The Law of Becoming: 4 (The Novels of the Jaran)

  Weavings curtained the interior. Embroidered pillows were piled neatly in one corner. The bronze warming stove sat on its stag-headed legs next to a carved wooden chest inlaid with bone and gold. Leather flasks hung from the ceiling poles, and the great leather vessel used for fermented milk sat on a metal trivet, surrounded by its attendant dishes and a wooden scoop. Ilyana opened the chest and got out wooden bowls and spoons. She set them on the rugs, which were layered three deep in the outer chamber of the tent, and then pushed past the curtain, stepping up onto the six deep carpets of the inner chamber of the tent.

  Karolla Arkhanov reclined on a raised wooden bed. Sitting on a stool by her feet was another flunky, this one a producer’s daughter who had recently managed the transition into being allowed into the intimacy of the family quarters of the tent by virtue of having accidentally been in the flat when the new baby had come five days ago. She had made herself useful by boiling water and pounding the birth rhythms on the drum, and had thus been granted a status which she evidently deemed glorious but which Ilyana knew was the equivalent of a favored servant. Right now she was spinning, and rocking the baby’s cradle with rhythmic pushes of one foot while Karolla gave her a desultory lesson in khush.

  “Here is Yana,” said Karolla. Yana went obediently over to her mother, gave her the flowers, and kissed her on either cheek, in the formal style. She nodded at the flunky, who bobbed her head enthusiastically in return. Thank the gods that Rory wasn’t there; he was the first, and the worst, of the flunkies, and had, in fact, made himself useful to her parents, but recently he had been eyeing Ilyana with unbearably sexual interest. At least the women, whatever their inclinations, were polite and discreet.

  The baby was sleeping. Ilyana knelt and brushed her fine pale skin with a finger. The newborn had no hair, but she had a thumbnail-sized red blemish below her left ear. Because of this blemish, Karolla refused to name the baby until she was blooded again—until her menstrual cycle started. It was an old superstition, and it embarrassed Ilyana even while the flunkies and patrons thought it charming.

  “Do you want Valentin to take the baby outside, for some fresh air?” Ilyana asked her mother, switching to khush.

  There was a silence. “Valentin has been rude,” said Karolla gravely. “Our visitor was forced to leave.”

  “Uh, who was it?” Ilyana flicked a glanced toward the producer’s daughter. Karolla had no sense of privacy. All the serious flunkies used language matrices to learn khush and put up with Karolla’s verbal lessons as part of the game of playing court.

  “M. Pandit,” said the producer’s daughter, who went by the unfortunate nickname of “Nipper.” Valentin always said, coarsely, that it was because she liked to be bitten, but Ilyana had overheard someone at a party say it was because her grandmother had raised her in Old Japan. Ilyana didn’t know what her real name was.

  Ilyana shrugged, kissed the baby, and retreated outside, gathering up the bowls and spoons as she went. M. Pandit was a new visitor, and while Ilyana didn’t much like her, she hadn’t pegged her yet. Definitely not a flunky: M. Pandit had a greasy aura of power around her, as a potential patron would have, though she was not, as far as Ilyana knew, connected with the vast entertainment tribe in any way. Neither did she seem to be interested in Vasil Veselov in that way. With a few notable exceptions, those were the only three reasons anyone ever came to visit the Arkhanov camp.

  Valentin sat chatting with Evdokia by the fire, encouraging her to count the vegetables as she washed them. He didn’t help, of course. Their mother would have an absolute fit if either of the boys helped to cook: Jaran boys didn’t cook; they learned to help with the herds, to work with hides and leather and harness, to embroider, to fight, to do men’s work. There was very little men’s work to do here, but Karolla managed not to see that, and since she rarely went to other people’s homes, she never saw that both women and men cooked here on Earth. She was content that Anatoly Sakhalin instructed the boys in fighting and in embroidery. She was resigned to the fact that the children had to attend khaja school. She ruled over her flunkies, received homage from her husband’s admirers, and had babies.

  Ilyana fetched a shank of lamb from the pantry hidden behind the bank of potted shrubs that flanked the “spring” from which they got water and hunkered down beside Evdokia to slice it up for stew.

  “I went upstairs,” said Evdokia in a soft voice, “an’ Portia and I played with—” She broke off and glanced over toward the weaver, lowering her voice further. “—real toys. Yana, when can we live in a real flat? When do I get to go to school like Portia?”

  “I don’t know, little one,” replied Ilyana, feeling suddenly sick with guilt for her afternoon of freedom at Kori’s house. She should have been home, spending time with the little ones. The gods knew, they needed it. “Maybe not till you’re six. Go pour that water out down the drain, heartling.” Obediently, Evdokia trotted off. “Valentin,” hissed Ilyana, lowering her voice so that it barely sounded. “What did you say to M. Pandit?”

  “Didn’t say anything to her,” retorted Valentin. “I just told Mother that she’s an oily old quisling and anyway she’s just sniffing round here ʼcause she thinks her smart young trophy husband is interested in Dad, and she dun’t want him to be.”

  “Valentin!” Ilyana squealed, and clapped a hand over her mouth. In some ways Valentin was grossly ignorant, but in others he was far, far too knowing. “How could you? Why do you think that anyway?”

  Valentin rolled his eyes. “You were at that awful reception, Yana. Didn’t you see her? Didn’t you see Dad making eyes at her husband?”

  “No. They had those great reproductions of Greek and Roman amphitheaters in the salon. I just stayed there the whole time.” No one had bothered her there, a quiet girl lingering by three-dimensional models that most of the adults ignored. “Anyway, if M. Pandit is a quisling, then what can her trophy husband do for Dad? He never makes eyes at anybody unless he thinks they can do something for him.”

  “I don’t know everything, Yana! You oughta pay more attention.”

  “Why?” she asked, and then they both clamped their mouths shut when their father emerged from the spare tent. He looked at them but, mercifully, decided to go in to his wife instead. Evdokia returned, Anton tagging along behind.

  “Can we go out, Valentin?” Anton asked querulously. “I’m bored.”

  Valentin glanced at Ilyana. “Oh, all. right,” he said.

  “Voice tag yourself for forty minutes,” said Ilyana. “Then it’ll be dinnertime.”

  “Can I go, too?” begged Evdokia.

  “You’re too little,” said Anton with all the scornful superiority of an eight-year-old.

  “Yes, you can come,” said Valentin swiftly. “Let’s get out of here before Dad comes back out and says we can’t.” They vanished out the door—a stretch of gold and blue horizon that opened into the startling blank flatness of hallway and then merged back in with the endless land again—and it was suddenly quiet. The flunky at the loom shifted position now and again. Ilyana chopped up the vegetables, humming to herself.

  The sudden appearance of her father startled her, he arrived so silently. He crouched down beside her. “I have to attend an opening tonight, and your mother is too ill to go with me.” It was a convenient fiction: Her mother was almost always “too ill” to attend functions, even if in this case it was true, the baby just having come. He settled a hand tenderly on her knee and smiled at her. “Will you come with me?”

  “What kind of opening?” she asked reluctantly, even while she knew it was already decided.

  “Oh, nothing too overwhelming, I think. Not as bad as the last one, anyway.” His smile became conspiratorial, including her in the memory of how stultifyingly official the last reception had been. “It’s an exhibition of photography.”

  “Photography? Like the two-dimensional stuff?”

  He chuckled warmly. “Some of it, I suppose. I don’t know all the technical terms
.”

  “Father,” she asked suspiciously, “why are you going to an art exhibit? Are you angling for someone to do a portrait of you?”

  Now he really laughed. It was such a rare sound that Ilyana cherished it. “I don’t think so. There’ve been so many, after all. But you will come with me, won’t you? It’s at the Little Tate, and there’s that nesh-enhanced exhibit of the Floating Gardens of Babel in one of the adjoining galleries.”

  It was actually the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but she didn’t correct him. “Oh, all right,” she said, not immune to bribery. Then she felt a pang. “But I really should stay home with Valentin and the little ones.”

  “I’ll send them upstairs.”

  “Valentin doesn’t get along with Anatoly Sakhalin, Father. You know that.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Her father clenched one hand, and his gaze fixed on the haze of the false fire. “Certainly Anatoly Sakhalin has his own views of the world, and a certain position to maintain as a prince of the Sakhalin—” Which was to say that Vasil did not like him much, either. “—but if Valentin behaved like a boy and not like indolent khaja chattel, Sakhalin would not despise him. Valentin has to become a man someday.”

  Ilyana winced, her father’s tone was so biting. “But, Daddy,…” she began.

  He cut her off. “It is kind of you to plead for him, Yana, but if you continue to protect him, he will never grow up.”

  Tears stung at her eyes. She bent down and chopped furiously at the vegetables. It wasn’t fair. Why could no one see that Valentin had taken it hardest of all, torn out of the tribes and transported to this strange new world? It had happened to Valentin twice now, first losing his father before he could understand what had happened and then losing the aunt and uncle who had sustained him through those difficult years when Karolla had lived in the Veselov tribe alone, her husband an outlaw. Their father had returned to them, but Vasil had never forgiven Valentin for not accepting him instantly, even though it was too much to expect from the wary five-year-old child Valentin had been back then. And Vasil had compounded the offense by taking them away from the jaran forever.

  Her father’s hand touched her hair and stroked down to cradle her neck and jaw, the way he had comforted her when she was a child. “I… I…” she said through her tears, but she could not go on.

  “Tell me, heartling,” he said quietly.

  “I’m worried about Valentin. I’m worried about him guising too much.”

  He withdrew his hand. “There is nothing wrong with Valentin that he can’t cure by acting as he ought! We will not discuss this any further, Yana. You’re making excuses for him. And he still hasn’t apologized to your mother.” But, relenting, he kissed her on the forehead and then stood up. “We’ll leave after supper.”

  She sighed, brushed away her tears, and dumped the vegetables into the stew.

  One of the reasons Ilyana hated going to receptions with her father was that he never, ever, traveled like most people did, on public lines. He always had to hire a private carriage, no matter how expensive, no matter how exclusive it made him look. Vasil Veselov liked being exclusive. He liked pressing the sumptuary laws to their edge, never quite crossing into the pale. Not even Kori’s Uncle Gus or her Aunt Parvati, who was a member of Concord Parliament, took private carriages. Gods, even Charles Soerensen, the only human who had gained a rank within the Chapalii Empire, traveled like everyone else did. Everyone knew that.

  Ilyana wore a plain blue silk tunic and a calf-length silk skirt, ornamented with a belt of wooden beads and a single gold necklace, but her father, to her horror, got himself up in jaran clothes: the scarlet shirt gaudily embroidered down its arms and along the collar, the black trousers and black leather boots decorated with gold tassels, and gold bracelets and enough necklaces to make him gleam. He looked positively barbaric.

  Their arrival at the Little Tate Gallery caused a sensation. The carriage sank down beside the broad steps and spit out a tongue of stairsteps down which Vasil made his entrance onto the street amidst the crowd of arriving pedestrians. Ilyana slunk along next to her father, trying to disappear, while he was pointed at and swarmed and in general made much of. He had a word or a touch or a glance for every soul who came within ten feet of him. They bogged down in the gallery foyer until a tall, red-haired woman plowed through the crowd and made an opening for herself before them.

  “Veselov! I’m honored to see you here! I’m Margaret O’Neill.” She stuck her hand out, the khaja way of greeting.

  “I remember you,” he said, taking hold of her hand and lifting it to his lips, an affectation he had picked up from old-time “moving” flat films.

  She snorted, giving him time to finish the gesture before she extricated her hand and turned to look at Ilyana. “Charmed, I’m sure. This is—” She hesitated, and a peculiar expression swept her face and vanished. “Ilyana, isn’t it?”

  “Ilyana Arkhanov,” said Ilyana crisply. “I’m sorry, M. O’Neill, but have we met before? If we have, I beg your pardon for not remembering.”

  “Call me Maggie.” She smiled, and Ilyana liked her immediately. “You were younger though. I last saw you—what?—eight years ago when we were all leaving Rhui. I don’t expect you would remember me. Here, come inside. There might even be a photo of you, Ilyana.”

  “Of me?” Ilyana’s heart sank, weighted down by an awful sense of foreboding. Maggie O’Neill. Leaving Rhui eight years ago. They passed through the double doors and into a well-lit gallery cut by zigzagging white panels and spittled with big white cubes. Maggie O’Neill’s records adorned these surfaces. Her records of the jaran.

  With leaden feet Ilyana stalked over to the nearest cube and gaped at the three-dee film grown up from its surface. A young jaran woman played and sang, accompanied by an intent young man on a drum. Ilyana could understand her, of course; she didn’t need to read the words scrolling by along the rim of the cube or listen in to the translation plug. The Singer sang the story of Mekhala and how she had brought horses to the jaran tribes, freeing her people but in turn binding herself in marriage to the wind spirit who had aided her.

  “Isn’t this marvelous?” said a man in passing to his companion. “And they made it a flesh-only viewing, too. It’s all of a piece with the subject and materials.”

  Ilyana hunched down just a little lower and sidled over to the nearest panel. Old-fashioned flat photos were displayed here, but somehow the primitive subject matter looked right on the two-dimensional surface. She reached out to touch a photograph of a woman, heavy in a felt coat, seated before a loom, then withdrew her hand abruptly. There, two boys stood by a cluster of sheep, faces dirty, smiling at some joke. And there, a light-haired girl sat on horseback, a bow slung over her back. And there, a troop of riders marched off to war, gloriously armed with spears tipped with flags and rank upon rank of sabers.

  All her unwanted old childhood memories came rushing back, overwhelming her. She could hear the harness jingling and the noise of the horses, and then she realized that there was another white cube behind this panel boasting a living, moving three-dee, this one of a jahar riding endlessly off, ready for battle.

  “And look, Amber,” said a woman’s voice breathlessly behind her. “I told you braving the crowd would be worth it. Isn’t that Vasil Veselov in the flesh? Goddess, look how he’s dressed. I could just die.”

  Ilyana cringed. She edged away toward another panel and pretended to examine a panoramic photo of a jaran camp spread out along a flat horizon of gold. She could hear conversations from the other side of the panel, but she felt protected here, invisible. She had lost track of her father.

  “I don’t know, Youssef, I think all the fuss a little ridiculous myself. Consider the genre as well. I just don’t think the primitive recording techniques add anything to the subject, even though I’m sure they’re meant to be a commentary on the planet’s interdicted status.”

  The comment elicited only an uninterpretable grunt.

/>   “M. O’Neill, how nice to see you again,” said a familiar, sharp voice that Ilyana couldn’t quite place.

  “Ah, M. Pandit. How wonderful to see you. I’m so pleased you could come.” Maggie O’Neill’s voice sounded so deadpan that Ilyana couldn’t tell whether she was being sarcastic or polite. “But a little surprised to see you at this kind of event.”

  “My husband is interested in the arts,” replied M. Pandit. “I can’t help but be interested as well in an exhibition of this kind. The planet of Rhui is interdicted by Chapalii protocol dictates, after all, and under Duke Charles’s order, as well. I’m just surprised that this kind of material would exist at all. Of course, we all know about the unfortunate death of his sister on Rhui. Such a shame. But one can’t help but be interested in seeing pictures of a planet few of us will ever visit, especially knowing that Terese Soerensen spent her last days there. That she might even have been—why, here, look at these native women. How easily any of us might blend in among them.”

  Ilyana had a sudden vivid memory of Tess Soerensen kissing her good-bye, in the formal style, on either cheek. She had really liked Tess Soerensen. But she also had a premonition that Tess’s image would appear nowhere in this room.

  “So true,” said Maggie in fulsome tones. “As you know, Marco Burckhardt has been doing anthropological surveys of the native populations on Rhui for many years now. I happened to spend some time with him, and I did a little recording of my own. I did so feel that it might be important to make a permanent record of some of the Rhuian natives. I think it illuminates something of our own past to us, don’t you? I couldn’t resist showing it here.”

  “Especially not with a native brought back from Rhui, in defiance of the interdiction.” M. Pandit’s tone was menacing.

  Maggie laughed easily. If she was cowed by M. Pandit’s veiled threats, Ilyana could not hear it in her voice. “Yes, there were compelling medical reasons, as well as aesthetic ones… but I won’t go into that here. Also, as you know, Veselov originally was contracted to the Bharentous Repertory Company, a bit of an—experiment—by Owen Zerentous, but he went on to—ah—bigger and better things. I’m lucky to have him here today. His presence can only add luster to my exhibit. He’s so very famous now, you know, as well as quite handsome. But they were all in general a good-looking people.”