The Sublimer looked up the street behind him. ‘Oh, we believe in the power of the Sublime,’ she said. ‘Let me tell you more.’ She glanced up the avenue again. ‘Oh; perhaps we ought to get off the street, don’t you think?’ She held out her hand and took a step back towards the pavement.
Genar-Hofoen looked back, to where things were getting noisy. The giant animal he’d noticed earlier – a sexipedal pondrosaur – was advancing slowly down the avenue in the midst of a retinue and a crowd of spectators. The shaggy, brown-furred animal was six metres tall, splendidly liveried with long, gaudy banners and ribbons and commanded by a garishly uniformed mahout brandishing a fiery mace. The beast was surmounted by a glitteringly black and silver cupola whose bulbously filigreed windows gave no hint of who or what might be inside; similarly ornamented bowls covered the great animal’s eyes. It was attended by five loping kliestrithrals, each black tusked creature pawing at the street surface and snorting and held on a tight lead by a burly hire guard. A knot of people held the procession up; the pondrosaur paused and put its long head back to let out a surprisingly soft, subdued roar, then it adjusted its eye-cups with its two leg-thick fore-limbs and bobbed its head to either side. The gaggle of promenaders began to disperse and the great beast and its escorts moved forward again.
‘Hmm, yes,’ Genar-Hofoen said. ‘Perhaps we’d better move out the way.’ He finished the 9050 and looked round for a place to deposit the empty container.
‘Please; allow me.’ The Sublimer girl took the field-goblet from him as though it was some sort of holy object. Genar-Hofoen followed her onto the sidewalk; she put an arm through his and they proceeded slowly towards the entrance to the sekos, where the woman was still standing talking to the other two Sublimers with her look of ironic curiosity.
‘Have you heard of Sublimers before?’ the girl on his arm asked.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, watching the other woman’s face as they approached. They stopped on the pavement outside the Sublimer building, entering a hushfield in which the only sound was gently tinkling music and a background of waves on a beach. ‘You believe everybody should just sort of disappear up their own arses, don’t you?’ he asked with every appearance of innocence. He was only a few metres from the woman in the shadowrobe, though the compartmented hushfield meant he couldn’t hear what she was saying. Her face was much like he remembered it; the eyes and mouth were the same. She had never worn her hair up like that, but even its shade of black-blue was the same.
‘Oh, no!’ the Sublimer girl said, her expression terribly serious. ‘What we believe in takes one completely away from such bodily concerns…’
Out of the corner of his eye he could see up the street, where the pondrosaur was shuffling forwards through a thick crowd of admirers. He smiled at the Sublimer girl as she talked on. He shifted a little so that he could see the other woman better.
No, it wasn’t her. Of course it wasn’t. She’d have recognised him, she’d have reacted by now. Even if she’d been trying to pretend she hadn’t seen him he’d have been able to tell; she’d never been very good at hiding her feelings from anybody, least of all from him. She glanced at him again, then quickly away. He felt a sudden, unbidden sensation of fearful pleasure, a jolt of excitement which left his skin tingling.
‘… highest expression of our quintessential urge to be greater than we…’ He nodded and looked at the Sublimer girl, who was still babbling away. He frowned a little and stroked his chin with his free hand, still nodding. He kept watching the other woman. Out on the street, the pondrosaur and its retinue had come to a stop almost alongside them; a Tier Sintricate was hovering level with the giant animal’s mahout, who seemed to be arguing angrily with it.
The woman was smiling at the other two Sublimers with what appeared to be an expression of tolerant ridicule. She kept her eyes on the Sublimer fellow doing the talking at that point, but took a long, deep breath, and – just as she let it out – glanced at Genar-Hofoen again with the briefest of smiles and a flick of her eyebrows before looking back at the Sublimers and tipping her head just a little to one side.
He wondered. Would SC really go this far to keep him under their control, or at least under their eye? How likely was it that he should find somebody who looked so much like her? He supposed there must be hundreds of people who bore a passing resemblance to Dajeil Gelian; perhaps there were even a few who had heard something about her and deliberately assumed her appearance; that happened all the time with genuinely famous people and just because he’d never heard of anybody taking on Dajeil’s looks didn’t mean nobody had ever done so. If this person was one of them, it was just possible he would have to be on his guard…
‘… personal ambition or the desire to better oneself or to provide opportunities for one’s children is but a pale reflection of, compared to the ultimate transcendence which true Subliming offers; for, as it is written…’
Genar-Hofoen leant closer to the girl talking to him and tapped her lightly on the shoulder. ‘I’m sure,’ he said quietly. ‘Would you excuse me for just a moment?’
He took the two steps over to the woman in the shadowrobe. She turned her head from the two Sublimers and smiled politely at him. ‘Excuse me,’ he asked. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ He grinned as he said it, acknowledging both the well-worn nature of the line and the fact that neither he nor she was really interested in what the Sublimers had to say.
She nodded her head politely to him. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. Her voice was higher than Dajeil’s; more girlish, and with a quite different accent. ‘Though if we had met and you hadn’t altered in some way and I’d forgotten, certainly I’d be far too ashamed to admit it.’ She smiled. He did the same. She frowned. ‘Unless… do you live on Tier?’
‘Just passing through,’ he told her. A bomber, in flames, tore past just overhead and exploded in a burst of light behind the Sublimer building. On the street, the argument around the pondrosaur seemed to be getting more heated; the animal itself was staring intently at the Sintricate and its mahout was standing up on its neck, pointing the flaming mace at the darkly spiny being to emphasise whatever points he was making.
‘But I’ve been this way before,’ Genar-Hofoen said. ‘Perhaps we bumped into each other then.’
She nodded thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps,’ she conceded.
‘Oh, you two know each other?’ said the young Sublimer man she’d been talking to. ‘Well, many people find that Subliming in the company of a loved one or just somebody they know is-‘
‘Do you play Calascenic Crasis?’ she asked, cutting across the young Sublimer. ‘You may have seen me at a game here.’ She put her head back, looking down that long nose at him. ‘If so, I’m disappointed you left it till now to say hello.’
‘Ah!’ the Sublimer lad said. ‘Games; an expression of the urge to enter into worlds beyond ourselves! Another-‘
‘I’ve never even heard of the game,’ he confessed. ‘Do you recommend it?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, and sounded ironic. ‘It benefits all who play.’
‘Well, I’m always willing to entertain some new experience. Perhaps you could teach me.’
‘Ah, now; the ultimate new experience-‘ began the Sublimer lad.
Genar-Hofoen turned to him and said, ‘Oh, shut up!’ It had been an instinctive reaction, and for a moment he was worried he might have said the wrong thing, but she didn’t seem to be regarding the young Sublimer’s hurt look with any great degree of sympathy.
She looked back to him. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You stand me my stake and I’ll teach you Crasis.’
He smiled, wondering if that had been too easy. ‘It’s a deal,’ he said. He waved the cloud cane under his nose and took a deep breath, then bowed. ‘My name’s Byr.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’ She nodded again. ‘Call me Flin,’ she said, and, taking hold of the cane, waved it under her own nose.
‘Shall we, Flin?’ he said, and indicated the street beyond, where the pondrosaur had sunk to its belly, its four legs doubled up underneath it and both fore-limbs folded beneath its chin, as though bored. Two Sintricates were shouting at the enraged mahout, who was shaking the flaming mace at them. The hire guards were looking nervous and patting the restless kliestrithrals.
‘Certainly.’
‘Remember where you met!’ the Sublimer called after them. ‘Subliming is the ultimate meeting of souls, the pinnacle of…’ They left the hushfield. His voice was drowned out by the thudding of projected anti-aircraft fire as they walked along the pavement.