by Tanith Lee
When we came forth, the afternoon bloomed full across the town, a primrose sunshade for two suns, and it was sad enough to make you spit.
“Miranda’s hormones are starting to pick up. Did she have crying jags, do you know?”
We walked across to the Indoor Jardin, the one place we hadn’t yet re-seen. In the ornamental pond, the bright fish live and die and are taken away, and new-bred bright fish put in. Maybe it was the last Coalwater taken in the Sand Bar on East, but I, or Miranda’s body, began suddenly to weep.
“Goddamn it, Miranda, leave it out, will you? I’ve only got you for another ten hours, and you do this to me. Quit, Miranda.”
“Why does it have to be Miranda who’s crying?” said Haro in his damn nice, damn clever way.
“Well, who’s it look like?”
“Looks like Miranda. Sounds like you, feller.”
“Falsetto? Yeah. Well. I didn’t cry since — Christ, when did I last?”
“You want me to tell you.”
Belligerent, I glared at him through massed wet cilia thick as bushes. “So tell me, tell me, turkey.”
“When the core blew, and took Mary with it.”
“Ah. Oh, yes. Okay. Shit.”
The pain of that, coming back when I hadn’t expected it, stopped me crying, the way a kick in the ear can stop hiccups. You preferred the hiccups, all right?
“I’m sorry, Scay,” Haro said presently. “But I think you needed to know.”
“Know how I felt about — I know. It doesn’t help.”
“Sometime, it may. You wanted to be with her. And Company red tape on marriage liability got in your way, and you both chickened out. But your insides didn’t.”
“I used to dream about it,” I said sullenly. “The Accident. And her, and what it must’ve —”
There was a long pause, and the fish, who lived and died, burned there in the pond like votive candles.
“It’s over now,” said Haro. “It isn’t happening to her anymore, except inside your head.”
We sat on the stone terrace, and he put his arm over my Miranda’s shoulders, and Miranda responded, the length of her spine.
“Miranda,” I said, slightly ashamed, “wants you.”
“And I notice the guy I’m wearing today fancies the heck out of Miranda.”
He turned me, carefully, because I was a woman and he was much larger in build than I, and he kissed me. It was good. It got to me how good it was.
“We’ve never been in this position before,” I muttered, in Miranda’s husky voice. “As the space-captain said to the wombat.”
“Never been male and female together, I mean.” I elaborated, as our hands mutually traveled, and our mouths, and our bodies warmed and melded together like wax, and the flame lit up about the usual way, about the usual part, but, oh brother, not quite. “What I mean is, kid. If you’d tried this on when we were both male, I’d have knocked you into a cocked cuckoo-clock.”
“The lady,” said Haro, “doth protest too much.”
So I shut up, and we enjoyed it, Haro, Miranda, and I.
The lemon light was going to the acid of limes, and the birds were tearing round the sky when we started back along Mainstreet. I hadn’t gotten Miranda too drunk, but I had got her well-laid, and that was healthful for her. She had nothing to reproach me with.
“You’re not, by any chance, walking me home, Haro Fielding?”
“Nope.”
“Well, good. Because, when I see you again, I don’t know how I’m going to live this down.”
Heck, yes, I could hear myself, even the sentence-constructs were getting to be like Miranda’s. That’s how you grow used to what you are. I suppose it was inevitable, the other scene, he and me, sometime. Buddies. Yip.
“Don’t worry too much about that,” said Haro.
I shrugged. “I’ll be Back In. I won’t be worrying at all. That place is a real desexer, too. Genderless we go. And get Out…confused.”
“That place,” he repeated. “In. All that labor and all that machinery, to keep alive. When all the time, being In is, I’d take a bet, almost what death is.”
“You said that already.”
“I did, didn’t I? So if that’s what death is like, where’s the difference? “
“The difference is, there’s a guaranty on this one. You get there. You go on. Not like — not like Mary, blown into a million grains of sugar.”
“Mary’s body.”
“Okay. Her body. I liked her body.”
Haro stopped, looking up over the town at the glowing dying sky.
“Don’t fool yourself. You loved Mary, not just Mary’s skin. And though Miranda and this guy here were making love, you and I were making it, too.”
“Oh, now look — I’ve got nothing against — but I’m not —”
“Forget that. You’re missing the doorway and coming in the garbage-shoot with catsup in your hair. What I’m saying is this, and I want you to listen to me, Scay, or you won’t understand.”
“What do I have to understand, buster? Hah?”
“Just listen. Sens-D is — Christ, it’s a zoo, an enclosure full of egos — of psychic, noncorporeal, unspecified, unclassified, inexplicable, and unexplained matter, that persists out of, and detached from, the flesh. Got it?”
“I got it. So?”
“Death, Scay, is being that same psychic, noncorporeal, etc., etc., material — only Out of the skin and Out of the box.”
“Yes?” I said politely, to see if he’d hit me. He didn’t.
“The place, as you call it, is a bird-cage. But look up there. That’s where the birds want to be. The free wide sky.”
I watched the birds in spite of myself. I thought about our extended peculiar lives in the slave gangs of the Company. Of going to sleep on ice. Of sliding into the place. Of days in the skin.
“That’s it?” I said eventually. “All you want to tell me?”
“That’s it, that’s all.”
We said our good-byes near the Transfer ramp.
“See you next skin,” I said.
And Haro grinned and walked away.
Dydoo waved an ear at me as I strolled in. “Had a nice day?”
“Divine.”
Poor mutt. He’d been smoking, two trays full, and spilling over.
I refrained from cracks about dog ends. What a life the man led, held in that overcoat of fur and fume. It was a young specimen that died up on the ridge, and the robots found it, cleaned out the disease, did the articulation surgery, and popped in Dydoo. Sometimes, when he gets crazy-mad enough, he’ll bark. I know, I used to help make him. And you know, it isn’t really funny. Bird-cage. Dog-cage.
I got ready for going Back, and Dydoo gave me my shot. I wasn’t bothered today, not fighting or wanting to. I guess I haven’t really been like that for years. The anguish, that had also gone, just a sort of melancholy left, almost nostalgia, for something or other. Beyond the high windows the night was coming, reflecting on instruments and panels and in the pier-glass, till the lights came up.
“You ready now?” Dydoo peered down at me.
“Go on, lick my face, why don’t you?”
“And put myself off my nice meaty bone? You should be so honored. Say, Scay? Yah know what I’m coming Out as at the end, the new body? Heh? The Hound of the Baskervilles. And I’m gonna get every last one of you half-eyed creeps and —”
Then the switches went over.
One minute you are here, and then you are — there —
I glided free of the lump of lead into the other world.
Three days later (that’s the time they tell me it was) I made history. I spent two hours in my own skin. Yes. My very own battered thirty-five-year-old me. Hey!
My body was due, you see, for someone else, and because of what happened, they dumped me into it first. So they could thump all those questions out at me like a machine-gun. The Big Wrench. Then Dydoo yelping and growling, techies from C Block, some schmode I
didn’t know yelling, and a whole caboodle full of machines. I couldn’t help much, and I didn’t. In the end, after all the lie-check tests and printouts and threats and the apologies for the threats, I reckon they believed me that it was nothing to do with me. And then they left me to calm down in a little cubicle, to get over my own anger and my grief.
He was a knight, Haro Fielding. A good guy. He could have messed it up with muck, that borrowed skin, or thrown it off a rock or into one in a jeep, and smashed it up, unusable. Instead, he donated it, one surplus body, back to the homeless ones, the Rest of Us. All they had to do was fill it up with nice new blood, which is easy with the technology in town here.
He’d gone up into the rockies, sat down, and opened every important vein. The blood went out like the sea and left the dry beach of Haro lying under the sky, where the searchers found him — it. They searched because he was missing. He hadn’t turned up at Transfer next day. They thought they had another battling hysteric on their hands. No use to try transfer now, obviously. The body had been dead long enough the ego and all the other incorporeal, etc., were gone. Though the body was there, Haro was not.
The slightest plastic surgery would take care of the knife cuts. One fine, bonus, vacant skin. He was a gentleman, that louse.
God knows how long he’d been planning it, preparing for it in that dedicated, clear-vision crusader sort of way of his. Quite a while. And I know, if I hadn’t met him Out that day, the first I’d ever have heard of it would have been from some drunk sprawled in the Star Bar: Hey, you hear? Fielding took himself out.
As it was, obliquely but for sure, Haro’d told me all of it. I should have cottoned on and tried to — Or why should I have? Each to his own. In, or is it Out? For keeps.
And I guess it was grief and anger made me laugh so hard in the calm-down cubicle. God bless the Company, and let’s hear it for the one that got away. As the line says, flying to other ills — but flying. Home free.
Free as a bird.
Within the Ghost
Once worlds have ended, and the curtains of space closed upon them, where does their genius go? Their great music and art, their architecture, literature, and thought, their beauty — all held till then in vessels of physical form, or the records of machines, or simply in the memory of humankind. Is everything obliterated merely, rinsed away and lost?
Nothing is ever lost. Though every atom, note, and perfume perishes, yet it remains caught within some vast awareness that needs no facsimile, no re-creation, neither speech nor vision. And this it is that, thereafter, leaves indelible, golden paw prints on the glass sands of eternity, and all across the darkness of the deepest void.
During the afternoon of the 9th mid-season Epicyle, a meteor shower of colossal force struck the planet Arkann.
The meteoraid had, through a series of uncommon errors, stayed undetected until the thirteenth hour of the previous night. Full evacuation therefore proved impossible. Since there was no use in doing so, and to avoid undue and fruitless panic, the population was not alerted. The shower was traveling at unusual speeds if with abnormal density. It did not become generally apparent until 70 minutes before the initial impacts began. What precautions were feasible were then taken. Of course, to no purpose.
The ’raid destroyed much of the center-cyle face of Arkann and rocked the world on its axis to some awkward effect.
As the catastrophe played out, several of the space-stations then crossing above the center-cyle quadrant were themselves struck and destroyed, or disabled to the point of nonviability.
One station, however, the Kayis 42X, was struck a side-long blow, which only uncoupled it from a controlled orbit, casting it adrift. While detonation and destruction collapsed the planet, the Kayis was pushed out into the farther reaches of space, a solitary lifeboat jettisoned from a sinking liner.
Vils had been sleeping when the station’s alarm resounded.
The alarm rarely activated, but during the five years he had served there, he had already experienced the event twice. On both occasions the problem was comparatively slight. A malfunctioning refrigeration unit flooding the storage deck; a solar flare of some kind that temporarily impeded communications with the station’s Connect HQ groundside. In each case Kayis’s own mechanisms were soon in control, the flaw repaired in an hour, planetary time. But naturally the Kayis did not take chances. It was most reliable, just as it had been built to be.
That afternoon Vils had slept less than 2 hours after an active stint of 27. This was to be the last period of his current 3-month term on the station, following which he was due for 30 days leave on-planet. He had therefore been getting everything in proper order for the alternative crew. The rest of his own team, Dmitru and Linka, had left days before, Dmitru on compassionate grounds (a death in his family). Vils alone therefore encompassed the work of three. He needed rest. When Kayis woke him with its wailing, Vils was angry.
“What is it?”
The soft blue communication screen found in all the station’s spaces flickered with a moment’s scintillance. The siren paled to a monotone. The calm, genderless, ageless voice of Kayis answered.
“A meteoraid is occurring. Planet Arkann has been struck —”
A thin whistle broke through the Kayis voice.
Vils was already on his feet, staring at the view-screen that had opened in the cabin wall.
What it showed was like a scene from a poor quality disaster movie of several centuries before. It was laughable, unbelievable. Vils did not laugh or disbelieve.
He started to ask Kayis to repeat the passage of words that the sonic whistle interrupted.
As he did so a terrific soundless noise eclipsed all others, and a blinding non-light put out all images, sane or mad, and next all consciousness, and so too the individual world of which Vils, like all living things, was composed.
The second time he woke up was stranger.
At first he could not figure out why he was lying on the floor of the cabin, but the blue comm screen was showing soft waves like a lazy tide, and Kayis spoke to him at once.
“You are unharmed, Vilsev” — it always used his full name, an eccentric, pointless courtesy — “only a little bruising to the edge of the left hand, left knee. Treatment has been applied. Lie still for a moment and breathe slowly. The air has been reinforced. Now, regain your feet, and drink the medication in the fountain-cup.”
Vils lay where he was.
“What happened?”
“What do you remember?”
“The siren. You said — the planet —”
Kayis’s voice, always calm, practical — very nearly stupidly, and certainly inappropriately, reassuring: “Arkann is lost.”
“Arkann —”
“This station has been ejected from orbit and thrown on to a random course, outward. Kayis is now computing its new trajectory, although unable substantially to alter it.”
“What about Connect HQ?”
“It is destroyed.”
“Then contact other planet centers.”
“They are destroyed also.”
“Then other stations — vessels in the area — the Straida Hub —”
“The communication system of this station no longer fully functions beyond the planetary radius. It has suffered some damage.”
Vils swore in a whisper.
Kayis paused politely for the swearing, then went on. “All other systems aboard Kayis are unimpaired and have been secured. Defense systems are operative. Minor pockets of surface damage the mechanics are now restoring.”
“Wait,” he said. “Wait.” He sat up, and a hurricane surge of nausea swept through him, then away. He sat on the cushioned floor, listening to Kayis’s calm kind voicelessness. Presently, having taken the medication from the dispenser, he left the cabin and went about through the entire complex, while in reply to his interrogation, the voice offered reports of itself. It did this as ever, speaking politely and formally, as to any human aboard. Kayis too always sp
oke, and did so now, of itself in the third person — “It,” Kayis said. “Kayis,” it said. “The machine.” “The station…”
At some juncture, staring from the great view-lens on the foredeck, out into an infinity of infinities, all unknown and new and terrible and, now, unavoidable, Vils wept.
He thought of Dmitru at his mother’s funeral, blown to pieces among the shattering crystal chapel and the smashed verdigris of old trees; of Linka with her lover, crushed into a scarlet amalgam. He wept for all Arkann, and for Arkann itself. He wept in vain, as humanity must.
Kayis went on being compassionate and did not try to comfort him. It simply told him all the optimistic pluses. Safety and secured existence still supported the unknown journey that now they must choicelessly undertake, the man and the machine.
For the first two days he was shocked and mostly deadly quiet. For the next 20 days he was partly crazy, ranting about the failed communication system and oddly, contrastingly, breaking things that were breakable. After this he made the station’s mechanism play over to him excerpts from his time (electrocorded of course, for general security) with Linka and Dmitru, and earlier with others who had served on Kayis. He got drunk a lot during this period. He also smoked several of the brands of less-safe cigret.
Gradually, and then quite swiftly, began a phase of melancholy, and finally inertia. For brief spells sometimes he again ranted about the comm facility that must be — somehow — restored. To no avail, they were well out of planetary range. This phase also faded.
Then he no longer glared in rage or mockery at the flowing of space, the vague intimations of other distant solar systems, and unidentifiable outer star clusters through which, now, Kayis almost incidentally endlessly passed. Equipped to be a lesser type of space-vessel, Kayis had fully become one. Compelled to voyage, it did so. If ever cut adrift, providing reasonably intact, all such structures would be capable of self-maintenance, and an indefinite plateau for survival for themselves and their inhabitants. Unluckily for the rest of Arkann’s anchored fleet, the meteoraid had pulverized their chances.
