The most striking thing about Rhysha was her glowing, deep turquoise plumage. It covered her from head to heels in what appeared to be a clinging velvet cloak. The coloring was so much more intense than that of the bodies in the tepidarium that Kerr would have thought she belonged to a different species than they.
Her face, under the golden top-knot, was quite human, and so were her slender, leaf-shaped hands; but there was a fantastic, light-boned grace in her movements such as no human being ever had. Her voice was low, with a ‘cello’s fullness of tone. Everything about her, Kerr thought, was rare and delightful and curious. But there was a shadow in her face, as if a natural gaiety had been repressed by the overwhelming harshness of circumstance.
“Where shall I have the ashes sent?” Kerr asked as he took the form.
She plucked indecisively at her pink lower lip. “I am not sure. The manager where we are staying has told us we must leave tonight, and I do not know where we will go. Could I come back again to the bureau when the ashes are ready?”
It was against regulations, but Kerr nodded. He would keep the capsule of ashes in his locker until she came. It would be nice to see her again.
She came, weeks later, for the ashes. There had been several battles of the bird people in the interval, and the pool in the tepidarium was full. As Kerr looked at her, he wondered how long it would be before she too was dead.
He asked her new address. It was a fantastic distance away, in the worst part of the city, and after a little hesitation he told her that if she could wait until his shift was over he would be glad to walk back with her.
She looked at him doubtfully. “It is most kind of you, but—but an Earthman was kind to us once. The children used to stone him.”
Kerr had never thought much about the position of the non-human races in his world. If it was unjust, if they were badly treated, he had thought it no more than a particular instance of the general cruelty and stupidity. Now anger flared up in him.
“That’s all right,” he said harshly. “If you don’t mind waiting.”
Rhysha smiled faintly. “No, I don’t mind,” she said.
Since there were still some hours to go on his shift, he took her into a small reception room where there was a chaise longue. “Try to sleep,” he said.
A little before three he came to rouse her, and found her lying quiet but awake. They left the bureau by a side door.
The city was as quiet at this hour as it ever was. All the sign projectors, and most of the street lights, had been turned off to save power, and even the vast, disembodied voices that boomed out of the air all day long and half the night were almost silent. The darkness and quiescence of the city made it seem easy for them to talk as they went through the streets.
Kerr realised afterwards how confident he must have been of Rhysha’s sympathy to have spoken to her as freely as he did. And she must have felt an equal confidence in him, for after a little while she was telling him fragments of her history and her people’s past without reserve.
“After the Earthmen took our planet,” she said, “we had nothing left they wanted. But we had to have food. Then we discovered that they liked to watch us fight.”
“You fought before the Earthmen came?” Kerr asked.
“Yes. But not as we fight now. It was a ritual then, very formal, with much politeness and courtesy. We did not fight to get things from each other, but to find out who was brave and could give us leadership. The Earth people were impatient with our ritual—they wanted to see us hurting and being hurt. So we learned to fight as we fight now, hoping to be killed.
“There was a time, when we first left our planet and went to the other worlds where people liked to watch us, when there were many of us. But there have been many battles since then. Now there are only a few left.”
At the cross street a beggar slouched up to them. Kerr gave him a coin. The man was turning away with thanks when he caught sight of Rhysha’s golden to p-knot. “God-damned Extey!” he said in sudden rage. “Filth! And you, a man, going around with it! Here!” He threw the coin at Kerr.
“Even the beggars!” Rhysha said. “Why is it, Kerr, you hate us so?”
“Because we have wronged you,” he answered, and knew it was the truth. “Are we always so unkind, though?”
“As the beggar was? Often… it is worse.”
“Rhysha, you’ve got to get away from here.”
“Where?” she answered simply. “Our people have discussed it so many times! There is no planet on which there are not already billions of people from Earth. You increase so fast!
“And besides, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need us, there isn’t any place for us. We cared about that once, but not any more. We’re so tired—all of us, even the young ones like me—we’re so tired of trying to live.”
“You mustn’t talk like that,” Kerr said harshly. “1 won’t let you talk like that. You’ve got to go on. If we don’t need you now, Rhysha, we will.”
From the block ahead of them there came the wan glow of a municipal telescreen. Late as the hour was, it was surrounded by a dense knot of spectators. Their eyes were fixed greedily on the combat that whirled dizzily over the screen.
Rhysha tugged gently at Kerr’s sleeve. “We had better go around,” she said in a whisper. Kerr realized with a pang that there would be trouble if the viewers saw a “man” and an Extey together. Obediently he turned.
They had gone a block further when Kerr (for he had been thinking) said: “My people took the wrong road, Rhysha, about two hundred years ago. That was when the council refused to accept, even in principle, any form of population control. By now we’re stifling under the pressure of our own numbers, we’re crushed shapeless under it. Everything has had to give way to our one basic problem, how to feed an ever-increasing number of hungry mouths. Morality has dwindled into feeding ourselves. And we have the battle sports over the telecast to keep us occupied.
“But I think— I believe—that we’ll get into the right road again sometime. I’ve read books of history, Rhysha. This isn’t the first time we’ve chosen the wrong road. Some day there’ll be room for your people, Rhysha, if only—” he hesitated—“if only because you’re so beautiful.”
He looked at her earnestly. Her face was remote and bleak. An idea came to him. “Have you ever heard anyone sing, Rhysha?”
“Sing? No, I don’t know the word.”
“Listen, then.” He fumbled over his repertory and decided, though the music was not really suited to his voice, on Tamino’s song to Pamina’s portrait. He sang it for her as they walked along.
Little by little Rhysha’s face relaxed. “I like that,” she said when the song was over. “Sing more, Kerr.”
“Do you see what I was trying to tell you?” he said at last, after many songs. “If we could make songs like that, Rhysha, isn’t there hope for us?”
“For you, perhaps. Not us,” Rhysha answered. There was anger in her voice. “Stop it, Kerr. I do not want to be waked.”
But when they parted she clasped hands with him and told him where they could meet again. “You are really our friend,” she said without coquetry.
When he next met Rhysha, Kerr said: “I brought you a present. Here.” He handed her a parcel. “And I’ve some news, too.”
Rhysha opened the little package. An exclamation of pleasure broke from her lips. “Oh, lovely! What a lovely thing! Where did you get it, Kerr?”
“In a shop that sells old things, in the back.” He did not tell her he had given ten days’ pay for the little turquoise locket. “But the stones are lighter than I realized. I wanted something that would be the color of your plumage.”