Food was a variety of vegetables cooked in elaborate combinations with very little meat; in that sense it was like Chinese cooking. The old man named Gording escorted Corbell through the routine. Tables were of different sizes, seating four to twelve. At a table for six with Gording and four women, Corbell had a fair chance of following a conversation.
They asked him about his hair. He told them Skatholtz's lie, and expressed surprise at their monochromatic hair and receding hairlines. Maybe they believed him.
Observing his dinner companions up close, he noted that, like the Boys, they showed pallid, almost translucent skin, coupled to all the shapes natural to human beings: noses broad or narrow, lips thick or thin, bushy eyebrows or eyes with epicanthic folds, or both; bodies burly and invulnerable or slender and fragile.
"Vitamin D?"
He'd spoken aloud. They looked at him, waiting.
"It's only a theory," Corbell tried to explain. "Once all dikta were dark brown, when the sun was hot and bright. Some dikta went far north, where it was so cold that they had to cover themselves or die." They were smiling nervous incomprehension, but he went doggedly on: "Our skin makes a thing we need, from sunlight. When dikta cover themselves for warmth, their skin must let more sunlight through, or they die. My people grew lighter skin. I think it was the same with your people, after the sun turned red."
They were still smiling. "Dark brown," Gording said. "Your tale is strange, but our skin does make a life-chemical, kathope."
"But how do you live in the long night?" Almost six years!
"Kathope seed. We press it for the oil."
Escaping Dikta City should have been easy during the long night, when the Boys all gathered in Sarash-Zillish. But fugitives would have to carry their own kathope seed... yeah, and Boys would tear it up if they found it growing anywhere but here or in Sarash-Ziffish. Corbell was beginning to worry. Maybe he really was trapped.
He asked about the coming festivities.
"We take sex in company," T'teeruf told him. At a wild guess she was sixteen or so, her face heart-shaped, her eyes large and expressive, her mouth full and made for laughter, her hair a tightly coiled ruff. Even she was half bald. "Sex is the only pleasure we have that the Boys can't ever understand. That, and giving birth." Her eyes dropped shyly. "I haven't done that yet."
II
The orgy hall (what else could you call it?) was an afterthought. It seemed the Boys hadn't thought of putting one in when they built Dikta City. The dikta had repaired the omission by building a kind of infinity sign on the roof, composed of twelve of the mass-produced triangular bedrooms arranged like two pies of six wedges each, with two baths set between. They had knocked out all the inner walls. The small toilets that belonged to the bedrooms still had doors (at least the dikta kept that form of privacy!), but the closets didn't, and the "phone booths" had been ripped out. Of course.
When Corbell arrived there were dikta on every horizontal surface, beds and couches and coffee tables, and more coming in. Half a dozen women gestured invitation from one of the beds. Corbell accepted.
His nervousness left him quickly. Rippling water bed and warm woman-flesh formed his pillows, and it was altogether delightful. Out of courtesy and because she was nearest, he lay with an older woman first. She expressed no disappointment, but he was too quick and he knew it. After all that time, to hurry... and still it felt like a mighty victory. "I gave this up forever," he said, and thanked her with his eyes.
Now he beat his chest and warbled the Challenge of the Great Ape, and took a woman with pronounced oriental features and warm, skilled hands. This time it was longer, better. The partial baldness of these women made them more exotic. Their breasts were alike, large in diameter but flattened; even in older women they did not sag.
They asked him about his sensations. Even with his wife, Corbell had had difficulty analyzing his own reflexes, and he had trouble now. They probed delicately, with questions and with stroking fingertips, exploring his ancient nervous system and telling him about their own.
A younger man joined them. Two women left, were replaced by two more. Corbell scratched T'teeruf's back while she was in sexual congress with the other man. Was he through for the night?
Evidently not- The man was using his hands and toes, attempting to satisfy five Women at a time, reminding Corbell of old paintings from India. Egotist! But it seemed fair, given the proportion of women to men.
When inspiration came, Corbell tried those variations himself. It took some concentration... and he had never been in practice. He was tentative, a bit clumsy.
One of the women asked him about it. He told her. One woman to a man... monogamy... no children's immortality... The faces around him closed down like masks, and the woman changed the subject.
He hardly noticed. He was drunk on the hormones bubbling in his blood. He watched the other man and two women, trying to follow what they were doing, but it all came out as a tangle of arms and legs.
"There are lost skills," T'teeruf told him a bit wistfully. "Positions used in free-fall. Now they exist only in the tales."
He tried the sauna (crowded) and the bathtub (crowded). Hot water churned with bubbles and the currents generated by a couple on the far side: Gording and the older woman who had been his first since the corpsicle tank. Wet women rubbed against him. A water splashing war erupted and died out. Corbell and a young woman with golden hair made love, sitting cross-legged in the tub facing each other.
That was when he looked up and saw the Boys: half a dozen of them seated on the edge of an open airwell with their feet hanging down toward the tub. They passed comments to each other while they enjoyed the show. Ktoffisp caught him looking and waved.
The girl's eyes followed Corbell's upward, then dropped in disinterest. Okay, it didn't bother her... When Ktollisp waved again, Corbell waved back.
In the bedroom in One City there had been an old videotape of two couples demonstrating lovemaking positions. Even then Corbell had sensed the presence of an audience. Now he knew. They had been there at the coffee table: Boys or Girls watching borrowed dikta, or even (how old was that tape?) Boys and Girls mixed, before the great rift.
The orgy's impetus dwindled. Now half of Dikta City clustered on the beds and couches and coffee tables in half of the bedroom complex, questioning Corbell. His audience thinned as some left by the stairwell; others went by twos and threes to the other half of the multiple-bed complex and came back later. Corbell talked on and on.
The first man to see the bottom of the universe, he had his audience at last. Euphoria!
Suddenly he was yawning uncontrollably.
No, they didn't use the bedrooms for sleeping. They slept in a ground-floor room. Gording volunteered to walk him over. The fresh air cooled his damp body and cleared his head. The stars were slightly misted over. Gording pointed to a steady pink-tinged star in the north. "Corbell, you came from space recently. What is that?"
"A world like a little Jupiter. It shouldn't be there, but it is."
"It grows brighter, but it does not move against the pattern of fixed stars."
"That bothered Krayhayft, too." It was brighter, wasn't it? "Listen, I'm too tired to think."