“I’m no judge,” he answered.
“And I hope you never become one,” she said cryptically. “The flesh is so great a gift…. But those who wear it rarely appreciate it.” Her mouth trembled, and she went back to her dishwashing with a somewhat forced air of concentration.
“I’m sorry,” he said, though he was unsure of his offense.
“Never mind,” she said, and smiled. “Listen, why don’t you sleep for a while? Somnire gave me a precis of your recent memories, and I’d like to look over them, to see what weighs so on your soul.”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” Ruiz said. He felt a shudder of hot shame, that this clean lovely person might learn of the terrible things he had done.
“I must,” she said. “It’s my job.”
She took him to a cool dark room in the center of her house, where a narrow bed waited. “Sleep as long as you like,” she said. “Somnire has explained the elasticity of time here, so don’t fret about wasting it. We’ll have you back in your body before your muscles have a chance to cool off. We want you spry when you return to the niche.”
He sat on the bed and tugged off his sandals. The white sheets drew him almost as passionately as Leel’s body had.
She went to the doorway and reached up to untie a curtain. The light shone through her shift, so that for an instant she seemed luminously naked.
Just before she went, he spoke. “Why? Why are you doing these things?” he asked. It seemed the only important question.
She shrugged. “Can’t you guess? We want to hurt Roderigo, and you can do it for us. Or so Somnire believes, which is good enough for me.” She smiled and waved her hand. “Sweet dreams,” she said, and then she was gone, the curtain fluttering.
Ruiz woke in a sweat, though the room was still cool. He sat up and wiped his face with trembling hands. Oddly, he felt a little better after his imaginary slumber, though still far less than well.
After a while, he rose and went out.
The house was silent, but for a thread of the fountain’s music, almost inaudible.
He wandered down the hall, which was lined with waist-high pedestals, each of which supported a crystal belljar. Under each jar was some enigmatic object, extraordinary only for the value evidently placed on it by its owner. Here was a tiny bedraggled baby shoe, with laces of rainbow shimmerglass. Next, a black hat with a narrow soft brim, sweat-stained and dusty. An empty wine bottle. An old leather dog collar with a rhinestone bauble. A rusty trowel. A tangled nest of fishing line, from which a gaudy treble-hooked lure peered with bulging black eyes. Crumpled blue panties, entangled in a worn-out work glove. A silver-framed flatgraph of Leel, wearing ragged shorts and nothing else, leaning from a sunny balcony, a look of contentment shining from her face.
A fascination grew in Ruiz as he went from pedestal to pedestal, trying to imagine the significance of the objects. It was oddly entertaining, a sort of archaeological voyeurism, and it diverted him from his weariness.
So absorbed did he become in his speculations that he jumped when Leel spoke. “More silliness,” she said. “I anchor my memories as best I can. But it helps. Some of us here have grown very strange. Forgotten our names, and even our humanity.” She stood in the far doorway, arms folded.
He wanted to ask her about the objects, or about the strange virtual-dwellers, but then he decided his curiosity might seem rude.
“Well,” she said. “Let’s talk. Come in my bedroom. I won’t make indecent advances, unless you’re very charming.”
He had to smile at the absurdity of it all.
Her bedroom was spacious and full of light. Ornate glass doors led out to a flagstone terrace, and thick rugs of brown and maroon wool covered the floor. Leel waited on her bed, gracefully cross-legged in the center of a faded patchwork quilt. Spread in a semicircle about her were a dozen squares of smoky plastic. “I made Somnire give me your memories in these,” she said, laying her hands on two of the squares. “He wanted me to experience them directly, but I wouldn’t. I know I’m just a pattern of electrons in the circuits of the machine, but I refuse to have it demonstrated to me more forcefully than is absolutely necessary.” She patted the bed and said, “Sit.”
He sat uncomfortably at the bed’s edge.
She picked up one of the squares. “I believe Somnire when he says these magic mirrors hold a fair sampling of your memories — though no sampling could be completely fair, I suppose. Still, in Somnire we trust. Right?” She flexed the plastic square and it threw moving light on her features — though Ruiz could see nothing of the images that shifted through the square.
Ruiz wondered what she watched; her expression was unreadable.
She looked up at him and smiled, without mockery. “By any humane standard, you’ve been a great monster, Ruiz Aw. The things you’ve done….”
“Yes,” said Ruiz. “A monster.” He felt only a sort of detached discomfort.
“It doesn’t matter,” she went on, “that in most things you meant well — at least until you went to work for the Art League. Monsters are as monsters do. Many monsters are loving to their families, take good care of their pets. So strange.”
Ruiz looked down at his hands, confused as to the purpose of the conversation.
“I should, really, detest you,” she said. “But for some reason I can’t.”
“Why not?” Ruiz asked, intrigued. Who, knowing what he had done, would not detest him? “Are you also a monster?”
She laughed. “I don’t think so — though for a fact, monsters generally don’t think themselves monstrous. You’re unusually forthright in that respect. Maybe that’s why I like you. And also, despite what you’ve done and been, there’s still a sweetness to you. A decency. Very strange, but there it is.”
A silence grew, while she picked up one square and then another.
He grew uncomfortable. “I don’t understand any of this. Why should you care? If I’m a monster, give me what I need to hurt Roderigo and set me on them. Why all this, this… discussion? Dissection?”
“Well, for one thing, I’m curious about you,” she answered. “Strangers come infrequently to the virtual — or anyway, strangers we can entertain. Will you humor me? And besides, have you not felt a lessening of effectiveness, a blunting of purpose lately? Perhaps discussion will help a little.”
“Perhaps,” he said, grudgingly.
She held up a square, and in it he saw the farmhouse where he’d been born a slave. It was early morning, just after dawn, and the light lay silver on the old stones.
“Tell me about this,” she said in a terribly gentle voice. He felt tears of remembrance cloud his eyes.
Leel was far more thorough than any minddiver, even Nacker the Teach. She turned the stones of his memory over, and seemed unrepulsed by all the ugly things that scurried from the light. She reviewed his childhood as a slave, his youth as a bondservant to a senile aristocrat, his career as a free-lance emancipator — his scarce and empty triumphs, his betrayals and disappointments. When he took his first contract with the Art League, she seemed only puzzled. She asked an occasional question, but mostly she listened without response to his terse summations.
When Leel saw his memories of the empty world where he had lived alone for so many years, she seemed to take an unforced pleasure in touring the gardens he had cultivated there.
“If you live, and escape Sook… will you go back there?” she asked, a little wistfully.
“Perhaps,” he said. The idea seemed as fantastic as any fairy tale.