204 CR, day 42
Message, Base Director to E. McGee, in field
Sent in writing with supplies.
I am backing you on this. Hope that your health improves. Please remain in close contact.
xxxiii
204 CR, day 200
Cloud Towers
Elai laughed, laughed aloud, and it startled calibans, who shifted nervously; but not Scar, who merely shut his eyes and kept taking in the sun, there upon the roof of First Tower, with McGee, in the warm tail of summer days. And McGee went on telling her heir how his mother had tried to swim to the islands one day some years ago. Young Din’s eyes achieved amazement. He looked at his mother to see whether this were true, while his five year old sib played his silent games, put and take with ariels–silent, Taem was; he would always be one of the silent ones, lost to the line of Flanahans, but not without his use. There was three year old Cloud, who was noisy in his wandering about, who played wicked games, disrupting his brother Taem’s Patterns. But ariels retrieved his thefts, and nurses interfered when he grew too persistent.
There were the calibans, besides Scar: a halfgrown brown named Twostone, that was the heir’s; and a smaller, runt brown that had attached itself to Cloud. But Taem had no caliban in particular, owned nothing in particular. Taem was Taem. He never spoke, except with the stones, at which he had precocious skill.
“One in a house,” Elai had said of Taem, “that’s fine. I can stand that.”
“What if he were the only child?” McGee had asked.
“Usually it’s the youngers that go,” Elai had said. “I thought Cloud would go since Taem had. But I lost Marik in Cloud’s first year. Maybe that weighed some on Cloud.”
McGee had doubted this, but she listened to it all the same. Perhaps she had some influence on Din, who had begun to hang on her more than on his nurses. Din liked the tales she told.
“Did you?” Din asked now. “Did you swim out there?”
Elai pulled up her robe and showed the old scar. “That’s why I don’t walk so fast, young one. Would have bled everything I had onto that beach if MaGee hadn’t stopped the blood.”
“But what’s out there in the sea?” The young eyes were dusky like Elai’s, roiled with thoughts. Din’s brows were knit.
“Maybe,” McGee said, “things you haven’t seen.”
“Tell me!” Din said. His caliban came awake at that tone, came up on its legs. Scar hissed, a lazy warning.
“That’s enough stories,” Elai said. “Some things a boy has no need to know.”
“Maybe,” said McGee, “tomorrow. Maybe.”
“Go away,” said Elai. “I’m tired of boys.”
Din scowled. His caliban was still up and darting with its tongue, testing the air for enemies.
“Take your brothers with you,” said Elai. “Hey!”
Nurses came, the two old women, fierce and silent, half Weirds themselves. There was no escape for the boys. Rowdiness and loud voices near Scar were not wise. So they went away.
And Elai kept sitting in the sun, caliban‑like, basking on the ledge against the wall. All about the towers the fields were golding. Between them, like skirts, gardens remained green atop the odd mound‑houses of the fishers and workers; weirs sat on riverside like lopsided cages, and fish hung drying beside rows and rows of drying washing and drying fisher‑ropes and nets.
McGee smiled in the tight, quiet way of Tower‑folk, minor triumph. She knew what she did. Elai was well‑pleased, if one knew how to read Tower‑folk gestures. Her heir had come from silence to questions, from sullen disdain to a hurting need to know; and from disdain of Elai to–perhaps a curiosity and a new reckoning what his mother was; for quite unexpectedly since spring Elai had begun to flourish like a hewn tree budding, had put on weight: muscle was in the way Elai moved now. It might have been the exercises, the antibiotics against persistent lowgrade fever, the vitamins and trace‑minerals. McGee herself was not sure; but there were differences in diet on the Cloud, and she hammered them home to Elai.
“Fish guts,” Elai had said in disgust.
“Listen to me,” McGee had said. “Styxsiders eat grays. They get it that way. Grays eat all the fish. Fish eat other fish. Whole. You won’t eat grays, so you’ll have to do better with the fish. Net the little ones. Smoke them. They’re not bad.”
“I like the pills fine,” Elai said.
“Haven’t enough for everyone,” said McGee. “Want healthy people?”
So the nets. And soups and such. And fish dried against the wintertime when fishing was scant.
Interference, they would call it behind the Wire.
xxxiv
Notes, coded journal Dr. E. McGee
So I ask the boy questions. I tell him stories. The sullenness is gone. Used to look at me like I was something too vile to think on. Used to look at his mother the same way, but there’s respect when he talks to her now.
What I find here between Elai and her sons is strange. We talk in cultural terms about maternal instinct. It’s different here. I don’t say Elai doesn’t have any feeling for her sons. She talks with some disturbance of losing one baby, but I draw no conclusions whether the distress is at the discomfort without reward, at the failure, at some diminution of her self‑respect–or whether it’s what we take for granted is universal in human mothers.
Here is an instance where we have adjusted data to fit the desire, since it is ourselves we measure. The human species is full of examples of motherhood without feeling. Can a researcher impugn motherhood? Or have we been wrong because it was as a species safer to construct this fantasy?
How many such constructs has the species made?
Or is it the attribute of an advanced mind, to make such constructs of an abstract nature in its folklore when its genetic heritage doesn’t contain the answer? Folklore as an impermanent quasi‑genetics? Do all advanced species do such things? No. Not necessarily.
Or I am wrong in what I see.
They are Union; they came out of labs.
Two hundred years ago. There’s been a lot of babies born since then.
Elai’s sons had different fathers. Some Cloud Tower folk pair for what seems permanence. Most don’t. I asked Elai if she chose the fathers. “Of course,” she said. “One was Din, one was Cloud, one was Taem. And Marik.”
So the boys have the father’s name. I haven’t met the mates. Or we haven’t been introduced. Elai said something that shed some light on it: about Taem: “That man’s from New Tower. Scar and that caliban were trouble; he ran. Got rid of that one.”
“Killed him?” I asked, not sure whether she was talking about the caliban or the man.
“No,” she said, and I never did find out which one.
But Taem rules what they call the New Tower over by the sea. And I think it’s the same Taem. Relations seem cordial at least at a distance.
I say Elai has no motherhood. I found the relationship between herself and her sons chilling, like a rivalry, one in which the dominancy of the Calibans seemed to have some bearing; and Taem’s lack of one, his silence–Elai’s resignation, no, her acceptance of his condition. (Humans bearing children to give to calibans?)
But today I picked up something I hadn’t realized: that Elai treats her heir as an adult. Cloud can run about being a baby; Weirds take care of him, and those two old women. Taem–no one knows what Taem needs, but the Weirds see he gets it, I suppose. Only this six year old is no child. God help us, I haven’t seen a child in twenty years excepting natives, but that’s no six year old of any mindset I’m used to.