Walk to the End of the World (19 page)

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Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas

BOOK: Walk to the End of the World
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Fern, she thought, you only think you think. The pitcher the man drinks from does not think. The camper that carries his weight does not think.
She felt hollow in body, which was fitting in one who was merely a receptacle for the use of men; and she felt hollow in mind, for there was nothing she might imagine, feel or will that a man could not wipe out of existence by picking her up for his own purposes. Any fem drifted helplessly, awaiting their actions and desires until one of them inadvertently authenticated her by seizing her to himself — if only to run an errand or repeat a phrase — for an instant. That she could have a mission, a direction of her own — or that others like herself to whom she was in some way bound could — was an absurdity. A man’s usage conferred existence.
But this man didn’t know his part. He should have ignored her or briskly ordered her to change the bedding, signifying that the incident had no importance for him. Instead, he surged back onto his knees, though the pain drove the blood from his face, and he took the front of her smock in his hands and shook her so that her teeth snapped together.
‘You haven’t made a cub off me, have you?’
The question was unheard of. If a man intended to breed, it was assumed that he did so unless interfered with by femmish magic. Breeding was a matter entirely out of the control of fems, who came into estrus as time demanded.
Panicked by his agitation, she stammered automatically, ‘Not if
the master wills not.’
‘Nor stolen my soul,’ he said, giving her a shake. ‘Is that all there is to it, then?’
He had gone rogue; he was going to kill her. Her head was full of flarings of blackness from the violence of his handling. She couldn’t speak.
‘Then it’s nothing!’ he cried, and flung her backward against the end-wall of the camper. One of the carriers outside staggered at the sudden shift in weight.
Alldera lay where she had fallen. She’d bitten her tongue and tasted blood.
Very low, the Endtendant said to her, ‘Listen, fem. I couldn’t stay in the camper last night, so I slept outside. I heard your songs. I heard how you sang them. I came closer to listen. In the Boyhouse, they taught me that ferns’ songs are nonsense. They also taught that coupling with a fem outside of the breeding-rooms is a dreadful peril, and here I am, no different than before; so maybe the songs are not nonsense.
‘Now you talk straight to me, bitch, or I’ll break your neck, for I’m fed to the teeth with tricks and lies!’
Exhilarated, she almost laughed. She dreaded a crippling injury too much to oppose him physically, yet here the man bade her take up words, her only weapon.
‘The master has heard all the songs I know,’ she said, and stopped, struck by her own daring, saying silently to herself, ‘I. I.’ She could hardly believe she had spoken the magical pronoun aloud to him, the equalizing name for the self.
He didn’t even notice. ‘No more songs,’ he said. ‘One version of the past seems as likely as another. Tell me about now. Tell me about your own experience.’
That meant, tell about your life. Alldera’s life was the only thing she owned, not to be had for the asking. But she saw that she could use parts of it, and parts of other femmish lives (he wouldn’t know the difference), to beat him down. He was not armored against her in the callousness that most men acquired by customary contact with her kind.
Was he disturbed by the suspicion that he had been taught lies in the Boyhouse? Excellent. She decided to begin with what young fems were taught in the kit-pits and training-pens of Bayo and let him draw his own conclusions. She began to speak evenly and matter-of-factly, as if she were delivering a long message.
She told about life in the pits, where young fems lived till the breaking age of nine. They scrabbled naked in filthy straw for food that the trainers threw down, and only strong and cunning fems survived. She made for him the sounds of the pits: the grunting
signals that the young kits learned from those a little older, for no one spoke human language around the pits. The theory was that ferns’ capacity for language was generally so limited that they must not be confused by exposure to any more words than the basic command and response phrases.
Learning to speak more than the minimum was a risky maneuver. Alldera described the care she had taken to disguise her natural aptitude, so that it would seem to the men of Bayo that her verbal achievements were entirely to the credit of her trainer. Otherwise they might suspect witchery, by means of which she would be supposed to have raised herself so far and so fast above the norm for her kind. She had made her trainer work to discover her mimetic abilities and her grasp of the structure of complex speech.
A pity, they had said, that she wasn’t pretty enough to be trained as a pet, some of whom were taught to tell stories and jokes in an entertaining manner. The Bayo men had altered her diet to improve the quality of her hair and skin, and they had succeeded to some extent; but she would never be pretty, only presentable.
So they had taught her how to memorize messages, how to find her way from place to place, how to identify other men than her master by clothing, mien and surroundings, and how to present a message properly. Then came the wonder of her first trip from Bayo to the City on a barge with a dozen others ripe for the bidding of the companies; the glory of the highstanding City, paved streets after mud-walled Bayo, and the majestic and terrifying peal of the company bells, which she had taken at first for the voices of monsters clanging out over the City.
She spoke of her pride in being selected to serve an important Senior (to a fem fresh from Bayo, all Seniors were important to an equal, exalted degree): Senior Robrez of the well respected Squire Company.
How impressed she had been with the size of his femhold: a private squad of seven fems under the domination of Fossa, who at that time had been only a year away from discard. At first, Alldera had not perceived the sly politicking among the other fems of the hold, the jockeying for favorable positions from which a lower fem could hope to vault into Fossa’s place once it was vacated. Gradually, young Alldera had recognized the aping of men’s hierarchical concerns among the fems, even though rank for them could only
be a pretense; no real power - beyond the reach of a master’s whim – accrued to any femmish position.
Then there was Senior Robrez himself. With time, his pomposity, his pettiness and his spite had all revealed themselves, and the god-like virtues she had attributed to masters (real masters, not trainers brutalized by life in Bayo) had been toppled forever in her mind.
She told how Senior Robrez had had her painted up one night as a pet, so that he could humiliate an unfavored guest by assigning a hideous fem to attend him. Delightedly, the other fems had decorated Alldera for the occasion, not permitting her to see herself or to guess the true purpose of her assignment to personal service that night. Only later, in the privacy of the guest-alcove, she had glimpsed her own face in the surface of the water she brought the man for washing.
They had lacquered her hair into a spiky crown; her skin had been covered in blue and green spirals; and her lips had been made up into a great bruise-colored weal. No wonder the guest had regarded her with such disgust, once they were both hidden from the amused eyes of others.
After that, Alldera had redoubled her efforts to acquire the speed skills that Senior Robrez had hired a man to teach her. Her trainer had been a Skidro derelict who had once trained young men of the Squires Company to race in intercompany games. She remembered the good pain of pushing herself to the limit, the wind of her own speed (though her steps only brought her around again to her trainer in the end).
She stopped speaking. She hadn’t meant to tell about that last part; it was a private thing, and therefore treasured. She remembered the glory of racing through the streets of the City early in the morning or late at night alone. That the messages she carried were most often trivial (plaints of love and jealousy, protests at infringements of standing, claims on others’ time or property or loyalty, simple gossip) didn’t seem to matter then. Neither did she care that the chief use of her hard-won speed skill was to race after some departing guest, arrive at his door before him, and greet him there with messages from Senior Robrez, whom he had just left.
When she had realized that messages of any urgency could be sent more quickly from rooftop to rooftop by means of coded flags, she had fallen into her first despair. The skills of which she was so
proud had no real purpose. Rather than live as a luxurious symbol of her master’s wealth and status, she had decided to run herself to death. Her chosen method of suicide had proven a poor one; she had only exhausted herself and come down with a cold …
None of this was for any man to hear. Her purpose was to disturb him, not to cause herself pain. She had an uneasy feeling that his stillness and concentration, while permitting her to omit the phrases of submission, were drawing more from her than she had intended to give.
‘And?’ he prompted. ‘How was it that you were returned to Bayo?’
‘To Oldtown first,’ she said, ‘for work-discipline.’
He frowned. ‘What is there for a fem with your talents to do in Oldtown?’
‘Nothing. That’s why it’s discipline.’
Oldtown was the processing center for the hemp harvested from the plains. The hemp yielded not only all fibers from fine threat to cable-rope, but a variety of foods made from the seeds, roots and leaves. Manna for dreaming was a product of the taller, more widely scattered highland hemps grown west of Oldtown and handled entirely by male crews. Fems were forbidden to have anything to do with the plants which made the dreaming drug. Nevertheless, the winds blew westerly, and during hemp harvests the plain breathed a sweet redolence that could give even Oldtown fems strange visions.
Alldera’s job had been at the take-in sheds where the leaves were pulled from the stalks and fed to the curding-mills, and the hempseeds were beaten out, pressed, and ground into flour. The sheds, having no walls, let in the stench of the retting ponds, where the stripped stalks decayed under water until the fibers came loose.
She hadn’t minded. She found herself describing her time there with nostalgia.
Of her fantasies – and she had had her share – she said nothing. To recall the dream in which no one – man or fem – could understand a word of her speech was still terrible, a rending betrayal of that first great astonishment at discovering that communication need not be confined to the grunts and snarlings of the kit-pits. She had wakened sweating and gasping from that nightmare. The longing to run until her heart burst had recurred, no less
impracticably than the first time.
Finally the Matris had sent a message to her in Oldtown, saying by way of the news-songs that they had a job for her to do. She had feigned loss of her speech skills (due to lack of practice in the take-in sheds), so that when her work-discipline at Oldtown had been completed, she had been sent back to Bayo for retraining.
There she had discovered the existence of the Pledged rebels, and she had grown restless. All winter arguments had raged among the Matris about her suitability for the mission of going inland and all the risks of sending such a messenger at all. If she had been steadier they would not have taken the time to maneuver her into the Rendery as a chastisement and a testing. They would have sent her west sooner, with a shipment of newly trained fems to the City. She might not have been caught like this, her job half-done and the murder of fems already begun, if she had been more dutiful toward the Matris and less proud. Knowing that she was the only speed-trained messenger they could get hold of just then, she had hesitated and argued, instead of bowing at once to the Matris’ plan and getting on with it …
She had fallen silent, thinking of these things. The Endtendant was watching her.
‘Did you think of running away?’ he prodded.
‘From Oldtown? To where? What should a fem eat in the Wild, stones? As for bolting to hide inside the Holdfast, that just gives men a fem to hunt for sport. I have never actually seen a formal fem-hunt; the last time they caught a runaway and set her loose in the City for the Rovers to catch I was in Oldtown, so I missed it. There are plenty of stories of such hunts and songs about them – locked doors and crowds of men on the rooftops to cheer the Rovers on and to see to it that their own fems watch the futile flight of the quarry.
‘But I saw a fem bolt in Oldtown. It was early in the morning. She just put down her beating-stick, took off her apron, and ran. The men sent Rovers to pull her down and kill her. Work was held up for a while so the men could watch and gamble on the result. The rest of us paid for her moon-madness — the moon was up that morning – by having to work double time until her replacement arrived.’
‘Why did she run?’
‘Fems are creatures of impulse.’
‘Nonsense,’ he snapped. ‘That’s obviously the last thing you can afford to be. Did Rovers guard you there on the Oldtown work floors?’
‘No, they patroled the perimeters of Oldtown, more on the watch for Scrappers than for escaped fems. Where we worked, the noise and activity of numbers of us would have put Rovers too much on edge.’
‘Yet Captain Kelmz held those two Penneltons in the depths of Bayo without evident strain.’
‘He was a first-class officer. We had few of those at Oldtown. The companies like to keep them home in case a skirmish is called.’
‘You fems can tell a good officer right away, can’t you.’
‘It’s important to us. At Oldtown, we could even spot Rovers trained by Kelmz. He turned out clean killers, quick, accurate, no hesitation or flailing about. It’s worth the effort for fems to know roughly what kind of behavior to expect from a given brace of Rovers.’
‘Like the Juniors,’ he remarked, sardonically, ‘though most young men would not be pleased to see the similarity. You can’t have enjoyed traveling with Captain Kelmz.’
‘No.’
‘Yet you came with us, in spite of his being one of our group.’
‘Old Fossa told you; I had to get out of Bayo.’
He looked at her, and said nothing.
The camper was being carried up the steep portage road which ran from the plain to the upper plateau through the defile cut by the descending river. The slow, lurching progress, already more than an hour old, was bothering the Entendant’s wound. Dark patches of sweat stained and spread from the armpits of his shirt. He kept shifting his bandaged leg from one position to another.
He had not asked her again to repeat what he himself had said to Kelmz at the Scrappers’ that night; he did not ask now. Instead, as if he were still pondering his connection with the dead man, he asked about love and friendship among fems.
In carefully chosen generalities she sketched the explosive style of relations among people whose lack of security intensified their loves and hates to extraordinary levels. There was no time among fems for the ripening of delicate affinities. Fems went where their masters
went, often without warning or time to send messages of farewell to lovers in other femholds. Did this man feel sorry for himself because his friend d Layo was inconstant in adversity? Alldera told of betrayals, disfigurements, even murders among femmish lovers.
‘And fems who love — masters?’ he probed.
‘Fems who bewitch their masters? They are burned for it.’
‘Do fems ever love masters as some men fall into loving fems? Tell me what your songs say.’
‘They make fun of such perversions.’
‘Ah,’ he said, with a sour twitch of his mouth. ‘Books of the Ancients on the subject say much the same. But sometimes they suggest that such perversion could be a great glory.’

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