“I stole it.” Even though the words came with gushes of air through ill-anchored vocal cords, at ten the orphaned gypsy spoke some half dozen of the languages bordering the Mediterranean much more facilely than people like Leo who had learned his tongues under a hypno-teacher.
The construction men, grimy from their power shovels (and hopefully limited to Turkish) sat down at the table, massaging their wrists and rubbing their spinal sockets on the smalls of their backs where the great machines had been plugged into their bodies. They called for fish.
Leo bent and tossed. Silver flicked the air, and the oil roared.
Leo leaned against the railing and opened the drawstring. “Yes.” He spoke slowly. “None on Earth, much less here, I didn’t know was. Where it from is?”
“I got it from the bazaar,” the Mouse explained. “If it can be found on Earth, it can be found in the Grand Bazaar.” He quoted the adage that had brought millions on millions to the Queen of Cities.
“So I’d heard,” Leo said. Then in Turkish again: “These gentlemen their lunch you give.”
The Mouse took up the ladle and scooped the fish into plastic plates. What had gone in silver came out gold. The men pulled chunks of bread from the baskets under the table and ate with their hands.
He hunted the two other fish from the oil and brought them to Leo who was still sitting on the rail, smiling into the sack. “Coherent image out of this thing, can I get? Don’t know. Since fishing for methane squid in the Outer Colonies, I was, not in my hands one of these is. Back then, pretty well this I could play.” The sack fell away and Leo sucked his breath between his teeth. “It pretty is!”
On his lap in crumpled leather, It might have been a harp, it might have been a computer. With inductance surfaces like a theremin, with frets like a guitar, down one side were short drones as on a sitar. On the other were the extended bass drones of a guitarina. Parts were carved from rosewood. Parts were cast from stainless steel. It had insets of black plastic, and was cushioned with plush.
Leo turned it.
The clouds had torn even further.
Sunlight ran the polished grain, flashed in the steel. At the table the workmen tapped their coins, then squinted. Leo nodded to them. They put the money on the greasy boards and, puzzled, left the boat.
Leo did something with the controls. There was a clear ringing; the air shivered; and cutting out the olid odor of wet rope and tar was the scent of … orchids? A long time ago, perhaps at five or six, the Mouse had smelled them wild in the fields edging a road. (Then, there had been a big woman in a print skirt who may have been Mama, and three barefoot, heavily mustachioed men, one of whom he had been told to call Papa; but that was in some other country …) Yes, orchids.
Leo’s hand moved; shivering became shimmering. Brightness fell from the air, coalesced in blue light whose source was somewhere between them. The odor moistened to roses.
“It works!” rasped the Mouse.
Leo nodded. “Better than the one I used to have. The Illyrion battery almost brand-new is. Those things I on the boat used to play, can still play, I wonder.” His face furrowed. “Not too good going to be is. Out of practice am.” Embarrassment rearranged Leo’s features into an expression the Mouse had never seen. Leo’s hand closed to the tuning haft.
Where light had filled the air, illumination shaped to her, till she turned and stared at them over her shoulder.
The Mouse blinked.
She was translucent; yet so much realer by the concentration he needed to define her chin, her shoulder, her foot, her face, till she spun, laughing, and tossed surprising flowers at him. Under the petals the Mouse ducked and closed his eyes. He’d been breathing naturally, but on this inhalation, he just didn’t stop. He opened his mouth to the odors, prolonging the breath till his diaphragm stretched sharply from the bottom of his ribs. Then pain arched beneath his sternum and he had to let the breath out. Fast. Then began the slow return—
He opened his eyes.
Oil, the yellow water of the Horn, sludge; but the air was empty of blossoms. Leo, his single boot on the bottom rung of the rail, was fiddling with a knob.
She was gone.
“But …” The Mouse took a step, stopped, balancing on his toes, his throat working. “How …?”
Leo looked up. “Rusty, I am! I once pretty good was. But it a long time is. Long time. Once, once, this thing I truly could play.”
“Leo … could you …? I mean you said you … I didn’t know … I didn’t think …”
“What?”
“Teach! Could you teach … me?”
Leo looked at the dumbfounded gypsy boy whom he had befriended here on the docks with tales of his wanderings through the oceans and ports of a dozen worlds. He was puzzled.
The Mouse’s fingers twitched. “Show me, Leo! Now you’ve got to show me!” The Mouse’s mind tumbled from Alexandrian to Berber Arabic and ended up in Italian as he searched for the word. “Bellissimo, Leo! Bellissimo!”
“Well—“ Leo felt what might have been fear at the boy’s avidity, had Leo been more used to fear.
The Mouse looked at the stolen thing with awe and terror.
“Can you show me how to play it?’ Then he did something brave. He took it, gently, from Leo’s lap. And fear was an emotion that the Mouse had lived with all his short, shattered life.
Reaching, however, he began the intricate process of becoming himself. Wondering, the Mouse turned the sensory-syrynx around and around.
At the head of a muddy street that wound on a hill behind an iron gate, the Mouse had a night job carrying trays of coffee and salep from the tea house through the herds of men who roamed back and forth by the narrow glass doors, crouching to stare at the women passing inside.
Now the Mouse came to work later and later. He stayed on the boat as long as possible. The harbor lights winked down the mile-long docks, and Asia flickered through the fog while Leo showed him where each projectable odor, color, shape, texture, and movement hid in the polished syrynx. The Mouse’s eyes and hands began to open.
Two years later, when Leo announced that he had sold his boat and was thinking of going to the other side of Draco, perhaps to New Mars to fish for dust skates, the Mouse could already surpass the tawdry illusion that Leo had first shown him.
A month later the Mouse himself left Istanbul, waiting beneath the dripping stones of the Edernakapi till a truck offered him a ride toward the border town of Ipsala. He walked across the border into Greece, joined a red wagon full of gypsies, and for the duration of the trip fell back into Romany, the tongue of his birth. He’d been in Turkey three years. On leaving, all he had taken besides the clothes he wore was a thick silver puzzle ring too big for any of his fingers—and the syrynx.
Two and a half years later when he left Greece, he still had the ring. He had grown one little fingernail three quarters of an inch long, as did the other boys who worked the dirty streets behind the Monasteraiki flea market, selling rugs, brass gewgaws, or whatever tourists would buy, just outside the edge of the geodesic dome that covered the square mile of Athenas Market; and he took the syrynx.
The cruise boat on which he was a deck hand left Piraeus for Port Said, sailed through the canal and on toward its home port in Melbourne.
When he sailed back, this time to Bombay, It was as an entertainer in the ship’s nightclub: Pontichos Provechi, recreating great works of art, musical and graphic, for your pleasure, with perfumed accompaniment. In Bombay he quit, got very drunk (he was sixteen now), and stalked the dirty pier by moonlight, quivering and ill. He swore he would never play purely for money again (“Come on, kid! Give us the mosaics on the San Sophia ceiling again before you do the Parthenon frieze—and make ‘em swing!”). When he returned to Australia, it was as a deck hand. He came ashore with the puzzle ring, his long nail, and a gold earring in his left ear. Sailors who crossed the equator on the Indian Ocean had been entitled to that earring for fifteen hundred years. The steward had pierced his earlobe with ice and a canvas needle. He still had the syrynx.