of questions.
“One thousand and twenty-five bills, dear sir,” she said from beside him.
He looked down quickly. “Tarnilee!”
Her mouth opened slowly. “How do you know my name?”
“I am Tohm.”
“Tohm who?” she asked, suddenly impatient.
“Your Tohm. Your man.”
She looked back at him, her eyes wide. “You are not Tohm. Tohm is dark. You are fair.”
“That's true. But I am Tohm. I was killed after the Romaghins kidnapped us — rather, my body was killed. But they saved my mind, and I have a new body now.”
“You speak nonsense. One thousand and twenty-five bills, please.”
He took he by the shoulder. “Look, Tarnilee, I—”
“Take your hands off me, please, dear sir.”
Hesitantly, he removed his hand. “Look, I can prove it. Do you remember the red-leafed trees, the one above our hut. We lived and loved on a grass mat which you always said was filled with patterns that resembled people, faces. We were to be married in a month.”
She looked at him a moment. “That I said, and that we were. Where did you learn all of this?”
“I am Tohm!”
The bidding was getting heated on the latest girl. Numbers were called out to cheering on both sides while Rashinghi urged them higher and higher. Tohm talked louder. “Do you remember the sea and how it talked? I used to listen to the sea, converse with it while we sat on the beach. You said I was insane but that you loved me anyway.”
She twisted the money bag anxiously in her small hands. “So what. So what… what if you are Tohm?”
“So what? You can come with me. That's so what. I've crossed Hell a dozen times getting here.”
There was a sudden gleam in her eye, and her voice changed subtly. “But how are you sure I am Tarnilee?”
“But you just said—”
“My name is now Rashinghiana.”
“You have assumed the feminized version of Rashinghi?”
“My name is Rashinghiana.”
He felt himself swaying. “Tarnilee, you're not married to that… to that—”
“My name is not Tarnilee,” she said firmly.
“But why him?”
“He is good to me.”
“I was better.”
She frowned. “You never showed me the wonders of the universe, the foods, the wines, the places and the things.”
He sighed, wiped perspiration from his upper lip. “Look, Tarnilee. I just discovered these things myself. I never knew of them.
“My name is not Tarnilee. Besides, if it were, and you were Tohm, you are nothing but a peasant. You could not fill the desires these new things have raised in me; you could not feed the hungers.”
His mind was aching with the new order, the clearer understanding of human nature that was suddenly being thrust upon him. This was an old scene — thousands of years old, but he did not know that. The sun seemed like a huge candle whose melting wax was dropping upon everything, hazing over the buildings and the people, seeping through his ears and encasing his brain. He clutched her arm, dug his nails in. “Look, Tarni— okay, Rashinghiana. In a few days, you're going to be stuck with a smaller, different universe. I don't understand how, but I know the Muties are going to—”
“Muties?” she said. “You associate with them? You're a pervert?”
He dug his nails deeper, hoping that, beneath the toga, blood was seeping. “Listen—”
“Help!” she shouted. “A pervert. Mutie-lover!”
The crowd turned. Several rich bidders surged toward him. Clutching her even tighter, he brought the gas pistol into his free hand. M. Glavoirei was the first to go down, his leg a shattered hunk of meat worse than anything one might see in the open-air meat markets.
“You're coming with me,” he said, dropping her arm and wrapping his own burly limb about her slim waist.
“No!”
A hand touched his neck. He ducked, swung, and blasted out the man's intestines, sending him down, kicking for a moment before he lay still. The others stopped their advance, eyed him warily.
“Let me down, you peasant!” she screamed.
The wax of the sun was hotter. The first layers of it were beginning to solidify over him. If he didn't move quickly, he knew he could never move at all. He fiddled with the flybelt, lifted, turned toward the center of town and the hutch. Then the small, whirring sphere that had dislodged itself from the muzzle of a policeman's rifle burst beneath him.
Sweet perfume…
Blue mists engulfed him, swallowed him, dragging him through denser and denser fogs into total blackness…
Into death?
XII
No.
Not death.
Although, he reflected, it might as well have been. It would be. He was penned on the third floor of the Capital City Prison in a maxi-security cell. It was less than a yard by a yard. He could sit, and that was all. He sat looking out the window, through the massive steel bars at the gallows they were erecting in the courtyard. His gallows. For his neck.
Trial was certainly speedy here; one could not complain about judicial procrastination. He had been arrested, tried, and sentenced to death within three hours of his capture. The account would be all over the city by now— in the papes, on teevee. In the morning, just about when his twenty-four hours would be up, a crowd would gather in the courtyard to watch the floor jerk out from under him and to hear his neck snap in one, brittle, final comment.
Swift.
Clean.
Nearly painless.
And, strangely enough, if he could have known the answers to a few questions, he would not have minded. After all, what had kept him moving was dead: Tarnilee's love and his love for her. Hers had expired naturally; his had been murdered back there in the market. She had shot it full of ugly holes. The world was not goody-good. Mayna had been right. But he still wasn't ready to die. Curiosity gave him the willpower to live. Ever since that little vial of dope had stopped dripping and his brain had come awake, he had been plagued with so many mysterious concepts, ideas, people, that he could not sort them out anymore. Once, he would have prayed, but he could not now. He thought of Seer babbling, horrified, mummified, a vegetable cowering before some unknown terror that faced everyone— would face Tohm himself — when he died. That was another reason he didn't want to die. What lay on the other side of the veil, across the gauze between life and death?
A few answers. That's all he wanted now. What was the Fringe? What were shell molecules? Would the Muties succeed or fail? What, exactly, were they trying to do? Were they demons or angels? And Mayna. If only he could understand and solicit a smile from Mayna, perhaps dying would not be as difficult to face. But strangling to death out there without any answers was not a pleasant future.
