“—move, damn it, it’s Dorothy!—”
But it was too late.
“Boys…”
Father Dorothy’s voice rang out, a hoarse tenor. Paul looked up and saw him, clad as always in salt-and-pepper tweeds, his long grey hair pulled back through a copper loop. “It’s late, you shouldn’t be here.”
They were safe: their tutor was distracted. Paul looked beyond him, past the long sweep of the galley’s gleaming equipment to where a tall figure stood in the shadows. Claude swept the box of hologravures beneath a stove and stood, kicking Paul and Ira and gesturing for the twins to follow him.
“Sorry, Father,” he grunted, gazing at his feet. Beside him Paul tried not to stare at whoever it was that stood at the end of the narrow corridor.
“Go along, then,” said Father Dorothy, waving his hands in the direction of the boys’ dormitory. As they hurried past him, Paul could smell the sandalwood soap Father Dorothy had specially imported from his home Below, the only luxury he allowed himself. And Paul smelled something else, something strange. The scent made him stop. He looked over his shoulder and saw the figure still standing at the end of the galley, as though afraid to enter while the boys were there. Now that they seemed to be gone the figure began to walk towards Father Dorothy, picking its feet up with exaggerated delicacy. Paul stared, entranced.
“Move it, Pathori,” Claude called to him; but Paul shook his head and stayed where he was. Father Dorothy had his back to them. One hand was outstretched to the figure. Despite its size—it was taller than Paul, taller than Father Dorothy—there was something fragile and childlike about it. Thin and slightly stooped, with wispy yellow hair like feathers falling onto curved thin shoulders, frail arms crossed across its chest and legs that were so long and frail that he could see why it walked in that awkward tippy-toe manner: if it fell its legs would snap like chopsticks. It smelled like nothing else on Teichman Station, sweet and powdery and warm. Once, Paul thought, his mother had smelled like that, before she went to stay in the women’s quarters. But this thing looked nothing like his mother. As he stared, it slowly lifted its face, until he could see its enormous eyes fixed on him: caramel-colored eyes threaded with gold and black, staring at him with a gaze that was utterly adoring and absolutely witless.
“Paul, come on!”
Ira tugged at him until he turned away and stumbled after the others to the dormitory. For a long time afterwards he lay awake, trying to ignore the laughter and muffled sounds coming from the other beds; recalling the creature’s golden eyes, its walk, its smell.
At tutorial the next day Father Dorothy said nothing of finding the boys in the galley, nor did he mention his strange companion. Paul yawned behind the time-softened covers of an ancient linguistics text, waiting for Romulus to finish with the monitor so he could begin his lesson. In the front of the room, beneath flickering lamps that cast grey shadows on the dusty floor, Father Dorothy patiently went over a hermeneutics lesson with Ira, who was too stupid to follow his father into the bio-engineering corps, but whose beauty and placid nature guaranteed him a place in the Izakowa priesthood on Miyako Station. Paul stared over his textbook at Ira with his corkscrew curls and dusky skin. He thought of the creature in the galley—its awkwardness, its pallor; the way it had stared at him. But mostly he tried to remember how it smelled. Because on Teichman Station—where they had been breathing the same air for seventeen years, and where even the most common herbs and spices, cinnamon, garlic, pepper, were no longer imported because of the expense to the station’s dwindling group of researchers—on Teichman Station everything smelled the same. Everything smelled of despair.
“Father Dorothy.”
Paul looked up. A server, one of the few that remained in working order, lurched into the little room, its wheels scraping against the door. Claude snickered and glanced sideways at Pauclass="underline" the server belonged to Paul’s mother, although after her conversion she had declared it shared property amongst all the station women. “Father Dorothy, KlausMaria Dalven asks that her son be sent to her quarters. She wishes to speak with him.”
Father Dorothy looked up from the monitor cradled in his hand. He smiled wryly at the ancient server and looked back at Paul.
“Go ahead,” he said. Ira gazed enviously as Paul shut his book and slid it into his desk, then followed the server to the women’s quarters.
His mother and the other women lived at the far end of the Solar Walk, the only part of Teichman where one could see outside into space and realize that they were, indeed, orbiting the moon and not stuck in some cramped Airbus outside of New Delhi or one of the other quarantined areas Below. The server rolled along a few feet ahead of him, murmuring to itself in an earnest monotone. Paul followed, staring at his feet as a woman passed him. When he heard her leave the Walk he lifted his head and looked outside. A pale glowing smear above one end of the Walk was possibly the moon, more likely one of the station’s malfunctioning satellite beacons. The windows were so streaked with dirt that for all Paul knew he might be looking at Earth, or some dingy canister of waste deployed from the galley. He paused to step over to one of the windows. A year before Claude had drawn an obscene figure in the dust along the edge, facing the men’s side of the Walk. Paul grinned to himself: it was still there.
“Paul, KlausMaria Dalven asks that you come to her quarters. She wishes to speak with you,” the server repeated in its droning voice. Paul sighed and turned from the window. A minute later he crossed the invisible line that separated the rest of Teichman from the women’s quarters.
The air was much fresher here—his mother said that came from thinking peaceful thoughts—and the walls were painted a very deep green, which seemed an odd choice of colors but had a soothing effect nonetheless. Someone had painted stars and a crescent moon upon the arched ceiling. Paul had never seen the moon look like that, or stars. His mother explained they were images of power and not meant to resemble the dull shapes one saw on the navgrids.
“Hello, Paul,” a woman called softly. Marija Kerényi, who had briefly consorted with his father after Paul’s mother had left him. Then, she had been small and pretty, soft-spoken but laughing easily. Just the sort of pliant woman Fritz Pathori liked. But in the space of a few years she had had two children, both girls. This was during an earlier phase of his father’s work on the partho-genetic breeders, when human reproductive tissue was too costly to import from Below. Marija never forgave Paul’s father for what happened to her daughters. She was still small and pretty, but her expression had sharpened almost to the point of cunning, her hair had grown very long and was pulled back in the same manner as Father Dorothy’s. “Your mother is in the Attis Arcade.”
“Um, thanks,” Paul mumbled. He had half-turned to leave when his mother’s throaty voice echoed down the hallway. “Marija, is that him? Send him back—”
“Go ahead, Paul,” Marija urged. She laughed as he hurried past her. For an instant her hand touched the top of his thigh, and he nearly stumbled as she stroked him. Her fingers flicked at his trousers and she turned away disdainfully.
His mother stood in a doorway. “Paul, darling. Are you thirsty? Would you like some tea?”
Her voice was deeper than it had been before, when she was really my mother, he thought; before the hormonal injections and implants; before Father Dorothy. He still could not help but think of her as she, despite her masculine appearance, her throaty voice. “Or—you don’t like tea, how about betel?”