“Airy!” squealed Che as Prince clapped the shape over her shoulders.

Through the transparent leer, her own delicate, green-eyed face twisted into laughter.

“Here, one for you!” Down came a saber-toothed panther’s head for Cecil; an eagle for Edgar, with iridescent feathers; Jose’s dark hair disappeared under a lizard’s head.

A lion for Dan (who had come protesting at everyone’s insistence, though they had forgotten him the moment he had given his belligerent consent) and a griffon for Brian (whom everyone had ignored till now, though he’d followed eagerly).

“And you!” Prince turned to Lorq. “I have a special one for you too!” Laughing, he lifted down a pirate’s head, with eyepatch, bandana, scarred cheek, and a dagger in bared teeth, It went lightly over Lorq’s head: he was looking through mesh eyeholes in the neck. Prince slapped him on the back. “A pirate, that’s for Von Ray!” he called as Lorq started across the cobble street.

More laughter as others arrived at the bridge.

Above the crowd, girls in powdered, towering, twenty-third-century, pre-Ashton Clark coiffures, tossed confetti from a balcony. A man was pushing up the street with a bear. Lorq thought it was someone in costume till the fur brushed his shoulder and he smelled the musk. The claws clicked away. The crowd caught him up,

Lorq was ears.

Lorq was eyes.

Bliss filed the receptive surface of each sense glass-smooth. Perception turned suddenly in (as the vanes of a ship might turn) as he walked the brick street, mortared with confetti. He felt the presence of his centered self. His world focused on the now of his hands and tongue. Voices around him caressed his awareness.

“Champagne! Isn’t that just airy!” The transparent plastic rat had cornered the griffon in the flowered vest at the wine table. “Aren’t you having fun? I just love it!”

“Sure,” Brian answered. “But I’ve never been to a party like this. People like Lorq, Prince, you—you’re the sort of people I only used to hear about. It’s hard to believe you’re real.”

“Just between us. I’ve occasionally had the same problem. It’s good to have you here to remind us, Now you just keep telling us—”

Lorq passed on to another group.

“…on the cruise boat up from Port Said to Istanbul, there was this fisherman from the Pleiades who played the most marvelous things on the sensory-syrynx. .

“…and then we had to hitchhike all the way across Iran because the mono wasn’t working. I really think Earth is coming apart at the seams…”

“…beautiful party. Perfectly air…”

The very young, Lorq thought; the very rich; and wondered what limits of difference those conditions defined.

Barefoot, with a rope belt, the lion leaned against the side of a doorway, watching. “How you doing, Captain?”

Lorq raised his hand to Dan, walked on.

Now, specious and crystal, was within him. Music invaded his hollow mask where his head was cushioned on the sound of his own breath. On a platform at a harpsichord a man was playing a Byrd pavane. Voices in another key grew over the sound as he moved further on; on a platform on the other side of the street, two boys and two girls in twentieth-century mod re-created a flowing antiphonal work of the Mommas and the Poppas. Turning down a side street, Lorq moved into a crowd that pushed him forward, till at last he confronted the towering bank of electronic instruments that were reproducing the jarring, textured silences of the Tohu-bohus. Responding with the nostalgia produced by ten-year-old popular music, the guests, in their bloated mache and plastic heads, broke off in twos, threes, fives, and sevens to dance. A swan’s head swayed to the right. Left, a frog’s face wobbled on sequined shoulders. As he moved even further, into his ear threaded the thirdless modulations that he had heard over the speaker of the Caliban, hovering above the Himalayas.

They came running through the dancers. “He did it! Isn’t Prince a darling!” They shouted and cavorted. “He’s got that old Turkish music!”

Hips and breasts and shoulders gleaming beneath the vinyl (the material had pores that opened in warm weather to make the transparent costume cool as silk), Che-ong swung around, holding her furry ears,

“Down, everybody! Down on all fours! We’re going to show you our new step! Like this: just swing your—”

Lorq turned under the exploding night, a little tired, a little excited. He crossed the street edging the island and leaned on the stone near one of the floodlights that shone back on the buildings of the Ile. Across the water on the opposite quay people strolled, in couples or singly, gazing at the fireworks or simply watching the gaiety here.

Behind him a girl laughed sharply. He turned to her—

—head of a bird of paradise, blue feathers about red foil eyes, red beak, red rippling comb—

—as she pulled away from the group to sway against the low wall. The breeze shook the panels of her dress so that they tugged at the scrolled brass fastenings at shoulder, wrist, and thigh. She rested her hip on the stone, sandaled toe touching the ground, one inch above it. With long arms (her nails were crimson) she removed her mask. As she set it on the wall, the breeze shook out her black hair, dropped it to her shoulders, raised it. The water reticulated below them as under flung sand.

He looked away. He looked back. He frowned.

There are two beauties (her face struck the thought in him, articulate and complete): with the first, the features and the body’s lines conform to an averaged standard that will offend no one: this was the beauty of models and popular actresses; this was the beauty of Che-ong. Second, there was this: her eyes were smashed disks of blue jade, her cheekbones angled high over the white hollows of her wide face. Her chin was wide; her mouth, thin, red, and wider. Her nose fell straight from her forehead to flare at the nostrils (she breathed in the wind—and watching her, he became aware of the river’s odor, the Paris night, the city wind); these features were too austere and violent on the face of such a young woman. But the authority with which they set together would make him look again, he knew, once he looked away; make him remember, once he had gone away. Her face compelled in the way that makes the merely beautiful gnaw the insides of their cheeks,

She looked at him: “Lorq Von Ray?”

His frown deepened inside his mask.

She leaned forward, above the paving that lipped the river. “They’re all so far away.” She nodded toward the people on the quay. “They’re so much further away than we think or they think. What would they do at our party?”

Lorq took off his mask and placed the pirate beside her crested bird.

She glanced back at him. “So that’s what you look like. You’re handsome.”

“How did you know who I was?” Thinking he might somehow have missed her in the crowd that had first come across the bridge, he expected her to say something about the pictures of him that occasionally appeared across the galaxy when he won a race.

“Your mask. That’s how I knew.”

“Really?” He smiled. “I don’t understand.”

Her eyebrows’ arch sharpened. There were a few seconds of laughter, too soft and gone too fast.

“You. Who are you?” Lorq asked.

“I’m Ruby Red.”

She was still thin. Somewhere a little girl had stood above him in the mouth of a beast—Lorq laughed now. “What was there about my mask that gave me away?”

“Prince has been gloating over the prospect of making you wear it ever since he extended the invitation through your father and there was the faintest possibility that you would actually come. Tell me, is it politeness that makes you indulge him in his nasty prank by wearing it?”

“Everyone else has one. I thought it was a clever idea.”

“I see.” Her voice hung above the tone of general statement. “My brother tells me we have all met a long time ago.” It returned. “I… wouldn’t have recognized you. But I remember you.”