” Standard end-of-breakfast talk, it happened to be true. “Soon I hope we will get a chance to converse for a length of time, free from the oils of hunger and the stones of flavor.”
“Good,” Korga said for the ninth time. “I want to talk to you too.”
It was grossly impolite. Still, I’m sure all my mothers translated it: “I want to taste what lingers behind your lower lip,” and made exceptions.
And Black Lars and I both—because we’re really rather alike—mulled on the changes in this opening meal of the day that had occurred here in the Fayne-Vyalou to make it performable by (not to mention acceptable to) infiltrating humans.
Hatti held the leaves up before her face, turned, and hurried through green and purple.
Black Lars looked at us again, her broadest tongue extended now, cupping water that she had held in her mouth from the meal’s start. One of her tongues beneath asked: “Would you like the final drink before setting off?”
Rat got up on his knees, leaned forward, and, one hand supporting the mottled flesh, sipped noisily.
“No thanks, love,” I told her. “Got to dash. See you this evening.” I pushed up from sweaty leather. “Rat, if we’re going to get to the hunting grounds …?”
“Good hunting,” my sister said. “Good singing.”
3.
WE WALKED ACROSS GREEN flags, over colored clays, between ivory cactuses, along clinking brown rollerways that carried us under ove
rhead parks. “We’ll have to stop off at the hunting union to get gear. You negotiated breakfast well. Here in the south, because we use such a range of feeding techniques—hands, implements, communal and individual feeding, or what have you—it can get pretty confusing for a human like you. Or me,” I added; then felt awkward for adding it. “Anyway, it can get pretty confusing for humans. Or evelmi—” and felt more awkward. “I mean for anyone who’s only used to one.”
Korga said: “It was much like my home.”
I looked up.
We were ambling across the blue stones of Water Alley.
“On my world,” Korga said, “people wore hanging masks that dangled in pieces before their face. They were only supposed to turn the masks aside to eat or make love; or sometimes if they were working hard. On my world both love and food could get even messier than they do here.”
I started to protest. But I’m diplomat enough to know that even on a single world one culture’s variegated informality can be another’s unholy mess. “You know,” I said, “if you would be more comfortable, you could get such a mask for here. No one would mind—”
“On my world—” As we came under the shadow of a pylon supporting a section of overhead park, Korga’s eyes lost silver for green—“I never wore one.”
“Why not?”
“I think it was because—” We walked around the fountain base, dry as the Dyethshome spill—“I was always hungry …” He seemed to wonder at his answer. “Or because I was a rat.” Perhaps I wondered and projected wonder into his rough voice.
By the pillar near the butcher’s union door, copper hair, tanned hands—the redheaded apprentice stopped her headlong charge and clutched stone, staring, panting.
The gold-clawed apprentice behind her rumbled: “There …”
The little human went: “Shhhh …!” as I glanced.
I smiled and was silently curious. Rat walked beside me, not looking. I looked; I waved.
The evelm apprentice reared on her hind fours and raised a gilded claw. “Hello, Marq Dyeth. Hello, Rat Korga.”
Rat looked over now and raised his hand in acknowledgement.
Then a carping voice—Si-id on her morning inspection tour—called the two to come back in and get to work.
The human waved; the evelm arched her lip-ridge; and both were gone.
“You’re becoming a well-known figure. I wonder if it was students, tattling? Or my siblings and parents, dropping little hints at various unions on their rounds of play, work, and survival?”
Rat nodded—and I wondered to which of my comments, on his world, nodding was the proper response. Rat’s hair—dull brown with the red kiss in it human blood dries to—clawed at his ears, curled at his neck. “They told me this might happen.”
“Back in the Web?”
“Yes. There.”
We walked over cracked, dusty blue, and I thought: In anyone else that inflection would have to have meant, “There as well,” implying she had been told it dozens of places before. But Rat’s grasp of our language’s music was so awkward, it was impossible to read the various subtexts that inscribed their co-messages on the flow of his breath, or among the stutters of his de- and re-voicings, rough melodies, and stops.
“Up this way,” I said.
We mounted the narrow metal steps, the black finish pitted with past hotwinds. The support girders wove around.
We came out under Iiriani among broad blue and orange mural-fungi; their great sheets swayed above the gravel.
Rat blinked on mirror-bright balls.
“If we’re going to walk across the city, it’s nicer to do it up here in the park.”
At the rail to this particular park (parks make a net above the entire complex, with, here and there, even broader parks a level up: we could see three of those from here, like giant tables whose webbed and re-webbed legs stamped down into the green, and blue foliage that spread away on this one) only one woman sat on a curved bench, her scaly head bent over a reader which put out a fan of shadow up about her face. Two children were galloping about between a clump of cactuses further on, every once in a while one rearing back to spread dark wings, whereupon the other would fall to the ground, roll over, and kick all her legs, her low laughter reaching us like the roll of a gong.
“There’re not many people out today,” I observed. “But then, we’re between shifts.”
“Where are they all? Rat asked.
“At work2, mostly.” Squinting at him in the light, I realized his eyeballs must compensate for this overground brilliance; his lids were wide on their silver. “Some of them, I suspect, are in there—” I pointed to the moss-grown ridge of the run to our left, then pulled my tongue back in between tight teeth, which always tickles a little: “Did they tell you in the Web what that is?”
He looked at the mossy slope; about seven meters down, blobby bars erupted over the structure to form a free-form vent: “That is a run?”
I grinned. “That’s right. Would you like to go in it?”
“Yes. I would.”
I said: “This particular stretch is pretty tame by most standards. But it suits me. And the people who enjoy its style frequently come from quite a ways.” I joined my hands behind me. “I’ve never really known if it was because it was so near that its particular offerings became my preferences, or whether I was just lucky enough to have my preferences fit neatly into what was available. But then, I have both parents and siblings who prefer city runs much further off.”
“We climb in through there, don’t we?” Korga said, pointing to the vent we were nearing.
First I frowned. Then I burst out laughing. “But there’s a door right down there!” I put my hand up on his shoulder now. “The problem with General Information—” and then remembered he wasn’t on GI—“I mean with information you get from someone who got it from GI—is that it’s often ten years out of date—if not a hundred. Especially when it comes through the Web. If Morgre were a complex with only an evelm population, then of course we would enter by a vent—the one with the lower sill highest from the ground used to be the customary way. I think that’s how they did it in Morgre up until about six years before I was born.” I shrugged. “But cultures meld.” I turned off the path and started for the entrance.
The door deliquesced.
Cool against my thigh, chest, and face, mist from the sill-trough blew back as I lifted my foot over the—“Hey, don’t step in that!” I pushed up at Rat’s shoulder—
His big foot came down with the heel a centimeter beyond the trough rim. He staggered around to face me, not looking surprised.
“You’re supposed to step over. You yell at little kids for getting their feet wet in the door trough.” I laughed. “Look …” as I stepped over.
The blue liquid, behind us now, began to foam; the foam rose, climbing at the jambs faster than in the middle; and darkening, and shutting out light as the door’s semicrystals effloresced.
“Come on,” I said. “It’s all right.”
Rat turned, his eyes gone empty glass; we started up the corridor.
“Oh, yes,” I said—as Rat stepped wide of the irregularly shaped footpool with the bubbles shifting about on it—“you are supposed to step in that when you come in from outside.”
And did.
So he went back and did too.
Tingling heels drying, we walked down the resilient woven flooring of the shadowy tunnel. Here and there along the arched ceiling or the curved wall, a meter-wide vent, or sometimes a three-meter-wide vent, let in light.
The abstract statues along both sides, no matter how many times I come in here (three, five, ten times a week since I was twelve—at least when I’m home), always look like people for the first few seconds, till your eyes adjust to the dimness—at which point you begin to make out the people, humans and evelmi, who stand or stroll among them: not many in this run, this time of day.
One I did recognize came over to me, didn’t bother to sniff my feet
(in case they do is why you step in the foot trough) and nuzzled my groin; I scratched behind his wide purplish gill-ruff (the male and neuter evelmi’s most sensitive erogenous zone) and his great wings quivered a bit—and I walked on.
Korga looked at me with empty eyes.
I smiled. “You know, we’ve been going through this once a month at least since I’ve been coming here. I still don’t know his name, and we’ve only had real sex maybe six times in all those years. Still, he comes over and greets me every time I come in. Or if I’m here when he comes in, I always greet him. Are there any statues that particularly intrigue you? If they’re all too baffling, I’ll just point out my favorites.” I touched his arm. “It goes without saying, if you see anyone who attracts you more than the statuary, just go on over.”
The hollow-eyed face looked down. “This is where you come for sex?”
“And sculpture.” I nodded for him to follow me between two high vegetal shapes of plastic with a ring of taste plates at licking level. “At least for the day-to-day variety when you want to spend less than twenty minutes at it on your way somewhere else. The sculpture, at any rate, is a bit restricted …” I nodded at the construction on our right: a female evelmi with claws of an impossible verdigrised bronze but, other than that, an uncannily lifelike reproduction. At the uncannily high level of reproduction, the artist had worked in a number of subtle contradictions: her turmeric-colored gill-ruff rustled as though she were perched on a mesa edge, moments before a hotwind. Her lowered head moved back and forth over a fraction of a degree as though she might bend to sniff the feet of anyone who passed in her run. The scales on her mid-haunches flexed slightly recalling the movements an hour after birthing (which only occurs months after hotwind time)—internal machines provided her with a dozen shadows of life, all from completely incompatible situations (at hotwind season, females do not usually come into all-male/neuter runs), the more shadowy for their bizarre dislocations—shadows that, as I watched, I wondered if Rat could even sense, much less feel the piece’s dark and oppressive ironies. “Modern stuff. Very experimental,” I said, and felt silly passing on these judgments that only brought home their arbitrariness. “Very unconventional.” We wandered on until we came to the structure of black globes, pocked with crystal lenses, sending needle beams into the other black globes that, from floor to ceiling, hung motionless in their suspensor field. “On the surface of most worlds worth the name, there’re very few serious reminders that there are other worlds about. When I got back from a diplomatic mission1 three years ago, and dropped in here on my way home, I was surprised to see what I assumed was a schematic representation of one of the information nets in the Web. Each of the worlds was represented as the same size; the information itself is suggested by beams of light … it all seemed too pointed not to be intentional.” I nodded sagely. “It’s a giant model of microscopic luminous algae that you can find in the cover puddles floating on the top of -wr’s in the colder latitudes south and north. At least that’s what the artist told me when I looked her up in the GI catalogue and called her to send my compliments.”