Songmaster (27 page)

She nodded, trying to get rid of the smile.

“Let’s pretend you think I’m worth having around. Let’s pretend you want to see me tonight. Let’s pretend that you give me your room number, and we go walking in the Zone so that you don’t have to worry about me trying to get you in bed. Let’s pretend you trust me.”

She pretended. It wasn’t hard. “Thirty-two seventeen,” she said. Then he let go of her arm and she went back to her office alone, feeling strangely delighted, the humiliation of the morning’s reprimand from Warvel forgotten. For the first time since she had first come to Earth, she genuinely liked someone. Not a lot, but enough that spending time with him might even be fun. The idea of having fun appealed to her, though she was not altogether sure what fun felt like.

To her surprise, she had only been at her desk for a few minutes when one of her co-workers, a parrot-beaked woman who did actuarial estimates for the population at large, came over to her desk and sat on the edge of it.

“Kyaren,” the woman said.

“Yes?” Kyaren asked, suspicious and prepared openly for hostility, though inwardly she hoped vaguely that this would actually be a friendly overture—she was in the mood for it, now.

“That bastard from Death, Josif.”

“Yes.”

“Just a friendly warning. Don’t bother with him.”

“Why not?”

Parrot-beak’s expression grew darker—she was apparently not used to being questioned when she gave unsolicited advice.

“Because he’s a whore.”

That was so far from her impression of Josif that Kyaren could only look surprised and say, “What?”

“You heard me.”

“But—he didn’t try anything, didn’t offer anything.”

“Not to
you
,” the woman said, rolling her eyes impatiently heavenward. “You’re a
woman
.”

And the woman got up and went to her own desk, leaving Kyaren to punch money into the lives of old people while wondering if it was true, insisting that it made no difference, and knowing that the thought of Josif as a homosexual prostitute completely destroyed her delight at the quarter-hour she had spent with him.

She was tempted not to answer his voice at the door. I’m not here, she thought. Not to you.

But when he spoke a second time, she couldn’t resist getting up from her bed and opening the door. Just to see him and confirm for herself whether it was true or not.

“Hi,” Josif said, grinning.

She did not smile back. “One question. True or false. Are you a homosexual whore?”

His face went ugly, and he didn’t answer for a moment. Then he said, quietly, “You see? You don’t have to be one of the in-group to get the dirt on someone else.”

He hadn’t said no, and her contempt for people who sold themselves became dominant. She started closing the door.

“Wait a minute,” he said.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“You asked two questions.”

She digested that. “All right then.”

“I’m not a whore,” he said. “And the other just guarantees you’re safe from me tonight, doesn’t it?”

The whole thing was ugly. Today had been fun, but now she could not think of him except in a sexual context. She knew about homosexuality, of course; the mental picture she had of the act between men was an ugly one, and now she could not stop herself from picturing him performing the act. It made him ugly. His slenderness, the delicacy of his face, the innocence in his eyes—they became deceptive, repulsive to her now.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just want to be alone.”

“No you don’t,” he said.

“I know what I want.”

“No you don’t.”

“Well, if
I
don’t,
you
certainly don’t.”

“Yes I do.” And he pushed the door open carefully, ducked under her arm, and went inside.

“You can get out,” she said.

“I can,” he agreed amiably, sitting on the edge of her bed, the only large piece of furniture in her room.

She pointedly sat in a chair.

“Kyaren,” he said. “You liked me today.”

“No I didn’t,” she said. And because she knew she was lying, she went on: “I didn’t like you at all. You were pushy and obnoxious and your attention was completely unwelcome.”

“Come now, we’re statisticians, aren’t we?” he said. “Nothing’s complete. Let’s say I was seventy percent obnoxious and you sixty percent didn’t want me around. Well, I’ll be here for only ten percent of the night, so there’s plenty of margin. Concentrate on liking me. I mean, I overlooked the fact that you’re as mean as the imperial fleet. Surely you can overlook the fact that I do perverted things. I won’t do any of them to you.”

“Why are you bothering me like this?”

“Believe me, I’m not trying to be bothersome.”

“Why don’t you leave me alone?”

He looked at her a long time before answering, and then tears came into his eyes and his face went all innocent and vulnerable and he said, quietly, “Because I keep hoping I won’t always be the only human being in this zoo.”

“Just think of me,” she said, “as one of the animals.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because you aren’t.”

The way he looked at her, his eyes swimming with tears, was getting through to her. Is it an act? she wondered. Is this just an incredibly complex line? Then it occurred to her that he was probably not interested in the thing that lines usually led to.

“What do you want?”

Perversely, he took the question wrong. Deliberately wrong, Kyaren knew, and yet exactly right.

“I want,” he said, “to live forever.”

She started to interrupt. “No, I mean—”

But he refused to be interrupted. He spoke louder, and got up from the bed and walked aimlessly around the limited floorspace of the room. “I want to live forever surrounded by the things I love. A million books, and one person. All of humanity in the past, and only a single example of the human race in the present.”

“Only one person?” she asked. “Me?”

“You?” he asked in mock startlement. Then, more subdued, he said, “Why not? For a while at least. One person at a time.”

“All of humanity in the past,” she said. “You like your work in the Office of Death that much?”

He laughed. “History, Kyaren. I’m a historian. I have degrees from three universities. I’ve written theses and dissertations. Feces and defecations,” he amended. “With my specialty, there’s not a chance in the world of my getting a job on this planet. Or a really good job anywhere.”

He walked up to her, knelt beside her, and put his head in her lap. She wanted to shove him away, but found that she could not bring herself to do it. “I love all mankind in the past. I love you in the present.” And he smiled so crazily, reaching up a clawed hand to paw ineffectually at her arm, that she could not stop herself from laughing.

He had won. And she knew it. And he stayed, talking.

He talked about his obsession with history, which began in the library in Seattle, Westamerica, a town on the site of a great ancient city. “I didn’t get along with other children,” he said. “But I got along great with Napoleon Bonaparte. Oliver Cromwell. Douglas MacArthur. Attila the Hun.” The names meant nothing to Kyaren, but they obviously were rich with memories to Josif, “Napoleon is always in dense forest to me. I read about him among trees, huge trees covering ground so moist you could almost swim in it. While Cromwell is always in a little boat on Pungent Bay, in the rain. The library made me pay for the new printout of the book—the ink ran on the copy I had. I dreamed of changing the world. Until I got old enough to realize that it takes more than dreams to make any kind of impression on events. And a reader of books is not a mover of men.”

He was so full of memory, which flooded out of him uncontrollably and yet in marvelously subtle order, that Kyaren also remembered, though she said nothing of it to him. She had been raised amid music, constant songs; but here she found a better song than any she had heard on Tew. His cadences, his melodies and themes and variations were verbal, not musical, but because of that they reached her better, and when at last he finished she felt she had listened to a virtuoso perform. She resisted the temptation to applaud. He would have thought she was being ironic.

Instead she only sighed, and closed her eyes, and remembered her own dreams when she first became a Groan and thought of one day singing before thousands of people who would watch her intently and admire and be moved. The dreams had been stripped from her one by one, until nothing was left of them but a scar that bled often but never reopened. She sighed, and Josif misunderstood.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought it would matter to you.” And he got up to go.

She stopped him, caught his hand and pulled him away from the door, which was closing again because he had not stepped through it.

“Don’t go,” she said.

“I bored you.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “You didn’t bore me. I just don’t know why you told me.”

He laughed softly. “Because you’re the first person in a long time who looked like she might be willing to hear and capable of understanding.”

“Dreams, dreams, dreams,” she said. “You’ve never grown up.”

“Yes I have,” he said, and the pain in his voice was painful to hear.

“Drink?” she asked.

“Water,” he said.

“It’s all I have,” she answered. “So it’s a good thing that’s what you want.”

She came back in with two glasses, and Josif sipped it as reverently as if it had been wine dedicated on some altar. His eyes were grave as he said to her, “I cheated.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I changed the subject.”

“When?” He had been through many subjects that night. She glanced at her wrist. It had been more than two hours.

“Right at the first. I started talking about childhood and dreams and history and my private madnesses. While all you wanted to talk about was perversion.”

She shook her head. “Don’t want to talk about it.”

“I do.”

“No. I’ve enjoyed this. I don’t want it wrecked.”

He drank the rest of the water quickly.

“Kyaren,” he said. “They make it ugly, and it isn’t.”

“I don’t want to know if it’s ugly or not.”

“They call me a whore, and I wasn’t.”

“I believe you. Let’s leave it at that.”

“No, dammit!” he said fiercely. “What do you think I’ve been going through the last couple of hours? You think I go to parties and tell people my life story? I’m attaching to you, Kyaren, like a bloodsucker to a shark.”

“I don’t like the analogy.”

“I’m not a poet. I don’t know what kind of pain you’ve gone through in your life to turn you into what you are, but I like what you are, and I want to be with you for a while, and when I do that I don’t just play around at it. I become ubiquitous. You won’t be able to get rid of me. I’ll be there whenever you turn around. You’ll trip on me getting out of bed in the morning and whenever you feel someone tickling your feet at work it’ll be me, hiding under your desk. You understand? I plan to
stay
here.”

“Why me?” Kyaren asked.

“Do you think I know? A stuck-up Princeton graduate like you?” He hazarded a guess. “Maybe because you listened to me all the way through and didn’t fall asleep.”

“I thought of it a couple of times.”

“I came here as Bant’s lover.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“Bant loved me and I loved Bant and he came here and brought me with him because he didn’t want to be without me and so he got me a job in Death while he was in charge of Vitals. I didn’t want to come here. All I wanted to do was stay near a library and read. For the rest of my life, I think. But Bant came here and I came, and then after a year Bant got bored with me. I get boring sometimes.”

Kyaren decided not to try to be humorous.

“I got boring, and so he didn’t bring me with him when he transferred over to be head of Employment. And he didn’t notify me when he moved to better rooms. But he didn’t take away my job. He was kind enough to let me keep my job.”

And Josif was crying and suddenly Kyaren understood something that nobody had ever bothered to explain to her in all the explanations of homosexuality that she had heard. That when Bant left it was the end of the world for Josif, because when he attached to somebody he didn’t know how to let go.

Yet Kyaren was unsure how to react. Josif was, after all, nearly a stranger. Why had he poured out his heart to her tonight? What did he expect her to do? If he thought she was going to respond by baring her soul to him, he was wrong—Kyaren kept all her memories hidden. She didn’t want to start talking about her childhood in the Songhouse. What could she say? I was miserable for years because I simply didn’t have the ability to measure up to the Songhouse’s minimum standards? She didn’t want pity because of her childhood inabilities. She wanted respect because of her current competence.

Respect didn’t enter into this situation, with the man crying softly, his face pressed into his knees as he sat on the floor leaning against the bed. She could think of only one reason for his emotional outpouring. He obviously didn’t want to seduce her; therefore, he could only be trying for friendship. She knew how painful her isolation had been. If his had been half so bad, no wonder he was grasping at the first person who showed any sign of liking him.

For that matter, she wondered, why don’t
I
feel any desire to take hold of his offer of friendship?

Because she didn’t quite trust him, she realized. She was instantly ashamed of her suspicions. She knelt and then sat beside him, put an arm over his shoulders, tried to comfort him.

Fifteen minutes later he started undressing her. She looked at him in surprise. “I thought—” she said, and he interrupted.

“Statistics,” he said. “Trends. I’m sixty-two percent attracted to men, thirty-one percent attracted to women, and seven percent attracted to sheep. And one hundred percent attracted to you.”

She had been right to mistrust him, the cynical, beaten part of her mind said sneeringly. It had all been a line.