And nine feet away someone said, "Ma'am?"
Poloscki glanced over her shoulder. "An, you awake?"
An stepped into the silver light, rubbing his neck. "That office chair is pretty hard, sister."
"He's here?" I asked.
"Sure," Poloscki said. "He didn't have any place to stay so I let him sleep in the office while I finished up some work in the back. Vyme, I meant what I said. Leave if you want, but not like this. Untwist."
"Poloscki," I said,, "you're very sweet, you're fun in bed, and a good mechanic too. But I've been there before. Asking me to join a group is like asking me to do something obscene. I know what I'm worth."
"I'm also a good businesswoman. Don't think that didn't enter my head when I thought about marrying you." An came and stood beside her. He was breathing hard, the way an animal does when you wake it all of a sudden.
"Poloscki, you said it, I didn't: I'm a mess. That's why I'm not with my own group now."
"You're not always like this. I've never seen you touch a drop before."
"For a while," I said, "it happened with disgusting frequency. Why do you think my group dropped me?"
"Must have been a while ago. I've know you a long time. So you've grown up since then. Now it only happens every half dozen years or so. Congratulations. Come have some coffee. An, run into the office and plug in the pot. I showed you where it was." An turned like something blown by the world-wind and was gone in shadow. "Come on," Poloscki said. She took my arm, and I came with her. Before we left the light, I saw my reflection in the polished steel tool-cabinet.
"Aw, no." I pulled away from her. "No, I better go home now."
"Why? An's making coffee."
"The kid. I don't want the kid to see me like this."
"He already has. Won't hurt him. Come on."
When I walked into Poloscki's office, I felt I didn't have a damn thing left. No. I had one. I decided to give it away.
When An turned to me with the cup, I put my hands on his shoulders. He jumped, but not enough to spill the coffee. "First and last bit of alcoholic advice for the evening, kid-boy. Even if you are crazy, don't go around telling people who are not golden how they've trapped you. That's like going to Earth and complimenting a nigger on how well he sings and dances and his great sense of rhythm. He may be able to tap seven with one hand against thirteen with the other while whistling a tone row. It still shows a remarkable naïvete about the way things are." That's one of the other things known throughout the galaxy about the world I come from. When I say primitive, I mean primitive.
An ducked from under my hands, put the coffee on the desk, and turned back. "I didn't say you trapped us."
"You said we treated you lousy and exploited you, which we may, and that this trapped you — "
"I said you exploited us, which you do, and that we were trapped. I didn't say by what."
Poloscki sat down on the desk, picked up my coffee and sipped it.
I raised my head. "All right. Tell me how you're trapped."
"Oh, I'm sorry," Poloscki said. "I started drinking your coffee."
"Shut up. How are you trapped, An?"
He moved his shoulders around as though he was trying to get them comfortable. "It started in Tyber-44 cluster. Golden were coming back with really bad psychic shock."
"Yes. I'd heard about it. That was a few; years back."
An's face started to twitch; the muscles around his eyes twisted below the skin. "Something out there ... "
I put my hand on the back of his neck, my thumb in the soft spot behind his ear and began to stroke, the way you get a cat to calm down. "Take it easy. Just tell me."
"Thanks," An said and bent his head forward. "We found them first in Tyber-44, but then they turned up all over, on half the planets in every galaxy that could support any life, and a lot more that shouldn't have been able to at all." His breathing grew coarser. I kept rubbing, and it slowed again. "I guess we have such a funny psychology that working with them, studying them, even thinking about them too much ... there's something about them, that changes our sense of reality. The shock was bad."
"An," I said, "to be trapped, there has to be somewhere you can't go. For it to bug you, there has to be something else around that can."
He nodded under my hand, then straightened up. "I'm all right now. Just tired. You want to know where and what?"
Poloscki had put down the coffee now and was dangling the chain. An whirled to stare.
"Where?" he said. "Other universes."
"Galaxies further out?" asked Poloscki.
"No. Completely different matrices of time and space." Staring at the swinging ball seemed to calm him even more. "No physical or temporal connection to this one at all."
"A sort of parallel — "
"Parallel? Hell!" It was almost a drawl. "There's nothing parallel about them. Out of the billions-to-the-billionth of them, most are hundreds of times the size of ours and empty. There are a few, though, whose entire spatial extent is even smaller than this galaxy. Some of them are completely dense to us, because even though there seems to be matter in them, distributed more or less as in this universe, there's no electromagnetic activity at all. No radio waves, no heat, no light." The globe swung; the voice was a whisper.
I closed my fist around the globe and took it from Poloscki. "How do you know about them? Who brings back the information? Who is it who can get out?"
Blinking, An looked back at me.
When he told me, I began to laugh. To accommodate the shifting reality tensions, the psychotic personality that is golden is totally labile. An laughed with me, not knowing why. He explained through his torrential hysteria how with the micro-micro surgical techniques from Tyber-44 they had read much of the information from a direct examination of the creature's nervous system, which covered its surface like velvet. It could take intense cold or heat, a range of pressure from, vacuum to hundreds of pounds per square millimeter; but a fairly small amount of ultraviolet destroyed the neural synapses, and they died. They were small and deceptively organic because in an organic environment they appeared to breathe and eat. They had four sexes, two of which carried the young. They had clusters of retractible sense organs that first appeared to be eyes, but were sensitive to twelve distinct senses, stimulation for three of which didn't even exist in our continuum. They traveled around on four suction cups when using kinetic motion for ordinary traversal of space, were small, and looked furry. The only way to make them jump universes was to scare the life out of them. At which point they just disappeared.
An kneaded his stomach under his belt to ease the pain from so much laughter. "Working with them at Tyber-44 just cracked up a whole bunch of golden." He leaned against the desk, panting and grinning. "They had to be sent home for therapy. We still can't think about them directly, but it's easier for us to control what we think about than for you; that's part of being golden. I even had one of them for a pet, up until yesterday. The damn creatures are either totally apathetic, or vicious. Mine was a baby, all white and soft." He held out his arms. "Yesterday it bit me and disappeared." On his wrist there was a bluish place centred on which was a crescent of pin-pricks. "Lucky it was a baby. The bites infect easily."
Poloscki started drinking from my cup again as An and I started laughing all over.
As I walked back that night, black coffee slopped in my belly.
There are certain directions in which you cannot go. Choose one in which you can move as far as you want. Sandy said that? He did. But there was something about Sandy, very much like someone golden. It doesn't matter how, he's going on.
Under a street lamp I stopped and lifted up the ecologarium. The reproductive function, was it primary or adjunctive? If, I thought with the whisky lucidity always suspect at dawn, you consider the whole ecological balance a single organism, it's adjunctive, a vital reparative process along with sleeping and eating, to the primary process which is living, working, growing. I put the chain around my neck.