Her former companions remained more outgoing. While Captain Langendijk was icily correct toward the agents, Rueda Suarez calculatedly condescending, and Benedetti sometimes abusive, the rest fraternized in varying degrees. Frieda von Moltke even found a long-desired sexual newness among them. The other women disdained that, keeping their favors for their friends, but were not above a game of cards or handball.
Lonelier still, not in quite the same way that a human among nonhumans would have been, Fidelio first sought Joelle's kind of solace, then increasingly sought her. He asked for elucidations of things that bewildered him. He had studied Spanish before embarking, but not the thousand cultures of a foreign species. She could best help, because she had been most engaged in learning his two languages, originally using holothetics to assist Alexander Viantis, then taking over leadership of the research after a tidal bore drowned the linguist.
She was screening Swinburne on a particular daywatch when the Betan called. Much fiction and poetry left her unmoved, or else puzzled; she had too limited an experience of ordinary emotional relationships, too wide an experience of that which underlay the universe. However, the romantic sensualists appealed to her viscera, as the precisionists did to her cerebrum. She believed she understood-
-Time and the Gods are at strife: ye dwell in the midst thereof,
Draining a little life from the barren breasts of love.
I say to you, cease, take rest; yea, I say to you all, be at peace.
Till the bitter milk of her breast and the barren bosom shall cease.
Her thoughts drifted from the text, as they had been doing since she began to read. The impulse behind both was the same; she had shown these words to Dan Brodersen, the last time they were together. In this her present isolation, his image often arose, ever more vividly until she could smell his pipe and almost count the crow's-feet around his eyes. She wondered if that was because he was alive (oh, he must be alive!) while Christine was dead, or because his maleness was somehow safer than the memory of her, or-Forgive me, Chris, passed through her as she surrendered to what had been.
"Well," he said, "it's pretty. No, more than that. He was tackling something real." He paused. "Excuse me, though, isn't it kind of longwinded? Kipling would've gotten the same across in one page at the most."
"Perhaps that is why I have never managed to appreciate Kipling," she answered.
He cocked a brow at her. "Not even the poems about machinery? And yet you, the holothete, whose soul is supposed to be a computer program, you enjoy Swinburne?" With a shrug: "Well, people are paradox generators."
Suddenly, irrationally hurt, she blurted, "I don't quite understand you, for sure. But I assumed you normal types sometimes resonate with each other. So you mean you can't either?"
For an instant she imagined she did comprehend an ancient myth. It felt indeed as if the daimon of this place possessed her. They were spending the few days they could arrange to be together on an island in the Tuamotu Archipelago which he knew of old (yes, with another woman, he admitted unabashed). From the verandah, where they stood, her gaze went past a red-and-green riot of hibiscus, down a path to the beach, which curved around a lagoon. Ranked palms nodded and whispered in answer to a blowing mildness. The water was lapis lazuli strewn with stars, save out on the reef where it creamed and thundered. The only clouds stood opposite the sun, a wall with a rainbow for portal. She had no names for the sweetnesses and pungencies the air cast at her.
This morning she and Brodersen had wandered hand in hand along the shore, stripped (save for sneakers against the beautiful sharp coral) to go swimming, afterward lounged about-the light soaked through her skin to the marrow-until he warned against burns and they dressed. On the way back they encountered a brown man who smiled, chatted in broken Spanish, invited them to his nearby home for a bite to eat, and later fetched out a guitar and swapped a few songs with Brodersen. The rain which came along about then was like sky and Earth making love.
Now he who had come to her from Demeter implied that he too dwelt forever within walls. The daimon knew horror. The pain mounted.
"Oh, well, I dunno, never worried about it to speak of-" He broke off. "Hoy, what's the matter? Au at once, you look sandbagged."
She shook her head, eyes squeezed shut. "It's nothing," her tongue formed.
He trod forward, took her by both arms in hands that trembled just a little, and growled, "The hell it's nothing. Anything that can shake you, Joelle-"
"I don't know, I don't know," she answered before she could stop herself. Control returned. "I. . . have my. . . irrational moments too." Observing his shock: "Didn't you realize that?"
He gulped, which astonished her. Surely he'd experienced enough women and their vagaries. After a while he said slowly, "Well, yes, you must enjoy my company-aside from bed, I mean -which doesn't make a lot of sense."
She saw that, beneath the easy manner he'd acquired with her over the years, he was still wonder-smitten by her intellect.
"But if you also have a real weakness-" He lost his words as she cast herself against him.
"Hold me close, Dan," she begged and commanded, for she did not want to be reminded of the contemptible psyche beneath her aware mind. "Let's go inside." Let's appease the animal part.
-But this time she couldn't make it work. He was as kind and strong as always, and there was some relief in it, and afterward more in reassuring him that she was merely out of sorts and everything would soon be fine again: which was doubtless true.
Still- none of us escape the fact that it's often difficult, too often impossible for us, thought Joelle in the Wheel. Worse for the Betans, of course. What can it be like, having to pin your hopes for love on an alien and barely half-civilized race? Is that a part of the reason, quite aside from our shared holothesis, why I feel so close to Fidelio?
The door chimed. "Come in," she said, and was more than pleased when it proved to be him. Not only had she been thinking of him. Against the bleakly functional room, which pastel paint did nothing to make cheerful, he stood like a solid avowal that there was more to reality.
"Buenos digs," he greeted in the harsh, guttural voice of his breed upon land. Whistling overtones made the words hard to follow.
"Bienvenido," she replied, and suggested he employ his native speech, the one intended for air. She would stay with Spanish. Without computerized voder equipment, she could not render Betan vocables, and she didn't feel like taking him down to the lab and talking under the eyes of the guard posted in the hail, who would come along. If the conversation required phrases of his, she could write them. To be sure, lacking her holothetic assembly, she had but limited knowledge. The languages held more nuances strange to her than an unaided brain could master. (The underwater "tongue" was worse, from the standpoint of pronunciation and comprehension both.) However, if things didn't get complicated today, she could manage.
"Are you engaged, female of intellect?" he asked politely. "I would not interrupt a dream-logic." That was her rendition of a certain concept, not very satisfactory but doubtless better than "meditation" or "philosophical thought" or "purposeful daydreaming."
"No, I'm idle and wish I weren't," she assured him. "How are you? I haven't seen you since- I don't know. Time is meaningless in this damned place."
"I was in the pool," he said. Early on, Emissary's biologists had warned that Fidelio would sicken and die if he couldn't spend several hours per week in water like that of his native sea. The composition was not identical with that of Earth's oceans, but not exotic either; any chemical laboratory could supply the ingredients. They had been fetched from the ship to the Wheel and a bath constructed. The trade in salt between coastal and inland communities had conditioned a great deal of Betan history.
"Good for you," Joelle said, and thought how inadequate that was. What a tragedy it would be to lose him: for both species, and perhaps many more. Besides, he was brilliant and gentle, worth a million Ira Quicks.
We will lose him, if his food runs out, she remembered. He couldn't get nourishment from Earthborn tissues; most were poisonous to him. The returning expedition had carried a year's rations for Fidelio, chiefly in freeze-dried form. They took for granted that well before then, the Union would have opened regular traffic with Beta.
She was not given to rage, but abruptly she tasted it. Seeking calm, she regarded him as he sat on feet and tail before her lounger. She always found something, a matter of shape or motion or less easily identifiable subtlety, which she had not noticed before.
Well, we two are the products of four billion years of separate evolution, from the primordial stuffs that went into our two very unlike planets. Names are necessary, but they mislead, they give us the impression that we have an insight when we actually don't.
Their arbitrariness made them twice deceiving. The explorers dubbed the sun to which the star gate transported them "Centrum" for lack of a more imaginative proposal, and its attendants "Alpha," "Beta," "Gamma". . . in outward order. "Fidelio" was bestowed by Torsten Sverdrup, who adored Beethoven, and stuck. At home the being was called, approximately, "K'thrr'u" on land, "Gaoung Ro Mm" in the water, but no Terrestrial alphabet rendered either appellation right.
He was as typical of his species as she was of hers, which ranged from Chinese to Papuan, Celt to Pygmy, Negro to Eskimo, and onward. Specifically, he came from the eastern seaboard of the principal continent in the northern hemisphere, at a middle latitude, and belonged to that society which had taken the lead in an industrial revolution a millennium ago. Civilizations didn't seem to rise and fall on Beta as they had on Earth. Nevertheless, today his whole world, and its colonies around other stars, faced a peculiar crisis- Fidelio was a six-limbed biped. His body was the size of a large man's, exclusive of a powerful tail, ending in horizontal flukes, which added half again the length. Because of his forward-leaning posture, he stood about a hundred and fifty centimeters tall, and blubber hid the formidable muscles. His legs, which reminded her of Tyrannosaurus Rex, ended in broad, webbed feet, the upper arms in long claws with webs between, the smaller lower arms in hands with three fingers and a thumb, not especially human-looking. The skeletal anatomy made limbs and digits, plus the torso, tail, and slender neck, so flexible as to seem almost boneless. His head was narrow, bulging backward to hold the brain. A short, sharp muzzle surrounded by stiff whiskers bore a single closable nostril and a mouth whose omnivore's variety of teeth included a pair of alarming fangs. The two ears were small. The two eyes were large and of a uniform blue; nictitating membranes could change their optical properties for underwater seeing. Sleek dark brown fur covered his entire skin, lighter on the belly. A tangy, iodine-like odor came from him. For clothing he wore a kind of bandolier with pockets. His reproductive organs being retractable, and not much like a man's anyway, he wasn't obviously male. . . except at home, where just for a starter he had two-thirds the bulk of the average female.
His distance vision in air was not equal to the human, though he saw far better when submerged or in the dark, and at least as well at close range. His hearing was superior, and he possessed chemosensitivities which Joelle had decided not to label "taste" or "smell." For his part, he was constantly amazed at the discriminations she could make with her fingertips.
Here he is, she thought, the good-faith goodwill ambassador of his people, slammed into jail; and I don't even know how he feels about it. He's tried to tell me, but he can't make himself clear unless I go holothetic, and maybe then he can't quite.
"What can I do for you, Fidelio?" she asked softly.
"I seek to bring into my dream-currents the knowledge of how your kind first came to the transport engines and to information about the Others."
"Why, you've heard," she said, surprised. "We simply found the machine in the Solar System, the same as your interplanetary explorers earlier found the one that orbits Centrum."
Earlier? she wondered. What does that mean? Simultaneity is not a concept that applies across interstellar distances. Moreover, it turns out that the "T" in "T machine" stands not only for "Tipler" and "Transport," but also for "Time." The Betans themselves aren't sure whether, in a passage through a different system, they visit their future or their past. For that matter, we don't know what our temporal relationship is to our colony on Demeter. All that astronomers can determine is that the three gates open on the same general era of this galaxy.
And, for whatever it's worth, which may be nothing, we have the fact that the Betans have behind them centuries more of being scientific-civilized than we do on Earth -if we are civilized yet.
"That is a truth cast onto a reef and bleached dry," Fidelio said. "I am in search of the living coral. It must have been comparable on Earth. Still, the wave it raised bore a shape peculiar to your kind, in whatever condition contemporary humanity was. And the ripples cannot have died out. I have been reading histories, Joelle, but they are gorged with references to events and personalities that mean nothing to me."
"I see," she answered slowly. ("Comprendo" = "I grasp." English and Spanish idioms are not equivalent. As for his, at sea he would have said, "My teeth close on it," ashore he would have said, "I sense it in my vibrissae.")
"Well," she went on, "I hardly think I can give you a complete answer, when I myself am rather lost. But let's make an attempt." She stroked her chin, pondering. "Yes, I remember a documentary on the whole subject, intended for schools, which contains much original material. I'll try to retrieve it."
Like every apartment in the Wheel, hers had a computer terminal, with display and printout. The piece she had in mind was such a classic, and went back such a number of years-back to when folk expected a permanent population here, including children-that she supposed it was in the data bank. She activated the keyboard and tapped out her request.
It was.
