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PART ONE

RYDRA WONG

Here is the hub of ambiguity.

Electric spectrums splash across the street.

Equivocation knots the shadowed features of boys who are not boys; a quirk of darkness shrivels a full mouth to senility or pares it to a razor-edge, pours acid across the amber cheek . . .

. . .  or smashes in the pelvic arch and wells a dark clot oozing on a chest dispelled with motion or a flare of light that swells the lips and dribbles them with blood . . .

They say the same crowd surges up the street and surges down again, like driftwood borne tidewise ashore and sucked away with backwash, only to slap into the sand again, only to be jerked out and spun away.

Driftwood; me narrow hips, and liquid eyes, the wideflung shoulders and the rough-cast hands, the gray-faced jackals kneeling to their prey.

The colors disappear at break of day when stragglers toward the west riverdocks meet young sailors ambling shipward on the street . . .

—from Prism and Lens, M. H.

I

 IT'S A PORT CITY. Here fumes mist the sky, the General thought. Industrial gases flushed the evening with oranges, salmons, purples with too much red.

West, ascending and descending transports, shuttling cargoes to stellar centers and satellites, lacerated the clouds. It's a rotten poor city too, thought the General, turning the corner by the garbage-strewn curb.

Since the Invasion six ruinous embargoes for months apiece had strangled this city whose lifeline must pulse with interstellar commerce to survive. Sequestered, how could this city exist? Six times in twenty years he'd asked himself that. Answer? It couldn't.

 Panics, riots, burnings, twice cannibalism—

The General looked front the silhouetted loading towers that jutted behind the rickety monorail to the grimy buildings. The streets were smaller here, cluttered with transport workers, loaders, a few stellarmen in green uniforms, and the hoard of pale, proper men and women who managed the intricate sprawl of customs operations. They are quiet now, intent on home or work, the General thought. Yet all of these people have lived for two decades under the Invasion. They've starved during the embargoes, broken windows, looted, run screaming before fire-hoses, torn flesh from a corpse's arm with decalcified teeth.

Who is this animal man? He asked himself the abstract question to blur the lines of memory. It was easier, being a general, to ask about the 'animal man' than about the woman who had sat in the middle of the sidewalk during the last embargo holding her skeletal baby by one leg, or the three scrawny teen-age girls who had attacked him on the street with razors (—she had hissed through brown teeth, the bar of metal glistening toward his chest, "Come here. Beefsteak! Come get me Lunchmeat. . . " He had used karate—) or the blind man who had walked up the avenue screaming.

Pale and proper men and women now, who spoke softly, who always hesitated before they let an expression fix their faces, with pale, proper patriotic ideas: work for victory over the Invaders; Alona Star and Kip Rhyak were great in "Stellar Holiday" but Ronald Quar was the best serious actor around. They listened to Hi Lite's music (or did they listen, wondered the General, during those slow dances where no one touched). A position in Customs was a good secure job—working directly in Transport was probably more exciting and fun to watch in the movies; but really, such strange people—