Shadow Man (Paragons of Queer Speculative Fiction)
Page 3
There was more but Tatian flicked the screen off again. Masani had been one of the people who had built NAPD's Haran business in the first place, and %e clearly knew and loved the planet. And %e had been right about one thing: people felt free to do things on Hara that they would never dream of doing at home. Trade existed everywhere in the Concord Worlds, of course; in the Concord, it was more a matter of how much space each world allowed it, and how much the players were looked down on, how much they had to hide their tastes. The Concord was relatively rigid in its roles, its acceptable sexualities--it had to be, with the dozens of HIVs that circulated among the planets despite the IDCA's best efforts at control.... But there were always people who didn't fit in, always some desires that weren't fulfilled. The biggest group were the ones who couldn't quite accept the new roles that came with the five sexes, the ones who looked back to the good old days when there were only two genders, two roles, two complementary parts to play. Even if those days had never truly existed, it was still a compelling image to a certain minority, and in Hara, those people had found their sexual paradise. On Hara, players could always find someone of the sex they desired who was willing to play boy to their girl or girl to their boy, regardless of actual sex and without the complications of Concord society. In effect, Hara was a whole world that practiced boy/girl trade, and it was no wonder that even the most secure and normal people found themselves occasionally doing something outside their norms.
Like Prane Am, who had called herself man-straight, a woman who liked men, but was now seeing, maybe even sleeping with, a mem--if, of course, Jons Kaialis had the story right. Tatian stared back out the window, at the cityscape only partly obscured by the sun-screen, suddenly, violently disgusted with it and himself and everything around him. There was only one cure for that, as he knew perfectly well. He reached for the keypad again, tied a secondary screen into the Nest's housekeeping systems, and called up the schedules for the racquet courts. At least two people at his rating were currently seeking partners, and he hastily put his name into the system. A moment later, the screen beeped, and offered him the chance to play Lefsin Morley if he could get to the EHB Two courts in ten minutes. He pressed the accept button, and headed for the door. The confirmation chimed as the door closed behind him, and he grinned, anticipating losing his bad temper in a simple, physical, game.
Man: (Concord) human being possessing testes, XY chromosomes, some aspects of male genitalia; he, his, him, himself.
Warreven
The library was cool, the night breeze blowing in through the open windows. Warreven could smell the ocean, the pungent smell of Ferryhead at low tide, could smell, too, feelgood drifting in from the braziers in the compound itself. The faitous and other workers at Stane house were celebrating Aldess's return to normal life. He stretched his legs, feet digging into the thick carpet. It was imported from off-world at God and the spirits alone knew what expense--carpeting wasn't common on Hara, especially not along the coast, where mildew was a constant problem--and the deep wine-red color matched the strips of silk between and above the tall bookcases. Tendlathe saw him looking, and grinned, reading the thought.
"Yes, it cost a small fortune. Father's idea." He gestured to the jug of wine that sat next to a platter of fruit on one of the low tables. "Help yourself, I remember you could always eat sweets."
Warreven smiled back, acknowledging his weakness, and took one of the chunks of sourcane. He turned it so that the fibers ran perpendicular to his fingers, and bit carefully into the sour-sweet flesh. It had been soaked in sweetrum, but the natural flavor was still there. The juice was as sweet as the sweetrum, the plant itself sour, with a bitter-sharp aftertaste that clung to the tongue. Tendlathe lifted the jug in silent query, and Warreven nodded, waited while the other filled a pair of tall glasses. He recognized the work--out of the Stiller glassworks, sand from their miles of beachfront tinted with sea salts and blowers' clays and the powders ground from half a dozen plants--and wondered if Tendlathe was making a deliberate point, or just using the best he had.
He hadn't seen Tendlathe in a while, not up close, and took the chance to look carefully again. They still looked much alike, though Warreven had broadened through the hips and chest at puberty, while Tendlathe had stayed slim as a reed; their skins were the still same shade of golden brown, unmarked by the fierce sun. Tendlathe was still dressing as traditionally as ever, in the shirt-vest-and-loose-trousers suit that was popular in the Stanelands, but the material was better than before, showing off-world colors and an off-world eye for cut and form. Only the jewelry remained the same, the wide etched-steel bracelets, cut from the interior hull of the Captain's cabin before the hulk that had been the colony ship broke up and fell flaming into Hara's seas, and the matched steel hoops, each with a pendant square, faded blue etched with lines of gold, which might have been part of the ship's computer. Warreven touched his own bracelets--smaller, darker, carved from the outer hull but still part of the ship--for reassurance and thought again that Tendlathe was an extremely handsome man. Not that there was anything between them beyond that admiration: anything more had been put firmly out of bounds the day he himself had refused to change legal gender. He accepted the glass that Tendlathe held out to him and sipped the wine, nodding his appreciation.
"This is nice."
"It's Delacoste, they've planted a vineyard outside Estaern, with off-world rootstock," Tendlathe answered. "They paid a near fortune for it, mind you, and it has to be tended daily, but the result seems to be worth it." He paused, looked away again, concentrating on setting the jug of wine back in its place. "I'm sorry about Father, by the way."
Warreven nodded. The marriage was a sore point between them; he hadn't expected even this oblique reference. "What's he up to, anyway, bringing all that up again?"
"I wouldn't know." Tendlathe's voice was cold, and Warreven sighed, accepting the rebuff.
"So what did you want, Ten?" he said, after a moment.
Tendlathe grinned, exactly the expression, amused and slightly abashed, that he'd always had when they'd both known he was speaking out of turn. "Like I said, it's Aldess. She wants to go to an off-world doctor, maybe even go off-world, see if they can help her carry to term."
"It's not a bad idea," Warreven said. "They probably can."
"I don't think she should." Tendlathe took a deep breath. "I think it's dangerous, and I want you to help me talk her out of it."
Warreven blinked. "Ten, Aldess is never going to listen to me--she doesn't like me, she's never liked me, and she doesn't listen to anybody once she's made up her mind to something. Besides, I think it's probably a good idea."
"It's dangerous," Tendlathe said again. "We're not really like them."
"The off-worlders have been dealing with the problem for centuries," Warreven said. "It's the same mutation that made the odd-bodied. Hyperlumin causes miscarriages and intersexual births, everybody knows that. And if anybody knows how to get around it, the off-worlders do--they're still taking the stuff, you can't go FTL without it."
"I don't want her going to them," Tendlathe said.
"God and the spirits," Warreven began, and Tendlathe went on as though he hadn't spoken.
"The off-worlders--hyperlumin's their excuse, it justifies what they are. But we're not like them. We're not the same."
"We're not that different, either," Warreven answered. "You talk like they're aliens or something."
"Well, they are," Tendlathe said. "In every way that really matters, they're aliens. That's what Aldess and I have been arguing about, Raven, that's why I want your help. We aren't like them, and we can't afford to become like them. We're all that's left of what people, human beings, are supposed to be, and if we change, that's lost forever."
"Ten--" Warreven broke off, shaking his head. "I agree with Aldess on this one. If she wants to talk to the off-worlders, I think she should--if she wants to go off-world, I think she should. It's stupid not to take advantage of their skills."
Warreven nodded. He remembered the girl, all right, a year younger than either of them, but clever, so that she had been in most of their classes. She had been striking at fifteen, long-necked, skin like polished wood, her face already losing the roundness of childhood, fining down into the serene planes of a statue. He hadn't thought of her in years, wondered vaguely if she had retained that beauty.
"Remember when we were studying the end of the First Wave?" Tendlathe went on, and Warreven nodded again. "The off-worlder they hired in to teach us--what was his name?"
"Sten something," Warreven said, wondering where this was leading. "Or something Sten." The Donavies, Aldess their leader, had joked that he was a blake sten, punning on the name and his nearly black skin: a stupid thing to remember, after all these years.
"Colde's father wouldn't let her come to those classes," Tend-lathe said. "Said they might tell facts, but they weren't true, and he didn't want his daughter having to say they were."
Warreven felt a chill run down his spine, told himself it was only the night breeze on his skin. The First Wave of Emigration had ended in 207, when people had finally made the connection between hyperlumin--hyperlumin-A, he corrected himself, remembering the classroom, the smell of shaefler outside the window and Sten-something's dry, accented voice--and the increased rate of miscarriages and intersexual births. FTL travel had ended almost overnight--no one had wanted to risk the mutation, but it was impossible to travel through the jump points without taking hyperlumin to suppress the FTL shock--and hundreds of colonies had been virtually abandoned. Hara had been one of those, a minor place, settled late, at the end of a particularly unpleasant and ill-charted jump point. It had taken nearly four hundred years for the Concord Worlds to find Hara again: too many records had been lost as the old Federation split apart, each colony slowly losing touch with its neighbors. Planets are big: most colonies were well planned, well settled, and they survived; even Hara, as mineral-poor as it was, had thrived. What was the loss of technology, compared to the riches of the seas and jungles? But over that time, the rate of intersexual births and of miscarriages had remained just the same, something that could be ignored only as long as Hara was out of touch with the rest of human-settled space. He said, "It is true, Ten, and you know it. We're human, they're human, we all come from the same stock, we've all been exposed to hyperlumin. They just know how to handle it better."
"They've let it take over," Tendlathe said. "And that's why we--why Hara can't sign the Concord." He took a deep breath. "The point I was making is, I think Colde's father was right. Kids shouldn't be taught this, not the way we were--I think that's what ruined Haliday, Raven, and it'll ruin you, too, if you're not careful. We need to be very careful that we understand the difference between fact and truth, and I'm not having a child of mine exposed to that."
Warreven stared at him for a moment. They'd had this argument before, in one form or another--it defined the basic difference between Traditionalists and Modernists, and Warreven had been a Modernist from the day he'd walked out on Temelathe's offer--but this was the most extreme version he'd heard Tendlathe espouse. "Well, if you don't go to the off-worlders, I doubt you'll have that problem."
"What do you mean?" Tendlathe's face was tight and set behind the narrow beard.
Warreven sighed, already regretting the words. "Just what I said. Aldess has had four miscarriages already, not a live birth yet in, what, eighteen bioyears? She's not stupid, she's never been stupid about this sort of thing, and if she says she needs help from the off-worlders, then I'd trust her."
"Then you won't help me."
"I won't try to talk her out of it," Warreven said.
"You never liked her," Tendlathe said.
"No, I don't," Warreven answered, "but I think she's right."
"I might've known you'd be jealous," Tendlathe said. He sounded remote, almost thoughtful--you would have said calm, Warreven thought, except for the grip of his hand on the arm of his chair that made his knuckles stand out white against the gold of his skin.
"I'm not jealous--"
"It was you who turned me down."
Warreven took a deep breath, no longer bothering to keep control of his temper. "I said I wouldn't marry you, and I wouldn't change my sex. That's my right, under law and custom, to say what I am, and I made my choice to be a man. And I would still have slept with you. Then."
Something ugly writhed across Tendlathe's face, and for an instant Warreven thought he'd gone too far. He let his hand slide down the stem of the wineglass, ready to smash it into an improvised dagger. It was a trick he'd learned in the wrangwys bars and dance houses, never expected to use in Temelathe's house--Then Tendlathe slammed his hand against the arm of his chair, the sound very loud in the quiet space, and Warreven let himself relax.
"I'm not wry-abed," Tendlathe said, through clenched teeth.
"Fine," Warreven answered. But I am. He let those words hang, unspoken, not needing to be spoken, set the undamaged glass carefully on the table beside the half-full jug, and pushed himself to his feet. "We both made choices, Ten. Live with it."
Tendlathe looked away, tight-lipped, said nothing. Warreven hesitated for a moment, wishing there were something he could say that would bring back the old days, said at last, "Good night." Tendlathe muttered something in return. Warreven sighed, and turned away, letting himself out into the cool dark of the garden.
Player: (Hara) an off-worlder who is involved in trade, or who is willing to pay for sexual favors; not a common term outside of Bonemarche arid assimilated areas.
Trade: (Hara) specifically, the semi-organized business of sex (paid for in money or favors) between off-worlders and indigenes of either legal gender; because these transactions take place outside the normal social systems, and involve unusually large sums of money and/or metal as inducement, an indigene in trade, whether a man or a woman, is not necessarily considered to be a prostitute. By extension, the term also covers indigenes and off-worlders who facilitate the buying and selling of sexual favors, and the various permits that allow off-worlders to stay on Hara.
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Warreven
Lightning flickered beyond the windows, too far away as yet to hear the thunder. Warreven counted the seconds anyway, to fifteen, and then to twenty--more than eight kilometers away, too far to worry about--then dragged his attention back to the courtroom. No one had noticed the lapse: the judges--one from each of the clans involved in the case and a man from the White Watch to arbitrate--were still murmuring over their note boards, heads close together, bodies inclined toward the center. Behind them, the notice board displayed the particulars of the case in letters and a machine-read strip for the off-worlders that flashed brighter than the lightning. Warreven wasn't wired; he looked instead toward the table where the brokers were waiting. Beyond them, he could see the IDCA agents and their advocate, Dinan Taskary, punctiliously respectful in his formal suit; they were technically the greater danger to his client, but he was more concerned with the brokers. All three of them--all men, or maybe the third, the slight one who wore no jewelry, was only passing--were sweating, and that was a good sign. They were all indigenes, Green Watchmen, two Maychilders and an Aldman; if they were sweating, it was not from the heat, but from worry.
Thunder grumbled, and Warreven glanced again toward the window. The storm was getting closer, a darker band of cloud shouldering up beneath the gray outriders, blue-black against the orange tiles of the roofs of Ferryhead on the far side of the harbor. As he watched, lightning flashed again, a jagged, multi-forked bolt from cloud to ground. He counted again and reached fifteen before he heard the thunder.
One of the judges looked up at the sound, an older woman, dressed in an off-wor
ld shirt and narrow trousers, but with strands of shell and glass beads woven into her graying hair. She beckoned to the nearest clerk, and said, "Lights, please."
The young man nodded and crossed to the central podium, where he fiddled with the room controls. The lights came up strongly, blazing to life in the inverted bowls of the hanging lamps, and threw a distorted reflection of the courtroom across the lower half of the window. The clouds still visible in the upper half looked even darker by contrast.
Warreven stared at the reflection, picking out his own image--common enough, distinguishable only by position and by the loose mane of hair--from among the line of lawyers and advocates and the brokers and seraalistes that filled the spectators' seats at the back of the room. In the imperfect mirror, the groups of people waiting for their cases to come up looked like shapes in a kaleidoscope, the bright colors of the indigenes' traditional clothes vivid against the duller off-world palette. By contrast, the three judges behind their tall bench looked like a painting formally composed, the triangle of bodies leaning together over the one man's noteboard, blending, through the brown arms out-stretched to balance the women on the ends, with the polished wood below.
"Æ, Raven."
The voice was barely a murmur, but Warreven winced and turned his eyes back to the courtroom.
"Are you all right?"
Warreven nodded, knowing perfectly well why the question had been asked, and made a show of recalling something on his noteboard. The Stane judge, who as the White Watch spokesman had ultimate authority over the court, was a stickler for the proprieties and would be looking for an excuse to throw the case to IDCA. Under the cover of the gesture and the flickering text, he answered, "Sorry."