Moonstar (11 page)

“You are so sweet. You are so special. Do you know I love you?”

“Yes. I love you too.”

“Shall we be lovers now?”

“Now and forever.”

“And shall we tell everyone?”

“They probably already know.”

They must have grown into each other's souls as surely as their bodies grew into each other. They fit together. There were no air spaces between them. The flat muscles of Rurik's belly touched the softer muscles of Lono's and they moved together. Their thighs touched. Their arms wrapped, their cheeks brushed; the gentle swelling bud of one pressed against the hardening of the other, and it didn't matter of the moment which of them found a warm home in the other—when everything is new, everything is wonder. They brushed their bodies one against the other and swelled into the fullness of their blush.

Where before there had been neither genital nor gender, now there came the development of both—blush is more than just a time of Choice, it is a time of learning. A moment ago, they had both been sexless and unformed; now suddenly they had each become a male and female both, each felt masculine and feminine, a wild unfettered joy that shone with the faces of gods, Mother Reethe and Father Dakka; final blush, still far away, neither face was yet confirmed on either. At this moment, they were butterflies grown visible within their chrysalides, on the threshold of emergence into color, wind and flight.

Rurik and Lono—first one would be the male to the other's female, and then, reversing roles, the first would be a female to the other's male. And as genital explored itself, so did gender learn its shapes. One might take the lead in certain actions, yet follow in some others. If Lono liked to dance for Rurik, then Rurik liked to cook for Lono—and yet before the turning of the triad, Lono might be cooking and Rurik might be dancing, and again they shaped their lives as they grew into them. Each one learned what pleased her in every role, each one learned what pleased her lover too—each understood the dualities of love far better than would any who has not been given Choice. Each knew what it was to be who has not been given Choice. Each knew what it was to be like Dakka, the necessities of tenderness, the skills and dominances that the act requires. Each knew what it was to be like Reethe, to give support and strength and guidance for them both. Each knew both, not only as a lover, but as one who is loved for being what she is: not only with their genitals, not only with their genders, but with their purer souls—those parts that still remain untouched within each one of us and are seen only in the deepest sharing.

In such a way Lono and Rurik must have learned that each of us is both of Dakka and Reethe, sometimes more one than another, but neither to the exclusion of the other, not in body, not in soul. Neither can be totally expressed alone, a soul cannot be whole without its other half. Whatever happened after that, it is the nature of this bonding of the two that makes their story echo in our hearts; for in their love we like to see reflections of our own. That's why we make them myth. How sad that Rurik's father was so blind she could not see her own lost blush rekindled in her child . . .

Early on a dawning Sunday Jobe arrived at Option. There was a pinkish moondrop in the east, a yellow one in the west; the atmosphere did that sometimes. High above, an amorphous glow shimmered silver on its eastern edge. That bright crescent would shrink as the day turned on and the Godheart rose toward zenith. When the shield became invisible in the sky, eclipse was less than an hour off.

Jobe was sitting in the bow of the barge. Ahead, a dark line of land grew on the horizon. Option was indistinguishable from a thousand other islands, a spill of vegetation, tumbling down the sides of jagged cliffs and rocks. It was crested with green and purple vegetation, moss and ivy and ferns, feather-trees rising stiff above, and everywhere were the meter-wide white blossoms of silkflowers and the smaller red spikes of bloodthorns. If you squinted, it was a splash of purple, red and white; the green disappeared altogether. Some said the light of Godheart wasn't favorable to green anyway, turned it black to the eye. Many of the purple plants, and there were a great variety of them, were called Chtorr-plants; they didn't use chlorophyll for their photosynthesis, but either of two other molecules instead, one less complex, the other a more sophisticated relative of the first. They were named for the legendary place of child-eating demons from which they were supposed to have come. But there were a lot of legends floating loose in the Wilderness Seas; everything had a myth wrapped around it—or perhaps everything was a myth already. Sola had once said, “A myth is the only way we can ever know the truth.”

There were no other travelers bound for Option on the boat with Jobe; the boat she was supposed to meet had gone ahead without her. She had missed her boat at Cameron, and the shuttle from Tarralon as well—that was Orl's fault, or Kirstegaarde's; she blamed them both. She was already a triad and two days later than Suko had planned.

Originally, it had been planned that Sola would take Jobe with her when she sailed eastward, bringing her to Cameron, where she would catch the clipper north. Jobe had been excited at the prospect of sailing with Sola, who was a figure both of mystery and adventure (she'd never been out of the Lagin before either), but at the last moment, Kirstegaarde had objected. “It's wrong to expose a child of Jobe's sensitive age to the company of a deviate—Jobe is at her time of blush. I love Sola as much as anyone here, but for Jobe's sake I think we must arrange an alternate form of transportation. I mean, consider it—she will be with Sola for two triads or more, depending on the winds they have to fight, and all the while Jobe will be pushing closer toward the edge of Choice. Is it right for Sola to be the one to make the most vivid impression on the child's life at such a time? No offense intended, of course, but I just want Jobe to have her chance without the influences of a sexual anomaly so strong upon her—”

And that was where the argument had begun. Jobe knew what was going on in those quiet angry discussions that always seemed to cease whenever she was near. She herself couldn't see any harm in sailing with Sola; Sola was her favorite aunt. But Kirstegaarde had support from some of the younger and newer members of the circle—co-wives and co-husbands, recent marriages, who did not know Sola, were not related to her, did not care and had no great feeling for her either way—but were discomfited by the fact she was a deviate. Suko and Kuvig, Hojanna, and those who remembered some of the older days, were firm in their insistence. They said quietly that it would insult their sister to rebuff her in this way, to say that she was not fit to care for their children—but the structure of the circle was changing, the strength was shifting from the older generation toward the newer. It happens in every family, it is inevitable. A parent feeds a child and she grows; the parent weakens with the effort, till the child feeds the parent. The Kossarlin authority was moving toward those who were reaching the ascendancy of their maturity, and like all young power before it, it was inconsiderate of the traditions and compassions of the past.

Sola was her own person, however, and she did not like being in the middle. She was a person of quiet dignity and strength who had grown used to solving problems by sailing away from them—probably because she had never had any affection for anything or anyone strong enough to justify staying and fighting for her interest. In annoyance, finally, she kissed Jobe good-bye and wished her wisdom in her Choice; then she cast off in her catamaran with only her cat and bird for company. She did not bother to say farewell to any other member of the family. She was obviously hurt and Jobe wondered if she would ever see her aunt again. She did not expect here ever to return to Kossarlin. It was not the same circle it had been before.

When Kuvig and Suko heard of Sola's abrupt departure they—and certain other members of the family who still respected the ways of the past—were embarrassed and hurt. There were painful silences for many days afterward, and most of the adults in the circle seemed to be making a point of avoiding at least half of the others. It affected the children too and there were more than the usual run of sibling squabbles.

Anyway, that forced the decision in Kirstegaarde's favor. Cousin Orl, a beefy Dakkarik who Jobe hardly knew, and did not want to know, took her to Cameron on one of the uglier boats the circle maintained. Orl was gruff and little-spoken; when she did speak, she was rude and insensitive. She was one of the new ones who had recently married into the family, and Jobe wondered why—more puzzling was why the others had accepted her in the first place. Perhaps they had to; she was related to someone, though Jobe wasn't sure who. But, on the other hand, some of the Rethrik parents, including Kirstegaarde, seemed to . . . favor Orl. Jobe wasn't sure of the relationship, so much of it was based on things unsaid and somehow darkly mysterious, but she suspected some kind of infatuation on the part of some of the aunts. Kirstegaarde, for instance, had seemed changed since Orl arrived—more gay and painted, more easy with her laugh, not quite as harsh as she had been before; that should have been improvement enough to justify Orl's arrival, but Kirstegaarde was still as sour as ever in her outlook, and covering it with laughter only made the laughter acid and unpleasant. As if Kirstegaarde were laughing at some kind of joke on all the rest. Jobe preferred it when her moodiness was less directed. No matter now, though. But Jobe—and some of the other older siblings who still had not married out—resented that the order of the past was changed, and they blamed Orl and some of the other new ones for the disruption. Anvar, whom they'd liked, had left when Orl came.

It was Orl who brought Jobe to Cameron, sailing with no great regard for Jobe's connection with the clipper, so of course they missed it. When they arrived, Jobe found it was gone two days before—because Orl hadn't wanted to waste the fuel for the motor, or strain herself to rig two extra sails. “Hmpf,” she said, when she heard the packet had been missed. “A wasted trip. Well, let's go back.” She was an echo of Kirstegaarde, not surprising since she flourished in her shadow; she too was skeptical of Option.

Jobe said, “There must be other boats.”

Orl was dogmatic. “You're too young to be alone.”

“Then, you take me—it's your fault we got here late.”

“I'm not going to take any more time away from my nets. We'll go home and decide what to do there.”

Jobe hated hearing Orl refer to Kossarlin as home. It was Jobe's home, yes—but Orl's? Never. “Let's radio,” she said.

“Too expensive.” The family had a general policy against purchasing unsubscribed services—even for emergencies; long-distance mail and phone services were “luxuries” not subscribed. Besides, each member of the Kossarlin circle was supposed to be autonomous; that was supposed to be one of the Kossarlin's strengths.

“It's your fault,” accused Jobe. “You didn't use the motor or the extra sails.”

Orl lifted her arm in a vaguely threatening gesture, but Jobe twisted out of her reach. “If you ever touch me,” she said, “Hojanna will kill you—if Kuvig and Suko don't do it first.” It was the meanest thing she'd ever said, and she instantly regretted it. It was a wrongness to remind a person that she was new to a family that way. But she couldn't bring herself to apologize—not to Orl. She grabbed her case and started walking up the pier. Orl followed, but at a distance.

Jobe went to the local service office and obtained a warrant of protection, subscribed to the Kossarlin circle in the Lagin; it was so simple she felt disdainful of Orl for not realizing this obvious solution in the first place. Orl shrugged, it didn't matter to her. She was relieved of her responsibility now, she could return to Kossarlin with a clear conscience. She left without a word of either advice or affection, just a grunted, “Don't choose Reethe, you'd be a lousy bed”—which Jobe didn't know whether to take as a joke or insult.

Jobe caught the first barge to Tarralon that the service office could locate. It was a freight barge, slow and tranquil; it was owned by its sailors, they were a family all their own, with small children running free upon the upper decks, but none of them were more than a few years old—the gap between their age and Jobe's was large enough that they could regard her as another grown-up, and were therefore free to ignore her. She was a transient, not a family-member. Jobe didn't mind. She sat in the bow and practiced on her flute and kept out of the way. There didn't seem to be that much work on such a barge, but the family always seemed to be busy either fishing or sewing or repairing or painting, that is, when they weren't rigging or sighting or climbing aloft in the sails.

They were a friendly group, though. At dinner, they would regale Jobe with stories about their past lives; each of the sailors seemed determined to out-story all the others and they spun wild fancies of myth and history all evening long. Jobe didn't know what to believe or not—they told her of the places they had seen: the Forbidden Mountain, Stormhole, the Great Spill of the North, the Upland Desert, the valley of Lorisander that has no shield and yet is an oasis in the barrens, far west of Lagin. They'd been on islands that had no shields of their own, yet had two eclipses every day, one early and one late, because they were between two adjacent shielded areas. They'd been so far south, they'd seen the polar ice, huge bergs of it drifting silently, majestically, in cold oceans. They'd once sailed across the vast unshielded shallows of the north and braved the white waters of the distant east. They'd stood on airless mountaintops and walked the plains of Avatar and Alabaster, the twin settlements of Lannit's lowlands. Once they'd even met an Erdik! It was tall and sharp-featured—ugly! They hadn't liked her. And they spoke of the persons they had known in all these places, all their previous lovers, and the ones they'd longed to love as well—Quare Dorry and Sweet Hazel, Bright Pennelly and Lavar (the Fool) and Tumbleson as well. Then they told of how they'd married into this circle, as if it were their destiny—and by now Jobe suspected it was not; these people were too volatile to stay locked in one place for any length. And some of them even spoke of how they'd come to their own Choices, Dakkarik and Rethrik. Many of the tales were obviously long familiar to the members of the family, but they seemed to appreciate hearing them again—as if it were the delight of a new audience that so amused them, not the telling of the tale itself, and perhaps that's what it was. Jobe was entranced by all the colors of their stories, the weavings of emotions and events. Her face expressed her empathy with each and every incident, she laughed and giggled when Lavar lost her kilt at Fest, she cried when Pennelly went back to the sea, she felt glad when little Lor was born, and it showed within her eyes as brightly as if a colored light were painting all the hues of wonder's spectrum on her face. Jobe was entranced by their tales, filled by their hearty red soups and heavy dark bread, and warmed by their gentle affection for each other—all of which they shared with her without any reservation at all. She was half tempted to skip Option altogether and ask if she could marry in here, even though there wasn't anyone in this circle who she was immediately attracted to as a possible lover.