This time, Val did take Tedla in her arms. It clung to her, and she stroked its back soothingly. “You’re not powerless,” she said.
“You don’t know anything,” Tedla said.
“Yes, I do. I heard you in that courtroom today. You were magnificent.” Val took the neuter by the shoulders and pushed it away so she could see its face. She found it hard to believe this was the same person who had stood up to Nasatir, the same who had led her through the city. No wonder Galele had been confused.
“Tedla, you’re going to have to tell me how you ended up here. You had a degree from UIC and an Epco scholarship. You didn’t need to resort to prostitution. You had a thousand other choices. What happened?”
“It’s a terrible story,” Tedla said.
“Tell me.”
She had no way to record, but that was not what Val wanted any more. This was not professional; it was personal now.
***
I knew that Magister Galele was risking something by bringing me to Capella Two. I didn’t know how much.
By the time we arrived here, our story was well known in the circles where people’s fates are decided. Because of us, WAC’s huge investment had come to nothing. Emissary Ptanka-Ni and the rest of the researchers were due to arrive back in disgrace only days after us. There was already a date set for a hearing to investigate Magister Galele’s professional ethics.
All their anger was directed at him, none at me. Even so, I quickly learned to trust no one. They tried very hard to seem kind, but their main interest in me was economic. They wanted to tap me for all the information they could get. But they went about it the wrong way.
They tried to separate me from Magister Galele. They put me in a hospital where the alien curators and mentationists could perform their tests and probe my body and my brain, telling me it was for my own good. Never, not even at Brice’s, had I felt so dehumanized, so utterly like an object. There was a window in my room that looked out on your strange, barren landscape, all craters and dust. I would watch that ominous orange planet rising in the sky, like an angry ember waiting to incinerate us. I couldn’t imagine how such a place could even be habitable, much less home. Whenever I asked to see the Magister, they would answer, “He doesn’t want to see you,” which I knew was a lie, or “You don’t have to see him any more,” which made no sense. After a while, I started resisting in the only way I knew how. I stopped responding to them. I stopped even moving. All I would do was sit in bed, staring at the floor. At last they grew concerned enough to consult him, and he persuaded them to let him in. I was so happy to see his funny face that I broke down in tears and begged him to take me away. He said, “If that’s what you want, Tedla, you’ve got to insist on it. You’ve got rights here, but you have to exercise them for yourself. I can’t do it for you.”
“But you’re my guardian!” I protested. “That’s what guardians are for, to fight for us.”
“Not here,” he said, a little bitterly.
I couldn’t imagine how I was going to survive in this strange land without a guardian. He saw my fear, and said kindly, “You’ll do fine, Tedla. Just tell them what you want, and if they don’t pay attention, tell them again until they do.”
I followed his advice. It took several days, but when they finally realized they weren’t going to get another speck of information out of me, they relented. I later found out that Magister Galele had been desperately using the only power he had to achieve the same result.
They only wanted one thing from Magister Galele: silence. WAC had decided to cover the whole thing up and avoid bad publicity. Our silence was the price of staying together.
For Magister Galele, it was a heavy sacrifice. To keep his bargain, he could offer no defense at his hearing, and they stripped him of his degree and credentials. After that, he could no longer work in his own profession. He couldn’t teach, he couldn’t publish, he couldn’t profit in any way from all his knowledge of Gammadis. To keep me out of their hands, he had to accept a life of invisibility.
We moved together into a tiny room in that housing tower I showed you. It was not a very safe area, but we had no money for anything else. After more than a century in travel, he had no friends or family left to help him. He tried to look up the children of some people he had known, but they were not anxious for the friendship of a disgraced and indigent former magister. Facing them was more than he could stand, so he gradually gave up trying to make connections.
He fought through a terrible depression that first year. The hard thing about poverty here is the isolation. This planet is in a constant state of conversation with itself, and to be cut off from that is like being cut off from part of your brain, to be less than aware. He talked constantly about finding enough money to get an infoservice, and I began to realize it was something he needed in order to feel human.
The isolation was not nearly as hard on me. The university had revoked my scholarship, probably under pressure from WAC, but I doubt I would have gone through with it anyway, then. The landscape was unsettling, the customs strange, and the people frightening, and at first I rarely ventured out, instead spending my time making that little room into as much of a home as I could. But I couldn’t stay cooped up forever, and when I did go out—that was when I learned about the blands on your planet.
It is not just a matter of poverty, as you seem to think. Here, where people can inherit money, or get it from partners or royalties without earning it, you have many well-to-do blands. But most of them are poor. They live shabby, circumscribed lives—aware of, but never aspiring to, the humanity around them, though they will live off it parasitically if they can. They are the eyes behind all those windows in the housing tower you saw. They take whatever chances others give them. They complain, but not so that you hear them. There are no graydoors here except the ones inside peoples’ minds, but those are closed as tight as ever—and locked from both sides.
There were times, that first year, when I was worried Magister Galele himself was turning into a bland. He seemed listless and sad all the time. I tried to get him interested in the world around him—I even suggested he do a study of the people in the building, to compare with my planet. But he was like you—he didn’t want to think of his own planet that way, and denied there was any parallel.
“There is only one similarity,” he said. “You are no more free than you were on Gammadis. You are still just a house servant.”
It was hard for me to see him so unhappy, and I would have done anything in my power to cheer him up. Sometimes I would catch him gazing at me as if he dreamed of touching me, and having me touch him in return; but if ever I tried to show him I was willing, through some little gesture or other, he would grow cold and draw away. He insisted we sleep on opposite sides of the room, as if he couldn’t trust himself to get any closer. Even so, I more than once woke in the night to find him standing over me, watching me sleep. He always grew very flustered, and tried to make up some excuse.
I think the thing he dreaded more than any other was that I would cease to love him. Every other thing—career, reputation, income—he could give up, but not that. In a strange way, he was utterly dependent on me, as if only my love would justify his life. A thousand ways I tried to show him that he didn’t need to worry, but always there was a nagging self-doubt in him.
And so it wasn’t until he was truly desperate that he managed to bring himself to suggest how I might earn some money. We were sitting and eating our government-issue rations one night when he said hesitantly, “I talked to Magister Diabu today.” I waited for him to go on, but it took a while for him to gather the courage. “He’s a historical linguist, and has been studying the WAC files on the Gammadian language. He wanted to ask me some questions, but of course I couldn’t answer because of the agreement with WAC. I told him I wasn’t the one to ask, anyway.” He paused, then said, “Tedla, you didn’t sign any nondisclosure agreements. You could charge him a good price for an interview. We might be able to get
a terminal.”
Since I knew a terminal was what he wanted more than anything aside from me, I agreed at once. So the next day he took me to Magister Diabu’s office and waited outside in the hall while the linguist asked me questions about Argot, our language. Diabu was surprised and pleased at my cooperation, since WAC had concluded I had nothing of value to say. At the end, he led me out into the hall and paid Magister Galele in cash—more Capellan cash than I had ever seen in one place before—and asked if I could return the next week. Magister Galele was busy hiding the money away under his baggy sweater, so I agreed.
Afterwards, Magister Galele asked me anxiously, “Was it all right? Did you mind doing it?”
“It was fine,” I said.
“So if I found someone else willing to pay, would you do some more interviews?”
He didn’t want to share me, I could tell; but he desperately needed to. I said, “It doesn’t bother me.”
It soon proved that there were quite a few researchers eager enough to interview a Gammadian asexual that they were willing to engage in an untraceable financial transaction with Magister Galele to get access to me. He was pressing the boundaries of his agreement with WAC, but he was always careful to abide by its letter. He never dealt with any but the most legitimate scholars—no popularizers or networkers who might start a leak. I expect WAC knew what he was up to, but instead of interfering, they simply bought up all the information and made it proprietary. Naturally, that didn’t discourage the magisters, since there was a ready market for their monographs.
Before long, we were able to move into better quarters, and we soon had quite a fine infoservice subscription. Magister Galele had terribly mixed feelings about the situation. On good days he talked about himself as my agent; on bad ones, he bitterly called himself my pimp.
After many return visits, I got to know Magister Diabu rather well, and he became concerned about my welfare. I know he was suspicious of my relationship with Magister Galele, since he often hinted that I could tell him if anything untoward was going on. One day he said, “Tedla, why aren’t you enrolled in a university?”
I laughed and told him the story of my brief admission to UIC. “You shouldn’t let that stop you,” he told me. “If you applied again as a Capellan resident, you could get in.”
His words made me very thoughtful. I knew by now that Magister Galele didn’t need a Personal here. I felt useless, and he felt gallingly dependent; it was a bad situation. So one day I asked him if he would tutor me so I could get into the university.
“Would you really like that?” he said, quite pleased. I knew then it was the right solution. It put us back on the proper footing, him the sponsor and me the protégé, not this strange reversal of roles we had been struggling with. I really didn’t have any ambition to get into the university; what I wanted was to get Magister Galele on his feet again.
It worked. He took my education on as a project, and soon some of his old enthusiasm started coming back. All my earnings started going into access fees for books and databases, and our days were soon quite full of lessons. He began to take me on field trips to the enclaves and convocations, to train and test my observational skills. He made me write reports afterwards, and never let me rest unless I marshalled my evidence and drew conclusions. He taught me the intricacies of your infonets, and drilled me on all the classics.
The second time I applied for entry to UIC, the test took place in a huge hall like a matriculatory. When I saw the hundreds of other applicants, my expectations sank. This time, there was no one to “translate” for me. I was competing against the smartest young people in known space. My only chance was that the university would make allowances for my background.
I don’t know if that was what they did, or if Magister Diabu pulled strings for me, but they accepted me. When we got the word, Magister Galele hugged me tight, lifting me right off the ground in his joy. That night we splurged on a fine meal and liquor. After he was rather drunk, he became moody, and I asked him what was wrong. He said, “Will you want to move out?”
“You don’t want me to, do you?” I said, alarmed.
“No,” he said.
“How could I ever get through university without your help?” This wasn’t just for his benefit. I really believed it, and still do.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get you through,” he said with a sad version of his old rapscallion grin. “You’ll have the best transcript of any Gammadian who’s ever attended UIC.”
I laughed, and thought the subject was closed. But later I caught him looking at me, and he blushed and looked away. “Maybe it would be better if you moved out, and had a chance to live a normal life,” he said.
“This life is normal for me,” I said.
His next words came in a strained, slurred voice. “I’m afraid so much of the time. Afraid of myself, my feelings. Afraid of hurting you.”
I couldn’t tell what he wanted. He was giving me such contradictory signals, I just sat there confused. He wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t give me any hint. At last I said, “I’m going to bed.”
I half expected him to follow me, but he just sat there drinking late into the night.
As soon as I was admitted to UIC, Epco offered me a scholarship, on condition that I stop selling information to anyone affiliated with WAC. After that, I could no longer talk to Magister Diabu, except as a student. He was remarkably good-natured about it.
My home life changed very little. Magister Galele helped me with the assignments, often having to read the texts himself, since he was rather out of date. He kept joking about how he was getting a second education free of charge. I attended the classes by myself, of course, but I felt little rapport with the other students. They reminded me of the young humans in the midway house. They seemed to feel it was their right to inherit the universe.
By this time, Magister Galele had begun to pick up some freelance writing and other odd jobs, but his real vocation was still my education. It was the only thing that really touched his inner passions. Watching him, I began to understand something about you Capellans. I had always thought—in fact, you always claim—that you are a perfectly secular society. But that’s not true. The feeling you have for knowledge is very close to the awe others feel for the sacred. Faith in knowledge is the principle you will never back away from, the thing you protect when everything else is gone. Creating it is your highest calling. Destroying it, or polluting it, is the unforgivable sin. Learning is your righteousness, research is your sacrament, discovery is your revelation. You believe not in a transcendent God but in a transcendent truth that we all can strive toward through learning. You are profoundly religious people, in your way.
Magister Galele didn’t just want me to have a degree. He wanted me to have a soul.
As the years went by my grades improved, and he began talking about getting me into a graduate program in xenology. “Not here, not at UIC,” he said, still smarting from the treatment he had gotten. “C4D has a good program.”
I never really expected C4D to accept me. The day I got the word, I sat on a bench by the sand fountain in the Court of Induction for a long time, not wanting to have to go home and tell him. I knew that this would mean a parting of our ways.
“I’m going to turn it down,” I said to him later that evening. “I don’t want to go.”
“You can’t back down now,” he said. “You’ve got to prove you can do it.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
He was silent a moment, then said, “Tedla, I’m so damned proud of you it hurts. Everything you accomplish makes my life more worthwhile. It would break my heart to think I had held you back.”
It was as if I had to leave him, to prove that I loved him.
He came with me to the lightbeam waystation, and though he joked bravely, I could tell how badly he was hurting. Neither of us cried when we embraced, though both of us were close. When I lay down on the slab, the last thing I saw was the bittersweet expression on
his face.
At C4D I was on my own as I had never been before. The first few months were horrible, and every day I was on the verge of giving up and going back. Magister Galele sent me long, encouraging letters, but we couldn’t afford PPC transmission, so they were always four days late. If Magister Delgado hadn’t befriended me, I don’t think I ever would have made it. I learned later that Magister Galele was in close touch with him, and sent him reams of advice about how to handle me. It was as if he was being my guardian by remote control.
C4D is a tolerant, cosmopolitan place. Even so, it was awkward for me, fitting into a gendered society. There were simple things like which bathroom to use, and more complicated ones like language. I grew accustomed to hearing people stumble in embarrassment over pronouns. I found that they tended to assign me a gender in their minds, so that they could interact, but even so I was excluded from many of the situations where gender pairs are prescribed. Often people took it on themselves to let me know that surgery was available to correct my condition.
I had intended to come back each year to visit Magister Galele, but as it turned out, the money was very scarce, and Epco wouldn’t pay for social trips. In four years, I only made it back once. I found that he had relapsed into his old habits of shabbiness and disorder. He seemed unhealthy; his hand had acquired a tremor, and his skin a sallow color. Though he made a great attempt to appear in control, I could tell it was getting hard for him to cope. I felt anxious to finish my business at C4D and get back to him.
Graduate school itself was a terrible disappointment. I had been very naive going into it. I had thought I was going to spend four years learning about other cultures from people who knew a great deal about them. But that’s not the purpose of graduate school at all. We didn’t study other cultures; we studied the people who had studied other cultures before us. The purpose was to induct new members into the brotherhood of learning by teaching us the history of our predecessors. We learned to offer them honor by citing them in our footnotes, giving them immortality that way. It’s an elaborate kind of ancestor-worship, really. The promise was that, if we were good enough, some day future students would immortalize us with their prayer-offering citations.
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