Daughter of Elysium

by Joan Slonczewski

  “Our shonlings themselves were the first to invite the Urulite delegates to their craft fair.” Verid leaned forward, fixing her gaze on Raincloud. “Zheron has advanced views on the rights of sims. Your teacher risked his life to escape bondage. You can return his legacy.”

  Raincloud’s face grew hot, and she took a deep breath. “You know nothing about that.” And yet, she bleakly realized, she had no answer. She owed it to Rhun, and even to that creature in Tulle’s preserve who shared his lineage. If Urulan rejoined the community of worlds, the sims might be freed.

  Suddenly she recalled that logathlon. Her anger boiled over. “What do you Elysians know of freedom? For all your wealth, you live in a glass cage. You never sow and reap your own. Where I come from, every family has their own herd of goats and their own hot spring out back to run the generator. What do you think you live for—beauty? Nothing but bread and circuses.”

  The Sub-Subguardian lowered her voice meditatively. “There’s the Snake, remember. The Snake brings good, and does not ask why.”

  Raincloud felt her skin crawl, and she gripped the arms of her chair. How could this Elysian begin to know what the Dark Goddess meant? She stared at the diminutive woman with her thick black eyebrows.

  Nightstorm would have gone, if the Goddess called her, as the Snake was called. But how could Raincloud know what she was called for, here, so far from the Hills? And what was the fate of the Snake, if not to be eaten?

  Chapter 10

  BLACKBEAR RETURNED FROM THE LAB AT HIS WITS’ END. The simulator was having fits again, and his mutant test would have to be redone. His hearing on the Fertility Project was less than a week off, and he still could not answer all the questions Alin had warned would come up. He had left the diapers home for once, but Sunflower wet his pants three times; the child had regressed completely. And Hawktalon had given up on tissue culture to spend the day with her crayons, drawing goats and stick figures on Doggie’s back. The four of them, including the much-decorated trainsweep, collapsed exhausted in the house.

  “What’ll you eat, kids?” muttered Blackbear. At least there was no cooking and cleaning, he reflected; Elysium had its compensations. But what a job he would have unspoiling everyone when the family went home to Tumbling Rock.

  The “visit” of Raincloud’s sister had set him wondering again about home. He missed his old clan members keenly, especially his brother Quail with the two pairs of twins. Quail usually remembered to call; but then, it was hard to keep track of men, who always married out into different clans.

  And how were his patients back in Tumbled Rock getting on with the doctor in the next town? The goddess whose fractured femur he had set just before departure—had it healed up all right? And the young father of four, with testicular cancer—had he kept up his chemotherapy treatments, a day’s journey for each? It felt odd, not to be getting calls at midnight anymore.

  When Raincloud at last got back from the Nucleus, she avoided his look, seemingly preoccupied. Somehow everyone made it through dinner without mishap, except Sunflower, who managed to fall off the chair onto his head.

  With the children asleep, Blackbear sank into his bed, his ears still ringing. Raincloud sat by the night table, nibbling a handful of corncrunch to steady her stomach for the night. Her breasts peeped out cheerfully beyond her bare back and shoulders. He watched appreciatively, but doubted he would have the energy to please her tonight.

  Raincloud turned her head toward him, the beads swinging back across her neck. “They want me to go to Urulan.”

  He blinked at her, perplexed. “Urulan? That’s impossible.”

  “Zheron invited me.”

  “Well you said no, didn’t you?”

  “Sh, keep your voice down,” she whispered, “the holostage might hear you. I could lose my job—”

  “You can quit the darn job for all I care,” he exclaimed. “You can’t go off to Urulan and end up in chains. Why don’t you think of us for a change?”

  Raincloud straightened her back, and her breasts rose as she took a breath. “Should I shun the volcano’s slope, too? Should I never build a house, for the earthquakes? Blackbear, you know my clan would always provide for you.”

  He still felt angry, and yet foolish for losing his temper. “Why should it be you?” he insisted more quietly. “If you farm the slope of the volcano, at least you bring the clan a rich harvest. What is there on cursed Urulan for you?”

  “I owe it to Rhun to go. Besides—our clan is part of the universe, you know. If Urulan threatens Elysium with missiles, some day they’ll threaten Bronze Sky, too.”

  He had never had a teacher like Rhun, Blackbear reflected; the doctors at the medical school were more formal. He had met the old sim once or twice, an odd sort of fellow who asked unsettling questions. But why should Rhun’s ghost have such a hold on Raincloud? “The universe is none of our business,” he said. “Let the High Priestess speak for the universe.”

  “Then why did you come here? Did the High Priestess send you out to find immortality’? Or would she tell you it’s blasphemy?”

  He did not answer. He had carefully avoided the temple before they left, not wanting an answer.

  “You still have to call on Verid,” Raincloud reminded him. “You tell her yourself.”

  On top of everything else. “All right,” he muttered. “Let’s get some sleep.” He switched off the light, then turned over away from her on his side, pulling up the coverlet.

  The bed dipped as Raincloud got in. “Blackbear,” she whispered, putting a hand on his waist. He could see her hand, as his eyes adjusted to the dim amber night-light provided by the house. He still did not move, for he was too tired and angry. “Blackbear, you know I always think of you first. Right now I want to see the mushroom come up…” Her hand probed insistently, like six hands, he imagined, all six of the Goddess. He felt himself growing warm and hard. For a moment he wanted to cry, then he lost himself in desire.

  ON HIS NEXT VISITING DAY BLACKBEAR SET OUT FOR the Nucleus. For once he left the children behind, with Raincloud. At first he panicked every few minutes, feeling certain his empty arms had left something precious behind. He kept telling himself the children would love to have their mother to themselves all day, and Raincloud had sworn she would get Sunflower potty-trained at last.

  At Tulle’s suggestion, he had made for Verid an embroidered scene of the Day of the Child, the next holiday of the Clicker year, another five months off in springtime. On that day the High Priestess and all the assistant priestesses of the temple led a great procession of families up the hill to the cave of the Sacred Snake, which the children passed one by one. He had stitched the scene on his Visiting Days, after completing Hawktalon’s last garment. Such handwork was much prized in Elysium, Tulle said.

  The scene reminded Blackbear how much he missed the steady march of the year’s seasons. Shora had its seasons too, of course, but no sign of them seemed to penetrate the floating city. The weather rarely entered Elysian conversation. Only Draeg observed that he hardly dared enter the ocean now that the great seaswallowers had arrived along their march from pole to pole, consuming all in their path except the largest rafts. The meadow of raft seedlings that had greeted the Windclans on arrival would soon be cleared.

  At the Nucleus, a servo frisked him down, an octopod whose tentacles slithered around him; he repressed the impulse to fend them off with rei-gi. Another servo showed him to the Foreign Affairs sector. He recalled how angry he was; he still could not get over their treatment of Raincloud.

  He recognized the Sub-Subguardian immediately, from her appearances on the news. In person, Verid looked even smaller than he had expected. Her eyebrows rose expressively. “My highest duty, to meet you at last,” she said, beckoning him to her office. “Your handwork is famous around Helicon; what a privilege to receive some.”

  Feeling embarrassed, Blackbear still would not be mollified. It was hard to talk back to a goddess, especially one of such authority.


  “How is your project?” Verid asked him before he could speak. “Will we have fertile Elysians soon?”

  Or ageless offworlders, he added to himself. “The Eyeless gene looks promising,” he said reluctantly.

  “Which is…?”

  “It controls egg development.”

  “So in the future, females may be fertile while males are not. What a scandal! That should keep our logens busy.”

  “We’re working on the male germ-line, too.”

  Verid laughed. “Never mind, it doesn’t take much to keep logens arguing.”

  “Well let them have their arguments,” he exclaimed suddenly. “It’s ‘duels to the death’ that worry me. My mate did not come here for any such thing.”

  “I suppose not,” said Verid quietly. Her hands rested on the arms of her wooden chair, an unexpected reminder of home. “None of us came into the world expecting to find missiles pointed at us from twenty light-years away.”

  Blackbear waved his hand impatiently. “You have to live with volcanoes. It doesn’t mean you have to jump into one.”

  Verid’s lips wrinkled, as if restraining a laugh. “I should hope not! Blackbear, I know you think of your children, too. Do you know how many children I have? Over two thousand, from my decades as generen. They’re all grown, now; but somehow, children never fully leave their shon, don’t you think?”

  It was true. He still remembered himself in his father’s arms, years after he had moved to Raincloud’s clan. “It’s not the same,” he told her. “Our clan is linked by blood. Besides, you can’t possibly raise two thousand children as you’d raise one. It sounds like the orphanage in Founders City.”

  “We are orphans,” she observed. “Daughters and sons of Elysium; but those of us who remember Helix…are orphans.”

  Helix, the world that had shared destruction with lethal Torr. His scalp crawled. “Torr was a deathworld, taken over by machines. That can’t happen again.”

  Suddenly her face went blank. “Not on Urulan,” she observed. “That, at least, is unlikely. But there are dangers worse…” She smiled again. “What fools we must seem, to you. Yet Urulan is my daily business, just as volcanoes are yours—and I promise, we won’t jump in.”

  The Sub-Subguardian was deceptively disarming, and her good-humored remarks about Elysians made it hard to feel critical.

  “I have to take you out somewhere,” said Verid, “or it doesn’t count as ‘visiting.’ If we’re done with confidential matters—have you been to the concert hall?”

  Blackbear resigned himself to yet another form of Elysian entertainment. Out in the street-tunnel, Verid in her long train of leafwings might have been just another citizen strolling to view the butterflies, except for her ever present octopod who followed never more than a meter behind.

  The concert hall was a vast darkened interior of a sphere, something like a planetarium. Blackbear sat next to Verid, momentarily uneasy at being next to a goddess in the dark. But the auditorium was filling up, after all, and the security octopod dutifully planted itself several seats over. The scents and perfumes were enough to make one swoon.

  A sound grew out of the darkness, imperceptible at first, deep enough to be felt in the bones. An earthquake, it seemed at first, but it changed, as new tones came in like distant bells. Then firesparks of light appeared, winking out almost before they had come. At last the sparks showered into the audience, who could actually toss them back into the darkness.

  Other pieces followed, a feast for the eyes and ears. Holographic dancers sprang out, as spirited as those who danced for the Goddess; the figures almost seemed to glide into the audience and carry people away. For instrumental works, live players hung suspended overhead, fingering their flutes and strings. The texture of their music was familiar to Blackbear, though the particular instruments were foreign. The servo announcer noted with pride that Elysians had designed more than a hundred new electromechanical instruments throughout their history.

  The final work started off somewhat like the first, with a low, barely perceptible line of sound. But this line traced a melody, as simple as the ones children sing. One by one, additional lines of melody added on, some of them actually sounding like voices singing, although in no language he knew, until the full complexity of it burst upon him. For some reason the incredible beauty of it left him very sad.

  “What did they say that was?” he asked Verid as they were getting up to leave.

  “It’s known as the Song of Joy, although it always sounds rather sad to me.”

  “Elysians composed it?” He could imagine Alin coming up with something like that.

  “It’s from old Torr.” Before Torr fell to the machines. Blackbear shuddered.

  “The original instrumentation is a matter of much debate.” Verid’s eyebrows rose at him. “If you think Helicon is bad, in Anaeaon they’ll even hold logathlons over ancient music.”

  “Well, personally I wish they’d all stick to music.”

  At that Verid laughed very loudly, and a couple of heads turned. “You’ve taken on a ‘volcano’ yourself, I hear. Don’t worry, though, you’ll come through all right. Good luck with your hearing.”

  UPON BLACKBEAR’S RETURN, RAINCLOUD CROWED WITH success over Sunflower’s training. Apparently the two-year-old had spent the entire day on and off the potty, with various enticements.

  “All right, Sunny,” called Raincloud. “It’s time to perform. Look, Sunny: Doggie’s waiting at the potty. See? Hurry up and show Doggie how to do it.”

  “Hurry up and show Doggie,” echoed Hawktalon.

  The pet trainsweep, now scribbled all over with animals and stick figures, was stationed right next to the potty. Sure enough, Sunflower tiptoed over and strained to pull his pants down over his chubby legs. Then he sat upon the little seat, smiled broadly, and made a stream of water in the receptacle.

  “He did it! Hooray!” shouted Hawktalon, clapping her hands.

  “Very good,” said Raincloud. “House, please,” she called, “a teaspoon of fudge ice cream.”

  “I show Doggie,” said Sunflower proudly, as Raincloud fetched him the spoonful of ice cream.

  Blackbear sank into a chair and contemplated a day without diapers. “I think we might all have fudge sundaes.” Except for Doggie, he thought. The trainsweep jiggled happily, emitting a squeak now and then.

  THE HEARING ON THE FERTILITY PROJECT TOOK PLACE AT the swallowtail garden outside Science Park. Raincloud had taken Hawktalon to the circus with Iras, and she would have taken Sunflower too, but Blackbear knew he would feel better having the boy with him. Now Sunflower was off playing with Doggie among the bushes full of caterpillars. The tiptoeing boy with his pet trainsweep had drawn nearly as full a crowd as the hearing.

  Onyx had agreed to help Blackbear conduct the session; Tulle came too, of course, but declined to take part directly, lest it seem that Kal’s logathlon had obliged her. Draeg and Pirin had come, and Alin sat in the audience up front. Blackbear felt good to see him; Alin would not let him down. He and Alin were regular sparring partners now—with the holostage turned off.

  Other citizens trickled in, after their customary five or ten minutes viewing the butterflies. Onyx pointed out several notable logens; then she stopped with an exclamation. “Look—it’s the Guardian Jerya Tenarishon!”

  The Guardian was tall for an Elysian, and the butterflies on her talar were unusually striking, their pale blue wings marked with “eyespots.” A golden sash crossed her chest to her shoulder.

  “She’s a logen, and now a Guardian,” Onyx added. “If the voters of Tenarion support her, someday she’ll rotate in as Prime.”

  “No sign of the Killer yet,” remarked Draeg.

  Blackbear smiled, but in fact he was disappointed. Perhaps Kal would arrive later on. He was determined to set that logen straight.

  Onyx at last pounded the gavel to open the hearing. She held up a lightbox and read from a prepared text, describing her research on eg
g genes in considerable detail. It sounded much like one of Tulle’s grant proposals; and, judging by the file size displayed in the lightbox, it would take nearly as long to read.

  Blackbear had chosen a different approach. After one last anxious glance at Sunflower, he explained in halting Elysian why he had traveled across the Fold to study ageless embryos. “My people begin to wither and lose their strength at an age when most of you are barely out of the shon. We have children, yes; but they all live with the sadness of watching us die. Why should we have to make this choice? Humans have always longed for children, and for long life, in the same breath.

  “Our Clicker families deserve longevity, as surely as you do.” Blackbear carefully said “longevity,” not “immortality,” a word which touched a nerve for some reason. “We are a peaceful people,” he insisted, wishing that Kal were there to hear. “Our children don’t cause wars. We draw our essential needs from the Hills—we grow our own crops, harness our thermal springs. Yet the very earth preys on us; it’s a harsh land, one that no one else wants. Even if we don’t age, life will remain a challenge for us.” Unlike Elysium, where life’s main challenge seemed to be the subversion of Visiting Days.

  “You are a peaceful people, too,” he concluded. “Why shouldn’t you as individuals rear children of your own, to carry on your own traits and character? Instead of leaving them all in a—” he tripped over the word “orphanage.”

  “Preserve,” completed Onyx. “Like an animal preserve; that’s what the shon is, if you think about it.”

  “In any case,” Blackbear continued, “no one would be forced to have children, just because it’s possible. Freedom of choice—isn’t that what your republic is about? Let us scientists do the science; then you, and your elected representatives, may choose to use that knowledge or not.” As he concluded, Blackbear was sweating. He had never given a speech before, much less one about freedom and democracy, but Alin had insisted that he put this last bit in.

  There was polite applause.

  In the audience, a citizen dressed in yellow butterflies stood up and began speaking rapidly. “Your science sounds most impressive, but as usual you foreigners persist in the most perverse notions about the shon. How else can you rear a child with a modern education, if not in the best professional shon? How do you manage?”