A strained sound from the rasa; then, “Nothing. I feel nothing anymore. At least I don’t feel it physically. But of course I remember many things.”
Shiyung gave a small disappointed sigh and let her kimono drape back across her legs. She took another sip of her vitro. “It must be painful for you. Remembering things.”
Tast’annin tipped his head so that she saw the mask’s smooth contours, crimson threaded with silver in a pattern that appeared only when it caught the light at a certain angle. His eyes glowed dangerously. “It is worse than any torment I could have imagined,” he said at last.
For some minutes they sat without speaking. Shiyung sipped her drink. At her feet the caracal snored softly. The rasa seemed deep in thought, at least his posture assumed pensive lines as he stared at the floor with its simple grass carpeting. Finally he looked up. Tast’annin’s ice-pale eyes stared out at Shiyung as he said, “There was a hermaphrodite at the dream inquisition this evening. An interloper of some sort. She correctly scryed my dream—my “memory—and then Âziz asked her to read hers.”
“Yes. She told me.” Shiyung was bored. Her pleasure in Tast’annin’s plight had not been as acute as she had hoped. She felt neither glee nor the rarer thrill of remorse and pity; only a detached vicarious curiosity that Tast’annin seemed unlikely to indulge. “Âziz had a little fit and had her locked up.”
“I’d like to see her.”
Shiyung raised an eyebrow and finished her drink. The faintest note of something—pleading, maybe, or anger; it was so hard to tell when he had no face—had crept into the rasa’s nearly uninflected voice. “Âziz?”
“No. The hermaphrodite. The one she’s imprisoned.”
“Hmm.”
Shiyung set the tall tumbler on a night table and stood, stretching. Her kimono fell open on a swath of buttery skin and she did not bother to close it as she walked to the window. She was thinking again about the child she had given birth to fifteen years before. Another one of her whims. She and Nasrani had been sharing a bed, and she had decided it might be interesting to have a natural child. Only something had gone wrong—the physicians warned her about it, and with her dabbling in genetics she had known there was a chance of something like this. Too many Orsinas together over too many centuries. When the child was born she couldn’t bear to look at it, the tiny penis and behind it the pink vulva, and witch’s milk oozing from its breasts. The last report she’d had of it, from the Chambers of Mercy, was that it was a true hermaphrodite, the first to be born of natural parents in many years. She hadn’t bothered finding out the details of its final disposition.
Now, thinking of this morphodite who had so upset Âziz, she wondered what had happened to that other one. Perhaps it had been cruel of her to give it to the Chambers of Mercy. Perhaps—her heart beat a little faster at the thought—perhaps there were reparations to be made. Perhaps Blessed Narouz (or Christ Cadillac, or Prophet Rayburn) had sent this other morph just for this purpose, to permit her to make amends. It might be a noble thing for her to do, to save this gynander. Especially at Æstival Tide. Shiyung was very fond of doing noble things under the right, usually public, circumstances.
She pulled the draperies back, displaying a dizzying view of Araboth: the cobalt reaches of the dome above, indigo and rose-pink and viridian sweeps of light below, darkening from level to level, until at the very bottom an inky blue gleamed, as though reflecting back the fastnesses of Seraphim.
She looked up at the domes and pointed. “You can see the stars tonight. There—?”
Tast’annin stood and stepped beside her. He placed one hand on her shoulder. It was warm, warmer than any human hand would be, and vibrated so that her shoulder tensed beneath it. “Yes, those are stars. Some of them, at least. There, and—”
He pointed to the faint light salted across the dark curves of the dome. “There. That is Orion.”
“That star?”
“No. That set of stars. A constellation. The Hunter.”
“And that?” She pointed at a glorious sweep of color trailing from horizon to horizon. “The Milky Way?”
He made a small sound meant to be laughter. “That is the reflection of the palace lights in the dome.”
“Ah.”
Behind them the caracal continued to snore. Shiyung let the curtains fall back across the window and turned to Tast’annin. “Why do you want to see her, this hermaphrodite? Why didn’t you go to Âziz?”
The rasa shrugged. “I knew she would refuse me, at least tonight while she’s still angry. And who knows, tomorrow the hermaphrodite might be dead.”
Shiyung nodded thoughtfully. “Probably. Was she pretty?”
“Childish. But yes, she was attractive.”
Shiyung settled onto the bed and motioned for the rasa to join her. “But that’s not why you want to see her.”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s not. She said something tonight, about Âziz’s dream. She said it symbolized the Green Country.”
Shiyung was silent. She bunched up a corner of the woolen comforter and released it, glanced up to see the rasa staring at her with those eerie bright eyes.
“Well,” she said after a moment. “Rather careless on her part, I’d say. No wonder Âziz had her locked up.” She nibbled her lip thoughtfully. “I wonder why Âziz didn’t tell me. I mean when she called, she said the morph had been detained but she didn’t say why. So my sister has dreamed of the Green Country.”
She stood and paced the room, nudging the caracal as she passed it. It sat up, startled, then stretched and slunk beside its mistress.
The Green Country. Of all the superstitions that haunted the city, the most potent. Not even Âziz would have been able to keep from succumbing to some fear when she heard that particular twist given to her dream. It must have been a very stupid morphodite, to just spit out something like that. Very, very stupid.
Or—
And here Shiyung slowed her pace and stared at the mirror that hung across from her bed. A chrome crucifix dangled above it, with a tiny plastic automobile hanging from the cross’s horizontal bar. Beside this hung a polyimage of Blessed Narouz and a vial of petroleum, a moujik prayer wheel, and a plastic bas-relief of Nefer-ka’ ehlvi.
Or, thought Shiyung as she flicked the prayer wheel so that it spun with a loud whir, perhaps the morph has the true Sight. The Final Ascension had been predicted for centuries now, mostly by those who suffered under the tyranny of the Orsinate Ascendants. Recently there had been Signs that were difficult to ignore, even by an Orsina, and especially if one listened to those on the lower levels. The rasa cult, for instance—surely that was evidence of something, the dead seeking some kind of revelatory meaning in their hopeless, horrible existence. And these shakings and tremblings of the ground; and last night an explosion in one of the refineries. And of course the usual claims of publicity-seekers that they had heard the Redeemer waking early from its decade-long sleep, or seen the mad geneslave Zalophus flying like a fouga beneath the domes.
Her sisters scoffed at these tales—at least Âziz scoffed; Nike nodded absently and took more morpha—but Shiyung considered it a point of honor to pay attention to such things. No mongrel cult was too rabid for her to partake in its rites at least once; no moujik witch so deranged but that Shiyung wouldn’t take a vial of her spittle and carry it back to Seraphim to display on her wall or in one of her curio cabinets.
“Did she have a name, this morphodite? Do you remember what they called her?” She turned back to the rasa. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes glistened as she hurried to sit beside him.