Entering his newly finished rooms for the first time, Subtwo allowed a sense of well-being to flow around him. The environment lessened the tension under which he had struggled since arriving on earth. In his rooms were no velvet tapestries, no embroidery, no rough-worked stone. The lines were straight and the angles square. His apartment consisted of pleasing rectangular shapes and volumes. The proportions were geometrically and aesthetically perfect.
The walls and floor and ceiling were formed of white plastic, Subtwo’s desk module held a three-dimensional representation of a complex mathematical function (the only decoration he needed or wanted), and the spare shipboard computer was already installed. He had access to anything and everything he had ever needed before.
Throughout the remodeling, Subtwo had worked with Blaisse’s steward: Madame had executed his wishes with flawless efficiency. Subtwo admired her abilities and appreciated the speed and ease with which the transition had been accomplished, yet now that he was physically comfortable again, he was not settled in his mind. It took him much thought and analysis to realize that his unease resulted from having no more work to do with Madame.
He wished others of his people would ask to have their rooms changed so he could feel justified in requiring her presence. He could not understand their preference for plush and velvet.
A few flaws still marred his place. Eventually they would prey on him, catch his eye, enrage him, but he wondered if Madame would take his insistence on perfection as criticism. He had never worried about making criticisms before, and had always insisted on perfection. Yet this was tolerable: no simple pattern of flaws could upset him more than had the raw stone caves and useless ornamentation. He saw the precious stones and metals in electronics, guidance, fine mechanical constructs; their misuse in mere decoration sent him into periodic rages that he almost failed to conceal. In this castoff place there seemed no way to convert them to any useful function.
He had been on earth only a short time and already he was bored. With the boredom came loneliness, which he had never experienced before. He had never needed anyone, even Subone. Though the pseudosibs seemed united against outsiders, they had never gotten along well. They simply tolerated each other; and they knew each other so well that they were interchangeable in any action. This had nothing to do with liking or empathy or love; it was a purely physical leftover from their upbringing as isolated behavioral duplicates, each influenced as much by the other’s responses as by his own.
Since they arrived on this world, Subone seemed to be growing apart from him. Subtwo’s pseudosib spent more time with the squad members than working; he wasted his time in dissipation. Subtwo had gone into Center only once: the noise and disorder were more than he could stand.
“Come,” he said, in response to a scratch on the door. It was Madame, who did not knock, whether because she had no experience with doors or because she was reluctant to make so much noise, Subtwo did not know. The sensor which controlled the opening mechanism was clumsy and makeshift, slapped together by a technician on his crew. It was insensitive: it would open to Subone’s voice as well as to Subtwo’s own. It was one of the small flaws that would begin to annoy him soon.
He turned to face the steward. She was a handsome and elegant woman, and he still did not know her name.
“My rooms are finished now. How do you like them?”
She looked at him with what seemed genuine surprise. “Why do you ask my opinion, sir? It is of no merit.”
He had not yet decided if she were serious in her self-deprecation or if she were mocking him. He believed she was too intelligent to believe her thoughts were worthless, but in the days they had been working together, she had never deviated from the role she played, if role it was.
His sexual experiences had been experiments, exploratory for him, casual for his partners. Memories of them did not linger unbidden, as did Subtwo’s thoughts of Madame. She performed her duties with exquisite correctness but was never servile. Nor did she ever assert her individuality or her opinions, which disturbed Subtwo deeply, but he had realized that such self-repression was essential for survival in a place where a free person literally held the power of life or death over a slave. He thought, though, that by now Madame should know that he would never take advantage of such a situation. He thought she should trust him. He did not understand that Madame’s situation required either an erosion of spirit or an erosion of trust.
“Come now,” Subtwo said. “I’m not Blaisse.”
“You are his guest.”
“I’m used to being thought peculiar for my tastes. I could hardly be offended if you agreed with the majority.”
“By the rules of the Palace, you may correct any slave whose behavior you find offensive.”
“No one should be offended by honesty.” He smiled, a cold expressionless smile that was in his terms meaningful.
“I find your rooms somewhat strange but not unattractive,” Madame said abruptly. “Strange… yet somehow familiar.”
“A few places in the Sphere build in this style,” he said. “Perhaps you—”
“There is no way of knowing.”
“Civilized planets keep records.”
She smiled at him ironically, and needed to say no more to indicate the futility of his curiosity. “Is there anything you need, sir, before I go upstairs?”
He hesitated, gazing at her, until he realized she had looked away from him and was standing rigid and withdrawn.
“No,” he said. “Nothing.”
o0o
Jan Hikaru’s Journal:
Today I had a long, strange conversation with Subtwo. I think my presence upsets him. He knows I’m not a raider, he knows my interests and my areas of competence, he knows my background, but he doesn’t know what I am. And how could I tell him, when I don’t know myself?
I did tell him that I don’t plan to join his group, and never did, that I’m here by chance, that I’ll leave as soon as possible. Whatever happens, I doubt I’ll be stranded here. Subtwo was not, I think, brought up with starship traditions, but he respects (or indulges) his people’s customs. And the raiders have enough regard for my poet to give me a ride off earth.
I think Subtwo knows more about me than I know about him and Subone. Something unusual: I used the computer link in the common room and tried to key the memory for the pseudosibs. I didn’t get a null, so there should have been information in the news-storage banks, but the terminal couldn’t—or wouldn’t—produce the data. I wonder what terrible things the blank spaces held to make a perfectionist like Subtwo erase a whole segment from his precious files?
o0o
When the invitation from the Lady Clarissa arrived, Subtwo had to send someone into Center to find his pseudosib. Subone had been spending more and more time in that morass of irregularities and inconsistencies. He seemed to like it, while it drove Subtwo to distraction. Subone would sit with his people, with sellers of sexual oddments, with anyone, with no one, drinking and laughing, forgetful of propriety and oblivious to his training, his position, his intelligence. Subtwo was pleased with the growing apart, though he wished Subone had chosen a different way of manifesting the change. Perhaps, with his increasing ingestion of narcotics, depressants, hallucinogens, and stimulants, Subone was trying to drive away what reactions he felt from Subtwo. The experiment of their upbringing would not be completely finished until they stopped feeling the occasional resonances of each other’s muscles in their own.
When Subone returned, he was wearing a smelly tunic of animal fur and he had animal teeth tied in his hair. He smelled of ethanol and sweaty sex.
“Yeah, what?”
Subtwo disliked the imprecision that had crept into Subone’s speech, but could think of no way to correct it. “We’re dining in the Palace tonight,” he said. “At the request of our hosts.”
“At their orders, you mean.”
“We are partners.”
Subone sneered. The expression fit badly on his smooth, bronzed face. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“Are you going like that?”
“Of course. Why not?”
“It offends me.”
“Ahh,” Subone said in disgust.
Subtwo shrugged; they walked together to the alice tube and allowed themselves to be pressed upward into the Palace.
o0o
Subtwo had not expected a banquet. Clarissa’s communication had made no mention of other people, but when the pseudosibs reached the top of the alice tube, they were conducted to a large hall lit by chandeliers and guttering flames in cages of brass wire. Multiple flickering shadows, like electromagnetic auras, surrounded all the people: forty-one, Subtwo observed, and he and Subone made forty-three. Both prime numbers. Subtwo knew of omens, numerical omens based on primes and perfect squares and triads, but he did not know if this might be an omen, or what kind. He did not like prime numbers: no formula could predict them.
The Lady Clarissa reclined at the end of the table near the doorway by which they entered. She was wearing a series of metallic strips that twined around her body, changing hue and intensity with the temperature gradient. She stretched out her graceful jeweled hands to the pseudosibs. Her eyes mimicked the flash of diamonds. Subtwo wondered how she could see through the multiple facets; he wondered if she saw, with an insect’s vision, numerous minuscule shifting images.
“It’s good of you to come,” she said. “Everyone’s anxious to meet you.”
“We are pleased to be invited,” Subtwo said by rote, as Clarissa inspected first him, then Subone, with an unhurried gaze. The iris enhancers gave her a strange appearance of blindness.
Clarissa released Subtwo’s hand, and stroked Subone’s furry tunic. “How exquisite,” she said. “It must have been very expensive. It suits you well.” She let her hand rest just above the hem, which reached barely halfway down Subone’s thigh. Subone smiled at her; his teeth were as white and shiny and sharp as the fangs strung in his black hair.
“In such a historical place, what else should I wear but fur?”
Clarissa laughed. “But what does one wear under it?”
“Why, nothing. That would reduce its barbaric impact.”
The guests in range of his voice laughed uneasily, unsure of Subone’s aim, compliment or insult.
“You must let me wear it sometime,” Clarissa said. “It would make me feel primal.”
“You may wear it now, if you like,” Subone said, and reached for the lacings. Shocked, Subtwo reached out to stop him, but Subone’s quick glare held him back. The Lady Clarissa watched until Subone had unlaced the tunic past his groin. “Ah, no,” she said. “I spent too much time on my own garments, and they might not flatter you.”
“Another time, perhaps.”
Clarissa introduced them to the nearby guests, and pointed out each individual of the assembled company, who lay on thick cushions around the long table. Subtwo made appropriate sounds of greeting, filing their names and faces away in his mind should he ever need the information. They were all related to Clarissa in one manner or another, and each was served by at least one personal attendant. The attendants were not introduced, though Subtwo had included them in his original tally.
He involved his full attention in the social ceremonies only when Clarissa announced Blaisse’s brother Kenton, who had been sent to Clarissa’s people to seal the alliance between the Families and Stone Palace. A few years younger than Blaisse, he was a sullen man who muttered an unintelligible response and turned back to the ministrations of the youth behind him. Subtwo shuddered and averted his gaze: the slave’s hormonal balance was disarranged, Subtwo supposed purposely. The result was not pleasing to his eye. But Kenton both interested and repelled him, for Subtwo had found that all Blaisse’s statements about the Families were true. If the pseudosibs had tried to carry out their original plan, one of them would now have been in Kenton’s place, dissipated, trapped, turning in boredom to perturbing other people’s lives.
Clarissa finished the introductions and grasped Subone’s hand. “Sit here by me.” He sprawled next to her, his bare thigh against her leg. Clarissa glanced up and spoke to Subtwo, as though in afterthought. “Blaisse wishes you to take the place to his left.”
Subtwo walked to the other end of the room, aware of the stares of the other guests. They reminded him of another uncomfortable entrance he had made, when he was first presented to the outside world as a successful experiment. The world’s first experience with him was his first experience with the world, and he had wished only to flee back to the safe and constant environment in which he had been raised. That day had held the beginnings of his guilt.
He looked around. These people were nothing to him. He would not even remember their names. If he refused to remember, their pitted stupid faces might blur together in his memory. Except for their foolish dress, they looked ordinary enough individually. But collectively, their physical similarities revealed so much inbreeding that Subtwo felt distress, with simultaneous relief that he had prevented Subone from completing the Palace takeover. Subtwo knew that he could never have considered a permanent sexual alliance with one of these high-bred, inbred, radiation-exposed people. He could imagine their chromosomes leaping and twisting and breaking and rejoining in some mad intoxicated dance, to a rhythm counted by free subatomic particles. The possible results of a partnering were too disgusting to contemplate, though Subtwo did not doubt that their gene pool would benefit from an infusion of new traits.
He reached the end of the table, shuddering, but having avoided touching anyone, slave or lord. By then, they had all gone back to their pleasures or their duties, and Blaisse’s alien consort was the only one to observe Subtwo’s approach. She watched him, wide-eyed, frightened.
Blaisse looked up languorously and gestured to a pile of cushions. He was already under the influence of some drug, Subtwo did not know and did not care which one. “Sit down, sit down,” Blaisse said, motioned for a drink to be poured, and turned back to his conversation with the gilt-gray-haired woman on his right. The serving slave moved forward, sidling very close, and poured three layers of different colored fluids into a heated goblet that mixed them slowly. The effect was revolting. The slave rubbed her naked hip against Subtwo’s shoulder. Subtwo ignored her and she went away. A male slave replaced her, but Subtwo ignored him as well. At the other end of the table, Subone and Clarissa whispered and laughed together and put their hands inside each other’s clothing.
Subtwo sat in the midst of golden cushions, still with distaste, hiding his dislike with rigidity. The people nearby began to watch him covertly, but none addressed him. The noise of conversation became almost white in its meaninglessness. The crystal chandeliers broke the light into spectra, giving the impression of underwater illumination. The serving of food began. Accustomed to artificial fare, Subtwo had no taste for natural products. Unruly textures disturbed him; chewing the meat made his jaws ache. The probable cost of the banquet did not impress him. He ate slowly and cautiously, tasting every mouthful of each course for suspicious inclusions, wishing for distilled water to wash away the taste of spices. He looked for Madame, but she was not in the room. He knew she must be within calling distance, but he did not know how to call her, and she was one person, perhaps the only one, whom he did not wish to command.
As the evening progressed, the clamor made by the revelers rose toward his threshold of pain. Subtwo was bored, but too uncomfortable to let his thoughts take a path away from this gathering of animals. He noticed Blaisse’s slave girl watching him again, always watching, with those round, jeweled, silver-blue eyes, with her hair brushed back like a mane, with her breasts only half-covered, lying behind Blaisse, peering over his shoulder.
Blaisse turned to Subtwo and smiled as though his guest had just arrived. “Do you have what you want? Does your attendant please you?”
“I can feed myself,” Subtwo said.
“Ah, but we all need someone to watch over us at these gatherings,” Blaisse said. “In the event that we are incapacitated in our play.” The beverage he sipped sparkled with a silver drift of some compound Subtwo assumed would work synergistically with alcohol.
“I prefer not to submit my body to such indignities, even in play.”
“What difference does it make? What else is life for, but to play with? Others understand that. Your brother—”
“We are not brothers,” Subtwo snapped.
Some rare spark of curiosity seemed partially to sober Blaisse. “Not brothers? What, then?”
“The correct term is ‘pseudosib.’ We were raised identically, separately, without human interference. Our reactions were linked.”
“I would have thought you were twins.”
“No, we are only distantly related. We were intended to represent the behavioral equivalents of genetic twins.” Subtwo knew, but thought it strange, that people found distinguishing between himself and Subone difficult; he saw only general similarities. Still, he was trained to observe minute detail, while ordinary people fumbled through their lives with generalities. He glanced down the table at Subone. “Obviously, the same parallels do not hold.”
“I see,” Blaisse said, and yawned. “That’s very interesting.” But he asked no more questions; he reached for his silver-laced drink, swirling the liquid before putting it to his lips. Half the people in the room had gone to sleep over the last course. Their clothes disarrayed, they nestled in the cushions, while the rest pleasured themselves with their attendants. Subtwo felt pressed down and smothered by the glutted snoring bodies and the pumping flesh. He wanted to leave, but he did not know the protocol; he wished he could overcome his early training all at once and become rude and thoughtless and sloppy, stand, shout imprecations, overturn the table, and stalk away. But he sat for another hour, stiffly, disapproving, while the activity ranged around him. It could not be called an orgy; it was closer to mass communal masturbation. None of the free people caressed or even touched each other. They lay supine and allowed their slaves to work over them until involuntary reactions set them into motion. It was as though they considered each instant’s personal pleasure so important that they would not give up any of it, not to give pleasure to another human being, not to communicate, not to love. They seemed to feel the rewards would not be worth the cost. They threw away what Subtwo sought, and he despised them for it.
In the whole huge room of jeweled and perfumed people, only Subtwo was alone, and only Clarissa and Subone were together. Subtwo could hear their voices; he could not avert his ears as he averted his eyes from the Lady’s bare white skin and his pseudosib’s darker nude body. He could hear their commands to each other, and he reflected both that Subone had learned a great deal since their release and escape from their solitary, sexless beginnings, and that Subone and Clarissa were really no different from anyone else in the room.
He waited until almost everyone had fallen into exhausted sleep, and even the slaves dozed, awakening and glancing covertly at him every so often to see if he had left them without observers. He started to rise.
“Is there nothing you wish?”
Startled, he glanced down. Blaisse’s alien slave peeked past her lord’s body. She cringed at the sharpness of Subtwo’s look. Almost naked now, she wore only the jewels on her eyelids and the armbands of silver and sapphire. Subtwo realized quite abruptly that she was very young.
“How old are you?” he asked gently. He remembered her name: Saita. He was almost surprised that she was not called by some animal’s diminutive, like a pet, for Blaisse had not treated her as an intelligent being, but used her as an animal.
“I don’t know, Lord.”
“How long have you been here?”
“The Lady Clarissa has said three years, Lord.”
He saw that she had never been taught anything but how to induce erotic pleasure. Wasted potential always enraged him. There was intelligence in her face; she was not stupid, only naive and ignorant, ignorant of the meaning of her status and surroundings, somehow untouched by them.
“No,” he said. “No, there’s nothing I want that you can give me.”
He made his way past sleeping and unconscious bodies, stepping over and around them with revulsion. At the other end of the table Subone stretched on his cushions. The Lady Clarissa lay with her head pillowed on his belly and her sparkling eyes closed.
“You don’t know how to enjoy yourself,” Subone said.
Subtwo hesitated, looking down at them. Subone’s muscles seemed slack, his expression greedy and foolish. Abruptly, Subtwo departed, making no response.