The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  Instead, to her intense bewilderment, I gave Humay rings, wristlets, earpieces, brooches, necklaces, and die-cut cameos, all from the collection of Rumai Montieth, governor of Miroste: anything distinctive enough for my wife to recognize at a glance. Then, at functions requiring Rumai’s presence, I asked Humay to attend, too. Sometimes I accompanied her, sometimes I found an escort among the single men assigned to me as aides. Always I ensured that Rumai should see Humay, if not in a reception line then in the sweep of the formal recessional. Afterward, I asked Humay, who rarely had a clue into my game’s purposes, to return whatever piece of jewelry she’d worn. She always did so. Then I put this jewelry back in my wife’s sandalwood box before she could verify its “theft.” I suppose I wanted to make my dishonesty conspicuous.

  Finally, dismissing Humay for good, I presented her a cameo that an artisan in the Furak District had crafted. Later, I learned that she’d flung this cameo at an aide of mine about something else entirely. Several times she raised my name. At length (in two days’ time), she received an arbitrary transfer to Yagme, the frontier administrative center of the Furak District, and I never saw her again.

  “Later, Sharer, when I dreamed of Humay, I saw her as a woman with mother-of-pearl flesh and ruby eyes. In my dreams, she became the jewelry with which I’d tried to incite my wife’s sexual jealousy, blunting it even as I summoned it.”

  The Sharer regarded me with hard but not unsympathetic eyes.

  Why? I asked. Why had I dreamed of Humay as a precious clockwork automaton, gilded, beset with gemstones, invulnerably enameled? And why had I so fiercely desired Rumai’s jealousy?

  The Sharer’s silence invited confession.

  After the Haft Paykar Incident (I went on, pacing), after Diderits had fitted me with a full-body prosthesis, my nightmares often focused on the woman exiled to Yagme. Although in Port Iranani I’d never touched Humay erotically, in my readable nightmares, I often descended into a catacomb or a dry quarry to force myself, without success, on the bejeweled automaton that she had become. Always, Humay awaited me underground and turned me back with coruscating laughter, and in my nightmares I realized that I wanted Humay far less than I did residency in the subterranean places that she’d made hers. The klieg lights directing my descent always followed me back out, so that Humay remained many kilometers below, exulting in the dark.

  The Sharer stood and took a turn around the room, the quilt over his shoulders clutched loosely at his chest. He’d never moved so far of his own volition, and I sat down to watch. Did he understand me at all? I’d spoken to him as if he must—but perhaps all his “reactions” were projections of my ambiguous hopes. When he at last returned, he extended both hideously canaled arms and opened his fists. In them, the disc and the penlight: an offering, a compassionate, selfless offering. For a moment, I stared at them in perplexity. What did the Sharer, Wardress Kefa, and the others who had sent me here want? How could I purchase their forbearance or my freedom? By choosing power over impotency? By manipulation?

  I hesitated.

  The Sharer placed the small disc in the larger one beneath his sternum. Then, as before, a thousand esoteric connections severed, he froze. In the hand extended toward me, the faintly glittering penlight threatened to slip from his insensible grasp. I took it, pulled back the sheath on its head, and gazed into its red-lit hollow. I released the sheath and pointed the light at the disc in his chest. If I pulled the sheath back again, he would turn into little more than an external prosthesis—as much at my disposal as my own alien hands.

  “No,” I said. “Not this time.” And I flipped the penlight across the chamber, out of the way of temptation. With my nails, I pried the small disc out of its electromagnetic moorings above the Sharer’s heart.

  He was restored to himself.

  As was I to myself…as was I.

  —

  A day later, early in the afternoon, I ran into the Orhas in the House’s mid-interior. They approached me out of a lofty, sideways-canted door as I peered upward from the access corridor. Man and woman side by side, mirror images ratcheting down a Möbius strip of stairs, on they came.

  “The brand-new client,” Cleirach Orha told his sister at the lowest step. “We’ve seen you before.”

  “Briefly,” I said, “on the night you arrived from Manitou Port for your leave.”

  “Such a memory,” Cleva Orha said. “We also saw you the day you arrived. You and the Wardress were setting out from Wolf Run Summit. Cleirach and I sat beneath the ski lodge, watching.”

  “You wore no coat,” Cleirach said, to explain their interest. Both stared at me. Nor did I wear a coat in the well of the House—even though the temperature hovered only a few degrees above freezing and our breaths ballooned before us like the ghosts of ghosts….

  My silence made them nervous, and brazen.

  “No coat,” Cleva repeated, “on a day cold enough to freeze your spit. ‘Look at that one,’ Cleirach said, ‘thinks he’s a polar bear.’ And we laughed, studling.”

  Bile flooded my mouth. I wanted to escape the Orhas’ warty humor. They were intelligent people; otherwise, no one would have cloned them, but face-to-face with their flawed skins and loud sexuality, I felt my reserves of tolerance overbalancing like a tower of blocks.

  “We seem to be the only ones in the House this month,” Cleva volunteered. “Last month the Wardress was gone, the Sharers had a holiday, and we had to content ourselves with incestuous buggery in Manitou Port.”

  “Cleva!” the man protested, laughing.

  “It’s true.” She turned to me. “And that little she-goat—Kefa, I mean—won’t even tell us why the Closed sign was out for so long.”

  “Yes,” Cleirach said. “An exasperating woman. You have to tread lightly on her patience. One day, I’d like to find out what makes her tick!”

  “She’s a maso-ascetic, brother.”

  “I don’t know. This House has many mansions, Cleva, several of which she has refused to show us. Why?” He lifted one brow suggestively, as Cleva often did, and the Orhas’ expressions matched exactly.

  Cleva appealed to me: “What do you think? Is our Wardress at bed and bone with a Sharer? Or does she lie alone under an untanned elk hide?”

  “I haven’t really thought about it.” Containing my anger, I tried to leave. “Excuse me, Orha-clones.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Cleva said mincingly. “You know our names, and that puts you up, studling. You can’t leave without revealing yours.”

  Resentfully, I disclosed my name.

  “From where?” Cleirach asked.

  “Colony World GK-Eleven, otherwise known as Miroste.”

  The Orhas exchanged a glance of enlightenment, after which Cleva raised her thin brows and spoke mockingly: “Ah, the mystery solved. Out and back our Wardress went and therefore closed her House.”

  “Welcome, Mr. Lorca. Welcome.”

  “We’re going up to Wolf Run for an after-bout of toddies and P-nol. Please come. The climb won’t affect a studling like you. Look, Cleirach, biceps unbundled and sinuses still clear.”

  I declined.

  “Who have you been with?” Cleirach bent toward me. “We’ve been with a native of an extrakomm world called Trope: the local name. Anyhow, there’s not another such being inside a hundred light-years.”

  “The face intrigues us,” Cleva explained, saving me from replying. She reached out and ran a finger down my arm. “Look. Not even a goose bump. Cleirach, you and I suffer the shems and trivs, but Mr. Lorca stands unperturbed.”

  Cleirach started to ask his question again, irritated with Cleva’s non sequiturs, but, studying me closely, she had an insight and overrode him: “Mr. Lorca can’t tell you about his Sharer, Cleirach. He’s not a regular visitor to the House and he doesn’t want to violate the confidences of those who are.”

  Dumbfounded, I said nothing.

  Cleva guided her brother beyond me into the House’s antechamber. Then the Orha-clones l
et themselves out and started the long climb to Wolf Run Summit.

  What had happened? Cleva Orha had recognized me as a man-machine. From this recognition, she’d drawn a logical but mistaken inference—that, like the “mouthless one” from Trope, I was also a slave of the House.

  —

  During my next tryst with my Sharer I spoke for an hour or more of Rumai’s infuriating patience, her dignity, her serene ardor. I had maneuvered her to the expression of these qualities by my hollow commitment to Humay and to the others before Humay who had engaged me only physically. Under my wife’s attentions, though, I preened sullenly, demanding more than Rumai—or any woman in her position—had the power to give. My needs, I wanted her to know, had at least as much urgency as our world’s. At the end of one of these fatiguing encounters, Rumai seemed both to concede the legitimacy of my demands and to decry their intemperance: she took a warm pendant from her throat and placed it on my palm like an accusation.

  “A week later,” I told the Sharer, “we inspected the diggings at Haft Paykar.”

  These things said, I achieved a first in the Wardress’s House: I fell asleep under the hand of the Sharer. My dreams were dreams, not nightmares, and lucid ones, shot through with light and peaceful funnelings of sand. The images flooding me were haloed arms and legs inside a series of shifting yellow, yellow-orange, and subtly red discs. The purr of running sand behind these images conferred upon them the blessing of mortality, and that, I felt, was good.

  —

  I awoke in a blast of icy air and found myself alone. The door to the Sharer’s apartment stood open on the shaft of the stairwell, and faint, angry voices came across the emptiness between.

  Groggy, I lay on my stove-bed watching the door, a square of shadow feeding its chill into the room.

  “Dorian!” a husky voice called. “Dorian!”

  Wardress Kefa’s voice, diluted by distance and fear. A door opened, and her voice hailed me again, more loudly. Then the door slammed, and every noise in the House took on a smothered quality.

  I got up, dragging my bedding, and reached the narrow porch on the stairwell. Thin starlight filtered through the louvered windows in the ceiling. But, looking from stairway to stairway, I had no idea behind which door the Wardress had hidden. Because there were no connecting stairs among the staggered landings, my only option was to go down. I took the steps two at a time, nearly plunging.

  At the bottom I found my Sharer with both hands clenched about the outer stair rail, trembling. Indeed, he seemed about to shake himself apart. I put my hands on his shoulders, and the tremors racking his systems threatened to rack mine, too. Who would fly apart first?

  “Go upstairs,” I told the Sharer. “Get the hell up there!”

  The Wardress called again, her summons hard to pinpoint.

  The Sharer could not or would not obey me. I coaxed him, cursed him, goaded him. Nothing availed. The Wardress, calling me, had inadvertently called the Sharer out as my proxy, and he declined to yield to me the role that he’d usurped. The beautifully faired planes of his skull turned to me, bringing with them the stainless-steel rings of his eyes. These parts of his body did not tremble, but they couldn’t countermand the agues shaking him. As inhuman and as immovable as they were, his features still managed to convey stark entreaty.

  I knelt, felt about his legs, and removed the penlight and the disc from the two pocketlike incisions holding them. Then I stood and used them. “Find Wardress Kefa for me, Sharer.” I pointed at the high windows.

  And the Sharer floated up from the steps through the mid-interior of the House. In the starlight, rocking a little, he passed through a knot of curving stairs into a space where he suddenly grew brightly visible.

  “Which door?” I jabbed the penlight at several different landings around the well. “Show me the one.”

  My words echoed. The Sharer, legs dangling, inscribed a half-circle, then pointed at a half-hidden doorway. I stalked across the well, found a likely-seeming stairway, and climbed it with no notion of what to do. Wardress Kefa didn’t call out, but the same faint, slurred voices muttered again—the Orhas. A pair of muted female guffaws convinced me of this, and I hesitated on the landing.

  “Okay,” I told the Sharer, turning him with a wrist movement. “Go home.”

  He dropped through the torus of a lower set of stairs, found our chamber’s porch, and settled upon it like a clumsy puppet. I pocketed the penlight in my gown and knocked on the Orhas’ door.

  “Enter,” Cleva Orha said. “By all means, Sharer Lorca, enter.”

  Every surface of the room was burnished as if with beeswax. The timbers shone. Whereas in the other chambers I’d seen, nearly all the joists and rafters were rough-hewn, here they were smooth and splinter-free. The scent of sandalwood pervaded the air, and opposite the door a carven screen blocked my view of the stove-bed. A tall wooden lamp illuminated the furnishings and the figures arrayed about its border of light like iconic statues.

  “Welcome,” Cleirach said. “Your invitation was from the Wardress, however, not us.” He wore only silken pantaloons drawn together at the waist with a cord. His right forearm pressed down on Wardress Kefa’s throat, restraining her movement without yet cutting off her wind.

  His frowzy clonemate, in a gown much like mine, sat cross-legged on a cushion toying with a waxed stiletto. Her eyes gleamed wide, as did her brother’s, the doings of too much placenol, too much Wolf Run small-malt, and the Orhas’ own meanness. Cleva was drugged and drunk, malicious to a turn. Cleirach didn’t appear that far gone, but all he had to do to strangle the Wardress was lift his forearm into her trachea. I felt out of my element, gill-less in a sluice of stinging saltwater.

  “Wardress Kefa—”

  “She’s all right,” Cleva told me. “Perfectly all right.” She gazed from her right eye alone and barked a deranged-sounding laugh.

  “Let the Wardress go,” I told Cleirach.

  Amazingly, he looked intimidated. “Mr. Lorca’s an anproz,” he reminded Cleva. “That letter opener you’re cleaning your nails with—it’ll mean nothing to him.”

  “Then let her go, Cleirach. Now.”

  Cleirach released the Wardress, who, massaging her throat, hurried to the stove-bed. She halted beside the screen and beckoned me over. “Mr. Lorca, please…Will you see to him first? I beg you.”

  “I’m going back to Wolf Run Summit,” Cleirach said, slipping on his night jacket. Then he gathered his clothes and left. Cleva stayed on her cushion, her head tilted back as if sipping poison from a chalice. Glancing at her, I went to the Wardress, stepped around the wooden partition, and saw her Sharer.

  The Tropeman lying there was slender, almost slight, with a ridge of flesh where a human being has a mouth. His eyes were an organic sort of crystal: uncanny and depthful stones. One of these brandy-colored stones, Cleva’s “letter opener” had dislodged from its socket. Although the Orhas had failed to pry it loose, blood streaked the Tropeman’s face. These streaks ran down into the bedding under his narrow head, giving him the look of an aborigine in war paint. Lacking external genitalia, his body was spread-eagled atop the quilts so that the burns on his legs and lower abdomen called for notice as plangently as did his face.

  “Sweet light, sweet light,” the Wardress chanted, now in my arms, clutching me tightly above her beloved, butchered Sharer.

  “He’s not dead,” Cleva insisted. “The rules…the rules say not to kill them, and brother and I obey the rules.”

  “What can I do, Wardress Kefa?” I whispered, holding her.

  Slumped against me, she repeated her consoling chant. Fearful that this being with gemstone eyes would die, we still delayed, Wardress Kefa emanating a warmth that I had never believed available to me.

  She, I saw, was also a Compassionate Sharer—as much a Sharer as the bleeding Tropeman on the stove-bed or the creature whose electrode-studded body and gleaming death’s-head had mocked the efficient mechanical deadness in me: a deadness tha
t, in turning away from Rumai, I had turned into a god. In the face of this realization, my disgust with the Orhas changed into something new: a mode of perception; a means of adapting.

  I had an answer, one not easy, but still quite a simple one: I, too, qualified as a Compassionate Sharer. Monster, machine, anproz, the designation no longer mattered. Wherever I might go, I would live forevermore a ward of this woman’s House—my fate, inescapable and sure.

  The Wardress broke free and knelt beside the Tropeman. She tore a piece of cloth from her tunic. Wiping blood from the Sharer’s face, she said, “Downstairs, I heard him calling, Mr. Lorca. Encephalogoi—brain words. I came as quickly as I could. Cleirach tried to stop me. All I could do was shout for you. Then, not even that.”

  Her hands touched the Sharer’s burns, hovered over the wounded eye, moved about with a mysterious somatic knowledge.

  “We couldn’t get it all the way out,” Cleva Orha said, laughing. “It wouldn’t come. Cleirach tried and tried.”

  I found the cloned female’s pea jacket, leggings, and tunic. Then I took her by the arm and led her downstairs. As I did so, she reviled me tenderly.

  “You,” she predicted, “you we’ll never get.”

  She was right. Years passed before I returned to the House of Compassionate Sharers; and, upon learning of their sadistic abuse of a ward of the House, the authorities in Manitou Port denied the Orhas any future access. A Sharer, after all, was an expensive commodity.

  —

  But I did return. After going back to Miroste and living with Rumai the remaining forty-two years of her life, I applied to the House as a novitiate. I reside here now.

  In fact as well as in metaphor, I have become a Sharer.

  My brain cells die, and I can do nothing to stop the depredations of time. But my body mimics that of a younger man, and I move inside it with ease.