Elizabeth Verdi turns around then and sees the three of them standing there watching, and she does something with her hands—Cassie doesn’t know what, some gesture—and although the men go on playing with the color fountain they do it more quietly.
“It’s so beautiful,” Elizabeth Verdi says to them, smiling at them, not embarrassed, how can she not be embarrassed? “I’ve never seen one before—I didn’t know such a thing existed! Imagine, playing with a rainbow, and bossing one around!”
Behind the woman, her husband’s arm moves to touch her, and Cassie winces a little; he will move her smoothly away from the group now, before she can disgrace him further, and when they come back she will have a properly chastened look; she will look white and strained, and she will have a hard time not crying.
But the Verdi man does nothing of the kind. He touches his wife’s hand and leans toward her, whispering, and she listens, but she doesn’t turn to him, she just listens and nods her head. And then she speaks to the silent women staring at her.
“My husband says to ask you to join us,” she tells Cassie and Burgundy and Brune. “And he is quite right—you’re missing all the fun. My dears, won’t you come play, too?”
CHAPTER 21
“The Seas of Space”
“Oh come and sail the seas of space,
that have no shores . . . and their waves are light!
Come sail with me; be my constant friend
on the journey out that has no end.
“I’ll show you wonders on every hand
you’ll never see on any land;
and Terra wrapped in endless light
and wound around in blue and white.
“And if you mourn what you’ve left behind,
I’ll hold you close—I’ll ease your mind—
and we both shall weep for those who roam
the seas of space, and can ne’er go home.
“For they are strange, the seas of space;
no dolphin leap there, no seaweeds sway;
and the solar wind, though it fills our sail,
is a foreign wind, in a foreign gale.”
(Twentieth-century folksong, set to the tune of the much earlier “The Water Is Wide”)
There had been no reason at all for the agent to worry about discovery. Terran perceptions were so limited that she could move about with complete freedom and never do anything more in the way of trying to conceal herself than being quite sure she didn’t actually touch anyone; humans were sensitive enough to tactile sensations to notice (and be mystified) if she did that. But they couldn’t see her, or hear her, or smell her; and she had no reason to go into the few places where there were sufficiently sophisticated scientific instruments to betray her presence.
It was a boring assignment. Something you took your turn at because it had to be done and it was only fair to share the boredom. Or, as in her case, it was an assignment you took because you were being punished for fouling up some other assignment. She didn’t want to think about how badly she had failed on the archipelago, had been absolutely determined not to think about it—there was nothing she could do now to change it, and no reason to torment herself with it, and there was good reason to believe that the new team in place would be able to repair the damage or at least lessen its effects. But Earth duty was so stupefyingly boring that her mind kept going back to what she had done, the scene playing over and over inside her head . . . it was maddening. If she’d been anywhere where caution was necessary, her state of distraction would have worried her; on the other hand, if she’d been anywhere where caution was necessary, her mind would not have fallen constantly into useless rehashings of the past.
To be “sent to Earth”. . . . It was an expression of her people. Faced with something unpleasant, you said “I’d rather be sent to Earth.” But she had been sent to Earth, and the expression now had a dreary reality for her. How did Terrans stand it? She shuddered, and forced herself to pay attention; not that there was anything to pay attention to.
The agent understood, intellectually, why things had to be this way, why so little could be done to help these pitiful people, why even the slightest changes had to be introduced with glacial slowness. She knew the theory. But her heart did not understand, and her most constant impulse was to round up the entire population and take it somewhere where it could live decently, at once. If not sooner. There was a Panglish word for that; it was called “paternalism,” and it was not allowed. And of course she would not do anything of the kind; she would obey her orders down to the last comma. She had done too much damage the last time, when she took it upon herself to make what had seemed to her no more than a minute alteration in her instructions, to ever do such a thing again. It was that previous folly that had gotten her sent to this pesthole; and she deserved it. She had agreed with them that she deserved it, and had been grateful that this was all, because she had been afraid they would tell her it was time to take up some other sort of work. What would she do, if that happened? What would she have done? She didn’t know. She loved what she did, loved it passionately; she could not imagine doing anything else.
“Just gather data,” they had ordered her sternly, though with less contempt than she had been expecting. “Don’t do anything . . . just observe. Gather the data that the sensors aren’t capable of interpreting properly, and be sure you miss nothing important.”
She had been almost through with the assignment when the trouble occurred; she had spent one unit of time in each of the other twelve Households of the Lines, without incident, without a ripple in the smooth fabric of her scrupulous observation and reporting. She had saved Chornyak Household for last, because it was likely that if she found anything important she would find it there—almost anything new in the Lines began with the Chornyaks and then moved to the other families.
She’d been on duty at Chornyak Household in recording mode through three Earth days before it happened, and she had not been especially careful. Her only precaution had been to stay well away from the Interface, since the current Aliens-in-Residence would have been able to see her. They would never have betrayed her deliberately, but the linguists were capable of astonishingly acute observations, and she could not take the chance that some slight unintentional change in the AIRYs’ behavior would catch the Terrans’ attention and disturb their state of placid ignorance. Placid ignorance was the Consortium prescription for Earth, for the very best of reasons. But other than that one small concession, she had been completely relaxed, completely invulnerable, completely unaware. And that was how it had happened.
There had been a disturbance in the spectra around her, and she had tensed immediately, startled, searching for its source. And then she had seen the Terran woman staring at her.
She looked like any ordinary woman of the species. She was standing in the doorway of the room; she held some cleaning implements in her hands and was clutching them as if for protection. Her knuckles were white with the effort she was making. She had graying hair—an older woman, then—and was a little thicker of body than the other women of Chornyak Barren House that the agent had seen. She wore the same clothing that any of them wore, was groomed the same way that any of them were groomed. . . . The agent could find no difference at all; she looked like an ordinary woman of the United States of America, Planet Earth.
But the woman could not have been ordinary, because she had perceived the agent. The nature of that perception was not something the agent could be sure of. It was possible that she saw nothing, but smelled a smell entirely new to her experience or heard a sound that could not be identified as anything of her world. It was a defining characteristic of these people that only a few of their senses were sufficiently developed for use, and even those had a pitifully narrow range.
There was no help for it now, and the sensory modality was irrelevant; the agent had been spotted. Her mind raced frantically. How could it have happened? It wasn’t possible, how could it have happened? And what would the con
sequences be when the agent removed the woman from this spacetime? How could it be done without causing a disruption in this spacetime? A simulacrum . . . could she substitute one without creating multiple problems?
The agent knew what despair was now. Next to this, her previous error had been a matter of no significance. She would go down in history now, but not for her distinguished achievements. She would be remembered as the agent who had somehow managed to fail in her assignment on the planet Earth, despite the fact that such a thing was as nearly impossible as any event in the known universe could be. Congratulate yourself, she thought bitterly, now you have really done it! Now you will spend your life sorting cajederai-lipoba into neat small stacks, like an infant; perhaps the Consortium will allow you to do this in the company of others in disgrace, who will look at you with awe, your disgrace being so much greater than theirs.
The Terran woman was obviously in great distress; any minute now she would scream and bring others running. And what would she say? She was of the Lines—she would scream, “Perceive! Perceive!” And point at the agent, and explain. And then what? The end of the world? The agent could not even begin to imagine what that might lead to.
I am standing here, she thought then, doing nothing at all, watching the world collapse. How very admirable! How professional! She shook herself, snapped herself back to awareness, and did the thing she should have already done, wondering how much precious time she had wasted; she queried her datary. Who is that woman? She specified full information, although she would only scan it; somewhere in the data there might be the single item that would help her understand what had happened . . . there might even be something that would help her decide what to do next.
Making the query was a very simple act, but apparently it caused a perception that was more than the human woman could tolerate; some defense mechanism in her nervous system took over and she fell to the floor in the pattern Terrans called a “faint” as the agent began extracting items from the cascade of information.
THE WOMAN IS SELENA OPAL HAME . . . IN SIXTH DECADE OF LIFE . . . IN GOOD HEALTH . . . MOTHER KILLED IN ACCIDENT WHEN HAME WAS ONLY A FEW DAYS OLD . . . FATHER TURNED INFANT OVER TO AGENCY CALLED GOVERNMENT WORK . . . FROM THIRD WEEK OF LIFE, GIVEN DAILY DOSES OF DRUGS TERRANS CALL HALLUCINOGENS . . . NOT A SINGLE SUCH DRUG, BUT A VARIETY Of THEM . . . AT FOUR WEEKS, PUT INTO A STANDARD INTERFACE . . . RESULT, ALMOST INSTANTANEOUS DEATH OF QTEQN CITIZEN SHARING INTERFACE AND TRANSFER OF INFANT TO FEDERAL ORPHANAGE . . . MOST OF LIFE SPENT AT ORPHANAGE, NO SIGNIFICANT EVENTS UNTIL TRANSFER TO CURRENT RESIDENCE AT REQUEST OF CHORNYAK HOUSEHOLD . . . NOTE SERIOUS DISABILITY CONFINED ONLY TO THIS CLASS OF INFANTS—SUBJECT HAS NO LANGUAGE, CAN NEITHER SPEAK NOR WRITE NOR SIGN, REPEAT SUBJECT HAS NO LANGUAGE . . . FURTHER DETAIL??? WAITING. . . .
The agent made the necessary hasty queries and scanned the answers as rapidly as possible, keeping one wary eye on the woman lying on the floor, demanding repeats when what the datary displayed seemed too good to be true.
The woman was stirring now, but the agent was no longer concerned about the consequences, other than for the poor creature herself. The agent was weak with relief; if “fainting” had been a process available to her physiologically she would no doubt have done that in her turn.
Talk of miracles! Of all the hundreds of thousands of people she might have encountered on this planet, she had managed to run straight into the one and only unique individual capable of perceiving her. The one and only individual whose nervous system had been altered early enough and drastically enough, at the time of greatest plasticity, to make that perception possible. And then, in that bizarre situation of improbable catastrophe, it turned out that the same neurological alteration had still another consequence—it left the woman without language. How awful for her . . . how wonderful for all other persons on this planet!
The woman could not tell what she had seen. Ever.
And now she was getting up, weeping, brushing the tears away with clumsy swipes of her hands across her cheeks. It was over.
Dataries do not present erroneous data. This woman, this woman now leaning against the wall, huddled into herself, her face distorted by her distress, lacked the mechanism of human communication, for all that she was truly and wholly human. This woman had eaten and slept, had done household tasks, had cared for infant and young humans, had walked about, had seen to her personal grooming and her bodily functions; she was capable of many things. But she was not capable of communicating to any other human being the message: THERE IS SOMETHING ALIEN HIDING IN THIS HOUSE!
Because the agent wasn’t human, she was not subject to the human temptation to conceal this event. It might be exceedingly important at some future time, in some other place. Its consequences, for all she knew, might be significant; she did not know how they could be, but that was not her field, and she had been wrong in that way before. She had been positive that what she had done on the archipelago could not possibly have any consequences that mattered, and she had been terribly wrong. When she returned to her locus, she would report this occurrence, and that would be the end of her service as an agent of the Consortium. She would not be trusted with any other assignment, because there were no assignments less important than the one she just failed in, and there was nowhere worse to send her even if they had been willing to permit it. None of this was open to question or discussion.
But catastrophe was not going to happen. The agent would never know anything more than that she had been perceived. It had taken her only seconds to make certain that Selena Opal Hame was not capable of communicating with her, either, except in the form of an attempt to escape from her presence. The agent would never know whether she had been seen or heard or smelled by the human woman, or if the alteration of Selena’s nervous system had activated in her one of the normally nonfunctioning sensory systems. But no one else would ever know, either, because Selena Opal Hame had no way to communicate what had happened. And that was what mattered.
The woman gone, the danger past, there was time to spare; the agent entered into the state of prayer, for she had much to be thankful for. And when the prayer was complete, she advised her datary that the time had come for her to return; she could be of no further use here. Nor could any other agent, for so long as Selena Opal Hame lived at Chornyak Household.
It was categorically forbidden for any agent to cause distress to any Terran, and there was no question about Selena Opal Hame’s distress. The three buildings of Chornyak Household—the main house, Chornyak Barren House, and Chornyak Womanhouse—would be added to the list of forbidden sites for so long as Selena lived. The harm done to her could not be undone, but no further chance of harm would be permitted. It would not be necessary to remove her from this site, or to disturb her life in any other way whatsoever. Her file would be flagged in the master dataries as a routine measure, to provide an alert if ever she did begin to communicate, but that was only a formality. A human being of her age who had never acquired language would not do so—the Terran brain did not work that way. No one but the agent’s superior would ever know what had happened; Selena Opal Hame could be left in peace. And in time, in the way of humans who have endured shocking experiences, the memory would be buried in her mind, walled off and harmless, explained away as a dream or a hallucination, and then forgotten.
It was all right, then. Everything was going to be all right.
Except that the agent’s career was over, and her life effectively at an end unless she could learn to enjoy her exile from everything that she valued. Except for that.
CHAPTER 22
The White House has just announced that the President will not veto the tax reform bill passed last night by both houses of Congress. According to White House Spokesman Chad “Bull” Whipple, the President continues to disapprove strongly of the provision canceling the requirement for all American Earth colonies to remit one percent of their annual income taxes to the Internal Revenue Service in Washington DC. However, he will not—repeat
, will not—veto the package, since he finds it otherwise acceptable. Spokesman Whipple added that the President sincerely hopes the colonies will voluntarily continue to return the monies in question.
“Well, Senator, how do you feel about the President’s position on this bill?”
“Brodo, do you have any idea how degrading it is for our colonies to have to apply every goddam year for exemption from that stupid one percent levy?”
“No, Senator, I can’t say that—”
“And do you know that not one of those requests has ever been turned down? Do you know how long it’s been since any taxes were actually paid by a colonial government? Would you believe sixty-three years? And do you—”
“Wait a minute, Senator! Are you telling our viewers that the Soviet Union allows—”
“Oh, the Soviet Union! What the hell does that have to do with this? I don’t pretend to know what the tax arrangements are for the Soviet colonies, Brodo, I am talking about the great and glorious United States of America! And I am saying that although of course the President had to make some ritual noises of protest—”
“Are you saying that the one percent tax levy is only a symbol, sir?”
“Well of course it’s just a symbol! If anybody should be paying taxes, we should be paying them, to the colonies . . . do you know how many billions of credits—trillions of credits—our colonies save us every single year? That levy has never done one damn thing but cause bad feeling and rotten public relations!”
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