This virus goes through the membranes of a pessary like a drillworm through bone' – this was the rumour that spread through Borja and Resa more quickly than any plague. But it was not so. The virologists determined that the preparations that prudent people made before coupling were usually sufficient to maim the virus, or at least to stop it from spreading. During the worst part of the storm, when everyone at the Academy was required to submit bits of tissue for examination at the virologists' tower, only four other people were found to be infected. This good news touched almost everyone with an unreasonable joy.
(It is curious how deliverance from disaster will elevate human beings to the highest of spirits, even though their day to day lives remain as dull and arduous as ever.) Danlo, even though he scorned the fear of disease for himself, was nevertheless relieved that none of his friends or colleagues would fall to the memory virus. He had been especially concerned for Tamara, who, after all, had made a career of swiving the lords and masters of the Order. He decided that she should be told the news immediately, and so he braved the snowpacked streets and made the short, frigid journey to her house. He was surprised to find her not at home. Six times over the next three days, he crossed the City into the Pilots' Quarter, but her house remained as dark and empty as an abandoned cave.
'Most likely she's taken shelter at a hotel,' Thomas Rane said to Danlo when they met for their evening remembrancing work. 'Or perhaps she's cloistered in some master's apartment and hasn't wanted to get her feet cold. There's no reason to worry.'
But Danlo did worry, and as the storm continued to blow, his worry deepened to dread. Then, on the 82nd, there was an interlude in sarsara's ferocity; the wind died to a low howl, the snow stopped, and the temperature rose almost to the melting point of mercury. And still Tamara did not return home. On a hundred other planets, of course, Danlo might have signalled her instantly by fone or radio, but this was Neverness and no such devices existed. (That is, they did not exist legally.) Finding a lost or hidden person in a city of such great size was nearly an impossible quest, but Danlo was certain that something terrible had befallen her, and so he set out into the snowy streets on his skis, searching every place he could think to search. First he went to the Hollow Fields to make sure she had not left the City. After the Port Master assured him that no one like Tamara had taken passage on any shuttle or other vessel leaving Neverness, he skied back along the almost abandoned Way to the centre of the City.
Just south of the Street of Embassies, he turned off on a broad sliddery which ran past the grounds of the Courtesans' Conservatory. He stopped before the gates of the Conservatory and implored the gatekeeper to tell her superiors that he requested an audience. Few men, of course, had ever been admitted into the Conservatory. Danlo might have been turned away, but he vowed to wait outside in the cold until the gates were opened. He stood there with his back to the wind as patiently as a hunter crouching over a seal's hole. Seeing that he might freeze to death on the Society's property, the gatekeeper took pity upon him. At last, she let him in. She ushered him into the gatehouse, where a harridan was summoned to talk to him. The harridan – a once-beautiful courtesan wearing embroidered red pyjamas – questioned him about his precise connection to Tamara. When he revealed that theirs was a great love match, possibly the greatest the universe had ever known, she made a sour face as if she had been made to chew on the fruit of a lemon. But then she assured Danlo that the Society was as concerned with Tamara's disappearance as he was. She agreed to help him. She would send messengers to the City's pleasure domes to query courtesans who might know her whereabouts. She would review the list of Tamara's most recent assignations and make discreet inquiries of the Order's lords and masters. 'I promise she'll be found if it's possible,' the harridan said sternly. 'But when she's found, I can't think she'll be allowed to continue a liaison with a pilot who hasn't even taken vows.'
The next place Danlo journeyed in search of Tamara was to her mother's house. Although it was unlikely she would have returned to her family home, he thought that if Tamara were sick or dying, she might desire a reconciliation with her mother. And so he went down into the remotest part of the city, where the Ashtoreth District overlooks the open sea. On huge, tree-lined blocks stood the houses and apartments of the many Ashtoreth families, and Danlo knocked on five doors before he found a matron who directed him to Tamara's mother's house. This was an ugly and soulless mansion just off the Long Glissade. Victoria One Ashtoreth received him in the mansion's outer hallway, which was all heating grates and bare stone, and quite cold, scarcely above zero temperature. In truth, it was more of an airlock than a place for human beings to meet and converse about important matters. But the Worthy Victoria did not invite him into the inner hallway, nor into the house proper. She stood before him in a voluminous fur gown, puffing out steamy breaths of air as she ascertained his mission. Despite the shapelessness of her furs, it was obvious that she was pregnant, as he remembered, with her thirty-third child. She stood tall and aloof, with her hands folded across her swollen belly. Hers was a suspicious, calculating face, plumped out with maternity fat, but still lively and beautiful, in many ways more beautiful than Tamara's. She was not a friendly woman. She looked Danlo up and down with the kind of disdain one usually reserves for autists or itinerant maggids. As a pilot in a city where pilots are elevated to an almost godly status, her dismissive manner might have irked (or amused) him, but he was too desperate to indulge such emotions, and so he merely stood before her scrutiny, waiting for her to deny that she had seen Tamara. This she soon did. In fact, she denied Tamara altogether, patting her belly and saying, This boy will be named Gabriel 33 Ashtoreth, but he'll only be my thirty-second child. My tenth child no longer exists. She's been forgotten. In answer to your question, I must say I don't know anyone named Tamara Ten Ashtoreth. I must say this – do you understand? None of my kinsmen will know her either. You may ask for her in any house on any street, but the woman you seek would never return here. Never.'
Although the Worthy Victoria must have perceived that Danlo was hungry and cold, she offered him neither food nor hot drink. As an Architect in good standing – and he being one of the Unadmitted – she was forbidden to extend this simple courtesy. But she was not a cruel woman; when Danlo opened the door letting in a frigid blast of wind, she offered to send for a sled. As Danlo had no money, she even offered to pay for it. For a matron of a sect renowned for chariness with money, this was an unusual grace. Danlo thanked her but shook his head and bowed, and then went out into the storm. Because he had made a practice of unbelief, he went up and down the street knocking on doors and asking if anyone knew Tamara Ten Ashtoreth. But no one did. She truly had been forgotten, it seemed, banished wilfully from people's memories.
On the 85th of deep winter, snow began falling again and it grew colder. As it happened, in the year 2953, this was also the first day of the Festival of the Broken Dolls. It was a dangerous time for anyone to be out on the streets. Although the Festival is held to memorialize and mourn all artificial life wantonly erased over the centuries, there are always a few aficionados of terror who use this holiday to make human beings mourn their own lives. There are slel neckers who steal upon the unwary at night, who jab needles into necks and fract DNA with terrible little viruses; they do this to 'break' human beings at random so that people might understand the pain of all the dolls broken in all the cybernetic spaces of computers throughout the Civilized Worlds. It was a dangerous time for Danlo to go about the Old City slidderies searching for Tamara, but he had no thought – then – of slel neckers. Late on 85th night, after he had spent many cold and fruitless hours exploring the hospices near the various cemeteries, he returned to his dormitory rooms. There, in the inner hallway standing next to the fireplace, a messenger was waiting for him. A young novice from the Society of Courtesans informed him that Tamara had been found. Tamara was alive and waiting to meet with him. The novice had been sent to escort Danlo back to this meeting at the Courtesans' Conservatory.
Upon hearing this news, Danlo beat the air with his fists and cried out in joy. He did not care that his shouts likely would awaken his entire dormitory. Then he looked at the novice all grim and earnest in her flawless furs. His face fell hard as iron, and he asked the question that he did not want to ask: 'Is she well or ... ill?'
'She's ill,' the novice said. 'I'm sorry.'
'Please tell me ... how ill?'
'I don't know. If you'll come with me, everything will be explained.'
Pausing only to grab a fresh face mask from his room (the mask he had worn all day was stiff and caked with ice) he accompanied the novice across the Academy's deserted grounds to the West Gate. Then they skated up the old gliddery that leads from the Academy straight to the great circle outside the Hofgarten. It was very late, too late and much too cold for anyone to be about. But the street was not wholly empty of people. They passed quite a few festival-goers returning from parties. Despite the cheery voices and puffs of toalache smoke, an air of menace overlay the street. It was impossible to make out the features of the people's faces, covered as they were with masks or hoods. And it was too dark. The flame globes had all been extinguished so that their light would not interfere with the glow of the ice lanterns. Hung from each building were ice lanterns fashioned in the shapes of little houses or temples or other types of dwelling places. They were delicate constructions of sheet ice and light, the faint light of the blue or green or scarlet flames burning inside. These flames were meant to symbolize the life of all artificial organisms, and the street should have been glorious with light. Only, it was snowing and the wind was up, and too many of these lights had been snuffed out. Danlo marvelled at the trouble the people took to renew the lights, night after night, year after year. He thought deep, troubled thoughts, then, and he despaired over the inherent fragility of flame. He was very glad when they turned off the street and passed through the gates of the Courtesans' Conservatory. No matter how ill Tamara might be, he thought, it would be good to smile at her again, to press his lips against her forehead and listen to her rising breath.
'Please follow me,' the novice said as they entered the grounds of the Conservatory. 'And please keep a silence – we're not supposed to talk while the novices are doing their midnight exercises.'
She led him past dark buildings rimed with driven snow. He had no difficulty keeping a silence. He listened to the novice's chattering teeth and the whoosh of his own breath inside his face mask. The wind had died, momentarily, and the Conservatory was oppressive in its silence. He expected to be taken to a hospice or cryologist's station, but the novice surprised him by showing him to the door of the great house at the centre of the Conservatory. 'This is the Mother's house,' she said. 'You're the second man today she's asked inside.'
Without knocking, the novice opened the door and escorted him through various hallways into a gowning room. She took his furs, face mask and his boots, and she stowed them neatly on drying racks. She gave him a pair of knitted house boots to wear over his cold feet. Then she helped him pull a black silk gown over his head, and she told him, 'You may dress in this house as you wish, but you must be gowned if you're to talk with the Mother – she's asked to meet you before you go in to see the Ashtoreth.'
Danlo nodded his head, and he followed the novice into a fire room rich with beautiful furniture and other finely made things. Although the room was much too luxurious to suit him, it was a luxury of good taste and perfect proportion; he thought he had never been in such a lovely room since coming to Neverness. He sat at a marble chess table which had been cleared of chess pieces and set with a tea service. He rubbed his head as he watched the novice pour a fragrant cha tea into his blue cup. She bowed to him, smiled shyly, and she went to inform the Mother that he was prepared for their meeting.
He waited through three cups of tea. To him, this seemed quite a long time, but it was actually not since he gulped his tea like a thirsty wolf, burning his mouth and throat. At last he heard sounds outside the room, and then the door opposite the fireplace opened. Two harridans in red pyjamas stood supporting an old woman between them. It was the Mother, he thought, the famous harridan who was the head of the Society of Courtesans. She wore a gown of black silk over her pyjamas. The whole of the gown, front and back, was covered with crewelwork and other embroidery; the scores of harridans who run the Society had each stitched this exalted fabric with jewels and lovely designs, as a pledge of their devotion to the Mother. The harridans helped the Mother into a soft couch next to Danlo. They made sure that her legs were properly cushioned and elevated. They poured her tea. After plumping out her pillows and arraying her gown so that it spread out like a giant fan, they bowed to Danlo and left him alone with her.
The Mother inclined her head toward Danlo, and she said, 'My name is Helena Turkmanian, but you may call me "Mother", if that pleases you.'
Danlo smiled and he bowed to her. It pleased him indeed to regard her as a most motherly woman, for she seemed aglow with life and tenderness, despite her great age. In truth, she was late into her final old age; she was old beyond old in a way that the women of Danlo's tribe had never been. Her skin hung freely from her bones and smelled sweet as a good leather. She was frailer than any bird, yet she still possessed the strength of a great energy, which seemed to well up inside her and concentrate in her eyes. She had lovely eyes, clear and infinitely kind, though hard as diamonds. Looking at her as she looked at him, he thought that she would be completely generous in her devotion to others – and completely selective of those upon whom she bestowed this rare gift of love. At last, he said to her, 'You are "Mother" to the courtesans, yes?'