The Sparrow (49 page)

Now, faced with Gayjur itself, the three humans understood that it would be a real job just to get a superficial impression of the city in the six days allotted to this visit. Marc Robichaux began to feel that this was another of the step-by-step increments they were meant to take.

Coming within line of sight to his compound, Supaari radioed Awijan, announcing their arrival, and steered the little powerboat through the towering mass of shipping. He docked with insouciant skill and a yawn and pointed out his compound's gateway with casual pride, trusting its impressive size and the obvious signs of prosperity to tell his visitors that they were dealing with a man of consequence. "Shall you rest now or go out to see the city?" he asked them, knowing full well what they would say. When they said it, he handed them over to his secretary and told them to trust Awijan to escort them properly and to answer their questions. He, Supaari, was going to sleep now and would see them the next day, in the morning at second sunrise.

A
ND SO, WITH
as much preparation as they could have hoped for, Marc Robichaux, Jimmy Quinn and George Edwards plunged into an alien city for the first time. It was all very well to expect to be surprised and confused, but it was sheer bedlam to experience. The scents and noise of Gayjur assaulted them: warehouses filled with the sweet and spicy and grassy fragrances of perfume components; docks and shipyards smelling of wet sail, rotting sea life, sealants and paint, sailors and loaders shouting; cookshops and street stalls and factories turning the air fragrant and stinking by turns with soups and ammonia and frying vegetables and solvents. There was a vast amount of exchange going on, of buying and selling, of business being done in temporary but well-made booths with handsome fittings leaning against beautifully built masonry walls. Vendors hawked unidentifiable objects from pushcarts, simply designed and nicely balanced. Moving through the cramped side streets, they caught glimpses through half-open doors of Runa working with their ears clamped shut amid a deafening clamor of hammers and chisels, drills and electric saws.

The pace was much faster than in Kashan, and there was far more variety of physical type, Marc noticed. The dockworkers were stockier, sturdy and drop-eared; there were others, robed as Supaari had been when they met him, but smallish and subtly different in the face, alert and fine-boned, with a direct and disturbing gaze, and Awijan was one of these. And there were differences in coat: the colors and textures varied, some rough and curling, others silkier and longer than normal in Kashan. Regional variations, Marc thought. Immigrant populations, perhaps, natural in a port city.

It was a weird feeling, walking along in plain view, undeniably strange, and yet no crowds gathered, no children screamed or pointed or hid. They were noticed and commented upon quietly as they passed through the streets, but when Awijan offered to buy them kebablike sticks of roasted vegetables, the vendor simply handed them their food with ordinary courtesy. They might have been buying pretzels in Philadelphia.

As night fell, Awijan led them back to Supaari's compound and took them through an open courtyard, past many small storage buildings, along the edge of an impressive warehouse, and then into the living quarters, spare and plain-walled but hung with brilliant tapestries and cushioned with deep carpets. After years of sleeping in the huddled company of Runa, they were astonished to be given small private rooms and found the circular bedding on raised platforms nestlike and very fine to curl up in. They slept soundly until long past first sunrise.

It was midday when Supaari met them for their first and his only meal. As they reclined against the pillows and cushions along the walls, a long low table was carried in and then paved with a stream of plates and bowls and platters emerging from the kitchen. There were roasted meats, soups, extraordinary things that appeared to be seafood stuffed with pastes of something savory and then formed somehow into loaves and sliced, and fruits they had not seen before and many kinds of vegetables, plain and with sauces and carved cunningly and left whole. There were strong flavors, and delicate and bland and spiced. The service was soft-footed and discreet, and the meal took hours. Awijan sat nibbling at a little distance and observed; Marc noted the next day that the dishes that had pleased no one were gone from the array and those that the guests had most enjoyed were prominently offered again, surrounded by other choices not seen earlier.

That second evening, Awijan took the foreigners farther uptown, and it was on this tour that they began to get a feel for the strangely hybrid layout of the city. There was, they now realized, the skeleton of rational gridwork, a rectilinear system of main streets well paved with good heavy cobbles and a system of canals, dividing the city into segments that linked incoming freight from the countryside or ocean to processing and distribution centers in the city.

The city was not crowded in the way that the teeming ports of Earth were. There were no beggars, no limbless cripples, no emaciated loners picking through garbage or potbellied children tugging at weary despairing parents. There was an increasingly noticeable contrast between the rich and the poor as they moved uphill and the congestion thinned and the buildings became more imposing, but it did not disturb the humans as they might have been disturbed in Rio or Calcutta or Lima or New York. Here, one had the impression that prosperity was attainable, that people were competent and confident and either on their way up or content to be where they were. The makeshift markets and bustle seemed due to a desire to get down to business without a lot of extraneous bother over display. And there was a kind of beauty in that.

They saw no schools but many small shops and little factories and minifoundries in which apprentices absorbed skills by patient accretion. For all the movement and hustle in the streets, there were gates to small yards in which families could be seen at rest, eating under wide overhanging eaves, sheltered from the rain but outside in the evening air. There was an eerie quiet sometimes, when the sounds of soft-booted feet and musical Runa voices and the plashing patter of steady rain were all that could be heard as they passed through districts where the trade, like tailoring and embroidery, involved no metal.

On their third evening, Awijan took them across the bay to the glassmakers' quarter to see the manufacture of spectacular serving pieces like those that graced Supaari's table: clear, heavy, polished glass with streamers of sparkling bronze-colored aventurine ribboning through the bodies of the bowls. Marc had the impression that there were two main aesthetic traditions, one encrusted and heavy with decoration, the other rather spare and clean. Made for Jana'ata and Runa, respectively, he guessed, gazing across the bay to Galatna Palace and the surrounding hillside compounds, with their mosaics and fountains, their high walls crenellated and corbeled, their facades barnacled with ornament. More money than taste, Marc thought uncharitably. Galatna had an overevolved look, like that of classical Chinese architecture, as though it had been worked on too long, layered and added to more than was strictly good for it.

He questioned Awijan about this as they toured the next shop. "Most Jana'ata prefer such things as those," Awijan told him, indicating the highly decorated items, and added in a low confiding voice, "Someone's eyes get tired looking at them." Which confirmed Marc's admiration for Runa chic.

And yet on their final day in the city, Marc was forced to modify his dismissal of Jana'ata art. George and Jimmy had finally made it clear that the one thing they must do without fail was talk to a chemist about fuel for the lander. It took a fair bit of explaining, but Supaari finally caught on to what they were trying to say and Awijan dispatched a runner to a local distiller of perfumes who brought back a thin-faced and somewhat nervous-looking chemist. With graphics of the periodic table of elements to establish some common ground and 3-D displays of fuel components to work from, the chemist was quick to catch on to the problem. To the belly-deep relief of the foreigners, the formula did not seem at all daunting.

But Marc's eyes glazed over during the technical discussion that followed and Supaari, equally bored, asked if perhaps Robichaux would like to see something of Jana'ata art. The suggestion was so casual that Marc, who was beginning to know Supaari, suspected immediately that Supaari had planned it in advance. A two-passenger chair was summoned, and Marc was given a hooded robe that was far too large and helped into the curtained conveyance. Supaari declared that he himself would accompany the Foreigner Marc on this excursion, leaving Awijan behind to assist George and Jimmy with the chemist.

It was full daylight and Marc, peeking through the spaces between the curtains as they were carried uptown, caught glimpses of new areas of the city and got an entirely different impression of the place. Here, Jana'ata were everywhere and conspicuous, "In robes," Supaari murmured, a little sarcastically, "as heavy as their responsibilities, headdresses as lofty as their ideals." The faces were very like the Runa faces Marc was familiar with, but there was a hollow-cheeked and wolfish look to them that left him uneasy. Unlike Supaari, they seemed not lively but frighteningly intent, not friendly but coldly courteous, not humorous but keenly observant, and above all: unapproachable. Everywhere, Runa stepped back, bowed or nodded or turned aside. Marc shrank back into his enclosure, now feeling in his gut some of the reasons behind Supaari's repeated warnings about other Jana'ata, and gave thanks to God that they'd encountered the Runa first.

The commotion of the city receded as they continued uphill and turned toward the mountain south of Gayjur. At length they arrived at a solitary stone building, low-lying and horizontal in plan, galleried and deeply eaved. Supaari told Marc to wait out of sight, and then disappeared for some time. When he returned Supaari leaned in through the curtains and whispered, "You are an elderly Jana'ata lady here to observe the ceremony for your serenity. For this reason, you must be alone. You understand?" Marc lifted his chin and understood very well. Jana'ata were capable of lying, he observed with some amusement. Supaari continued very quietly, "Someone has purchased the exclusive viewing rights. They will clear the courtyard so you may enter the balcony. It is not permitted to speak Ruanja here. Say nothing."

When they were alone except for the Runa chaircarriers, Supaari assisted Marc out of the chair and led him, head down under his hood and dripping oversized Jana'ata draperies like a child playing dress-up, into the building and across a central open area with scented fountains. Holding up his robes, keeping his hands concealed under the long oversleeves, Marc found himself ascending a ramp to a second-level gallery. He was so intent on not tripping over his garment and keeping his alien anatomy under wraps that he hardly glanced at anything around him until they reached a small curtained room, like a box at the opera. Supaari stepped in first and found his position before drawing the front curtains close together. Then he motioned Marc in and closed off the back curtain, leaving the box in semidarkness, indicating with a gesture that it was safe for the foreigner to throw back his hood.

"You shall stand back a little, but watch carefully," Supaari whispered. "It is very beautiful. Like your ‘landscapes.' "

Marc was charmed by this compliment but very worried that they were taking some terrible risk. Before he could say anything, the ceremony began, and since they were already in as deep as he imagined they could get, he decided to trust Supaari's judgment and God's plan.

Moving slightly so he could see through the small gap in the curtain, Marc looked down into a little room of quiet perfection, the gray dressed-stone walls nearly mortarless and shining like polished granite, the floor paved with flags of something veined and figured like pink marble. There was a large, low, black stone bowl, filled with some colorless liquid, and around this knelt six plain-robed Jana'ata. At the knees of each was an array of pottery cups, containing pigment, and behind each, a small brazier in which some kind of incense had been set burning. The scent reached Marc just as the chanting began and although he had been told that these were artists, it all recalled for him the mood and awe of worship.

Then, in time with the telling of some epic poem, leaning toward the bowl in a balletic movement of body and arm, the adepts each dipped their styluslike talons into the pigment pots and touched the surface of the black bowl's contents. For an exquisite moment, colors appeared: blending, spreading, dispersing in a radiant mandala. Again and again, the artists, chanting and dipping and swaying in time, touched the liquid surface with magic and color, the shimmering patterns changing with every hypnotic verse, the incense growing more powerful …

Later, Marc would have no memory of leaving the box or of climbing into the chair again. The swaying rhythmic movement of the carriers merged in his mind with the poetry he had heard, and the ride back to the harbor compound of Supaari VaGayjur was a mixture of half-dreamt visions and floating moments of reality. Slumped against Supaari and staring with dilated eyes inside his fabric cocoon, Marc noted at one point with vague and distant interest that they were going past a public square of some kind. He saw through a space in the curtains three Runa publicly put to death, their throats slit as they knelt with their backs to the Jana'ata executioners, who stood behind them and drew their heavy claws across their victims' throats as cleanly and humanely as kosher butchers.