The Green Queen

by Margaret St. Clair

  It wasn't any of his business. Candia's papers were her own affair.

  Then he remembered. It had been at a party. The quota was one of the things people didn't talk about—one of the painful, hateful necessities that life on Viridis, where the supply of non-polluted food was so limited, forced on society. But the woman he had been talking to held a high position in the Bureau of Demography, and she had enough to drink that her ordinary good manners were relaxed. He had expressed interest in quota mechanisms. She had pulled an orange out-quota notice from her hand-pouf and showed it to him.

  If the piece of orange paptex on Candia's desk was an out-quota notice, it was very much his affair.

  He ought to wait until Candia came down, and then ask her about it. But ... Bonnar drew the sheet from under the pile and looked at it.

  The message was couched in the usual official verbiage, but the meaning was clear enough. The Bureau of Demography regretfully informed Miss Candia Dee, that any children or child, born to her between (a date two weeks in the past) and (a date over a year in the future) would be held out-quota. A separation would be regretfully enforced two months after the birth of said children or child and ... consequences.

  The consequences were enumerated in small type below.

  So. Even when Candia had made her suggestion at the party, she'd known.

  There was a step on the balcony overhead. Bonnar turned, still holding the out-quota notice in his hand.

  There was a wave of perfume, flower-like, very sweet, and Candia started down the stairs toward him.

  For a moment Bonnar forgot everything. Candia knew her limitations; she had made no attempt to present herself as more than she was. Her hair was combed, her face was lightly made up. That was all. But from shoulder to waist she was naked; she was wearing a gown of jet black fabric whose high collar and long sleeves made more deliberate its astonishing décolletage. Against the intense blackness of the material her nakedness had a hieratic, ritualistic quality. Her skin was dazzlingly white. And despite her multiple pregnancies—perhaps because of them—the outlines of her body were astonishingly virginal.

  She came toward him, her hands outstretched, welcome in her voice. "Bonnar! I'm so glad." Then her eyes fell upon the sheet of paptex in his hand. "Oh ..." she said.

  Bonnar thought, does it make any difference? This is Candia's affair. He could put the out-quota notice down on the desk and forget about it, take her hands and sit down beside her on the k'ang. Candia wouldn't mention the notice unless he did. But he couldn't get it out of his mind.

  No, it wouldn't work. What he had wanted from Candia hadn't been a short-lived physical relief. That wasn't too hard to come by though he liked Candia well enough. But he had thought that fatherhood would have been something to set beside his jealousy of Miss Leaf Amadeus, meaningful enough to have counterbalanced it. There wasn't much satisfaction in being the father of an out-quota child.

  Candia was looking at him. "What's the matter?" she said at last. "Are you going to let that bother you?" She hadn't a particularly attractive voice.

  "Doesn't it bother you?" After a pause he went on, "You love children, Candia. But do you want a child of yours to be reared as a Body-servant? Or, more likely, to have to go down the Stairs? Lowers don't live very long. And they don't like their lives."

  She made a gesture. Her face twisted up. "I've thought about it so much," she said. "But I love babies. And it's more than a year, Bonnar, it's such a long time.

  "How can I wait that long? You don't know what it's like to have a baby, Bonnar, it's a kind of direct creation, it's wonderful. A man can't imagine how it feels. And giving birth's the most wonderful of all. It's such a triumph! When you hear the baby's first cry ...

  "Maybe they'd let my baby be a Body-servant. I hope they would. But I'd get to have it for the first two months, anyhow. I'd get to nurse it for the first two months."

  She seemed to have finished speaking. She was looking away from Bonnar and down at the floor.

  There was a silence. At last Bonnar said, "No. Not my child."

  He started past her toward the door. Candia shivered. "You—you're going?" she said. Her voice was a little high. "You won't even sit down by me on the k'ang? We could discuss it, Bonnar. Maybe you'd decide ..."

  "I'm sorry, Candia."

  "Go on, then," she said. She tried to sneer. It was not a very good sneer, for Candia's face was more used to making the gentle expressions of maternity, but she managed it. "Go on. If you're not man enough—well, there are other men.

  "Get one of them, then," Bonnar said. He went out. The Body-servant looked at him with a surprised face as she met him in the front hall.

  Bonnar lived in a small flat not far from his office. He went home, went to bed. He had taken a sleeping pill. He couldn't get to sleep.

  At, last, about two in the morning, he got up and dressed. The report of progress he was supposed to fill out was still lying on the table where he had put it down when he had opened it. He looked at it without picking it up. Then he locked the door of his flat behind him and went out into the street.

  It was so late that the yellow sodium vapor street lights had been shut off. The moon-bright radiance of Viridian night shone unimpeded through the fabric of the dome. The streets looked clean and flat and wide in the unfamiliar bleached white light.

  He began to walk. Several times he was stopped by peace officers, but he was unmistakably Upper. Only one of them made him show his laissez-passer.

  He walked for hours. Shalom, in the penetrating white glow was oddly different from its daylight self. More than once he had to look at the street name imbedded in the curb before he knew where he was.

  At last he looked at his watch; it was a little after four; in not very much longer it would be dawn. The streets of Viridis would be green again. He might as well go home. He was so tired that he thought he could sleep for a few hours.

  Where had he got to? He was on the edge of the city, near—oh, yes, of course. His mouth twisted as he tried to laugh. His legs had taken him, without conscious direction, very close to where Leaf lived.

  Why not? Why shouldn't he look. He wanted to. And then he'd go home.

  Leaf's apartment was on the second floor of a block of flats. To his surprise—it was well after four by now—a dim light shone through the thin matting that covered the windows. It looked as if there were a light, not in the maskart room itself, which was on the front, but in one of the rooms behind.

  He stood watching. He didn't know what he was waiting for. The light grew brighter, as if a door had been opened. A shadow seemed to approach the window blind.

  It was Leaf. The shadow was blurred, but he would have recognized it anywhere. She seemed to be hurrying into the maskart room.

  Another shadow followed her. This one was unmistakable too. Damn him, damn him. Horvendile.

  They seemed to argue. Once Leaf put out her hand toward the other shadow as if to push it away. She shook her head. But shadow Horvendile was persistent. He put his arm around her shoulders. She resisted a moment and then let him draw her up to him.

  The embrace grew closer. Horvendile's face bent to Leaf's. She put her arms around his neck. There was a long, deep kiss. When it ended, Horvendile, his arm still around Leaf, drew her gently from the maskart room.

  Still interlaced, the shadows retreated. The light grew dim again, as if a door had closed. After a moment the light went out.

  Bonnar was shaking with rage. It didn't occur to him that the scene he had witnessed could have any interpretation other than the obvious one. For a moment he thought of breaking the door down, killing Horvendile, raping Leaf. Then reason asserted itself. He turned and began the long walk home.

  It was broad green day when he let himself into his flat. He went straight to the table beside the k'ang, picked up the progress report, dipped a brush in ink, and began filling in the report.

  When he had finished writing, he
read his work. What he had put down on the report wasn't quite true. Quite true? Most of it wasn't true at all. But it would be true; he'd see to that.

  He yawned. He undressed and got into bed. He was asleep almost at once. He wouldn't have believed it if somebody had told him that the report he had just filled out would change the course of Viridian history.

  Chapter Three

  "WE WERE civil to each other when we were outside," Bonnar said. "I suppose it was because we were both so badly confused ..."

  "JANSEN'S work," Horvendile said. He indicated the suburban street which, lined on both sides with elegant "advanced" houses, began abruptly and without preamble in the middle of the heavy jungle undergrowth, ran for some fifteen hundred feet as straight as the marks of a ruler, and came to an end again as abruptly and unreasonably as it had begun. There was not a single weed in the pavement of the street, not a blade of grass in the houses' neat concrete yards; but over the tops of the buildings the tall trees of the rain forest had closed in to make an almost solid roof.

  "Jansen the First, Contractor of Viridis," Horvendile continued, smiling. "The man's energy was enormous. There are streets like this all over Viridis, sometimes even whole villages, except in the very worst radioactive areas. Sometimes the glass in the windows is cracked, but the houses themselves are made of permastone, and they're nearly as fresh as they were when they were built two hundred years ago. I don't suppose three percent of them have ever been lived in, but they're complete down to the tiling in the kitchens and the perfume showers in the bath.

  "Why? You seem surprised, Bonnar. Haven't you ever been outside before? Jansen's in all the history books."

  Bonnar considered. "I'd read about it," he said at last. "But I don't suppose I realized how it was. What was he trying to do, anyhow?"

  "Jansen? Oh, build an empire. What he'd have called an empire, I mean—really, a planetary government with himself at the head. He thought the best way of getting followers would be to offer them beautiful free housing. He loved to build. And he was a very rich man."

  Bonnar was still thinking. "I don't see how they could have made a mistake like that," he said slowly.

  "Like thinking the unprotected surface was habitable? It is odd. But you see, their instruments for measuring radioactivity were defective. Nobody knows just how it happened; some historians think there was deliberate sabotage on the part of Jansen's political opponents.

  "At any rate, their instruments were defective. People lived in the houses—some of the houses—for about six months before they realized that anything was wrong. There was a good deal of anxiety, probably from an unconscious realization of bodily damage occuring, and some of the settlers had low-grade fevers and skin rashes, but Jansen had a dominating personality, and he persuaded them to ignore it. They thought it was just fungus. Then the big bad lesions broke out. People started dying. They recalibrated their instruments in a hurry after that."

  Horvendile had made this explanation with his usual air of faint mockery. It was as if he never quite believed in anything he said. This time Bonnar was not much bothered by it. "Is that why the law about recalibration was passed?" he asked.

  "The law that all instruments to measure radioactivity must be calibrated against those already in use on Viridis before they can be introduced into the planet? Yes. They were afraid of further sabotage, you see."

  Horvendile halted. Through the leaded glass of his helmet Bonnar could see his sandy eyebrows raised. Then he got up from the hillock where he had been sitting and made a sketchy, half-formal, half-humorous bow. "Hello, Leaf."

  The girl moved along the street toward them. In the strange, sub-aqueous light that filtered down through the long leaves of the Lepidodendrons and calamites to lie in stripes of lime green and ashy gray on Jansen's pavement, she seemed not so much to walk as to drift, as if she pressed her way through a medium denser and more resistant than air.

  She was, as always, graceful. Even in the heavy protective suit of lead-coated fabric she moved well. But as she got nearer Bonnar saw, through the glass of her helmet, that her face still wore the dreaming, remote, self-centered look that so irritated and frightened him. He glanced toward Horvendile. The historian was looking down, frowning. He seemed to dislike the expression Leaf had been wearing as much as Bonnar did.

  "Hello, my dear," Bonnar said when she had got up to them. "You were gone a long time. Did you find what you were looking for?"

  "No." She raised her hands toward her helmet, as if she would have liked to press her head. "I don't think it's here. We'll hunt further on tomorrow. But look." Leaf's expression lost its dreamlike quality and became animated; Bonnar watched the change with a pleasure that was tinged with jealousy, since it was Horvendile she was speaking to. "It's getting dark. Let's hunt through the houses and decide which one we want to sleep in. That would be fun." She smiled at the historian.

  Bonnar bit his lip. He was afraid that Leaf or Horvendile would glance toward him and see that he was flushing. Oh, the shameless, shameless—Then common sense came to his rescue. They were all wearing the heavy protective lead suits. They all knew the danger. It was unsafe, really, to eat or eliminate. As far as anything else went, Leaf and Horvendile might as well be wearing reciprocal belts of chastity.

  He glanced toward the sky. The foliage was too dense for him to see the sun, but the light did seem to be dimmer. Horvendile was nodding agreement with Leaf's plan. They started along the street, laughing and talking. He followed them.

  Now that he had no longer the distraction of Horvendile's disquisition on Jansen, his worries returned to him. He was in a spot, all right. A bad spot. No doubt of it.

  There were, in the first place, his reports about Leaf. After he had sent in the initial one, he had received a long questionnaire to fill out. There had been over a hundred questions, ranging from Leafs current sleeping habits to what she said about the activities in the Apple Pickers, and he would have been able to answer only twenty or so of them with the confidence of real knowledge. A confession of ignorance would have been dangerous; it would have meant that in his first report he had lied. So he had filled in the answers at random, sweating with anxiety.

  Time had passed; he had begun to hope that his answers had been right, or at least plausible. (If only he had been able to see some trend behind the questions! Then he would have known what answers to give. But he couldn't make out what they were driving at.) Yes, he had begun to hope that he had gotten away with it. But two days ago he had received a slip requesting him to report for a clarifying examination in connection with the questionnaire.

  Oh, he was in a spot. He had heard stories about what "clarification" could amount to. He woke up in the night thinking about it, feeling sick.

  That in itself had been bad enough. But there had been trouble with the new mask.

  It hadn't been a bad mask, really. He and a couple of his assistants had worked hard on it. It had stressed the similarity of the Lowers' dim, green-lit world below Stairs and a romantically hostile jungle, and had inculcated with reasonable subtlety the need for patience, courage, and self-sacrifice in dealing with both. But a man named Kramner had been killed last week by Lowers and one of the Lowers had said that Kramner was an evil jungle animal that deserved to be killed. He had cited phrases from the current mask in proof. Would they hold Bonnar responsible?

  Rumor had it that Kramner was an important Upper, perhaps even one of the Eleven, who spent a lot of time below Stairs.

  For a moment phrases and fears shifted kaleidoscopically in Bonnar's mind. High treason ... The person of an Upper shall be secure ... social stability ... The Eleven is actually the government ... does Miss Leaf Amadeus wear much metal jewelry? Then his thoughts settled into immobility, a conviction that ran: I'm in a bad spot. I can think of only one way to get out of it.

  Horvendile and Leaf had paused in front of one of the houses. From a long way off there was a hollow reverberating crash; somew
here deeper within the rain forest a tree had fallen. But Leaf and her companion were too absorbed in each other to turn.

  Bonnar looked at them unseeingly, for once not jealous. This trip with Leaf represented—it was the only way he could think of it—his last hope. If he could find out what the government wanted from her, why she was important, he might be able to get through the clarifying examination safely. But if he could discover what Leaf herself was hunting, it might be—it must be, he was in such a bad spot—it might be a piece of information so important that he could bargain against Kramner's death with it.

  But what little luck he'd had so far! The day before yesterday Leaf had come to him and asked him to help her and Horvendile get a laissez-sorter from Shalom. He'd been overjoyed at the chance to get back in contact with her. He'd told her certainly, yes, he'd get the pass for her, but he was afraid he would have to go along too. Security reasons. And she'd accepted his presence on the trip gracefully enough.

  So far, so good. He'd even succeeded in getting a 'copter out on loan from the two that were assigned to Verbal, and he'd piloted. But as soon as he had set the ship down in a clear spot near where she told him, she had seemed to draw away from him. He had tried to accompany her when she had gone walking off into the forest; she had turned on him and told him to go away, he prevented her from thinking. And to every overture of his since then she had responded with blankness or an actual warding off.

  "It might be fun to sleep in this one," Leaf was saying. "I like the color of the roof, that luminous blue-green, and the pink plaster—I know it's not plaster, but it looks like that—has been put on so heavily, in those long curving lines, that the house looks like it had been covered with some sort of long-haired fur. Don't you think it would be fun to sleep in a pink fur house, Horvendile?"