STRINGS (part 2)

Jon-Cat comes to see the show with his friends.

She knows them for portcrew--they are all so standard. Portcrew don't much do modification. Brown hair receding back away from his face, brown skin, a little darker than Cardamon. Kit sings to him, crooning and swaying. Smoke music, so sad. He has big eyes for her but he is embarrassed. Goodsign, portcrew's pink face. Between sets she comes out to sit with him, shysmiling back at his surprise. That is when he tells her that he is called Jon-Cat. She tells him that her name is Kistna but everyone calls her Kit. He says they are both cats and they are made for each other.

She sings the next set at him, not so shy, her eyes and ears focused on him. Sweetsad, why-did-you-leave-me songs, and she turns her face away as if in sorrow. She watches him from above the stage while Cardamon sinuously rolls her hips, but he does not seem interested in Cardamon's wisebody ways. If he was, Kit knows she could not compete. She is innocence, that is her trump. Cardamon is joss and Sunday morning alone and knowing she will never keep her man. Cardamon is a lamia.

Someday Kit will be a lamia, but not yet, now she is still a smokey Juliet.

He offers her joss, a drink.

"Not joss," she shakes her head, her ears flickerback. "Not good for the dancesing." She smiles. He buys her a prettydrink in a tall thin glass.

The club is full of jossfog and chatter. He and his friends talk about the port. They talk about other safeclubs on the portlist. They talk about transit, the twenty-two curled dimensions. They call the transit between stars the click and talk about how many clicks they've had. Kit imagines the dimensions flower-burst for just that moment. "What's it like?" she asks.

They laugh. "Nothing."

"Fast," says one, "over before you know it."

"You don't notice?" she asks, disappointed.

They are thoughtful, look at each other, afraid to speak their trade religion, the unofficial things that they all know and that science doesn't explain. "Sometimes, afterwards, you remember what it's like," Jon-Cat says. "It tastes like horn music."

"It smells as soft as velvet."

"It's the color of a woman's low laugh."

"It feels as slick as the blue of your dress."

They are drunk. Kit pouts, ears droop.

"You can't explain it," Jon-Cat says, wistful.

She goes back and changes into short skirt and butterscale boots. She takes Jon-Cat out the back and they walk to her place. She is as tall as he is. He laughs at her hat. "Why cover your pretty ears?"

In bed, at the talktime, the aftertime, he tells her in a drowsy way about his home, very far away. Clicks and clicks. She imagines jumping from star to star. "Wheredau is so strange," he says. "A hothouse under radiation shields. Why do people change themselves?"

"To be like breedtrues," she says. Swiveling her ears to cup his voice.

"What does that mean?"

"I was born this way. My ears are my genetic own," she says. "Maybe my baby will have ears if everything else is right." Usually not. Almost never-never. But maybe.

"Your mama had ears?"

No, her ears were hidden in long spaces of her mama's chromosomes, alternates, keyed alert by accidents of environment and her daddy's own chromalanguage. Probably, Kit's children will not manifest alternate chromalanguage.

Her mama didn't have ears, didn't know about ears til Kit was born. Her mama had red eyes, but that was modified. Breedtrues were different born. Modifieds made themselves different. And standards, like Jon-Cat--well, Jon-Cat was sweet so she didn't care if he was simple-standard.

"Sometime in the past people had to have been modified. Gene modified. Or you wouldn't have alternate strings in your chromosomes," he says.

"That's wrong," she says, sullen. Not supposed to change humans. Already, distance makes genedrift. Humanity fragments. Considerate people do not encourage that. "Cardamon talks like you."

He doesn't like Cardamon. "She couldn't be in love like us, she's too old," he says. Kit lays her head on his chest. He strokes her hair, plays with her ears, long ticklish pleasure.

"I want a baby," Kit tells Cardamon.

"Shabata-sweet," Cardamon says, "more like my daughter than my own two children, why don't you wait a few years. There is time enough for babies. How will you get your big break if you have to take a baby with you?"

Kit knows a baby won't matter. Lots of people have babies at her age.

"You don't know, longlegs, about the baby and the work at night. It's so hard." But Cardamon sighs because she sees that Kit has this idea in her head. And although Cardamon knows all about the work, she thinks of baby, sweet milkbaby smell and soft hair, and her arms curve to hold it.

"Will you be a baby's auntie?" Kit asks. Whispers.

"Of course," Cardamon says. She gives Kit a big hug. "But you should wait a little while, sweet thing."

Kit sees Jon-Cat every night and when she isn't singing she takes him through Wheredau. At the bazaar they eat meatfruit on a stick and stare at lavender sanddragons, sleepy and parasite-scaled. She stops to look at children's toys--finger fish that dart around her hands, gossamer strings for babies to tangle and play with. Jon-cat buys her birds to fly above them in bed, singing children's songs.

Her place is full, of her things, of his things, and at night, of the ghostly luminescence of finger fish. Lullaby birds throw soft lights on his face while he sleeps. She thinks of long strings curled in his cells, wonders what they might tell long strings curled in hers. Why would she choose Jon-Cat for baby's father? Because he is thoughtful and good and sweet.

Her daddy was portcrew. Something about ports, she is sure, will make her baby breedtrue. She nuzzles Jon-Cat and sleepily he turns towards her, settles with his arm around her. She tickles him with her finger tips, her ears sweep forward and back as she concentrates. He opens drowsy eyes and smiles. Inside his eyes are twenty-six dimensions, twenty-two curled tight. Strings describe the universe and strings are curled into her cells. What makes portcrew so important? Maybe it is the click that jars the unfolding of alternate codes in her genetic strings.

"Jon-Cat," she says.

"What?"

"Who is allowed to go on ship?"

"What do you mean? Crew?"

"Can I go on ship with you?"

He frowns, "Get a job in port? You wouldn't like it, Kit. People are always telling you what to do. It's all hierarchy, you hate that."

"No, just take one trip," she says.

"A trip? Transport liners are too expensive."

"Not a transport liner." She sits up and birds flicker around her ears like bioluminescent earrings. "Like you work on, cargoship. Can I just go see? See where you work?"

"You want to come to the port?" he says. "Okay."

She smiles then kiss-kiss-kiss, tickling until he is laughing. "My fingerfish will get you," she warns him, her fingers flickering, tickling and teasing.

He catches her hand and puts her fingers in his mouth. "Best toys," he mumbles around them. Laughing, making love.