Like most of the modularities that were popular in this decadent age it was of an antiquarian nature: a resurrection of one of the many vanished forms through which the human species had passed in the course of its long voyage through time. The original Serenities, a long-vanished human species that had been dominant in the peaceful and cultivated period known as the Fifth Mandala, had been oval in form, tender and vulnerable in texture: tapering custardy masses of taut cream-hued flesh equipped with slender supporting limbs and ornamented along their upper surfaces with a row of unblinking violet eyes of the keenest penetration. The motions of a Serenity were heartbreakingly subtle, a kind of vagrant drifting movement that had the quality of a highly formal antique dance. All this had been quite accurately reproduced in the modern recreation.
So neither Prime nor Kaivilda would appear to be in any way human to you, nor did either one look remotely like the other. But why should they? For one thing, there’s been all that time for evolutionary change to take place (not to mention a lot of deliberate genetic fiddling-around for cosmetic purposes) in the thousands of centuries that separate their time from ours. In the Ninth Mandala—when the various races of humanity were spread across billions of worlds and millions of light-years, and just about anything was technologically possible—you could, as we’ve already noted, take on any physical form you cared to; or none at all, for that matter. (The disembodied form—for those who liked to travel light—was still a minority taste, but not really rare.) No reasons existed for everyone to look like everyone else. Everybody understood this. Nobody was troubled by it.
To you, then, Kaivilda would seem like a gigantic boiled egg, peeled of its shell, adorned with a row of blue eyes and a slit of a mouth and a few other external features like arms and a pair of spindly legs.
It would be hard for you to find much physical appeal in that, I suspect. No matter how kinky you like to think you are, Kaivilda just wouldn’t be your type.
But you aren’t Hanosz Prime of Prime, and this isn’t the 1111th Encompassment of the Ninth Mandala. Your tastes aren’t relevant to what turns Prime on, and vice versa. So maybe you’d be better off to forget what I’ve just told you about what she looks like. If you’re a man, you’ll have a lot simpler time of it if you try to see her as your own ideal of present-day feminine beauty, whatever that may be—a tall willowy blonde or a petite brunette or a voluptuous redhead, whatever kind of woman turns you on the most. And if you’re female you may find that it will also help to forget all I said about Hanosz Prime’s oppressive bulk and mass, the sharp bony quills jutting from his upper back, the other lethal-looking spurs and crests of bone sticking out elsewhere on his body, and those fleshy yellow frills dangling from his neck. Think of him as a lanky, good-looking young guy of about twenty-five who went to a nice Ivy League school, wears expensive sweaters, and drives a neat little Mercedes-Benz sports car. I suppose you may argue that that would be cheating. Okay: go ahead, then, and get yourself into a proper Ninth Mandala mind-set. Hanosz Prime looks like a cross between a compact two-legged dinosaur and a small battle-tank, and Kaivilda like a giant boiled egg mounted on a pair of very spindly legs. And each one thinks right away that the other is tremendously sexy, as that concept is understood in Ninth Mandala times, though I assure you that sex as we understand it is definitely not a custom of the era. There you are. Cope with it any way you can.)
As Prime stood frozen and gaping with delight and awe, Kaivilda moved smoothly to his side and said, speaking softly with her fingertips, “Welcome to Kalahide Keep, Hanosz Prime.”
“How beautiful it is to be here,” said Hanosz Prime. It was an effort for him to frame words at first, but he managed. “What a marvelous house. And what a glorious planet this is. How delighted I am to look upon its ancient hills and valleys.”
(Meaning:
And now he comprehends the thing that he has come here to learn. The Earth will be destroyed, before very long on the cosmic scale of things, of that there is no doubt. Its immortal folk will surely perish with it. The galaxies themselves will crumble, sooner or later, although more likely later than sooner. But none of that matters today, to these happy people of Old Earth, for today is today, the finest day that ever was, and who, on a day like this, could fret about the morrow? Hanosz Prime understands that fully, now, for he is here with Kaivilda of Old Earth, and even if the universe were to end tomorrow, that makes no difference to him today. Let the future look after itself, he tells himself. We all live in the present, do we not, and isn’t the present a glorious place?
“Come,” Kaivilda said. She took him by one of his bony wrist-spurs and gently drew him into the Keep.
