The Unraveling

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

  Fift felt zir faces flushing and fought to keep zir mouth an even line. “What do you mean?”

  Pip looked back at zir, once, before turning, trudging on.

  “What I mean, Fift, is that it was quite clear from your brain, during the family meeting, that you aren’t just motivated by an impartial sense of fairness here.” Ve sighed, threading vir fingers together. “Don’t be embarrassed, dear. It’s natural for Staids your age to form strong bonds of affection, to have . . . crushes. It’s the most natural thing in the world! You can ask Grobbard . . . I’m sure ze had any number of ardent secret longings in zir First Childhood. And it’s not so uncommon to have a little moment of . . . confusion about the right target for your affections, to get carried away. It’s just, well . . .”

  Fift’s skin was icy, zir forehead burning. Ze got up in one body and shuffled past zir Father. In vir copper-spiked body, Squell ignored zir; in vir silver-spiked body, ve raised an eyebrow and watched zir go into the hall, but didn’t follow.

  “I don’t . . .” In the body on the bed, Fift looked at zir hands. Ze wished ze had let Squell opaque the room to the house feed. Opaquing now would be practically admitting that zir attachment to Shria was . . . Ze tried to breathe deeply, to slow zir hearts (210% of standard heartrate in the bedroom, 185% in the hallway, 120% following Pip down the stairs . . . )

  “I really don’t wish to embarrass you,” Squell said. Ve half-raised a hand, as if preparing to place it comfortingly on Fift’s shoulder. The hand wavered, retreated, and ended up tugging on the shimmery fabric of vir own clothing.

  Ve doesn’t know anything, Fift thought. Not about what I . . . did. Ve thinks I have a crush, like Minth had on Abador in the lyrical eighth subsection of the fourth responsum of the tenth additional corpus. Maybe ve thinks I haven’t even admitted it to myself?

  Ze couldn’t ask zir social nuance agent; this was dangerous ground, and the agents would probably report back to zir parents. Zir hands were slippery with sweat. Even without neural data, the house feed might know if ze lied.

  The thought of lying outright made zir nauseous anyway—it was as if parts of zir were tearing away from each other, like layers of a pressed fabric coming apart. Had ze wanted to be comforted like an infant when ze let them expose zir brain? To nestle in, let zir Fathers know and decide? What a joke: ze’d only achieved the opposite. Now that Squell had almost glimpsed the truth in Fift’s brain, ze had to tear zir trusting child-self out of zir for good.

  Ze descended the stairs behind Mother Pip (that body trudging, reluctant) and the stairs in the apartment (that body restless, agitated).

  Frill, Grobbard, and Smistria were in the breakfast room—all silent, pretending not to pay attention to the conversation between Squell and Fift. The last thing Fift wanted was to go in there. Ze turned into the empty anteroom instead. By the front door, ze started checking zir message queue.

  Shria and friends were in Wallacomp now, moving through the bustle of Perilax. Striding boldly, heads held high. They must have passed several sluice operators. To be this far from home, they must have some specific purpose . . .

  Squell was looking at zir intently.

  Ze swallowed. “What do you want me to say?”

  “Nothing, dear cubblehedge. I don’t need you to say anything. But I want you to take a step back. I don’t want you to communicate with Shria anymore. I don’t want you to involve yourself in . . . whatever comes next. Just for a while. And after this little jaunt with Mother Pip is over, and those anonybodying cowards have been properly rebuked, I’d like you to, well . . . stay home for a bit.”

  “Not send to Shria at all? Father Squell, I can’t do that!” Even if Shria had said practically the same thing. But that was different! Or was it? Kumru. Zir guts clenched.

  “Cubblehedge. I am trying to be delicate about this, but really . . . I don’t think you realize how dangerous this situation is. For one thing, our ratings hang in the balance, and the last thing you need is an accusation of . . . well, inappropriate inclinations.”

  Fift didn’t want to hear this. In the anteroom, ze kneaded zir hands together and riffled through zir message queue. Homework agent nags, parental fussing, zir classmates’ boring gossip . . . Zir attention agents had recovered themselves enough to clear out most of the bizarre messages from strangers. But there was another message from Thurm’s connection Dobroc Pengasius Um of name registry Hopalong Fennel Trance 3, the Staid who’d suggested asking Hrotrun about Far History, about the time before Vail and Staid.

  Ze told zir agents to run a query on this Dobroc Pengasius Um. Who was ze? How were zir ratings? What about zir history of public emotional transactions? Why would ze keep contacting Fift anyway? The message sat in the queue, unopened.

  “Father Squell, I haven’t done anything wrong.” Sweat prickled zir scalp; did the house know that ze was lying? Would they start searching back through the feed archives, wonder about the lost hour? “And neither has Shria. Anyway, don’t people have enough real things to worry about without—”

  “Fift, listen to me—this isn’t only about what other people think, about our parenthood ratings or our emotional capital or the bets at the bookies’ shops or your future prospects. It’s not even just about the very real threats to this cohort’s existence, up to and including forced dissolution! Those are all just—outside things, consequences. No, the important thing is you, Fift.” Squell bit vir lip. “I think you know I have never been a gender conservative. I’ve certainly spoken up many times in defense of Staids doing some of the more . . . well, collapsing ontologically, for instance! And we have never been terribly controlling about emotional displays and so on. We both know some families that are very strict about Staid children being uncalm! Who use neural enhancements to avoid it. Do you remember the cohort we met in Flouncedaddy with the Staid children who were mood-collared? What was that cohort called? Kydena? Kydara?”

  Ve paused, frowning as though ve were looking it up, but then said, “And I think that’s very wrong. I think Kumru’s stomach would turn. I’ve always wanted you to be a full person, free to make your own choices . . .”

  Mood-collared? Kumru’s eyeballs, this was getting ugly. “Look, Father Squell, I’m sorry for whatever you think I—I mean, I’m totally fine with staying home. Maybe I could just come back here and stay for a handful of days, until the world is back in order—”

  Squell didn’t seem to be paying attention. Ve was staring out into the middle distance, as if replaying memories. “Even before you were conceived, some of us were a little worried.” Ve smiled wanly. “Seven Vails and two Staids—were we really equipped, if you turned out to be a staidchild? But we thought, you know, we have Pip and Grobbard. Pip is so dominant, and so committed! And Grobbard is so . . . so properly Staid, if you know what I mean. Versed in the classics and so on. Though of course Pip is, you know, ah”—ve blushed a little, and looked to the side—“very . . . Vail-oriented. We were all, I think, so flattered by that, amused by it. We didn’t think about whether that might in itself have any . . . impact . . .”

  Dobroc Pengasius Um of name registry Hopalong Fennel Trance 3 was 17 years old, a latterborn, three-bodied Staid from Dimmin habitation on the other side of Foo. Like Fift, a child of Foo, but unlike Fift (according to the agents reporting back) one with excellent ratings. A rock-solid parental cohort: eighty parents! And ze was some kind of Long Conversation prodigy—still in First Childhood, and ze already had a ranking in dialectical subcurrent initiation (which Fift hadn’t even attempted in private). What did ze want with Fift?

  “But perhaps it did have an impact,” Squell said. Ve turned to the wall and stroked a rough scar in the wallskin where the apartment had grown too fast and torn. “Perhaps it’s made it easier for you to get . . . confused. And perhaps we haven’t given you the proper guidance. Perhaps we’ve failed you—”

  “Don’t say that,” Fift said, hating the quiver in zir voice. “Of course you haven’t—”

/>   (“—have to accept,” Bluey was saying as they crossed a byway from Perilax to the bubbling goopfields of Tentative Scoop. Ve ran a finger along the thorns that bordered vir aquamarine face. “It’s not like this fucker can keep claiming to be anonymous now. We know who ve is—”

  (Shria reached into Bluey’s dark hair, untangling and rebraiding the glittering gold threads. Bluey grinned, closed vir eyes, leaning back into Shria’s hands. Shria’s other body, a step behind, watched Vvonda’s profile . . . )

  “Fift, please!” Squell gnawed one of vir thumbs. “It’s perfectly obvious! We don’t even participate in religious rituals . . . as a family, I mean. We pay lip service to the idea, you know, of the Balance—between the quick and the stable, the center and that which protects the center—but . . . we never find the time to . . .”

  (“and then we—” Bluey went on, eyes still closed.

  (“Bluey, shut up,” Vvonda said, eyes on the goopfields around them. “We’ve got audience, and you’re going to run off the lapine.”)

  “. . . and, and it’s hard to be a parent when you’re over three hundred, anyway, and I’m three hundred and sixty! When your own childhood was that long ago, it’s easy to forget how it was. It’s easy to take for granted that your values are obvious, to forget that you need to communicate them . . .”

  Dobroc’s emotional history checked out. {Sane, stable, and respectable.} Fift’s context advisory agent commented. {A thoroughly acceptable contact.} Fift, looking at the transactions with an apprentice banker-historian’s eye, thought Dobroc looked maybe a little . . . intense? But ze opened the message.

  {Most admired Fift,} it began. {Let me repeat my ardent wishes for your family’s continued success and thriving in these current difficulties. I would cherish the opportunity to speak to you sometime in person. Have you, by any chance, studied the lyrical seventh subsection of the fourth responsum to the tenth additional corpus?}

  “Father Squell,” Fift said, “if we’re just talking about a few days, or even a week or two, I can—”

  “Fift! You are in more danger than you think. It’s dangerous to . . . to go astray. You are a child.” Squell’s throat tightened, and tears glistened in vir eyes. “A precious child. Who you are in the world matters—the Balance matters! I know it isn’t always easy to follow the path that’s been chosen for you. Do you think it’s easy to be a Vail?” A tear broke through the welling dam at the corner of one of vir eyes and crept its way down vir cheek. “I have three Staid younger siblings, Fift. Do you think it didn’t seem magical and mysterious and wholly unfair that they were allowed to sit and think for hours, to pass spoons and read and talk about the . . .”—vir voice roughened, softened, an exhalation like a whisper—“. . . the Conversation?”

  {If I could, most esteemed Fift,} Dobroc’s message went on, {I would give you a Singing Fruit like the one Abador gave Minth in that passage.}

  “That they were allowed all that rest, and taken so seriously by the adults, not just cuffed and wrestled with and told to go play? They were engaged in something so important, so entrancing, a vast, rich world of learning and culture. Of course I felt excluded from it—”

  (Vvonda stiffened, and Shria and Bluey and Stogma looked up, following vir gaze.)

  “—I used to listen at the crack of the wall when they had their lessons . . .”

  (Hrotrun dropped from a slipthread, doublebodied. With vem were five other Vails, nine bodies in all.)

  {How foolish of me}, Dobroc had sent, {to write this to you at all! Yet I cannot seem to get it . . . you . . . out of my mind.}

  “But Fift,” Squell said, reaching across and taking zir hand, “I am a Vail. I’m meant to range around, to protect and enliven, to gambol and delight, to fight and feel—to encircle the center that holds and is!”

  Fift looked away.

  (Vvonda stood straight, towering above Hrotrun. If ve was surprised that Hrotrun was already here, ready for them, with friends, ve was trying not to show it. “We’re here,” ve began, too loud, clenching one fist and then the other, “to issue a formal challenge—”)

  “And to be a Staid or a Vail,” Squell said, “is to be something real, Fift, something that has a meaning and a . . . a richness. But to fall between the cracks is just to get lost, I really believe it!” The tears were flowing now, laying shining tracks on vir face.

  {And now, probably for the next hour or two}, Dobroc had written, {I will be sitting and thinking of you and of Abador and Minth! How foolish!}

  Fift couldn’t stand it anymore, sitting passive next to Squell’s humiliating earnestness, and the implication that ze . . . that these things ze felt for Shria meant that ze . . . and zir other Fathers staring at their soup in the breakfast room, pretending not to hear every word . . . and following zir Mother numbly through the crowds of Undersnort . . . ! Ze couldn’t bolt from the bed—zir legs were heavy, feet glued to the floor—but ze had to do something. Ze couldn’t stand another moment of this.

  The body in the anteroom was the only option. Ze went out the apartment’s front door, onto the pathways on the surface of Foo.

  There was something strange about Dobroc’s message, something that didn’t synchronize . . . something it wasn’t saying out loud. Abador and Minth? Ze’d just been thinking of that very responsum.

  On the other side of Foo, Dobroc was walking. Ze was a dark, leathery Staid with a thick unruly shock of black hair and some kind of complex skinwork. Ze had a self-confident but abstracted air. Ze looked up, squinted, nodded to zirself, and disappeared into one of the access tunnels that led down into the heart of Foo.

  Of course, Dobroc could tell Fift was in zir audience, which was suddenly embarrassing; Fift pulled zir attention away.

  (“—found you!” Vvonda cried. “You can’t refuse us! Tell them, Shria!”

  (Shria was bouncing from one foot to the other, vir hands held in front of vem. “We’re taking this to the mats where it belongs, Hrotrun. We’ve got”—ve flushed with pride—“we’ve got preliminary approval from a mat room in Izist. They consider the quarrel legitimate enough! As long as—”

  (Bluey, lips tight, vir opal eyes intense, nodding and glaring at Hrotrun. Stogma, grinning, white teeth showing in vir broad, pleasant dark-blue face . . . )

  “You just have to let go, Fift,” Squell said. “It’s not too late! No permanent harm has been done. But you have to let these dangerous temptations go!”

  Squell’s tears, vir flushed pink face, the fact that ve was filling Fift’s room with vir fluttery emotional vailish excess—it was too much. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Father Squell,” ze said. Maybe the house would claim ze was lying; ze didn’t care. “You’re just being unfair. Shria’s my friend and it’s not vir fault . . . ve’s doing vir best to fix things. Vir ratings, I mean.” Hrotrun would have to accept Shria’s challenge, and their conflict would be moved to the mats where it belonged. Shria would win, and it would be a coup for vem to win a formal match so young, which would blot out the disgrace of the riot and save vir cohort. “Look, maybe I could . . . I could take a break, stay at home, for a few weeks, okay? But—”

  Ze was a little ways past the apartment on a lane that meandered through gardens and pavilions down to the edge of Foo. It was a strange message from Dobroc, all right. There was something charmingly quirky about its randomness. Abador gave Minth the Singing Fruit while sitting on a noise-canceling couch in the middle of a maelstrom, before Minth’s hour of destiny. It was a famous, and moving, story. But Abador was a Vail, which made the whole allusion rather strange!

  Although Fift had never gotten one zirself before, ze knew that Staids zir age sent each other flowery letters full of classical citations and subtle allusions to mutual devotion all the time. But the Temptation of Minth? If Dobroc was sedately flirting, why not reference some devoted Staid couple—why not Sprioli and Funarn, or Ranim and Pugari, or even Imim and Balranti?

  At the edge of a metalscrap garden, zir pa
ce slowed. Was it actually an insult? An accusation? Was even Dobroc insinuating things about Shria? No, that was surely paranoid . . .

  “A few weeks might do it,” Squell said, “as long as you don’t get any more audience! That’s the important thing. If we can just keep this a private matter until things stabilize again. Oh, I’m so angry at the Clowns!”

  No. That made no sense. Seeking out a more marginal Staid just to mock zir didn’t fit Dobroc’s profile; ze was no Umlish. But it would also be very odd for Dobroc—a staidchild who’d made it to ranked dialectical subcurrent initiator at the age of seventeen—to choose an inapt passage!

  Of course . . . Dobroc also knew full well that Fift’s parents would read whatever ze sent Fift. What if the murkiness was intentional? What if ze were trying to slip some kind of secret subtext past them?

  (Hrotrun looked at vir cohort members, all of whom shared vir slightly-too-perfect, slightly-too-similar, poured-from-a-box prettiness. They had the same ordinary bangles and feathers, the same slightly peculiar scarves; but they stood at awkward angles to each other, not quite meeting each other’s eyes, as if they were strangers thrown together by chance, together only grudgingly.)

  “I’m so sorry to say that,” Squell said, kneading vir hands, “because you know I love the Clowns! Everyone does, except your Father Smistria. But why did they have to fool around with the feed? The feed is . . . it’s like our immune system, and to compromise it . . . ! Well. No wonder infections, spiritually speaking, are blooming!”

  Fift looked for Dobroc again. Ze would see Fift in zir audience, but so what? Ze’d just sent zir a message: of course Fift would look zir up, everyone did that when they got a message, it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of.