“Mmm. Sometime soon we must entirely investigate this. But for now—” What had I done wrong? He wasn’t going to dump me, was he? The next installment of relief cascaded as he said, “I think you should come to the party tonight.”
“It’s a good one, baby. Gargantuan apartment, gold-plated everything, and champagne flowing like piss. Up on the top of the city. Montis Heights. Heard of it?”
As we drove on, he asked me what birth sign I was.
“Scorpio.”
“Oh, my. I should have known from your eyes.”
• 2 •
Above, in the city half-dark, the apartment domes were golden or milky indigo or translucent scarlet spaceships, resting on snow-walls softly stained with revolving rainbows.
The park below was lamplighted to a blazing green fire, and birds sang wildly in the trees. (“They never get to sleep,” Sharffe remarked, “think it’s day all the time.”) A racoon had bounded onto the car roof and off, its natural fur shining like—silver.
He hadn’t exaggerated about the apartment. He
There was a roof terrace garden, running all around the dome. A round door undid itself, glass into glass. He looked peculiar in the magenta light inside. No doubt we both did. I know my dress looked cheap in it.
The corridor was tiled in veined black marble. That is, real marble, nothing fake. “From Italy,” he told me, waving at the walls. I’d have hated him if I’d had time, but I hadn’t, and my heart was going for a drum solo in virtuoso rapid tempo. Then we were at the next door, trimmed and paneled in white marble and gold. I think he said the gold was forty carats, and the door was opened, not by automatics, but two sort of butlers in Victorian gear. And my heart was lost in the tumult of quake-rock.
All the rooms were lit in different colors. There were plenty of colors/rooms. The foyer was pink. The next room yellow like wine, and the next red like wine. Then we went through an iceberg-blue conservatory, crowded by plants and by people, as the other rooms had been. Then the biggest room yet was in front of us, coolest gold—in fact, only the best sort of panelectric light, but spilling from crystal fixtures in the domed ceiling and marble walls. Everywhere were champagne fountains; you know, the thing where the drink sprays from the bottle and pours down and over to fill a pyramid of goblets. But here it just kept pouring down endlessly from inexhaustible “bottles,” over the goblets, splashing on, sparkling, into basins of marble so white it ached.
I said there were people everywhere. Sharffe greeted lots of them with cheery intimacy. I noted randomly that not all of them responded.
In the champagne room people were dancing the Chaste, the two-together dance where you keep both your upper bodies plastered on each other by sheer ability or determination, not touching with hands or arms.
I stared at this. Maybe I was a little drunk from the previous wine and liqueurs, or the pine forest, or even the sharp, airborne fizzle of excessive champagne—but I had one of those revelations they say kids get. I watched all these people dancing the Chaste, and suddenly I saw them as if I were an alien from another planet, the kind that’s a giant ant, or an amoeba, something like that. Because I could see how foreign, in turn, it was, to have this shape—a head and neck and torso, two arms, two legs—all that, strange to me, as if I were of quite another kind.
And then, through the alien humans, I glimpsed a silky furl of wheat-gold, and a shiver of shoulders and arms with highlights that were molten. Coppery Sheena was dancing with a human man, keeping their bodies supernaturally adhered, their legs and arms quite free. Her dress now was short, primrose satin.
And Black Chess was there, also dancing in flawless connection with a woman whose eyes were lambent, hypnotized, gazing into his—where a dragon lay, waiting.
And Glaya, in jade spirals, danced with another woman, breast to breast.
“Now, Loren,” said Sharffe. Someone was there, a smiling human alien, with a tray of champagne tinted like strawberries. Obedient, I took one of the tall thin goblets. “Come with me,” said Sharffe.
We walked out across the floor. I thought he was going to dance the Chaste with me. I decided he’d be a rotten dancer.
No, I didn’t think we’d dance.
I knew what it was. I’d known since he said that password to me.
“
Sharffe spoke not even self-consciously. He was actor-exact again, and practiced. He addressed the figure as if he approached a fellow mortal—friendly, if not quite a friend.
And the man, who had not been dancing but standing there by one long window, looking down to the forgotten kingdoms of the world… this man, who wasn’t alien, but much more, since he was an angel—he turned to look at us. His clothes were white as ice. His red hair was longer than it had been earlier. It ran right down his back. He smiled. Calm as silence.
“Hallo, Sharffe,” he said. He looked, then, at me.
He was about half a foot taller. I’m quite tall, you see.
His eyes were like…
I stood, looking up at him.
Sharffe said, pleased to introduce us, “Verlis, this is Loren. Why don’t you two dance awhile? The floor’s great, they tell me. I just have to find somebody—business, always business. Okay? See you, Loren. Soon.”
His eyes—I have to know what his eyes are
Her words flood through me, (Jane’s written paragraphs):
His eyes were like two russet stars. Yes… exactly like stars. And his skin seemed only pale, as if there were an actor’s makeup on it…. It was silver… that flushed into almost natural shadings and colors against the bones, the lips, the nails. But silver. Silver.
He was Silver.
“Would you like to dance with me?” he asked.
My lips parted. No sound came out.
His eyes were not stars. They were suns. I couldn’t look into them; they’d blind me. I couldn’t look away.
“You’re not afraid of me, are you?” he asked softly. Under the racket of the quake-rock, where almost everyone was shouting that wanted to be heard, his adapted voice entered my hearing with the politest, most musical intimacy.
“Yes,” I said. “Shouldn’t I be?”
“Not at all. Really, I’m not that bad a dancer.”
I laughed. It was bitter and rasped my throat. He could see I wasn’t tickled by his irony. That I didn’t want to play that he was only a man.
He said, “I apologize for Sharffe. He should have found out first whether or not you wanted to try this.”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Many reasons. But I’m sure you’re the best judge.”
I said, finding my voice properly at last, tempering it, “And of course,
“Of course.”
I was speaking, so nearly, Jane’s dialogue. Some figment of me said, “Don’t you remember?”
His smile now was quizzical, beautiful. Unfazed. “I have memories, yes.”
