Disappearing Act

by Margaret Ball

  "Yougottabehotinthatoutfitwantatrysomeoftheseon? Well?" the girl added impatiently when Maris didn't respond immediately. "You want to try some of these on?"

  "If they're like your mother's and sister's dresses, I don't really see the need," said Maris. Those loose billowing tents of lightweight organics would fit anybody, wouldn't they? And she was less than thrilled about wearing a white organic tent printed with tiny little pastel flowers. With her coloring, she'd look like a short stick of broiled soypaste kebab wrapped in way too much recycled flimsy.

  Saara grinned. "You'd be surprised. Ten millimeters too long in the hem, and you step on it every time you try to walk anywhere."

  A very short kebab, Maris thought ruefully. Even if she liked these pallid prints, these dresses were designed for tall fair Barentsians.

  "And if I hike it up and get it ten millimeters too short, I suppose that wouldn't be so good either?"

  "My dear! Dreadfully fast, showing your ankles like that! And a Diplomat, too! Old hens," Saara added in her own voice, making a couple of clucking noises with her tongue.

  Maris looked at Saara's own long, tanned legs and minuscule cut-off bodysuit without saying anything.

  "Yeah, but I'm only a child," Saara said. "Sixteen next spring. I get until I turn eighteen before I have to wear this stuff. 'Course I got some proper lady dresses now, for like Ma's parties and like that, but I don't have to like wear it all the time, sowhenMasayscanIsparesomeIgolikesure, no problem, you know? Howoldareyouanyway?"

  When Maris deciphered the question a flash of panic stopped her voice. I don't bunu know how old I am, nobody ever said, nobody ever asked me that, nobody ever cared . . . oh, stop worrying, you ninny, she wants to know how old Calandra is. But the answer to that was somewhere on the identity papers Nyx had handed her, and she hadn't studied them, she hadn't planned on "being" Calandra Vissi longer than it took to disembark from the shuttle . . .

  "Sorry," Saara said with an embarrassed laugh as Maris failed to answer, "Ma keeps telling me to talk slower, but I get like wound up and I forget. I said how old are you anyway?"

  By that time an acceptable evasion had occurred to Maris. "Old enough to have to dress like a proper lady," she said ruefully. "Can you show me how these go on?" What had looked simple at first glance turned out, when she picked up one of the garments, to consist of a bewildering profusion of under-panels and over-panels, hard knobbly round things, long narrow fluttery things, gathered bits and straight bits . . .

  "Sure, and you can tell me all about other worlds. I'm going to be a Diplo, you know, when I'm old enough."

  Maris blinked. "But don't you have to be—"

  "Selected? Yes, but the School would select me, if they knew about me," Saara said confidently. "As soon as I'm old enough to take passage off-planet without my parents' permission, I'm going into the Real World, and—"

  "What do you mean, the Real World?"

  "Oh, you know. Anywhere but here. I mean, Valentin is like some kind of game we're all playing, pretending to be pioneers back in the Age of Expansion, playing at living without technology. Nothing happens here!" Saara said explosively. "Anyway, I'm not going to wait around for a Selector to happen to notice me; I'll just go to the School and explain that they ought to want me. I'm plenty smart enough and I know lots of useful things already, and I'm good at languages—only I suppose that doesn't matter if you get those chip implants, does it? Like, you probably speak better Kalapriyan than I do!"

  "I think it extremely unlikely," Maris said firmly, resolving to get some language practice with Kamnan as soon as this unnerving girl went away. "The implants aren't nearly as powerful as most people think they are." Since Saara accepted this without question, she went on to say, "All they really give me is ability to learn the language faster than most people would." That felt safe enough. Maris's entire life had depended on being faster and sneakier than anybody expected, and why should learning languages be any different from the things she'd learned with Johnivans?

  "Oh. You don't already—"

  "Hey," Maris said with a forced laugh, "it's not like they open up your head and pour a dictionary in, you know!"

  After a moment's disappointed silence, Saara laughed too. "Silly me," she said good-naturedly. "Up until this moment I had the idea it really worked like that. I guess a lot of things in the Real World don't work like I think. I guess if I just like stop talking and let you tell me how it is out there, I can learn a lot from you."

  "Not nearly as much," Maris said, "as I hope to learn from you."

  Chapter Four

  Udara on Kalapriya

  The Office of Lands and Properties Contracts had a lofty-sounding title, and a reasonably high place in the hierarchy of Udara's court bureaucracy—Chulayen's supervisor's supervisor had the title of Minister and reported directly to the Bashir—but the offices themselves were no better housed than any in Puvaathi, and worse than some. The three-story mud-and-timber building with its thick walls and deep, narrow windows had been converted from a family dwelling erected back when Puvaathi was just another one of the quarrelsome, feuding villages that made up the original Bashirate of Udara. Back when the Bashir himself had been a baby born into one of these sprawling compounds where four and five generations of a family lived together in a state of perpetual quarreling that mimicked the relations between villages and states—so Chulayen's father, the Minister for Trade, had described old Udaran life.

  Having grown up with no family but his parents, a staid couple high in the Bashir's service who treated Chulayen with all the adoration usually lavished on a late-born son to a couple who'd given up hope, Chulayen himself had no clear idea of what life had been like in those old-style family compounds. Crowded and noisy certainly, like his own rooms down the hill now that the twins were almost seven and the baby was beginning to crawl. Multiply that by twenty or thirty, add old dowagers screeching about long-buried feuds, put it all in the smoky darkness of this compound and what did you have?

  Probably something very like the Office of Lands and Properties, but without so much paper and ink, Chulayen thought with an inner amusement that did not show on the smooth brown mask of his court-trained face. His supervisor, old Lunthanadi, was as cranky an old woman as anybody could want, even if her trouble was too much to do rather than too little. With a very small exercise of imagination he could cast his colleagues as siblings and cousins jostling for recognition: the young clerk-trainees were the toddlers, good for nothing but to spill the inkwells they were supposed to be refilling and misdeliver the memoranda they were sent to carry from one department to another; and the shadowy, unseen figures of the Bashir and his High Council could be the ancient great-grandfathers who still held the land titles and the keys to the money chest clenched in their bony fingers.

  And fantasies like this did nothing to diminish the stack of memoranda still on the writing desk before him, waiting for a word scrawled in the margin here, a tactfully worded answer there, before they could be forwarded to some other unfortunate soul or even, with great good fortune, go to rest in the overloaded filing drawers along the west wall.

  Chulayen squinted at the crabbed handwriting on the topmost document, held it close to the lamp to see it better, and for the thousandth time contemplated announcing that he was moving his office out to the verandah, where he could work in decent light, breathe clean air, and see the panorama of the city's countless flat-roofed dwellings spilling down the mountainside before him. Quite impossible, of course. There were highly confidential documents and very important papers somewhere in this stack; one couldn't risk having such things snatched up by a passing wind and blown down the muddy lanes of Puvaathi.

  Even though this particular letter, when he finally deciphered it, proved to be neither confidential nor important.

  "I shall go blind before I'm thirty," he complained to Sudhan, at the next desk. "All this just to read one more complaint from some dung-shoveling villager who thinks the Bashir's decision
to confiscate one of his fields for court costs was unjust! But I suppose that's what it is to live in the modern world. My father used to say that in the old Bashir's day anybody who dared to write a letter of complaint after a hearing in court would have had his nose and ears cut off."

  "He wouldn't have written it anyway," Sudhan said, gloomily surveying his own stack of paperwork. "Back when everything had to be inscribed on scraped sheepskins, people wouldn't have stood for all this writing everything down and making copies in triplicate. In which case," he said, recovering his normal air of bouncy good humor, "we'd have been out of a job, so gods bless the man who invented paper! And now I look at it," he added, studying the sheet before him, "this particular piece of paper is more in your department than mine." He reached out a long arm and added the page to Chulayen's pile, making his own stack infinitesimally shorter.

  "I'll do the same for you, first chance I get," Chulayen threatened. At least the document Sudhan had palmed off on him was in fair court script, an official judgment of some sort. Easy enough to read, but nothing to do with him; he was supposed to be evaluating appeals against previous judgments, not codifying new ones. A sinecure, since there had never been a successful appeal, but it showed the Bashir's dedication to doing the right thing. Someday the court could make a mistake, and when they did, Chulayen would be there to set it right.

  He skimmed the page to get some idea whose desk he could dump it on, and frowned as he reached the bottom.

  "Here, this can't be right."

  "It's a pronouncement of the Bashir's court," Sudhan said. "Right and wrong have nothing to do with it—"

  He broke off suddenly, hearing the rustle of Lunthanadi's full trousers, and almost choked while rewording the sentence to express more acceptable sentiments. "I mean, that is, pronouncements of the court are by definition right. We're not supposed to evaluate them, just file them."

  "I'm not even supposed to be doing that," Chulayen said. "It should have been routed to a filing clerk, but all the same . . . Mother Lunthanadi," he appealed politely to the supervisor, "there's a mistake in this court pronouncement, what should I do about it?"

  "Mistake? Hah. Those court scribes can't spell, I always said so! Send it back to be recopied, boy."

  "Worse than a spelling error," Chulayen persisted. "This is a bad judgment. It's—the court has made a mistake, they can't have been informed of all the facts."

  "Talking treason," old Lunthanadi said. "The Court of the Bashir doesn't make mistakes, Chulayen. And even saying they did make a mistake, once it's been pronounced and copied, it ain't a mistake, it's the law, and it ain't for us to question it, just to record and uphold it."

  "Yes, but this really is a mistake. They wouldn't have done this if they'd understood—Mother Lunthanadi," Chulayen said, desperately willing her to understand. "Someday there will be an appeal against this judgment, and it will be a good appeal, and we will be forced to uphold it. Do you want your department to be the first one ever to support a successful appeal against a pronouncement of the Bashir's court?"

  Lunthanadi held the paper out at arm's length and studied it. "And what makes you think you know more than the Bashir's own advisers about these Jurgan Caves?"

  "I've been there," Chulayen said. "I've seen them. And you know it's not easy to travel there, at least it didn't used to be, before last spring." That was when the state of Thamboon had been peacefully absorbed into Greater Udara. Before that, Thamboon had been definitely hostile to Udara, a trouble spot on the borders from which seditious drawings and ballads entered the Bashir's territory. Of course, two years before that, Thamboon and Udara hadn't shared a border; the narrow strip of Narumalar had been a buffer between them . . . until the Bashir announced that the Narumalarans, alarmed at the aggressive actions of Thamboon, had requested the honor of becoming part of Udara. At the time when Chulayen and Anusha went there on a pilgrimage discreetly disguised as a general tourist trip, Udaran visitors weren't popular in either Narumalar or Thamboon; but he supposed the nasty aggressiveness of the Thamboon people had made Narumalar consider Udara the lesser of two evils. Certainly the Bashir, having taken in Narumalar, protected its people and borders as zealously as his own; why else would he have felt it necessary to absorb Thamboon?

  Lunthanadi's lips twitched. "Ah, yes. I had forgotten Anusha's . . . enthusiasms. She's still involved in that cult, is she?"

  "It's not exactly a cult," Chulayen said. "More of a . . . way of approaching life, you might say." Inside, he writhed with embarrassment. Following the Inner Light Way wasn't treasonous or even illegal; it was just not the sort of thing his class of people did. Mention the Inner Light Way and people got images of crumbling warehouses and a bunch of common Rohini and half-Rohini people, day laborers and maids and people like that, going into transports of ecstasy over the flames from a crude oil lamp. Anusha's continued involvement with the sect was a constant embarrassment to Chulayen, the sort of thing that might make his superiors feel that despite his impeccable Rudhrani lineage, he wasn't the kind of young man who could be trusted at the lofty level of the Bashir's personal council and their assistants. Normally he wouldn't have said anything at work to remind people of Anusha's religious enthusiasms. But in this case there was no way around it.

  "We visited the Jurgan Caves," he said. "Eight years ago." To pray for a son, Anusha had said. A holy pilgrimage to ask the blessings of the earth. And the Earth had responded in Her usual way, with double blessing but no son: his beautiful twin girls, Neena and Neeta. Young devils, those two, with their glossy black pigtails dipped into any mischief-broth that might be stirring . . . but still a blessing. And now that they had a son, baby Amavashya, to carry on the lineage and say the ancestor-prayers when he and Anusha passed on, Chulayen could just enjoy his girls for the light and laughter they brought to his home.

  "Very nice," Lunthanadi said, already looking bored. "You are a good husband to cater to Anusha's little hobbies. Some might say, too good."

  Despite this broad hint, Chulayen felt he had to continue. "Mother Lunthanadi! This pronouncement says that the Jurgan Caves have become property of the State of Udara, to be mined for saltpeter."

  Lunthanadi raised her bushy eyebrows. "And your little wife will have religious objections, I suppose?"

  "Probably. I don't know. That's not the point! The caves are a natural wonder, Mother Lunthanadi. You don't have to be a believer of the Inner Light Way to see that. They are . . . there are whole chambers as large as this building, all lined with crystals, and lighted at noonday through openings in the roof, so that they sparkle like jewels on the breast of the earth." Embarrassed anew by his poetical flight, Chulayen reined himself in and tried to speak only of the practical issues. "The caves are hard to get to, high in the mountains. There's only a footpath leading to them, and it is a difficult path, the Thamboons won't—wouldn't—let anybody old, or handicapped, or pregnant women, even attempt it. Even if we desperately needed the saltpeter deposits, extracting and removing them would be a nightmare."

  "Where there's need, roads can be built," Lunthanadi said slowly.

  "Not there," Chulayen said with deep feeling. "The Thamboon mountains make Udara look like one of the Plains States. Half the rock is limestone, and crumbling, so you can't count on any path you used last year to still be there after the snow melt has washed down the mountainside. And if it is still there, it takes a Thamboon-born guide to recognize it."

  "Ghaya tracks," Lunthanadi nodded. "Is that all, boy? We've all traveled in the mountains, you know. You're not an engineer, what do you know of road building? 'He who does not know how to dance says that the floor of the courtyard slopes.' "

  "No self-respecting Udaran ghay," Chulayen said desperately, "would recognize a Thamboon mountain path as a usable track. And then there are the bridges, did I tell you about the bridges? Three strips of twisted grass rope if you're lucky—one to stand on and two to hold. If you're not lucky, maybe only two strips of grass rope. Or one." He sw
allowed hard, remembering. If Anusha hadn't been so shrill about his failure to support her beliefs, if he hadn't been so desperate to stop the nagging that the risk of death seemed an acceptable price to pay, he'd never have made it across the first bridge. "The Thamboons get loads across balanced on their heads. Do you really think we're going to export significant quantities of saltpeter that way?"

  "Modernization," Lunthanadi said. "Development. Build better bridges."

  "And we don't even need the saltpeter!"

  Lunthanadi gave him a sharp bright glance. "We don't, eh? What are you, one of those loonies who thinks we don't need a national defense? I heard Inner Light types get that way—"

  "I'm not an Inner Light follower," Chulayen said. "And yes, I know we need a strong defense force, and I know saltpeter is used in making gunpowder, but I also happen to know that our gunpowder stores have increased, not decreased, over the last five years. Despite all the enemies we've had to fight in that time."

  "Precisely," Lunthanadi said. "Udara is surrounded by enemies. Not your place, nor mine, to argue with the Ministry for Defense. 'When they come to shoe the turagai of the Bashir, does the dung beetle stick out her foot?' We need the Bashir's army as never before, to pacify all those hostile states, and—what do you mean, the gunpowder stores have increased? Not your department, is it? Not even mine."

  Chulayen swallowed again. He'd picked up that bit of information from Anusha's chatter after an Inner Light meeting where some low-level clerk from the Ministry for Defense had been saying things he shouldn't. But mentioning the Inner Light Way again would destroy any credibility he had left, and if he mentioned the clerk . . . talking about Defense Ministry stores at a public meeting was probably treason. Traitors deserved their swift punishment and removal from society, of course, but the poor guy hadn't meant any harm, he was just another nut case deluded by the pacifistic babble of the Inner Light Way.