It was early the next day when I entered Magister Galele’s quarters, but he was already up and drinking coffee. He greeted me with a charged mix of joy and horror. “Tedla, thank god! They sent me your clothes, without a word of explanation. It was like receiving the ashes of someone who died. Lord in heaven, what have they done to you?”
He wanted me to get out of the uniform and put my clothes back on. “I can’t stand to see you like that,” he said, really perturbed. I hesitated, but decided the odds of Supervisor Moriston coming to his quarters to see what I was wearing were pretty remote, and I might as well please him. But even after I had hung the uniform by the graydoor, he couldn’t get over my shaved head. Outrage alternated with heartbreak all morning as I fixed his breakfast, shaved his face, and laid out his clothes.
“That woman’s a tinpot tyrant,” he said. “She’s jealous of someone with better looks than hers, that’s what it is.”
I didn’t dare tell him what I thought her real motive was. I said stoically, “It will grow back.”
“That’s not the point,” he said. “It’s not the hair I mind. It’s seeing you debased and humiliated. That makes my blood boil.”
I hadn’t felt either debased or humiliated until he suggested it. To feel debased, you must have a feeling that you deserve better, which no bland has. But knowing he felt that way made me self-conscious and ashamed whenever he looked at me, and slowly I began to resent what had been done to me. It wasn’t a familiar feeling, and I kept rolling it around in my mind, like a hard candy you suck on till it gets sharp against your tongue. Still, it wasn’t really resentment for my own sake. I resented Moriston for going against Magister Galele’s wishes, and causing him pain.
When the time came for me to leave that evening, he said, “I wish you didn’t have to go. I keep thinking I’ll never see you again.”
“Think of all the good material I’ll collect,” I said.
That consoled him a little. “Be sure to watch for historical consciousness,” he said.
***
It took a few weeks for blue team to stop noticing I was there and talk freely in front of me. When they did, I was astonished at what I found. You have done fieldwork, so you won’t be surprised to hear that it had nothing to do with what Magister Galele expected to find.
Blue team was heavily involved in witchcraft.
In a way, it was an outgrowth of the petty sabotages all blands perform against people or other blands they don’t like. They will polish the floor so the target of their malice will slip, or put extra bleach in the clothes to make the wearer break out in a rash. A really rebellious bland might spit in the soup. They whisper about poison, but never do it. They have an almost superstitious belief in the humans’ ability to trace real sabotage back to the responsible party.
That was the joy of witchcraft. It caused harm that seemed unrelated to the actual perpetrators.
Blue team didn’t stop with polishing the floor and passively waiting for an accident. They cast hexes to make the floor malevolent. They bewitched machines to make them pinch and burn their human operators, or give electric shocks. They sprinkled potions on the linens to make the humans sleepless with nightmares, or impotent. Magic lightbulbs made everything they illuminated look ugly.
Their main target was Supervisor Moriston. They spent hours inventing sorceries to make the woman’s life a misery. She suffered from a constant succession of cramps, rashes, and infections for which blue team took credit and the other blands took warning.
Cholly was the ringleader. It was regarded with a kind of admiring terror by the other blands, and used its reputation to tyrannize even the reluctant ones into collaborating. There was a clique around Cholly, a bitter group of malcontents. The younger blands were completely cowed by fear of becoming their target. When Cholly’s coven convened in the center of the roundroom, the rest of us huddled on the edges, whispering.
“You’ve got to be more careful,” Pots whispered to me. I had taken its place as the lowest-status bland in the blue team roundroom. There was a much more rigid hierarchy here than at Menoken, based on age and closeness to Cholly. “You talk to Cholly too much like a human, and make it mad,” Pots said. “You know, it already witched you.”
“Really?” I said.
“Why do you think you ended up down here, in Cholly’s power? Why do you think Moriston shaved your hair? That was Cholly’s spell.”
“How did Cholly do it?” I whispered.
“I don’t know,” Pots said in a fearful tone that made me think it did know, and didn’t dare tell me. When I thought of the nearly unlimited access Cholly had to Magister Galele’s quarters, the possibilities were endless.
“Is Cholly hexing the alien?” I asked.
“Are you kidding?” Pots said. “Where do you think Cholly got its powers? I told you the alien liked it. He must like Cholly more than he likes you, because he gave it stronger magic.”
I soon learned that I had been just about the only bland in the East Questishaft not to know the story of my own bewitching. It had been one of Cholly’s more spectacular successes. When I had first arrived, unwittingly challenging Cholly’s monopoly on Magister Galele, everyone had expected a magical battle to erupt between us. Now I found out it had happened, and I had lost.
Of course, each day I would report everything to Magister Galele. I kept expecting him to scoff and ridicule us, but instead he was thrilled. “Such drama! Such tension!” he would exclaim. “The humans have no notion what a cauldron they are sitting on.”
He explained to me the role of magical thinking, especially among oppressed and powerless populations. Every day he had some parallel example from another culture. It brought me back to reality to think I was witnessing an objective phenomenon, a mode of thought. If I had been trapped in East Questishaft with no one but blands to talk to, I’m sure I would have begun to believe in magic myself.
As time passed, he grew dissatisfied with hearsay. He said to me, “Do you think you could get them to let you participate?”
I was terribly reluctant. He didn’t understand what a risk I was taking even telling him. Even if the witchcraft itself was absurd, the malice behind it was very real, and had a kind of power which I found disturbing. If it hadn’t been for Magister Galele, I would have stayed as far away from it all as possible.
When he saw my face, he said, “Tedla, you don’t believe in this hocus-pocus, do you?”
“No,” I said defensively. “But if any humans found out, I’d be in big trouble.”
He gave a quizzical smile and I realized I’d just implied he wasn’t human. I started to apologize, but he laughed and patted my shoulder. “I know what you meant,” he said. “I’m flattered, in a way.”
But he still wanted me to try and penetrate Cholly’s coven. Over the next few days he wheedled and cajoled me, and at last, against my judgment, I agreed to try.
I approached Cholly during the day, when it was cleaning Magister Galele’s quarters. Oddly enough, now that Cholly had conquered me, it seemed to regard me as a kind of trophy rather than an enemy. Moriston’s treatment of me was part of the reason. In Cholly’s eyes, my shaving made me a natural ally against her. It was part of the illogic of it all that they held her accountable for her acts, while simultaneously taking credit for witching her into doing them.
I pulled Cholly aside into the bathroom and said in a low voice, “Listen, I want to get back at Moriston. Will you teach me to witch her?”
It gave me a long, appraising look. Its eyes were a strange, pale color, and you could see the whites all around the iris. I got quite uneasy at its silence. At last it said, “You’ll have to obey me.”
“Okay,” I said, forcing back my misgivings.
“If I help you, I own you,” it said.
I nodded.
“I’ll tell you your task later,” it said, and turned back to the cleaning.
That evening in the hygiene station, when I stepped out of the shower, I
found myself surrounded by Cholly’s crew. They hustled me over into a corner where Cholly was waiting, still dressed in its uniform. It looked me over, then drew something out of its pocket. “Do you know what this is?” it said.
It was a contraceptive diaphragm. “Is it Moriston’s?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“How did you get it?” I whispered.
“Never mind. Here, piss on it.”
“What?”
“Go on.”
They were all watching me, and I realized it was a kind of initiation. So I took the diaphragm and wet it with my urine. Cholly said, “Now tell your piss what you want it to do to her.”
“Make her burn and itch,” I said.
“Good.” Cholly took it back and put it, still wet, in a plastic bag. “Next time you see her, you’ll know your piss is inside her body,” it said.
There was something primal about this revenge that made me quake with disgust and fear. Cholly saw my reaction, and smiled triumphantly. “All of us saw you do it,” it said.
Now they had a hold over me. After that, since my obedience was ensured, they let me hang around their circle in the roundroom, listening.
They did a lot less actual magic than everyone believed. Most of their conversation was just vicious gossip and revenge fantasies. But Cholly also had a number of stories it liked to tell, usually late at night when the conscientious blands had all gone to sleep and only Cholly’s crew and some younger hangers-on like me were there to listen. Cholly was a good storyteller. The slightly manic quality that made it seem so odd in daily life made it fascinating to watch in performance.
Cholly’s favorite tale was about Brazen Potlicker Bland. (That was a joke; it had a name like a human.) Brazen had a cruel supervisor who pulled on his blands’ ears if they misbehaved. Brazen had misbehaved so many times its earlobes dangled down below its shoulders, and it had to tie them back out of the way when it was working. (Cholly always acted out some funny business here, showing us how Brazen’s earlobes got in the way.) The supervisor was so mean that whenever he went into grayspace to beat some blands, he left his soul behind on his dresser because he didn’t want it interfering by making him kind. One day the supervisor went looking for Brazen with a big whip, to beat the stuffing out of it. (Here Cholly acted the part of the supervisor, glaring around at us as if we might be Brazen, which we all denied.) Brazen was so scared it nearly peed in its pants. (Here, Cholly shook and grabbed its crotch. We all roared with laughter.) It ran and ran, and finally came to the graydoor into the supervisor’s room. It went through to hide, thinking that was the last place the supervisor would look. What should it spy but the man’s soul sitting on the dresser. Being a thieving bland, Brazen couldn’t resist taking the soul. Just then the supervisor came in, saw Brazen, and started chasing it. Brazen knew it was going to get caught, and had no place to hide the soul it had taken, so it swallowed it. But instead of going down right, the soul got stuck in Brazen’s throat. (Here, Cholly showed us how Brazen’s eyes got big and bugged out as it tried to cough up the soul.) When the supervisor caught Brazen, he tried whacking it on the back, and hanging it upside down, but nothing would bring the soul back up.
After that, Brazen had a soul like any human. It was smart as a person, but lazy and devious like a bland. It had many subsequent adventures in which it had internal conversations with the soul, which always spoke in a condescending, superior tone, just like a human, and always wanted Brazen to act human when it wanted to act like a bland. Cholly played both parts, Brazen and the soul. We thought the whole thing was hilarious, in a scandalous way.
I thought the stories were all just entertainment—though the kind of entertainment only bad blands would enjoy. Cholly used them to draw us into its subversion, and make us feel culpable. But Magister Galele was sure they had a deeper meaning. “Cholly is creating a collective culture by giving you a common mythic vocabulary,” he said. “It’s a technique of charismatic leaders. I wish I knew how deliberate it is.”
What he most wanted to know was whether the blands were beginning to see their oppression as a collective problem, not an individual one. Up to this point, I—and every other bland I knew—had thought of mistreatment as the moral failing of individual humans. Once Magister Galele taught me that the system was independent of the individuals—the people could all be replaced and everything would stay the same—I could form the idea that it was the system that needed changing. Personal resentment changed into a sense of social injustice.
“Do you think they would understand, if you told them?” he would press me.
I shook my head. “No way.”
But I understood.
***
One day a large box arrived at Magister Galele’s doorstep. From the markings I could tell it had come all the way down from the Capellan questship. When he saw it, he gave an exclamation of satisfaction and said, “Come here, Tedla. These are for you.”
They were all books and disks in Capellan. I thought he was joking, so I laughed. He said seriously, “I’ve decided you can’t be really useful to me as an assistant unless you learn my language.”
I was incredulous. “I can’t learn another language. I can barely speak one right.”
He absolutely refused to listen. We argued on and off for three days, and he finally wore me down. So every morning before lunch we sat down at the table for an hour, and he taught me Capellan. As I said, he was a wonderful teacher: funny, interesting, and involved. I so much enjoyed having his undivided attention that I tried to learn just so he wouldn’t lose interest in me. Before too long, we were talking simple Capellan phrases to each other in the apartment. It was like having a private language only we knew.
Magister Galele did not entertain much; in fact, I was surprised at what a life of isolation he lived. But there were a few humans who came to his quarters from time to time. One was a man named Gambion, who enjoyed evenings of intellectual sparring. I did not like him. From the beginning he looked at me in a knowing way, as if with a sophisticated wink at what he assumed to be the relationship between me and Magister Galele. From time to time he would even touch me suggestively, as if thinking I was somehow available. It made my skin crawl.
I would work in the kitchen as they sat at the table drinking, and was astounded to hear how similar was the tone of Gambion’s political gossip to what I heard in the roundroom. The difference was that the humans’ gossip involved real power.
One day I had served them some food and was cleaning up when I heard Gambion’s voice drop low, which always made me listen more closely. He said, “Ovide’s in real trouble, you know.”
“Really?” the Magister said. He sounded distressed.
“Yes, there’s an election petition going around. She’s too open to innovation. Her politics are the product of another time when there weren’t so many threats. She doesn’t understand what an age of anxiety this is.”
“What are people anxious about?”
“You need to ask that? You, my friend. They’re anxious about you.”
“Us?” Magister Galele sounded astonished. “But we’ve done nothing. There are so few of us. We’re completely under your control.”
“It seems that way to you, I’m sure. But we have far less insight into your intentions and your powers than you have into ours. People are beginning to question the unrestricted access we’ve given you, without demanding the same in return. And then, there is your effect on our blands.”
“We have an effect on the blands?” The Magister sounded astonished.
“Oh, please, Alair, don’t be so ingenuous. Of course, you must. But that’s not important. What’s important is that people think you do.” His voice dropped even lower. I held my breath to hear. “You must understand by now, our system is extremely unstable. There’s a vast population of them, more than anyone admits, and it’s constantly growing. How are we to keep them under control? They’re unpredictable. In the last twenty years we have eased up restr
ictions and improved their lot, but it’s only made them more discontent. What chance do you think the humans in this convergence would have if the blands turned on us?”
“Oh, surely that’s not likely,” Galele said.
“You think not? How can we tell what’s in their minds?”
It was a complete revelation to me that the humans feared us as much as we feared them. More, perhaps—because we understood the humans, or thought we did.
“People wonder whose side you would take, if the worst happened,” Gambion said.
“Why, no one’s side,” Galele said. “We are strictly observers. Whatever our personal opinions may be, our employer obliges us to remain neutral.”
I winced. Gambion’s question had been purely rhetorical; Magister Galele had assumed it was a serious option not to support the humans.
Gambion was silent for a moment, absorbing the indiscretion without reaction. At last he said coolly, “You have said very little about what the rest of the galaxy will make of us. We can’t help wondering, you know. We think of ourselves as enlightened people. If we thought other planets were going to scorn us as barbarians, that would have a strong effect.”
“I know that, Gambion. That’s precisely why I can’t be open with you. I’m here to study you as you are now. Believe me, you will change all too fast when the conduits of information are turned on.”
I took a damp cloth and went out to wipe the table. I wanted to see Gambion’s face. He was watching Magister Galele with a controlled, appraising air. “People think I know you. Yet when they ask me the simplest question—what are you doing here?—I can’t answer. What viewpoint do you support? I can only guess, from the company you keep.” He glanced at me, but I knew it was Squire Tellegen he was thinking of. I was just the tangible evidence of that connection.
When Gambion took his leave, I came out and stood looking at the Magister till he turned to me.
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