She had not seen scourges since she’d returned to Perdur Alas. Mother had said they’d died soon after arriving, screaming in the night, crying like lost children, hungry and cold. So it wasn’t scourges who’d killed Mother. Something had. Something had killed her and chewed on her bones. Was it as Diagonal Red and the others had shown her? Had they done it?
She didn’t know. There was no way of telling. Nothing was left of that former time. Nothing but monsters. Monsters and Mother’s bones.
I Saluez had thought to grieve a little and then to sleep, but it was not to be. There was a stir of discontent eddying among us travelers, and its name was Lutha Tallstaff. She would not settle. Trompe fell asleep. Leelson fell asleep. Even Leely was quiet, with none of his usual restless little murmurs, but Lutha moved and sighed, sighed and moved, wearing herself out with trivialities. She went out and checked the panels not once but a dozen times. She put Leely’s harness upon him and fastened the end to her belt. Though Leelson had already referred to Bernesohn Famber’s yellowed map when he said we would finish our journey on the following day, Lutha unrolled the map once more and sat perusing it by lamplight. When she tired of that, she wedged the door shut, leaving me gasping for air.
“I’ll go outside,” I said. “There are no Kachis tonight.” It was true. There were none at all, and I desperately wanted to be by myself.
I did not escape. She came after me, to the limit of the cord that bound her to Leely at any rate. Obviously, I was to have no privacy on this particular evening. I sighed and sat myself up within my cocoon of blankets, seeking some topic of conversation that would distract her from this hectic activity.
“How did you and Leelson ever meet?” I asked.
She sat down upon the step of the wain. “I met him while working in the Greinson Library at Prime.”
“Such places must be interesting,” I said politely.
She laughed under her breath. “Or deadly dull. I was trying to make sense of some knotty old document written long ago in a dead language, memorializing a contract between peoples who don’t exist anymore.”
“Dull, but no doubt important,” I murmured.
“I suppose. It was one of those documents universally acknowledged to be ‘precedental,’ so I struggled mightily, trying to extract something my client could use in a court of law, glumming, as one does, writing down and crossing out. Then I had this odd feeling, as though I was being stared at, and when I looked up, Leelson was there. I knew at once he was Fastigat.”
“How did you know?”
“Oh, they have such absolute confidence, a stunning savoir faire which puts mere poise to shame. Still, I’d dealt with Fastigats before. One does tend to get a bit short of breath when they turn on the charm, but up until then I’d considered the effect manageable.”
“Until then?”
“Until he began to speak, yes. ‘Something called me down from up there,’ he said. The document niches are all up and down the towers, and the whole place was dotted with little scholars on their lift plates, zooming up, dropping down. He said, ‘Perhaps it was your perfume.’
“I wasn’t wearing perfume. I made some remark about being generally in good odor, and Leelson laughed. We introduced ourselves. I thanked him for his compliments, and the whole time I was gasping for air, sort of mentally, you know?”
I said yes, I knew. I’d been doing the same all evening.
“I resolved with every fiber of my being not to return to the library and to stay away from Fastigats. My kind of people, that is, Mama Jibia’s kind of people, the non-Fastigat professional class, consider Fastigat men unsuitable for women who are serious-minded.”
“You are serious-minded?” I wanted to laugh, but did not. Despite Lutha’s undoubted intelligence, she was constantly exploding like fireworks, laughing or crying, passionate about every trifle. On Dinadh, we think of such behavior as typical of children, not serious adults.
“Don’t you think I am?” she asked, surprised.
I told her exactly what I thought, hoping she would go away.
When I had finished, however, she only said thoughtfully, “It’s the way we were reared, Yma and I. If you’d ever met my Mama Jibia, you’d understand. She was a singular person, of extremely forceful mien, a faithful follower of the Great Org Gauphin, who preached logic and good sense in all things. Mama Jibia was dead set against Yma or me getting tangled up in feelings we couldn’t express or understand. Starting at puberty, she had us experiencing sex through sensurround, so we’d know about that. Then, twice a year she had us vetted by the mental health people from the Temple of the Great Org Gauphin. We had emotional and stress inventories and sessions with a behaviorist, and I’d wager we knew more about the human animal at fifteen than most of our contemporaries ever learned.”
I murmured, “It sounds quite … rigorous.”
“Well, she was trying to make us immune to romance or sentimentalism. Of course, many of our friends came from Firster families, and sentimentalism is one of their largest stocks in trade. They use it to excuse all kinds of nasty behaviors. If Papa beats you, it’s because he loves you, you know the kind of thing….…”
I did. I knew more than that. Probably far more than she!
She went on, “Firsters don’t approve of pragmatism, self-analysis, or sexual sensurround for anyone, much less virgin girls who should be, so they claim, innocent, by which they really mean susceptible to any self-serving lie that’s going around! So, Yma and I saw our friends being romanced and falling
