Cards of Grief (12 page)

Paula Sigman, our Anthro Second, corrected him.

“Troop,” she said.

Hopfner looked surprised.

“Monkeys come in troops.”

We had a good laugh at that since, as the lieutenant pointed out, the trogs did look like monkeys and they
were
the military. Sort of. But that came later, when we were back in the ship for the night. First nights planetside are usually full of such bad jokes and small puns. We need laughter to settle us down, I guess.

You said that was later, Aaron. What else happened in the Queen’s room? Was there entertainment? Did you give them gifts?

We didn’t bring gifts because our studies of the tapes had indicated that the L’Lal’lorians were not a gift-giving people. Except at times of grieving, in the Halls, there was little exchange of monies or presents. Rather they paid for things with a kind of elaborate bartering system and the Royals paid for things with public touching and private tumbling and the ultimate gift of a Royal-bred child. Also, it is a recent Anthro Central policy not to bring gifts.

Is that a regulation? I have no record of it.

Not exactly a regulation, sir. Just a policy, though with time it may become reg. We call it the Manhattan Policy. A recent Funded Study showed that such transfers of gifts, like the ancient buying of the island of Manhattan on Earth leads only to misunderstandings and misappropriations and years of bad feelings. So—no gifts. Of course, since it’s policy and not reg, we can bend it a bit if necessary.

Sir, should I get all of this down?

All of it, Malkin.

They fed us with sweet fruits and cakes and tumblers of a honey-based wine. It was very mild. And we were each supplied with a couple of pillows apiece and had to lie down on them for eating. The lieutenant and his aides seemed uncomfortable, but we anthros fared well enough, even in our landing suits. After learning to eat raw invertebrates while kneeling for hours on the shells with the
jung
! GRAN’OTYLI, cushions and sweet succulents were a pleasure. I did my training under Dr. Z on
jung
!

The Queen herself peeled grapelike sweets for me, but she let Linni teach me how to eat them. If you bite into one quickly, it releases a bitter spurt which even the sweet aftertaste does not erase. But if you first roll it around your mouth for a moment, then squeeze gently with your lips, the juice runs back into your mouth and is incredibly sweet with just a taste of tart. The grapes are called
loro’pae.

Then Prince B’oremos sang for us. After about three or four songs, I asked to see the instrument. It was a plecta, not too different from our mandolin in looks, but with a surprisingly deep tone. I experimented with several runs up and down the fretted neckboard and won a startled, shy, beginning smile from Linni.

Emboldened, I asked the Queen if I might sing for her.

“What can you sing, sky-wanderer?” she asked.

“I can sing one or two of your songs, my lady,” I said. Actually I had about thirty of them in my repertoire but most were their sacred grief songs and not appropriate. “And many more of our own.”

She mused a bit, then said, “I know all of our songs and they interest me not in the least in the mouth of a man from the sky. But what kind of songs do your people grieve with?”

“We sing many kinds of songs,” I said, “and only a few of them are for grief. We also sing for love.”

“What is this word?” she asked, for I had said
love
in English since they hadn’t the word for it.

“It is like—and unlike—your ladanna.”

There was a sharp intake of breath in the room and I wondered if I had misspoken, using a taboo word. Yet there had been nothing in the tapes to indicate that. Perhaps the problem was not with us but with the trogs in the room.

“What do you, sky-farer, know of ladanna?” the Queen asked.

I looked over at Dr. Z. She moved her hand back and forth as if to caution me to tread with care.

“I know…” I began. “I know that it is like—and unlike—plukenna.”

The Queen was silent for a moment, but Linni spoke.

“There is a story, one of the lesser tales, that talks of that difference,” she said. “For it was and it was not that a Queen wanted to know whether it was better to be plowed by a Common Griever or to be sown by a prince. But she knew there was none but a prince past his mission year who could touch her without being consumed by the fire in her skin. So she lay down in the sand and commanded the waves to wash over her and put her fires out. Well, the waters lapped her head and shoulder all that day and the next, but still her skin was hot and dry to the touch. So she went deeper even beneath the waves. Little colored fish swam in between her fingers and seashells washed through the dark ropes of her hair. But still her skin was dry and hot. So she went deeper still till the water washed away her skin and hair and she was nothing but a ligature of bones that neither prince nor commoner could plow. She was grieved by all but sown again by none, so for her, plukenna and ladanna became one and the same. For no one else are they even similar.”

I nodded. “We have a song about the difference ourselves,” I said. I began the old ballad of ‘Tam Lin,’ explaining the story to them as I sang, about the fairy Queen and the girl Fair Janet, both of whom were sown by the young knight Tam Lin. But of course the ending was unsatisfactory to them, for the human girl wins back her own true love from the Queen. I was about halfway through the song when I knew I was going to be in trouble by the end, so I let it trail off.

“Your song does not please me, for it has unpleasant sounds and no real ending, but your singing is pleasant enough,” said the Queen. “Is that a song not of grieving but of…What was your word?”

“Love,” said Dr. Z, standing slowly and moving forward with the easy practiced grace of an anthro, though she weighs close to three hundred pounds. I saw that she had, in the interval of my song, taken the pins out of her hair and it fell in long spirals over her back, down to her waist. There were heavy gray streaks running through the black, which makes her hair even more striking. She has used that trick often with humanoid civs. Have you read her paper on that? It’s brilliant! She stood at the bottom of the dais and bowed her head, letting the hair come forward over her shoulders.

“You are one of those who sometimes leads?” asked the Queen.

“I am,” Dr. Z said and looked up. She was careful not to smile. “Our boys sing almost as nicely as yours, but of course our songs talk of different things. We are a different people.”

“From the sky,” said the Queen.

“Where love is—and is not—the same as it is here on your world,” Dr. Z said.

“Run along, boy,” said the Queen, dismissing me with short, quick flicks of her hand. “I would speak to your Queen.”

We have a full account of Dr. Z’s notes, sir.

I’ve read them. Seems the two “Queens” talked of ruling the trogs and a bit of history and pretty young boys, but no more specifically about Aaron Spenser. And since it is with Anthro First Class Spenser we are concerned, I see no need to read it into the official record, Lieutenant.

As you wish, sir.

I was sent away with the others in the charge of Linni, who showed us around the apartments and who entertained us in a little courtyard with still more food. And though the lieutenant was worried about Dr. Z, worried that we were slowly being split up, nothing bad came of it. In fact, everyone was very pleasant to us; there was an aura of gentleness and good breeding about it all. No one’s voice was ever raised above a whisper. I think it was
that
that bothered Hopfner the most. He said afterward a good shout once in a while might purge them.

Thinking back on it, I guess what they desperately needed was to laugh. But perhaps for them laughing was sacrilegious, like telling a dirty joke in a convent.

Around dark, which seems to seep in slowly around the edges of the sky like long black fingers pointing toward the palace, we were summoned by the Queen. And after much ritual bowing and signing, we were escorted back to the ship. Dr. Z had us give report, which is not so different from what I’m telling you now, except for the use of technical terms which defined the anthropological aspects. Dr. Z coordinated our notes with Hopfner’s.

We have those, sir.

And she told me that I handled myself well under pressure. She did warn me, however, that more pressures were likely to be exerted—on me in particular. And by the Queen.

“She sees young, sweet-faced boys as her own private hunting grounds, Aaron,” Dr. Z said. “And as she is not now grieving anyone important and has nothing better to think about, she is just as likely to want to try you. But be careful. That story the girl told has some truth to it. The Queen held my hand at one point, sister to sister, Queen to Queen, and after a minute, I could feel her skin growing noticeably hotter on mine. A long touch brings it out. Their metabolism is probably very different from ours.”

“I’ll take care,” I said seriously.

She winked at me, and we both laughed.

We went the next day without our heavy suits. The lieutenant and his aides wore dress blues, which were still too hot for the planet. Dr. Z had the anthros dress in white shorts and short-sleeve shirts. Because of her weight—though she said it was because she was our Queen!—Dr. Z wore one of the silky baptism robes from
jung
! instead. The back of her robe was embroidered with a red lizardlike creature, the famous “dragons” or morgs of
jung
!, though they are really more like eels and live underwater. Of course the Queen wanted the robe but Dr. Z did not give it to her, though she let her borrow it for a day. The next morning the Queen had an exact duplicate, or as close a copy as L’Lal’lorian hands could come. Evidently six apprentice grievers, all artists, stayed up the night working on the embroidery.

Didn’t that violate your Manhattan Policy?

Dr. Z didn’t actually
give
the robe to the Queen, sir. She lent it. And got it back.

You seem to have a problem distinguishing between the letter and the spirit of the law, son.

It’s not exactly a law, sir.

Hmmm. There seems to be more than one way to contaminate a culture. Perhaps the wrong person is on trial here. Strike that, Lieutenant. Just my musing.

Let me say, sir, that any contact is a kind of contamination. That’s the first corollary to the Anthro Oath—“to observe, to study, to learn,” is what we say. But we know that anytime you study a culture face-to-face, by the very act of studying, you change it. It’s known as Mead’s Law, sir.

That’s like Heisenberg, sir.

Lieutenant, why don’t you keep
your
musings to yourself. That way they won’t contaminate mine.

Yes, sir.

The point is to keep the contamination as insignificant as possible and to always understand in what way the culture under study has changed because of the contact. I hope that you’ll come to see that it was I—not the culture—that was the most changed.

That, son, will certainly come into our final judgment.

While the Queen and Dr. Z continued their talk, the rest of us went exploring in other ways. Dr. Z had given us assignments, which we were—within limits set by the civs—supposed to carry out. I was to try to visit the Hall of Grief because of my interest in artistic expression. It was my luck to be accompanied by B’oremos, the Singer of Dirges, as he was called.

The prince who had sung for you the day before?

Yes, sir. He took me first to his own rooms where he was fussed over endlessly by a group of trog servants. While they did his hair and nails, I examined the instrument collection he had hanging on his walls. They were all stringed and fretted. In fact, except for the funerary drums, some very minor reedlike pipes, and bells used to announce visitors to and from the Queen, the strings were the only musical instruments on the planet. It was an art form in a very early stage, though the music B’oremos could coax from those strings was impressive.

He bade me choose an instrument to play that day and after almost an hour of trying them, I ended up with something called a harmonus. It was shaped more or less like an ancient Indian instrument, the sitar, with a wide hollow-sounding bowl carved from a gourd and a three-foot-long neck strung with seven strings. I liked the odd modalities of the thing and adopted it for my own.

Once during that hour, when I was sitting with the harmonus in my lap—you had to play it sitting—the tune I picked out was so strange I laughed out loud.

B’oremos looked over at me from the pillow where his servants were still working on his face. “That is a peculiar harsh sound you make.”

I apologized. “I am not yet used to this last string,” I said, pointing to the wide drone string that ran only half the length of the harmonus.

“I am talking of the grating noise you made with your mouth, like the sound of moons’ caps snapping closed.”

I laughed again.

“There,” he said, pointing at me. His servants bowed and elbowed one another. He dismissed them irritatedly with his hands.

“It is a laugh,” I said. “Do your people not laugh at all?”

He shrugged back with a wry, small smile. “We are men of tears. To grieve well is an art.”

“We are men without tears,” I said. “We try not to grieve at all.”

“Well, Man Without Tears,” he said, “then it is time to take you to the Hall of Grief. There we will find the tears in you as easily as you find the music in that.” He pointed languidly at the harmonus, which I shifted from my lap.

He shouted, and a new servant entered on silent feet.

“This is Mar-keshan,” said my host. “He is to servants what the Queen is to women.”

Mar-keshan bowed, read his master’s fingers, and with quick flicks of his own fingers silently answered back. I liked Mar-keshan at once. He was brisk, almost to the point of brusqueness. His round face was a berry brown, his eyes the bleached-out blue of a sailor’s, the kind that gives a double impression—that of blindness but of far-seeing as well.