She stared out across the plaza, looking confused and troubled, as if gazing into an unfamiliar new world.
Flaminio had seen that look before on the future suicides. They came to the Astrovia during the daylight first, accompanying tours that stopped only briefly on their way to the Colosseum and the Pantheon and the Altair Gate, but later returned alone and at night, like moths compulsively circling in on death and transformation in smaller and more frenzied loops before finally cycling to a full stop at the foot of the Aldebaranian Steps, quivering and helpless as a wren in a cat’s mouth.
That, Flaminio decided, was what must be happening here. The woman had gotten as far as the transmission beam, hesitated, and turned around. As he watched, she raised a hand to her mouth, the pale blue gems on her silver bracelet gleaming. She was very lovely, and he felt terribly sorry for her.
Impulsively, Flaminio took the woman’s arm and said, “You’re with me, babe.”
She looked up at him, startled. Where Flaminio had the ruddy complexion and coarse face of one of Martian terraformer ancestry, the woman had aristocratic features, the brown eyes and high cheekbones and wide nose of antique African blood. He grinned at her as if he had all the carefree confidence in the world, thinking: Come on. You are too beautiful for death. Stay, and rediscover the joy in life.
For a breath as long as all existence, the woman did not react. Then she nodded and smiled.
He led her away.
Back at his room, Flaminio was at a loss as to what to do. He had never brought a woman home for anything other than romantic purposes and, further, to his astonishment, discovered he felt not the least desire to have sex with this one. So he gave her his narrow bed and a cup of herbal tea. He himself lay down on a folded blanket by the door, where she would have to step over him if she tried to return to the Astrovia. They both went to sleep.
In the morning he rose before dawn and made his rounds. Flaminio had a contract with a building seven stories high and though the denizens of the upper floors were poor as poor, everybody needed water. When he got home, he made his guest breakfast.
“Stat grocera?” she asked, holding up a sausage squash. Then, when Flaminio shook his head and spread his hands to indicate incomprehension, she took a little bite and spat it out in disgust. The bread she liked, however, and she made exclamations of surprise and pleasure over the oranges and pomegranolos. The espresso she drank as if it were exactly what she were used to.
Finally, because he could think of nothing else to do, he took her to see the Great Albino.
The Great Albino was being displayed in a cellar off of via Dolorosa. Once he had been able to draw crowds large enough that he was displayed in domes and other spaces where he could stand and stretch out his limbs to their fullest. But that was long ago. Now he crouched on all fours in a room that was barely large enough to accommodate him. There were three rows of wooden bleachers, not entirely filled, from which tourists asked questions, which he courteously answered.
Flaminio was able to visit the Great Albino as often as he liked, because when he was young he had discovered that Albino knew things that no one else did. Thirteen times in a single month he had managed to scrape together a penny so he could pepper the giant with questions. On the last visit, Albino had said, “Let that one in free from now.”
So of course, the first question the young Flaminio had asked on being let in was “Why?”
“Because you don’t ask the same questions as everyone else,” Albino had said. “You make me call up memories I thought I had forgotten.”
Today, however, the tourists were asking all the same dreary questions as usual. “How old are you?” a woman asked.
“I am three thousand eight hundred forty seven years and almost eleven months old,” Albino said gravely.
“No!” the tourist shrieked. “Really?”
“I was constructed so that I would never age, back when humanity had the power to do such things.”
“My tutor-mentor says there are no immortals,” a child said, frowning seriously.
“Like any man, I am prone to accident and misfortune so I am by no means immortal. But I do not age, nor am I susceptible to any known diseases.”
“I hear that and I think you are the very luckiest man in the world,” a man with a strong Russikan accent said. “But then I reflect that there are no women your size, and I think maybe not.”
The audience laughed. Albino waited for the laughter to subside and with a gentle smile said, “Ah, but think how many fewer times I have to go to confession than you do.”
They laughed again.
Flaminio stood, and the woman in white did likewise. “Have you brought your bride-to-be for me to meet, water carrier?” Albino asked. “If so, I am honored.”
“No, I have rather brought you a great puzzle—a woman who speaks a language that I have never heard before, though all the peoples of the worlds course through Roma every day.”
“Does she?” Albino’s great head was by itself taller than the woman was. He slowly lowered it, touching his tremendous brow to the floor before her. “Madam.”
The woman looked amused. “Vuzet gentdom.”
“Graz mairsy, dama.”
Hearing her own language spoken, woman gasped. Then she began talking, endlessly it seemed to Flaminio, gesturing as she did so: at Flaminio, in the direction of the Astrovia, up at the sky. Until finally Albino held up a finger for silence. “Almost, I think she must be mad,” he said. “But then… she speaks a language that before this hour I believed to be dead. So who is to say? Whatever the truth may be, it is not something I believed possible a day ago.”
“What does she say?” one of the audience members asked.
“She says she is not from this planet or any other within the Solar System. She says she comes from the stars.”
“No one has come back from the stars for many centuries,” the man scoffed.
“Yes. And yet here she is.”
The woman’s name was Szette, Albino said. She claimed to come from Opale, the largest of three habitable planets orbiting Achernar. When asked whether she had been contemplating suicide, Szette looked shocked and replied that suicide was a sin, for to kill oneself was to despair of God’s mercy. Then she had asked what planet this was, and when Albino replied “Earth,” adamantly shook her head.
Much later, in Flaminio’s memory, the gist of the conversation, stripped of the torrents of foreign words and the hesitant translation, which was curtailed because the paying customers found it boring but continued at some length after the show was over, was as follows:
“That is not possible. It was Earth I meant to visit. So I studied it beforehand and it is not like this. It is all very different.”
“Perhaps,” Albino said, “you studied a different part of Earth. There is a great variety of circumstance in a planet.”
“No. Earth is a rich world, one of the richest in the galaxy. This place is very poor. It must have been named after Earth so long ago that you have forgotten that the human race was not born here.”
At last, gently, Albino said, “Perhaps. I think, however, that there is a simpler explanation.”
“What explanation? Tell me!”
But Albino only shook his head, as ponderously and stubbornly as an elephant. “I do not wish to get involved in this puzzle. You may go now. However, leave me here with my small friend for a moment, if you would. I have something of a personal nature to say to him.”
Then, when he and Flaminio were alone, Albino said, “Do not become emotionally involved with this Szette. There is no substance to her. She is only a traveler—wealthy, by your standards, but a butterfly who flits from star to star, without purpose or consequence. Do you honestly think that she is worthy of your admiration?”