Walk to the End of the World

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  His voice died; Servan was nodding, smiling, making it very clear without saying a single word how delighted he was that the Senior understood the precariousness of his position because of these same actions – one might say, crimes – that he was listing. It was not only for DarkDreaming that this Senior could be hauled before the Board.

  This was not the first time that Bek had profited by Servan’s skill at blackmail. He did not enjoy it any more now than he had in the Boyhouse. On the other hand, neither did he object or shrink away, let alone refuse as he had sometimes done in the past. He did not like this hardness in himself. But he could not afford to be balked in his search by tenderness of feeling.

  12

  In the end, Kendizen agreed to contact a certain high man who could put them in touch with Karz Kambl, though he could not promise that anything would come of it other than immediate arrest for them all.

  ‘Don’t give this intermediary time to think about it,’ Bek said. ‘Bring him to meet us at the Boyhouse Library during the dreaming.’ The Boyhouse would be an ideal place, deserted for the afternoon. The boys would all be assembled on the roof with their Teachers.

  Kendizen protested, ‘He’d never consent to miss a dreaming!’

  ‘Servan will help you think up a tale to bring him.’

  At this, the Senior made a sound that was half-groan and half-sigh, glanced at Servan and said, ‘Yes, Servan can probably think of a way … Well,’ he added, with an attempt at a smile that came out very wry, ‘whatever happens, at least I know the Board won’t send me off to Endpath, don’t I.’

  ‘I’ll leave you, then,’ Bek said. ‘I want to go and rest while I can.’

  One of the tattooed fems showed him to a sleeping alcove off the main court, while Servan and Kendizen continued to circle the fountain in the sun-court, talking.

  The fem settled herself in a corner in case Bek should want anything of her. He tried to send her away. She didn’t comprehend his wish to be alone and came back twice to apologize for having forgotten what it was he had sent her to fetch. The third time, he sent her for Alldera. Having furnished him with another fem to attend him, Kendizen’s fem retired without further confusion.

  After Kendizen’s phantasmagoric femhold, the sturdy simplicity of Alldera was a relief. She had cleaned up and been given a fresh smock to wear. Now that she stood straight without the pack-basket bowing her back, he found her rather pleasant to the eye.

  She knelt to take off his shoes for him.

  ‘Look up,’ he said, remembering the curding-room fem’s approach to Servan.

  She turned up toward him a face like a round shield of warm metal. Instead of the sweet perfection of Kendizen’s pets, this fem’s face expressed a willful stupidity that was perfect in its own way. The muscles around the wide mouth were strongly molded and the lips cleanly edged, but instead of mobility the effect was one of obstinate dullness. Her eyes, not large enough for the breadth of cheekbone underneath, gazed blankly past his shoulder; she blinked only after a long interval, and sleepily. The total impression given was one of fathomless unintelligence.

  Close up and undistracted, he studied her; and he did not believe her. He wondered how long it would take to penetrate this smoothness that offered no hold for the lance of keen sight, and what sort of being would be found hiding. Her hands still rested on his ankle and instep. He felt their warmth and stillness. He began to get a sense of her solid body close to his own that Kendizen’s decorated servitors hadn’t touched in him. He drew back his foot.

  ‘Go sit outside the alcove,’ he commanded, ‘and see that Kendizen’s fems don’t come disturb me.’

  ‘Please-you-master,’ she said in that vacant uninflected tone that he didn’t believe either, and she rose and left him.

  Bek could not hear the men’s voices, only the faint splash of falling water. Servan would round out their plan and see that Kendizen didn’t talk to the wrong people before the dreaming. Of what else he might do with the Senior, it was better not to think. Servan had always been promiscuous by nature.

  He hadn’t realized how tired he was, and he only began to feel it fully when he lay down in the hammock. But the body-brute was feeling too skittish and self-important to let go and sleep.

  There was a theory that a man’s soul was a fragment of eternal energy that had been split off from the soul of his father and fixed inside his dam’s body by the act of intercourse. Being alien to everything that the soul represented, the fem’s body surrounded the foreign element with a physical frame, by means of which the soul could be expelled. Seen from that perspective, a man’s life could be regarded as the struggle of flesh-caged soul not to be seduced and extinguished by the meaningless concerns of the brute-body.

  Bek had been fighting that battle all his life. His body was his oldest and most constant enemy, often subdued but never defeated. It was powerfully armed against him. Starving, it would approach food with a mouth tasting like dust and then nag him with hunger-pains later. His body would ache for rest and greet the opportunity with subtle muscular discomforts that made anything but a shallow doze impossible. It warmed impartially toward men of any age and even toward fems according to caprice alone, as witness just now. With its inconsistencies, it sought to wear down and break his spirit.

  He had nearly killed himself before discovering that it was a mistake to try to discipline the rebellious body with pain or any but the subtlest punishments. When crossed, his body could marshal a whole range of aches, cramps and rashes against him, and weaken him with fevers, sweats and racking chills. The only possible attitude to bring to the struggle was determination to endure and to prevail.

  All this was a conceit he indulged, a sort of game. He knew well enough that what he fought so hard was merely the inertia and imperfection of any material lump, not a consciously malicious enemy. It had, however, become a habit of thought to consider himself split into opposites, particularly after he had realized that it was through the body-brute that the will of others could be inflicted on him. When his body was moved to Endpath, Bek himself, imprisoned in it, went too. The trick was to compel the brute-flesh to act as his own instrument, rather than the instrument of others or of its own appetites.

  He lay on his back and soothed his eyes with the design of a fine mat-weaving that hung on the wall. To ease into sleep, he concentrated on how comfortable his body had been made here in Kendizen’s house: the nails of his fingers were clean and shaped; his skin felt fresh and was clothed in first-grade hemp-cloth; his cheeks were smoothly shaven; his teeth were clean; his hair was glossy with washing and brushing (though he had avoided the fem with the scent-bottle); his travel-stiffened muscles were massaged into relaxation; his stomach was full … Only a slight sexual tension remained to be assuaged.

  On cue – he was always on cue – Servan stepped into the alcove, drew the curtain behind him and came over to the hammock, all in silence; he knew that words had no place in the pleasures of the body-brute.

  When Servan touched him, Bek did not turn toward him. He would turn soon enough.

  Alldera woke them, calling, ‘Masters. Masters. Masters,’ in that maddening, empty voice. It was time to go to the square in the bright noon for the dreaming.

  Servan would not leave his fem in Kendizen’s house, being unsure of when they might be able to return for her. So she came with them, walking with two of Kendizen’s fems who paced along at the rear in tattooed splendor, their hair lacquered into wide, glossy fans spreading down past their shoulders. Bek and Servan, exercising the guest-privilege of wearing blanks, walked behind Senior Kendizen, who wore a mantle trimmed with blond fur. As Kendizen’s escort, the two of them augmented his standing.

  Other men moved in the same direction through the quiet that always preceded a dreaming: the bells of the City were still. It was said that the silence could madden any man foolish or crooked enough to withhold himself from dreaming – which was only just, since what legitimate purpose could any man have
to be awake and active while all his fellows slept?

  First to converge on the square were these mantled Seniors attended by fems, young friends, and peers. Heads were inclined this way and that in precisely measured degrees of respect and condescension. The ideal was to present oneself in a splendor of dress and company.

  Young men in the Seniors’ entourages eyed each other, from group to group, with haughty disdain. They were Juniors who had found favor in the eyes of elders important enough to flout the age-rules, though never so openly as at these ceremonies. A Senior’s patronage brought sure meals, gifts of clothing and even sometimes of small items like jewelry that might be traded for rations later on, when the patron’s favor had been withdrawn. In recent years, competition for Senior protection had grown fierce among young men handsome or clever enough to have good prospects. They watched each other for signs of slippage, sharp-eyed to press for their own advantage with a generous Senior or one likely to go to Endpath soon and leave property to his favorites. It was always this way in lean times; there had been lean times in the Holdfast for over a decade now.

  Later the less fortunate Juniors would come, grouped by company in sullen ranks, far from splendid in the work clothes which was all most of them had. They were more in need of the comforts of dreaming than those who had gone before them. A man in a dream felt no hunger.

  Bek remembered the appropriate stately pace, and in the same moment remembered who had taught it to him: Senior Bajerman of the Hemaways. He began looking for faces he knew and forgetting his salutes, which brought him cold stares from older men trying to identify him so that they could mark him for one of their young friends to challenge in the Streets of Honor at a later date. The suit of dress-blanks that Kendizen had furnished Bek included only a domino-type mask, but Bek wasn’t nervous about being recognized. He’d been through that on the ferry. He felt, rather, exhilarated by the pageantry around him.

  The square opened ahead of them. Every eye turned to the tables set up before the Boardmen’s Hall and the figures standing beside them. Kendizen and his fems moved on with the crowd. Bek and Servan, with Alldera at their heels, cut swiftly to one side and into an alley, making for the Boyhouse on the south side of the square by the back way.

  Nothing about the Boyhouse had changed; not the ease of slipping in unseen, not the sweaty redolence of the hallways, or the glimmering floors of the classrooms. The open cubbies lining the corridors contained the same sparse crop of personal belongings: a bright bit of cloth, a clay top or comb, a string of clay bells. In the corners of the classrooms, lecterns loomed under their burdens: books of the Ancients, chained securely down. Portions of these books were read aloud over and over, until each boy could repeat what he had heard word perfect. Some said that most of the Teachers couldn’t read either, but it didn’t matter. The books were only the palpable authority behind the lessons.

  Bek had been a fanatical and gifted memorist, taking possession of the heritage of men like a starveling at a feast, chewing everything over and over. He’d been a great one for the forms of things in those days, uneasily putting aside the discrepancies of content that he had occasionally perceived.

  For instance, once he had made the connection: all boys learn how to get in and out of the Boyhouse unnoticed when they want to; all men have been boys; all men know how to get in and out of the Boyhouse unnoticed if they want to.

  How terrified he had been over that, fearing that his father would come soon to kill him. He had conceived a gripping horror of dreaming, because instead of the stylized patterns he studied, he kept slipping off into fantasies of flight from invisible pursuers and of struggles with huge intruders bent on devouring him. It wasn’t even possible to tell the Teachers about it, because they would have suspected a penchant for DarkDreaming – for which they had no cure, as Servan’s case so clearly illustrated later on. Bek cured himself, with patience and self-control.

  When this hysteria (and the sweaty bout of illness that its banishment cost him) had faded, what remained was the suspicion that much if not all of men’s civilization was built on secret foundations that no one ever hinted at, let alone discussed – unarticulated agreements that might even run directly counter to the rules that were spelled out in the Boyhouse.

  Not that it mattered in the long run. Bedrock truth, he had come to understand later, was found only at Endpath. He no longer believed that the purpose of the Boyhouse was to teach the truths that made men out of boys. It was to impose discipline.

  How unpleasant it had been! These corridors were normally either empty as now (but reverberating to the chanting voices of classrooms full of boys on either side), or filled with lines of boys shuffling in lockstep from class to class with downcast eyes. Sometimes they were turned out into the halls to walk up and down after a whole morning of sitting and chanting, before returning to an afternoon of more of the same. They always had to wear those wretched grass sandals that could barely be kept on, so that moving quietly was impossible. Even upstairs on the dorm floor, where boys lived naked to be reminded of how like beasts and Dirties they were, the first thing to do on being wakened in the morning was to slip into those sandals; and woe to the boy whose enemy had kicked his pair away down the floor during the night. Always there would be a Teacher nearby, and even the ones who were most bored and impatient with Boyhouse work were alert to the sound of whispering among the ranks, or of bare feet on the worn and polished tiles, or of blows and gasps when a couple of boys surreptitiously tried to settle a feud.

  And then there was the ceaseless gnawing of hunger in the gut. Only later did a boy learn that the deprivation he had been taught to regard as valuable discipline was a constant factor in the lives of most Holdfast Juniors.

  ‘In discipline is belonging,’ the Teachers said. ‘In discipline is solidarity among men against the sly evil of the void with which your dams have infected you.’ And again, ‘Discipline is the firm ground on which rugged individualism stands.’ And again, ‘We are here to help melt the fem-fat from your spirits and toughen you into men.’

  There were lots of punishments, and whatever a boy was caught doing reasons were found to punish him for it. Most often, the culprit was docked a meal. Those who finally turned their backs on punishment forever by giving up and turning their backs on life were deliberately forgotten. Their names were erased from the Boyhouse ledgers.

  By and large, a boy settled for hating his Teachers (and shining up to those who had food to spare for favored boys); stewing in guilt over steamy affairs with older or younger boys; betraying other boys to Teachers and to each other; and generally passing on all of the grimness of Boyhouse life that he could to boys who were junior to him. The Teachers knew all this. They said it was better than in Ancient times, when boys had been left to their filthy dams to raise. (Was it any wonder they had turned Freak, and attacked their own fathers!)

  Ah, the stories, the threats, the casual insults and deadly hatreds! Incredible, Bek thought, that one lived through it.

  At the doorway to the Deportment room, he paused. There were lines painted in white on the floor; they shimmered in the sunlight striking in through the clerestories. The lines marked out patterns of precedence in the meetings and dealings-together of the various age-ranks of men. Under the tutelage of Bajerman or his like, boys learned to keep the proper distances, and to present the proper expressions, stances and salutes for this or that encounter. Bek remembered practicing the correct manner of approaching the Endtendant at Endpath. History gave the reasons; Deportment instilled the behavior. He could still recite the chant called ‘Roberts Rules’, which described some long-lost game in the archaic language.

  There was no proper manner, however, of being an ex-Endtendant.

  Bek saw his own reflection glimmering at him from the wall-wide mirror, spare, straight-backed, even elegant in the understated trimness of dress-blanks. He seemed a model of the Cityman, a successful graduate of the Boyhouse (he who had never graduated), the body-bru
te triumphant. No wonder he hadn’t been recognized in the street, even only half masked. He scarcely recognized himself.

  Servan’s reflection came and stood beside his.

  ‘Do you remember,’ Servan said, with mock-nostalgia, ‘when I came along in time to whip off that bunch who had you pinned on the steps, right after Anzik killed himself? Poor Anzik, he was no realist! Even if you’d returned his feelings, there were so many higher-ranking suitors ahead of him that he’d have hung himself anyway in the end, out of jealousy.’ He grinned and put his arm across Bek’s shoulders. ‘Poor Eykar, you did spend a lot of time limping through these hallways, what with one thing and another.’

  Trust Servan to bring everything down to its lowest level. Their double reflection looked out of the shadowed glass, like the manly lovers Bek had seen in a fine glaze-painting once; the peer-couple, handsome and well matched, linked faithfully together from boyhood on in spite of all obstacles and partings, like two heroes of a love-chant. They were in reality a parody of that ideal.

  Bek’s education in love had begun in the Boyhouse, as was common. Though frail of build, he had often been called to the Library to help with the heavier drawers and bins. As he was setting an armload of books back onto the shelves, he would hear the sound of squeaking wheels as a book-cart was drawn across the end of the aisle, guaranteeing privacy. In theory, inter-age sex was banned by Boyhouse rules. Adults were supposed to confine their love affairs to their own peers, and so were younger men. In this way, those who were more mature avoided the possibly corrupting influence of younger, less masculine lovers. In practice, many Teachers seemed to seek out such corruption, and not always against the will of the boys they preyed upon.