Among the riders were more humans than one would have expected with a random gathering; almost forty percent.
Flyers and riders flocked nearer.
I looked back over Rat’s arm at the two red figures following.
Ahead, three or five feed paths fed onto the highway—and a hundred meters further, three or five more.
Six, a dozen, twenty scooters splatted noise and shadow onto the road. Sound around us trebled. Bony faces passed, staring—too many without scales. (When humans mass in too great numbers on Velm, though I am one, I think of the dangerous north.) Zub and zub zub zub and zub zub, in the welter and rumble passing. Glancing right, I saw a dark face: her gum bluish, her black eyes narrowed in the wind, watching, her blue-black claws clamping her machine’s guide bar. Then she dropped away among and behind others. Skimmers pulled ahead and fell behind. Their drafts slapped us like dragon wings.
I wanted to call out and could think of nothing to call. I mauled my guide bar with my hands and marveled Korga’s hands did not maul me. We grumbled up on another sand-spilled junction. And, as the scooters had come, they went.
Scooters growled away along feed-paths, out across the plain.
We moved down the raw highway in our own quiet roar; I glanced aside to watch scooters dispersing over the sandy web, under the unsettling flights of the women.
On my left, sound increased. I shifted my shoulders under Rat’s hands, and turned to see first Ollivet’t’s, then Shalleme’s scooter pull abreast. Ollivet’t said with three tongues at once, loud enough to cover it:
{“WHAT WAS THAT?”
{“WHAT WAS THAT?”
{“WHAT WAS THAT?”
I shouted, loud as I could (it doesn’t compete): “I’LL TELL YOU LATER.” Then as an afterthought: “YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE ME IF I DID,” and hoped Shalleme could read my lips. It’s a talent many of us humans have been developing as a sort of racial compensation.
Their scooters fell behind, and I watched them to detect some reason in their passage—saw only their intentness at driving.
Morgre’s stone walls—we were coming in at the Broidwey Tunnel—loomed, blotched high as the wing-spread of a neuter dragon with the rock-algae that gives the stony Fayne (but not the Vyalou) its characteristic purple. We dove in.
3.
I’D NEVER SEEN THIS many people in an industrial rotunda. Vaulted mosaics hung thirty meters above the covered catwalks, crane housings, and grapples. Guide patterns flickered and faded in clear flooring, dark as Korga’s eyes, beneath myriad clawed and nailed feet. I pulled to a stop before a dozen parked scooters, beside the ambling crowds. Fifty meters away behind a wire-mesh wall, a roller ribbon hauled its load of cartons to rotundas further on.
Ollivet’t and Shalleme pulled up beside me. The rotunda roared. More scooters echoed in behind us.
“What’s happening?” Shalleme asked.
With wavering wings, Ollivet’t pulled scaly claws free of her foot holders and came to four feet beside her machine, searching among the crowd. Turning to Shalleme, she showed the tongue configuration (one larger and two smaller) that means the unimportant questioning one could ignore.
Shalleme ignored it. “Is there something wrong?” she asked Rat—at least the question began at him. It finished at me, probably because he wasn’t looking at her.
“No,” I said, realizing I didn’t know how to explain that I suspected. “No, there’s nothing wrong. At least I don’t think—” Then I looked at Rat.
He was watching my foot—I’d been kicking at the stand to get it down.
Rat said: “No. No, there’s nothing wrong.”
Shalleme looked around again.
And Ollivet’t’s wings were moving.
I still hadn’t gotten the stand down right.
“Marq?” Rat asked.
“What?” I got it.
“I think most of these people are here because I—”
“Skinura Marq!” The voice, at initial and final consonant, singsonged.
All ivory today, she strolled up through the gathered women. Most were facing away, the evelmi now and again rearing to see over those before them, the humans now and again jumping. She was tall, closer to Rat’s height than mine. Her white body mask was shot with silver. I recognized her as the woman who had come up around my room with the students, as the white peeled away from her red skullcap, from her brown round face with its epicanthicked eyes, this time her amber irises filigreed with black. “Ah,” she declared, “by my ancestors on Eurd, so it really is Skepta Marq. I do not need to inquire after the identity of your friend. I already know of Rat by legend and report.” She turned to our hunting companions, as the body mask fell away from her lean neck. The gold bar with its ruby-tipped wires dropped on its chain across her sharp shoulders, down her long flat breasts. “But these …?”
Ollivet’t said: “This is my companion, Shalleme Doru,” with one tongue and, “I’m Ollivett Doru,” with another.
“Ah, it’s Skalla Ollivet’t and Skri Shalleme? Well, I’m delighted. But really—” The petals collapsed from her waist to suggest, below her breasts and belly, an oddly paneled skirt. She made the awkward bow of the very tall. “Enchanted. Now you must all come with me.”
“There!” someone called.
I looked sharply around.
“Over there?” and, “I think it’s …” echoed under the rotunda ceiling. But the surge of people moved somewhere to the right. Five hundred? Five thousand? When you are simply unused to crowds, it’s difficult to evaluate their number. I only know that there were more people all around us than could fit in the Dyethshome amphitheater.
“Really,” the tall woman said, “I think all you honorable Skryonchatyn should come with me. If they recognize you …” She inclined her head toward Rat.
“I don’t under—” Ollivet’t began with one tongue. “I mean,” another continued, “we were only coming into the city here to—”
“All of you,” the woman said. “You must agree with me, no? It would be safer.”
“But what about the scooters?” Shalleme asked. “We were going to park them at the local hunting union before we—”
“You can see—or does it require a logical leap not usual in your culture? You cannot get anywhere near the union’s port. If you like, we will leave you here to try—”
“Look,” I said. “I’ll disk the scooters, and you two can pick them up at Dyethshome later.” I pushed a hand under the rough flap of our daykit and grubbed in twine, cloth, and small containers for the plastic-covered circles. I drew out a handful. “Here.” I pressed the adhesive side of the green disks against the fork of our tandem, then turned to press two more against the forks of the other women’s. “They’ll be at Dyethshome in half an hour, waiting for you. It’s very easy to find: the largest out-city co-op to the oest. Just ask for Whitefalls. Anyone can set you on the proper roller.”
“Dyethshome,” Shalleme said, turning to Ollivet’t. “Wasn’t that where Kessll and Via-pr’d went to study2 about six or seven years back …?”
In the dim light, Rat, his eyes flickering between green and clear, said: “Who are you?”
The tall woman, her hands at her side, her chin raising just a trifle, said: “My name is JoBonnot. Remember that name, Rat Korga. No one likes advice. I give you some anyway. Remember that name. Please.” She glanced at me.
I turned from the foreigners, wondering what status accrued in that honorific-clotted home tongue to those free of all of them; and someone else shouted: “There! Just over there.”
The black floor beneath us flared. Six inches down in the clear plastic, three-meter arrows suddenly mapped lapped paths about the rotunda. I realized as I looked around us that Rat, in a fuzzy glow of red, was the center of them all.
“Come with me!” JoBonnot barked. “Now they really have seen you!”
I began: “But where—?”
“We have supper with your sister tonight, Marq,” Rat said, wh
ich, in the circumstances, seemed the oddest thing to remind me of.
But JoBonnot grinned at me with perfectly insistent delight. “Ah, yes. A message from your sister, the prudent and insightful Skern Black-lars,” which was the way she pronounced it: not Black Lars, but Black-lars. “Her informal supper for the evening has been canceled. If you do not believe me, check the first time we reach a call station. Now come!”
I wasn’t in mind to argue. “We’ll go with you.”
The women scattered near, all faces now, were—most of them—backing away. But between, I could see women running up.
I pushed Rat’s elbow with one hand and slapped at the back of Ollivet’t’s mid-haunch with the other (comes from a local kids’ game in which, by such slaps, you urge each other to run); JoBonnot shoved at Shalleme’s arm with a gesture enough like mine to make the ID in me speculate briefly on the convergence of childhood games grown up worlds apart.
We hurried away from the scooters, the red glare, the convergent arrows.
“Our scooters,” Shalleme said. “Are you sure they’ll—” It takes a good three minutes for the identidisk to activate a local retrieval system, and I think she imagined the scooters immobilized by the crowd before they could begin their journey. Me too.
Some from behind were coming forward.
The red location light and bright guide arrows had stayed where they originally had come on—probably because this particular rotunda seldom received deliveries of moving cargo; tracking lights hadn’t been installed here.
A few women looked at us as we hurried by. (JoBonnot: “No, don’t run!”) But most stared off at the red glow up from the floor between the three parked scooters.
We edged between some women who weren’t watching us and some who were. Ten meters away, the wall of one of the block houses split on blue light. The slate door slid back. Blue flooded the floor. JoBonnot dashed through onto the meshed catwalk and turned to hand Rat, Shalleme, Ollivet’t, then myself among rising cables, descending hooks and pulleys.
I looked back.
A few were coming toward the doorway. One dropped to all sixes to run.
From Shalleme: “But where are we—”
JoBonnot said, “Your friend Skya Santine is waiting for us in the interlevel,” and did something so that the door, much faster than it had opened, closed, shutting out our pursuers. The railed lift we were standing on lowered.
Ollivet’t reared to stare at the overhead machinery.
Shalleme leaned over the rail to gaze down.
“Marq?” from the shadows. “JoBonnot, did you find them?”
I called: “Santine?”
The tracer’s bulk came up. The lift shuddered, locked, and Santine leaned from the tank’s outrider. A bar light came on beside her, glistening along her flank. “Hop aboard. Well, it looks like you’ve brought a whole party.” Santine was alone. “This way.”
Squatting to examine the rail catch, Shalleme pushed something; the rail rose. She stood, looking at us to see if she shouldn’t have pushed it.
“Come on,” Santine called again.
From JoBonnot: “Go, now.” She herded us toward the machine.
“Climb in!” Santine moved back from the forward outrigger; JoBonnot pulled herself up.
We climbed on at mid-platform where cadets had ridden that morning. A barlight on one side of the tunnel went off; two on the other came on. Shalleme gave Ollivet’t a hand; she came, forefeet, middle, and rear, a furl of red wing-lining showing beside her bright tourist vest.
Rat, in his roughened voice, asked: “Where are we going?”
“Anywhere you like.” Santine grinned. “The crowd won’t follow us here. We can get you back to Dyethshome if you want. Or, if you’d prefer, you can visit with me in my room on Dylleaf for a while—”
In her white skullcap, JoBonnot swung her head back around the drive housing. “I would delay returning to Dyethshome were I you. By now, that’s where everybody expects you to be. That is to say, you will be fairly traceable there, and not only by tracers. And for at least another hour or so, all the curious in Morgre will be trying to find you, now you’ve actually been spotted.”
Ollivet’t exchanged glances with Shalleme, who leaned against the corner of the rear housing, red-sleeved arms folded over the fringed edges of her tourist jumpsuit, open below her navel. She said: “We’ve reserved a visitor’s room down in the Abakreg’gia—”
“—Perhaps you could take us there?” Ollivet’t’s black eyes gleamed. She glanced around at Shalleme. “Or take us somewhere from which we could get there?”
“We’ll pick up our scooters at …” Shalleme stood up now and unfolded her arms—“… Dyethshome. We’ll pick them up tomorrow.”
Once more JoBonnot’s head swung back around the tracer’s cab: “My honorable Skyshottyn, would you welcome our group to your rooms in the Abakreg’gia, if by doing so you could render great aid to troubled women?”
Once more the foreign hunters exchanged looks. “Why should we refuse?” declared, or better declaimed, Ollivet’t in a rumbling basso. “Come share our space a while. And perhaps you can explain some of this confusion.”
“By all means, generous Skynosheani.” JoBonnot swung back and out of sight.
The tracer tank lurched on its fat treads. Ollivet’t and Santine immediately sat on their rear haunches.
Rat looked at both and squatted on the plates, ringed hand on the floor, swaying.
Shalleme took hold of the support-bar on the back cabin wall and stayed standing, watching now the tiles, now the girders, now the stone walls of the passing interlevel.
I put a steady hand on Santine’s scaled neck and bent. “Where in the world did she learn to drive a tracer?” I whispered into the ridged auditory plate within the curved flaps of dark flesh just before her gill-ruff.
Santine stuck a smaller tongue out the corner of her mouth and said in the blurred boom that serves evelmi for a whisper: “Probably from the driver-instruction program I revised for our local GI service about fifteen years—” and another tongue, somewhere on the other side of her mouth, roared, “standard,” and (as Rat and Ollivet’t glanced over) went back to the whisperer, “ago now.”
I scowled at Santine’s left eye, which blinked at me. “What I mean, Santine, is where could she have come from?”
Santine turned her whole large face toward me. “Given the honorific system she uses, Marq, the chances are high she comes from Klabanuk … wouldn’t you think?” Santine has never been offworld; but, prompted by her friendship with me, she’s done a good deal of otherworldly exploration in vaurine. Years back most of her trips had been limited to worlds I’d worked1 on, but she’d branched out since.
“Where’s Klabanuk?”
A barlight on the left swooped its violet across plates and flesh and rails and scales. Santine swiveled her head to me again. “It’s an open-run junction about twelve kilometers outside Hysy’oppi Complex—and Hysy’oppi, in case you’ve forgotten, is about fourteen hundred kilometers north, in G-19.”
I frowned as another passing barlight lit our faces for each other. “Hysy’oppi is where you were born!” I said, and looked down at Santine’s aluminum-colored claws which darkened to gun-metal as our tank lurched around another unlighted curve.
“With all your star stepping, I’d wondered if you’d remember.”
I looked at the forward housing, somewhere to the side of which, and out of sight, the tall woman guided us along the bar lit dark. “Santine, what’s the difference between a Skina and Skyochot?”
“I told you, Klabanuk was twelve kilometers away from where I was brought up; though I heard it enough when I was a child, I never bothered to learn the dialect.”
We leaned around another corner; and the notion that this odd woman, whom I’d first seen almost a year and a galactic diameter away, hailed from only fourteen hundred kilometers to the west was enough to totally confuse. My mind leapt among explanations, from Santine
’s possible mendacity to the possibility JoBonnot herself was a free-agented professional1 of a cunning to dwarf that of her erstwhile companion, Clym.
I looked at Rat, who still squatted beside Ollivet’t, his bear hand over one knee, the other, on the plate, five fingers in a jeweled pentalon about which the rest of his tall weight swung as he watched slurred mosaics rush by in half-dark.
We lurched as lift grapples caught us. Shalleme, standing, and Korga, squatting, swayed. I nearly toppled as side grapples hooked into our flanks. There are some outlying interlevel drops that actually use black-chain over two hundred years old; but not this one. We lowered down the near vertical slope.
4.
SEVERAL CENTURIES AGO, A northern tribe developed a ceramic cooker, essentially a large clay pot, called, yes, a kollec, which is where the term used in lizard-perch divination comes from, by way of a metaphoric leap. You put water (or sometimes oil) in the kollec’s bottom, and in on top of that you put a complicated seven-layer shelf with various perforations for rising steam, various ducts to conduct juices down from one layer to bypass another and shower over another still lower. Food on the different shelves cooks at different rates. Juices percolate to form a general gravy at the bottom. Individual essences are collected in draining cups at shelf edges on their respective levels. Elaborate meals can be prepared with a single kollec, and in a number of northern cities humans have all but taken it over for their own foods—omitting the inedible flavored stones and unchewable barks that still make up a large part of Velmian cookery but that we humans in the south are learning to appreciate if not actually enjoy.
The seven-level urban complexes, sunk all over the variegated surface of Velm, have been compared to kollecs in drama, song, poem, and philosophical meditation so often, all over this world, that it has somehow passed beyond cliché to become a sort of classical figure by which Velmian artists of all races signify (almost always in the antepenultimate act of the work) that the drama is to be read as aspiring to a certain ambition.
Abakreg’gia is under the base of the kollec, where the flames lick the bottom.
The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One Page 77