“Come see the beautiful job they’ve made of it,” called Jamice from the temple doorway. “Look at these mosaics, Zilia. If you’d had artists sent in from Phansure, they couldn’t have done better. And see how neatly the children have laid the roof logs.” She went in, still talking, leaving the others to follow.
The children sat down where they were, watchful but quiet. After a time the visitors came out of the temple, trailed by their settlement escorts, the latter looking slightly puzzled though not at all concerned.
The children rose politely, as they had been taught to do in the presence of elders.
“Are you going to reconstruct another of the temples?” Jamice asked them, using her sweetest tone of voice. She was moved to make much of the children, partly by her scorn for Zilia Makepeace, and partly by her well-developed esthetic sense. The graceful complexity of the designs in the newly laid floors had impressed her greatly.
“No, Ma’am,” said Saturday in her most courteous voice. “We don’t plan to. It was very hard work, and we learned just about everything there was to learn about it.”
One of the men was watching her very closely, a rather ugly man. He smiled at her, and she blushed, suddenly realizing who he was. He wasn’t nearly as ugly as Africa had said.
“What are you going to do with it, now that it’s done?” the ugly man wanted to know. It was the same question Gotoit Quillow had asked, months before. Now, as then, no one answered it. Saturday looked at the questioner from beneath her lashes, shrugging. Jeopardy glanced at Willum R.
“Would you like to come to our Settlement Series tonight?” Willum R. asked Spiggy, with an ingenuous smile and a gesture indicating that all the visitors were included in the invitation. “We’re playing Settlement Three, and winner gets to play Settlement Four in the semifinals.”
• Guest quarters in Settlement One, as in all the settlements, were on the upper floor of the Supply and Administration building: half a dozen bedrooms with bath and sanitary facilities, a kitchen, and a comfortable room furnished with information stages, which could be used for relaxation or meetings or work. As was customary during visitations by CM staffers, a kitchen crew had been detailed to cook for the visitors.
The people from CM were served a plentiful and well-prepared supper, after which they separated: Horgy and Jamice going off to attend the game they’d been invited to by Willum R; Spiggy and Zilia announcing their intention of taking a walk out to see the place Sam had been attacked. Once Horgy and Jamice had left, however, the other two found reasons to put off their exercise, lingering over the cheese, sweet filled cakes, and dried fruits which had been served as “finishers.”
“What are these?” wondered Spiggy.
“Plum willow,” she said. “They grow here and over around Settlement Five.”
“Amazing,” Spiggy murmured. “I’ve been here for over fifteen lifeyears, the last six in management, and I’m still learning things every day. You know a remarkable amount to have been here such a brief time.”
“My father always said I was a fast learner. And it’s been almost two years, now.”
“You came from Ahabar, didn’t you?”
“How did you know that?”
“You used the word father. Hardly anyone does, unless they’re from Ahabar.”
“I was born on Ahabar, in the southern counties of Voorstod. A county called Green Hurrah. I grew up mostly in the Celphian Rings.”
“I’ve never been to the Rings.”
“Nobody with any sense would ever go there.”
“You must have had some reason for being there.”
“My father was sure he could find moon-gems where other people had failed. Father always had this conviction that he was destined to succeed where others couldn’t. He took other people’s failures as favorable omens. If they couldn’t do it, he’d try it. If other people were successful at a given endeavor, father wasn’t interested. He needed to succeed at something other people had failed at. It made his life, and ours, a succession of disasters and disappointments. In the Rings, we lived in a environment container unit with a faulty recycler. Father was out prospecting for fire opals most of the time, and he got food at the outpost, but Mother finally died, mostly from malnutrition. I was very sick, too.”
“Your family had a marriage tradition?”
“All the Voorstoders do, yes. Mother was from there.”
“How do you feel about that tradition?” he asked curiously.
“After watching Mother wither away among the Rings? I feel the same way I feel about slavery and genocide,” she snarled at him. “Which are also Voorstod traditions. Why do you ask? Were you going to propose a contract.”
He laughed shakily, set back by her sudden ferocity. “No, I was just curious. Cultures with marriage traditions are so much in the minority, I find them exotic, that’s all. I’m from Thyker, and Thykerites regard marriage as a kind of slavery. I know Voorstod has one of the old tribal religions that allows slavery.”
“That insists upon slavery,” she spat. “They have an interesting doctrine. According to the prophets, the only men who are free are those who do only what they want to. Doing what someone else wants you to is the sign of a slave. However, since there are always things that must be done, but that no one wants to do, a free man must have slaves to do those things. According to the Voorstoders, slavery is God’s signs of approval to his people. It isn’t allowed, it’s required.” She made an angry sound and rubbed her forehead, “Luckily, my father’s family wasn’t pure Voorstoder. In Green Hurrah there’s been intermarriage for generations.”
“So, how did you get away from the Rings?”
“After Mother died, Authority wouldn’t let my father leave me in the Environmental Containment Unit alone. Child endangerment, it’s called. At the time I thought that was pretty funny. Wife endangerment isn’t a crime under the Authority—or among the
