Nearby, looking into the tank at the vastness of the sleeping leviathan, Kim drifted, suspended in the water, his thoughts dark. To his right, some twenty ch'i distant, was Rebecca, her hands pressed tight against the outer glass.
Behind them, the early morning sunlight filtered down through the shadowed outline of the City overhead, forming broad shafts of gold in the pale blue water, while below them the endless depths stretched down, into dark, unseen realms of perfect blackness.
"He's beautiful," Rebecca said, her eyes, half glimpsed behind the face-plate of her mask, gleaming with a strange delight. "So strong and graceful, don't you think?"
Kim half turned in the water, moving back, away from the menace of the slumbering form. Powerful it was, and strong. But beautiful? He turned, looking back at it, then shook his head. No, even in sleep, Old Darkness was inimical. A deadly, hostile thing, lacking all warmth, all sympathy with human life.
Looking at it, at the dark, repulsive bulk of it, he felt the deep stirrings of unease. Inimical it was, and yet connected. The first time he had seen the creature he had recognized it, but here, alone in the water with the beast, that feeling was much stronger. Old Darkness ... it was aptly named, for the light of intelligence, of love or connectedness, had never touched this creature. It was a thing of nightmare. And yet...
He shuddered, then forced himself to formulate the thought. It was as if he were staring back at himself. Or not himself exactly, but a part of him: that part that was forever hidden from the light. Here, in the figure of Old Darkness, it was given solid form, cold and gargantuan.
Its hideous, he thought, and yet the thing exists. It has a purpose in the scheme of things. Like darkness itself, it exists because, without it, there would be no light, no warmth. Because, without it, there would be nothing.
"What does it eat?"
Rebecca's laughter came ringing through the earphones of his mask. "Anything we give it," she answered, turning toward him, smiling through her mask. "The deep survey teams bring it back tidbits from the deep. Strange things with glowing eyes and spiny fins, bloated things with heavy, scaly bodies and huge, hinged mouths."
Again he shuddered, imagining it down there in its natural element, and wondered whether it was like that in the deepest recesses of the mind; whether there were creatures there like Old Darkness, vast leviathans of the imagination, gliding silently, dark against the darkness, their long tentacles coiling and uncoiling as they preyed upon the deformed progeny of the undermind.
"Seen enough?" Rebecca asked, kicking up toward him, her right hand trailing lightly along the surface of the glass.
He nodded. Enough for thirty lifetimes. "You're right," he said. "In a strange way he is beautiful. But frightening too."
For a moment she was close, beside him in the water, her hand on his ami. "Maybe that's what beauty is. Something that frightens us." And then she was gone, moving up, past him, toward the hatch, some fifty ch'i above.
REBECCA SHOWERED and dressed, then came through to where Kim sat on the bench in the men's room, cradling a bulb of ch'a between his cupped hands. It was quite early—not yet nine—and they were alone there in the big, echoing room.
"Well?" she said, sitting on the bench across from him. "How's it going?"
Kim smiled. "Fine," he said. "Bonnet's a bit of a pain. Schram too. He can't keep his nose out of things, can he? Whatever I do, he has to know about it. But I've known worse."
She nodded thoughtfully. "You and I both."
"Yes . . ." For a moment he looked at her, realizing how lonely he had been, how pleased to see her familiar face. But it was more than that. They had come from the darkness of the Clay, he and she; had struggled to make their way in this world of light, failing once and yet surviving. Coming through. They both knew what it was to be a "thing," owned bone, blood, and flesh by another, their very existence subject to the whims of petty men. And that had formed them, just as much as their experience of the Clay. Yes, and made them different, separate from the rest. Physically and mentally different.
"Do you ever think of those times?" he asked quietly. "You know, back in Rehabilitation?"
"Sometimes." She looked down. "Do you remember the bird?"
He nodded. After Luke had defied them—after they had taken him away that first time—the powers-that-be had given the four of them that remained a bird. A strange, artificial thing, he realized now. Something made, not born. A product of GenSyn's labs.
The bird's eyes had been amber, the pupils black. It had gazed into the far distance, proudly, arrogantly, barely deigning to acknowledge their presence there outside its cage. Strong, three-toed claws had gripped the metal perch, the talons stretching and tightening as if impatient. And when it had spread its wings, the vivid emerald feathers unfolding like twin fans, it had seemed a gesture of dismissal.
Kim shuddered, remembering that first moment. Will, like himself, had thought it beautiful, and Deio had likened it to a song made flesh. Only Rebecca had not been moved by it. "It's too bright," she had said, and he had turned, staring at the bird, wondering how anything could be "too bright."
From that day on, Will had been obsessed. Each morning, the big North European lad had fed the bird, talking to it through the bars of its cage.
And each night he had pressed close to the cage, whispering to it. Always the same. Four lines of poetry in the ancient guttural tongue of his part of the Clay. Closing his eyes, Kim could still hear him saying it, even now, four years on.
Mit alien Augen sieht die Kreatur das offene. Nur unsere Augen sind wie umgekehrt und ganz un sie gestellt als Fallen, rings um ihren Freien Ausgang.
The words had moved him, thrilled him, long before Will had told him what they meant.
\
With all its eyes the creature-world beholds the open. But our eyes, as though reversed, encircle it on every side, like traps set round its unobstructed path to freedom.
So it was, for all of them, bird and Clay alike. And then Luke had died. Suddenly, awfully.
Will had been devastated. Kim remembered that too. Remembered the sight of him sitting on Luke's empty bed, still, dreadfully still, hunched into himself, his big, changeling's body forced into a much smaller area than it was used to, as if he was trying to fit himself into Luke's skin, into his smaller, subtler form.
Kim looked up, his eyes moist. Rebecca was watching him, her eyes wide, as if she too saw what he saw. "Why did he do it, Kim?" she asked. "I thought he loved the bird?"
He shrugged, but the memory was so strong, so vivid, it was as if he could see it there before him.
The bird lay at the bottom of its cage, its golden eyes dulled, unseeing, its soft neck broken. Emerald wing feathers littered the floor beside the damaged cage, evidence of a struggle, while in a chair nearby sat Will, dull-eyed yet breathing, his hands resting loosely in his lap.
"I don't know," he said, the image slowly fading. But it was untrue. He knew why Will had killed the bird.
She came close, crouching beside him, looking up into his face. There were tears in her eyes now, pain in the lines of her mouth. "I never understood it. Never. Luke, Will, Deio . . . there was no reason for their deaths. No point."
"No," he said, putting his hand over hers comfortingly. "It was awful." He shivered, the pain raw in him, as if it had been yesterday. "You know, I've blanked it out since then. I couldn't live with it. Couldn't face it until now. I feel guilty, you know that, Becky? Guilty that I survived and they didn't."