Recognition

by Ann Herendeen

  There, that was what Dominic had mentioned yesterday. A signal station. But what exactly was that? I knew more or less what a seminary was, enough to realize I had just been offered something of great value, like winning first prize in a competition. I must at least acknowledge the honor the sibyl did me.

  As I searched for the right words, a man jumped up shouting. He was Lord Singh, the same man who had been convinced I was a Terran spy at yesterday’s meeting. “Then I’ll repeat myself, too!” he bellowed. “How can you even consider letting a Terran into La Sapienza? In a week they’ll have their machines all over the ‘Graven Realms, grubbing for minerals, cutting down the forests, building roads.”

  Other voices came in supporting him until Lady Ndoko, replaying her part from yesterday, interposed. “You left out one thing, Landgrave Singh. At La Sapienza, at least for a while, Ms. Herzog will be unavailable for sexual companionship, and certainly for childbearing. Isn’t that bothering you more than these other hypothetical considerations?”

  Lord Singh scowled, but he didn’t answer. His supporters were quiet as well. Lady Ndoko’s authority, that I had noticed yesterday, was, if anything, stronger here in Assembly, in front of an audience consisting entirely of her peers.

  While debate was temporarily at a standstill, Lady Ndoko thought to me directly, answering my questions. A signal station is the applied or practical section of our seminaries, like the laboratory at one of your research universities. It is devoted to the use and study of crypta. The work is not dangerous to us, but the amplified energy from the large prisms we use with our gifts can harm a baby in the womb. Young women in a seminary avoid pregnancy, just as you do. If they wish to have children, they must leave.

  You see, she concluded, there are some options for us, even birth control. She opened her mind still further, letting me in for a brief moment of communion, a great intimacy from someone in her position, and accomplished, through her skill, without physical contact. I learned that she was in her twenties, Landgravina of the Ndoko Realm in her own right, and Sibyl of Netrebko Seminary. She was unmarried by choice, and would wait until she was ready to produce the heir to Ndoko. We’re not so different, are we? she thought with a soft laugh as she disclosed this much, before she lowered a mental barrier, shutting me out from her thoughts, just as the burqa she wore hid her face.

  I thanked her silently as the mental barricade descended. She had shown me a way to escape my past, had given me a taste of a promising future. I bowed my head, trying to deliberate, to reach a considered decision, instead of rushing impulsively ahead as I always did. It was impossible. All I could think of was freedom. In this La Sapienza Seminary I could buy myself time, learn to control my gift, be safe from all these men so eager to find out if I was fertile. And I would not have to impose on Dominic, force him into the role of protector that left him vulnerable to the taunts and accusations of the others. I could take a leave from my Terran job, maybe quit—

  There was the catch. If I wasn’t careful, the world I came from would follow me. Lord Singh, whom Lady Ndoko had so thoroughly rebuked, might have been an alarmist about my spying, but he was right about most of what he feared now. As soon as one of their citizens entered the restricted world of ‘Graven and signal station, the Terrans would take it as a mandate to overturn Eclipsis’ Protected status that prevented development and commerce. All the apparatus of modernization would follow. Everything I had seen in my few weeks on my new job convinced me of the very real danger.

  Whatever my preferences, or those of the other inhabitants, I didn’t want to bring ruin to Dominic’s world. I knew him well enough to be certain that this was the only world he could live in. Destroy it, and I destroyed him, as surely as if I took a forbidden Terran weapon and blasted him into subatomic particles.

  The large meal had replenished my strength, although I wished I had drunk some of that coffee-turpentine to make my mind work less sluggishly. Still, a plan was forming, based as much on what I could get from the others’ apprehensions as from my own initiative.

  I raised my head, took a breath and turned to Lord Singh. “Your fears are well-founded, Landgrave,” I said, using the honorific I had heard in the others’ speech, to show respect for the man and his concerns. “If I go to La Sapienza as a Terran, it’s an invitation to disaster.”

  I turned next to the young man who had befriended me earlier in the test. “Lord Roger, would you please show me the inner flame?”

  Lord Roger, guessing what I had planned, winked at me, raised his left hand and snapped his fingers. A blue flame appeared at the end of his thumb like a magician’s illusion. He pretended to snuff it out with his right hand, then drew his dagger and used the prism at the finial, much the way Dominic had manipulated the traffic light, to concentrate his body’s heat into a visible form that resembled a stove’s gas jet. He did it several times, slowly, until I had observed and memorized all the steps.

  We learn this as children, he thought to me, like your insect-frying on Terra. We don’t need a prism once we’re adults. It’s why ‘Gravina Ertegun thought you would know.

  Lady Ertegun handed me a similar dagger without comment as I faced the Assembly one last time. Working through the prism, I created my own blue flame that burned steadily with only occasional flare-ups. With my right hand, I opened my wallet and pulled out all my Terran documents. One by one, I held each to the flame, let it shrivel and vaporize. Passport, off-world ID, housing voucher, Information Department hologram. The hologram made a satisfying popping noise as it melted.

  When the documents were all gone I extinguished the flame and announced, “I am no longer Terran. I am simply a gifted woman, as you have voted. I will go to La Sapienza for training, and if there is any Terran interference I will answer for it.”

  Of course the master records were all on file, at the Terran Protectorate administrative offices, and on Terra itself. Most of the Eclipsians knew that. But they appreciate gestures, and they understood the significance of what I had done. I had renounced my allegiance to my native world, had deliberately cut myself off, made myself hostage. While Terra could always find me, it could no longer claim me as its own without my consent. And if I wanted to return to my old life, I would have to start from scratch, like an Eclipsian. Like one of them.

  I heard no more objections, from Lord Singh or any of the others. The debate seemed to have ended, a conclusion reached that all could accept. As people began to file out, Lady Ertegun took charge of me. I was under her protection now, she explained. I would spend the night in her quarters here in ‘Graven Fortress, and we would go directly to La Sapienza in the morning. “We will ride out first thing after an early breakfast,” she said, a cautionary tone making her voice querulous. “To fly in one of those helicopters, as I did yesterday, would only alert your compatriots.”

  She was not asking for my opinion or agreement, merely stating the facts. I bowed my head in acquiescence, grateful that she understood my desire to disappear into another life, another self. I would not even have to tell them, I thought with guilty pleasure of my coworkers and supervisor. I would not have to argue about what my role should be, would not have to try to hold back information. I would truly enter this world, as I had imagined doing when I first had the idea of coming here, before I learned it would be just another job, in overheated buildings with stale air and surrounded by the same oblivious minds.

  Dominic joined us, elation obvious in his face at this solution he had not allowed himself to hope for. He took my hand as we walked, our shared consciousness creating a throbbing between us of incipient communion. “I will visit you,” he promised.

  Lady Ertegun bristled. “No, Margrave Aranyi,” she said, “you will not visit her. Nobody visits novices in training.” Sibyl of a seminary, her word was law. As I had seen with Lady Ndoko, not even the Viceroy would willingly defy her.

  My new protector confronted Dominic and, looking into his eyes, forced him to drop my hand. The two of them squar
ed off like duelists, each one trying to make the other blink, giving up after a few tense moments. Neither could prevail, neither would submit. With a shrug of irritation, Lady Ertegun turned her back on Dominic, directing me to follow.

  I walked off with her, taking one last look over my shoulder. Dominic was standing very still and straight. I will come to you, he thought to me.

  Somehow I didn’t doubt it. I’ll be waiting, I thought back.

  CHOICES: Book Two of Eclipsis

  Can’t wait to find out what happens next? Here’s a preview of Choices, Book Two in the Eclipsis series of Lady Amalie’s memoirs:

  The ride to La Sapienza was brutal, although Edwige, ‘Gravina Eretegun, declared, a mocking smile on her face, that the weather had “held up nicely, given the season.” It was early in the first month of autumn, and autumn on Eclipsis, even in the relatively low-lying plains between the city and the seminary, features a great deal of wind, freezing rain and sleet. In our fourteen-hour day of travel, broken up, again according to Edwige, into two “easy stages,” we had encountered all of these conditions as we maneuvered our mounts along the narrow, slippery, rocky trails, Eclipsis’s only roads.

  You wanted this, I told myself. You’re the one who gave up a comfortable life in the Terran Sector to become an Eclipsian. Nobody forced you. But it had happened so quickly there had been no time to think it through or imagine what I had chosen.

  Two days ago—two days ago!—I had been a Terran, working as an information manager, living in a heated apartment, rarely venturing farther than the Protectorate Headquarters a short walk away on Terran-style paved sidewalks. Now I was riding on an animal, a sturdy little mountain pony suitable for a woman traveling in hilly terrain. My clothes were drenched, I was shivering under my borrowed cloak—I who am never cold—and I was near the end of my strength. When, late in the evening, we reached the gate of La Sapienza, only the quick action of a sympathetic guard prevented me from landing flat on my back in the mud as I dismounted.

  My one friend was gone soon enough. The guards who had escorted us were dismissed with thanks and directed to a hostel in the nearby town.

  Once inside the great hall I was too exhausted to take in much of my surroundings. What looked like an enormous company had turned out to welcome me, the unique Terran woman, gifted enough to merit admission to this citadel of knowledge, but they were a blur of faces and strange compound Eclipsian names. ‘Gravina Ertegun, for all her sardonic amusement at my lack of conditioning, recognized my state of near collapse and sent me to my assigned room. I gobbled the tray of food that had been left for me and, peeling off my sodden clothes, fell gratefully into the soft bed piled with blankets and topped with a quilt.

  I had thought I would be too nervous to sleep in a strange place, wondering what I had let myself in for, but I was out before I had time to think. For once, I was in a room that was cold enough for my body to relax, and the twenty-six-hour cycle of the Eclipsian day left me time enough to sleep out and wake up naturally, refreshed and ready for new experiences.

  Almost ready. I opened my eyes to see a non-human being staring down at me with round, feral eyes. It stood on two legs, but slightly crouching, like an ape. It was covered with fur in a mottled gray and black pattern, and had a long, ringed tail like a lemur. The face was a disturbing mix of features and expression: part cat, part primate—and part human. I shut my eyes and lay still. Perhaps the dream would fade if I ignored it.

  Preview: TWO WEEKS AT GAY BANANA HOT SPRINGS

  And now for something completely different!

  Like most readers, I enjoy many different genres and styles. T.T. Thomas sets her pitch-perfect stories in the world of California lesbians, just long enough ago to seem more exotic than Eclipsis to this 21st-century Brooklynite. Her writing is witty without being arch and sexy without being coarse.

  Here’s a preview of Thomas’s Two Weeks at Gay Banana Hot Springs.

  Two Weeks At

  Gay Banana Hot Springs

  By

  T.T. Thomas

  Monday: The First Week

  Dear Diary,

  G.U.T.A.S.A.H.B. (This will be the official acronym for Got up, Took a Swim And Had Breakfast).

  So! GUTASAHB (pronounced goo-ta-sob), and then a quick fluff and fold of the psyche, a.k.a. a phone call to Mother who was preoccupied or afflicted--I never can discern which, but she is rarely anything but either. The distinctive line between the two concepts, after decades of squinting at it, blurs badly for eyes too myopic to have the watery sexiness near-sightedness causes in its earlier stages, right after night blindness but a good quarter century before cataracts.

  After the phone call, in which l concluded very little, if anything, could ever be done to help Mother, I jazzercised my way into the dressing room and proceeded to prepare myself for yet another in an on-going series of positively grueling luncheons at Daddy’s club, hoping against all hope I wouldn’t run into Daddy. I didn’t realize what I would actually run into was far worse than mere Daddy.

  When l slid open the closet door, a flaming red silk shirt and pants from somewhere in France screamed to go to the club, so of course I ignored them. I reached to the back of my closet and pulled out a five-dollar outfit of virginal white. The razor-sharp, double-pleated trousers and manly-tailored jacket were picked up at the Pasadena branch of the Salvation Army.

  How were any of us to know that a few years later, the Army outlets would be merely one of the many and ever popular recycled clothing boutiques outsmarting the name-brand retail chains by a score of a hundred to one? For me, it was a choice between the Army outlet and St. Vincent de Paul’s, and everyone knew the Catholics did not wear expensive clothes to begin with, making these same clothes all the more dilapidated by the time they reached charity. Conversely, while the Protestants’ style was a bit too conservative for my tastes, the Pasadena Protestants bought expensive conservative, so basically what I had was a barely worn Hart, Schaffner and Marx white summer suit instead of a thread-bare, standard-issue, blue blazer and grey slacks suitable for Sunday Mass.

  Once every few months I’d tell my mother I was going to visit a friend in Pasadena, casually adding if she or any of her friends had a few items for the Salvation Army, I’d be happy to drop them off. Numerous 32 Regulars never saw Pasadena.

  My mother was not completely pleased with my standard dress drag, but she once allowed as how I carried it off with a certain naturalness. Surprisingly, she seemed unconcerned that my stylistic eccentricities had earned me a minor degree of infamy among her friends. I never knew whether to be amused or alarmed when more than one woman of mother’s circle would look at me as though she had just seen her husband, mistaking his old suit for him. It’s probably a good thing more men do not realize how many women do that. Oddly enough, I never saw a single male recognize his old suit when I was wearing it because most emperors have no idea what becomes of their old clothes.

  To this brazen display of recalcitrant cross dressing, I backpedaled plucklessly and added a modestly divulging sleeveless silk shell mistakenly shipped to the local K-Mart store on a day when I mistakenly wandered in. It was a lot of look for the buck.

  While I had not actually met the men I was planning to out man, I had heard much about them. None of it was kind, or even average, which, in my family, is the same thing. Also, if I don’t like a name, I tend to hate it, and I’m not big on moderation either. So, naturally, I had some serious attitude adjustment work to do when I first heard the name Chester Simpson. It sounded too sincere, and too much sincerity makes me nervous. An accountant lately heralded from Houston, Simpson was to be accompanied by his erstwhile client, a certain Baron Hotchkiss. There’s a name for you.

  Baron, called Bo, was hardly a real baron, so the down-home nickname was clearly an unnecessary gesture of reverse affectation. I felt as though I had no earthly use for these two men, that they were somehow an imposition in my otherwise well-manicured life. Ah, the lies I told myself.
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  I kept repeating to myself the end did justify the means, and these two men had the fiscal solvency after which I thirsted, some would say lusted; however, all metaphorical commingling involving carnal desire and cash on the line makes me skittish always has. The rich and the poor know what I mean.

  I suppose my attitude about this upcoming lunch could be called opportunistic posturing, or just attitude, since after all, I was the one who needed the money. Still one must never appear as though one is coming from hunger, as it were, though I do favor mixing the money and food symbolism over all others. Speaking of motivation, I hoped my mother’s life-long insistence on civility would help me to keep the more desperate and pathetic edges of panic out of my voice. I hoped, too, the response to me would be civil and not so utterly kind as to humiliate me. Of course, these days, it is no longer possible to accurately predict good or bad behavior by either good or bad manners, which is somewhat of a shame for the simple reason it was easier when one could.

  Anyway, as I performed this ritual of vanity, I mentally reviewed the contents of the report prepared for me by my father’s accountancy corporation relative to the Messes. Simpson and Hopscotch. All accountancy corporations handling a rich man’s affairs have at least one enterprising young upstart who is willing to go to quite extraordinary lengths to aid the rich man’s someday-to-be-rich daughter. The young idealist who decided to hitch his wagon to my star was Jerry Sweeney. Thus did I receive the rather extensive and wonderfully informative report on my two lunch mates.