Chaypas stood. Leaving her meal and Supaari behind, she walked outside and then a short way uphill to a vantage point that gave her a view of Galatna Palace, with its twisted marble columns, its finely wrought and silvered gates, its silken awnings, its glazed tile walls gilded and sparkling in the reflections from the paired three- sided fountains sending droplets of precious scented oils like fire sparks into the sunlight.
'In flood, the heart longs for drought,' Chaypas said when she returned, and set the simplest of the flasks before him. Then she held out both her hands to him and said, with a warmth that touched him to his soul,
Hlavin Kitheri was a poet, and it had always seemed especially outrageous to him that his title, Reshtar, had such a grand significant sound to it.
The two men had other things in common. They had been born in the same season, some thirty years earlier. As thirds, they existed in a state of statutory sterility—neither was allowed to marry or have children, legally. Both of them had made more of their lives than anyone could have expected, given their birth positions. And yet, since their honor derived not from inheritance but from accomplishment, they both existed largely outside the bounds of their society.
There the similarities ended. In contrast to Supaari's decidedly middling ancestry, Hlavin Kitheri was the scion of Rakhat's oldest and most noble lineage, and he had once been third in line to succeed as the paramount of Inbrokar. In a reshtar's case, being a third was not a family scandal but the unfortunate consequence of a poorly timed aristocratic birth. Traditionally, noblewomen were bred frequently because their sons died in high numbers. Supaari's parents had no such justification for their lapse. And while men like Supaari often wondered why they'd been born at all, a reshtar's purpose was explicit: it was to exist, as a spare, ready to step into an elder brother's place if he were killed or incapacitated before an heir was born. Reshtari were trained therefore to versatility, prepared equally for war or for governance; either or neither could be their fate.
In the old days, the probability of succession by a reshtar was high. Now, in the enduring peace of the Triple Alliance, most aristocratic thirds simply lived out their lives in pointlessness: softened by servants, dulled by ease, blunted by sterile pleasure.
There was, however, another path open to reshtari, called, appropriately, the Third Way: the way of scholarship. History and literature, chemistry and physics and genetics, both pure and applied, formal architecture and design, poetry and music, all these were the products of aristocratic thirds. Barred—or liberated—from dynasty, the reshtari of Rakhat were freed—or driven—to make sense of their lives in other ways. If a reshtar was careful not to attract a dangerous faction while in exile and did not arouse a routinely paranoid brother's suspicions, he could sometimes produce a sort of intellectual posterity by making some lasting and significant contribution to science or the arts.
Thus, the princely thirds of Rakhat were the volatile elements, the free radicals of Jana'ata high culture, just as bourgeois thirds like Supaari VaGayjur formed the striving, bustling commercial element of Jana'ata society. The crushing restriction of their lives was like the pressure that turns coal to diamond. Most were lost to it, ground to powder; some emerged, brilliant and of great value.
The Reshtar of Galatna Palace, Hlavin Kitheri, was among those for whom constraint had been transforming. He had redeemed his life and given meaning to it in an unprecedented way. Lacking a future, he became a connoisseur of the ephemeral. A singularity, he devoted himself to an appreciation of the unique. He made himself alive to the moment, embracing its transience and, paradoxically, immortalizing it in song. His days were a form of artistry, arising from an aesthetic of evanescence. He brought beauty to vapidity, weight to hollowness, eloquence to emptiness. Hlavin Kitheri's life was a triumph of art over fate.
His earliest poetry was stunning in its originality. In a culture wreathed by perfumes and incense since ancient times, Hlavin Kitheri turned his attention in the beginning to the most reviled of odors. Faced with the ugly, reeking, clamorous city of his exile, he composed songs that captured and exalted the metallic vapors of the marble quarries, the stinking alkaline bite of the red swamps, the smoky sulfurs and strange fermentations and mephitic phantasms emanating from the mines and factories, the seething mixtures of oily and saline compounds transpiring from the dockyards of Gayjur. Scent: capricious and enduring, vanguard of taste, instrument of vigilance, essence of intimacy and recollection—scent was the spirit of the world, Hlavin Kitheri sang. His finest work was a haunting poetry of storms, songs that spoke of the slackening and rarefication and elasticity of such scents, transformed by lightning and rain as the wind danced. These songs were so compelling that his concerts began to be broadcast, the first nonmilitary use of radio in his culture's history.
The acclaim did not dilute the cogence of his poetry. He accepted it as validation and, strengthened, turned his mind and his art to a fearless examination of a reshtar's living death. He survived his own unblinking scrutiny. The poetry that resulted, written when Kitheri was only twenty-six, had what many thought would be his greatest influence on his culture.
Robbed of any possibility of reproduction, empty of any future, sex for a reshtar was reduced to its most irremediable physicality, no more satisfying to the soul than a sneeze or the voiding of a bladder. In youth, Hlavin Kitheri had fallen into the trap that snared so many others of his kind, compensating for utter vacuity with numerically staggering indulgence, hoping to make up in sheer repetition of experience what was missing in depth and meaning. In maturity, he came to despise the harem of sterile courtesans and cross-species partners his brothers provided; Hlavin saw it for what it was: a sop thrown to him to dissipate envy of his elders' fecundity.
And so he turned his aesthetic sensibilities to the experience of orgasm and found the courage to sing of that evanescent moment which, for the fertile, brings the weight of the past to bear on the future, which holds all moments in its embrace, which links ancestry and posterity in the chain of being from which he was barred and exiled. With his poetry, he severed that moment from the stream of genetic history, carried it beyond the body's drive to reproduce and the lineal need for continuity and, focusing the mind and soul on it, discovered in climax a reservoir of piercing erotic beauty no one else in the history of his kind had suspected.
In a culture walled in by tradition and heavy with stability, Hlavin Kitheri had created a new subtlety, a delicacy, a new appreciation of raw experience. What had once been merely obnoxious or ignored was now theater and song: scent's veiled and hidden opera. What had once been dynastic duty or meaningless carnality was resolved and purified, raised to an aesthetic voluptuousness that had never before existed on Rakhat. And, scandalously, the Reshtar of Galatna lured even those who could have bred productively to artistic lives of momentary and sterile but ravishing brilliance, for he had changed the world of those who heard his songs for all time. There arose a generation of poets, the children of his soul, and their songs—sometimes choral, sometimes singular, often the call-and-response of the oldest chants—propagated through space on unseen waves and reached a world they could not imagine, and changed lives there as well.
It was to this man, Hlavin Kitheri, the Reshtar of Galatna Palace, that Supaari VaGayjur now sent, in a strikingly simple crystal flask, seven small kernels of extraordinary fragrance.
Opening the flask, breaking its vacuum, Kitheri was met by a plume of sweetly camphoric enzyme by- products giving off notes of basil and tarragon, by chocolate aromatics, sugar carbonyl and pyrazine compounds carrying the suggestion of vanilla, by hints of nutmeg and celery seed and cumin in the products of dry distillation created during roasting. And, overlaying all, the tenuous odor of volatile short-chain carbons, the saline memorial of an alien ocean: sweat from the fingers of Emilio Sandoz.
A poet with no words to describe organic beauties whose origin he could not possibly suspect, Hlavin Kitheri knew only that he must know more. And, because of this, lives were changed again.
25
NAPLES:
JULY 2060
Standing in the hallway, John Candotti and Edward Behr could hear half of the conversation taking place inside the Father General's office quite clearly. It was not necessary to eavesdrop. It was only necessary not to be
