Nova 1

by Anthology

  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 w
ere 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.”

  “I saw a picture of Ginh, 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. Our 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, looked around. I noticed again the tension in her 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, inUnion. 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 look
ed 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 UNDERWAY F. 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 TOWER-MAIN.

  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.”