“Yes!” The words were torn from the depths of Flaminio’s soul. “Yes, I do!”
Albino had said that he did not wish to be involved. But apparently he cared enough to notify the protettori, for later that day they came to arrest Szette and take her to the city courts. There, she was duly charged, declared a pauper, issued a living allowance, and released on Flaminio’s recognizance. During the weeks while her trial was pending, he taught her how to speak Roman. She rented a suite of rooms which Flaminio found luxurious, though she clearly did not, and moved them both into it. Daytimes, after work, he showed her all the sights.
At night, they slept apart.
This was a baffling experience for Flaminio, who had never shared quarters with a woman other than his mother on anything but intimate terms. He thought about her constantly when they were apart but in her physical presence, he found it impossible to consider her romantically.
Their conversations, however, were wonderful. Sitting at the kitchen table, Flaminio would ask Szette questions, while she practiced her new language by telling him about the many worlds she had seen.
Achernar, she said, spun so rapidly that it bulged out at the equator and looked like a great blue egg in the skies of Opale. Its companion was a yellow dwarf and when the planet and both stars were all in a line, a holiday was declared in which everyone dressed in green and drank green liqueurs and painted their doors and cities green and poured green dye in their rivers and canals. But such alignments were rare—she had seen only one in all her lifetime.
Snowfall was an ice world, in orbit around a tight cluster of three white dwarfs so dim they were all but indistinguishable from the other stars in a sky that was eternally black. Their mountains had been carved into delicate lacy fantasias, in which were tangled habitats where the air was kept so warm that their citizens wore jewelry and very little else.
The people of Typhonne, a water world whose surface was lashed by almost continuous storms, had so reshaped their bodies that they could no longer be considered human. They built undersea cities in the ocean shallows and when they felt the approach of death would swim into the cold, dark depths of the trenches, to be heard from no more. Their sun was a red dwarf, but not one in a hundred of them knew that fact.
On and on, into the night, Szette’s words flew, like birds over the tiled roofs of the Eternal City. Listening, occasionally correcting her grammar or providing a word she did not know, Flaminio traveled in his imagination from star to star, from Algol to Mira to Zaniah.
The day of Szette’s trial arrived at last. Because Albino was a necessary witness and the city courts could not hold his tremendous bulk, the judges came to him. The bleachers were dismantled to make room for their seven-chaired bench, from which they interviewed first Flaminio, then Albino, and then Szette. The final witness was an engineer-archivist from the Astrovia.
“This has happened before,” the woman said. She was old, scholarly, stylishly dressed. “But not in our lifetimes. Well… in his of course.” She nodded toward Albino and more than one judge smiled. “It is a very rare occurrence and for you to understand it, I must first explain some of the Astrovia’s workings.
“It is an oversimplification to say that the body of a traveler is transformed from matter to energy. It is somewhat closer to the truth to say that the traveler’s body is read, recorded, disassembled, and then transmitted as a signal upon a carrier beam. When the beam reaches—or, rather, reached—its destination, the signal is read, recorded, and then used to recreate the traveler. The recordings are retained against the possibility of an interrupted transmission. In which case, the traveler can simply be sent again. As a kind of insurance, you see.”
The engineer-archivist paused for questions. There being none, she continued. “I have examined our records. Roughly two thousand years ago, a woman identical to the one you see before you came to Earth. She stayed for a year, and then she left. What she thought of our world we do not know. She is, no doubt, long dead. Recently, there was an earth tremor, too small to be noticed by human senses, which seems to have disrupted something in the workings of the Astrovia. It created a duplicate of that woman as she was when she first arrived in Roma and released her onto the streets. This duplicate is the woman whose fate you are now deciding.”
One of the judges leaned forward. “You say this has happened before. How many times?”
“Three that we know of. It is of course possible there were more.”
As the testimony went on, Szette had grown paler and paler. Now she clutched Flaminio’s arm so tightly that he thought her nails would break.
The judges consulted in unhurried whispers. Finally, one said, “Will the woman calling herself Szette stand forth?”
She complied.
“We are agreed that, simply by being yourself—or, more precisely, a simulacrum of yourself—you know a great deal about an ancient era and the attitudes of its people that would be of interest to the historians at the Figlia della Sapienze. You will make yourself available to be interviewed there by credentialed scholars, three days a week. For this you will be paid adequately.”
“Two days,” snapped the lawyer that the Great Albino had hired for Szette. “More than adequately.”
The judges consulted again. “Two,” their spokeswoman conceded. “Adequately.”
The lawyer smiled.
That night, Szette took off her bracelet, which Flaminio had never seen her without, opened her arms to him, and said, “Come.”
He did.
The way that Szette clutched Flaminio as they made love, as if he were a log and she a sailor in danger of drowning, and the unsettling intensity with which she studied his face afterwards, her own expression as unreadable as a moon of ice, told Flaminio that something had changed within her, though he could not have said exactly what.
All that Flaminio knew of Szette was this: That she came from a world called Opale orbiting the stars Achernar A and B. That she loved the darkness of the night sky and the age of Roma’s ruins. That she would not eat meat. That she was very fond of him, but nothing more.
This last hurt Flaminio greatly, for he was completely in love with her.
Flaminio was a light sleeper. In the middle of the night, he heard a noise—a footstep on the landing, perhaps, or a door closing—and his eyes flew open.
Szette was gone.
All the rooms of the apartment were empty and when Flaminio went to look for her on the balcony, she wasn’t there either. He stared up at the battle-scarred moons and they looked down on him with contempt. Then all the sounds of the city at night drew away from him and in that bubble of silence a sizzle of terror ran up his spine. For he knew where Szette had gone.
It was not difficult to catch up with her. Szette did not hurry and Flaminio ran as hard as he could. But when he stood, panting, before her, she held up a hand in warning. The pale blue stones on her bracelet flashed bright.
He could not move.
He could not speak.
“You have been so very kind to me,” Szette said. “I hope you will not hate me too much when you realize why.”
She turned her back on him. With casual grace, she climbed the steps. Like many another before her, she hesitated. Then, with sudden resolution, Szette plunged into the beam.