Val let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “I guess they didn’t want to wait for you to decide,” she said.
“They didn’t want to acknowledge I had a right to decide,” Tedla said. “Bad precedent.”
Its face had the firm look she had seen before, briefly, at WAC. She asked, “Are you going to fight them?”
Tedla paused a long time. “Yes,” it said at last. “I thought I wanted to go back. But I’m remembering a lot of things now.” It looked to Val. “You don’t know how I came to leave my planet. Even if you’ve read the official version, you still don’t know.”
“There isn’t an official version,” Val said. “The whole story’s been suppressed.”
“Then I need to tell you,” Tedla said.
“Good. I’d like that.”
“Can we go in the studium?”
Val hesitated. “As long as we don’t turn on the terminal. It’s not secure.”
“You don’t understand. I want you to turn on the terminal. I want whoever is listening to hear this part.”
“Can I sit in?” Max asked.
“Yes,” Tedla said. It looked at Deedee, who seemed far from any sleep. “You all can. I’m tired of this concealment. I want you to know the truth.”
Chapter Nine
A great many lies have been spoken about Magister Galele. It is time I told the truth.
The months following Squire Tellegen’s death were very hard for me. Each morning I would wake up alone, and all the weight of my life would press me back. I had no interest in my duties any more, and had to drag myself through the day as if time had grown thick and slow, resisting my passage. Through all of this Magister Galele was there, feeding me pills and coffee, talking to distract me, giving me jobs to occupy my mind. But the most powerful tonic he gave me was affection. He was patient when I would stop responding to him, and held me in his arms when nothing else would cheer me. Say what you will about him, to me he was the kindest-hearted man alive, and I grew to love him dearly.
It was a very different feeling than the one I had had for Squire Tellegen, so different I didn’t recognize it at first. I wasn’t blind to Magister Galele’s faults. He didn’t inspire awe and admiration. In fact, I loved him because he needed me as badly as I needed him. We were both muddled and groping in a world of people who seemed to know exactly what they were doing.
He was his own worst enemy. Time and again I watched him sabotage himself. He was always ready to jump up and race off to do something without thinking it through. He was easily distracted, always sidelined by a good conversation or a novel experience. He could head off in sixteen different directions in a single hour. I had been trained to be systematic and methodical, and he nearly drove me to distraction at times. But I must say, he never bored me.
Even then, in those early months, I wondered whether his constant activity was a race to escape his own thoughts. I had many thoughts of my own to avoid, and I saw his perpetual motion through the lens of my mood.
“What a rich feast your planet is!” he would exclaim to me after relating some discovery he’d made. “You have such a thick, chunky gumbo of a culture. My own culture has become a watery bouillon, a mere broth of what it once was. But Gammadis—you never know what you’ll find yourself chewing on.”
And yet every now and then I would catch him brooding, as if thinking of his home, left so far behind him. My own homesickness ached like an ulcer, and I imagined his must be worse—fifty-one light-years worse. But if he thought I had noticed him, he would leap up, all good humor again.
There were odd lapses in his knowledge of our world. He had made great strides with the language since I first saw him, but was strangely ignorant of manners, style, and taste. Perhaps he was just naturally impatient with such matters. But I had been drilled in them, and so I drilled him. He called me his Master of Protocol. I wouldn’t let him out in public until I’d checked that his shoes matched and his mustache was free of food.
“You act like my mother,” he said once.
“I just want people to respect you,” I said.
“You’re such a prig, Tedla. If you weren’t fifteen, I’d swear you were fifty.”
“Grump, grump, grump,” I said. I knew exactly what I could get away with. And if I could make him laugh, I could get away with nearly anything.
In the course of cleaning his apartment, I had come up against the irreducible mass of material he had collected, most of it notes and raw data he intended someday to process. I had shoved much of it into the closets, but it was constantly overflowing. One day I asked what he wanted it all for, and he stood staring at a stack of bursting boxes sadly, as if reflecting on his own inadequacy. “I ought to be indexing, translating, and digitizing it. I have to get it all in shape to ship back.”
“You need an assistant,” I said.
Something dawned on him, and he said, “Tedla, do you want to be really helpful to me?”
“I meant a human assistant,” I said. “I’m not smart enough to do this.”
“Oh, it doesn’t take any brains at all,” he said. “It’s the most tedious, mindless work imaginable. It regularly bores humans into a coma.”
I couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking. He said, “Please? I’ll teach you some things so simple a well-behaved ashtray could do them.”
That was how he manipulated me into helping with his work. It wasn’t nearly as simple as he made out. The records were in a jumble of formats and two languages, so he had me start out by scanning all the written matter and putting the recordings through the transcriber. Of course, I then had to correct the transcriptions. We devised a filing system, and that led to an index so he could look things up by date, name, or subject. Soon I was spending hours each day at the terminal in the studium. It cut into my other work, but he kept saying, “This is much more useful to me, really.”
The truth was, I couldn’t have kept busy just managing that one small apartment, and I was glad for the methodical thinking the clerical work took. Even if the world around me was shattering and shimmering with impermanence, I could create a tiny pocket of order in the clutter of Magister Galele’s research.
He was still quite avid to get information about grayspace, and as soon as I felt able to go back among the blands, he began coaching me on what to look for. It was a long list: songs, stories, proverbs, pastimes, crafts, beliefs. Then he had more complex questions: Were there hierarchies among the blands, leaders and subordinates? What did blands think about humans? Did they have a sense of their own history? How did they keep antisocial elements in line? He would never just accept my opinion: Always I had to bring him concrete evidence, and explain what I thought the evidence proved, and why.
I was not even aware how profoundly he was changing the channels of my thought. He was teaching me not just self-awareness but social awareness. No one on my planet distinguishes blands and humans the way he did. To us, the differences are a matter of mental capacity; to him they were sociological. Always before, I had thought of blands as mere parasites on human society, completely dependent, incapable of creative action. Bland thoughts were just childish versions of human thoughts. Magister Galele taught me to see us as a group with our own original customs and modes of thinking. I didn’t know it then, but I could never turn back once I had learned this. To see something you must cease to be it.
I am not sure it was entirely a gift. It is a peculiarly Capellan affliction, this need to articulate and analyze your own behaviors, thoughts, and creations. The more you analyze them, the more alienated from them you get, until you lose all the richness of unconscious act, and your glib articulation becomes the dominant test of who you are. It’s certainly your test of intelligence, and very nearly your test of sanity. I ought to know.
I’m sorry, that was a digression.
An air of passive resentment permeated the grayspace of the East Questishaft. As I got to know the blands better, it seemed that most of their creative tho
ught went into new ways of malingering and avoiding work. It’s not that they were all lazy, though some were. It was a way of resisting and manipulating their supervisors, asserting control.
Their attitude toward humans was hostile enough to shock me. To them, the stereotyped human was a loud-talking bully, always in a hurry, always pushing. The blands had so little contact with humans, and the ones they did see were so dissatisfied with their own low status, that there was seldom any evidence to contradict their notions. After spending a while listening to their complaints and bitterness, I would feel like showering to wash off the bile.
“They ought to be grateful,” I would say to Magister Galele.
“Why?”
“Well, where would they be without humans? It’s the humans who take care of us.”
“Seems to me you’re the ones taking care of them,” Magister Galele said. “Think about it, Tedla: You blands do all the work that’s not purely intellectual.”
“But the humans give us food, and shelter—”
“Who grows the food? Who builds the shelters?”
“But we wouldn’t know how without them!” I protested. “We just follow directions. If you had a thousand thousand blands, they still couldn’t build a convergence. They’d just mill around wondering what they were there for.”
He said, “Tedla, you’re a bigot. Do you know what that is? It’s someone who lumps a group of people together and says they’re all one thing or another.”
I retorted, “I thought that’s what xenologists did.” I was getting very impertinent by this time.
He pretended to be outraged. “Oh, you ingrate! Is this what I get for teaching you irony?” He turned the serious teacher then, and said, “All right. But a xenologist reaches conclusions based on evidence and a chain of reasoning. A bigot’s opinions are based on irrational grounds or no grounds at all. If you want to argue that blands are dumb, you have to bring me evidence. And it has to outweigh the fact that you were smart enough to do it.”
He was like that, a natural-born teacher. He was always challenging me, making me defend myself in words. If he had stopped to think what he was doing, he might have seen the danger in it. But he was enjoying himself too much. Once, after he had explained bell curves to me, and what you couldn’t learn from them, he leaned back and exclaimed, “I’d forgotten how much fun this was.”
“Were you a teacher on your planet?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I loved it.”
“Then why did you stop?”
His face took on an odd, closed expression. He said, “Well, Tedla, life doesn’t always go the way you expect it to.”
He didn’t need to teach me that. I said, “Maybe you can do it again when you go back.”
He gave me an odd look. “What makes you think I’m going back?”
It had never occurred to me that he would be here forever. “What about your home, your friends, your planet?” I said.
“What about them?” There was a trace of bitterness in his voice. “It took fifty-one years to get here. The people I knew on Capella Two are all old now. If I went back, they would be dead. If I cared about going back, I never would have come.”
I tried to imagine leaving my home and all I knew forever. “I couldn’t do it,” I said.
“Oh, you might,” he answered. “It would depend on how desperate you were.”
I wondered what had made him desperate. But his face had such an uncharacteristically grim look, I knew that topic was locked away.
It soon became obvious to me that I couldn’t get the information he really wanted without going to the roundroom. The roundroom was the only place where we felt truly at ease and private amongst ourselves, and as long as I wasn’t part of that, the blands didn’t wholly trust me. But I couldn’t even get into the roundrooms without a badge and a team assignment.
“You’ve got to talk to Supervisor Moriston,” I said to Magister Galele again after a couple of months had passed. I hadn’t seen her since that one confrontation, and she had made no effort to track me down. I suppose she had enough blands to worry about without me. Not even humans go out of their way to create work for themselves.
Magister Galele was very reluctant. “What if she assigns you somewhere else?”
“Can’t you talk to someone powerful?”
Embarrassed, he admitted, “Ovide doesn’t even know you’re here. I’ve been hoping I can just get away with it.”
“Forever?” I said.
“Well, no. Of course not. I never thought...I suppose I’ll have to do it, eh?”
“Eh,” I said.
It took him several days to get up the courage, but he finally went to talk to Moriston. He came back looking flustered and angry. “What a dragon lady,” he said. “She treated me like some under-evolved primate.”
By liberal use of Elector Hornaday’s name he had gotten a grudging promise not to alter my assignment, and had agreed to send me down for processing later that day. But when it came time for me to leave, he looked so worried and forlorn that I realized the thought of getting separated from me preyed on him. It was more than professional need for my information. The loneliness was eating him alive.
“You liven this place up so much,” he said. “It’s damnably quiet without you.”
For a moment I felt guilty to be going back to the company of my own kind, abandoning him to his isolation. So I hugged him and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll never leave you. I’ll always come back.”
He was deeply moved. “You are the best thing that’s happened to me on this planet, Tedla,” he said.
Now I look back on my promise and think it was the thing he needed more than anything in the world. I kept the promise, too—for twelve years. When I finally broke it, I think it broke his heart. When he knew I wasn’t coming back, it killed him.
But that was still a long way off.
When I entered Supervisor Moriston’s office through the graydoor, a postulant with an electronic clipboard directed me into a tile-floored processing room. She took my thumbprint, the history of my assignments, and what I’d been trained for. Then she said, “Take off your clothes and give them to me.” Silently, I did as directed. She put the clothes in a paper bag, wrote something on it, and left. I stood there waiting naked in the chilly room, rubbing my goosebumps. At length another woman came in, dressed in a curator’s tabard. She started by taking a blood sample and sending it away for analysis. Then she made me stand under a bright light and inspected my body. I was worried that she would find the scars on my wrists; but the Capellan curator had used some medical adhesive that had made the cuts heal very cleanly, and they were not easy to see unless you were looking. At any rate, she didn’t notice. She then asked me about a whole series of symptoms—warts, rashes, difficulty urinating, on and on. I kept shaking my head. At last she began pulling on a pair of latex gloves. She said, “Bend over. I’ve got to do a rectal exam.”
My whole body began shaking at once. I backed away from her, unable to control myself. I knew what was going on now. They thought Magister Galele had been molesting me, and were looking for evidence.
“He hasn’t touched me,” I said.
“What do you mean?” she asked. I realized how incriminating my blurted protest sounded. Another word would only make it worse. I kept silent.
“Turn around,” she said.
I had to, though I was shaking like someone with palsy. She was mercifully skillful and quick. When she was done, she told me to go into the next room, find a uniform in one of the bins, and wait.
I was soon sitting on a bench dressed in drab gray coveralls. Through a window into an adjoining room I could see the curator talking to Supervisor Moriston, who was nodding. At last the supervisor came in, with the postulant trailing her. Moriston’s face was broken out in pimples, and she looked cross. She said to her assistant, “Did you check it for head lice?”
“No, do you want me to?” the postulant said.
“
Better just shave it.” The postulant went to a cupboard and got out some clippers. I watched apprehensively. I knew Magister Galele would be upset, but this didn’t seem like the time to play the humans off against one another. So I sat without moving as the postulant ran the clippers over my skull, shearing away the curls. One ringlet fell in my lap and I stared at it, wishing I could save it; but a bland has no place for keepsakes.
When it was over I ran my hand over my smooth, bald skull. It felt cold and drafty. But Supervisor Moriston looked satisfied. “Stand up,” she said to me. When I was facing her, she said in a too-loud voice, “Now I want some things clear. From now on you sleep in the roundroom. No more nights in his quarters. I don’t ever want to see you out of a uniform again, not even in his rooms. If he asks you to do anything you wouldn’t want me to see, you come straight to me. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. It came to me then: She thought she was protecting me by making me look ugly and blandlike.
She handed me a blue badge. “You’re on blue team. Your refectory time is posted downstairs. You know how to find your roundroom?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She dismissed me then.
That night it felt strange to be in a roundroom again, smelling the old familiar musk of close-packed bodies. I felt like a spy from human space, disguised in my neuter form. Cholly, Gibb, and Pots were all on blue team. When Cholly saw me in the shower, all shaved as I was, it said, “Did Moriston finally get to you?”
I nodded. Cholly’s tone held no sympathy—more like triumph. I saw some others whispering and glancing my direction, and realized they must have been gossiping about me all this time, and now believed I had been taken down a peg. Nothing gives blands such satisfaction as to see one of their own kind put in its place. I wasn’t sure how they would feel about touching me, so I didn’t try to join them in the center of the roundroom. It was odd: I had expected to feel at home here, after my long exile in human space, and human beds. But I didn’t. I was turning into a halfway thing, neither human nor wholly bland.
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