The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  I have figured out what the vase is, by the way. The etched lines on the silver straw that looks like a lily are scratches. I am piecing together a ten-thousand-year-old Coke bottle. Here. You must be thirsty. The beys may have had a wonderful civilization, but years before the Sandalman’s grandparents even showed up, they were busy poisoning princesses. They murdered her; and she must have known it, and that’s why she leans her head against her hand so hopelessly. They murdered her for what? For a treasure? For a planet? For a story? And didn’t anybody try to save her?

  The first thing Evelyn said to me was, “Help me.” What if I had? What if I had said the hell with the story and called Bradstreet, sent him over to get the Lisii team’s doctor and evacuate the rest of the team? What if, while he was still on the way, I had burned a message to the Sandalman that said, “You can have the princess if you’ll let us off the planet?” and then plugged in that trachea respirator that wouldn’t let her talk but might have kept her alive till we could get her onto a ship?

  I like to think that I would have done that if I had known her, if it had not been, as she said, “Too late.” But I don’t know. The Sandalman, who was so enamoured of her that he gave her his own bey, stood in the tomb and offered her poison in a Coke bottle. And Lacau knew her, but what he went back for, what he died for, was not her but a blue vase.

  “There was a curse,” I say.

  Evelyn’s bey drifts slowly across the room, and the lights brighten and then dim again as she passes. “All,” she says, and sits down on the bunk. The reading light at the end of the bed goes on.

  “What?” I say, and wish I still had the translator.

  “Curse everybody,” she says. “You. Me. All.” She crosses her dirty-looking hands over her breast and lies down on the bed. The lights go out. It is just like old times.

  In a minute she’ll get tired of it being dark and get up, and I’ll go back to labeling the jigsawed pieces of the blue vase so a team of archaeologists who have not yet been killed by the curse can put it back together. But for now I have to sit in the dark.

  “Curse everybody.” Even the Lisii team. Because of the relay in my tent, the Sandalman thought they were helping me get the treasure off Colchis. He buried them alive in the cave they were excavating. He couldn’t kill Bradstreet because he was halfway to the Spine with a broken-down Swallow, and by the time he got it fixed the Commission had landed, and he’d been fired, and my boss had hired him to file stories on the hearings. They have the Sandalman in custody in a geodome like the one he burned down. The rest of the suhundulim sit in on the Commission’s hearings, but the beys, according to Bradstreet, don’t pay any attention to them. They are more interested in the Commission’s judicial wigs. They have stolen four of them so far.

  Evelyn’s bey gets up and then flops back down on the bunk, trying to make the highlights flicker. She is not at all curious about this story I am writing, this tale of murder and poison and other curses men fall victim to. Maybe her people got enough of that in the good old days. Maybe Borchardt was wrong and the suhundulim didn’t take Colchis away from them at all. Maybe the minute they landed, the beys said, “Here. Take it. Hurry.”

  She has fallen asleep. I can hear her quiet, even breathing. She is not under the curse, at least.

  I saved her, and I saved the princess, even though I was a thousand years too late. So maybe I am not entirely in its clutches either. But in a few minutes I will go turn on a light and finish this story, and when I’m done with it I’ll put it in a nice, safe place. Like a tomb. Or a refrigerator.

  Why? Because having gotten this story at such great cost I am determined to tell it? Or because the curse of kings stands all around me like a cage, hangs overhead like a tangle of electrical cords?

  “The curse of kings and keepers,” I say, and my bey scrambles off the bunk and tears out of the cabin to fetch me a drink of water in a Coke bottle she must have been carrying when I dragged her on board, as if I were her new patient and lay under a drape of plasticmesh, already dying.

  Even the Queen

  The phone sang as I was looking over the defense’s motion to dismiss.

  “It’s the universal ring,” my law clerk Bysshe said, reaching for it. “It’s probably the defendant. They don’t let you use signatures from jail.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s my mother.”

  “Oh.” Bysshe reached for the receiver. “Why isn’t she using her signature?”

  “Because she knows I don’t want to talk to her. She must have found out what Perdita’s done.”

  “Your daughter Perdita?” he asked, holding the receiver against his chest. “The one with the little girl?”

  “No, that’s Viola. Perdita’s my younger daughter. The one with no sense.”

  “What’s she done?”

  “She’s joined the Cyclists.”

  Bysshe looked inquiringly blank, but I was not in the mood to enlighten him. Or in the mood to talk to Mother. “I know exactly what Mother will say. She’ll ask me why I didn’t tell her, and then she’ll demand to know what I’m going to do about it, and there is nothing I can do about it, or I obviously would have done it already.”

  Bysshe looked bewildered. “Do you want me to tell her you’re in court?”

  “No.” I reached for the receiver. “I’ll have to talk to her sooner or later.” I took it from him. “Hello, Mother,” I said.

  “Traci,” Mother said dramatically, “Perdita has become a Cyclist.”

  “I know.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought Perdita should tell you herself.”

  “Perdita!” She snorted. “She wouldn’t tell me. She knows what I’d have to say about it. I suppose you told Karen.”

  “Karen’s not here. She’s in Iraq.” The only good thing about this whole debacle was that thanks to Iraq’s eagerness to show it was a responsible world-community member and its previous penchant for self-destruction, my mother-in-law was in the one place on the planet where the phone service was bad enough that I could claim I’d tried to call her but couldn’t get through, and she’d have to believe me.

  The Liberation has freed us from all sorts of indignities and scourges, including Iraq’s Saddams, but mothers-in-law aren’t one of them, and I was almost happy with Perdita for her excellent timing. When I didn’t want to kill her.

  “What’s Karen doing in Iraq?” Mother asked.

  “Negotiating a Palestinian homeland.”

  “And meanwhile her granddaughter is ruining her life,” she said irrelevantly. “Did you tell Viola?”

  “I told you, Mother. I thought Perdita should tell all of you herself.”

  “Well, she didn’t. And this morning one of my patients, Carol Chen, called me and demanded to know what I was keeping from her. I had no idea what she was talking about.”

  “How did Carol Chen find out?”

  “From her daughter, who almost joined the Cyclists last year. Her family talked her out of it,” she said accusingly. “Carol was convinced the medical community had discovered some terrible side effect of ammenerol and were covering it up. I cannot believe you didn’t tell me, Traci.”

  And I cannot believe I didn’t have Bysshe tell her I was in court, I thought. “I told you, Mother. I thought it was Perdita’s place to tell you. After all, it’s her decision.”

  “Oh, Traci!” Mother said. “You cannot mean that!”

  In the first fine flush of freedom after the Liberation, I had entertained hopes that it would change everything—that it would somehow do away with inequality and matriarchal dominance and those humorless women determined to eliminate the word “manhole” and third-person singular pronouns from the language.

  Of course it didn’t. Men still make more money, “herstory” is still a blight on the semantic landscape, and my mother can still say, “Oh, Traci!” in a tone that reduces me to preadolescence.

  “Her decision!” Mother said. “Do you mean
to tell me you plan to stand idly by and allow your daughter to make the mistake of her life?”

  “What can I do? She’s twenty-two years old and of sound mind.”

  “If she were of sound mind, she wouldn’t be doing this. Didn’t you try to talk her out of it?”

  “Of course I did, Mother.”

  “And?”

  “And I didn’t succeed. She’s determined to become a Cyclist.”

  “Well, there must be something we can do. Get an injunction or hire a deprogrammer or sue the Cyclists for brainwashing. You’re a judge, there must be some law you can invoke—”

  “The law is called personal sovereignty, Mother, and since it was what made the Liberation possible in the first place, it can hardly be used against Perdita. Her decision meets all the criteria for a case of personal sovereignty: It’s a personal decision, it was made by a sovereign adult, it affects no one else—”

  “What about my practice? Carol Chen is convinced shunts cause cancer.”

  “Any effect on your practice is considered an indirect effect. Like secondary smoke. It doesn’t apply. Mother, whether we like it or not, Perdita has a perfect right to do this, and we don’t have any right to interfere. A free society has to be based on respecting others’ opinions and leaving each other alone. We have to respect Perdita’s right to make her own decisions.”

  All of which was true. It was too bad I hadn’t said any of it to Perdita when she called. What I had said, in a tone that sounded exactly like my mother’s, was “Oh, Perdita!”

  “This is all your fault, you know,” Mother said. “I told you you shouldn’t have let her get that tattoo over her shunt. And don’t tell me it’s a free society. What good is a free society when it allows my granddaughter to ruin her life?” She hung up.

  I handed the receiver back to Bysshe.

  “I really liked what you said about respecting your daughter’s right to make her own decisions,” he said. He held out my robe. “And about not interfering in her life.”

  “I want you to research the precedents on deprogramming for me,” I said, sliding my arms into the sleeves. “And find out if the Cyclists have been charged with any free-choice violations—brainwashing, intimidation, coercion.”

  The phone sang, another universal. “Hello, who’s calling?” Bysshe said cautiously. His voice became suddenly friendlier. “Just a minute.” He put his hand over the receiver. “It’s your daughter Viola.”

  I took the receiver. “Hello, Viola.”

  “I just talked to Grandma,” she said. “You will not believe what Perdita’s done now. She’s joined the Cyclists.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “You know? And you didn’t tell me? I can’t believe this. You never tell me anything.”

  “I thought Perdita should tell you herself,” I said tiredly.

  “Are you kidding? She never tells me anything either. That time she had eyebrow implants, she didn’t tell me for three weeks, and when she got the laser tattoo, she didn’t tell me at all. Twidge told me. You should have called me. Did you tell Grandma Karen?”

  “She’s in Baghdad,” I said.

  “I know,” Viola said. “I called her.”

  “Oh, Viola, you didn’t!”

  “Unlike you, Mom, I believe in telling members of our family about matters that concern them.”

  “What did she say?” I asked, a kind of numbness settling over me now that the shock had worn off.

  “I couldn’t get through to her. The phone service over there is terrible. I got somebody who didn’t speak English, and then I got cut off, and when I tried again, they said the whole city was down.”

  Thank you, I breathed silently. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  “Grandma Karen has a right to know, Mother. Think of the effect this could have on Twidge. She thinks Perdita’s wonderful. When Perdita got the eyebrow implants, Twidge glued LEDs to hers, and I almost never got them off. What if Twidge decides to join the Cyclists, too?”

  “Twidge is only nine. By the time she’s supposed to get her shunt, Perdita will have long since quit.” I hope, I added silently. Perdita had had the tattoo for a year and a half now and showed no signs of tiring of it. “Besides, Twidge has more sense.”

  “It’s true. Oh, Mother, how could Perdita do this? Didn’t you tell her about how awful it was?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And inconvenient. And unpleasant and unbalancing and painful. None of it made the slightest impact on her. She told me she thought it would be fun.”

  Bysshe was pointing to his watch and mouthing, “Time for court.”

  “Fun!” Viola said. “When she saw what I went through that time? Honestly, Mother, sometimes I think she’s completely brain dead. Can’t you have her declared incompetent and locked up or something?”

  “No,” I said, trying to zip up my robe with one hand. “Viola, I have to go. I’m late for court. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do to stop her. She’s a rational adult.”

  “Rational!” Viola said. “Her eyebrows light up, Mother. She has Custer’s Last Stand lased on her arm.”

  I handed the phone to Bysshe. “Tell Viola I’ll talk to her tomorrow.” I zipped up my robe. “And then call Baghdad and see how long they expect the phones to be out.” I started into the courtroom. “And if there are any more universal calls, make sure they’re local before you answer.”

  Bysshe couldn’t get through to Baghdad, which I took as a good sign, and my mother-in-law didn’t call. Mother did, in the afternoon, to ask if lobotomies were legal.

  She called again the next day. I was in the middle of my Personal Sovereignty class, explaining the inherent right of citizens in a free society to make complete jackasses of themselves. They weren’t buying it.

  “I think it’s your mother,” Bysshe whispered to me as he handed me the phone. “She’s still using the universal. But it’s local. I checked.”

  “Hello, Mother,” I said.

  “It’s all arranged,” Mother said. “We’re having lunch with Perdita at McGregor’s. It’s on the corner of Twelfth Street and Larimer.”

  “I’m in the middle of class,” I said.

  “I know. I won’t keep you. I just wanted to tell you not to worry. I’ve taken care of everything.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “What have you done?”

  “Invited Perdita to lunch with us. I told you. At McGregor’s.”

  “Who is ‘us,’ Mother?”

  “Just the family,” she said innocently. “You and Viola.”

  Well, at least she hadn’t brought in the deprogrammer. Yet. “What are you up to, Mother?”

  “Perdita said the same thing. Can’t a grandmother ask her granddaughters to lunch? Be there at twelve-thirty.”

  “Bysshe and I have a court-calendar meeting at three.”

  “Oh, we’ll be done by then. And bring Bysshe with you. He can provide a man’s point of view.”

  She hung up.

  “You’ll have to go to lunch with me, Bysshe,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “Why? What’s going to happen at lunch?”

  “I have no idea.”

  On the way over to McGregor’s, Bysshe told me what he’d found out about the Cyclists. “They’re not a cult. There’s no religious connection. They seem to have grown out of a pre-Liberation women’s group,” he said, looking at his notes, “although there are also links to the pro-choice movement, the University of Wisconsin, and the Museum of Modern Art.”

  “What?”

  “They call their group leaders ‘docents.’ Their philosophy seems to be a mix of pre-Liberation radical feminism and the environmental primitivism of the eighties. They’re floratarians and they don’t wear shoes.”

  “Or shunts,” I said. We pulled up in front of McGregor’s and got out of the car. “Any mind-control convictions?” I asked hopefully.

  “No. A bunch of suits against individual members, all of which they won.”

  “On g
rounds of personal sovereignty.”

  “Yeah. And a criminal one by a member whose family tried to deprogram her. The deprogrammer was sentenced to twenty years, and the family got twelve.”

  “Be sure to tell Mother about that one,” I said, and opened the door to McGregor’s.

  It was one of those restaurants with a morning-glory vine twining around the maitre d’s desk and garden plots between the tables.

  “Perdita suggested it,” Mother said, guiding Bysshe and me past the onions to our table. “She told me a lot of the Cyclists are floratarians.”

  “Is she here?” I asked, sidestepping a cucumber frame.

  “Not yet.” She pointed past a rose arbor. “There’s our table.”

  Our table was a wicker affair under a mulberry tree. Viola and Twidge were seated on the far side next to a trellis of runner beans, looking at menus.

  “What are you doing here, Twidge?” I asked. “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “I am,” she said, holding up her LCD slate. “I’m remoting today.”

  “I thought she should be part of this discussion,” Viola said. “After all, she’ll be getting her shunt soon.”

  “My friend Kensy says she isn’t going to get one. Like Perdita,” Twidge said.

  “I’m sure Kensy will change her mind when the time comes,” Mother said. “Perdita will change hers, too. Bysshe, why don’t you sit next to Viola?”

  Bysshe slid obediently past the trellis and sat down in the wicker chair at the far end of the table. Twidge reached across Viola and handed him a menu. “This is a great restaurant,” she said. “You don’t have to wear shoes.” She held up a bare foot to illustrate. “And if you get hungry while you’re waiting, you can just pick something.” She twisted around in her chair, picked two of the green beans, gave one to Bysshe, and bit into the other one. “I bet Kensy doesn’t. Kensy says a shunt hurts worse than braces.”

  “It doesn’t hurt as much as not having one,” Viola said, shooting me a Now-Do-You-See-What-My-Sister’s-Caused? look.

  “Traci, why don’t you sit across from Viola?” Mother said to me. “And we’ll put Perdita next to you when she comes.”