Moonstar (13 page)

Rurik, on the other hand, found no such fertile soil for her growth. As her hips and breasts began to swell, as her skin grew softer, fleshier, as her features gentled and her voice took on a lighter tone, as her pelvis widened, as all of these began to show, her father grew more distant, sharp and hostile; there was coldness between them. Rurik admitted with a shining face that she was happiest when she was Reethe in Lono's Dakkarik embrace—and such admission only angered her uncomprehending parent. “You act as if you are no son of mine!” she screamed at her. “You were meant to be a Dakkarik, and now you lie beneath another male!”

“But why—why is this Choice so wrong to you?” Rurik could not comprehend. “Why can't I be a woman if I choose? Why can't I bear my lover's children?”

How to explain to her? The Dakka option was the preferable one to Rurik's father; she had taken it herself so many years ago, adopting it so wholeheartedly that she would be more Dakka than any one unchosen born to Dakka. She'd proved that to others in everything she did, and proved and proved it to herself, as if to deny the option that she might possibly not be a Dakkarik at all—as if to convince herself that she truly was a male. She could not let her son now choose to be a daughter; such would only reflect the failure of her own masculinity. As the maker of her family, it was her right to choose the sexes of her children, she knew what was best for them, and Rurik would be Dakka, like herself. She could not, would not, grant that Rurik's feelings were important—she refused to recognize the validity of any option but her own. Rurik's inclinations, after all, were just childish things, patterns of play to be outgrown as she herself had outgrown such immature experiments; Rurik would be a much better person when she accepted who she had to be. Her father knew better what would be best for her.

Imagine it as a story now. Truth is myth and myth is truth. Whatever truly happened, if in fact it did, no longer matters.

We cannot know the fact, only the story—and we know it in a thousand forms. Imagine Rurik on a stage, alone beneath a single light, a hard one tinged with blue. Upstage of her, in glowing rose, her Lono sings a simple declaration of herself, a happy melody, “I will be what I will be.” But when Rurik takes the song into her mouth, the melody takes on a harsher tone, and when she makes the words her own, they turn sullen and defiant. The same soliloquy is used by both, independent of each other; it reverberates with each one's life. Lono's joy is Rurik's, but Rurik's has been stolen from her by her family, and she stiffens in resistance.

Rurik's parents, all of them, her mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles, must have tried to pacify the child, yet none of them seemed to understand the depth of her emotions. Whether childish or not, they still were truly felt—Rurik couldn't let them devalue her love, because to do that would devalue Lono too. Only her birth-mother perhaps, or so we like to tell the story, tried to understand—because her birth-mother, being chosen herself, knew the magic of the time of blush. She knew what Dakka was, but she became a Rethrik so she could be with Rurik's father—she understood her child's pain. But her co-wives and co-husbands were not all chosen. They listened to the child's words and never heard what she was saying. “Of course, you must be who you must be—but do you know yet who that is? This love that you profess may be just a passing phase. Eventually you may tire of Lono—don't shake your head; these things do happen—don't condemn the adult you will be to the consequences of a decision made by a love-struck child.”

And using that as justification, they confined her to the gardens; she was not allowed to see her Lono until she “came to her sensibilities” and accepted Dakka as her god. Rurik languished; her selfness had never been too strong; too often had she allowed others to shape her decisions—and now that she must finally seize command of her own helm, she couldn't for she didn't know the way to do it.

There are pressures and there are pressures, but none so foul or devastating as those we put on others in the guise of love; the things that parents do to children for their own good are among the worst of these—almost always it is for the parents' good instead. Such it was with Rurik's Choice. She would thank them for their wisdom someday, they believed.

Poor Rurik—she had no Choice now. Eventually she succumbed to the pressures that they placed on her—they told her that Lono had gone away, that Lono no longer cared, that Lone had gone Rethrik; they told her a thousand different lies, each more painful than the last. Lono was betrothed to someone else, or she was dying, or that she had already died. Rurik felt her grasp of truth was slipping badly—she could not believe a word—but she longed to hear the truth from Lono.

But Lono, as the story's told, was racked by fever—such illnesses are not uncommon at the time of blush. All the systems of the body are in flux, resistances are down, and Lono, on the threshold of her final blush, had taken ill with Virulent Fever. Unconscious and not knowing, she had no words to send. She called out for Rurik often, though; she asked only for a sign, a touch—even in delirium, she loved. And when her parents sent for Rurik, Rurik's family ignored the messages, not knowing and not caring why they came, pleased only that Lono was kept apart so they could work their ways on Rurik. And work they did—do you fault her now for slipping? That her love for Lono proved no match for lies? Or can you see that memory is tissue when it is subject to a storm of falsehood? Every doubt that Rurik had was magnified into a chasm. And finally, in hysteria, she gave in to them—it was the only way that she could stop them from lying to her about the one she loved—and with certain hormonal injections, the Choice was irrevocably made. She came to her time of second blush and final blush, and she was Dakkarik. Not unhandsome in her own way, but Dakkarik, a male.

Let the chorus sing the victory of the Father-glacier, and a single voice will whisper sadly of a victory that tastes of ash. Rurik's family might have won a son, but they lost their daughter's love.

It was months before the two could meet again. The myth, as it is told, portrays the scene against the dawning rays of spring: Lono, risen eager from her bed, looking for her Rurik; Rurik, frightened by herself. They met by chance along the shore—imagine it as a moment of flashing, rapidly shifting emotions. Just as the seasons sweep across the seas, so must the feelings of the two have risen buoyant, stopped and started, only to stop again, expressions turned like birds before the tossing wind, horrorstruck as awareness of what has happened to them works its painful realization into their hearts; their surprise at seeing each other again after the long winter, now transmuted into grief with the knowledge that they'll never make their special magic anymore within each other's arms. They must have clutched each other, first with happiness and then with terror, parting, stepping back—seeing Dakka's hands on both. Each was ripe with final blush—Lono's shoulders, wide and strong, were echoed by Rurik's equally grown and growing still. The pudgy fat of childhood was disappearing into the rippling musculature of youth, its last traces were still visible, but fading from the bodies of these two young men, so sorrowstruck. The enchanted time of blush was only memory, and the fullness of their love a brighter moment within. Lost now, all lost.

Rurik sinking to her knees in tears, cries, “Lono, I'm so sorry, forgive me, please. We can no longer love each other, it is my fault. It is not manly for us to care, or for me to cry—forgive me, please.”

And Lono, equally tearful, sinking down beside her, takes her in her arms and says, “If you had only told me, Rurik, I would have become Rethrik for you. I would have been anything you wished just to be with you.”

And then, silence, tear-filled and close, while the two just held each other, just being close again. A memory of what it was before. Lono's hands caress the hair, the cheeks, the eyelids of her lover. Her finger traces the line of Rurik's neck, her palm shields the back of it, a touch that Rurik always liked for the strength of its support. And Rurik, finally allowing herself to be soft within her lover's arms, allows the touch.

“I still love you, Lono,” she admits at last. “I mustn't, but I do.”

“I love you too. I never stopped.” And softly, adds, “My love for you is far too strong. We will continue. We must. Despite all boundaries of flesh or family, we will go on. To do otherwise would be to deny the truth of what we feel.”

And Rurik—blinking tears away, while more keep coming in a mix of sad and happy—asks, “Can we do that, Lono? Can we really? They won't let us—”

Lono, holding her again: “We have to—because there's nothing else. We won't let them stop us.”

Can radiance be rekindled? Are there other ways of saying love, as pleasurable in their own right? Can Lono and Rurik still express a thousand small delights in each other's presence? Let moralists and scholars argue all they wish. The myth says that they did.

And this too speaks of Satlik ways. No chosen one ever forgets the touch of Reethe or Dakka even if she herself might choose that same path for her own. Let this moment of the myth remind us all that the touch we knew in childhood can be echoed in our adult lives. To do otherwise denies the truth of what we felt before, denies the duality of our human souls. Let them love now; it is all they have left . . .

Even when the weather was dreary with the threatening clouds of storm, Jobe's restlessness drove her out in search of something she could not name, but never stopped searching for. She would walk down to the beach and stare out over the water, wistfully following nonexistent catamarans in her mind as they drifted across the horizon. She wished one would come and whisk her away to a magic green and gold lagoon far from everything that pressed upon her. Without quite knowing how, she longed for escape—if not of one kind, then another.

Books were good—they were limited escapes, albeit temporary ones, and new books were available on the network all the time. Her desire to know was insatiable and she fed it ravenously. She read everything she could find on Choice and love and sex and friendship and how to be a human being. That was what she wanted most. If she could have explained it, she would have said she wanted to be a real person, one around whom a circle turned; but she was afraid instead that she was still a shadow, one of the ones who only orbited restlessly; or worse, moved without an orbit from circle to circle, seeking one to join. She read the books. She understood the words, their meanings, how they strung together to make the larger content of ideas; she understood what they were telling her—but still, somehow, it seemed that she was missing something. Being real was not something that one learned, Jobe knew it in her heart; but, still, refusing to believe what she already knew, she went on searching for the lessons that would teach her. If she couldn't learn it, then she'd imitate it—all the gestures, mannerisms, clever jokes and styles; she copied them, trying to be what she could only pretend to be. You had to be real to become real, she knew that, but she never stopped her trying because she didn't know yet any other way.

She prayed. She built an altar: a mirror flanked by water-candles; and she wrote her own petitions to the Tau: “Mother Reethe, let me join your holy flows, let me sing your words in sunlight, let me live where the west-wind goes.” But she had no one to share her prayers with and she feared they sank like stones in oily silence. Not even ripples answered.

Often, she thought about love. A new philosophy was developing in the theater and literature, and giving birth to brooding new directions of thought and style. It was called Romanticism, it was an Erdik thing, a method of emotionally weighting a piece so that the viewer did not have to make her own decision as to which of the protagonists in the confrontation depicted was closer to the Tau. That decision had already been made by the playwright or the author, and the story was presented so the audience would root for her conclusions. Jobe felt vague misgivings about the trend, felt it was wrong somehow, but she didn't have the words yet to describe what kind of wrongness. A sour teaching was the way she thought of it—this kind of storytelling showed not only what to think about, but what to think about it. But—it was Erdik, and Erdik things were stylish now. All the Satlik authors were intrigued by Erdik concepts and were beginning to experiment with stories about singular “heroes”—and almost always Dakkarik, another Erdik style. “Hero” and “villain”—what strange new words they were—implying too that something evil could recognize itself and still remain an evil; that one could willingly be vicious—

Well, maybe . . . Jobe considered it. After all, if such were the case, it would easily explain the Erdik. The Satlik are the “heroes” and the Erdik are the “villains.” Instead of two in opposition, seeking compromise or even mutual goals, we now have two in opposition, each seeking victory on the other. And each one is a hero to herself, looking at the other as the villain. No wonder the Erdik had so many bloody wars—always looking at themselves like that.

And with that concept came the notion of romantic love as a necessary reward for a hero's endeavors—as if one male and one female were destined to meet and live and mate in harmonic perfection. The stories were nearly always constructed so that such a fate seemed inevitable. The world didn't work that way, or so Jobe thought, but still it was an intriguing perception of destiny. Perhaps the orderliness of it was what was so appealing; but—

—as the romantic tradition crept slowly into Satlik life, so did its subtext that sexuality was somehow wrong—that one's body was a private temple to be saved only for one's lover. Therefore, sharing it with someone else or even tempting another person through the display of one's beauty was also wrong.

Jobe had, at first exposure, thought these theories silly, alien and self-contradictory. If one could not display herself, how could she attract another person? If she could not sleep with many partners, how could she become proficient? If she could not know the ways of love, how could she hope to know her lover?