“If you leave food and water within my reach. And something to read.”
“There isn’t much. I’ll bring more back for you. It’ll be a quiet day for you, I’m afraid.”
“Perhaps there will be a visitor.”
“A visitor?” Thesme cried, dismayed. “Who? What sort of visitor? No one comes here! Or do you mean some Ghayrog who was traveling with you and who’ll be out looking for you?”
“Oh, no, no. No one was with me. I thought, possibly friends of yours—”
“I have no friends,” said Thesme solemnly.
It sounded foolish to her the instant she said it—self-pitying, melodramatic. But the Ghayrog offered no comment, leaving her without a way of retracting it, and to hide her embarrassment she busied herself elaborately in the job of strapping on her pack.
He was silent until she was ready to leave. Then he said, “Is Narabal very beautiful?”
“You haven’t seen it?”
“I came down the inland route from Til-omon. In Til-omon they told me how beautiful Narabal is.”
“Narabal is nothing,” Thesme said. “Shacks. Muddy streets. Vines growing over everything, pulling the buildings apart before they’re a year old. They told you that in Til-omon? They were joking with you. The Til-omon people despise Narabal. The towns are rivals, you know—the two main tropical ports. If anyone in Til-omon told you how wonderful Narabal is, he was lying, he was playing games with you.”
“But why do that?”
Thesme shrugged. “How would I know? Maybe to get you out of Til-omon faster. Anyway, don’t look forward to Narabal. In a thousand years it’ll be something; I suppose, but right now it’s just a dirty frontier town.”
“All the same, I hope to visit it. When my leg is stronger, will you show me Narabal?”
“Of course,” she said. “Why not? But you’ll be disappointed, I promise you. And now I have to leave. I want to get the walk to town behind me before the hottest part of the day.”
3
AS SHE MADE HER WAY briskly toward Narabal she envisioned herself turning up in town one of these days with a Ghayrog by her side. How they’d love that, in Narabal! Would she and Vismaan be pelted with rocks and clots of mud? Would people point and snicker, and snub her when she tried to greet them? Probably. There’s that crazy Thesme, they would say to each other, bringing aliens to town, running around with snaky Ghayrogs, probably doing all sorts of unnatural things with them out in the jungle. Yes. Yes. Thesme smiled. It might be fun to promenade about Narabal with Vismaan. She would try it as soon as he was capable of making the long trek through the jungle.
The path was no more than a crudely slashed track, blaze-marks on the trees and an occasional cairn, and it was overgrown in many places. But she had grown skilled at jungle travel and she rarely lost her way for long; by late morning she reached the outlying plantations, and soon Narabal itself was in view, straggling up one hillside and down another in a wobbly arc along the seashore.
Thesme had no idea why anyone had wanted to put a city here halfway around the world from anywhere, the extreme southwest point of Zimroel. It was some idea of Lord Melikand’s, the same Coronal who had invited all the aliens to settle on Majipoor, to encourage development on the western continent. In Lord Melikand’s time Zimroel had only two cities, both of them terribly isolated, virtual geographic accidents founded in the earliest days of human settlement on Majipoor, before it became apparent that the other continent was going to be the center of Majipoori life. There was Pidruid up in the northwest, with its wondrous climate and its spectacular natural harbor, and there was Piliplok all the way across on the eastern coast, where the hunters of the migratory sea-dragons had their base. But now also there was a little outpost called Ni-moya on one of the big inland rivers, and Til-omon had sprung up on the western coast at the edge of the tropical belt, and evidently some settlement was being founded in the central mountains, and supposedly the Ghayrogs were building a town a thousand miles or so east of Pidruid, and there was Narabal down here in the steaming rainy south, at the tip of the continent with sea all around. If one stood by the shore of Narabal Channel and looked toward the water one felt the terrible weight of the knowledge that at one’s back lay thousands of miles of wilderness, and then thousands of miles of ocean, separating one from the continent of Alhanroel where the real cities were. When she was young Thesme had found it frightening to think that she lived in a place so far from the centers of civilized life that it might as well be on some other planet; and other times Alhanroel and its thriving cities seemed merely mythical to her, and Narabal the true center of the universe. She had never been anywhere else, and had no hope of it. Distances were too great. The only town within reasonable reach was Til-omon, but even that was far away, and those who had been there said it was much like Narabal, anyway, only with less rain and the sun standing constantly in the sky like a great boring inquisitive green eye.
In Narabal she felt inquisitive eyes on her wherever she turned: everyone staring, as though she had come to town naked. They all knew who she was wild Thesme who had run off to the jungle—and they smiled at her and waved and asked her how everything was going, and behind those trivial pleasantries were the eyes, intent and penetrating and hostile, drilling into her, plumbing her for the hidden truths of her life. Why do you despise us? Why have you withdrawn from us? Why are you sharing your house with a disgusting snake-man? And she smiled and waved back, and said, “Nice to see you again,” and “Everything’s just fine,” and replied silently to the probing eyes, I don’t hate anybody, I just needed to get away from myself, I’m helping the Ghayrog because it’s time I helped someone and he happened to come along. But they would never understand.
No one was at home at her mother’s house. She went to her old room and stuffed her pack with books and cubes, and ransacked the medicine cabinet for drugs that she thought might do Vismaan some good, one to reduce inflammation, one to promote healing, a specific for high fever, and some others—probably all useless to an alien, but worth trying, she supposed. She wandered through the house, which was becoming strange to her even though she had lived in it nearly all her life. Wooden floors instead of strewn leaves—real transparent windows—doors on hinges—a cleanser, an actual mechanical cleanser with knobs and handles!—all those civilized things, the million and one humble little things that humanity had invented so many thousands of years ago on another world, and from which she had blithely walked away to live in her humid little hut with live branches sprouting from its walls—
“Thesme?”
She looked up, taken by surprise. Her sister Mirifaine had come in: her twin, in a manner of speaking, same face, same long thin arms and legs, same straight brown hair, but ten years older, ten years more reconciled to the patterns of her life, a married woman, a mother, a hard worker. Thesme had always found it distressing to look at Mirifaine. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing herself old.
Thesme said, “I needed a few things.”
“I was hoping you’d decided to move back home.”
“What for?”
Mirifaine began to reply—most likely some standard homily, about resuming normal life, fitting into society and being useful, et cetera, et cetera—but Thesme saw her shift direction while all that was still unspoken, and Mirifaine said finally, “We miss you, love.”
“I’m doing what I need to do. It’s been good to see you, Mirifaine.”
“Won’t you at least stay the night? Mother will be back soon—she’d be delighted if you were here for dinner—”
“It’s a long walk. I can’t spend more time here.”
“You look good, you know. Tanned, healthy. I suppose being a hermit agrees with you, Thesme.”
“Yes. Very much.”
“You don’t mind living alone?”
“I adore it,” Thesme said. She began to adjust her pack. “How are you, anyway?”
A shrug. “The same. I may go to Til-omon for a while
.”
“Lucky you.”
“I think so. I wouldn’t mind getting out of the mildew zone for a little holiday. Holthus has been working up there all month, on some big scheme to build new towns in the mountains—housing for all these aliens that are starting to move in. He wants me to bring the children up, and I think I will.”
“Aliens?” Thesme said.
“You don’t know about them?”
“Tell me.”
“The offworlders that have been living up north are starting to filter this way, now. There’s one kind that looks like lizards with human arms and legs that’s interested in starting farms in the jungles.”
“Ghayrogs.”
“Oh, you’ve heard of them, then? And another kind, all puffy and warty, frog-faced ones with dark gray skins—they do practically all the government jobs now in Pidruid, Holthus says, the customs-inspectors and market clerks and things like that—well, they’re being hired down here too, and Holthus and some syndicate of Til-omon people are planning housing for them inland—”
“So that they won’t smell up the coastal cities?”
“What? Oh, I suppose that’s part of it—nobody knows how they’ll fit in here, after all—but really I think it’s just that we don’t have accommodations for a lot of immigrants in Narabal, and I gather it’s the same in Til-omon, and so—”
“Yes, I see,” said Thesme. “Well, give everyone my love. I have to begin heading back. I hope you enjoy your holiday in Til-omon.”
“Thesme, please—”
“Please what?”
Mirifaine said sadly, “You’re so brusque, so distant, so chilly! It’s been months since I’ve seen you, and you barely tolerate my questions, you look at me with such anger—anger for what, Thesme? Have I ever hurt you? Was I ever anything other than loving? Were any of us? You’re such a mystery, Thesme.”
Thesme knew it was futile to try once more to explain herself. No one understood her, no one ever would, least of all those who said they loved her. Trying to keep her voice gentle, she said, “Call it an overdue adolescent rebellion, Miri. You were all very kind to me. But nothing was working right and I had to run away.” She touched her fingertips lightly to her sister’s arm. “Maybe I’ll be back one of these days.”
“I hope so.”
“Just don’t expect it to happen soon. Say hello to everybody for me,” said Thesme, and went out.
She hurried through town, uneasy and tense, afraid of running into her mother or any of her old friends and especially any of her former lovers; and as she carried out her errands she looked about furtively, like a thief more than once ducking into an alleyway to avoid someone she needed to avoid. The encounter with Mirifaine had been disturbing enough. She had not realized, until Mirifaine had said it, that she had been showing anger; but Miri was right, yes, Thesme could still feel the dull throbbing residue of fury within her. These people, these dreary little people with their little ambitions and their little fears and their little prejudices, going through the little rounds of their meaningless days—they infuriated her. Spilling out over Majipoor like a plague, nibbling at the unmapped forests, staring at the enormous uncrossable ocean, founding ugly muddy towns in the midst of astounding beauty, and never once questioning the purpose of anything—that was the worst of it, their bland unquestioning natures. Did they never once look up at the stars and ask what it all meant, this outward surge of humanity from Old Earth, this replication of the mother world on a thousand conquered planets? Did they care? This could be Old Earth for all it mattered, except that that was a tired drab plundered forgotten husk of a world and this, even after centuries and centuries of human occupation, was still beautiful; but long ago Old Earth had no doubt been as beautiful as Majipoor was now; and in five thousand more years Majipoor would be the same way, with hideous cities stretching for hundreds of miles wherever you looked, and traffic everywhere, and filth in the rivers, and the animals wiped out and the poor cheated Shapeshifters penned up in reservations somewhere, all the old mistakes carried out once again on a virgin world. Thesme boiled with an indignation so fierce it amazed her. She had never known that her quarrel with the world was so cosmic. She had thought it was merely a matter of failed love affairs and raw nerves and muddled personal goals, not this irate dissatisfaction with the entire human universe that had so suddenly overwhelmed her. But the rage held its power in her. She wanted to seize Narabal and push it into the ocean. But she could not do that, she could not change a thing, she could not halt for a moment the spread of what they called civilization here; all she could do was flee, back to her jungle, back to the interlacing vines and the steamy foggy air and the shy creatures of the marshes, back to her hut, back to her lame Ghayrog, who was himself part of the, tide that was overwhelming the planet but for whom she would care, whom she would even cherish, because the others of her kind disliked or even hated him and so she could use him as one of her ways of distinguishing herself from them, and because also he needed her just now and no one had ever needed her before.
Her head was aching and the muscles of her face had gone rigid, and she realized she was walking with her shoulders hunched, as if to relax them would be to surrender to the way of life that she had repudiated. As swiftly as she could, she escaped once again from Narabal; but it was not until she had been on the jungle trail for two hours, and the last outskirts of the town were well behind her, that she began to feel the tensions ebbing. She paused at a little lake she knew and stripped and soaked herself in its cool depths to rid herself of the last taint of town, and then, with her going-to-town clothes slung casually over her shoulder, she marched naked through the jungle to her hut.
4
VISMAAN LAY in bed and did not seem to have moved at all while she was gone. “Are you feeling better?” she asked. “Were you able to manage by yourself?”
“It was a very quiet day. There is somewhat more of a swelling in my leg.”
“Let me see.”
She probed it cautiously. It did seem puffier, and he pulled away slightly as she touched him, which probably meant that there was real trouble in there, if the Ghayrog sense of pain was as weak as he claimed. She debated the merit of getting him into Narabal for treatment. But he seemed unworried, and she doubted that the Narabal doctors knew much about Ghayrog physiology anyway. Besides, she wanted him here. She unpacked the medicines she had brought from town and gave him the ones for fever and inflammation, and then prepared fruits and vegetables for his dinner. Before it grew too dark she checked the traps at the edge of the clearing and found a few small animals in them, a young sigimoin and a couple of mintuns. She wrung their necks with a practiced hand—it had been terribly hard at first, but meat was important to her and no one else was likely to do her killing for her, out here—and dressed them for roasting. Once she had the fire started she went back inside. Vismaan was playing one of the new cubes she had brought him, but he put it aside when she entered.
“You said nothing about your visit to Narabal,” he remarked.
“I wasn’t there long. Got what I needed, had a little chat with one of my sisters, came away edgy and depressed, felt better as soon as I was in the jungle.”
“You have great hatred for that place.”
“It’s worth hating. Those dismal boring people, those ugly squat little buildings—” She shook her head. “Oh: my sister told me that they’re going to found some new towns inland for offworlders, because so many are moving south. Ghayrogs, mainly, but also some other kind with warts and gray skins—”
“Hjorts,” said Vismaan.
“Whatever. They like to work as customs-inspectors, she told me. They’re going to be settled inland because no one wants them in Til-omon or Narabal, is my guess.”
“I have never felt unwanted among humans,” the Ghayrog said.
“Really? Maybe you haven’t noticed. I think there’s a great deal of prejudice on Majipoor.”
“It has not been evident to me. Of course
, I have never been in Narabal, and perhaps it is stronger there than elsewhere. Certainly in the north there is no difficulty. You have never been in the north?”
“No.”
“We find ourselves welcome among humans in Pidruid.”
“Is that true? I hear that the Ghayrogs are building a city for themselves somewhere east of Pidruid, quite a way east, on the Great Rift. If everything’s so wonderful for you in Pidruid, why settle somewhere else?”
Vismaan said calmly, “It is we who are not altogether comfortable living with humans. The rhythms of our lives are so different from yours—our habits of sleep, for instance. We find it difficult living in a city that goes dormant eight hours every night, when we ourselves remain awake. And there are other differences. So we are building Dulorn. I hope you see it some day. It is quite marvelously beautiful, constructed entirely from a white stone that shines with an inner light. We are very proud of it.”
“Why don’t you live there, then?”
“Is your meat not burning?” he asked.
She reddened and ran outside, barely in time to snatch dinner from the spits. A little sullenly she sliced it and served it, along with some thokkas and a flask of wine she had bought that afternoon in Narabal. Vismaan sat up, with some awkwardness, to eat.
He said after a while, “I lived in Dulorn for several years. But that is very dry country, and I come from a place on my planet that is warm and wet, like Narabal. So I journeyed down here to find fertile lands. My distant ancestors were farmers, and I thought to return to their ways. When I heard that in the tropics of Majipoor one could raise six harvests a year, and that there was land everywhere for the claiming, I set out to explore the territory.”
“Alone?”
“Alone, yes. I have no mate, though I intend to obtain one as soon as I am settled.”
“And you’ll raise crops and market them in Narabal?”