by John Barnes
“Apparently, some of them got injuries that prevented their playing their instruments for a while, leaving some trophies to go to other schools. Or perhaps it wasn’t as lopsided as it was supposed to be. Anyway, you, Raimbaut, and the others were responsible for the only reprieve I ever got from the bullies.”
The conversation drifted off to school days, old times, life as a jovent, and how the time slips by and suddenly those memories are so far away that you might as well have gotten them from someone else. At least one advantage of growing up Occitan is that by the time you’re twenty-five, you have plenty of stories to swap. It was all very pleasant until Arnaut said, “Candidly, do you see a problem with our affiliating to the Council of Humanity?”
“Well, there are only three thousand of you, and the current smallest culture, Dakota, has seven million. It’s more likely you’ll be invited to integrate into Nou Occitan.”
“We could live with that.”
“I’m not altogether sure that Nou Occitan can,” I said. “Not anymore. Your culture manifestly causes great human suffering; I would hope the Royal Occitan Parliament and the Council of Humanity would have problems with that, and I will be disappointed if they don’t.”
“Disappointed?”
I shrugged. “I don’t like it, but sometimes the Council of Humanity compromises just to prevent an open break. We let Pure, Égalité, St. Michael, and Texaustralia, to my knowledge, keep brutal and oppressive parts of their culture in order not to have an open rupture with us. I prefer what we did in places like Caledony, Freiporto, Fort Liberty, and New Bengala—kicked down the doors and told everyone they were joining human society, right now, and that individual human rights were going to be universally enforced, even against the cultural government.”
“But Occitan culture—”
“Is often permeated with a simply glorious gratz and espiritu, but the pre-springer version was brutal and misogynistic and wasted many lives, in order to achieve that very narrowly defined ideal. Thirty-some stanyears after Connect, no doubt there are fewer really Occitan Occitans in Nou Occitan, but certainly there are more happy ones. Especially if you count women, which, in the old days, we didn’t.”
To my surprise—he seemed determined to keep being a better person than I expected—Arnaut nodded and said, “You will find that many of us are relieved, not at all secretly, to have someone come in here and make us stop some of the foolish, uncomfortable, and cruel customs that we once thought it was so important to save.” He paused a moment, licked his lips, and said, “May I ask whether any of the experiences that led you to that conclusion happened on Briand? I know you must think something. You wrote that song cycle about him.”
There was something about the way he said “him” that made me feel as if my ears had just stood straight up, like a rabbit in a cartoon. “Ix was not the only interesting person I met on Briand. Far from it. And he’s not the only character in the Ix Cycle, by far.”
“But still … a man of his influence … a man whose teachings have now captured millions—”
I leaned forward and took a big gamble. “Arnaut, by any strange chance, are you Ixist?”
“It’s an un-Occitan religion and everyone here is a member of the Holy Catholic and Catharian Church,” he said, much too quickly, as his right hand slipped from the table, against his body, where it was unlikely that anyone except me would see it roll to the side in an emphatic thumbs-up. “Except of course for you and your companho. I hope I haven’t given offense with what I’ve just said … that none of you are … ?”
I shook my head slightly; he shrugged.
So the Minister for Purity—officially the fourth-ranking cabinet minister—having coffee in a public place, had to fear being spied upon by people he couldn’t trust. And he was a secret Ixist. And obviously needed to keep it secret. “Well,” I said, “then let me tell you what I really think, since you have been frank with me. The peoples of Tamil Mandalam and Yaxkintulum hated each other, no question. And they both had cultures that were strongly xenophobic and intensely inward-looking. If the Council had jumped in with both feet, there is no question that there would still be Council peacekeeping forces there today, being shot at by both sides, and we’d be paying a bill in lives per month, perhaps tens of lives per month. Furthermore, after the Council had opened its Bazaar, to make the outsiders and the misfits wealthy and take away the power of the traditional leaders to ruin lives, all those traditions would have burned up in one big, happy foomp! the same way they did in Noupeitau.”
“But you were a Traditional, in Occitan society,” Arnaut said.
“Things change, and they aren’t what you expected them to be, and time hurries on,” I said. “I was sincere about Traditionalism then, I am sincere about encouraging assimilation now, and who knows what I might be sincere about the day after?”
“Just so,” Arnaut said. “Just so. Sad to say, one thing that does remain the same is that there’s never unlimited time to just sit with a friend, no matter how agreeable the friend.” He pushed back his chair and stood. “Oh, and, by the way, that was an excellent question about the airships, and why we are patrolling, and what we are patrolling against.”
I stood, shook his hand, and waited. “Are you going to answer that question?” I asked him.
“Not at all. But I think it was an excellent question. Perhaps your second-best. Do you suppose that if the Council of Humanity had, as you say, kicked down the door on Briand, and forced both cultures into collapse and dissolution, that we would have had the teachings of Ix?”
“He would have told you that every wise thing he ever said had been said to us many times before. He might have been a good thing, very probably he was. But he was never necessary.”
“Thank you for that insight. I do hope you and I will talk more while you are here, and perhaps on future visits as well. I’m sure there are more questions we can answer for each other.”
5
“There are just three women in the performing workshop, and none in composing,” I said, under my breath, as I turned to pass a wine bottle full of water to Raimbaut.
“So which one do you think it will be?”
“No question, Reilis de la Caelazur. She’s twenty-five stanyears old so she must have been among the very first ones born here.” I kept my face pointed toward him; here on a ledge on a rock face above the sea, there was a good chance we were not being listened to, but nothing’s perfect. “Olive skin, graygreen eyes, wheat-blonde hair, could be Paxa’s daughter or Azalais-when-she-was-younger’s sister—so they did some research but they don’t know me perfectly. Today she listened very intently and asked smart, brief questions. And acted like I was the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen, of course.”
“Of course.” Raimbaut wriggled back a little to get his bootheels farther from the edge.
We had agreed before coming that we would establish a habit of going hiking in hard-to-bug places. We could at least make them work for information. We had also been quite certain that an attractive young woman, probably planted in the workshop, would approach me. No one would bring in a visitor like me, in circumstances like these, without at least trying to turn me. I was officially of suspect loyalty already, and my reputation would probably lead them to try a woman rather than money or ideology.
We watched the waves pound the rocky shore far below us a little longer, then followed the trail that laced from ledge to ledge along the sheer cliff face back up to the top.
That evening we did the same thing we had done every night since arriving in Masselha: we went to some reception to stand about in Occitan clothes and be bored, disagreeing politely whenever we were asked if this wasn’t, really, in our hearts, the place where we felt we belonged. At least that’s what they asked Raimbaut and me. Noucathars hardly asked women anything, so Laprada had to stand and be bored in Occitan clothes without even that much relief.
“Why are they all like that?” Raimbaut asked, as we strolled b
ack to our hotel late one evening, after a long, pointless, dull party. “At home, when we were young, when everything turned around being a jovent and we were all about as Occitan as anyone could ever be, we never talked about being Occitan or who was most Occitan or what the Occitan thing to do would be. We talked about whether or not a tapi broke at the right point to display our thighs, and whose poetry had the best juxtaposition of refinement with vulgarity, and who played the lute best.”
“And whose entendendora had nice legs,” I added, “and who was getting between them besides her entendendor, and whether or not her entendendor could defeat her boy-on-the-side in a duel atz fis prim. At least they do still talk about who’s doing who.”
Laprada groaned, “Oh, god. Oh, god, do they. At least you boys aren’t pushed off into the donzelhas’ corner.”
“Was it worse than usual tonight?”
“Either that or I’ve lost all my essential skills. Back on Earth when they called me Proddy, I might have handled this just fine, but I don’t giggle very well anymore. The major topic of conversation at the center of that swirl of big foofy dresses is ‘girls who are too brainy and will never get a man.’ God, god, god, god, god. I would kill to go through a good, brisk assassination attempt—either as the assassin or the bodyguard. Or maybe a smash-and-grab on an illegal lab. Right now you could sign me up to do deep cover in a Freiporto drug warehouse, unarmed, with no communicator. The donzelhas’ corner is honestly worse than the artist-café society on Earth was; at least the people I spent my teen years with knew they were useless, and some of them even tried to resist.” She sighed, and, obviously imitating someone’s voice, said, “‘Your hair is not—well, it’s not—well, it’s not the way that it would be if it was—you know how? Like that. It’s not.’ Longest single speech sticking to one topic I heard all night. I’d love to come over among all you testicle-types and barge in on some of the politics and philosophy conversations.”
“Then do,” I said. “We’re not here to make friends. I’m sorry if it wasn’t clear that you didn’t have to put up with being shoved over into the corner—”
“Well, I’m going to stop, but there was some use in going there the first few days. I did pick up some information. Even if it was mostly about my hair.”
Apart from the soft clop of our bootheels on the cobblestones, the swish of Laprada’s long skirts (they were breakaway and she was packing an extremely modern and non-Occitan arsenal on her hips under them), and the occasional clink of the chains of our scabbards, the street remained silent.
The next morning, I was in a mildly foul frame of mind when I set down my fork, wiped my mouth, and went upstairs to change into my better clothes for the workshop. I had worked myself into being angry at the world in general by the time I went back out through the big arched gallery of the hotel and into the warm, sunny streets of Masselha. It was another gorgeous day, and I couldn’t help noticing, in the clear amber-white sunlight, that all the traditional Occitan costumes looked like costumes. I had a feeling of being on the set for some enormous historical epic, set in some fashion-minded designer’s vision of medieval Avignon.
Today would be Reilis’s turn. No doubt, having found the exact body type I liked, they were now going to surprise me with her talent—they would have trained her very heavily so that she would be conspicuously the best in the class. There would be no more real music in her than you’d find in an aintellect, but she’d have a proficiency, and feign a passion, that would make her stand out in the little clot of not-quites and never-to-bes that they had saddled me with.
There is something about being played for an utter fool, by people who think they can fool me about the things I know and love best, that makes me grouchy and spiteful. (Perhaps you’ve noticed.)
The conservatory’s spaces were like everything in Masselha—decor was rigorously and consistently Occitan, but in any room where people made music, the blank bare walls, floor, and ceiling were antiseptically clean grown-in-place single-piece hardwood, every bit, from the baffle to the rake, clearly the work of acoustic-engineer aintellects, not human craftsmen.
They were still lovely spaces to work in, if you could find your way past the indifferent quality of the performances—a perfect metaphor for what was wrong with Noucatharia.
Reilis de la Caelazur was the first one up that morning. At least they had prepared nice bait for me. She was very beautiful, with an exceptional contrast between darker skin and lighter hair and that shade of sea-gray eyes that always hypnotizes me (I wondered how much research they had done to find that out?). A mesomorph, she might have done well at crew or as a soccer back, and she carried herself in a way that suggested she had been more of an athlete than most of the local donzelhas.
So I was very prepared, psychologically, to defend myself. I walked into the room; they were all waiting, and tuned, as I expected. Curtly, I gestured Reilis toward the performer’s chair, and sat down to see what else would be part of the bait.
Reilis walked to the chair, sat down, got into position, glanced at me. I nodded impatiently. She gave me a tiny half smile (wonder how long she practiced that?), bent to her work, and played.
The universe changed. With a lute in her hand, and an audience around her, she was one of the most wildly alive people I have ever seen in my life. She seemed more focused on the life within her, more astounded by it, than anyone I had ever encountered—even more than my childhood friend Bieris Real, who had grown up to be a well-known painter; even more than Ix preaching; even more than Paxa in the middle of our wildest everything-turned-to-solid-shit, surrounded-and-shoot-our-way-out operations.
Reilis had talent, as much as the very best performers I had ever seen, but of course the Noucathars, having studied me so thoroughly, would have used the most talented bait they could find. But how did they find someone who would put her heart into it? Intellectually I know that there are people who sing with deep passion that they don’t feel, and actors who have an utter ring of truth but no internal state corresponding to what they are doing. Mild autism is fairly common in the arts.
But I would swear that this was not merely technical brilliance onto which I was projecting emotional content. Reilis handled the lute the way the newly mature handle a lover’s body, as if simultaneously wanting to devour it and fearing that it might vanish at any moment. The coordination between fingers and sounds seemed to delight her, as it would a mere brilliant technician, but when she sang—there is a moment, if you are lucky, when an old song lives, and you hear it for the first time no matter how familiar with it you are. The tiny changes that a slight difference of grip and pressure, a slightly different way of plucking a string, make in the timbre, were lined up with the little catches and rushes of her voice as it went from pitch to pitch, word to word, breath to breath.
She always meant what she played. Most people don’t—they are busy hitting pitches, or remembering words, or wallowing in the feeling; but Reilis did, as naturally as anything.
When she sang of a lover far away and missing his palm on her thigh, I would defy any hetero man to sit still; when she sang of loneliness, it was like a fine whiskey sliding down your throat, by a fire, all alone in the woods, on a cold night two days’ walk from home, with just your little fire and the distant stars for company.
She was tasting and expressing, meaning each word at the moment it came, and not telegraphing it an instant before or hanging on to it an instant longer. She sang as naturally as a little girl singing to herself and dancing in the yard, when she thinks she’s all alone. That particular miracle, perhaps the only miracle I was prepared to recognize by that point in my life, was something I never grew tired of. (The impossibility of growing tired or jaded about it is essential to a true miracle, m’es vis.)
Well, I was supposed to act as if I were falling for this, and it wasn’t going to take much acting. Of course it didn’t hurt that she was beautiful. That hardly ever does hurt; blame it on my upbringing or my gender or both. Hair
the color of newly varnished maple, eyes the shade of gray that would invite comparisons to the sea on a sunny windy day, nose almost but not really turned up, a strong-yet-delicate jaw at the base of a heartshaped face. And the most important thing I could do was to remember that none of it really had anything to do with me.
When she finished her set, I clapped loudly, and of course so did everyone else.
“Well, all right, I’m sure she is. Has to be. And I am forced to give Ebles or Arnaut or whoever came up with Reilis a great deal of credit; they found the perfect bait,” I muttered to Laprada, in the middle of a hissing and whispering quarrel we were having while the regenner chopped up the breakfast dishes in the kitchen.”You don’t own Raimbaut, and he can do what he wants.”
“He’s just confused about what he wants and you are taking advantage of him the same way you would any other pretty young body,” she snapped back at me, and then, as a plate hit the smashers, whispered, “All right, we proceed and you walk into the trap. I’ll start a conversation about your infatuation tonight at dinner.”
“She’ll be very fine indeed,” I said to Raimbaut and Laprada, over dinner that night. “She’s right out on the edge of lyric and music.”
“You’re certainly excited enough about finding this one,” Laprada said. “Are you sure it’s not just a sense of relief after some of the duds they saddled you with?”
“I’m sure that could be part of it,” I said. “But Reilis—and this pescaroz—are so far the two things I’ve found here that really make me say, ‘Now that is Occitan! Now that is authentic!’”
“The pescaroz is good,” Raimbaut agreed. “Though I think more is owed to the ingredients than to the chef. They send robots out with instructions to bring back a few perfect fish every day, and they’ve got a whole planet of ocean to support all those fish. Three thousand people eating the pick of the planet eat pretty well.”