by Anissa Gray
Envy! Could she help it that she had been given a combination of genes that gave her an extraordinary memory, an enormous capacity for grasping and understanding ideas, and a mind that was able to make connections that no one else could see? It’s not as if she chose to be able to do mental gymnastics beyond the reach of anyone she had ever met in person. 〈There were people just as intelligent as she, and some perhaps more intelligent, but they were in far cities, even on other continents, and she knew of them only through their published works, distributed by the Oversoul from city to city.〉 She had no malicious intent. She certainly didn’t have the ability to share her ability with the envious ones—she could only share the products of her ability. They gladly took those, and then resented her for being able to produce them.
Most human beings, she concluded long ago, love to worship from afar people with extraordinary ability, but prefer to have their friends be genial incompetents. And, of course, most of them get their preference.
But now she was permanently attached to this little society of sixteen people, and unable to avoid meeting them day by day. She did her work—her time weeding in the garden, her water turn, her hours of baboon-watching during the day to make sure they didn’t leave their area and get into the food. She gladly covered for Luet when she was throwing up, and uncomplainingly did the tasks that Sevet was too lazy and Kokor too pregnant and Dol just generally too precious a being to do. Yet still she did not fit, was not accepted, was not part of the group, and it only got worse, day by day.
It didn’t help a bit that she understood exactly what was happening. The bonding between husband and wife triggers a need for others also to be bonded in the same pattern, she knew that, she had studied it. The old courtship patterns, the loose and easy friendships, those now make the married ones feel uneasy, because they don’t want anything around them that threatens the stability of the monogamous marriage bond, while the essence of unmarried society is always to be off balance, always to be free and random and unconnected and playful.
Admittedly, that was precisely the way some of them still wished to behave—Shedemei could see how monogamy chafed at Mebbekew and Obring, Sevet and Kokor. But they were acting the role of spouse right now, perhaps even more aggressively than the ones who actually meant it. In any event, the result was that Shedemei was even more cut off from others around her than she had ever been before. Not that she was shunned. Hushidh and Luet were as warm to her as ever, and Eiadh in her way was decent, while Aunt Rasa was utterly unchanged—she would never change. However, the men were all universally what, civil? And Dol’s, Sevet’s, and Kokor’s attitudes ranged from ice to acid.
Worst of all, this little company of humans was taking a shape that systematically excluded her from any influence in it. Why had they stopped saying, “The men will do this while the women do that”? Now it was, “The wives can stay here while the men go off and” do whatever it was that the men wanted to do. It drove her crazy sometimes that the women were lumped together as wives, while the men never called themselves husbands—they were still men. And, as if they were as stupid as baboons, the other women seemed not to know what Shedemei was talking about when she pointed it out.
Of course, they did notice, at least the brighter ones did, but they chose not to make an issue of it because . . . because they were all becoming so wifelike. All these years in Basilica, where women did not have to submerge their identity in order to have husbands, and now, six weeks into the journey, and they were acting like nomadic tribes-women. The coding for getting along without making waves must be so deep in our genes that we can never get it out, thought Shedemei. I wish I could find it, though. I’d dig it out with a trowel, I’d burn it out with a hot coal held in my bare fingers. Never mind the absurdity of dealing with genes with such blunt instruments. Her rage at the unfairness of things went beyond reason.
I didn’t plan to marry, not for years yet, and even when I did I expected it would only be for a year, long enough to conceive, and then I’d dismiss the husband except for his normal rights with the child. I had no place for bonding with a man in my life. And when I did marry it would not have been with a weak-kneed semi-vertebrate archivist who allowed himself to be turned into the only servant in a company of lords.
Shedemei had entered this camp determined to make the best of a bad situation, but the more she saw of Zdorab, the less she liked him. She might have forgiven him the way he came to this company—tricked by Nafai into carrying the Index out of the city, and then bullied into taking an oath to go into the desert with them. A man could be forgiven for behaving in an unmanly fashion during a time of stress and uncertainty and surprise. But when she got here she found that Zdorab had taken a role that was so demeaning she was ashamed to belong to the same species as him. It wasn’t that he took upon himself all the tasks that no one else would do—covering the latrines, digging new ones, carrying away Issib’s bodily wastes, doing the baking, the washing up. She rather respected someone who was willing to help—she certainly preferred that to the laziness of Meb and Obring, Kokor and Sevet and Dol. No, what made her feel such contempt for Zdorab was his attitude toward doing all that work. He didn’t offer to do it, as if he had a right not to offer; he simply acted as if it were his natural place to do the worst jobs in the camp, and then performed his work so silently, so invisibly that soon they all took it for granted that the repulsive or unbearably tedious jobs were all Zdorab’s.
He’s a natural-born servant, thought Shedemei. He was born to be a slave. I never thought there was such a human creature, but there is, and it’s Zdorab, and the others have chosen him to be my husband!
Why the Oversoul permitted Zdorab to have such easy access to her memory through the Index was beyond Shedemei’s comprehension. Unless the Oversoul, too, wanted a servant. Maybe that’s what the Oversoul loves best—humans who act like servants. Isn’t that why we’re all out here, to serve the Oversoul? To be arms and legs for her, so she can make her journey back to Earth? Slaves, all of us … except me.
At least, that’s what Shedemei had been telling herself for all these weeks, until at last she realized that she, too, was beginning to fall into the servant category. It came to her today, as she carried water up from the stream for Zdorab to cook and wash with. She used to do this job with Hushidh and Luet, but now Luet was too weak from all her vomiting—she had lost weight, and that was bad for the child—and Hushidh was nursing her, and so it fell to Shedemei. She kept waiting for Rasa to notice that she was hauling the water all alone, for Rasa to say, “Sevet, Dol, Eiadh, put a yoke on your shoulders and haul water! Do your fair share!” But Rasa saw Shedemei carrying the water every day now, saw her carry the water right past where Sevet and Kokor were gossiping as they pretended to card camel hair and twine it into string, and Aunt Rasa never said a thing.
Have you forgotten who I am! she wanted to shout. Don’t you remember that I am the greatest woman of science in Basilica in a generation? In ten generations?
But she knew the answer, and so she did not shout. Aunt Rasa had forgotten, because this was a new world, this camp, and what one might have been in Basilica or any other place did not matter. In this camp you were either one of the wives or you were not, and if you were not, you were nothing.
Which is why, today, with her work done, she went looking for Zdorab. Servant or not, he was the only available male, and she was sick of second-class citizenship in this infinitesimal nation. Marriage would symbolize her bowing to the new order, it would be another kind of servitude, and her husband would be a man for whom she had nothing but contempt. But it would be better than disappearing.
Of course, when she thought of actually letting him do his business with her body, it made her skin crawl. All she could think of was Luet throwing up all the time—that’s the result of letting men treat you like a bank in which to deposit their feeble little sperm.
No, I don’t really feel that way, thought Shedemei. I’m just angry. The sharing o
f genetic material is elegant and beautiful; it’s been my life. The grace of it when lizards mate, the male mounting and clinging, his long slender penis embracing the female and searching out the opening, as deft and prehensile as a baboon’s tail; the dance of the octopuses, arms meeting tip to tip; the shuddering of salmon as they drop eggs, then sperm, onto the bottom of the stream; it is all beautiful, all part of the ballet of life.
But the females always get to have some choice. The strong females, anyway, the clever ones. They get to give their ova to the male who will give them the best chance of survival—to the strong male, the dominant male, the aggressive male, the intelligent male—not to some cowering slave. I don’t want my children to have slave genes. Better to have no children at all than to spend years watching them grow up acting more and more like Zdorab so that I’m ashamed of the very sight of them.
Which is why she found herself at the door of the Index tent, ready to walk in and propose a sort of semi-marriage to Zdorab. Because she felt such contempt for him, she intended it to be a marriage without sex, without children. And because he was so contemptible, she expected him to agree.
He was sitting on the carpet, his legs crossed, the Index on his lap, his hands together on the ball, his eyes closed. He spent every free moment with the Index—though that wasn’t really all that much time, since so few of his moments were free. Often Issib was with him, but in late afternoons Issib took his watch at the garden—the long arm of his chair was quite effective at discouraging baboons from exploring the melons, and had been known to bat birds out of the air. It was Zdorab’s time alone with the Index, rarely more than an hour, and the one respect that the company paid to him was to leave him alone then—provided that dinner was already cooking and somebody else didn’t want to use the Index, in which case Zdorab was casually shunted aside.
Looking at him there, his eyes closed, she could almost believe that he was communing with the great mind of the Oversoul. But of course he didn’t have the brains for that. He was probably just memorizing the main entries in the Index, so he could help Wetchik or Nafai or Luet or Shedemei herself locate some bit of information they wanted. Even with the Index, Zdorab was the pure servant.
He looked up. “Did you want the Index?” he asked mildly.
“No,” she said. “I came to talk to you.”
Did he shudder? Was that the quick involuntary movement of his shoulders? No, he was shrugging, that’s what it was.
“I expected that you would, eventually.”
“Everyone expects it, which is why I haven’t come till now.”
“All right then,” he said. “Why now?”
“Because it’s plain that in this company the unmarried people are going to slip further and further into oblivion as time goes on. You may be content with that, but I am not.”
“I haven’t noticed you slipping into oblivion,” said Zdorab. “Your voice is listened to in councils.”
“Patiently they listen,” said Shedemei. “But I have no real influence.”
“No one does,” said Zdorab. “This is the Oversoul’s expedition.”
“I didn’t think you’d grasp it,” said Shedemei. “Try to think of this company as a troop of baboons. You and I are getting thrust farther and farther to the edges of the troop. It’s only a matter of time until we are nothing.”
“But that only matters if you actually care about being something”
Shedemei could hardly believe that he would put it into words that way. “I know that you have utterly no ambition, Zdorab, but I don’t intend to disappear as a human being. And what I propose is simple enough. We just go through the ceremony with Aunt Rasa, we share a tent, and that’s it. No one has to know what goes on between us. I don’t want your babies, and I have no particular interest in your company. We simply sleep in the same tent, and we’re no longer shunted to the edge of the troop. It’s that simple. Agreed?”
“Fine,” said Zdorab.
She had expected him to say that, to go along. But there was something else in the way he said it, something very subtle ...
“You wanted it that way,” she said.
He looked at her blankly.
“You wanted it this way all along.”
And again, something in his eyes ...
“And you’re afraid.”
Suddenly his eyes flashed with anger. “Now you think you’re Hushidh, is that it? You think you know how everybody fits with everybody else.”
She had never seen him show anger before—not even sullen anger, and certainly not a hot, flashing scorn like the one she was seeing now. It was a side of Zdorab that she hadn’t guessed existed. But it didn’t make her like him any better. It reminded her, in fact, of the snarling of a whipped dog.
“I really don’t care,” she said, “whether you wanted to have sex with me or not. I never cared to make myself attractive to men—that’s what women do who have nothing else to offer the world than a pair of breasts and a uterus.”
“I have always valued you for your work with genetics,” said Zdorab. “Especially for your study of genetic drift in so-called stable species.”
She had no answer. It had never occurred to her that anyone in this group had read, much less understood, any of her scientific publications. They all thought of her as someone who came up with valuable genetic alterations that could be sold in faraway places—that’s what her relationship had been with Wetchik and his sons for years.
“Though I couldn’t help but regret that you didn’t have access to the genetic records in the Index. It would have clinched several of your points, having the exact genetic coding of the subject species as they came off the ships from Earth.”
She was stunned. “The Index has information like that?”
“I found it a few years ago. The Index didn’t want to tell me—I realize now because there are military applications of some of the genetic information in its memory—you can make plagues. But there are ways to get around some of its proscriptions. I found them. I’ve never been sure how the Oversoul felt about that.”
“And you haven’t told me till now?”
“You didn’t tell me you were continuing your research,” said Zdorab. “You did those papers years ago, when you were fresh out of school. It was your first serious project. I assumed you had gone on.”
“This is the kind of thing you do with the Index? Genetics?”
Zdorab shook his head. “No.”
“What, then? What were you studying just now, when I came in?”
“Probable patterns of continental drift on Earth.”
“On Earth! The Oversoul has information that specific about Earth?”
“The Oversoul didn’t know it had that information. I kind of had to coax it out. A lot of things are hidden from the Oversoul itself, you know. But the Index has the key. The Oversoul has been quite excited about some of the things I’ve found in its memory.”
Shedemei was so surprised she had to laugh.
“I suppose it’s amusing,” said Zdorab, not amused.
“No, I was just ...”
“Surprised to know that I was worth something besides baking breads and burying fecal matter.”
He had struck so close to her previous attitude that it made her angry. “Surprised that you knew you were worth more than that.”
“You have no idea what I know or think about myself or anything else. And you made no effort to find out, either,” said Zdorab. “You came in here like the chief god of all pantheons and deigned to offer me marriage as long as I didn’t actually touch you and expected me to accept gratefully. Well, I did. And you can go on treating me like I don’t exist and it’ll be fine with me.”
She had never felt so ashamed of herself before in her life. Even as she had hated the way everybody else treated Zdorab as a nonentity, she had treated him that way herself, and in her own mind had given no thought for his feelings, as if they didn’t matter. But now, having stabbed him with the contemptuous
ness of her proposal of marriage, she felt she had wronged him and had to make it right. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I’m not,” said Zdorab. “Let’s just forget everything about this conversation, get married tonight and then we don’t have to talk again, agreed?”
“You really don’t like me,” said Shedemei.
“As if you have ever cared for one moment whether I or anyone else liked you, as long as we didn’t interfere too much with your work.”
Shedemei laughed. “You’re right.”
“It seems that we were both sizing each other up, but one of us did a better job of it than the other.”
She nodded, accepting the chastening. “Of course we will have to talk again.”
“Will we?”
“So you can show me how to get to that information from Earth.”
“The genetic stuff?”
“And the continental drift. You forget that I’m carrying seeds to replenish lost species on Earth. I need to know the landforms. And a lot more.”
He nodded. “I can show you that. As long as you realize that what I have are forty-million-year-old extrapolations of what might happen in another forty million years. It could be off by a lot—a little mistake early on would be hugely magnified by now.”
“I am a scientist, you know,” she said.
“And I’m a librarian,” said Zdorab. “I’ll be glad to show you how to get to the Earth information. It’s sort of a back door—I found a path through the agricultural information, through pig breeding, if you can believe it. It helps to be interested in everything. Here, sit across from me and hold on to the Index. You are sensitive to it, I hope.”
“Sensitive enough,” said Shedemei. “Wetchik and Nafai both took me through sessions, and I’ve used it to look things up. Mostly I just use my own computer, though, because I thought I already knew everything that was on the Index in my field.”
