Gray Matters (16 page)

Obu Itubi watches the graceful hips and slender brown ankles; he notes the firm swell of her breasts under the white cotton shirt. This woman balancing a basket is a daily enticement, her invasion of his numb retreat a painful reminder of an old dream gone sour. Itubi takes a slobbering drink from his calabash. Belching bittersweet, he wipes his mouth on his forearm and smiles. Drunkenness helps to erase memory for a time. The pious hospitality of the Qaf Tropiques supplies his brewpot with honey as well as the bread he uses to start the mash working. Pure spring water and acres of fruit come free in the forest. He wallows in the sunshine, sodden and heavy with beer, indifferent to his misery until the woman comes every afternoon and makes him think of how it might have been.

She remains a stranger. He has never spoken or shown himself to her. He knows all too well the distant sound of her voice, the placid smile. Tropiques, Nords, men or women, they are all stamped from the same mold. Center Control adjusts the light that burns in the clear unwavering eyes. The outside world is only another level in the Depository System.

Still, it’s fun to imagine stripping those floppy pajamas from her perfect shoulders, seizing breasts, hips, a fold of thigh, before plunging his face into the syrupy mussel-colored maw of her, to drink and taste, uncoiling his long tongue like a butterfly sipping nectar from a flower.

Nothing ever changes. Years seem to pass between Philip Quarrels’ visits, and yet Vera detects no aging in her mirror. Time slips by, one day exactly like the next, yesterday the twin of tomorrow, and her only real memories are of the hours she spends with Philip. Even the house stays the same. When she returns for supplies this week (or was it last week, or last month?), the familiar sun-filled rooms seem as fresh and new as the day of her first visit.

She hurries through the pantry, filling her hamper with cheeses and tinned delicacies. Freshly baked bread and a tantalizing assortment of glacéd cakes wait in the kitchen. A trip to the wine cellar yields a half dozen dusty bottles. Vera dumps the trash she brings from her tent into a barrel in the yard outside the kitchen door. The barrel is empty as it will be next time, as it was the time before. And ever shall be, Vera thinks. Except when he’s here. Then, it’s almost real.

She lives in the shelter of his parachute, safe to borrow only those memories which are pleasant. Quarrels can never come to the house, she knows that too. Still, she wishes she could share some particle of her past with him. He is apathetic to the fine food and drink, sleeping as easily in the sand as in the nested pillows on her tigerskin. The treasures of her lifetime hold no interest for him. She wants something to please a man, something like Raoul’s shotgun upstairs in the trunk.

The woman is on her knees in front of him, pulling tubers from the moist earth and placing them in her basket. At the sound of Itubi’s lurching stumble she turns her head and starts to rise, but he catches her sleeve and pulls her down beside him in the leaves. He is a naked devil, tearing at her clothes, his florid face leering and wild. She lies inert, curious and detached as he parts her legs with a savage thrust of his knee.

Itubi sways, panting above her, his hands pinning her shoulders to the ground. “Too pure, aren’t you?” he snarls as her eyes calmly meet his hate-filled stare. “Too pure and holy to fight back?” He slides his hands down to her breasts, cruelly pinching her nipples. “But you can’t stop these from wrinkling and hurting and growing hard, can you?” She doesn’t move. “What’s the matter? Is your cunt so saintly? Is that what’s the matter? The precious sepulcher is about to be defiled. Isn’t that worth fighting for? Isn’t it!”

“Your need is so great,” Oona says, opening her thighs for him. “You must suffer.” She slips her ankles behind his knees.

Itubi recoils, his hands lifting from her breasts as if the flesh has suddenly putrefied beneath his touch. “Oh no, I don’t want that.” He rises to his feet. “I’ll do better with my fist, milking my dreams.”

“But it’s not for pity.” Oona lifts her hand, fingers gently drifting along the silken shaft, tracing the swollen blood vessels like a blind woman. “I’ve seen does mounted in the forest and the copulation of whales, and every day in the barnyard the cock runs the hens to earth and I watch him cover them with his strong wings.” She is standing beside him. “I am different from the others, like you are.” She directs his fingers up between her legs. “The sight of a stag in rut never made me open in such a manner.”

They cling together, moaning and swaying like trees in the wind. Uprooted, they fall back into the leaves. Itubi enters her with slow deep strokes and the spasms of release are immediate, all his tensions flooding helplessly into the soft enveloping warmth. For Oona it is something different. His passion is the threshold of an all-consuming universe, ever expanding into particles of light, the very atoms of her being disintegrate, electrons collide. She is lost in the electric fire of creation.

Spent, Itubi gamely endeavors to match Oona’s voracious rhythm. He remains erect, but his mind is elsewhere. He is thinking of the drone bee mating in midair with the Queen, chosen out of a legion of pursuing bachelors. The nuptial flight ends in tragedy. The drone falls back to earth, disembowled, while the Queen flies off with his sexual apparatus and a portion of trailing abdomen still obediently pumping.

“Throw!”

Vera skims a flat-sided seashell up into the air, launching it with a flick of her wrist like a tiny discus. Quarrels swings the shotgun in a sweeping arc, taking an extra second to gauge the lead. He fires and the seashell powders. Vera jumps up and down in the sand, applauding.

“You try,” he says, slipping two red plastic cartridges into the smoking cylinders.

“No, it hurts my shoulder. I like throwing better.”

“Can you throw two at once?”

“Why not?” She hunts along the surfline for shells the proper size. “Philip,” she remembers to call him Philip, “isn’t this fun, Philip?”

“Terrific.” He grins.

“I hope it never ends.”

“I’m going back to the Depository, if that’s what you mean.”

“Oh?” Vera tries for nonchalance as she picks up a second seashell. “Soon?”

“Not for a while. But the alarm is already set for a disconnection, so talking about it won’t help. Are you ready?”

She nods.

“Throw!” Quarrels swings with the spinning shells and fires twice, splintering the first into five pieces, missing the double. No applause. Vera’s smile remains but her eyes are glinting and cruel. “There’s work I must do,” he says. “I have a schedule to follow. Maybe I can arrange something next time so the Commission won’t miss me. I know how to adjust the coordinates.”

“Next time, no alarm?”

“I promise.”

“And we’ll be together forever?”

“I promise, my darling.”

Y41-AK9 complains to his Auditor: If the System is just, why does it permit injustice?

What would you suggest?

Authorization by Center Control for the immediate apprehension of the subject. The necessary equipment could be delivered by Sentinel.

It is not the duty of the Depository to police the world.

But who else is to do it? The Law Speakers take no action. Itubi is given shelter wherever he goes. A female is housing him now. He has a life of ease ahead. Is that just? If the residents of Level I ever guess his fate, there will be complete chaos.

Center Control Regulations specify that the goal of Level I is acceptance of the Depository as their only world. Residents must learn to have faith in the System. Knowledge of truth is a precious responsibility, Y41-AK9. Perhaps continued exposure to the outside is weakening your trust. Temptations are strongest when Intellect and Ego cloud the mind.

I strive for patience and wisdom.

We suggest it. Without those qualities delusions arise, rash recommendations not congruent with order are seriously offered, the oblique workings of the subconscious
r
evealed. To propose using machines against man is absurd; to imply that an Auditor might break his vows and pass along forbidden information to a lower-level resident is unimaginable. If performance of duty is proving too heavy a burden for Y41-AK9, then perhaps another Auditor can be assigned to the Subject.

My endeavors will be doubled with the wise assistance of those who see farther and guide me when I go astray.

The Weaver’s palm-thatched house stands on the crest of a hill overlooking the sea. Gaudy jungle fowl scratch in the yard in front of the open door. Itubi sits on the step, mending a wooden stool, surrounded by the geometric patterns boldly painted on the whitewashed cut-coral walls. Skeins of newly dyed yarn hang in brilliant loops from the drying racks above his head, an awning as bright and ever changing as a rainbow. Everywhere he looks, he is confronted by color. Even the vegetable plots are divided by opulent rows of flowers.

He closes his eyes and listens to the sounds of the shuttle as Oona works at her loom inside. While he is prone to sit and dream, Oona is never idle—tending the dyeing vats, sweeping, drawing water from the cistern, spinning cotton fiber into yarn at her wheel, working in the garden. Her chores begin at sunrise and end in the smoky flickering light of a beeswax candle. She never asks his help, and except for two days a week when he leads the horse along the coastal path to the broad central valley and returns with a bale of cotton strapped to the pack saddle, Itubi is forced to invent work, finding simple tasks like the wobbling stool to fill his day. Aside from some desultory whittling, he has made no attempt to sculpt. The urge is no longer in him.

Still, Obu is content. Life is pleasant and warm. The beehives hum like a row of dynamos behind the house. Slender green lizards scramble in and out of the garden wall. A flame-crested jungle cock chases a chattering hen across the yard. Oona sings inside the house. “I am better than a rooster,” Itubi muses. “The woman is pleased with me. Not a night without lovemaking. Should I be blamed if she has no other use for my arms?”

The loom is silent. Soon Oona appears in the doorway, carrying a round loaf of bread and a basket piled with fruit, wedges of goat cheese, a shattered coconut, and fat oozing squares of honeycomb. She sits, placing the basket between them on the step, and slices the loaf into broad slabs with a bone-handled knife. As always, she is smiling.

Obu spreads honey on the dark bread. “You seem happy today,” he says.

“I am happy every day.” Oona peels an orange. “But today there is special cause for joy.”

“I could tell. I’ve never heard you sing before.”

“The song should be yours as well, Obu. Your seed is alive within me. Today is my time of the month, and yet my menses do not flow. I’m pregnant, Obu.”

“Impossible!”

“I knew it from our first union. You should rejoice.”

“It’s not true. I’m sterile, you know that. All male fetuses are sterilized in the hatchery, that’s the law.” Itubi feels his heartbeat accelerate. He wipes a smear of honey off his chin.

“What law, Obu?”

“Why, World Council law, to prevent unauthorized breeding and ensure ...” Itubi falters. The old schoolboy slogans implanted hypnotically in his memory are of no help. Oona must know them all:
MOTHERHOOD IS A PRIVILEGE, NOT A
RIGHT. CONTROLLED POPULATION IS THE KEY TO PEACE, STERILITY EQUALS STABILITY.
They were as much a part of childhood as the Mother Goose doggerel that returns to nag at him from out of the past:

Born in a hatchery,

Without the help of mother;

That’s the reason why I’m me

And all the world’s my brother!

Oona reaches across to grip his trembling hand. “You are your own authority now, Obu,” she says.

“I’m sorry, my head is full of nursery rhymes. I forgot where I am, or even who I am. There no longer is any World Council, is there?”

“Not since the Awakening.”

“And you’re really going to have a baby?”

“Of course.”

“There’s no law forbidding it?”

“Nothing is forbidden. The Law Speakers provide guidance for the tribe, not restrictions.”

“Incredible!”

Itubi remembers the complex procedure of obtaining his first child: the application forms, the psychiatric interviews and medical examinations, the long appraisal period, all the restrictions and redtape he and his wife submitted to before the hatchery approved their request. And even after an infant was reserved in their name on the production schedule, the complications continued. There were parental guidance clinics, mandatory infant care classes, a series of injections for his wife to induce lactation,
PARENTHOOD MEANS RESPONSIBILITY!

“No, I don’t believe it,” he says. “You’re making it up. My wife never menstruated. Females were fixed in the hatcheries just like the men.”

“All but one in every thousand, Obu.”

“That’s right, all but the bleeders.”

“Obu, I was a …
bleeder.
Those cruel slang words hurt when I was a girl. It was not an easy life being an Ovulator. Normal people didn’t understand. I was medicated for eleven years, one thousand units of TCG every two weeks, and every month in the Incubation Center of Brazil Hatchery Twenty my uterus was drained by a suction tube. Once my yield was one hundred and seventy-three eggs.”

“What about the Depository?”

“I was never in the Depository. Listen, eleven years was enough. This island was a holiday retreat in the old days; there was no permanent population. I made it look like an accident, ditched my gyro-gravcraft in the sea. When the other tourists were recalled after the Awakening, I hid in the forest. I never knew what it was all about. For ten years, maybe more, life was easy; food is no problem here. Then they started coming back, the ones from the Depository, and I spied on them until I learned enough to mingle without notice. I just appeared one day after a ship sailed and was accepted without question.”

“Where did you learn to weave?”

“At the State Handicraft Preservation Center in Rio. Government Ovulators had lots of free time. We were encouraged to take up hobbies, you know, for extra points on our credit ratings.”