Collected Short Fiction, page 1091
The venture into Narabal had been a disaster for her. Proud, defiant, rebellious, scornful of Narabal’s conventional ways, she had hauled her Ghayrog lover to town to flaunt him before the tame city-dwellers, and they had not cared. Were they such puddings that they could not guess at the truth? Or had they seen instantly through her pretensions, and were determined to give her no satisfaction? Either way she felt outraged, humiliated, defeated—and very foolish. And what about the bigotry she imagined she had found earlier among the Narabal folk? Were they not threatened by the influx of these aliens? They had all been so charming to Vismaan, so friendly. Perhaps, Thesme thought gloomily, the prejudice was in her mind alone and she had misinterpreted the remarks of others, and in that case it had been stupid to give herself to the Ghayrog, it had accomplished nothing, flouted no Narabal decorum, served no purpose at all in the private war she had been fighting against those people. It had only been a strange and willful and grotesque event.
Neither she nor the Ghayrog spoke during the long slow uncomfortable return to the jungle. When they reached her hut he went inside and she bustled about ineffectually in the clearing, checking traps, pulling berries from vines, setting things down and forgetting what she had done with them.
After a while she entered the hut and said to Vismaan, “I think you may as well leave.”
“Very well. It is time for me to be on my way.”
“You can stay here tonight, of course. But in the morning—”
“Why not leave now?”
“It’ll be dark soon. You’ve already walked so many miles today—”
“I have no wish to trouble you. I will go now, I think.”
Even now she found it impossible to read his feelings. Was he surprised? Hurt? Angry? He showed her nothing. He offered no gestures of farewell, either, but simply turned and began walking at a steady pace toward the interior of the jungle. Thesme watched him, throat dry, heart pounding, until he disappeared beyond the low-hanging vines. It was all she could do to keep herself from running after him. But then he was gone, and soon the tropical night descended.
She rummaged together a sort of dinner for herself, but she ate very little, thinking, He is out there sitting in the darkness, waiting for the morning to come. They had not even said goodbye. She could have made some little joke, warning him to stay out of sijaneel trees, or he could have thanked her for all she had done on his behalf, but instead there had been nothing, just her dismissal of him and his calm uncomplaining departure. An alien, she thought, and his ways were alien. And yet, when they had been together in bed, and he had touched her and held her and drawn her body down on top of his—
It was a long bleak night for her. She lay huddled in the crudely sewn zanja-down bed that they had so lately shared, listening to the night rain hammering on the vast blue leaves that were her roof, and for the first time since she had entered the jungle she felt the pain of loneliness. Until this moment she had not realized how much she had valued the bizarre parody of domesticity that she and the Ghayrog had enacted here; but now that was over, and she was alone again, somehow more alone than she had been before, and far more cut off from her old life in Narabal than before, also, and he was out there, unsleeping in the darkness, unsheltered from the rain. I am in love with an alien, she told herself in wonderment, I am in love with a scaly thing that speaks no words of endearment and asks hardly any questions and leaves without saying thank you or goodbye. She lay awake for hours, crying now and then. Her body felt tense and clenched from the long walk and the day’s frustrations; she drew her knees to her breasts and stayed that way a long while, and then put her hands between her legs and stroked herself, and finally there came a moment of release, a gasp and a little soft moan, and sleep after that.
7
In the morning she bathed and checked her traps and assembled a breakfast and wandered over all the familiar trails near her hut. There was no sign of the Ghayrog. By midday her mood seemed to be lifting, and the afternoon was almost cheerful for her; only as nightfall approached, the time of solitary dinner, did she begin to feel the bleakness descending again. But she endured it. She played the cubes she had brought from home for him, and eventually dropped into sleep, and the next day was a better day, and the next, and the one after that.
Gradually Thesme’s life returned to normal. She saw nothing of the Ghayrog and he started to slip from her mind. As the solitary weeks went by she rediscovered the joy of solitude, or so it seemed to her, but then at odd moments she speared herself on some sharp and painful memory of him—the sight of a bilantoon in a thicket or the sijaneel tree with the broken branch or the gromwark sitting sullenly at the edge of the pond—and she realized that she still missed him. She roved the jungle in wider and wider circles, not quite knowing why, until at last she admitted to herself that she was looking for him.
It took her three more months to find him. She began seeing indications of settlement off to the southeast—an apparent clearing, visible two or three hilltops away, with what looked like traces of new trails radiating from it—and in time she made her way in that direction and across a considerable river previously unknown to her, to a zone of felled trees, beyond which was a newly established farm. She skulked along its perimeter and caught sight of a Ghayrog—it was Vismaan, she was certain of that—tilling a field of rich black soil. Fear swept her spirit and left her weak and trembling. Could it be some other Ghayrog? No, no, no, she was sure it was he, she even imagined she detected a little limp. She ducked down out of sight, afraid to approach him. What could she say to him? How could she justify having come this far to seek him out, after having so coolly dismissed him from her life? She drew back into the underbrush and came close to turning away altogether. But then she found her courage and called his name.
He stopped short and looked around.
“Vismaan? Over here! It’s Thesme!”
Her cheeks were blazing, her heart pounded terrifyingly. For one dismal instant she was convinced that this was a strange Ghayrog, and apologies for her intrusion were already springing to her lips. But as he came toward her she knew that she had not been mistaken.
“I saw the clearing and thought it might be your farm,” she said, stepping out of the tangled brush. “How have you been, Vismaan?”
“Quite excellent. And yourself?”
She shrugged. “I get along. You’ve done wonders here, Vismaan. It’s only been a few months, and look at all this!”
“Yes,” he said. “We have worked hard.”
“We?”
“I have a mate now. Come: let me introduce you to her, and show you what we have accomplished here.”
His tranquil words withered her. Perhaps they were meant to do that—instead of showing any sort of resentment or pique over the way she had sent him out of her life, he was taking his revenge in a more diabolical fashion, through utter dispassionate restraint. But more likely, she thought, he felt no resentment and saw no need for revenge. His view of all that had passed between them was probably entirely unlike hers. Never forget that he is an alien, she told herself.
She followed him up a gentle slope and across a drainage ditch and around a small field that was obviously newly planted. At the top of the hill, half hidden by a lush kitchen-garden, was a cottage of sijaneel timbers not very different from her own, but larger and somewhat more angular in design. From up here the whole farm could be seen, occupying three faces of the little hill. Thesme was astounded at how much he had managed to do—it seemed impossible to have cleared all this, to have built a dwelling, to have made ready the soil for planting, even to have begun planting, in just these few months. She remembered that Ghayrogs did not sleep; but had they no need of rest?
“Turnome!” he called. “We have a visitor, Turnome!”
Thesme forced herself to be calm. She understood now that she had come looking for the Ghayrog because she no longer wanted to be alone, and that she had had some half-conscious fantasy of helping him establish his farm, of sharing his life as well as his bed, of building a true relationship with him; she had even, for one flickering instant, seen herself on a holiday in the north with him, visiting wonderful Dulorn, meeting his countrymen. All that was foolish, she knew, but it had had a certain crazy plausibility until the moment when he told her he had a mate. Now she struggled to compose herself, to be cordial and warm, to keep all absurd hints of rivalry from surfacing—
Out of the cottage came a Ghayrog nearly as tall as Vismaan, with the same gleaming pearly armor of scales, the same slowly writhing serpentine hair; there was only one outward difference between them, but it was a strange one indeed, for the Ghayrog woman’s chest was festooned with dangling tubular breasts, a dozen or more of them, each tipped with a dark green nipple. Thesme shivered. Vismaan had said Ghayrogs were mammals, and the evidence was impossible to refute, but the reptilian look of the woman was if anything heightened by those eerie breasts, which made her seem not mammalian but weirdly hybrid and incomprehensible. Thesme looked from one to the other of these creatures in deep discomfort.
Vismaan said, “This is the woman I told you about, who found me when I hurt my leg, and nursed me back to health. Thesme: my mate Turnome.”
“You are welcome here,” said the Ghayrog woman solemnly.
Thesme stammered some further appreciation of the work they had done on the farm. She wanted only to escape, now, but there was no getting away; she had come to call on her jungle neighbors, and they insisted on observing the niceties. Vismaan invited her in. What was next? A cup of tea, a bowl of wine, some thokkas and grilled mintun? There was scarcely anything inside the cottage except a table and a few cushions and, in the far corner, a curious high-walled woven container of large size, standing on a three-legged stool. Thesme glanced toward it and quickly away, thinking without knowing why that it was wrong to display curiosity about it; but Vismaan took her by the elbow and said, “Let us show you. Come: look.” She peered in.
It was an incubator. On a nest of moss were eleven or twelve leathery round eggs, bright green with large red speckles.
“Our firstborn will hatch in less than a month,” Vismaan said.
Thesme was swept by a wave of dizziness. Somehow this revelation of the true alienness of these beings stunned her as nothing else had, not the chilly stare of Vismaan’s unblinking eyes nor the writhing of his hair nor the touch of his skin against her naked body nor the sudden amazing sensation of him moving inside her. Eggs! A litter! And Turnome already puffing up with milk to nurture them! Thesme had a vision of a dozen tiny lizards clinging to the woman’s many breasts, and horror transfixed her: she stood motionless, not even breathing, for an endless moment, and then she turned and bolted, running down the hillside, over the drainage ditch, right across, she realized too late, the newly planted field, and off into the steaming humid jungle.
8
She did not know how long it was before Vismaan appeared at her door. Time had gone by in a blurred flow of eating and sleeping and weeping and trembling, and perhaps it was a day, perhaps two, perhaps a week, and then there he was, poking his head and shoulders into the hut and calling her name.
“What do you want?” she asked, not getting up.
“To talk. There were things I had to tell you. Why did you leave so suddenly?”
“Does it matter?”
He crouched beside her. His hand rested lightly on her shoulder.
“Thesme, I owe you apologies.”
“For what?”
“When I left here, I failed to thank you for all you had done for me. My mate and I were discussing why you had run away, and she said you were angry with me, and I could not understand why. So she and I explored all the possible reasons, and when I described how you and I had come to part, Turnome asked me if I had told you that I was grateful for your help, and I said no, I had not, I was unaware that such things were done. So I have come to you. Forgive me for my rudeness, Thesme. For my ignorance.”
“I forgive you,” she said in a muffled voice. “Will you go away, now?”
“Look at me, Thesme.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Please. Will you?” He tugged at her shoulder.
Sullenly she turned to him.
“Your eyes are swollen,” he said.
“Something I ate must have disagreed with me.”
“You are still angry. Why? I have asked you to understand that I meant no discourtesy. Ghayrogs do not express gratitude in quite the same way humans do. But let me do it now. You saved my life, I believe. You were very kind. I will always remember what you did for me when I was injured. It was wrong of me not to have told you that before.”
“And it was wrong of me to throw you out like that,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t ask me to explain why I did, though. It’s very complicated. I’ll forgive you for not thanking me if you’ll forgive me for making you leave like that.”
“No forgiveness was required. My leg had healed; it was time for me to go, as you pointed out; I went on my way and found the land I needed for my farm.”
“It was that simple, then?”
“Yes. Of course.”
She got to her feet and stood facing him. “Vismaan, why did you have sex with me?”
“Because you seemed to want it.”
“That’s all?”
“You were unhappy and did not seem to wish to sleep alone. I hoped it would comfort you. I was trying to do the friendly thing, the compassionate thing.”
“Oh. I see.”
“I believe it gave you pleasure,” he said.
“Yes. Yes. It did give me pleasure. But you didn’t desire me, then?”
His tongue flickered in what she thought might be the equivalent of a puzzled frown.
“No,” he said. “You are human. How can I feel desire for a human? You are so different from me, Thesme. On Majipoor my kind are called aliens, but to me you are the alien, is that not so?”
“I suppose. Yes.”
“But I was very fond of you. I wished your happiness. In that sense I had desire for you. Do you understand? And I will always be your friend. I hope you will come to visit us, and share in the bounty of our farm. Will you do that, Thesme?”
“I—yes, yes, I will.”
“Good. I will go now. But first—”
Gravely, with immense dignity, he drew her to him and enfolded her in his powerful arms. Once again she felt the strange smooth rigidity of his alien skin; once again the little scarlet tongue fluttered across her eyelids in a forked kiss. He embraced her for a long moment.
When he released her he said, “I am extremely fond of you, Thesme I can never forget you.”
“Nor I you.”
She stood in the doorway, watching until he disappeared from sight beyond the pond. A sense of ease and peace and warmth had come over her spirit. She doubted that she ever would visit Vismaan and Turnome and their litter of little lizards, but that was all right: Vismaan would understand. Everything was all right. Thesme began to gather her possessions and stuff them into her pack. It was still only mid-morning, time enough to make the journey to Narabal.
She reached the city just after the afternoon showers. It was over a year since she had left it, and a good many months since her last visit; and she was surprised by the changes she saw now. There was a boomtown bustle to the place, new buildings going up everywhere, ships in the Channel, the streets full of traffic. And the town seemed to have been invaded by aliens—hundreds of Ghayrogs, and other kinds too, the warty ones that she supposed were Hjorts, and enormous double-shouldered Skandars, a whole circus of strange beings going about their business and taken absolutely for granted by the human citizens. Thesme found her way with some difficulty to her mother’s house. Two of her sisters were there, and her brother Dalkhan. They stared at her in amazement and what seemed like fear.
“I’m back,” she said. “I know I look like a wild animal, but I just need my hair trimmed and a new tunic and I’ll be human again.”
She went to live with Ruskelorn Yulvan a few weeks later, and at the end of the year they were married. For a time she thought of confessing to him that she and her Ghayrog guest had been lovers, but she was afraid to do it, and eventually it seemed unimportant to bring it up at all. She did, finally, ten or twelve years later, when they had dined on roast bilantoon at one of the fine new restaurants in the Ghayrog quarter of town, and she had had much too much of the strong golden wine of the north, and the pressure of old associations was too powerful to resist. When she had finished telling him the story she said, “Did you suspect any of that?” And he said, “I knew it right away, when I saw you with him in the street. But why should it have mattered?”
Crime and Punishment
That one takes him back to the beginning of his explorations of these archives. Thesme and the Ghayrog all over again, another forest romance, the love of human and non-human. Yet the similarities are all on the surface, for these were very different people in very different circumstances. Hissune comes away from the tale with what he thinks is a reasonably good understanding of the soul-painter Therion Nismile—some of whose works, he learns, are still on display in the galleries of Lord Valentine’s Castle—but the Metamorph is a mystery to him still, as great a mystery perhaps as she had been to Nismile. He checks the index for recordings of Metamorph souls, but is unsurprised to find that there are none. Do the Shapeshifters refuse to record, or is the apparatus incapable of picking up the emanations of their minds, or are they merely banned from the archives? Hissune does not know and he is unable to find out. In time, he tells himself, all things will be answered. Meanwhile there is much more to discover. The operations of the King of Dreams, for instance—he needs to learn much more about those. For a thousand years the descendants of the Barjazids have had the task of lashing the sleeping minds of criminals; Hissune wonders how it is done. He prowls the archives, and before long fortune delivers up to him the soul of an outlaw, disguised drearily as a tradesman of the city of Stee—
