Daughter of Elysium

by Joan Slonczewski

  “I don’t get it,” Raincloud told Lem Inashon, who still brought her Urulite intelligence to translate. “Rolling the payments back a decade is bad enough; why reward them with development aid?”

  “How else will they ever pay it off?” Lem explained. “That ‘stabilization program’ means massive cuts—health care, schools, you name it. Half the work force may be out on the street.”

  “Then their provinces will revolt, and they’ll want to buy weapons. Well, at least with their current credit rating they can’t get any more loans for that.”

  “Oh, L’li can borrow again right away,” said Lem. “That’s the point of rescheduling.”

  Raincloud stared at him. “That’s crazy,” she exclaimed. “You Elysians will all pay for it; and for what?”

  “We can’t just keep our cash under the bed,” Lem said. “We have to lend it somewhere.”

  She was momentarily speechless.

  “Besides,” he added, “just think of all those ships of emigrants L’li could send off to crash-land on Valedon—or even Shora. Policing illegal emigrants was another point of their ‘austerity plan.’”

  Raincloud drew herself up. “I thought free migration was a founding principle of the Fold,” she said frostily.

  Lem shrugged. “Welcome to real life. Do you want ten billion immigrants on Shora? How does Bronze Sky enforce its quota? Go ask, when you go back home.”

  She wondered what Iras would have to say about it. Would Iras still have the nerve to defend her L’liite loans?

  Iras, of course, was still forbidden “professional” discussions by the relentless voice of the Palace of Rest. Nonetheless, she and Raincloud had worked out a little code to exchange comments now and then. They did so under cover of rei-gi practice.

  At first Raincloud had been reluctant to take on an adult beginner whose body was several hundred years old; the training program was designed for toddlers. To her amazement however, Iras progressed rapidly, almost without effort. Her limbs had far better tone than those of a non-Elysian with comparable lack of exercise. She soon picked up the basic movements of stepping and arm swinging, achieving the “immovable” posture that Raincloud could not upset by pushing at her hips or shoulders. Next came the one-armed somersault, a key to the proper way of “falling.” After one or two tries, Iras rolled a perfect circle along her right arm, her back, and her hips, remembering to tuck the left leg under. Her trousers sliced the air in one plane, and she arose in perfect form to face her imagined attacker.

  “Not bad.” For the first time Raincloud envied the Elysians. Long life was something she could take or leave, more easily than Blackbear; but existence in such extraordinary well-being was something to covet. “You’ll be doing the entire somersault in the air, next. I’ll get Blackbear to record it for you.” In advanced pregnancy, there were some moves she avoided.

  “A flying somersault,” Iras repeated, catching her breath. Her cheeks were pink and her braids scattered, a look that would have men fainting in Tumbling Rock. “How—how foreign! Verid will be scandalized.”

  “I should hope not,” said Raincloud cautiously.

  “Of course not, dear,” Iras laughed. “Tell me, how is the fanwing flying?”

  The fanwing, a winged fish native to Shora, was their codeword for Bank Helicon. “It soars higher than ever,” Raincloud answered. “The taxpayers will provide an updraft.”

  “So I hear,” admitted Iras, unperturbed.

  “And the legfish?” Raincloud demanded, referring to L’li. Legfish were scavengers that crawled awkwardly up onto rafts, where children loved to chase them. “Will you go on feeding the legfish?”

  “Not I,” announced Iras with surprising finality. “I’ve had some time to think about this. Legfish will always be hungry, and never satisfied. I’m through with legfish.”

  So Iras, at least, had sworn off L’liite loans. This small triumph of good sense cheered Raincloud immensely. She could not resist giving her a quick hug, and Iras, despite her Elysian reserve, did not seem to mind.

  “It’s an odd thing,” Raincloud later told Blackbear, “how you can get to like these Elysians. Something about Iras—she feels like a sister.”

  Blackbear agreed. He had been feeling something similar himself; or rather, trying to repress the feeling, for he still felt somehow guilty about seeing Kal. “That Alin is quite a fellow. Even Draeg calls him ‘brother.’ I guess all the ‘visiting’ adds up.”

  “Visiting is more than a pastime,” she reflected. “As they say, it’s their ‘highest duty.’”

  THE DAY OF THE CHILD CAME AT LAST. A WREATH OF greeting cards hung above the Goddess in the shrine, and new suits sewn by the house clothed all the Windclans.

  “It won’t be the same,” murmured Raincloud as she spooned grapefruit for Sunflower. The boy was perfectly capable of spooning his own, but he enjoyed the morning habit of being fed; it seemed to have replaced the suspended nursing. “The holiday just can’t be the same.”

  “Not without the Goddess Procession, and the games,” Blackbear agreed. Nor without all the ones they loved; that was too painful to mention.

  “Excuse me, Citizen,” interrupted the house suddenly. “I have located in the anthropology directory an authentic hologram of a Clicker Child’s Day Festival, complete with the procession of the High Priestess to the Mountain Shrine.”

  Hawktalon looked up from her oatmeal. “Wow! We’ll get to see the procession after all.”

  “Finish your breakfast, please,” reminded Blackbear. But he too felt his heart lighten.

  “Thanks so much,” Raincloud told the house. “We’ll view it directly after the ritual readings. By the way, House,” she added thoughtfully, “is there any way we could give you the day off?”

  The house hesitated. “Apologies for my defect, I do not know the answer. I think the doors would close and air circulation would cease, if I were shut off for a day. This condition is not livable,” it pointed out.

  “I didn’t mean ‘shut off,’” said Raincloud, “I meant, a day off. Like a Visiting Day.”

  “I see,” said the house. “My network has no such program. I will search the main directory.”

  “No, don’t.” Blackbear’s heart thudded for a moment. “It might be…dangerous.” All he needed was for Public Safety to show up to haul off his entire “house.”

  Hawktalon and Sunflower had already abandoned their breakfast and run to the holostage. They clamored for the procession.

  “Readings first,” called Raincloud. “We’ll gather in the shrine.”

  The shrine was filled with flowers, exotic lilies and orchids and unnamable blooms of every description. Blood-red roses entwined the serpent of the Dark One, and a bed of mountain flowers cradled the child beneath. Perhaps he had overdone the decorations this year, Blackbear thought, since everything else was lacking.

  Hawktalon announced without prompting, “I get to tell the Worldbeginning this year, Mother.”

  “Yes, dear.” Raincloud was pleased, and somewhat surprised. How proud she would have been to have her firstborn recite for the clan this year.

  Facing the Dark Goddess, Hawktalon straightened her back and began.

  In the beginning, there was Dark. The Dark was perfect, and She was good.

  But the Dark was One, and the Dark One was alone.

  The Dark One longed for an Other. And in that instant, the Dark One’s longing created Light. Because the Light was Other, the Light was imperfect and evil. Through its imperfection, the Light fractured into many colors, and it was beautiful.

  The colors of Light sparked living things: first the microbes and the green-blooded plants, which fed upon Light, then the red-blooded animals, which ate the plants, and finally the humans which devoured everything, including themselves. And the Dark One saw this spectrum of living things, in all its beauty, and knew that it was evil.

  Of all living things the humans were the most evil, and as their evil grew, it threatened to
consume the Dark One’s entire creation. So the Dark One decided to teach them good.

  The Dark One made a seed of goodness. The seed took root and made a tree, which bore a sweet fruit. Then the Dark One plucked one of Her own fingers and made it into a snake. The snake went to a human female and said to her, “I am a warning, sent to you by the Dark One. The Dark One forbids you to eat the fruit of that tree, lest you attain the powers of a Goddess like Herself.”

  The female, being evil, immediately disobeyed the snake and plucked the fruit and tasted it. In that instant she knew goodness, the precious sweetness that comes of compassion for all suffering things. She turned to her consort, who, being evil, tore the fruit from her grasp and began to devour it. The first mouthful taught him goodness also, and so he worshiped her as a goddess, and he distributed the rest of the fruit to their children.

  But although the fruit made them good, it did not make them perfect. It did not keep them from disease, age, and death. Furthermore, now the fruit was gone, and many evil humans remained to be taught.

  Still, the Dark One knew that good was stronger than evil and would ultimately prevail. She swallowed up the snake and regrew her finger. She put the taste of the fruit into the mother’s milk, to remind the newborn child. And the child that grew up on this milk learned to dance.

  HAWKTALON LAID THE BOOK IN HER LAP. SILENCE FELL, for a few seconds. The old tale gathered new resonance, in the voice of one who had never spoken it before.

  “Procession now, Mother?” begged Sunflower hopefully. “Can Sunflower ride on shoulders up the mountain?”

  His sister, however, was still thinking. “Which world did the Goddess create, Mother? The whole universe, or just Bronze Sky? Or the Hills?”

  Seated on the floor, Sharer style, Raincloud straightened her back and cleared her throat. “All your world, the world that matters to you: The Dark One made it.”

  “I wish She hadn’t made Sunny,” Hawktalon added as the boy tried to wrest the book away from her. “Sunny is definitely evil. Go away, bad boy.”

  “We are all born evil,” said Raincloud sharply. “All of us, until we taste the good. All good comes from Her—remember that.”

  “What does good taste like?” Hawktalon persisted.

  The question tickled Blackbear. “Ice cream,” he suggested playfully.

  “She should have made us all good from the start,” said Hawktalon. “Then we could eat ice cream all day.”

  Failing to obtain the book, Sunflower threw himself upon his father. “Procession, Daddy!”

  “All right, on with it,” he sighed.

  Upon the holostage, the light revealed a village from across Clicker country on the western slope of Black Elbow. There the mountain stood, jagged and erect, a thin wisp of smoke rising from its summit into the ruddy haze of morning. The scene must have been recorded several years ago, for the elbow-shaped peak was intact, before its explosive eruption. Blackbear’s skin crawled as he realized that most of the people he would see must now be dead.

  At the village center the temple of the Goddess, like the one in Tumbling Rock, was painted shiny black with fantastic ornamentation in red and gold. Villagers were gathering to join the growing chorus of drums and cymbals. Small children bobbed on their parents’ backs, while older ones played chase around the tall trees that shaded the temple. At the time of sunrise, the sky shone scarlet all around, with a few swirls of orange overhead.

  The High Priestess emerged from the temple. She wore black trousers that swirled around her, with an erupting volcano embroidered in fiery lines. Her hair, dyed burnt orange, was done into dozens of fine braids pulled upward and woven into a crest. In her arms, instead of one of her many children, she held an obsidian statuette of the six-armed Goddess.

  A High Priestess rarely left her realm, lest the power of the Dark One be dissipated. The sight of one now on an Elysian holostage was unsettling. She seemed at once terrifyingly immediate, and yet somehow diminished by this foreign technology.

  The pace of the music quickened, and the flutes sang out in a higher voice. The High Priestess and her retainers twirled as they proceeded, their leggings flaring out with flashes of color. All the goddesses of the village filed after, swinging their children, sometimes laughing as the little ones got their own ideas of how the procession should go. With rhythmic steps they wove out through the village, past the thermal springs that served their homes and the herds of goats which fled or stayed to watch curiously.

  When the High Priestess reached the cave of the Snake, where she would have danced with the snakes on Snake’s Day, the procession stopped. The goddesses formed a double line, and their men lined up outside. Then the dance of the children began, as the children passed from arm to arm, weaving in a complex pattern that brought each one briefly to the Priestess for her blessing. Some of them shrieked upon reaching her, terrified by her mask and her flame-like crown of braids.

  Their terror was not without sense, Blackbear thought, struck again by the memory of the eruption that must have claimed so many of those young lives. The One who brought forth all that was good had made the volcano, too.

  THAT AFTERNOON, RAINCLOUD RECEIVED AN UNEXPECTED visit from Leresha.

  Raincloud had to rouse herself from her afternoon nap; nowadays, she seemed to sleep more than she waked. With an effort she pulled herself erect and straightened her talar, which strained at the front.

  Leresha sat cross-legged in the middle of the sitting room. “I hope you shared a good rest; I’m sorry to disturb you.”

  “Not at all.” Raincloud was alert now. Thinking quickly, she pulled down a seat cushion and crossed her legs before the Sharer. Raincloud felt she now knew Leresha a little, although she had yet to learn the cause of the Sharer’s disfigured skin. There was something penetrating about Leresha, coming perhaps from her mental discipline of whitetrance. Whatever it was, the Sharer made Raincloud feel almost transparent, as if Leresha could see right through her.

  “You’ve been asleep,” Leresha said, “but your child is wide awake. What an active swimmer. She must dance in your dreams.”

  The baby in fact was tumbling vigorously, its head moving from front to back where it butted her spinal column. Leresha must have observed her belly shifting. “I share the great honor of your presence, on my ‘Visiting Day.’” She used the Elysian phrase, hoping Leresha would understand that she could not discuss business without getting into trouble.

  “What else is our business, if not visiting?” said Leresha. “Don’t be concerned. It’s an honor indeed, to share an hour with you and your child.”

  Raincloud swallowed uneasily. “How are your girls? Did the eldest take a selfname?” What had Leresha come for, she wondered.

  “She took her selfname at the last moon.” The twin planet Valedon was a “moon,” to the Sharers. “She named herself the Careless One, and joined the Gathering.”

  “She’ll outlive that name soon, I’m sure.”

  “Not too soon, or it was not hard enough! Raincloud, what I have to share with you concerns children. The Elysians, I hear, intend to bear children of their own wombs.”

  “Yes?” That project of Blackbear’s seemed to cause no end of trouble. “To be born in one’s child is a natural desire.”

  “Desire, of course. But there are consequences.”

  Raincloud knew well enough about that. “I’m afraid I can share little help with you. The Guard takes no position on the matter.”

  “But Verid chose you and your child to assist her,” Leresha replied. “Your child speaks clearly enough.”

  To that Raincloud said nothing. Even Lord Zheron was easier to face than this one who invoked an unborn child.

  “Perhaps I may share help with you,” Leresha added. “Are you aware that Elysians outnumber Sharers on this world by a factor of eight?” The twelve floating cities totaled eight million citizens, approximately eight times the Sharer population. “We allowed this by treaty with the Heliconian Doctors
, on the understanding that Elysians confine their reproduction to their centers of lifeshaping, which now number eight-plus-half-eight.” Sharers count by base eight. “But the population total must not grow.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So now, why do Elysians seek to remove restraint from individual reproduction?”

  Raincloud wondered how much she could say without getting into trouble. “It’s all speculative research,” she muttered. “Verid thinks it will come to nothing.” In fact, she realized, she did not know what Verid thought.

  “This is no frivolous matter. The Heliconian Doctors worked hard to ensure that individuals could not conceive; but what humans create can be uncreated.”

  So Tulle had it right, then. Elysians in their pride tried to overlook this part of their history. “Perhaps Blackbear can explain better,” said Raincloud. “I wish I could share more help.”

  “You’ve shared well,” said Leresha. “By the way, your sister Doggie seems to care more for us now. She comprehends our speech and shares her needs with us more clearly. She remains safe with us. We will add her name to our fugitive register at the World Gathering.”

  “Fugitive register?” Raincloud’s arms tensed.

  “Our treaty requires us to report any Elysian fugitives sheltered,” Leresha told her. “By description, though not by name. The rule does not please me, but there it is.”

  THE CHILDREN WERE IN BED, AND RAINCLOUD LAY ON her side, half-covered by the sheets. In the pale ruddy glow, adjusted to their liking, Blackbear rested on an elbow, his hair bursting provocatively across the pillow. “Feeling better?” he whispered, his hand lightly brushing her hip.

  The touch sent a warm wave of pleasure through her limbs. She stretched a bit, relaxing.

  “How’s the little one?”

  “Not so little.” Now that Raincloud neared the end of her seventh month, the Sharer halfbreed Doctor Shrushliu projected a weight of over four kilos. Raincloud figured she was eating more rich food and getting more sleep than she had during her graduate studies, when the other two were born. With her hand, she could feel the head looming inside, and the two lively feet. She saw the stretch marks, the “Goddess’s fingerprint,” she thought with satisfaction. All Iras’s superior physique would never give her this. “Leresha asked, you know, about your project.”