Six Moon Dance (35 page)

And now, adding irritation to aggravation, here were these two outlanders, asking questions!

“Have you worked here long?” Ellin asked.

“Too long,” snarled Ornery.

“Yes, Madam,” said Mouche, with an admonitory glance at Ornery. They were under instructions to be polite, word having filtered down just what the stakes were in this particular game. It had been intimated that some great penalty might be exacted by the Council of Worlds, a penalty that would affect each and every one of them. Discretion, urged the powers that be. No matter who you are, discretion.

Bao, who was still in his women’s garb, said, “I am seeing gardens with much work invested. What numbers of persons are working to keep them so?”

“A lot,” snarled Ornery from behind his veil.

“More sometimes than others,” said Mouche, leaving himself a way out.

“How many right now?” asked Ellin, with a hint of asperity.

Mouche laid down his shears and tucked in his veils as he said slowly and pleadingly, “Mistress, we don’t know. We are very lowly persons. We are not told things by those who hire us, except to go here or there, to do this or that. Sometimes there are a good many gardeners at meals in the servants’ quarters. Other times, there are fewer. Some who work the gardens may also labor in the stables or the fields. To find out precisely how many, you would need to ask the head gardener or the steward.”

This was the longest speech Ellin had managed to provoke from a veiled man as yet, and she noted the way in which it was delivered. Humbly, but eloquently, with a slight catch in the pronunciation that spoke of a minor speech impediment. Also, the man who spoke stood like a … well, a dancer. Or perhaps an actor. Reason told her he should have been a little stooped and gnarled if he had, in fact, worked a long time in the gardens. Reason told her, also, that the voice should not have sounded so very well trained. It was, in all respects, an attractive voice.

She turned to the other veiled figure and asked, “Is that so? Are you truly told so little?”

“It’s true,” grunted the other. “It’s hardbread and tea, work until noon, soup and hardbread and work until sundown. That’s life on Newholme.”

“It sounds hard,” said Gandro Bao.

“But satisfying,” said Mouche with a grim look at Ornery. “We are content with our lot.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Ornery.

Mouche took a deep breath and spoke directly to Bao. “You ladies are not veiled. Sometimes we who are veiled find working in such conditions troublesome and itchy. Sometimes we get irritable, as my friend is now. He is a good friend, however. I do not want to lose him
as my friend
. Please, do not say to anyone that
my friend
was anything less than accommodating to your needs.”

The four stood staring at one another, open interest on the one side and veiled frustration on the other. With some vague idea of clarifying things, Ellin asked, “Will you take down your veils for us? Just for a moment.”

Ornery and Mouche looked at one another, surprised, Mouche more shocked than Ornery, who had gone long times without veils on the ship.

“Please,” begged Ellin. “We will not mention it to anyone, but we need to discover things about this world, and so much of it is hidden behind … veils.”

“You are not getting into trouble over it,” said Bao. “We are discovering all kinds of things, as Ellin says.”

Well, they had been told to be polite! Though Mouche would have preferred not to display his battered countenance, he did so, with a quick glance around to be sure they were unobserved. The veil dropped at one side, and as it did so Mouche saw in his mind what he would have seen in a mirror, more or less what his interlocutors would see, and it struck him that he and the woman confronting him could have been kin. They had the same coloring. Same bones. Same long, thin hands. Only one of them was badly cut, of course.

Ellin and Bao searched the exposed face before them: ivory skin, a lock of pale hair showing under the cowl, dark brows, green eyes, a spatter of pale beard shadowing mouth and chin, and a new, horrid scar from beneath the left eye to the corner of the mouth. It seemed to be healing cleanly, but the flesh around it was livid and puffed. If it had not been for that, it would have been a handsome though, at the moment, rather furtive face.

“Why do you have to wear the veil?” Ellin asked.

“So as not to stir your insatiable lusts, lady,” said Ornery in a slightly ironic voice, lowering his own veil to display a countenance tanned by the sea winds and the sun.

Ellin managed to look both amused and offended. “My what?”

“Your insatiable lusts,” murmured Mouche. “So we are taught as children.”

“At the moment, I have none,” Ellin said. “Have you noticed that I have insatiable lusts, Gandro—ah, Gandra Bao?”

“I am seeing nothing of that kind, no,” he said, bowing slightly in her direction. “Perhaps, to be helping us, this gentleman will be explaining?”

Mouche leaned on his rake, examining their faces for guile. “Women are easily moved to lust,” he said at last, believing them to be truly interested. “It is part of their biological heritage, which is so very valuable to mankind. Their lusts serve their lineage, of course, since it forces them to bear and tend, which otherwise many would reject as uninteresting. Also, any child they bear is unequivocally their own, and the more males each female can associate herself with, the more likely she has links to survival. This is all sensible and correct as a survival technique, and women’s instincts still thrust in that direction.

“Historically, so we are taught, the same was true for males. They also desire survival, and through the designs and desires imposed on them by their own genetic pattern, wish more than anything to guarantee their own posterity. We are taught how great predator cats kill cubs not their own. Other creatures also do this, including sometimes mankind males, who take up with a woman with children, then kill her children. Males want above all to guarantee their own line. So, in order that men have surety of their lineage and women not be lured into mismothering, men must not stir their lusts.”

“This is making loving very dull,” said Gandro Bao, with a seductive smile at Mouche.

Mouche ignored the smile. “Only for husbands! Say for them rather it is very stern and thoughtful. We are taught it is better that posterity be engendered with coolness, with much deliberate intention. Once that task is completed, however, women are entitled to compensatory joys, and for that they require a Consort who does not make it dull! Someone to indulge their lusts, but not engender children. You see?” Mouche had become carried away with his explanation and had said a good deal more than he intended.

Ellin said to herself, Oh-ho, so here is what compensation is offered. She and Bao looked at one another, eyebrows raised. Mouche and Ornery waited.

Finally, though he was sure he already knew, Bao asked, “What is being Consort?”

“A man trained to cosset women,” said Ornery. “Like him,” and she jerked a thumb in Mouche’s direction.

Mouche merely blinked at her, refusing to be drawn by her chiding tone. From beyond the recently trimmed hedge, they heard the approach of persons, loudly talking to one another. Hastily, Mouche and Ornery rearranged their veils and turned to their work, busily raking while the two agents went thoughtfully back to their window, far above.

“What is hardbread?” Ellin asked.

Bao didn’t know. He summoned a servant. “What is hardbread?”

“A kind of dried cracker that sailors eat, sir. Hardbread and tea. Or so they complain.”

“Sailors, not gardeners?”

“Not gardeners, no. Gardeners eat garden stuff, and bread from the kitchen. Ships have no kitchens, so between barbecues and fish fries ashore, shipfolk eat hardbread.”

“Interesting,” said Ellin. “A sailor and a … a Consort. I would have guessed he was an actor. How did the two of them get to be friends?”

“I think they were meeting for first time not long ago,” said Bao, “but men are striking up friendships quickly. Particularly in adversity. It is having survival benefit.”

“I don’t know what women do,” she said thoughtfully. “Every time I thought I had made a woman friend, they switched me somewhere else. Even the dance classes. They kept moving them around, shuffling them. Sometimes you didn’t see the same people for two shifts running.”

“Forget what is past. Now I am being your friend,” he said.

She gave him a somewhat suspicious look, finding nothing in his expression but placid good will. “Careful, Bao, or you may stir my insatiable lusts!”

He flushed, rubbing with a finger at the furrow between his eyes. “This is not my desire.”

She scarcely heard him. “Besides, are there male-female friends who are truly friends? I’ve never heard of any.”

“There are such friends,” he said firmly. “And if there were never being any, we could decide to be the first.”

 When Ellin and Bao learned the nearest infant school was in Sendoph it was already quite late in the day. Accordingly, they postponed their interviews with children until the following morning. The Questioner emerged from her room in the early evening, seeming somewhat changed. Ellin and Bao had been with her shortly after a maintenance session aboard ship, and they were prepared for the slight uncertainty her appearance evoked.

“It’s the machines,” the Questioner had told them while aboard ship. “The mind is affected by the files and the maintenance machines and so is the body. If I were human, I would change with time, so the machines change me a little, perhaps to make me aware of time passing.” This sounded good, though she felt it probably wasn’t true. Since receiving the information about her donor minds—though certainly “donor” wasn’t the proper word—she had found maintenance more than usually uncomfortable. Now that she
knew
about her indwelling minds, the buffer that held their memories from her own had been breached. Each time she came from maintenance she had learned more about their lives, and each time she felt more angry. Those who had killed her indwelling children were dead these several hundred years, but she hated them still! Hated them, was furious at them, and knew her duty required her to set all such feelings aside.

Ellin launched at once into a report of their conversation with the gardeners along with the inferences she and Bao had drawn from it, all of which Questioner entered into her memory, commenting, “So the one was a sailor and here he is, cutting away at the little hedges. And the other man is, according to the first, a Consort….”

“He talks like an actor,” said Ellin. “And he moves like a dancer. Don’t you agree, Bao?”

“Yes, I am concurring,” said Bao, his voice thickening slightly. The pale gardener resembled someone he had once known well but far too briefly. He cleared his throat. “His voice is projecting extremely well. I am having feelings of recognition, as when I am meeting someone of my own profession. His work is seeming to say that making women happy is mostly acting!”

The Questioner nodded ponderously. “Not a definition most women would appreciate, though I don’t doubt its truth. More often it is women who do the acting. On Generis, in fact, prostitutes belong to the actors’ guild, for it is recognized their profession is pretense. Let us consider: if there were other gardeners here before, and these are here now, presumably they had to get these from somewhere. So, they got them from nonessential areas? The sea and … whatever this other thing is?”

“Compensation,” said Ellin. “Consorts provide pleasurable compensation. The Hags at the Temple referred to it, remember? But I forgot to ask them what it was.”

“I am having one thing more to report,” said Bao, referring to his notes. “There is most unpleasant smell….”

“The one out at the back,” the Questioner said, nodding as she pointed vaguely away. “Yes. I wandered about while you were in town. The smell is near the servants’ quarters. My lexicon would identify this particular smell as a considerable stink.”

“Oh, that at least,” muttered Ellin. “Bao and I thought it was maybe animal excrement.”

The Questioner considered this. “Animal excrement is accumulated near the stables and spread upon the fields. It smells, yes, but this stink has a much higher rating than animal excrement. The ooze of the volbers of Planet Gosh, a notable stench, rates a maximum of seven. This rates an eleven on a scale of twelve. A most putrescent and malodorous reek! Which raises an interesting question. How and why do the servants tolerate it?”

“It seems a minor matter,” Ellin remarked, “but we can ask the servants.”

“Mercy me, no.” Questioner smiled. “One cannot imagine such fetor existing without Mistress Mantelby’s knowledge, though it may be something she would prefer not to discuss. With that in mind, we’ll play a little game to learn why it is she is not greatly offended.”

She then took a few moments to rehearse them, then sent one of the Mantelby servants to Mistress Mantelby, requesting a guided stroll in the gardens for the Questioner and two of her aides.

Marool’s immediate reaction was to reject any such claim on her time, but she caught herself. The Questioner’s numerous entourage was causing a good deal of agitation, and the repression of Marool’s normal appetites was becoming a grave annoyance. The sooner the Questioner could be satisfied and depart, the sooner Marool herself could resume her usual devotions.

She agreed, therefore, to meet the Questioner on the terrace. Questioner showed up with Bao, in wig, and Ellin, who had been coached to be quite Perkins in her persona, as polite as it was possible to be. They proceeded downward into the garden from the lofty and balustered terrace, Questioner leading the way without at all seeming to do so, while Ellin and Bao chatted inoffensively and commented effusively. Marool, though totally contemptuous of the Questioner and her entourage, was lulled into a state of complacent disdain.

“I so seldom have time merely to walk,” Questioner murmured. “One would not think strolling much of an amusement, but we spent such a long time coming to your lovely world, and the ships are never large enough to walk in. I find this gentle ambulation quite wonderful. And may I say, Mistress Mantelby, how beautiful your gardens are. I have seen many, all over the sector, and yours are among the loveliest.”