by John Barnes
She looked at me with a new expression, more teeth in her smile and more crinkles in her eyes than I had seen before. “Giraut,” she said, “I take it back. I think Ix had a profound effect on you.” She took my hand.
I looked down at our hands, and up at her. If I hadn’t been aware that the “young mother” in big bug-eye shades, billowy dress, and pregnancy pad at the next table was Laprada, or that the bored little boy in a sailor suit with her was Dad, fidgeting and acting up to cover his staying close enough to listen in, it might have been a truly romantic moment. As it was, it wasn’t bad; one way I knew Azalais really was Occitan was that she had perfect first-blush-of-romance technique. I was glad to be fifty.
As we strolled hand in hand back to Azalais’s apartment in the north suburbs, I didn’t bother to look at the muscular young man in the wet suit, carrying a surfboard, behind us. I knew he would disappear shortly after a little boy in flip-flops and bathing suit, with a big sand pail, drifted into the crowd beside us, or a pretty young woman in headscarf, bathing suit, coverup, and VR glasses wandered across our path and drifted in our direction.
The OSP has a fine tradition that as long as your shadows are on you, taking the bait is expected. There are worse jobs and worse employers.
I declined Azalais’s invitation to stay the night, though it was a pretty nice invitation, accompanied by a very long, slow, sweet kiss. I pleaded a need for extra rest before we got back into the recording session. Then I went through her springer into the one in my bedroom. I was about half-done with my shower and thinking about getting a cup of coffee before going to dinner when Raimbaut tapped the bathroom door and said, “Are you decent?”
“I was just told I’m pretty good, actually.”
There was a chorus of razzing noises, and Dad’s boy-treble piped, “I want you all to know he gets that from his mother’s side of the family.”
I turned off the shower and grabbed a towel. “Out in a few minutes.”
“No hurry. Margaret commed and left a full report. We have some things to talk about,” Raimbaut said.
When we had all settled with coffee in the parlor to watch Margaret’s report, her face appeared on my wall. “Hi, Giraut and team, here’s what we’ve got. You were right that you knew Azalais from somewhere before. She was your entendendora for most of the year you were nineteen.”
I had been tripped up by a deliberate blind side of my cultural heritage. In the tradition of finamor, a jovent was supposed to have an entendendora, a donzelha whom he would worship, consider to be perfect, make art for and about, and fight in defense of. Naturally enough, when you are required to think of someone as perfect, paying too much attention to her will get in the way; there was a saying for centuries that if you were tired of listening to a female friend, you should make her your entendendora. I had had several entendendoras, and I’m sure some of them were very nice, but I hadn’t known any of them terribly well while she was my entendendora. (One of them, Garsenda, had eventually become one of Margaret’s close friends, but I now heard about what she was doing only through Margaret.)
In principle, I was glad that finamor was extinct; it had spoiled relations between the genders, excused young males for behaving like louts, and encouraged young women in silly degrading affectations. In my heart, where one has no choice in what gets in there early, it seemed like the only natural way to behave, and I could not quite believe it was gone.
I really should have remembered Azalais. While she had been my entendendora, we had hiked and camped together all over Terraust, and more than once we had walked all night along Platzbori with just a big flask of red wine, holding hands and talking about the universe. (Well, all right, I was talking, she was listening. That was the way things were in Nou Occitan at that time. Is there no statute of limitations on cultural embarrassments? Now that people are going to live for millennia, couldn’t some detente or amnesty be imposed with regard to the things we used to do?)
I had defended Azalais’s honor in a dozen brawls. When she had been struck by a stray neuroducer, I had spent weeks at her bedside. (It didn’t actually take that long to recover physically, and she actually stopped hallucinating the deep gash on her upper arm within the first week, but waiting on her hand and foot was a delightful game as long as we knew we could call it off any time. Besides, it gave me more sober time in which to practice my lute while she slept, and I had an important gig coming up.) She had had a few Camille-like crises, during which I had become pathetic and distraught of course, running out into the Quartier des Jovents to drink myself into a stupor, whenever we started to get really tired of each other and needed a break.
(Of course, I had no idea what to do for her “wound,” which was a job for the neurological aintellects, and if the wound had been real, I wouldn’t have wasted time on hysteria. I’d have used the first aid I learned in the Scouts and commed for medevac, just as I had when Bieris broke her arm while we were climbing, or when Rufeu slipped with an axe and cut his foot.)
You would think that after a year gazing adoringly at Azalais, I wouldn’t be able to forget what she looked like, but then adoration works on the memory as petroleum jelly does on a camera lens. Besides, when we had both been young, Azalais had had thick straw-gold hair, fewer freckles, and an excruciatingly tiny waist. She had plucked her eyebrows differently, too. Had that puckish half smile developed in the intervening years? I hoped I would have remembered it.
“Well,” I said, “all right, it has been clearly established that I am an idiot and not a very perceptive one, even for an idiot. Is there anything else about this we need to cover in this report?”
The attached aintellect—the little mind that had been built into the report to answer simple questions, or to know when to com for the AI that had written it—said, “I have indications that you may find this part of the report personally embarrassing but it is also noted that some information not yet given may be important for you to know. Please instruct me as to your preferences.”
Raimbaut, Laprada, and Dad all started to laugh, and the aintellect said, “I had not been instructed to be prepared for humor in this situation. Should I obtain and install a humor-and-irony module to better understand your responses and questions?”
“Considering it’s this crowd,” I said, “yes, you should. Take the time you need to find one that’s good and comfortable for you, and install it. Let us know when you’re ready to proceed. We’ll take a physical-things break while you do, so don’t hurry. Thank you for thinking of that—it was a good idea.”
Everyone was staring at me.
After a moment, Dad said, “That’s a little unusual, Giraut. For some reason I never quite pictured you going soft on machines, though I know Paxa always was.”
I shrugged. “That particular consciousness only gets to exist whenever someone accesses the report—which will be secret and restricted for generations. I suppose it doesn’t hurt anything if its few hours, at most, of existence contain some pleasure. Anyway, can I get everyone a beer?”
When we resumed, the aintellect seemed to be in very good spirits—perhaps Paxa was right that treating them kindly was actually in our self-interest. And the report was certainly interesting.
After being my entendendora, Azalais de Mont-Belh had spent almost two years as the entendendora of Ebles Ribaterra, a passionate and hotheaded Traditional (jovent society at the time was bitterly divided between the Interstellars and the Traditionals; Raimbaut had lost his born body in a brawl with Interstellars.)
Ribaterra had enlisted in the Leghio Occitan, the Occitan unit then being formed under the command of Thorburger officers and noncoms, supposed to become, eventually, a full CSP unit with completely Occitan command. Instead, the Occitan Legion had disgraced itself during the revolution against the Saltini regime in Utilitopia, the capital of Caledony on Nansen. I was far too painfully aware of that—it had happened while I was posted to Utilitiopia on my first diplomatic-service job, back before I even knew th
ere was an OSP. Margaret was from Utilitopia, and it was there that I had met Shan.
Most people in human space knew three things about Nou Occitan, if they knew anything: Bieris Real’s landscapes, my songs, and the Occitan Legion’s Utilitopia Massacre. Thanks to them, a hundred years from now I would probably still be expected to turn abruptly violent in public.
The Leghio Occitan had been disbanded, its colors permanently withdrawn, and Occitan units were forbidden for the next fifty stanyears; Occitans could serve only in the “rainbow” CSP units, the ones deliberately made up of a cultural mixture.
Ebles Ribaterra had not been among the worst; he had merely beaten a bound prisoner about the face, not mutilated or killed her. He had come home and served his year of parole quietly. Prince Consort Marcabru—Raimbaut’s and my childhood companhon, spending two stanyears as royalty because his entendendora had been chosen Queen—had tried to honor the returning Legionnaires as a way of thumbing his nose at the Council of Humanity and the Interstellar Metaculture, but that move had been slapped down sternly by the Embassy, so Ribaterra had not been allowed to accept a position at court. Azalais had, and to all appearances had broken it off with him at that time.
Forty days after the end of his parole, Ebles Ribaterra vanished from the records.
Azalais drifted in and out of extremist Traditional organizations for another three years, then abruptly ceased political activity, entered the conservatory, and became serious about her cello. She quietly converted to Ixism a decade later, one of the first Ixists on Wilson. And ever since, she had been living quietly—so quietly that sometimes she didn’t seem to be anywhere on the planet at all for periods of as much as a stanyear, though there was also no record of her having sprung off-planet.
“Clear as sunlight after a four-day rain,” Raimbaut said. “As I read the story, Ribaterra and Azalais hid their relationship because she had a good position at court. Then he vanished—maybe telling her he was going somewhere, probably not—and she drifted into extremist groups.
“She was probably not too far from getting involved in running guns or planting bombs, when she got a visit from Ebles, who told her about that magic land somewhere over the rainbow where everyone is a jovent forever and nobody ever has to deal with the icky existence of other kinds of people. Classic pattern—strongly subversive opinions, suddenly drops them totally, moves somewhere to live quietly. Exactly what you’d expect to see when a radical underground has to do most of its recruiting from fringe groups and dedicated fanatics.
“So she’s stayed here as one of their sympathizers—at least running a safe house, probably spying and handling some ends of covert ops, and since she really is a good musician, probably quietly spreading Traditonalist subversion in one of the most highly respected sectors of our society.”
“Where do you fit the Ixism in?” Laprada asked.
“I can’t fit it in. I was going to sweep it under the carpet and stomp it flat,” Raimbaut admitted. “No idea. There is nothing about the Ixists, except their attachment to Giraut, that even faintly suggests a connection to Nou Occitan. The Ixists are about as Interstellar-Metacultural as a religion can be—the whole message is about isolating cultural differences into interesting little fetishes to amuse each other, and cherishing other people’s cultures … I can hardly think of anything that would have appealed less to ultraculturalist nuts like the Traditionals.”
“Hey, we were two of those nuts,” I pointed out to Raimbaut.
“We were proto-nuts. Traditionalism didn’t become really goofy until Marcabru took things to such extremes. By that time you were in Council service and off-planet, and I was dead. We both have excuses—we were absent! But even so … Giraut, when we were in our last year before I died and you joined up—suppose someone had told you about Ix and Ixism, and asked you to become an Ixist. What would you have done?”
“Issued a challenge without limit, summoned you, Marcabru, Aimeric, and Rufeu to second me, and cut the silly bastard (and all his stupid friends) to ribbons, trying for the kind of massacre that could make a really fine canso.”
“I was a terrible fighter, Giraut, why would you have taken me and not Johan?”
“Because our cause would need a martyr.”
“I believe I have detected an inside joke,” the aintellect said. “Confirm?”
“Definitely confirm,” I said. “Thank you for checking. No explanation.” I looked around at everyone and said, “Does anyone have any more questions for the report?”
No one did.
“All right, we’re through,” I told the aintellect. “See if you can find the number of suspected ultraculturalists and Lost Legion contacts who have become Ixist in the last few stanyears. It might take some considerable creativity, since Ixists don’t hold services or register converts, and ‘ultraculturalist,’ ‘Traditional,’ and ‘Lost Legion contacts’ are all fuzzy terms.”
“Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”
“Thank you. You’re an excellent aintellect.”
This time no one stared, so I suppose they were getting used to my resolution to be polite to aintellects.
Little vows like that were sometimes all that was left of a love affair. That idea might have a song in it. I unfolded my computer to play with the idea of “tiny promises that make you now who you were then.” I couldn’t make it phrase in Occitan.
9
As Azalais had promised, the Ixist musicians were a blessing and a gift. Songs came together quickly and well, and we worked late nights only because it was sometimes too much fun to stop.
Azalais and I still found time for some long breakfasts and slow lovemaking. Not once did she mention that she had been my entendendora, or a close friend of Yseut, my then-best-friend’s entendendora.
To confirm my legendary absentmindedness, I took Azalais to “meet” Mother, who of course recognized her at once, realized I didn’t, and could barely keep from laughing with delight all evening. The hilarious story of my unawareness spread from Mother into the wider circle of friends and relatives.
Meanwhile the adversary didn’t try to kill me or destroy a recording again. Margaret found that puzzling. “Maybe they have decided that attempts on your life won’t frighten you into quitting.”
“Oh, they frighten me—it’s the ‘quitting’ part of the plan that isn’t working. But they might be laying low for a different reason, if they know me as well as I’m afraid they do, Margaret. We’re getting close to what would be an extremely effective time to kill me, if they want to delay the Ix Cycle but not stop it, and reduce my influence without removing me entirely.”
She leaned forward toward the com screen—it made her flattish features look even flatter—and said, “Explain.”
“Well, I haven’t mixed much yet. I wanted to get everything laid in by the team of musicians I liked and trusted, in as many good versions as possible. If whoever-the-bad-guys-are shoot me right now, allowing for all the time of getting used to the psypyx and finding the right host and retraining the fingers and so on, it’ll be a long time before I’m ready to mix again.”
“And the problem with that would be?”
“I’d have to wait for several stanyears to be able to put out a definitive version.”
“Forgive me for asking, Giraut, but given that most of the OSP Board wishes you weren’t doing it in the first place, is there a reason we should care about there being that delay?”
“If there is no definitive version, nothing where I’ve put my stamp on it and said, ‘This mix is the closest to my intention we ever came,’ then you’ll lose impact in my core following—”
“Giraut, considering you still haven’t given me a reason not to suppress the whole thing, why exactly do you think I should care whether you get a definitive version composed?” She looked down at the desk in front of her, out of sight in the screen. “That sounded excessively harsh.”
“Maybe you meant it anyway.”
“Maybe I did.”
“Don’t call me midons. We are not married any longer and I’m your boss, not your feudal lord.” She sighed. “Oh, my, that did come out harsh.”
“Oc, ja. Ver, tropa vera.”
She looked down at the desk in front of her and sat back. “I just don’t want to see you dead. Or have you sidelined for god knows how long. I know we have to run this trap, but I hate baiting it with you. So I get angry at you about it.”
“You’re human, Margaret. And you’re in charge of something very difficult. That’s the way humans react, and that’s why I want my boss to be a human, and not an aintellect.”
Occitans take every fifth day off, starting from when they begin a job or a school term, regardless of the rest of the calendar, except that when the fifth day falls on a day off, they take a day before or after; a fine tradition to keep us from working too seriously. Today was a fifth day for recording the Ix Cycle, so Azalais and I had taken a long walk up Platzbori and back. Now we were at her apartment, broiling fresh fish, tomatoes, and cheese we had bought from stalls nearby. I was just slicing some bread, warm and fresh-sprung from the favorite bakery of my childhood in Elinorien, when she got a com call. She talked for a moment, said, “Oh, yes, that would be fun,” and clicked off.
Coming back into the kitchen, she asked, “Didn’t you tell me that Prince Consort Marcabru was one of your companho when you were younger?”
I had said that at least a hundred times, but I did my best to look mildly curious and surprised that she had remembered. “Yes, but, I was in Utilitopia for almost all that time while he was Prince Consort. I barely got back in time to give Marcabru the beating and humiliation he deserved while he was still Prince Consort.” I regretted that brutal act as much as anything I had done in my life, but it sounded like something a Traditional might say.