The saskiad, p.27
The Saskiad, page 27
"And it never occurred to you, I suppose," Lauren said, "to think that money might be needed by the rest of us."
"No, it didn't."
"How do you think it would be if I spent all the money I earned on things for myself?"
Saskia shrugged. "Maybe you'd have nicer clothes." She wondered what the opposite of baring your breasts to the moonlight might be, and clearly it is this. She has flat places over her hipbones now, and her ribs lend a pleasing texture to her dark slender back. Soon her breasts will be positively Amazonian in their undeniable not-getting-in-the-wayness. Saskia suns, and sweats, and shrinks. No, she is not anorexic. Sue Walsh is anorexic, and talks about how fat she is even as she skeletonizes. Saskia doesn't bake all night, or dream all day of food, or scarf and barf. That's sick, like the decadent Romans. Saskia just wants to be dark and whip-thin, without grossness or excess, the essence of herself, a rod of apple wood stained with walnut juice and polished with beeswax, a scourge of the unrighteous. Is that so much to ask? It says right in her alchemy book, You will know the true Adept by this sign, that she no longer needs food. Everyone is an organism, and the less you consume, the less you secrete, and the less you secrete, the less you end up lying in your own muck. We must learn to tread lightly on this Earth, like the phantom walkers of Tasmania. Such a satisfying image! She would skim like a swallow over the rare lichens, she would look back and not even see footprints, nothing but nature, boundless to the horizons. No one would ever know she had been there.
12
If you go out at midnight in midautumn on a clear night you will see Perseus straight overhead. One of his legs points to the Pleiades, and if you continue in that direction through the Pleiades you will come to the southwestern quadrant of the sky. Chances are you never looked much here, because the whole area is conspicuously lacking in bright stars. Heh heh. It was designed that way. Take Thomas's binoculars and look again. Start with Perseus' leg and go through the Pleiades. About fifteen degrees farther on you will run into an oval of six stars. You are now in the constellation of Cetus, the Whale. The oval is the Whale's head. Continue southwest along the neck, one, two stars.
Stop. The star you are looking at is called Mira. It is classed as a variable, because over a period of 332 days its brightness varies from ninth to third magnitude and back again. In other words, Mira is usually invisible to the naked eye. Nonetheless, it happens to be the most important star in the galaxy. It has only one planet, and an unusual feature of the Miran system is that the planet remains motionless while the star revolves around it. In fact, the entire galactic disk revolves around this planet. Have you figured it out yet? The planet is Hyperbores.
Don't bother trying: you can't possibly see it, not even with the most powerful terrestrial telescope. But if you could, you would surely exclaim at how intensely blue it appeared in your eyepiece, like a marble of lapis lazuli. That, in fact, is why the Hyperboreans are also called Lapps. All of them carry the sign of their origin in their eyes, which twinkle from their sockets like hard blue stones.
Hyperbores shines so blue in the jet black of space because its surface is entirely covered by water. The only solid area to be found lies inside its Arctic Circle: right at the line, the water freezes. At the North Pole of Hyperbores, in the exact middle of this vast circle of ice, stands the only building on the planet, a castle as white as the pure ice, as green as ecology, and as pink as perfect love: the Ty-chonic Astronomical Observatory. No one except the Grandmaster of the TAO knows how long the castle has been there, or who built it, but all Hyperboreans drink in with their mothers' rich milk the knowledge of its sacred charge as Guardian of the Way. The TAO monitors every one of the 32,544 inhabited planets in the galaxy, applying corrective measures when necessary. Mira, in fact, is not a star at all but a vast and sophisticated generator of a communications beam that sweeps the galaxy like a lighthouse light, completing one circuit every 332 Earth days. TAO agents on the various planets compose messages with the aid of complex formulas and transmit them along the beam by means of special spermacetic chambers in their foreheads. Mira then relays them to the golden Cetus exhalant on the top of the Observatory, which focuses the beam and directs it downward to the specially designed golden nose of the Grandmaster, who hears the messages as voices in his head.
It was in this way that he heard one night a desperate message from his agents on a little planet circling a star called Sol, out toward the edge of the galaxy: "Then Man, rapacious, wild, insatiable, came upon Earth and upset the Balance of all things, and it did come to pass—" The Grandmaster sat bolt upright. "Man!" he groaned, bouncing a palm off his sleek forehead. "Not him again!"
When trouble is afoot on a planet, special agents have to be sent to do the undercover work that the regular agents cannot perform. Only the best and brightest Hyperboreans are selected for this work, and they undergo a grueling course of training at the Observatory to enable them to fit into the subject population. "You will be disguised as Men," Tycho said, "and for the entire period of this project I too will be disguised as a Man. I do this because, as you will shortly discover, it is an intensely unpleasant experience, and I cannot have my men thinking I would ask them to do something I would not do myself." Alas, he was right, the disguises were pure torment: the dry skin, as suffocating as a rubber glove, the coarse body hair, the clumsy mode of locomotion. Worst of all were the shit-brown contact lenses.
There were four of them. They would be known to each other on the target planet as the Four Unknown Superiors, and they would be sent not only to different continents but to different time periods. Their mission, however, would be the same: to learn as much as they could about the ways of these Balance-upsetting Men, to weaken them in whatever fashion feasible, and to act as advisers for the invasion force when it landed later to decimate the race. "Of the five billion Men that currently infest the place, we might allow a billion to live," Tycho said. "But I'm being generous." They picked their roles out of a hat. Albescus landed the hardest one, that of "Saskia White," a second-class citizen of Novamundus in the last quarter of the twentieth century. "What did you get?" she asked Haven, a male whale and a good friend.
"Odysseus," he said, reading the card. "A warrior and wanderer in the eastern Mediterranean, circa 1200 B.C."
"Oh!" she flapped her flippers. "Do you want to trade?" But trading was not allowed. Her two other friends became Marco Polo, a merchant and traveler of the Far East in the thirteenth century, and Horatio Hornblower, a captain in His Majesty's Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Tycho wisely gave them the ability to travel in time so that they could enjoy each other's company now and then, and thus avoid being driven crazy by loneliness. She, Odysseus, Marco, and the Captain get together just like old times on Hyper-bores (except that they have to keep their darn skins on), to relax, to get away from the cares of business: they play whist, or shoot arrows through axes, or mix wine in the silver basin and go out in search of willing wenches. Sometimes they just sit around and shoot the breeze. They complain about teachers, or the Admiralty, or Poseidon's enmity, and usually end up laughing uproariously at what fools these Earthlings be. They all look forward to the invasion, after which they will be able to go home. Home! They are reminded of the warm consoling waters of Hyperbores by the tears that spill from their eyes whenever they speak of it.
And what about Jeppe? They sometimes talk about him. What really happened when he was the head agent in that Cassiopeian system that got into a horrible nuclear war, making its own sun go supernova? Such a beautiful star it was in the Hyperborean sky, marking the place where billions and billions of Way-following creatures had died.
13
With her contacts popped out to let in more starlight she can make out shapes even in the barn. She wishes she could shuck her skin off, too, but she doesn't dare. She slips across the rough wooden planks and stops at the black pit of the stall. She can feel the steam rising against her face. She squats and inches forward, feeling ahead with her hand until she touches bristle. The large mass suddenly butts up. She can just make out the dim gleam of Marilyn's eyes.
"It's me." She runs her hand along Marilyn's neck. "Go back to sleep." Marilyn drops her head to the floor and lets out a groan. Saskia continues to stroke her as she crawls to the place where Marilyn's rounded side is closest to the wall. There is some dry hay here, and just enough room for Saskia to sit. The knobby ridge of Marilyn's spine is at the perfect height for Saskia to rest her weary head. She throws an arm up the mountain of Marilyn and puts her cheek against the hot fur and breathes in the lulling fumes of straw and milk.
God how she misses this, when she is walking down the halls with her lavender hair, her perfumed wrists. Thomas smelled it when she came home and scowled, coughed. "I'm suffocating," he managed to choke out. "Is my Saskia in there somewhere?"
She had tried to wash it off before getting on the bus. She told Thomas that Monica insisted she try it. Of course Thomas would sniff out the decadence of it, the graveyard whiff of thousands of rabbits tortured to death in LD-50 tests. Yet Earthlings find this pleasing. Marilyn's smell is honest. It reminds Saskia of home. Her people, too, are great milk producers, and their milk is richer than cream, creamier than the swarm of stars at which they gaze up in wonder whenever they break the surface to blow an oar upright of steam. Funny, what this strange planet does to you. Now even Marilyn's relatively thin milk is too rich for Saskia. It seems to coat her throat like paint and lies heavily in her stomach. The waters of home always buoyed her up. The terrestrial substitute is coffee, which floats you up onto your toes and gives you the illusion of lightness for a while.
Autumn is the season in which Marilyn's milk production tapers off. She will be having a calf in a couple of months and Mim milked her yesterday for the last time. Now she will have a rest so she can go ahead and make her baby. The milking won't ever start again. Thomas let the girls finish the cycle so that Marilyn's rhythms would not be upset, but next year will be different. The calf will grow and will not be sold and Marilyn will eventually dry up, naturally. She and the calf will grow old together, peacefully in the meadow, un-meddled with by Man. "I'm just freeing the slaves," Thomas said.
Marilyn, a slave? But she stands so patiently for the milking. She lows when Saskia is late. Each spring, on the first day they let her into the meadow she runs skipping, her tail high. "De happy slave," Thomas said. "A typical slaveholder's fantasy." But Jane and Saskia worshiped her! She presided maternally over the bonding of their eternal friendship! "The fat black mammy. Another fantasy. Look at Aunt Jemima." But Marilyn does love Saskia! Doesn't she? In the darkness Marilyn sleeps, radiating warmth on this cold November night, accepting Saskia into her bed.
"Cows wouldn't survive one week without Man," Thomas said. "And just as well. There are too many of them, desertifying the world." He told Saskia to stop closing the door of the chicken coop at night. "They're grown animals, aren't they? Can't they take care of themselves?" On the third night something came in and killed four of them. Thomas guessed it was a raccoon. Whatever it was, it ate only their heads. "The fattiest tissue," he explained. "The delicacy." Saskia could hardly force herself to touch the mutilated bodies, and she cried weakly. "Try to let go of this sentimental idea about nature/' he said gently, throwing the bodies into a wheelbarrow. "Chickens aren't a real species." Two nights later the raccoon, or whatever it was, came back and ate the heads of the last three hens.
Now when Saskia looks at the empty chicken coop she sees Thomasness. When she sees the straightened porch with the new floor she sees Thomasness. The elements of Wholeworld are one by one falling into place, orienting themselves along the axis of Thomasness like ions in a magnetic field. As each molecule locks into position the Wholeworld crystal becomes more pure, and as it becomes more pure it hums more and more like a goblet with Thomas's finger running along the rim.
14
Years ago Saskia brought home a doll that she had found in the grass at the Farmers' Market. The remarkable thing about this doll was that if you pulled on her champagne-blond hair it would get longer, and when you turned a knob on her back it would get shorter again. Saskia quickly tired of the gimmick and gave the doll to Mim, but the idea it inspired — experimentally pulling on the crew's hair to see if it promoted growth — lasted longer.
Now she stands in front of her mirror and brushes her hair, tugging furiously downward, fifty, sixty strokes. Hope springs eternal. But the hair merely recoils, curling again like something shriveling in pain. She detaches a cloud from the brush and dumps it in the waste-basket, resprinkles what's left, starts again. At times like this she wonders if she should just cut it all off and be done with it. Lauren says she feels much freer and lighter now that she has a crew cut. But if the truth be told, Saskia thinks she made a big mistake. She looks like a lamp without its shade, and her ears, surprisingly small, seem to cling for dear life. Worst of all, the deed was done while Saskia was at school, and by the time she got home Thomas had thrown the armfuls of glorious hair, which she had dreamed for so many years of having for herself, onto the compost heap, and emptied a garbage pail after them.
Saskia comes down to find Thomas and Jo cleaning up in the kitchen. "Look at you," Jo rasps. What? Saskia lifts a hand toward her hair. How hopeless is it? Is there a paper bag in the house? Jo shakes her head ruefully, as if Saskia were pulling a fast one. "You're starting to get pretty on us." Oh, just what she needs. The Jo Flynn Seal of Approval. You're looking great, Saskia, you look like a halibut. "But you should pencil your eyebrows. They look funny when they get blond like that."
"The way to solve that is to stop using the sunlamp," Thomas says.
"I wish I could get a tan like that," Jo asserts.
"You'll have the last laugh when she dies of skin cancer." He massages a dishtowel. "Are you ready?"
"Yeah," Saskia says, hanging her head.
"Get your coat on."
"I don't need a coat."
"It's cold out."
"We're going in Betsy, aren't we?"
"Your coat isn't sexy enough, I suppose."
"It's not that."
"Next time I'm in Ithaca I'll buy you a leopardskin, so you'll have something to wear." Saskia puts on her hideous old coat. They drive up the dirt road in silence. On the county road Thomas observes, "You're not wearing a bra. Why not?"
Saskia looks at him. Nothing occurs to her.
"I'm just curious. Why are you wearing a clinging knit dress without a bra? Do you want to look sexy?"
"No."
"Then you shouldn't wear it."
Betsy hums along through the dark.
"There's nothing wrong with wanting to look sexy, Saskia. You can admit it. You're getting interested in boys?"
"Not much."
"Then why are you going to this party?"
"Monica and Marie are going to be there."
"So the sexy dress is for them?"
"I'm just trying to look nice." So it's impossible. So shoot her.
"Are you going to put makeup on after I let you off?"
"No."
"You look better without it, you know. Your skin is good. Makeup will coarsen it. Lauren and Jane don't wear makeup."
"They can get away with it."
"All women look better without it. It amazes me how much money and time women spend making themselves uglier. Don't listen to Jo. You want to look like her?"
"No."
"A made-up woman looks like a corpse, ready for the open casket and the viewing line. Perfume is for corpses, too. And your hair looks better when you leave it alone. It's thin hair, you just have to accept that. It's my hair. You've got something against my hair?"
"You're a man."
"Being a woman doesn't mean you have to be a Barbie doll." 1 guess.
"You say 'I guess' when you're ignoring me."
"I'm not ignoring you."
"When you don't want to hear what I'm saying. Why do you want to attract these boys?"
"I said I didn't."
"But you're not telling the truth. You're tanning yourself and you're wearing sexy clothes and makeup because you want some boy to notice you. There's nothing wrong with that, but at least you can admit it."
"I just want to look nice!"
"Nice and sexy, you mean."
"OK! Nice and sexy, or whatever."
"Don't say 'or whatever.' Say, 'I want to look nice and sexy.'"
Saskia looks away from him, out the window. "I want to look nice and sexy," she says quietly. When she looks back, he is smiling.
"You do. You look very nice and very sexy."
He rests his right arm along the back of the seat, which is the signal for Saskia to slide across. She does. He gives her a manly squeeze. A few minutes later, he turns down the street where Sue Walsh lives. Rusty low-riding gas guzzlers line both curbs. "Don't let one of these high school boys drive you home, they're dangerous even when they're sober. Call me." He holds her head and gives her a kiss. She slides across to the passenger door. "You can leave the coat here. So you don't have to hide it in the bushes." She is so grateful to him for knowing everything. She shrugs off the coat. He tilts the rearview mirror toward her and turns on the dome light. "You can use this to make yourself up." "But—"
"Go on. I know you've got the stuff in your bag." She hesitates. "I couldn't," she says at last. Not in front of him. "All right. Be careful with those high school boys." Sure.
"Are you wearing underpants?" "Oh my gosh! Of course!"
"Well that's something, anyway. We need to talk about birth control."
Saskia is shocked. "No we don't!"
Thomas looks amused. "You'd be surprised. Here, give me another kiss. All right. Call me." He drives away.
Saskia hurries out of the cold through the garage door into the humid kitchen warmth of crowded boys and cigarette smoke. "Hey Saskia!" somebody says, and she throws a "Hey" over her shoulder as she hurries through, thinking only, Don't look don't look, down a hall stepping over legs and under arms braced from wall to wall until she finds the bathroom and locks herself in. The hair of the Saskia in the mirror has sproinged back into hideousness and she's still brushing it out again when someone knocks on the door. "Busy!"
