place.
'Shias Engin,' she nodded. 'I write poems.'
'You're a poet?' he said, delighted. 'I've always been fascinated by poets. I tried writing poems, once.'
'Yes,' she sighed and looked wary. 'I suspect everyone does, and you are…?'
'Cheradenine Zakalwe; I fight wars.'
She smiled. 'I thought there hadn't been a war for three hundred years; aren't you getting a little out of practice?'
'Yeah; boring, isn't it?'
She sat back in the seat, took off her coat. 'From just how far out of town have you come, Mr Zakalwe?'
'Aw heck, you've guessed,' he looked downcast. 'Yeah; I'm an alien. Oh. Thank you.' The drinks arrived; he passed one to her.
'You do look funny,' she said, inspecting him.
' 'Funny'?' he said indignantly.
She shrugged. 'Different.' She drank. 'But not all that different.' She leaned forward on the table. 'Why do you look so similar to us? I know all the outworlders aren't humanoid, but a lot are. How come?'
'Well,' he said, hand at his mouth again, 'It's like this; the…' he belched.'… the dustclouds and stuff in the galaxy are… its food, and its food keeps speaking back to it. That's why there are so many humanoid species; nebulae's last meals repeating on them.'
She grinned. 'That simple, is it?'
He shook his head. 'Na; not at all. Very complicated. But,' he held up one finger. 'I think I know the real reason.'
'Which is?'
'Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?' He knocked the glass on the table. 'Loads of stuff; but much of it alcohol.' He drank from the glass. 'Humanoids are the galaxy's way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.'
'It's all starting to make sense now,' she agreed, nodding her head and looking serious. She looked inquisitively at him. 'So, why are you here? Not come to start a war. I hope.'
'No, I'm on leave; come to get away from them. That's why I chose this place.'
'How long you here for?'
'Till I get bored.'
She smiled at him. 'And how long do you think that will take?'
'Well, he smiled back, 'I don't know.' He put his glass down. She drained hers. He reached out for the button to call the waiter, but her finger was already there.
'My turn,' she said. 'Same again?'
'No,' he said. 'Something quite different, this time, I feel.'
When he tried to tabulate his love, list all the things about her that drew him to her, he found himself starting at the larger facts — her beauty, her attitude to life, her creativity — but as he thought over the day that had just passed, or just watched her, he found individual gestures, single words, certain steps, a single movement of her eyes or a hand starting to claim equal attention. He would give up then, and console himself with something she'd said; that you could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process; not a state. Held still, it withered. He wasn't too sure about all that; he seemed to have found a calm clear serenity in himself he hadn't even known was there, thanks to her.
The fact of her talent — maybe her genius — played a role, too. It added to the extent of his disbelief, this ability to be more than the thing he loved, and to present to the outside world an entirely different aspect. She was what he knew here and now, complete and rich and measureless, and yet when both of them were dead (and he found he could think about his own death again now, without fear), a world at least — many cultures, perhaps — would know her as something utterly dissimilar, a poet; a fabricator of sets of meanings that to him were just words on a page or titles that she sometimes mentioned.
One day, she said, she would write a poem about him, but not yet. He thought what she wanted was for him to tell her the story of his life, but he had already told her he could never do that. He didn't need to confess to her; there was no need. She had already unburdened him, even if he did not know quite how. Memories are interpretations, not truth, she insisted, and rational thought was just another instinctive power.
He felt the slowly healing polarisation of his mind, matching his to hers, the alignment of all his prejudices and conceits to the lodestone of the image she represented for him.
She helped him, and without knowing it. She mended him, reaching back to something so buried he'd thought it inaccessible forever, and drawing its sting. So perhaps it was also that which stunned him; the effect this one person was having on memories so terrible to him that he had long ago resigned himself to them only growing more potent with age. But she just ringed them off, cut them out, parcelled them up and threw them away, and she didn't even realise she was doing it, had no idea of the extent of her influence.
He held her in his arms.
'How old are you?' she'd asked, near dawn on that first night.
'Older and younger than you.'
'Cryptic crap; answer the question.'
He grimaced into the darkness. 'Well… how long do you people live?'
'I don't know. Eighty, ninety years?'
He had to remember the length of the year, here. Close enough. 'Then I'm… about two hundred and twenty; a hundred and ten; and thirty.'
She whistled, moved her head on his shoulder. 'A choice.'
'Sort of. I was born two hundred and twenty years ago, I have lived for a hundred and ten of them, and physically I'm about thirty.'
The laughter was deep in her throat. He felt her breasts sweep across his chest as she swung on top of him. 'I'm fucking a hundred-and-ten year old?' she sounded amused.
He laid his hands on the small of her back, smooth and cool. 'Yeah; great, isn't it? All the benefits of experience without the con —»
She came down kissing him.
He put his head to her shoulder, drew her tighter. She stirred in her sleep, moved too, her arms around him, drawing him to her. He smelled the skin of her shoulder, breathing in the air that had been on her flesh, was scented by her, perfumed by no perfume, carrying her own smell only. He closed his eyes, to concentrate on this sensation. He opened them, drew in her sleeping look again, moved his head to hers, his tongue out flickering under her nose to feel the flow of breath, anxious to touch the thread of her life. The tip of his tongue, and the tiny hollow between her lips and her nose, vexed and caved, as if designed.
Her lips parted, closed again; her lips rubbed against each other, side to side, and her nose wrinkled. He watched these things with a secret delight, as fascinated as a child playing boo with an adult who kept disappearing round the side of a cot.
She slept on. He rested his head again.
That first morning, in the grey dawn, he had lain there while she inspected his body minutely.
'So many scars, Zakalwe,' she said, shaking her head, tracing lines across his chest.
'I keep getting into scraps,' he admitted. 'I could have all these heal completely, but… they're good for… remembering.'
She put her chin on her chest. 'Come on; admit you just like showing them off to the girls.'
'There is that, too.'
'This one looks nasty, if your heart's in the same place as ours… given that everything else seems to be.' She ran her finger round a little puckered mark near one nipple. She felt him tense, and looked up. There was a look in the man's eyes that made her shiver. Suddenly he seemed all the years he'd claimed, and more. She drew herself up, ran her hand through her hair. 'That one still a bit fresh, huh?'
'That's…' he made the effort of trying to smile, and ran his own finger over the tiny dimpled crease on his flesh.'… that's one of the oldest, funnily enough.' The look faded from his eyes.
