“Do you talk to them about the problems you’re having? Can you?” Gundhalinu sat down again, this time taking a closer seat.
Tammis frowned. “You mean, that I can’t decide whether I want to make love to men or women? That’s why this happened to me tonight, you know.”
“I know.” Gundhalinu nodded.
Tammis watched him darkly. “Did you ever feel like that? Did your own father ever call you a pervert?”
Gundhalinu shook his head. “No,” he said. “But he went to his grave thinking I was a coward. Everyone who mattered to me considered me a coward, once. Some of them still do, in spite of everything I’ve accomplished. They also called me a degenerate, for falling in love with your mother, because she wasn’t a Kharemoughi.” Tammis’s frown faded. For a moment Gundhalinu wasn’t sure which confession had caused the surprise reflected on his face.
“There was a time when even I thought I was better off dead … but one special person changed my mind.”
“Who?” Tammis asked sullenly.
“Your mother.”
Tammis blinked suddenly, rapidly, and looked away.
“Have you tried to talk to your mother about this, or … or to—” Sparks. Your Father. He broke off
Tammis shrugged, a hopeless gesture. “She never has time to listen to anything. She hasn’t for years. And she’s a Summer… . She makes us go to the Summer clan gatherings, and study our traditions, so that we know who we are and what our people believe. For years I’ve heard the Summers, my people, talk about how wanting somebody you couldn’t make children with went against the Lady’s Way.” Habitually he made the triad sign with his fingers. “They say ‘the Mother loves children above all else’—even though they use childbane. They don’t have to have children, somehow that’s all right with the Lady … as long as they always put the right parts together.” His voice turned bitter. “If my mother knew, she might … she might …”
“… stop loving you?”
His face reddened. He pressed his lips together, and nodded. “Like Da. Da … saw me, once.” He lifted his hands, let them drop into his lap, hopelessly. “I’m an adult, I’m a married man. I should be able to solve my own problems!” He shook his head.
“What about the Winters—your friends?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know what they really think … neither do they. Some of them don’t like it … some of them don’t care about anything. But that’s because they’re like the offworlders, they don’t have strong traditions and values, the way we do—”
“You mean like Summers?”
He nodded.
Gundhalinu smiled faintly. “Oh, you’ll be surprised… . There’s an old saying we have on Kharemough: ‘My gods or your gods, who knows which are stronger?’ That’s why we honor them all—just in case. There are more cultures even than gods in the Eight Worlds, and among them you’ll find people who are willing to kill you, or each other, over any difference in belief or lifestyle or physical appearance you can imagine—and some you can’t. They all think they’re right. There’s no Truth, Tamrnis, only differences of opinion. If that confuses the Tiamatans, they’re not alone.”
“How would they feel on Kharemough, if you wanted to make love to another man, instead of a—a woman who wasn’t like you.”
“Well, that would depend on his caste, and mine, probably.”
Tammis looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“The varieties of prejudice are infinite.” Gundhalinu shrugged. “But if social rank was not a problem, most Kharemoughis I know wouldn’t care what consenting adults did with each other—as long as they did it discreetly. Public displays of affection or flesh are considered in bad taste. On the other hand, in parts of Newhaven, from what Jerusha PalaThion tells me, near-nudity is typical, because of the heat.”
Tammis’s eyes widened briefly, as if the idea that Jerusha PalaThion had ever been a casually naked child was more than his mind could imagine.
“Jerusha used to say she’d never get used to the cold weather here. I used to think I’d never get used to the faces—the eyes. All those pale, cold eyes.” He glanced away from Tammis’s eyes, which were the warm earth-brown of his own.
Tammis shifted in his seat, pulling his soft-shod feet up under him. “But I don’t live in any of those places—I live here! And the people I live with, that I care about, they all hate what I am. They say even the Lady hates it—”
“Just because you’re outnumbered doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”
Tammis pressed his mouth together. “That’s easy for you to say.”
Gundhalinu laughed. “Much easier than it was when I left Tiamat.” He touched the sibyl sign, glancing down. “As far as having judgment passed against you: You wear one of these. You’ll never meet a more terrifyingly impartial judge of character than a sibyl choosing place. … On Kharemough every Technician child is required to go and be judged at one. When I was a boy, I was so afraid of being found unworthy that I lied to my family and said I’d failed the test, rather than go in, and actually know for sure that I was not strong or stable enough to suit it.”
“Then, how—?” Tammis gestured at Gundhalinu’s trefoil, touched his own.
“I’ll tell you that tale another time.” Gundhalinu smiled faintly. “It will prove to you that sibyls aren’t saints.… Do you know who Vanamoinen and Ilmarinen are?”
Tammis shook his head.
“You should. They were responsible for setting up the sibyl net that’s served all our worlds ever since the Old Empire fell. They were two men who were lovers. They’d been lovers for years; and I remember knowing that it was their love that made them believe they could make a difference, even in an impossible situation, when I … That is, one of them was my ancestor. Ilmarinen is the one my family has revered as its founder for centuries.”
Tammis glanced away. “But that means … Did he have both men and women for lovers?”
Gundhalinu shrugged. “I only know that he found his solution. You’ll have to find your own. But if you ever need to know that you have a right to be alive, just look down. Think about what sibyls mean to your people, and why.”
Tammis sighed, stretching out his legs again, as if he were uncoiling a spring.
“But …”he said, looking away, and his fist began to rap silently on the wooden arm of his seat. “But Merovy …”
“What about her?” Gundhalinu asked.
“She threw me out.”
“Because you were seeing other men?”
Tammis nodded. “I can’t help myself. I don’t want to do that to her, but then I start thinking about it, and I hate myself for it, but the more I hate myself, the more I want to—”
“You never think about wanting other women?”
“Yes, I do.”
“As much as you want to be with men?”
Tammis nodded again. “But they aren’t Merovy, and so I—I stop. Because I love her, there’s no one else I ever felt that close to. That’s why I married her.”
“No boy or man you ever felt that close to either?”
“No. No one I really loved. Not like her.”
“Then why can’t you stop?”
Tammis shook his head. “I don’t know… .”He half frowned, as if he had never thought about it.
“Would Merovy have thrown you out if you’d been seeing other women?”
Tammis looked up at him. “Probably.”
Gundhalinu shifted in his chair, realizing that he had been sitting motionless for far too long. “Then maybe the problem you both have is that you’ve been unfaithful to her at all.”
“I suppose so. …” Tammis rubbed his eyes, and winced. “I guess maybe it is.”
“Then maybe the question you need to give some thought to is whether you really want to hate yourself more than you want to love your wife.”