Arriangel spoke a sharp syllable. "Why?"
Memfis slipped back behind her eyes.
She couldn't understand Garso-Yao's reluctance. She loved him, but she couldn't understand him. She was rich; he was poor — these were irrefutable facts, so why couldn't he accept her assistance gracefully?
He shrugged. "I've explained, Arriangel. I thank you for your offer, but if I take your money, I'll be weakened. Anyway, you shouldn't worry; my needs are simple, and the school meets them well enough."
"Well," she said, exasperated. "I suppose . . . though I can't see how decent clothing and a good dataslate would corrupt you fatally. But why won't you live here with me?" ^
He looked about, a glance that seemed to inventory her many comforts. "I can't risk it. I might become used to... all this." He shook his head. "I know it seems foolish to you. But where I was born, only the strongest prosper." He shivered, and for a moment his face took on a curious expression, compounded of fear and nausea. "It's a terrible place, Arriangel. I can't go back. I won't jeopardize my opportunity here." His expression softened. "I'm already taking a great risk, by loving you, by coming here at all. I should insist that you come to my cubicle instead, but I've come to want you too much, and you might refuse."
Then he left.
Idiot, she thought... but the thought was tempered with fondness. She found Garso-Yao vastly interesting — it was as if she loved an alien, so different was he from her other friends. He would tell her strange stories of his bizarre childhood in the streets of Howlytown; he could sing unfamiliar songs in a sweet, resonant tenor; he was exciting in bed, with his untrained enthusiasm and his unforced gestures of affection.
She felt a pleasant wonder at her own daring in choosing so unusual a lover. "You're a rarity," she whispered, addressing herself as much as Garso-Yao.
Memfis shifted her recall onto a parallel trial vector and cycled them through the next month. His sensors warned that a major decison point approached; all over his board, warnings flashed.
He watched her confer with her friend Loyaluiz.
"What's the matter with him?" she asked.
"He's afraid he'll have to go back to Howlytown; didn't he say so?" Loyaluiz seemed rather indifferent to Arriangel's complaints. Observing the scene, Memfis saw that her indifference masked a small envy: that Arriangel had once again been more precocious than Loyaluiz, had been first to experiment with that ancient emotion, love.
"So what can I do?"
Loyaluiz shrugged. "He fears poverty, right? Settle an endowment on him, so he can live well forever, no matter how his education turns out."
Arriangel smiled. "Of course! Why didn't I think of that?"
"You're too rich; you swim in wealth like a fish in water, and you never notice what you swim in."
A few days later, Memfis watched Arriangel and Garso-Yao in bed, tumbled in the sheets, sharing a glass of sweet blond wine.
"I have a surprise," she said, setting the glass aside and taking a small dataslate from the bedside counter. "Here."
He took it carefully, a mulish look settling over his face. "I can't accept this, Arriangel."
"Not the slate, silly. Look!" She touched the slate, and it lit up with the details of the endowment she had created for him.
His eyes grew large, and his mouth fell open.
"Now you're rich, too, and you'll never have to go back to Howlytown, no matter what happens," she said. "Isn't it perfect?'
He looked up at her, speechless. His expression wasn't entirely satisfying to Arriangel. Certainly he was surprised, but she saw some deep wound there, too, and how had that happened?
Tafilis had returned. "Oh yes," he said, looking over his brother's shoulder. "Her first big mistake . . . but if it hadn't been so, she'd have found another way. I know her; she's one of mine."
"No," said Memfis, certain that for once his brother was wrong.
To verify his judgment, he tracked the decline of Arriangel's first romance.
Garso-Yao tried to give the money back, but Arriangel had been clever enough to make the transfer of funds irreversible, and the principal untouchable.
Memfis watched Garso-Yao accept his changed fortunes. At first, this was satisfying to Arriangel; Garso-Yao spent most of his vast new income on charity, on wildly eccentric gifts for her, on entertainments for new friends.
But then Garso-Yao slowly came to understand that the obsessive drives that had shaped his existence had become irrelevant.
He became a very strange young man.
He left school, of course. He experimented with the most expensive civilized vices: wireheading, pseudodeath, beasting. He took an apartment in Bo'eme, a quarter frequented by decadent artists and their sycophants. He dressed with extravagant tastelessness; he had his body tattooed with grim images — screaming faces, broken corpses, instruments of torment — so that Arriangel felt a growing reluctance to take him into her bed. Gradually he ceased to be interesting, and began to be an embarrassment to her.
The only thing about him that didn't change was Garso-Yao's devotion to Arriangel. When she changed her school and her lockplates and refused to see him, he committed his final act of gaucherie.
His cronies found him dangling from a silken cord outside her security port one night. She had gone away for a few days, and so was spared the sight of his swollen black face.
At first, she was melodramatically inconsolable, but eventually he faded into a slightly regretful, romantic memory.
"Cold," said Tafilis.
"She was very young," Memfis said wearily.
"Sure."
Loyaluiz shrugged. "He fears poverty, right? Settle an endowment on him, so he can live well forever, no matter how his education turns out."
Arriangel felt a sudden twist in her perceptions, a feeling of displacement. She rubbed at her temples, and the sensation faded. "What?" she asked.
"An endowment. Then money won’t be an issue between you."
Arriangel looked at her friend, and saw something in her unremarkable face that she had never noticed before. Envy? Slyness?
"I'm not sure that would be a good idea," she said slowly. "I'd have to think about it."
Loyaluiz curled her thin lip. "Miserliness? From you? I can hardly believe it."
"That's not it; what a foolish notion.'' Arriangel regarded Loyaluiz with new eyes, and decided she didn't like what she saw, at all.
Memfis watched the screen as the processors remade the reality recorded in Arriangel's memories.
For a while all went well. Garso-Yao continued his education and his devotion to her, and Arriangel believed herself to be settling deeper into the love of her live.
A month passed in pseudorecall. Events began to sour. The two of them quarreled more frequently. Garso-Yao still told his strange stories, but he was starting to repeat himself. She resented the time he spent at his studies; what use was it to be young and beautiful and in love if she could never go where envious eyes could see her?
Arriangel's mouth more and more often fell into a pout of discontent, and Garso-Yao grew thin and too intense.
"Oh yes," said Tafilis.
Memfis tried to tweak the track back onto a smooth course. The processors approached overload, and Tafilis laughed. "That's cheating," he said.
"Shut up," said Memfis without heat. "It's only the first try. What did you expect?"
That evening, after Arriangel had bathed, dined, and rested, Memfis came to her apartment and showed her the recording. They sat together on the couch, not quite touching, and watched a sensie screen that descended from the ceiling.