'Three days ago,' she said, rubbing her foot along his ankle. 'God, those clothes were so heavy, and then the last scene- You didn't see it, of course?'
'How could I?'
'No, of course not. Well, try to, si c'est possible, because I'm really fine in the auto-da-fe scene.'
'What scene?' Rafiel knew that Docilia had finished shooting something about the Spanish Inquisition, with lots of torture - torture stories always went well in this world that had so little personal experience of any kind of suffering. But he hadn't actually seen any part of it.
'Where they burn me at the stake. Quelle horreur! See, they spread the wood all around in a huge circle and light it at the edges, and I'm chained to the stake in the middle. Che cosa! I'm running from side to side, trying to get away from the fire as it bums toward me, and then I start burning myself, capisce? And then I just fall down on the burning coals.'
'It sounds wonderful,' Rafiel said, faintly envious. Maybe it was time for him to start looking for dramatic parts instead of all the song and dance?
'I was wonderful,' she said absently, reaching under the covers to see what was happening. Then she turned her face to his. 'And, guess what? You're getting to be kind of wonderful yourself, galubka, right now....'
Three times was as far as Rafiel really thought he wanted to go. Anyway, Docilia was now in a hurry to send off the picture of her child. 'Let yourself out?' she asked, getting up. Then, naked at her bedroom door, she stopped to look back at him.
'We'll all be fine in this Oedipus, Rafiel,' she assured him. 'You and me in the lead parts, and Mosay putting it all together, and that merveilleux score.' Which was still repeating itself from her sound system, he discovered.
He blew her a kiss, laughing. 'I'm listening, I'm listening,' he assured her. And did in fact listen for a few moments.
Yes, Rafiel told himself, it really was a good score. Oedipus would be a successful production, and when they had rehearsed it and revised it and performed it and recorded it, it would be flashed all over the solar system, over all Earth and the Moon and the capsule colonies on Mars and Triton and half a dozen other moons, and the orbiting habitats wherever they might be, and even to the distant voyagers well on their way to some other star - to all ten million, million human beings, or as many of them as cared to watch it. And it would last. Recordings of it would survive for centuries, to be taken out and enjoyed by people not yet born, because anything that Rafiel appeared in became an instant classic.
Rafiel got up off Docilia's warm, shuddery bed and stood before her mirror, examining himself. Everything the mirror displayed looked quite all right. The belly was flat, the skin clear, the eyes bright - he looked as good as any hale and well-kept man of middle years would have looked, in the historically remote days when middle age could be distinguished from any other age. That was what those periodical visits to the hospital did for him. Though they couldn't make him immortal, like everyone else, they could at least do that much for his appearance and his general comity.
He sighed and rescued the red pantaloons from the floor. As he began to pull them on he thought: They can do all that, but they could not make him live for ever, like everyone else.
That wasn't an immediate threat. Rafiel was quite confident that he would live a while yet - well, quite a long while, if you measured it in days and seconds, perhaps another thirty years or so. But then he wouldn't live after that. And Docilia and Mosay and Victorium - yes, and lost Alegretta, too, and everyone else he had ever known - would perhaps take out the record of this new Oedipus Rex now and then and look at it and say to each other, 'Oh, do you remember dear old Rafiel? How sweet he was. And what a pity.' But dear old Rafiel would be dead.
4
The arcology Rafiel lives and works in rises 235 storeys above central Indiana, and it has a population of 165,000 people. That's about average. From outside - apart from its size - the arcology looks more like something you'd find in a kitchen than a monolithic community. You might think of it as resembling the kind of utensil you would use to ream the juice out of an orange half (well, an orange half that had been stretched long and skinny), with its star-shaped cross section and its rounding taper to the top. Most of the dwelling units are in the outer ribs of the analogy's star. That gives a tenant a nice view, if he is the kind of person who really wants to look out on central Indiana. Rafiel isn 't. As soon as he could afford it he moved to the more expensive inside condos overlooking the lively central atrium of the arcology, with all its glorious light and its graceful loops of flowering lianas and its wall-to-wall people -people on the crosswalks, people on their own balconies, even tiny, distant people moving about the floor level nearly two hundred storeys below. To see all that is to see life. From the outer apartments, what can you see? Only farmlands, and the radiating troughs of the maglev trains, punctuated by the to-the-horizon stretch of all the other analogies that rose from the plain like the stubble of a monster beard.
In spite of all Rafiel's assurances, Docilia insisted on getting dressed and escorting him back to his own place. She chattered all the way. 'So this city you saved, si chiama Thebes,' she was explaining to him as they got into the elevator, 'was in a hell of a mess before you got there. Before Oedipus did, I mean. This Sphinx creature was just making schrecklichkeit. It was doing all kinds of rotten things - I don't know - like killing people, stealing their food, that sort of thing. I guess. Anyway, the whole city was just desperate for help, and then you came along to save them.'
'And I killed the Sphinx, so they made me roi de Thebes out of gratitude?'
'Certo! Well, almost. You see, you don't have to kill it, exactly. It has this riddle that no one can figure out. You just have to solve its riddle, and then it I guess just goes kaput. So then you're their hero, Oedipus, but they don't exactly make you king. The way you get to be that is you marry the queen. That's me, Jocasta. I'm just a pauvre petite widow lady from the old dead king, but as soon as you marry me that makes you the capo di tutti capi. I'm still the queen, and I've got a brother, Cleon, who's a kind of a king, too. But you're the boss.' The elevator stopped, making her blink in slight surprise. 'Oh, siamo qui,' she announced, and led the way out of the car.
Rafiel halted her with a hand on her shoulder. 'I can find my way home from here. You didn't need to come with me at all, verstehen sie?'
'I wanted to, piccina. I thought you might be a little, well, wobbly.'
'I am wobbly, all right,' he said, grinning, 'mais pas from being in the hospital.' He kissed her, and then turned her around to face the elevator. Before he released her he said, 'Oh, listen. What's this riddle of the Sphinx I'm supposed to solve?'
She gave him an apologetic smile over her shoulder. 'It's kind of dopey. "What goes on four legs, two legs and three legs, and is strongest on two." Can you imagine?'
He looked at her. 'You mean you don't know the answer to that one?'