Cosmocopia (7 page)

Lazorg’s curiosity now switched topics. “So the shape of the introciptors is what distinguishes male and female among your people?”

Putting herself in Lazorg’s position—alone and bereft in a strange land, desperate for information—Crutchsump could pardon his indelicate presumption. Nonetheless, the topic was unwelcome. She felt herself flushing beneath her caul.

“Your ideas are ridiculous right down the line! Male and female introciptors are shaped identically.”

“Then what—?”

“Male and female are variable roles based on size. During mating, whichever introciptor is the smaller will slip inside whichever is the larger. The smaller is considered the male.”

“And at that point?”

“Well, eventually … after, ah, some activity … the male passes his gamete to the female, where it bonds with the matching gamete inside her. The fused gametes grow, and the female eventually gives birth.”

“So an individual can function as male or female, all depending on their partner’s size?”

“Yes.”

“And do individuals exhibit preferences for performing as either sex? Do they search out partners that allow them the desired role? And what of partners with identically sized organs?”

Crutchsump regarded the packed dirt floor of her quarters. “Not so much. Occasionally. That is, attraction to one’s character—”

This was ridiculous! Discussing sex with a being from another world! Crutchsump looked up with a fierce glare.

“Enough of this foolish racy talk! What does it matter to you after all? You’re sexless!”

Lazorg made no reply to this rebuke, and Crutchsump felt she had effectively if harshly put an end to this unproductive line of talk.

“Pay attention now. If you’re to continue living here, we have to make some alterations in this apartment. And that’s going to cost money. We can spend what I have, but we’ll need more for afterwards.”

“I can help. I don’t want to be a burden. Are we going to collect more bones from the Mudflats?”

“No. Almost as soon as I sold Rheaume the ostealist my harvest, all my peers will have learned that the Shulgin Mudflats are no longer haunted, and will have descended on the flats like a flock of minouskine. I doubt there are any shifflets left. But with your help, we can go after bigger prizes.”

Crutchsump did not elaborate, and Lazorg refrained from inquiry. Just as well, since the bone scavenger was a trifle awed at her own nascent ambitions, and might have quailed stating them aloud.

“Let’s go now.”

“Where?”

“To Lustrum’s Domestics.”

Out on busy Weepmark Lane, Crutchsump led the way. Lazorg, she noted, tended to lag, fascinated by the commonplace surroundings, his gaze bouncing around excitedly from one unexceptional street tableau to another. Only Pirkle chivvying at his heels kept the fellow moving.

So intent was Lazorg on the passing parade that he failed to note or be offended by the taunts and giggles and shocked gasps elicited by his empty and flaccid introciptor pouch. But Crutchsump felt hurt and offended on his behalf. If only people knew that a stranger from another Cosmocopian plane walked among them, they’d be more respectful. …

Caul-clad citizens carrying their market baskets. Mothers trundling prancer prams. Shouting children playing raggle taggle. Hawkers touting their wares, licit and illicit. A stray noetic, a brave yet circumspect uniformed member of the civil guardia, an ethical advocate proudly wearing the scarlet and gold midriff wrap of her profession. …

Smells of guttermire, spices and the sea infiltrated the alleys and mews of the district. Adding to the soup of smells, Pirkle met another wurzel and exchanged aromatic scat lozenges.

Without a second look, Crutchsump passed a vendor standing beside a tray of cheap ideations, unimaginative renderings of awkward abstract shapes. The seller seemed too bored with his own wares even to praise them to potential customers.

But even without invitation, Lazorg stopped short beside the display. He picked up a palm-sized sample, all interlocking curves that frustrated intuitive vision rather than allured it.

“What is this? It’s made of the same strange material as the model of the Cosmocopia at Palisander’s.”

“Put that down,” said Crutchsump. “We have no money or time for geegaws.”

Lazorg obeyed, and they moved on.

The decrepit block of conjoined buildings housing Lustrum’s Domestics was composed of buttery cheesestone from the famed Boumalik quarries, legacy of the building’s past fashionable existence. The combined light of Watermilk and Zarafa rendered the distressed facades luminously polychromatic, lending the tawdry street a bit of romance in Crutchsump’s eyes.

The dusty interior of Lustrum’s Domestics held various oddments of furniture and fabrics, most of the goods secondhand. The desultory sales staff adequately mirrored the merchandise.

Savoring this rare consumerist splurge, Crutchsump tracked down the best bargain in relatively clean bed clothes and doss pads. She selected the thickest, cheapest curtains, some rods and fittings. Lazorg did the toting. Once she had paid the toll, Crutchsump found she had just enough scintillas left for a few days’ meals for the two of them.

Out on the street again, Crutchsump announced, “Back home now.”

Burdened with the purchases, Lazorg still managed to dawdle and act the lookyloo.

Down in their basement quarters once again, Crutchsump directed her new partner. The second pallet was established as far across the room from the original as the limited dimensions of the space allowed. Standing on a wobbly crate, Lazorg erected the curtain rod up high down the middle of the room, and hung the sliding drapes on their clattering wooden rings. Retracted, the divider was hardly noticeable. But once extended, the curtains formed a seamless privacy barrier between the two sleeping pads.

Finished, they went out to shop for food.

At the market square, Lazorg became intrigued by the Belkys Tower, the time-humbled remnant of vanished Fort Verveer, which in another age had occupied the market grounds.

“Can we climb it?”

“Certainly.” Crutchsump entrusted their purchases temporarily to the nearest vendor.

A circular staircase with crumbling steps clung to the exterior wall of the Belkys Tower. An iron railing on the outside edge of the steps seemed more rust than rail. Pirkle, perhaps wiser than anyone, declined to follow.

The top of the Tower afforded a small platform with waist-high crenellations. The view extended for miles in all directions, a variegated roofscape of chimneypots, orerries, spires, windsocks, ghost-traps, beetle-browed garret windows and glass-walled penthouses of the distant rich, transected by unmappably twisting streets. Numerous birds of assorted sizes and squawks—juncos, lammergeiers and questrals, among other types—parceled the sky into avian empires.

Lazorg absorbed the view with a numb silence, pivoting slowly to take in all of Sidetrack City. Crutchsump tried to imagine his feelings and thoughts. At last the man turned to the bone scavenger. She saw tears staining his caul. Lazorg’s voice was choked with emotion.

“It’s real. It’s all real.”

Crutchsump understood the enormity of Lazorg’s sudden comprehension, and could sympathize. His transit across the membranes of the segmented Cosmocopian infundibulum constituted a monumental climacteric. But, ever practical, Crutchsump also envisioned trying to guide a big mystically bemused stumblebum down the precarious staircase, and so she sought to cast cold water on his epiphany.

“Oh, yes, it’s all real—as you’ll be able to ascertain as soon as your stomach starts rumbling! Let’s get home and get supper on the table!”

Crutchsump’s stern voice brought Lazorg’s sensibilities back to earth. “Of course. I only meant—Well, never mind.”

On pavement once more, they reclaimed their victuals, hailed Pirkle from his rooting in a midden—the wurzel emerged with garish dotted fruitskins draped across his brow—and headed back to the basement apartment.

Over a meal of oudknoobs and breaded, fried sea-skate, Lazorg spoke with voluntary optimism of his future.

“Back in my previous life, I was a tired, debilitated old man. My artistic impulses were all exhausted. Now I’ve been given youth and enthusiasm. Admittedly, at the price of losing all that was familiar and safe. But earning a living should come easy, with your help and tutelage. And once I’ve gotten my feet under me, I can turn my hand to my art again.”

Crutchsump was intrigued. “What art was that?”

“Painting.”

“What is ‘painting’? Is it a kind of thing like ‘writing’?”

Lazorg’s voice contained a hint of hysteria. “No, don’t tell me—That’s impossible! I can’t believe you don’t know painting!”

Crutchsump yawned broadly. “I’m sure you’ll discover whether your imaginary art form exists here or not. But first we have to earn some scintillas, starting bright and early tomorrow. So I’m going to sleep. I haven’t rested fully for two nights now.”

Lazorg stood up, making an evident effort at self-control. “I’m sorry, Crutchsump. Your unease was my fault. You were very generous to give up your bed for me. But now we have two. Goodnight then.”

Lazorg moved toward the original pallet, with its old rumpled threadbare accoutrements. Crutchsump halted him.

“No, you take the new arrangements. I’m used to that old bed.”

Lazorg hesitated, then said, “Whatever you wish.” He moved to his side of the room, and Crutchsump drew the thick curtains between them.

“Don’t forget, you can remove your caul now. Otherwise you’ll develop scaly itch.”

“I’ll do as you say.”

Alone on her side—even Pirkle had deserted her for the allure of the fresh blankets—Crutchsump lingered a moment with her hand on the curtains. Finally though she retreated to her bed, where she removed her caul.

The bedding smelled faintly, disturbingly, of the Mudflats, from when the dirty monster had first lain there, overburdened with the odor of Lazorg’s cleaner sweat. But despite the fragrances of her doss, sleep came easily, a welcome guest.

But in the middle of the long night, Crutchsump was awakened by sobs from beyond the divider, as Lazorg cried out a name over and over:

“Velina, Velina! Oh, Velina, I’m so sorry, Velina!”

The Chatterant Fields occupied a hundred acres or so outside Sidetrack City to the north. Hauling a small wain thence (borrowed from Rheaume on the promise of imminent profit for the ostealist) through the city streets starting before dawn took Crutchsump and Lazorg many hours. (Pirkle had been forced to remain home, noisily argumentative, for fear of slowing down the enterprise.) But the journey passed pleasantly enough, as Crutchsump answered Lazorg’s many questions about the urban sights and activities they passed.

At last though the easygoing preliminary stage of their workday ended, at the green margins of the place the volvox frequented.

Chatterant Fields hosted a wild monocrop of blue gasplants. At these gasplants, the volvox could oft be found, having dropped from the skies at necessary intervals to sip.

One volvox was in place now.

The volvox was an entity voluminous as the main room of Crutchsump’s apartment. A symmetrically multifaceted geometrical shape, the volvox boasted a bright, slightly damp green skin whose macroscopic cellular structure was quite apparent, each cell with its own nucleus and apparatus of life. Faintly beneath the skin of the otherwise hollow being could be seen its intricate lightweight skeleton—the very prize which Crutchsump had in mind to win, with Lazorg’s help.

Adhering to the trumpet of the gasplant by a suction valve, the volvox now sought to replenish its cargo of lighter-than-air lifting gases. When finished, it would detach and float away above any clouds, to absorb maximum sunlight that powered it.

Crutchsump produced a sharp knife, newly obtained on credit that morning from Grippo, the local dealer in cutlery.

“Once we rip through its skin, it will deflate and die. Then we secure the skeleton for sale!”

Lazorg studied the volvox dubiously. “Why can’t one person do this?”

“The skin is tougher than it looks. It takes some sawing to get through. So: I’m alone, and I jump atop the volvox and start sawing. It panics and lifts my meager weight up into the skies. Even if I succeed in killing it, we both plummet to injury or death. But you’re big and heavy, bigger than anyone else I know. You’ll serve as an anchor while I stab it.”

“Can’t they be rushed by a group?”

“Too skittish. Even the pair of us might alarm it. So proceed delicately!”

“All right. Let’s give it a try.”

Lazorg and Crutchsump began stalking the blimpy creature. Whatever it used for sensory organs were not obvious, so they could not reliably select a “blind” side to focus on.

Sure enough, the volvox detected their approach, and took flight.

The scavengers retreated to the edge of the field.

“Next time I’ll go alone,” said Lazorg. “Then, when I’ve got it, you race in.”

“Agreed!”

Under the shade of a geazel tree, they were just finishing the tasty cold lunch they had packed when a second volvox made its descent.

Lazorg dropped to his belly in the grass that grew around the gasplants, and began to worm toward the green faceted balloon.

Closer, closer—and a bold leap!

Even as she dashed forward, Crutchsump watched Lazorg’s fingers dig into the rubbery skin of the volvox. The creature attempted to lift, but Lazorg’s straining muscles and mass kept it from rising far.

Crutchsump leaped likewise through the air, landing on the upper irregular hemisphere of the volvox. She held on with one hand, while raising high the knife in the other. Down came the blade—and bounced off!

Crutchsump struck again, where skin seemed stretched thinner, over a ridge of bone.

The knife went in! She jagged the sharp side of the blade downward.

The lips of the wound vibrated with the expelled gas, making an uncanny animalistic moan that seemed to carry a freight of pain and despair.

The volvox hit the earth.

“Jump on it!” yelled Crutchsump. “Crush its bones!”

The two scavengers began to kick and mangle the relatively fragile skeleton inside the green skin. Soon the volvox had been reduced to a heap of calcific flinders, all inside a handy squishy sack much more compact than the inflated live creature.