There was a grainy clip of Dobroc’s present position; then ze passed out of range of that visual pickup and Fift could only hear zir footsteps in an echoing space, and behind them, a dull thrumming and a hushed roaring.
“There have been more riots,” Squell said, “did you know that? Since the feed has been back up! Velvet-waving hooligans and marginals with nothing to lose . . . !” Ve shuddered. “I’m sorry, smoothling, I shouldn’t be burdening you with this.” Ve took a deep breath. “The point is, everyone’s doing their best to calm things down again. If you avoid getting any more audience, if things stabilize, if you break off contact with Shria, if you don’t comment in the world-of-ideas, if you stay in the apartment for a few weeks—” Ve heaved a sigh, and tried to smile.
(An electric look passed between Hrotrun and vir cohort. They looked like they were gathering courage, grim and excited and scared at the same time, with a hint of mounting euphoria. It seemed like a strong reaction to a challenge to the mats by a bunch of vailchildren . . . although, if they were so marginal, maybe it was as much of a breakthrough for them as it was for their challengers? Hrotrun reached up and fingered the odd-looking scarf around vir throat . . . )
Dobroc was not visible, but zir one public location was clear enough—ze was in the access tunnels that threaded into the fulcrum of Foo. That’s why ze wasn’t visible—feed pickups were sparse there, and interested in maintenance, not people.
Anyone could go to the fulcrum, though hardly anyone did. Fift shuddered, remembering one class trip to the heart of Foo. At the fulcrum, the grinding and straining and crackling of the muscle-engines turning their habitation around its axis was so loud, even the pickups couldn’t hear anything. Fift’s ears, zir whole body, had been saturated with the bone-crushing sound. It had been agony until the class finally reached a noise-canceling couch, placed there to give a little respite to those on some industrial errand . . .
“—then things will be fine again!” Squell said, with a forced brightness. “And I do so want things to be fine again for you, cubblehedge.” Ve tentatively reached out and took Fift’s shoulder.
(Hrotrun’s fingers on the scarf at vir throat, stroking it, as if it were something soft, luxurious, sensual. As if . . . as if it were velvet . . . )
A noise-canceling couch.
Like the one where Abador gave Minth the Singing Fruit . . .
Fift turned abruptly and headed for the edge of Foo. There was a stairway there that clung to the outside of the habitation and led to a tunnel into the fulcrum.
The fulcrum: where you were practically invisible, and where it was so loud that, if you were sitting on a noise-canceling couch in the middle of the maelstrom of sound, you could talk and no one could hear you . . .
“So,” Squell said, “can you do that for me, my child?”
Not send to Shria? At all? There was no way ze could agree to that. Except, of course, that that’s just what Shria had asked for. “Let me think about it,” Fift said, without looking up at zir Father. Ze lay down and closed zir eyes, as if tired.
(Hrotrun took vir hand from vir scarf. Ve walked across the broken landscape of the abandonage, right up to Shria. Stogma and Bluey tensed, but Vvonda made a show of standing loose, and Shria just raised one of vir fiery red eyebrows, grinned vir lavender grin.
(Hrotrun placed one finger on Shria’s clavicle, traced sensually along its length. “You want an answer to your formal challenge, do you, youngling?” ve said.
(Shria’s nostrils flared. In anticipation? In anger?)
“All right, cubblehedge,” Squell said. Ve got up from the bed. “Rest a little. We’ll talk again soon.”
(Hrotrun punched Shria in the stomach.)
15
It wasn’t the same as the riot.
It wasn’t hundreds. It wasn’t faceless red and blue anonybodies. There wasn’t that terrible roar, soaking into Fift, surrounding zir, dissolving zir like a soupcube in soup. It was just sixteen bodies: Shria’s friends, Hrotrun’s cohort . . .
Over the feed, the shoving and kicking, the tackles and grappling and gut-punches, seemed flat, bleached of emotion, unreal. Almost comical.
But it wasn’t funny.
Fift saw, in the stiffening of zir Fathers around the breakfast room table, in the way they caught one another’s glances and raised eyebrows, that they’d seen it, too.
All three of Fift’s throats were dry.
Hrotrun’s hand, grappling for purchase, tangled in Shria’s bright orange hair. Vvonda’s shoulder barreling into them, taking them down; velvet; someone yanked away and thrown; the crunch of someone’s fingers breaking; an ankle sweeping feet off balance and Hrotrun’s willowy cohort-partner collapsing like ceramic disks clattering to a floor; Bluey’s hand closing on someone’s arm, and someone else slamming into vem, tearing vem away; a body bucking like a desperate lapine beneath the crush of other bodies; sweat glistening on violet skin, sliding against smooth bone-white limbs . . .
Fift pushed it all away, occluded that part of the feed. In the silence, in zir bare room, ze could feel zir heart pounding.
Halfway down the stairway to the access tunnel, ze put zir hands on the rail and leaned out into the breeze coming from beneath the habitation.
Breathed.
What was ze doing?
Why was ze going to meet this Dobroc person?
Ze didn’t want some pious gloomy Long Conversation pedant. Or some gloating, simpering, prissy gossip, offering false sympathy over Shria. Or some perfect, responsible, latterborn staidkid, pitying the mess ze and Shria were making of their lives . . .
Disturbingly, ze had an audience, and it was growing. Several hundred people were watching zir do nothing but stand on a stairway and look out over Temereen.
(In Undersnort, where ze waited with zir Mother in a long line for a sluice, there were a few thousand observers, checking in to see if ze’d found zir second attacker.)
It must have seemed to Shria like the perfect solution to the problem: issue a direct challenge, bring the matter onto the mats, where it would become a source of reputation and approval. Who could have known that Hrotrun and vir cohort would be so erratic, so irresponsible, so dangerous?
{Fift!} Father Smistria sent. {Whatever are you doing hanging off the side of Foo? Haven’t you caused enough trouble?}
Fift gritted zir teeth. “I’m taking a walk,” ze said aloud, in zir bedroom, where all zir parents could hear. “A walk. I need to think.” Ze told zir agents to block zir parents’ grumbles. If they wanted to keep pestering zir, they’d have to send someone in a body up to zir room.
Second afternoon light, gold and bluish-white, limned the habitations below.
Ze went down the stairs.
There were two Peaceables holding tubes of stoppergoo flanking the entrance to the access tunnel.
Fift’s heart stuttered. Would they stop zir? What are you doing out here, staidchild? Don’t you know there have been riots? Go home!
One Peaceable nodded to Fift calmly. The other didn’t even seem to notice zir.
They were watching out for Vails. For velvety cloth. Not a plump little staidchild in a plain white shift.
Fift went into the great dim tunnel past the surging, humming tubes of liquid.
Ze walked past abstract displays commemorating Our Mothers Who Dug Fullbelly, striated planes of gray hanging in midair, and faintly glowing mold-graffiti on the walls (“Your crimes are invisible,” “stanza 1345 4th subsec 2nd resp 8th corp” “Our Fathers Who Mugged Dullbilly,” “For A Good Time Call Kumru”). Ze walked among puddles of condensation and the scurrying trashrats who stopped to sip from them. The light was a dim amber. An intermittent breeze from the ventilating wall-lungs swept across zir, tugging zir robes first this way, then that.
Ze wouldn’t look at Shria over the feed. Ze didn’t want to see it. Not this. Not again.
Ze wouldn’t send to vem. Ve’d told zir not to bother vem. Ze’d obey Father Squell.
&
nbsp; Ze didn’t look, but ze felt vem anyway, in memory. Vir silken lavender skin; vir rich mellow smell; the pressure of vir forehead on zir shoulder; vir body in flight, slamming into the red nobody.
The sound of the laboring muscle-engines grew from whispered to insistent to overwhelming to painful. Then, finally, there was the couch.
Dobroc stood up.
Fift looked down. Ze couldn’t look at zir. This was a mistake. But the hurricane of sound, loud enough to rattle zir teeth, pushed zir forward.
As Fift approached the couch, the monstrous sound around zir flooded into white noise, then sighed away to nothing, leaving zir ears ringing in a gentle silence.
Ze sat down.
Dobroc sat down on the other end of the couch. There would have been room for a body or two to sit between them, though they’d only brought one body each. They didn’t bow, or cup ears, or exchange any formal greetings. Fift couldn’t raise zir eyes to Dobroc’s. Ze looked at the hem of Dobroc’s shift instead.
The couch smelled of chalky industrial dust, and beneath that, the slightly acrid, almost-human smell of Foo’s great muscle-engines.
Ze couldn’t see Dobroc over the feed; they were out of the range of any pickup. Ze checked recent footage instead, zoomed in on Dobroc strolling the interdecks with a look of concentration, smiling mildly at the edge of a group of older Staids. Under zir thick, unruly shock of black hair, zir beige skin had been worked into an intricate topography of folds, ridges, grottoes, channels, swirls, cracks, and labyrinthine wrinkles.
It was an original and adept piece of somatic engineering. Fift had never seen anything like it before. It was dramatic, but also delicate: it made Dobroc seem like a maze to be entered, to lose yourself in. Fift couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to touch that skin.
Had Dobroc created this look zirself? Such a dramatic design would seem to imply a certain self-confidence and poise, particularly in someone so young. Unless zir parents had chosen it for zir.
Dobroc sat just as silent and reticent as Fift on zir end of the couch.
At the top of the sluice to Undersnort, Fift shuffled along behind Pip in the midst of a hodgepodge crowd. Who was the second attacker? Would Pip tell zir if ze asked now?
Mother Pip hadn’t said anything about Shria; ze just stared out into the middle distance, probably working on the accounts of some client. As if Fift’s . . . best friend wasn’t ruining vir life in the goopfields of Tentative Scoop. As if nothing was real, and nothing mattered. This plodding through stairs, byways, sluices—it was like Holy Kumru’s endless time-loop ordeal in the snow, “until all meaning was lost, until atonement blurred away the long-forgotten thing atoned for . . .”
In zir room, Fift sat alone, looking at the tiny scar on the wall where the house had grown too fast, stretched too hard. Ze should probably do some homework, if ze could concentrate. Ze’d abandoned the Ranhulo, but other assignments kept flowing in from zir scholastic agents. Ze’d done the assigned review of instant-fame comportment, and it was all very sensible advice. Ze hoped there wouldn’t be points for practical application, though, since meeting an instant-fan—if that’s what Dobroc was—with very tenuous prior connections to zir, alone, in a concealed area, was definitely against the rules.
Dobroc cleared zir throat. “Thank you for seeing me,” ze said. Zir voice was gentle and clear with a hint of roughness, like fingers stroking warm sand. That voice must be part of why ze was ranked; you could fall into it, and be carried off, to the Ages before the Ages.
“Oh,” Fift said. “Well, of course.” Ze looked at zir hands, fingers grasping knuckles.
What do you want? ze thought, but didn’t, of course, say. The silence of the couch was immense; zir heart throbbed just beneath zir hearing. What had Fift been thinking, coming here? Was ze that lonely? Was it Dobroc’s words of support, the lure of someone admiring zir? Maybe Dobroc was just being polite.
Ze wanted to check on Shria, but if they were still fighting, ze didn’t want to see it. Or maybe the Peaceables had arrived to break up the riot? Maybe not: in the world-of-ideas, people were saying that the Peaceables had been overstretched since the Unraveling began, with all the cohorts failing or being forcibly disbanded, all the newly incoherent to herd to Idylls. So maybe the Peaceables wouldn’t have arrived yet. Maybe that was even worse.
Did Dobroc know about Shria?
Fift’s agents were quiescent. Perhaps they were lulled by the silence, perhaps the chaos and motion of the fulcrum distracted them, or perhaps something else was occupying their attention—something in the world beyond Fift’s view. But they were surely watching zir conversation with Dobroc. How far could ze trust them to respect zir privacy? Would they report back to zir parents about what was said here?
“I’m . . . glad you came,” Dobroc said.
“Okay,” Fift said. Kumru, this was awkward.
“I have been . . . in your audience lately,” Dobroc said. “Perhaps you’ve noticed.”
“Yes,” Fift said. “You sent the question. That I asked Hrotrun. About Vail and Staid.”
Dobroc cleared zir throat again. “Yes. I am sorry that . . . well, I’m afraid it didn’t help you. It seemed only to irritate your Mother.”
Fift looked up; Dobroc was looking at zir own hands, folded before zir.
“It’s okay,” Fift said. “It was a good question.”
Dobroc smiled a small smile of relief. “Yes, I think so. I often wonder . . . well. I’ve been in your audience, you see, since you talked to Thavé.” Zir eyes widened a little.
“Oh . . .” Fift said.
“I’m what you might call . . .” Ze shrugged. “A Thavé-watcher? It’s a, a hobby, you know. There aren’t so many of us. I, uh, I don’t tell everyone this. My parents don’t approve of it.”
“Oh.” Fift tried to imagine being latterborn in a cohort of eighty parents. It was a tremendous amount of power standing behind you, of safety . . . but if they disapproved of what you cared about, imagine the pressure . . .
“They think it distracts me from what’s important,” Dobroc said glumly. “From the Conversation.”
“Do you—do you not want to compete in the Long Conversation? You’re such a, I mean, you’re so good. They must be proud of you, right?”
Dobroc grimaced, zir teeth white in zir leathery, furrowed, downturned face. “I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say . . . proud. You know it’s a specialist cohort, right? All eighty of my parents are Staids. All eighty of them are ranked in different aspects of the Long Conversation. The whole thing is a project designed to produce, you know, the next Ranhulo or whatever.”
“Kumru!” Fift said. “I didn’t know! What would happen if they’d had vailkids?”
“Two of my older siblings are Vails,” Dobroc said, and sighed. “Their lives are . . . well, it’s not great for them, let’s put it that way. Talk about being shunted to the margins. It’s not great for my elder Staid siblings who didn’t measure up, either. The ‘disappointments.’” Ze shrugged. “Then there’s me. The latterborn. As long as I stay ranked, as long as I maintain a reputation as a Conversationalist destined for greatness, I’m not a disappointment yet. When I lose the thread . . .” Ze shrugged again. “Then they have another kid, and I get supplanted.”
“Kumru!” Fift said.
Dobroc glanced shyly up at zir, then down again. “Fift, I don’t mean to complain to you about my life. It isn’t so bad. I have lots of privilege that I never earned.”
“But all that pressure . . . does it make you . . .” Fift took a breath. Could ze ask this, really? But ze was sick of the guarded, standoffish way the staidkids ze knew talked, sick of never saying what ze felt. And here ze was, in the thundering, invisible heart of Foo, in this little pocket of silence, with Dobroc’s silken voice. “Does it make you hate the Long Conversation?”
Dobroc looked up, meeting Fift’s eyes. Zir eyes were the same color as zir skin; in feed footage it had made zir look blank, muted,
but face to face they were rich and warm. “Oh no! I love the Conversation! That is . . . I love it for what it’s meant to be, for what it could be. But I hate what we’ve turned it into: rules and proctors and rankings and secrets, part of the way we police the world and force everyone into little boxes, everyone ashamed of their performance, competitive and grasping! All these Staids with cramped little imaginations holding these stiff recitations up as . . . as some kind of consolation, proof that at least they’re better than Vails! As if the Conversation could be hoarded, or gloated over. It’s become a prison, when it was only ever meant to be freedom, just freedom! ‘As flight requires a gravity well, as language requires separation of minds, so my words are prison guards only to liberate . . .’”
They were Muon’s words, from the discursive introduction to the second work of the fifth cycle. In Dobroc’s mouth they were not pompous; they were electric. The skin of Fift’s necks prickled.
Fift reached the front of the line for the sluice and looked over to Pip, who roused zirself with a sudden twitch, arched an eyebrow at Fift, and motioned zir forward. Fift launched zirself into the sluice, and hurtled down, a little too fast to be perfectly proper, feeling the wind on zir face.
Ze scooted a little closer to Dobroc on the couch.
“Have you ever met Thavé?” Fift asked zir.
“Oh no!” Dobroc said. “No, I’ve never even tried. That time you met zir in the pavilion was one of the closest sightings to Foo, and even then, well—I don’t think I could have traveled out that far.”
Fift hit the braking goop, plowed a bodylength into it, and climbed out. Ze stood there, waiting for zir Mother.
“We couldn’t have either,” ze said. “I mean, not if we didn’t have Tickets . . .” Ze realized abruptly that ze was carrying zir Ticket—the actual physical object—in a pocket of the shift ze was wearing here, on the noise-canceling couch . . . which meant that zir location here at the fulcrum was being cached and published by Cirque-watchers . . .
“That’s when I began . . . to admire you,” Dobroc said. “You and Shria Qualia Fnax of name registry Digger Chameleon 2. Your forthrightness—your honesty—they’re what drew Thavé out! I don’t think anyone beyond the deep core of the world’s husbandry has heard zir speak so frankly or so, well, emotionally, for at least two hundred years . . .”
The Unraveling Page 19