Spring 2007 (4 page)

Kusak should have done something useful and tactful
about the matter, because he had also hoped and planned for a new kind of
child, one fit to live more lightly on our stricken Earth. Captain Kusak tried
to speak some common-sense to his wife, I think; but he was clumsy, so this
made her stubborn. Baratiya lost friends and her social prospects darkened. She
obsessed so single-mindedly about the child that even her husband grew
estranged from her.

Baratiya is more sensible now that other such children
have been born to us. At the time, though, this woman was the talk of our
Station.

You see, though motherhood is the golden key to
humanity’s future, it can be a leaden burden in the present day. And as for the
past–well! Many of us scarcely understand that a mere half-century ago,
this world was crowded.

Certain grand people existed in those greater, louder,
richer days. These moguls knew that a general ruin was coming to the
Earth–for they were clever people. They feared our planet’s great
calamity, and they schemed to avert it, or at least to adapt to the changes.
They failed at both efforts, of course. The heat rose so suddenly that the
rains dwindled and the mass of mankind starved in a space of years.

Rich or poor, the ancients perished quickly, but some
few of that elite had a fierce appetite for living. Among them was a certain
grand lady, a pioneer founder of our own Hill Station. Privately, we call this
persistent woman “Stormcrow.”

I myself have nothing to say against her
ladyship–if not for her, I would have no post within Government. However:
if a little girl who eats straw differs from the rest of womankind, then a
woman who never seems to age is even more remarkable.

Our Stormcrow is black-eyed, black-haired, slender,
brown, clever, learned and elegant, and, taken all in all, a dazzling creature.
Stormcrow sleeps a great deal. She pecks at her food like a bird. She lives
with her servants in a large and silent compound with shuttered blinds. Yet
Stormcrow takes a knowing hand in all we do here.

That old woman has no more morality than a rabbit. You
had only to mention her name over the tea-and-oatmeal for every younger woman
in the room to pull a sari over her head straightaway. Yet Stormcrow was witty
and bright, and astoundingly well-informed–for Stormcrow, despite the
world’s many vicissitudes, owned a computer. She invoked her frail machine only
once a day, using sunlight and a sheet of black glass.

That machine was and is our Station’s greatest marvel.
Its archives are vast. Even if her own past glories had vanished, Stormcrow
still possessed the virtual shadow of that lost world.

They knew a great many fine things, back then. They
never did our world much good through the sophistical things that they knew,
but they learned astonishing skills: especially just toward the end. So: given
her strange means and assets, Stormcrow was a pillar of our community. I once
saw Stormcrow take a teenage girl, just a ragged, starving, wild-eyed, savage
girl from off the plains, and turn her into something like a
demi-goddess–but that story is not this one.

We therefore return to Captain Kusak, a brusque man with
a simple need of some undivided female attention. Kusak’s gifted baby had
overwhelmed his wife. So Kusak’s male eye wandered: and Stormcrow took note of
this, and annexed Kusak. Captain Kusak was one of our best soldiers, an earnest
and capable man who had won the respect of his peers. When Stormcrow appeared
publicly on Kusak’s sturdy arm, it was as if she were annexing, not just him,
but our whole society.

Being the creature she was, Stormcrow was quite
incapable of concealing this affair. Quite the opposite: she publicly doted on
Kusak. She walked with him openly, called him pet names, tempted him with
special delicacies, dressed him in past ways.… Stormcrow was clawing herself
from her world of screen-phantoms into the simpler, honest light of our present
day.

Decent people were of course appalled by this. Appalled
and titillated. It does not reflect entirely well on us that we spoke so much
about the scandal. But we did.

Baratiya seemed at first indifferent to developments.
The absence of her tactless husband allowed her to surrender completely to her
child-obsession. Baratiya favored everyone she knew with every scrap of news
about the child’s digestion and growth rates. However, even if the child of a
woman’s loins is a technical masterpiece, that is not the end of the world. Not
even raw apocalypse can end this world, which is something we hill folk
understand that our forebears did not.

Blinded with motherly pride, Baratiya overlooked her
husband’s infatuation, but some eight lady friends took pains to fully explain
the situation to her. Proud Baratiya was not entirely lost to sense and reason.
She saw the truth plainly: she was in a war. A war between heritage and
possibility.

When Kusak returned home to Baratiya, an event
increasingly rare, he was much too kind and considerate to her, and he spoke
far too much about incomprehensible things. He had seen visions in Stormcrow’s
ancient screens: ideas and concepts which were once of the utmost consequence,
but which no longer constitute the world. Baratiya could never compete with
Stormcrow in such arcane matters. Still, Baratiya understood her husband much
better than Kusak understood her. In fact, Baratiya knew Captain Kusak better
than Kusak knew anything.

So she nerved herself for the fight.

Certain consequential and outstanding people run our
Government. If they send a captain’s wife a nicely printed invitation to eat,
drink, dance, sing, and to “mingle with society,” then it behooves her to
attend.

The singing and the dancing are veneers for the issue of
real consequence: the “mingling with society,” in other words, reproduction.
Our gentleman soldiers are frequently absent, guarding the caravans. Our ladies
are often widowed through illness and misfortune. Government regards our grimly
modest population, and Government does its duty.

So, if the Palace sets-to in a public celebration, there
will reliably be pleasant music for a dance, special food, many
people–and many private rooms.

“I can’t attend this fine ball at the capital,” said
Baratiya to her husband, “the dust and heat are still too much for little
Florrie. But that shouldn’t stop you from venturing.”

Captain Kusak said that he would go for the sake of
civic duty. He then saw to the fancy clothes he had begun to affect. Baratiya
knew then that he was feigning dislike and eager to go the ball. Kusak planned
to go to the capital to revel in the eerie charms of Stormcrow–shamefully
wasting his vigor on a relic who could not bear children.

If one of our Hill women dresses in her finest garments,
that generally means a patchwork dress. Certain fabrics of the past are
brightly dyed and nearly indestructible. They were also loomed and stitched by
machines instead of human hands, so they have qualities we cannot match.
Whenever a salvage caravan comes from a dead city during the cooler months,
there is general excitement. Robbing the dead is always a great thrill, though
never a healthy one.

In daily life, our hill women mostly favor saris, a
simple unstitched length of cloth. Saris are practical garments, fit for our
own time. Still, our women do boast one kind of fine dress which the ancients
never had: women’s hard-weather gear.

Stiffened and hooded and polished, tucked and rucked,
our hard-weather gear will shed rain, dust, high wind, mud, mosquitoes–it
would shed snow, if we ever had snow. Baratiya was young, but she was not a
soldier’s wife for nothing: she knew how to dress.

When Baratiya was through stitching her new ball-gown,
it was more than simply strong and practical: it was a true creation. Its stern
and hardy look was exactly the opposite of the frail, outdated finery that Stormcrow
always wore.

The road to the capital is likely our safest road. Just
past the famous ravine bridge–a place of legendary floods and
ambushes–the capital road becomes an iron railway. So if the new monsoons
are not too heavy, a lone woman in a sturdy ox cart can reach the railhead and
travel on in nigh-perfect security.

Baratiya took this bold course of action, and arrived at
the Palace ball. She wore her awesome new riding habit. She arrived in high
time to find her husband drinking fortified wine, with Stormcrow languishing on
his arm and pecking at a plate of rice. This sight made Baratiya flush, so that
she looked even more gorgeous.

Baratiya deposited her invitation, opened an appointment
card and loudly demanded meat.

The Palace is a place of strict etiquette. If a man and
a woman at a Palace ball fill their appointment card and retire to a private
niche, they are expected to do their duty to the future of mankind. In order to
mate with a proper gusto, the volunteers are given our richest foodstuffs:
pork, beef.

Much more often than you think, after gorging on that
flesh, a man and woman will simply talk together in their private room. It is
hard work to breed with a stranger. The fact that this conduct is
Government-approved does not make it more appealing. Mankind is indeed a
crooked timber, and no Government has ever built us quite straight.

Stormcrow instantly caught the challenging eye of
Baratiya, and Stormcrow knew that Baratiya’s shouted demand for a feast was a
purposeful gesture–aimed not so much at the men, who crowded toward the
loud new arrival–but a gesture aimed at herself. Stormcrow was caught at
disadvantage, not only by the suddenness of the wife’s appearance, but by the
stark fact that Captain Kusak seemed to lack much appetite for her.

The old woman’s overstated eagerness to enter a private
Palace room with Kusak had dented his confidence. Kusak too had been drinking
too much–for he was shy, and troubled by what he was about to do. He was
a decent man at heart, and he somehow sensed the inadequacy of his paramour.

More to the point, Kusak had never seen his young wife
so attractive. Those fact that other men were so visibly eager for her company
made Kusak stare, and, staring, he found himself fascinated. He could scarcely
believe that this startling orgiast, shouting for meat and wine in her
thunderous gown, was his threadbare little homebody.

Stormcrow smiled in the face of her misfortune and
redoubled her efforts to charm. But Stormcrow had overplayed her position. She
could not hold Kusak’s eye, much less his hand.

Kusak shouldered his way through the throng around his
wife.

“I fear that you come too late, Captain Kusak,” said
Baratiya, swilling from her wine-cup. Kusak, his voice trembling, asked her to
grant him a private meeting. In response, she showed him her engagement card,
already signed with the names of four sturdy male volunteers.

Kusak begged her to reconsider these appointments.

Then she replied: “Then show me your own program, dear!”

Kusak handed his engagement card to her, with his
mustached face impassive but his shoulders slumping like a thief’s. Baratiya
said nothing, but she smiled cruelly, dipped a feather pen in the public
inkwell and overwrote Stormcrow’s famous name. She defaced it coolly and
deliberately, leaving only her ladyship’s time-tattered initials.… which are
“R” and “K.”

Man and wife then linked arms and advanced to a private
verandah. They emerged from it only to eat. They publicly demanded and ate the
most forbidden meat of all, the awesome fare the pioneers ate when they first
founded our Hill Station. It is not pork, neither is it beef. But a man and
woman will eat that meat when there is no other choice but death: when their
future survival together means more to them than any inhibition from their
past. In the plain, honest life of our Hills, it is our ultimate pledge.

A man and woman with a child are of one flesh. When they
take a step so grave and public as eating human meat, even Government sees fit
to respect that. So wife and husband ate from their own special platter, with
their faces burning and their hands trembling with rekindled passion. They ate
together with a single mind, like two people stirring the same flame.

Then Stormcrow, who will never again gorge herself in
such a way, turned toward me in the lamplight. She confessed to me that she
knew herself well and truly beaten.

Then she looked me in the eye and confided: “In the very
first days of Creation, a woman could just hand a man an apple and make him
perfectly happy. Now this is a twice-fallen world. We women have truly been
kicked out of Paradise–and as for the men, they’ve learned nothing.”

I thought otherwise, as is
common with me, but I had nothing to say to console her. So I simply stroked
the pretty henna patterns on her hands.

Fiction:
A Season of Broken Dolls by Caitlin R Kiernan

Part I

August 14, 2027

Sabit’s the one with a hard-on for stitchwork, not me.
It is not exactly (or at all) my particular realm of expertise, not my cuppa,
not my
scene
–as the beatniks used to say, back there in those
happy Neolithic times. I mean the plethora of Lower Manhattan flesh-art dives
like Guro/Guro or Twist or that pretentious little shitstain way down on
Pearl–
Corpus Ex Machina
–the one that gets almost as much
space in the police blotters as in the glossy snip-art rags.