“I was talking about your looks,” said Akuin. He touched a patch of fur that wasn’t blotchy. Instead, it shone like silver. “If you had been like this all over –”
“Hah! I would have been something! There would have been men lined up at our door, and very inconvenient it would have been for the rest of you.” Thev paused. He was sprawled on his bed, resting on his elbows, regarding Akuin with resin-yellow eyes. “Yes, it has bothered me at times,” he said at last. “When I first realized how very ugly I was, and again when I was in school and the age when boys begin to fall in love. No one would ever love me, I thought. I would have to be content with my hands, and the programs about safe and healthy sexual behavior which the Public Health Corps makes.”6
“Has that happened?” Akuin said.
Thev smiled. “I have seen a lot of public health programs. But I have discovered that some men like intelligence. Believe me, I am intelligent!”
They became friends, though the other roommates couldn’t understand why. Akuin was lovely and also sad, the kind of youth that older men — some older men — liked to comfort. No one would ever try to comfort Thev. He was too confident and happy. In addition, they were slightly different ages. Thev had stayed on the home world for two extra years, studying at the famous Helig Institute. Instead of being twenty or twenty-one, he was twenty-three, though he didn’t seem especially old. His time had been devoted to ideas rather than experience. It was stars he knew, not manners.
They stayed together through the period when new arrivals were oriented to life in space. “Like two burrs,” said the other roommates, who began to suspect it was Akuin’s beauty that drew the other man. But what drew Akuin to a man whose conversation was so often impossible to understand? All these kinds of stars that fell into themselves, changing (as they did so) the nature given them by the Goddess, and even in some cases (according to Thev) falling out of the universe the Goddess had created. This was unexpected! Who could make sense of it? Who could find it interesting or erotic?
When the orientation period was over, Thev began to spend his time with other physicists. Akuin started his new job, in the station’s garden.
A garden, you may think. The lad had been saved. He’d found his natural environment.
The garden occupied a series of rooms, grey metal like everything else in the station. The plants, all useful rather than ornamental, grew in raised beds like metal boxes. Light came from panels in the ceiling. Moisture was provided by a network of tubes, which dripped water directly on the roots. Nothing was wasted. Nothing was present unless it was needed.
Akuin discovered that gardening (for him) comprised many things besides the garden itself. He missed sunlight, clouds, rain, bugs, raiding tli, the sight of hills rising in the distance, the smell of a nearby forest or ocean. It was home he missed, the home world in its entirety. Most especially he missed his home country: the valleys full of stones and stony rivers, the indomitable granite mountains.
But he could not go home, except for an occasional brief visit, until he was eighty. To think of sixty years in stations like this one! The idea was horrible!
“Don’t be morose,” Thev said. “You have a gift for gardening. The senior gardener has said that often. In time you’ll be transferred to one of the big stations, where there are ornamental plants and bugs, maybe even a hologram of the home world sky. Think of that above you, while you pick suckers off stems! And I, by then, will be a distinguished physicist. They’ll bring me in to lecture, and we’ll make jokes about the way our lives used to be.”
Akuin felt doubtful and said as much.
“And then, finally, when you are a success, I’ll confess to you that I’ve always loved you. And only the Goddess can know why, because you have an awful disposition.”
Akuin looked at his friend. “Do you mean that?”
About your disposition? Absolutely!”
“About loving me?”
“From the first moment I laid eyes on your shining pelt. From the first time I heard you complain.”
“Why?”
“I have no idea. Remember that my area of competence is stars, not people.”
Akuin kept looking at Thev, who was (as usual) sprawled on his bed, under the empty wall niche. He’d just come from the communal shower. Naked, it was possible to see all the blotches on his front. One covered half his forehead. Another, even larger and just as badly shaped, covered half a thigh.
“Did you ever think of coloring your fur?” Akuin asked.
“My aunts tried dying me when I was young. I hated it, a horrible messy process that stank and had to be done over and over. When it was time, when I smelled the dye cooking, I’d run away and hide, and they would come hunting. They made my cousins join in, until they began to refuse. ‘If Thev wants to be ugly, let him be. We don’t want to hunt him down like an animal.’ My aunts gave up finally.”
“You never rethought that decision?”
“What are you telling me, Akuin? You are willing to become my lover if I turn myself black? But not otherwise? Can’t you be content to be the lovely one? I am certainly content to be the smart one.”
No question the spots were ugly. But the thin body was good enough, and so was the voice, even and friendly and amused. The mind was in front of any mind he’d ever encountered. What would it be like to make love with someone who could peer into the center of stars and see what lies beyond ordinary experience?
Akuin kissed his friend. Thev responded with passion. Ugly he might be, and intellectual, but he was also passionate.
They became lovers. This is always a difficult situation when the couple is young, without much privacy. Either they waited till their roommates were gone, or they used the rooms-for-sex-and-other-intimate-behavior that are associated with gymnasia.
It would be better to do these things, Akuin thought, in the woods of Atkwa or in a secluded part of his grandmother’s garden. Even the dunes next to his boarding school would have been better. Love did not belong in the station. Though Thev didn’t seem to mind the grey rooms and the air that smelled of machinery.
Would life have been different, Akuin wondered later, if he’d chosen a more appropriate lover? One of the older men, who showed an interest in him? The senior gardener, for example?
The problem now, aside from the uncomfortable places they made love, was Thev’s other passion. He was onto something interesting about the star grove.
Maybe if Akuin had loved his work as much, he would have been able to endure Thev’s periods of abstraction or his long discussions of the behavior of aging stars. He tried to be as boring, telling Thev about the garden’s problems. It is always difficult to keep an incomplete ecology in balance. This particular garden had recurrent infestations of a parasitic organism that was neither a plant nor an animal, but rather alive in its own peculiar way. It was native to the hwarhath home world, but had changed after the hwarhath had inadvertently carried it into space, a region it liked; or rather it liked the conditions of gardens in space. It thrived under lights that did not have the exact spectrum of the hwarhath home star; and soil that wasn’t full of the home world’s microorganisms seemed like a gift from the Goddess.
Thev listened patiently, but what he heard — more than anything else — was complaining. Obviously, a garden in space was going to be different from a garden on the home planet. Obviously, there were going to be difficulties and problems. But to a man of his temperament, optimistic and determined, problems were something one overcame or suffered cheerfully, the way he suffered his spots.
If Akuin’s plants were covered with mold, well then, Akuin would have to find a cure. If a cure could not be found, the garden would have to grow other kinds of plants.
“Does nothing discourage you?” asked Akuin.
“You do, sometimes. Why not enjoy life? Is anything improved by moping? Think of how handsome you are! Think of my devotion! Do you think mold is any worse than my equations, which are not going where I want
them to?”
In spite of his excellent heritage, Thev said, he was not a first-rate mathematician. Rather, he had an instinct for how things are. “Where that came from, I don’t know. The same place as my spots, maybe. In any case, I don’t reason out what the Goddess has done with the universe. It comes to me almost as a vision; and if you think it’s easy to see things in more than the usual five dimensions, you are wrong.7 That’s what the grove is like: a place that requires far more than five dimensions, if I’m going to understand it. There are so many stars here, and they are packed so closely!”
Maybe the problem was a difference in magnitude. Mold seems like a trivial problem, compared to Thev’s struggles with his equations. More likely it was a difference in temperament. Thev’s energy made everything he did important. When he struggled, it was a real struggle. Akuin’s sadness, which was chronic now, diminished his concerns. Nothing he did seemed worth doing, to himself or to those around him.
His first year in space ended. The second began. According to messages from relatives, everyone at home was doing well, though his grandmother’s garden didn’t thrive as it had when he tended it. Beyond doubt, he had a gift. “How lucky that you can use it where you are,” his mother said.
The mold was under control now. He had convinced the senior gardener to introduce a few ornamental plants.
“Just in the corners, lad. The places we aren’t using. This isn’t a great station. If the officers here want flowers for their lovers, too bad. And no matter how you beg, I’m not going to send for bugs. They aren’t in the budget.”
At first he put in plants with colored leaves. They shone like jewels at the corners of beds full of green and blue-green vegetation.
“Like fire in the night,” said one of the station’s senior officers. “Are flowers possible?”
“Talk to the man in front of me. He says we don’t have the money.”
The officer, a physicist and a good one, according to Thev, ran his hand along a bright red leaf. “Maybe something can be worked out, though he’s right that research never gets the funding it deserves.” The man glanced at Akuin. “You are Gehazi Thev’s friend.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve made a good choice. He’s going to have a future, in spite of being as ugly as a wall made of mud. Beauty isn’t everything.” The man touched the leaf a second time. “But it’s something.”
Money was found for flowers, though not for bugs. The senior officer picked the first bloom that opened. “To give to someone dear.”
“I know who that is,” Thev said. “A man who gets ahead on charm. He’ll go into administration. He hasn’t got the mind for research. But he isn’t a bad fellow, and he’ll make sure the men who can think get the chance to think. Do you think charm can take a person all the way to the front, Akuin?”
“I never got the impression that the Frontmen-in-a-Bundle were charming.”8
“Research scientists don’t make it to the Bundle,” Thev said. “Accountants, yes, and administrators, though I’m not sure they are especially charming administrators. Also experts on warfare. But not experts on how the universe really works.”
“Are you ambitious?” Akuin asked.
“Yes, but not in that way. What I want, aside from you –” He rolled over and took hold of Akuin, pulling him close. “Is fame that goes on forever and a good teaching position.”
At the end of his second year in space, Akuin got leave and went home, like any other young man, to his native country and the house where he’d been raised. He was there for the usual length of time, working in his grandmother’s garden and taking hikes in the stony hills. For the most part, he spent his time alone.
Hah! He had grown, his female relatives told him. He was handsomer than ever! They didn’t mention his aloofness, which troubled them, or the expression of sadness that appeared too often on his face.
“It may be nothing,” his grandmother said in private. “There are men who have trouble adjusting to space, but almost everyone manages in the end. This other young man sounds encouraging. I’ve done research on the family. They are a small lineage, not rich, but they have made excellent alliances; and their traits seem fine. If this romance works out, and Akuin stays involved with the Gehazi boy, we ought to think of approaching them for semen.”
“It’s the other side of the planet!” Akuin’s mother exclaimed. “And the young man has spots!”
“He’d be a poor choice to father children,” the grandmother admitted. “Though he is apparently a genius. But I agree with you. It would be better to go to his male relatives. He has plenty who look normal, and most are bright. As for Gehazi’s location, these are modern times. We can’t be provincial. Who can say which alliances will prove useful?”
At the end of his leave, Akuin visited his former school. It was almost empty, the students on vacation, but Tol Chaib was there, getting his garden ready for winter. Hah! The air was cold already and smelled, when the wind came off the land, of drying vegetation.
He spent a day working with his mentor, digging into the sandy soil, cutting stalks and branches, gathering fallen leaves. In the evening they drank halin and talked, alone together in Tol Chaib’s quarters. The rest of the building was unoccupied.
After they were both drunk, Tol Chaib said, “I always wanted to have sex with you. It wasn’t possible, until you became a man. But the longing was there. It frightened me. I’m not usually attracted to boys.”
What was it, Akuin wondered, about him and ugly men? Maybe they could see the wrongness in him, though it was different from their ugliness. There was nothing wrong with Thev except his spots. In every other way, he was a model young man: loyal, determined, direct, pious. Though not violent. Thev lacked the fifth male virtue. Well, no one was perfect, and Thev’s other traits — his intelligence and cheerfulness — ought to count for something.
Tol Chaib was more disturbing. Looking at him, Akuin saw loneliness and grief for things lost: his old beauty, his life in space. The old man was like a mirror, reflecting Akuin’s future. He could end like this. Though he didn’t think he would ever be attracted to boys. That was a perversion, after all; and his wrongness — whatever it was exactly — seemed unconnected with perversity. He was a gardener, who wanted to garden at home. A shameful ambition! But not the same as wanting to molest children.
In the end, after another cup of halin, he went to bed with Tol Chaib, though he was never certain exactly why. The old man wanted this to happen, and he felt he owed his mentor something. That was as good an explanation as any. In the morning they parted, Tol Chaib giving him a tropical flower from the school greenhouse. It was huge and intricate and as blue as the sky, though almost scentless. Akuin carried it until it wilted, then threw it in the ocean. This was on one of the rocket islands. An ikun later he boarded a rocket, which carried him into space.
Gehazi Thev greeted him with affection when he got back to their station. “Though it was a good idea to have time away from you. I thought about stellar evolution instead of sex. There is much to be said for both, of course, but my job is stars.”
During his absence, Thev had moved into a new dormitory, this one occupied by four young physicists.
“There didn’t seem to be any reason to stay in my old room. I have nothing in common with the other men. It was only habit that kept me there. Habit and you, and you were gone.”
Their romance continued, though it might have ended. Who can say what ties men (or women) together? They returned to their old habits, exercising in the station’s gymnasia, going to its one theatre to see recordings of plays put on in the great stations, places such as Tailin. Both enjoyed soaking in the pools-for-soaking. Both enjoyed sex in the rooms-for-privacy.
These last were small, like everything in the station. There was a low bed, fastened to the floor, and two stools that moved in grooves. The ceiling had a mirror, which could be turned off, though the lovers usually kept it on. The wall opposite the bed could be repl
aced with a hologram. Thev liked scenes of space: galaxies, nebulae, stars, and planets. Akuin (of course) preferred scenes of home.
During one of their stays in a private room, Thev spoke about the work he was doing. They’d had sex and were lying together on the bed’s thin mattress. A trio of stars—red, white and orange — blazed at the room’s end. The mirror above them showed their bodies, quiet now, Thev resting on his belly, Akuin on his back.
Later, Akuin remembered the scene, as he remembered the day he first fell in love with his grandmother’s garden.
Thev had been working with geometry. “Making models, so I can visualize what is happening in this region of space. Mind you, it isn’t easy. We evolved to see five dimensions, and that’s the number we insist on seeing, no matter how many there may be.
“But it is possible, especially if one uses a computer. How did our ancestors get anything done, before the existence of computers? Imagine trying to understand the universe by counting on fingers! Or making lines in the dirt! No wonder the universe was small in those days! No wonder it was simple!
“What one does –” Thev rolled over and began to go through his uniform’s pockets9 A moment later he was kneeling by the hologram projector. The triple star vanished. In its place was an irregular object made of glowing white lines. It floated in midair, turning slowly and changing shape as it turned.
“– Is eliminate one of the ordinary visible dimensions and replace it with a dimension that can’t be seen. Obvious, you may say to me; and certainly it has been done many times before; and certainly it isn’t adequate to show what’s happening in this region of space.
The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004 Page 87
