“He doesn’t like you,” I said.
“What?” the Magister said, startled.
“I could tell from the way he watched you. You weren’t paying attention. I don’t think you ought to trust him.”
He looked very unsettled. “That can’t be right,” he said.
But from that day he began avoiding Gambion.
It was not long after that he came into the studium when I was at work and said, “Tedla, you’re really good with machines, aren’t you?”
Actually, I wasn’t particularly good with them; but he was unbelievably bad. I had never seen anyone who could get so mixed up when confronted by anything mechanical. He had recently gotten some equipment for recording visual-audio data, but after a few attempts had abandoned it and reverted to his old notebooks, written in crabbed Capellan hieroglyphs that broke into Gammadian whenever he quoted someone verbatim, so that no one but a perfect bilinguist could make head or tail of them.
All I said was, “I’m okay.”
“No, you’re really good. You know, when I’m on an interview, I don’t have time to be worrying about equipment. I think it would work a lot better if you came along to set up the recorders and change disks and so on, so I can concentrate on what I’m doing.”
I thought it over. I was growing restless by now, never getting out of his apartment except to go into grayspace. If I could tag after him as a menial, I might be able to satisfy my curiosity about human space. My boredom made me bold, so I said, “Okay.”
He looked pleased that I hadn’t put up more of a fight. “Good. I can use your insights, too. I’m not sure I always catch the nuances you Gammadians see.”
That was true, too, but I didn’t say anything.
I was a little uncertain how his interviewees would react to my presence, but it turned out not to be a problem. When we went out, I trudged along loaded with bags of equipment and supplies, so obviously a packhorse that it didn’t attract attention. As I would string cords and set up, he would engage the humans in some social banter that relaxed everyone. All he had to do was glance at me to see when I was ready, and then he could launch into his questions. Once the machines were running I would settle down cross-legged on the floor. No one ever minded me listening.
I learned a lot about humans this way. The first interview I went on was with a pregnant woman. I had never seen one before, and had to force myself not to stare. She was very self-conscious, and I realized that the public honor given to women who procreate hides a private shame. Magister Galele was extremely skillful at getting her to relax. I watched him play the clown for her, pretending to be more stupid and ignorant than he was, so she would laugh and want to teach him things. At first I felt annoyed at him—how could people respect him if he acted with so little dignity? But I slowly realized how he was managing her by deprecating himself. He got her to talk about some astonishingly intimate things.
“Will you be sad to give up your child?” he asked.
“In a way,” she answered. “I had a dream the other night, about holding it in my arms. It was so small, and so alive....But what can I do? No one would assign me a bland just so I could keep it.”
“Wouldn’t you consider raising it yourself?”
“Are you joking? I already have a full-time assignment. Besides, child-rearing is just mindless drudgery all day. I’d be no better than a bland.”
It was something I heard over and over, their fear of becoming like a bland. It was why they feared sickness, and age, and all vulnerability, because it would make them like a bland. We were like their weak part, that they had walled off from themselves, and now no longer understood.
Observing the humans, I also learned a great deal about sexual culture. I was still very innocent. I know why you are looking at me in that skeptical way: but you have to understand that sexual experience is not the same as sexual sophistication. What I didn’t know were the verbal innuendoes, double entendres, gestures, hints, winks, all the ways you weave sexual meaning into your communication. All that is quite independent of sexual activity. In fact, I think it is often a substitute.
Magister Galele and I often talked about the interviews afterward—mostly in Capellan, which is a much more analytical language than ours. As my grasp of the language improved, he gave me Gossup’s Elements of Culture to read. I labored a long time over that book, and not just because of the language. There were a thousand subversive ideas in it that shocked and disturbed me. From it, I learned that humans have always oppressed and exploited portions of their population, under a thousand different names and justifications. I learned strange new arguments about the rights of individuals. Worst of all, I realized there was nothing natural about our society—it was merely one way among many, and not even, perhaps, the best.
As the months passed, and the Magister increasingly took me wherever he went, people began to notice. First they teased him and joked; then the ribbing became a little harsher. He always shrugged it off, or bantered back, but it made me touchy. Of course, they were all completely wrong about him. Everyone in Tapis Convergence assumed he was sodomizing me, a vice they understood. That he was educating me was beyond their comprehension.
***
My first inkling of real danger came during a visit to one of the midway houses run by the Order of Matriculators. I was very interested in this part of his research, since it gave me a chance to see the kind of place—perhaps the very place—I would have gone after matriculation, if only I had been human. The midway houses are where newborn humans live for nine months as their bodies mature and they make up their minds what profession to pursue. The orders and communities recruit promising candidates. In fact, the young people are generally made much of, as if they have achieved something extraordinary just by becoming human. Since they are freed from the discipline of the creche and not yet bound by the regulations of a community, the atmosphere is wild—and tolerated indulgently by the adults in charge.
In the end I did not enjoy the visit much. There was a strident arrogance in these young humans that did not become them. They seemed so pleased with themselves. Rulers of the universe, I called them mentally. They could not resist commenting on my presence, making me feel conspicuous. Perhaps it was because I represented the fate they had so lately escaped.
On the other hand, they were awed and intrigued at Magister Galele, and eager to display their cleverness to him. Magister Galele was in his element, joking and teasing his way from one interview to the next. I followed him around silently with a recorder.
Toward the end of the day he got into an intimate conversation with a young girl who so clearly wanted to have a sexual encounter that I sat nearby, itching with indecision whether to withdraw tactfully, or wait for him to ask me. He seemed to be encouraging her, and I could imagine why; I had often been puzzled by his completely celibate life. But at the last moment he broke off and told me we were leaving. As we walked away, I said to him in Capellan, “You led her on.”
He looked at me, amused, and said, “Tedla, are you jealous?”
I was astonished at the suggestion, and quickly denied it. “I’d like you to have a partner worthy of you,” I said.
But it wasn’t strictly true. The fact was, we had become so close I had begun to think of him as mine.
All that day I had been aware that one of the postulant matriculators was watching us closely. He had wispy brown hair and a broad forehead, with close-set eyes that gave him an almost cross-eyed appearance. Something about him made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t quite place it.
As we were about to leave, I saw him again, loitering by the exit. This time the shock of recognition hit me. It was Zelly.
That was not his name any more, of course. He had a real name now, though I never heard it. I stared at him, thunderstruck, feeling a hot wave of shame, till his eyes flicked in my direction and I saw that he recognized me—had, in fact, recognized me from the beginning. My gaze fell to the floor, but not before I had seen his expression, as if
I were a maddening blot on his past.
He addressed Magister Galele in a voice tight with forced aggression. “Do you think we don’t know what you are really doing here?”
Magister Galele sized him up and responded calmly, “Here at this midway house, you mean?”
“No. Here on this planet. Interfering with our politics. Defiling our customs.”
Carefully, Magister Galele said, “What has given you that impression?”
The young man gave an exclamation of disgust and discomfort. “You know what I mean. We all know what you’re up to. You and that weeping baby, Ovide Hornaday.” He said the elector’s name with intense contempt.
By now, I could tell, the Magister was mystified, and quite curious. But he gave his standard response: “We are completely neutral in regard to your politics. We are only observers.”
“If that’s true,” Zelly said in a venomous voice, “Why have you spent all your time hanging out with atomists and neuter-lovers?”
My eyes were on the floor, so I had no idea how to interpret the silence that followed. My own ears were buzzing with mortification.
Magister Galele said slowly, “I would be happy to hang out with someone else. Would you care to join me for a hopscotch?”
“No, not me,” Zelly said. “It’s Rustim that ought to talk to you. He’ll set you straight.”
“Fine. How can I get in touch with him?”
“I’ll ask him. He’ll talk to you, all right.” He paused, then added with a particularly personal malice, “He’ll talk to your bland, too. We’ll be happy to set it straight for you.”
I felt that he had finally gotten to the crux of his message.
When we had left and were walking down the corridor toward the central hub of the convergence, Magister Galele said in Capellan, “Well, that was enlightening. Not pleasant, but enlightening.”
I was silent. My face still burned to think that Zelly had seen me like this.
Magister Galele began to talk about returning for some more interviews the next day. I said abruptly, “I don’t want to go back.”
“Why, because that punk was rude to you? He was out of line, Tedla. Don’t worry about it.”
I sometimes despaired of him. He felt so invulnerable, so immune to everything. “You don’t get it,” I whispered.
He stopped right there in the public corridor and turned to me. “What don’t I get?”
I could feel people’s eyes on us. Sooner or later they were going to stop making allowances for him. He was going to stop being the eccentric alien who didn’t know the rules. “Not here!” I hissed. “I’ll tell you at home.”
By the time we reached home, he was embarked on another tangent and forgot all about it.
That evening I was silent and moody, and he finally asked me what was the matter. I wanted to tell him, but I felt too ashamed.
The next day we went back to the midway house, despite my misgivings. All day I hung back and kept my eyes down for fear of seeing Zelly again. The only time he came near us was near noon, when he handed Magister Galele a slip of paper and left without a word. The Magister glanced at it and put it in his pocket.
He wrapped up his interviews early that day, and had me pack up the equipment. I shouldered my load with relief and followed him to the door.
No sooner had we stepped into the corridor than we were surrounded: Two men took up positions on either side of Magister Galele, and I felt my arm seized roughly from behind. Something pressed against my buttock, and I heard a pop, then gasped at the bite of pain. It was a stinger, an instrument that administers a sharp little electric shock. It hurt like fire, but I didn’t make a sound. “Like that, whore?” Zelly sneered in my ear. “You’ll get more if you misbehave.”
The men led us quickly away from the frequented corridors, and downward, by such a circuitous route that I was soon disoriented. Loaded down as I was, it was hard to keep up, and I got three more shocks in the buttocks to keep me moving. At the last one, I finally gave a little sound of pain, and Magister Galele turned around suspiciously. There was nothing for him to see.
At last they ushered us through a nondescript door into a private dwelling. It was the type of dingy place the lowest-status humans occupy—just a single room with a bed and sink, no private kitchen or bath, a well-worn carpet and flimsy chairs. A man and a woman were waiting there, sitting at a table. The lights were turned very low.
They gave Magister Galele a chair to sit in, and all gathered round. I crouched down silently on the floor next to the door, still smarting from the shocks, and trying to look invisible.
They had brought the Magister there to listen to a diatribe. Their spokesman, Rustim, was a man with a huge belly and very small eyes. He spoke in torrents, drowning all response in the rush of his verbiage. I had never seen Magister Galele so speechless for so long.
“We were a noble world before you came here. Now we’re in decay. Everywhere people are rebelling and questioning our great traditions. We had strong morals once. Now, nobody wants controls on their behavior. You aliens think you can weaken us by undermining our high standards. Well, there are some people who will still resist you, who will resist you to the end.”
In Rustim’s mind, civilization was dangling by a thread, menaced by a host of threats. He summoned fact after fact to prove it, jabbing his thick forefinger at the tabletop as if the surface held an invisible diagram. “I have evidence—evidence you can’t deny—that Tapis is on the verge of an uprising. No one’s controlling the blands. We used to know how to keep them in line. We used to have things like skeerings to deal with the bad blands. You only had to kill one, you see, but you cut open the body and made it like a little basin, then brought the other restless blands to wash their hands in the blood. That cured them. They didn’t just hear aimless talk of what might happen to them; they smelt it and felt it. That got through to their brains.
“You’re all so blind, you weepers, so sorry for them, you don’t know what vicious vermin they are. I could show you evidence. People have found hex tokens in their rooms. They communicate with each other that way, like an underground network. They’re all into sorcery, every last one of them. Don’t you believe it when you hear an accident has happened to someone. That’s no accident. It’s witchcraft. It’s all around us, everywhere. The blands don’t work any more. All they do is cast spells. Some day you’ll wake up in your bed, bleeding from every opening. Then you’ll know your bland has gotten back at you.
“You aliens think we’re so blind. You come here and try to stir up the blands, try to gather evidence that they’re human. I suppose some day you’ll want to raise them up over us and make us obey them.”
He went on and on in the same vein, veering from blustering to threats to paranoia, then back again, till I lost track of any argument, and only understood the underlying rage. Magister Galele had enough sense not to try to argue. At first he sat listening, stunned and flushed. Then his eyes began wandering, as if he were thinking of how to escape. From time to time Rustim would pause for a breather, and silence would fall; then I could hear Magister Galele shifting uncomfortably, as if tensing to make a dash for it. I decided that I would leave the equipment behind if I got a chance to run.
“We’re watching you, alien,” Rustim said. “You and your bland.” He rose then, for the first time since we had come in, and I saw he was a massive figure. He came slowly over to where I was, his footsteps heavy on the thin carpet. I stood up, my back pressed to the wall.
He came so close I could smell his breath and see the sheen of sweat on his face. With his eyes on me he said, “These atomists don’t even have pride in being human. They think nothing of debasing themselves with their pubers. They even drag their catamites with them out in the open for a quickie during the day, and no one objects. And the pubers are so full of cum they think they’re turning human.”
Suddenly he raised his hand threateningly, watching to see what I would do. I braced myself for a blow, but
didn’t cower or beg.
Magister Galele leaped to his feet. Fiercely, he said, “Don’t you touch it, Rustim. Whether you approve or not, there are still laws here, and I’ll bring them down on you if you harm a hair on Tedla’s head.”
He looked very small beside Rustim, but very feisty. I held still, my eyes switching from one to the other of them, waiting. At last Rustim lowered his hand. “Get out,” he said.
We gathered the equipment and walked away swiftly, neither of us very sure where we were. When we had put some distance between us and that little room, Magister Galele said, “I’m sorry, Tedla. I’m sorry to have exposed you to that. I had no idea what nut cases I was dealing with.”
“Now do you get it?” I whispered.
He was silent a little while; then when no one was nearby he took my hand and squeezed it. “The world isn’t made up of people like that, Tedla. Don’t judge everyone by a few crazed extremists.”
He still thought I was the one misinterpreting. Even with the evidence in plain sight, he couldn’t see any danger. It gave me a feeling of helplessness, as if I were riding in an aircar headed straight for a mountainside. There was nothing I could do. He was my guardian; I was strapped to my seat.
***
That evening when I took off my uniform, the other blands noticed the burns on my behind, but I got little sympathy. “What do you expect, acting the way you do?” Gibb said.
All I wanted to do that night was sleep, but there was a tense air in the roundroom, and I quickly realized something was afoot. Cholly’s crew was gathered at one side, talking, and the rest were trying not to watch them. I lay down among the outsiders, not caring if Magister Galele missed some data because of my laziness. But several of the witches looked over their shoulders at me, and finally one came over. “Cholly wants to talk to you,” it said.
Reluctantly, I went. Cholly had a strange, animated expression, halfway between torment and elation. It looked almost human.
“It’s time for you to do something for us,” it said to me.
Sulkily, I said, “What?”
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