by Ian Watson
“Which means you won’t have to truck crates aboard the shuttle before we take off,” Naomi offered by way of sardonic consolation.
“Shut up, Dr Davis!”
“Keiko,” said Betti, impulsively embracing her there on the high, flame-lit scaffold, “Keiko, you’ve not done well. Oh, Kei, how could you let this happen?”
She had no answer. Her eyes on the cold pyrotechnics of decoupling, she accepted the cyberneticist’s embrace and patted her consolingly on the hump of her parka. Indeed, Keiko regretted her behaviour more because it stimulated the others’ sympathy than because it embodied a private disgrace. Once upon a time, she knew, a Japanese woman in her position would have reached automatically for the knife and readied it at her throat. But, no, she was not going to die for Andrik Norn. Whatever duty toward him she had ever owed was now wholly fulfilled; and, she told herself, in some ways her duty to the expedition was best served not by unthinking surrender to the dictates of a man like Captain Hsi but by rigorous obedience to … well, to what Andrik had once called “hunch and circumstance”. Smiling, she put her chin on Betti’s shoulder. That was why she had let him go out there, if not also—though it would never do to admit this aloud—for the sake of the Kybers themselves. …
Captain Hsi glanced back toward the lab complex. “Milius’s floater is already aboard the Heavenbridge. Where’s the other?”
“There,” said Craig, jabbing heavily with his mittened hand. “Beyond the inflatadorm. You can see its nose.”
“Dr Norn went out there on foot?” The captain tapped Betti’s shoulder and gingerly eased her aside. Face to face with Keiko, he cried, “I’ve never authorized anyone to venture out there on foot! Never!”
Unable to repress the urge, no matter how incongruous or self-defeating, Keiko laughed at the man.
“Oh,” said Naomi. “You wish those who disobey you to do it within a framework of obedience. Or vice versa, I suppose.”
“The distinction,” said Captain Hsi pedantically, “is that had he taken the floater, we might have expected his immediate safe return. Now that’s a doubtful prospect. We must go after him. If he perishes pursuing whatever it is he seeks—” He looked meaningfully at Keiko.
“Then let me go with you,” she said.
“Oh, I insist upon it, Dr Takahashi. I do not relieve you of that duty. Moreover, you taught the Kybers—all of them—to speak, and you may prove useful out there.” He bowed crisply to each of the people at the railing. “Good night, Dr Olivant, Dr Davis, Dr Songa. Good night.” Then, gripping Keiko’s elbow, he herded her unceremoniously away from her friends, toward the blister of the dormitory. The deck plates under their feet were awash with a flickering tide, and the inflatadorm shimmered beneath the barrage of a dozen bright auroras.
Keiko shook herself free of the captain’s grip, to demonstrate that she could walk with him without assistance.
“Mr Sixkiller!” he bellowed distractedly.
“Ah, so you do know where he is.”
“We need someone not only to fly the floater, but to take us to the heart of the Kyber maze.”
They went together through the hooped archway of the dormitory. Only a few privileged personnel still maintained sleeping quarters here, everyone else having been shunted—exactly as Andrik had predicted—into the lecture room of the observatory. The central corridor of this dorm always suggested to Keiko the ribbed innards of a whale, aglow with a pale blue bioluminescence. Captain Hsi led her through the gloom to the double-unit dormicle that everyone on the Platform knew to be his. The other four units belonged to Sixkiller, Eshleman, Sharon Yablon, and the floater pilot Milius, who had disassembled his craft yesterday and taken it aloft aboard a shuttle. No one had petitioned to occupy his abandoned unit.
“Mr Sixkiller!”
The captain thumbed open his door and entered, pulling Keiko after by her wrist and simultaneously activating the dormicle’s sun-bulb. A noise like insects scurrying greeted these preliminaries, and then Keiko, half-blinded by the brilliance of the light, understood that this noise betrayed a frantic shifting of fabrics and linen.
She squinted. A heat-quilt slid aside, and there on the bedstead she saw Clemencia Venáges naked atop the sprawled and supine body of Farrell Sixkiller. The planetologist’s back was frozen upright in a lovely curve, and her startled profile revealed one wide liquid eye and a veil of dark, dishevelled hair. Six-killer’s eyes were closed, almost as if in pain. Clemencia’s hips concealed, and maybe even contained, a portion of his nakedness.
“We need a floater pilot, Mr Sixkiller,” said Captain Hsi. “We need a floater pilot right now.”
“All right,” said Sixkiller without opening his eyes.
Clemencia folded her arms across her breasts and blinked through a tangle of hair. “Hello, Kei. Is that you?”
“It’s me,” she acknowledged. “Hello.”
The captain’s hand moved to the wall, and he killed the sun-bulb. “These are my quarters. Those who come to my quarters must have a personal invitation, or they must be brought here by me.”
“Yes, sir,” said Sixkiller and Clemencia together.
Taking advantage of the dark, through which slid faint hints of the turmoil in Onogoro’s skies, Clemencia disengaged from the floater pilot and gracefully searched out her clothes. An unhooded window-lens silhouetted her movements. Keiko tried to retreat back into the corridor, but Captain Hsi restrained her, as if honour required no strategic abandonment of one’s own nest, no matter how vilely it was polluted or how provocatively besieged.
“For five more hours this dormicle belongs to me,” he said. “We are going to a Kyber palace together, Mr Sixkiller, but while we’re gone no one is to presume to use my quarters.” He ignored Clemencia Venáges, but his tone clearly implied that a randy Clemencia might lead still others to his private nest. Binary love-sharing was one thing, which could be blinked at—but not if it happened in his own sheets. Hsi had just, in a sense, been cuckolded visibly by the pilot, but Hsi obviously preferred to believe it was Clemencia’s fault.
“Yes, sir,” Sixkiller said dutifully.
Keiko backed away. “I’m going out for a breath of air, Captain Hsi. Please tell me when you’re ready to leave.” This time he made no move to hinder her, and, bemused and fretful, she escaped to the frigid safety of the Platform.
FIFTEEN
The seats in the floater were cold. She could feel their iciness even through the bulk of her thermal clothing. But when Sixkiller activated the blowers set like chromium mouths under the long canopy, the floater filled with warmth so rapidly that Keiko gasped and threw back her hood.
“Let’s go,” said Captain Hsi.
They lifted off the Platform and swept out over the plain in a soundless arc. Keiko, looking back at the receding tower on which she and the others had lived for seventy-seven days, was plunged into a recollection that had nothing to do—so far as she could determine by occasionally stepping clear of the emotional vice of her reverie—with either Onogoro or the Kybers.
Once, in her girlhood, her parents had taken her with her older brother and sister on a family outing to Tokyo. The Takahashis had gone in the spring, following northwards the triumphal progress of the cherry blossoms, their pink and white clouds billowing upon the land—while the sky itself remained cloudless, a thin, porcelain blue. The cinder cone of Fuji wore a generous ice-cream cap of snow. As they swung past along the tracks at bullet speed, Keiko almost tasted Fuji. Soon, in the city itself, sight and savour, piquant aroma and sound, all crescendoed for her, setting the seal “Tokyo” indelibly on the scroll of her memory.
So many sights and sensations! The octopus arms of overhead expressways, aerial bobsled runs humming with turbine-powered taxis and mini-trucks. … And then the skyscrapers, dripping neon messages so rapidly down their lengths that the buildings appeared to be sinking into the ground and then magically reconstituting themselves in mid-air. … At the surface of the city proper, such bustle a
nd confusion: shops crowded with pearls, and silks, and Go sets, with tanks of dozing hundred-year-old carp or goggle-eyed ebony goldfish; restaurants where Hokkaido crabs flexed their metre-long arms, dazed by their fall from grace in the northern sea; and fish shops, whose mongers sloshed buckets of ice water over piled-up, gasping shoals, all the while chanting their wares. Clouds of incense drifted from the shrines between the street stalls and bars, the Go parlours and pachinko arcades. … Overhead, flotillas of red and white balloons, cascading neon kanji down their guy ropes. Atop one department store, globes of Jupiter and Saturn, their moons swinging about them in an orrery ballet of lights. Atop another such emporium, a full-scale Mississippi steamboat! … And beneath the surface, accessible by huge, zipperlike escalators, the crowded fluorescent labyrinths of the undercity.
Nothing in Keiko’s previous experience had ever been so vivid. Whatever happened afterward—no matter how sweet, or tart, or bright, or piercing, or terrible—all subsequent experience would overlie the memory signatures of her trip to Tokyo like plastic transparencies with no distinct character of their own. Even at the age of eight, Keiko had understood this. Although unable to communicate this mystical discovery to her parents, she had let them know that they could not possibly extend their stay in Tokyo long enough to satisfy her cravings for its smells, colours, noises, tastes. Delighted, they had laughed, and she with them, vibrant as a temple bell.
But on their last day in the city she had behaved badly, not whining or demanding—but hanging back with a studied ruthlessness, refusing both food and drink as if she mistrusted the likely savour of any final meal in Tokyo. They were on the Ginza, late in the afternoon, and her parents, ordinarily indulgent to the point of servility, stiffened their resolve and scolded her for trying to halt time. She would not be able to accomplish that, they informed her, by dragging the heels of her new patent-leather shoes. Such behaviour was not only wicked, in the context of her obligations to others, but quite pointless.
Here the scolding had ended. Along with her brother and sister, Keiko was marched into a monstrous department store, quick with customers and clerks, raucous with fishboys in the food hall, discreet with kimono-clad employees stationed at the foot of each escalator with a duster for the rubber rail. “Welcome, welcome, welcome,” they intoned, bowing with puppet regularity. The Takahashis rode up. At each floor they were serenaded by salesgirls reciting their sing-song inventories: gold-lacquer ware, screens, cloisonné; dolls, bridal costumes, coral; restaurants (French, Indonesian, sushi, tempura); microelectronics, imitation extrasolar imports, recent holofiches of alien landscapes. …
Finally the Takahashis disembarked together on the margin of a penthouse pavilion given over to the whirrings and collisions of … yes, vintage bump’em cars. Or maybe they were repro, modern facsimiles. Except in the league table of “face” among competing store managers, the distinction scarcely mattered. Electricity crackled under the roof of the pavilion as adults and children charged their squat vehicles around the concrete floor, banging the cars together or whirling them in noisy holding patterns. Keiko, along with sister Etsuko and brother Okido, gawked.
Soon the three of them were wheeling about in the bump’em cars, too. Mother and Father, having deflected Keiko from her unseemly behaviour, stood at the pavilion rail and with gestures and shouts urged their children to fly around the perimeter of the rink. In her own jerkily advancing car, Keiko looked out on a sea of anonymous foes, all of them, it seemed, intent on driving her smack into somebody else’s vehicle, or up against a bumper rail, or maybe even through the pavilion’s supporting columns and so out into the airspace over the Ginza itself—into the clutches of gravity and death.
A pair of cars bracketed her own, nudging, ricocheting, and converging again, whereupon a driver in front of her—a grown man wearing a thin moustache and a navy-blue cravat—abruptly spun his car about so that its blunt nose knocked Keiko’s car into the one on her right. Then another car collided with hers. And another. Suddenly every face over every disc-like steering wheel, Okido’s and Etsuko’s among them, was homing in on her with murderous hilarity flashing in its eyes. Her brother was a vengeful samurai, whirling to the attack. Fearful that this was a punishment secretly planned by Mother and Father, Keiko began to scream … And so her last, and starkest, memory of Tokyo was of the terror she had experienced in the bump’em car pavilion on the uppermost level of that bustling department store on the Ginza.
Bump’em cars, of all things. She imagined a bevy of them spinning about on the deck plates of the Platform, their vertical motive rods extending directly into the auroras discharging their lightning over Onogoro. That image, Keiko realized, somehow tied together the girl she was at eight and the self-doubting person she was today.
Her days under heaven were bridged by joy and regret.
They were over the Kyber palace where Andrik, Betti, and Sixkiller had first found her prize pupil, the crater in which several members of its family had actually condescended to speak to her and Andrik before willing themselves back into kybertrance. The floater banked as if to put down on a nearby ledge, a surface of slate twinkling with diamonds of frost.
“No,” said Captain Hsi, who had been talking with Sixkiller about nothing much at all, avoiding the subject of Clemencia’s presence in his dormicle and staring pensively at the alien landscape as he spoke. “No, Mr Sixkiller, I want you to hover over the central atrium. Flood it with light. We don’t have time to wander through one of those foggy mazes only to discover that our Kybers are all off visiting some other clan, in some other labyrinth.”
“They don’t do that,” Sixkiller said.
“Nevertheless—”
So the floater tilted back toward the centre of the ruins, eased itself into hover, and rotated a few degrees on its long axis so that its passengers could peer down into the pit.
Three thick beams of light picked out the angles of the rocks. These crossed and recrossed, then expanded to illuminate the trapezoidal living chamber. Noonday over an arctic ocean.
Sixkiller dropped them lower and lower, and Keiko feared that the floater would indeed crush the inhabitants of the ruins. For, clearly, the ruins were occupied, and Andrik Norn, whom she had tried to send magnanimously on his way and then put completely from her mind, stood foreshortened in the enclosure, his white face washed out in the glare. Around him were grouped five aliens, all in postures of obeisance or prayer, while beyond them, back to back on a long stone bier, lay the fused carcasses of the group’s pregnant couple. Everything was much as it had been on Keiko’s other two trips to the plain, except that tonight the Kybers were animate and her former lover had positioned himself at the centre of a living, five-pointed star. It was impossible to tell what Andrik’s expression was or exactly what sort of ritual he was celebrating with the Kybers.
Captain Hsi leaned back in his seat and released a sigh of weary satisfaction. “Land, Mr Sixkiller.”
The pilot obeyed, carrying them in a swift upward sweep out of the bowl of the labyrinth and then setting them down on a craggy ridge. The legs of the floater touched the gem-bright coverlet of snow almost daintily, then popped with tensile strain as the fuselage settled its weight.
Captain Hsi made no move to undo his seat belt. He stared straight ahead, out through the canopy at the distant Onogorovan mountains, luminous in the ice mists and auroral shadows. Keiko and Sixkiller waited.
Finally the captain said, “You’re to take Dr Takahashi through the maze, Mr Sixkiller, then escort her back here with Dr Norn.”
“That’s all?”
“Do it as quickly as you can.”
“Then there’s no need for Dr Takahashi to go,” said Six-killer. “You both sit tight, and I’ll be back with Dr Norn pronto-presto.”
“I think you had better take Dr Takahashi with you. She has this last duty to fulfil, Mr Sixkiller, and Dr Norn, having deserted us for obsessions of his own, may have very little inclination to obey a summons conveye
d through you.”
“All right. If that’s how you want it.”
“Leave the blowers on,” said Captain Hsi.
Before Keiko and Sixkiller could climb down from their seats and exit the floater, however, there reared up beyond its canopy four stilt-walking Kybers. They looked to be half blind. Their forward pupils had shrunk to mere specks in their gleaming, mahogany faces; and their lateral pupils were set too far to the sides of their heads to be readily visible from the floater. They tottered up from the crater like so many remote-controlled machines, then peered blindly through the canopy at the bewildered human beings huddling in its cone of warmth. This was something new. Keiko felt trapped.
“What do they want?” Captain Hsi asked no one in particular, his calm so steady and reasonable-sounding that it nearly calmed her, too.
“Let the linguist parley with ’em and maybe we’ll find out.” The floater pilot had his hand on his utility belt, a thumb on the butt of the laser.
Keiko noticed that the cloaks of flesh or quasi-flesh draping the Kybers’ arms and torsos were hanging in tatters. The Rite of Conjoining? Was there a link between their ravaged appearance and that mysterious rite? Andrik had come out here to participate in that event, and she feared that he had not been disappointed in his quest. She was reminded of the strips of skin flensed from beached porpoises by the peasant peoples on the coasts near Kushimoto, her mother’s birthplace; of wet parchment; and of tissues grown in versatile ropy cultures by the transplant technicians of latter-day Tokyo. …
“Well, then,” she said, “let me go see.”
She went down the recessed stairs below her seat, waited for Sixkiller to spring the door for her, and leapt out into the night. Tottering, the Kybers gravitated toward her as if she possessed some secret necessary to their survival. She fell back a step, caught herself, and stared up at the haloed faces, each of which turned to scrutinize her with one of its pulsing lateral eye-bulbs.
Thanatoscopes, Andrik had called them: instruments for perceiving death-in-life and life-in-death.
