Courtship Rite

by Donald Kingsbury

  “You know me,” said Kathein.

  “You’re positive?” asked Gaet. “You’ve been with Aesoe a long time.”

  Kathein dropped her eyes and Oelita took her hand and confronted Gaet for the both of them. “What do you want to know about us? Just ask.”

  “Let me go over some history first. We’ve had a Five that works well. I didn’t really understand it when I started it. A family was a misty dream, something to do as I climbed the ladder of Kaiel tradition. I was told that the bonds of a family created abilities that no single man could aspire to by himself, and I wanted to do everything — and be everything — and so a family was just a natural extension of myself.”

  “Do you think of your family as beginning the day you met Noe?” asked Kathein.

  “The day I met Noe was a disaster. Whatever happened began the day I met Joesai.”

  Joesai was a studious child, intolerant of the flaws in both his peers and masters. He was larger than his peers and used his extra strength to bully. Whoever crossed him ran the risk of dying at the next Trial. Joesai never exacted revenge through an intermediary but if the offender could stay out of Joesai’s way for at least a week, the slight was forgotten. He had no friends. He was a thief but no master ever caught him.

  He knew his father was Tae ran-Kaiel, the Prime Predictor, and that gave him an arrogant hope that he might survive the creche. But he didn’t know who his mother was and that made him unsure of his worth.

  He pestered his genetics teacher for his record. Then he learned why no one had told him about his mother. They thought he wouldn’t understand. It was puzzling. His mother was both a woman and a man and two people and the same person.

  Tae ran-Kaiel had authorized an experiment in an attempt to create a predictor as powerful as himself. He had bred himself with one of the early successful predictors, a Gaieri ma-Kaiel, whose sperm had been frozen in liquid nitrogen yet never used because he was a known carrier of multiple lethal recessives.

  In a technique developed by Tae’s own study group, hundreds of 23-chromosome sets from Gaieri sperm cells were infused into chromosomeless ova and triggered to yield a cell of 23 chromosomes in the dyad form — each with two chromatids and one joining centromere, similar to the stable secondary oocytes carried by women prior to ovulation. Tae’s group developed a process by which the final meiosis was inhibited, the centromeres broken and a fully homozygous 46-chromosome cell formed that when transferred to the womb of a machine mother began to grow into an embryo.

  Four million homozygous female individuals — sub-clones — can be formed from one heterozygous male. One hundred eighty pregnancies were started. One hundred fifty-three of these aborted before coming to term because of doubled y-chromosomes and doubled lethal recessives. Twenty-one of the surviving twenty-seven babies were judged to be substandard and were used for medical experimentation, teaching purposes, or sold to the abattoir.

  The best specimen of the final six, Joesai’s mother, was artificially matured, butchered, and her ovaries used for further experimentation. She became, in this indirect fashion, the genetic mother of nine of Tae’s children. At the time Joesai read the records, four of that batch were still alive: Sanan, Gaet, Hoemei, and Joesai. Unilaterally, he began to protect his Gaieri-derived brothers for no more reason than that he felt their kalothi was somehow tied to his own.

  “We didn’t even like him,” mused Gaet to Kathein and Oelita there on the beach. “We made fun of him. We taunted him.”

  “You made fun of him? And he was helping you!” said a saddened Oelita.

  “Poor little boy,” said Kathein.

  Gaet grinned.

  At their first Trial of Strength Joesai bullied Hoemei through his failures, saving his life and teaching him the value of an alliance, but Hoemei, instead of joining forces with Joesai, made a blood oath with Gaet and Sanan. Joesai remained on the periphery of the alliance, bullying them, goading them, tormenting them — and protecting them. They reacted with scorn.

  It was only later, after the death of Sanan when he saw Joesai crying, that Gaet understood the folly of their petty bickering and made the conscious decision to forge a team from the three of them. He began to mediate the disputes between his brothers. When Hoemei was trapped, he actively sought Joesai’s help and when Joesai was up for soup stock he worked out an aid program with Hoemei. It wasn’t long before they were impressed by their alliance. Gaet negotiated them out of trouble, Hoemei anticipated trouble, and Joesai fought them clear.

  “What I’m trying to say,” said Gaet, “is that the ugly fight you’ve witnessed is nothing new. I know how it is going to turn out and so do my brothers. Noe and Teenae are a little frightened because the worst of our brotherly conflicts were over before women came into our lives and so our wives still don’t understand the roots of our fights. You two aren’t used to them at all. My brothers take a fight as far as it will go, and then they turn around and compromise. Probably, I don’t even need to be there anymore. I’m more worried about you two charmers.”

  Kathein was watching sand slip through her fingers. “Don’t be. I’m used to heartaches.”

  “Don’t say that!” said Oelita, all empathy with Kathein. She was afraid of heartache herself. “We’re in this together!”

  “Yes,” said Kathein wisely, “but can we stand it?”

  Gaet put on his smoothest manners. “Is it such a tragedy that life doesn’t fit the pictures we have of what life should be? That’s what makes physics exciting — when the reality-trials don’t fit the theory.”

  “I’m a romantic,” replied Kathein. “I worship Stgi and Toe. Love is not like physics.”

  “Did I ever tell you how we came to marry a madwoman like Noe?” Gaet laughed. “What is the Kaiel picture of a courtship? Doesn’t a single man seek a woman? Doesn’t a woman keep her eye out for that special man? The man and woman love and marry. Then don’t they look around for another man or woman or couple that they can love and, finding such, court them and marry again to increase their kalothi? So it goes.

  “But we were three men. There weren’t any women we met who knew what to do with that. Noe married us for all the wrong reasons. She hated responsibility. She started something new every week and finished nothing. Her temple work gave her contact with men without any long-term responsibilities.

  “I met her the night she first noticed that she was unhappy. She thought with the three of us she’d have all the advantages of marriage and none of the disadvantages.” Gaet’s amusement warmed his voice. “It was a disaster. She was a spoiled brat. She knew everything about holding a man for the first week and nothing beyond that. She was the terror of her family; very sober people. And we knew nothing about women beyond the basics of getting our wicks dipped.

  “She was so impossible that Joesai beat her from time to time and Hoemei and I would sit around in the next room listening to the screams, biting our nails and saying Thank God someone was doing something about her. Then when it was over, we would ostracize Joesai and comfort and cuddle her.

  “Money was never a problem. We were very successful with the coins — we had our mansion already — but our Four got worse and worse. And worse. Finally she left us.”

  “She never told me that!” said Kathein.

  “Of course not.”

  “Did you miss her?” Oelita asked with sentimental curiosity.

  “Miss her! I was never so happy in my life that she was gone. Hoemei was wiped out. It was sexual withdrawal. He moped around not saying anything. Joesai was our moralist. He always has been. He didn’t even like her but he hunted her down and brought her home against her will. I’ve never found out what happened then. I couldn’t get rid of her afterwards. I was pissing from my nose, I was so mad at Joesai for bringing her home. He remembers being very firm and gentle. But she acted like she thought he was going to kill her if she didn’t behave, that there was no escape from him. I don’t think he ever threatened her, but when you are fresh from
the creche you have a certain cavalier attitude toward death that the non-creche never really want to test.”

  “I think I know the man,” said Oelita.

  Kathein was wistful. “I’m sure Noe returned because after she’d been away she knew she couldn’t live without you all. She was probably happy that Joesai came for her.”

  “That’s when I found Teenae. I was up in the mountains and happened to pass through one of the o’Tghalie estates when they had a child auction. My maran prescience, which we all have from Tae, could see the woman she was to become and I was smitten even though she had shaved her head to make herself ugly so that no one would want to buy her.

  “Mostly, though, I was thinking how nice it would be to have a child bride around who could be trained properly in the ways of serving a man and wouldn’t be spoiled like Noe. It never struck me that the reason the o’Tghalie were selling her was that she was unmanageable. So I finished my trip in the mountains with this girl-child terror who would follow me because I owned her, but who wouldn’t do the tiniest thing I asked.”

  “She loves you now,” said Oelita.

  “Of course.” He smiled. “I’m telling you these stories because marriage isn’t an easy thing, and when we look back we never see the thing we saw then. Some marriages that look perfect, don’t work. And some marriages that are the despair of all rational people somehow have the basics that make them work.”

  “How did you win her?” asked Kathein.

  “I was trying to resell her for half-price to an og’Sieth steel-smith who was interested in her because of the reputation of the o’Tghalie women as superior servants for their men. He asked her about her ambitions and she jinxed the sale by telling him she wanted to be a mathematician. Back on the trail I muttered and told her I’d teach her some mathematics if she’d fix the food. She looked at me skeptically and told me that if I taught her the mathematics first then she would fix our food. So I taught her some algebra that I’d learned painfully and that she learned as fast as I could remember what I knew. She smiled for the first time.”

  “Did she fix your meal?”

  “The best road meal I ever had! Joesai was the one who really got to her, though. He had her number from the start. He came on with total assurance and would teach her some manipulation that was always flawed. She’d catch him and then he’d grab anyone who’d listen and tell them in amazement how smart she was. When he didn’t know what she wanted to know, he’d hire an o’Tghalie male to teach him and then smuggle what he’d learned home to her. She became our slave. We could get her to do anything provided we were consistent. If we weren’t logical, then she’d fight us tooth and dagger. It would have been a good life, but Noe took pity on her and taught her some of the fine points about bamboozling men.”

  “When I met your Five you were very happy,” said Kathein. “I loved your happiness.”

  “A baby learns to walk. Every other step was a disaster no matter how hard we concentrated — and then suddenly we were running and we were such a good team that our services came to be in high demand.”

  “I thought you were the smoothest people I knew,” Kathein said, laughing.

  “So did we. That’s the danger signal. As soon as you learn to walk so well that you can run over rough ground, then you want to fly and you break your bones in your first sailplane crash. We hadn’t counted on Aesoe.”

  Oelita broke her silence. “Joesai told me that one day Aesoe just ordered you to marry me.”

  “That’s the way it was. We were outraged.”

  “He wanted me,” said Kathein contritely.

  Gaet grinned. “He gave us a fair trade. Aesoe had excellent taste in women!”

  The women stared at Gaet and he knew the question that each was asking him with her eyes but was unwilling to speak. Which of us do you prefer?

  Gaet paused solemnly. “We have arrived at a conflict of futures. The five of us learned to love you, Kathein, and I think it was mutual — and then you left us and we still loved you but we began to look at alternatives. The five of us didn’t want you, Oelita, not because we didn’t love you when we met you, but because you had been imposed on us against our will.”

  “And against mine,” she added.

  “But wasn’t Aesoe right? You could have become part of a functional Six. Still, Aesoe’s vision went awry and so we have this situation in which two futures try to occupy the same present The five of us cannot resolve this conflict. It is up to you two.”

  “We’re back where we started,” said Kathein, almost angrily.

  “You cannot ask that of us,” said Oelita.

  “We could flip a coin,” said Kathein bitterly.

  Gaet was smiling. “Do you like each other?”

  “Of course we like each other!” flared Kathein.

  Tears were running down the ridges of Oelita’s facial cicatrice.

  “Could you live with each other?”

  A look of astonishment crossed Kathein’s face. She turned to Oelita. “Do you know what this man is proposing?”

  “No.”

  Kathein was on her feet. She was dressing. “Poor Hoemei and Joesai are back at the mansion feeling miserable, and this lecher here has the audacity to think he can have both of us. I know this man very well. I know what he is thinking.”

  “I don’t believe it!” said Oelita, staring at Gaet’s face. She saw it was true and rose with Kathein to dress, too.

  “It’s one solution,” said Gaet, admiring two women he loved.

  “But a Seven is illegal!” exclaimed a shocked Oelita.

  “By custom, not by law. With Hoemei as the Prime Predictor it would hardly be a problem.”

  “Where were you planning to take us? I know you! There must be pillows around here somewhere.” Kathein was sarcastic.

  “The Temple of the Gray Rocks. It’s small, but it has a charming game room. What better place to spend the night?”

  “See!” said Kathein indignantly. “See how easily he betrays his brothers!”

  Oelita was still staring at Gaet, remembering all the lonely nights, the suffering, the string of lovers who had been her fate because of her vow never to marry, the fear she carried with her which even the peace of the desert had never mollified. She began to speak firmly. “Joesai and Hoemei have fought. Let them suffer. At the creches they would have a name for it: the Trial of Stupidity. Kathein and I have not been fighting. We’ve only committed ourselves to loving, and challenged our fear to find that. We deserve our pleasures. Gaet, I’ll go with you.” She turned her eyes to Kathein defiantly. “I love this man. And I can live with you — because I love you.”

  64

  Until her hair has gone to gray

  A woman will not know to say

  That all of loving’s painful play

  Was worth the joy of every lay.

  From a Liethe drinking song

  A FEW WINDOW-FRAMED globes added their green glow to the night sky. Then, like a black cloud across the stars, a shadow passed into the yard, examining the stairways and balconies and the footholds in the face of the wall. The Queen of Life-before-Death clutched the black shawl that made her invisible by night, waiting for the globes to be shrouded. Gaet had left her with women and she was resentful. She wanted to be with Hoemei. It was her duty to be with men. Her knees were like jelly knowing this was the most important night of her whole life. Someone inside the mansion covered the globes.

  She heard sea noises. She was a wave rising as it ran toward shore at the very heartbeat before it crested, foaming, roaring, to lay itself on the beach.

  As silently as God flowing across His Sky she moved up the stairs. With an assassin’s stealth she stole through the window-door open to the night breeze. She knelt beside the figure on the pillows, colored by the pale reflection of a waxing Scowlmoon across the sea. She longed to touch him but pulled her fingers back. Hoemei. This was the man she was raising to the highest position on Geta.

  His sudden darting
hands reached out to grab her by the arms, paralyzing her.

  “It’s just me,” said her soft Liethe voice.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to dance at your wedding.”

  “You’re early.”

  “No I’m not. I’m your beloved Honey.”

  “You gave me heart failure. I thought you were an assassin for the Expansionists.”

  “They’ve hired me to enchant you and take you away with me to the North Axis where we can go around in circles together for the rest of our lives and not bother anyone.”

  He dismissed the notion. “Gaet must have sent you,” he sighed.

  “I have a present for you.” She brought out a tiny strip of dried and salted Aesoe. “Eat it. It will make you strong. I have a gut feeling that you’re going to need all your strength.”

  He looked at her, wondering at the symbolism and the smug smile on her starlit face. “Are you thinking that they’ll make me Prime Predictor? Have you been listening to gossip at the Archives?”

  She stuffed the fragment of Aesoe into his mouth. “That’s not the kind of strength I mean. Silly. You’re going to need all your strength to make love to me — now.”

  He munched and laughed. “Be a good woman and tell me what Gaet is cooking. I have a shortage of spies.”

  “Ask Joesai.”

  “I’m not speaking to him.”

  “Gaet ran away with Kathein and Oelita. He was looking very hard-crotched. I think they are off to the South Axis for a cozy ice cave to be away from us mortals. I couldn’t bear the idea of you being left alone — so I came to console you.”

  “Hmmm. Do you still have your job at the Palace?”

  “No, silly. Not unless you hire me after your triumphant return to Kaiel-hontokae. If you love me, you’ll hire me. Do you love me?”

  “Only a besotted fool loves a Liethe.” He was undoing her black robe.

  He wasn’t shy anymore. He had changed. She liked his hands. “Are you a besotted fool?”