"Um…can't we just hold hands now and then?"
Once again, Bilenda seemed to perceive Peter's confusion as disappointment. She reached across the table and laid her hand over his. "Not even that. The law says that you have to treat her with all the respect and distance that you would any woman who is not your shoulder."
"My what?"
"I'll get to that. Manners, Peter. Manners matter here. Not just manners one-on-one with other people, one at a time. Manners matter with respect to everyone else you see, simultaneously, all the time. Sitting and holding hands with a woman is rude to men who have no women to hold hands with. Which would be a solid majority of them. Don't you see?"
"Couldn't we just meet in secret somewhere?"
Bilenda sighed. "People do. When the secret gets found out, people die. And it's usually not the woman who dies."
Peter pursed his lips. He should have expected this. It made sense! What would Geyl think? "So the Airhogs were going to tell me I could keep Gina so I'd sign with them. Then they'd stop us."
Bilenda nodded. "They wouldn't be so blatant as to lay the rules down on you. They'd just ship her out to their orderhouse at Adziel. That's five hundred klicks down the coast. They'd arrange things so that you wouldn't see her but maybe once a year at Reversal Day Gala—if even that."
Peter realized he was clenching one fist, put his hand back in his lap. "That's no way to keep valued employees. I'd quit in a shot."
"It doesn't work like that. You sign with an order for five years. If you quit, the law wouldn't allow any other order to sign you. Scabs don't do well here. You could live in a cave out in a natural gas field with the Burning Men and stack pipe fittings. You could grow your hair long and join the Moomoos and chase woolly mammoths like a wildman. Or you could just walk west until a smilodon ate you—if the Moomoos didn't shoot you first for trespassing."
|Cripes, what a place.|
Welcome to Hell. Here's your straightjacket.
|Shut up.|
"What are these Moomoos I keep hearing about?"
Bilenda closed her eyes for a moment. "Mu Mu Mu. They're an order, if you could call it that, and a disease that I, for one, would like to see eradicated. When they're not making trouble they herd beef cattle in the wilderness. They never accepted the Charter—but we need the beef."
The subject clearly troubled her, and she passed Peter a covered silver bowl of scrambled eggs, steaming from its place on the chafing dish. Peter took the eggs and ate. Inwardly, he was relieved. Sharing quarters with Geyl would have gotten depressing after awhile. A short while. Maybe no while at all.
I'm sensing too much relief in your blood. You're nominally losing your only sexual outlet. Look shattered.
Peter put down his fork and looked down at the tablecloth. "Ok. Rules are rules. She'll probably join another order anyway. I guess I can wave to her when I pass her on the street, and if somebody shoots me, so be it."
"Peter, I'm sorry." Bilenda rose from her place and rounded the table to stand behind Peter. She placed her hands on his shoulders and began to rub his neck with a sort of confident expertise Peter would expect of a massage therapist. "You're only the eighth married couple on record to come to Hell together—though a woman will occasionally provoke a fistfight to get herself sent to Hell after a husband or lover has been transported. Give our system a chance. Most people think it works very well. Unless you're really really close to Gina, you both may find it works better than a so-so marriage."
"So-so is a polite word for what we've got. And your system is?"
Bilenda moved from Peter's neck to his shoulders. "When a new drop signs with an order, the order arranges a relationship for him with one of their social integrators. Each SI maintains between four and six such relationships. Most drops initially think of this as a kind of prostitution, but it's not. We have whole orders devoted to prostitution here, though thankfully not as many as there used to be.
"A relationship with an SI is a genuine friendship. At Rho Alpha Delta, you share a private meal with your SI twice a week. It might be breakfast, or it might be lunch. Sometimes the kitchen sends it up. Sometimes you and your SI cook it together. Sometimes it's a formal meal like this, with linen and silver. Sometimes it's a picnic on a blanket in the sun, in a private pavilion like this on the orderhouse roof. You talk, you cuddle. If you have to, you cry. That's why people often call SI's 'shoulders.' Nobody ever knows. It's a very private relationship. Twice a month, after dinnerhall, you have an evening and a night together with your SI. And once a year you meet your SI in a beautiful place in the mountains for a four-day private holiday."
Peter smiled. How long had it been since anyone had rubbed his neck? "Sounds great. One problem: Why don't the guys fight over their SI's?"
"Easy: The one secret that everyone keeps is who his SI is. No one knows with whom they share her time and attention. So although it's really a form of polyandry, it looks like monogamy if you squint a little. While you're with your SI, she's truly thinking only of you. What jealousy arises lacks a focus— and those who throw jealousy tantrums or try to snoop get cut off."
Peter nodded, his head responding to the rhythm of her hands. "Hey, twice a month is better than nothing."
"Peter, twice a month is better than most marriages achieve on Earth after a few years. How often do you and Gina make love?"
Peter had to work hard to suppress a grin. The Sangruse Device helped him. He was glad she was standing behind him. "Umm…your point. What do the guys do while their SIs are off in the mountains with somebody else?"
Bilenda ran her right hand through the curls over Peter's left ear. "Free passes to Sigma Epsilon Xi, order buys. But you know, half the time nobody even goes. Once your SI becomes your best friend, paid sex with a babe loses something. The older you get, the more it loses."
Peter heard a thump somewhere deeper in the house, and a soft, complex chime as of muted bells. Bilenda gave both his shoulders one final squeeze and moved away. "Pneuma. If I were with one of my spouses it'd be turned off."
Peter rose and followed her. On the other side of the kitchen, beyond a paper wall, was a small desk in teak. Embedded in the wall above the desk was a polished copper tray, in which an aluminum cylinder rested on one end. Bilenda twisted the end off the cylinder and retrieved a piece of paper from inside.
"Well. Gina went back down to Purple Hall this morning and signed with Duncan. She told him if you didn't choose to sign with us she'd talk you into it. She's a love, though I'm not looking forward to my conversation with her."
At least she'll be nearby. But truly private conversation may be problematic.
Peter took the cylinder from Bilenda and turned it end for end, looking it over. It was about eight centimeters in diameter and thirty long. On each end was a soft rubber ring, and in between were twelve hard plastic rings that rotated into one of ten positions. Each ring had a notch. Peter twisted a few of the rings around, assuming they were some sort of destination encoder.
Like the Paris pneu of the nineteenth century. A network of pipes carried capsules pushed by compressed air. Obviously Hell has taken the concept considerably farther.
"Does Gina get an SI too?"
"If she wants one. About twenty percent of our women choose to remain solitary. Women handle solitude far better than men. Most men who incite gunfights here are solitary. The first year death rate of men who refuse SIs is over forty percent, and that's from violence alone. Another ten percent die of various diseases. For men at least, not cuddling can be fatal."
Peter thought of poor Jamie Eigen, once a carrier of HRIS, now an unwitting carrier of the Sangruse Device. How much of the deadly power of the disease was the disease itself—and how much was simply the power of being shunned?
"Bilenda, is there somewhere you can send a note with this thing asking where a friend of mine ended up? He was my cellmate for awhile and I'd hate to lose complete track of him."
Bilenda sat at her desk and pulled a
notepad in front of her. In a strong vertical hand she wrote a note including Jamie Eigen's name and occupation and asking whether he had signed with an order. After placing the note in the cylinder, she looked up an address in a paper book, and twisted the rings around the cylinder so that their notches lined up with the numbers called out in the book.
"Reception keeps meticulous records, and they're quite fast about it." She shoved the cylinder back into the hole from which it had emerged. Peter heard the air take it with a muffled rush.
Bilenda rose, and led Peter by one hand through the rest of the house. Peter saw the great low bed that filled nearly one half of the bedroom, and a sunken stone tub beside a window that looked out over a garden of bonsai trees. Through a sliding door was another garden within stone walls. At the far end of the garden Bilenda led Peter up a stone stairway that rose to the top of the wall.
A strong wind blew her hair to one side of her head, like a black flame. Peter expected the wall to overlook the street or another building. Instead, the building on which they stood stretched away and somewhat below them for at least a kilometer. Bilenda's garden was on the raised periphery. The vast flat rooftop opened downward in four great circular wells that met in the center, in a four-leaf clover pattern. Distant windows in the sides of the wells glinted in the morning sun. All the rest of the roof was divided into green plots, among which tiny figures could be seen moving about, tending plants.
"In ancient times we grew food here against the possibility of siege. Now the plots are plant genetics research projects. Hell's been at peace with itself for over a hundred years. That's the research I'm proudest of. The Ralpha Dogs invented the SI system. We were the first to take house prostitution and transform it to committed friendship. Some people say peace came about through growing economic interdependence among the orders. I know human nature. And because I know human nature I know better."
Bilenda turned to Peter and took both his hands in hers. "Sometime soon you'll have to make a decision. Please keep in mind everything I said."
Peter nodded unsteadily. "I will. But I've already made my decision. I'll sign with Rho Alpha Delta. If…"
She stood back and looked at him sharply. "If what?"
"…if you'll be my SI."
She closed her eyes for a moment and sighed. "Peter, you need to meet the other SIs. There are over six hundred female SIs here in the masterhouse alone. Every Hellday is an Order Ball. You can meet the other SIs. Talk to them. Dance with them. You're young and beautiful. Any one of them..."
"You're beautiful too. Young doesn't matter."
There's a word for this hormonal condition you're displaying. It's called "infatuation."
Her eyes didn't leave his, but there was a certain amount of discomfort in them. "I'm forty-six. I've had three children. My breasts sag horribly, and I'm getting a tummy on me. And stretch marks..."
"That's my decision."
"Peter!"
"I can still sign with the Airhogs."
She released his hands and put both arms around him. "You are a shameless blackmailer. What if I didn't have an opening for you?"
"I'd work for the Airhogs. Do you have an opening?"
She pressed her face against his chest. "Not anymore." She looked up. "You took it."
"Is this promised and official?"
She closed her eyes and placed her lips against his. Peter felt a buzz in his head he hadn't felt since college. Bilenda pulled back, and placed her index finger on his lips. "My kiss is my bond. And this is a deadly secret, my new love, for now and always."
She returned to the little copper-roofed house without speaking, Peter following behind. Above her desk another pneuma capsule waited. Bilenda twisted off its end and read the message it contained.
"Are you sure you remembered his name correctly?" she asked. "Nobody named anything even close to 'Jamie Eigen' landed with the last drop."
8. Agonil
The earnest young man showed Peter to his room, and maintained eye contact while handing Peter the elaborate cylindrical key. On his lapel was a pin shaped like a stylized golden key.
"Mr. Novilio, please remember that our Rule prohibits you from entertaining guests in your cell. Entertaining women in particular is a censurable offense, regardless of the innocence of your intent. The masterhouse has lounges everywhere for meetings, both within the order and with brothers and sisters from other orders. If I can help you in any way, please let me know."
He tipped his head forward in a very slight bow, turned, and marched off down the hall.
|It's a weird prison where they hand you the key to your cell.|
The allusion is actually to ancient monastic communities. Monks lived in rooms called cells. The gathered conventions and protocols of the community were called its Rule. So far, Rho Alpha Delta resembles a monastery more than anything else.
Like all the other mechanical devices Peter had handled on Hell, the key and the lock worked with a silky smoothness. Beyond the dark wood door was an L-shaped room perhaps four meters on the short leg and five meters on the long. A large window opened from the end of the short leg into one lobe of the cloverleaf space at the center of the masterhouse.
A tiny bathroom with water closet, sink, and shower stall opened to one side of the window. A small closet full of what Peter sensed were identical outfits opened beside the bathroom, and beside that was a built-in system of drawers lying beneath a single bed set into the wall at chest height and reached by three inset footholds. Peter pulled some of the drawers at random, to discover black socks, black undershorts, various austere toiletries, and little else.
The long leg of the room was more interesting by far. On the inner wall was a massive wooden desk and wheeled chair upholstered in dark green leather. Peter had to stop himself from wondering where the tombstone was stored. Beside the desk was one of the tilted drawing tables he had seen in Duncan Eukamp's photo album, with an elaborate system of straightedges on levers. Peter tugged at the corner of one straightedge, and it glided over the clean white wooden surface as though oiled. In a drawer on the desk were a multitude of the carbon styli, plastic straightedges in various shapes and sizes, and other implements he did not recognize, as well as sheets of crisp tan paper.
|I sure hope they have courses in how to use this stuff. |
I can explain anything I see here. In a pinch I can act as tutor. I have any number of 20th century books on manual drafting using this technology, which was obsoleted by desktop workstations circa 1985.
Beside the drawing table was a cabinet on wheels, roughly the size of the desk chair. A hose connected it to the wall. On its front surface was a slanted mechanical keypad with keys for the ten digits and various symbols.
|A calculator! |
Peter pressed the digit "2". The rightmost wheel of six in a row rotated downward with a number of sharp sounds to display the digit. Peter's finger paused over the keypad, and eventually pressed the key bearing the square root symbol.
Behind a glass window toward the top of the device Peter could see five white cylinders beginning to rise, slowly and smoothly, as though propelled by hydraulic pressure. The leftmost four were inscribed with ten digits. One by one they stopped, at different heights, so that the digits 1414 lined up horizontally along the bottom edge of the window. Then, in a second window beneath the first, a cylinder was moving from right to left. At its end was a black dot. When the cylinder stopped, the dot lay between the leftmost 1 and 4 and slightly below them. The whole process took about three seconds.
Notice the scribe marks on the fifth cylinder. It's a vernier display providing another digit of precision.
|I don't know what a 'vernier display' is.|
I'll explain later.
|Can you guess how this thing works?|
If I had to, I would venture a hydraulic slide rule. Basically an analog computer based on logarithms expressed as pressure gradients, powered by air pressure from the Plenum. It's admirably digital in its I/O.
Most of the far wall was devoted to built-in shelving nearly filled with ancient-looking books. Peter scanned the leather spines.
|Hey, here's Mischel's Supersonic Airframes'! He pulled the book from its place and opened it as though it were the museum artifact it resembled.
Mischel wrote in the 21st century. You knew that, didn't you?
Peter shrugged. |I never clicked to the copyright stuff. I always figured he was some old guy at MIT. How do you find anything in one of these without an index?| Peter flipped past pages of printed text and technical figures.
It has an index at the end. It's a linear list of topics with page references. You have to search it with your eyes.
|Yikes! And no hotlinks!|
No hotlinks. Of course, I have a digital copy of this book and can tell you where any particular topic is located. With indigenous paper books it will be harder.
Peter scanned the other titles, spotting an occasional book he had used in college, though in a tombstone window rather than these archaic paper copies. Physics, math, metallurgy, statistics, all the tools of an AE were there, if he could ever get the knack of finding highly technical information by eye alone.
|Hey, they've even got Glover's Elements of Orbital Insertion. Wishful thinking, sheesh.|
Peter, wait. There's something wrong here.
|Yeah. No hotlinks.|
Not that. Glover's book might be wishful thinking. But I also see Bentley's Ablative Braking, and Gehm's Vacuum Hardening of Organic Synthetics.
|Right. We studied Bentley.|
And there: Wicker's Linear Plasma Acceleration for Propulsion. Very odd.
|I'll say! How'd these books get here?|
They're all pre-starflight. They're standard tomes on Earth and could have come here with the first colonists, at least in electronic form. I'd more ask why they're here.
|They must like to drive themselves nuts with frustration.|
That's not in the Ralpha Dog style. And look there: Roper's The Metallurgy of the Rare Earths.
The Cunning Blood Page 14