“Hello,” Katin said.
The Mouse grunted and went on tuning drones.
Katin sat down on the other side of the Mouse and watched for a few moments. “I just had a thought,” he said, “Nine times out of ten, when I just say ‘hello’ to someone in passing, or when the person I speak to is going off to do something else, I spend the next fifteen minutes or so rehearsing the incident, wondering whether my smile was taken for undue familiarity, or my sober expression improperly construed as coldness. I repeat the exchange to myself a dozen times, varying my tone of voice and trying to extrapolate the change this might cause in the other person’s reaction—“
“Hey.” The Mouse looked up from his syrynx. “It’s all right. I like you. I was just busy is all.”
“Oh.” Katin smiled; the smile was worn away by a frown. “You know, Mouse, I envy the captain. He’s got a mission. And his obsession precludes all that wondering about what other people think of him.”
“I don’t go through all that like you described,” the Mouse said. “Much.”
“I do.” Idas looked around. “Whenever I’m by myself, I do it all the—“ and dropped his dark head to examine his knuckles.
“It’s pretty fair of him to let us all have this time off and fly the ship with Lynceos,” Katin said.
“Yeah,” said Idas. “I guess it—“ and turned his hands over to follow the dark scribblings on his palms.
“Captain’s got too many things to worry about,” the Mouse said. “And he doesn’t want them. It doesn’t take anything to get across this part of the trip, so he’d just as soon have something to occupy his mind. That’s what I think.”
“You think the captain has bad dreams?”
“Maybe.” The Mouse struck cinnamon from his harp, but so strongly their noses and the backs of their mouths burned.
Katin’s eyes teared.
The Mouse shook his head and turned down the knob Idas had touched. “Sorry.”
“Knight of … “ Across the room Sebastian looked up from the game and wrinkled his nose. “ …Swords.”
Katin, the only one with legs long enough, tipped the water below the ramp with the toe of his sandal. Colored gravel shook; Katin took out his recorder and flipped the recording pip:
“Novels were primarily about relationships.” He gazed at the distortions in the mosaic wall behind the leaves as he spoke. “Their popularity lay in that they belied the loneliness of the people who read them, people essentially hypnotized by the machinations of their own consciousness. The Captain and Prince, for example, through their obsessions are totally related—“
The Mouse leaned over and spoke into the jeweled box:
“The captain and Prince probably haven’t even seen each other face to face for ten years!”
Katin, annoyed, clicked the recorder off. He considered a retort; found none. So he flipped it on again: “Remember that the society which allows this to happen is the society that has allowed the novel to become extinct. Bear in mind as you write that the subject of the novel is what happens between people’s faces when they talk to one another.” Off again.
“Why are you writing this book?” the Mouse asked. “I mean what do you want to do with it?”
“Why do you play your syrynx? I’m sure it’s for essentially the same reason.”
“Only if I spent all that time just getting ready, I’d never play a thing; and that’s a hint.”
“I begin to understand, Mouse. It’s not my aim, but my methods of achieving it which bug you, as it were.”
“Katin, I do understand what you’re doing. You want to make something beautiful. But it don’t work that way. Sure, I had to practice a long time to be able to play this thing. But if you’re going to make something like that, it’s got to make people feel and thrill to the life around them, even if it’s only that one guy who goes looking for it in the Alkane’s cellar. It won’t make it if you don’t understand some of that feeling yourself.”
“Mouse, you’re a fine, good, and beautiful person. You just happen to be wrong is all. Those beautiful forms you wield from your harp, I’ve looked at your face closely enough to know how much they’re impelled by terror.”
The Mouse looked up and wrinkles scored his forehead.
“I could sit and watch you play for hours. But they’re only momentary joys, Mouse. It’s only when all one knows of life is abstracted and used as an underlining statement of significant patterning that you have what is both beautiful and permanent. Yes, there is an area of myself I haven’t been able to tap for this work, one that flows and fountains in you, gushes from your fingers. But there’s a large part of you that’s playing to drown the sound of someone screaming in there.” He nodded to the Mouse’s scowl.
The Mouse made his sound again.
Katin shrugged.
“I’d read your book,” Idas said.
The Mouse and Katin looked up.
“I’ve read a … well, some books—“ He looked back at his hands.
“You would?”
Idas nodded. “In the Outer Colonies, people read books, even novels sometimes. Only there aren’t very … well, only old—“ He looked up at the frame against the walclass="underline" Lynceos lay like an unborn ghost; the captain was in the other. He looked back with loss in his face. “It’s very different in the Outer Colonies than it is—“ He gestured around the ship, indicating all of Draco. “Say, do you know the place we’re going well?”
“Never been there,” Katin said.
The Mouse shook his head.
“I was wondering if you knew whether we could get hold of some …” He looked back down. “Never mind …”
“You’d have to ask them,” Katin said, pointing to the cardplayers across the room. “It’s their home.”
“Oh,” Idas said. “Yeah. I guess—“ Then he pushed himself off the ramp, splashed into the water, waded onto the gravel, and walked, dripping, across the rug.
Katin looked at the Mouse and shook his head.
But the trail of water was completely absorbed in the blue piling.
“Six of Swords.”
“Five of Swords.”
“Excuse me, do any of you know—“
“Ten of Swords. My trick. Page of Cups.”
“—on this world we’re going. Do you know if—“
“The Tower.”
(“I wish that card hadn’t come up reversed in the captain’s reading,” Katin whispered to the Mouse. “Believe me, it portends no good.”)
“The Four of Cups.”
“My trick. Nine of Wands.”
“—we can get hold of—“
“Seven of Wands.”
“—any bliss?”
“The Wheel of Fortune. My trick is.” Sebastian looked up. “Bliss?”
The explorer who decided to name the outermost of the Dim, Dead Sister’s planets Elysium had indulged a poor joke. With all the planoforming devices available, it was still a frozen cinder ellipsing at trans-Plutonian distances from Her ghost-light, barren and uninhabited.
Someone had once proposed the doubtful theory that all three of the remaining worlds were really moons that had been in the shadow of a gigantic planet when the catastrophe occurred, and thus escaped the fury that had annihilated their protector. Poor moon if moon you are, Katin thought as they swept by. You’ve done no better as a world. A lesson there in pretension.
Once the—explorer explored further, he regained his sense of proportion. His grin faltered at the middle world; he called it Dis.
His fate suggests the agenbite of inwit come too late; flaunting the gods even once reaped a classical reward. His ship crashed on the innermost planet. It remained unnamed, and to this day was referred to as the other world, without pomp, circumstance, or capitals. It was not till a second explorer came that the other world suddenly disclosed a secret. Those great plains, which from a distance had been judged solidified slag, turned out to be oceans-of water, frozen. True, the top ten to a hundred feet was mixed with every sort of rubble and refuse. It was finally decided that the other world had once been entirely under two to twenty-five miles of water. Perhaps nineteen twentieths had steamed into space when the Dim, Dead Sister went nova. This left a percentage of dry land just a little higher than Earth’s. The unbreathable atmosphere, the total lack of organic life, the sub-sub temperatures? Minor problems, compared to the gift of seas; easily corrected. So humanity, in the early days of the Pleiades, encroached on the charred and frozen land. The other world’s oldest city—though not its biggest, for the commercial and economic shift over the past three hundred years had shifted the population—had been very carefully named: the City of Dreadful Night.