Hespira

by Matthew Hughes

  “It seems an unnecessary impediment to good commerce,” I said.

  The woman’s face expressed that sense of certainty that a traveler among the foundational domains soon comes to recognize. “To the contrary. Everyone knows what to expect, and daily life is securely anchored to a reliable structure.”

  Chumblot intervened. “Now, Shree, you cannot expect them to fit into our ways. They come from some little corner on the far side of nowhere. Besides, haven’t we bent a rule or two ourselves?”

  The woman softened somewhat, and laughed when he playfully beat on her upper arms with gentle fists. But her face showed outrage when the driver let her see the chit that had been imposed on my client by the arbiger. “Jumped-up little regulant,” she growled. “We’ll pay no heed to that.”

  But Hespira’s status could not be readily determined, she being unable to answer any of Shree’s questions about birth, heredity, or occupation. After a period of thoughtful chin-pulling and staring abstractedly into the middle distance, the clothier hit upon a solution. To Chumblot she said, “What if we made her a Sister of Repose?”

  The driver threw a hand into the air, fingers spread. “Brilliant!” he said. “Who would question it?”

  The clothier proceeded to enrobe my client in a long-sleeved gown of fine gray wool that she said was spun from the fleece of an indigenous mountain ungulate, then cinched it at the waist with a belt of linked hammered plates of a pale metal. Hespira’s fiery curls were confined by a wire-mesh snood of the same metal, and her feet were shod in gray leather shoes with tiny buckles to echo the belt and hairnet. The composite effect was striking, the subdued colors and accessories evoking Hespira’s natural dignity. I contributed a deep-kneed courtesy, executed with a flourish of wrist and fingers that would not have been out of place at the Archon’s levee, and was rewarded with another of those remarkable laughs.

  “What rank does this represent?” she asked.

  The clothier’s face exhibited several consecutive expressions before settling upon complacency. “It is a… special category,” she said, “difficult to define. The important thing is that there will be no problems of admittance or undue pause.”

  “Especially if he is dominoed,” said Chumblot. He and his friend gave each other a glance of shared mischief then the woman reached into a drawer and brought out a half-mask of soft turquoise leather. They helped me to fit the earpieces and adjust the item so that I could see through the slits that covered my eyes. Only my lips and chin were left visible.

  “That,” said Chumblot, “will get the pair of you in anywhere.” To Shree he said, “They want to eat well.”

  The aura of mischief deepened as Shree said, “The Greeneries? Is that what you are thinking?”

  Chumblot’s smile widened. “It is.”

  “ ‘If a hill, why not a mountain?’ as the old poet said,” the clothier quoted. “They’ll have a memorable time.”

  “And the high-toned will have a chance to unlimber their tongues.”

  “How they do love a good wag,” said Shree.

  I was catching the sense of this banter, but was concerned that some crucial details might have slid by me. “What are you proposing for us?” I said. “We do not wish to find ourselves suddenly surrounded by scandalized officials like that arbiger, their authority at full charge and ready to be unleashed at a pair of hapless visitors.”

  The two Razhamans fluttered their hands in a motion meant to disavow any danger. “No harm will come to you,” Chumblot said. “These garments will admit you to the finest dining establishment in the city, without pause and with no questions asked.”

  “At least not of them,” Shree said, and I would swear that the next sound that came out of her was a giggle, quickly suppressed.

  “Come along,” said our driver. “You will want to reach the Spire while the sun still has some warmth.”

  My assistant had said the man could be relied upon. What was the point of hiring local expertise if I was not going to trust their judgments? So, more sequints passed out of my purse, warm smiles were offered in all directions—particularly between our driver and the clothes vendor—and we returned to the ground car and our journey to Candyk’s Spire. This remarkable eminence was north of Razham proper, but the city was compact and we were soon out beyond the suburbs and climbing the hills that ringed the Spire’s lower slopes. The way became ever steeper, until finally we arrived at a plaza beyond which wheeled ground cars could not go.

  Again Chumblot offered his advice: “The ride along the outside trail is rough,” he said, adding a knowing nod and a frown—so we did not engage one of the eight-legged stalkers lined up at the foot of the path. Instead, we bought tickets on the funicular ascender that spiraled through the living rock of the mountain. Some sections of the ascender’s course also brought it out of the darkness and into the light, so that we sometimes moved along a narrow ledge on the western face of the Spire and gained glimpses of the chasm above which the northern side of the mountain continued in a sheer cliff.

  At last, we reach the ascender’s terminus, a cavern hollowed out not far below the Spire’s apex. The air here was remarkably thin and we heeded Chumblot’s counsel, given down below, that we each take another supplement before venturing near the edge. When our breathing was steady, I took Hespira’s warm hand and, as recommended by the signs hung about the walls, we slowly ventured toward the waist-high railing that was all that separated us from the Plunge.

  To our backs and sides was the blue-gray fastness of Candyk’s Spire, but now before and below us was nothing but a great emptiness. The continent’s central plateau was riven by a chasm that dwarfed any I had seen up or down The Spray. It ran from east to west, huge enough to have swallowed whole counties of Old Earth, its sheer sides riven here and there by vertical crevices. From some of these issued streams of rushing water, where underground rivers suddenly met nothing but air and gravity. The cataracts plunged down and down, yet they never splashed against the ground so far below; the Plunge was so deep that the torrents broke into droplets and the droplets were further disseminated into mists and clouds that hid the bottom of the chasm from view.

  I was curiously affected by the sight, being reminded of the littleness of a human life against the immense scale here so flagrantly displayed. I felt at once tiny and beneath notice, yet also as if I owned some vital share in all this magnificence: for none of this, not the Spire, nor the Plunge, nor the rushing waters, nor the huge trees that sprouted from the cliffs like insignificant weeds, could comprehend itself. I half-remembered a line from some ancient hero-play, about how the deities of old wept bitterly after, in one of their periodic fits of temper, they had wiped out humankind only to find themselves alone and unregarded. “For without us, the gods simply are; only with us, and by us, are they known.”

  I spoke the words aloud and felt Hespira move beside me. I turned and saw that she was shivering—a cold wind swept up the face of the Spire—and I put an arm around her shoulders. As I did so, I saw beyond her one of those quick motions that discriminators learn to note: someone had been observing us and had quickly turned his head away as my gaze had shifted in his direction. Now the watcher looked out to right and left across the emptiness, as if fixing in memory a last image, and turned, with a casualness that I found suspect, toward the platform where the ascender became a descender. He caught my eye then, and flashed a fool’s grin at me. A moment later, he was gone, dropping down into the bowels of the mountain.

  I watched him go, wishing now that I had worn my assistant, or at least some elements of a surveillance suite, so that I could have captured his image and other details. I no longer had intuition to support me, but I had experience in plenty, and I would have bet against good odds that the man had been watching us. I called up a mental picture of him: middling in stature; of mature years and physically fit; clothed in the muted tans and deeper browns that locally denoted middling social rank, but without the adaptive anatomy of a Razhaman.
He had had enough self-possession not to overreact when observed by the subject of his observation, and the sense to leave the scene before the slip could be followed up. The marks of a professional, I thought. But what about the idiot’s grin he had sent my way?

  Hespira was saying something. I looked and saw a double rainbow far below, where a gust of wind blowing along the chasm had briefly parted the mists and let the westering sun strike through. “Indeed,” I said, “beautiful and unforgettable. But we should go down now. It grows cold and I, for one, grow hungry.”

  We were warmer when we arrived at the plaza, but hungrier. I assisted Hespira into the ground car than stood outside with Chumblot to discuss where to go for dinner.

  “Your friend mentioned a place,” I said.

  “The Greeneries,” he confirmed. “I am told it offers the finest meals in Razham.”

  “You have not dined there yourself?”

  “The pause for such as me would stretch on forever.”

  “Yet foreigners are admitted?” I said. “So long as they are dressed—” I touched the mask that hid half my face. “—as we are?”

  I saw that he was genuinely embarrassed. He looked at his toes, his brows working, then he hit upon something. “There is a brief,” he said. “That will explain it.” He gestured for me to enter the vehicle.

  “A brief?”

  “The Visitor’s Bureau has prepared information for offworld persons who have need of… that is to say, when they discover they have certain… urges. Some will approach a driver and ask to be taken to…”

  He gestured obscurely, his eyes averted, but after a moment’s puzzlement, I suddenly understood. “By all means,” I said, stepping toward the car, “let me see the brief.”

  “Excellent,” Chumblot said. He gave me a look that said we were both men of experience whose minds, on matters of importance, met and meshed happily.

  But I stopped as I was about to climb in and said, casually, “By the way, did you see a man come down from the descender shortly before us?” I described the watcher from the cavern above.

  “I did,” said Chumblot. He cast a quick glance Hespira’s way and I saw a wariness enter the back of his eyes. “Did the man give offense?”

  “No. I just wondered if I might have known him. Did you see where he went?”

  He indicated an area across the plaza where vehicles could be left unattended. “I do not see him now,” he said.

  “No matter.” I pressed another sequint into his hand. “But if you do notice him again, you could let me know.”

  He gave me another version of that knowing look; this one said we had just reached a new, deeper level of mutual understanding. “But quietly?” he said, in a small voice.

  “Yes,” I said, “quietly would be best.”

  When I was seated in the passenger compartment the vehicle’s screen appeared and began to display the “brief.” At first, the screen remained blank while several stringed instruments played a particularly insipid passage. Then text appeared, informing me that the material about to be shown was “of an inciteful nature and not suitable for children or unespoused adults.”

  I looked up and saw that Chumblot’s nape had flushed a deep red, and when I looked at the screen again I was faced by an avuncular but serious man of full years. He was sitting behind a desk in a setting whose decor, augmented by some complex-looking pieces of apparatus, suggested the office of a senior professional.

  “Welcome to Razham,” he said, then paused to give weight to what followed. “While visitors are expected to respect the mores of our society, we recognize that persons of other cultures may not have developed the self-discipline that is a universally admired attribute of the Razhaman. However, tumult and rowdiness will never be tolerated.”

  The speaker paused again to underline further the gravity of the subject, then his sternness relented by a bare fraction. He summoned up a smile that he intended would say that he was indeed a man of wide and tried experience. What followed was an oration marked by circumlocution and strained metaphor, from which I eventually winnowed certain hard facts.

  The citizens of Razham and its surrounding districts, at all ranks of their society but most of all in the uppermost strata, were sexually repressed. Women, in particular, did not enjoy a free rein in the exercise of their libidos. Marriage was almost universal, but provided little relief: most Razhaman unions were coldly calculated affairs, designed to increase, or at least to hold, each partner’s relative position in the many-tiered ladder on which their society was hung.

  As in all such cultures, the stark tensions that resulted from this regime had to find some outlet, lest the homicide and suicide rates spiral beyond all toleration. The answer had come, back in times out of mind, when a clutch of dissatisfied matrons had formed a charitable order, The Sisters of Repose. The sorority’s charter committed its members to perform only good works, though these were vaguely defined, and provided cloisters where their eleemosynary labors could be undertaken.

  To these shuttered and close-doored refuges, any mature Razhaman female could commit herself from time to time, there to work off her tensions on the large numbers of male Razhamans who presented themselves in need of the Sisters’ charity. Each Sister had full discretion to choose which of these patrons she would accommodate; for their part, the men committed themselves to a standard of behavior that was often far higher than that with which they favored their spouses. If, as happened rarely, any “tumult” broke out, a special unit of the Watch would attend, wearing masks and armed with neural stingers; the offender would suffer immediate and painful consequences, regardless of rank.

  The institution was known to all, though never publicly acknowledged. Its business was transacted behind closed doors, and Sisters were almost never seen outside the cloister. The exception was an option sometimes exercised by women of the loftiest superlant and elegantiast ranks who wished to correct their husbands’ conduct. They would step out of the cloister clad in the gray habit of the Order and escorted by a masked relative or retainer. Ostensibly, the costume and mask conferred social invisibility on the wearers. She would not be addressed or acknowledged by any but her escort, who was himself socially invisible, and persons who knew her would affect not to. But the appearance of a habited Sister of Repose at a restaurant or theater immediately set off intense whispered speculations as to who she was, who her spouse was, and what sort of vileness he must have got up to, to inspire her to make such an egregious display.

  The purpose of the “brief” was twofold: to alert visitors to the existence of the cloisters, should they be unable to restrain their urges; and to warn them off approaching any Sister of Repose in the rare instance of their encountering one in the outside world. Such a breach of etiquette would be punished instantly and far more severely than for a fracas in a cloister. “The wrongdoer,” said the presenter of the brief, wearing his sternest face, “would beg for the neural stinger’s fleeting caress.”

  I was sure that Chumblot and his clothier friend had meant no harm. As an amnesiac, Hespira had been impossible to place within Razham’s tightly graded social hierarchy. In the guise of a Sister of Repose, she could go anywhere and experience minimal pause, and I too would equally be beyond question. It had been an inspired solution. But it would have been convenient for us if they had explained the peculiarities of the institution to us—which I realized they could not do, owing to the prudish reticence that cloaked the whole arena of sexual relations on this world.

  As the brief finished, we arrived outside the Greeneries. This was an eatery set in a terraced garden not far from our hotel, with many small tables placed among fragrant bushes and luscious blooms that rightly belonged to Ikkibal’s lowlands, but were protected from the harsher upland elements by being surrounded by perpetual curtains of warm air. It seemed to me that we arrived there by a somewhat circuitous route, and that our driver had been even more aware of the vehicles that shared the roads with us than before. As he helped
Hespira out of the car, Chumblot caught my eye and his head moved in a subtle negative motion.

  My mind still marveling at the implications of the brief and our costuming, it took me a moment to understand that the driver was indicating that we had not been followed by the man in brown.

  “Very good,” I said. I put the fellow’s interest down to the implications of Hespira’s garb. Then I cocked my head toward the restaurant’s door, where the greeter, a deeply groomed personage in the dark greens and grays of a senior servitor, waited for us. Though the man was carefully not looking at us, it was plain that we were the sole focus of his attention. “Any recommendations as to the food?”

  “The Four Glories,” Chumblot said, without hesitation, “But the summer ale makes a better accompaniment than the wine. And it’s cheaper.”

  I thanked him and we went in. The greeter was a master of his craft, offering us a precisely graduated expression of respectful welcome without actually acknowledging our presence. I noticed, though, that he gave Hespira a considering look before ushering us to our table. I also saw him engage in a short but emphatic conversation with one of the servers.

  The place was well filled, the other patrons attired in combinations of black, silver, and gold, many of the fabrics diamond-patterned. All conversation and all sound of cutlery meeting plates ceased the moment Hespira came into view, and the room remained silent except for the tinkling of a tintinnabulary fountain that combined thin arcs of water with tiny bells of different sizes and metals, to a very pleasing effect. The greeter led us to a table near the pool, a spot so located amid the greenery as to make it effectively a private booth. Above the music of the fountain I heard a rising buzz of whispered commentary punctuated by two or three barks of laughter.