Redworld, page 15
Oh, unfair, Josi! Your purse furnished my Guild fee; your body certified me to this job, and freed me from Gard. Not to mention that I love you. But also I thought of Mother, and meat on the table, and how hard it would be to find another job. I said, “I don’t know.”
She mocked me. “You would just about die, but you would do it?”
I looked at her gloomily. How had we got into this? I reached across the table for her right hand. She pulled away. “Please,” I said. “I want to … check something.” She pulled off her glove and let me have the hand. She watched me closely. Those five fingers didn’t have ordinary ridges. They had strange loops and whorls. There was nothing like her five fingers on her individual prints in any militia station in the world. She was absolutely unique. Naturally. She was a lamia.
I was thinking rapidly. Suppose she were ever accused of something … trivial … serious … anything. They’d haul her in. On my shift, of course. I’d have to print her. And then the show-up. I’d have to set type for it. Then early morning roll call. The matron would bring her out. Josi would have to walk in a circle while the men pawed her with their eyes, and the shift lieutenant would read wearily …
“Ro Noman, alias Josi Vys, alias.… Arrested on suspicion of operating a disorderly house …”
Then they’d ask her questions, so she’d have to say something, and they could remember her voice.
“Josi … when you ran the Tower, did you lay it on the line yourself?”
“No.”
“Speak up, Josi, we can’t hear you.”
“NO.”
“Your fingerprint record shows that you have only five fingers per hand. Confess, woman, are you a lamia?”
Oh Sins.
“Pol.”
I blinked. She was looking at me in puzzled concern. “Are you all right?”
I smiled. “Sure.”
“For a little while, you were in another world. Well, did you figure out my fingerprints?”
“Yes.” For just now a very interesting thought had struck me. If I ever had to fingerprint Josi I knew exactly what to do. Circumstances permitting that is. With a little luck, her prints would get a classification that would bury them forever. It would be as though they had never been taken. No record. No nothing.
I felt better. I returned her glove, with its false sixth finger. “Are you still mad at me?”
“I was never mad at you.”
The maid cleared away the table and we were left with our brew. I reached down at my side, picked up my case, and pulled out a paper bag. From the Scroll Shop. I passed bag and contents over to Josi. She took the volumen out and unrolled the first few pages.
It was wonderful to see her eyes light up. “Madonna of the Clouds! Tern’s epic! With hand illuminations! Why Pol, how gorgeous! What a treasure.
“They did it especially for you, Josi.”
“I’ll read it through, with great pleasure.” She rolled it back up and tucked it carefully into the bag.
I said: “I’ve reserved a room here at the inn.”
“Such enterprise! I bet they made you pay in advance.”
“That’s right.”
“How much?”
“Two hundred solati.”
She laughed. “Well, come on. We can’t waste all that money.”
I CLOSED THE DOOR behind us, slid the bolt, and pulled her into my body. My hands moved over her hips, then down, and cupped her buttocks. I lifted and spread them under her dress as I thrust my tongue into her open mouth. She kicked her shoes off. I found the buttons on the side of her skirt. I pulled it down over her hips, and it fell about her feet. Then her blouse. We had to break contact as she pulled it over her head. The slip followed. Again that strange hands-on-opposite sides routine.
She wore no smallclothes. The brassiere unclasped in the front. And there she stood, naked.
Across the street the red oxien lamp over Zeig’s Boot and Saddlery gleamed faintly but steadily, lighting up the side of her body in barely visible crimson profile. It was too dark to see her face clearly.
I got my jacket off. She moved forward and locked her arms around me. Somehow I got my belt unbuckled. But my shoes were still on. This wasn’t going to work. I picked her up, and, hobbled by my fallen breeches, I carried her to bed.
Afterward, we lay there, sweating and panting.
In a little while she began drifting off. I felt her body twitch. The signal for approaching sleep. I wish I could sleep. Josi, you beautiful sorceress don’t you ever worry you’ll be found out? Aren’t you afraid of being electrofried in the public square, like poor Jehanne-Mar, and others before her?
Time passed.
Her body began to move slowly. (Had my silent concern awakened her?) Silently, carefully, she sat up on the edge of the bed. She looked around at me, but the light was so dim, I knew she couldn’t tell whether I was awake or not. She got up and went to the bathroom.
While she was gone I kicked my breeches off.
She must have heard me. She lit the tiny oxien lamp in the bathroom and did not completely close the door as she came out. I could see her fairly well. I watched her as she walked over to the window. She had dimples in her haunches, and I watched these indentations sway in rhythmic precision as she walked in the half-light. What marvelous, seductive engineering! Do all naked women walk this way, or only lamiae?
I was always discovering something new about her body. Like sailing along the shore of a beautiful island. The island is always the same island, but the variety of bays, peninsulas, and shore profiles is forever changing, even when the circuit is repeated again and again. It’s the same beautiful Josi-body, but the lines are forever changing, with mood and lighting and things that go on in my head.
“Hi,” I said.
She turned, and smiled, and came back to the bed. She looked down at me. I beat her to the punch. “Is that all you ever think of?” I said sadly.
She snorted in feigned indignation. “Well siriS take you!” She climbed up on me. I pulled her down, held her tight, and rolled over on her. Our mouths locked.
LATER, WHEN WE were getting dressed, she murmured: “Was she pregnant?”
“Huh? Was who pregnant?”
“The lady in my scroll. The Madonna. The Revenant saved her from those who would kill her, and took an arrow in his back. He carried her into the sky ship, and the ship sailed away. And my question is, was she pregnant?”
“Josi, it’s just an old myth, set to rhyme. Was she pregnant? Who knows? Ask Tern. He wrote it.”
“He’s long dead.” She smiled. “And he wouldn’t know anyway. I think she was pregnant. I think that’s why she came, in the first place. When she got pregnant, it was time to leave.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so.”
24
In the Library
“THE LIBRARY KEEPS all controversial items locked up down here in the dungeon,” I explained to Josi next evening as we walked carefully down the damp stone stairs. “Some of the most dangerous things are chained to the shelves. You have to bring your own light and read standing up in the aisle.”
I held the lamp high, but even so she kept a hand on my shoulder.
“How do you know all this?” she asked.
“When Gil and I were boys we would come at night, after closing, and ease out the basement window. We brought candles and read everything in the place.”
“And what are we going to read now?”
“A couple of reports—if they’re still here. Down this way.” We turned into a narrow aisle with shelves and books and scrolls on either side, stacked right up to the low ceiling. The tag titles on the scrolls stuck out like limp skinny fingers, and one by one I examined them. “Here we are, Negotiations for the Great Treaty. What we’re looking for ought to be in the first scroll.”
“You actually read all this stuff?”
“Most of it. Years ago.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Because it was forbidden, I guess.”
She laughed.
I pulled out a scroll and began rolling it out. “Hold the lamp a little closer.”
“What is it? What are you looking for?”
“This.” I showed her.
She read slowly. “On the road to Dervil. Our delegation, led by Squire Vys, stopped and witnessed an amazing event. A great cylindrical-shaped thing floated slowly down out of the skies. It hovered head-high for several breaths, then drifted away, and settled down close by. As though this marvel were not enough, a portal opened in the side, and a body fell out and landed with a ‘plush’ near the road. We all shrank back in great fear. The borches bolted, and most of us (including my prudent self) ran away with the animals. When we finally re-assembled, far down the road, we counted noses, and it was discovered that we had one additional person in the group—a young female. She lay prone in the squire’s coach all the way to Dervil, sometimes babbling, sometimes silent, sometimes moaning.”
We were both silent a moment. “Sige Tern wrote that,” I said.
“The poet?”
“A poet, in that he wove her delirium into a great epic. But he was more than that. He was also a great scientist. Come down here.” We walked carefully by lamplight into the next aisle. “A few years later he returned to the site of the miraculous descent. The Tower was still there—no doors or windows visible anywhere. He went over to the spot where the Tower had first hovered, and there he performed a certain experiment.” I pulled out a second volumenelle. “It’s reported here. Tern took a transparent glass jar, and he suspended thin alumen leaves in it, through a wooden stopper. He charged up the leaves electrically so that they spread apart, and then he walked into what he calls the ‘hover area.’ And there the leaves promptly collapsed. That proved to him that the area was soaked with electricity. A month later he died, killed, he thinks, by the electricity. That’s why you covered up the hover area with a wooden shack, so people wouldn’t be exposed to that electricity.” I showed her the text in the wavering light. “Do you want to read it?”
“The Death Hut,” she muttered. “But they go inside anyway, and they die there. They want to die, and that speeds it up. Put it away, Pol.”
“Josi,” I said, “who are you?”
She would not look at me. The lamp trembled in her hand. “Who am I?” She repeated my question, in a kind of musing wonder, almost as though she expected me to answer. “Sometimes I am not really sure. But look at it this way. Suppose there is a land far far away. The people there love to make war. Their war-weapons become more and more terrible. They all agree there mustn’t be any more wars, but they all get ready, anyhow. They know that the only way to avoid war is to become immortal. If you can’t be killed, war is pointless. And just then a survey ship returns from a long journey. The captain reports that they may have found in that distant place a genetic strain that can generate a race of immortals.”
I just stared at her. I knew she was trying to tell me something. But what? Why couldn’t she state it plainly? Probably because she thought I couldn’t understand it. But I understood a great deal. “That was why you had my picture and my genealogy in one of your books.”
She still would not look at me.
I shrugged. So be it.
I considered her. Josi the lamia. But my lamia. A mystery, but my mystery. And my woman. Slowly I reached out and took the lamp. And now she did look up at me. I put the lamp on an empty space on an upper shelf.
“No, Pol. Not here.”
I took her in my arms. I gave her a quarter turn and pressed her against the stacks. She closed her eyes and put her arms around my neck. I kissed her mouth. I moved to her cheeks, her throat. My hands moved over her hips, then up between our bodies, to cup her breasts. Gently, I massaged her stiffening nipples.
She fumbled at my belt. My hands came away, and we broke contact for a moment as I bent over, got my hands under her tunic and skirt, and pulled them up about her waist. She wore only her usual white smallclothes.
“Lie down,” I said.
In silent acquiescence, and without regard to present or future audience, or what this might do to her clothes, she lay down in swift folding motions on the cold stone floor with her skirt bunched up around her waist. I eased down on her and pulled the centerband of her smallclothes aside. No preliminaries. I rammed home. She winced, but her hands dug back under my underwear, and even through her gloves I could feel her nails clawing my bare skin. Soft moaning sounds began to bubble up in her throat. I had a brief idiotic vision of the lady librarian rushing down to silence us. “Quiet, please!”
“Now,” I whispered. “Now!”
Synchronized. Crash. Boom. Then the great retreat. Fading. Fading. I listen. Something faint. In the distance. The big front door opening, then closing. Then opening, closing. People leaving the library.
From far away a female voice floats down and finds us. “Library closing.”
I struggle up, then I help my beloved get to her feet. I get my kerchief out, and we daub at each other. I get my pants up, my tunic tucked in. Through all this, I have worn my jacket and she her shoes. We look at each other. She smooths my hair back and grins her crooked grin. We are passable.
We walk slowly up the stairs, out into the reading room, and past the speculative but enigmatic librarian. (“Good night.”
“Good night.”)
We pause for just a moment by the manikin and his book table at the entrance. The little creature is supposed to represent the legendary Peir Bookeater, who read books faster than they could be brought to him. After he had read all books that had ever been written, he sat at his bench (so the story goes) crying “More books! More books!”
The manikin and his table and his dust-gathering volumes probably constitute the oddest exhibit in the whole library. Nobody seems to know where he came from or how long he has been stuck away in his little alcove. Be that as it may, a peculiar myth has grown up about this manikin—a myth within a myth.
Peir’s eyes are designed to close at night. This action is supposed to be the consequence of a combination of the amount of light (or lack of it, really) plus temperature, working on a delicate reed mechanism behind the translucent cheeks. As the light fades and the night begins to cool a little, the invisible mechanism tightens and starts rotating the eyeballs in their sockets.
There is, however, a very slight mechanical hitch, said by some experts to be deliberately designed into the work: the eyes don’t close simultaneously. First one closes, then, perhaps a breath later, the other. The initial result is a wink. And the myth is, if a woman sees the wink, she will get pregnant. If a man sees it, he will die soon. Peir has even entered local metonymic idiom. If a man dies unexpectedly we say, “He saw the manikin blink.” And when a woman gets pregnant, we might say, “The Bookeater winked at her.”
So why didn’t someone get rid of it? Impossible. What man was brave enough? Nor would the women permit it. Anyhow, why bother; no one had to look.
It’s interesting to watch people as they leave the library at night. A man will almost always avert his eyes. (Not I, though. I always look at Peir, because I know it’s just a silly superstition.) What a woman does depends on whether she wants to get pregnant.
Actually, it’s nothing to be concerned about, one way or the other. In all my years of goings and comings, I had never seen Peir wink. And I never expected him to. Nor did I really care if he did.
As we passed, barely aware of the existence of the manikin, the lashless eyelid of the creature’s right eye clicked down.
The sudden movement startled Josi. “Did you see that?” she whispered.
Did she know the story? Probably not. And I wasn’t going to tell her. “See what?” I said.
“The manikin … his eye. Oh, never mind.”
There was nothing to it. A myth. A superstition. We have to be logical. I shrugged. “I have to get on to work. I can’t see you home.”
“It doesn’t matter. The gig’s across the street.”
I watched her as she crossed the empty street and got into the little carriage. I waved as she clattered off. A memorable evening.
“MOISELLE VOLA dropped by for a few minutes this morning,” said Mother.
(Moiselle Vola was Dean Gard’s scrivener and the town busybody.)
It was the eighth hori of the evening, and we sat at the table together. For me it was breakfast time. Sort of. Mother was having chai.
“That’s nice,” I said. “How was Moiselle Vola?”
“Fine, I guess.”
“How’s the temple?”
“Fine, too.”
“And the good dean?”
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“Maybe just a little. Well, then, what was on her mind?”
Another careful sip of chai. “It seems she was in the Public Library last night. She said she saw you … and a woman … coming out …”
“That was Josi.”
Another sip. The cup rattled as she replaced it in the saucer.
I extracted a slice of toast from the charcoal grill.
She continued. “Moiselle Vola said the lady was very pretty.”
“That is correct. She is also older than I am.”
“In her thirties, at least, I understand.”
“That’s true.”
She sighed. “Do you mind that we’re talking this way, I mean, about her …? I know so little.” Her voice thinned and trailed away.
I looked across the table at the saintly, luminous eyes. “I don’t mind. I’m just sorry you had to learn from Moiselle Vola. But there’s really not much more to say. We don’t seem to have any real plans, at least at the moment. If anything starts to firm up you’ll be the first to know.” I smiled at her. “All right?”
“Oh, of course.”
But of course it wasn’t all right. An older woman that she knew nothing about! It was definitely not all right.
Well, it could have been worse. What if Moiselle Vola had come down the dark stairs at the exact worst moment?
“Gotta go,” I said. I gobbled down the second strip of zork on my way to the stairs.
