The avowedly masculine element in the gathering fell on him with catcalls. Clavel, much amused, refused to retract.
A feud between parasites and childbearers was another peculiarity, to add to the local obsession with religion, their promiscuous mingling of formal and informal language, their horrid food. But the variation of human traits at home was equally wild and wide. It wasn’t for nothing that an executioner searched each body before he struck, to find how this particular heart was placed. Kumbva put their collective opinion into Spoken Words.
“It takes all sorts to make a world!”
For once it was Rajath who brooded, unable to join in the byplay. He could talk of nothing but the main concern: this frightening abyss that had opened between them and their trading partners. It must be turned into opportunity. But how? He had been delighted to find when he arrived on this planet that his talent for foreign formal languages, after long disuse, was still intact. It annoyed him that he couldn’t get hold of the inflection as well as Clavel, but he was in control. Still, these locals cheated.
Rajath hurriedly retracted, shrugging placatingly, before the majority of his friends and dependents could start beating him around the head.
Everyone jeered. Rajath’s talent for creative interpretation was a tolerated scandal.
The captain was unabashed.
Atha had been uncomfortable since the locals left.
Lugha hugged his guardian, and glared at everyone.
Lugha was told to moderate his language. What happens when people lie down together is not to be mentioned: Clavel’s love songs were bad enough, but a poet couldn’t help himself. The small mind, that can only hold knowledge, was under no congenital obligation to talk dirty.
Rajath prepared to speak. His eyes darkened, his whole face glowed. Rajath the beautiful was never so lovely as when he was deep in greedy mischief.
This was agreed to be proven. Only Brhamari, Kumbva’s physician, refused to be convinced.
His point wasn’t taken.
Kumbva was intrigued.
Rajath dropped from Kaoru’s chair, where he’d been squatting. He made his speech.
“I have a plan. Okay, we went too far with our expression of outrage. We can’t take it back, so we’d better frighten them before they start thinking of revenge. They are angry? We must be twice as angry. Their lack of wanderers is a card up our sleeve. Our artisans have proved how easy it is to convert their machines to our service. I will need help from Lugha and Clavel and Mr. Kaoru. Meanwhile, there’ll be no more visitors. We’re going to get down to business.”
Clavel had opened a sliding wall and sat propped against it staring into the evening sunlight, his legs gracelessly asprawl. He considered the character shrine, and the room that held the dead: both of them stuffed with hoarded tradegoods. In the evenside and in the dawn wing, the other captains’ quarters were cluttered with more small luxuries from home. He reviewed his own remaining possessions and those of his crew, and admitted defeat. A few scraps of souvenirs, and a carton of baby things that had once been a locker in the cabin of the lander.
So that was that. Conversation became desultory.
Samhukti, Rajath’s chaplain, pondered the revelation that Mr. Kaoru believed himself to be part of their nation: and rejected it.
Rajath’s young partner, Aditya, recalled the time in Alaska when the locals had tried to force him to betray his rich lover. He longed for another taste of adventure.
The next moment, he was puzzling over his latest scheme.
Maitri, extremely glad to have seen the contents of that hollow needle secured, began to relax. He wondered mildly:
Kumbva fetched a laptop computer and pored over it with some of his people. Clavel glimpsed the calculations: like thickly textured cloth, shifting in and out of detail. Kumbva’s signals master kept track of faraway deadware, by occult means only he and the engineers understood.
Clavel was depressed. Everybody had noticed, even those who had least use for words, that he’d refrained from making a speech, and therefore was certainly reserving his options in some way. They heard him withholding agreement. They tolerated, accepted, imposed no sanctions. The Rajath mood had prevailed over the Clavel mood, in Clavel as much as anyone. And yet people were anxious, anxiety gone underground. Aditya expects drama, Kumbva gets ready for an emergency. He considered the status of the Spoken Word among his own people, a meaning that made him a kind of holy fool and Rajath a fascinating troublemaker. What did words mean to the locals, who all seemed to use them so freely? Nobody cared. Nobody else but Lugha wondered what the locals were made of. And Lugha didn’t really care.
But the river spoke to Clavel of Johnny. There’d been a lot of grumbling about the locals’ dishonesty. How long could Clavel go on deceiving his other self?
It was late in the evening. The meal had been prepared and served and the kitchen made tidy. Lugha was in the character shrine with the other children, learning to be himself: learning (as far as Lugha could learn) to know his companions: the meaning of a certain person’s gestures, the consequence of an enmity, the myriad tiny lessons of history. Atha slipped into the other shrine, and covered his face. He knelt in front of the images. Feminine people, according to the lore of Atha’s kind, are the people who’d rather work all night in the dark than call someone who can fix the light. The kind of people who chatter when they’re exhausted and go to sleep when they’re happy. The kind of people who can’t live without being needed but hate to need anything from anyone. Masculine people, on the other hand, can never leave well enough alone, break things by way of improving them, and will do absolutely anything for a kiss and a kind word….
One could go on: but it was hard to imagine what such an idle gossipy game could have to do with what he saw in this screen. Atha had assisted at the more conventional local religious services, in Kaoru’s character shrine. He had attended Tampopo, Diamonds Are Forever, The NBC Serial of Genji Mon
ogatari. He knew, therefore, that these were people just like himself. He accepted that most of his companions didn’t believe in magic. But Atha wasn’t one to scoff. He had seen some strange things, in his time. He could try at least to give solace to the dying, to comfort the grief. The cook closed his eyes. His skin wept, invisibly. Go, little Athas. Hurry to this place, where those people are lying in pain, wherever it is in the real world, and do what you can.
iii
Karen city. The premier hotel had the kind of defective aircon that is infinitely worse than sweat and a fan. The chap from the BBC didn’t know that “five star” generally means nothing good in a grubby industrial town of the South: he wasn’t much of a traveler. It wasn’t Braemar’s place to tell him. She lay in a long cane chair, gazing out at the lights of waste plant that churned on through the night; lights of boat-bars and floating markets that bobbed on the waters of the Kok river. The stuffy room stank of incinerated chemicals.
The alien child aswarm with colored lice had been bustled out of sight pretty swiftly. How thoughtless of the kid to burst in on an execution like that! She wanted to think about that weird little apparition: what did the bugs mean? But she was afraid to think of anything that had happened at Uji…. The chair was vat-grown rattan, quite a nice piece. The room’s furnishings were surprisingly good and up to date. One should always notice the pleasant things.
She felt as if she was suffocating.
“What will happen?” she wondered aloud.
“I haven’t the faintest idea. Maybe it will all blow over. After all, one little kaffir servant girl. We can’t expect them to share our notions about the sanctity of individual human life.” Her meal ticket was nervous, his tongue unguarded.
“Um, lemme see. One can trust Kershaw and Lloyd-Price. And the Viets. Absolutely heroic, the way they joined in the cabaret. Could be they saved all our lives. I worry about those pinko Americans. A covert panic button, my God, damned idiots. Then there’s Kaoru, whatever his bloody game is. And your lot, Braemar. You could have the glob-pop up in arms, baying for a shock and awe response. Can you resist that?”
“If I had anything to show—”
She tipped her head back. “What an irony. Mr. Kaoru disposes! Frankly, I wish the Nips were still in charge in East Asia. If they were, I believe I’d be able to replace my maker without remortgaging my house…. D’you think they can make the confiscation stick?”
“Want to bet?”
Braemar stared at the lights on the dark water. How contented the Aleutians had been in that little valley. They didn’t miss the wide open spaces of freedom: not at all. Kaoru’s chopper pilots were fairly tightlipped, but there had been a giggling reference to incontinence pads. Containment, yes; of all kinds. They were habituated to containment. But what was the use in stringing telltales together. People would go on gazing at the Emperor’s new clothes.
Kaoru had sealed Uji. The innate prejudices of the Women’s Affairs Conference had worked for him: not to mention that cretinous Californian AI outfit. No interference! As a matter of etiquette, we mustn’t take so much as a flake of dandruff. No one said it was serious, everyone told you the aliens wouldn’t hurt a fly. Well, now we know. If we touch a hair of them, they’ll kill. That had been the unspoken truth behind all the sweetness and light up there, all along.
Think about something else.
What about Clavel? Johnny’s alien. Who embodied the “Purity” sonnet, who drove her chief wild with reluctant admiration. She noticed herself surrendering to the attribution of gender, maybe just from weakness. It means something, generally, when a young woman is reluctant to pronounce the name of a young male acquaintance. About the same as when she can’t stop repeating it…. Think about her, think. A bad thing happened to a kid. Forget it. Remorse does no good.
The meaning of actions. Physical assault: to draw blood. To draw blood is an act of war. The meaning of words. They use the spoken word like decoration, the icing on the cake. They don’t need it. Read minds? Not in the traditional sense. But what they do instead must take some fancy wiring. Maybe they really are superior. Not in any comicbook way but insidiously, hopelessly. Stop that. You know that trap.
On the hotel room tv, an Uji archive tape played. Lugha the demon child sat on the polished teak floor at Uji, with Douglas Milne. Douglas tossed a coin: a small disc as near to the notional fair coin as could be honed from metal. “Heads. Tails, Heads, Heads, Tails, Tails, Tails, Heads, Tails, Heads.” Lugha’s voice was a faint sound. He giggled, just like a child. He’s not psychic, he simply sees, because he’s watching, how the coin will land. What did he use for the connection between eye and brain? A cubic mile of coralin? She wished she dared tell Arthur to switch it off.
“I sense you’re not smitten?” said the Englishman, uneasily jovial. “It was a nasty incident: but personally I still foresee great things between us and the Aleutians.”
And who is “us”? If you let him, Arthur would soon convince you in a hundred subtle ways that whites, especially the men, are inevitably better, brighter. They just are.
Sometimes, just sometimes, there was a kind of satisfaction in the clairvoyance that haunted Braemar. Somebody passed below, singing: a Japanese folksong that had been a global hit about ten years ago. “The crows have wakened me/By cawing at the moon/ I pray that I shall not think of him…” The single voice was reedy and uncertain.
I pray so intently
That he begins to fill my whole mind
This is getting on my nerves
I wonder if there is any of that wine left?
“Shall we go to bed?”
In the confusion and panic of getting out of Uji the forms had been observed, more or less. Her skin was sore from the decontamination. The itch of loneliness was stronger. She let him handle her breasts, but put a finger to his lips.
“Ssh, don’t say a word. I want to pretend you’re somebody else, do you mind?”
A pound of flesh, yes. Brae always paid her way. But not one drop of blood.
6
MR. KAORU DISPOSES
Rajath and Clavel visited Mr. Kaoru’s cottage.
Its single room was strikingly different from anything in the main house. The floor was square tiled in slick grey, the lighting was fiercely white. There were photographs on the walls: flat, monotone images of a kind the Aleutians had seen nowhere else. In an alcove stood deadware machinery, which was also strangely styled. The screens carried columns of squiggle, no figurative images; and nothing was moving there. Neither of them had been inside the cottage before. They sensed that they had entered a very solemn shrine; knelt and covered their faces.
Kaoru had been about to rise to greet his guests. He remained, half seated and half kneeling behind his low desk, the dark full sleeves of his housecoat sweeping the floor. Kaoru’s face was very old, the skin crumpled and reamed by a thousand lines of decay. None of them were the sort of people who knew much about old age, but maybe it was because his physical features were so closely written that they felt at ease in his company. They could read the old, impacted grief in that face, as if it was being acted out on tape; and the wildness that was so reminiscent of Rajath. They could imagine encompassing the person within alongside their certain knowledge of each other.
Rajath explained the plan. He demanded, in compensation for Sarah’s heinous crime, several tracts of real estate, which must be evacuated and the deeds handed over. They hoped that Mr. Kaoru, who was in no way to blame for what had happened, would help them to draw up the documents.
Clavel converted this into correctly inflected speech, while Kaoru listened, head bent and nodding occasionally. At the end of it he looked up, and his quiet amusement was eloquent.
“And will the invasion force now arrive?”
Kaoru drew aside the polished cover of his desk, opened an atlas, and turned to a projection of the globe. He handed Rajath a light pen.
“Perhaps you’d like to mark the areas. I would suggest you favor the temp
erate latitudes, between thirty and forty degrees. Avoid volcanic regions, but give yourself plenty of coastline. Conurbation would present problems in the long term—”
“But for maximum irritation—” murmured Clavel.
“Quite. Also, you’ll find it hard to avoid them.”
Rajath drew a square on the southern half of America, another near the tip of Africa, a circle on West Africa for Clavel’s sake. He kept the marks small. He didn’t know the exact scale of this simulation, but he had a vague idea. He didn’t want to appear greedy.
In the end he settled on six portions: one in each of the Americas, two in Africa, a piece of New Zealand, a piece of Western Europe and a piece of somewhere between Europe and China. He sat back on his heels. Kaoru enhanced each area and brooded over tiny hologram detail that meant nothing to his visitors. He was moved to justify the ragged corrals, but on reflection restored Rajath’s original lines. He smiled, looking past the ebullient Rajath.
“You could call them ‘treaty ports.’ Or some such name.”
Clavel’s joints crept, urgently desiring flight. Scribbling over a planet like that, it was certainly funny. Why not laugh?
He had felt close to Kaoru in their quiet talks: the old man reminiscing about all those weary years in business, his mind dying all the time. When he had learned Kaoru’s secret, his instant reaction had been delight. Of course! his heart had cried. That proves it. That explains how I can be the same person as Johnny! The story was undoubtedly nonsense, Kumbva and Lugha had immediately told him so. It still appealed to the lover. But the steely sense of family that Kaoru had expressed, along with that odd little formal speech, made Clavel’s blood run cold. The disaster that Johnny’s friend had described had no doubt been done to Kaoru’s household: such things don’t just happen. Even so, Kaoru’s attitude, after so many years, was alarming. Did all of them on this planet treasure injury like this? It was a worrying thought.
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