Claire stands where she is, stunned, until a slender figure separates itself from the crowd. That other face seems to hang in the air, obscuring his—red and distorted, mouth agape.
The man takes her by the elbow, urges her toward the outer door. "What are you to Dio? Did you know him before?"
"Before what?" she asks faintly. They are crossing the room of machines, empty and echoing.
"Hm. I remember you now—I let you in, didn't I? Sorry you came?" His tone is light and negligent; she has the feeling that his attention is not really on what he is saying. A faint irritation at this is the first thing she feels through her numbness. She stirs as they walk, disengaging her arm from his grasp. She says, "What was wrong with him?"
"A very rare complaint," answers the other, without pausing. They are in the outer room now, in the gloom under the bright frieze, moving toward the doors. "Didn't you know?" he asks in the same careless tone.
"I've been away." She stops, turns to face him. "Can't you tell me? What is wrong with Dio?"
She sees now that he has a thin face, nose and lips keen, eyes bright and narrow. "Nothing you want to know about," he says curtly. He waves at the door control, and the doors slide noiselessly apart. "Goodbye."
She does not move, and after a moment the doors close again. "What's wrong with him?" she says.
He sighs, looking down at her modish robe with its delicate clasps of gold. "How can I tell you? Does the verb 'to die' mean anything to you?"
She is puzzled and apprehensive. "I don't know . . . isn't it something that happens to the lower animals?"
He gives her a quick mock bow. "Very good."
"But I don't know what it is. Is it—a kind of fit, like—" She nods toward the inner rooms.
He is staring at her with an expression half compassionate, half wildly exasperated. "Do you really want to know?" He turns abruptly and runs his finger down a suddenly glowing index stripe on the wall. "Let's see . . . don't know what there is in this damned reservoir. Hm. Animals, terminus." At his finger's touch, a cabinet opens and tips out a shallow oblong box into his palm. He offers it.
In her hands, the box lights up; she is looking into a cage in which a small animal crouches—a white rat. Its fur is dull and rough-looking; something is caked around its muzzle. It moves unsteadily, noses a cup of water, then turns away. Its legs seem to fail; it drops and lies motionless except for the slow rise and fall of its tiny chest.
Watching, Claire tries to control her nausea. Students' cabinets are full of nastinesses like this; they expect you not to show any distaste. "Something's the matter with it," is all she can find to say.
"Yes. It's dying. That means to cease living: to stop. Not to be any more. Understand?"
"No," she breathes. In the box, the small body has stopped moving. The mouth is stiffly open, the lip drawn back from the yellow teeth. The eye does not move, but glares up sightless.
"That's all," says her companion, taking the box back. "No more rat. Finished. After a while it begins to decompose and make a bad smell, and a while after that, there's nothing left but bones. And that has happened to every rat that was ever born."
"I don't believe you," she says. "It isn't like that; I never heard of such a thing."
"Didn't you ever have a pet?" he demands. "A parakeet, a cat, a tank of fish?"
"Yes," she says defensively. "I've had cats, and birds. What of it?"
"What happened to them?"
"Well—I don't know, I suppose I lost them. You know how you lose things."
"One day they're there, the next, not," says the thin man. "Correct?"
"Yes, that's right. But why?"
"We have such a tidy world," he says wearily. "Dead bodies would clutter it up; that's why the house circuits are programmed to remove them when nobody is in the room. Every one: it's part of the basic design. Of course, if you stayed in the room, and didn't turn your back, the machine would have to embarrass you by cleaning up the corpse in front of your eyes. But that never happens. Whenever you saw there was something wrong with any pet of yours, you turned around and went away, isn't that right?"
"Well, I really can't remember—"
"And when you came back, how odd, the beast was gone. It wasn't 'lost,' it was dead. They die. They all die."
She looks at him, shivering. "But that doesn't happen to people."
"No?" His lips are tight. After a moment he adds, "Why do you think he looked that way? You see he knows; he's known for five months."
She catches her breath suddenly. "That day at the beach!"
"Oh, were you there?" He nods several times, and opens the door again. "Very interesting for you. You can tell people you saw it happen." He pushes her gently out into the vestibule.
"But I want—" she says desperately.
"What? To love him again, as if he were normal? Or do you want to help him? Is that what you mean?" His thin face is drawn tight, arrow-shaped between the brows. "Do you think you could stand it? If so—" He stands aside, as if to let her enter again.
"Remember the rat," he says sharply.
She hesitates.
"It's up to you. Do you really want to help him? He could use some help, if it wouldn't make you sick. Or else—Where were you all this time?"
"Various places," she says stiffly. "Littlam, Paris, New Hoi."
He nods. "Or you can go back and see them all again. Which?"
She does not move. Behind her eyes, now, the two images are intermingled: she sees Dio's gorged face staring through the stiff jaw of the rat.
The thin man nods briskly. He steps back, holding her gaze. There is a long suspended moment; then the doors close.
III
The years fall away like pages from an old notebook. Claire is in Stambul, Winthur, Kumoto, BahiBlanc . . . other places, too many to remember. There are the intercontinental games, held every century on the baroque wheel-shaped ground in Campan: Claire is one of the spectators who hover in clouds, following their favorites. There is a love affair, brief but intense; it lasts four or five years; the man's name is Nord, he has gone off now with another woman to Deya, and for nearly a month Claire has been inconsolable. But now comes the opera season in Milan, and in Tusca, afterwards, she meets some charming people who are going to spend a year in Papeete. . . .
Life is good. Each morning she awakes refreshed; her lungs fill with the clean air; the blood tingles in her fingertips.
On a spring morning, she is basking in a bubble of green glass, three-quarters submerged in an emerald-green ocean. The water sways and breaks, frothily, around the bright disk of sunlight at the top. Down below where she lies, the cool green depths are like mint to the fire-white bite of the sun. Tiny flat golden fishes swarm up to the bubble, turn, glinting like tarnished coins, and flow away again. The memory unit near the floor of the bubble is muttering out a muted tempest of Wagner: half listening, she hears the familiar music mixed with a gabble of foreign syllables. Her companion, with his massive bronze head almost touching the speakers, is listening attentively. Claire feels a little annoyed; she prods him with a bare foot: "Ross, turn that horrible thing off, won't you please?"
He looks up, his blunt face aggrieved. "It's the Rhinegold."
"Yes, I know, but I can't understand a word. It sounds as if they're clearing their throats. . . . Thank you."
He has waved a dismissing hand at the speakers, and the guttural chorus subsides. "Billions of people spoke that language once," he says portentously. Ross is an artist, which makes him almost a player, really, but he has the student's compulsive habit of bringing out these little kernels of information to lay in your lap.