The Ice Owl

by Carolyn Ives Gilman

  “I’ll ask around and see who’s doing tutoring,” Clarity offered.

  “Sure, okay,” Maya said noncommittally.

  Thorn got up, glowering at their lack of respect for her independence and self-determination. “I am captain of my own destiny,” she announced, then made a strategic withdrawal to her room.

  ***

  The next forenote Thorn came down from her room in the face-masking veil that women of Glory to God all wore, outside the Waste. When Maya saw her, she said, “Where are you going in that getup?”

  “Out,” Thorn said.

  In a tone diluted with real worry, Maya said, “I don’t want you going into the city, Tup.”

  Thorn was icily silent till Maya said, “Sorry—Thorn. But I still don’t want you going into the city.”

  “I won’t,” Thorn said.

  “Then what are you wearing that veil for? It’s a symbol of bondage.”

  “Bondage to God,” Thorn said loftily.

  “You don’t believe in God.”

  Right then Thorn decided that she would.

  When she left the house and turned toward the park, the triviality of her home and family fell away like lint. After a block, she felt transformed. Putting on the veil had started as a simple act of rebellion, but out in the street it became far more. Catching her reflection in a shop window, she felt disguised in mystery. The veil intensified the imagined face it concealed, while exoticizing the eyes it revealed. She had become something shadowy, hidden. The Wasters all around her were obsessed with their own surfaces, with manipulating what they seemed to be. All depth, all that was earnest, withered in the acid of their inauthenticity. But with the veil on, Thorn had no surface, so she was immune. What lay behind the veil was negotiated, contingent, rendered deep by suggestion.

  In the tiny triangular park in front of the blackened shell of the school, life went on as if nothing had changed. The tower fans turned lazily, creating a pleasant breeze tinged a little with soot. Under their strutwork shadows, two people walked little dogs on leashes, and the old men bent over their chessboards. Thorn scanned the scene through the slit in her veil, then walked toward a bench where an old man sat reading from an electronic slate.

  She sat down on the bench. The old man did not acknowledge her presence, though a watchful twitch of his eyebrow told her he knew she was there. She had often seen him in the park, dressed impeccably in threadbare suits of a style long gone. He had an oblong, drooping face and big hands that looked as if they might once have done clever things. Thorn sat considering what to say.

  “Well?” the old man said without looking up from his book. “What is it you want?”

  Thorn could think of nothing intelligent to say, so she said, “Are you a historian?”

  He lowered the slate. “Only in the sense that we all are, us Wasters. Why do you want to know?”

  “My school burned down,” Thorn said. “I need to find a tutor.”

  “I don’t teach children,” the old man said, turning back to his book.

  “I’m not a child!” Thorn said, offended.

  He didn’t look up. “Really? I thought that’s what you were trying to hide, behind that veil.”

  She took it off. At first he paid no attention. Then at last he glanced up indifferently, but saw something that made him frown. “You are the child that lives with the Gminta hunter.”

  His cold tone made her feel defensive on Hunter’s behalf. “He doesn’t hunt all Gmintas,” she said, “just the wicked ones who committed the Holocide. The ones who deserve to be hunted.”

  “What do you know about the Gmintan Holocide?” the old man said with withering dismissal.

  Thorn smiled triumphantly. “I was there.”

  He stopped pretending to read and looked at her with bristly disapproval. “How could you have been there?” he said. “It happened 141 years ago.”

  “I’m 145 years old, sequential time,” Thorn said. “I was 37 when I was five, and 98 when I was seven, and 126 when I was twelve.” She enjoyed shocking people with this litany.

  “Why have you moved so much?”

  “My mother got pregnant without my father’s consent, and when she refused to have an abortion he sued her for copyright infringement. She’d made unauthorized use of his genes, you see. So she ducked out to avoid paying royalties, and we’ve been on the lam ever since. If he ever caught us, I could be arrested for having bootleg genes.”

  “Who told you that story?” he said, obviously skeptical.

  “Maya did. It sounds like something one of her boyfriends would do. She has really bad taste in men. That’s another reason we have to move so much.”

  Shaking his head slightly, he said, “I should think you would get cognitive dysplasia.”

  “I’m used to it,” Thorn said.

  “Do you like it?”

  No one had ever asked her that before, as if she was capable of deciding for herself. In fact, she had known for a while that she didn’t like it much. With every jump between planets she had grown more and more reluctant to leave sequential time behind. She said, “The worst thing is, there’s no way of going back. Once you leave, the place you’ve stepped out of is gone forever. When I was eight I learned about pepcies, that you can use them to communicate instantaneously, and I asked Maya if we could call up my best friend on the last planet, and Maya said, ‘She’ll be middle-aged by now.’ Everyone else had changed, and I hadn’t. For a while I had dreams that the world was dissolving behind my back whenever I looked away.”

  The old man was listening thoughtfully, studying her. “How did you get away from Gmintagad?” he asked.

  “We had Capellan passports,” Thorn said. “I don’t remember much about it; I was just four years old. I remember drooping cypress trees and rushing to get out. I didn’t understand what was happening.”

  He was staring into the distance, focused on something invisible. Suddenly, he got up as if something had bitten him and started to walk away.

  “Wait!” Thorn called. “What’s the matter?”

  He stopped, his whole body tense, then turned back. “Meet me here at four hours forenote tomorrow, if you want lessons,” he said. “Bring a slate. I won’t wait for you.” He turned away again.

  “Stop!” Thorn said. “What’s your name?”

  With a forbidding frown, he said, “Soren Pregaldin. You may call me Magister.”

  “Yes, Magister,” Thorn said, trying not to let her glee show. She could hardly wait to tell Hunter that she had followed his advice, and succeeded.

  What she wouldn’t tell him, she decided as she watched Magister Pregaldin stalk away across the park, was her suspicion that this man knew something about the Holocide. Otherwise, how would he have known it was exactly 141 years ago? Another person would have said 140, or something else vague. She would not mention her suspicion to Hunter until she was sure. She would investigate carefully, like a competent field agent should. Thinking about it, a thrill ran through her. What if she were able to catch a Gminta? How impressed Hunter would be! The truth was, she wanted to impress Hunter. For all his mordant manner, he was by far the smartest boyfriend Maya had taken up with, the only one with a profession Thorn had ever been able to admire.

  She fastened the veil over her face again before going home, so no one would see her grinning.

  Magister Pregaldin turned out to be the most demanding teacher Thorn had ever known. Always before, she had coasted through school, easily able to stay ahead of the indigenous students around her, always waiting in boredom for them to catch up. With Magister Pregaldin there was no one else to wait for, and he pushed her mercilessly to the edge of her abilities. For the first time in her life, she wondered if she were smart enough.

  He was an exacting drillmaster in mathematics. Once, when she complained at how useless it was, he pointed out beyond the iron gridwork of the dome to a round black hill that was conspicuous on the red plain of the crater bed. “Tell me how far away the Creep
ing Ingot is.”

  The Creeping Ingot had first come across the horizon almost a hundred years before, slowly moving toward Glory to God. It was a near-pure lump of iron the size of a small mountain. In the Waste, the reigning theory was that it was molten underneath, and moving like a drop of water skitters across a hot frying pan. In the city above them, it was regarded as a sign of divine wrath: a visible, unstoppable Armageddon. Religious tourists came from all over the planet to see it, and its ever-shrinking distance was posted on the public sites. Thorn turned to her slate to look it up, but Magister Pregaldin made her put it down. “No,” he said, “I want you to figure it out.”

  “How can I?” she said. “They bounce lasers off it or something to find out where it is.”

  “There is an easier way, using tools you already have.”

  “The easiest way is to look it up!”

  “No, that is the lazy way.” His face looked severe. “Relying too much on free information makes you as vulnerable as relying too much on technology. You should always know how to figure it out yourself, because information can be falsified, or taken away. You should never trust it.”

  So he was some sort of information survivalist. “Next you’ll want me to use flint to make fire,” she grumbled.

  “Thinking for yourself is not obsolete. Now, how are you going to find out? I will give you a hint: you don’t have enough information right now. Where are you going to get it?”

  She thought a while. It had to use mathematics, because that was what they had been talking about. At last she said, “I’ll need a tape measure.”

  “Right.”

  “And a protractor.”

  “Good. Now go do it.”

  It took her the rest of forenote to assemble her tools, and the first part of afternote to observe the ingot from two spots on opposite ends of the park. Then she got one of the refuse-picker children to help her measure the distance between her observation posts. Armed with two angles and a length, the trigonometry was simple. When Magister Pregaldin let her check her answer, it was more accurate than she had expected.

  He didn’t let on, but she could tell that he was, if anything, even more pleased with her success than she was herself. “Good,” he said. “Now, if you measured more carefully and still got an answer different from the official one, you would have to ask yourself whether the Protectorate had a reason for falsifying the Ingot’s distance.”

  She could see now what he meant.

  “That old Vind must be a wizard,” Hunter said when he found Thorn toiling over a math problem at the kitchen table. “He’s figured out some way of motivating you.”

  “Why do you think he’s a Vind?” Thorn said.

  Hunter gave a caustic laugh. “Just look at him.”

  She silently added that to her mental dossier on her tutor. Not a Gminta, then. A Vind—one of the secretive race of aristocrat intellectuals who could be found in government, finance, and academic posts on almost every one of the Twenty Planets. All her life Thorn had heard whispers about a Vind conspiracy to infiltrate positions of power under the guise of public service. She had heard about the secret Vind sodality of interplanetary financiers who siphoned off the wealth of whole planets to fund their hegemony. She knew Maya scoffed at all of it. Certainly, if Magister Pregaldin was an example, the Vind conspiracy was not working very well. He seemed as penniless as any other Waster.

  But being Vind did not rule out his involvement in the Holocide—it just meant he was more likely to have been a refugee than a perpetrator. Like most planets, Gmintagad had had a small, elite Vind community, regarded with suspicion by the indigenes. The massacres had targeted the Vinds as well as the Alloes. People didn’t talk as much about the Vinds, perhaps because the Vinds didn’t talk about it themselves.

  Inevitably, Thorn’s daily lessons in the park drew attention. One day they were conducting experiments in aerodynamics with paper airplanes when a man approached them. He had a braided beard strung with ceramic beads that clacked as he walked. Magister Pregaldin saw him first, and his face went blank and inscrutable.

  The clatter of beads came to rest against the visitor’s silk kameez. He cleared his throat. Thorn’s tutor stood and touched his earlobes in respect, as people did on this planet. “Your worship’s presence makes my body glad,” he said formally.

  The man made no effort to be courteous in return. “Do you have a license for this activity?”

  “Which activity, your worship?”

  “Teaching in a public place.”

  Magister Pregaldin hesitated. “I had no idea my conversations could be construed as teaching.”

  It was the wrong answer. Even Thorn, watching silently, could see that the proper response would have been to ask how much a license cost. The man was obviously fishing for a bribe. His face grew stern. “Our blessed Protectorate levies just fines on those who flout its laws.”

  “I obey all the laws, honorable sir. I will cease to give offense immediately.”

  The magister picked up his battered old electronic slate and, without a glance at Thorn, walked away. The man from the Protectorate considered Thorn, but evidently concluded he couldn’t extract anything from her, and so he left.

  Thorn waited till the official couldn’t see her anymore, then sprinted after Magister Pregaldin. He had disappeared into Weezer Alley, a crooked passageway that Thorn ordinarily avoided because it was the epicenter of depravity in the Waste. She plunged into it now, searching for the tall, patrician silhouette of her tutor. It was still forenote, and the denizens of Weezer Alley were just beginning to rise from catering to the debaucheries of yesternote’s customers. Thorn hurried past a shop where the owner was beginning to lay out an array of embarrassingly explicit sex toys; she tried not to look. A little beyond, she squeamishly skirted a spot where a shopkeeper was scattering red dirt on a half-dried pool of vomit. Several dogleg turns into the heart of the sin warren, she came to the infamous Garden of Delights, where live musicians were said to perform. No one from the Protectorate cared much about prostitution, since that was mentioned in their holy book; but music was absolutely forbidden.

  The gate into the Garden of Delights was twined about with iron snakes. On either side of it stood a pedestal where dancers gyrated during open hours. Now a sleepy she-man lounged on one of them, stark naked except for a bikini that didn’t hide much. Hisher smooth skin was almost completely covered with the vinelike and paisley patterns of the decorative skin fungus mycochromoderm. Once injected, it was impossible to remove. It grew as long as its host lived, in bright scrolls and branching patterns. It had been a Waster fad once.

  The dancer regarded Thorn from lizardlike eye slits in a face forested over with green and red tendrils. “You looking for the professor?” heshe asked.

  Thorn was a little shocked that her cultivated tutor was known to such an exhibitionist creature as this, but she nodded. The she-man gestured languidly at a second-story window across the street. “Tell him to come visit me,” heshe said, and bared startlingly white teeth.

  Thorn found the narrow doorway almost hidden behind an awning and climbed the staircase past peeling tin panels that once had shown houris carrying a huge feather fan. When she knocked on the door at the top, there was no response at first, so she called out, “Magister?”

  The door flew open and Magister Pregaldin took her by the arm and yanked her in, looking to make sure she had not been followed. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “No one saw me,” she said. “Well, except for that…that.…” She gestured across the street.

  Magister Pregaldin went to the window and looked out. “Oh, Ginko,” he said.

  “Why do you live here?” Thorn said. “There are lots better places.”

  The magister gave a brief, grim little smile. “Early warning system,” he said. “As long as the Garden is allowed to stay in business, no one is going to care about the likes of me.” He frowned sternly. “Unless you get me in trouble.”<
br />
  “Why didn’t you bribe him? He would have gone away.”

  “I have to save my bribes for better causes,” he said. “One can’t become known to the bottom-feeders, or they get greedy.” He glanced out the window again. “You have to leave now.”

  “Why?” she said. “All he said was you need a license to teach in public. He didn’t say anything about teaching in private.”

  Magister Pregaldin regarded her with a complex expression, as if he were trying to quantify the risk she represented. At last he gave a nervous shrug. “You must promise not to tell anyone. I am serious. This is not a game.”

  “I promise,” Thorn said.

  She had a chance then to look around. Up to now, her impression had been of a place so cluttered that only narrow lanes were left to move about the room. Now she saw that the teetering stacks all around her were constructed of wondrous things. There were crystal globes on ormolu stands, hand-knotted silk rugs piled ten high, clocks with malachite cases stacked atop towers of leather-and-gilt books. There was a copper orrery of nested bands and onyx horses rearing on their back legs, and a theremin in a case of brushed aluminum. A cloisonné ewer as tall as Thorn occupied one corner. In the middle hung a chandelier that dripped topaz swags and bangles, positioned so that Magister Pregaldin had to duck whenever he crossed the room.

  “Is all this stuff yours?” Thorn said, dazzled with so much wonder.

  “Temporarily,” he said. “I am an art dealer. I make sure things of beauty get from those who do not appreciate them to those who do. I am a matchmaker, in a way.” As he spoke, his fingers lightly caressed a sculpture made from an ammonite fossil with a human face emerging from the shell. It was a delicate gesture, full of reverence, even love. Thorn had a sudden, vivid feeling that this was where Magister Pregaldin’s soul rested—with his things of beauty.

  “If you are to come here, you must never break anything,” he said.

  “I won’t touch,” Thorn said.

  “No, that’s not what I meant. One must touch things, and hold them, and work them. Mere looking is never enough. But touch them as they wish to be touched.” He handed her the ammonite fossil. Its curve fit perfectly in her hand. The face looked surprised when she held it up before her, and she laughed.