Nest of Worlds (4 page)

Gavein’s apartment was claustrophobic. The walls were white, empty, smooth, and of uneven height; the ceiling showed every sag in the roof; each room, with its narrow, high windows, was like the half of a misshapen skull. Outside, the rows upon rows of small houses differed only in their details: balustrades, porches, the arrangement of the windows.

In Lavath, when individual houses were occasionally built, they were as solid as the concrete bunkers. They made comparison possible, gave a sense of scale, of what was big and what was little. Here almost all the buildings were the same size.

For hours Gavein lay on his inflated mattress, looking at the ceiling or at the walls, where flakes of paint hung and fell. He had had a phone installed (a phone was obligatory), but no one ever called. Ra Mahleiné had still not arrived.

The only events in the day were the meals at Edda’s. They kept him from going crazy. Every day, pasta from the refrigerator was reheated and served. With hot tea poured from a pot, or coffee that had no caffeine. Zef, Edda’s oldest son, would eat his pasta before the others and sit sewing more skulls or skeletons on his black leather jacket. He came back to the table when the pizza was served. (He was definitely adopted: Edda was not over forty.)

The children of Haifan and Gwenda usually ate with everyone else. The younger one, Aladar, often stayed late at school to do additional work. The older one, Tad, was alone today; perhaps that was the reason he sucked at his strands of spaghetti with a quietness unlike him.

Zef was finishing a new skull, which had sequins instead of sockets. The other diners were laboring over their pasta as it turned cold.

“Going somewhere?” Edda asked.

Zef’s red comb had been newly stiffened. It reminded Gavein of a rooster puffed up to crow.

“At Bats they’re showing a movie for three packets. Four whole hours for three packets,” Zef said.

“What’s it called?” Gavein asked, interested. The last pieces of spaghetti were short; you didn’t have to work to twist them around a fork. Finally you could converse.

“The title’s not important. Lola Low’s in it, the former basketball star, and there’s a lot of sex . . .”

“Zef,” cautioned Edda, nodding at Tad.

“And Maslynnaya’s in it too. She’s short, dainty, and completely bald, they say. Wears a wig everywhere,” he continued, unfazed.

“You’re taking a girl to the movie?” Edda asked, darkening.

“Lib unwound and hasn’t been rewound yet.” When Zef spoke of women, he always used jargon.

Gavein disliked the style. Speaking of women as people and not as things was something he had always done, not the result of age. But to give Zef a lecture about this would have been a waste of breath.

The wait between the first and second course was longer today, because Edda had forgotten to take the pizza out of the freezer. The diners got up and went their ways, leaving only Gavein and Haifan at the table.

“So who’s going with you?” Edda asked her son.

“Pete, Beanpole, Hans, and a new guy, Earthworm. He’s black. We’re taking seltzer.”

“For shooting?” Edda continued her interrogation.

“Yeah. We’re shooting from the balcony on the people below, but only after the second hour of the movie. That’s the deal.”

Shooting seltzer was a harmless form of gang warfare. But often it degenerated to the usual black eyes and bloody noses.

“And the people below you?” asked Gavein.

“They bring umbrellas. It was announced. Beanpole did that. That’s the deal.”

“There won’t be any trouble?”

“No trouble. It’s all arranged. Next week we sit below, and they’re on the balcony.”

“Just don’t go roaming the streets at night. There are no deals outside the theater door.”

Of Zef’s gang Gavein knew only Beanpole and Earthworm. They dropped in once, when Gavein was helping in the kitchen.

Beanpole, unusually tall, had a morose, pimply face and long hands. Being a white, he lived in the slum nearby. He took interest in nothing, cared about nothing. Every other sentence, he used his favorite word, “Loose.” His utterances all seemed the same—but there were worse faults than that.

Earthworm was new in Zef’s gang. They had accepted him because he was black. As tall as Beanpole, but frail, his limbs like sticks, he reminded Gavein of a clothes hanger.

“Something here I don’t get,” said Zef, breaking the silence. He turned to Gavein but was watching Haifan out of the corner of his eye. “Your wife, Dave, is a couple of years younger than you. But everyone moves from Lavath, Davabel, or Ayrrah when they’re exactly thirty-five or seventy, never any other way. Unless they make it to a hundred and five, a geront. So if you’re thirty-five now, how did she come with you?”

“I came by plane, she by ship,” replied Gavein. He understood that Zef’s intention was to draw Haifan into the conversation. Haifan, an astronomy teacher at an elite middle school for blacks only, was unaware that this Mohawked, ridiculous-looking kid was studying for bachelor’s degree orals in physics. Zef was setting a trap for the supercilious pedagogue.

The fish took the bait. Haifan put down his paper and began to hold forth in the confident, resonant voice of wisdom: “That is simply explained. First, the speed of time is dependent on the altitude above sea level. The higher you go, the more slowly time passes. Here on the ground in Davabel, an hour elapses on your watch, but at a great height, it’s a minute, and higher still, it’s a second, and higher still, even less.”

“How high was your plane?” asked Zef.

“The pilot said we were at the altitude of seconds,” said Gavein.

“Well there you are,” Haifan continued. If two people wish to depart for a Land at the same time but one of them is not yet thirty-five or seventy, the younger of the two travels by ship in real time—that is to say, in time as it passes on the ground—while the older individual takes a plane. The route and the height of the flight are chosen so that at the end of the voyage, reaching Davabel, Ayrrah, or Lavath, the two persons have exactly the same age, which is the End of Youth or the Beginning of Old Age or, for a lucky few, the Attainment of Venerability. Sometimes it is necessary for a person to go by both ship and plane, because there are limited routes and possibly several stops along the way. Seaplanes are used by those who make stops. Did you take a seaplane, Gavein?”

“No, but I saw one flying past us.”

“How are we able to see the stars, if time on them practically stands still?” asked Zef, all innocence.

“That’s absurd,” Haifan replied with a superior smile. “The star doesn’t know that it functions in retarded time, and it burns normally. The light reaches us, and we see it.”

“I don’t know, Haifan. Once I saw a line of cars on 5300 Avenue, in a high-speed lane, you know? Close together, at a speed of seventy. Then there was this sign that they could go to a hundred, and they all accelerated at the sign. And you know what happened? The line spread out.”

“I don’t get your point,” Haifan huffed. But he was too intelligent not to get it. He began to sweat, and his voice grew tight.

“Let me spell it out.” Zef knew he had his opponent by the throat now. “Suppose a square centimeter of star emits a million photons a second. I pulled that number out of a hat—I’m sure you know the right number—but the important thing is this: we see that the star is burning because many photons from it reach us. A second for the star, however, is a million years for us. And a million photons over a million years, that means a photon a year, which is nothing, complete darkness. The star is invisible! And yet, Haifan, you see the star when you look up, am I right?” Zef blew a slow gray bubble from his chewing gum.

Haifan muttered that of course the stars shone. He said that he had to go and wouldn’t be back until the pizza. He even left a few pages of his newspaper. Zef’s victory was crushing. The red comb above his head seemed to glow redder.

“Do you often needle him like that?” asked Gavein, amused.

Zef shook his head and drew in the gray bubble.

“Today was the first time,” he said seriously. “But I’ll do it regularly now. It was because of that bastard that I had to repeat a course. They assigned him to our school once. He doesn’t remember me.”

“And what is the truth, about the stars?”

“No one knows the truth. But he didn’t know that no one knows. In general, people think that space is like a piece of cheese with holes. In the holes, time flows quickly, that is, normally. It’s in the holes that you have the stars and planets. But where you have nothing . . . in the cheese itself, so to speak, time slows. That’s how we can see the stars.”

“So you’re saying that the speed of time depends on how far you are from a mass?” Gavein asked.

Zef nodded, blowing another bubble.

“But in that case something should happen in the regions where time slows down, in the cheese. Take runners at the end of a race, who start walking as they reach the tape. Suddenly there seem to be more of them. They’re packed closer together than when they were running . . .”

“Bunch of brains in Lavath,” Zef grumbled. Clearly he liked to preen no less than Haifan. “You’re right, Dave. Where time slows down, the photons pack together and it’s brighter. What was it like for you at the altitude of minutes, or higher?”

“It was bright, very bright, until the canvas covering us glowed red. Then we had to put on special glasses, so our eyes wouldn’t be damaged.”

“Those sons of bitches put people in canvas planes.” Zef spat. “You must have got one hell of a dose.”

“Dose of what?”

“X-rays, man! It’s not just light out there. Cosmic rays . . . microwaves, the whole bit. Your balls are as good as hard-boiled, Dave.”

“During the flight, they had us lock our hips in these metal boxes. For shielding, I’m sure. The metal was very thick.”

Zef gave Dave a look. “Around your hips, your pelvis, you say? Yeah, those transport guys know what they’re doing. But even so you probably became anemic. Hair fall out?”

“My hair? That started falling out when I was in the cradle. I have no idea where it keeps coming from, on my head . . . Since I’m getting stupider as I get older, maybe the gray matter oozes out through the sweat glands and evaporates, and everybody thinks it’s hair.” Gavein found himself talking like Zef. He was taken with the style, as much as the Tonescus detested it.

Zef picked his nose and regarded his finger.

“My gray matter must be leaving me through the nose, I have so much of this stuff,” he said.

Gavein grimaced. Then he slapped his forehead. “Wait. That’s why the plane flies at night, and why it goes so low during the day. It would burn up otherwise! From the sun.”

“Not bad . . . not bad,” said Zef. “Chop on.”

“Chop on?”

“With your brain. My expression signifies encouragement that you proceed mentally,” Zef translated.

“The planes can’t go too high, or they’ll explode. For that reason time compensation can’t equal more than five years.”

“Wow,” Zef said with admiration. He got up, went to the door, and stuck the ball of snot to the frame. “If Mom didn’t find this in the usual place, she’d pack me off to the psychiatrist for sure. I have to keep up my image of rebel,” he explained. “And they didn’t tell you why the planes aren’t metal?”

“They said that formerly the fuel would explode from the heat. Jet engines now are used only for takeoff. There’s no fuel left, at least not the high-octane stuff, and during the flight the propellers take over. Someone told me they run on steam, but that’s hard to believe.”

Gavein fell silent, puzzling over Zef’s persona of defiant youth, and also over the photons.

“Zef,” he said at last. “You know what this means? The sun must shine in a completely different place from the one in which we see it. Because the light doesn’t arrive right away. Maybe when it’s bright for us, it’s really night in the sky, and vice versa. Do you think?”

“I’ll go further.” Zef was digging in his nose for more of his brain. “Some guys think that the delay might be so great that Earth is wrapped in a bright spiral of day and a dark spiral of night, like two ribbons interwoven. Assuming, of course, that the planet doesn’t move.”

The Tonescus returned, but not all of them: just Gwenda; Haifan, with his newspaper; and Tad. The older Tonescu boy, unusually quiet, sat with his eyes on the tablecloth. The younger one still had not put in an appearance.

“You were right, Haifan. The stars can be seen because, although each one shines in slower time, it is unaware that its time is slower,” said Zef, gloomy. “I’ve thought it over. You win.” He emphasized “win” with a theatrical lowering of his head.

Haifan didn’t answer but sat more comfortably in his chair and spread his newspaper wider.

Zef sent a mischievous wink to Gavein, who was inspecting his pizza. The frozen pizzas came on cardboard trays that stuck to the food. The cardboard could be removed more easily after heating, but bits of it still ended up on one’s plate or even between one’s teeth.

“Awful! The things people do!” Haifan exclaimed. “Listen to this. ‘Today, in the afternoon, a group of children poured gasoline over an eight-year-old boy and set fire to him,’” he read aloud. “‘The boy ran into the road, calling for help. Eyewitnesses say he resembled a torch. It took them a minute to catch him, roll him over, and smother the flames. The child is in critical condition, his name still unknown. The perpetrators fled. We ask all parents in the district to report to the hospital at 5650 Avenue and 5430 Street.’ But that’s near us . . . !”

Gwenda looked at her son with suspicion.

“Tad, if you had a hand in this,” she said. She turned to her husband. “He’s hiding something, I know it.” To her son again: “Look me in the eye!”

The boy started crying. “I didn’t do it. I only held him down.” Tad sniveled. “Then I was sorry, because Aladar screamed so much.” He bawled.

“Aladar!” Gwenda cried.

She tried to strike her son, but Haifan restrained her. Then everything happened very quickly: she fainted; Edda revived her; Leo went to get the truck from the garage, because neither Haifan nor his wife were in any condition to drive; then Haifan began to beat his son but stopped.

Leo, Haifan, Gwenda, and Tad left for the hospital, and suddenly it was very still.

“What was Aladar’s Name?” Gavein asked, for the first time in his life asking what someone’s Significant Name was.

“
Flomir
,” said Edda.

Flomir
meant “from fire.” It was a Name of Element.

“You’ll miss your movie, Zef,” Gavein said. “Your Maslynnaya and Lola Low.”

“Screw them both,” muttered Zef. “Both at the same time . . .”

Silence.

“And you, Dave, is your Name by any chance
Aeriel
?” Zef asked unexpectedly.

Gavein started. “That’s right,” he said.

“And how long were you at the altitude of seconds?”

“The pilot told us it was about twenty-seven hours.”

“You should get yourself checked, man, for leukemia.”

It was obvious now to Gavein why he had seen so many more planes at high altitude than low. They were simply packed together, like photons arriving from the stars.