Authors: Sheri S. Tepper
“If we still
have
some of the Timmys who danced,” said Ellin. “They aren’t all dead, are they?”
“Not quite all, no,” said Questioner, with a significant look at the Hags. “The governing powers were not quite that efficient.”
Bao went on, “If we have story, we can start with plot. Who are characters? What is represented, what is emotion? What is done? Surely this much Kaorugi knows!”
“According to the Corojum,” said Questioner, “Kaorugi knows only that the dance soothed the Quaggima and let it sleep.”
With her brow furrowed in concentration, Ellin offered, “It might be plotless, Bao. Just movement for movement’s sake. Kind of like hypnosis, or wall patterns. I always kept my walls on patterns because they were soothing. And if there’s no story line, it’s very difficult to figure out what went on.”
“Assume for the moment there was a story,” said Questioner.
“Well then, I’d look for representations of the work of the solo dancers, verbal or pictorial, to see how they moved, how they worked, what their style was …”
“Style?” asked Calvy. “I don’t see—”
Ellin interrupted him, “We know the Timmys danced. Well, they were shaped differently. What could that shape do? What kinds of jumps, positions, movements? How did the choreographers work? Did they work out lengthy series of steps and teach the series, already set, or did they allow the dancer a share in developing the vision? On Old Earth, we’d ask the patrons of the ballet, as well, but I guess that doesn’t apply here.”
“The music,” said Bao. “Again, I am emphasizing importance of music.”
“How many people are we talking about here?” asked Calvy. “How many dancers? Musicians? Scene setters?”
Ellin, who had, despite herself, become interested in the problem, shook her head firmly. “The numbers aren’t that critical. Even in a large ballet, you wouldn’t need everyone in order to learn what they did. A lot of ballet is ensemble work. One dancer in an ensemble could reconstruct the whole ensemble, or large chunks of it, because she would move as everyone else does, or groups would move in repetitive sequence. It wouldn’t matter if there were twelve or two hundred, they might all be doing the same steps. The same is true for small groups: in a pas de deux, for example, either dancer could remember what the other one did….”
Bao objected, “Except, there were being in twentieth century, so-called modern dances in which every person was doing something completely different from everyone else. Movements and groupings were being more sculptural….”
“But if these were very small dancers, doing something to soothe a very large being, they’d have to move en masse to be perceived, wouldn’t they?” Ellin asked plaintively. “I keep getting this twentieth-century, Old Earth flash of Busby Berkeley musicals. Hundreds of dancers parading around. Or carnival processions! Or even pageants! Something with hundreds, thousands of participants, all jingling and jiggling, headdresses bobbing, skirts swirling…. Looking at the size of the wings on that creature in the pit, I wonder if it could even perceive individual dancers.”
“Postpone that concern,” said Questioner. “For now, merely find out everything you can, without worrying about how we’ll use it. We have no newspapers or reviews; we have no notes; we do, however, have some persons, creatures, who saw the dance or did the dance or provided music for it.”
“I must be very stupid, but I can’t understand why Kaorugi doesn’t remember,” cried Ellin, frustrated.
Questioner pondered. “Let me simplify. Imagine that your brain is spread out everywhere under your skin. Imagine that you could detach your arm and send it off to pick strawberries, and imagine the brain under the skin had sensors to see and smell and taste with. Imagine your arm can remember what it is supposed to do, and can record what happens. When the arm comes back, once it is reattached, you would remember picking the berries. If your arm never came back, however, you would remember sending the arm, but not what happened to it. Kaorugi can remember deputizing its parts, but it can’t remember what they do until and unless they return.”
“And Kaorugi can’t extrapolate the missing parts?” Madame said, shaking her head.
Questioner said, “Madame, I don’t know all the implications of Kaorugi’s mind. I think the dance was a sub-function that was left up to the Timmys and the Corojumi, a constantly changing detail Kaorugi never incorporated into its core. The Timmys and the Corojum are, after all, virtually independent. The system had plenty of redundancy until we came along, but this planet hasn’t had a history of traumas and mass deaths. We brought the habits of murder with us, which meant the redundancy level just wasn’t high enough.”
“Ridiculous,” muttered Onsofruct.
Questioner said patiently, “It does us no good to ponder and fret over what we don’t have, let’s start with what we do. We will go down to the Fauxi-dizalonz and find out what the one Corojum remembers. We will find out what the remaining Timmys remember and whatever else exists that might retain any memory of the dance. And by the way, what are the members of my entourage doing down there?”
Ellin shook her head in confusion. “Were they down there? We didn’t see them.”
“The Corojum said they were there,” Questioner averred.
Bao stood up, took Ellin by one hand, and pulled her erect. “We’ll see when we get there.”
Mouche was standing at the rim, examining the crowd of persons below. His Goddess was not there, which gave him a sense of relief. On the voyage he had managed not to look at her, it, too closely, and just now he had carefully refused to listen to Questioner’s exposition, knowing he wouldn’t like the implications of it. He could not accept that Flowing Green was a part. His mystical dream required that she, it, be a singular creature woven of starlight and shadow, magic and romance. She was a perilous eidolon, a symbol of marvel and mystery. Instinctively, he kept a respectful distance to separate his Hagion from reality. Since she, it, was not by the Fauxi-dizalonz, nothing prevented his going with the others.
The road began its descent into the caldera from the north end of the ledge, and they went along it only a little way before cutting downward on a steep narrow track interrupted by rocky stairs. The road had a much gentler slope, but it went so far around the caldera before each switchback that it would have taken them half a day to traverse it. Even as it was, Questioner thought, setting her climbing legs on slow, a careful journey would take them some time.
Madame, the Hags, and Questioner were at the end of the procession. Madame stared after Mouche, worried by his manner. Something there. Something strange. When he came back, she’d have to try and find out what. She turned a troubled face toward the Questioner, who was watching her closely.
“You’re worried about the boy?” Questioner asked.
“I am, yes.”
“Mouche?” asked D’Jevier. “What’s wrong with him?”
“He is enchanted,” said Questioner.
“By them?” D’Jevier looked downward. “The Timmys?”
“One of them, I should think,” said Madame. “Though how it happened …”
“He watched them,” said Questioner. “At their dances, while he was at your establishment, Madame.”
“Impossible!”
“Nothing is impossible when it comes to youthful mischief, as we all know,” Onsofruct drawled in a muffled voice.
Questioner said firmly, “Since we are more or less alone, just we four … women, I think it’s time for you to tell me the truth about Newholme.”
D’Jevier refused to be cowed. “By all the Hagions,” she erupted, planting her feet firmly on the trail and turning on her interlocutor. “Don’t play games with us, Questioner. You know the truth! You know we lied about the Timmys. You’ve probably had that one figured out since shortly after you got here. I don’t know what made us think we could hide it.”
“I know some of the truth about that, yes,” said Questioner. “But I am speaking now of the truth of Mouche and Madame. I mean the other truth.”
The three women looked at one another. Onsofruct sighed. “What about Mouche and Madame?”
“This Consort business. This business of men going about in veils.”
The two sisters exchanged a glance, and Onsofruct shrugged. “There’s no point in not telling you. It’s not unethical.”
Questioner said, “You may be right, though I doubt Haraldson would have approved. It’s part of the Newholmian pattern, and I need to know about all of it.”
Onsofruct sat on a boulder at the edge of the path, removed her boot, and dumped gravel out of it, saying: “Tell her about the woman raids, D’Jevier. That’s where the whole thing started.”
D’Jevier did so, concluding, “The men who took them made no bones about their intentions. They’d been promised wives with the second ship, and they weren’t going to wait. They had stolen women, they would steal more, and they intended to keep them all under lock and key to prevent their running away.
“Well, Honored Questioner, ‘keeping women under lock and key’ or ‘stopping their running away’ sounded like the worst sort of patriarchal repression to our fore-mothers, some of whom, as required by the Settlement Act, were cultural historians.”
Onsofruct interrupted, “The women knew that if we got entrenched in a patriarchal system, no matter how useful it might be for a generation or two, there’d be no simple way to stop it sixty or seventy years later. Once a male dominance system got started, it would take centuries before their daughters and granddaughters could achieve equality.”
Onsofruct got to her feet and started down the path again, Questioner close behind. “The women used the fortress in Sendoph. It was unfinished, but it had strong walls that were easy to defend, and our ancestresses had control of medical care, tools, weapons, and women. That gave them what they needed to enforce the newly written dower laws. Our foremothers knew that when women had to be paid for, they were more highly valued, so we told the men they’d either pay and pay well for a woman’s reproductive life, or they would do without.
“Well, you know about the dower laws. Women have a contractual right to be well supported during their entire lifetimes—there is no divorce in an economic sense—and in return the women agree to contribute their reproductive capabilities to their husbands’ lineage for a specified number of years. If a woman has talents or skills, the contract may include some contribution toward the business. The marriage contract can guarantee support, but no contract can guarantee affection or pleasure. Our people thought women should be entitled to those as well. After a dutiful childbearing, women had a right to the same pleasures men have always achieved through having mistresses.”
“You gave them Consorts,” said Questioner.
“Exactly. Someone to offer intellectual stimulation, to make conversation, to create romance, to cuddle and cosset, to make love to them. Men of Business are too busy with the game of business—which most men seem to enjoy more than anything else—to have time for pleasuring a wife.”
Questioner asked, “And you’re satisfied with the system?”
Onsofruct said, “Almost everyone is satisfied because we tried very hard to give everyone what they wanted. What men most wanted was clear title to their children’s paternal genetics, so we gave it to them. What women most wanted was to lead productive and companionate lives. We gave them that by giving them broadly educated companions, Consorts who read, who enjoy the arts. Whenever you see art or hear music or enjoy culture upon Newholme, you may thank women and their Consorts, for they are the ones who keep it going.”
“It wouldn’t work if you had as many women as men,” said Questioner.
Onsofruct and D’Jevier plodded on, blank-faced.
Madame said, “Our system works for us. It’s coercive, yes, but no more so than every other system. We know Haraldson’s edicts say people shouldn’t be coerced in matters of reproduction, but you know as well as we do they’ve always been coerced, women particularly. Here, we tried to balance things.”
“I give you credit for good intentions,” said Questioner in a preoccupied tone. “I will report you, of course, but chances are the Council of Worlds will agree with you. Your system works. And it probably makes no difference, for you’re sufficiently at risk over the business of the Timmys that the matter of coercion takes second place.”
“You’re going to report the Timmys, too.” Onsofruct sighed.
“You’d expect me to, wouldn’t you?” asked Questioner. “Though it’s an interesting question whether they are, in fact, indigenes. I’m not sure detachable parts can be considered an indigenous race. And since there’s only one of Kaorugi, it isn’t exactly a race. It’s more of a biota. Haraldson’s edicts cover destruction of biotas, but killing the Timmys didn’t kill the biota. The hearings on the question should be interesting, no?”
“Oh, certainly, certainly.” Madame threw up her hands, as though throwing the subject to the winds. Then, looking down the hill, she remarked, “Let’s catch up to your assistants and the men.”
They went on at somewhat greater speed, Madame with a clear conscience, the two Hags somewhat troubled, and Questioner quite certain she knew what each of the others was thinking.
T
hough Ashes and his sons kept to the high road, their progress was slowed by the traffic in Newholmian leggers and tunnelers along with various of Ashes’s kindred who rolled, heaved, crawled, slunk, poured, bounced, and otherwise ambulated along in the same direction. By the time half the morning had worn away, Dyre and Bane were dizzy with the variety they had observed and half paralyzed by the monstrousness of the movers and shakers—for so Ashes called them.
“Movers and shakers, boys,” he crowed. “That’s us, the movers and the shakers.”
“When they all get there, what are they going to do?” asked Bane, keeping his voice in the even, careless register that Ashes seemed able to hear without growing angry.
“Like Hugh said, roll ‘em over.” Ashes chuckled.
Bane started to ask why, then desisted. Ashes wouldn’t know why. Yesterday it had occurred to Bane that Ashes had never known why, and probably neither had any of the first settlers. They had been discontented with life on Earth, so they’d moved to Thor. They’d been discontented with the rules on Thor, so they’d broken the rules. They’d been discontented with the punishment received for that, so they’d moved. They had been discontented without women, so they’d tried stealing some. They’d continued discontented with the results of that; they would always be discontented, and probably they would never know why. During the night just past, he had dreamed of Ma-dame’s voice going on and on about angry men, discontented men, men who went off like bombs.