He knew nothing of the girl’s personality. He loved blindly. “I am just another doting father,” he would tell himself, and then he would go to the bank and deposit a small sum in Uda’s account.
Uda was pretty but not the beauty Redo imagined. She wasn’t particularly bright, so her betrayals would always be small ones. There was in her a placidity that prevented world-shaking concepts from fermenting in her brain, and this was just as well, since Redo disapproved of females who shook the world. He wanted Uda to laugh and preen and say foolish things, which she did.
They walked to one of the piazzas a foreign element had built in hopes of luring customers to the mediocre restaurants a block away. They sat at a table and sipped lemonade, and Uda chattered about subjects that made Redo yawn. He looked at her with fondness, glanced at the ladies walking by with their escorts, and it was with satisfaction that he viewed reality. His mind functioned with facility but by and by he found himself drifting into a gray and pleasant world of apathy. He heard his daughter’s chatter without really hearing it, and once in a while he nodded.
It was with a sense of annoyance that he realized someone had stopped at their table. The time spent with Uda was one of his pleasures and now he must go to the bother of sharing her. He came out of his reverie and looked up at a face that could belong to no one but a Filly. It was a face he recognized. He rose to his feet, but not too quickly. A Filly abroad in the enemy camp always traveled as a commoner.
“How do you do?” he said, and took the slender paw of the man who smiled faintly. “Sit down and join us.” He hoped his invitation would be declined.
“Thank you, I will.”
“This is my daughter, Uda. Dear, allow me to introduce Mr. Jale. He’s also in real estate.” Redo had picked the name of Jale out of a hat. Filly Ten went by any number of phony names.
“A pleasant time of day,” said Ten, seating himself. “I enjoy fall evenings. Ambition ebbs with the sun and there is time for good conversation.”
Filly Ten fancied himself a rakehell. He knew the company of town girls and had known them since his fifteenth birthday. He often dressed as a commoner and journeyed off the estate. At the moment he was tired, and grateful to have spied Redo in the crowds. Filly Ten wasn’t a rakehell. He overpaid his girl friends and didn’t know this was the reason for their consideration. He found them kind and gentle and good. They found him dull and unattractive.
Redo viewed the unwelcome intruder through slitted eyes. His thoughts turned gloomy. The Fillys on their own territory was one thing, but this part of the world belonged to people. Redo smiled inwardly. His subconscious was a friend. Never had he suspected that he didn’t believe the Fillys were people. This Ten regarded himself as a kind of black sheep of the family. Probably he was correct. The others looked down their noses at members who spent time amidst the hovels. Why did Ten do it? wondered Redo. Why forsake perfection, even for a minute? Maybe Ten felt the cleft between himself and humanity; maybe he feared the loss of his humanness.
Actually Ten feared only accident. Floods and earthquakes were beyond the control of the Fillys, and this constituted sacrilege. He had no fear of his fellow men. Half a dozen personal bodyguards drifted through the crowds.
The three politely touched upon unimportant subjects, and soon Redo saw that Filly Ten desired real conversation no more than he. He subsided once again, enjoyed his reverie and heard only vaguely the low murmurings of Uda and the Filly. His glance strayed to the sidewalk as a young man passed the table. Their eyes met and the young man flashed a smile before going on by. Redo was enchanted by the smile. The boy was handsome and evidently full of sunshine, if he could greet a stranger so cheerfully.
Redo began to brood. Would that the fate of the world hung upon the decisions of smiling boys. Even now, war drums were beginning to mutter. The sounds would grow in volume. The thunder would increase to a crescendo before the year was out. Madness was coming upon the children of men because the Fillys in the Eastern Hemisphere didn’t like what they read on their ticker tapes. The time had come to stir men from lethargy. If they wouldn’t buy refrigerators with a little coaxing, they would be forced to buy guns and bombs. One way or another—it was all the same to the Fillys. There would be war. The sweet boy who had passed the table would gurgle out his life in some muddy hole in the hinterlands of Chin.
As he sometimes did when his soul groaned, Redo looked for the sublime face of Uda. He found it, and sat basking in the peace and contentment of love. His gaze idly strayed to Filly Ten. Suddenly, he sat frozen in his chair while he underwent an emotional bombardment the likes of which he had never experienced in his life. Filly Ten was looking at Uda in a way that no man must ever look at her.
In fact, Filly Ten was doing nothing of the kind. Had he been able to guess the consequences of his empty stare, he would have promptly torn out his eyeballs and ground them under his heel.
Ten had grown bored with watching faces and bodies go by. Ennui had settled upon him. His mechanical gaze unfortunately fastened on Redo’s daughter. He had already classified her as a possibility for some young man, but he hadn’t thought of himself. Unaware that a tiger crouched beside him, he continued to stare and sank deeper into boredom.
For the first time in his life, Redo failed to be logical. He sat quietly while a cauldron licked his nerve endings. Rage backed up in his throat, and his metal fingers dug into the arms of his chair. So strong was his anger that he raised one steel hand. He forced it down on the table, made it flatten out, glared at it until his eyes were like daubs of pitch.
He shrank in his chair. He didn’t like what he was feeling. He felt like an old man, felt as if his youth drained from him with every breath. Uda, Uda! he cried silently, and didn’t know how foolish he was.
Uda had already classified Filly Ten as too old to be of any interest. It would have surprised her to know that Ten was 22. She saw a man too thin and rapidly balding; the pectorals winced beneath the shirt, and dark shadows lay on the cheeks. Uda’s eye was fond of lingering on men who were burly and loud-voiced. She knew Filly Ten was staring at her; she also knew he wasn’t really seeing her. Another thing she knew was that something bothered her father. His face bulged in a strange way and his eyes were little round balls.
His fury controlled, Redo sat calm and still. Inside he was a corpse. Men were men and Fillys were Fillys. It was not to be borne. His little Uda. Where on Earth could a man hide from the rich vultures? There was nothing he could call his own if a Filly wanted it. His flesh and blood was property to be purchased with silver or a casual snap of the fingers by this stinking cadaver. His child was only a thing in the eyes of the rulers.
Reason tried to assert itself: Ten couldn’t be a raging enemy. Where was sanity? Look at them! The Filly no longer stared at her. He was indifferent. Uda didn’t see him. There was no spark between them. Redo knew he was a fool. His emotions made a maniac of him. He should look at the facts.
He looked and saw his desolation.
The first Sunday of every month was Family Day at the Filly estate. In an enormous dining room, the entire clan of some 50 members met and dined and discussed everything but business. This was the day when business was stringently ignored. It was the time when new additions to the family were introduced by proud parents, the time when the state of health of those members too ill to attend the gathering was commented upon. Betrothals were announced, generally after dessert, unless the ardor of the couple was so intense that they couldn’t wait to tell the news.
Approximately one-fourth of the group was composed of children who ranged in age from one week to 15 years. Adjoining the dining room was an activity area, where the young were taken by their nurses after the meal. Next to this room was a large quiet nook, where the adults enjoyed after-dinner drinks and conversation.
Family Day was an occasion for the Fillys. Servants swarmed about the diners, pouring wine, cutting the children’s food or carrying gleaming pots of coffee to a sidetable for later use.
At the head of the table sat Filly One. Beside him was his wife, Arda. To the left of One sat Two, across from whom sat Three. Their wives sat beside them. Four and Five faced each other, as did their wives. A commoner would have called these five men the daddy guns of the estate. All the little guns sat according to their filial relationship to the big guns. The closer the blood, the nearer one sat to the head of the table, while those more distant occupied chairs toward the end.
Only a computer could have figured out how the Fillys arrived at their family layout. The big guns, their wives and children numbered 18 persons. Filly Two had three children, Three had two children, Four had only one and Filly Five had two.
Filly One and Arda and a host of servants occupied the first wing of the estate. Distributed throughout the four remaining wings were eight orphaned nephews of the big guns. The eight had failed to become big guns in the estates in which they had been born, and they chose to reside in Osfar rather than live under their brothers’ or cousins’ rule. There were, in this estate, eight orphaned nieces who would become wives of the eight nephews.
Filly Six, the cranky and half-mad big gun who had abdicated his throne, lived with Filly Five in the fifth wing. There were also 14 other male and female Fillys who, for one reason or another, chose to live in the Osfar estate.
The five thrones in the Osfar family would never be occupied by any but the direct offspring of Filly One. Since he had no children as yet, it seemed likely that the regimen, adhered to by the Fillys for 500 years, might be altered. It was unthinkable that the children of Filly Two would become the next big guns, but it was even more unthinkable that there would be a mixture of children on the thrones. But so far the five reigning Fillys had produced only four sons.
Every person in the dining room on that Family Day thought intently of the bad situation. Several nephews were eating blindly, confused by the stars in their eyes. The stars novaed cruelly when the wife of Filly Four, a thin and blue-nosed girl named Ora, gave them all a clear side view of her big belly as she abandoned her seat to retrieve the napkin she had deliberately dropped. It annoyed her that a servant rushed to snatch it up and lay a fresh one beside her plate. But the side view had been enough to convey her message. Filly Four was due to produce his second heir. Eight nephews lost what little appetite they had, finished the meal glumly, and their future wives sat with pinched lips and glittering eyes. To make it worse, the wife of Filly Five calmly announced over her wineglass that she expected a baby in six months. She had a somewhat virulent smile for Ora as she made the announcement.
“How very nice,” said Arda, the wife of Filly One. He, in turn, smiled coldly.
Filly Six, who hadn’t been out of his suite in years, came to the nook after the meal was done. Jub wheeled him down the hall in a great, plush red chair, paused in the entranceway, waited for his master’s signal.
Six hunched beneath several blankets, shivered, grinned, waited for the silent hush that fell upon the group. He kept grinning. He had deliberately left his teeth upstairs in a glass.
“Well, well,” he croaked, “how we do increase. Or are we just a fatter bunch of sons of bitches?”
Jub sensed the signal, pushed the chair into the center. The people on the deep couches sat up straight and stared. One left his seat and approached his brother.
“How very nice. This is an occasion.”
“Why?” said Six.
“The pleasure of your company, and the knowledge that you’re feeling better.”
“Go sit down. You’re blocking my view.”
“My apologies,” One said easily, and returned to his seat.
“I’ll have that,” Six said to a servant who was about to hand a drink to Filly Three. The servant immediately went to the wheelchair. Filly One frowned, so did Three, while Six grinned and took the glass.
“Pull that little couch into the middle here and transfer me to it,” said Six, and all the servants stopped what they were doing and obeyed him. One kept frowning. All the other Fillys, including the women, began smiling.
“My brother wants his presence made known,” said One. “We won’t blame him for that.”
“Don’t care if you blame me or not, and my presence in this building is always known beforehand.” Six slopped some of his wine, and a servant moved to clean his chin with a napkin. “Get away from me!” he yelped. The man drew back. “Oh, go ahead and dab at me like I was a baby.” While the servant finished his brief chore, Six let his gaze flit from face to face. “Looks like I’m in the center of things, doesn’t it?” he said. “Or maybe I’m in the middle. There’s a big difference between the two positions, but I don’t expect anyone here to understand that. The Filly brain pickled at about the time the rest of the world leaped ahead.”
“Would you care to join us in our light banter?” said Filly One.
“No, I wouldn’t.” Delicately, Six scratched his nose with the hook on his mechanical hand. “What I’d really like to do is sit in your chair. This one is too hard and digs into my ass.”
A chill smile flitted across One’s face. The chair in which he sat looked like a throne, as indeed it was. Ornamented with little golden stars and red stones, it was large enough to accommodate three persons and was sumptuous enough to satisfy a king, of which there were none in the world, nor had there been since the Fillys instigated their power-play centuries before.
“I’m afraid this chair won’t suit you at all,” One said. “It really isn’t all that comfortable. It has a way of reminding its occupant of his myriad duties.”
“It wouldn’t to me. I’d use it like any other back support. That’s where you make your mistakes, brother. You put too much importance in the wrong symbols. Me, I never do that, know what’s proper and what isn’t and respect only symbols that can work for me.”
“I didn’t know you had any symbols,” said One.
“The ones I have work for me. But back to that chair. I have a mind to sit in it today. Are you going to hike your backside out of it, or shall I order the servants to pick you up and deposit you elsewhere?”
The eyes of Filly One were slitted and gleaming, his expression not angry nor disbelieving. Nor did he seem exasperated. He looked as if he might call Filly Six’s bluff and have the servants toss the older man out of the room altogether. All at once he relaxed and chose humility as a manner of saving face. He stood up with a smile. “I’ll do anything that pleases you. Just to get you out of your room and among the living will be worth it.”
“Living? Where? Well, never mind, since you haven’t an answer, and thanks for the chair.” After he had been gently transferred to the Filly throne, Six smacked his elbows on the soft arms and winced as one of the rubies bruised him. He scowled. “I’m going to have one made of foam and air. Never mind the damned jewels, they’re for looking, that’s all.” He grinned at One. “But it’ll be a throne, nevertheless.” He waved an arm that appeared to indicate everyone in the room. “Trot out your brats, I have a mind to see them.” Waiting until the words had a chance to sink in, he said, “You heard me right. I haven’t seen a child for more than a decade, have almost forgotten what they look like. Didn’t you hear me? Get the kids. Wake up. Stir yourselves to action. Or do I have to order the slaves to bring them?”
Filly Two spoke for the first time. “Dear brother—”
“Shut up,” said Six.
“The children are an unruly lot. You can’t possibly—”
“The last time I saw any Filly children, they hadn’t enough energy to eat,” said Six. “Are you telling me I can’t see yours? Because if you are, I’d better tell you the servants in this estate are answerable to no one but me.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, you can see every last child on the property,” said Filly One. “Simply be at peace with us and yourself.”
The children were presented to Filly Six. One by one, the servants brought them past his chair. Six appeared to be bored, scarcely looked at them, twisted in agitation wh
en they fussed or giggled, but his ferret eyes stuck like glue for a second to each bright and rosy face.
When it was done and he had seen them all, he made wiping motions with his steel hands and looked at his brother, One. “What we have here is a zoo, eh?” he said, gently. “Where all the little Filly monkeys belong, eh?”
One smiled and smiled and hated and despised with each twitch of his mouth.
Not one of the children had a drop of Filly blood in them. The young ones were mongrel breeds, the offspring of common servants, which meant that the five rulers of the estate had perpetrated a gross crime. Genuine Filly seed wasn’t good enough, and so the seed of chattel was brought forward and offered as princes and princesses.
“Over my dead body,” Six said, to no one in particular. He had done his homework. It was the same all over the world, in all the Filly estates. Not one true Filly was destined to wear a crown. That is, unless something was done, and he would do something. Six would act at last.
The ballroom was too large for the family. Everyone was there except for the children and Filly Six, who languished in his bedroom. The dance—or party—was held twice a year and they were the only occasions during the year when real noise was produced at the estate. There were food and drink on long, glittering tables, continuous music came through stereo units built into the walls, Filly members ate, talked, danced or simply wandered. The only commoners present were three fortunetellers who sat at small tables near the three exits. Their names were Mr. Fate, Mr. Omega and Mr. Deuce.
Mr. Fate was dressed in a flowing silver cloak. He wore silver shoes, silver gloves, silver cap, and over his face lay a snug-fitting silver mask. Mr. Omega and Mr. Deuce were dressed exactly the same.
Arda, the wife of Filly One, sat at Mr. Omega’s table and tried to pull free of his grasp. He had her paw and her wrist safely in tow.
“I’m not a believer,” she said faintly.
“Then why are you seated at my table?” said Mr. Omega. His eyes, through the slits in the mask, seemed to sparkle.
A Billion Days of Earth Page 14