She stopped and stared at Reive. The gynander only shrugged, then reaching from the divan snatched back Tatsun Frizer’s card from the floor. Ceryl sighed, defeated.
“What am I doing, talking to you? Look at you—you’re just a—a child, really,” she said. She paused in front of the brandy bottle, then shoved it back into the cabinet. “Every ten years a few of us recall the last time, and maybe we get angry, or frightened, but nothing ever happens. Nothing ever changes. Four hundred years of Orsinas. I don’t suppose it will ever end. I guess I’d better decide what to wear to this evening’s atrocity.”
She disappeared into her bedroom, reappeared a moment later holding a long sleeveless tunic of brilliant jade-green satin. Reive’s mouth hung open in surprise, but Ceryl only shrugged and started across the room.
“Well, it’s the damn Feast of Fear, right? Might as well wear green.” She stopped abruptly and looked at the gynander. Her voice dropped.
“You won’t say anything, about—about my dream? Reive?”
Reive shook her head slowly. “We had forgotten about it,” she admitted. Ceryl smiled wryly.
“Well. That’s just as well.” She gazed with distaste at the tunic in her hands. “I guess if we’re going to make it by twenty-seven o’clock we’d better get dressed.” At Reive’s expression she added, “I can’t let you go alone. Whether or not Tatsun Frizer invited you. It would be like throwing a baby to the Redeemer.”
Reive nodded, tipping her head so that Ceryl wouldn’t see her smile, and reached for her cosmetics box.
By the time they reached Seraphim Level, Ceryl’s mood had shifted from aggrieved resignation to barely concealed anxiety. A dream inquisition in the Four Hundredth Room! That would mean all three margravines, and most of the pleasure cabinet, and she, Ceryl, having to convince them of the innocence and beauty and originality of some dream she’d never had. Not to mention carefully worded praise for the afternoon’s Investiture, and feigned delight at the pleasures of Æstival Tide still to come. Twice she had stopped, breathing deeply while reciting a calming verse a galli had taught her. She wondered what would happen if she just didn’t show up for the inquisition.
But then, of course, Reive would go on alone; and at that thought Ceryl’s breathing became a tortured gasp and she hurried after her companion.
Fortunately the gynander seemed subdued. Ceryl had watched, intrigued, as Reive carefully removed mascara and rouge and powder. She had never seen a hermaphrodite’s face unpainted; the effect was unsettling. Like most people, Ceryl thought of the hermaphrodites as she or her or sometimes it. But, as Reive blotted off the last traces of rouge, for the first time Ceryl noticed how strong her jaw was; how her mouth without its carmine pout was in fact thin, and might even seem cruel were it not for a certain perplexed twist of the lip. And her eyes, with no penciled brows arching above them, were, despite their color, quite gentle. She no longer had the childish mien associated with the hermaphrodites. Except for the lack of eyebrows and her rounded shoulders, she looked like a young man or thoughtful boy. In fact, she resembled one of the unsmiling busts of Orsina ancestors that lined the corridors of the Seraphim’s palace. Ceryl had nearly commented on this peculiar resemblance, but decided it would only make the gynander conceited. Instead she sat in silence while Reive painted her face chalk-white, with only a small green whorl upon each cheek as a token of Æstival Tide.
Now Ceryl wished she had said something. With her face dead-white save for those green spirals and her eyes and mouth unrouged, the gynander looked disturbingly corpselike. There was little foot traffic headed for the palace, and only a few rickshaws. In one of these another hermaphrodite sat giggling on the lap of a drunken diplomat, and stared back amazed as they passed. Ceryl glanced at Reive, but the gynander didn’t even look up as the rickshaw rattled by; only stared straight ahead with her cool emerald eyes.
The truth was, Reive was nervous, even frightened. Everything looked different than it had that afternoon. Servers had spent the last few hours adorning the boulevards for the upcoming festival. The water frothing in the fountains was now green, lit by hidden lanterns. Some of the sculptures had been replaced with bizarre representations of the world Outside—trees of steel and iron, grotesquely twisted and covered with thorns; huge skeletal figures of winged creatures with gaping mouths and dripping talons; naked figures of men and women cowering before the holographic image of an immense wave, its curling edge flecked with blood. There was the inevitable holo of the Compassionate Redeemer, its lamprey’s mouth opening and closing in eerie silence while the ventricles at its feet pumped out the choking scent of charred roses. And seeping into everything the smell of the sea, thick and rank and warm, growing heavier as the air pressure dropped Outside. Some of the other guests wore linen masks over their mouths. Reive regretted not having bought one for herself—the briny smell nearly choked her, like having viscous water poured into her nostrils. Silently she wandered along the boulevard, twisting her head to stare at the marvels the Orsinate had arranged for the festival.
But as they approached the palace Reive stopped, shaking her head in disbelief. Turning to Ceryl she cried, “What have they done?”
It seemed that all of Dominations Level had been moved up here. Scores of biotechnicians and aardmen were still at work, dragging huge cages from the freight gravators, swearing and shouting and snarling beneath the dim violet lights of Seraphim’s false evening. Trees—real trees, live trees engineered in the laboratories of Dominations—had been set in concrete tubs to form a sort of forest, palms and oaks and conifers lined up neatly in rows, but so close their limbs had tangled or, in some cases, broken off to fall in heaps on the pavement. Reive and Ceryl passed through them slowly, and drew closer to each other as they walked.
Because it was one thing to view these things in the brightly lit corridors and workrooms of Dominations, or shoved into the background of one of the dioramas where exhausted jackals and dire wolves panted on the cement floor. But to see them here, beneath the dim purple lamps in the domes above, with the humid breath of the unseen ocean thick in your lungs, the smell of the sea mingling with the ticklish scent of firs and the acrid musk of frightened animals—it suddenly made Seraphim Level seem endless.
Because, vast as it was, wherever you were inside of Araboth you knew that there was an end to it—that the Domes were there, hidden behind heat fences or murals or refinery smoke, but there, protecting you from the world Outside.
But the effect of these shrubs and trees and vines crowding the boulevard and the very steps of the Orsinate’s palace was perverse. Rather than make the place appear smaller, the shadows and rustlings and myriad smells made it all seem huge. Ceryl could no longer tell where the domes were, hidden behind tangled branches and leaves. Even the constant undercurrent of hisses from the ventricles, of the whir of servers out on errands, was drowned by a ceaseless soft stirring, as though some errant wind moved among the stolen forest.
Only the smell of the sea remained the same; and Reive shuddered, imagining it somewhere just out of sight, lapping against the gravator entrance or smashing through the bulwarks surrounding the refineries.
“This must be what timoring feels like,” she murmured. “If you do it right. Or what it’s really like, Outside…”