The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  Old Music, whom he now surmised to be the head of the Embassy’s intelligence system, called him in on his return from a winter leave at home. The Hainishman had learned not to make emotional demands on Teyeo, but could not hide a note of affection in his voice greeting him. “Hullo, Rega! I hope your family’s well? Good. I’ve got a particularly tricky job for you. Kingdom of Gatay. You were there with Kemehan two years ago, weren’t you? Well, now they want us to send an Envoy. They say they want to join. Of course the old King’s a puppet of your government; but there’s a lot else going on there. A strong religious separatist movement. A Patriotic Cause, kick out all the foreigners, Voe Deans and Aliens alike. But the King and Council requested an Envoy, and all we’ve got to send them is a new arrival. She may give you some problems till she learns the ropes. I judge her a bit headstrong. Excellent material, but young, very young. And she’s only been here a few weeks. I requested you, because she needs your experience. Be patient with her, Rega. I think you’ll find her likable.”

  He did not. In seven years he had got accustomed to the Aliens’ eyes and their various smells and colors and manners. Protected by his flawless courtesy and his stoical code, he endured or ignored their strange or shocking or troubling behavior, their ignorance and their different knowledge. Serving and protecting the foreigners entrusted to him, he kept himself aloof from them, neither touched nor touching. His charges learned to count on him and not to presume on him. Women were often quicker to see and respond to his Keep Out signs than men; he had an easy, almost friendly relationship with an old Terran Observer whom he had accompanied on several long investigatory tours. “You are as peaceful to be with as a cat, Rega,” she told him once, and he valued the compliment. But the Envoy to Gatay was another matter.

  She was physically splendid, with clear red-brown skin like that of a baby, glossy swinging hair, a free walk – too free: she flaunted her ripe, slender body at men who had no access to it, thrusting it at him, at everyone, insistent, shameless. She expressed her opinion on everything with coarse self-confidence. She could not hear a hint and refused to take an order. She was an aggressive, spoiled child with the sexuality of an adult, given the responsibility of a diplomat in a dangerously unstable country. Teyeo knew as soon as he met her that this was an impossible assignment. He could not trust her or himself. Her sexual immodesty aroused him as it disgusted him; she was a whore whom he must treat as a princess. Forced to endure and unable to ignore her, he hated her.

  He was more familiar with anger than he had used to be, but not used to hating. It troubled him extremely. He had never in his life asked for a reposting, but on the morning after she had taken the makil into her room, he sent a stiff little appeal to the Embassy. Old Music responded to him with a sealed voice-message through the diplomatic link: “Love of god and country is like fire, a wonderful friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire. I don’t like the situation. There’s nobody here I can replace either of you with. Will you hang on a while longer?”

  He did not know how to refuse. A veot did not refuse duty. He was ashamed at having even thought of doing so, and hated her again for causing him that shame.

  The first sentence of the message was enigmatic, not in Old Music’s usual style but flowery, indirect, like a coded warning. Teyeo of course knew none of the intelligence codes either of his country or of the Ekumen. Old Music would have to use hints and indirection with him. “Love of god and country” could well mean the Old Believers and the Patriots, the two subversive groups in Gatay, both of them fanatically opposed to foreign influence; the Envoy could be the child playing with fire. Was she being approached by one group or the other? He had seen no evidence of it, unless the man in the shadows that night had been not a knifeman but a messenger. She was under his eyes all day, her house watched all night by soldiers under his command. Surely the makil, Batikam, was not acting for either of those groups. He might well be a member of the Hame, the asset liberation underground of Voe Deo, but as such would not endanger the Envoy, since the Hame saw the Ekumen as their ticket to Yeowe and to freedom.

  Teyeo puzzled over the words, replaying them over and over, knowing his own stupidity faced with this kind of subtlety, the ins and outs of the political labyrinth. At last he erased the message and yawned, for it was late; bathed, lay down, turned off the light, said under his breath, “Lord Kamye, let me hold with courage to the one noble thing!” and slept like a stone.

  The makil came to her house every night after the theater. Teyeo tried to tell himself there was nothing wrong in it. He himself had spent nights with the makils, back in the palmy days before the war. Expert, artistic sex was part of their business. He knew by hearsay that rich city women often hired them to come supply a husband’s deficiencies. But even such women did so secretly, discreetly, not in this vulgar, shameless way, utterly careless of decency, flouting the moral code, as if she had some kind of right to do whatever she wanted wherever and whenever she wanted it. Of course Batikam colluded eagerly with her, playing on her infatuation, mocking the Gatayans, mocking Teyeo – and mocking her, though she didn’t know it. What a chance for an asset to make fools of all the owners at once!

  Watching Batikam, Teyeo felt sure he was a member of the Hame. His mockery was very subtle; he was not trying to disgrace the Envoy. Indeed his discretion was far greater than hers. He was trying to keep her from disgracing herself. The makil returned Teyeo’s cold courtesy in kind, but once or twice their eyes met and some brief, involuntary understanding passed between them, fraternal, ironic.

  There was to be a public festival, an observation of the Tualite Feast of Forgiveness, to which the Envoy was pressingly invited by the King and Council. She was put on show at many such events. Teyeo thought nothing about it except how to provide security in an excited holiday crowd, until San told him that the festival day was the highest holy day of the old religion of Gatay, and that the Old Believers fiercely resented the imposition of the foreign rites over their own. The little man seemed genuinely worried. Teyeo worried too when next day San was suddenly replaced by an elderly man who spoke little but Gatayan and was quite unable to explain what had become of San Ubattat. “Other duties, other duties call,” he said in very bad Voe Dean, smiling and bobbing, “very great relishes time, aha? Relishes duties call.”

  During the days that preceded the festival tension rose in the city; graffiti appeared, symbols of the old religion smeared across walls; a Tualite temple was desecrated, after which the Royal Guard was much in evidence in the streets. Teyeo went to the palace and requested, on his own authority, that the Envoy not be asked to appear in public during a ceremony that was “likely to be troubled by inappropriate demonstrations.” He was called in and treated by a Court official with a mixture of dismissive insolence and conniving nods and winks, which left him really uneasy. He left four men on duty at the Envoy’s house that night. Returning to his quarters, a little barracks down the street which had been handed over to the Embassy Guard, he found the window of his room open and a scrap of writing, in his own language, on his table: Fest F is set up for assasnation.

  He was at the Envoy’s house promptly the next morning and asked her asset to tell her he must speak to her. She came out of her bedroom pulling a white wrap around her naked body. Batikam followed her, half-dressed, sleepy, and amused. Teyeo gave him the eye-signal go, which he received with a serene, patronising smile, murmuring to the woman, “I’ll go have some breakfast. Rewe? have you got something to feed me?” He followed the bondswoman out of the room. Teyeo faced the Envoy and held out the scrap of paper.

  “I received this last night, ma’am,” he said. “I must ask you not to attend the festival tomorrow.”

  She considered the paper, read the writing, and yawned. “Who’s it from?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  “What’s it mean? Assassination? They can’t spell, can they?”

  After a moment, he said, “There are a number of other in
dications – enough that I must ask you—”

  “Not to attend the festival of Forgiveness, yes. I heard you.” She went to a window seat and sat down, her robe falling wide to reveal her legs; her bare, brown feet were short and supple, the soles pink, the toes small and orderly. Teyeo looked fixedly at the air beside her head. She twiddled the bit of paper. “If you think it’s dangerous, Rega, bring a guardsman or two with you,” she said, with the faintest tone of scorn. “I really have to be there. The King requested it, you know. And I’m to light the big fire, or something. One of the few things women are allowed to do in public here . . . I can’t back out of it.” She held out the paper, and after a moment he came close enough to take it. She looked up at him smiling; when she defeated him she always smiled at him. “Who do you think would want to blow me away, anyhow? The Patriots?”

  “Or the Old Believers, ma’am. Tomorrow is one of their holidays.”

  “And your Tualites have taken it away from them? Well, they can’t exactly blame the Ekumen, can they?”

  “I think it possible that the government might permit violence in order to excuse retaliation, ma’am.”

  She started to answer carelessly, realised what he had said, and frowned. “You think the Council’s setting me up? What evidence have you?”

  After a pause he said, “Very little, ma’am. San Ubattat—”

  “San’s been ill. The old fellow they sent isn’t much use, but he’s scarcely dangerous! Is that all?” He said nothing, and she went on, “Until you have real evidence, Rega, don’t interfere with my obligations. Your militaristic paranoia isn’t acceptable when it spreads to the people I’m dealing with here. Control it, please! I’ll expect an extra guardsman or two tomorrow, and that’s enough.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and went out. His head sang with anger. It occurred to him now that her new guide had told him San Ubattat had been kept away by religious duties, not by illness. He did not turn back. What was the use? “Stay on for an hour or so, will you, Seyem?” he said to the guard at her gate, and strode off down the street, trying to walk away from her, from her soft brown thighs and the pink soles of her feet and her stupid, insolent, whorish voice giving him orders. He tried to let the bright icy sunlit air, the stepped streets snapping with banners for the festival, the glitter of the great mountains and the clamor of the markets fill him, dazzle and distract him; but he walked seeing his own shadow fall in front of him like a knife across the stones, knowing the futility of his life.

  “The veot looked worried,” Batikam said in his velvet voice, and she laughed, spearing a preserved fruit from the dish and popping it, dripping, into his mouth.

  “I’m ready for breakfast now, Rewe,” she called, and sat down across from Batikam. “I’m starving! He was having one of his phallocratic fits. He hasn’t saved me from anything lately. It’s his only function, after all. So he has to invent occasions. I wish, I wish he was out of my hair. It’s so nice not to have poor little old San crawling around like some kind of pubic infestation. If only I could get rid of the Major now!”

  “He’s a man of honor,” the makil said; his tone did not seem ironical.

  “How can an owner of slaves be an honorable man?”

  Batikam watched her from his long, dark eyes. She could not read Werelian eyes, beautiful as they were, filling their lids with darkness.

  “Male hierarchy members always yatter about their precious honor,” she said. “And ‘their’ women’s honor, of course.”

  “Honor is a great privilege,” Batikam said. “I envy it. I envy him.”

  “Oh, the hell with all that phony dignity, it’s just pissing to mark your territory. All you need envy him, Batikam, is his freedom.”

  He smiled. “You’re the only person I’ve ever known who was neither owned nor owner. That is freedom. That is freedom. I wonder if you know it?”

  “Of course I do,” she said. He smiled, and went on eating his breakfast, but there had been something in his voice she had not heard before. Moved and a little troubled, she said after a while, “You’re going away soon.”

  “Mind reader. Yes. In ten days, the troupe goes on to tour the Forty States.”

  “Oh, Batikam, I’ll miss you! You’re the only man, the only person here I can talk to – let alone the sex—”

  “Did we ever?”

  “Not often,” she said, laughing, but her voice shook a little. He held out his hand; she came to him and sat on his lap, the robe dropping open. “Little pretty Envoy breasts,” he said, lipping and stroking, “little soft Envoy belly . . .” Rewe came in with a tray and softly set it down. “Eat your breakfast, little Envoy,” Batikam said, and she disengaged herself and returned to her chair, grinning.

  “Because you’re free you can be honest,” he said, fastidiously peeling a pini fruit. “Don’t be too hard on those of us who aren’t and can’t.” He cut a slice and fed it to her across the table. “It has been a taste of freedom to know you,” he said. “A hint, a shadow . . .”

  “In a few years at most, Batikam, you will be free. This whole idiotic structure of masters and slaves will collapse completely when Werel comes into the Ekumen.”

  “If it does.”

  “Of course it will.”

  He shrugged. “My home is Yeowe,” he said.

  She stared, confused. “You come from Yeowe?”

  “I’ve never been there,” he said. “I’ll probably never go there. What use have they got for makils? But it is my home. Those are my people. That is my freedom. When will you see . . .” His fist was clenched; he opened it with a soft gesture of letting something go. He smiled and returned to his breakfast. “I’ve got to get back to the theater,” he said. “We’re rehearsing an act for the Day of Forgiveness.”

  She wasted all day at court. She had made persistent attempts to obtain permission to visit the mines and the huge government-run farms on the far side of the mountains, from which Gatay’s wealth flowed. She had been as persistently foiled – by the protocol and bureaucracy of the government, she had thought at first, their unwillingness to let a diplomat do anything but run round to meaningless events; but some businessmen had let something slip about conditions in the mines and on the farms that made her think they might be hiding a more brutal kind of slavery than any visible in the capital. Today she got nowhere, waiting for appointments that had not been made. The old fellow who was standing in for San misunderstood most of what she said in Voe Dean, and when she tried to speak Gatayan he misunderstood it all, through stupidity or intent. The Major was blessedly absent most of the morning, replaced by one of his soldiers, but turned up at court, stiff and silent and set-jawed, and attended her until she gave up and went home for an early bath.

  Batikam came late that night. In the middle of one of the elaborate fantasy games and role reversals she had learned from him and found so exciting, his caresses grew slower and slower, soft, dragging across her like feathers, so that she shivered with unappeased desire and, pressing her body against his, realised that he had gone to sleep. “Wake up,” she said, laughing and yet chilled, and shook him a little. The dark eyes opened, bewildered, full of fear.

  “I’m sorry,” she said at once, “go back to sleep, you’re tired. No, no, it’s all right, it’s late.” But he went on with what she now, whatever his skill and tenderness, had to see was his job.

  In the morning at breakfast she said, “Can you see me as an equal, do you, Batikam?”

  He looked tired, older than he usually did. He did not smile. After a while he said, “What do you want me to say?”

  “That you do.”

  “I do,” he said quietly.

  “You don’t trust me,” she said, bitter.

  After a while he said, “This is Forgiveness Day. The Lady Tual came to the men of Asdok, who had set their hunting cats upon her followers. She came among them riding on a great hunting cat with a fiery tongue, and they fell down in terror, but she blessed them, forgiving them.” His voic
e and hands enacted the story as he told it. “Forgive me,” he said.

  “You don’t need any forgiveness!”

  “Oh, we all do. It’s why we Kamyites borrow the Lady Tual now and then. When we need her. So, today you’ll be the Lady Tual, at the rites?”

  “All I have to do is light a fire, they said,” she said anxiously, and he laughed. When he left she told him she would come to the theater to see him, tonight, after the festival.

  The horse-race course, the only flat area of any size anywhere near the city, was thronged, vendors calling, banners waving; the Royal motorcars drove straight into the crowd, which parted like water and closed behind. Some rickety-looking bleachers had been erected for lords and owners, with a curtained section for ladies. She saw a motorcar drive up to the bleachers; a figure swathed in red cloth was bundled out of it and hurried between the curtains, vanishing. Were there peepholes for them to watch the ceremony through? There were women in the crowds, but bondswomen only, assets. She realised that she, too, would be kept hidden until her moment of the ceremony arrived: a red tent awaited her, alongside the bleachers, not far from the roped enclosure where priests were chanting. She was rushed out of the car and into the tent by obsequious and determined courtiers.

  Bondswomen in the tent offered her tea, sweets, mirrors, makeup, and hair oil, and helped her put on the complex swathing of fine red-and-yellow cloth, her costume for her brief enactment of Lady Tual. Nobody had told her very clearly what she was to do, and to her questions the women said, “The priests will show you, Lady, you just go with them. You just light the fire. They have it all ready.” She had the impression that they knew no more than she did; they were pretty girls, court assets, excited at being part of the show, indifferent to the religion. She knew the symbolism of the fire she was to light: into it faults and transgressions could be cast and burnt up, forgotten. It was a nice idea.