The House of Compassionate Sharers
by Michael Bishop

And he was there, and it was not far enough, not yet, for the earth hung overhead like a rotten fruit, blue with mold, crawling, wrinkling, purulent and alive.

—Damon Knight, “Masks”

In the Port Iranani Galenshall I awoke in the room Diderits liked to call the “Black Pavilion.” I was an engine, a system, a series of myoelectric and neuromechanical components, and The Accident responsible for this clean and enamel-hard enfleshing lay two full D-years in the past. This morning was an anniversary of sorts. I ought by now to have adjusted. And I had. I had reached an absolute accommodation with myself. Narcissistic, one could say. And that was the trouble.

“Dorian? Dorian Lorca?”

The voice belonged to KommGalen Diderits, wet and breathy even though it came from a small metal speaker to which the sable curtains of the dome were attached. I stared up into the ring of curtains.

“Dorian, it’s Target Day. Will you answer me, please?”

“I’m here, my galen. Where else would I be?” I stood up, listening to the almost-musical ratcheting that I make when I move, a sound like the concatenation of tiny bells or the purring of a stope-car. The sound is conveyed through the tempered porcelain plates, metal vertebrae, and osteoid polymers holding me together, and no one else can hear it.

“Rumer’s here, Dorian. Are you ready for her to come in?”

“If I agreed, I suppose I’m ready.”

“Dammit, Dorian, don’t feel you’re bound by honor to see her! We’ve spent the last several brace-weeks preparing you for a resumption of normal human contact.” Diderits began to enumerate: “Chameleodrene treatments… hologramic substitution… stimulus-response therapy… You ought to want Rumer to come in to you, Dorian.”

Ought. My brain was—is—my own, but the body Diderits and the other kommgalens had given me had “instincts“ and ”tropisms“ peculiar to itself, ones whose templates had a mechanical rather than a biological origin. What I ought to feel, in human terms, and what I in fact felt, as the inhabitant of a total prosthesis, were as dissimilar as blood and oil.

“Do you want her to come in, Dorian?”

“All right. I do.” And I did. After all the biochemical and psychiatric preparation, I wanted to see what my reaction would be. Still sluggish from some drug, I had no exact idea how Rumer’s presence would affect me.

At a parting of the pavilion’s draperies, only two or three meters from my couch, appeared Rumer Montieth, my wife. Her garment of overlapping latex scales, glossy black in color, was a hauberk designed to reveal only her hands, face, and hair. The way Rumer was dressed was one of Diderits’s deceits, or “preparations”: I was supposed to see my wife as little different from myself, a creature as intricately assembled and synapsed as the engine I had become. But the hands, the face, the hair—nothing could disguise their unaugmented humanity, and revulsion swept over me like a tide.

“Dorian?” And her voice—wet, breath-driven, expelled between parted lips…

I turned away from her. “No,” I told the speaker overhead. “It hasn’t worked, my galen. Every part of me cries out against this.”

Diderits said nothing. Was he still out there? Or was he trying to give Rumer and me a privacy I didn’t want?

“Disassemble me,” I urged him. “Link me to the control systems of a delta-state vessel and let me go out from Diroste for good. You don’t want a zombot among you, Diderits—an unhappy anproz. Damn you all, you’re torturing me!”

“And you, us,” Rumer said quietly. I faced her. “As you’re very aware, Dorian, as you’re very aware… Take my hand.”

“No.” I didn’t shrink away; I merely refused.

“Here. Take it.”

Fighting my own disgust, I seized her hand, twisted it over, showed her its back. “Look.”

“I see it, Dor.” I was hurting her.

“Surfaces, that’s all you see. Look at this growth, this wen.” I pinched the growth. “Do you see that, Rumer? That’s sebum, fatty matter. And the smell, if only you could—”

She drew back, and I tried to quell a mental nausea almost as profound as my regret… To go out from Diroste seemed to be the only answer. Around me I wanted machinery—thrumming, inorganic machinery—and the sterile, actinic emptiness of outer space. I wanted to be the probeship Dorian Lorca. It hardly seemed a step down from my position as “prince consort” to the Governor of Diroste.

“Let me out,” Rumer commanded the head of the Port Iranani Galenshall, and Diderits released her from the “Black Pavilion.”

Then I was alone again in one of the few private chambers of a surgical complex given over to adapting Civi Korps personnel to our leprotic little planet’s fume-filled mine shafts. The Galenshall was also devoted to patching up these civkis after their implanted respirators had atrophied, almost beyond saving, the muscles of their chests and lungs.

Including administrative personnel, Kommfleet officials, and the Civi Korps laborers in the mines, in the year I’m writing of there were over a half million people on Diroste. Diderits was responsible for the health of all of them not assigned to the outlying territories. Had I not been the husband of Diroste’s first governor, he might well have let me die along with the seventeen “expendables” on tour with me in the Fetneh District when the roof of the Haft Paykar diggings fell in on us. Rumer, however, made Diderits’s duty clear to him, and I am as I am because the resources were at hand in Port Iranani and Diderits saw fit to obey his Governor.

Alone in my pavilion, I lifted a hand to my face and heard a caroling of minute copper bells…

Nearly a month later I observed Rumer, Diderits, and a stranger by closed-circuit television as they sat in one of the Galenshall’s wide conference rooms. The stranger was a woman, bald but for a scalplock, who wore gold silk pantaloons that gave her the appearance of a clown, and a corrugated green jacket that somehow reversed this impression. Even on my monitor I could see the thick sunlight pouring into their room.

“This is Wardress Kefa,” Rumer informed me.

I greeted her through a microphone and tested the cosmetic work of Diderits’s associates by trying to smile for her.

“She’s from Earth, Dor, and she’s here because KommGalen Diderits and I asked her to come.”

“Forty-six lights,” I murmured, probably inaudibly. I was touched and angry at the same time. To be constantly the focus of your friends’ attentions, especially when they have more urgent matters to see to, can lead to either a corrosive cynicism or a humility just as crippling.

“We want you to go back with her on Nizami” Diderits said, “when it leaves Port Iranani tomorrow night.”

“Why?”

“Wardress Kefa came all this way,” Rumer responded, “because we wanted to talk to her. As a final stage in your therapy she’s convinced us that you ought to visit her… her establishment there. And if this fails, Dorian, I give you up; if that’s what you want, I relinquish you.” Today Rumer was wearing a yellow sarong, a tasseled gold shawl, and a nun’s hood of yellow and orange stripes. When she spoke she averted her eyes from the conference room’s monitor and looked out its high windows instead. At a distance, I could appreciate the spare aesthetics of her profile.

“Establishment? What sort of establishment?” I studied the tiny Wardress, but her appearance volunteered nothing.

“The House of Compassionate Sharers,” Diderits began. “It’s located in Earth’s western hemisphere, on the North American continent, nearly two hundred kilometers southwest of the gutted Urban Nucleus of Denver. It can be reached from Manitou Port by ‘rail.”

“Good. I shouldn’t have any trouble finding it. But what is it, this mysterious house?”

Wardress Kefa spoke for the first time: “I would prefer that you learn its nature and its purposes from me, Mr. Lorca, when we have arrived safely under its several roofs.”

“Is it a brothel?” This question fell among my three interlocutors like a heavy stone.

“No,” Rumer said after a careful five-count. “It’s a unique sort of clinic for the treatment of unique emotional disorders.” She glanced at the Wardress, concerned that she had revealed too much.

“Some would call it a brothel,” Wardress Kefa admitted huskily. “Earth has become a haven of misfits and opportunists, a crossroads of Glatik Komm influence and trade. The House, I must confess, wouldn’t prosper if it catered only to those who suffer from rare dissociations of feeling. Therefore a few—a very few—of those who come to us are kommthors rich in power and exacting in their tastes. But these people are exceptions, Governor Montieth, KommGalen Diderits; they represent an uneasy compromise we must make in order to carry out the work for which the House was originally envisioned and built.”

A moment later Rumer announced, “You’re going, Dor. You’re going tomorrow night. Diderits and I, well, we’ll see you in three E-months.” That said, she gathered in her cloak with both hands and rearranged it on her shoulders. Then she left the room.

“Good-bye, Dorian,” Diderits said, standing.

Wardress Kefa fixed upon the camera conveying her picture to me a keen glance made more disconcerting by her small, naked face. “Tomorrow, then.”

“Tomorrow,” I agreed. I watched my monitor as the galen and the curious-looking Wardress exited the conference room together. In the room’s high windows Diroste’s sun sang a capella in the lemon sky.

They gave me a private berth on Nizami. I used my “nights,” since sleep no longer meant anything to me, to prowl through those nacelles of shipboard machinery not forbidden to passengers. Although I wasn’t permitted in the forward command module, I did have access to the computer-ringed observation turret and two or three corridors of auxiliary equipment necessary to the maintenance of a continuous probe-field. In these places I secreted myself and thought seriously about the likelihood of an encephalic/neural linkage with one of Kommfleet’s interstellar frigates.

My body was a trial. Diderits had long ago informed me that it—that I—was still “sexually viable,” but this was something I hadn’t yet put to the test, nor did I wish to. Tyrannized by morbidly vivid images of human viscera, human excreta, human decay, I had been rebuilt of metal, porcelain, and plastic as if from the very substances—skin, bone, hair, cartilage—that these inorganic materials derided. I was a contradiction, a quasi-immortal masquerading as one of the ephemera who had saved me from their own short-lived lot. Still another paradox was the fact that my aversion to the organic was itself a human (i.e., an organic) emotion. That was why I so fervently wanted out. For over a year and a half on Diroste I had hoped that Rumer and the others would see their mistake and exile me not only from themselves, but from the body that was a deadly daily reminder of my total estrangement.

But Rumer was adamant in her love, and I had been a prisoner in the Port Iranani Galenshall—with but one chilling respite—ever since the Haft Paykar explosion and cave-in. Now I was being given into the hands of a new wardress, and as I sat amid the enamel-encased engines of Nizami I couldn’t help wondering what sort of prison the House of Compassionate Sharers must be…

Among the passengers of a monorail car bound outward from Manitou Port, Wardress Kefa in the window seat beside me, I sat tense and stiff. Anthrophobia. Lorca, I told myself repeatedly, you must exercise self-control. Amazingly, I did. From Manitou Port we rode the sleek underslung bullet of our car through rugged, sparsely populated terrain toward Wolf Run Summit, and I controlled myself.

“You’ve never been ‘home’ before?” Wardress Kefa asked me.

“No. Earth isn’t home. I was born on GK-world Dai-Han, Wardress. And as a young man I was sent as an administrative colonist to Diroste, where—”

“Where you were born again,” Wardress Kefa interrupted. “Nevertheless, this is where we began.”

The shadows of the mountains slid across the wraparound glass of our car, and the imposing white pylons of the monorail system flashed past us like the legs of giants. Yes. Like huge, naked cyborgs hiding among the mountains’ aspens and pines.

“Where I met Rumer Montieth, I was going to say; where I eventually got married and settled down to the life of a bureaucrat who happens to be married to power. You anticipate me, Wardress.” I didn’t add that now Earth and Diroste were equally alien to me, that the probeship Nizami had bid fair to assume first place among my loyalties.

A ’rail from Wolf Run came sweeping past us toward Manitou Port. The sight pleased me; the vibratory hum of the passing ’rail lingered sympathetically in my hearing, and I refused to talk, even though the Wardress clearly wanted to draw me out about my former life. I was surrounded and beset. Surely this woman had all she needed to know of my past from Diderits and my wife. My annoyance grew.

“You’re very silent, Mr. Lorca.”

“I have no innate hatred of silences.”

“Nor do I, Mr. Lorca—unless they’re empty ones.”

Hands in lap, humming bioelectrically, inaudibly, I looked at my tiny guardian with disdain. “There are some,” I told her, “who are unable to engage in a silence without stripping it of its unspoken cargo of significance.”

To my surprise the woman laughed heartily. “That certainly isn’t true of you, is it?” Then, a wry expression playing on her lips, she shifted her gaze to the hurtling countryside and said nothing else until it came time to disembark at Wolf Run Summit.

Wolf Run was a resort frequented principally by Kommfleet officers and members of the administrative hierarchy stationed in Port Manitou. Civi Korps personnel had built quaint, gingerbread chateaus among the trees and engineered two of the slopes above the hamlet for year-round skiing. “Many of these people,” Wardress Kefa explained, indicating a crowd of men and women beneath the deck of Wolf Run’s main lodge, “work inside Shays Mountain, near the light-probe port, in facilities built originally for satellite tracking and missile-launch detection. Now they monitor the display boards for Kommfleet orbiters and shuttles; they program the cruising and descent lanes of these vehicles. Others are demographic and wildlife managers, bent on resettling Earth as efficiently as it may be done. Tedious work, Mr. Lorca. They come here to play.” We passed below the lodge on a path of unglazed vitrifoam. Two or three of Wolf Run’s bundled visitors stared at me, presumably because I was in my tunic sleeves and conspicuously undaunted by the spring cold. Or maybe their stares were for my guardian…

“How many of these people are customers of yours, Wardress?”

“That isn’t something I can divulge.” But she glanced back over her shoulder as if she had recognized someone.

“What do they find at your establishment they can’t find in Manitou Port?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Lorca; I’m not a mind reader.”

To reach the House of Compassionate Sharers from Wolf Run, we had to go on foot down a narrow path worked reverently into the flank of the mountain. It was very nearly a two-hour hike. I couldn’t believe the distance or Wardress Kefa’s stamina. Swinging her arms, jolting herself on stiff legs, she went down the mountain with a will. And in all the way we walked we met no other hikers.

At last we reached a clearing giving us an open view of a steep, pine-peopled glen: a grotto that fell away beneath us and led our eyes to an expanse of smooth white sky. But the Wardress pointed directly down into the foliage.

“There,” she said. “The House of Compassionate Sharers.”

I saw nothing but afternoon sunlight on the aspens, boulders huddled in the mulch cover, and swaying tunnels among the trees. Squinting, I finally made out a geodesic structure built from the very materials of the woods. Like an upland sleight, a wavering mirage, the House slipped in and out of my vision, blending, emerging, melting again. It was a series of irregular domes as hard to hold as water vapor—but after several red-winged blackbirds flew noisily across the plane of its highest turret, the House remained for me in stark relief; it had shed its invisibility.

“It’s more noticeable,” Wardress Kefa said, “when its external shutters have been cranked aside. Then the House sparkles like a dragon’s eye. The windows are stained glass.”

“I’d like to see that. Now it appears camouflaged.”

“That’s deliberate, Mr. Lorca. Come.”

When we were all the way down, I could see of what colossal size the House really was: It reared up through the pine needles and displayed its interlocking polygons to the sky. Strange to think that no one in a passing helicraft was ever likely to catch sight of it…

Wardress Kefa led me up a series of plank stairs, spoke once at the door, and introduced me into an antechamber so clean and military that I thought “barracks” rather than “bawdyhouse.” The ceiling and walls were honeycombed, and the natural flooring was redolent of the outdoors. My guardian disappeared, returned without her coat, and escorted me into a much smaller room shaped like a tapered well. By means of a wooden hand-crank she opened the shutters, and varicolored light filtered in upon us through the room’s slant-set windows. On elevated cushions that snapped and rustled each time we moved, we sat facing each other.

“What now?” I asked the Wardress.

“Just listen: The Sharers have come to the House of their own volition, Mr. Lorca; most lived and worked on extrakomm worlds toward Glaktik Center before being approached for duty here. The ones who are here accepted the invitation. They came to offer their presences to people very like yourself.”

“Me? Are they misconceived machines?”

“I’m not going to answer that. Let me just say that the variety of services the Sharers offer is surprisingly wide. As I’ve told you, for some visitants the Sharers are simply a convenient means of satisfying exotically aberrant tastes. For others they’re a way back to the larger community. We take whoever comes to us for help, Mr. Lorca, in order that the Sharers not remain idle nor the House vacant.”

“So long as whoever comes is wealthy and influential?”

She paused before speaking. “That’s true enough. But the matter’s out of my hands, Mr. Lorca. I’m an employee of Glaktik Komm, chosen for my empathetic abilities. I don’t make policy. I don’t own title to the House.”

“But you are its madam. Its ‘wardress,’ rather.”

“True. For the last twenty-two years. I’m the first and only wardress to have served here, Mr. Lorca, and I love the Sharers. I love their devotion to the fragile mentalities who visit them. Even so, despite the time I’ve lived among them, I still don’t pretend to understand the source of their transcendent concern. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

“You think me a ‘fragile mentality’?”

“I’m sorry—but you’re here, Mr. Lorca, and you certainly aren’t fragile of limb, are you?” The Wardress laughed. “I also wanted to ask you to… well, to restrain your crueler impulses when the treatment itself begins.”

I stood up and moved away from the little woman. How had I borne her presence for as long as I had?

“Please don’t take my request amiss. It isn’t specifically personal, Mr. Lorca. I make it of everyone who comes to the House of Compassionate Sharers. Restraint is an unwritten corollary of the only three rules we have here. Will you hear them?”

I made a noise of compliance.

“First, that you do not leave the session chamber once you’ve entered it. Second, that you come forth immediately upon my summoning you…”

“And third?”

“That you do not kill the Sharer.”

All the myriad disgusts I had been suppressing for seven or eight hours were now perched atop the ladder of my patience, and rung by painful rung, I had to step them back down. Must a rule be made to prevent a visitant from murdering the partner he had bought? Incredible. The Wardress herself was just perceptibly sweating, and I noticed too how grotesquely distended her ear-lobes were.

“Is there a room in this establishment for a wealthy and influential patron? A private room?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

It had a full-length mirror. I undressed and stood in front of it. Only during my first “period of adjustment” on Diroste had I spent much time looking at what I had became. Later, back in the Port Iranani Galenshall, Diderits had denied me any sort of reflective surface at all—looking glasses, darkened windows, even metal spoons. The waxen perfection of my features ridiculed the ones another Dorian Lorca had possessed before the Haft Paykar Incident. Cosmetic mockery. Faintly corpselike, speciously paradigmatic, I was both more than I was supposed to be and less.

In Wardress Kefa’s House the less seemed preeminent. I ran a finger down the inside of my right arm, scrutinizing the track of one of the intubated veins through which circulated a serum that Dederits called hematocybin: an efficient, “low-maintenance” blood substitute, combative of both fatigue and infection, which requires changing only once every six D-months. With a proper supply of hematocybin and a plastic recirculator I can do the job myself, standing up. That night, however, the ridge of my vein, mirrored only an arm’s length away, was more horror than miracle. I stepped away from the looking glass and closed my eyes.

Later that evening Wardress Kefa came to me with a candle and a brocade dressing gown. She made me put on the gown in front of her, and I complied. Then, the robe’s rich and symbolic embroidery on my back, I followed her out of my first-floor chamber to a rustic stairwell seemingly connective to all the rooms in the House.

The dome contained countless smaller domes and five or six primitive staircases, at least. Not a single other person was about. Lit flickeringly by Wardress Kefa’s taper as we climbed one of these sets of stairs, the House’s mid-interior put me in mind of an Escheresque drawing in which verticals and horizontals become hopelessly confused and a figure who from one perspective seems to be going up a series of steps seems from another to be coming down them. Presently the Wardress and I stood on a landing above this topsy-turvy well of stairs (though there were still more stairs above us), and, looking down, I experienced an unsettling reversal of perspectives. Vertigo. Why hadn’t Diderits, against so human a susceptibility, implanted tiny gyrostabilizers in my head? I clutched a railing and held on.

“You can’t fall,” Wardress Kefa told me. “It’s an illusion. A whim of the architects.”

“Is it an illusion behind this door?”

“Oh, the Sharer’s real enough, Mr. Lorca. Please. Go on in.” She touched my face and left me, taking her candle with her.

After hesitating a moment I went through the door to my assignation, and the door locked of itself. I stood with my hand on the butterfly shape of the knob and felt the night working in me and the room. The only light came from the stove-bed on the opposite wall, for the fitted polygons overhead were still blanked out by their shutters and no candles shone here. Instead, reddish embers glowed behind an isinglass window beneath the stove-bed, strewn with quilts, on which my Sharer awaited me.

Outside, the wind played harp music in the trees.

I was trembling rhythmically, as when Rumer had come to me in the “Black Pavilion.” Even though my eyes adjusted rapidly, automatically, to the dark, it was still difficult to see. Temporizing, I surveyed the dome. In its high central vault hung a cage in which, disturbed by my entrance, a bird hopped skittishly about. The cage swayed on its tether.

Go on, I told myself.

I advanced toward the dais and leaned over the unmoving Sharer who lay there. With a hand on either side of the creature’s head, I braced myself. The figure beneath me moved, moved weakly, and I drew back. But because the Sharer didn’t stir again, I reassumed my previous stance: the posture of either a lover or a man called upon to identify a disfigured corpse. But identification was impossible; the embers under the bed gave too feeble a sheen. In the chamber’s darkness even a lover’s kiss would have fallen clumsily…

“I’m going to touch you,” I said. “Will you let me do that?”

The Sharer lay still.

Then, willing all of my senses into the cushion of synthetic flesh at my forefinger’s tip, I touched the Sharer’s face.

Hard, and smooth, and cool.

I moved my finger from side to side; and the hardness, smoothness, coolness continued to flow into my pressuring fingertip. It was like touching the pate of a death’s-head, the cranial cap of a human being: bone rather than metal. My finger distinguished between these two possibilities, deciding on bone; and, half panicked, I concluded that I had traced an arc on the skull of an intelligent being who wore his every bone on the outside, like an armor of calcium. Could that be? If so, how could this organism—this entity, this thing— express compassion?

I lifted my finger away from the Sharer. Its tip hummed with a pressure now relieved and emanated a faint warmth.

A death’s-head come to life…

Maybe I laughed. In any case, I pulled myself onto the platform and straddled the Sharer. I kept my eyes closed, though not tightly. It didn’t seem that I was straddling a skeleton.

“Sharer,” I whispered. “Sharer, I don’t know you yet.”

Gently, I let my thumbs find the creature’s eyes, the sockets in the smooth exoskeleton, and both thumbs returned to me a hardness and a coldness that were unquestionably metallic in origin. Moreover, the Sharer didn’t flinch—even though I’d anticipated that probing his eyes, no matter how gently, would provoke at least an involuntary pulling away. Instead, the Sharer lay still and tractable under my hands.

And why not? I thought. Your eyes are nothing but two pieces of sophisticated optical machinery …

It was true. Two artificial, light-sensing, image-integrating units gazed up at me from the sockets near which my thumbs probed, and I realized that even in this darkness my Sharer, its vision mechanically augmented beyond my own, could see my blind face staring down in a futile attempt to create an image out of the information my hands had supplied me. I opened my eyes and held them open. I could see only shadows, but my thumbs could feel the cold metal rings that held the Sharer’s photosensitive units so firmly in its skull.

“An animatronic construct,” I said, rocking back on my heels. “A soulless robot. Move your head if I’m right.”

The Sharer continued motionless.

“All right. You’re a sentient creature whose eyes have been replaced with an artificial system. What about that? Lord, are we brothers then?”

I had a sudden hunch that the Sharer was very old, a senescent being owing its life to prosthetics, transplants, and imitative organs of laminated silicone. Its life, I was certain, had been extended by these contrivances, not saved. I asked the Sharer about my feeling, and very, very slowly it moved the helmetlike skull housing its artificial eyes and its aged, compassionate mind. Uncharitably I then believed myself the victim of a deception, whether the Sharer’s or Wardress Kefa’s I couldn’t say. Here, after all, was a creature who had chosen to prolong its organic condition rather than to escape it, and it had willingly made use of the same materials and methods Diderits had brought into play to save me.

“You might have died,” I told it. “Go too far, Sharer—go too far with these contrivances and you may forfeit suicide as an option.”

Then, leaning forward again, saying, “I’m still not through, I still don’t know you,” I let my hands come down the Sharer’s bony face to its throat. Here a shield of cartilage graded upward into its jaw and downward into the plastically silken skin covering the remainder of its body, internalizing all but the defiantly naked skull of the Sharer’s skeletal structure. A death’s-head with the body of a man…

That was all I could take. I rose from the stove-bed and, cinching my dressing gown tightly about my waist, crossed to the other side of the chamber. There was no furniture in the room but the stove-bed (if that qualified), and I had to content myself with sitting in a lotus position on the floor. I sat that way all night, staving off dreams.

Diderits had said that I needed to dream. If I didn’t dream, he warned, I’d be risking hallucinations and eventual madness; in the Port Lranani Galenshall he’d seen to it that drugs were administered to me every two days and my sleep period monitored by an ARC machine and a team of electroencephalographers. But my dreams were almost always nightmares, descents into klieg-lit charnel houses, and I infinitely preferred the risk of going psychotic. There was always the chance someone would take pity and disassemble me, piece by loving piece. Besides, I had lasted two E-weeks now on nothing but grudging catnaps, and so far I still had gray matter upstairs instead of scrambled eggs…

I crossed my fingers.

A long time after I’d sat down, Wardress Kefa threw open the door. It was morning. I could tell because the newly canted shutters outside our room admitted a singular roaring of light. The entire chamber was illumined, and I saw crimson wall hangings, a mosaic of red and purple stones on the section of the floor, and a tumble of scarlet quilts. The bird in the suspended cage was a red-winged blackbird.

“Where is it from?”

“You could use a more appropriate pronoun.”

“He? She? Which is the more appropriate, Wardress Kefa?”

“Assume the Sharer masculine, Mr. Lorca.”

“My sexual proclivities have never run that way, I’m afraid.”

“Your sexual proclivities,” the Wardress told me stingingly, “enter into this only if you persist in thinking of the House as a brothel rather than a clinic and the Sharers as whores rather than therapists!”

“Last night I heard two or three people clomping up the stairs in their boots, that and a woman’s raucous laughter.”

“A visitant, Mr. Lorca, not a Sharer.”

“I didn’t think she was a Sharer. But it’s difficult to believe I’m in a ‘clinic’ when that sort of noise disrupts my midnight meditations, Wardress.”

“I’ve explained that. It can’t be helped.”

“All right, all right. Where is he from, this ‘therapist’ of mine?”

“An interior star. But where he’s from is of no consequence in your treatment. I matched him to your needs, as I see them, and soon you’ll be going back to him.”

“Why? To spend another night sitting on the floor?”

“You won’t do that again, Mr. Lorca. And you needn’t worry. Your reaction wasn’t an uncommon one for a newcomer to the House.”

“Revulsion?” I cried. “Revulsion’s therapeutic?”

“I don’t think you were as put off as you believe.”

“Oh? Why not?”

“Because you talked to the Sharer. You addressed him directly, not once but several times. Many visitants never get that far during their first session, Mr. Lorca.”

“Talked to him?” I said dubiously. “Maybe. Before I found out what he was.”

“Ah. Before you found out what he was.” In her heavy green jacket and swishy pantaloons the tiny woman turned about and departed the well of the sitting room.

I stared bemusedly after her for a long time.

Three nights after my first “session,” the night of my conversation with Wardress Kefa, I entered the Sharer’s chamber again. Everything was as it had been, except that the dome’s shutters were open and moonlight coated the mosaic work on the floor. The Sharer awaited me in the same recumbent, unmoving posture, and inside its cage the red-winged blackbird set one of its perches to rocking back and forth.

Perversely, I had decided not to talk to the Sharer this time—but I did approach the stove-bed and lean over him. Hello, I thought, and the word very nearly came out. I straddled the Sharer and studied him in the stained moonlight. He looked just as my sense of touch had led me to conclude previously… like a skull, oddly flattened and beveled, with the body of a man. But despite the chemical embers glowing beneath his dais the Sharer’s body had no warmth, and to know him more fully I resumed tracing a finger over his alien parts.

I discovered that at every conceivable pressure point a tiny scar existed, or the tip of an implanted electrode, and that miniature canals into which wires had been sunk veined his inner arms and legs. Just beneath his sternum a concave disc about eight centimeters across, containing neither instruments nor any other surface features, had been set into the Sharer’s chest like a stainless-steel brooch. It seemed to hum under the pressure of my finger as I drew my nail silently around the disc’s circumference. What was it for? What did it mean? Again, I almost spoke.

I rolled toward the wall and lay stretched out beside the unmoving Sharer. Maybe he couldn’t move. On my last visit he had moved his dimly phosphorescent head for me, of course, but that only feebly, and maybe his immobility was the result of some cybergamic dysfunction. I had to find out. My resolve not to speak deserted me, and I propped myself up on my elbow.

“Sharer… Sharer, can you move?”

The head turned toward me slightly, signaling… well, what?

“Can you get off this platform? Try. Get off this dais under your own power.”

To my surprise, the Sharer nudged a quilt to the floor and in a moment stood facing me. Moonlight glinted from the photosensitive units serving the creature as eyes and gave his bent, elongated body the appearance of a piece of Inhodlef Era statuary, primitive work from the extrakomm world of Glaparcus.

“Good,” I praised the Sharer, “very good. Can you tell me what you’re supposed to share with me? I’m not sure we have as much in common as our Wardress seems to think.”

The Sharer extended both arms toward me and opened his tightly closed fists. In the cups of his palms he held two items I hadn’t discovered during my tactile examination of him. I accepted these from the Sharer. One was a small metal disc, the other a thin metal cylinder. Looking them over, I found that the disc reminded me of the larger, mirrorlike bowl set in the alien’s chest, while the cylinder seemed to be a kind of penlight.

Absently, I pulled my thumb over the head of the penlight; a ridged metal sheath followed the motion of my thumb, uncovering a point of ghostly red light stretching away into the cylinder seemingly deeper than the penlight itself. I pointed this instrument at the wall, at our bedding, at the Sharer himself—but it emitted no beam. When I turned the penlight on my wrist, the results were predictably similar: Not even a faint red shadow appeared along the edge of my arm. Nothing. The cylinder’s light existed internally, a beam continuously transmitted and retransmitted between the pen-light’s two poles. Pulling back the sheath on the instrument’s head had in no way interrupted the operation of its self-regenerating circuit.

I stared wonderingly into the hollow of redness, then looked up. “Sharer, what’s this thing for?”

The Sharer reached out and took from my other hand the disc I had so far ignored. Then he placed this small circle of metal in the smooth declivity of the larger disc in his chest, where it apparently adhered—for I could no longer see it. That done, the Sharer stood distressingly immobile, even more like a statue than he had seemed a moment before, one arm frozen across his body and his hand stilled at the edge of the sunken plate in which the smaller disc had just adhered. He looked dead and self-commemorating.

“Lord!” I exclaimed. “What’ve you done, Sharer? Turned yourself off? That’s right, isn’t it?”

The Sharer neither answered nor moved.

Suddenly I felt sickeningly weary, opiate-weary, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stay on the dais with this puzzle-piece being from an anonymous sun standing over me like a dark angel from my racial subconscious. I thought briefly of manhandling the Sharer across the room, but didn’t have the will to touch this catatonically rigid being, this sculpture of metal and bone, and so dismissed the idea. Nor was it likely that Wardress Kefa would help me, even if I tried to summon her with murderous poundings and cries—a bitterly amusing prospect. Wellaway, another night propped against the chamber’s far wall, keeping sleep at bay…

Is this what you wanted me to experience, Rumer? The frustration of trying to piece together my own “therapy”? I looked up through one of the dome’s unstained polygons in lethargic search of the constellation Auriga. Then I realized that I wouldn’t recognize it even if it happened to lie within my line of sight. Ah, Rumer, Rumer…

“You’re certainly a pretty one,” I told the Sharer. Then I pointed the penlight at his chest, drew back the sheath on its head, and spoke a single onomatopoeic word: “Bang.”

Instantly a beam of light sang between the instrument in my hand and the plate in the Sharer’s chest. The beam died at once (I had registered only its shattering brightness, not its color), but the disc continued to glow with a residual illumination.

The Sharer dropped his frozen arm and assumed a posture more limber, more suggestive of life. He looked… expectant.

I could only stare. Then I turned the penlight over in my hands, pointed it again at the Sharer, and waited for another coursing of light. To no purpose. The instrument still burned internally, but it wouldn’t relume the alien’s inset disc, which, in any case, continued to glow dimly. Things were all at once interesting again. I gestured with the penlight.

“You’ve rejoined the living, haven’t you?”

The Sharer acknowledged this with a slight turn of the head.

“Forgive me, Sharer, but I don’t want to spend another night sitting on the floor. If you can move again, how about over there?” I pointed at the opposite wall. “I don’t want you hovering over me.”

Oddly, he obeyed. But he did so oddly, without turning around. He cruised backward as if on invisible casters—his legs moving a little, yes, but not enough to propel him so smoothly, so quickly, across the chamber. Once against the far wall, the Sharer settled into the motionless but expectant posture he had assumed after his “activation” by the penlight. I could see that he still had some degree of control over his own movements, for his long fingers curled and uncurled and his skull nodded eerily in the halo of moonlight pocketing him. Even so, I realized that he had truly moved only at my voice command and my simultaneous gesturing with the penlight. And what did that mean?

…Well, that the Sharer had relinquished control of his body to the man-machine Dorian Lorca, retaining for himself just those meaningless reflexes and stirrings that convince the manipulated of their own autonomy. It was an awesome prostitution, even if Wardress Kefa would have frowned to hear me say so. Momentarily I rejoiced in it, for it seemed to free me from the demands of an artificial eroticism, from the need to figure through what was expected of me. The Sharer would obey my simplest wrist-turning, my briefest word; all I had to do was use the control he had literally handed to me.

This virtually unlimited power, I thought then, was a therapy whose value Rumer would understand only too well. This was a harsh assessment, but, penlight in hand, I felt that I too was a kind of marionette…

Insofar as I could, I tried to come to grips with the physics of the Sharer’s operation. First, the disc-within-a-disc on his chest apparently broke the connections ordinarily allowing him to exercise the senile powers that were still his. And, second, the penlight’s beam restored and amplified these powers but delivered them into the hands of the speaker of imperatives who wielded the penlight. I recalled that in Earth’s lunar probeship yards were crews of animatronic laborers programmed for fitting and welding. A single trained supervisor could direct from fifteen to twenty receiver-equipped laborers with one penlight and a microphone—

“Sharer,” I commanded, blanking out this reverie, pointing the penlight, “go there… No, no, not like that. Lift your feet. March for me… That’s right, a goosestep”

While Wardress Kefa’s third rule rattled in the back of my mind like a challenge, for the next several hours I toyed with the Sharer. After the marching I set him to calisthenics and interpretative dance, and he obeyed, moving more gracefully than I would have imagined possible. Here—then there—then back again. All he lacked was Beethoven’s piano sonatas for an accompaniment.

At intervals I rested, but always the fascination of the penlight drew me back, almost against my will, and I once again played puppetmaster.

“Enough, Sharer, enough.” The sky had a curdled quality suggestive of dawn. Catching sight of the cage overhead, I was taken by an irresistible impulse. I pointed the penlight at the cage and commanded, “Up, Sharer. Up, up, up.”

The Sharer floated up from the floor and glided effortlessly toward the vault of the dome: a beautiful, aerial walk. Without benefit of hawsers or scaffolds or wings the Sharer levitated. Hovering over the stove-bed he had been made to surrender, hovering over everything in the room, he reached the cage and swung before it with his hands touching the scrolled ironwork on its little door. I dropped my own hands and watched him. So tightly was I gripping the penlight, however, that my knuckles must have resembled the caps of four tiny bleached skulls.

A great deal of time went by, the Sharer poised in the gelid air awaiting some word from me.

Morning began coming in the room’s polygonal windows.

“Take the bird out,” I ordered the Sharer, moving my penlight. “Take the bird out of the cage and kill it.” This command, sadistically heartfelt, seemed to me a foolproof, indirect way of striking back at Rumer, Diderits, the Wardress, and the Third Rule of the House of Compassionate Sharers. More than anything, against all reason, I wanted the red-winged blackbird dead. And I wanted the Sharer to kill it.

Dawn made clear the cancerous encroachment of age in the Sharer’s legs and hands, as well as the full horror of his cybergamically rigged death’s-head. He looked as if he had been unjustly hanged. And when his hands went up to the cage, instead of opening its door the Sharer lifted the entire contraption off the hook fastening it to its tether, and then accidentally lost his grip on the cage.

I watched the cage fall—land on its side—bounce—bounce again. The Sharer stared down with his bulging, silver-ringed eyes, his hands still spread wide to accommodate the fallen cage.

“Mr. Lorca.” Wardress Kefa was knocking at the door. “Mr. Lorca, what’s going on, please?”

I arose from the stove-bed, tossed my quilt aside, straightened my heavy robes. The Wardress knocked again. I looked at the Sharer swaying in the half-light like a sword or a pendulum, an instrument of severance. The night had gone faster than I liked.

Again, the purposeful knocking.

“Coming,” I barked.

In the dented cage there was a flutter of crimson, a stillness, and then another bit of melancholy flapping. I hurled my penlight across the room. When it struck the wall, the Sharer rocked back and forth for a moment without descending so much as a centimeter. The knocking continued.

“You have the key, Wardress. Open the door.”

She did, and stood on its threshold taking stock of the games we had played. Her eyes were bright but devoid of censure, and I swept past her wordlessly, burning with shame and bravado.

I slept that day—all that day—for the first time since leaving my own world. And I dreamed. I dreamed that I was connected to a mechanism pistoning away on the edge of the Haft Paykar diggings, siphoning deadly gases out of the shafts and perversely recirculating them through the pump with which I shared a symbiomechanic linkage. Amid a series of surreal turquoise sunsets and intermittent gusts of sand, this pistoning went on, and on, and on. When I awoke I lifted my hands to my face, intending to scar it with my nails. But a moment later, as I had known it would, the mirror in my chamber returned me a perfect, unperturbed Dorian Lorca…

“May I come in?”

“I’m the guest here, Wardress. So I suppose you may.”

She entered and, quickly intuiting my mood, walked to the other side of the chamber. “You slept, didn’t you? And you dreamed?”

I said nothing.

“You dreamed, didn’t you?”

“A nightmare, Wardress. A long and repetitious nightmare, notable only for being different from the ones I had on Diroste.”

“A start, though. You weren’t monitored during your sleep, after all, and even if your dream was a nightmare, Mr. Lorca, I believe you’ve managed to survive it. Good. All to the good.”

I went to the only window in the room, a hexagonal pane of dark blue through which it was impossible to see anything. “Did you get him down?”

“Yes. And restored the birdcage to its place.” Her tiny feet made pacing sounds on the hardwood. “The bird was unharmed.”

“Wardress, what’s all this about? Why have you paired me with… with this particular Sharer?” I turned around. “What’s the point?”

“You’re not estranged from your wife only, Mr. Lorca. You’re—”

“I know that. I’ve known that.”

“And I know that you know it. Give me a degree of credit… You also know,” she resumed, “that you’re estranged from yourself, body and soul at variance—”

“Of course, dammit! And the argument between them’s been stamped into every pseudo-organ and circuit I can lay claim to!”

“Please, Mr. Lorca, I’m trying to explain. This interior ‘argument’ you’re so aware of… it’s really a metaphor for an attitude you involuntarily adopted after Diderits performed his operations. And a metaphor can be taken apart and explained.”

“Like a machine.”

“If you like.” She began pacing again. “To take inventory you have to surmount that which is to be inventoried. You go outside, Mr. Lorca, in order to come back in.” She halted and fixed me with a colorless, lopsided smile.

“All of that,” I began cautiously, “is clear to me. ‘Know thyself,’ saith Diderits and the ancient Greeks… Well, if anything, my knowledge has increased my uneasiness about not only myself, but others—and not only others, but the very phenomena permitting us to spawn.” I had an image of crimson-gilled fish firing up-current in a roiling, untidy barrage. “What I know hasn’t cured anything, Wardress.”

“No. That’s why we’ve had you come here. To extend the limits of your knowledge and to involve you in relationships demanding a recognition of others as well as self.”

“As with the Sharer I left hanging up in the air?”

“Yes. Distance is advisable at first, perhaps inevitable. You needn’t feel guilty. In a night or two you’ll be going back to him, and then we’ll just have to see.”

“Is this the only Sharer I’m going to be… working with?”

“I don’t know. It depends on the sort of progress you make.”

But for the Wardress Kefa, the Sharer in the crimson dome, and the noisy, midnight visitants I had never seen, there were times when I believed myself the only occupant of the House. The thought of such isolation, although not unwelcome, was an anchoritic fantasy: I knew that breathing in the chambers next to mine, going about the arcane business of the lives they had bartered away, were humanoid creatures difficult to imagine; harder still, once lodged in the mind, to put out of it. To what number and variety of beings had Wardress Kefa indentured her love…?

I had no chance to ask this question. We heard an insistent clomping on the steps outside the House and then muffled voices in the antechamber.

“Who’s that?”

The Wardress put up her hand to silence me and opened the door to my room. “A moment,” she called. “I’ll be with you in a moment.” But her husky voice didn’t carry very well, and whoever had entered the House set about methodically knocking on doors and clomping from apartment to apartment, all the while bellowing the Wardress’s name. “I’d better go talk with them,” she told me apologetically.

“But who is it?”

“Someone voice-coded for entrance, Mr. Lorca. Nothing to worry about.” And she went into the corridor, giving me a scent of spruce needles and a vision of solidly hewn rafters before the door swung to.

But I got up and followed the Wardress. Outside I found her face to face with two imposing persons who looked exactly alike in spite of their being one a man and the other a woman. Their faces had the same lantern-jawed mournfulness, their eyes a hooded look under prominent brows. They wore filigreed pea jackets, ski leggings, and fur-lined caps bearing the interpenetrating-galaxies insignia of Glaktik Komm. I judged them to be in their late thirties, E-standard, but they both had the domineering, glad-handing air of high-ranking veterans in the bureaucratic establishment, people who appreciate their positions just to the extent that their positions can be exploited. I knew. I had once been an official of the same stamp.

The man, having been caught in mid-bellow, was now trying to laugh. “Ah, Wardress, Wardress.”

“I didn’t expect you this evening,” she told the two of them.

“We were granted a proficiency leave for completing the Salous blueprint in advance of schedule,” the woman explained, “and so caught a late ’rail from Manitou Port to take advantage of the leave. We hiked down in the dark.” Along with her eyebrows she lifted a hand lantern for our inspection.

“We took a proficiency leave,” the man said, “even if we were here last week. And we deserved it too.” He went on to tell us that “Salous” dealt with reclaiming the remnants of aboriginal populations and pooling them for something called integrative therapy. “The Great Plains will soon be our bordello, Wardress. There, you see: You and the Orhas are in the same business… at least until we’re assigned to stage-manage something more prosasic.” He clapped his gloved hands together and looked at me. “You’re new, aren’t you? Who are you going to?”

“Pardon me,” the Wardress interjected wearily. “Who do you want tonight?”

The man looked at his partner with a mixture of curiosity and concern. “Cleva?”

“The mouthless one,” Cleva responded at once. “Drugged, preferably.”

“Come with me, Orhas,” the Wardress directed. She led them first to her own apartment and then into the House’s mid-interior, where the three of them disappeared from my sight. I could hear them climbing one of the sets of stairs.

Shortly thereafter the Wardress returned to my room.

“They’re twins?”

“In a manner of speaking, Mr. Lorca. Actually they’re clonemates: Cleva and Cleirach Orha, specialists in Holosyncretic Management. They do abstract computer planning involving indigenous and alien populations, which is why they know of the House at all and have an authorization to come here.”

“Do they always appear here together? Go upstairs together?”

The Wardress’s silence clearly meant yes.

“That’s a bit kinky, isn’t it?”

She gave me an angry look whose implications immediately silenced me. I started to apologize, but she said: “The Orhas are the only visitants to the House who arrive together, Mr. Lorca. Since they share a common upbringing, the same genetic material, and identical biochemistries, it isn’t surprising that their sexual preferences should coincide. In Manitou Port, I’m told, is a third clonemate who was permitted to marry, and her I’ve never seen either here or in Wolf Run Summit. It seems there’s a degree of variety even among clonal siblings.“

“Do these two come often?”

“You heard them in the House several days ago.”

“They have frequent leaves then?”

“Last time was an overnighter. They returned to Manitou Port in the morning, Mr. Lorca. Just now they were trying to tell me that they intend to be here for a few days.”

“For treatment,” I said.

“You know better. You’re baiting me, Mr. Lorca.” She had taken her graying scalplock into her fingers, and was holding its fan of hair against her right cheek. In this posture, despite her preoccupation with the arrival of the Orhas, she looked very old and very innocent.

“Who is the ‘mouthless one,’ Wardress?”

“Good night, Mr. Lorca. I only returned to tell you good night.” And with no other word she left.

It was the longest I had permitted myself to talk with her since our first afternoon in the House, the longest I had been in her presence since our claustrophobic ’rail ride from Manitou Port. Even the Orhas, bundled to the gills, as vulgar as sleek bullfrogs, hadn’t struck me as altogether insufferable.

Wearing neither coat nor cap, I took a walk through the glens below the House, touching each wind-shaken tree as I came to it and trying to conjure out of the darkness a viable memory of Rumer’s smile…

“Sex as weapon,” I told my Sharer, who sat propped on the stove-bed amid ten or twelve quilts of scarlet and off-scarlet. “As prince consort to the Governor of Piroste, that was the only weapon I had access to… Rumer employed me as an emissary, Sharer, an espionage agent, a protocol officer, whatever state business required. I received visiting representatives of Glaktik Komm, mediated disputes in the Port Iranani business community, and went on biannual inspection tours of the Fetneh and Furak District mines. I did a little of everything, Sharer.“

As I paced, the Sharer observed me with a macabre, but somehow not unsettling, penetration. The hollow of his chest was exposed, and, as I passed him, an occasional metallic wink caught the corner of my eye.

I told him the story of my involvement with a minor official in Port Iranani’s department of immigration, a young woman whom I had never called by anything but her maternal surname, Humay. There had been others besides this woman, but Humay’s story was the one I chose to tell. Why? Because alone among my ostensible “lovers,” Humay I had never lain with. I had never chosen to.

Instead, to her intense bewilderment, I gave Humay ceremonial pendants, bracelets, ear-pieces, brooches, necklaces, and die-cut cameos of gold on silver, all from the collection of Rumer Montieth, Governor of Diroste—anything, in short, distinctive enough to be recognizable to my wife at a glance. Then, at those state functions requiring Rumer’s attendance upon a visiting dignitary, I arranged for Humay to be present; sometimes I accompanied her myself, sometimes I found her an escort among the unbonded young men assigned to me as aides. Always I insured that Rumer should see Humay, if not in a reception line then in the promenade of the formal recessional. Afterwards I asked Humay, who never seemed to have even a naive insight into the purposes of my game, to hand back whatever piece of jewelry I had given her for ornament, and she did so. Then I returned the jewelry to Rumer’s sandalwood box before my wife could verify what her eyes had earlier that evening tried to tell her. Everything I did was designed to create a false impression of my relationship with Humay, and I wanted my dishonesty in the matter to be conspicuous.

Finally, dismissing Humay for good, I gave her cameo of Rumer’s that had been crafted in the Furak District. I learned later that she had flung this cameo at an aide of mine who entered the offices of her department on a matter having nothing to do with her. She created a disturbance, several times raising my name. Ultimately (in two days’ time), she was disciplined by a transfer to the frontier outpost of Yagme, the administrative center of the Furak District, and I never saw her again.

“Later, Sharer, when I dreamed of Humay, I saw her as a woman with mother-of-pearl flesh and ruby eyes. In my dreams she became the pieces of jewelry with which I’d tried to incite my wife’s sexual jealousy—blunting it even as I incited it.”

The Sharer regarded me with hard but sympathetic eyes.

Why? I asked him. Why had I dreamed of Humay as if she were an expensive clockwork mechanism, gilded, beset with gemstones, invulnerably enameled? And why had I so fiercely desired Rumer’s jealousy?

The Sharer’s silence invited confession.

After the Haft Paykar Incident (I went on, pacing), after Diderits had fitted me with a total prosthesis, my nightmares often centered on the young woman who’d been exiled to Yagme. Although in Port Iranani I hadn’t once touched Humay in an erotic way, in my monitored nightmares I regularly descended into either a charnel catacomb or a half-fallen quarry—it was impossible to know which—and there forced myself, without success, on the bejeweled automaton she had become. In every instance Humay waited for me underground; in every instance she turned me back with coruscating laughter. Its echoes always drove me upward to the light, and in the midst of nightmare I realized that I wanted Humay far less than I did residency in the secret, subterranean places she had made her own. The klieg lights that invariably directed my descent always followed me back out, too, so that Humay was always left kilometers below exulting in the dark…

My Sharer got up and took a turn around the room, a single quilt draped over his shoulders and clutched loosely together at his chest. This was the first time since I had been coming to him that he had moved so far of his own volition, and I sat down to watch. Did he understand me at all? I had spoken to him as if his understanding were presupposed, a certainty—but beyond a hopeful feeling that my words meant something to him I’d had no evidence at all, not even a testimonial from Wardress Kefa. All of the Sharer’s “reactions” were really nothing but projections of my own ambiguous hopes.

When he at last returned to me, he extended both hideously canaled arms and opened his fists. In them, the disc and the penlight. It was an offering, a compassionate, selfless offering, and for a moment I stared at his open hands in perplexity. What did they want of me, this Sharer, Wardress Kefa, the people who had sent me here? How was I supposed to buy either their forbearance or my freedom? By choosing power over impotency? By manipulation?… But these were altogether different questions, and I hesitated.

The Sharer then placed the small disc in the larger one beneath his sternum. Then, as before, a thousand esoteric connections severed, he froze. In the hand still extended toward me, the penlight glittered faintly and threatened to slip from his insensible grasp. I took it carefully from the Sharer’s fingers, pulled back the sheath on its head, and gazed into its red-lit hollow. I released the sheath and pointed the penlight at the disc in his chest.

If I pulled the sheath back again, he would become little more than a fully integrated, external prosthesis—as much at my disposal as the hands holding the pen-light.

“No,” I said. “Not this time.” And I flipped the pen-light across the chamber, out of the way of temptation. Then, using my fingernails, I pried the small disc out of its electromagnetic moorings above the Sharer’s heart.

He was restored to himself.

As was I to myself. As was I.

A day later, early in the afternoon, I ran into the Orhas in the House’s mid-interior. They were coming unaccompanied out of a lofty, seemingly sideways-canted door as I stood peering upward from the access corridor. Man and woman together, mirror images ratcheting down a Mobius strip of stairs, the Orhas held my attention until it was too late for me to slip away unseen.

“The new visitant,” Cleirach Orha informed his sister when he reached the bottom step. “We’ve seen you before.”

“Briefly,” I agreed. “The night you arrived from Manitou Port for your proficiency leave.”

“What a good memory you have,” Cleva Orha said. “We also saw you the day you arrived from Manitou Port. You and the Wardress were just setting out from Wolf Run Summit together. Cleirach and I were beneath the ski lodge, watching.”

“You wore no coat,” her clonemate said in explanation of their interest.

They both stared at me curiously. Neither was I wearing a coat in the well of the House of Compassionate Sharers—even though the temperature inside hovered only a few degrees above freezing and we could see our breaths before us like the ghosts of ghosts… I was a queer one, wasn’t I? My silence made them nervous and brazen.

“No coat,” Cleva Orha repeated, “and the day cold enough to fur your spittle. ‘Look at that one,’ Cleirach told me, ‘thinks he’s a polar bear.’ We laughed about that, studling. We laughed heartily.”

I nodded, nothing more. A coppery taste of bile, such as I hadn’t experienced for several days, flooded my mouth, and I wanted to escape the Orhas’ warty good humor. They were intelligent people, otherwise they would never have been cloned, but, face to face with their flawed skins and their loud, insinuative sexuality, I began to feel my new-found stores of tolerance overbalancing like a tower of blocks. It was a bitter test, this meeting below the stairs, and one I was on the edge of failing.

“We seem to be the only ones in the House this month,” the woman volunteered. “Last month the Wardress was gone, the Sharers had a holiday, and Cleirach and I had to content ourselves with incestuous buggery in Manitou Port.”

“Cleva!” the man protested, laughing.

“It’s true.” She turned to me. “It’s true, studling. And that little she-goat—Kefa, I mean—won’t even tell us why the ‘Closed’ sign was out for so long. Delights in mystery, that one.”

“That’s right,” Cleirach went on. “She’s an exasperating woman. She begrudges you your privileges. You have to tread lightly on her patience. Sometimes you’d like to take her into a chamber and find out what makes her tick. A bit of exploratory surgery, hey-la!” Saying this, he showed me his trilling tongue.

“She’s a maso-ascetic, Brother.”

“I don’t know. There are many mansions in this House, Cleva, several of which she’s refused to let us enter. Why?” He raised his eyebrows suggestively, as Cleva had done the night she lifted her hand-lantern for our notice. The expressions were the same.

Cleva Orha appealed to me as a disinterested third party: “What do you think, studling? Is Wardress Scalp-lock at bed and at bone with one of her Sharers? Or does she lie by herself, maso-ascetically, under a hide of untanned elk hair? What do you think?”

“I haven’t really thought about it.” Containing my anger, I tried to leave. “Excuse me, Orha clones.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” the woman said mincingly, half humorously. “You know our names and a telling bit of our background. That puts you up, studling. We won’t have that. You can’t go without giving us a name.”

Resenting the necessity, I told them my name.

“From where?” Cleirach Orha asked.

“Colony World GK-11. We call it Diroste.”

Brother and sister exchanged a glance of sudden enlightment, after which Cleva raised her thin eyebrows and spoke in a mocking rhythm: “Ah ha, the mystery solved. Out and back our Wardress went and therefore closed her House.”

“Welcome, Mr. Lorca. Welcome.”

“We’re going up to Wolf Run for an after-bout of toddies and P-nol. What about you? Would you like to go? The climb wouldn’t be anything to a warmblooded studling like you. Look, Cleirach. Biceps unbundled and his sinuses still clear.”

In spite of the compliment I declined.

“Who have you been with?” Cleirach Orha wanted to know. He bent forward conspiratorially. “We’ve been with a native of an extrakomm world called Trope. That’s the local name. Anyhow, there’s not another such being inside of a hundred light-years, Mr. Lorca.”

“It’s the face that intrigues us,” Cleva Orha explained, saving me from an immediate reply to her brother’s question. And then she reached out, touched my arm, and ran a finger down my arm to my hand. “Look. Not even a goose bump. Cleirach, you and I are suffering the shems and trivs, and our earnest Mr. Lorca’s standing here bare-boned.”

Brother was annoyed by this analysis. There was something he wanted to know, and Cleva’s non sequiturs weren’t advancing his case. Seeing that he was going to ask me again, I rummaged about for an answer that was neither informative nor tactless.

Cleva Orha, meanwhile, was peering intently at her fingertips. Then she looked at my arm, again at her fingers, and a second time at my arm. Finally she locked eyes with me and studied my face as if for some clue to the source of my reticence.

Ah, I thought numbly, she’s recognized me for what I am…

“Mr. Lorca can’t tell you who he’s been with, Cleirach,” Cleva Orha told her clonemate, “because he’s not a visitant to the House at all and he doesn’t choose to violate the confidences of those who are.”

Dumbfounded, I said nothing.

Cleva put her hand on her brother’s back and guided him past me into the House’s antechamber. Over her shoulder she bid me good afternoon in a toneless voice. Then the Orha clones very deliberately let themselves out the front door and began the long climb to Wolf Run Summit.

What had happened? It took me a moment to figure it out. Cleva Orha had recognized me as a human-machine and from this recognition drawn a logical but mistaken inference: She believed me, like the “mouthless one” from Trope, a slave of the House…

During my next tryst with my Sharer I spoke for an hour, two hours, maybe more, of Rumer’s infuriating patience, her dignity, her serene ardor. I had moved her—maneuvered her—to the expression of these qualities by my own hollow commitment to Humay and the others before Humay who had engaged me only physically. Under my wife’s attentions, however, I preened sullenly, demanding more than Rumer—than any woman in Rumer’s position—had it in her power to give. My needs, I wanted her to know, my needs were as urgent and as real as Diroste’s.

And at the end of one of these vague encounters Rumer seemed both to concede the legitimacy of my demands and to decry their intemperance by removing a warm pendant from her throat and placing it like an accusation in my palm.

“A week later,” I told the Sharer, “was the inspection tour of the diggings at Haft Paykar.”

These things spoken, I did something I had never done before in the Wardress’s House: I went to sleep under the hand of my Sharer. My dreams were dreams rather than nightmares, and clarified ones at that, shot through with light and accompanied from afar by a peaceful funneling of sand. The images that came to me were haloed arms and legs orchestrated within a series of shifting yellow, yellow-orange, and subtly-red discs. The purr of running sand behind these movements conferred upon them the benediction of mortality, and that, I felt, was good.

I awoke in a blast of icy air and found myself alone. The door to the Sharer’s apartment was standing open on the shaft of the stairwell, and I heard faint, angry voices coming across the emptiness between. Disoriented, I lay on my stove-bed staring toward the door, a square of shadow feeding its chill into the room.

“Dorian!” a husky voice called. “Dorian!”

Wardress Kefa’s voice, diluted by distance and fear. A door opened, and her voice hailed me again, this time with more clarity. Then the door slammed shut, and every sound in the House took on a smothered quality, as if mumbled through cold, semiporous wood.

I got up, dragging my bedding with me, and reached the narrow porch on the stairwell with a clear head. Thin starlight filtered through the unshuttered windows in the ceiling. Nevertheless, looking from stairway to stairway to stairway inside the House, I had no idea behind which door the Wardress now must be.

Because there existed no connecting stairs among the staggered landings of the House, my only option was to go down. I took the steps two at a time, very nearly plunging.

At the bottom I found my Sharer with both hands clenched about the outer stair rail. He was trembling. In fact, his chest and arms were quivering so violently that he seemed about to shake himself apart. I put my hands on his shoulders and tightened my grip until the tremors wracking him threatened to wrack my systems, too. Who would come apart first?

“Go upstairs,” I told the Sharer. “Get the hell upstairs.”

I heard the Wardress call my name again. Although by now she had squeezed some of the fear out of her voice, her summons was still distance-muffled and impossible to pinpoint.

The Sharer either couldn’t or wouldn’t obey me. I coaxed him, cursed him, goaded him, tried to turn him around so that he was heading back up the steps. Nothing availed. The Wardress, summoning me, had inadvertently called the Sharer out as my proxy, and he now had no intention of giving back to me the role he’d just usurped. The beautifully faired planes of his skull turned toward me, bringing with them the stainless-steel rings of his eyes. These were the only parts of his body that didn’t tremble, but they were helpless to countermand the agues shaking him. As inhuman and unmoving as they were, the Sharer’s features still managed to convey stark, unpitiable entreaty…

I sank to my knees, felt about the insides of the Sharer’s legs, and took the penlight and the disc from the two pocketlike incisions tailored to these instruments. Then I stood and used them.

“Find Wardress Kefa for me, Sharer,” I commanded, gesturing with the penlight at the windows overhead. “Find her.”

And the Sharer floated up from the steps through the mid-interior of the House. In the crepuscular starlight, rocking a bit, he seemed to pass through a knot of curving stairs into an open space where he was all at once brightly visible.

“Point to the door,” I said, jabbing the penlight uncertainly at several different landings around the well. “Show me the one.”

My words echoed, and the Sharer, legs dangling, inscribed a slow half-circle in the air. Then he pointed toward one of the nearly hidden doorways.

I stalked across the well, found a likely-seeming set of stairs, and climbed them with no notion at all of what was expected of me.

Wardress Kefa didn’t call out again, but I heard the same faint, somewhat slurred voices that I’d heard upon waking and knew that they belonged to the Orhas. A burst of muted female laughter, twice repeated, convinced me of this, and I hesitated on the landing.

“All right,” I told my Sharer quietly, turning him around with a turn of the wrist, “go on home.”

Dropping through the torus of a lower set of stairs, he found the porch in front of our chamber and settled upon it like a clumsily handled puppet. And why not? I was a clumsy puppetmaster. Because there seemed to be nothing else I could do, I slid the penlight into a pocket of my dressing gown and knocked on the Orhas’ door.

“Come in,” Cleva Orha said. “By all means, Sharer Lorca, come in.”

I entered and found myself in a room whose surfaces were all burnished as if with beeswax. The timbers shone. Whereas in the other chambers I had seen nearly all the joists and rafters were rough-hewn, here they were smooth and splinterless. The scent of sandalwood pervaded the air, and opposite the door was a carved screen blocking my view of the chamber’s stove-bed. A tall wooden lamp illuminated the furnishings and the three people arrayed around the lamp’s border of light like iconic statues.

“Welcome,” Cleirach Orha said. “Your invitation was from the Wardress, however, not us.” He wore only a pair of silk pantaloons drawn together at the waist with a cord, and his right forearm was under Wardress Kefa’s chin, restraining her movement without quite cutting off her wind.

His disheveled clonemate, in a dressing gown very much like mine, sat cross-legged on a cushion and toyed with a wooden stiletto waxed as the beams of the chamber were waxed. Her eyes were too wide, too lustrous, as were her brother’s, and I knew this was the result of too much placenol in combination with too much Wolf Run small-malt in combination with the Orhas’ innate meanness. The woman was drugged, and drunk, and, in consequence of these things, malicious to a turn. Cleirach didn’t appear quite so far gone as his sister, but all he had to do to strangle the Wardress, I understood, was raise the edge of his forearm into her trachea. I felt again the familiar sensation of being out of my element, gill-less in a sluice of stinging salt water…

“Wardress Kefa—” I began.

“She’s all right,” Cleva Orha assured me. “Perfectly all right.” She tilted her head so that she was gazing at me out of her right eye alone, and then barked a hoarse, deranged-sounding laugh.

“Let the Wardress go,” I told her clonemate.

Amazingly, Cleirach Orha looked intimidated. “Mr. Lorca’s an anproz,” he reminded Cleva. “That little letter opener you’re cleaning your nails with, it’s not going to mean anything to him.”

“Then let her go, Cleirach. Let her go.”

Cleirach released the Wardress, who, massaging her throat with both hands, ran to the stove-bed. She halted beside the carved screen and beckoned me with a doll-like hand. “Mr. Lorca… Mr. Lorca, please… will you see to him first? I beg you.”

“I’m going back to Wolf Run Summit,” Cleirach informed his sister, and he slipped on a night jacket, gathered up his clothes, and left the room. Cleva Orha remained seated on her cushion, her head tilted back as if she were tasting a bitter potion from a heavy metal goblet.

Glancing doubtfully at her, I went to the Wardress. Then I stepped around the wooden divider to see her Sharer.

The Tropeman lying there was a slender creature, almost slight. There was a ridge of flesh where his mouth ought to be, and his eyes were an organic variety of crystal, uncanny and depthful stones. One of these brandy-colored stones had been dislodged in its socket by Cleva’s “letter opener”; and although the Orhas had failed to pry the eye completely loose, the Tropeman’s face was streaked with blood from their efforts. The streaks ran down into the bedding under his narrow, fragile head and gave him the look of an aborigine in war paint. Lacking external genitalia, his sexless body was spread-eagled atop the quilts so that the burn marks on his legs and lower abdomen cried out for notice as plangently as did his face.

“Sweet light, sweet light,” the Wardress chanted softly, over and over again, and I found her locked in my arms, hugging me tightly above her beloved, butchered ward, this Sharer from another star.

“He’s not dead,” Cleva Orha said from her cushion. “The rules… the rules say not to kill ‘em, and we go by the rules, brother and I.”

“What can I do, Wardress Kefa?” I whispered, holding her. “What do you want me to do?”

Slumped against me, the Wardress repeated her consoling chant and held me about the waist. So, fearful that this being with eyes like precious gems would bleed to death as we delayed, each of us undoubtedly ashamed of our delay, we delayed—and I held the Wardress, pressed her head to my chest, gave her a warmth I hadn’t before believed in me. And she returned this warmth in undiluted measure.

Wardress Kefa, I realized, was herself a Compassionate Sharer; she was as much a Sharer as the bleeding Tropeman on the stove-bed or that obedient creature whose electrode-studded body and luminous death’s-head had seemed to mock the efficient, mechanical deadness in myself—a deadness that, in turning away from Rumer, I had made a god of. In the face of this realization my disgust with the Orhas was transfigured into something very unlike disgust: a mode of perception, maybe; a means of adapting. An answer had been revealed to me, and, without its being either easy or uncomplicated, it was still, somehow, very simple: I, too, was a Compassionate Sharer. Monster, machine, anproz, the designation didn’t matter any longer. Wherever I might go, I was forevermore a ward of this tiny woman’s House—my fate, inescapable and sure.

The Wardress broke free of my embrace and kneeled beside the Tropeman. She tore a piece of cloth from the bottom of her tunic. Wiping the blood from the Sharer’s face, she said, “I heard him calling me while I was downstairs, Mr. Lorca. Encephalogoi. ‘Brain words,’ you know. And I came up here as quickly as I could. Cleirach took me aside. All I could do was shout for you. Then, not even that.”

Her hands touched the Sharer’s burns, hovered over the wounded eye, moved about with a knowledge the Wardress herself seemed unaware of.

“We couldn’t get it all the way out,” Cleva Orha laughed. “Wouldn’t come. Cleirach tried and tried.”

I found the cloned woman’s pea jacket, leggings, and tunic. Then I took her by the elbow and led her down the stairs to her brother. She reviled me tenderly as we descended, but otherwise didn’t protest.

“You,” she predicted once we were down, “…you we’ll never get.”

She was’right. It was a long time before I returned to the House of Compassionate Sharers, and, in any case, upon learning of their sadistic abuse of one of the wards of the House, the authorities in Manitou Port denied the Orhas any future access to it. A Sharer, after all, was an expensive commodity.

But I did return. After going back to Diroste and living with Rumer the remaining forty-two years of her life, I applied to the House as a novitiate. I am here now. In fact as well as in metaphor, I am today one of the Sharers.

My brain cells die, of course, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop utterly the depredations of time—but my body seems to be that of a middle-aged man and I still move inside it with ease. Visitants seek comfort from me, as once, against my will, I sought comfort here; and I try to give it to them… even to the ones who have only a muddled understanding of what a Sharer really is. My battles aren’t really with these unhappy people; they’re with the advance columns of my senility (I don’t like to admit this) and the shock troops of my memory, which is still excessively good…

Wardress Kefa has been dead seventeen years, Diderits twenty-three, and Rumer two. That’s how I keep score now. Death has also carried off the gem-eyed Tropeman and the Sharer who drew the essential Dorian Lorca out of the prosthetic rind he had mistaken for himself.

I intend to be here a while longer yet. I have recently been given a chamber into which the light sifts with a painful white brilliance reminiscent of the sands of Diroste or the snows of Wolf Run Summit. This is all to the good. Either way, you see, I die at home…

The End.

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Scan notes and proofing history

AK #4
Scanned with preliminary proofing by A/NN\A
October 9th, 2007—v0.8