The Ozark trilogy (32 page)

“Responsible of Brightwater,” demanded Granny Hazelbide sternly, “why are you shivering?”

“You said `trouble’ your own self, ma’am. And I respect your opinion.”

“There’s more to it than just mischief,” said the Granny. “Like I said, I have a funny feeling.”

“Think she’ll strangle me in my bed?” ventured Responsible, her voice careful and light. It wouldn’t do to have the Grannys feuding.

“I’ll wager she could, without leaving her own.”

“Ah, but she wouldn’t! She’s a Traveller born, Granny Hazelbide, and she’d be drawn and quartered naked before she’d use illegal magic.”

“I’ll grant you that much, but you mark my words-”

“Mark mine,” put in Responsible. It wasn’t polite to interrupt a Granny, but when Granny Hazelbide said to mark her words you were in for a good hour’s worth to mark, and she just simply didn’t have the strength.

“Mark mine,” she said, “the woman’s done it to torment me, purely because she delights in tormenting me. Nothing more. And I don’t intend to let her have the satisfaction of thinking she’s achieved her purpose.”

“It’s possible,” said the Granny. “I suppose it’s possible.”

“And you, I’ll thank you to help me rather than hinder me in this. All I need is that woman thinking she has you upset; it won’t do, Granny! I need you serene, not al1 in a fidget.”

Get in a staring match with a Granny, you can wear your eyes out, and Responsible’s eyes already burned from no sleep and the hours poring over papers. But she held firm, and it was the old lady who gave way first.

Every Ozark child was familiar with the building called Confederation Hall, whether they lived five miles away or clear on the far side of the Ocean of Storms. Little girls in Granny School, and the boys under the instruction of their Tutors, became familiar with it whether they would or no, and at a very early age. They drew it on sheets of pliofilm and took the pictures home to be fastened up on the housewalls; they made lopsided models of it from Oklahomah’s thick blue clay and gave them to their fathers for desk ornaments. The girls embroidered it on heavy canvas, with name and date beneath; the boys built it of scrap wood and carved their names with the points of their first good knives.

It was red brick, two stories high plus a tiny attic said to be haunted by a half dozen dead Grannys, with tall narrow arched windows framed in stone, and stone steps leading up to a central door. And the whole sitting square in the middle of a broad green lawn with a walk all around. A spanking-white bandstand stood in the left front corner of the lawn as you faced the Hall door, and the other corner had a statuary group lasered out of Tinaseeh ironwood. There on the pedestal block was First Granny, wading ashore with her skirts pulled up just high enough to show her shoetops; and there was Captain Aaron Dunn McDaniels, standing on the shore and reaching a hand to her; and there stood a miscellaneous child beside him looking very brave. The inscription across the base read: FIRST LANDING-MAY 8, 2021.

Confederation Hall was authentic Old Earth Primitive, right down to the solar collectors on its roof. And the children knew why. “Not
every
thing on Earth was bad,” the Grannys and the Tutors told them. “When the Confederation of Continents was established in twenty-five twelve, meeting then just one week in the entire year, Confederation Hall was built as it was to
remind
us of
that. It represents some of the good things.”

Ordinarily it was a building empty enough to have an echo in its corridors. Even during the one month in four when the Confederation met, the delegations and their staffs weren’t large enough to dent its emptiness, running as they did to two or three men and a single staff member. And the other eight months there was nobody at all there but an Attendant to show visitors around, one official to keep up the records and the archives, and a few servingmaids to see to the cleaning. The Travellers disapproved of that; if they’d had their way it would of been closed up tight except during meeting months. But the Traveller children were taught to make the embroidered pictures and the wooden models just
like
everybody else’s.

Today it was a long way from empty. Responsible of Brightwater, standing at the speaker’s podium in the Independence Room, ran her eyes over the crowd of delegates with satisfaction. Not one Family had boycotted the Jubilee, leaving the assembly without its full complement of votes; the message had come in that morning before breakfast, the Smiths were delayed but they would be there. Not every seat was filled-though every seat in the balcony was-and there were empty rows at the back. But it was a satisfying turnout, and when the Smiths did arrive they’d take up a goodly number of those empty spaces.

Twenty-eight of Ozark’s twenty-nine Grannys, lacking only Granny Gableframe of Castle Smith, filled the first row of the balcony, a sight Responsible had never seen before and wasn’t sure she could handle with a straight face. They looked like twentyeight matched dolls up there, each with her hair knotted up high on top of her head as required, each with the same thin sharp nose and tight-puckered mouth, every last one of them in the same crackly gown and triangular shawl and high-topped shoes, and round eyeglasses perched halfway down their noses whether they needed them or not. Not to mention the twenty-eight sets of flying knitting needles. Responsible looked away from them hastily, feeling unseemly laughter tugging at her mouthcorners, and concentrated on the Travellers instead. That was dampening enough to end all hazard of either laughter or smile. And talk of waste! The Traveller delegation, by her rapid count, numbered twenty-four ebony-coated men. Quite a contrast with the grudging tokens they sent to regular meetings, and each and every one of them entitled to speak to any question raised,
plus
offer a rebuttal. They had men enough there to tie up the floor for hours at a time.

At her side, in the big square-cut chair reserved for the leader of the meetings, sat her uncle Donald Patrick Brightwater the 133rd, fidgeting. Since her father had been dead these seven years, it was Donald Patrick that would take over on behalf of Brightwater once she finished the welcoming speech. And he was itching to get at it, too, she could tell. It was made particularly clear when he grabbed her elbow and hissed at her under his breath to get started.

Responsible didn’t intend to be hurried. There were still people moving into the balcony doors to stand and try to get a glimpse of the proceedings below, and the delegates hadn’t yet left off rustling documents and muttering to one another. She’d not begin to speak till she had silence in the room, and she was not through looking her audience over. She’d had a bad moment when she saw who was included in the Wommack delegation, though she ought to of known Lewis Motley Wommack wouldn’t let himself be left behind. A Grand Jubilee would come along only once every five hundred years; you miss your chance at one, you weren’t likely to get a second try. She would have to deal with the problem he presented as it was presented.

“Responsible!” said her uncle, too cross now to be discreet. “
Will
you get on with it? At this rata it’ll
be
noon and time for dinner before we get past your performance!”

He had been opposed to her making the speech at all.

“It’s not appropriate,” he’d complained, three Family meetings in a row, while his wife sat and lived up to her name and waited for him to exhaust himself. Patience of Clark wasted no words on her husband unless she was convinced he couldn’t be relied on to talk himself into silence unassisted.

Donald Patrick had had arguments he considered potent. In the first place, he’d pointed out, women were not allowed in the business sessions of the regular Confederation meetings; therefore, a woman ought not to be allowed in this one. In the second place, if the excuse for having a woman present on the Hall floor was her social function as hostess of this to-do
-which
he could grudgingly see might be reasonable-then that welcoming speech should not be made by Responsible, it should be made by her mother, as Missus of this Castle. Thorn of Guthrie had raised her brows at that and allowed the ivory perfection of her face to be marred by a frown that was as downright ugly as any expression Responsible had ever seen her use, and had declared as how she’d have nothing to do with it; and no argument of Donald Patrick’s would sway her.

“
Why
won’t you do it?” he’d demanded, smacking his fist in the palm of his hand. “I will feel like a plain fool sitting there listening to a fourteen-year-old girl-”

“Going on fifteen,” put in Granny Hazelbide.

“-a fourteen-year-old girl giving the welcoming speech on behalf of this Castle and this Kingdom. And so will every member of the Brightwater delegation. And so would
you
, Thorn of Guthrie,
and
you
,
Responsible, if you had any decency at all, or any respect for your father’s memory, rest his soul?”

Thorn of Guthrie had looked at him and sighed, and then she turned to Responsible and said, “Well, Responsible, will you abide by my order and let your uncle do the honors?”

Responsible had said no, and Thorn of Guthrie had said “You see?” and Donald Patrick Brightwater had stomped out of the room in a black mood that had lasted well past suppertirne.

Responsible had made an effort at calming him, in the few chinks of time available to her, promising that as soon as the speech was over she’d move to the balcony and mind her manners for the rest of the week. And Patience of Clark had put as much of her skill into soothing him as she’d considered reasonable.

But he sat beside her as unresigned and as infuriated as he’d been from the beginning. When Responsible began to speak, the silence having grown tangible enough to suit her, she felt almost obliged to be ready to leap aside at any moment and prevent him from snatching the sheets of paper out of her hands. He had his eyes fixed on the brilliant bunting that circled the room at the level of the balcony and ran across its front rail, with the crests of the Twelve Families hung in strict alphabetical rotation at each looped-up swath, and an expression of propriety slapped onto his face like a mask. But like all men, when sitting rankled him his thigh muscles kept tensing, and he would inch forward in the chair, and then recollect the situation and jerk suddenly bolt upright again. And then start it all over, tugging at his beard and then crossing his arms over his chest and then tugging at the beard again. He put Responsible in mind of a five-year-old too far from the bathroom, and she hoped his manners would last him till she finished.

She knew the words of the speech by heart, every one of them the perfect word. All about the solemnness of this occasion. Commemorating that great day five hundred years ago when after much struggle the Twelve Families had set aside their fears of anything remotely resembling a central government and allowed the Confederation of Continents to be formed. Commemorating the slow but steady progress as they moved from meeting one week in the year, a token foot in the waters, toward the present one month in four. A couple dozen sentences about the wickedness and corruption of Old Earth that had driven them away and into space, and the mirroring sentences that congratulated the Confederation for letting none of those varieties of wickedness arise here on Ozark. She rang the changes and pushed the buttons, and she could of done it all in her sleep, so far as the words went.

But the manner of
saying
those words-the modulation of her voice and the phrasing, the set of her features and the positions of her body-that was a very different matter. That demanded considerable fine-tuning, a constant eye on the men she faced, an adjustment for a frown here, a careful pacing of a phrase for a wandering expression there; it took her mind off both her uncle and Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd.

If it hadn’t been for that, she’d of been delighted to let Donald Patrick read the
words;
and if it hadn’t been for that, and the fact that her mother knew full well she hadn’t the skill to control this roomful of males, Thorn of Guthrie would of insisted on her right to read them and backed Donald Patrick in every objection he raised. Thorn had no reluctance for the limelight.

A thousand years had gone by here on Ozark, and who knew how many billions before that on Earth; and still men spoke solemnly of the power of logic, the force of facts and figures, and remained convinced that you persuaded others and won their allegiance by the words you said. It would of been funny if it hadn’t been such pathetic ignorance, and there were times when Responsible wondered whether the males of other inhabited worlds suffered from the same ancient illusion.

It would for
sure
have been helpful if she could of known whether the members of the Out-Cabal shared the same faith in the power of the surface structure of language. In fact, it would of helped to know whether those three beings were males of their species, just for starters.

She put that thought out of her head instantly; it was distraction, and a sure certain way to lose her audience and run into objections to her plans for this day.

In the balcony the Grannys noted appreciatively the skill with which Responsible wooed her unruly crowd, and Granny Hazelbide felt she was justified in her pride at having brought the girl up. She stood up there, bald as brass before the restless males, and she played them as easily as a person that lived by fishing would play a little stippleperch in a creek. It looked easy when she did it, and Responsible looked cool and easy herself in her elegant gown of dark green with a pale green piping round its hem and collar. But Granny Hazelbide had held the girl’s head all the night before while she’d first vomited everything she’d eaten and drunk at the Banquet and the Dance-which wasn’t much-and then retched miserably on an empty stomach and cursed the weakness of her body. Not more than an hour’s sleep all told had she had, Granny Hazelbide was certain of it, but none of that showed now. Not a tremble of her hands, brown hands that showed the hard work they did, against the creamy paper. Not a slightest hesitation of that voice, though her throat must of been raw. Smooth as satin, bold as brass, cool as springwater, that was her girl.