"You argue well," Jan said, straining tea into two cups. "I don't know about you, but I'm tired."
"You don't seem as tired as you were last night. Or this morning."
Steam from the tea swirled around Jan's face with the exhalation of his breath. "A different kind of tired," he said. "Better." He leaned back, staring up at the rock ceiling. "No one in the Sphere thinks about earth anymore. They've put it out of their minds. It's quite a shock to visit a place you've always been taught was dead."
"No," Mischa said, and Jan thought he might have offended her, but she continued. "It isn't dead, it's dying. And that's worse."
"I'm going to take a bath," Jan said abruptly. "Want to come?"
"Sure."
Jan had been pleasantly surprised to find a Japanese-style bath in the Palace. He had spent so many years at school, avoiding going home for any reason, living in places where the only bathing facilities were small showers, that he had almost resigned himself to giving up the luxury of soaking in a deep, hot tub of water. Since leaving school, living in cheap and sometimes squalid places, he had done most of his bathing from the basins of public washrooms.
In the dim, steamy bathing grotto, he and Mischa stripped, soaped and rinsed themselves, and slid into the sunken pool. Mischa was even thinner than he had thought. There was a deep, old scar on her left forearm, and a newer one across her ribs beneath her left breast. He wanted to ask her about the scars, but did not know how. He lay on his back, floating. The water filled his ears; he could hear the circulation, the faint low splashes of wavelets against the side of the pool, his own heartbeat. The heat soaked into him, producing a pleasant, languorous feeling.
"Can I ask you something?"
"That's your job," Jan said. "Mine's to answer."
"Where are you from?"
Jan raised his head and was momentarily startled by the illusion that her eyes reflected the light like a cat's. He shook the water out of his face; then Mischa's eyes simply seemed black in the dim light.
"I come from a planet called Koen," he said. "It's very beautiful." The very name meant "park." Nearly the whole world was parklike, in an infinity of ways. Recalling it, he described it and its inhabitants. It had been colonized by people who had for centuries felt a comradeship with the land; they did not violate their new earth. But the world was in some ways too pleasant, and too easy; it provided insufficient challenge, and the people grew self-indulgent and too concerned with the minute details of life. "My father used to spend a lot of time trying to grow bonsai trees," Jan said. "They're supposed to stay very small, and grow as you direct them, but his always kept growing until he had to plant them outside." This far away, this removed in time, he could even smile about his father's eccentricities. "He used to write poetry too. It was terrible, whatever language he tried."
"Why did he keep on with it?"
"He doesn't realize it's bad. And there's no point in telling him. If he believed it, he'd be hurt, but he wouldn't believe it in the first place."
"Oh."
"He's quite. unusual." Jan took a deep breath of the damp air. "He sometimes thinks he's a character from a very old novel. Genji Hikaru wrote poetry, so Ichiri does too."
"You don't have to read it, do you?"
"There are days when it's the only way he'll communicate."
Mischa laughed softly and Jan found himself smiling. On this level, it was amusing. "The poetry's not all of it," he said. "Mixing perfume was a social grace when the novel was written, so of course Genji excelled at it. But sometimes our house smells so bad you can't sleep in it."
"That must be uncomfortable if you have storms in the winter."
"There isn't any winter on Koen."
"No winter," Mischa said, with some wonder. "I wish it was like that here." She slipped underwater like a young otter, and came up behind him. "Have you got any other family?"
"No," Jan said. "My mother died about a hundred years ago."
"Oh," said Mischa, with the beginnings of sympathy. Then, " What?"
"She died—" Jan stopped. There were no germ banks in Center, so the manner in which he had been produced was unfamiliar to Mischa. "She lived a hundred years ago," he said. "A hundred years before I was born." He told Mischa about the banks on many places in the Sphere, where genetic material was kept frozen for anyone who cared to deposit it, where anyone who fit the terms of the donor's will could make a withdrawal. The means of reproduction were theoretically simple, technically rather complex and expensive. It was undertaken on Koen perhaps more often than in other places. The people were rich and the past important: on Koen, one was more likely to become infatuated with a historical figure and wish to reproduce with one.
"Why do people go to so much trouble?"
Putting his feet against the side of the pool, Jan pushed himself through the water, feeling it flow through his hair, across his shoulders, between his toes. He had never thought about some of the things people could do on the innumerable and variegated worlds of the Sphere. He was not sure he could answer Mischa's question.
"It's difficult to explain. When you get out there and see more, it'll be easier to understand. People don't have to work as hard; on the other hand, there are more things they can do."
"You mean they can do nothing but play. Your father made you—" She sounded shocked, and a little angry. "Is the Sphere just like Center? Do they play with each other's lives too?"
"No—" Jan hesitated. No one had ever expressed his own questions in those words and those sentiments. He did not like the idea of himself as a complicated plaything, though he had long before accepted that his father would always try to direct his life in ways that ordinary families would not. "Yes, I guess they do, to a certain extent. People always do. On Koen at least the manipulation is less likely to be tyranny than overprotection." From what he had seen of Stone Palace and the city, most controls in Center were built on pain and fear. Jan's father had never hurt him, and Jan had never been afraid of Ichiri. "My father makes people feel they've tried to injure him deliberately if they don't do what he expects." He glanced toward Mischa through the steam. "It took me a long time to figure that out. It's quite effective."
She nodded. "I understand." From her tone, Jan felt that she had experienced control by manipulation as well as control by force, that she did indeed know how hard it was to defy someone who continually expressed love.
"You must wonder what your mother was like."
"I've read her journals, and there's a good deal of documentation about her life. Murasaki was quite extraordinary." Jan envied her; he wished he had inherited more of her decisiveness and flexibility. She had been an explorer, one of the few with a first-contact clearance, until an accident almost killed her and ended her first career. Her second was benthic architecture: thirteen worlds held undersea cities she had designed.
"She sounds like a good person to have for a parent," Mischa said. "Even if you never got to meet her."
"Yeah," Jan said. "But, you know? That didn't have anything to do with why Ichiri picked her."
"What, then?"
"Her name. Just her name. The old novel I told you about—it was written by a Japanese noblewoman named Murasaki, who used herself as a character—Prince Genji's wife."
"You're right. Your father really is strange."
Jan allowed old memories to overtake him for the first time in a long while. Once he and Ichiri had not spoken for weeks because Jan would only answer to his own name, the name Ichiri was required to give him by the terms of Murasaki's will. It was the name of her father, a man pictures showed as pleasant, large, square-faced, and very blond, one of the original settlers of Koen. Half the original colonists had been Dutch, and the other half Japanese; Ichiri's own descent was not as pure as his strange ideas made him believe.