Mouth slightly opened, Rat raised his hollow eyes. (The sculpted balls were black and opaque; light lanced between them.) His eyeballs were black and clear. On them, seen from the side, light lay out its web in a small reflection.
“Excuse me.” The hand on my shoulder, from weight and heat and texture, was not his. I glanced back; so did Korga. The other hand was on Korga’s shoulder. The male (human) said, mostly to me: “Could I interrupt you two long enough to take your friend to my friend …” He gestured with his tongue at a purple-black evelm, standing a few meters down the run, foreclaws off the ground; darting long and short tongues from his jaw, creating no sound in anticipatory lust.
I said: “You must ask my friend.”
Korga said to me: “Will you watch if I go? Please?” And to the human: “Is it all right if Marq watches?”
The human, surprised, smiled and shrugged at once: “Yes. Certainly. Of course.” And to Korga: “You have come from very far away, am I right?”
Korga glanced at me.
“But that’s no matter.” The human hand dropped from my shoulder but remained on Korga’s.
About ten meters up, there was a large ceiling vent that let in its dozen trapezoids of light. I stood at the shadow’s edge, joined—before the three of them, Korga, the human, and the evelm were through—by a dozen others, their cool scaled haunches and warm fleshed shoulders jostling mine.
“On my world, there were pictures—” Korga said, then interrupted himself. “Did you come?”
“Yes … But you didn’t.”
“I was too excited.”
“That can be a problem.”
“Mostly by the human—but the other … you see on my world there were pictures,” he repeated. “Of creatures, like that. Lizards. Dragons. Some had wings.”
“The evelmi aren’t dragons,” I said. “And confusing an evelm with a dragon is rather like confusing a human with a chimpanzee.”
“Chippa …?” asked Korga.
“To be sure,” I said. “There were probably no other primates besides humans on Rhyonon. Not that I’ve ever seen any in vivo myself. Still, dragons are what we’re hunting, Rat. Evelmi—like you and me—are women. You don’t know what goes on in the north of this world. A good deal of the trouble comes from certain humans getting rather confused about just such not-so-fine distinctions.”
“But there were pictures,” Korga said. “They were imaginary pictures. They weren’t real. I used to look at them—sometimes for hours. They were beautiful. Some of them had wings. Some didn’t.”
“Females and neuters have wings. Males don’t—generally. Of course that’s true of evelmi, dragons, and half a dozen other trisaurian species on Velm.”
“But I’d never seen one alive before. I never knew I could feel … lust with one!”
I laughed. “If I can, you can. And I have, many many times.” We turned by a black, shaly structure, one of whose protuberances actually went up and out an overhead vent into Iirianilight. “That’s Japril’s decimal points at work again.”
As we approached the wall, it collapsed into the trough. Handfuls of foam dissolved into clear blue between the ornate, tarnished jambs.
4.
AN UPPER PARK LAY shadow over us and the dark sand we came out on. Pole-lights laced their long reflections on the plastic blister rising among banks of maroon shrubs. (I looked for the light in his eyes—but his eyes were again white and green.) Some women—most human, most pregnant—came down the further path, carrying their heavy breasts and high bellies above the dim dyll clusters hanging at the tops of the squat rock cactuses that grew thigh high here out of the direct sun.
“The union we’re going to is just down there,” I told Rat. “Before we go down, would you like to see—” and some diplomatic sense (the same that had finally taught me to deal with Thants) decided me that ritual direction rather than ritual request would be less confusing: “I’d like to take a look at my old nursery. Come with me.”
We walked across the clearing, between the shrubs, up to the carved wood rail around the plastic shell. “Look in.” I leaned forward. “Go on. Look.”
Beside me, Korga leaned among the narrow leaves and gazed through the plastic wall.
Each big as a big woman’s two fists together—say Korga’s—their infant fur, which would darken in a decade and fall off except for the leg pelts, now dull pearl, their belly scales metallic copper (some few out of them had silver stomachs), infant evelmi lay on their backs, kicking their six legs leisurely, licking and licking and licking their lips.
“There’s another nursery just below it, where human children are taken care of before they start their official study groups,” I told Korga. “Human and evelmi have such different life styles and rearing styles. Evelmi aren’t ready for gestural language until four and verbal language till six. But it’s still astonishing how much we’ve taken over from them. Not to mention what they’ve taken from us.”
“Do they ever mix them together?” Korga asked. “All of the children, from both races?”
I watched Rat gaze at the evelm infants. Clawless fingers; pale fur that would become dark scales in maturity; what northerners called the “milk tongues” dominating their mouth movements—I guess because northern humans started it, the term is frequently considered offensive here in the south; but I always heard it in my stream, both from humans and evelmi, and I was ten before I learned to be circumspect about using it outside. “They all play together several hours a day.” I glanced down at his big knuckles, his rings, his gnawed nails, remembering my time here. “More and more as we both get older.”
Without looking up, Korga said: “Those women back there are watching us.”
I didn’t look up either. “Are they?” I tried to recall them, the humans in simulated purple scales; wondered if they would look away when I looked up. “Well, one of the more famous runs that females, neuters, and males use together lets out just down there. They’re probably wondering if you’re going to go in. Really, there must be quite a web of rumor forming about you. You’ve gotten quite popular in—well, it’s under a day.”
Korga’s hand closed on my shoulder. He moved closer to me. “Should we go on, Marq?”
We walked along beside the pentagonal bases of the pole-lights, circling the big dome in which evelm infants so slowly grew. At the path side, we passed a meter-wide grill through which came the muffled screams, shouts, sobs, and laughter of the very loud human infants growing up below.
I glanced back at the women—who were, indeed, turning away; one gestured for another to look away.
“There’s a drop-lift over there,” I said. “The hunting union’s a few levels down.” We walked through different vegetations, none local and each from a vastly different latitude, each requiring careful and individual tending here in this alien clime by the night-shift gardeners2, absent this morning. And because their foliage was all pale blue, I wondered if Korga took in any distinctions through his false eyes.
5.
ONLY A FEW OTHER women were on the lift down with us, two in rather worn work tunics, one in a clean pink one with a spiffy new union insignia I couldn’t quite make out because there was an anxious guy standing in front of her and swaying, naked—she must have been on a labor2 sabbatical and leading the far more anxious life one does in such situations.
Through the gridded floor, I watched the cable loops drop faster than we did. At the next level, the irregular ropes and metal railing shifted, clanked, rose, and a very boisterous group of oldsters surged on, so that for half a minute we were caught up in the thunder of their converse, as this one jumped and waved her claws over the head of a friend to get the attention of a third, while that one, in her excitement, furled and unfurled great, red-lined wings.
Silence throbbed, a level after their departure.
We walked out below the thirty-meter pillars. Korga looked across the maroon and blue tiles stretching between them. In the distance a wall of mo
saicked reliefs and light-shapes curved and recurved.
After a few more steps, Korga just stopped.
He looked some more.
“This is the second industrial level,” I told him. “But it gets more ornate, the further down you go.” The evelm influence. Humans seldom combine labor with anything this decorative.
Most of the unions on this level are entered from the top. Here and there over the floor, carved gates stood around entrance portals; workers2 filed about. A few sleds, winged like dragons, with two or three women leaning at the rails, made their ways along farther transparent lanes. “We can walk,” I told him, “or we can go up—” I pointed at a stairway to the overhead rollerways, fringed with ivory plants, indigenous to the hive caves one finds only in the north—“and ride.”
Somewhere, wind rose a moment, then quieted. “Let’s walk,” Korga said, eyes still up and moving.
I began to walk.
His hand shifted on my shoulder; Korga walked with me.
As we came up over a blue, shaly outcrop, set each side with old statues that had belonged to some ancient labor co-op, here before the city was sunk, the sound of whirring treads cleared from the irregular underground winds.
“Hey there, you—”
I hadn’t heard the tracer tank nearing us; I was surprised. I guess all the other attentions Korga had received today made me start to move off.
“Marq, how are you doing there?”
On the side of the big tracer’s twin cabins’ slant walls, with six handles both human and evelmi can hold, Santine hung and grinned and licked.
As the tank rolled up on its tri-treads, some of the youngsters craned over the mid-platform rail. Once Santine and I had worked2 together in a fourth-level produce distributor union; and three years ago we had shared upstairs and downstairs living rooms, during a joint inner city labor2 break—from which I had left on several diplomatic missions1, then happily returned, days or weeks later, to the smell of excellent cooking. She waved a leg and a tongue, as the tank swept by, and called something into the grill—presumably she was telling the autodrive to halt.
The rumble became a whine.
The tread belts sagged, slowed, halted.
Santine grinned on. “I’ve been looking for you. We’ve found enough of your garbage—since you got back from Beresh, Marq. But you, my friend Korga, have had a very clean visit so far. Though I assume you were both at breakfast …?” which, as a greeting, was informal, illegal, and highly complimentary.
It made me uncomfortable, nose to toes.
Korga waited, his hand still, still on my shoulder.
“Santine,” I said. “How are you doing? And why are you doing it here?”
“I wanted to see you and your friend.” She let herself swing out from the outrider by one set of claws. “I hoped you wouldn’t mind.”
“Korga,” I said, “this is my old friend Santine. Santine, this is my new friend, Korga.”
Santine leered happily. “And these—” She gestured toward the rail behind her—“are some of this season’s most promising cadets. Korga, you’re a student at Dyeth-shome now …?”
Somewhere above me, Korga nodded.
“Well, if you want to transfer and come to the tracer cooperative, we would certainly be happy to consider you.”
“What is the tracer cooperative?” Rat asked with characteristic bluntness.
Santine looked first unbelieving, then laughed. Some students looked at one another.
Santine, who after all has met other-worldlings before, said: “We … well, collect and dispose of the refuse that the women of Morgre leave behind them in the course of their material lives.”
“They also record it,” I said, glancing up at Rat; “they analyze it—that’s how they knew about our breakfast—they make maps of it, which are carefully charted against the maps they made last week and last year, so that they generate both a synchronic and diachronic picture of just what material life in this urban complex is doing at any point in space and where it’s been going between any points in time.” Every sixteen-year-old evelm—and ten-year-old human—has to spend four months working and studying at the tracer cooperative, learning about the ecology of our urban complex, as well as learning the techniques of how to learn more about it. The ones with a feeling for it are invited to come back in fifteen—or ten—years as primary workers1. “Santine and I met when I was a very young and she was a very old cadet there.” The tracer cooperative is probably the single most prestigious institution about the city: “The tracers also form the primary advisory council for the domestic and industrial boroughs that govern our complex.” I turned to Santine. “Have I about covered it? You know that Korga is from another world.”
Santine’s turn to be uncomfortable: “Our job1 yes, is complex. We try to do well,” she said, a bit inanely.
“I am complimented,” Korga said, “that one of your profession1 would want to meet me,” which is the kind of treatment a tracer1 like Santine expects.
Santine nodded her large scaly head and smiled her large scaly smile.
A cadet just behind her leaned over the rail and blurted: “But you don’t have a world at all now—”
Another just behind: “Are you going to live on ours?”
“—here in the south?”
“—at Morgre?”
Korga looked at them.
Two more had stood up to see him. One, I noted, holding on to the upright rail at the cabin edge, looked as if she had just been, or was about to be, very upset—two or three tongues constantly licked her upper lip ridge; her rust-colored claws flexed on the upright pipe.
“I do not know yet,” Korga said.
And for the first time I considered possible limits to his visit; beneath his hand, chills spilled my shoulder.
“Well, if you do decide to stay,” Santine said, “in six days you have to register for one job2 or another. I know it’s a little unusual for the invitation to come like this, but then, you are a somewhat unusual visitor in a somewhat unusual situation, Rat Korga. If you would like, we would certainly be happy to consider you at the tracer collective. There are advantages to the job2—but I’m sure young Dyeth can explain them to you.”
“Thank you,” Korga said, with that disconcerting calm; and said nothing else.
“That’s very land of you and your cooperative, Santine,” I added; warm surprise overlay the chill. “It really is.”
“Well, we’ll let you go on.” Santine knotted her claws and rapped on the grill. “Come on! Let’s move!” She inclined her head toward us. “I’m sure you have other things to do than stand around yakking the morning away with a bunch of tracers with shit under their talons and their minds on Arvin,” which is part of the ritual modesties necessary to survive when you are that high up in a culture that so prizes egalitarian ideals. “Good to see you, Marq.”
A chatter of tightening treads; a whine; a rumble: the tracer tank rolled away Santine and the gawking students, till ribbed hangar doors folded back, and they grumbled into a flood of blue; I glimpsed the grapplers that would carry them to the interlevel where they collected the refuse for their field work.
“That’s really something,” I said to Korga. “It’s funny, but I have no idea why this is happening. Still, everybody seems to know about you.”
We came down the three rough steps in the rock to the tile level.
“On my world,” Korga said (and I glanced up at his eyes, expecting to see them gone crystal, but there had been no change in the light: they were still a human white and green), “it was always assumed there was nothing about me to know. Here, everyone seems to know everything. I don’t know—perhaps it is the GI they can’t connect me with. But the feeling, Marq—” His hand slid forward on my shoulder, then back, and he moved a little closer to me with the next step—“is much the same.”
The tile floor here was mostly yellow. Five rollerways met above us to the left in a formation we used to call a star-ju
nction … “Rat, when I was a kid, we used to call that … but then, I don’t know whether its name has changed or—”
“Why are all those people waiting over there?” Rat asked.
The hunting-union entrance was surrounded by a gate topping a low wall of reliefs carved from blue-black stone.
Clustered around the entrance leading down into the union were two or three dozen people—some sat on portable mossmats that they had brought along. Most stood in little groups. On any other day I would have simply thought it was a bigger than usual hunting party collecting.
“Excuse me. But perhaps you know. Is the survivor here yet?”
Korga and I both turned. And I just knew Korga was about to say something honest and awful like: I am the survivor and this is my friend, or maybe, Yes.
“Over there,” I pointed quickly. “That’s the direction he’s supposed to come from.”
The three youngsters hurried off.
“Rat,” I said. “What do you—?”
“Why are all those people waiting for us?”
The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One Page 73