Year's Best Scifi 6 Part 17

"It's the moon tugging at the rocks."

"Of course," exclaimed Clancy, "of course. With a moon that size, even the rocks have tides that can be felt."

He walked to the edge of the headland. He heard another creaking below him and a little stone dislodged itself and rattled down the precipice.

"Lunar erosion," he observed with a smile.

The warrior had come up beside him.

"It tugs at your soul too," he volunteered. "Makes you long for things which you don't even know what they are. No wonder the women stay indoors under the moon. It tugs and tugs and if you're not careful, it'll pull your soul right out of you and you'll be another ghost up there in that dead dry place and never again know the sea and the solid land."Having made this speech, the young man nodded firmly and wandered back to his post at the foot of Clancy's steps.

"Wow," breathed Clancy, "good stuff! Did you record all that?"

Of course Com had.

The moon had nearly cleared the horizon now. It towered above the world. The wattle huts below were bathed in its soft pink light and the water once more filled up the bay.

"Take a note, Com. I said we in Cosmopolis had forgotten our moon, but actually I think our moon has gobbled us up. After so many centuries of asking for the moon, we have..."

"...we have...?"

"Forget it. I think I'm going to be sick."

"I visited a quarry," Clancy dictated, a week into his stay, "a little dry dusty hollow at the island's heart, where half a dozen men were facing and stacking stone. It was the middle of the day but quite dark, due to one of the innumerable eclipses, so they were working by the light of whale-oil flares. The chief quarryman was a short, leathery fellow in a leather ap.r.o.n, his hands white with rock dust. I asked him why he worked there rather than on the sea like most of the other men. He had some difficulty understanding what I was asking him at first, then shrugged and said his father had worked there, and his grandfather and great-grandfather. It was his family's allotted role. (A slow knowledge approach to life, you see, a sea knowledge approach. Any Cosmopolitan would want to demonstrate that his job was chosen by himself.) "But I realized that my question had left the man with some anxiety about how he was perceived. He stood there, this funny, leathery human mole, and stared intently at my face for a full minute as if there was writing there which he was trying to read.

" 'It isn't on the sea,' he said at length, 'but it's real moon work! No women are ever allowed here.'And he told me that there were some rocks they only attempted to s.h.i.+ft right under the moon. The strain of the tide going through the rock made the strata more brittle. Hit the rock in the right place under the moon and it would suddenly snap. Hit it any other time and it remained stubbornly hard. With some rocks, he said, it is enough to heat the rocks with fire when the moon is up, and they fly apart into blocks.

It was real moon work all right.

"So I told him that I had no doubts whatever about his manhood."

Clancy paused.

"You know, Com, I think we've got nearly enough material already. We just need one more episode, one more event to somehow bring the themes alive. Whatever 'alive' is."

He got up, paced around the tiny s.p.a.ce of Sphere's leisure room.

"What is the point of all this? Back and forth across empty s.p.a.ce, belonging nowhere, an outsider in the lost worlds, an outsider in Cosmopolis, no one for company but a plastic egg. What are my books but mental wallpaper?"

Com conferred with Sphere by ultrasound, then suggested a gla.s.s of wine.

Clancy snorted. "You and Sphere always want to pour chemicals down me, don't you? Come on, back to work. Resume dictation."

Next day when the tide was out, Clancy got into conversation with harpooneer, a sly, sinuous, thin-faced man, with to fingers missing from an encounter with one of the big whale-like creatures which he hunted under every moon.

As with the quarryman, Clancy asked the man why he did the work he did, and received exactly the same answer: his father, grandfather and great-grandfather had done the same. Then Clancy asked him would he not like to have a choice of profession?

When Com translated, the man did not seem to understand.

"I know the word for choice in the context, say, of selecting a fish from a pile," Com explained to Clancy. "But it does not seem to be meaningful to use this word in the context of a person's occupation."

"Okay," said Clancy, "ask him like this. Ask him does he prefer his ale salty or sweet? Ask himwhether he prefers whale meat fresh or dried? Ask him does he prefer to fish when the sun is hot or when it is cloudy? Then ask him, how would it be if someone had said to him when he was a child, would he rather be a quarryman, a harpooneer or a fisherman with nets?"

Com tried this. The old man replied to each question until the last. Then he burst out laughing.

"They simply have no concept of choosing their own way in life," Clancy recorded later. "They follow the role allotted to them by birth and don't resent it because it has not occurred to any of them that anything else could be a possibility. How would they react if they could come to the city, and see people who have chosen even their own gender, changed their size, their skin, the colour of their eyes?"

He considered.

"There is something idyllic about their position. In some respects, in any case, they are spared the burden of Free Will. Even marriage partners, I gather, are allocated according to complicated rules to do with clan and status, with no reference whatever to individual choice. I see no evidence that people here are less happy than in our city. In fact a certain kind of fretfulness, found everywhere in the city, is totally missing here, even though life is certainly not easy for those allocated the roles of slave, say, or concubine or witch..."

He considered this. Com waited.

"It is this idyll of an ordered, simple life (isn't it?) which the city pays me so well to seek out. Not that anyone wants it for themself. This life would bore any Cosmopolitan to death in a week. But they like to know it is there, like childhood...

"By the way, one new thing the harpooneer told me. He asked me when I would meet the king's daughters. I told him I didn't know the king had daughters and he laughed and said there were three, and no one could agree which was the most beautiful."

Clancy dined that evening on the high table in the hall of the king, with all the king's warriors ranged on benches below. In the middle of the room the carca.s.s of an entire whale was being turned on a spit by household slaves. The whole s.p.a.ce was full of the great beast's meaty, fatty heat.

"Wahita wahiteh zloosh," chanted the king's poets on and on, "wamineh weyopla droos.h.!.+..."

Clancy leant towards the king.

"Your majesty, I am told that you have three very beautiful daughters. I hope I will have the pleasure of meeting them."

The effect of this on the king was unexpectedly electrifying. He jolted instantaneously into his most formal mode- and, seeing this, the entire hall full of warriors fell suddenly silent.

"Prince from the sky, I am most honoured that you should ask. They will be made ready at once."

He called to a servant, gave urgent orders and dismissed him with an imperious wave. The warriors began their talking and their shouting once again.

"An hour pa.s.sed," Clancy dictated later, "and then a second. The warriors grew restless, wriggling on their benches like naughty children. The whale carca.s.s, what was left of it, grew cold. The king and I, whose relations.h.i.+p consisted entirely of exchanging information, ran out of things to say to each other, and he eventually gave up all attempt at conversation, sinking into his thoughts, turning a gold ring round and round on his finger, and from time to time jolting himself awake and pressing more sea-weed ale on me.

"I began to wonder whether there had been some mistake. Surely it could not take that long for the princesses to be made ready? Had they been summoned from some other island? Had I perhaps completely misunderstood what was going on? But Com a.s.sured me that, yes, the king had said his daughters were being got ready.

"Another hour pa.s.sed. I endured the king's poets repeating their repertoire for the third time.

('Wahita wahiteh zloosh/ wamineh weyopla droos.h.!.+...' repeated after every one of 23 verses!) "And then a door opened at the end of the dais, all the warriors lumbered to their feet, and the king's three daughters were led in."At this point in his narration, Clancy asked for wine.

Sphere poured it for him.

"The harpooneer had not lied to me, all three princesses were indeed beautiful and it wasn't hard now to see why they had taken so long. Their hair was plaited, ribboned and piled in elaborate structures on their heads, their bodies, bare to the waist, had been freshly painted in the most intricate designs of entwined sea plants and sea creatures.

"They came round the table and knelt behind my seat, the youngest first, her sisters behind. Then, at a word from the king, the youngest daughter stood up, offered her hand to me briefly and went to stand behind him. The second daughter did the same. And then the third, the oldest..."

Clancy gulped down his wine and went across to the dispenser for more. He was agitated, scared.

"What the h.e.l.l is that feeling?" he demanded. "It's not like l.u.s.t at all, but you can't call it love, not when you don't know the person. It's like a buried longing for some kind of sweetness, which we try to stifle beneath worldliness and weariness and all the busy pointless tasks we lay upon our selves. And suddenly a person touches it for some reason and it erupts, all focused on that one person, her lovely sad intelligent eyes, her unconscious grace..."

He checked himself.

"What a load of c.r.a.p! What do I know about her except her face? What is it I want from that face?

What can a face give me? What is a face except muscle and skin? d.a.m.n it, it means nothing, nothing! It's all just a trick played on us by biology!"

"Are we still doing dictation?" Com politely enquired.

"No of course we aren't, you plastic prat!"

Clancy swallowed the wine in one gulp and shoved the empty cup straight back into the dispenser for more.

"Okay, let's admit it. The oldest daughter, Wayeesha. When I met her eyes it felt as if something pa.s.sed between us, some recognition, some hope that it might not always be necessary to be so...so terribly alone. It's all c.r.a.p, of course: she's not much more than half my age, she's been brought up to marry some iron age warlord on some bleak little island. We don't even speak the same language."

He downed the third cup of wine in one, with a little shudder.

"All that we might possibly have in common is some kind of longing to escape ..."

"Sometimes it helps to talk about what happened," said Com, after a ten-microsecond conference with Sphere. "Perhaps if you finished the story..."

"Oh for G.o.d's say spare me your second-hand wisdom you sanctimonious rattle!" exclaimed Clancy.

But in spite of that he sat down again and carried on.

"So then when all three women were standing behind the king's chair, he smiled proudly at me and asked me whether or not they were indeed as beautiful as people had told me. Of course I said yes.

" 'That's good,' he said, 'and now the choice is entirely yours.'

"I suppose I had been rather naive, but until that point, I hadn't understood that when I asked to see his daughters he had a.s.sumed that I wanted one of them for a wife."

Again Clancy jumped to his feet.

"d.a.m.n it, Com, this is intolerable. One minute I was falling for a woman in a way that seemed scary and new to me, the very next minute I was being offered her hand in marriage. How could anyone deal with that? I played for time, of course. I said that in my own world a man sleeps on a decision like that...

Delete that whole paragraph. You rewrite it. Leave out the nonsense about my personal feelings. Just describe her as very attractive and tempting. Generic rather than personal. Worldly rather than sentimental. Low adjective count."

"Done. Shall I read it back to you?"

"Later...It's maddening. This is precisely the event I needed to bring the book together. The marriage of sky and sea! The s.p.a.ce traveller falls in love with the daughter of a fisher king. What could be better! d.a.m.n! d.a.m.n! Why has reality always got to be so awkward.""Go on," said Com, who was a good listener.

"I mean it might make a good book, but if I marry her I can't just go back to the city with the book, can I? I have to go back with her. How would it look if I bring back some kid half my age who doesn't even know how to read or write? I'll look like a dirty old man."

"Don't forget," said Com, who had filed and indexed everything they'd learnt about the local culture, "that here it is the man who moves to live with the woman. Women are not allowed to cross the sea."

"So I couldn't take her back with me? Yes, that's true. And if a marriage fails here a man returns to his own island doesn't he?"

Clancy sat down, picked up the yellow egg and turned it over in his hands.

"You may look like a kid's rattle, Com, but you have your uses. I could marry her here, and if things didn't work out, which of course they won't after a while, I can take off home. No harm done, a lovely honeymoon, and a nice sad end for the story. Sky and sea try to marry, but in the end they just don't mix. s.p.a.ceman has to be free, even at the price of loneliness and alienation. Ocean princess has to be with her people..."

Then he frowned. He was very cold and empty inside, but not wholly without scruples. He was concerned, at any rate, with how his actions might be seen.

"But that is just using her, isn't it? I can't do that. My readers wouldn't like it. They don't expect me to be an angel, but they do expect a certain... integrity. d.a.m.n."

He thought for a while.

"And anyway she is so beautiful, and so sad. I don't want to..."

A thought occurred to him.

"By the way, I meant to ask you. When she shook my hand she said something, very quietly, so no one else could hear. What was it?"

" Eesha zhu moosha -you have my heart. Do you want me to play it back as she said it?"

"No!" Clancy jumped up as if he had been stung. He was shaking with fear.

"Oh all right," he whispered, shrinking back down, as if in antic.i.p.ation of a blow, "go on, play it back."

When he had heard it, he wept: just two tears, but tears all the same, such as he hadn't shed for years.

"d.a.m.n it, Com, I'll do it. In this culture marriage is all about using people. It won't do her any harm to have been married to the sky man! I'm going to b.l.o.o.d.y do it. Do it and be d.a.m.ned for once."

He glared at the yellow egg as if it had questioned his action.

"Don't worry," he said, "I'll make the book come out right somehow."

Down in the wattle-and-daub settlement the fisher king had a lookout post beside his hall. It consisted of two tree-trunks fixed cleverly end to end, with a small crows'-nest at the top. He invited Clancy up there on the night before the wedding to watch as the other grooms arrived from across the sea.

Weddings in the sea-world were communal affairs, taking place on a single day just once a year.

Bonfires burned all along the beach. Under a huge half-moon that dwarfed the island and made the sea itself seem small, canoes appeared in the distance among the glittering waves, first of all as faint dark smudges and then gradually growing more distinct as they approached the land and the firelight. Each one was cheered as it approached and, as they drew close to the beach, the king's warriors waded out into the sea to greet the new arrivals and help to drag the boats ash.o.r.e.

Clancy turned to the king and smiled. It was a magnificent spectacle.

The king laughed.