“Yes.”
“You want to talk about, like, uh, how you’re feeling?”
Tis laughed, a hollow sound devoid of humor. “I’d almost rather talk about my father, and that walloping load of guilt.” Mark opened his mouth, but she forestalled him with an upraised hand. “Just kidding. Fear is easier to face than guilt. And that’s what I’m feeling. I’m absolutely, totally terrified. I don’t want to have this baby. Somebody else has got to have this baby for me.” She levered herself to her feet and paced nervously up and down in front of him. “I have been shot, beaten, poisoned, slashed, and raped. Pain is an old companion to me. But this pain terrifies me. I’ve seen women in hard labor…” Her voice trailed off, and she stared out at the eastern sky where the first evening stars were just beginning to show. “Maybe Jay will come ambling back with Blaise and my body in tow.” She turned back to Mark. “I have that fantasy a lot. Stupid, isn’t it?”
Very slowly, for the words cost him, Mark said, “I used to go to sleep at night and think that if I just hoped long enough or prayed hard enough, when I woke up in the morning, Sprout would be all right. She wouldn’t be retarded. We all have crazy fantasies.”
Even an imagination as fertile and creative as Jay’s couldn’t turn Ilkala into New York City. No self-respecting New Yorker would build office buildings in pale lavender, lime green, dusty rose… the list of offensive pastel colors went on and on. And while the Takisians built tall, they built tall wrong. The multistory buildings couldn’t really be called skyscrapers, they were too spindly for that. Meadows, in another of his endless, fucking lectures, had explained that too. Something about how Takis had a relative mass about one-third? Two-fifths? – some damn number or other – of Earth norm, so the gravity was less, and buildings could look anemic.
And everybody could be a flit, thought Jay sourly as he surveyed his fellow passengers on the tram. It seemed a prosaic description for an impeccably clean means of conveyance which had no apparent means of propulsion. It hummed lightly up the deep valley to within a mile of the House Ilkazam, depositing servants, and the occasional slumming psi lord, and went humming back to the city. If the New York subway system was a tenth this nice – He cut off the thought ruthlessly. He didn’t want to like anything about Takis in his present mood. The seats. Yeah, the seats were way too small. Not comfortable at all.
Mollified by finding fault, he returned to a sour contemplation of his physical surroundings. He had no idea where to exit the tram. The rush of events hadn’t left him with much time to peruse the guidebooks. What were the sights and attractions of Ilkala? Did Takisians write guidebooks? Did Takisians take vacations? He tried to picture the Takisian equivalent of a Hawaiian shirt and failed utterly. Some things man was not meant to see.
At least there was a bizarre familiarity to the entire commuting ritual. In place of briefcases the business people possessed wafer-thin laptop computers that were attached by fine filament wires to a throat patch. Jay presumed they were all dictating information to the critters rather than typing. Seemed sort of cumbersome. Other people read (the books were shimmering projections at eye level, which adjusted for a shift in your posture) or listened to music on tiny radios disguised as ear clips. The competing musical styles formed whispers in the air. Apparently Takis had avoided the boom-box phenomenon.
Yeah, as cranky as they all are, they’d come over and beat the crap out of you for infringing on their ear space, Jay mused.
The number of young moms and young dads with babies and toddlers in slings or glider prams were about equal. Apparently child rearing was an equal-opportunity task among the Tarhiji. And then there were the old, all of whom were treated with the gravest courtesy.
The tram sighed to a stop, and about half the passengers rose and began to disembark. Though they were clearly in a financial and business district, Jay decided to go with the flow. He joined the mass exodus.
“Excuse me,” Jay said in halting Sham’al. The woman turned and looked at him with an expression of polite inquiry. “What is this office that you’re going into?”
“Jhaconda and Stirpes. We’re providers of @^ amp;*.” Static again. Jay shook his head. She tried to explain. “We guarantee objects against loss or damage. People too.”
She vanished into the building, and Jay accosted another worker well dressed, at least by Takisian standards. And got the same answer. Again. And again. He’d either hit the wrong street, or everyone on Takis was either a pooftah or an insurance salesman. It was really depressing. Jay was beginning to wish he’d followed the young moms and dads, or the old grandmas and grandpas shopping or wherever they were going.
Interspersed with the office buildings were shops of various kinds. Jewelry, shoes, clothes, electronic gadgets. As he strolled and gawked, certain facts pummeled their way past the resistant barriers in his mind. The streets were very clean. No garbage in the gutters. No graffiti marring the pastel walls. There were lots and lots of tiny parks complete with the obligatory Takisian fountain, flowers, grass, and trees. And no homeless people sleeping in them. No homeless huddled like shapeless sacks in doorways or shuffling down the sidewalks accosting passersby for money.
Maybe they kill ’em and eat ’em.
Or maybe there weren’t any. It didn’t jibe with the implicit and (in his brief experience) the fucking explicit cruelty of the culture, or the elitism of the psionic overclass. Then Jay reflected on his brief acquaintance with Tachyon – the paternalistic attitude the alien held toward humans in general and jokers in particular. The whole noblesse oblige act. Probably the motive was pride – there aren’t going to be any hungry or homeless people in our cities, by damn – but the result was good, grudging though Jay’s admission of that fact might be.
They think they’re so goddamn special, Jay thought resentfully, though no psi lord was in view to trigger the reaction. And it’s just a fluke of genetic mutation which could be a universal gift if the elegant lords and ladies would deign to mix their precious bodily fluids with some of the lower order.
No, that wasn’t the problem. Metaphorically and literally speaking, the telepaths would fuck the mind blind with the greatest alacrity. They just wouldn’t breed with them.
Jay wished he had someone with whom to share these thoughts and revelations, and then suddenly the emotion that had been tugging at the edges of his mind like a shy child came clearly into focus. He was lonely. He didn’t have a damn soul on Takis to talk to… come to that, he didn’t have a damn soul to talk to back in Manhattan. He had an inflatable sex doll that doubled as a receptionist. He knew a couple of sympathetic waitresses at the Java joint who served him patty melts and coffee and let him ramble, but he realized he knew nothing about them beyond their names. His one deep friendship with Hiram Worchester had sorta gone down the shitter when Jay helped unearth the evidence that Hiram was a murderer – however exonerating the circumstances.
Jay’s thoughts went back to Vi and Flo at the seedy Times Square coffee shop, spurred no doubt by the aromas floating through the open door of the Takisian equivalent. Jay hesitated a few more minutes. Then a pretty woman, carrying an armful of cut flowers, came whisking through a back door and began filling the empty vases on the fifteen tables.
Like most of the Tarhiji she was on the zaftig side, but her soft hair looked like spun caramel, and the pure oval shape of her face reminded Jay of a painting he’d seen in one of his catechism books – the Madonna of the Cherries. It was the only picture of the Virgin he’d ever liked. Instead of looking sappy the Virgin looked sensual, and she seemed genuinely thrilled to be kissing her baby.