by Anissa Gray
Now she was sitting across from him, and he set the Index between them and they both bowed forward to lean their elbows on their knees and rest their hands on the golden ball. Her hands touched his, but he did not move his hands out of the way, and there was no trembling; just cool, calm hands, as if he didn’t even notice she was there.
She immediately caught the voice of the Index, answering Zdorab’s inquiries, responding with names of paths and headings, subheads, and catalogs within the memory of the Oversoul. But as the names droned on she lost the thread of them, because of his fingers touching hers. Not that she felt anything for him herself; what bothered her was that he felt nothing at all for her. He had known for more than a month that she was going to be his wife, or at least that she was expected to; he had been watching her, certainly he had. And yet there was not even a glimmer of desire. He had accepted her proscription of sexual relations between them without a hint of regret. And he could endure her touch without showing the slightest sign of sexual tension.
Shedemei had never felt more ugly and undesirable than she did right now. It was absurd—until a few minutes ago she had had such contempt for this man that if he had expressed any sexual interest she would have been nauseated. But he was not the same man now, he was a much more interesting person, an intelligent person with a mind and a will, and while she didn’t exactly feel a great flood of love or even sexual desire for him, she still felt enough new respect that his utter lack of desire for her was painful.
Another wound in the same old place, opening all the fragile scabs and scars, and she bled afresh at the shame of being a woman that no man wanted.
“You’re not paying attention,” said Zdorab.
“Sorry,” she said.
He said nothing in reply. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her.
“Nothing,” she said, brushing away the tear that clung to her lower eyelashes. “I didn’t mean to distract you. Can we start again?”
But he didn’t look back down to the Index. “It isn’t that I don’t desire you, Shedemei.”
What, was her heart naked, that he could see right through her pretenses and see into the source of her pain?
“It’s that I don’t desire any woman.”
It took her a moment for the idea to register. Then she laughed. “You’re a zhop.”
“That’s really an old word for the human anus,” said Zdorab quietly. “There are those who might be hurt at being called by such a name.”
“But no one guessed,” she said.
“I have made quite sure that no one would guess,” said Zdorab, “and I’m putting my life in your hands telling you.”
“Oh, it’s not as dramatic as that,” she said.
“Two of my friends were killed in Dog Town,” he said.
Dog Town was where men who didn’t have a woman in Basilica had to live, since it was illegal for an unattached male to live or even stay overnight inside the city walls.
“One was set upon by a mob because they heard a rumor he was a zhop, a peedar. They hung him by the feet from a second-story window, cut off his male organs, and then slashed him to death with knives. The other one was tricked by a man who pretended to be . . . one of us. He was arrested, but on the way to prison he had an accident. It was the oddest sort of accident, too. He was trying to escape, and somehow he tripped and in the act of falling, his testicles somehow came off and got jammed down his throat, probably with a broomhandle or the butt of a spear, and he suffocated on them before anybody could come to his aid.”
“They do that?”
“Oh, I can understand it perfectly. Basilica was a very difficult place for male humans. We have an innate need to dominate, you see, but in Basilica we had to deal with the fact that we had no control except as we had influence with a woman. The men living outside the walls in Dog Town were, by the very fact they didn’t live inside, branded as second-raters, men that women didn’t want. There was the constant imputation that Dog Town men weren’t real men at all, that they didn’t have what it took to please a woman. Their very identity as males was in question. And so their fear and hatred of zhops”—he said the word with scorching contempt—“reached peaks I’ve never heard of anywhere else.”
“These friends of yours . . . were they your lovers?”
“The one who was arrested—he had been my lover for several weeks, and he wanted to continue, but I wouldn’t let him because if he went on any longer people would begin to suspect what we were. To save our lives I refused to see him again. He went straight from me into the trap. So you see, Nafai and Elemak aren’t the only ones who have killed a man.”
The pain and grief he was showing seemed deeper than anything Shedemei had ever felt. For the first time she realized how sheltered her scholarly life had been. She had never had such a close connection with someone that she would feel their death this strongly, so long after. If it was long after.
“How long ago?”
“I was twenty. Nine years ago. No, ten. I’m thirty now. I forgot.”
“And the other one?”
“A couple of months before I—left the city.”
“He was your lover, too?”
“Oh, no—he wasn’t like me that way. He had a girl in the city, only she wanted it kept secret so he didn’t talk about it—she was in a bad marriage and was marking time till it ended, and so he never spoke about her. That’s why the rumor started that he was a zhop. He died without telling them.”
“That’s—gallant, I suppose.”
“It was stupid beyond belief,” said Zdorab. “He never believed me when I told him how terrifying it was in Basilica for people like me.”
“You told him what you are?”
“I thought of him as a man who could keep a secret. He proved me right. I kind of think—that he died in my place. So that I could be alive when Nafai came to take the Index out of the city.”
It was so far beyond anything she had experienced—beyond anything she had imagined. “Why did you keep on living there, then? Why didn’t you go to someplace that isn’t so—terrible?”
“In the first place, while there are places that aren’t so bad, I don’t know of any place that I could actually get to that is actually safe for someone like me. And in the second place, the Index was in Basilica. Now that the Index is out of there, I hope the city burns to the ground. I only wish that Moozh had killed every one of the strutting men of Dog Town.”
“The Index was that important to you, to make you stay?”
“I learned of its existence when I was a young boy. Just a story, that there was a magic ball that if you held it, you could talk to God and he would have to tell you the answer to any question you asked. I thought, How wonderful. And then I saw a picture of the Index of the Palwashantu, and it looked exactly like the image in my mind of the magic ball.”
“But that’s not evidence at all,” said Shedemei. “That’s a childhood dream.”
“I know it. I knew it then,” said Zdorab. “But without even meaning to, I found myself preparing. For the day when I’d have the magic ball. I found myself trying to learn the questions that it would be worth asking God to answer. And, still without meaning to, I found myself making choices that took me closer and closer to Basilica, to the place where the Palwashantu kept their sacred Index. At the same time, being a studious young man helped me conceal my—defect. My father would say, ‘You need to set down the books now and then, go and find some friends. Find a girl! How will you ever marry if you never meet any girls?’ When I got to Basilica I used to write to him about my girlfriends, so he felt much better, though he would tell me that the way Basilicans marry, for just a year at a time, was awful and against nature. He really didn’t like things that were against nature.”
“That must have hurt,” said Shedemei.
“Not really,” said Zdorab. “It is against nature. I’m cut off from that tree of life that Volemak saw, I’m not part of the chain—I’m a genetic dead end. I thin
k I read once, in an article by a genetics student, that it was not unreasonable to suppose that homosexuality might be a mechanism that nature used to weed out defective genes. The organism could detect some otherwise unnoticeable genetic flaw, and this started a mechanism that caused the hypothalamus to remain stunted, causing us to be highly sexual beings but with an inability to fixate on the opposite sex. A sort of self-closing wound in the gene pool. We were, I think the article said, the culls of humanity.”
Shedemei blushed deeply—a feeling she rarely had and didn’t like. “That was student work. I never published it outside the scholarly community. It was speculation.”
“I know,” he said.
“How did you even find it?”
“When I realized that I was expected to marry you, I read everything you wrote. I was trying to discover what I could and could not tell you.”
“And what did you decide?”
“That I’d better keep my secrets to myself. That’s why I never spoke to you, and why I was so relieved that you didn’t want me.”
“And now you did tell me.”
“Because I could see that it hurt you, the fact that I didn’t want you. I hadn’t planned on that. You didn’t come across as someone who would ever want the love of a contemptible crawling worm like me.”
Worse and worse. “Was I so obvious in my attitude?”
“Not at all,” he said. “I deliberately cultivated my wormhood. I have worked hard to become the most unnoticeable, despicable, spineless being that anyone in this company will ever know.”
And now, thinking of what happened to his two friends, she understood. “Camouflage,” she said. “For you to remain single and not be suspected of what you are, you had to be sexless.”
“Spineless.”
“But Zdorab, we’re not in Basilica now.”
“We carry Basilica with us. Look at the men here. Look at Obring, for instance, and Meb—doomed by their particular lack of gifts to be at the bottom of any pecking order you can imagine. Both of them aggressive and yet cowardly—they long to be on top, but haven’t the gumption to take on the big men and take them down. That’s why they’re doomed to follow men like Elemak and Volemak and even Nafai, though he’s the youngest, because they can’t take risks. Imagine the rage built up inside them. And then imagine what they’d do if they learned that I was the monstrous thing, the crime against nature, the unmanly man, the perfect image of what they fear that they are.”
“Volemak wouldn’t let them touch you.”
“Volemak won’t live forever,” said Zdorab. “And I don’t trust my secret to those who won’t keep it.”
“Are you that sure of me?” said Shedemei.
“I have put my life into your hands,” said Zdorab. “But no, I’m not that sure of you. Like it or not, though, we’ve been forced together. So I’ve taken a calculated risk. To tell you, so that I have one person here that I don’t have to lie to. One person who knows that what I seem to be is only a pretense.”
“I’ll make them stop treating you so—so unregardingly.”
“No!” cried Zdorab. “No, you mustn’t. Things will be better when we’re married, for both of us—you were right about that. But you must let me remain invisible, as much as possible. I know best how to deal with what I am, believe me—you’ve never even imagined it, you said so yourself, so don’t bull your way into my survival strategy and start trying to fix things because you’ll end up killing me if you do. Do you understand that? You’re brilliant, one of the finest minds of our time, but you know absolutely nothing about this situation, you are hopelessly ignorant, you will destroy anything you touch, so keep your hands off.”
He spoke with unbelievable vehemence and power. She had not imagined him capable of talking this way. She loathed it—being put in her place so firmly. But when she thought about it, instead of reacting viscerally, she realized that he was right. That for now, at least, she really was ignorant and the best thing she could do was let him continue to handle things however he thought best.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll say nothing, I’ll do nothing.”
“Nobody expects you to be proud to be married to me,” said Zdorab. “In fact, they’ll all think of it as a noble sacrifice you’re making. So you won’t lose any status by being my wife. It’ll make you sort of heroic to them.”
She laughed bitterly. “Zdorab, that’s how I thought of it myself.”
“I know,” he said. “But that’s not how I thought of it. I even hoped—imagine, having the right to be alone in the same tent with the keenest scientific mind on the planet Harmony—every night—with nothing to do but talk!”
It was so sweetly flattering and yet, for reasons she couldn’t quite grasp yet, it was also vaguely tragic.
“That’s a marriage, after a fashion, don’t you think? We won’t have babies like the others, but we’ll have thoughts. You can teach me, you can talk to me about your work and if I don’t understand I can promise you that I’ll educate myself through the Index until I do. And maybe I can tell you some of the things I’ve found.”
“I’d love that.”
“We can be friends then,” he said. “That’ll make ours a better marriage than most of theirs. Can you imagine what Obring and Kokor talk about?”
She laughed. “Do you think they actually do?”
“And Mebbekew and Dol, both playacting and secretly loathing each other.”
“No, I don’t think Dol hates Mebbekew, I think she actually believes the part she’s playing.”
“You’re probably right. But they’re pretty awful, don’t you think? And they’re going to have children!”
“Terrifying.”
They laughed, long and loud, till tears ran down both their faces.
The door parted. It was Nafai.
“I clapped,” he said, “but you didn’t hear me. Then I realized you were laughing and I thought I might come in.”
Both of them immediately grew sober. “Of course,” said Zdorab.
“We were just discussing our marriage,” said Shedemei.
Shedemei could see the relief spread over Nafai’s face as if the shadow of a cloud had just passed. “You’re going ahead and doing it,” he said.
“We were just stubborn enough to want to wait until it was our idea,” said Zdorab.
“I believe it,” said Nafai.
“In fact,” said Zdorab, “we ought to go tell Rasa and Volemak, and besides, you wanted to use the Index.”
“I did, but not if you’re not done with it,” said Nafai.
“It’ll still be here,” said Shedemei, “when we’re ready for it again.” And in moments they were outside the tent, heading for—where?
Zdorab took her by the hand and led her to the cookfire. “Dol was supposed to be watching here,” he said, “but she usually runs off—she needs her little nap, you know. It doesn’t matter—I let Yobar touch the cookpot once, and he must have spread the word about how it feels, because the boons don’t come anywhere near here now, even when it smells as good as this.”
It did smell good.
“How did you learn to cook?”
“My father was a cook,” said Zdorab. “It was the family business. He was good enough that he was able to afford to send me to Basilica to study, and I learned a lot of what he knew. I think he’d be proud of what I’ve been able to do in these piss-poor conditions.”
“Except the camel cheese.”
“I think I’ve found an herb that will improve it,” said Zdorab. He lifted the lid of the cookpot. “I’m trying it tonight—there’s twice as much cheese in this as usual, but I don’t think anybody will mind.” He lifted the stirring spoon and she saw how cheesily the liquid strung and glopped off of it.
“Mmm,” she said. “Can’t wait.”
He detected the irony in her voice. “Well, it’s not as though you don’t have ample reason to be suspicious of anything that looks like it might taste like the cheese, but I f
igure that we’ve all had years of loving cheese and only a couple of months of hating it, so I should be able to win you all back if I do it right. And we will need the cheese—it’s too good a source of animal protein for all the nursing mothers we’re going to have.”
“You’ve got it all planned out,” she said.
“I have plenty of time to myself, to think,” he said.
“In a way,” she said, “you’re really the leader of this group.”
“In a way,” he said, “you’d best not say that in front of anyone else or they’ll be sure you’ve lost your mind.”
“You’re the one who decides what we’ll eat and when, where we’ll void ourselves, what we’ll plant in the garden, and you guide us around in the Index—”
“But if I do it right, no one ever notices,” he said.
“You take responsibility for us all. Without ever waiting to be told.”
“So do all good people,” he said. “That’s what it means to be a good person. And I am a good person, Shedya.”
“I know that now,” she said. “And I should have known it before. I interpreted all you did as weakness—but I should have known that it was wisdom and strength, freely shared with all of us, even the ones who don’t deserve it.”
And now at last it was time for tears to come to his eyes. Just a little shining, but she saw, and knew that he knew that she saw. It occurred to her that their marriage would be far more than the sham she had intended. It could be a real friendship, between the two people who had least expected to find friends and companions on this journey.
He stirred the pottage and then replaced the lid, leaving the spoon hooked over the side.
“I imagine this is the safest place we could come and talk, if we didn’t want to be disturbed or overheard,” she said. “Because I don’t imagine anybody ever comes near the cookfire if they can help it, for fear of being asked to work.”
Zdorab chuckled. “I’ll always be glad for your company while I’m working here, as long as you understand that cooking is an art, and I do concentrate on it sometimes while I do it.”
