“What’s your name?” he asked.
“That’s none of your business,” she explained gently. “Pm Girl to you, sir, if you don’t mind. You may address me as Young Girl if I have so displeased you that you have a reprimand ready.”
“Oh.” He wasn’t sure he knew what she was talking about—and it wasn’t the strange accent. Did farmen actually need both physical and social reorientation after living in a ship’s closet for months? “Is this your room or mine?” he asked in an initial attempt at clarifying his confusion. Nothing, it seemed, could be taken for granted.
“It’s yours, sir.” The inflection said of course.
“And why are you here?”
“Sir, I’m your servant. I’m here to serve you, obey your orders, and see that you come to no harm when you are drunk even if I have to risk my own life.” Then she added, with downcast eyes that were more flirtatious than afraid, “I’m at the mercy of your good behavior but I’m allowed to defend myself. It’s in my contract.”
Such a strange word, servant—even though it was in his vocabulary, it didn’t tell Eron anything; he had no context in which to place it. They didn’t have servants on Agander, only service that varied by circumstance and intricate game rules. ‘Then you’re to do anything I ask of you, Girl?”
“Only what is specified in my contract, sir,” she replied coyly. “You can famfeed a copy in the normal way—though I don't advise it. The contract automatically installs behavior constraints.” To say what was unspoken, her hidden hand teasingly poked his erect penis, which he was trying to hide under the covers. She giggled.
He began to see some of the disadvantages that beset a farmen—a farman was constantly having to learn new and amazing rules. “And what does this contract define as your duties?”
“I’m to please you.” There was the tone of catechism in what she said. She had her own private reservations—it was in her tone—and she had no intention of sharing them with him. He would have to guess.
What he was guessing disturbed him because it was so un-Gandarian. As best as he could read her, she was willing to make a flexible interpretation of her duties if he was able to choose a kind way in which to ignore the conditions of her contract. Kindness was one of mankind’s universal. He sensed that she didn’t know who he was and that scared her, but because he hadn’t yet done anything to scare her, she wasn’t doing whatever it was that she did when she felt the need to defend herself. It was her unspoken invitation that upset him—knowing that her desires would always remain unspoken. With the covers now more firmly under his arm-pits, he began to talk to the ceiling. It felt weird to shift into Murek’s valence and begin a tutor’s rhetorical approach to a new student. ‘‘You know what a man of Neuhadra would expect of you, am I right?”
She nodded.
“But you aren’t sure what might please a farman?” A frantic part of him was telling him to stop being an intellectual.
“I’m to please all whom I serve, sir,” she explained.
That kind of ambiguous phrasing drove him crazy. “So you’re here to please me even though I may have very strange demands? Would you be willing to please a farman like me whose greatest delight was eating spit-roasted girls for breakfast with a knife, fork, and teeth?”
She squeaked and pulled herself into a sitting position at the very comer of the bed, holding up the covers around her body until only her eyes showed. “That’s not in my contract!” But her voice rang with mirth.
“Fortunately for you, Girl, I forgot my knife and fork back on Agander!”
She was now staring under the covers to get a good look at the body she had already carefully undressed the night before. It was very much the curiosity of a young child. “It’s your teeth I’m worried about. Deflecting knives and forks is part of my training.” She dropped the covers so that he could see her. And she was beautiful, in a non-Ganderian sort of
way. He wasn’t sure if her breasts were fully formed yet. “After lugging you upstairs last night, I’m too salty to eat without a bath. I’d go for the eggs and sausage myself, if I were you.” She smiled shyly.
“Ah, hunger.” He sighed. “You have eggs?”
With the same squeak that she had used to wrap herself in the covers, she leaped out of bed. That was a request for which she knew the response. With a flick, a wall panel opened up to the cuisinator. “Eggs and sausage coming right up!”
A voluptuous servant to instruct a robocook which had been designed to replace a servant; there, thought Eron, was a new definition of luxury.
Her task quickly done, she asked, “Will you let me dress you now?”
“I’m used to doing it myself.”
“Sir! At that you are incompetent! The togs you were wearing were disgraceful. You have no taste. I put them in the dispozoria. You’ll have to let me dress you. I know everything about clothes! I measured you last night very carefully with my calip while you snorted in your sleep and, by now, the manufacturum in die closet has everything ready for you.”
“You measured me? Really?”
“I’m afraid you disappointed me as a farman, sir, I didn’t find any tentacles, sir. And you were very drunk; your penis only measured two centimeters. Sir.”
While he waited for his breakfast, he watched her spread out his new clothes—collars, even! This was worse than being attended by a robovalet! She hadn’t bothered to dress herself. And watching, he found himself inanely straining to feel like a forty-year-old married man (like his father) who had shouldered the duty of sexually training a young girl. But he wasn’t an older man, and he had no business being with this child and even thinking about sex; if he’d been caught on Agander with this she-sapling, the men of his class would have put him in the stocks for attempted ruination! Young men were not allowed to seduce young girls.
Young girls were reserved for men with already established careers. He had a moment of smug revolt now that he had left Agander forever; nobody on Agander trusted the maturity of their young, even ones who had a straight kick shot! And so much had happened in the last few months that he was now sure of his maturity.
Still, he felt he should have been given a mature woman as a servant. He tried to imagine Melinesa as his servant. And couldn’t. Lover maybe, servant, never. Well, this was Neuhadra and they did things differently—farmen were all crazy. Dingbat crazy! And woe, woe, woe, he was now a far-man himself!
Girl was chattering while she made intricate decisions about color and cut and texture. This was worse than trying to escape Kapor’s mathematical traps! How could anyone care that much about clothes? Now he knew what she used her exquisite little fam for! She probably had forty thousand years of fashion stuffed in there. Her naked back was made enticing by the fascinating curves of that fam. He stopped listening to her while he became more and more involved in coveting it. Maybe the next time they were in bed together and she was snoring away, he could switch with her. He knew it was an idle fantasy; it was already ten years too late. Fams take as long to mature as humans. It drove him crazy to be right in the heart of the worlds where they built such awesome fams. From here one could rule the Galaxy.
Maybe not. Cloun-the-Stubbom had already tried that with the Crafters working their magic for him. If rumor was right, these people had built the original visi-harmonars for Lakgan. “The First Citizen of the Galaxy” had designed his strategy around personal control of minds. That’s what “First” meant. First mind. It hadn’t worked. Why? Cloun-the-Stubbom had missed comprehending the number-one cliche: The Galaxy is a big place. What was it that tutor Ka-por had said about control-vanity? “Men who are obsessed with personal control because they trust no one with their vision end up out of control—like a single puppeteer trying to pull off a mob scene with multiple puppets on stage.” Maybe it wasn’t wise to do what he’d have to do to seduce Girl. 77/ resist her, he comforted himself virtuously, if he could get his penis to agree.
Nevertheless he let Girl dress him. The clothes she
had selected were a comfortable fit, and if he didn’t look in a mirror he didn’t even feel conspicuous. He kissed her hand. Better not start his seduction with anything more complicated than that. Now that he was dressed, he wished she’d get dressed, too. He was finding her slim body more and more enticing. She had a peculiar surgically added organ along her ribs under her arm. He thought at first that it was merely decorative—the cicatrix signifying a servant perhaps—but it was the organ to which she attached her artificial lung when she went outside. Neuhadra’s atmosphere, of course.
Later in the morning Eron spent time at an archival terminal famfeeding himself some Neuhadran history, thousands of years of it, back to Imperial times, back to the first settlers who crossed the Helmarian Rift itself. He didn’t even need a tutor’s prodding anymore to immerse himself in that kind of labor.
Girl reappeared from nowhere when he decided to take a walk out along the crater wall. She insisted that he wear his oxygen supplementer with its annoying pull-down mask. Then she faded away again. Probably she could locate him with some gizmo in his clothes. Maybe she was even responsible to monitor his life-signs. Damned if he was going to use the sissy mask. He was well past the winter gardens into the wilderness, running down the slope, when he started to feel dizzy and the hat beeped. The mask dropped over his face automatically. Why did people try to settle planets like Neuhadra? He was beginning to guess what all farmen meant when they called Agander a heaven.
The mountain slope looked like any ordinary slope leading gently down into a lake—but there were all sorts of telltale signs of cataclysm. His famfed Neuhadran history wasn’t really available to him until cues keyed it in to help him understand what he was seeing. Ninety-six percent of the life on Neuhadra had been destroyed by this impact less than a million years ago. The local life was still scrambling to fill vacant niches.
He recognized the tripartite mouths of a red flowering plant in the thin snow that still showed vestiges of its former life in the Neuhadran seas. It crawled. A whole class of leafy sea-forms had always been mobile, but there had been no crawling land plants a million years ago. There had been no niche for them on land then, either. It was fascinating. Moments later he saw one of the strange native pulse-burrowers scamper out of a rotten fem trunk. A whole extinct class of large animals had yet to be replaced by evolution, perhaps the pulse-burrowers would grow into the vacant niche—if rats or rabbits or horses didn’t fill it first. Some might-have-been paths would never be taken because of mankind’s empire and invaders from the stars.
Eron saw daffodils. Or maybe they weren’t daffodils anymore? Would a daffodil recognize spring on a planet with an orbit as eccentric as Neuhadra’s? He spotted a cocoon waiting for the warmth to release its tiny being. Not native. A starfaring insect from who-knew-what planet, a hobo fresh off some careless ship?
Standing here on the slope of this cataclysm he did not have to wonder why the Glatim clan dominated the galactic meteoroid&comet deflection business. He could almost write the history himself from the hints he had heard around the feast table.
The original Glatim family had been driven to settle here around the crater during the forced “relocations” of Imperial times at the end of the Wars Across the Marche. Protection from the sky would not have been a worry at the time of the Dispersion—the Galactic Empire’s Omneity of Planetary Safety was the bureaucratic entity that handled errant asteroids and comets and meteoroids. But when the Empire died in paroxysm, the Omneity vanished. Not so the Helmarians of Neuhadra. The Glatims still lived on the edge of their crater, and the night sky was still full of falling stars and the frolicking seven suns were still out there playing with the local stability of planetary orbits. Theirs was a threat to keep thinking about.
Perhaps out in the Galaxy other worlds had tried to take the Omneity’s place, but the Glatims had been well situated. They were of the Helmarian Crafters and so culturally undaunted by the mere mechanical details of moving worldlets. They were survivors of the Wars Across the Marche and so bore the Empire particular malice and would be only too willing to take over territory vacated during the collapse. They soon found protection under the False Revival of Cloun-the-Stubbom who owed his power to them, and, after that, they were spatially situated to thrive under the suzerainty of Faraway’s peculiar interstellar-size city-state. All through the Interregnum they would have consolidated their business. Simple math.
Eron was amazed at how a little travel could so broaden one’s viewpoint, even if he had to manage his thinking with the crummy aid of that antiquated tech from the Periphery that burdened his shoulders.
He was turning up a slope of boulders to get a better view when a voice commanded him. “By the Ghosts of the Emperors, am I glad to see you!” said a puffing Rigone as he appeared from behind some bushes on the trail. “Slow down!” The Scav paused to take a deep puff from his mask. “This place gives me the willies. One can walk klom after klom without running into anyone. It’s worse than being lost in space; at least there you have a fifty/fifty chance of running into an ancient race once an episode!”
“Impressive, isn’t it?” commented Eron as he motioned out over the crater’s lake from their new height.
Rigone shrugged off the view. “How well do you know this Murek Kapor fellow of yours?”
“Well enough.” Eron thought about it. “But not as well as I once supposed.”
“I’ve been cooped up in a coffin with him for decawatches. He’s playing games, deep games. Nice chap—but shifty.”
“He likes to play games when he’s teaching me something,” said Eron warily.
Rigone softened. “I don’t think I’m referring to that kind of game. Some games are more deadly than others. I saw you headed out for a walk and I came out here after you— where there are no spies—to ask you something, kid. At least I’m assuming that there are no clever little Crafter devices hanging out here in the woods and we can talk man to man, or boy to boy—whatever the case may be. Damn, I wish they’d turn the heating up. But keep your mouth shut. Keep your own counsel. You’re old enough to start thinking for yourself. For your own good, you damn well better be!”
“On the planet I come from, you are being offensive,” said Eron in the gravelly voice his father used to dismiss overbearing clients.
“On the planet I come from, I’m talking too much. But we need to come to an understanding, in private—with only your problem and my problem at stake. I’ve decided to play your tutor’s game. I don’t know what it is, but I know I have no chance of ever finding out—so I’m not asking. You want a fam upgrade; you’ve told me so yourself—many times. Kapor wants you to have one and has asked me to do it. That makes two problems for you.
“One: Kapor is too insistent. That’s suspicious to me. Maybe he really thinks you need one, maybe he has an ulterior motive. That’s for you to figure out. Me, my best opinion is that you don't need one. Scorn Faraway tech all you want. I don’t. Obsolete? So what? I have a piece of obsolete tech in my antique collection that’s maybe a hundred thousand years old if it isn’t a damn fine fake. It is supposed to be a piece of flint from Old Rith. Fake or not, it’ll still skin a rabbit.”
In the interest of humor, Eron was about to protest the propriety of using flint technology to chip away at his fam when Rigone abruptly went off on another one of his tangents. He found a mossy log, freed of snow by the wind, its branches long rotten to nubs. He sat down. “Amazing place. They let a tree fall and don’t even use it! We’ll put it to use as a bench. Sit down.” He put up his hand to prevent Eron from interrupting. “Keep your mouth shut. You’re supposed to be listening to me.”
“I am listening.”
‘Two: Kapor thinks he has leads to someone who will train me, to put a modem edge on my skills. I think he does. That’s also suspicious, and you’ll have to think about it. Why isn’t the expert going to do the job himself and bypass a novice like me? That’s a game for which we don’t know the rules. But aside from that, I
’m good. First off, I know my limits. Smart men know their limits. They’re going to train me how to upgrade your fam. I’ve done crazy things with fams in my life—even illegal things—but, mark this, I’ve never damaged a single mind, ever. I intend to keep that record. I’m not going to touch your fam until I’m absolutely certain of what I’m doing. I have too much at stake to do otherwise. My life. If you so much as end up cross-eyed, I end up dead. You understand? You can still refuse.”
“Sure. I want you to do it.”
“You want me to do it? You’re a space-crazed young fool in search of an El Dorado star. That’s a star any moth can’t miss—and if you get there it will fry you! I’ll help you if you insist. But remember, two men helping each other don’t always have the same goal. It’s like I’m the man with a ship’s hull and you’re the man with the hyperatomic motor. We need each other—but we may not have the same destination. Such trivia can lead to, ahem, a bit of a major fracas.” “We can ferry each other around.”
“You hope. Don’t look at me. Look at your sainted tutor. I’m just in this because it is a game move for me. I have to make points or I don’t play. But I don’t move blindly. Every move in a game has its consequences. A man not ready for the recoil doesn’t pull the trigger. If I decide I don’t like the consequences, I'm gone. He who doesn’t understand bad consequences gets clobbered just the same. Naive kids who don’t believe in death die anyway. The wide-eyed innocents get fried along with the guilty. Famfeed that. It’s your call. It’s your head.”
“Are you going to transmogrify me into a supergenius?” Rigone rose up off the log like one possessed. He raised his arms and roared to the sky. “No, no, no—a thousand times: No! You won’t even know your brain’s been upgraded! You’ll think like you always have. It is just that in some ways, when you least expect it, you’ll be a little faster, maybe even a little smarter.”
“Will I be able to roar like you?” Eron laughed.
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