Guilt Edged Ivory

by Doris Egan

  Jack had been very nice about it, actually. "Don't be silly," he'd said, when I apologized for what we were putting him through. "I can't wait to get my hands on you, Theodora. That is to say, on your data."

  "You won't be able to share it with anyone," I pointed out.

  Jack grinned. He seemed none the worse for being the focus of an eight-hour, three-sorcerer spell that observers had been barred from, but which had left a very strange odor all through the top floor corridor. "Knowing the facts myself comes first; sharing is a distant second, I'm afraid."

  "Hmm. No wonder you don't mind being a Cormallon."

  He'd been running Net scenarios all day and night. By now he must have hundreds. He hadn't said it would take this long.

  I'd been pacing, dinnerless, straight into the evening, when he appeared at the door to the dining room.

  "Theo?"

  I went straight to him. "What? Tell me."

  He ran a hand through his sparse brown hair. His eyes were deeply lined, his casually tasteful Tellysian jacket long since discarded, his shirt rumpled and stained. "I asked— God, I'm thirsty." His voice had come out as a croak. He stared around at the dining room as though at a foreign land, then picked up a carafe of water from a sideboard and drank directly from it. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I asked your husband to join us," he said, more firmly.

  "I can't wait. Tell me now."

  "It's not the kind of thing you can boil down to a sentence—"

  Ran entered the other end of the hall. He glanced at a bottle of Ducort on a rack by the entrance, evidently wondering if fortification would shortly be necessary. Then he walked down the length of the sideboard, took in my state at a glance, turned to Lykon and said, "Jack?"

  "Can we sit?" asked Jack.

  Ran motioned toward some scattered pillows by a corner of the dining table. We sat.

  Jack said, "First you have to understand that we're dealing with a lot of unknowns here. One specimen does not a statistic make. I had to tag a lot of variables with question marks, so I'm not speaking with a high level of confidence in anything I say."

  He looked at Ran as though wondering how a sorcerer would take this kind of talk. The funny thing is, that's exactly how sorcerers do talk. He peered uncertainly into Ran's eyes. "Do you see the point I'm trying to make?"

  "I do indeed, Mr. Lykon. You're being very clear. Please continue."

  "Uh, yeah. Anyway, I ran all kinds of simulations, using different guesses in different phases. They're educated guesses, based on what we know already, but they're still guesses. I haven't found anything that looks like a 'gene for sorcery,' by the way. I assume it's genetically based, but it's obviously more subtle than that. We'll have to dig harder."

  "Why do you assume it's genetically based?" asked Ran calmly, while I tried not to bite through my tongue.

  "Well, everything's genetically based, in the final sense," said Jack. The genalycist's version of the hand of destiny. "Anyway, that's not the question you two are interested in. It gets complicated here—"

  "Are Ran and I the same species?" I cut in.

  He looked pained. "Theodora, for your own sake, try to let me tell this my own way, or you'll only get half the story—"

  "Can't you give me a yes/no? I'll listen to the whole story afterward; I promise."

  "Nothing is ever that simple. The category of species is imposed by man—by our attempt to cut up the universe into pieces to better understand it. The categories were never really that hard and fast, though. We want yes/no, either/or, yin/yang, but it's all really a continuum even gender is a continuum. There are plenty of babies born each year whose sex isn't clear to the attending physician. They have to make something up on the spot, or the parents get upset, then all hell breaks loose twelve years down the road—"

  "Jack, this is fascinating, but I need to know about my own kids here—"

  "Theo, I'm trying to tell you why I'm not the oracle with the final answers."

  "And I'm grasping for straws, Jack. Throw me a couple of uncertain hypotheses. Please."

  He sighed heavily. "All right. The signs seem to indicate that you two can conceive."

  Score one! I would have smiled, but I was waiting for the other shoes to drop. I say 'shoes,' because Jack was showing centipedelike tendencies.

  He said, "As far as I can tell, my highest-probability guess is that the child would be a functional, viable being, with a strong chance of being sterile."

  "What odds?" I said.

  "Functional and viable? Seventy-two percent. Sterile, ninety-three percent. And I'm saying it with a confidence level of eighty-five, plus or minus five."

  I turned to Ran, whose dark eyes had the slightly dazed look of someone who's been slapped but is trying to continue in proper social fashion. The Cormallon council must never hear about this. He took my hand.

  "The functional and viable rating is based on out planet medical care being available at all times, as well as access to a proper environment for premature births. The odds drop substantially without those two factors."

  I asked, "You think it'll be premature?"

  He shifted uncomfortably on his pillow. "Not exactly. Well, yes, it probably would be. It gets complicated here because Theodora isn't a normal Pyrenese—"

  "Whoa! Where did you get that idea?"

  "Your genes say so, Theo. You've got a higher portion of tagged unknowns than is usual for a standard citizen. Not that that makes you a freak or anything; there are always a proportion of unknowns showing up in the general population. It keeps us boiling. You've got plenty of company, statistically, but it makes our job that much harder."

  He wiped his face again and glanced around for the carafe. It was still on top of the sideboard. He shrugged, giving it up for lost, and said, "I had to run a lot of extra scenarios. That's what took me so long. I was hoping to get a better run of luck somewhere along the way, but it didn't happen. The vast majority of combinations ended in death."

  I said, slowly, "You said the fetus was viable…"

  "Yeah. The fetus lives. You die. Eighty-nine percent of the time."

  Ran's hand had frozen into something metallic. I said, "Why?"

  "Incompatibilities between you and any offspring you would have with Ran. They're quite survival-oriented little packages, though; whenever the scenario ended in death, it was usually yours."

  "Huh." I felt a slight tremor of hysteria somewhere down on the ocean floor. "It's good to know I'd be producing high-caliber individuals."

  Ran said, with no emotion whatsoever, "You're not sure about this."

  "I'm not sure of any of it. That's what I'm telling you. You wanted an expert opinion, and that's what you've got—an opinion." Jack let his professional facade crack by a millimeter. "I'm sorry, Theo. This isn't what I wanted to tell you."

  I saw that his insistence on keeping this on a theoretical level, his clinging to the role of detached expert, was born of his own discomfort with making me unhappy. I said, "It's all right. We wanted the facts, as well as you could discern them."

  "I'm sorry," he said again. He looked at a loss, as though any words beyond those two had deserted him.

  I turned to my husband, "Ran?"

  He still had that slapped look. His eyes focused on me slowly. I'd wanted a child, for what I thought of as the usual reasons; but Ran defined his identity around his family. I don't think it had really, seriously occurred to him that he wouldn't live the same traditional life everyone else in his family took for granted. That this particular branch of Cor-mallon would come to an abrupt breaking-off because he'd married me.

  "Ran?" I asked, uncertainly.

  We'd been speaking with Jack in Standard. Ran looked down at my hand, still in his own. He raised it and covered it with both his palms. "Beloved," he said, in Ivoran, "we will think of something."

  Maybe we would. But I couldn't see any good answers anywhere on the horizon.

  Chapter 18

  No answers
presented themselves over the next couple of weeks, either. Ran retired to his Net terminal to work on some scenarios of his own, based on the weapons requirements of the Tolla. He estimated it as a four-month project, and said somebody would have to go to Tellys at some point to do preliminary testing. Meanwhile, Jack Lykon's gag-spell was tested within an inch of his life before he was released from Cormallon territory. And our Sim was discharged from the care of the Red Tah Street healer and given a nice bonus to play with in the capital before he returned home.

  And what was I doing? I wasn't studying tinaje healing; I didn't need to read the cards on new clients, as we weren't taking any new clients; I wasn't required to accomplish much of anything, at the moment, so I had plenty of time to brood. The day after Jack's talk I returned to the Dart Street healer and came out fitted with a thing she called a "cap," a gadget to prevent fertilization. Not that Ran and I had been showing any great talent in that area, but I decided not to take any chances. At the same time, you'll notice I didn't go to an outplanet clinic and pay the much higher price for an implant. Implants last for a couple of years, a length of time I felt unable to deal with at that point, despite Jack's warning. I'm not saying this made sense, I'm only telling you what I did.

  Having accomplished this one errand, the days stretched before me, an open invitation to depression. So I decided to return to scholarship, the one thing in life that could be counted on not to rise up and bite you in the neck. Or not often, anyway. One day when Kylla was taking refuge in our parlor after an argument with Lysander, I sat down in the shade of the courtyard and cracked open Coalis' copy of Kesey's Erotic Poems.

  I'd been swimming in and out of gloomy thoughts ever since our talk with Jack. Before this I would never in a million years have thought of myself as someone who found any part of their self-definition in fertility—the very idea was primitive and insulting. This misconception was rudely adjusted. I felt a failure as a Cormallon member, as a wife, possibly as a woman. Coming on top of all this, that remark of Jack's about my "unknowns" must have rankled more than I realized. I started to feel abnormal, out-of-place… the most distorted view of "barbarian" seemed to fit me, when I thought of who I was. Whoever I was. The word freak, in fact, was bobbing somewhere near the surface.

  So it turned out I was really not in the proper state of mind to take on Kesey's view of the world.

  Maybe you're familiar with the work. Kesey's Erotic Poems are about six centuries old, and there's been considerable language drift, but they're still understandable, and the book is supposed to be a classic. But despite an introduction full of lavish praise from all sorts of people, I became more and more disappointed. It mostly seemed to be about his trouble getting dates.

  One of the poems was written from the viewpoint of a woman making love with him—he was supposed to be a veritable wonder at getting the woman's angle—and as I read it I found myself wincing.

  I closed the book, marking the page with a finger, and stared into space. Maybe I really wasn't normal. Jack had seemed to imply it, Kylla often found my reactions to daily life amusingly odd, and Ran's occasional comments on the barbarian attitude toward sexual practices made me wonder. Maybe there was something wrong with me, after all. Maybe—

  I walked into the parlor, still carrying the book. Kylla was looking out the tiny slit window that faced the street. "Kylla? Do you like the idea of a man pinching your nipples? I mean, do you find it erotic?"

  Kylla, bless her, showed no surprise at the question coming out of the blue like that. She shivered in an involuntary response that reminded me of my own reaction. "Good heavens, no. You enjoy that, Theo? What's your chest made of, cast iron?"

  "No, no, I find the idea exquisitely painful, myself. But in this book a fellow does it and the woman thinks it's terrific stuff. They both seem to take it as a normal part of lovemaking."

  She smiled. "I'll bet a man wrote that book."

  "He did, actually… So you don't think I'm abnormal?"

  "Certainly not."

  I considered it. "Then where do men get the idea we enjoy it? This isn't the first time I've read about it; and I was starting to get paranoid."

  She looked a bit sheepish. "Well, I suppose we have to take part of the blame. It's happened to me once or twice, and in the heat of the moment—well, I didn't want to hurt his feelings, so I pretended I liked it."

  "Are you ever going to set him straight?"

  She looked puzzled. "Who?"

  "Lysander."

  "Oh! Urn, it wasn't Lysander who did it."

  I stared at her. "Kylla! When was this—"

  There was a sound of footsteps in the hall, and Ran walked in. He kissed us both. "Talking about anything interesting?"

  "We were discussing literature," said Kylla, smoothing her outerrobe as she retook her seat by the window.

  "Theodora, do we still have that seed-cake from yesterday?… Theodora?"

  "Kylla," I began, as soon as he left.

  "What book are you reading?" she said.

  "What? Oh—it's Kesey's Erotic Poems. Ky, when did you—"

  "Well, no wonder, then. My brother used to call it 'superbly humorless.' He said it was the most overrated piece of literature ever perpetrated on an innocent public, but at least you could use it to separate the pretentious from the true lovers of poetry."

  I blinked. "I didn't even know Ran had read it. He didn't mention it."

  "Actually… I was referring to Eln."

  References to Ran's older brother were taboo, and came rarely, even from Kylla. "Superbly humorless." That sounded like Eln, all right. Maybe recalling the lover(s) of her younger days had brought him back to mind for her. I said, "Kylla, when did all this happen?"

  "There's no seed-cake," Ran announced, reentering the room.

  Kylla and I exchanged a glance, and let the topic drop. I'm willing to share most things with Ran—frankly, anything but openness gets far too complicated for me to handle in the long run—but Kylla's personal scandals don't belong to me. And he wouldn't want to hear about Eln.

  My husband looked hungry. "Let's go out to dinner," he said. "How does the Lantern Gardens sound? Ky?"

  She shrugged. I said, "I don't think I'm up to the naked floorshow tonight."

  "We can take a table in the outside garden, by the pond. Listen to the music, watch the paper boats sail. I made a breakthrough today on the weapons project, I want to relax and let my mind empty out. Indulge me, Tymon."

  I grinned suddenly. Maybe I owed him something for never trying to pinch vulnerable areas of my body.

  "What's so funny, my barbarian?"

  "Nothing. All right, let's go to the Lantern Gardens. But, Kylla, what happens when Lysander tries to call here and beg for forgiveness?" For this was how all her fights with Lysander ended. She had early set a precedent in their marriage that giving in would be based not on logic but on gender.

  She smiled wickedly. "Let him call and be frustrated. Maybe he'll come by and sit on your doorstep. Let's stay out late, Ran."

  He gave her a formal bow.

  The outdoor section of the Lantern Gardens is huge. A shallow pond is on one side, and slender manmade rivers on high clay aquaducts extend out from it to curve around the tables. In the daytime, the trellises overhead are hung with cages, each containing a songbird. At night, the pond and its farflung tributaries bear an armada of colored paper boats, each carrying a candle. If you haven't gotten the idea by now, the Lantern Gardens is an expensive place to eat. It was Ran's favorite restaurant.

  Kylla paid ten kembits and folded a small paper wish into a red boat, then dropped it on the pond.

  "What did you wish?" I asked.

  She smiled a smile that said she wasn't going to tell me. "For wisdom and discretion," she murmured, as we made our way to the table, "as every proper woman of good family wishes."

  I looked around at the crowd: Wild tourists, showing bare legs and arms shamelessly, drinking down Ducort red as though it were fruit j
uice; sedate matrons, overdressed to the limit and beyond, dripping with gems; young men escorting conservatively robed young ladies and their chaperones… other young men escorting hard-eyed young professionals with no chaperones. One of them inched by us on the way to the lavatory, her belt of feathers brushing past me as she went—her illusionless eyes brushing over me as well. Oh, yes, I thought, wisdom and discretion. I'm sure it's the wish on every boat here tonight.

  The Lantern Gardens makes what it claims is Pyrenese cheeseburger. I never saw a cheeseburger before with unidentified white sauce running down it, and hard toast instead of buns; but if it wasn't Pyrenese cheeseburger, whatever it was tasted good. I've ordered it there before. Midway through the meal, Kylla glanced toward the line of paper boats sailing on the miniature river just beyond us. "Here comes my wish," she announced, smiling.

  The smile froze on her lips, even as it drained from her eyes. I turned my head to see what she was looking at. Three tables away, across the line of boats, sat Eliana Por-ath. Leel Canerol was on her right, a light meal in front of her and a glass of water. On Eliana's left was a young man in a robe of exquisite tailoring, edged in gold thread. He was chatting away happily… chatting quite a bit, in fact, apparently expounding-for-the-benefit-of-the-lady in the longwinded way some young men will, and some old men who never grew up. He had two forks set some distance apart on the table, and a knife at right-angles, and kept gesturing as he spoke, explaining… the mechanics of an aircar? His conception of government politics? A new addition to his house? At least he had a good-natured face, though, and there are worse things in the world than a tendency to be pompous. Eliana and her chaperone were clearly not required to do much beyond listen and make admiring sounds.

  I turned back to our table and saw Ran watching them as well. "Well, life goes on," I said coolly. "I see her father's lending her out on a trial basis already."

  "What did you expect?" asked Ran, taking a bite of Tellysian-style casserole. "The creditors won't wait."