Courtship Rite

by Donald Kingsbury

  “This Frozen Voice of God is the one that was formerly in your possession. It is not mine. You’ll recognize the chipped end.”

  Teenae swiveled her eyes to Oelita, examining her friend minutely for shock. She poised, ready to restrain her but Soepei was there, alert, strong, and Kathein sat, ready.

  Oelita kept her game face, as if she had simply had a bad throw of the dice. “And my man?”

  “Detained at the Temple of Human Destiny. He has not been harmed. He will be free once you have spoken to him. He will receive a bounty from the Temple as reward for his fine care of the crystal.”

  “You are gracious.” Oelita’s voice revealed by its hollowness just how stunned she was.

  “We are not gracious!” Kathein was irked. “That bounty and that respect has been earned. We appreciate the deliverance of the sacred crystal by whatever means it came!”

  “How did you find him?”

  Kathein paused. “Oelita, you do not understand this city. It is our city. Almost every human here has a personal contract with his own Kaiel and little goes on that is unreported to us. To hide from the Kaiel, you must hide from every eye.”

  “I am at your mercy.”

  “No, you are not at our mercy! We are profoundly grateful! We shall be negotiating with you as if you had retained possession of the crystal that God willed to you. That is the Kaiel way. You will not get all you wish because our resources are limited and our objectives different from yours, but when we cross hands on a deal it will not rankle with you in the future. You will not wake up some morning, knowing the true value of your crystal, and feel that you have been cheated.”

  Teenae spoke. “She is upset because of the Death Rite.”

  “She is upset! You should see Aesoe’s stormings! He called a full Council meeting. Joesai is to be banished!”

  “No!” said Teenae, stricken.

  Kathein turned to Oelita wearily. “You have powerful friends here in the city. I do not know if Aesoe is angry at Joesai for his handling of you, or if it reaches his heart that my son is Joesai’s son, but certainly the visitation of a Death Rite upon you is the excuse for his fury.”

  “Where will he be sent?” asked Teenae in commotion.

  “To the port of Kissiel on the Aramap Sea, probably.” Kathein was laughing without humor. Kissiel was on the opposite side of Geta at the other end of the diameter that touched Kaiel-hontokae. “I could kill that man sometimes. I could roast him in burning dung and feed him to the orthoptera! I tried to intercede for him but it did no good. No, he won’t be sent to Kissiel. Aesoe is shaking up a Gathering against the Mnankrei and will send him on the staff of Bendaein hosa-Kaiel to Soebo. Aesoe does not waste the talents of a man he intends to kill.”

  “Does Aesoe wish Joesai dead?” asked Oelita.

  “Yes!” Kathein answered her coastal rival, her almost hostile rage barely suppressed.

  “He has no mercy,” replied Oelita thoughtfully.

  “Of course he has no mercy! He’d send his own clone up for Ritual Suicide!”

  “Joesai will object,” said Oelita.

  “He won’t object to going to Soebo. That’s where his men are,” mused Teenae.

  “The Gathering will kill many, Joesai among them.” Kathein was morose.

  “I, for one, will bet on Joesai’s kalothi,” Oelita stated calmly.

  “He’s foolishly impetuous!” stormed Teenae.

  “He’s stubborn beyond reason!” reviled Kathein.

  “Nevertheless, he has rare kalothi,” insisted Oelita,

  “Would you wish him dead?” Kathein was curious.

  “As long as I live, I would make peace with him.”

  Kathein closed her hand on Oelita’s wrist. “Aesoe is angry with Hoemei, too, for his part, but he needs Hoemei and cannot exile him. You will negotiate your deal with Hoemei. I will be custodian of the crystal. We have done preliminary work with it but our listeners are improper in their attitude and must be rebuilt” — she sighed — “again. I’ll show you our one conversation with God.” She gestured. “Soepei, bring the silvergraph.”

  The page was blurred, meaningless. “It is not more genetic maps. It is writing. Teenae, it is God’s writing. Three pages are superimposed and we cannot read through it, but see the alphabet? It is not our alphabet but it is close enough. It is like the carvings in the wall at Grief. See the ‘p’ and at the side, that could be the inflected ‘t’.”

  “There’s the under-edge of a line of writing at the bottom!” exclaimed Teenae in awe.

  “We’ve puzzled it out. This is what it says.” She wrote for them:

  SOMBER HELICOPTER GUNGOD FLEW BEYOND THE RANGE OF

  “What does that mean?”

  “God knows. God’s Silence comes in mysterious hushes. We need more silvergraphs. We must have better rituals. We need more reverence and better tools. We need more money.”

  “You are deducing much from very little,” ventured Oelita.

  “What? Did maelot excrete that crystal?” Kathein was impatient with barbarian speculations.

  Oelita’s mind was working, hunting for a place to fit this piece of data. The leaves in her teacup did not give her many clues.

  “May I see Jokain?” asked Teenae sweetly.

  Soepei took the box of the crystal and the silvergraph and Teenae followed Kathein, who warmed at the mention of her baby. “He may be asleep. I never know. He hardly cries. Sometimes when he is awake and hungry he just stares about his world so intently, as if he really saw something. He’s very patient. He only cries when he’s been ignored outrageously.”

  They found him in his basket, awake, cooing, fluttering an arm, not quite sure why one was free and the other pinned. Teenae lifted him, and he took that as the signal to attack her breast with his lips. Teenae squealed. Kathein laughed and put him to her breast.

  “You do not visit us,” said Teenae reproachfully.

  “It is forbidden.”

  “Not everything can be seen by Aesoe.”

  Kathein carried her child to the window. “When you love people you cannot have, that is painful. When you see them, you inflict your pain on them though all you might ever wish for is to make them happy. Because of your pain they learn to hate you. I do not wish that to happen.”

  “Kathein.” The younger woman could not get her attention. “Kathein.” She took her beloved betrothed from behind, and held her while the baby nursed. “You’re full of nonsense for a mind so intelligent.”

  “Oelita is very nice. I’m glad for you.”

  “Oelita is the nicest person in the world,” whispered Teenae. “But she is a barbarian. She is too different from us. She’s unformed, uneducated. It will never work. A Six is a difficult creation. We need you, Kathein.”

  “Now you have made my pain so much worse.” She patted Teenae’s hand wrapped around her waist. “We have to find a way to protect Joesai from Aesoe. I couldn’t bear it if he died and I was mistress to Aesoe and could do nothing. Go. Please go. Our business is finished.”

  Teenae brought out a bright ribbon with a bauble on the end. She pressed it into Kathein’s hand. “For Jokain. Homage to the Horse,” she said.

  33

  There is no way for the backward-facing mind to see what is spread before the forward-facing eyes. The eye is attached to the mind only across a chasm of time that falls from the here and now down to the turmoil of our conception. Every vision drops from the eye to the darkness of the womb and crawls up through a lifetime of ledges before it reaches the mind that watches now. The lower baby-who-was filters all sensation for line and form and color, passing what remains up to the simple child who blocks out the sketch and perspective and sets the balance and passes what remains up to the convoluted adult who adds the detail and mutes the unnecessary and gives purpose to the image. Is it any wonder that two people seeing the same thing see such different shapes?

  From The Prime Compendium

  THE TEMPLE OF Human Destiny was dominate
d by a circular window of blazing glasses that illustrated the backward-facing mind and the forward-facing eyes. It glowed like a lunar overlord in the dimness above the gaming dens where citizens played their wits against the priestly measures. Oelita thought the Kaiel temples obscene, profligate, grandiose compared with Stgal elegance. Noe, who had brought her here, showed a delight in overwhelming bigness that probably stemmed from an architect daughter’s pride in the sheer ability to over-engineer. Still, the Temple was staggering.

  Oelita released her man from his cell, comforting him. He was a guileless fellow who feared he had done her grievous wrong. She thanked him for not letting the crystal come to harm. She gave him money and told him where he could stay to await further word from her.

  “Noe!”

  A painted temple courtesan, roguish in his sensual outfit, rushed through the relaxed crowd and spoke to Noe with the gaiety of an out-of-touch friend. He had introduced Gaet to Noe when she was working here, consoling those who claimed Ritual Suicide and entertaining those who merely came to the Temple to practice their wits.

  “How’s the game?” she asked in the wry way she talked to people who never changed.

  “The girls seem to prefer chess,” he lamented.

  “You’re not losing your ways?”

  “I need new colors, new makeup.”

  Noe took his hand and brought him with them to share cakes — for a moment. They talked of books Oelita had never read, and of Saeb’s astonishing rendition of the Commandment Chant they were to hear tonight.

  It was dizzying for a coastal villager to adjust to an exuberant people who were consciously building a city that they intended to be the dominant intellectual and ruling center of Geta. The loose, almost revealing gown Noe had insisted that Oelita wear was stylish but she had never worn such a thing before in public. She found their religious pragmatism refreshing — but shocking to coastal ears — and it frightened her that she, who had always taken such a delight in shocking people, sounded conservative to herself when her conversation was interlaced with these people’s easygoing disrespect for the temples they were totally committed to uphold.

  Oelita was curious to visit the meat market. No such place existed in Sorrow. There the only meat was given away at the Temple when it was freshly available, or one waited to be invited to a funeral. Here it was sold by the temples at atrocious prices. Noe bought a small jar containing two pickled baby tongues. For a moment, remembering her own twins, Oelita hated Noe with a violent passion. Then she calmed herself. She had long ago learned that the way to tackle such widespread customs was to accept them utterly until she knew the very source of the thought patterns that created the custom. Only then did she have a chance of exorcising it.

  God’s Will. That’s what they would say. In the end she would have to destroy their God. He was at the root of all this evil. They thought: I am not killing and eating these children; God is eating them and I am merely the arms and mouth He lacks. She shuddered.

  Oelita asked to see the back room where the meat was prepared. She spoke to the butchers gently, never showing her mind, searching theirs. They were jovial about their task as they prepared the carcass of a “machine,” the name the Kaiel seemed to have given the genetic monster-women who bore the babies for the creches.

  “Ye covet a block o’ that thigh? Cost ye an arm and a leg, it will.” He laughed.

  “Was she very old?”

  “This un, ye’ll have’t’ boil. She mebe 30-40 chile down the road.”

  These Kaiel machines matured sexually when a normal child was just learning to walk and hosted their first embryo immediately. Their second batch was always twins, and their third, when they were fully grown, triplets. Once they were as old as a normal woman would be at the first flowering weight of full breasts, the machines were worn out and ready for butchering. They were sterile, and reproduced by cloning.

  Oelita left hurriedly and returned to the Temple where Noe was now engaged in a game of batra with an old gentleman, testing the quickness of her sight. The machines mainly supplied the creches but Noe, Oelita thought, would be the kind of woman who would use a surrogate mother to carry her own children. She’d have a batch of maybe six and keep the finest of the lot for herself after careful tests had sent the remaining five to a temple abattoir. How was it possible to reach a woman like that?

  When Oelita expressed some curiosity about the “machine” wombs, Noe took her out for more exploration. This wife of her lovers was inexhaustible. She walked Oelita halfway across the city to a small sacristy hidden behind iron gates. A friend of Gaet finally agreed to take them underground.

  Pillowed and pampered, the sacred object looked like another superstition to Oelita. Its frame was crusted and bent. Had a colony of sea creatures been building their apartment around some piece of flotsam that had later been fished from the waves, then crushed, and burned?

  “Another sacred rock,” she said, a touch of irony in her voice.

  “You’ve heard of the Arant heresy?” asked Noe.

  “Not the Arant side of the story.”

  “They claimed we were created by machines.”

  “As logical an origin as falling out of a star.”

  “This is such a machine. It’s old, old. It is a non-biological womb.”

  Oelita only smiled.

  Noe did not seem offended. She was well aware that the object was not impressive. “Who knows what it was once like? It was recovered many generations later from a building burned and razed during the Judgment. Joesai wanted you to see it. He thinks your education is lacking.”

  “Joesai is a superstitious man.”

  “He accepts the word of many great priests. You’ve heard of Zenei?”

  “No.”

  “Zenei deduced the function of this machine from its remnants, no easy task. The carbon-based components have all been burned away.”

  “Fortunately for Zenei.” Oelita was not hiding her skepticism.

  “We learned how to duplicate the function of this machine.”

  “No you didn’t. Your machine is no more than a genetically modified woman.”

  “The end result is the same,” replied Noe stiffly.

  “Then you follow the Arant? You don’t believe in the God of the Sky?”

  The needling was successful. “The Arant were wrong!” Noe blazed. “They denied Original Conception. Even with such a machine, conception is necessary. We know God exists because this machine was part of Him.”

  “Is She dead and Her parts scattered — a Finger here, a Womb there?” Oelita asked wryly.

  Noe sighed. Was there no quick way to deal with ignorance?

  They returned to the central hustle of Kaiel-hontokae, their conversation reduced to talk of men and sex. As the red twilight faded, dim alcohol torches were lit and Noe and friends decided it was time to wander toward the Chanting. They led Oelita past stalls where anything might be had. There were artists who showed their work and willingly carved into your flesh the design of your choice. A cabinet worker planed and polished while selling, potter joked with rugmaker, and og’Sieth waited to make you ornament or instrument out of metal. Oelita broke away to watch a craftsman building electron jars by ghoulish yellow electric light. Noe and her laughing male friend had to pull her away.

  They arrived at the amphitheater before the Chanting began and seated themselves beneath the stars on benches carved from bedrock. The crowd joked. Men flirted with women they had never met before, and women teased men. Children were hushed. Newcomers arrived to display their finery.

  “Look. See where Saeb enters! He’s here tonight!” Saeb doffed his helmet and smiled for those who had noticed him.

  A party entered from below, taking honored seats. Instruments piped a welcome. “Aesoe’s group,” whispered Noe, pointing him out to Oelita. “Your patron. You could have no stronger ally! I have been commanded to introduce you to him tonight.”

  Oelita craned her neck. He did not seem imposing
at this distance. “Who are those women he is with?”

  “Which ones?”

  “They wear veils.”

  “Those are only his Liethe whores. One of them has her teeth into our Hoemei.”

  The music began like a faint whistling storm, building on piping reed instruments. The crowd hushed. Slowly eight male and eight female Kaiel, carrying torches and humming as does the wind blowing over the plains, ascended from two narrow underground tunnels. The procession moved by step and pause, step and pause. They were dressed only in cape and headplumes but the body designs that crawled in the flickering fire fully clothed them. All threw their torches simultaneously into the central pit, causing an explosion of igniting flames. As if by signal, eighty children flowed onto the stage, their bodies covered to hide their undecorated nakedness. Each wore a mask-piece which contained resonant chambers and flaring beaks to distort and amplify the voice.

  Inexorably the Commandment Chant began its recitation of the laws of genetics — but in an astonishingly different form than anything Oelita had ever heard in theater. Throats swooped and boomed and danced in alien harmony, sometimes to soft effect, sometimes building on a rising timbre that shook the amphitheater with inhuman tone.

  “What in the Sky?” asked Oelita so dumbfounded she willingly exposed her ignorance.

  “Saeb has put God’s Voice into the children.”

  “But how does he do that!”

  “Don’t ask about it! Just listen!”

  The celebrating went on all through the brief night. Noe moved her party to a temple that was nothing compared to the Temple of Human Destiny and only a third as large as the Stgal Temple at Sorrow. But it was intimate and quiet in its glory. Noe told Oelita that this was where Aesoe had commanded them to meet him.

  He was already there. He waved his people away to allow Oelita access to his table and immediately set her up for a game of chess. Being senior to her he took God’s side, white, and opened with a classic Farmer to Child’s four. He smiled and waited. She moved. He followed her move instantly.