MIRRORS SWUNG BACK AND up and out and down; I stepped under the irregular stone arch, traced with emerald guano. (I’ve mentioned the pearlbats …?) High Iiriani behind one of the towering multichromes flung parti-colored dapplings down through the transparencies and over the amphitheater’s tiered stones. Low Iiriani-prime was a diamond at the edge of one of the others—did it lend enough light to pale those hues? I could hear the falls, but all I could see from here were a few fountains, the thin jets deflected by suspended vanes.
I walked down the cracked steps, squinting up among the theater seats’ ninety rows.
Each month’s student load is about twenty-five. It can be as low as twelve; it can be as high as thirty. They come to study the art (endless), the architecture (exemplary), the history (frequently embarrassing), or the technology (extensive) of Dyethshome—sometimes some combination or interface. They usually arrive in the late afternoon on the north monoline spur, which takes longer but doesn’t go through Morgre proper; lets them off within sight of the rear grounds—except during hotwind season, when we have someone meet them at the central station and take them here by an underground route. When I come in to meet them, they’re inevitably scattered up around the top ten tiers. I call them down, and after an hour’s orientation, during which I tell them about where they’ll stay in the six stories of galleries, tunnels, halls, corridors, ramps, lifts, and lounges below the amphitheater, comprising the subterranean part of the south court, discuss study aids, research guides, and various ways to get into town, tell them where they can cook, eat, wash, and shit, describe the more and less interesting runs for sex through Morgre, note the public parks offering the most joyous and the most somber dancing, the pools around which the conversation is the most and the least subtle, we’re usually all on a first-name basis and fairly happy.
At the foot of the stairs I stepped over the grate; below it water glimmered. Barefoot and naked, I wandered onto the middle of the skene.
Despite Shoshana’s lights, the amphitheater was empty.
Trying to make sure I hadn’t overlooked someone sitting or standing in the very top row, I walked to a side aisle, stepped on the bottom stair, and ran the service number through my mind three times—before I realized I had it wrong.
I corrected it—and the right side of the steps, on which I was standing, began to escalate me up.
I looked about the falling rows, left and right.
Still no one. Passing tier forty-four, I glanced over at the entrance corridor. The light above it was out, which meant no one was still down inside. The globes along its ceiling, as well as the blue lights at both ends, turn on when you enter and off when you leave. I looked back down over the seats, over the rounded roofs of the oest court, across the upper parks of Morgre, to the pitted crust of the Vyalou. Here and there, purple patches wound through the orange east from the fuming Hyte. (Amphitheater: half-theater. The other half should always be kilometers of calm sublimity.) When I reached the seventieth or so tier, I stepped off and started walking behind the backs of the seats. At the next aisle, I didn’t bother to start the escalator. I just walked down. I was thinking of calling out, was not sure what to call, and found myself amused at my own hesitancy.
In the center of the twenty-first row is the polarized chamber—built with the amphitheater for those people who wanted to see the performance or the landscape but who did not want to be seen seeing. Invisible from the outside, it appears only as the smallest gap between the row’s two center seats, perhaps an inch wider than the space between the others. It deflects light and sound around it, so that two people can sit in those two “center” chairs and hold a whispered conversation with each other and never realize that they are some twelve feet apart. The only thing that doesn’t work is leaning to touch your friend’s hand. Our great joke as children was to have our friends count the seats in that row: though they seem to correspond seat for seat with the row behind and the row before, the count always comes out to ten short, which, after you’ve counted the three tiers five or six times to check, tends to unnerve both evelmi and humans. Students who come here have frequently done their GI homework pretty thoroughly and know of nooks and crannies in this place even I’ve forgotten.
Just to check, I walked over to the place where I could see nothing but seats and stepped inside.
She stood up from one of the high-backed chairs. “Marq Dyeth …?”
He remained cross-legged on the cushioned bench, watching me. And did not blink.
“Nea …?” I said. “Nea Thant! What in the worlds brings you here?”
Through ornate ceiling panes, Iirianilight, twice colored, caught in the crevice between white gem and silver setting above his thumb’s deeply ridged knuckle. He breathed; and the glare detonated at my right eye’s inner corner. I swayed back a little. Perhaps my eyes narrowed. But I didn’t blink.
“Hello, Marq!” Nea held out a hand, gloved in red foil. (I took it.) “This month I’m one of your students. I wanted to get here early, though. I needed a chance to say hello, to talk—”
Beneath the line of a roof tessellation’s shadow, lopsided like a mask, his eyes were black holes out of whose eerie absences he looked at me from under rumpled brows. For all Japril’s explanations, I could only think: But why here …?
“Marq Dyeth, I had to come!” Nea said, with the growling intensity you should reserve for statements made just before committing murder, but which the Thants use to underline a tenth the things they say. “I had to talk to somebody … somebody who would understand. I flew here. I flew across sixteen thousand light-years, alone and terrified, to tell you. It’s about—” and somewhere on the other side of dazzlement I heard her voice lose all voicing, her breathing go all breathy—“about our reproductive commune, Marq. That’s why I came. There’s a small, unimportant world, Marq, that no one’s ever heard of, called Nepiy. Oh, if you know its name at all it’s because Thadeus mentioned it last time we were here—at your lovely party. But it’s a world with many problems among its impoverished lowlands.”
He put one great bare foot down on the stone flooring. He leaned forward to put his elbows on the frayed knees of his canvas pants: unhemmed at waist and cuff, belted with some ornamental chain, they and his rings were all he wore. The big hands, one naked, one weighted with metal and stone, hung between his knees from heavy wrists.
“There’s been talk, in many of Nepiy’s geosectors, of the possibility of Cultural Fugue,” Nea went on. “Just recently fifty-two of its hundred-seventy-nine geosectors voted to call in the Family to reconstruct some of its social functions in a less volatile form. Of course there’s some opposition from some of the lower lowland areas more oriented toward the Sygn. But the Family has approached Thadeus and our reproductive commune to serve as a Focus Family—for all of Nepiy!” She caught her breath.
He breathed.
“You mean they want you to become Focus Family for an entire world? For Nepiy?” I tried to remember what I could of that strange form of rule by celebrity, by media, by notoriety. “Does Thadeus want to move from one world to another? Do you all want to be bothered with all that publicity and attention?” I remembered to breathe.
Again.
“Thadeus thinks it would be exciting. Eulalia wants to do whatever Thad wants. And Clearwater doesn’t care, which amounts to the same thing. Thadeus says it’s our duty; she says it would be exciting. She says when a whole world calls to you in need, you must put aside personal considerations and rise to the occasion. We would be virtually the most important …” she paused … “important family on the entire world. Its rulers, for all practical purposes. In the early days of Dyethshome, among your interstellar visitors there were several visits by Focus Units from various worlds. In the time of Vondramach. So I’ve come here to study them—and yes, I know the study is all pretense. I just want to talk to someone who knows something about interworld relations.”
And I thought: How could his fingers, even that big, hold so many rings? Three iron ones; four bigger ones of bronze; some were narrow and copper; three, of pale gold, on different fingers, were set with shards of different jades, two, on the same, of bright aluminum, with both agates and opals; the platinum one on his thumb was cast in a shape very like one of our local dragon’s heads, big as a dyll nut and gnawing a mistrock as big.
“Zetzor is a very different world from Velm, Marq. And Nepiy is different from them both. But one thing that Zetzor and Velm share—at least your part of it and my part of it—is that they both function under the Sygn. We have never been seriously religious any more than you have. But to be asked suddenly to adopt a religion that, in a sense, we’ve never really known; to be asked, suddenly, to abandon one world for another, to leave our home—” A nervous motion took her a step to the side—in front of him. And I think I actually saw her for the first time, while he became only a brown canvas knee, creased and with a worn spot, the brown curve of a shoulder, reddened further from the ceiling panes, visible at her side, all equally and confusingly astonishing. She looked down at the loose flags, pushed at one with her baggy boot’s soft leather. “I love the Thants, Marq. And I’m terrified for us. I’m terrified that Thadeus will get her way. And I’m just as terrified that she won’t.”
“Nea …?” I said, and did not take a great step either to the left or to the right. “Look, maybe we should go inside and talk to Egri about this.” I think there was a slight ringing in my ears. Low in my abdomen it was as if a bubble had suddenly blown up to push all my organs around into uncomfortable positions. I mean, what do you do when you first see your perfect erotic object and have been assured, by unimpeachable sources, that the perfection is mutual? (The one thing I can vouch for; I never had the slightest question who he was.) “Come on, Nea,” I said. “Let’s get out of here!”
With neither nod nor smile, and my ears and knees heating with diplomatic embarrassment, I fled the chamber.
Nea came after me. (Did she look back at her companion and excuse herself? I didn’t hear. I didn’t see.) She caught up to me when we were halfway down to the skene. (And from the invisible chamber, he watched me with his invisible eyes.) As we stepped out onto the amphitheater stage, me naked and her in leather and foil, I think I was about to turn around and rush back, when Nea said, in a funny kind of voice: “What a strange one, Marq …! I could tell you felt it too!”
“Nea,” I asked, and felt like a fool for it, for somehow with all I knew, I didn’t know at all: “Who is …?” I began but was afraid to place before her the pronoun that would place me with … him.
“She is rather odd,” Nea said, confirming what, I was unsure. “She’s just another one of your students—at least I assume so. We got to talking on the monoline down. In the whole trip, I didn’t manage to get her name. But I gather she’s from very far away.” Then, as we stepped across the grill and started up the cracked steps, she gave a great sigh, and I could almost hear her thoughts travel thousands of light-years off. We reached the top of the stair, beneath hanging green. Mirrored blades swung in and out at us.