“Paul.” Father Dorothy’s whispered voice was surprised, shaming without being angry. The boy let his breath out and peered up at his tutor, clad in an elegant grey kimono, his long iron-colored hair unbound and falling to his shoulders. “What are you doing? What do you have there—”
His hand went unerringly to where Paul had hidden the pamphlet. The shaft of light danced across the yellowed pages, and the pamphlet disappeared into a kimono pocket.
“Mmm.” His tutor sounded upset. “Tomorrow I want to see you before class. Don’t forget.”
His face burning, Paul listened as the man’s footsteps padded away again. A minute later he gave a muffled cry as someone jumped on top of him.
“You idiot! Now he knows—”
And much of the rest of the night was given over to the plebeian torments of Claude.
He knew he looked terrible the next morning, when, still rubbing his eyes, he shuffled into Father Dorothy’s chamber.
“Oh dear.” The tutor shook his head and smiled ruefully. “Not much sleep, I would imagine. Claude?”
Paul nodded.
“Would you like some coffee?”
Paul started to refuse politely, then saw that Father Dorothy had what looked like real coffee, in a small metal tin stamped with Arabic letters in gold and brown. “Yes, please,” he nodded, and watched entranced as the tutor scooped it into a silver salver and poured boiling water over it.
“Now then,” Father Dorothy said a few minutes later. He indicated a chair, its cushions ballooning over its metal arms, and Paul sank gratefully into it, cupping his bowl of coffee. “This is all about the argala, isn’t it?”
Paul sighed. “Yes.”
“I thought so.” Father Dorothy sipped his coffee and glanced at the gravure of Father Sofia, founder of the Mysteries, staring myopically from the curved wall. “I imagine your mother is rather distressed—?”
“I guess so. I mean, she seems angry, but she always seems angry.”
Father Dorothy sighed. “This exile is particularly difficult for a person as brilliant as your mother. And this—” he pointed delicately at the pamphlet, sitting like an uninvited guest on a chair of its own. “This argala must be very hard for KlausMaria to take. I find it disturbing and rather sad, but considering your father’s part in developing these—things—my guess would be that your mother finds it, um, repellent—?”
Paul was still staring at the pamphlet; it lay open at one of the pages he hadn’t yet gotten to the night before. “Uh—um, oh yes, yes, she’s pretty mad,” he mumbled hastily, when he saw Father Dorothy staring at him.
The tutor swallowed the rest of his coffee. Then he stood and paced to the chair where the pamphlet lay, picked it up and thumbed through it dismissively, though not without a certain curiosity.
“You know it’s not a real woman, right? That’s part of what’s wrong with it, Paul—not what’s wrong with the thing itself, but with the act, with—well, everything. It’s a geneslave, it can’t enter into any sort of—relations—with anyone of its own free will. It’s a—well, it’s like a machine, except of course it’s alive. But it has ho thoughts of its own. They’re like children, you see, only incapable of thought, or language. Although of course we have no idea what other things they can do—strangle us in our sleep or drive us mad. They’re incapable of ever learning, or loving. They can’t suffer or feel pain or, well, anything—”
Father Dorothy’s face had grown red, not from embarrassment, as Paul first thought, but from anger—real fury, the boy saw, and he sank back into his chair, a little afraid himself now.
“—institutionalized rape, it’s exactly what Sofia said would happen, why she said we should start to protect ourselves—”
Paul shook his head. “But—wouldn’t it, I mean wouldn’t it be easier? For women: if they used the geneslaves, then they’d leave the women alone…”
Father Dorothy held the pamphlet open, to a picture showing an argala with its head thrown back. His face as he turned to Paul was still angry, but disappointed now as well. And Paul realized there was something he had missed, some lesson he had failed to learn during all these years of Father Dorothy’s tutelage.
“That’s right,” his tutor said softly. He looked down at the pamphlet between his fingers, the slightly soiled image with its gasping mouth and huge, empty eyes. He looked sad, and Paul’s eyes flickered down from Father Dorothy’s face to that of the argala in the picture. It looked very little like the one he had seen, really; but suddenly he was flooded with yearning, an overwhelming desire to see it again, to touch it and breathe again that warm scent, that smell of blue water and real sand and warm flesh pressed against cool cotton. The thought of seeing it excited him, and even though he knew Father Dorothy couldn’t see anything (Paul was wearing one of his father’s old robes, much too too big for him), Father Dorothy must have understood, because in the next instant the pamphlet was out of sight, squirrelled into a cubbyhole of his ancient steel desk.
“That’s enough, then,” he said roughly. And gazing at his tormented face Paul thought of what the man had done, to become an initiate into the Mysteries; and he knew then that he would never be able to understand anything his tutor wanted him to learn.
“It’s in there now, with your father! I saw it go in—”
Ira’s face was flushed, his hair tangled from running. Claude and Paul sat together on Claude’s bunk poring over another pamphlet, a temporary truce having been effected by this new shared interest.
“My father?” Paul said stupidly. He felt flushed, and cross at Ira for interrupting his reverie.
“The argala! It’s in there with him now. If we go we can listen at the door—everyone else is still at dinner.”
Claude closed the pamphlet and slipped it beneath his pillow. He nodded, slowly, then reached out and touched Ira’s curls. “Let’s go, then,” he said.
Fritz Pathori’s quarters were on the research deck. The boys reached them by climbing the spiral stairs leading up to the second level, speaking in whispers even though there was little chance of anyone seeing them there, or caring if they did. Midway up the steps Paul could see his father’s chambers, across the open area that had once held several anaglyphic sculptures. The sculptures had long since been destroyed, in one of the nearly ritualized bouts of violence that periodically swept through the station. Now his father’s balcony commanded a view of a narrow concrete space, swept clean of rubble but nonetheless hung about with a vague odor of neglect and disrepair.
When they reached the hallway leading to the chief geneticist’s room the boys grew quiet.
“You never come up here?” Claude asked. For once there was no mockery in his voice.
Paul shrugged. “Sometimes. Not in a while, though.”
“I’d be here all the time,” Ira whispered. He looked the most impressed, stooping to rub the worn but still lush carpeting and then tilting his head to flash a quick smile at himself in the polished metal walls.
“My father is always busy,” said Paul. He stopped in front of the door to his father’s chambers, smooth and polished as the walls, marked only by the small onyx inlay with his father’s name engraved upon it. He tried to remember the last time he’d been here—early autime, or perhaps it had been as long ago as last Mestris.
“Can you hear anything?” Claude pushed Ira aside and pressed close to the door. Paul felt a dart of alarm.
“I do,” whispered Ira excitedly. “I hear them—listen—”
They crouched at the door, Paul in the middle. He could hear something, very faintly. Voices: his father’s, and something like an echo of it, soft and soothing. His father was groaning—Paul’s heart clenched in his chest but he felt no embarrassment, nothing but a kind of icy disdain—and the other voice was cooing, an almost perfect echo of the deeper tone, but two octaves higher. Paul pressed closer to the wall, feeling the cool metal against his cheek.