As she dressed she said, "I won't be back from Narabal until nightfall. Will you be all right here by yourself?"
"If you leave food and water within my reach. And something to read."
"There isn't much. I'll bring more back for you. It'll be a quiet day for you, I'm afraid."
"Perhaps there will be a visitor."
"A visitor?" Thesme cried, dismayed. "Who? What sort of visitor? No one comes here! Or do you mean some Ghayrog who was traveling with you and who'll be out looking for you?"
"Oh, no, no. No one was with me. I thought, possibly friends of yours—"
"I have no friends," said Thesme solemnly.
It sounded foolish to her the instant she said it — self-pitying, melodramatic. But the Ghrayrog offered no comment, leaving her without a way of retracting it. and to hide her embarrassment she busied herself elaborately in the job of strapping on her pack.
He was silent until she was ready to leave. Then he said, "Is Narabal very beautiful?"
"You haven't seen it?"
"I came down the inland route from Til-omon. In Til-omon they told me how beautiful Narabal is."
"Narabal is nothing," Thesme said. "Shacks. Muddy streets. Vines growing over everything, pulling the buildings apart before they're a year old. They told you that in Til-omon? They were joking with you. The Til-omon people despise Narabal. The towns are rivals, you know-the two main tropical ports. If anyone in Til-omon told you how wonderful Narabal is, he was lying, he was playing games with you."
"But why do that?"
Thesme shrugged. "How would I know? Maybe to get you out of Til-omon faster. Anyway, don't look forward to Narabal. In a thousand years it'll be something, I suppose, but right now, it's just a dirty frontier town."
"All the same, I hope to visit it. When my leg is stronger, will you show me Narabal?"
"Of course," she said. "Why not? But you'll be disappointed, I promise you. And now I have to leave. I want to get the walk to town behind me before the hottest part of the day."
3
As she made her way briskly toward Narabal she envisioned herself turning up in town one of these days with a Ghayrog by her side. How they'd love that, in Narabal! Would she and Vismaan be pelted with rocks and clots of mud? Would people point and snicker, and snub her when she tried to greet them? Probably. There's that crazy Thesme, they would say to each other, bringing aliens to town, running around with snaky Ghayrogs, probably doing all sorts of unnatural things with them out in the jungle. Yes. Yes. Thesme smiled. It might be fun to promenade about Narabal with Vismaan. She would try it as soon as he was capable of making the long trek through the jungle.
The path was no more than a crudely slashed track, blaze-marks on the trees and an occasional cairn, and it was overgrown in many places. But she had grown skilled at jungle travel and she rarely lost her way for long; by late morning she reached the outlying plantations, and soon Narabal itself was in view, straggling up one hillside and down another in a wobbly arc along the seashore.
Thesme had no idea why anyone had wanted to put a city here-halfway around the world from anywhere, the extreme southwest point of Zimroel. It was some idea of Lord Melikand's, the same Coronal who had invited all the aliens to settle on Majipoor, to encourage development on the western continent. In Lord Melikand's time Zimroel had only two cities, both of them terribly isolated, virtual geographic accidents founded in the earliest days of human settlement on Majipoor, before it became apparent that the other continent was going to be the center of Majipoor life. There was Pidruid up in the northwest, with its wondrous climate and its spectacular natural harbor, and there was Piliplok all the way across on the eastern coast, where the hunters of the migratory sea-dragons had their base. But now also there was a little outpost called Ni-moya on one of the big inland rivers, and Til-omon had sprung up on the western coast at the edge of the tropical belt, and evidently some settlement was being founded in the central mountains, and supposedly the Ghayrogs were building a town a thousand miles or so east of Pidruid, and there was Narabal down here in the steaming rainy south, at the tip of the continent with sea all around. If one stood by the shore of Narabal Channel and looked toward the water one felt the terrible weight of the knowledge that at one's back lay thousands of miles of wilderness, and then thousands of miles of ocean, separating one from the continent of Alhanroel where the real cities were. When she was young Thesme had found it frightening to think that she lived in a place so far from the centers of civilized life that it might as well be on some other planet; and other times Alhanroel and its thriving cities seemed merely mythical to her, and Narabal the true center of the universe. She had never been anywhere else, and had no hope of it. Distances were too great. The only town within reasonable reach was Til-omon, but even that was far away, and those who had been there said it was much like Narabal, anyway, only with less rain and the sun standing constantly in the sky like a great boring inquisitive green eye.
In Narabal she felt inquisitive eyes on her wherever she turned: everyone staring, as though she had come to town naked. They all knew who she was — wild Thesme who had run off to the jungle — and they smiled at her and waved and asked her how everything was going, and behind those trivial pleasantries were the eyes, intent and penetrating and hostile, drilling into her, plumbing her for the hidden truths of her life. Why do you despise us? Why have you withdrawn from us? Why are you sharing your house with a disgusting snake-man? And she smiled and waved back, and said, "Nice to see you again," and "Everything's just fine," and replied silently to the probing eyes, I don't hate anybody, I just needed to get away from myself, I'm helping the Ghayrog because it's time I helped someone and he happened to come along. But they would never understand.
No one was at home at her mother's house. She went to her old room and stuffed her pack with books and cubes, and ransacked the medicine cabinet for drugs that she thought might do Vismaan some good, one to reduce inflammation, one to promote healing, a specific for high fever, and some others — probably all useless to an alien, but worth trying, she supposed. She wandered through the house, which was becoming strange to her even though she had lived in it nearly all her life. Wooden floors instead of strewn leaves — real transparent windows — doors on hinges — a cleanser, an actual mechanical cleanser with knobs and handles! — all those civilized things, the million and one humble little things that humanity had invented so many thousands of years ago on another world, and from which she had blithely walked away to live in her humid little hut with live branches sprouting from its walls—
"Thesme?"
She looked up, taken by surprise. Her sister Mirifaine had come in: her twin, in a manner of speaking, same face, same long thin arms and legs, same straight brown hair, but ten years older, ten years more reconciled to the patterns of her life, a married woman, a mother, a hard worker. Thesme had always found it distressing to look at Mirifaine. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing herself old.
Thesme said, "I needed a few things."
"I was hoping you'd decided to move back home."
"What for?"
Mirifaine began to reply — most likely some standard homily, about resuming normal life, fitting into society and being useful, et cetera, et cetera — but Thesme saw her shift direction while all that was still unspoken, and Mirifaine said finally, "We miss you, love."
"I'm doing what I need to do. It's been good to see you, Mirifaine."
"Won't you at least stay the night? Mother will be back soon — she'd be delighted if you were here for dinner—"
"It's a long walk. I can't spend more time here."
"You look good, you know. Tanned, healthy. I suppose being a hermit agrees with you, Thesme."