Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
“Now, as to the husband. It is important that you consider the personality of your patroness’s husband, for though she has the right to a Consort of her own choosing, husbands accommodate that right in various ways. It is essential that you analyze the degree and type of accommodation and make every effort to meet it more than halfway.
“For example, the husband of your patroness may be complacent, in which case honest civility will be all that’s required. He takes first place. At functions where husband and wife must appear together, you do not appear at all. At functions planned for patronesses and Consorts, at the theater, at restaurants, at fêtes and jollities, he does not appear.
“He may be envious, in which case you will speak
to
him of how highly his wife speaks
of
him. You will use a variation of the same technique used on servants and children. ‘She is so lucky to be married to you. She says so, all the time.’
“Occasionally, however, you will meet a husband who is given over to an amorphous rage, which may or may not direct itself at you. Some people, more often men, spend their entire lives awash in bitterness. They rage against injustices done to their forefathers, perhaps centuries in the past. They rage against injustices done to their countrymen, their families. They rage against people who are unlike themselves, who, by virtue of their difference, must be up to no good. They rage against people who are like themselves who do not share their views. They rage against their parents, their wives, their children, and against anyone who is sympathetic to any of these. Their rage is a screen between them and the world, behind which they huddle over their egos, like a caveman over his fire, unable to see out through the smoke.
“Even some apes display this characteristic. Such fury may begin as a matter of status, as resentment against the dominant male. It may begin out of frustration of desires. It may begin with an unhappy nature that is born depressed and uses anger to fuel itself into action. It may begin in mystery, and it may end in tragedy. However or whyever it begins, it is essential that your patroness be protected from it. Your duty to your patroness is to give her joy and keep her from harm. She selected you. She places her happiness and her trust in you. She is your responsibility. If you injure a husband in protecting your patroness, you are exempt from any damages or judgments, even if the entire Executive Council of the Men of Business rises in wrath. This is one of the reasons you are taught hand-to-hand combat.
“Anger is our most destructive emotion. The most difficult part of your job is to deal with anger, your own or others’. We need anger to defend ourselves, so we cannot breed it out or teach ourselves not to feel it, but when we let the anger well up without a proper object, it floods our minds and renders us helpless. We all know men who are angry at everything, simply because they prefer to be angry at everything. Often, they self-destruct, and sometimes they take other people with them.”
S
ettlers had spread outward from Naibah along the shores of the Jellied Sea, so called for the semi-annual hatch of Purse fish whose translucent egg sacs rose from the pelagic ooze in uncounted millions, turning the sea for that brief period into an oceanic aspic. There were good-sized communities as far as several days’ sail east or west, and small struggling settlements more distant than that. These places were supplied by ships from Gilesmarsh, the port at the mouth of the river, a place well equipped with doss houses, gambling dens, taverns, and stews built on tall pilings above the tidal ooze. Naibah was actually a bit inland from the delta, away from the stink of the mud flats and on high enough land to avoid both five-moon tides and the occasional tsunami resulting from sub-oceanic seisms.
Most boats docking at Gilesmarsh tried to do so at middle high tide, so their passengers could take one of the wind taxis upstream to Naibah and Water Street. There the transvestites were younger, prettier, and more agile than the old swabs at the port; the drink was of less lethal quality; and a man in his cups was less likely to end up dead, providing he kept his veils straight. Though there were few women of good repute to be offended on Water Street, there were alert Haggers everywhere.
One of the Water Street taverns was called the Septo-pod’s Eye, and in addition to more-regular customers the place was patronized quarterly, more or less, by a group of odd fellows who came into Naibah from different directions, looked considerably different from the usual run, and smelled different from (and worse than) any living thing. One of them was called the Machinist, and another went by the name of Ashes, and the third one called himself Mooly. Whenever the barman (who despite his profession was a respected family man, entitled to a g’ and a cockade) caught sight of any of the three, he summoned several bulky Haggers to sit about and look menacing and made sure his wife and daughters were up in the family quarters behind locked doors.
The three odd fellows never seemed to notice these arrangements. Each time they came, they sat at the same table and they drank the same brew, and they left at the same hour—-just before the night boat sailed for Nehbe. Every time they came, any patron they spoke to was offended, and every man who got close enough to smell them was offended, and all in all, the barman was thankful they only showed up three or four times a year.
“So,” said the one called Mooly to the one called Ashes, “you got your vengeance all underway, have you?”
“All moving along nicely.” Ashes grinned ferociously and dipped his snout into his glass. “Machinist kind of helped me out. Now I’m waitin’ for matters to ripen.”
“You figure gettin’ ridda her will change things, do you?” asked Mooly.
“Change my irritation some,” Ashes growled. “Teach her a lesson. Woman had no right to go off like that. I shoulda had daughters! I shoulda had riches! Woulda had, but for her!”
“Still got no ship,” murmured Mooly.
“We’ll get the ship. No reason for hurry. Mountains are gonna roll, Mooly-boy. Mountains are gonna roll.” He leaned back, opened his mouth and sang, “An’ when they do, it’s me and you, and devil take the hindmost.”
Everyone in the place began talking of something, anything, to cover the sound of that song, for it held a horridly broken quality, as though it issued from the throat of something not quite complete.
“Well,
we’re
ready,” said Mooly, glaring at Ashes, his long yellow nails, ridged as washboards, making a dry tattoo upon the tabletop, like the rattling of bones. “
Been
ready some time.”
Ashes squirmed, perhaps uncomfortable at this challenge. “I know, I know. Gotta be patient. Gotta wait on events. You tell ‘em Ashes said so. Wait on events.”
“I done my part,” whispered the Machinist. “Nothing new, here, Ashes. Why’d you need me here? I don’t like coming here.”
“Got to show the flag to the bloody Hag, Mah-cheeny. Got to come out in the open, ever now and then, listen to people talk, see ‘em wander, figure ‘em out.”
“You’re drunk,” said Machinist, who drank nothing but water. “You’re pickled.”
“And if I am? Who’s got more right? Never mind, Mah-cheeny, old boy. These little get-togethers keep us in touch. You over there near Nehbe. Mooly over the mountain with our folk. Me wanderin’ around in Sendoph and Naibah, keepin track of this one and that one. Now you can go back to your con-stit-you-encies and tell ‘em what’s goin’ on.”
“Got no constituency,” grated Machinist. “Don’t want none.”
Ashes sneered, “You got one, whether you want it or not. There’s still folks remember you well, Mah-cheeny. Folks that speak of you often. Shatter sends regards. So does old Crawley! Meetin’ here keeps us all together, keeps us on track. Whatever happens, we’re gonna be all together. No matter what happens.”
“What happens better be what we planned to happen,” said Machinist. “That’s what’d better happen.”
“Sure, sure,” soothed Ashes. “All in good time.”
“There’s been too damn much good time!”
“You want it sooner, you can lead it.”
“Don’t want to lead it,” said Machinist. “Never did.”
“Well then, don’t be so impatient. It’ll all come to pass. You can rely on that. It’ll all come to pass. No more Hags. No more smart-ass women dyin’ when we do ‘em. No more g’this and g’that. You relax, old boy. All’s going just the way it should.”
They drank, they muttered, and around them the air seemed to seethe with frustration, expressed and repressed, a kind of livid glow that exhausted the air, leaving it without sustenance. Not a moment too soon, they left, this time with no assaults and no insults beyond the assault of their smell and the insult of their presence. Everyone in the room gasped with relief and those nearest the windows rose to throw them wide.
The barman propped the door ajar as well, then summoned two supernumes-of-all-work to scrub the table and chairs where the three had sat. He bought drinks for the house just to restore a little conviviality. Every time the trio descended on him, he swore it would be the last, but he still hadn’t come up with a way to keep them out without insulting them, and somehow he didn’t think insulting them was a good idea.
O
n Old Earth, History House #8739 (one of 10,000) glowed golden in dawn, shone rose-pink in sunset, a mountain of mirrored surfaces set like the facets of a gem. The interior ambience fulfilled the exterior promise; all was brilliance and luxury. Gilded columns towered, white faux marble stairs curved away to unseen marvels, while the tall mirrors on every wall expanded the interiors into infinite, though often fragmentary, spaces. Carpets were thick and mattress-soft, and they led past fountains and sculptures and flowering trees, artificial but scented like real ones, to wide corridors that opened into the exhibits:
Old Earth, 20th-century America; Old Earth, Asian Heritage; Old Earth, the Arts; Old Earth, Africa, Cradle of Man; Old Earth, the Primordial Fauna; Old Earth, Trees, Trees, Trees
. And so on, and so on.
The exhibits were an artful combination of theme park, resort, museum, concert, theater, and zoo. They were even partly, though by far the lesser part, authentic. Late in the fourth millennium of the common era, who was to say what had been real two millennia ago, or three millennia, or even longer than that? Clothing, ideas, fads, convictions, all had been transitory and miscible. Nature itself had been ephemeral. Even religions had shifted, becoming more or less than they had been, or had been thought to have been, but History House offered hints and approximations of the spiritual just as it offered approximations of everything else.
Though they were called “artists” in the puff stuff, the performers who made the displays enjoyable and understandable did not profit from the glitter of the lower floors. Artists who lived in, mostly quota clones, occupied the far upper floors, for people on contract were not important enough to be allocated either luxury or space, both of which stopped at the 80th floor, just above the suites and gyms and dining rooms allocated to management. Above that were the shops, warehouses, and rehearsal halls, and above them were the dining rooms, grooming suites, and Denti-meds, serving those who lived above. The topmost floors were hives, with artists’ cubicles crammed like cells in a honeycomb.
One’s cubicle, however sterile and cramped, held all one had of home. Ellin Voy’s cubicle, for example. On her narrow bed lay the stuffed bear Mama One had given her when she was three and the dolly Mama One had given her when she left for History House. On the shelf above was a little holo of herself and Mama One and Mama Two when they met at the ballet school for Ellin’s thirteenth birthday. There was the book that Mama Two had given her for a sixteenth birthday present:
The Wizard, of Oz
, a facsimile of a real book written centuries and centuries ago.
Hung above the shelf were other pictures memorializing brief holidays and ephemeral friendships. There was Ellin standing next to the bionic bull and the real bullfighter, the time she was assigned to History House in Spain; standing next to a handsome guard at the Tower of London when she’d been assigned to History House in England. Artists got reassigned among the History Houses all the time, or their contracts expired, or they paid off their contracts and left. There was no one in the corps de ballet that Ellin had known longer than two years. She looked at the pictures of herself with this one and that one, and sometimes it was hard to recall their names.
At night, the three inner cubicle walls could be set to show views chosen from among an extensive library of landscapes and interiors and events, both Terran and other worldly. Most of the artists chose something from their assigned periods of earthly history, something homey: a fireplace with glowing logs; a summer garden, glorious with flowers; an autumn landscape, with trees changing color and a little wind riffling the surface of the pond; a city with broad avenues where spring blossoms fell gently onto the horses and carriages; views of things that no longer existed and places that no longer were.
Honorable Artist Ellin Voy chose otherwise. The sight of morning sun through autumn leaves made her cry. The sight of a fire burning on a hearth hurt her, as did trees dancing in moonlight. Views that made her think about the walls themselves made her choke, unable to catch her breath. Some fault within her, some unsuspected weakness that should have been eradicated before she was allowed to develop, had escaped the scrutiny of the monitors.
No matter what other artists did, Ellin kept her walls set on patterns only: receding colors of infinite depth, currents full of eddies and swirls, shapes that opened up and ramified and became other shapes, or endless streams of bubbles changing hue as they floated up and away. She curled on her narrow bed after lights out, dissolving in the patterns like a lump of sugar, unskeining like syrup into the liquid movement, becoming clearer and clearer, fading into transparency. Somewhere in that fluid motion was the thing she longed for, the total absorption, the absence of painful memory. In a few moments her eyes would blink, and soon she would fall asleep to dream of the same patterns and of herself as part of them.