Lusine's laughter was like the call of a silverbell bird. Whatever her
unhuman appetites, she had a beautiful voice. She said, "How comical!
And how do you, with your brave ideas, like being regarded as a
harmless figure of fun, or as a sick man?"
"I like it as well as you would," he growled.
She gripped the bars of her window until the tendons on the back of
her long thin hands stood out and the membranes between her fingers
stretched like wind-blown tents. Face twisted, she spat at him,
"Coward! Why don't you kill somebody and break out of this ridiculous
mold--that Skin that the Ssassarors have poured you into?"
Rastignac was silent. That was a good question. Why didn't he? Killing
was the logical result of his philosophy. But the Skin kept him
docile. Yes, he could vaguely see that he had purposely shut his eyes
to the destination towards which his ideas were slowly but inevitably
traveling.
And there was another facet to the answer to her question--if he had
to kill, he would not kill a Man. His philosophy was directed towards
the Amphibians and the Sea-changelings.
He said, "Violence doesn't necessarily mean the shedding of blood,
Lusine. My philosophy urges that we take a more vigorous action, that
we overthrow some of the bio-social institutions which have imprisoned
Man and stripped him of his dignity as an individual."
"Yes, I have heard that you want Man to stop wearing the Skin. That is
what has horrified your people, isn't it?"
"Yes," he said. "And I understand it has had the same effect among the
Amphibians."
She bridled, her brown eyes flashing in the feeble glowworms' light.
"Why shouldn't it? What would we be without our Skins?"
"What, indeed?" he said, laughing derisively afterwards.
Earnestly she said, "You don't understand. We Amphibians--our Skins
are not like yours. We do not wear them for the same reason you do.
You are imprisoned by your Skins--they tell you how to feel, what to
think. Above all, they keep you from getting ideas about
non-cooperation or non-integration with Nature as a whole.
"That, to us individualistic Amphibians, is false. The purpose of our
Skins is to make sure that our King's subjects understand what he
wants so that we may all act as one unit and thus further the progress
of the Seafolk."
The first time Rastignac had heard this statement he had howled with
laughter. Now, however, knowing that she could not see the fallacy, he
did not try to argue the point. The Amphibs were, in their way, as
hidebound--no pun intended--as the Land-walkers.
"Look, Lusine," he said, "there are only three places where a Man may
take off his Skin. One is in his own home, when he may hang it upon
the halltree. Two is when he is, like us, in jail and therefore may
not harm anybody. The third is when a man is King. Now you and I have
been without our Skins for a week. We have gone longer without them
than anybody, except the King. Tell me true, don't you feel free for
the first time in your life?
"Don't you feel as if you belong to nobody but yourself, that you are
accountable to no one but yourself, and that you love that feeling?
And don't you dread the day we will be let out of prison and made to
wear our Skins again? That day which, curiously enough, will be the
very day that we will lose our freedom."
Lusine looked as if she didn't know what he was talking about.
"You'll see what I mean when we are freed and the Skins are put back
upon us," he said. Immediately after, he was embarrassed. He
remembered that she would go to the Chalice where one of the heavy and
powerful Skins used for unnaturals would be fastened to her
shoulders.
Lusine did not notice. She was considering the last but most telling
point in her argument "You cannot win against us," she said, watching
him narrowly for the effect of her words. "We have a weapon that is
irresistible. We have immortality."
His face did not lose its imperturbability.
She continued, "And what is more, we can give immortality to anyone
who casts off his Skin and adopts ours. Don't think that your people
don't know this. For instance, during the last year more than two
thousand Humans living along the beaches deserted and went over to us,
the Amphibs."
He was a little shocked to hear this, but he did not doubt her. He
remembered the mysterious case of the schooner _Le Pauvre Pierre_
which had been found drifting and crewless, and he remembered a
conversation he had had with a fisherman in his home port of Marrec.
He put his hands behind his back and began pacing. Lusine continued
staring at him through the bars. Despite the fact that her face was in
the shadows, he could see--or feel--her smile. He had humiliated her,
but she had won in the end.
Rastignac quit his limited roving and called up to the guard.
"_Shoo l'footyay, kal u ay tee?_"
The guard leaned over the grille. His large hat with its tall wings
sticking from the peak was green in the daytime. But now, illuminated
only by a far off torchlight and by a glowworm coiled around the band,
it was black.
"_Ah, shoo Zhaw-Zhawk W'stenyek_," he said, loudly. "What time is it?
What do you care what time it is?" And he concluded with the stock
phrase of the jailer, unchanged through millenia and over light-years.
"You're not going any place, are you?"
Rastignac threw his head back to howl at the guard but stopped to
wince at the sudden pain in his neck. After uttering, "_Sek Ploo!_"
and "_S'pweestee!_" both of which were close enough to the old Terran
French so that a language specialist might have recognized them, he
said, more calmly, "If you would let me out on the ground, _monsieur
le foutriquet_, and give me a good epee, I would show you where I am
going. Or, at least, where my sword is going. I am thinking of a nice
sheath for it."
Tonight he had a special reason for keeping the attention of the
King's mucketeer directed towards himself. So, when the guard grew
tired of returning insults--mainly because his limited imagination
could invent no new ones--Rastignac began telling jokes. They were
broad and aimed at the mucketeer's narrow intellect.
"Then," said Rastignac, "there was the itinerant salesman whose
_s'fel_ threw a shoe. He knocked on the door of the hut of the nearest
peasant and said...." What was said by the salesman was never known.
A strangled gasp had come from above.