“Well, that’s the way fathers are.” Soft blue smoke wisped into the darkening sky, smelling of driftwood and cedarbloom. “You lads out hunting?”
“In a manner of speaking,” the lank one said. The giant snorted.
“We’re scavengers,” the old man said harshly. “If that’s not good enough for you, then say so now and fuck off.” They all stared at him, unblinking.
In the sudden silence, the bureaucrat could hear the show he’d interrupted.
Byron, come away from that window. There’s nothing out there but cold and changing Ocean. Go into the air. Your father thinks—
My father thinks of nothing but money.
“I’ve got a bottle of vacuum-distilled brandy in my briefcase.” He fetched the bottle, took a swig, held it out. “If I could convince you…”
“Well, that is hospitable.” The flask went around twice, and then Lank said, “You must be heading into the village.”
“Yes, to see Mother Gregorian. Perhaps you know her house.”
The three exchanged glances. “You won’t get anything out of her,” Lank said. “The villagers tell stories about her, you know. She’s a type.” He nodded toward the television. “Ought to be on the show.”
“Tell me about her.”
“Naw, I don’t think so.” He raised a sticklike arm, pointed. “The road dead-ends into the first street to the waterfront. Go down to the river, to the fifth—”
“Sixth,” the old man said.
“Sixth street after that. Go up by the kirk and past the boneyard to the end, right by the marshes. Can’t miss it. Big fucking castle of a place.”
“Thanks.” He stood.
They were no longer looking at him. On the screen, an albino girlchild was standing alone in the middle of a raging argument. She was an island of serene calm, her eyes vacant and autistic. “That’s Eden, she’s the boy’s sister. Hasn’t spoken since it happened,” Lank remarked.
“What happened?”
“She saw a unicorn,” the giant said.
* * *
From the air the village had looked like a very simple antique printed circuit, of the sort Galileo might have used to build his first radio telescope, if he wasn’t confusing two different eras, a comb of crooked lines leading inward from the water, too small for there to be any need of cross-streets. The houses were small and shabby, but warm light spilled from the windows, and voices murmured within. An occasional dog stridently warned him away from boat or yard. Other than an innkeeper who nodded lazily from the door of the watermen’s hotel, he met no one by the riverfront. He turned onto the marsh road, the river cold and silver at his back. He went past a walled-in ground where skeletons hung from the trees, the bones bleached and painted and wired together so that they clacked gently in an almost unnoticeable breeze.
Beyond the boneyard the ground rose gently. He passed several large dark houses, still unscavenged, newly abandoned by their wealthy owners. Probably gone to the Piedmont to participate in the economic boom. Last on the road, just before the land wearily eased itself down into marsh, was his destination.
The house was blistered and barnacled, and it was meager light indeed that escaped the thickly curtained windows into the wider world. But under its mottling of chrysalids the wood planking was gracefully carved and fitted. He stood before the massive entranceway and touched the doorplate. Within, a voice gonged, “Callers, mistresses.” Then, to him, the door said, “Please wait.”
A moment later the door opened on a pale, thin face. On seeing him, it opened in startlement, revealing an instant’s fear before tightening again into wariness. The woman lifted her chin defiantly, so that her eyes seemed simultaneously to flinch away from him. “I thought you were the appraiser.”
The bureaucrat smiled. “Mother Gregorian?”
“Oh, her.” She turned away. “I suppose you’d best come inside.” He followed her down the gullet of a hallway flocked with a floral print gone dead brown into the crowded belly of a sitting room. She seated him in a dark lionfooted chair. It was a massy thing, shag-maned atop and fringed beneath, with padded armrests. He’d hate to have to move it.
A woman hurried into the room. “Is that the appraiser? Have him look at the crystal, I—” She stopped.
Tock.
A metronome wedged between dusty specimen bells reached the end of its swing and began the long, slow return, ponderously counting out the slow seconds of mortality. Trophy beasts peered down at him from the tin ceiling with eyes of green and gray and orange glass. Now that he noticed, the room was full of faces. Heavy-lidded, openmouthed and disapproving, they were carved into the legs, sides, and bases of the escritoires, tables, sideboards, and china cabinets that jostled one another, competing for space. Even the blond mahogany pieces had been extravagantly carved. He wondered where the shavings were now; they would not have been discarded. It was an enormously valuable room, and would have been twice as comfortable with half as much furniture.
Tock.
The metronome reasserted itself, and still the women studied him, as if they would never speak again.
“Honestly, Ambrym, must I wait forever for you to introduce your friend?”
“He’s not mine, he’s Mother’s.”
“All the more reason to show a little common courtesy.” She thrust forward a hand, and he stood so they could shake. “I’m Linogre Gregorian,” she said. “Esme! Where are you?”
A third woman, dressed in mousy brown, appeared, drying her hands with a cloth towel. “If that’s the appraiser, be sure he knows that Ambrym broke the—” She stopped. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had a caller.” She didn’t leave, but stood there, watching.
“Don’t be stupid, Esme, this gentleman is here to see Mama. Fetch him a glass of beer.”
“You don’t have to—”
“The Gregorians have always kept a decent house,” she said firmly. “Please, sit. The doctor is with Mother now. But if you’ll wait, I’m sure she’ll want to see you, if only briefly. You must take care, however, not to excite Mother, for she is extremely ill.”
“She’s dying,” Ambrym said. “She won’t let us take her to the Piedmont, where the good hospitals are. She’s taken a notion into her head to stay in this decaying hovel to the bitter end. I think she’s expecting to be washed away with the tides. Not that the evacuation authorities would allow that.” A faraway look came into her eyes. “That will be the final indignity, to be removed as paupers.”
“If you don’t mind, Ambrym, I’m sure our visitor is not interested in our private sorrows.” The bureaucrat did not miss the way Ambrym stepped back from her sister, nor the defiance with which she did so. “May I ask your business with our mother?”
“Yes, certainly.” Esme placed a delicate crystal beerglass in his hand. “Thank you.” She set a saucer by his elbow, lacy porcelain that was faintly translucent even in the evening light. It was a fairy mist of crockery, delicate beyond belief. “I’m from the Division of Technology Transfer within the System government. We’d like to talk with your brother, but unfortunately when he left our employ, he didn’t leave his forwarding address. Perhaps you…?” He let his voice trail off, and took a sip from his glass. It was lager, thin and almost tasteless.
“I’m sure we wouldn’t know,” Linogre began coolly.
But Ambrym snapped, “Are you his agent? He left home when he was a child. He’s not entitled! We’ve worked all our lives, we’ve slaved—”
“Ambrym,” her sister said meaningfully.
“I don’t care. When I think of the years of work, the suffering, the shit she’s put me through…!” She appealed directly to the bureaucrat. “Every morning I polish her riding boots, every morning for the last five years! I have to kneel on the floor before her, while she tells me she’s thinking of leaving the best things to Linogre. It’s not as if she were ever getting out of that bed again.”
“Ambrym!”
They fell silent, eyeing one another. The metronome doled out six heavy ticks, and the bureaucrat thought, surely Hell must be like this. Finally Linogre prevailed, and her sister looked away. From the shadows Esme said timidly, “Would you like another glass of beer?”
The bureaucrat held up his glass, all but untasted. “No, thank you.” Esme reminded him of a mouse, small and nervous, hovering at the edges of light in hopes of some small crumb. And yet on Miranda the mice were dimorphic, like everything else. At the end of the great year they would swim out into the ocean and drown in great numbers, and the few survivors would transform into—he tried to remember—little amphibious creatures, like vest-pocket seals. He wondered would she change too, come the tides?
“Don’t think I can’t see how you suck up to her,” Ambrym snapped angrily. “Miss Meek-and-Harmless. I saw you hiding away the silver gravy boat.”
“I was cleaning it!”
“In your room, uh-huh, sure.”
Panicky little eyes. “Anyway, she said it was mine.”
“
When
?” both sisters cried in outraged unison.
“Just yesterday. You can ask her.”
“You remember—” Linogre glanced at the bureaucrat and lowered her voice, half-turning her back to him. “You remember that Mother said we were to divide the silver evenly, share and share alike. She’s always said that.”
“Is that why you took the sugar tongs?” Ambrym asked innocently.
“I never!”
“You did.”
Listening intently, the bureaucrat put his glass down beside him. It landed a trifle harder than he’d intended, and he heard a faint
crack
of breaking china.
Sharp-eared Esme was the only sister to notice. With a quick warning shake of her head, she whisked away the broken fragments of saucer, and replaced them with another before anyone else had realized what had happened.
“The moment Mother’s estate is settled,” Ambrym was saying, “I intend to leave the house and never return. As far as I’m concerned, without Mother there is no family, and I am not related to either of you.”
“Ambrym!” Esme squeaked, horrified.
“This is a shameful way to talk, with Mother dying just above us!” her elder sister cried.
“She won’t die, not when she knows how happy that would make us. Spite will keep her alive,” Ambrym said. Her siblings turned disapproving frowns on her, but did not disagree.
They came to an abrupt halt then, and there was about the group a satisfied air of fulfillment, as if they had just enacted a private drama for his benefit and were awaiting applause so they could link hands and take their bows. There, their collective attitude seemed to be saying, now you know all about us. It was a well-rehearsed scene, and he could tell that no one who entered the house would be allowed to escape without witnessing some variant of it.
At that moment the doctor descended the stairs, and all three looked up expectantly. He solemnly shook his head at the sisters, and departed. It was an ambiguous gesture at best.
“Come.” Linogre started up the stairs.
In a somber mood, he followed.
* * *
She led him into a chamber so dimly lit he was not sure of its exact dimensions. An enormous bed dominated the room. Bed-curtains hung from brass hooks set into the ceiling, a tapestry of some bright land where satyrs and astronauts, nymphs and goats, frolicked. The edges were bordered with the constellations of Old Earth, wands and orchids, and other symbols of generative magic. Age had faded the colors, and the browned fabric was torn by its own weary weight.
Within the bed, propped up on a billowing throne of pillows, lay a grotesquely fat woman. He was reminded inevitably of a termite queen, she was so vast and passively immobile. Her face was doughy white, her mouth a tiny gasp of pain. A ringed hand hovered over a board floating atop her swollen belly, on which was arranged a circle of solitaire cards: stars, cups, queens, and knaves in solemn procession. A silent television flickered at her feet.
The bureaucrat introduced himself, and she nodded without looking up from her slow telling out of cards. “I am playing a game called Futility,” she said. “Are you familiar with it?”
“How does one win?”
“You don’t. You can only postpone losing. I’ve managed to keep this particular game going for years.” She looked up at her daughter.
“Don’t think I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“All is pattern,” she said. She had to pause ever so slightly between sentences to take in air. “Relationships between things shift and change constantly; there is no such thing as objective truth. There is only pattern, and the greater pattern within which the lesser patterns occur. I understand the greater pattern, and so I’ve learned to make the cards dance. But inevitably the game must someday end. There is a lot of life in how one tells the cards.”
“Everyone knows. You’re not very subtle about it. Even this gentleman beside you understands.”
“Do you?” The mother looked directly at him for the first time, both she and her daughter awaiting his answer with interest.
The bureaucrat coughed into his hand. “I must have a few words in private with you, if I may, Mother Gregorian.”
She favored Linogre with a cold look. “Leave.”
As the daughter closed the door, her mother said loudly, “They want to put me away. They conspire against me, and think I don’t notice. But I notice. I notice everything.”