“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Then what is it?” He reached out and took my hand, and sat looking at it against the aged skin of his own hand. “How long have you been a bland?” he asked, looking up into my face.
“Nine months, sir.”
“Are you used to it?”
It was the most astonishing question he could have asked me. Coming at me like that, it woke a wave of confusion inside me. I had thought I was quite reconciled to my state—happy, even. But when he asked me, my body answered for me, and tears started to my eyes. “No, sir,” I said.
He sat there looking at me as if his heart were hurting. He reached up to wipe a tear from my cheek with his thumb. “Poor child,” he said softly. “I wish there were something I could do for you.”
I fought to get control of myself again. My supervisors at Brice’s would have scolded me for being so blandlike as to break down in tears in front of my guardian. I pressed my mouth together and took his jacket to the closet. He undressed silently and put on his robe, then turned to his bed. I finished putting away his clothes, then stood there, still not knowing if he would want me sexually, but sensing that if it came at all, it would come now. He looked at me from his bed, hesitated, then said, “That’s all, Tedla. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. Once I was on the other side of the graydoor I leaned against it, weak with relief and gratitude. He didn’t want me that way. It wasn’t going to be part of my duties.
I think that was the moment I started falling in love with him.
***
I soon began to stake out my territory among the other blands. There were jobs and areas of the house where I, as the squire’s Personal, was unquestionably in charge, subject only to Pelch—the bedroom, the dining rooms, the serving pantries. I soon began to rearrange things the way I wanted them. Britz was quite willing to accommodate me, but some of the other blands were very set in their ways, and resisted any change to their routine. I learned to wheedle them, and joke, and reason, and if all else failed I went to Pelch. Pelch usually received my suggestions with an ill-humored scowl and a lecture about how I ought to know my place. Then, if I was right, I usually got my way.
Pelch and I ought to have been allies. We shared a lot of things—intelligence, high standards, and a desire to make our guardian happy. My arrival had even eased Pelch’s life by taking a large burden off its mind. Once it figured out that I knew what I was doing, the old bland pretty much left me to manage the squire’s comfort and turned its attention to other aspects of running the house. But even though we reached a guarded truce, Pelch’s jealousy constantly got in the way of our really liking one another.
Here on Capella Two I’ve learned that all human societies contain competing camps. In other cultures, the lines of division usually fall along gender or kinship or rank. Among us blands, the divisions were all by age. Britz and I, the youngsters, were much more energetic and flexible and curious than the older blands. We were constantly getting warnings about our boldness and impertinence. I attributed it all to neuter timidity till one day Mimbo, a wizened old bland in the kitchen, rolled up its sleeve and showed me the scars on its arm—hard, ropy skin, dead and white. “You know what that is?” it said. “That’s where a supervisor held my arm in a pot of hot oil because he thought I was being sassy. When I was your age, they could do that to blands, and nobody cared.”
It shocked me into silence. Pelch, who was nearby, said to me, “You’ve got Squire Tellegen to thank that people can’t do that to you. He was the one who got them to pass laws against abuse of blands. You’d have no legal protection today if it wasn’t for him.”
It was the first inkling I’d had that there were laws protecting me. Up to then, I had assumed that nothing held humans back but their natural goodness.
The blands seldom liked to talk about the old days, but now and then they would get started among themselves, and Britz and I would listen, frozen to our seats in horror. I learned that there had once been a sport called skeering, where humans set a bad neuter loose in the woods and hunted it down with throwing-knives. The climax was always the butchering, which was done not by the humans but by blands they’d brought along, to teach them a lesson. No bland was allowed to come back from a skeering until its hands were soaked in blood.
After hearing this, I understood their caution better, but I still couldn’t help being irritated by it. After all, things like that didn’t happen any more. They didn’t need to live their lives slinking around in fear.
By Brice’s standards, none of the blands at Menoken Lodge worked very hard. The older ones had learned to draw out their duties to take up the maximum amount of time. But Britz and I were often able to finish our jobs early and have some freedom. No one cared what we did then, as long as we stayed away from the humans. We explored all the bland-runs in the house, and risked life and limb scrambling on the cliffs outside. But our favorite thing was to go to the barns, where they kept the machinery and horses for working the ranch.
Squire Tellegen was only symbolically in charge of the ranch—there were three other humans who supervised the ranch blands. The ranchers rarely ate with the squire or mixed with his guests, not being the same rank of human. And we household blands almost never mixed with the ranch blands. They had a roundroom in one of the outbuildings, but most of their time was spent on the range, tending the herds. They seemed like strange, weathered, laconic creatures to Britz and me. I’m sure we seemed quite pampered and soft to them. We often wheedled the stable hands to let us pet and feed the horses, and we naively envied their jobs.
I found that my own job called for some ingenuity at manipulating humans. As soon as I completed my inventory of the squire’s closet, I brought the dire situation there to his attention.
“You need new clothes,” I said to him.
He dismissed the suggestion with a wave of the hand. “No, I don’t. I’ve got too many as it is.”
“They’re all worn and stained and ten years old,” I said. “I don’t know how I’m going to keep you dressed the way you ought to be.”
“Learn to reject vanity,” he said philosophically.
Since he was in a good mood, I said, “It’s not vanity. It’s decency.”
“Give it up, Tedla,” he said. “I am not asking the order to spend any money on clothes for me; they have too many other demands to satisfy. Use your ingenuity. I’m sure you have some.”
I thought it over, and decided he’d given me permission to solve the problem. The next time Elector Hornaday came to visit—as she did almost weekly—I maneuvered to catch her alone in the hall before dinner. I couldn’t initiate a conversation, but I gave her a significant look which prompted her to say kindly, “How are things going, Tedla?”
“He needs new clothes,” I blurted out. “And he won’t ask you.”
“Really?” she said, a little skeptical. “I’m surprised Pelch hasn’t been nagging my ear off.”
“Pelch is busy supervising blands,” I said.
“Well, make a list of what he needs. Be specific. Put down colors and sizes. Can you do that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. I hesitated, and she looked at me curiously. “Please don’t tell him,” I said.
She smiled. “All right. It’ll be our secret.”
The next time she came, I slipped her the list, and she winked at me conspiratorially. Within a week, a huge shipment of boxes arrived with most of what I had asked for. Pelch was puzzled by the delivery, and asked me what I knew about it. I played dumb, but reported that Elector Hornaday had been criticizing his clothes at dinner. Pelch shrugged at the unaccountable acts of humans, and said, “Well, take it all up to his closet.”
“Can I get rid of some of the tattered old things he’s wearing?” I asked.
“Yes, of course,” Pelch said. “You ought to keep an eye on his clothes. He never knows when he needs new ones.”
“Yes, Pelch,” I said obediently.
The squire never even noticed.
Or perhaps he did, and just kept it to himself. He watched my gradual settling-in with a great deal more interest than I had expected from a guardian. My disdain for blandlike sloppiness seemed to give him a sort of tolerant amusement. “You are a philosophical curiosity, Tedla,” he said to me one day. I hadn’t the faintest notion what he meant, and looked at him askance. He said, “Fifty years ago, a bland like you could not have existed. It gives me pleasure to think I have helped create a world in which you could come to be.”
It was a little disconcerting to be treated as an individual again. He watched my moods and sometimes even asked what I was thinking, as if blands thought. It threw me off my balance.
I watched him, too, of course. Much of what I saw concerned me. To me, Menoken Lodge was a glorious haven. To him, it was a prison. He was being eaten away inside by a parasite of loneliness.
He spent a great portion of his day reading, thinking, and writing. When he came up for grooming and dressing, he was sometimes preoccupied and pensive, scarcely noticing my presence; at other times, he would talk to me about something he was thinking—learned subjects far over my head, to which I could only respond with an occasional polite “Yes, sir,” or “I see.” I could tell he was pining for human companionship. There came days on end when there would be no visitors, and he grew restless and bored. When someone would finally show up for dinner, he would be vivacious and lively for an evening; when they left, he would subside into an irritated melancholy.
I asked him once why he didn’t go visit the convergence—he seemed to long for it so. He said, “I have chosen seclusion. I need to be away from the distractions of urban life and social prominence. I’ve done all that; now is my time for quiet.”
And yet, he fretted. He had a coterie of core admirers who came over and over, and whom I got to know well. At least three of them were ardently in love with him. He knew it, too—he would lead them on with warmth and charm all evening, and then just as some real intimacy seemed imminent, he would withdraw, and retreat to his lonely room. It drove them to distraction, but they always came back. I think he needed them. He needed to feel admired and loved; he drew sustenance from it. But always he had to be their impossible dream—floating just beyond their reach, remote and unattainable.
They often begged him to come back to Tapis, and end his exile. He needed to hear that, too. In fact, when they hadn’t said it recently, he would angle for it, leading the conversation in such a way that they would have to say it again. Then he would smile and decline graciously, saying he needed the peace to work on his book.
One night after he had entertained a group of visiting younger scholars from Paltrow Convergence who had come to meet the great man, he sat on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands, lost in dejection. I stood by waiting for him to undress, but he seemed unaware of my presence. “I have become so irrelevant,” he said, ostensibly to me, but really to himself. “Everything has moved on without me. It doesn’t matter that I exist any more.”
His words struck fear into me. It was still a month before his justification was due, but they were the words of a man who has no intention of living for another year. I saw the precarious security I had attained evaporating under my feet. I sat down beside him on the bed, feeling hollow inside. He looked up, as if startled to find me there.
“It matters to me that you exist,” I said.
It was a terribly presumptuous thing to say. But he did not get angry. Instead, he looked at me with a kindness that made me ache inside. “The loyalty of a bland is a terrible test of our humanity,” he said softly.
The next month, shortly before justification, he decided to go out and oversee the roundup and branding of the new calves. He called me into the library and said, “Tedla, do you know how to ride?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“Well then, I’m going to ask Jimmicky to give you some lessons. I will need you with me to help around camp.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
I was terribly excited at the prospect of learning to ride a horse and camp out. Even Pelch had to smile at my eagerness. Pelch had been out to the roundup many times.
“You don’t mind my going, do you, Pelch?” I asked.
“No,” it said. “I’m too old for it. He is, too, only he won’t admit it. I’m going to give you a medicine kit for when he finds out. He’ll be pretty crabby on the second day.”
I got reams of other advice from Pelch—how to set up the tent, prepare his bed, handle his washing and grooming. I wouldn’t have to cook, for which I was grateful, but I would be in charge of the squire’s coffee, tea, and liquor. I knew how trusted I had become that they let me have the liquor. Usually, it is kept strictly locked away from blands. In fact, it’s a tradition that if any bland can get ahold of alcohol, the whole roundroom is entitled to go on a binge. A roundroom full of drunken neuters is not a sight most humans find amusing.
Jimmicky was one of the stablehands Britz and I had pestered—a soft-spoken bland who knew all the horses as if they were a roundroom, and felt as shy and uncomfortable with other blands as most blands feel with humans. Since we had only three days before leaving, my lessons amounted to no more than how to stay on top and keep the horse from taking advantage of me. Jimmicky itself was coming along to saddle and feed and groom. Mine was to be a good-natured bland-horse (as we call a gelding), prettily striped, yellow and chocolate. When it first came out to meet me, the creature looked enormous—the stirrups were nearly at eye level, and I couldn’t imagine how I was going to get up. When the animal nuzzled me with its nose, smelling my pockets for treats, it nearly knocked me over. In monosyllables, Jimmicky taught me how to greet my horse. Our horses are very intelligent; there are sounds that are like a language to them. Skilled riders don’t even need reins—they just guide their horses with whistles and clicks.
We set out very early in the morning, when the grass was still dewy, so that we left a broad trampled track behind us, a dark swathe in the silver. The squire rode ahead on his tall red mare, and Jimmicky and I rode behind, our horses loaded down with equipment. The animals all seemed frisky and excited to be getting out, and it was hard not to catch the feeling. The sky was a pale blue with high, windblown clouds. Our path lay westward through low, rolling hills sprinkled with a dusting of flowers. The wind was at our backs.
When we paused at midmorning to rest, the sun was beating down, and the scent of hot sage was all around us. Stretching my legs as the squire drank his coffee, I found a patch of prairie flowers, where hundreds of tiny white butterflies were feeding. When I walked through, they all rose around me like an upside-down snowfall, and I was bathed in white wings. I laughed, imagining how they must tickle the flowers.
When I returned to the camp, I found that Squire Tellegen had been watching me. His smile was shadowed by a look of loss. “If only that joy of first discovery were still in me,” he said when I sat down beside him. “You are so much more alive than I, just from having lived less. It’s as if my substance has become stretched, thinned out with each passing year, leaving no room for wonder.”
When we resumed our travel, he called me up to ride beside him. He had become bored with solitude, and wanted to talk. “Tell me what you see,” he said. “I want to see this land through your eyes.”
At first I was reluctant. He was such a deep thinker, I knew that bland-talk wouldn’t hold his interest. I couldn’t begin to speak with all the allusions and nuances of his learned friends.
When he figured out what I was thinking, he laughed. “Believe me, Tedla, I get very bored with learned discourse. It becomes predictable after a while, moving by its own tenets and forms. It will be refreshing to hear something simple.”
“Blands are simple all right,” I said.
“I meant uncomplicated,” he said, looking at me closely. “But perhaps I misspoke. I don’t think you’re uncomplicated, Tedla. In fact, you are more of a mystery to me th
an most humans.”
He had made me feel self-conscious, so I tried to distract him by doing as he had asked, and turning his attention to the landscape.
Looking out from the hayloft at Menoken Lodge, I had thought the prairie was a bleak land, unvarying, without landmark or interest. Now that I was out in it, I saw I had been wrong. The grass was all shifting currents of color. In most places it was a bleached, grayish green—but then the wind would come along and press it into silver. There were streaks of umber and pale yellow flowing around the hills, and deep green in the hollows.
“All the colors have meanings,” Tellegen said to me when I had pointed it out. “A true plainsman knows what they all signify, and can read the landscape. He can know what lies underneath the ground the way a cook knows whether the dish is done from the color of the surface. To him, the vegetation reveals water, and type of soil, and even buried things abandoned by the ancients thousands of years ago.”
“Can you see those things?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “The only landscape I can read below the surface is the terrain of words.”
From far away, the hills all looked lush and velvety, and I imagined lying down on them, cushioned on a luxurious carpet of grass. But whenever we came up to them, they were covered with the same sharp, dry grass as grew everywhere else, and the ground was infested with tiny cactus and sand burrs. There was something frustrating about it: We kept riding toward soft hills in the distance, but up close our daily journey was nothing but prickles.
Tellegen laughed when he heard this. “Are you suggesting it’s a metaphor for life, Tedla?” he asked.
“I don’t even know what a metaphor is,” I said, though in fact I did.
“Well, think about this, then: You can lie down on manmade grass. We’ve bred it and changed it so it makes our lives soft and pleasant for us, but the price is, it needs us to survive. Tame grass would die out here. You can tell this grass is natural because it’s unyielding. All life is the same way. Even people.”
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