It was an incubator. On a nest of moss were eleven or twelve leathery round eggs, bright green with large red speckles.
"Our firstborn will hatch in less than a month," Vismaan said.
Thesme was swept by a wave of dizziness. Somehow this revelation of the true alienness of these beings stunned her as nothing else had, not the chilly stare of Vismaan's unblinking eyes nor the writhing of his hair nor the touch of his skin against her naked body nor the sudden amazing sensation of him moving inside her. Eggs! A litter! And Turnome already puffing up with milk to nurture them. Thesme had a vision of a dozen tiny lizards clinging to the woman's many breasts, and horror transfixed her: She stood motionless, not even breathing, for an endless moment, and then she turned and bolted, running down the hillside, over the drainage ditch, right across, she realized too late, the newly planted field, and off into the steaming humid jungle.
8
She did not know how long it was before Vismaan appeared at her door. Time had gone by in a blurred flow of eating and sleeping and weeping and trembling, and perhaps it was a day, perhaps two, perhaps a week, and then there he was, poking his head and shoulders into the hut and calling her name.
"What do you want?" she asked, not getting up.
"To talk. There were things I had to tell you. Why did you leave so suddenly?"
"Does it matter?"
He crouched beside her. His hand rested lightly on her shoulder.
"Thesme, I owe you apologies."
"For what?"
"When I left here, I failed to thank you for all you had done for me. My mate and I were discussing why you had run away, and she said you were angry with me, and I could not understand why. So she and I explored all the possible reasons, and when I described how you and I had come to part, Turnome asked me if I had told you that I was grateful for your help, and I said no, I had not, I was unaware that such things were done. So I have come to you. Forgive me for my rudeness, Thesme. For my ignorance."
"I forgive you," she said in a muffled voice. "Will you go away, now?"
"Look at me, Thesme."
"I'd rather not."
"Please. Will you?" He tugged at her shoulder.
Sullenly she turned to him.
"Your eyes are swollen," he said.
"Something I ate must have disagreed with me."
"You are still angry. Why? I have asked you to understand that I meant no discourtesy. Ghayrogs do not express gratitude in quite the same way humans do. But let me do it now. You saved my life, I believe. You were very kind. I will always remember what you did for me when I was injured. It was wrong of me not to have told you that before."
"And it was wrong of me to throw you out like that," she said in a low voice. "Don't ask me to explain why I did, though. It's very complicated. I'll forgive you for not thanking me if you'll forgive me for making you leave like that."
"No forgiveness was required. My leg had healed; it was time for me to go, as you pointed out; I went on my way and found the land I needed for my farm."
"It was that simple, then?"
"Yes. Of course."
She got to her feet and stood facing him. "Vismaan, why did you have sex with me?"
"Because you seemed to want it."
"That's all?"
"You were unhappy and did not seem to wish to sleep alone. I hoped it would comfort you. I was trying to do the friendly thing, the compassionate thing."
"Oh. I see."
"I believe it gave you pleasure," he said.
"Yes. Yes. It did give me pleasure. But you didn't desire me, then?"
His tongue flickered in what she thought might be the equivalent of a puzzled frown.
"No," he said. "You are human. How can I feel desire for a human? You are so different from me, Thesme. On Majipoor my kind are called aliens, but to me you are the alien, is that not so?"
"I suppose. Yes."
"But I was very fond of you. I wished your happiness. In that sense I had desire for you. Do you understand? And I will always be your friend. I hope you will come to visit us, and share in the bounty of our farm. Will you do that, Thesme?"
"I — yes, yes, I will."
"Good. I will go now. But first—"
Gravely, with immense dignity, he drew her to him and enfolded her in his powerful arms. Once again she felt the strange smooth rigidity of his alien skin; once again the little scarlet tongue fluttered across her eyelids in a forked kiss. He embraced her for a long moment.
When he released her he said, "I am extremely fond of you, Thesme. I can never forget you."
"Nor I you."
She stood in the doorway, watching until he disappeared from sight beyond the pond. A sense of ease and peace and warmth had come over her spirit. She doubted that she ever would visit Vismaan and Turnome and their litter of little lizards, but that was all right: Vismaan would understand. Everything was all right. Thesme began to gather her possessions and stuff them into her pack. It was still only mid-morning, time enough to make the journey to Narabal.
She reached the city just after the afternoon showers. It was over a year since she had left it, and a good many months since her last visit; and she was surprised by the changes she saw now. There was a boom-town bustle to the place, new buildings going up everywhere, ships in the Channel, the streets full of traffic. And the town seemed to have been invaded by aliens — hundreds of Ghayrogs, and other kinds too, the warty ones that she supposed were Hjorts, and enormous double-shouldered Skandars, a whole circus of strange beings going about their business and taken absolutely for granted by the human citizens. Thesme found her way with some difficulty to her mother's house. Two of her sisters were there, and her brother Dalkhan. They stared at her in amazement and what seemed like fear.
"I'm back," she said. "I know I look like a wild animal, but I just need my hair trimmed and a new tunic and I'll be human again."
She went to live with Ruskelorn Yulvan a few weeks later, and at the end of the year they were married. For a time she thought of confessing to him that she and her Ghayrog guest had been lovers, but she was afraid to do it, and eventually it seemed unimportant to bring it up at all. She did, finally, ten or twelve years later, when they had dined on roast bilantoon at one of the fine new restaurants in the Ghayrog quarter of town, and she had had much too much of the strong golden wine of the north, and the pressure of old associations was too powerful to resist. When she had finished telling him the story she said, "Did you suspect any of that?" And he said, "I knew it right away, when I saw you with him in the street. But why should it have mattered?"
TWO
The Time of the Burning
For weeks after that astounding experience Hissune does not dare return to the Register of Souls. It was too powerful, too raw; he needs time to digest, to absorb. He had lived months of that woman's life in an hour in that cubicle, and the experience blazes in his soul. Strange new images tumble tempestuously through his consciousness now. The jungle, first of all — Hissune has never known anything but the carefully controlled climate of the subterranean Labyrinth, except for the time he journeyed to the Mount, the climate of which is in a different way just as closely regulated. So he was amazed by the humidity, the denseness of the foliage, the rainshowers, the bird-sounds and insect-sounds, the feel of wet soil beneath bare feet. But that is only a tiny slice of what he has taken in. To be a woman — how astonishing! And then to have an alien for a lover — Hissune has no words for that; it is simply an event that has become part of him, incomprehensible, bewildering. And when he has begun to work his way all through that there is much more for his meditations: the sense of Majipoor as a developing world, parts of it still young, unpaved streets in Narabal, wooden shacks, not at all the neat and thoroughly tamed planet he inhabits, but a turbulent and mysterious land with many dark regions. Hissune mulls these things hour upon hour, while mindlessly arranging his meaningless revenue archives, and gradually it occurs to him that he has been forever transform
ed by that illicit interlude in the Register of Souls. He can never be only Hissune again; he will always be, in some unfathomable way, not just Hissune but also the woman Thesme who lived and died nine thousand years ago on another continent, in a hot steamy place that Hissune will never see. Then, of course, he hungers for a second jolt of the miraculous Register. A different official is on duty this time, a scowling little Vroon whose mask is askew, and Hissune has to wave his documents around very quickly to get inside. But his glib mind is a match for any of these sluggish civil servants, and soon enough he is in the cubicle, punching out coordinates with swift fingers. Let it be the time of Lord Stiamot, he decides. The final days of the conquest of the Metamorphs by the armies of the human settlers of Majipoor. Give me a soldier of Lord Stiamot's army, he tells the hidden mind of the recording vaults. And perhaps I'll have a glimpse of Lord Stiamot himself!
The dry foothills were burning along a curving crest from Milimorn to Hamifieu, and even up here, in his eyrie fifty miles east on Zygnor Peak, Group Captain Eremoil could feel the hot blast of the wind and taste the charred flavor of the air. A dense crown of murky smoke rose over the entire range. In an hour or two the fliers would extend the fire-line from Hamifieu down to that little town at the base of the valley, and tomorrow they'd torch the zone from there south to Sintalmond. And then this entire province would be ablaze, and woe betide any Shapeshifters who lingered in it.
"It won't be long now," Viggan said. "The war's almost over."
Eremoil looked up from his charts of the northwestern corner of the continent and stared at the subaltern. "Do you think so?" he asked vaguely.
"Thirty years. That's about enough."
"Not thirty. Five thousand years, six thousand, however long it's been since humans first came to this world. It's been war all the time, Viggan."
"For a lot of that time we didn't realize we were fighting a war, though."
"No," Eremoil said. "No, we didn't understand. But we understand now, don't we, Viggan?"
He turned his attention back to the charts, bending low, squinting, peering. The oily smoke in the air was bringing tears to his eyes and blurring his vision, and the charts were very finely drawn. Slowly he drew his pointer down the contour lines of the foothills below Hamifieu, checking off the villages on his report-sheets.
Every village along the arc of flame was marked on the charts, he hoped, and officers had visited each to bring notice of the burning. It would go hard for him and those beneath him if the mappers had left any place out, for Lord Stiamot had issued orders that no human lives were to be lost in this climactic drive: all settlers were to be warned and given time to evacuate. The Metamorphs were being given the same warning. One did not simply roast one's enemies alive, Lord Stiamot had said repeatedly. One aimed only to bring them under one's control, and just now fire seemed to be the best means of doing that. Bringing the fire itself under control afterward might be a harder job, Eremoil thought, but that was not the problem of the moment.
"Kattikawn — Bizfern — Domgrave — Byelk — so many little towns, Viggan. Why do people want to live up here, anyway?"
"They say the land is fertile, sir. And the climate is mild, for such a northerly district."
"Mild? I suppose, if you don't mind half a year without rain." Eremoil coughed. He imagined he could hear the crackling of the distant fire through the tawny knee-high grass. On this side of Alhanroel it rained all winter long and then rained not at all the whole summer: a challenge for farmers, one would think, but evidently they had surmounted it, considering how many agricultural settlements had sprouted along the slopes of these hills and downward into the valleys that ran to the sea. This was the height of the dry season now, and the legion had been baking under summer sun for months — dry, dry, dry, the dark soil cracked and gullied, the winter-growing grasses dormant and parched, the thick-leaved shrubs folded and waiting. What a perfect time to put the place to the torch and force one's stubborn enemies down to the edge of the ocean, or into it! But no lives lost, no lives lost — Eremoil studied his lists. "Chikmoge — FualleDaniup — Michimang—" Again he looked up. To the subaltern he said, "Viggan, what will you do after the war?"
"My family owns lands in the Glayge Valley. I'll be a farmer again, I suppose. And you, sir?"
"My home is in Stee. I was a civil engineer — aqueducts, sewage conduits, other such fascinating things. I can be that again. When did you last see the Glayge?"
"Four years ago," said Viggan.
"And five for me, since Stee. You were at the Battle of Treymone, weren't you?"
"Wounded. Slightly."
"Ever kill a Metamorph?"
"Yes, sir."
Eremoil said, "Not I. Never once. Nine years a soldier, never a life taken. Of course, I've been an officer. I'm not a good killer, I suspect."
"None of us are," said Viggan. "But when they're coming at you, changing shape five times a minute, with a knife in one hand and an axe in the other — or when you know they've raided your brother's land and murdered your nephews—"
"Is that what happened, Viggan?"
"Not to me, sir. But to others, plenty of others. The atrocities — I don't need to tell you how—"
"No. No, you don't. What's this town's name, Viggan?"
The subaltern leaned over the charts. "Singaserin, sir. The lettering's a little smudged, but that's what it says. And it's on our list. See, here. We gave them notice day before yesterday."
"I think we've done them all, then."
"I think so, sir," said Viggan.
Eremoil shuffled the charts into a stack, put them away, and looked out again toward the west. There was a distinct line of demarcation between the zone of the burning and the untouched hills south of it, dark green and seemingly lush with foliage. But the leaves of those trees were shriveled and greasy from months without rain, and those hillsides would explode as though they had been bombed when the fire reached them. Now and again he saw little bursts of flame, no more than puffs of sudden brightness as though from the striking of a light. But it was a trick of distance, Eremoil knew; each of those tiny flares was the eruption of a vast new territory as the fire, carrying itself now by airborne embers where the fliers themselves were not spreading it, devoured the forests beyond Hamifieu.
Viggan said, "Messenger here, sir."
Eremoil turned. A tall young man in a sweaty uniform had clambered down from a mount and was staring uncertainly at him.,
"Well?" he said.
"Captain Vanayle sent me, sir. Problem down in the valley. Settler won't evacuate."
"He'd better," Eremoil said, shrugging. "What town is it?"
"Between Kattikawn and Bizfern, sir. Substantial tract. The man's name is Kattikawn too, Aibil Kattikawn. He told Captain Vanayle that he holds his land by direct grant of the Pontifex Dvorn, that his people have been here thousands of years, and that he isn't going to—"
Eremoil sighed and said, "I don't care if he holds his land by direct grant of the Divine. We're burning that district tomorrow and he'll fry if he stays there."
"He knows that, sir."
"What does he want us to do? Make the fire go around his farm, eh?" Eremoil waved his arm impatiently. "Evacuate him, regardless of what he is or isn't going to do."
"We've tried that," said the messenger. "He's armed and he offered resistance. He says he'll kill anyone who tries to remove him from his land."
"Kill?" Eremoil said, as though the word had no meaning. "Kill? Who talks of killing other human beings? The man is crazy. Send fifty troops and get him on his way to one of the safe zones."
"I said he offered resistance, sir. There was an exchange of fire. Captain Vanayle believes that he can't be removed without loss of life. Captain Vanayle asks that you go down in person to reason with the man, sir."
"That I—"
Viggan said quietly, "It may be the simplest way. These big landholders can be very difficult."
"Let Vanayle go to him," Eremoil said.
"Captain Vanayle has already attempted to parley with the man, sir," the messenger said. "He was unsuccessful. This Kattikawn demands an audience with Lord Stiamot. Obviously that's impossible, but perhaps if you were to go—"
Eremoil considered it. It was absurd for the commanding officer of the district to undertake such a task. It was Vanayle's direct responsibility to clear the territory before tomorrow's burning; it was Eremoil's to remain up here and direct the action. On the other hand, clearing the territory was ultimately Eremoil's responsibility also, and Vanayle had plainly failed to do it, and sending in a squad to make a forcible removal would probably end in Kattikawn's death and the deaths of a few soldiers too, which was hardly a useful outcome. Why not go? Eremoil nodded slowly. Protocol be damned: he would not stand on ceremony. He had nothing significant left to do this afternoon and Viggan could look after any details that came up. And if he could save one life, one stupid stubborn old man's life, by taking a little ride down the mountainside—
"Get my floater," he said to Viggan.
"Sir?"
"Get it. Now, before I change my mind. I'm going down to see him."
"But Vanayle has already—"
"Stop being troublesome, Viggan. I'll only be gone a short while. You're in command here until I get back, but I don't think you'll have to work very hard. Can you handle it?"
"Yes, sir," the subaltern said glumly.
It was a longer journey than Eremoil expected, nearly two hours down the switchbacked road to the base of Zygnor Peak, then across the uneven sloping plateau to the foothills that ringed the coastal plain. The air was hotter though less smoky down there; shimmering heatwaves spawned mirages, and made the landscape seem to melt and flow. The road was empty of traffic, but he was stopped again and again by panicky migrating beasts, strange animals of species that he could not identify, fleeing wildly from the fire zone ahead. Shadows were beginning to lengthen by the time Eremoil reached the foothill settlements. Here the fire was a tangible presence, like a second sun in the sky; Eremoil felt the heat of it against his cheek, and a fine grit settled on his skin and clothing.
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