New Talent… science fiction appears to be happily blessed with more than its fair share of it. James Sallis is a lean man with the drooping moustache and far-seeing eyes of a Western outlaw caught in one of those early tintypes. He is quiet and listens far more than he spedks—perhaps because he has so much to say. When he speaks he speaks with words on paper and they are the words of a poet, as in this binary story. A glimpse of worlds, before and after a galactic tear.
A lot of Couriers are from academic backgrounds, everything from literature to energy mechanics, the idea being that intellectual hardening of the arteries is less likely to occur if you watch what you eat and keep the blood flowing. You have to stay flexible: one loose word, one unguarded reaction, and you've not only lost respect and a job, you've probably thrown an entire world out of sympathy with Earth. In those days a Courier was a kind of bargain lot diplomat/prime minister/officeboy, and we were playing most of it by air; we hadn't been in Union long enough to set standards. So when they started the Service they took us out of the classrooms, out of the lines that stood waiting for diplomas—because we were supposed to know things like unity being the other side of a coin called variety. Knowledge, they assumed, breeds tolerance. Or at least caution.
Dr. Desai (Comparative Cultural) used to lean out over the podium he carried between classrooms to proclaim: "All the institutions, the actions, the outrages and distinctions of an era find their equivalent in any other era." He said it with all the conviction of a politician making the rounds before General Conscript, his small face bobbing up and down to emphasize every word. I took my degree at Arktech under Desai, and in my three years there I must have heard him say that a hundred times: everything else he—or any other instructor—said built back up to it like so many stairsteps. A zikkurat: climb any side, you get to the top. Some early member of the Service must have had Dr. Desai too. They had the same thing in mind.
For me it was June, on a day like yellow crystal. I was sitting in an outdoor café across from the campus with my degree rolled up in a pocket, cup half full of punjil, myself brimful of insouciance. It was a quiet day, with the wind pushing about several low blue clouds. I was looking across at the towers and grass of the Academy, thinking about ambition—what was it like to have it? I had no desire to teach: I couldn't get past Desai's sentence. And for similar reasons I was reluctant to continue my studies. An object at rest stays at rest, and I was very much at rest
Distractedly, I had been watching a small man in Vegan clothes work his way down along the street, stopping to peer into each shop in turn. When finally he reached the café, he looked around, saw me in the corner and began smiling. I barely had time to stand before he was at the table, hand stuck out, briefcase already opening.
Like Desai, he was a little man, forehead and chin jutting back from a protruding nose.
"Hello, Lant," he said. "I was told I could probably find you over here." He sat down across from me. He had small, red eyes, like a rabbit's. "Let me introduce myself: Golfanth Stein. S-t-e-i-n: stain. I wonder if you've heard the Council's organizing a new branch." I hadn't "Now that we're in Union there's a certain problem in representation, you know. Much to be done, embassies to establish, ambassador work. So we're beginning the Courier Service. Your degree in anthropology, for instance…"
He bought me a drink and I signed his papers.
Ten years… Ten years out of school, ten years spent climbing the webwork of diplomatic service—and I found it all coming back to me there on Alsfort, as I sat in the wayroom of the Court.
There was a strike in effect; some of you will remember it A forced-landing had come down too hard, too fast, and the Wagon had snapped the padbrace like a twig, toppling a half-acre of leadsub over onto the firesquads. So the Court workers were striking for subsurface landings, for Pits. My inbound had been the last. They were being turned away to Flaghold now, the next-door (half a million miles away) neighbor, an emergency port.
And if you sat in a Court and sweated at what was going on a Jump-week behind you on Earth and two ahead of you, on Altar; if you cursed and tried to bribe the crews; if you sent endless notes to both ends of the line you were knotted on; or if perhaps you are a history student specializing in the Wars… you'll remember the strike. Otherwise, probably not Alsfort isn't exactly a backyard—more like an oasis.
Two days, and I'd given up insisting, inquiring, begging. I'd even given up the notes.
So I sat in the wayroom drinking the local (and distant) relative of beer. The pouch was locked into my coat pocket and I was keeping my left arm against it. I spent the first day there worrying what might happen on Altar without that pouch, then I gave it up the way I'd given up trying to surmount the strike, to curtail my immobility and its likely disastrous consequences. I just sat and drank "beer" and punjil and watched the people.
There was a short, wiry man of Jewish blood, Earth or Vegan, who limped from a twisted back, as though all his life he'd been watching over his shoulder. He drank tea saturated with grape sugar at ten and four and took his meals as the clock instructed: moon, six. He wore skirts, and a corduroy skullcap he never removed.
There was a couple, definitely Vegan. The woman was old (though only in profile), dressed in Outworld furs and wearing a single jewel against her emphatic and no doubt plastic bosom—a different jewel each time I saw them. Her companion was young, beautiful and asthenic, always precisely dressed in a fine tight suit, and quite often scribbling in a notebook he carried. They came irregularly and drank Earth brandy. By the third day too much sameness had taken its toll: she sat with her face screwed into jealousy as he smiled and wrote in his book. When she spoke, there were quiet, gulping rhythms in her voice, and her only answer was the boy's beautiful smile and, once, a hand that held hers tightly—too tightly—on the table. He waited in the halls while she paid; she kept her face down, an older face now; they went away.
A Glaucon, a man I knew from Leic, but his ruby robes signaled pilgrimage and forbade us to speak. I watched him at his evening coffees. A recent convert, he was not at all the craftsman-like politician I had come to know in those months spent on his world, in his home. He had been quick, loud; now he plodded, and his voice followed softly in the distance, muttering at prayer.
And there were others, many others…
A Plethgan couple with a Vorsh baby, evidently returning home from the Agencies at Llarth. They came to the wayroom just once, to ask about Vorshgan for the child, and were told there was none. The mother was already pale with fear, the father raging and helpless; the baby screamed and was turning blue. They went out talking quietly to themselves under the child's cries. I never saw them again.
A Llyrch woman, alone and wearing only a formal shawl. It was brown, showing midcaste. A single green stripe and a small silver star, proclaimed that her husband was dead; that he died in honor, in a duel on Highker, away from home. Once she turned in her seat and the shawl fell partly open, exposing, beneath her hairless head, exorcised breasts and the carvings in her belly. She took nothing but water, and little of that.
And there was a man who came to the wayroom as often as I and sat as long, sipping a pale violet liquid from a crystal cup, reading or simply sitting, hands together, staring at the wall and moving his lips softly. He was short, with a quick smile and white teeth, hair gathered with ribbons to one side of his head. I wondered what he was drinking. He carried it in a flask to match the cup; you could smell it across the room, a light scent, pale as its color, subtle as perfume. Outworld, probably: he flattened his vowels, was precisely polite; there were remnants of a drawl. Urban, from the way he carried himself, the polished edge of gestures. His mien and clothes were adopted from the Vegans, but that was common enough to be useless in reading origin, and might have been assumed solely for this trip. Vegan influence was virtually ubiquitous then, before the Wars. I generally travelled in Vegan clothes myself, even used the language. Most of us did. It was the best way to move about without being noticed.
The Outworlds, though. I was fairly sure of that…
Lying out along the fringe of trade routes, they were in a unique position to Union civilization. Quite early they had developed a more or less static society, little touched by new influences spreading outward from Vega: by the time ripples had run that far, they were pretty weak. There was little communication other than political, little enough culture exchange that it didn't matter. The Outworld societies had gone so far and stopped; then, as static cultures will, become abstracted, involuted—picking out parts and making them wholes. Decadence, they used to call it.
Then the Vegans came up with the Drive, the second one, Overspace. And suddenly the Outworlds were no longer so Out, though they kept the name. The rest of us weren't long in discovering the furth's fur, shelby and punjil, which for a while threatened to usurp the ancient hierarchy of coffee and alcohol on
Earth with its double function as both stimulant and depressant. Under this new deluge of ships and hands (giving, taking) the Outworlds were last touched. They were, in fact, virtually struck in the face. And the outworlds, suddenly, were in transition.
But there's always an Orpheus, always those who look back. Under the swing of transition now, decadence had come to full flower. Amid the passing of old artifice, old extravagance, dandyism had sprung up as a last burst of heroism, a protest against the changing moods.
And there was much about the man I watched—the way his plain clothes hung, something about his hair and the subtly padded chest, his inviolable personality and sexlessness; books held up off the table, away from his eyes—that smacked of dandyism. It's the sort of thing a Courier learns to look for.
There were others, fleeting and constant. Single; coupled; even one Medusa-like Gafrt symb in which I counted five distinct bodies, idly wondering how many others had been already assimilated. But these I've mentioned are the ones I still think about, recalling their faces, the hollow forms hands made in air, their voices filling those forms. The ones I felt, somehow, I knew. These—and one other…
Rhea.
Without her Alsfort wouldn't be for me the vivid memory it is. It would be a jumbled, distorted horror of disappointment, failure, confusing faces. A time when I sat still and the world walked past me and bashed its head into the wall.
Rhea.
I saw her once, the last day. For a handful of minutes we touched lives across a table. I doubt she remembers. For her now, there will have been so many faces. I doubt she remembers.
It was mid-afternoon of my fourth day on Alsfort. The strike was beginning to run down; that morning, perhaps from boredom, the workers had volunteered a bit of light, routine work away from the Wagons, just to keep the Court from clogging up beyond all hope. I watched them unpack, adjust, and test a new booster.
One of the men climbed into it and with a hop went sailing out across the pads, flailing his arms violently. Minutes later, he came walking back across the gray expanse, limping and grinning. He -went up to the engineer and began talking quietly, shaking his head and gesturing toward one of the leg extensions. They vanished together, still talking, into the tool shop, hauling the booster between them.
I had gone from lunch at the Mart to coffee from the lobby servicors. Settling into a corner I watched the people wander about the arcade—colors, forms, faces blurred by distance; grouping and dissolving, aimless abstract patterns. Going back to my room had been a bad experience: too quiet, too inviting of thought.
The landscape of Alsfort…
You can see it from the rim in the top levels—though see is inappropriate. Study would be better: an exercise in optical monotony. Brown and gray begin at the base of the Court and blend to various tones of baldness, blankness. Brown and gray, rocks and sand—it all merges into itself. Undefined. You walk out on the floating radial arms, trying to get closer, to make it resolve at least to lines. But it simply lies there. Brown, gray, amorphous.
So, after the briefest of battles, I wound up back in the way-room. There was a booth just off-center, provided with console-adjustment seats and a trick mirror. Sitting there, you had the private tables in front of you, quick-service counters behind. You could watch the tables and, by tilting your head and squinting, dimly see what went on behind you, at the counters. Through the door you could watch people wandering the corridors. I had spent most of my four days in that booth, washing down surrogate-tablets with beer and punjil. Mostly Energine: sleep was impossible, or at least the silent hours of lying to wait for sleep. And somehow the thought of food depressed me almost as much, I tried to eat, ordering huge meals and leaving them untouched. By the fourth day my thoughts were a bit scrambled and I was beginning, mildly, to hallucinate.
The waiter was bringing me a drink when she came in. I was watching the mirror, hardly aware of his presence. Behind me, a man was talking to a companion who flickered in and out of sight; I was trying to decide whether this was the man's hallucination or my own. The waiter put my drink down with one hand, not watching, and knocked it against the kerb. Startled, I felt the cold on my hands. I turned my head and saw what he was looking at…
Rhea.
She was standing in the doorway with the white floor behind her, blue light swelling in around her body. Poised was the word that came to me: she might fly at the first sudden motion.
She was… delicate. That was the second impression. A thing made of thinnest glass; too fine, too small, too perfect. Maybe five feet. Thin. You felt you could take her in your palm: she was that fine, that light. That fragile.
Tiny cameo feathers covered her body—scarlet, blue, sungold. And when light struck them they shimmered, threw off others, eyefuls of color. They thinned down her limbs and grew richer in tone; her face and hands were bare, white. And above the small carved face were other features: dark blue plumes, almost black, that brushed on her shoulders as she walked—swayed and danced.
Her head darted on air to survey the room. Seeing my eyes on her she smiled, then started through the tables. She moved like leaves in wind, hands fluttered at her sides, fingers long and narrow as blades of grass. Feathers swayed with her, against her, spilling chromatic fire.
And suddenly karma or the drugs or just my loneliness—whatever it was—had me by the shoulders and was tugging, pulling.
I came to myself, the room forming out of confusion, settling into a square fullness. I was standing there away from the booth, I was saying, "Could I buy you a drink?" My hand almost… almost at her shoulder. The bones there delicate as a bird's breast.
She stood looking back past me, then up at my face, into my eyes, and smiled again. Her own eyes were light orange beneath thin hard lids that blinked steadily, sliding over the eyes and back up, swirled with colors like the inside of seashells.
"Yes, thank you," in Vegan. "It would be very nice. Of you." She sang the words. Softly. I doubt that anyone but myself heard them.
I looked back at the Outworlder. He had been watching; now he frowned and returned to his book.
"I was tired. Of the room," she said, rustling into the booth. "I said. To him. I could not stay there, some time ago, much longer. I would like to come, here. And see the people."
"Him?"
"My… escort? Karl. That the room was. Not pretty, it made me sad. The bare walls, your walls are such… solid. There is something sad about bare walls. Our own are hammered from bright metals, thin and, open. Covered with reliefs. The forms of, growing things. I should not have to. Stay, in the room?"
"No. You shouldn't." I moved my hand to activate the dampers. All sound outside the booth sank to a dull, low murmur like the sea far off, while motion continued, bringing as it always did a strange sense of isolation and unreality.
I ordered punjil. The waiter left and returned with a tall cone of bright green fluid, which he decanted off into two small round glasses. His lips moved but the dampers blocked the sound; getting no response, he went away. "I'm Lant."
"Rhea," she said. "You are, Vegan?"
"Earth."
"You work. Here."
"No. Coming through, held up by the strike. You?" She sipped the punjil. "It is, for me, the same. You are a, crewman? On one of the ships then."
"No. I'm with a travel bureau. Moving around as much as I can, keeping an eye out for new ports, new contracts." Later, somehow, I regretted the lies, that came so easily. "On my way Out. I think there might be some good connections out there."
"I've heard the cities are. Very beautiful."
This is my first time Out in ten years." That part, at least, was true; I had gone Out on one of my first assignments. They were beautiful, breathtaking, even then. And they've done a lot in the last few years, virtually rebuilt whole worlds. The largest eclecticism the Union's known—they've borrowed from practically every culture in and out of Union… They're even building in crystals now. They say the cities look like glass blossoms, like flowers grown out of the ground. That there is nothing else like them." saw a picture of Girth, a painting, once. Like a man had made it in his hand and put it, into the trees. A lot of trees, all kinds. And sculpture, mosaics. In, the buildings. The trees were, beautiful. But so was. The city."
"We've all been more or less living off Outworld creativity for years now."
"A beautiful thing. It can take much… use?"
I supposed so, and we sat quietly as she watched the people, her eyes still and solemn, her head tilted. I felt if I spoke I would be intruding, and it was she who finally said: The people. They are, beautiful also."
"Where are you from, Rhea?" I asked after watching her a while. She turned back to me.
"Byzantium." She set her eyes to the ceiling and warbled her delight at the name. "It is from, an old poem. The linguist aboard the Wagon. The first Wagon. He was, something of a poet. Out cities took, his fancy, he remembered this poem. He too was. Of Earth."
"I'm afraid I don't know the poem."
"It is, much. Old. Cities they are hammered of gold and set, in the land. All is. Beautiful there, and timeless. The poem has become for us. A song, one of our songs."
"And is your world like that? A refuge?"
"Perhaps. It was."
"Why did you leave?"
"I am going, to Ginh. To… work." She moved gently, looted around. I noticed again the tension in herx face and hands, so unlike the easy grace of her body.
"You have a job there."
"Yes. I—" The mood passed. Her feathers rustled as she laughed: "Guess."
I declined.
"I sing." She trilled an example. Then stopped, smiling. We ordered new drinks, selecting one by name—a name she delighted in, repeated it over and over in different keys. It turned out to be a liqueur, light on the tongue, pulpy and sweet
She leaned across the table and whispered, "It is. Nice." Her breath smelled like new-cut grass, like caramel and sea-breeze. Long plumes swept the tabletop and whispered there too. "Like the other, was."
"What do you sing, Rhea?"
"Old songs, our old songs. Of warriors. Lovers. I change the names, to theirs."
"How long will you be on Ginh?"
"Always."
You have been there before, then? No.
You have a family there? No.
You love Byzantium, you were happy there? Yes.
Then why…?
"I am… bought by one of the Academies. I am taken there. To sing, for them. And to be looked at." She seemed not at all sad.
"You will miss Byzantium?"
"Yes. Much."
I cleared my throat. "Slavery is against Regulations. You—"
"It is. By my own, my will."
A long pause…
I see.
"My race is. Dying. We have no techknowledgy, we are not, in Union. Byzantium can not longer, support us. The money, they give for me. It feeds us for many years. It too buys machines. The machines will keep us. A part of us, alive."
She drew her knees up into a bower of arms and dropped her head, making the booth a nest. After a moment she lifted her face out from the feathers. She trilled, then talked.
"When I was a child, Byzantium was, quiet and still. Life it was easy. We sang our songs, made our nests, that is enough. For a lifetime, all our lives, lifetimes. That is enough. Now it is not longer easy."
"Perhaps it seemed that way. Because you were a child."
An arm hovered over the table. A hand came down to perch on the little round glass. "We took from her, Byzantium, she asked nothing. Our songs, our love. Not more. Our fires, to keep her, warm. The sky the earth it was. In, our homes."
"But you grew up."
"Yes and Byzantium, much old, she grows. Old-more than my Parent. Once it sang, with us. Now its voice broke, too went away. The souls left, the trees. Our homes. The rivers it swelled with sorrow, too burst. It fell, fruits from, the trees, too they were. Already dead. The moons grow red, red like the eye. Of a much old man."
"You tell it like a poem."
"It is, one of our songs. The last poem of, RoNan. He died before it was. Finished."
"Of a broken heart."
She laughed. Gently. "At the hands of, his sons. For to resist coalition. He spoke out in his songs, against the visitors. He thought, it was right, Byzantium to die. It should not be made to go on to live; living. He wanted the visitors, to leave us."
The visitors… Outworld?"
She nodded. The plumes danced, so deep a blue. So deep.
"They came and to take our fruits, too our trees. They could make them to grow again-new on Ginh. They took our singers.
They… bought, our cities, our unused nests. Then they to say, With these can you to build a new world. RoNan did not want a new world, it would be much wrong, to Byzantium."
"And no one listened."
They listened. Much of, them. The younger ones to not, who wanted too a life, a life of their own, a world for it. They learned, about the machines. They go much to Ginh and learned in, the Academies, there, they came back, to us. To build their new, world. Took it of the machines, like too bottomless boxes."
"Ginh. They went to Ginh…"
"Yes, where I am. Going. I am with our cities, too our trees on Ginh, in a museum, there. I sing. For the people. They to come. To look at us, to listen to me."
The ceiling speaker cleared its throat I looked up. Nothing more.
"He must have been a strong man," I said. To stand up so strongly for what he believed was right. To hold to it so dearly. A difficult thing to do, these days."
The decision was not his. He had, no choice. He was, what he believed. He could not go against it"
"And so were the others, the younger ones, and they couldn't either."
That is, the sad part."
Someone blew into the speakers.
"You knew him, you believe what he said?"
"Does it matter? He was. My father."
And we were assaulted by sound:
ATTENTION PLEASE. ATTENTION PLEASE. THE CHELTA, UNION SHIP GEE-FORTY-SEVEN, BOUND OUT, IS NOW ON PAD AND WILL LIFT IN ONE HOUR STANDARD. PASSENGERS PLEASE REPORT AT ONCE TO UNDERWAYS. UNDERWAY F.
So the strike was over, the workers would get their Pits.
A pause then, some mumbled words, a shuffling of papers:
WILL CAPTAIN I-PRANH PLEASE REPORT TO THE TOWERMAIN. CAPTAIN I-PRANH TO THE TOWERMAIN. THE REVISED CHARTS HAVE BEEN COMPLETED.
And the first announcement began again.
Rhea uncurled and looked up, then back past me, as if remembering something.
Her face turned up as he approached.
"Hello, Karl," she sang. 'This is, Lant." My Outworld dandy. I reached over and opened the dampers.
He bowed and smiled softly. "Pleased, Lant." Then added: "Earth, isn't it?"seeing through my Vegan veneer as easily as he'd made out her words through the dampers. His own voice was low and full, serene. "Always pleased to meet a Terran. So few of you get out this far. But I'm afraid I'll have to be rude and take Rhea away now. That was the call for our ship. Excuse us, please."
He put out a white hand, bowing again, and she took it, standing. Feathers rustled: a sound I would always remember.
Thank you for talking to Rhea, Lant. I'm sure it was a great pleasure for her."
"For me."
A final bow and he turned toward the door. She stood there a moment, watching me, feathers lifting as she breathed.
"Thank you for, the drinks Lant. And for… to listen." She smiled. "You are going, Out. You will be on this ship. Perhaps I will. See you, on the ship."
She wouldn't, of course.
And she went away.
Most of the rest you know.
I Jumped the next day for Altar, where I got down on my calloused knees and went through my bag of time-honored politician tricks. Money bandaged the wounds of insult, outrage was salved by a new trade agreement The Altarians would withdraw troops from Mersy: the wars were stayed.
But not stopped. The Altarians kept their sores and when, several weeks later, one of our writers published a satirical poem attacking Altar for its "weasel colonialism, that works like a vine," the wound festered open. The poet refused to apologize. He was imprisoned and properly disgraced, but the damage was done.
War erupted. Which you don't need to be told: look out your Window and see the scars.
War flashed across the skies, burst inside homes. Which doesn't matter: look in your mirror for the marks that tell, the signs that stay.
I don't have to tell you that the Vegans, victims of too much sharing and always our friends, sided with us. That they were too close to the Altar allies. That they were surrounded and virtually destroyed before our ships could make the Jump.
I don't have to tell you that we're still picking up the pieces. Look out your window, look in your mirror.
That we have the bones of Union and we're trying to fatten them up again…
I was one of the sideways casualties of war. One of the face-saving (for them) disgraces (for me). I believe I would have left anyway, I might have. Because there's something I have to say. And here I can say it, and be heard.
The Union gives a lot. But it takes a lot too. And I'm not sure any more that what it takes, what is shoved aside, is replaceable. Maybe some things are unique. I know one thing is.
Which is what I tell my students.
I sit here every day and look out at all these faces. And I wonder, Will this one be a Courier, or that one in the front row, or the one in back—the girl who swings her leg, the kid who brings sandwiches to class in his briefcase? Will they be the disciples of Earth's ascendance?
I wonder.
And I tell them that a society feeds off its people. That the larger it is, the more it consumes. That you never know what effect your words will have a hundred million miles away.
You never know. But you try. You try to know, you try to balance things out on your own scales. Utility; the best for the most; compromise and surrender. Your smallest weights are a million, a billion, people.
But I tell them something else to go with that.
I tell them…
That there may be nothing new under the sun. But there are new suns, and new faces under them. Looking up, looking down…
The faces are what matter.
The little animal went racing up the side of its cage, made a leap to the top, climbed upside-down halfway out—then dropped back onto the floor. It did this over and over, steadily tumbling, becoming each time wilder, more frantic. The last time, it lay still on its back in the litter, panting.
And she was lovely below him, beside him, above him. Was lovely in dark, lovely in shadow, lovely in the glaring door as she fingered the bathroom's light…
(She is sitting on the bed, legs crossed, one elbow cocked on a knee, holding a ruby fang that bites again, again into the dark around her. The window is a black hole punched in the room, and for a moment now when she lifts her arm, light slants in and falls across her belly, sparkling on semen like dew in dark grass; one breast moves against the moving arm.
Light comes again, goes again. It strikes one side of her tilted face and falls away, shadows the other. She looks down, looks up, the small motion goes along her body, her side moves against yours. There are two paths of glowing where light touched her skin, here on her belly, here on the side of her face, a dull glowing orange. Already it is fading.
Her cigarette drops through the window like a burning insect, drops into darkness. It's this kind of darkness: it can fill a room.)
She came back and sat on the edge of the bed. The light was off, her skin glowing softly orange all over, darker orange for month-old bruises on her breasts and hips. "Strong. He hadn't been with a woman for three years," she had said when he touched one of the bruises. "A real man." He had beaten her severely, then left twice what was necessary.
She struck a match and the spurt of light spiderwebbed the dirty, peeling wall.
"You're really from Earth…" (Silence breaking, making sounds. The little animal slowly moving now in his cage.)
"Naturalized. During the Wars."
"Oh. I see." She was thinking about ruin, the way it started, the roads it took. Her skin was losing its glow. "Where were you born?"
"Here. Vega." (She turned to look at him.)
"In Thule." (She waited.)
"West Sector."
She turned back to the window. "I see."
"I was signed Out. It was a Vegan ship, we were getting the declaration broadcast when communication from Vega stopped. Captain turned us around but before we hit Drive, Earth told us it was too late. We went on into Drive and stayed in till we could find out what happened—Altar had ships jumping in and out all along the rim, grabbing whatever they could, blasting the rest—a big wagon like The Tide was no match for what they had. We came out near Earth. Captain's decision, and I don't envy his having to make it. Anyway, the ship was consigned and the Captain pledged to Earth. Most of us went along, enlisted. There wasn't much to come back to."
The room was quiet then with the sound of her breathing, the rustle of the animal in its litter. Light from outside crept across the floor, touching her leg on the bed with its palm. She sucked at the cigarette and its fire glowed against her face, against the window.
"You're not Terran. I thought you were."
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I didn't realize—"
"It doesn't matter."
"But I didn't mean to—"
"It doesn't matter." She smiled. "Really."
He lay watching her face above him, a quiet face, still. And the room itself was quiet again, was gray, was graying, was dark…
And later: her hand on his shoulder, her lips lightly against his and his eyes opening, something warm for his hand.
"I made coffee. You'll have to drink it black."
He stared at the cup, breathed steam and came more awake. The cup was blue ceramic, rounded, shaped into an owl's head. The eyes extended out at the edges to form handles. "You shouldn't have. Coffee's hard to get, I know, you sh—"
"I wanted to. You gave me cigarettes, I gave you coffee." She tore her cigarette in two, threw the smoking half-inch out the window, dropped the rest into the cage. Her fingers glowed orange where the cigarette had been.
"Thank you. For the coffee," he said. Then: "You're beautiful."
She smiled. "You don't have to say that."
"I wanted to."
And she laughed at that.
He got up and walked to the cage, his hands wrapped around the mug. The little animal was leaning down on its front legs, hindquarters up, paws calmly working at the cigarette. It had carefully slit the paper and was removing the tiny lumps of charcoal from the filter one at a time, putting them in its mouth.
"Charcoal," she said. "There's charcoal in the filter, I just remembered. He likes it."
Having finished eating, the little animal rolled the remaining paper into a ball, carried it to one corner and deposited it there.
Then it returned to the front of the cage and sat licking at the orange fur that tufted out around its paws.
"What is it?" he asked after a while. The charcoal pellets were still in its mouth. After sucking at them for several moments, it began to grind them between its teeth.
"A Veltdan."
"Vegan?"
She nodded.
"I've never seen one."
"There aren't many left—none around the cities. Dying out. They're from Lame Valley."
He thought a moment, remembered: The telepaths!" The colony of misanthropic sensitives.
"Yes. That's where the colony is. I was born there, came to Kahlu after the Wars. Not much left, even that far out. The colony was wiped out"
"Are you—"
She shook her head. "My mother. Mostly I was born without their physical deformity or their talents, though I guess I got a little of both." She came up to the cage, thumped her fingers against the side. "The telepathy… some of it filtered down. I'm an empathist, of sorts." She grinned. "Makes me good at my work."
She walked to the bed and lit another cigarette. An insect came in through the window, skittered around the room hitting the ceiling again and again, finally found the window and flew back out. It was neon, electric blue.
"Veltdans are supposed to be the deadliest things in the universe. Four inches from nose to tail, altogether seven pounds—and you can put them up against any animal you want to, any size, any weight"
He took his hand off the cage and put it back around the mug. The Veltdan was over on its back in the litter, rolling from side to side, square snout making arcs. Watching this prim, almost exquisite little animal, he found it difficult to accept what she was saying; to put the two facts together.
"It registers external emotion. Whatever made the telepaths got into the Veltdan too—as much as they can handle with their brain. You get something coming at it with a mind full of hate and killing, the Veltdan takes it all and turns it back on the attacker—goes into a frenzy, swarms all over it, knows what the attacker is going to do next. It's small but it's fast, it has sharp claws and teeth. While the attacker is getting filled back up with its own hate and fury, the Veltdan is tearing it to pieces. They say two of them fighting each other is really something to see, it just goes on and on."
He looked down at the little orange-cerulean animal. "Why should they fight one another?"
"Because that's what they like best to eat: each other."
He grimaced and walked to the window. A shuttleship was lifting. Its light flashed against his face.
Every day just past noon, flat clouds gather like lily pads in the sky, float together, rain hops off to pound on the ground. For an hour the rain comes down, washing the haze of orange from the air, and for that hour people come together in cafes and Catches, group there talking. And waiting.
They were sitting in an outdoor Catch, drinking coffee. Minutes before, clattering and thumping, a canvas roof had been rolled out over them. Around them now the crowd moved and talked. Rain slammed down, slapped like applause on the canvas roof.
"This is where the artists come," she said, pointing to a corner of the Catch where several young people were grouped around a small table. Two of them—a young man with his head shaved and a girl with long ochre hair—were bent forward out over the table, talking excitedly. The others were listening closely, offering occasional comments. When this happened the young man would tilt his head away from the speaker and watch him closely; the girl would look down at the floor, a distant expression on her face. Then when the speaker had finished they would look at one another and somehow, silently, they would decide: one of them would reply. Cups, saucers, crumpled sheets of paper were piled on the table. One of the girls was sketching. Rain sprinkled and splattered on the backs of those nearest the outside.
"The one talking, that's Dave," she went on. "A ceramist, and some say he's the best in Union. I have a few of his pots at home. Early stuff, functional. He used to do a lot of owls; everything he threw had an owl in it Now he's on olms. Salamanders. They're transparent, live in caves. If you take one out into the sun it burns. Turns black and dies." She lit one of the cigarettes he'd given her. "They all come here every afternoon. Some work at night, some just wait for the next afternoon. I have a lot of their work." She seemed quite proud of that
"You like art quite a lot, then?"
"No." She grinned, apologizing. 'I don't even understand most of it. But I seem to feel it—what they think, their appreciation. And I like them, the people. They always need money, too."
She sat quietly for a moment, smoking, watching the group of young people.
"It's a tradition, coming here. This Catch was built where the Old Union was before the Wars; Samthar Smith always came here when he was on Vega. It's called Pergamum now."
"'All Pergamum is covered with thorn bushes; even its ruins have perished.' The epigraph for his novel, Pergamum, The eulogy he wrote for his marriage."
"Yes." She stared out at the rain. I love that book." Then she looked back at him. "Dave tells me they've taken the name as a symbol. The ruin of the old, the growth of a new art."
A disturbance near the center of the Catch caught his attention. Holding a glass of punjil, a fat middle-aged man was struggling to his feet while the others at his table tried to get him to sit back down. He brushed aside their hands and remarks, came swaying and grinning across the floor. Halfway across, he turned around and went back to put his drink on the table, spilling it as he did so,
"Hi," he said, approaching the table, then belched. Thought I'd come over and say that—Hi, I mean. C'n always spot a fellow Terran." Another belch. "William Beck Mann, representing United Union Travel, glad to meet you." He leaned on the table with one hand, shoved the other out across it. "Coming in from Ginh, stuck on this godamn dead rock while the com'pny ship gets its charts revised or somethin'. Nothing going on here at all, eh. You heading home too?"
Others in the Catch, Vegans, were staring toward their table in distaste.
"No… I don't know. Maybe.'
"Mind if I sit 'own?" Which he did, swiveling on the tabled hand, plopping into the chair.
"No, I don't mind. But we're about to leave."
"I see." He looked at the girl for the first time and grinned. His teeth were yellow. "Guess you got plans. Well. That case s'pose I'll get on back." The fat man hauled himself out of the chair and went back toward his own table. Two of the young people were leaving and he tried to walk between them, knocking the girl against a table. Hatred flared in the boy's face and a knife suddenly appeared in his hand.
"No, Terri, don't," the girl said. "He's drunk, he can't help himself."
The boy reached and pulled her to him. Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the hatred vanished from his face. He smiled squarely into the man's face (the knife, too, had vanished) and spat at him. He and the girl went on out of the Catch, holding hands. The fat man goggled after them, reeling out obscenities till someone from his table came and took him back.
"You know which part I like best?" she said after a while. "In Pergamum?" She turned from the rain and looked at him. The part where the girl pours coffee and says, This is the universe.' Then she holds up two rocks of sugar and says, 'And this is us, the two of us.' She drops the sugar in the coffee and it starts dissolving, you can't see it any more…"
"Yes, I know. They say it really happened, that Smith heard of it from one of his friends and later used it in Pergamum. I wonder if the friend felt honored?"
"I would have. He was a great man."
"He was also a very lonely man."
Disheartedly, they began to argue over whether Smith should be called a Terran or Vegan poet. She seemed strangely affected by the previous trouble, and his heart was just riot in the discussion. Smith had been born on Earth, had adopted Vega as his home for many years…
She had difficulty lighting her next cigarette. The rain was over and the winds were rising now.
A shuttleship was lifting.
Against the darkness, bands of pearl spread in layers and deepened, swelling into rainbow colors. They flashed on his face. When he turned from the window, her skin was glowing rich orange.
"Will you stay here? Have you come home now?"
"I don't know. That's why I came. To find out."
"It would be nice. If you stayed." She fed the Veltdan another filter; it was making muted, moaning sounds. "That's one of Dave's cups," she said. "He also built the cage for me." Everything was quiet for a long while. Finally he said: "Do you remember how Pergamum ends?"
"'Wherever we are content, that is our country.'" He nodded. "That's what I have to decide. Where I'm content, where my country is." He put the cup on the cage. "We keep talking about Samthar Smith…"
"An Earthman who became Vegan, as you're a Vegan who became Terran."
He turned to look at her. The orange glow was fading. He nodded again. "He finally found contentment. On Juhlz."
"And you?"
He shrugged. The Veltdan was grinding tie tiny bits of charcoal between its teeth. It sounded like someone walking over sea-shells far away.
"There's an insect On Earth," he said. "It dies when you pick it up. From the heat in your hand." He walked toward the bathroom.
A moment later: "The switch isn't working."
There's a power ration. This area's cut off for several hours, another gets to use the power. The peak periods are shifted about."
He came back and stared sadly at her.
"You don't know how ridiculous that is, do you? You don't realize. There's enough power on my ship—on one goddamn ship!—to give Vega enough electricity for years. You don't see how absurd that is, do you? You just accept it." He picked up the cup. The Veltdan was carrying its rolled-up paper toward the corner of the cage.
Suddenly he threw the cup across the room. It struck the wall and shattered; one eye-handle slid back across the floor and lay at his feet staring up at him.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"It doesn't matter. I can get another from Dave, An olm, one of his olms."
"I'll leave you money."
"It doesn't matter." She bent and began picking up the shards. "Besides, I have others. Would you like more coffee? Now?"
"No… thank you." He walked back to the window and stood there for several minutes, staring out. He could hear the Veltdan pacing in its cage.
"You know," he said finally, I feel free now. Because of you, and all this. I feel free, content I can go on."
When she spoke, her voice was very quiet Then you're not staying. He paused. "No."
Then:" Thank you, thank you very much. I'll leave money… for the cup."
She turned away from him, and spoke very softly again. "It doesn't matter." The Veltdan depended from the top of the cage. "I knew you would, from the first. You never believed you would stay. I could tell." She sighed. "The empathy."
He took the blue shards out of her hands and put them in the empty waste-bucket Then he put money on the cage and left.
Pearl spread outward and shelled the sky.
She stood at the window watching. The colors deepened, flared to a rainbow. Her skin glowed orange under the colors; the cigarette in her hand gleamed weakly.
Behind her the little Veltdan sat very still in its cage and blinked at the light.