“Your wife—?” Ananke murmured.
Tammis looked down. “I can’t explain it to her—why I feel these things. I can’t explain it to anyone I care about. I can’t even explain it to myself.”
Ananke nodded. Understanding and amazement filling his eyes like dawn. “Yes,” he said softly. “It’s like that for me. No one ever understood. There’s no one that I can ever share it with. Kedalion and Reede … they’re all the family I’ve got. But if they ever found out, I’d lose them. … I hate the way things are, the ideas about men, and women, and what makes them different; what they can do and can’t do about it. I hated it on my home world, I thought if I could get away from there, there must be a place, somewhere, where it would be better for me. But I’m still afraid—of what would happen if anybody found out what I really am—”
“—or afraid you’d see they’re really right, and you’re wrong. Or that even if you could have what you thought you wanted, it wouldn’t make you happy, because it’s not the real problem … because there’s no real answer.” Ananke nodded slowly; his face reflecting the impossible sorrow that squeezed Tammis’s own heart. “And so you never…?”
Ananke shook his head, glancing down. He brought his hands back onto the tabletop, and locked them together in front of him, intertwining his fingers.
“Not even—?” With someone who understands … with me?
Ananke looked up again, his eyes gleaming too brightly, full of precarious grief. “No,” he whispered.
Tammis stared at him, watching him struggle to bring his emotions under control. “But why not?” he asked at last, gently.
“Because it’s not really the problem. …” Ananke leaned back against the hard, mirroring wall of the booth, hugging himself with mournful resignation. There was no brightness in his eyes at all, now; no tears, no hope.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Ananke shook his head. “It wouldn’t change anything,” he said.
Tammis nodded, numbly. “Then I guess there’s nothing else to say. I guess I’d better be going.” His hand rose to the sibyl sign hanging against his shirt.
Ananke nodded, and broke his gaze.
“I’m sorry. …” Tammis pushed to his feet, sorry that there was nothing he could do to ease anyone’s pain tonight … anyone’s at all.
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
“Gods, I miss the open air! This place gives me claustrophobia: the mustiness, the ancientness, of it, the smells and the echoes. I keep thinking I’m seeing things out of the corner of my eye. The way it surrounds you… it’s unnatural.”
Gundhalinu pushed the simulator headset up from his eyes, startled out of his reverie as Vhanu dropped into a seat next to him, followed by Kitaro and Akroyalin, one of the Associate Justices. Gundhalinu blinked the main room of the Survey Hall into focus, and then their faces. “Here, NR, try one of these.” He stretched and pulled the headset off, holding it out. “They just arrived. Take a vacation without ever leaving your chair.” He had been enjoying a full-sensory recreation of the desert retreat his father had taken them to back on Kharemough. They had gone to the Springs every autumn in his childhood, because his father believed that the ascetic conditions, the heat and solitude, were good for body and soul.
Gundhalinu had never particularly enjoyed the place, in his youth. He had been surprised to find that spot among the selections on the headset’s menu. But he had discovered that after all these years he had finally come to appreciate his father’s wisdom. Even the illusion of sitting up to his chest in bubbling, mineral-tinted water had energized and relaxed him as utterly as if he had actually been there. He savored the faint reek of copper and sulfur filling his head, the bizarre wind and water-carved undulations of the red sandstone all around him, completely filling his vision. Like the undulations of a shell, glowing with reflected light…
He jerked out of the insidious daydream, the echo of the headset program … of a stolen memory, of a vision of history forcefed to him during his Survey initiation by a process he still did not really comprehend. Had it actually been his own world he had seen then, through some other man’s eyes, in a time before it had even been colonized?… Through the eyes of one of his own ancestors—? Had that image really appeared on this program by chance? Or was someone trying to make him think, remember, realize…? Coincidences happen, damn it! He shook his head, annoyed at the thought; realizing that Vhanu had gone on speaking and he had no idea about what. “Pardon?” he said.
“It must be a good one,” Vhanu said, smiling as he took the headset. “You hate to leave it.”
“Kharemough,” Gundhalinu murmured, returning the smile.
“The only place worth looking at for long,” Akroyalin remarked.
“Carbuncle is no more confined than the Hub cities back home,” Gundhalinu said. “There’s a lot worth seeing and doing here—more things every day. And you can always travel down along the coast, if you want to get out of the city.”
“I tried a day trip. Nothing exists outside Carbuncle but fog and fish and superstition. It’s as if time has stopped on this planet.” Vhanu shook his head. “And all that water … I found it oppressive.”
“Oh, come on,” Kitaro chided. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“ ‘Sense’ and ‘adventure’ do not belong in the same sentence, if you ask me,” Akroyalin said, dismissing her comment with a perfunctory glance. The ideal of the Survey Hall was that outside rank and status were to be left at the door; Gundhalinu had noted that some members lived more easily with those tenets than others. Kitaro’s mouth tightened, but she said nothing more. Akroyalin pushed up out of his seat and moved off across the room. “Well, at least these things will be a welcome addition to our limited recreational options,” Vhanu said, holding up the headset. “Although now that one can actually take a ship to another world—or go home—and return again without losing years, even this isn’t the same anymore.”
“It’ll be years before taking a casual vacation on another world will be as easy as putting on that headset,” Kitaro said dryly. “Especially for poor underpaid wretches like myself. You might as well take even vicarious pleasure while you have it, before everyone else hears about it—”
Vhanu glanced at her, raising his eyebrows. But he shrugged, and put on the headset. Gundhalinu watched him stiffen and then sigh involuntarily, as his chosen vision took hold of him.
Kitaro smiled in satisfaction, and leaned across the low table between them. “I have something for you,” she murmured, her smile falling away. She glanced around them, making certain that they were unobserved, and passed him a data button. He looked at it, as small and featureless as a nut in his hand. It had no governmental seal, no identifying marks on it at all. It might have been blank. He looked at her with sudden eagerness.
She nodded. “The information you wanted. Just make sure you get everything you need from it the first time. It’s a read-once database.”
He glanced down at the thing in his hand, over at Vhanu, lost in another world; back at her, questioning.
“Only you are at a level to be given access to this information,” she said.
He nodded, surprised for the second time. He pushed to his feet, slipping the data button into his pocket. “Tell me, Kitaro… do you know what’s on this?”
She went on smiling, her expression completely unreadable. “I think it only matters that you do, Justice.”
He returned her smile, before he excused himself and went in search of real privacy. He found an empty meditation room and shut himself into it. Settling cross-legged among the pillows, he pushed the button into the remote at his belt. He pressed a contact to his forehead, like a third eye above his other two.