“Don’t you mean Madame de Pompadour and her age?” Carlyle challenged. “That’s what you’re aiming at here, isn’t it? The age when kings’ mistresses ruled the world?”
“I’m not aiming at anything,” she answered, painted lashes fluttering at the suggestion. “I have created a period venue where clients of a particular taste can vent their unorthodox sexual appetites. If, as a side effect, my Son and I have encouraged peace and stability in the world for two decades, I don’t expect anyone will complain.”
Carlyle tried to slide away from Madame along the sofa, but politeness held him mostly fast. “And what about you, President Ganymede?” he asked. “Why are you here? Paying an avuncular visit?”
The Cousin was not worthy of the Duke’s full gaze. “I was born here, but I’m here now to retrieve Thisbe Saneer.” He turned the murder-blue diamonds of his eyes on her. “I thought you were more cautious than this, Thisbe. What if you’d been caught using the confidential data your bash’ is trusted with to infiltrate a secret stronghold which I didn’t happen to frequent?”
“I’m sorry.” There was frankly little apology in Thisbe’s apology. Her expression was like a child’s at that moment, a child clever enough to find the hiding place where Mom and Ba’pa have secreted some stash of candy for her birthday, and she accepts their admonishments, but in the same breath reaches for her chocolate. Thisbe collects us, you see. She was born to her bash’s secrets, but she collected me, the Major, Bridger. Now what a triple prize to set beside us in her spellbook: the President, the Chief Director, and this bizarre Madame.
“Thisbe.” The Duke President reconquered his Member’s attention with a toss of his golden mane. “If you were concerned about how the Prince D’Arouet was handling the case, you should have come to me directly. You know this must be handled delicately.” His eyes locked on me for a stabbing instant. My trembling was my apology.
“Excuse me, President Ganymede,” Carlyle interrupted, “did you say you were born here?”
“Here we prefer ‘Excuse me, Your Grace,’ ” Madame corrected, “and yes, he was, his sister too, part of my dear family, born and raised here, like Dominic and Heloïse and the Chevalier.”
“Inside a brothel?”
The Duke’s eyes locked on the sensayer, like a hawk about to dive. “We lived upstairs, the pit is downstairs, and if you’re calling my sister something vile then there’s a dueling arena downstairs where such things are settled.”
Carlyle’s limbs withdrew into the cloak like a retreating crab. “Cousins’ Law doesn’t allow dueling.”
“You could find a champion.”
“Please, Your Grace,” Madame intervened, “we must forgive newcomers for being new.”
“Of course.” It was Director Andō who seconded Madame’s forgiveness, and with such force that Ganymede had to let it go.
Madame smiled it all away. “Anyway, it’s not uncommon for a bash’ house to have a business in part of it—as yours does, Mademoiselle Saneer, your wonderful cars—nor is it uncommon for some of a bash’s children to join the family business while others work elsewhere. Speaking of which, Mademoiselle Saneer, I hear you’re up for another Oscar. Congratulations.”
Thisbe cocked an eyebrow. “Nominees for this year aren’t going to be announced for another two weeks.”
“I know.” Again Madame’s fan hid her smile, but she let it sparkle in her eyes, the smug allure of secret knowledge.
Carlyle, less secret-fluent than Thisbe, was still struggling to keep track. “So Director Andō married President Ganymede’s sister, who was raised here in the same bash’ as the Masonic porphyrogene?” The Cousin’s face strained just from outlining the web of what could be labeled neither incest nor nepotism, but smelled like both. “Another marriage alliance?”
“Precisely,” Madame answered, glowing, “so the Humanists too trust my Jehovah and let Him help maintain the balance between the Hives. That’s why He was asked to take care of this Black Sakura mess.”
“Was it an arranged marriage?” Carlyle accused. “Danaë and Director Andō?”
“Princesse Danaë, or Lady Danaë,” the Duke corrected, “and, no, it was not.”
Carlyle’s breath grew harsher. “I talked to Heloïse.”
The Duke’s eyes narrowed. “What about Sister Heloïse?”
“They were going to have an arranged marriage. The ‘fiancé’ who had been chosen for them? And they weren’t acting, were they? They actually live like a nun here. Think like a nun, and worship your son Jehovah like a god.” His eyes fixed on Madame. “The gendered boys and girls you raised here aren’t just playing. You’ve raised them to think inside this box. Like Heloïse, you probably got Danaë to believe the marriage was voluntary, but everything was planned. Am I wrong?” Spitfire Carlyle didn’t give them time to answer. “Period costume is one thing, but we got rid of gender roles to free people from this kind of mental subjugation. You’ve undone that. You’ve ‘raised children in such a way as to intentionally limit their potential and cripple their ability to participate and interface naturally and productively with the world at large.’ ”
A warning bell went off in all our minds. That last sentence wasn’t Carlyle’s, it was Nurturism, a quote from the infamous bill proposed in 2238, the height of the Anti-Set-Set Riots, when, in the name of kindness and free will, the Nurturist faction tried to add to the short list of Universal Laws that bind even Blacklaws this grim Eighth: a ban on raising children too strangely. The law that was defeated at such cost.
Madame stretched back across her sofa. “I don’t feel particularly subjugated.”
“Then why is your male child the Tribune, not you?” Carlyle accused. “Why aren’t you an Imperial Familiaris, or a player in the Humanist elections, or a Senator?”
“I prefer exerting this kind of power. I could have the other, but I don’t want to.”
“Separate spheres,” Carlyle accused. “Out of curiosity, Madame,” he pronounced the title with disdain, “did you do sensayer training research on Rousseau as well as Sade?”
Do you know our Jean-Jacques, reader? If there were three lights of the Enlightenment, the third was Jean-Jacques Rousseau: as brilliant as Aristotle, as disruptive as Alexander, as mad as good St. Francis. Whatever grand goal the Enlightenment took up, he managed to somehow support and attack it at the same time. The Age of Reason celebrated the possibility that science would improve the human condition generation by generation; Rousseau agreed, but cried that this would only make us wretched by pushing us further from the Noble Savage’s lost tranquility. The Age of Reason speculated that women might be no different from men if they were reared the same; Rousseau agreed, but cried that this would strip women of their rightful thrones, unmaking society’s peacemakers, and making men grow harsher without a fair sex to temper their passions. Even blood-feuding enemies must negotiate civilly in Madame de Pompadour’s presence, he would say; not so Bryar Kosala’s, since she is free to wage a feud herself. If newspapers and common discourse hailed Voltaire as Patriarch and Diderot as le Philosophe, Rousseau was known tenderly as ‘Jean-Jacques,’ a fragile firebrand always in need of sheltering lest it burn out, and ladies around the world wrote of how they wished to rush to and embrace this dear, romantic advocate of inequality who, they felt, knew their fragile hearts so well. Jean-Jacques became the favored spokesman of those women who, perversely but sincerely, wanted to remain pet-queens within their gendered roles. To temper your confusion, reader, I shall not call Rousseau “she,” but I am tempted.