by Tanith Lee
It was a sumptuous afternoon, the light clear again, the water a dark, acid green. Catseye was long out of sight. The heat-blanched sky carried just one pale feathering cloud-funnel all the way down it, last ghost of that distant storm which had put me here.
I was keeping a kind of log of things seen, and began making an entry on a crocodile I had visited at Catseye, a new and very live one, nearly sixty feet in length, plated as if with solid emeralds. It waddled round its enclosure, snapping at the flung enormous titbits. Its teeth were black, but from change not decay. They flashed like gems as they seared through the meat, ready to take off a leg. The notice, true to ecology regulations, promised us, and it, the creature would be returned to the lagoons in three months’ time. By then, however, enclosure-educated, it would be out of its depth.
‘If you’re planning a career as a detective,’ said Arro Haine, ‘you’re not going to be much of a success. Her cabin is over the other side of E Deck.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ We both knew what he meant.
‘Her cabin. My temporary liaison of the afternoon. Or didn’t you, after all, come aboard to spy on such activities for my wife?’
‘Actually, I don’t believe I did.’
He said, ‘Perhaps we can come to some arrangement. I’ll tell you when, with whom and how. You scribble it down and then pass on the message to Cim. You needn’t move at all, in that case. Otherwise you’ll be on the go morning, noon and night. It’s also a large boat, you’ll notice. You might get lost, climbing about to all those little round windows.’
‘Don’t you find,’ I said, ‘the lady in each instance informs Cimarin herself, at the first opportunity.’
‘Yes, that’s true,’ he said, coming over to join me by the rail. ‘The code d’honneur des aristos. What do you think of them?’
‘Of them?’
‘Not us,’ he said. ‘You know where I come from.’
‘Not exactly.’
‘As for you, you’re the hitchhiker.’
He had progressed now (he was fairly drunk) to the stage of forming a vituperative conspiracy with me. I rejected the delusion as neatly as I could by asking him if he had any lines down in the lagoon.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Hand-rigged, which means properly. Everything on this tub is left to machinery, which makes a Christ-awful mess of it.’ He called something over his shoulder and a robo appeared with glasses on a tray. ‘Are you drinking? Not-just-now-thank-you. All right.’ He took a drink. He said, ‘Cim has shown me a very complex piece of computer read-out that indicates she had ancestors in the Tenebris area. I mean the old sort. About a million years back. You’ve heard of that kind of research?’
‘I must confess I thought it was probably phoney.’
‘Must you confess? Well, since it’s confession hour, I agree with you. Blood and gene samples to date us all back to some pre-shock, pre-Millennium, pre-everything ape … But she’s convinced herself, my odalisque-type wife, that her exact progenitors crawled out of their caves around here. So we brought the vilyo over the drowned caves out of which they crawled and started crawling out of our skulls.’
‘Anyone’s ancestors came, analogously, out of a cave somewhere — the basic premise is fine. But applied this way, too broad, I would have thought, to be effective.’
‘Anyone’s ancestors? Surely, not yours?’
I felt sorry for him, but he was also boring me by now. Whatever I said would offend him, so I offended him by explaining I’d set up a minor experiment in my cabin which I now needed to see to.
‘Don’t mess up her expensive carpet,’ was all he said, as I walked back down the stair.
When the dinner-call went, a jade dusk was coming down on the jade water, and phosphorous hung low in the water-palms that rose in clumps out of the lagoons. The vessel was still quietly moving, distant walls of forest gliding by, melting into the sky as the immense night settled, black-green, bringing the nocturnal scents of glaucous foliage, and a wet air heavy as lead. Even the wax candles on that long table lay flattened out to butterfly wings, not a pointing tulip-shape among them. Something in the Tenebris atmosphere does odd things to fire, and occasionally to electricity.
Cimarin was wearing another golden dress. The surfaces of her long fingernails had been incised by her manicure to resemble prisms. ‘Don’t you admire it?’ she said. Lacquered pale, they fragmented light as she waved her hands. The fingernails called to my mind, again, the scales of the Catseye crocodile.
A giant pineapple dominated the table. It was not a mutation, but had been built up from twenty fruits of ordinary size, then sealed in a specially grown skin. The scimitar leaves gave shade to the whole table from the natural firework display that was going on above. ‘Shooting stars!’ Cimarin cried. She said it the very way some women still insist that wasps and mosquitoes ‘bite’, a childish shortcut that could be delightful or irritating depending on who heard it and in what mood. Meteors were common at that time of year. They sewed fiery lines through the dark, now and then exploding in silent white asterisks sixty miles overhead.
The dinner was notable for nothing but its good cuisine, and the efforts of Arro Haine to wreck it.
He was by now completely drunk, with the beautifully clear articulation of much practice. Not a cut or an innuendo was slurred. In turn, the table laughed at him, slyly in its non-existent sleeve, openly in his face. He was the court jester. They kept him to amuse them with insults. Even Cimarin perpetuated this idea. ‘Oh, now, Arro — ’ ‘Arro, how preposterous!’ He never lost his temper. (It had probably happened long ago, and he had seen the uselessness of it. As, presumably, for some reason, he was incapable of seeing the uselessness of this.) He remained smiling and venomous. Everyone laughed. Cimarin laughingly protested and apostrophised. They were still playing up to him. The pineapple, for example, might have been set there solely to aggravate and invite his scorn.
It had already occurred to me that he could have left her by now. He took her name on marrying her, a custom not uncommon in Cimarin’s walk of life. But his own stage name was still well known, he was still working, off and on. Plainly, this second environment offered no compensation any longer for the periods of non-expression. Its lavishness annoyed him as much as did its social function. The weakness that held him here was, it would seem, not a craving for luxury or even its habit. It was the sado-masochistic tensions which enslaved him then just as they did his partner in misery. (There was one other possibility, which I missed until later.) Even so, it was only a matter of time, one felt, before a vaguely sensed, random propulsion, caused by everything, ignited this static pile. Then, like one of the shooting lights overhead, he too would flare, and vanish for good.
I’d had some conversation with my neighbours, or they with me. As with any good theatre seat, I’d been placed a little way up from the stage — the seats of Cimarin and Arro. My new companions regaled me with anecdotes of his behaviour. The woman even explained carelessly she had slept with him three nights before. They spoke of him as if he were some savage and eccentric pet.
It was all very interesting and rather disgusting. The only aspect that began to concern me was the way in which Cimarin sometimes abruptly lowered her head, on pretence of regarding her plate, her glass, her fingernails, but actually as if she had been slashed across both cheeks and forehead by a whip. Could it be that already the grim drama was approaching its final act?
As the dessert was being served, a musical siren went off on the lower decks, indicating apparently that one of the “fishing” lines had claimed something.
Several of the party got to their feet. ‘That’s Arro’s line,’ said one of the women. ‘Oh, is it?’ he said. ‘Two lift notes and a three-tone descent. Don’t you know your own signal?’ ‘It would seem not.’ He looked at Cimarin, pushed back his chair, and went off with the same precision of movement he had shown phonetically. Most of the crowd followed him.
Cimarin sat back and eyed me.
‘
What are you doing over there? Come here. Sit in Arro’s place, he won’t mind.’ Here we went again. But I did as she suggested. Her face was feverish with forced gaiety. As I sat down she said, ‘You’re thinking I’m a fool.’ ‘No.’ Frankly I couldn’t tell her what I did think. My reflections would be too personal for comfort. ‘One wonderful lesson he’s taught me,’ she said. ‘The value of a good stiff drink.’ She was sampling something from a black bottle, a vintage champagne laced with spirits. She poured a dose for me, then tilted back her head to look at the meteors. ‘They used to say, didn’t they, wish on a star? What shall I wish for, my friend?’ We sat in silence after that, and I listened to the mild tumult on the other deck. The evidence was, something of interest had been landed.
In about five minutes, several of the crowd came hurrying back, bright and tuneful with the news. ‘The most peculiar stone — really spectacular.’ ‘Get ready, Cimarin. The robo’s bringing it up here.’ ‘Why, shall I be frightened?’ asked Cimarin, sportively. She positioned herself facing the stair, alert for manifestations.
When the robo appeared, it had one of the portage trays attached at front, with Arro’s catch sitting on it. Arro himself had not yet returned. The thing on the tray glittered obscurely. It was a fossil, about the size of one of the bronzeware bread plates, roughly triangular, dark, warty, with a glycerine shine about it, too. Cimarin rose behind me. The robo trundled nearer. I began to feel the object, unless it had concealed worth, was rather a disappointment. It presented to me nothing I had not seen a hundred times over littering the poorer collections of Tenebrite beachcombers. It was about ten feet away when I heard Cimarin’s dress rustle oddly, and the tribe of lovers made a wild varied outcry.
One of the men pushed by the robo and it backed off. Precisely then, Arro came up the stair and shouted at the carrier, ‘Here, bloody machine. Wrong way. H Deck.’ And the robo moved quickly about and rolled itself into a hatch, the find borne before it. By then I was part of the group around Cimarin, who was lying on the rugs where she had fallen. Her pulse, when I could get to her to take it, seemed almost normal. Next she opened her eyes, looking puzzled.
‘What am I doing down here?’
‘You fainted away, darling,’ said one of the women, who had Cimarin’s head on her sequinned knee.
‘But I’ve never fainted — in my life.’
‘Well, now you have, you clever girl.’
We helped her up. She seemed not to have hurt herself in collapsing, in fact she appeared to be perfectly all right, only a little surprised and disorientated. She said again, ‘But I don’t faint.’ Then glanced at the black bottle. ‘Oh-oh. Not such a good idea after all, eh, my scholar of scholars?’
Arro was standing staring at us from across the deck. He didn’t call out any questions. I saw her eyes fly to him. There was, for me, an unmistakable communication in her gaze. You see, you see? the eyes pleaded with him. This is how it is with me. But he only turned away and went off, not even following the robo up to the analysing unit on H Deck. Cimarin shrugged, and shivered. Her Company escorted her back to the Versailles suite full of love-gifts and empty of husband.
Not long after, I went to my cabin. I admit I had begun to calculate if the boat would make Tenebris South in three days as opposed to four.
I woke early. Someone was calling and hammering on my door. My first thought was the vilyo was on fire.
‘I’m sorry to dig you out at this vile hour — ’ I saw the man was wearing a nightrobe himself.
‘What is it?’
‘Cimarin. She’s in the most dreadful hysterical state, and asking frantically for you.’
‘Why?’ I said.
‘The comfort of strangers?’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I meant, why is she in a hysterical state?’
‘Oh — I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude to you. The state? It’s that damn fossil stone Arro’s line dredged up last night.’
‘All right. Tell her I’ll be along in ten minutes. Send me a robo guide, please. Does anyone have any convitol?’
‘That’s no good, I’m afraid. She takes it all the time anyway. Or at least, for two years. Since she married him.’
‘Try mixing it with three spoonfuls of white sugar.’
‘You’re serious? Oh, how interesting. All right.’ He went off throwing me fascinated glances until I shut the door.
Somehow I had known it was the fossil. It had been the fossil all along.
When I got to her, the sugar stimulant had energised the convitol and done the trick. She was lying in a cushioned hammock on the roof-deck, among the red lilies, very pale, mildly sobbing. She seized my hand. ‘Oh I’m so sorry, so sorry. How good of you. But I didn’t — I couldn’t — ’
‘It’s all right, Cimarin. Now. Tell me.’
‘Nothing to tell, my clever-boots. Nothing. Just that he said to me, come and see the fossil and — ’
‘You mean your husband?’
‘Who else?’ Who else. There was really only one man on board. Every other male was only a fragment of the love-chorus.
‘When he suggested you look at the fossil, you panicked.’
‘I super-panicked. I don’t know why. Terror — like — oh, like the feeling I’d have if someone held me out a twenty-second-storey window. Not that anyone ever did. Yet. But if they did — Oh God.’
They were all sitting or standing round, as usual, watching. She was playing as always to her audience. Solo. Arro wasn’t there.
‘Where is he?’ I asked.
‘H Deck,’ she said. ‘With — that thing.’
I didn’t especially want to make her move about, so I had to persevere where we were.
‘Can you describe what frightens you?’
‘I — I can’t.’ I waited. ‘The look — no. Not the look. But the shape — something. He — knows it scares me rigid. He knew before I knew.’
‘You knew.’
‘No — no I didn’t.’
‘Very well. Now lie still. Stay calm.’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. You’re my wonderful doctor and I trust you.
One of the men said, ‘We could chuck the wretched thing back in the lake.’
‘Arro might not like that,’ said another.
‘Unfortunate.’
They looked at me, then. I finished checking her pulse, which was going like an avalanche even through the convitol, before I said, ‘That might not solve the problem.’ And she said, ‘No, don’t do anything to upset him. Please don’t. A quiet life. Anything, anything for peace and quiet.’ You see how careful I am to make things smooth for him? And in return — ‘On the other hand,’ I said, ‘I don’t think Cimarin should go anywhere near this object until we know more what we’re dealing with.’
I stayed on the roof-deck until they had got some innocuous music wafting through the speakers, and she had almost fallen asleep in the arms of one of the love-chorus, smiling, while a girl told her what sounded like the traditional infant’s bedtime story — and when we get there, we’ll all go shopping, and the beautiful princess will be amazed — the beautiful princess was, of course, Cimarin. Then I got the robosteward to guide me up to H Deck.
The analyser unit was somewhat on the amateur scale, equipped to deal with straightforward lagoon curiosities and not much else. Arro was sitting on a counter inside the room, all the banks turned off, and the fossil reposing on a glass shelf. He looked at it and whistled Vivaldi.
‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ he broke off to say. ‘Not the slimy rock itself. My wife’s undoubted awe.’
‘Your wife’s undoubted awe is pure terror.’
‘Or just conceivably a ploy to gain attention and sympathy.’
‘She already has those.’
‘Not from me, as you’ll have noted. I find this upheaval overdone, don’t you?’
‘Then may I suggest you confine the cause as far away from Cimarin as possible. May I ask you not to mention it to her again?’
&nbs
p; ‘Unless she mentions it first.’
‘If she mentions it first, I recommend you change the subject.’
He left the counter and walked over to the fossil. He ran a thumbnail down the uneven surface of it. ‘Come and touch. You’re not squeamish, too, are you? This feels like glass. Every spiky knob is actually smooth as cream when you put your hand on it.’
I did go over at this invitation to examine the fossil. What he said was true, but its tactile pleasure — it was pleasant to touch — offered nothing I could accept as any kind of clue. I asked his permission, then turned on the magnifier. The machine’s strength was not very great, but I was able to make out certain differences in coloration, what might have been the detritus of fish or lizards. I could not be sure. Again, nothing came to me that was significant. Aside from that, I was up against my own conviction that Cimarin was employing the fossil as a fetish, a focus for her insecurities. Looking back, I learn again the painful lesson of having been too logical. But at the time it seemed to me the answers were not difficult.
There was also a sheaf of phototypes lying on a table. He saw me look at it and said casually, ‘Film. Next month.’
So you are planning to escape from her for a while?
‘I can see you like the notion of that,’ he said. ‘The villain of the piece slinging his hook for the quarter.’
‘It might be good for her.’
‘It’s good for me. I’m thinking of making it permanent.’
‘She knows?’
‘Not yet.’ He whistled — Bach transposing from the Vivaldi.
Then he said, ‘You’re asking how I’ll make out with no cash.’
‘Not at all.’
‘Congratulations, then.’
I turned off the magnifier. The fossil glinted and glowed, the hard refracted gleam beside the softer more slippery one.
‘Meanwhile,’ I said, ‘if you’re hoping I shall rush to let slip your news to her, saving you the trouble, I’m sorry but I won’t oblige.’