“Excuse me,” I said. My voice sounded boomy and distorted. “I am Marq Dyeth, and this is Rat Korga, the survivor whom you have all gathered to see—no, please. Move backwards, not forwards. Those of you out around Water Alley, please move back. You are endangering the lives of those nearer Dyethshome. You can all see from where you are. Please, don’t move forward any more. This is a matter of life. If those of you there and there—” I pointed—“can all move back ten steps …”
I saw it happen; and also realized how large our image must have appeared because I saw how small their motions were.
“Good. Still, if those there and there can move back, say, fifteen more steps.”
They did it. “Thank you. You must start to move people away from the grounds of Dyethshome. There is still room up in the upper park level, and the view is probably better from there anyway.” Here and there what had been a clear forward motion began to swirl, and then reverse. “Thank you. Again, I want to introduce to you …” I started to say, my friend, but thought better: “Rat Korga, the survivor of Rhyonon, who has come to visit our world, our city.”
I glanced up at Rat beside me. “Rat, will you … uh, say something to the women here at Morgre?”
He seemed so real beside me, gazing. I wondered if he recognized what he looked at, or the change of scale that accompanied it, or indeed if it mattered. “I am Rat Korga. As my friend, Marq Dyeth, said.” The accent that in a day I had almost grown used to, now that I knew thousands heard it, seemed as intrusive as when I’d heard his first words. “Thank you. That is all I can say to you. I have no world, now; and its destruction hurt me in many ways. Thank you for letting me visit yours.”
I looked about again, as Korga seemed to have said what he had to say. “May we ask you,” I said, “to return to your living rooms. Rat Korga has been with us a day, and has already walked in our streets, moved through our runs within the city, hunted dragons on the sands outside it. But by this disruption of your own lives, by gathering to see Rat here, you only disrupt his and ours as well. I know as you go about our city, from center to rim to center, many of you will pass him and will extend the same courtesy to him you have extended to visitors in our clime for centuries now. Many visitors have stayed to call this, our world, home …” I looked at Rat and wondered what I was trying to say, wondered why my single tongue stumbled now saying it. “The complex of flavors that awaits each of us is unique, interrupted only by sleep and ended only with death.” It’s a hopeless cliché, and where it came from, to spring out of my mouth just then, I later wondered for hours. “Return to the flavors of your lives and let us again take up ours. You’ve come to see Rat Korga, and you have. Please go, now, so that we may go on. Good night.”
As I glanced at Rat again, with his wide shoulders and hollow eyes, I saw he had raised his bare, big hand to those who stared up at us, with neither distress nor humor on his long, pitted face.
2.
OUT BETWEEN LOW HILLS was the smaller more distant toy.
“… I have no world, now; and its destruction hurt me in many ways. Thank you for letting me visit yours.” Above the courts’ five domes, projected on the freestanding walls, a tall doll and a short doll stood together. “… the complex of flavors that awaits each of us is unique, interrupted only by sleep and ended only with …” The comscreen, sticking above my desk’s clutter, concluded the replay Mima had thoughtfully made.
Rat sat on my bed. “Why did we come here?”
I walked across the orange carpet to the desk. “Formal suppers always have intermissions, where everybody retires for a while. There’re waiting-rooms for the guests to use. With all the confusion, Max and Shoshana thought this might be a good time to have it.” I glanced at the small, planetary spheres about the suspended lamp globe. They began to circle, each with its swarm of tiny moons.
“I’m still hungry,” Rat said. “I didn’t eat much.”
“No one ever really does at formal affairs. You just put in a lot of work doing it. But there’ll be the pickings once it’s all finished. Late-night snacks after these things are not to be believed.” I came around the desk and leaned my hip on it. Behind Rat, fire cactus bent thick branches in a warm gust. Falling needles ticked the rail. “This has been quite an evening. I still don’t know what the Thants were on about. All those things they were saying—those idiotic statements—they made me feel as if I were living on some world out of history where all that we do here was against the law!”
Rat said: “No, they didn’t.”
I frowned.
“They didn’t make you feel that way. That’s the way they made me feel.”
“I don’t understand what you mean.”
“You didn’t grow up on such a world. You didn’t spend your childhood and make your transition to maturity on a world where bestiality and homosexuality were legally proscribed. So you do not possess the fund of those feelings to draw on. I do.”
“But they spoke to me as much as …” I felt confused and angry again.
“They come from such a world,” Rat said, looking down at his lap. “Otherwise, it would never have occurred to them to say such things.”
“… but the north,” I said. “In the north of this world, at least up till comparatively recently, bestiality … as you call it, was illegal.”
“Before I came here, they told me as much about the north of your world as they did about the south.” Rat’s eyes, in the lamp light, moved now to human, now to hollow (and the all-black eyes of the evelmi, in such light, frequently look hollow). “Is the north your world?”
“More than it is yours.”
“I have no world, Marq Dyeth.”
I stepped toward him in what I thought was anger—and suddenly reeled within the combative flavors of desire. I shook my head, to see that he, standing, had stepped toward me. And knew that the desire we felt would not be consummated now. And at the same time I watched all sensations in me that were not desire fade on my tongue (metaphors of taste are so inadequate to describe what in reality is an appetite!) so that I was finally licked all round by it, till I almost fell, and would not because he did not fall.
More fire-needles dropped. A breeze (and we were only millimeters apart) took the physical warmth from between us that would have done for contact.
“Rat Korga?”
It was Japril’s voice on the comscreen, and I was the one who stepped suddenly back. (It was his hand, halted under its jeweled weight, that reached forward—and, possibly because of that weight, did not quite touch me.)
“Marq, I’d like to see Rat. I’m in the south court. It’s important …”
I didn’t speak.
But seconds later, Rat turned and walked to the metal plate in the corner of my rug.
“Rat’s on his way, Japril.”
I sat down at the desk, while Japril’s face dissolved to abstract colors. I wasn’t breathing hard; but I seemed aware of every alveolus as it filled with air to froth the bloody rush. My heart was not beating more strongly; but the slippage of muscle fiber against muscle fiber seemed to create a friction I could feel.
“Marq Dyeth!”
I sat, terribly conscious of the juncture of foot and rug, buttock and bench.
“Hey—Marq?”
I looked up, where George Thant materialized in the column, bronze, transparent, swaying in the view-light where, moments before, Rat had been.
“Don’t answer me, if you want. I don’t care—” Her words were slurred. I wondered what she’d eaten or drunk so much of as to half-drug herself. “Marq, let me in—!”
I thought through the entrance code out of habit, the way the first notes of a melody—George’s demand—produce the concluding ones without real effort. She staggered forward, then caught her balance. “So. This is where you run off to, hey?”
“George,” I said. “Look, I’m not sure what you and your folks are doing. But a lot’s been going on here that—”
“Well, we’re
sure what you’ve been doing—you and your folks.” She shook a big metallic finger at me; then the gesture lost focus, and she reached up to rub her bald, bronze head. Looking about through brazen lids, she took a few more steps. “Here, I’ve finally made it into one of your lizard-lover’s inner sanctums.”
And Rat was right. As an insult it only seemed odd.
“Now what do I find? That your world’s just the same as mine!” She looked around again. “This is no different from my room, a sun and a world and sixty-eight thousand light-years away. Not a puff of difference.” She came up to the desk. “Did you know that? There, in the cells of 17, cut into our canyon walls—you call yours Dyethshome, we call ours Thantspace—my living room is just like yours. Here—” In a crisp motion belying whatever drug her staggering had mimed, she grasped my desk edge, pulled out the small control drawer from under the lip, and reached inside. “I’ll show you!”
“George,” I said, “what are you—?”
George twisted things inside, knocked others with her knuckles, flattened still more under her polished palm.
“George, what in the—?”
Stars and clouds went out.
The hills, with Morgre between, vanished. George laughed. Fire cactus faded. Somewhere the stream ceased to plash. Bed and desk and rail and carpet disappeared.
Three meters by three meters, my living room’s wall plates had once been sprayed, probably back in Ari’s time, with a translucent green gum that had now worn off the center of the floor, showing tarnished blotches. Where the metal bolt-heads were deeply inset, some of the coating had pulled loose, though after a century it still accomplished its major job: to keep any random chemical reaction in the walls’ surface from adding some upsetting order to the image the plates could be excited to project.
George, no longer bronze and not quite as tall, stood by the control post that slanted up, off center, in the pentagonal floor. “Same technology. Same everything … Not a bit different from mine.”
I uncrossed my legs, feeling warm metal uncomfortable under my buttocks, and started to stand—even three years ago I could still get up from a cross-legged position on the floor in a single motion. But now I had to push myself up to my knees, roll around a little, and then get one foot under me, shove, and then another. “George,” I said. “You are rude beyond bearing—which is no news. But this takes all!”
George was looking at her arm, thinner than it had been. Above her elbow was a small sore. “That’s not supposed to be there,” she said. “At least not now. Oh, this is crazy …!”
Projection lenses lost their glow and retracted into the ceiling. Two metal doors clicked closed over them. (Three others did not, which meant some of the backup circuits were no longer working. But the room was overdetermined by a factor of seven, which meant maybe my great-great-great-granddaughter might have to have one or two repairs done before she moved in.) “I don’t know …” George shook her head, where, without the projection, there was at least three weeks’ growth of hair. “But—well, I guess …” She looked at the green, irregularly shaped walls. “No, it’s not that much like mine, really. Mine’s cubical—and the realspace must be half again the size of this. I bet some sociometrician could make a good argument that’s why I have my personality and you have yours.” Teeth together, lips pulled back, she rubbed one thick thumb over that sore. “Shit …”
“Get out of here,” I said. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but at this point I don’t want to know!”
“You don’t?” George looked up, glowering. “Nea tells you that we’re trying to take over the position of Focus Unit on Nepiy; you report our takeover to the Web; we come to confront you and receive your accusation directly—tonight the place is crawling with Web officials! Now you claim you ‘don’t know what we’re doing’? I said no, that’s not the Dyeth’s style. But Thadeus said: ‘You just watch! We’ll go there, try to make an honorable showing. Will they say a thing? They’ll have the odd Web officer just standing around, as if they just happened to be invited for some other purpose entirely. Chances are, they won’t even have told her yet. They’ll tell her after we go. They think that’s stylish.’ Well, we’re leaving your stylish, decadent, beastly little world. And when we leave, we’re going to Nepiy. And we’re going to take it over. And neither you nor the Web can stop us.”
“George,” I said. “I’ve been a little confused up till now. But you’ve just taken that confusion into another realm entirely. What are you talking about?”
But George was fingering her sore again. “The medical program gave me a point-three chance that it was bacterial and a one-point-six chance that it was viral, both of which go up by a factor of two-point-eight if it lasts more than four days. It’s going to be four days tomorrow. I don’t want to be sick. I was sick last year, for two whole weeks, and it was the scariest thing that ever happened to me. Oh, shit …”
“George,” I said.
“Well, Thadeus is right.” She looked up. “I said, ‘no.’ Alsrod said, ‘no.’ And Alsrod is pretty smart, and I always listen to what she’s got to say. But Thadeus has the experience and knows what to expect. Ordering experience is what a Family’s all about, you know? And we’re a Family, now. But don’t worry: we have our own ways of getting what we want, spiders or no spiders. That’s why we can go to Nepiy and still be who we are. We take our history with us.” She looked around, frowning. “Though this has been the most unpleasant experience of my life—imagine, you, betraying us to the spiders! But what could you expect from you lizard-loving perverts!”
“Betrayed you to—?”
George pulled her brown hand from the control post’s control plate—and grew large and bronze, while the green walls grew distances and stars and night and hills and railings and carpet and desk. She removed her hand from the drawer; and slid it closed. I sat down in the chair that, behind my desk, had once more molded to my shape.
As I moved my bare feet over the rug’s orange nap, bronze George stepped back onto the limen plate, laughing.
Light rose around her. George and her laughter faded.
More fire-needles fell.
All I could think was: Would hotwind season arrive early this year?
I know how much of my world—its streets, its hills, its runs, its rains, the halls, the heat, the sky, the stars, the stream itself—is and is not illusion. But for a moment, as I sat by my desk, still lost in the disruption from George’s invasion, I felt foreign as a creature from one of those primitive geosectors on some world where all reproductive media are safely contained in clearly visible frames, who, for the first time, confronts a modern society where all is what we once called—to use a word that in one ancient human language or another referred to vision but here on Velm had shifted to denote taste—spectacle.
Then, beyond the rail, a rustle of leaves, needles, wings.
“Marq …”
I looked up from the wrinkled covers on my bed.
“Marq?”
I blinked at the railing around my room. The shapes and objects beyond it came into night focus.
“Marq …!”
A dark forehead’s wide scales beneath gorgeous gills: Sel’v walked up over fallen needles toward my platform. I saw her face above the floor boards and below the lower rail-rung. The line of light moved down her neck, and I saw Small Maxa, thin and white, beside her. Sel’v’s wings sculled on the dark, and Maxa scooted ahead to the platform edge. “Go on, go on, go on’ …” Sel’v said with several tongues. Then my mother leaped, momentarily to perch on the rail, beating up tape and clutter to balance. Then down to the carpet, glancing back. “Hurry up, now, dear. Tell Marq what you told me.”
For a moment Maxa stood, grasping her thin elbow with the knuckly fingers of her other hand. Then she grasped the platform edge, vaulted up and hunkered under the railing to stand at our mother’s hinder haunch, blinking creamy eyes.
I frowned. “What is it?”
“Marq
…” Maxa’s hair was a rough, white cloud. “Marq, Rat’s gone.”
My fist, among dice and tape, opened on the desk’s varnished pith. “What?”
“Rat,’ she said. “Rat left. With that woman, the one from the Web.”
“With Japril,” I said. “Yes, I …”
Maxa looked up at Sel’v and a jaw muscle bunched.
Sel’v lifted her foreclaws, swung her head from side to side, and said: “Go on, dear. Tell Marq everything.”
“Rat Korga, your new friend,” Maxa said, “the survivor of Rhyonon …” Her voice was so low she only seemed to talk with half the tongue she had. “Rat was leaving with that Web woman. I met them outside on the terrace. The dark erased his eyes, Marq. I asked them where they were going—you know, Rat went with me to look at my mines this morning in the playroom.”
“Yes, of course,” I said. “What did they say?”
“Rat didn’t say anything,” Maxa said. “Only looked at me. And because of that look, I came to tell you.”
“Sel’v?” I stood up. “Maxa—this whole day has been full of people telling me things I don’t seem to be able to understand.”
“Tell Marq what she said,” Sel’v prompted, “what the spider said.”
“What did Japril say?”
“She said they were leaving this world forever. She said they were leaving Velm. She said that this world would not do for Rat. She said that she was sorry. And she said that I should relate this to you. But it was because of Rat’s look, Marq, that I—”
I don’t remember lunging across the carpet. I don’t remember grasping her shoulders. I know she screamed. And I know it was not because she felt my hands on her flesh—it was only another photocall. We were not near enough to the wall for the connection to be that good. Still, the notion that I might even mime such a violation brought her to writhing sobs.