CHAPTER EIGHT
The great ocean-liners of the world – all owned by companies in the Dozen Landsteads – were palaces of luxury, with grand ballrooms for nightly singing and dancing, stately staircases, gilded dining rooms, and cabin suites.
That was if you were a master. The hold of an ocean liner was reserved for servants and for foreign commoners who could not afford to pay even the minimal fee for third-ranked passage. It was dim, damp, and crowded. No ballroom was needed, for singing and dancing had been outlawed to Landstead servants since the nineteenth tri-century, when the Commoners' Guild of Yclau had spread sedition throughout the Midcoast nations by means of ballads. Cramped cabins housed the servant/commoner men at the bow of the liner; equally cramped cabins at the stern housed the servant/commoner women and children. Families were thus split apart along lines of sex and age, reuniting in the daytime in the stark common room between the cabins, which was also filled with engine rooms, furnaces, livestock pens, and other equipment required for long trips.
Now, as the voyage came to an end, the on-duty border guards were attempting to make order out of chaos. At the center of the hold stood a spiral staircase which was the sole means of exit from the hold (a fact well publicized by foreign newspapers since the woeful occasion on which a liner had caught on fire near that staircase, causing many foreign passengers – and all servant passengers – to perish). Around the staircase, the border guards had positioned twenty-seven booths, with gates in between. Now they were trying their best to usher the illiterate servants up to the correct booths, a job roughly akin to persuading feral cats to enter cages.
"Fours this way, please!" called one guard. "Over here, fours!"
"Excuse me." A foreign commoner politely tapped the guard on his shoulder. "We're a party of four. Do we queue up here?"
Endlessly patient with foreign misunderstandings, the servant-guard replied, "No, good woman. Here in the Dozen Landsteads, our numbering system is the same as our lettering system. What is your family name? Getson?" He glanced at the woman's passage-of-port. "You're with the eights, then. The letter eight-G," he added in the King's tongue of Vovim, seeing that the woman didn't understand. "Eight and G are the same word in the Dozen Landsteads. Sir, would it be of pleasure to you to show this family to the eights queue?" He tipped his cap at Carr, who had finished his duties for the day with the first– and second-ranked passengers, but had come downstairs in search of his supervisor.
"Certainly, comrade," Carr replied carefully. As far as he could tell, not a single servant or lower-ranked master who worked as a border guard was prepared to be foolhardy enough to acknowledge him as an equal, but Carr never departed from the training he had received from his father. "If you'll come this way—" He tipped his uniform cap politely to the foreign woman and proceeded to usher her and her three children toward the correct queue.
She was Vovimian, though. Instead of remaining respectfully silent, as a Landstead servant would have, she said, "Do you mind if I ask you a question?"
"Not at all." His gaze travelled over to his supervisor, who was standing at the zero booth, giving gruff instructions to a subordinate.
"Why are all those booths in a circle? Why not put them in a line?"
"They're in a calendar circle," he replied. Then, seeing her blank expression, he added, "They're in alphabetical order."
Her expression remained blank. Two of her children looked as dusky and weary as their mother, but the oldest child – just as dusky-skinned as the rest, but more alert – was tilting her head, listening in on her mother's conversation with the guard.
He tried again, his mind drifting back to a recent conversation with Jesse. "In the Dozen Landsteads, we represent the alphabet in a circular manner. —Here." He paused to pick up a pointer that had a stick of chalk attached to it – used by the boiler-room servants to mark equipment that had been inspected. Carr proceeded to draw a large circle on the metal floor of the hold. "There are twenty-seven letters in the alphabet—"
"Twenty-six," corrected the oldest child primly. She was apprentice-aged, perhaps four tri-years old, with her hair in braids and her body clothed in what Carr guessed was her best dress. It was considerably worse for wear from the journey.
"Sweet one!" scolded her mother. "Don't contradict the gentleman."
He smiled at the child. "You have twenty-six letters in Vovim. Here in the Dozen Landsteads, we have twenty-seven. The twenty-seventh is called the zero letter, because our letters also represent numbers."
"And the next letter is A?" The child pointed to the space just past the high point of the circle, further down the circumference.
"One-A," he said in the King's tongue, hoping that his Vovimian grammar, which he had learned in school, was correct. As he spoke, he wrote the symbol for the letter: a cross.
"And the next letter is B," said the mother, entering into the game.
"Two-B. A cross and a dash." He wrote down the symbols, +-. Then he waited for the others to catch up with his lesson.
"Three-C." It was the girl again. He wrote down what she said: +0. "Four-D." ++. "Five-E." +—.
Within a couple of minutes, they had reached the nadir of the circle. The girl hesitated, as though unwilling to venture further without guidance. Her mother prompted, "Fourteen-N."
"I'm afraid not," Carr replied. "Here's where the alphabet wraps around on itself. Negative-thirteen-N." He wrote out the symbols: —-.
"Look!" cried the child. "The symbol for thirteen is three crosses. The symbol for negative thirteen is three dashes. That's not a coincidence, is it?" She appealed to authority.
"No, it's not," replied Carr, surprised that she had made the connection. "We used balanced tertiary symbols in the Dozen Landsteads. That means you can make any number negative, simply by reversing its dashes and crosses—"
"So negative-twelve-O is dash-dash-zero." The child took the pointer from him and wrote down the latest letter on the circle.
His mother mistook the source of his astonishment, saying proudly, "She's very good with numbers. She's in the gifted program at school."
The child, more perceptive, took one look at his face and offered the pointer back. "Sorry. I didn't mean to grab."
"That's all right." He hesitated, wondering how he could convey the important information that servants who grabbed from masters in the Dozen Landsteads could end up in jail.
"I won't do it again," the child said quickly, perhaps seeing the concern on his face. "Grabbing is rude."
Satisfied, he handed her the pointer. "Here. You write out the rest."
She happily did so. "See?" she told the other children, who were beginning to show signs of waking up. "Three symbols – like the computers use. That's a base three numbering system. In ancient times, Yclau used base three. Vovim used base four. Then they decided that they should have the same numbering system, so they picked base twelve, because twelve can be divided into both three and four, see?"
"No," replied the youngest child crossly; he was lying on his belly, watching the creation of the calendar circle. "My teacher hasn't taught us to input division yet."
"You can do it without a computer, right?" The middle child, kneeling on her dress beside her brother, appealed to the oldest child.
"Of course you can! Humans can do anything computers can, just slower. Here, I'll show you." The oldest child took something from the pocket of her dress. With relief, Carr saw that it was a pad of paper, rather than a computer.
"Dearest, get off the floor; you're mussing your dress." The woman scolded the middle child in an automatic fashion, then turned her attention back to Carr. "We're saving up money for my eldest's education," she said proudly. "With her grades, she's sure to be eligible for a scholarship to attend the local university. She'll be the first person in my family, or her father's, to attend college."
"Congratulations," Carr said. He glanced at his supervisor, who was still busy, and then at the booths, where the twenty-six remaining border guards were checking
the passages-of-port of the servant passengers. No problems seemed to be arising; the passengers were being waved with alacrity toward the central staircase.
"What I don't understand," said the oldest child, right under him, so that he was forced to look down at her. "What I don't understand is why the alphabet is in a circle, rather than a straight line. You never explained that." Her voice was accusing, as though she thought he was a schoolmaster avoiding a question he couldn't answer.
He found himself smiling again. "It's a circle of rebirth," he said. "Have you heard of those?"
"I have," said the youngest child, evidently tired of playing the role of his sister's pupil. "My pal Johnnie goes to a temple where they teach about rebirth. His priestess says that, after death, hell's High Master takes evil people down to hell and tortures them, but if they repent of doing bad, he sends them to his sister Mercy, and she makes them alive again—"
"Yes, dear, but that's Johnnie's temple," his mother said firmly. "What actually happens is that evil people stay in hell forever, and good people are sent by Mercy to heaven." She added apologetically to Carr, "So many of our temples have been infected by Yclau superstition, but our family follows the traditional beliefs."
"Mother!" the oldest child protested loudly. "You're being rude to him! Landsteaders believe in rebirth, just like the Yclau do."
Carr dowsed a momentary flame of annoyance. "Actually, the Yclau learned the concept of rebirth from us. Ours was the first nation to conceive of time as a circle." He turned to the woman, who was looking chagrined, and said, "I'm not trying to convert your children to the Landstead religion. It's a mathematical concept, as well as a religious belief: some of the Vovimian mathematicians have shown interest in the idea that time isn't a straight line but a circle that loops around on itself—"
"A spiral." The oldest child pointed to the spiral staircase.
"Exactly. We draw the calendar as a circle, but we're actually looking down on a spiral from above. Time twirls round and round, going higher and higher."
"Look, it's simple," the oldest child insisted as her mother frowned in puzzlement. "You're standing in the middle of a spiral staircase." She pointed to the zero. "You can see thirteen steps going up. That's one-A through thirteen-M. And you can also see thirteen steps going down. That's negative-one-Z through negative-thirteen-N. The steps keep going further, but you can't see that, because the spiral wraps round on itself. Master—"
He felt a jump in his throat and had to remind himself that, in Vovim, the word "master" had become nothing more than a polite way of addressing a stranger. "Yes?"
"When you're standing on a spiral staircase, you can lean over and see the step that's directly above you and directly below you. Do you think you could jump up or down and skip through time like that?"
The boy rolled his eyes. His mother said weakly, "Sweet one . . ."
"You're quite right." He smiled at the child. "We call that 'cycle forward' or 'cycle back' in the Dozen Landsteads. When you meet a moment in time that connects with something that happened in the past or will happen in the future, you may momentarily jump forward or back – just in your mind, you understand – and thereby you will see what happened in the past or will happen in the future. In that way, you can understand the way in which the events you are currently experiencing connect with your past or your future." Or your past lives or your future lives. But it seemed best not to say that, given the mother's prejudice against the concept of rebirth into new lives.
"We could build a time machine!" With excitement, the oldest child turned to her siblings. "We could build a machine that would let us jump up and down the spiral of time whenever we wanted!"
"You'd have to major in temporal engineering," pointed out the youngest child.
"Could you do that?" asked the middle child doubtfully. "I heard it's hard for girls to get into the School of Engineering. . . ."
"You're so very kind to indulge my daughter's curiosity, Master . . ." The mother hesitated, lacking his name.
"I'm M Carruthers," he said, slipping his hand into his inner jacket pocket.
"Carruthers? Are you related in any way to the Carruthers of the First District?"
"Distantly. My family came from the First Landstead – the First District – long ago."
"Well, imagine that!" The woman put a gloved hand to her mouth. "My second cousin married a girl from the First District named Carruthers. You're family."
That gave him the opening he wanted. Slipping out a tremissis bill from his wallet, he pressed it into the woman's free hand. "Then accept this as a family gift."
She stared at the money. "Oh, really, no . . . I couldn't . . ."
"For your daughter." He nodded his head toward the oldest girl, who was now explaining why the computers of the world used a base three numeral system. "Please," he added. "I don't imagine you've budgeted much money for luxuries on this trip."
The woman dimpled. "That's true enough. It was my daughter's idea to come. She heard that the Second Landstead University has a working astrolabe, and she was passionate to see it. But really, Master Carruthers—"
"There's a shop just over the bridge, on the mainland," he persisted. "It's intended for masters and mastresses, but if you give the shopkeeper my name, he'll serve you. The shop sells cardboard circles showing the Landstead calendar, alphabet/number system, the heliograph code . . . I think your oldest daughter would enjoy it."
"Well," said the indulgent mother, obviously swayed by this argument, "you are family. . . ."
Carr glanced at the zero booth. The supervisor was free now. "I think it's time I helped you into the eight-G queue. The guards here are nearly finished checking passages-of-port."
This news stirred the woman into a frenzy. She gathered up her children and rushed over to the eight-G queue, but not before handing Carr her name and address, which she scribbled onto a scrap of paper, urging him to visit any time, saying she'd prepare him a real home-cooked meal, she'd press the microwave buttons herself . . .
She bustled away. The oldest girl, though, appeared disposed to linger. "Hoi, master," she said.
Again, that jump at the throat. "Yes?"
"I want to know where I can find more information about this." She pointed to the circle.
"Well," he said cautiously, "books have been written about the Landstead concept of time . . ."
"Oh, of course!" The girl dimpled, just as her mother had done. "I'll ask my school librarian about them. Thanks, master!"
He watched her go, seeing, in a dark corner of his mind, what sort of life she would have led in the Second Landstead. A servant girl, beaten repeatedly for showing ambition, denied the opportunity for education, denied the ability to rise higher than her rank at birth.
He realized now why his father had wanted him to take this job. Not merely because it was servants' work, but because it was work that brought him into contact with foreigners. Carr had spent so much of his childhood visiting his uncle that, unlike his father, he had not had time to travel abroad. He had been denied the opportunity to see what the Dozen Landsteads could be like if its laws were reformed.
He turned away. The image of the girl had transformed unexpectedly into the image of Jesse. He found himself wondering whether he should show Jesse the calendar circle again, so that he could learn the alphabet. . . .
He shook his head. He was being absurd. With the exception of the zero number, Yclau and its colonies used the same alphabet as the Dozen Landsteads did. Jesse could already read the Landstead language; he carried books and newspapers written in that language. Why should it have come into Carr's head that Jesse would need help to read?
Unwilling to explore further this disturbing path of thought, Carr approached the supervisor, who was busy checking the records of the guards who had already completed their queues. Without looking up, the supervisor said, "What service do you require of me, master."
It was the traditional phrase from a liegeman to his liege-master
, which the first-ranked supervisor was duty-bound to speak to his liege-master, the High Master. Out of courtesy, he might speak it also to the High Master's heir, who would one day be his liege-master.
But spoken as it was, in a flat tone, it conveyed nothing of courtesy. Instead, the supervisor's meaning was quite clear: "Bloody blades, man, I'm busy. Go away and stop bothering me."
The hold of the steamer was beginning to empty. The Vovimian children were skipping up the spiral staircase now, shouting their delight when they discovered that it did indeed have twenty-seven steps. Most of the other foreigners looked reasonably relaxed. Commoners who came from other countries had either scraped together money to visit one of the few nations that still offered affordable holidays – because the Dozen Landsteads was so far off the usual tourist circuit – or else they were immigrating because they had heard that labor jobs were plentiful in this nation. Presumably, the immigrants had not yet learned that, once situated here, they would not be permitted to leave.
The Landstead servants were looking far less comfortable. At the beginning of the tri-century, when the Dozen Landsteads began to spurn foreign influences, there had been a spate of servants leaving the nation: men and women seeking a better life in the First District of Yclau – as the First Landstead was then called – or other foreign parts. "Runaways," the masters and mastresses called them, because they had not sought their betters' permission before leaving.
In the end, faced with this drain on the nation's manpower, the High Masters had passed a new act proclaiming that no servant could leave the Dozen Landsteads unless accompanied by a master or mastress. The border guards were given orders to shoot runaways.
Carr bore no gun; neither did any of the other port guards, for the simple reason that the ocean steamer could not leave port until given permission by the guards' supervisor. But the servants here – all returning from foreign lands in the company of their masters or mastresses – did not know this. All they knew was that the guards here could kill them on a whim.
The supervisor was still waiting. Carr cleared his throat. "Sir," he said quietly, to remind the supervisor that, whatever rank Carr held, he was still a journeyman in training. "I apologize for interrupting you. Might I ask a brief question?"
He was never quite sure what it was that made lesser-ranked men and women listen to him. But the magic worked again; though he did not look up, the supervisor paused in turning pages. "Go ahead."
Carr struggled to find a way to concisely express his hopes and fears. "I've been working here for nearly a month now. I know that you won't be giving me a formal evaluation, but I was wondering . . . am I doing well in my work?"
"You're doing fine, Master Carruthers." The supervisor's hand moved again as he turned the page showing the daily evaluations of his guards' performance. "Don't worry yourself."
He tried again. "I know that I've made some bad mistakes—"
"Don't worry, sir." The supervisor jotted down a brief, excruciatingly frank deprecation of one guard's activities. "Everyone makes mistakes. —Hey! What do you think you're doing, man? —Excuse me, Master Carruthers." The supervisor hurried off. Soon he was shouting at one of the guard-servants who, having completed his work for the day, had moved his booth into storage, four inches to the right of where it should have been.
Carr watched for a while as the supervisor roundly bawled out his negligent guards and briefly praised the guards who had performed well. Nobody looked in Carr's direction. Everyone knew that he was immune from such evaluations. Indeed, none of the other guards had spoken to him since his unexpected arrival during Spring Transformation. The servant-guards were scared stiff of him, and the master-guards were clearly uncertain what to say to a man who came from such an eccentric House.
Besides, they knew what he would be, one day.
Carr moved toward the spiral staircase, seeking the fresh air upstairs. There was nothing in this place that was in any way odd or out of the ordinary. The other lads at school also treated him with distant respect. Only one lad there was willing to drop respectful formality and treat him as a friend . . . and Carr had never been entirely sure whether Art did so as a form of incipient liege-service to his future liege-master.
Nothing was different, nothing had changed. And yet everything had changed, Carr reflected as he placed his foot on the first step of the staircase. Everything had changed since he met a young foreigner who showed him not the least bit of respect.
o—o—o
Carr had just left his usual spot in the dependency – out of the way of the servants, drinking the tea that Sally had brought him, and perusing the lengthiest of Jesse's books, A Concise History of the Dozen Landsteads, having set aside the world atlas some time before – when the dependency's front door burst open and Jesse staggered through the doorway, bleeding onto the newly washed kitchen floor.
There was an immediate outcry from the servants, quickly shushed by Variel, who hurried forward to take hold of Jesse's waist, preventing the young man from sliding to the floor. Jesse smiled up at him with a lopsided grin. "Always knew . . . you'd recognize my charms in the end."
"Jesse!" Conscious of his parents, who remained awake in the main building, Carr kept his voice low as he ran forward. "What happened? How did you get hurt?"
Jesse turned his lopsided smile upon Carr as the blood continued to stream down his arm. "A little disagreement between me and a whip. I lost."
"But—"
"If you'll excuse us, master," Variel said firmly, "I think it would be best for me to tend Comrade Jesse in his room."
His tone said, as loudly as a steam-engine whistle, "Out of my way, you incompetent whippersnapper – leave this to someone who knows what he's doing." Carr carefully backed away, nearly stumbling over Millie, who had gone down on her hands and knees to wipe the blood off the floor. Millie glared up at Carr before she remembered her place and lowered her gaze.
Carr mumbled an apology. Still holding his books, he retreated from the kitchen, partly to give the servants an opportunity to discuss this event amongst themselves, and partly in order to visit his father's library.
He had to walk past the sitting room in order to reach the library. His mother was in the midst of one of her periodic attempts to darn a sock. Since she never actually asked the advice of anyone who knew how to darn a sock, the results were invariably dreadful. She looked as though she were about to reach the stage she always reached, when she threw the sock into the mending basket, where the stitches would be painstakingly removed by Irene before the servant set about doing a proper mending job, thus doubling the amount of mending that Irene had to do.
As it turned out, his father was in the library, reading a copy of The Commoners' Chronicle, one of the foreign newspapers that he was entitled to read, as an official contracted to the House of Government. "Looking for something?" he asked without raising his eyes from the paper.
"The Mippite Boys' Handy Book," Carr replied, crouching down to look at the bookshelves near the floor, where his old children's books were kept.
"By all that's sacred, you're going back to your boyhood, aren't you?" his father said mildly, turning a page with a rustle. "Are you planning to build a city with nothing but 'spare items found in the trash,' as the author puts it?"
"It has a chapter on first aid," replied Carr, pushing aside his much-beloved copy of Fantastic Voyages to the Moon and Beyond, which he had read each night between his third and fourth tri-year. That book had not been an import; it was one of the few books of scientifiction that the Dozen Landsteads had produced. Though he supposed, he thought as he flipped past the copies of utopian novels about Egalitarian nations that his parents had given him, that the First Landstead might have produced hundreds of scientifiction novels by now. After all, that landstead was a work of scientifiction in itself.
"First aid? Have you hurt yourself?" His father looked up quickly from the newspaper.
Carr shook his head as he pushed back the scientific
tion novels to hide a box which he kept behind them. He straightened up, holding the battered copy of his Handy Book. "One of the servants has. He got cut with a whip."
"Ah." His father subsided back into his paper, saying only, "I didn't know we still owned horses."
Carr did not bother to reply. He had just reached the door when his father roused himself enough to add, "First aid, you say?"
"Yes, sir."
His father gave him a quick smile. "Try to remember who you're speaking to, comrade."
"I'm sorry, Father." It took all his effort to keep impatience out of his voice; Jesse might very well be bleeding to death at this moment.
"First aid, first aid . . ." His father stared a moment at the high ceiling, which could only be cleaned by servants on ladders. "Oh, yes, I remember now. Middle bookshelf, next to the mantelpiece. You might find that volume helpful. Imported from Yclau – the latest medical advice. Their doctors are the best, you know."
"Thank you, Father." He found the book as his father was speaking: a hefty tome with print so small that he had to squint to look at it.
"Not at all." His father waved his hand expansively without looking up from the newspaper. "I'm glad to hear that you're taking up new service skills. Maybe you can teach the rest of us when you're through."
Carr had a vision of his mother applying ointments with cheerful indifference as to the nature of the labels, and he winced inwardly. "I'll bring the book back when I'm through," he promised.
His father's only response was a grunt. Carr walked past the sitting room – his mother had abandoned the half-darned sock in favor of reading the latest issue of Good Housecleaning – and made his way steadily to the foyer, where he broke into a run.
Using the servants' staircase, he went to his own room first and hurriedly read over the relevant entries. The medical book told him no more than the Handy Book did on how to treat cuts – it was simply more long-winded – but Carr took care to skim the following chapter, which was on how to treat war wounds. Then, still carrying with him one of the books he had been reading in the dependency, he went to look in the pantry tucked away near the servants' stairs. He emerged with bandages and a bottle of iodine.
When he reached Jesse's room, he saw that Variel had anticipated him in the matter of the bandages. The valet was in the midst of rolling a bandage around the arm of Jesse, who was bare to the waist. When Carr opened the door, both of the men tensed, then relaxed again when they saw who it was, though Variel's eyes remained wary.
"Did you put iodine on first?" Carr asked Variel.
"No, master; I'm sorry."
"I told him not to," Jesse inserted. "I don't want your parents missing medical items and wondering where they've gone."
"They'll never miss a bit of iodine. It's all right, Variel," Carr added as the valet came forward. "I'll take care of it. I've bandaged team-mates when our team was short of medics during games."
Looking dubious, Variel departed with no word but a bow. Jesse – pale-faced but alert – cocked his head at Carr. "Do you know anything about first aid, or are you just faking it?"
"I took a medical class as part of my military training," Carr replied, placing the iodine on the dresser next to the bed. "I know how to extract a bullet from a wound, if that's what you really have under those bandages."
Jesse gave a low chuckle as Carr sat down beside him. "I probably would, if this had happened back home. But your policemen in the Dozen Landsteads are so wonderfully old-fashioned. I met up with one who was carrying a whip and – wait for it – a dagger. I felt as though I'd just encountered a frontispiece in a book about the Eternal Dungeon."
"The Eternal Dungeon is in Yclau," Carr said as he carefully peeled back the bandage.
"Is it? It was mentioned in one of the books I read about the Dozen Landsteads."
Carr said nothing. The room was lit only by the lamp on the wall next to the bed; everything was shadow-dusky other than himself, Jesse, and the objects on the dresser.
Jesse said, "Have you just discovered that I've been cut by one of the infamous poisoned whips of the Dozen Landsteads?"
Carr looked up then. "We don't poison our whips."
"Well, I hope not, or this is going to be a short conversation. Look, what's up? When you shut down like that, I know I've given the wrong answer."
"We can talk about it afterwards. Let me take care of this first." Carr peeled back the last of the bandages; as he did so, Jesse's breath hitched. Carr looked quickly at his face, which had grown yet paler. "Are you all right?"
"Don't worry, I've had worse done to me." Jesse's lopsided smile was back. "What's the verdict, doctor? Will I live?"
"You? You're living proof of the reality of rebirth. No matter what is done to you overnight, you end up at the breakfast table each morning, smiling cheerfully." As Carr spoke, he sprinkled iodine on the wound. Jesse's breath hissed in again, but he didn't move. "I bet that stung," Carr said, without moving his eyes from the wound.
"Like I said, I've had worse done to me. What's the book you brought with you?"
Carr handed it to him and waited for the iodine to dry while Jesse leafed one-handed through the volume. "Interested in world geography?" Jesse commented.
"Page fourteen," Carr replied, taking up the fresh bandage roll and cutting out an appropriate length. The cut on Jesse's arm did look as though it came from a whip, and it had already stopped bleeding. Carr hoped that his own, minimal medical skills wouldn't worsen matters.
Jesse looked up from perusing page fourteen. "Well, well – I had no idea that Yclau possessed so many colonies."
"Tenarus isn't on the list of colonies."
"Tenarus is a city," Jesse countered.
"I checked the index of the atlas. It lists every city and town in the world, down to small villages. Tenarus isn't listed." Carr began to wrap the bandage around his visitor's arm. "Jesse, you're not a colonial. You don't know elementary facts about Yclau, yet you sound as though you've been reading whole encyclopedias on the Dozen Landsteads. Out-of-date encyclopedias. You know the Yclau tongue . . . but so does anyone who wants to visit the Dozen Landsteads for a lengthy period of time, because Yclau and the Dozen Landsteads share the same language." Tying the bandages with a final knot, Carr leaned back. "Who are you? And where have you come from?"
Jesse's smile did not reach his eyes this time. "Does it matter where I come from?" Then, as Carr remained silent, Jesse shrugged and added, "I told you, I'm from Tenarus, and I told you, you won't have heard of it before. Anyway, I haven't been living in Tenarus for a while now. I'm officially the resident of a country nearby – another one you won't have heard of – and I haven't been living there for months. I've been travelling."
"Why?"
"Why?" Jesse cocked his head. "Because I have a boyfriend in medical school, that's why."
"A—" It took Carr longer than usual to disentangle Jesse's dialect, probably because the word he was using had no Landstead equivalent. Carr resorted to using a word that the Yclau had coined. "A love-mate, you mean? You're bonded to a doctor?"
"Someone who's studying to be a doctor, which means my boyfriend is up past midnight each night, studying or talking to his new friends or reading medical journals. . . . After a while of this, I realized I could do one of three things. I could use my considerable talents at seduction to distract Quen from his studies and make him fail medical school. Or I could kill all his new friends in a fit of jealousy. Or I could go travelling till he found time for me again. I opted for the travel."
Smiling despite himself, Carr took the atlas back from Jesse. "That doesn't explain how you ended up bleeding on my kitchen floor. Or why you have a passage-of-port from Yclau."
"Oh, well, the passage-of-port . . ." Jesse waved his hand vaguely. "Some sort of computer mix-up in the First Landstead. I was trying for a passage-of-port that would show I was from the First Landstead, so that I could visit there, and this is what showed up in my mailbox instead, along with a
ticket to Solomons Island. I figured, Okay, I might as well start my trip from the Second Landstead. It had to be either the Dozen Landsteads or Yclau, because I'd already learned the language your two countries use."
"You could have gone to Mip," said Carr, tucking in a stray bit of bandage. "Most of the citizens there speak the Landstead tongue as well. You would have liked it better in Mip – no master rank or service rank there."
"See, now, you should have been telling me all this months ago," Jesse said crossly, as though Carr was to blame for everything that had gone wrong, including the whip-cut. "But you missed the point. I'm not travelling to places I think I'll like. I'm travelling to places I know I'll hate."
In the small silence that followed, Carr could hear the tick of the clock in the room, the clatter of kitchen dishes through the window, and the murmur of his mother and father downstairs. Stepping carefully into the next portion of the conversation, he asked, "What sort of work were you doing in – in the place you came from?"
Jesse rolled his eyes. Carr gave a rueful smile and said, "All right, that was a stupid question. But how did you get into that sort of work? And what do you hope to accomplish here? And did the whip reach your back?"
"What?" Jesse stared, then gave a short laugh. "Fucking hell, Carr, you've got to stop that. I'm supposed to be the one to change topics suddenly. . . . No, I don't think so. It doesn't hurt there." Jesse looked over his shoulder.
"Let me see." Carr turned Jesse around so that his back was facing the light. There was no sign that the lash had reached the back; the fine hairs there appeared undisturbed. Carr trailed his fingers along the back, seeking any sign of hidden damage.
Jesse stiffened. Carr's fingers paused, and he would have withdrawn his hand, but his hand lingered. Too faint to be seen, something could be felt under the hair on Jesse's back. Not a newly made wound, no. What he felt was a smoothness of skin, as though it was new skin – new skin that had healed over an old wound.
He traced it along the back, then trailed his hands down further. Yes, it was there: parallel lines, as though the back had been furrowed. Unmistakable to anyone, such as Carr, who had seen a Household punishment carried out.
Keeping his voice low, Carr said, "You're a servant?"
"Yeah. Was." Jesse's voice was too level to be read.
"A runaway?"
"Not like you're thinking. I have an emancipation document – not forged, it's really mine – that I can thrust into people's faces if I want. But since the only time I go back to Tenarus is to help runaway slaves, I'm kind of hoping I'll never have to show that document to the police."
Carr pulled his hands away. "Slaves?"
"Yeah." Jesse turned around and leaned back against the pillows with an elaborate show of indifference. "They don't mince words in Tenarus. Funny thing is, being a servant in the Dozen Landsteads is worse than being a slave in Tenarus. At least in Tenarus, people aren't born into slavery, slaves are allowed to socialize with masters, and slaves have a chance – a slim chance – of being emancipated by their masters and mistresses, the way I was. And nobody pretends that the slaves are being chained for their own benefit." Jesse's voice turned scornful.
Carr was silent a while. In some inner part of his mind, he had already begun to suspect that Jesse was his own country's equivalent of a servant; there was no other way to account for the immediate intimacy that servants had showed toward him. But Carr had managed until now to remove from his mind the implications of that fact.
A man was able to live part of his life as a servant and then be able to pass himself off as a true master. If Jesse could do this with such ease . . . what did that mean? That Carr's parents were right? That all men and women in the world were born equals, with no differences of rank except what they artificially imposed on one another?
The thought should have been comforting. Instead, Carr felt sick. And he knew why he felt sick.
"You okay?" As usual, Jesse was all too skilled at picking up on Carr's emotions.
"Yes, fine." Carr turned his head, under the pretense of placing the bandages and scissors on top of the book. "I'm sorry about what happened to you. I'm glad the story had a happy ending. And it's nice that you want to help others."
"Is it?" Jesse's voice had turned very quiet.
"I mean . . . If that's what you feel you have to do . . ." He was stumbling now, trying to figure out why panic was building in him, for surely he had not learned anything tonight that he did not already know.
He was a freak of nature. His freakishness remained hidden only by the fact that he lived in a society that had built up artificial, damaging barriers to normal human behavior. Once those barriers were removed – once every Landsteader lived with the freedom he deserved – then Carr's freakishness would be exposed for what it was. Every step he took to bring about the emancipation of the servants was one more stick in the building of his own corpse-fire.
"Hey." Jesse grabbed his arm. "Stop fiddling with those things. Look at me and tell me what's wrong. Gods, are you crying?"
"Of course not." He hastily palmed away the revealing tear. "I just hate to think of all those men and women who are forced to be servants, and who are exploited by their self-appointed masters. If we had a society where everyone was equals, we wouldn't have runaways, and we wouldn't need Abolitionists. I guess that would put you out of business." Trying to smile, he turned to look at Jesse.
The other youth still had his hand on Carr's arm. His light-and-dark eyes had grown serious; the lines of his frown creased his forehead, like waves rolling back from the shore. His hand tightened on Carr's arm, causing his biceps to grow so that Carr could see clearly the veins submerged under the skin. The fine, night-dark hair on his chest . . .
"Oh, sweet blood, no," whispered Carr.
"'No' what?" Jesse asked, his frown increasing. Then his gaze dropped. "Oh. Right."
Carr jerked back as though he had been about to touch a sea nettle; his hands ended up in his lap. Too late, he thought bitterly. A sardonic smile had entered Jesse's face.
"I get you," said the youth.
"Do you?" Carr's voice was faint.
"Yeah, it's pretty obvious. 'You want to fuck?' 'You're not my type.' 'You want to fuck?' 'You're not my type.' 'By the way, I was a slave.' Suddenly I'm your type." Jesse reached over and peeled off Carr's hands from his lap, revealing the stiffness there. "Relax. I was a sex slave. I'm used to masters getting turned on when they see me. Besides, I'd already guessed, when I saw the way you looked at Variel."
"Guessed?" His voice could barely be heard now.
"That you're one of those masters who can only get a hard-on when you're with a servant. Pretty funny, huh? At first you're not at all attracted to me – and then you find out I once wore service clothes, and suddenly your cock's all hungry." He leaned back further, scrutinizing Carr, and his smile slowly faded. "Okay, maybe not so funny if you're the guy with the terminal case of servant hunger. You haven't gone to bed yet with any of the servants?"
Carr looked away, staring into the darkness. "No."
"Because of that act your uncle was talking about? The – whatchamacallit – Abuse of Power Act, forbidding masters from having sex with their servants? Or are you just saving yourself for the right servant?"
"No." He cleared his throat and tried to speak above a whisper. "It would be wrong to bed a servant. I'd be exploiting him. I don't want to do that."
The bed moved as Jesse shifted. Carr looked over to see that the other youth was now sitting cross-legged, his elbows on his knees, his chin on his fists, and a smile on his face. "Okay, you know, don't you, that my respect for you just shot up about a hundred miles, right? Tell me you didn't say that only for effect, the way your parents would."
"No." He shook his head quickly, feeling the tension ease in him at Jesse's unexpected response. "No, I decided this two tri-years ago, when I first realized . . . when I first realized I wasn't normal. I mean, my parents had been talking since I was b
orn about the joys of equality in marriage or in a love-mate bond, and it all sounded wonderful. But when I reached the age where I was having dreams about being intimate in bed with others . . . The dreams were always about males, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing, my uncle is only interested in males, and my father told me once that he's only attracted to females, so only being interested in one sex wasn't the problem. It was—" The remaining words stuck in his throat.
"It's that you were always dreaming about being a master having sex with his servant." Jesse sighed and leaned back. Carr looked at him quickly, wondering whether the tolerance he had shown before – no, not tolerance, praise – would disappear, now that it had sunk in what type of threat Carr presented to his servants.
"Gods, Carruthers, I'm sorry," Jesse said. "I mean, I've met guys who preferred being on top, and I've met masters who didn't give a damn about whether their slaves were willing to have sex with them or not. Like my first master," he added with a quirk of a smile. "But the situation you're in – not being able to get an erection except when you're a master fucking your servant, and not wanting to exploit your servants . . . Hell. And you're not the type for lifelong chastity."
"I've already decided that," Carr said swiftly. "I'll stay celibate rather than bed a servant."
"Nope." Jesse's voice was flat. "Not the type for celibacy. Carr, don't argue with me – I can assess people better than you can. That's part of what I do. I teach new runaways how to be free; you've got to know something about human psychology to do that, because it's one hell of a transition, to go from being a doormat to being a free person." He tilted his head to one side as he looked at Carr. "I hate to point out the obvious – in fact, I wouldn't point this out except that you're about to make a fucking idiot of yourself by trying to be celibate, which will cause you to explode at some point, probably at the cost of one of your servants – but if there are masters in this world who are only turned on by servants, it sort of follows that there are servants in this world who are only turned on by masters. I mean, I'm not speculating here. I've met slaves like that."
Carr stared down at his shoes, his body as tense as it had been before. "I'd thought of that. There are tales . . . Well, I won't bore you with history lessons. But how would I figure out who these servants were? Any servant might say he wanted to go to bed with me, simply in order to gain my favor or because he was afraid to say no. And I don't have your skill at reading people. I'd probably end up taking someone to bed who hated being with me."
"Yeah, that's the kicker, ain't it?" As he turned and lay down on his bed, Jesse sighed. "And I can't help you, because I top in bed. Look, give me some time to think about it. Maybe I'll come up with a solution." He closed his eyes.
Carr hastily rose, collecting his items from the dresser. "I should let you sleep; you've had a rough night. . . . Jesse."
"Mm?" Jesse didn't open his eyes.
"Thank you for listening. And for not being shocked."
A smile touched the corners of Jesse's lips. "No problem. I've got this thing for masters with consciences. Just ask the master who arranged for me to be freed."
Master and Servant (Waterman) Page 8
