“Uh… l-love poems.” Elsevier tucked them hastily into her waistband and pulled down her veil. “He wrote some of them himself.”
“Hmm.” Her mother shook her head, and bells sang. “But he’s a Kharemoughi; he gave your father a video com outlet for the right to see you. My lord was very pleased. And it’s up to him in the end, after all… not to us.”
“Why?” Elsevier got up, crinkling with papers. “Why isn’t it?”
Her mother took the flower out of her hand and led her back to the women’s quarters.
TJ came faithfully to see her, a paragon of respectability before her parents, in private a headstrong dreamer falling in love not with the girl she was, but the woman she could be. He brought her more revolutionary literature disguised as love poems; but before she could begin to explore the new world whose horizons he widened every day, her halting attempts to assert herself with her family led to the discovery of her hidden cache of pamphlets, and he was banished from her life.
“But you didn’t let them keep you apart.” Moon leaned on the seat back. “Did you run away?”
“No, my dear.” Elsevier shook her head, folding her hands with remembered obedience. “My father locked me in the tower room because he was afraid I would, before I even thought of it.” She smiled. “But TJ was dauntless. He came back one night in a hovercraft, climbed in my window, and kidnapped me.”
“And you—”
“I was frantic! I wasn’t nearly as enlightened as he thought I was; or I did; in asserting myself I’d really only been pleasing someone else again… him. And now he’d ruined my reputation. I nearly died of shame that night. But by morning we’d reached the spaceport, and there was no going back.” She looked out at the city, seeing another place and time. “We were always like that, all our lives, I suppose: him believing in “Be certain you’re right, and then go ahead,” me believing in “Do what you must.”… But even that terrible night, there was no doubt in my mind that he’d done the deed with the purest of hearts, that he loved me in a way I had never dared to dream about being loved. I chided him — years later — for committing such a male-dominant act. He only laughed, and told me he was just trying to work within the system.
“We were married at the spaceport by one of those dreadful notary machines, and the passage to Kharemough was our honeymoon. Poor TJ! We were halfway across the galaxy before I let him touch me. But once I learned that all I’d been told about — my body all my life was a lie, it was easier to believe that I had a mind as well, and nourish it. We were different in many ways… but our souls were one.” She sighed.
Darkness swallowed them unexpectedly as the tram entered one of the transparent spokes that spanned the starship harbor’s vacuum to the spaceport hub of the city wheel. Moon lost the images of El sevier’s words as they flowed into a memory of her own, of firelight and wind, warm kisses, and two hearts beating together. The empty blackness seeped into the space in her own soul which should have been filled and hid her face, as her face turned as bleak as her heart. “Wish I could have known him.” Cress’s face shone briefly as he lit one of the spicy-smelling reeds everyone here seemed to smoke.
“He gone,” Silky said, pointlessly, remarking on the obvious. He spoke barely intelligible Sandhi, the international language of Kharemough, which Moon had been learning with Elsevier’s help. But the thoughts behind his murky mutterings were as opaque to her as they had ever been.
“TJ would have driven you right up the wall, Cress,” Elsevier said, fondly. “He was always switched on. You move through a much thicker temporal medium; you’re much better suited to astrogation
Cress laughed; it became a fit of coughing.
“You know they told you not to smoke!” Elsevier reached forward and took the glowing reed out of his hand; he didn’t protest.
“Gone,” Silky said. “Gone. Gone…” as though he were obsessed by the feel of the word.
“Yes, Silky,” Elsevier murmured. “The good always die young, even if they live to be a hundred.” She stroked one of the maimed tentacles draped across the back of Cress’s seat. “I never saw him as angry, or as fine, as the day he took you from that street carnival in Narlikar.” She shook her head, her necklace of bells rang silverly.
“He suffered everyone’s pain; and that was why he wanted to end it. Thank the gods he was so strong. I don’t know how he lived with it…”
Where is Sparks now, and who is hurting him? And why can’t I help him? Moon’s booted feet moved restlessly beside the seat; she stared at Silky with sudden, unwilling insight. Oh, Lady — I can’t wait longer! Her knuckles turned white on the seat back.
“To think he cut all his radical ties because he was afraid for me — when I knew he would gladly have died for his beliefs himself. I was incensed; but I was glad, too: He was a pacifist, among people who were not.” She took a puff from Cress’s reed. “And then he took up smuggling! Oh—”
The tram burst into the light again, on the passenger level of the star port itself. Wallscreens were everywhere along their path, with changing scenics of other worlds; in the lower levels of the complex an unimaginable number of goods imported from all of those worlds waited shipment down to the planet’s surface. Countless more shipments from Kharemough’s sophisticated industries passed through the star port in the return trade: There were other scenics, designed to awe arriving visitors, that glorified the technological heights that could sustain major manufacturing processes in space itself. Moon had been told that this was the largest floating city, but not the only one, above Kharemough; there were thousands of other production stations and factories, whose workers spent most of their lives in space between the planet and its moons. The idea of spending a lifetime in black isolation haunted and depressed her.
The tram drifted to a stop, in the waiting area for travelers down to the planet’s surface. Moon followed Cress and Silky wordlessly through the exploding crowds, to claim space on a lounge while El sevier went to the ticketing machines.
“Ah…” Cress settled back, looking up at the omnipresent video displays. Here they changed from scene to scene of the star port exterior: now the hazy, cloud-dressed surface of Kharemough; now the surface of the nearer moon, an abstract painting of industrial pollutants; now the glaring image of an interstellar freighter, a chain of coin discs strung out on the matte blackness like a necklace of drilled shell beads. He sat on Silky’s far side, protecting Silky from strangers by the barrier of their bodies; Silky gaped at the sluggish patterns of passersby, oil on a water surface. “That’s what I like about Kharemough — they always try to keep your mind occupied.” A false note sounded in the easy words as the starships flashed onto the screen. Elsevier had said that Cress had once been a journeyman astrogator for a major shipping line. “Too bad we can’t see the Prime Minister’s ships; but he’s not due home for a couple more weeks. That’s a sight to put your eyes out for sure, young mistress.”
Moon glanced down from the screens. “Why do you always call me that? My name is Moon!”
“What?” Cress looked at her blankly, shrugged. “I know it is, young mistress,” deliberate. “But you’re a sibyl; and I owe you my life. You deserve to be addressed with honor. Besides,” he smiled, “if I let it get too casual, I might fall in love with you.”
She stared at him, taken by surprise, but his face refused to tell her whether he was making fun of her or not. She looked away again moodily, not knowing how to answer him; tried to watch the pictures on the screens.
Disembodied voices made announcements in Sandhi, and half a dozen other languages she didn’t recognize at all. The ideo graphic symbols of written Sandhi were incomprehensible to her, but she was learning the spoken language from tapes that heightened recall while she listened. They opened her mind with music while they etched the words painlessly on her unconscious; and by now she could understand most of what she heard. But there were nuances within nuances to this language, just as there were to the relationships between the people who used it. A strict caste system controlled the people of this world, denning their roles in society from the day they were born. Offworlders were immune to its restrictions, as long as they remained aloof from them — she had been given a ticket, over Elsevier’s pleading, for addressing a shopkeeper by his Sandhi classification, instead of as “citizen.” More serious breaches of conduct within the system were punishable by stiff fines or even loss of an inherited rating. There were separate shops, restaurants, and theaters for the Technical, Nontechnical, and Unclassified ratings, and the highest and lowest could not even speak to each other without an intermediary. She had wondered indignantly, clutching her ticket, why they put up with it. Elsevier had only smiled and said, “Inertia, my dear. Most people simply aren’t unhappy enough with the known to trade it for the unknown. TJ could never understand that.”