Six Moon Dance (15 page)

“Oh, gracious,” cried the door. “Let us not speak of reportings. Feelings are strained. Emotions are liberated in unattractive ways. This is understood. Being nominated is stressful. Suddenness is resented by all organisms. Please. Sit down and let yourselves be comforted.”

Again hysteria threatened to erupt. Ellin’s jaw clenched tight as she sank back into the chair. One did not achieve pleasantness by greeting incivility with incivility. She knew that as well as she knew … anything.

A six-legged server came scuttling across the floor, eager to be of help. “Something to drink?” it whispered in a husky little voice. “A massage of feet? Of neck? Some food? Milky nutriment often soothes. Nordic types are lacto-tolerant. Please?”

“Tea,” she said in her Charlotte Perkins voice. “Hot tea. In a real cup. With lemon flavor and sweetness. And a cookie.” Long ago, the infant Ellin had been comforted with cookies by Mama One. She had not had a cookie for many years.

The server scuttled off.

“Apologies,” Bao said wearily. “I am being frangled.” He sighed and sank into the chair across from her, looking around himself at the luxurious setting. There were real carpets. There were real fabrics at the sides of the view screens. The chairs were large and cushiony. The small table at his side had the appearance of real wood, though that was, of course, unlikely. Still, going to the trouble to make it look like that was an indication of … something. “They are believing us to be important,” he said.

“They want us to believe they think we’re important,” she snarled, unwilling to forgive him. “Sending us off for years and years, disrupting our lives! All this is like offering a child candy if he will be good.” She had seen a good deal of that in Perkins Store, where so-called penny candies were provided for children as souvenirs of Old Earth.

He nodded, his eyes fixed on her face as though he had just noticed her. “There is being high probability we must be good regardless, so candy is being offered for making us more happy about inevitables. A bonus, perhaps?”

“Bribe, not bonus!” She snorted. Newholme. She had no idea where Newholme was. They spoke together:

“Are you knowing where …”

“I have no idea where …”

He laughed. After a moment, unable to help herself, she smiled waveringly.

He made an expansive, almost girlish gesture. “We are being angry at situation, not at one another. Maybe we are being angry with Questioner, but Questioner is not knowing and is not caring, so we waste anger on nothing. It is clear we are being together for some time. Let us be easy together.”

“Is the Questioner a she?”

“So I am understanding. Of a sort.”

The server brought the tea and several cookies, real cookies that smelled of vanilla and lemon. Ellin smiled at this and allowed herself to be soothed. Gandro Bao was right, of course. There was no point getting frangled with one another.

“Do you have family?” she asked.

“I was natural born,” he said. “I have mother, father, one sister.”

“Do you look anything like your sister?” Ellin asked curiously. Full siblings were rare except for clones. The genetic agencies usually required donor insemination for second births, to keep the gene pool as widely spread as possible within types.

He nodded, raising a hand to the server, which came buzzing over, stopping at his elbow. “I am desiring a ham sandwich,” he said. “With mustard and a pickle.”

“Corpulent likelihood,” murmured Ellin.

“I am testing if we are really important,” he said, crinkling his eyes at her. “Your question about my sister, yes, she is looking much like me, Asian type, and we are having similar facial structures. What is your family?”

“No family I know of. Except clones. I was born on preassigned ethnic quota, so my parent could have been anyone….”

“I am looking at you,” he corrected her. “I am thinking not just anyone, no.”

She flushed. “I never asked if I had non-clone siblings, full or half. Somehow it didn’t seem to matter.”

“Where was your rearing?” he asked.

“First in an infant fosterage, but I don’t remember much about it, to tell you the truth, except for Mama One. They cloned six of me, and History House approved us for fosterage—not together, of course—then it picked me up on a quota-clone contract when I was six …”

“After you were infant?”

“I lived at the History House boarding school, with dancing lessons every day, in a nurturance group—foster brothers and sisters—with our Mama and Papa Two, until I was twelve. Then I went into the ballet school, four of us with a foster aunt, for six years of additional education in dance and drama and twentieth-century studies. Then the corps de ballet. And they’ve moved me around. This last History House was my fifth.”

He grinned ruefully. “It is not sounding like much fun. How is it feeling to have foster parents? And foster aunts?”

She frowned, chewing on a mouthful of cookie, surprised to find her eyes filling. She shook her head impatiently, refusing the tears. “Well, actually, I loved Mama One very much. I guess you could say I never really got over the separation. I still hear from her, every now and then. Mama Two was different, but as she told me herself, her job was different. And when it came time for Foster Aunt, her job was to get the four of us through the second-decade miseries. Do boys have miseries?”

He laughed, his eyes half shut, his body shaking. “Oh, Ellin Voy, I am remembering all such things. Yes. Miserable boys, I am remembering.”

“How’d you get into a History House?” she asked. “Tapped, or on purpose?”

“I was being tapped,” he admitted. “I was attending school in town where family is living. There, in the school, I am being always … what is called a laughjerker …?”

“A clown?”

“You are knowing the exact word. Clown, yes. Everything is being a joke for the face and for the voice and for the legs, always being funny, always making the laughter, always falling down so much they are calling me Bao Bao Down. So many times I was having the settle-down speech, the school was getting tired of saying it. So, instead, they were giving me the test battery, and as soon as I was reaching twelve years, my family was being told I am born actor, born comic, born Kabuki dancer for women’s parts—all Kabuki is dancing by men, you know …”

“I didn’t know. Why?”

“Oh, long ago sex-workers were dancing Kabuki to be fetching customers, so Emperor was issuing decree that only men could be dancing. My life is being like your life. I am having foster uncle and three brothers also with miseries, and I am learning in the theater school, in the dance school. I am playing parts of women characters in Kabuki; princess so-so in Japanese drama; jokey fisherman wife in China Sea; fall-down silly daughter of man who is keeping cormorants.” He shrugged. “That one is fun, much miming of being in rocking boat, making whole audience seasick. Now I am dancing most of time, and for rotation I am doing weird empress or being strange holy woman.” He folded his arms, half closed his eyes and gazed directly ahead with a lofty, detached expression of infinite disdain. “Very wise. I am memorizing whole book of Confucian analects.”

“Tell me an analect,” she begged.

“Major principles suffer no transgression. Minor principles allow for compromise.”

“What does it mean?”

“It must be meaning my dancing is a minor principle,” he said, laughing. “For my career is being compromised.”

“I guess that’s how I feel, too.”

“Then we are agreeing on two things.”

“Two?”

“We are agreeing on what is minor and what is principle.”

She sat back, suddenly relaxed. This duty might not be so bad. He seemed all right. The expression on her face was mirrored on his, and they both smiled, pleased to be with one another, beginning to anticipate whatever it was that was coming. The server interrupted this calm to bring Gandro’s sandwich, which he sniffed at, tasted, and pronounced real—or so close as made no difference.

Though soothed, Ellin was not entirely willing to give up worrying. “You know, even though we’re both History House contractees, even though we think we know the period, this Newholme could be totally different from anything we know about.”

“Oh,” he nodded, chewing, his face very serious, “I am having no doubt about that. I am sure it is being very, very strange.”

W
est of Sendoph, the terraces were narrower and steeper than in the farmlands to the east, climbing from the river in a great stair flight that ended on a final set of wooded ridges where the homes of the elite were built, very near the wilderlands. There among others of its kind stood the mansion of Mistress Marool Mantelby—Monstrous Marool, as she was known to some—the youngest of eight sisters, whose parents had done Marool great services firstly by having had no sons, and secondly by having died along with their eldest daughter, after they had sold off six younger daughters but before they had been able to sell Marool herself.

Her prosperity had come upon her thuswise:

Margon g’Mantelby the elder, Marool’s grandfather, had dowered in for his son, Margon Jr., a very expensive daughter of the Rikajors, a family known to run to girls. Though the Rikajor girls had a high opinion of themselves, Margon Jr. was an acceptable if not intelligent candidate, and the Mantelby fortune, gained through the fiber trade, was large and growing. Margon g’Mantelby’s offer was accepted, and Stella was dowered in to the Mantlebys.

In the first five years of their marriage Stella outdid herself in the production of five daughters, all born at home. Though the Margons, Sr. and Jr., gave every public evidence of pleasure in accepting the congratulations of their peers, they were heard to remark among friends that a male child would have been acceptable. The girls, after all, would be dowered away from the line. Where were the Margon sons to continue the line itself? Who would inherit? One did not want as heir a dowered-out nobody! One wanted a son as like oneself as possible!

Mayelan, the eldest daughter, and her two oldest sisters were much cosseted. The next two were not so much admired. Margon Sr. had died by the time numbers six and seven, twins, were born, and the last daughter, Marool, born three years after her next sister, was the straw—so Margon said in private—that fucked the camel. It had been the last attempt to produce a son, as Margon and Stella had been married ten years, and Stella’s contract provided that after that term she might select a Hunk to keep her company and take her about the city and do what Hunks were known to do so well.

Thus Marool was born into a house in which fortune was assured, domestic tranquility was without fault, and her father seldom talked with her mother. Or vice versa. The Hunk was very nice, but he was her mother’s Hunk, and though Hunks were taught to cosset children, they were also cautioned not to overdo it. Girls could be ruined by too much charm too early in their lives, for the reality of marriage would then come as too great a shock.

In truth, the Hunk was not even tempted to cosset Marool. Unlike her sisters—tall, pale girls with blunted edges, like monuments of warm wax—Marool was dark and pudgy in the places she was not sharp, the first of her many contradictions. She was born angry. Her first words, to her heedless chatron-nanny, were “I hate you.” In this, as in most of her later life, she was completely truthful, for she did not care enough about anyone’s opinion to lie. When Marool was eight, her second oldest sister was dowered in by a wealthy family, followed by the next oldest sister, and so on each year until Marool was almost fourteen. At that point she became the only child left in the house except for Mayelan, the heiress, who had not yet found a man who was both willing to dower out and rich enough to tempt Stella and Margon. With the other daughters gone, family attention, long distracted, turned in Marool’s direction. There was, her parents felt, no point in keeping her as a family member. Since she had been allowed to run rather wild, she would need some work before she could be offered for dower. They decided to hire a team of Hagger trainers to clean her up and teach her to behave in a civilized manner. If that didn’t work out, they would offer her for Temple Service.

Rooly, as she called herself, was informed of these plans, at which point the resentment she had been stoking since she was in the nursery was ignited. There was a good deal of it to burn, and burn it did, with a sullen, consuming flame. She had been just another girl in an establishment where a son was desperately wanted. She was a disappointment. Well, so were they.

On her fourteenth birthday, Marool was reintroduced to her mother, who at first frowned at this dark changeling, trying to recall her name, and who then tried, during the ride to the Temple, to come up with a description of Marool that would appeal to the Hags. Many, many girls were picked for Temple Service; sometimes an only daughter was picked. Stella Rikajor, however, had thus far lost none of her daughters to the Temple, nor had her mother before her. The Rikajor family supported the Temple lavishly, and their generosity had been kept in mind.

Stella decided she would be honest about Marool and simply ask the Hags for a favor. While Stella was about this business, Marool herself slipped away into the Sanctuary to ask a few innocent-seeming questions. By the time she was rejoined by her disappointed mother—the Hags had not been responsive to Stella’s needs—Marool had the information she needed.

The following morning, Marool returned to the Temple alone. Though she was not supposed to leave the Mantelby mansion, she had sneaked into town often enough to know the way.

“I want to see the directory of Hagions,” she said to the two Hags on duty, D’Jevier and Onsofruct. Both were taken aback by this request from one so young and so unprepossessing in appearance. Marool was, in truth, very unkempt and disheveled, though, as D’Jevier remarked later, her manner forbade any motherly attempt to either kempt or hevel her. D’Jevier was not unkindly, and though she felt some antipathy toward the girl, she made herself be generous.

“What are you seeking, Marool? Perhaps it is something I can help you with?”