Kael admired the rise and fall of Anla’s breasts under her red knitted dress. Anla crossed is Anla sexy. He spoke with an exaggerated softness: “By no means, Anla, I can’t see any good reason why they shouldn’t be here, and neither can you.”
The two proctors started visibly at this unprecedented breakdown of collective responsibility, at the taboo intimacy. Con’s band relaxed a little. Anla looked steadily at Kael for a few seconds, her eyes bright and hard. When she spoke it was slowly, distinctly, every word given its precise dramatic emphasis:
“They haven’t got permission to be here, Sensei Ponchard.”
“On the contrary, they have my permission. Besides, I don’t think the rule that forces them to go outside is very sensible, do you?”
Anla disregarded the question. “But they have told me themselves they haven’t got permission.”
“Quite so, they don’t know about it; I only told these two, since they seemed so worried.”
Anla stared at the two proctors. The girl blushed and looked at her immaculately shod feet, the boy maintained the blank idiot gaze he had worn from the start. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”
“We didn’t think it was proper permission. They should have asked before they stayed inside.” She spoke to the floor.
Anla flashed Kael a look of pure hate and backed down as gracefully as the situation allowed.
“There seems to have been some misunderstanding, but in future, Con, you will have to get permission before you stay inside.”
Con gave a single, enigmatic shrug. Anla turned quickly and marched out of the facility with the proctors close on her heels. Kael watched the three representatives of law and order vanish down the corridor, then turned to Con.
“I won’t ask what you’ve been up to, though I imagine I’ll find out soon enough.” He looked steadily at the youth. “Don’t spread this story all over the place, will you, mate?”
“No worries.”
§
Anla sat at the console of Catsize’s skite, hyper-cool now, efficiently taking Kael and herself through the afternoon traffic. Kael lay well back in the passenger web, his feet up.
He looked down through the safety field at the arrays of flashy baubles: an estate of new cottages. All very neat. Designs chosen by the tenants.
Charioteers, the first colonists showed a bit more taste. Simplicity constrained by raw materials. Are they living in bliss today in these new horrors, glad, two and a half centuries later, to be out of the original whitewashed stone walls, mellow thatched roofs, twisting cobbled streets?
The uses of freedom. If the political consciousness of this community is on a par with its aesthetics we’re all stuffed.
The silence in the skite’s cabin was becoming oppressive.
When Anla spoke it was coolly, with no hint of aggression.
“It’s very easy to do that sort of thing, Kael.”
“What sort of thing exactly is that, Anla?”
“Feed your own image of yourself at the expense of the other staff.”
“You think I sided with Con only for the benefit of my own ego?”
Anla didn’t answer; she went to manual briefly, her option homeostatting into the cybernet, and slid deftly up into the highest corridor.
“Listen Kael, leaving the stolen computer time to one side, I don’t give a fuck whether Con and his friends break that stupid rule or not. If I can turn a blind eye to it I will, and so will a lot of other educers around the place. But if it comes to a direct question, as it did when those bloody proctors asked me to enforce the rule, I have no choice.”
Kael sat up in his web and shrugged, seeing the line Anla’s argument must necessarily take. He looked down at the muddy river flowing sluggishly under the equally sluggish line of skites. A gray sky, more rain coming. The next question, and its answer, were inevitable; he was constrained to ask it:
“Why did you have no choice?”
Anla chose her words with care.
“Because educers have to function as a group, as a team, if you don’t mind the word. You have to live with your fellows, you depend on them for all kinds of support. You have to be able to trust them and they have to be able to trust you.”
“Bullshit!”
“Don’t be so bloody petulant, Kael, you know what I’m saying is true.”
“Don’t you really mean that you were scared of what Con was programming on that holo?”
“Of course I’m worried, Kael. Con’s a smart kid, and I know he’s only five or six years younger than us but for all that he’s just a child. He’s impatient, he’ll destroy himself if someone doesn’t slow him down for a few years—”
“Yet you didn’t confiscate their crystal.”
“Don’t be offensive, you can see the difference as well as I can. Besides, they’d just go ahead with their little scheme some other way. On the other hand, now the proctors know they’re up to something they’ll put it aside if they have any sense at all. But that’s not the point. I repeat: if we educers start embarrassing and contradicting each other in front of the kids, we fuck up any chance of mutual support, and the whole job becomes impossible.”
The flow had speeded up. Kael turned his attention to the dwellings again; they were deep in the airspace of the established bureaucracy.
How the nimby swine had shrieked when the press of traffic had forced the opening of this corridor. Tall trees edged the bland translucence of privacy fields. What mad, illicit scenes raged beneath their cover?
Kael wondered who would get thrown out first, he or Con, and found the form fairly equal.
Of course Anla is right, he told himself, depressed. The job would very soon become impossible. Maybe for me it already has.
§
Theri sat on Catsize’s bed, listening to the thornglee outside flailing around in an orgy of mutual mutilation. Rain droned across the roof of the laundry. The poet threw a few lumps of compressed tea into the urn and activated it. Theri pulled a filament over her knees.
“Catsize, do you have any kids?”
“Half the universe has been sired by my mighty pizzle, child.”
Catsize swore by natural combustion; he selected a few fragments of driftwood Ben had fetched back from the ocean, and sprinkled a chemical catalyst over them. The wood caught with a rush of flame, filling the room with a sudden marigold light. Theri watched the flames shattering in the rain-streaked windows of the Cathouse. Outside, the gray afternoon had almost turned to night. A sunlight went on in the main dwelling; Anla or Ben must be home.
“What do you think will happen to them?”
Catsize warmed his hands over his primitive fire and looked at Theri.
“It will depend what happens when Ben finally starts to screw around like Anla. I think when it comes down to it our Ben is a one-woman-at-a-time man. Reacting against his upbringing. He’ll probably start to have it off with some wench to teach Anla a lesson and then find he’s up to his ears in love with her and want to leave Anla.”
“What will Anla do?”
“Go berserk, I should imagine; she really needs Ben. She loves him, too.”
“Do you think they’ll break up?”
“No. At least not for long, Anla’s far too strong to just let Ben go wandering off with some other woman—she’d get him back after a month or two.”
“When do you think it’ll happen?”
“Fairly soon, probably. With any luck it should bring them both to their senses.”
“Is she screwing that body-skier?”
“She was for a week, then he disappeared, she must have pissed him off. About bloody time too, what a pest.... Funny thing about Anla is that she sometimes tries to get Ben off with some nice little dolly or other. Of course, she never picks anyone who could possibly be a long-term rival. I wouldn’t mind betting that’s what keeps Ben so embarrassingly faithful to her; he’s hardly going to race off some lusty as an act of defiance if Anla’s actively encouraging him from the
sidelines. She’s perceptive, in an intuitive sort of way.”
Theri unwrapped herself and poured the tea. Catsize was watching the fire spreading little petals of flame along a bent leg of driftwood; the planes of his face flickered. She handed him his potion.
“Catsize, why aren’t you like this more often?”
“How do you mean?”
“Like you are now, not acting. Not performing.”
“What makes you think I’m not acting now?”
“Because you’ve been talking seriously and making sense.”
Theri retired to the bed and pulled the filament over her knees again. Catsize drank from his mug and placed it on the floor at his feet.
“Do you believe I can’t act at being serious and sensible? Here I am, in front of my fire, watching the universe with ancient eyes that have seen it all before, telling the very truth to my faithful disciple. Tiresias and his charge—an excellent role for a wet night.”
Theri laughed uncertainly, and then caught her breath. Catsize aged, his sight fading, hunched in his chair, holding his hands to the fire and slowly unbending the joints of his arthritic fingers, searching in vain for the lost warmth of youth. It was the mistaken horror of the ancient myths: immortality without rejuvenation. Fire light gave half his face a stolen, demonic life.
“Catsize, dear, have you foresuffered all?”
“A good part of it.”
“How old are you?”
“Timeless, ageless.”
“Catsize, do you know what is going to happen to me and Kael?”
“Of course.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s best you don’t know, my child.”
2.
Rubbing at her temples, Anla wondered yet again why she had so much trouble sleeping. It was obviously psychogenic; cloned offspring were free of ontogenetic mishaps, the quality control systems saw to that, and Jard’s chromosomes had been mapped for deleterious mutations as a matter of course.
Ben was still glooming around in the aftermath of that dumb fucking skier. He’d usually pulled himself together by this stage.
Her eyes skimmed the master console, watching how her kids scored on their “elicit-and-anchor” schedule. A striped pink bar moved up Streb’s readout, indicating too much alpha in his EEG. Before the autonomics had a chance to hit critical and give him a boot in the tail, with loss of points recorded toward his semester total, Anla cut in her voice circuit.
“Wake up, Streb, it’s no wonder you have a memory index like a sieve.”
The kid jerked out of his daydream, blushing, and fixed his eyes on the mnemonic schematics twitching away in the holo field. She hoped the kid wasn’t fantasizing about her.
A tone sounded; all the children dropped their eyes to the questions coming up on their libraries and stabbed away as best they could.
I wonder how Kael is hacking it, she thought, slugging with his class in that rotten little room they’ve stuck him in half a kilometer from everyone else. She remembered her own first year at Curringal, one of the untouchables at the bottom of the status ladder, given a room with defective heating, tramping twice as far as anyone else to get to her class.
She hadn’t remained untouchable for long; silly old Vann’d had his hands on her within days. Special treats in the Senior Commissary, the move to a superior classroom closer to the comforts of civilization.
Duvid’s readout blipped. That kid must have suet for brains; give him the entire peptide schema from Victoria’s leading geographer and he’d still get lost crossing the common. Anla cut him out of the programmed interrogation and asked him gently what he’d forgotten.
His miserable face stared up at her, lower lip thrust out and eyes brimming.
“Never mind, dear, we’ll have it sorted out in a moment, won’t we? Now where—”
“Attention, class!”
Anla was washed by abrupt, scalding rage. Shit! As if this job wasn’t delicate enough, without some cretinous busybody disrupting the kids’ concentration.
“The Co-ordinator of Curringal Basic Inlay will now speak to you on a matter of the gravest importance.”
Jonga Hewson, bloody old Grey’s simpering right hand, vanished from the holo field. The embodiment of sagacity took her place, seated behind his massive console.
Anla turned away, her jaw locked, and began putting the readouts on temporary stand down. Blocking her own attention, she only vaguely heard the voice saying with gray anger: “It has come to my notice as head of this establishment it has come to my it has come to my notice that an organized group of come to my notice that—”
The voice broke off, and Anla looked up with some surprise. What was the old fool on about? He was glaring at the class of small children. “In this institution, all political organizations are banned. It has come to my notice that an underground, covert group of troublemakers is at work in Curringal, and I will not tolerate it. Although we do not know the names of those involved, it is said that pupils can easily contact them simply by asking around.”
That’s funny, Anla thought. There’s something weird about— And then she realized who Grey was talking about. Those bloody snotty-nosed little proctors must have taken Con’s infractions to the top.
“Let me make this perfectly clear,” the gray man was saying with rising wrath. “There is a Departmental ruling which clearly forbids the discussion of all controversial issues in class. Your educers are forbidden to discuss Imperial guerrilla wars even if they want to. This underground group, which claims to be upholding the banner of freedom against what it calls the foul abuses of bureaucratic power, is carrying on in direct defiance of the Defense Forces Protection Act.”
Chariots on ice, he’s flipped his lid! Grey’s bilious voice was verging on hysteria. Anla glanced at her charges; they were staring with wide eyes. Most of this was going over their heads, but they recognized the authentic tone of maddened fury. The bastard, he’ll have them in tears in a moment.
“I have just one final thing to say. Next week the Imperial Legation will be arriving on Victoria from Earth, and people will make their traditional representations. I know for a fact—for a fact! that this rabble of secret conspirators plans to turn that public gathering into a riot. Such a riot can only succeed if everyone who agrees with their criticism joins them outside the Teleport in Bolte on that day. And I forbid it! I forbid it!”
Anla stared at the three-dimensional, frothing image with total incredulity. Breathing hoarsely, Grey’s projection looked out on them with crazy eyes. In the silence, someone at the back of the room blew a loud raspberry.
Anla lurched forward on her console and gazed numbly at her petrified group. There wasn’t one of them who would have made that sound. Charioteers, they were only ten years old! A strangled scream came up from the holo field.
“Stand up the child who did that! Stand up I say!”
“I didn’t,” an infant wailed, bursting into tears; her protestation was drowned by a chorus of cries. “Ooooh! Madam, look!”
Spinning back, Anla saw that the livid co-ordinator had spasmed to his feet. His face had turned, literally, green. He wore no trousers.
Anla uttered one appalled shriek of laughter. She toggled the projector off; it remained on. Over-ridden. Oh Con, you fucking lunatic! She strode briskly to the door and threw it open.
“All right, children, into the corridor. Come on now, one two three. That’s right, Streb, out you go. Now I want you all to march down to the playroom like good little children and wait for me there. Pronto!” She clapped her hands. Did they have a lanned holo-projector in the playroom? Well, once they were down there someone else could take charge. She waited until they had straggled off, then ducked back into the class room.
Grey had shrunk to half-size, and he was wearing the full regalia of an Imperial Commando general, without the trousers. A shocking detail struck her: between his legs the flesh was smooth. Co-ordinator Grey was, as she’d always claimed, completely dick
less.
Anla blinked, amazed, at the brilliant double-bind the image represented. At least they wouldn’t be able to prosecute the kids for lewdness and obscenity.
An idealized boy pupil entered the frame, all sinew and revolutionary fervor but polite with it, did a double-take and ventured toward the jerking, babbling manikin with the clear intention of announcing that the emperor wore no clothes. The diminutive tyrant seized up an explosive grenade and blasted the boy to bloody rags.
Chariots, Con, you’re over-doing it a bit.
Now the background was Kurd, reconstructed from the eidetic schema of official news observers. Smoking ruins, rotting flesh: the victims of para-viruses.
Grey swelled to a bloated toad. “It has come to my notice,” he screamed in a high-pitched voice, “that some pupils at Curringal Basic Inlay are changing the color of their hair. This will not be tolerated! I am the co-ordinator of this establishment.”
Amid a series of disgusting farts, billowing clouds of horrid cartoon vapor swirled about the gargoyle. Grey blanched and ran about foolishly trying to seize them and stuff them back whence they had come.
Come off it, Con, Anla thought, discomfited. Surely we can expect a touch of taste and discretion even in propaganda. But through the walls, she could hear gales of laughter, yells, stamping feet.
How the hell had this pirate splice been allowed to go on for so long? They must have jammed the deactivation circuits in the entire lan.
She took up her library and punched Kael’s code. Inactive. She tried two others. Both dead. Chariots, they’ve been thorough. And what has bloody Kael done? He’s probably got his class taking notes on it.
The holo fizzed out. Someone had cut central power.
§
When order was restored Kael sat for a moment, getting his own reactions under control.
Press on with the scheduled subject matter, pretend nothing had happened? Absurd. Worse, it’d be passing up a rare chance to lead them into an exploration of something real, something relevant to their own experience.
The mood of the class suffered a phase change as he sat there; the psychic temperature dropped suddenly, their manic hilarity jerking downward into frightened, quiet expectancy.
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