“I would, too, were I you,” she said. “I love to grow flowers, and here I’m always aware that it’s just a game, that the flowers don’t depend on air and water and soil, but on my remembrance of real flowers. It subtracts much of the joy from them, though they’re still beautiful, I suppose.”
Curiosity scratched at him. “Tell me. Did you always look as you look now?”
“Exactly so, since I came to the Compendium,” she said.
“You’re never tempted to improve anything?” he asked, looking away.
“Such as?” Her voice had a slightly tart edge.
“I don’t know,” he muttered. “The color of your hair? Your nose, perhaps… a little smaller, a little larger? Something.”
“My nose?” She giggled and looked down. She pulled the thin fabric of her shift tight over her breasts, so that the soft swellings and the puckered nipples became obvious. “Too small? Don’t you think they’re pretty?”
“Yes,” he said, his hands knotted in his lap.
“I’m sorry,” she said, sobering. “May we go on? Even if it does you no good at all, I’m fascinated. Do you know, when the Compendium was still alive, I was a specialist in human adaptation?”
“Really?” The information made him uneasy, as though she saw him as some sort of fungus, evolved to thrive in blood and bitterness.
“Really.” She picked up another memory square and saw the Gench who had installed the League death net in Ruiz’s mind. “Hideous creature,” she said.
She put it aside, gazed at another. “And here, poor Auliss Moncipor, who probably still dreams of you, in her sterile little cube of air and light and warmth, up in the blackness over Pharaoh.”
She patted his hand. “I find it easy to put myself in her place — and when I do I know she still thinks of you as a handsome prince from a far country, who might someday return and save her from her tedious destiny. Even though you so rudely departed the platform, without so much as a good-bye.”
“She was a slaveholder. She bought children for her pleasure and never gave a thought to what she did.” Ruiz recalled the anger and disgust he had felt — long ago it seemed — that night on the platform.
“So she was shallow — and a woman of her time and culture. Your self-righteousness is incongruous, to say the least.” But Leel’s tone was more amused than malicious. “Let me ask you this: Why do you not condemn your Nisa for holding slaves?”
He shook his head; he’d never really considered it.
“I think I know. Nisa is from another time and culture, so you make excuses. Auliss was a pangalac like you, so you could not forgive her for failing to share your sensibilities.”
“Perhaps,” Ruiz said.
“Well, then, I can make excuses for you. You’re not of my time and culture, after all,” Leel said. Her eyes twinkled, and Ruiz was forced to return her smile.
She went on to show him the stony face of Pharaoh, the tragedy of the play in Bidderum, the Blacktear Pens, his foolish escape attempt, his time with Nisa in Corean’s apartments.
“She’s quite beautiful, Ruiz,” Leel said, studying an image of Nisa dressed in one of the glittering gowns she’d invented to pass the time. “She’s unmodified, true? Born that beautiful… a rare thing.”
“Yes,” said Ruiz, gazing at the Pharaohan princess, who gazed out of the memory square with soft fond eyes. He felt a rush of hopeless longing. Could she ever look at him like that again? He shook his head, as if to drive such foolish thoughts from it.
Leel flexed the square, and she faded, to be replaced by his memory of Corean as they had boarded the airboat for SeaStack.
“Also beautiful,” said Leel. “But not as good to look at.”
Ruiz drew a deep breath. “She’s probably dead, for which I’m grateful. A dangerous woman.”
Leel regarded him sidelong. “I understand The Yellow-leaf is quite handsome, in her harsh Roderigan way. How is it that you have so many perilous entanglements with beautiful women?”
“You say that as though it were a bad thing,” said Ruiz with a wry smile. At that moment, Leel seemed very beautiful herself.
“Well… when I look through your memories, I see that various disasters seemed to follow these entanglements. Perhaps there’s no connection.”
“An evil destiny,” Ruiz said. “But there are compensations.”
“So I see,” said Leel, looking at the final square. After a long moment she turned it so Ruiz could see what she watched.
It was that night on the Deepheart barge, when he and Nisa had made love on the upper deck. Her dark head tossed, thrown back, her hair an obscuring cloud against the star fields. Her white breasts swayed as she moved her beautiful strong shoulders….
Ruiz made an odd choking noise; it forced itself from his throat against his volition, and he couldn’t seem to find his breath, or get it past the swelling in his throat. His eyes clouded with tears, and he rubbed fiercely at them.
“Lovely,” Leel said in a sad small voice.
She turned the square facedown on her quilt, slowly and reluctantly.
“Ruiz,” she said. “Somnire gave me other memories, and colorful memories they were… but this is the last important one. I know… you suffered and did terrible things: the murders in SeaStack, and on the barge. And of course the time you spent in the Roderigan slaughterhouse — though surely you understand that you were no less a victim there than those whose throats you cut.”
He laughed, a sour bitter sound. “It hurt me more than it did them, is that it?”
She shook her head, the translucent curls bobbing. “What else could you have done? Could you have saved any of them? The Roderigans are a pestilence on the universe. A plague that strikes down innocents at random, and what can be done? All anyone can do is try to survive.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “But I’ll never feel clean again.”
Her green eyes flashed, and he felt her anger, like hot breath. “Did you feel clean before? Then you were a monster indeed. How many innocents have you killed, over the years — or caused to die?” She bared her white teeth at him.
“I never claimed to be a saint,” he said.
“Did you claim to be human?”
Now he felt an answering anger. “Yes. I did.”
She flailed at the memory squares, scattering them off the bed. “These tell a different story, Ruiz Aw!”
“I didn’t force you to look at them,” he said stiffly.
The room seemed chilly. Ruiz wondered how he could have begun to feel comfortable in this foolish dream. He looked around; he seemed to be able to see through the imaginary walls of Leel’s house, to the tumbled stones that remained.
But Leel finally reached out and patted his arm — and her hand was as warm as a real woman’s hand. “I’m sorry, Ruiz. It’s not for me to judge you and what you’ve done with your life. My life was so different. I grew up on Becalt — a long-settled world, stable and prosperous. My family was wealthy and loving. I went to the university. I did my graduate work on Dilvermoon. I never knew a day of hunger or physical fear. All my crises were manufactured by myself: puppy loves, striving for status, social slights. During a long life in the pangalac worlds, I never saw a dead person.”
She took his hand and squeezed it. “Here, the same. My life ran down smooth channels and the only sorrows I knew… small things, compared to yours. A setback in my research. Envy of my more talented colleagues. A less than perfect party… similar small embarrassments. An unhappy love affair or two.”
“Well,” he said, wondering why she was telling him these things. “Not your fault if you had an easier life.”
“Oh, it didn’t seem easier, at the time. No, I was sure my little sorrows were as deep as anyone’s…. Anyway, this personality matrix, all that’s left of me now, was taken several months before the Roderigans and their allies destroyed the Compendium and slaughtered the people. So I have no direct memory of the end… of our lives. But Somnire made us watch recordings.”