Drinking Sapphire Wine Read online

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And you’re going to meet her?”

  “Kley,” I said, “right now I’m on my way to the History Tower.”

  “Oh no,” she said, “you’re coming with me. I’ve been reading the latest Jang love manual, the Purple Summit. You’re going to marry me for the afternoon and we’re going to do everything it says together, including the Trapezium with the red-hot Star-Whip, and—”

  “Kley,” I said, “look at me. Do I look strong enough to go through anything like that?”

  “Of course you don’t,” she snapped. “That’s how you had the body made, isn’t it? But if I know you—”

  “Kley,” I said, “you don’t.”

  Unlike the bright and burnished History Museum—where a couple of rorls worth of Flash Records and similar junk were kept—the History Tower, Harbinger of the Arcane, was suitably black, old, grim, and uninviting.

  And the facade worked pretty well. How many people went there? Twice, when I was pouring over some vis-plates, I heard the distant puttering of somebody else in another part of the building, the hiss of a flying floor going up and down. And once an Older Person, female and disapproving, came marching in to look up the origins of some committee motto for a treatise she was writing—or said she was. I wasn’t in my poetic body then, and she scowled at me as I slouched there robustly. I heard her later mutter something to one of the elderly robots that clanked about the Tower that Jang should not be allowed in.

  And when did I first enter those portals? About twenty units after I got out of Limbo that time, twelve vreks gone, when I made history myself by passing out cold, and was compulsorily refitted with flesh. Thinta had visited me, oh yes, I well recall. Thinta, clothed by innuendo: “Do you remember that funny word …” I had uttered it, apparently, on my way down. The funny word had turned out to be “God.” Thinta said she’d looked it up in the History Records. She said it sounded like a kind of very large special computer. She said it worried her, so she’d come along and worried me with it so she could feel better. In the end I arrived at the Tower to investigate for myself. I never really unraveled the mystery. The farther back you went, the more fragmentary the Records—and it was something to do, I believe, with the days when uncertainty was everywhere. However, I began to like the privacy of the Tower, and I began to delve into the Records, fragmentary or not, for their own sake. The things they teach you at hypno-school are barely a scratch on the surface.

  It was a substitute, too, let’s face it, for the activities I’d given up, like the Dream Rooms, since even the most meticulously programmed dreams—awash with swords, dragons, and so on—invariably turned into nightmares of the unprogrammed sort. The very last time I went I woke up screaming, and created history once again in Four BEE. I’d dreamed I was fighting a great monster of fire that burned flesh from bone, and it wouldn’t die however often I severed its head or pierced its heart. That was a dream I’d grown used to since, but at least I didn’t pay a Dream Room any more to saddle me with it.

  In the Tower, a crotchety robot came wheezing up. It looked quite pleased to see me, and its lights did a little display. The rooms smelled of metal and dust and a sort of incense smell, too, from some of the very ancient books which were kept in special vacuum containers and turned over by air jets rather than machine, to keep them from crumbling into bits.

  Actually I didn’t delve much on this particular visit. I sat in my alcove with some old (about ten rorls) music playing at me, and began to entertain rather romantic thoughts about Danor. Of course, she might be the disappointment of the vrek. Or she might have turned into a Hatta-horror, though it seemed unlikely. Poor frigid Danor. My reading up here had given me a few ideas. Looked at calmly, Danor was in the nature of a scientific experiment, but dress yourself in a poet’s skin and you find you’ve reached for a machine, and started to compose poetry to go with it. A Jang love poem for Danor, as elegant, charming, and empty as an unfilled room.

  She must have left Four BEE about the same moment I emerged from Limbo, carrying a cask of metal tape under my arm—that depressing saga of events I’d authored there. Possibly Hergal’s mouthings were true; she’d fled in fear of me, since our individual descents into misery occurred about jointly. But why come back?

  Finally I switched off the music and abandoned the alcove. Beyond the transparalyzed windows, the Four BEE sun was trudging down the sky.

  And there, on a steel bench, lolled Kley, smoking a hilarious golden cigar.

  “Paler than ever,” she remarked acidly. She flipped open an armband and offered me an energy pill, which I declined. “Going to faint at Danor’s feet, are you?”

  Yes, someone would always dig that up.

  “That shouldn’t be necessary,” I said.

  “Well, come on,” she vociferated. Her finger-long nails flashed in the sunset. “The whole circle’s going to the lock to welcome her in. Probably a a few other circles, too, recollecting that old thing she had about playing hard to get.”

  “Go on, Kley,” I said. “Strain yourself; play hard to get.”

  She nearly got me with a sideswipe of those nails, and five robots came over and hustled us out with disapproving creaks.

  3

  Bells rang. A soft explosion marked the closing of the dome locks, and Danor’s sky-boat sailed down out of Four BEE’s turgidly perfect sunset like a large silver bird.

  You could tell the boat came from BAA, city of the fabulous. Rubies flashed on the covered window spaces, which protected the passengers, as ever, from glimpses of the wild desert that reigns and rampages about beyond the domes. And when the exit ports opened, they spilled a crowd in trailing cloaks of noncombustible fire and similar finery, and with alarming android pet animals and crates of extraordinary luggage, not to mention a flock of baas, now bees. No longer did I use a bee. I carried things about on my person when I bothered to carry anything. The old bee, which always fell on me, more than partly with my own connivance, now lay among that heap of forgotten detritus that cluttered the upper rooms of home.

  Hergal was loitering at the edge of the Arrival Stretch with Zirk-as-hero. Both gave me sidelong apprehensive looks, and Zirk flexed a bicep or two in obvious warning. Of Hatta there was, fortunately, no sign, and Mirri had not come either. Thinta, however, materializing in a mild frenzy, darted up and glared at Kley with one of those unique Thinta-glares that convey as much menace as a lollipop.

  “Attlevey,” said Kley, poking me in the ribs by way of a comma. “She here yet? Or do I finally say ‘he’?”

  “Are you all right?” Thinta asked me. “You look so washed-out. (Danor? No, at least, we don’t know.) Did you remember to have a meal injection?”

  Nobody knew what body Danor was going to be in. Zirk was having a bet with a Jang male from some other circle that it was that nice little thing in pink, and the Jang male—Doval, by name—was saying he thought it was the other, nicer little thing in red.

  “Yes, Thinta,” I said.

  “But are you sure?” Thinta persisted. “Because I’ve brought some nutrition pills with me in case.”

  Just then I saw Danor. It was quite easy to spot her—yes, her. The dashing quality and the poignancy were still there, and you could see them clearly, shining up like light through colored glass. If you really looked. The others were still jostling and haggling and waving at the four points of the compass. And Kley suddenly yelled out that maybe Danor had graduated to Older Person status, and slapped on the back a dignified woman, who promptly began to complain about it to the nearest robot. Amid the confusion I slipped my guards—Kley, Thinta—strolled across to the reception area, and reached it at the very split Danor came away.

  Hair like a blue raincloud, and a BAA dress of transparent lightnings. She was leading by a chain of sapphires a sort of swan animal, elegantly stepping on very stiff legs, its plumage just the shade of her own lavender eyes.

  “Hallo, Danor.”

  She glanced up and at m
e, quizzically.

  “You know me? How derisann. And you?”

  I told her.

  “Oh—” she said, as if she were going on to say something else, and then hesitated. But her eyes, those lavender eyes, were open as two doors on a sort of turmoil—alarm, pleasure, cowardice, memory. She’d gone right back to the time she/he jumped off the floater, I could tell, right back to the Secret. No one else knew, surely? No one but me.

  “You sealed my lips with a kiss, remember?” I said.

  “Did I? Oh, yes,” she said. Then a troubled frown. She had apparently progressed beyond that kiss now, beyond the Archaeological Expedition, to the part when I, uttering incomprehensible moans about God and boredom, fell prone upon the floor of the Robotics Museum. Returning afterward from Limbo, I had found her gone, or would have had I been thinking of Danor then. “Are you happy?” she said to me, blatantly, gently.

  “I’m noted for it,” I said. She looked away. “And you? How was BAA all these vreks?”

  “Insumatt,” she said, “of course.”

  Her swan meanwhile had lifted one stiff immaculate leg and was peeing up the side of a reception pillar, a thing which surprised me, since the android animals of BAA are generally without bodily functions. Two Q-Rs were spraying disinfectant over all of us except, maybe, missing the swan. Zirk had come bounding up too, and was staring nonplussed at the scene, his Herculean face going magenta with explosive emotion. Finally he got out:

  “You must be Danor!”

  “Danor?” I said. “This isn’t Danor. Danor is the nice little thing in pink.”

  Danor remained silent.

  Zirk floundered and his pectorals deflated uncertainly.

  “Well, I did reckon the one in pink was … But then, who’s this?”

  “Does it matter?” I said. “You look after your interests and I’ll take care of mine.” I craned to his ear. “After all, I gave up the Danor idea when I saw you and Hergal getting to work. I should watch Hergal,” I added.

  Zirk spun round, registered Hergal’s position, and then galloped boatward to envelope the pink girl with Four BEE gallantry. How surprised she was going to be. Kley and Thinta were gawping at me, and Kley’s golden eyes had a leopardine gleam.

  “Danor,” I said, “there is a robot bird-plane for hire about ten paces to our left. You didn’t protest a moment ago, so I assume you won’t now.” And I took her hand, and she, I, and the swan ran for the plane and leaped inside. The swan landed on the dashboard, its beak making a merry rattling sound and its wings smiting left and right. I depressed the “PAY ON LANDING” button, closed the ignition switch, and we were sailing into the velvet upper air of the city. The swan also erupted into flight and whizzed about our heads.

  Danor giggled, hauling on the sapphire chain. The swan settled abruptly and the bird-plane plunged to port.

  “How silly,” said Danor. “Be calm,” she murmured to the swan, and to me: “It was a genetic mistake. The flashes in BAA reported it. It came out of the tank wrong and they were going to dismantle it. But I asked Kam if I couldn’t have it, and he said yes and arranged it.”

  “How splendid of Kam,” I said.

  “Kam was an Older Person,” said Danor. She folded her hands in her lap on top of the swan. Very serenely she said: “We lived together for eight vreks. Yes, ooma, a Jang girl with an older male. Watch the buttons,” she said softly as I inadvertently spun us into a Hergal-type dive—the old Hergal. “The Committee finally got around to suggesting we part company. They told us, very kindly, that it was not done, not good for us, not healthy. They told Kam that he was ruining my life, so he made me go.”

  The swan began to sing in a high-pitched inappropriate voice:

  “I only want to have love with you, for you are so derisann.”

  We changed to a bubble, and got along Peridot Waterway and so home. I didn’t pay for the bird-plane—I seldom did when I could avoid it—but I felt I had to for the bubble, since the swan, obviously a creature of irregular habits, crapped lethargically all over it. Danor did not apologize for the swan, for which I admired her.

  At home, we went into the suite of rooms I still occasionally used. An immediate machine came crawling out of the wall and sidled up to Danor, imploring her to let it get her some topaz meringue or crushed fire-apple. Danor declined, which intrigued me; once she had adored food at any hour of night or day. She inquired instead if the swan could have some syntho fruit juice. I acquiesced with mixed feelings.

  We sat together in the garden by the pool under the huge artificial stars of Four BEE—Danor, the swan, and I.

  “Can it swim at all?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” said Danor. The swan was apparently a total failure, which was why she loved it.

  We had said no more about Kam. At least, I had asked nothing and Danor had volunteered no more. But now, reflectively, she began to talk again. I could tell from her voice, so level and unbitter, that the story caused her great pain, but it was a pain she had mastered. She was informing me, not because she needed to, but out of a sense of fairness. Because to her, as to me, the brief weird trouble between us in the past had achieved importance over the vreks which followed. Danor and I had never been close. In those days Hergal was nearer to me, even Thinta, in her irritating way. But now, under the monotonous starlight, we might have been the offspring of the same makers, brother and sister.

  “When I went to BAA,” she said, “I was male again for a little while. A couple of other-circle Jang had followed me; I did it to shake them off, and it worked. One unit I met this older male in the Weather Gardens—you know the place in BAA where they have special weather effects, thunderstorms and snow and everything. I was with a crowd watching an avalanche—they only lay it on twice a unit and it was rather impressive. Then this male came up to me, and he said reproachfully: ‘If you were going to be here, why didn’t you signal me?’ I said I didn’t know what he meant. Then he stared very hard, and he blushed. How often do people blush? It was sort of unusual and rather attractive. He’d designed himself very handsomely, and he didn’t have that pompous, anti-Jang look either. He said: ‘I am sorry. I thought you were my child. He’s predominantly male, and his last body did look very like yours. But how stupid of me. What must you think.’ I said I thought it was quite natural, and I didn’t mind, and was he the guardian? He gave a little smile, the sort of smile that isn’t really a smile. ‘No, the other maker is his guardian. I don’t often see either of them.’ By this time the avalanche was finished. When he had looked at it, his eyes were really far away, unfocused. He didn’t seem happy or enthusiastic. Have you noticed, ooma, I expect you have, how nearly everyone is always happy and enthusiastic, and rushing about, and laughing and screaming? He was very restful, and I suppose he thought I was restful, because we were both very silent and sad-eyed. Presently he said he was called Kam, and would I care for a glass of opal wine or some Joyousness or something. Just then I think he wanted to make believe I was his child and I’d come to visit him. It eased out, bit by bit, how he and the other maker didn’t get along well now, and the other maker, predominantly female, had insisted she be guardian to the child, and it rather seemed she might have turned him against Kam. Kam didn’t actually say this. He was trying to be impartial, simply because he felt angry about it, and knew he might not be. I liked him. I said I wished he were my maker, I hadn’t seen my two since hypno-school ended.

  “That was the start of it. We began to go about on a maker-child basis. I was still male then. He was so very nice to me. He paid for everything, and he took me to see the sights—things I hadn’t even heard of. And he introduced me to his friends, though most of them were fairly anti as usual, and even had me meet a Jang circle or two, the children of his contemporaries. One day there were these two gorgeous Jang girls in his palace. They’d seen me and liked me, apparently, and Kam had encouraged them. He came in, being jolly and maker-ish. He expected I’d want to get married to one of them for the unit, but
of course I didn’t. And it wasn’t just the old thing—the having—love thing—either. It made me realize. When I didn’t bite, the two girls eventually flounced out. I told Kam I was predominantly female, and due for a change. He looked slightly taken aback. He looked something else, too—nervous, and not only that, somehow glad. I knew then, and I think he did. I went to Limbo that night. He didn’t go with me. This was the body I came out with. I wouldn’t change it now, and if I had to, I’d replicate—fortunately that’s a successful fashion that you started, ooma. I ordered it in these soft colors because I’d seen he liked them. His home was all blues and mauves like evening skies. Am I making him sound floopy, ooma? He wasn’t. But he was very kind. I came back at dawn, and I wondered if he was still asleep. But he’d been up the whole night. He was walking about on the roof, and he saw me and came down. To begin with, I felt scared, he seemed so flabbergasted. He just stared at me. And then he apologized and mumbled something about you never knew with Jang, I might have turned up the shade of a fireball, with a knife on each hip. I simply took his hand. I didn’t know what I wanted, really. I wasn’t analyzing or being rational, and I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t even remember the idea that Jang never have liaisons with older people. I mean, they never do, do they? I suppose, maybe, it must have happened once or twice, but only for a unit, and all hushed up and hidden afterward, with everyone ashamed and rushing off to suicide or something.

  “He said, ‘Darling, I’m at least half a rorl older than you, and you know I can’t follow Jang custom and marry you—there’s no provision for older people to marry. You do realize that?’ I said, ‘Doesn’t matter.’ He looked troubled, for me, because I was a Jang and breaking the unwritten law—though probably it is written, too. So I kissed him. I hadn’t planned to. I’d resigned myself anyway, ages before, that having love, for me, was a nonevent and always would be. You see, I hadn’t imagined it would be any different with him. I just wanted to make him happy, because he was so special to me. I was ready to play and pretend anything.” Danor’s eyes sparkled. Sublimely, majestically, she made a particularly unequivocal Jang sexual gesture. “Well, well, wasn’t I due for a surprise?”