Others had joined Vortcir and his aunt. As they descended, pitted cliffs rose. At last Vortcir’s feet scraped rock. Rahm caught his balance and stood alone once more, arms and chest tingling, while he looked at the great, windy back-beating maneuvers of the others landing about them — or at Vortcir’s own wing-beating, which finally stilled.
Drawing in his sails and breathing quickly (but not deeply; deep breaths seemed reserved for flight itself), Vortcir turned. “At Hi-Vator, here on the world’s roof, now you will see how those who fly can live.”
Others crowded in then. There was a general cry: “Vortcir! Handsman Vortcir! Vortcir has returned!”
Vortcir’s aunt pushed through. “But young Handsman, where is your chain of trust?”
Again Rahm noticed the chain around her own neck.
“I must have lost it when we were set upon by the terrible wailing.”
“You cannot very well go without it. As I wear the sign and trust of a Queen, so must our Handsman wear the sign and trust of one ready at any moment to become King.”
While this was going on, Rahm looked and blinked and looked again at these furred people, who stood so close to one another — in threes, fives, or sevens, always touching — but who now and then would explode into the air, soaring fifty, seventy-five, a hundred and fifty yards away from any fellows.
Already, in the margins of his takeoff with Vortcir and his aunt, at the rim of their ride together, and at the edge of their landing with the others, Rahm had learned that these were a people among whom the women’s furry breasts were scarcely larger than the men’s, and that the men’s genitals were almost as internal as the women’s. The distinction between the sexes was only minimally evident till one paused to urinate, as that male over there was doing, or when one of them was (as he realized at a glance to his left, where several were joking about a young female who evidently was) in a state of sexual excitement.
Carefully, while trying not to be caught staring, Rahm watched them. And in their close, nervous groups, with their small eyes they watched him back. They watched him from ledges above. They watched him from the rope nets strung from staid oak branch to staunch hemlock trunk — apparently the youngsters’ favorite place to play. They watched him from other, broader nets strung from the rocks down by the water to the higher ledges, thirty and forty yards overhead — where, it seemed, the elderly gathered to gossip, stretching their wings till they quivered. The watching was particularly strange because, by now Rahm knew, they were doing more listening than looking. What, he wondered, could they hear of him through their constant, mewing intercourse?
Within his first thirty minutes at Hi-Vator, Rahm saw a group of six winged children tease a smaller and younger child unmercifully. The older ones were — as far as he could tell — all boys. The little one was — most probably — a girl. The teasing reached such intensity that twice it became violent: had he been in his own home, Rahm would have stepped in to stop it. But now he could only look about uncomfortably for Vortcir or his aunt, both of whom happened, for the moment, to be somewhere else. Why, he wondered wildly, weren’t any other adults paying attention?
Within his first three hours there, Rahm observed a game where you sailed cunningly constructed toys made of twigs and thin leather from ledge to ledge, then took them into the sky to sail them from flier to flier. Also he saw two other children playing with a lemurlike pet. Then he became involved in what he only realized was another game after fifteen minutes of it, as first one then another Winged One politely volunteered to fly him now to this ledge, now to another, now to still one more: and he would grasp the warm, heavy shoulders and be carried here and there around the many ledges of the gorge in which their cave dwellings were sunk, either side of a silvery feather of falling water. Rahm had already noted, upon landing, that it was a lot easier to tell the sex of the Winged One — strong young female or male — who’d just carried him. From the giggling together of those waiting to ferry him about or the others who had just finished, Rahm realized — with sudden humor — that somehow with them this flying and carrying was a sexual game: and some others, he saw now, didn’t approve!
For ten minutes later, three older ones marched up and put a rather gruff end to it. The ones who’d been playing with him fluttered off. The older ones apologized to him in a way that, though he smiled and nodded and shrugged a lot, he didn’t quite see the point of — since there was no harm in it.
Three hours more, and he’d discovered that while the Winged Ones’ word for “star” was the same as his, they had no single word for “ear,” but more than ten for its various parts and functions. Also, from repeated inquiry, he finally decided they had no concept at all of the tomato plant.
“What are you thinking, my friend?” Vortcir asked, suddenly at his side, when Rahm, in those first three hours, had once more gone still a moment to stare off at those furry youngsters wrestling together by the falling water’s edge, or at the creatures who seemed to be grinding some sort of grain in the great circular stone troughs behind them, or just at the clouds behind them all, in the luminous mid-morning sky.
“I am thinking,” Rahm said, slowly and with consideration, “that, with perhaps here and there an exception that perplexes me”—he was recalling the children’s particularly violent teasing — “thou art a people, a people very like my own.”
And sitting in the sunlight, cross-legged on the blanket beside the wheel of his garbage cart, Qualt broke open a papaya. As its black seeds in their rich juice spilled out over the orange flesh in the morning, Qualt said: “Then, from what thou tellest me — with perhaps here and there something I do not quite understand — thy folk at Hi-Vator are…a people too, a people much like mine.” And the similarity of what Qualt said to what, miles up the mountain, Rahm was saying (and the vastly differing situations in which each said it) should begin to speak to you of the true differences between Qualt and Rahm.
Qualt tossed half the fruit.
Perched on the wooden frame of some overturned bench that was not used anymore in the village, but which sat here among the detritus lying about in the young garbage collector’s yard, it reached out a great wing. The tines at its end caught the fruit and brought it back to the small, dark face. It bit, and juice and seeds ran down the fur at both sides of the mouth. It mewed, resettling itself. “Good! Hey, groundling, my sister was a rude, rough girl who went with the other poor girls to collect the filaments the cave beasts spin, up in the rocks, to make our ropes and hunting nets and webs. But I was only a mischief-maker, too lazy even to help them there. No, my people often thought that I was not a good one. So I took to wandering — flying here, flying there, listening now to these ones, now to those! Even when I was coming back, I saw one of your men fighting with a lion, and dropped to give him my help, but one of those others seared my wing with the kind of flaming evil we saw last night.”
“It’s a killing evil!” Qualt bit his fruit. “And that’s why thou must do as I say. If we keep on, my friend, like we’ve begun this morning — ”
At which point there was jingling from behind the house.
Qualt was on his feet. “Quick now, as I told thee.” He sprinted off through the junk strewn about the yard toward the house corner, to step around it, over moist rocks and three piles of old pots — some broken, some nested in one another, hollyhocks grown up between them.
The path up to the garbage collector’s shack was narrow, and you couldn’t walk without brushing the low branches. Long ago Qualt had strung a rope between those branches, which, if any of them were hit, rang a goat’s bell he’d fixed to a post near the front door.