Abruptly the boy released the controls. “This is a foolish waste of time and energy,” he said. “Why should you care about our lost glories?”
The world shimmered and grew dim, and Ruiz felt an instant’s vertigo.
He and Somnire stood in one of the city’s courtyards. A flaming bougainvillea vine spilled down the sunniest wall, and a still pool full of cerise water lilies reflected the ancient stones on the shady side.
A tall angular woman came from a high doorway.
“This is Leel,” Somnire said. “She’ll try to make you well.”
Ruiz looked at Leel and thought of the wood and silver chair he had touched in the hall of dons. She was handsome in a spare understated way, her hair a translucent cloud, her eyes a soft earthy green, her mouth pale coral. She wore a thin artless shift that fell halfway down her slender thighs and left her arms bare.
“I’m not sick,” Ruiz said.
“Don’t be silly,” said Somnire. “Your heart is leprous with regret; your mind is hibernating. Your soul is so dark you can’t find it. You may have hard jobs to do soon. In your present state, I don’t think you could act with your former admirable ruthlessness.”
“I have no time,” said Ruiz, a little desperately.
“Time is elastic in the virtual. How long do you think you’ve been here? An hour? Two? Thirty seconds! In the niche, your enemy is searching her countryman’s carrion for his knife. The woman you love is watching your sleeping face; she has yet to form her first sad thought. So, take some time. Rest. Gather your thoughts. Your resolve.” Somnire patted his shoulder.
“Come,” said Leel in a low sweet voice, and took his hand in her cool fragile one. “It’s not as if you had any choice.” She gave him a smile so warm and unforced that he was charmed against his will.
When she drew him toward the doorway, he went without further protest.
Chapter 10
AS he passed through the doorway of Leel’s house, Ruiz heard music, a soft sweet murmur of strings and chimes. It seemed to swirl forth from a fountain that played in the center of the room. The white-plastered walls had no windows, but a pure bright light fell from high clerestories.
The fountain rose in languid jets from a shallow basin set in the red tiled floor, and after a moment Ruiz realized that the water of the fountain was moving far more slowly than was natural on a world of Sook’s mass.
He must have frowned or made some other gesture of distaste, because Leel gave his arm a little shake and looked at him with mock severity. “No, Ruiz, it’s not another of Somnire’s little liberties with reality. I allow none of his nonsense in my house; I live as I did in life, as much as possible. The fountain has a gravity filter under it. I thought it pretty. Isn’t it?”
She pulled him forward to stand in the cool air that billowed around the basin. “Yes, it’s pretty,” he said. The fountain, seen up close, seemed a confection of flowing glass, and he had the illusion that if he touched it, the glossy ribbons and upwellings would have a dense impenetrable surface. He reached out and learned that it was just water, though his hand felt very light when it passed through the shimmering curtain.
As his hand disturbed the fountain, the music fell into a dissonance, but it recovered its sweetness as soon as he pulled back.
“I read all sorts of omens into the music,” Leel said. “It always seemed remarkable to me that the universe is tied together with webs of gravity, and that whenever the farthest star trembles, my fountain shivers in response. I put the gravity filter under it not just to make it pretty, but to insulate my omens from the evil old mass of Sook, and make the stars’ messages stronger. Silly, right?”
“Doesn’t seem at all silly to me,” said Ruiz. He looked aside. Leel’s attention was fixed on the fountain and her face was full of a fresh vivid delight. This is a ghost, he reminded himself.
But she seemed as alive as anyone he had met lately. He wished, with a sudden stark intensity, that he felt half as vital as she seemed to be. He felt an odd shift in his perceptions. She became irresistibly desirable.
She looked so clean. He couldn’t imagine her with sour sweat greasing her face, with dirty feet, with lice in her translucent curls. With blood on her long fine hands.
I’m a ghost too, he thought, but it was an idea without significance.
He was horrified, ashamed of the lust that surged out of some deep place in his heart. His vision seemed misty with it; he heard the pulse pounding in his ears.
“Tell me,” he said thickly. “Are you a mind reader too?”
She gave him a quick bright look. “No. That’s Somnire’s sole privilege — and burden. Who would want that?”
He felt a certain relief, though the lust seemed as strong and hot as before. “Good,” he muttered, returning his attention to the fountain.
“Well,” she said. “Are you hungry?”
He shot her a sharp glance. Had she lied about the mind reading? But then he realized that she was asking if he wanted food. “A little, maybe.”
“Come to the kitchen, then,” she said, and led him from the fountain room.
Her kitchen was small and intimate, and it seemed to Ruiz that there was nowhere he could look that didn’t show him some desirable part of Leel. She seated him at an old table, its wood worn white with scrubbing. She arranged three sprays of tiny gold-red blossoms in a round blue vase and set it before him. She brought pale gray plates of an antique mannered design, and mugs of celadon porcelain. Her long legs carried her around him in a kind of graceful domestic dance. His desire seemed, impossibly, to intensify.
When she bent over him to set the silver, her shift fell open and he caught a glimpse of tiny breasts, puffy pink nipples. Her scent was of the sea and sunshine and something darkly sweet, like night-blooming flowers.
She laughed and laid her arm delicately across his shoulders. Her face was only a few centimeters from his, and he felt pleasantly engulfed in her smile. “Tell me,” she said. “Would you rather eat or go to the bedroom?”
An image filled his mind and pushed Leel from the center of his thoughts: Nisa in the bone-filled niche, watching him with strange eyes. A cold hand squeezed his heart and he looked down at his fists, clenched on the table.
“All right,” said Leel. “Perhaps I was wrong.” She seemed unoffended. She went to her stove, an archaic mechanism with nickel-silver fittings and blue enamel oven doors. She broke a pink egg into sputtering oil, she buttered toast, she poured a glass of amber fruit juice.
It was all so heartbreakingly ordinary.
“Is that enough? It’s easy to make more, if you’re still hungry.” She sat across from him, nibbling at a pastry filled with scryfruit and sweetened with a glistening smear of lime-blossom honey.
For a moment he didn’t answer — he was too fascinated by the pink tip of her tongue, licking up the crumbs that stuck to her lower lip. “No, that was fine,” he said.
“Good.” She put the last bite of pastry down and then took the dishes to the sink.
When she began to wash them, his bemusement spilled over into speech. “Why do you do this? Why eat? Why cook? Especially, why wash dishes?”
She turned gracefully, still swabbing at one of her antique plates. “When all you have is the illusion of life, you guard that illusion fiercely.” Her eyes were dark and deep and he regretted that he had asked her the question.
“I see,” he mumbled.
“No, you probably don’t,” she said. “Somnire doesn’t try to fool himself… but Somnire is the closest thing we have to a saint. The rest of us can’t be the way he is. We’d go mad. Of course, he’s more than a little mad, isn’t he?”