Finally I came to an agreement. I would keep the child and carry it on my journeys, though half of me remained unhappy with this decision.
How difficult it is to be of two minds! Still, it happens; and all but the insane survive such divisions. Only they forget the essential unity that underlies differences of opinion. Only they begin to believe in individuality.
The next morning, I continued into Ib.
• • •
The poem I composed for the lord of the warm keep became famous. Its form, known as “ringing praise,” was taken up by other poets. From it I gained some fame, enough to quiet my envy; and the fame led to some money, which provided for my later years.
Did I ever return to Ibri? No. The land was too bitter and dangerous; and I didn’t want to meet the lord of the warm keep a second time. Instead, I settled in Lesser Ib, buying a house on the banks of a river named It-Could-Be-Worse. This turned out to be an auspicious name. The house was cozy and my neighbors pleasant. The child played in my fenced-in garden, tended by my female parts. As for my neighbors, they watched with interest and refrained from mentioning the child’s obvious disability.
“Lip-presser on one side.
Tongue-biter on t’other.
Happy I live,
Praising good neighbors.”
I traveled less than previously, because of the child and increasing age. But I did make the festivals in Greater and Lesser Ib. This was easy traveling on level roads across wide plains. The Ibian lords, though sometimes eccentric, were nowhere near as crazy as the ones in Ibri and no danger to me or other poets. At one of the festivals, I met the famous plumber, who turned out to be a large and handsome, male and neuter goxhat. I won the festival crown for poetry, and he/it won the crown for ingenuity. Celebrating with egg wine, we became amorous and fell into each other’s many arms.
It was a fine romance and ended without regret, as did all my other romances. As a group, we goxhat are happiest with ourselves. In addition, I could not forget the prisoners in the treadmill. Whether the plumber planned it or not, he/it had caused pain for others. Surely it was wrong—unjust—for some to toil in darkness, so that others had a warm bed and hot water from a pipe?
I have to say, at times I dreamed of that keep: the warm halls, the pipes of water, the heated bathing pool, and the defecating throne which had—have I forgotten to mention this?—a padded seat.
“Better to be here
In my cozy cottage.
Some comforts
Have too high a cost.”
I never laid any fertile eggs. My only child is Ap the Foundling, who is also known as Ap of One Body and Ap the Many-talented. As the last nickname suggests, the mite turned out well.
As for me, I became known as The Clanger and The Wishik, because of my famous rhyming poem. Other names were given to me as well: The Child Collector, The Nurturer, and The Poet Who Is Odd.
© 2002 by Eleanor Arnason.
Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Eleanor Arnason has published six novels and thirty plus works of short fiction. Her novel A Woman of the Iron People won the Tiptree and Mythopoeic Awards. Her story “Dapple” won the Spectrum Award. She has been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her most recent books are Tomb of the Fathers, a short novel from Aqueduct Press, and Mammoths of the Great Plains, a chapbook from PM Press. Both came out in 2010. Eleanor spent most of her adult life working in offices, ending finally as a nonprofit accountant, because she could not find work as a space cadet. She is now retired and writing full time. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
FOOTNOTES:
1 Goxhat units, or “persons” as the goxhat say, comprise four to sixteen bodies and two or three sexes. The Bane of Poets was unusual in being entirely neuter, which meant it could not reproduce. According to legend, it was reproductive frustration and fear of death which made The Bane so dangerous to poets. Why poets? They produce two kinds of children, those of body and those of mind, and grasp in their pinchers the gift of undying fame.
2 This translation is approximate. Like humans, goxhat use wooden blocks to teach their children writing. However, their languages are ideogrammic, and the blocks are inscribed with entire words. Their children build sentences shaped like walls, towers, barns, and other buildings. Another translation of the poem would be:
Broken walls.
Broken sentences.
Ignorant offspring.
Alas!
3 According to the goxhat, when a person dies, his/her/its goodness becomes a single ghost known as “The Harmonious Breath” or “The Collective Spirit.” This departs the world for a better place. But a person’s badness remains as a turbulent and malicious mob, attacking itself and anyone else who happens along.
4 Actually, cerebral bulges. The goxhat don’t have heads as humans understand the word.
5 The goxhat believe masturbation is natural and ordinary. But reproduction within a person—inbreeding, as they call it—is unnatural and a horrible disgrace. It rarely happens. Most goxhat are not intrafertile, for reasons too complicated to explain here.
The Cost to Be Wise
Maureen F. McHugh
I.
The sun was up on the snow and everything was bright to look at when the skimmer landed. It landed on the long patch of land behind the schoolhouse, dropping down into the snow like some big bug. I was supposed to be down at the distillery helping my mam but we needed water and I had to get an ice axe, so I was outside when the offworlders came.
The skimmer was from Barok. Barok was a city. It was so far away that no one I knew in Sckarline had ever been there (except for the teachers, of course) but for the offworlders the trip was only a few hours. The skimmer came a couple of times a year to bring packages for the teachers.
The skimmer sat there for a moment—long time waiting while nothing happened except people started coming to watch—and then the hatch opened out and an offworlder stepped gingerly out on the snow. The offworlder wasn’t a skimmer pilot, though; it was a tall, thin boy. I shaded my eyes and watched. My hands were cold but I wanted to see.
The offworlder wore strange colors for the snow. Offworlders always wore unnatural colors. This boy wore purples and oranges and black, all shining as if they were wet and none of them thick enough to keep anyone warm. He stood with his knees stiff and his body rigid because the snow was packed to flat, slick ice by the skimmer and he wasn’t sure of his balance. But he was tall and I figured he was as old as I am, so it looked odd that he still didn’t know how to walk on snow. He was beardless, like a boy. Darker than any of us.
Someone inside the skimmer handed him a bag. It was deep red, and shined as if it were hard, and wrinkled as if it were felt. My father crossed to the skimmer and took the bag from the boy because it was clear that the boy might fall with it and it made a person uncomfortable to watch him try to balance and carry something.
The dogs were barking, and more Sckarline people were coming because they’d heard the skimmer.
I wanted to see what the bags were made of, so I went to the hatch of the skimmer to take something. We didn’t get many things from the offworlders because they weren’t appropriate, but I liked offworlder things. I couldn’t see much inside the skimmer because it was dark and I had been out in the sun, but standing beside the seat where the pilot was sitting there was an old white-haired man, all straight-legged and tall. As tall as Ayudesh the teacher, which is to say taller than anyone else I knew. He handed the boy a box, though, not a bag, a bright blue box with a thick white lid. A plastic box. An offworlder box. The boy handed it to me.
“Thanks,” the boy said in English. Up close I could see that the boy was really a girl. Offworlders dress the same both ways, and they are so tall it’s hard to tell sometimes, but this was a girl with short black hair and skin as dark as wood.
My father put the bag in the big visitors’ house and I put the box
there, too. It was midday at winterdark, so the sun was a red glow on the horizon. The bag looked black except where it fell into the red square of sunlight from the doorway. It shone like metal. So very fine. Like nothing we had. I touched the bag. It was plastic, too. I liked the feeling of plastic. I liked the sound of the word in lingua. If someday I had a daughter, maybe I’d name her Plastic. It would be a rich name, an exotic name. The teachers wouldn’t like it, but it was a name I wished I had.
Ayudesh was walking across the snow to the skimmer when I went back outside. The girl (I hadn’t shaken free from thinking of her as a boy) stuck out her hand to him. Should I have shaken her hand? No, she’d had the box, I couldn’t have shaken her hand. So I had done it right. Wanji, the other teacher, was coming, too.
I got wood from the pile for the boxstove in the guesthouse, digging it from under the top wood because the top wood would be damp. It would take a long time to heat up the guesthouse, so the sooner I got started the sooner the offworlders would be comfortable.
There was a window in the visitor’s house, fat-yellow above the purple-white snow.
Inside, everyone was sitting around on the floor, talking. None of the teachers were there; were they with the old man? I smelled whisak but I didn’t see any, which meant that the men were drinking it outside. I sat down at the edge of the group, where it was dark, next to Dirtha. Dirtha was watching the offworld girl, who was shaking her head at Harup to try to tell him she didn’t understand what he was asking. Harup pointed at her blue box again. “Can I see it?” he asked. Harup was my father’s age, so he didn’t speak any English.
It was warming up in here, although when the offworlder girl leaned forward and breathed out, her mouth in an O, her breath smoked the air for an instant.
It was too frustrating to watch Harup try to talk to the girl. “What’s your kinship?” he asked. “I’m Harup Sckarline.” He thumped his chest with his finger. “What’s your kinship?” When she shook her head, not understanding all these words, he looked around and grinned. Harup wouldn’t stop until he was bored, and that would take a long time.
“I’m sorry,” the girl said, “I don’t speak your language.” She looked unhappy.
Ayudesh would be furious with us if he found out that none of us would try and use our English.
I had to think about how to ask. Then I cleared my throat, so people would know I was going to talk from the back of the group. “He asks what is your name,” I said.
The girl’s chin came up like a startled animal. “What?” she said.
Maybe I said it wrong? Or my accent was so bad she couldn’t understand? I looked at my boots; the stitches around the toes were fraying. They had been my mother’s. “Your name,” I said to the boots.
The toes twitched a little, sympathetic. Maybe I should have kept quiet.
“My name is Veronique,” she said.
“What is she saying?” asked Harup.
“She says her kinship is Veronique,” I said.
“That’s not a kinship,” said Little Shemus. Little Shemus wasn’t old enough to have a beard, but he was old enough to be critical of everything.
“Offworlders don’t have kinship like we do,” I said. “She gave her front name.”
“Ask her kinship name,” Little Shemus said.
“She just told you,” Ardha said, taking the end of her braid out of her mouth. Ardha was a year younger than me. “They don’t have kinship names. Ayudesh doesn’t have a kinship name. Wanji doesn’t.”
“Sure they do,” Shemus said. “Their kinship name is Sckarlineclan.”
“We give them that name,” said Ardha and pursed her round lips. Ardha was always bossy.
“What are they saying?” asked the girl.
“They say, err, they ask, what is your—” your what? How would I even ask what her kinship name was in English? There was a word for it, but I couldn’t think of it. “Your other name.”
She frowned. Her eyebrows were quite black. “You mean my last name? It’s Veronique Twombly.”
What was so hard about “last name”? I remembered it as soon as she said it. “Tawomby,” I said. “Her kinship is Veronique Tawomby.”
“Tawomby,” Harup said. “Amazing. It doesn’t sound like a word. It sounds made-up, like children do. What’s in her box?”
“I know what’s in her box,” said Erip. Everybody laughed except for Ardha and me. Even Little Sherep laughed and he didn’t really understand.
The girl was looking at me to explain.
“He asks inside, the box is.” I had gotten tangled up. Questions were hard.
“Is the box inside?” she asked.
I nodded.
“It’s inside,” she said.
I didn’t understand her answer so I waited for her to explain.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Did someone bring the box inside?”
I nodded, because I wasn’t sure exactly what she’d said, but she didn’t reach for the box or open it or anything. I tried to think of how to say it.
“Inside,” Ardha said, tentative. “What is?”
“The box,” she said. “Oh wait, you want to know what’s in the box?”
Ardha looked at the door so she wouldn’t have to look at the offworlder. I wasn’t sure, so I nodded.
She pulled the box over and opened it up. Something glimmered hard and green and there were red and yellow boxes covered in lingua and she said, “Presents for Ayudesh and Wanji.” Everybody stood up to see inside, so I couldn’t see, but I heard her say things. The words didn’t mean anything. Tea, that I knew. Wanji talked about tea. “These are sweets,” I heard her say. “You know, candy.” I know the word “sweet,” but I didn’t know what else she meant. It was so much harder to speak English to her than it was to do it in class with Ayudesh.
Nobody was paying any attention to what she said but me. They didn’t care as long as they could see. I wished I could see.
Nobody was even thinking about me, or that if I hadn’t been there she never would have opened the box. But that was the way it always was. If I only lived somewhere else, my life would be different. But Sckarline was neither earth nor sky, and I was living my life in-between. People looked and fingered, but she wouldn’t let them take things out, not even Harup, who was as tall as she was and a lot stronger. The younger people got bored and sat down and finally I could see Harup poking something with his finger, and the outland girl watching. She looked at me.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Me?” I said. “Umm, Janna.”
She said my name. “What’s your last name, Janna?”
“Sckarline,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, “like the settlement.”
I just nodded.
“What is his name?” She pointed.
“Harup,” I said. He looked up and grinned.
“What’s your name?” she asked him and I told him what she had said.
“Harup,” he said. Then she went around the room, saying everybody’s names. It made everyone pleased to be noticed. She was smart that way. And it was easy. Then she tried to remember all their names, which had everyone laughing and correcting her so I didn’t have to talk at all.
Ayudesh came in, taller than anyone, and I noticed, for the first time in my life, that he was really an offworlder. Ayudesh had been there all my life, and I knew he was an offworlder, but to me he had always been just Ayudesh.
Then they were talking about me and Ayudesh was just Ayudesh again. “Janna?” he said. “Very good. I’ll tell you what, you take care of Veronique, here. You’re her translator, all right?”
I was scared, because I really couldn’t understand when she talked, but I guessed I was better than anybody else.
• • •
Veronique unpacked, which was interesting, but then she just started putting things here and there and everybody else drifted off until it was just her and me.
Veronique did a lot of
odd things. She used a lot of water. The first thing I did for her was get water. She followed me out and watched me chip the ice for water and fill the bucket. She fingered the wooden bucket and the rope handle.
She said something I didn’t understand because it had “do” in it and a lot of pronouns and I have trouble following sentences like that. I smiled at her, but I think she realized I didn’t understand. Her boots were purple. I had never seen purple boots before.
“They look strange,” she said. I didn’t know what looked strange. “I like your boots,” she said, slowly and clearly. I did understand, but then I didn’t know what to do, did she want me to give her my boots? They were my mother’s old boots and I wouldn’t have minded giving them to her, except I didn’t have anything to take their place.
“It is really cold,” she said.
Which seemed very odd to say, except I remembered that offworlders talk about the weather, Ayudesh had made us practice talking about the weather. He said it was something strangers talked about. “It is,” I said. “But it will not snow tonight.” That was good, it made her happy.
“And it gets dark so early,” she said. “It isn’t even afternoon and it’s like night.”
“Where you live, it is cold as this, ummm,” I hadn’t made a question right.
But she understood. “Oh no,” she said, “where I live is warm. It is hot, I mean. There is snow only on the mountains.”
She wanted to heat the water, so I put it on the stove, and then she showed me pictures of her mother and father and her brother at her house. It was summer and they were wearing only little bits of clothes.
Then she showed me a picture of herself and a man with a beard. “That’s my boyfriend,” she said. “We’re getting married.”
He looked old. Grown up. In the picture, Veronique looked older, too. I looked at her again, not sure how old she was. Maybe older than me? Wanji said offworlders got married when they were older, not like the clans.
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 28
