by Loki Renard
“Well, because there were important people living…”
“All people are important, Lydia.”
“I mean, people like…” She stopped speaking in order to avoid digging a deeper hole than the one she already found herself in. Tears welled in her eyes as she looked out at a world that seemed utterly horrific to her. There were no service robots, there was clearly nothing in the way of sanitation. The streets were dirty and the people shuffling back and forth were bowed and weary and looked desperately ill with gray pallor to their skin.
“I really didn’t know…”
“How were you to know,” he said. “You’ve been kept like a bird in a cage. It’s not your fault, but the consequences will be yours to bear.”
He sounded very solemn and very severe and Lydia felt a little trickle of fear in her belly. Tristan had been kind thus far, in a manner of speaking, but maybe his anger at the aristocracy would still be taken out on her. She closed her eyes and turned her head away from the window, no longer wanting to see the world beyond the one she had known.
The rest of the drive was conducted in silence, Tristan speaking little, Lydia speaking not at all. The day had been a most turbulent one. She had been awoken as a woman, she had tasted a man’s seed, she had been stripped and spanked and humiliated in parts—and she had looked upon earthly horrors unlike any she had imagined.
Thankfully the urban decay eventually gave way to green grasses and flowers growing wild among what had once been suburban homes. The further they traveled, the more green things became until Lydia found herself amid great fields of grasses and flowers and trees that stretched as far as her eyes could see. The horizon seemed impossibly far away. She had gotten so used to the limited views of the built-up arrondissements, snippets of sky visible between old stone architecture. There were no such boundaries in the countryside. The sky seemed to go on forever and the sun shone brighter. She lifted her face to the heat sinking through the glass window and breathed a deep sigh of relief. The city was already receding in the wing mirrors and she could almost believe that the dark smudge on the horizon had been nothing but a trick of her imagination.
She could have happily driven with Tristan forever, but after another hour or so he turned off the road and onto a gravel drive that wound its way between fences and willow trees and ultimately led to a small farmlet complete with farm cottage and outbuildings. The cottage itself was made of hand-hewn stone and thatched with some kind of plant material. It was the most archaic dwelling she had ever laid eyes on, but it looked warm and inviting and there was a sense of peace to the place as she stepped out of the car, green lawns surrounding the house with flowers growing brightly in edged gardens.
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed as Tristan helped her out of the car. “This is yours?”
“This will be our home,” he said, his stern demeanor melting into a smile. “I find the country air good for the spirit.”
Lydia understood what he meant. She felt lighter than she ever had, surrounded by endless space and land and a homey little place that evoked some primal instinct to nest. She had never before felt so drawn to a building and was very pleased when Tristan ushered her to the front door and opened it for her.
As she stepped through the door she was taken with the authenticity of the place. There were no obvious signs of machinery or other technology for that matter. The constant hum that characterized her own home was notably absent here. The house had lovely polished wood floors, a table and chairs that looked to her eyes to be handmade, white painted wood cabinetry in the kitchen, and a lounge in which a large stuffed couch was flanked by armchairs, all of which were upholstered with a kind of fabric she had never seen before. Most of the furniture in her parents’ house was synthetic, but she suspected that there was very little in the way of synthesized materials in this house.
“Welcome home,” Tristan said, sliding his hand against the small of her back and guiding her further in.
The house was not very large, but Lydia felt incredibly small as she stood there in her new home. It occurred to her that there was something very strange about it, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on… something… oh!
“Where is your cleaning robot?”
“There are no robots here,” Tristan informed her.
“No robots?”
“None,” he said, smirking at her confused and concerned response. “This is a traditional household. You will be a traditional wife. You will cook, clean, and otherwise take care of the domestic duties associated with the home.”
Cook? Clean? Do the tasks a machine would do? Be lowlier even than an animal? Lydia had never heard of such an unfathomably awful thing in all her life. “What have I done to deserve that kind of cruel and unusual punishment?”
“The fact that you think making a meal and ensuring that the environment in which you live is clean is punishment is enough reason to have you do all those things,” Tristan said. “You have never in your life learned anything of any practical use. You have become so separate from what it means to actually be a person, let alone a woman…” He shook his head. “I know you don’t believe me, but this is not a punishment. This is life as it should be.”
Life as it should be according to Tristan sounded like a life of tedious drudgery to Lydia.
“The robots were designed so we don’t have to spend our lives cleaning and cooking and whatever else it is they do,” she said. “They allow us to elevate ourselves intellectually.”
“Ah,” Tristan nodded. “That explains why you have received nothing more than a basic education.”
“My parents…”
“Your parents have much to answer for,” he interrupted. “That much is certain.” He looked at his watch. “It is three o’clock now,” he said. “Let’s see if you can have dinner on the table by six p.m. The refrigerator is full of food and the kitchen is fully equipped. It should not take long for you to put something edible on a plate.”
Lydia had never set foot in a kitchen in her life, let alone cooked anything. She was familiar with the general concept of heat and ingredients creating meals, but that was about as far as her knowledge went.
Tristan was looking at her expectantly. Knowing he would not want to hear a refusal, or possibly worse, excuses, she agreed.
“Yes, sir.”
He nodded toward a double doorway that was located a few feet away from a gleaming dinner table. “The kitchen is through there.”
Lydia wandered in the direction he had indicated and soon found herself in an utterly unfamiliar room filled with box-like objects. Fortunately for her, she was not quite so ill-educated as Tristan accused her of being. She recognized the refrigerator and the oven that had several elements ranged along the top of it, and knew that one was for making things hot and one was for keeping them cold.
She fiddled with some dials on the oven and was pleased when the coils started to glow. Yes. Heat. That was what did the cooking.
Having made the oven get suitably hot, Lydia peered into the refrigerator. The only item she truly recognized was a plate of covered chicken drumsticks. They were much paler than they usually looked when served, but that was probably because they hadn’t been cooked yet.
Pleased with her discovery, Lydia took the chicken pieces out of the refrigerator and carefully arranged them on the glowing elements atop the oven. It seemed very strange to her that there were four of them, all circular, but she supposed there was some reason for that. The chicken sizzled and started to smoke as she placed the pieces one after the other until all the elements were covered.
Standing back, Lydia smiled. Tristan would be very happy to discover that she had followed his directions to the letter.
Chapter Five
Tristan was pleased with his new wife. It would have been easy for her to crumble under the pressure of the revelations she had been witness to, or simply the expectation to actually do something. After all, women of noble blood were rarely asked t
o do anything besides sit there and look pretty. He was well aware that he was asking a great deal in asking her to prepare dinner, perhaps too much, but he was interested to see how Lydia would respond to the challenge.
He lit a fire in the grate then sat back and mused over the day’s events. There had been a great deal of unrest in the air of late; the revolution had been swift and fairly clean but there were still loose ends to tie up, which was why he had refrained from taking a wife. There was a small, but rather effective rebellion in the aristocratic ranks and he was their prime target. They would never forgive a common born boy for becoming the man who led the colony. And they would certainly never forgive him for deposing them in the process.
Tristan had planned to stay single until the colony was stable and entirely safe, but Lydia had changed his mind in an instant. He knew enough about the machine of the human mind that as much as he might rationalize the whys and the wherefores under which he had reversed his decision and decided to take her for his own, there was no rational reason for having made the choice. If indeed, he had made a choice at all. It felt to him as though he had not so much met Lydia, as recognized her deep in the chemistry of his body and in the recesses of his soul.
Out in the kitchen, he could hear drawers opening and closing and the soft clatter of cooking tools. The sounds brought a smile to his face. She was trying. Though she was as far out of her element as she could probably ever imagine being, she was at least attempting to please him. That won her a great deal of respect in Tristan’s mind as he stretched his long legs out toward the fire and felt a warmth in his chest that had little to do with the flames leaping in the grate.
He had been surprised by her reaction to the state of the city beyond her arrondissement. Disgust and confusion would have been understandable reactions, but it went deeper for Lydia. She had seemed genuinely upset and concerned by what she had seen; an indicator of an empathetic spirit that had not been crushed by privilege. Perhaps there was more hope for her than even he had held at first.
If it weren’t for the fire in the fireplace, he might have noticed the burning smell earlier. Unfortunately it took a minute or two for him to work out that the strange scent that had started to assail his nostrils wasn’t coming from the fire, but from the kitchen. The realization brought him to his feet and sent him striding into the room to check on Lydia. He pushed open the doors and discovered that their seal had hidden a virtual Hades in his home. It was complete and utter domestic mayhem in there. Black smoke was billowing from the oven and flames were leaping from the grease-spattered bench. Whatever had been on the oven, directly on the oven, he noticed, was now a charred husk covered in flames.
In the middle of the chaos, Lydia stood with a beatific smile on her face, apparently blithely unaware of the danger she was in. “Hello,” she said cheerfully in tones that indicated no small measure of pride. “I am cooking!”
“What the blazes!” he exclaimed, reaching for a fire extinguisher. Foam soon covered the cooker, the wall, and the benches, extinguishing both the fire and any hope of dinner. Tristan turned to discover that his new wife was watching him with a vaguely bemused expression.
“What on earth were you doing!”
Sooty, Lydia looked at him. “Cooking dinner.”
“The kitchen was on fire.”
Her delicate brows drew down ever so slightly into an expression of confusion. “Is it not supposed to be? I’ve never cooked before.”
He stared at her, not at all certain as to whether she was serious or playing stupid. “Fire is very dangerous. It can kill.”
“Fire is how we cook things, isn’t it?” She sounded concerned and confused in equal measure.
Tristan sighed inwardly. Like most aristocrats, Lydia was so sheltered it was tantamount to abuse. This was the result of a reliance on technology one did not understand. Not only could these aristocrats not fix the machines they needed to survive, they didn’t even know what function the machines performed. Cooked meals appeared out of the ether. Clothing was hung like magic in their wardrobes. Dirt was swept away as soon as the smallest particle landed on a monitored surface. It was entirely possible that Lydia had never lifted a finger to look after herself in her entire life.
He took a deep breath and remembered that but for an accident of birth, he could have been much the same way. As a young man Tristan had been raised by one of the lead mechanics responsible for the machinery, an old man who had insisted that he learn how to survive off the land, without machines or technology of any kind. Tristan had never understood why his mentor had refused to let him use any of the machinery they maintained to actually make life easier. It had been misery getting water from the well, grinding flour for bread, building a fire and cooking it. For whatever reason, old Forsyth had been particularly hard on him. The other mechanics in training had been allowed to simply get up in the morning, take their rations, and get to work. Tristan remembered his adolescence as cold mornings, aching muscles, and work upon work to do. At the time he had thought Mr. Forsyth was the very devil. Now he couldn’t have been more grateful to the man.
It wasn’t until the machinery in their sector broke down and people started dying within hours that Tristan understood the gift he’d been given. In the two weeks it took for new solar cells to arrive from the nearest supply colony, utter chaos had broken out. Hundreds died, and hundreds more were very ill thanks to the fact that they had no idea how to look after themselves. They would eat raw meats and drink fouled water, fall ill, and were unable to treat even the simplest of maladies.
The citizens of New Paris City hadn’t heard of it, of course, and even if they had they quickly dismissed it. Nothing had happened in over a hundred years. They had an unshakeable faith in the technology, though they did not understand it in the slightest.
The old guard thought the new regime was a political revolution, a power grab. It was much, much more than that to Tristan. As far as he was concerned, he was saving their silly, thoroughly spoiled lives and ensuring that their offspring had some chance of surviving. As a civilization, their reliance on the machinery had gone too far. They were weak, feckless, and in perpetual danger they could not see or understand. Every day New Paris City was one burned-out circuit board away from breaking down completely.
That was why he had instituted the choosing ceremonies. Better to get the young women of marriageable age into the care of capable men, and to take the young men and train them both in defense and maintenance. Right now he was the very devil to the self-styled lords and ladies, just as Forsyth had once been the devil to him, but in time they would see that he had done what was for the greater good.
“This is my fault, not yours,” he said reassuringly as Lydia’s lower lip began to tremble in anticipation of being in trouble. “To answer your question, heat is how we cook things, but it has to be a controlled heat.” His cheek quirked, seeing the humor in the situation. “If you encounter actual flames, you’ve gone too far.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” Lydia said. She was holding a melted spatula, more befuddled than afraid. She had no idea how close she’d come to being seriously burned. Again, Tristan could not help but marvel at how very sheltered she was. It was as if she had never experienced any pain or discomfort at all.
“Watch me,” he said as he began to clean up the mess. Fortunately for Lydia, Tristan had allowed some modern materials in his home and the kitchen was protected by somewhat flame-retardant synthetic coating. The fire had been feeding on grease and protein rather than the actual hardware and furniture. All it took was a scrubbing pad, some hot water and soap, and soon the kitchen looked like new, though the smell of smoke still lingered.
“Wow,” Lydia said, clearly impressed. “Look what you did! You’re like… a human machine.”
He snorted. Of course she thought that. Everything was backwards to these spoiled brats. They didn’t think of machines as doing human labor anymore. It had probably never occurred to Lydia before that v
ery moment that she could do the work that the machines did herself.
It would have been easy to write her off as stupid or simple, but Tristan knew very well that she was neither. She simply did not have the benefit of a basic practical education. If anything, he was the stupid one for sending her into the kitchen unsupervised. He would have to start from the very beginning and teach her what she needed to know.
“I’ll make dinner,” he said. “You watch. Tomorrow, you will do the same.”
* * *
Lydia had never known a man who could do so very many things. Tristan was the president of the colony, but he was so much more than that. He could drive a car, he could extinguish fire, he could make what had been completely destroyed in her eyes look entirely new again, and he could take bits and pieces of organic material and turn them into food. She watched him cook much as she might watch a magician pulling gold coins out of thin air. It seemed no less miraculous to her.
Tristan’s latest trick was manipulating a sharp knife as he sliced what he informed her were vegetables. Food, as far as Lydia was concerned, was something the synthesizers printed out when you put in the right settings. The machine at home could make anything at all from a beef casserole to cotton candy.
“Ohhhh…” she said as the strange orange root took a more recognizable shape under Tristan’s skilled fingers and blade. “Those are carrots!”
“Yes,” he said with an amused smile. “Never seen raw vegetables, have you?”
“I think I saw a picture of a potato once,” she said. “In an old schoolbook. My great-grandmother put some of them away for me, though Mother always thought it was silly to look at them. She said it was all made up and from the old days and nobody needed to know any of it anymore.”
“Your mother was wrong,” Tristan said. “Every person should know how to take care of themselves without machinery.”
“But… aren’t you the people who run the machinery?”