She twisted the money bag anxiously in her small hands. “So what. So what… what if you are Tohm?”
“So what? You can come with me. That's so what. I've crossed Hell a dozen times getting here.”
There was a sudden gleam in her eye, and her voice changed subtly. “But how are you sure I am Tarnilee?”
“But you just said—”
“My name is now Rashinghiana.”
“You have assumed the feminized version of Rashinghi?”
“My name is Rashinghiana.”
He felt himself swaying. “Tarnilee, you're not married to that… to that—”
“My name is not Tarnilee,” she said firmly.
“But why him?”
“He is good to me.”
“I was better.”
She frowned. “You never showed me the wonders of the universe, the foods, the wines, the places and the things.”
He sighed, wiped perspiration from his upper lip. “Look, Tarnilee. I just discovered these things myself. I never knew of them.
“My name is not Tarnilee. Besides, if it were, and you were Tohm, you are nothing but a peasant. You could not fill the desires these new things have raised in me; you could not feed the hungers.”
His mind was aching with the new order, the clearer understanding of human nature that was suddenly being thrust upon him. This was an old scene — thousands of years old, but he did not know that. The sun seemed like a huge candle whose melting wax was dropping upon everything, hazing over the buildings and the people, seeping through his ears and encasing his brain. He clutched her arm, dug his nails in. “Look, Tarni— okay, Rashinghiana. In a few days, you're going to be stuck with a smaller, different universe. I don't understand how, but I know the Muties are going to—”
“Muties?” she said. “You associate with them? You're a pervert?”
He dug his nails deeper, hoping that, beneath the toga, blood was seeping. “Listen—”
“Help!” she shouted. “A pervert. Mutie-lover!”
The crowd turned. Several rich bidders surged toward him. Clutching her even tighter, he brought the gas pistol into his free hand. M. Glavoirei was the first to go down, his leg a shattered hunk of meat worse than anything one might see in the open-air meat markets.
“You're coming with me,” he said, dropping her arm and wrapping his own burly limb about her slim waist.
“No!”
A hand touched his neck. He ducked, swung, and blasted out the man's intestines, sending him down, kicking for a moment before he lay still. The others stopped their advance, eyed him warily.
“Let me down, you peasant!” she screamed.
The wax of the sun was hotter. The first layers of it were beginning to solidify over him. If he didn't move quickly, he knew he could never move at all. He fiddled with the flybelt, lifted, turned toward the center of town and the hutch. Then the small, whirring sphere that had dislodged itself from the muzzle of a policeman's rifle burst beneath him.
Sweet perfume…
Blue mists engulfed him, swallowed him, dragging him through denser and denser fogs into total blackness…
Into death?
XII
No.
Not death.
Although, he reflected, it might as well have been. It would be. He was penned on the third floor of the Capital City Prison in a maxi-security cell. It was less than a yard by a yard. He could sit, and that was all. He sat looking out the window, through the massive steel bars at the gallows they were erecting in the courtyard. His gallows. For his neck.
Trial was certainly speedy here; one could not complain about judicial procrastination. He had been arrested, tried, and sentenced to death within three hours of his capture. The account would be all over the city by now— in the papes, on teevee. In the morning, just about when his twenty-four hours would be up, a crowd would gather in the courtyard to watch the floor jerk out from under him and to hear his neck snap in one, brittle, final comment.
Swift.
Clean.
Nearly painless.
And, strangely enough, if he could have known the answers to a few questions, he would not have minded. After all, what had kept him moving was dead: Tarnilee's love and his love for her. Hers had expired naturally; his had been murdered back there in the market. She had shot it full of ugly holes. The world was not goody-good. Mayna had been right. But he still wasn't ready to die. Curiosity gave him the willpower to live. Ever since that little vial of dope had stopped dripping and his brain had come awake, he had been plagued with so many mysterious concepts, ideas, people, that he could not sort them out anymore. Once, he would have prayed, but he could not now. He thought of Seer babbling, horrified, mummified, a vegetable cowering before some unknown terror that faced everyone— would face Tohm himself — when he died. That was another reason he didn't want to die. What lay on the other side of the veil, across the gauze between life and death?
A few answers. That's all he wanted now. What was the Fringe? What were shell molecules? Would the Muties succeed or fail? What, exactly, were they trying to do? Were they demons or angels? And Mayna. If only he could understand and solicit a smile from Mayna, perhaps dying would not be as difficult to face. But strangling to death out there without any answers was not a pleasant future.
At supper time, they brought him a bowl of worms.
He didn't eat them, even if, as the guard had said, they were the only fitting last meal for a pervert.
He contented himself, in the darkness of the night, with sitting and watching the stars blinking, flittering like so many consciences pinching the brain for penance. Dragon eyes. Sparks of dragon breath. Hellfires. He tried to think of as many metaphors and similes as he could, keeping himself awake and sharp. He was determined not to fall asleep on this, his last and only night alive.
The wind was cool through the bars.
He thought about Tarnilee. Quite often, the mind likes to torture itself by throwing up its mistakes, its wrong turns and blunders. He had misjudged the love of this woman. He tortured himself now. There had been tears when he first was thrown in the cell and realized what she had done to him, but all the tears had been wept now. He had come from a gentle world to a rough one. He had changed, and so had she. He had not, however, learned to expect that change.
He thought about Mayna, sleek and soft…
He thought about Hunk, twisted forever within his pitiful body…
He thought about Mayna, warm and smooth…
He wanted, somewhere deeply, to be nursed too, to crawl to her and be sheltered by her…
He wished she didn't hate him, or just hated him a little less…
He thought about Triggy Gop, the brain living after the body had perished. For what reason? So that he could, periodically, see how his child was growing. Twenty-odd years Triggy Gop had been floating through space looking for readers, people hungry for information, and found mostly warriors. He tried to remember what the librarian had said about seeing him again, a poem… Perhaps some… He tried to remember. Yes. Four lines the man had composed himself. He repeated the lines to the twinkling dragon eyes.
“Very poetic,” a voice said almost directly in front of him.
He started, jumped up, stumbled over his chair.