She turned her white hair aside, now left, now right. “Oh, Marq! Marq …!”
Crying, she looked up at me. Spittle on her chin had streaked the dust from the mine-clays that always grayed her face. There were tears on her cheek. Beside us, Sel’v had risen to her hind feet, to claw the air with four claws, her wings unfurled, making their own hurricane about my dwelling with her own distress.
{“Marq …!”
{“Marq …!”
{“Marq …!”
I pushed myself away and lurched, unsteady as George, for the limen plate.
3.
DARK ENOUGH TO STRIKE the Rat’s eyes’ glass.
A dozen women still stood or squatted, on two feet, four, or six, about the colored clays before the terrace. A few waited by the pool (I recognized the two hunting scooters, parked by the black and silver wall, showing no trace of the thousands that had milled around them only an hour ago), the same number now who might have gathered to see guests arrive and depart at any formal supper.
But because, with Rat, I had watched the crowds begin dispersing when we had hovered above them on the freestanding multichromes, I had somehow carried through that dispersal, in my mind, to completion:
The remaining women surprised me.
Had they watched, with Small Maxa, Rat and Japril leave?
Angered, I turned to reenter Dyethshome, and saw my face break up on a hundred mirrors.
At the column, Large Maxa stood, her foreclaws against the crystal, her midclaws just off the floor, her wings loose about her on the floor in folds of scarlet and dark green. She played one tongue and another on the glass surface, entranced with this one sculpture which, for so long now, we had all but ignored. I started to go past. My mother’s aesthetic interest seemed the most experienced and useless of things, and I wanted to be away from it.
But, bubbling, light still lived and rose inside it.
I frowned, looked back, turned back.
Without ceasing her appreciation of the sculptural marvel, Large Maxa looked at me with eyes whose blackness recalled his: she must have seen, with hers, even in her half-hypnotized state, my despair. She turned her great head to continue her examination of the column and to cut short, as one can only with members of one’s own stream, the necessity for greeting.
“Mother Dyeth …?” I said
“Mmm,” said the pillar’s brassy contralto. (Large Maxa’s wings rippled on the floor, but that was the only notice she gave of the vibrations that inscribed themselves across her study and pleasure.) “I’ve been playing through the research channels in the library. Someone was thoughtful enough to connect me up to those permanently when I was built. So: you’re one of my seven-times great-grand-offspring. Marq Dyeth, it’s nice to know you.”
I couldn’t very well interrupt Maxa to ask; no doubt we were interrupting her enough by my childish curiosity in this synaptic image of my human forebear. “Mother Dyeth,” I said, “where is everybody?”
“Gone home, back to their respective rooms, their respective worlds. From what I gather, this hasn’t been the most successful of parties.”
“The Thants …?”
“Your offworld guests of honor?” Her voice, by silence, projected the disapproval that a human face would sign by a slight lowering and an evelm face by a slight raising. (Large Maxa’s head, still licking, still without looking, raised; and I wondered what my grandmother made of my mother who tasted and tasted her gleaming flank.) “No, they were the first to leave. They’re not very friendly. I like you, boy. From what I overheard, you love the tall human with the rings. Yes? You remind me of me—and of my children. Are you old enough to remember my boy, Vrach? Vrach, with a lover, Orgik Korm, took this stream on into its second ripple, you know. I must say, the place looked very different back then. Not better, mind you. Just different.”
“I’ve heard of them,” I said. “But they died a hundred, a hundred-fifty years ago, grandmother.”
“Of course.” There was laughter, ending in a sigh. (Max’s wings whispered.) “I’m tired now. Do me a favor there, Marq. Turn me off.”
“Mother Dyeth,” I said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know how.”
I read a human frown in that absent voice.
“Don’t know how? Oh, well.” The sign that came next revised that frown’s meaning: “Well. Well, well.”
“How did Rat turn you on?”
She was a book, she was a text, she was a set of signs, some present, some absent but implied, and many just forgotten, to be interpreted like the interminable crystals I had been trying to read since adolescence. She was a hermeneutic enterprise I could not bear, who mocked me by the miming of a desire stronger than mine to withdraw from the encounter. “No, don’t go yet, Marq.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “I can go look up the access numbers—”
“It’s not necessary.”
“You know, Mother Dyeth—” It seemed the diplomatic thing to say—“I’m reading your memoirs. Really, I’ve thought about you on and off all my life.”
“On and off,” she said. “On and off. When I was alive, there were lots of worlds with switches that you actually had to do something to in order to activate. I guess they’re being phased out—at least here.”
I started to say something. Then I frowned. “How did Rat turn you on?”
“I was constructed,” Mother Dyeth confided, “so that anyone who wore those rings could activate or deactivate me.”
“Some information the rings contain?” I asked. “The rings of Vondramach?”
“No,” she said. “Actually, no.”
“Is it information you can give me? Can you tell me how?”
“Yes.”
“Go on, then.”
The voice became breathy, boomy, and I wondered if the synapse caster had erred, though the voice’s intention was clear. From an evelm tongue it would have been a whisper, though it filled the whole dim waterless court. (Someone—Egri? Maxa?—had turned off the spill.) “Look down at the pedestal just about level with the thickest part of your calf. You will see there some metal leaves. Just below them and to the left, you will find a small, black button.” I heard the sound of a deep and resigned breath. “Take your finger, and press it.”
There were the dyll leaves, sculpted centuries ago by Bybe’t. I stooped. Under them, in the shadow of Large Maxa’s loose wing, was a small black protuberance. In thirty-six years, child and adult, I’d never seen it.
Mechanical switches are less common than in my seven-times great-grandmother’s day. Still, I wondered which finger I should use. There are cultures where, depending on what you want to accomplish, it matters. Finally, however, with a forefinger, I jabbed.
Above the fluted pedestal, light died.
There was only the sound of delicate wet tongues peeling and peeling from glass.
It might as well have been silence; and unlike the silences that had interrupted the voice till now, no new words would come to enclose it, and thus inform it with meaning.
I stood, as Maxa moved further around the column, to taste other irregularities in the darkened crystal, dragging brilliant wings.
Walking back across the small bridges above dry carvings, I saw Egri come up the spiral stair, among the silver stars of Mu-3. She looked about. But the dining apparatus had all been retracted into floors and ceilings. She walked to the perch and climbed, tiredly, from one inlaid shelf to the other, finally to sit, one leg up and one hanging, blinking about the court. I walked up the ramp.
I had seen those mirrors so many times I missed my multiplication as I came out under guanoed stone to step down stone steps;
The amphitheater lights were still on.
“Sklenu Marq …?”
Cross-legged at the center of the skene, JoBonnot turned herself around on red-gloved hands to look up at me.
“Ah, yes. So. You are a fool, poor Squellem Dyeth.”
“JoBonnot—” I stepped over the grill—“where are they?”
br /> About the amphitheater, students sat here and there, whispering to one another, walking about in the aisles, oblivious to everything and anything that might have been going on on that bright stage.
“In fact—” JoBonnot leaned her masked head to the side—“as far as your GI can tell me, there are no words in the four major language groups that humans and evelmi share in this world to designate precisely the kind of fool you are.”
“JoBonnot,” I said, “Rat Korga is gone. He’s not on … on Velm any more. On my world.”
“Look up,” she said. “Look at the real stars in the real sky that you can’t see from here because the damned lights are too bright and because there are three freestanding multichrome walls around this amphitheater that block out anything interesting.”
I frowned. “Where has Japril …?”
She laughed. “Oh, what a marvelous and charming fool you are, my most undiplomatic Marq Dyeth! It starts on Zetzor and ends at my home, Nepiy. My world, Marq Dyeth. Where they are soon to be something close to kings. Oh, Skena Marq, as we gaze up at your own world’s sky, tonight, do you know what it is that you don’t see there? Do you know what sweeps invisible across it, even as I speak?”
“What?”
“A fleet of three-hundred-sixty thousand Xlv ships, circling, circling, circling this world, your world, Velm,” in orbits ranging from nineteen minutes to point-oh-two hours in duration. That’s very fast. No, don’t worry. They won’t do anything. I have more information about this than you. They’re watching. Watching you. Ah, I am receiving a report now … yes, some of them have started to leave already. The Web shuttle, flown by three cunning spiders, has just lifted above them, you see, and is laboring out between your two tiny moons.” She snorted a little, behind the white and red striped plastic covering. The sound came clearly through the grill at her mouth. “Myself, I’m quite terrified, sitting here, on your world, knowing what I know about Korga, the Xlv, you, Rhyonon, Velm … Really, you are the most disrupting and random of factors in a very complex equation, Marq Dyeth. I am terrified, yes. But I am also profoundly sane. What such sanity as I have gains me is a good sense of what terrors to trust and what terrors to fight, even to death. Have you figured out, yet, that I can help you, Skene Marq?”
“Can you help me find Rat Korga?”
She turned to look up among the amphitheater seats, while students did not look at us, did not stop whispering and walking. Above the ninetieth ring, among the shadowy statuary, I fancied I saw a short, heavyset male. And in the moment I thought I saw, I was sure she was waiting for the tall woman in the red and white body-mask before me.
“You have a job1 to do, Marq Dyeth. Go back to your room and prepare to do it.” In a single motion she stood, turned, and was at the skene edge, from which she leaped down. She clambered up over seats, now stepping on a cushion, now on the stone between. I read her motion as a headlong rush toward the distant figure who, later, I decided was just some sort of shadow, a projection of my own anxieties, my own terror for my threatened world. After all, he looked too much like me.
At the twenty-first row, she disappeared.
So had the mysterious male.
I started to call out, but a vast paralysis seized me that any attempt to break made that muscle—foot or tongue or hand or heel—cramp with pain. The theater around me swam and cleared and swam again as I blinked away the waters in my eyes. My cheek became a spill.
All the little traps about the stage edge were closed.
And JoBonnot had vanished into the polarized chamber.
I dragged in some loud, raucous breath; and didn’t fall.
Only one student—the evelm algae-farmer1—even looked up.
EPILOGUE
Morning
NIGHT PASSED; ANOTHER NIGHT followed; and another. I don’t remember when, among them, I first realized that I had no memory of the morning after his departure. The morning before? How could I forget rolling from my sleeping mat on my six-legged bed, the expectation of the hunt, the lizard perch, the trip to the student quarters and his seamless waking. Yet the morning after is as blank as the other is vivid. Time articulated itself over nights, days, evenings—and, yes, more mornings. But as, among them now, I began to move, to work2, to function, to work1, I found myself dwelling on that dawn absence in memory’s continuity, caused certainly by the intensity of loss, the absolute vanishing of the possible. Recollection, which custom edits as it sediments, is a notorious trickster. Yet what’s sedimented here is forgetfulness itself. I suppose if I were going to dwell on an absence, it would be easier to ponder what, by a slip of attention, I missed than what, through an imponderable clash of chance, I had lost. Some midnight, some noon, on my world or another or halfway through the dark between, I would try again to recall that subsequent waking, those first thoughts on the first day without him, but as soon as I would press my mind against the edgeless dislocation that marked the nothingness between that night’s half-sleep and a loggy waking, an exhausting frustration would couple with, finally, some kind of willful inattention and slip my mind to alternate dawns. For while we search out one fugitive reflection, another can snag the disengaged and free-spinning engine of effort; and I would end up reviewing, say, this most rehearsed of recollections. From another world and neither the most vivid nor the earliest, it is still among my most tenacious memories. I was perhaps ten. I don’t know which world it was, but it must have been one on which we’d stopped en route to Senthy.
Night:
A trip across an open field, on my back, in some flapping container, while shadows loomed hundreds of meters into the air around. Wind tugged at the scarred translucent covering, and I realized at one point that I was being borne by beast, not machine. I know I drifted off to sleep. And I know now that while I slept I could as easily have been carried a thousand light years as a thousand kilometers.
I woke.
Gauze hung around me; light poured through an octagonal opening in a slanting wall. I pushed up on the sleeping pad, scrambled through the gauze, did not go through several dark openings lower down, but clambered through the bright one. Air. Sky. Something smooth under my hands; something rough under my feet; and the pithy taste of an atmosphere not mine.
I stood up outside.
The pale blue near the horizon became much darker overhead, which later I would learn meant a world with an artificial atmosphere held down by force.
A sandy horizon, gray, flat: here and there black rocks broke it. Here and there dark machines labored on it.
I don’t remember if the gravity was slightly more or slightly less than I was used to.
But I knew some things about my location. The thrumming down below the metal plates I stood on had something to do with large pumps and a small water supply. Inside the great, shaggy fences off to the left were beasts similar to the ones that had borne my carrier before. But the isolation of these facts suggests things I’d either been told or figured for myself. They do not sit among a galaxy of facts as do data acquired from General Information. I sidestepped down … a rut? A gully? The crease in the loose soil, its bottom filled with pebbles, could have been the result of either attention or erosion.
With round black rocks set among flat tan ones, a stone wall rose to a mossy overhang at about eye-level. My ten-year-old toes and fingers would find easy purchase in those crevices. I was human. It never occurred to me not to climb it.
As I put one bare foot on the sandy stone, above the wall I suddenly saw a brownish stalk, on the end of which were five or six transparent globes, packed and backed with dim foil, each of them folded within dark membranes, which closed and opened, now over one, now over another, so that—I suddenly realized—I was gazing at an alien gazing at an alien gaze.
Yes, the reality struck me in that complex a set of terms.
The eyestalk retreated.
Pebble hit pebble on the other side; I heard a scrabbling, then movement away.
I wasn’t scared; I didn’
t feel confused. The encounter halted me, and I stood—halted—staring above the mossy rocks for a while. Then I climbed again.
Elbows fixed on the gritty stone, I leaned over. On the dirt below, the regular squiggles certainly looked like tracks, but not from a creature with feet as I knew them.
They angled from the wall, stopped for a meter, then took up for another two, stopped … if they took up again, they were lost in the rock-pocked sands.
Had it squirmed away?
Had it leapt?
I felt around with one foot to continue my climb.
“Marq—?”
I glanced behind me in the windless air that (later) I would connect with large open expanses on a newly planoformed world.
“Marq, please come down from there!”
I don’t know whether it was Hatti or Sel’v who called.
“Really, dear, you don’t know where you are, and while I’m sure nothing’s here that can hurt you, still, until Genya gets here, I wish you’d come back to the compound. It’s very early.”
In the trip to foggy, gardened and oceaned Senthy, somehow that interim world never got a name. Often, though, I have thought that this, my first unfettered experience of alien life, had far more to do with my choosing my particular profession1 than all the force of Genya, Egri, or my older sisters together.
But why, I wonder, when I tell you of that morning memory, does this one come to interrupt? (The more we come to rely on GI, the more our daily consciousness becomes subservient to memory’s wanderings; and day begins with morning.) A dozen or so had gathered in the ship’s viewing chamber. The transparent canopy was most of a half-sphere that went down to the meter-high black wall. Only a dozen of us, from among the thousands on the ship, had contracted to go without anti-anxiety drugs for a day and had been taking, instead, for the last three hours, the capsules that actually had to be swallowed with long draughts of water from special collapsible containers.