A large anthology of sci.., p.715
A Large Anthology of Science Fiction, page 715
“Can you stay a while?” I asked, stroking the long muscles woven across his back. “You’re doing me a lot of good, Barnabas.”
“Me too,” he said. “To be free of the worry, you know, of not making babies… . They like a man to be fertile here.” He shrugged and changed the subject. “Tell me about Ripotee. I was thinking of him just now; he used to complain that it was disgusting, us two together—”
“I think he was just jealous, not really overcome with horror at our inordinate hugenesses rolling around together. I tried taking a female cat aboard for him, but he couldn’t stand her.” I started to cry.
Barnabas hugged me and made soothing sounds into my frizz of new grown hair. I blubbed out how Ripotee had left the ship before I could do anything, even shoot him with antis. “He was in one of his crazy derring-do fits. He kept up with me as far as the market, but since then I don’t know—Helen doesn’t care. Maybe she’s already heard that he’s been caught and eaten. From what I’ve seen, no animals survive here except humans and chickens. People must be crazy for a taste of red meat—”
“Not cat meat, it is awful!” Barnabas exploded.
We curled up together and talked about Ripotee. I told Barnabas how it made me feel so peculiar to think back to the days when Ripotee had been a dumb cat that I could shove around and tickle and yell at, as people do with cats, without a thought. I’d teased him, called him all kinds of names, grabbed him up, and scrubbed him under the chin ’til he half-fainted with delight.
I didn’t do things like that any more.
“Don’t be put off,” Barnabas said. “It is only his pride that keeps him from flopping down for a chin rub just as he used to do, and he would love for you to push him over and rub his chin anyway.”
I shook my head. “He’s changed since you knew him. I think it’s ail that reading. When he lies relaxed with his eyes half shut looking at nothing, I know he’s not falling asleep any more; now he’s brooding. Like a person.”
Barnabas stood up and pulled on his shorts. “He is luckier than a person. If he were a mere man, he would be protesting always how all he needs are his mates, he must have good fellows to drink with and gossip and play cards.”
“This afternoon you and I certainly proved that’s a lie,” I said smugly.
He didn’t smile; he wrinkled his nose and sat down again, putting his arm around my shoulders. “But this is what they say here, and the women of New Niger can make it stick, too, I tell you. You know, Dee, I might have inherited wealth as you did, but my great grandfather was too ambitious. He was seduced by the big trade of international business like many other men in Nigeria. He jumped to put his money into the big boom of Europe and America, just as he had jumped right into Christianity and having only one wife at a time.
“So then the wars and the bad weather came and broke all the high finance, and him with it, among all the rest. He was left nothing but a worn out yam farm in an overcrowded, overworked corner of Iboland in the Eastern Region. Nobody had much of anything in Nigeria then, except some of the women traders with lorry fleets—the lorry mammies—and those who went even on foot from market to market, dealing haircombs and matches and sugar by the cube. They became the ones with funds to put into space travel.
“So here I am on the world they settled, trying to get rich
myself. And who do you think is my boss, the one that is giving me trouble and keeping me grounded?”
“A woman,” I guessed.
“A cousin of Helen’s, and a woman, yes.” He slipped on one of his plastic sandals. “The other men say, take it easy, relax and enjoy some drinking.”
I felt less than completely sympathetic; I heard that angry, self-pitying tone again and didn’t like it. I said lightly, “These women of New Niger are some tough ladies.”
He answered with a grudging pride: “Listen, long ago, when your ancestor-mothers were chaining themselves to the gates of politicians’ houses, my ancestor-mothers were rousing each other to riot against the English colonials’ plan to take census of women and women’s property. It was thought this would lead to special taxing of these women, for even then there were many wives who were farmers and petty traders on their own. They made what is still called the Women’s War. Thousands rose up in different places to catch the chiefs the English had appointed and to sit on them—it means to frighten and belittle a man with angry, insulting songs and to spoil his property. They tore some public buildings to the ground. In all some fifty women were shot dead by the authorities, and many more were wounded—that is how frightened the government were. No tax was applied, and the English had a big inquiry in their parliament on how to rule Iboland.
“Helen herself is named for the woman who began the War. On being told in her own yard to count her goats and children, this woman shouted to the official who said it, ‘Was your mother counted?’ and seized him by the throat.”
I could well believe it and said so.
Barnabas got up again.
“Where are you off to?” I said. Talking with him like this was almost like old times together in space.
“I must get ready for the party; you should too. Tonight Helen Nwanyeruwa holds a feast for the spirit of her ancestor the lorry mammy. Wealthy Missisi Helen had the ancestor-bones brought here on one of her ships; the spirit would not dare to displease her by staying behind.”
He bent and rested both hands on my shoulders, looking intently into my face. “It is very good to see you, Deedee.”
The outer surfaces of the house were illuminated so that the walled courtyard was brilliantly lit for the party. Family and guests milled around on the quickie grass, grown for the evening in an hour to cover where the plastic paving had been rolled back.
Wrapped in my Holy Wholist sari, worn properly this time with nothing underneath—it didn’t bother me, I often go naked in my ship—I milled around with the best of them. As a missionary I was not expected to join the dancing, for which I was grateful. I felt nervous and shy and alien, and I wandered over toward where Helen sat on a huge couch beside the shrine she had had erected: a concrete stele with the image of a truck on it. On the way I passed a line of men and a line of women dancing opposite each other, and Barnabas stepped to my side out of the men’s line. His skin was shiny with sweat. He caught me around the waist and murmured in my ear, “You and I do our own private dancing, Deedee, later on.”
As we approached, Helen patted the slowflow plastic next to her, making room for me but not for Barnabas. He joined the crowd of retainers on her right.
Helen wore African clothing of sparkling silverweave and a piece of the same cloth tied around her head into an elaborate turban. Even her white plastic sandals couldn’t spoil the effect. She was beautiful; by comparison, those around her who affected the fashionable billowing Victorian look of the new Romanticism seemed puny and laughable.
Sitting beside her wiry, tense body on the surface that slowly moulded to my shape, I felt protected by her feisty energy. Yet her boldness in having me up there in full view endangered me; suppose Bob had spies here? The drums thundered in the spaces of the courtyard. I gulped down the drink she handed me. It tasted like lemonade filtered through flannel.
I shivered. “Helen, what if—an enemy hears the drums and comes to your party?”
She looked at me out of the corner of her eye and said with haughty dismissiveness, “No enemy has been invited.”
This was repeated among the others around us and brought much laughter. Of course she must have robot guards, computer security systems and so on, I thought; but I felt edgy.
Barnabas leaned toward us. “Even so, Missisi Helen, it might be wise to take extra care. I myself and a few friends have devised a special power hookup—”
Helen set down her drink and turned to him. “Don’t worry yourself about these things, Barnabas; you will only get in the way. You are a good, strong young man, and Missisi Alicia tells me you have fathered a fine baby in her family. Go and drink from my private casks, over there, you and your friends. Go amuse yourselves.”
Barnabas spun and forced his way out through the crowd toward the dancers—then swerved sharply back toward the bar. “Why are you so hard on him?” I said.
“These boys get too big ideas of themselves, especially the young ones who have been out in space,” Helen replied, reaching for a fresh drink from a tray offered her. “They begin thinking their fathers ran fleets of lorries too.”
Everybody whooped over this. Helen was excited, feeding off the high spirits of those who fed off her own. She flung out her arm, pointing at a young man in the forefront of a huddle of others who had been looking our way on and off for quite a while. He resisted his friends’ efforts to push him forward.
“You see that boy there,” she said, pitching her voice so that everyone near the ancestor shrine must hear; “he has been chasing after that girl, my Anne, who is still nearly a baby, but he has not taken up his courage to speak to me about her. And he boasts that his father hunts lions with a spear in Old Africa, where there are fewer lions than here on New Niger.” She snatched up a pebble and pitched it not to strike but to startle into squawking flight one of the ubiquitous chickens pecking for scraps around a food table. “See what kind of lions we have here! Just such as that boy’s father hunts, just so fierce!”
At last, something familiar—the suitor who didn’t suit Mother. “Anne is one of your daughters?”
“Oh no,” Helen replied proudly, “one of my wives.”
I didn’t know what to say. Helen grinned at me, plainly pleased with the effect of her words.
“I have lots of wives,” she added with great satisfaction. “It was always Ibo custom that a woman rich enough to support wives could marry so; and I am very rich. My Anne will find herself a young man who makes her happy for a while. No fear, in time she will bring me a child of that union to be brother or sister to the children of my own body and my other wives’.”
She gave me an affectionate hug, chuckling. “Just as you look now, so shocked, that is how your aunt looked when I married my first wife. Even once I told her, ‘Juno, you should have daughters to comfort your old age and inherit your goods. Do as I do, there must be some White way with many documents.’ But she said, ‘I only have time for one creation, and that is the Steinway Line.’ Then she laughed because it was the kind of grand talk men use to impress each other; we both knew the petty trading would go on as always, while the men heroes choke on their grand schemes.
“I live by that petty trading, and I live well, as you see. Come make fast to my own good fortune, as in one of our African sayings: if a person is not successful at trading in the market, it would be cowardly to run away; instead she should change her merchandise.
“Give up wishing to be Admiral of a trading fleet, and say you will come work for my company, my bold White flyer.”
I was looking at Barnabas. He danced, his shoulders rippling like water shunting down a long container, first to one end and then to the other. A bit wobbly, in fact; as he turned without seeing me I realized that it was not only the ecstasy of the dance that sealed his eyes. He was drunk. I was alone among strangers.
I shook my head.
“You are too stubborn,” Helen said, giving me a thump in the side with her elbow. But she didn’t look unhappy. Maybe she thought I was just making a move in a complicated bargaining game, and approved. If I were any good at that kind of thing, I wouldn’t have been in this spot with Bob. It’s not the dealing I love, it’s the piloting. Helen didn’t know me well enough yet to really understand that. “Well,” she added, “you must do what suits you, and let them say!”
Somebody screamed, there was a swirling in the crowd as one of the food tables crashed down and a girl came flying toward us, shrieking. I leaped up, thinking, Netchkay has come, some one has been hurt because of him; but I was fuddled with drink and couldn’t think what to do.
Helen strode to meet the screaming girl.
“It spoke to me, the spirit of your ancestor,” the girl gibbered, twisting her head to stare wide-eyed over her shoulder at the tumbled ruin of the food table. “I was serving food, Missisi Helen, as you told me, and a little high voice said from
someplace down low, behind me, ‘A piece of light meat please, cut up small on a plate.’ I looked in the dark by the wall, I saw eyes like red hot coins.”
I hurried unsteadily over to where two servos were already sucking up the mess and getting in each other’s way.
Behind me I heard the girl: “I was afraid, Missisi. The spirit repeated, so I put down food, but then some one passed behind me and I heard the spirit cry, ‘Get off my tail!’ and it vanished. Mary thinks she stepped on it—Oh, Missisi Helen, will Mary and me be cursed?”
I shoved one of the servos aside, looking for the poor, crushed remains on Ripotee.
I found nothing but a hole in the wall, low, rounded, and utterly puzzling. I rapped on the nearest servo, which was busy wiping at some sauce with the trailing end of my sari, apparently under the impression that this was a large, handy rag.
“What’s this?” I said into the speaker of the servo, pointing at the hole. “Where does it lead to?”
“Madame or sir, it is hole for fowl,” creaked the servo. “Madame or sir, it leads in for chickens seeking entry to this compound for the night and leads out for—”
“All right, all right,” I said. While addressing me the tin fool had decided the sari was beyond salvage, and had begun ingesting it into its cannister body for disposal. I yanked.
The servo clicked disapprovingly and sheared off the swallowed portion of my garment with an interior blade. I made my way back through the crowd toward Helen, rearranging the remains of my clothing and swearing to myself.
“—Not possible that my ancestor has returned as an animal,” Helen was saying in an ominous voice. “Felicity, remember this: I took you from your mother for a good bride price, I put you to school. I have adopted your children for my own. Now think what you are saying to me of my own ancestor here before all my guests.”
Silence. I elbowed near enough to see just as the girl dropped suddenly full length on the ground, her hands spread flat beside her shoulders like some one doing the down part of a push-up.
The crowd gave a satisfied sigh; but Helen stamped her foot in exasperation and said, “We are not in Old Africa now, I will not have you prostrating to me. Just get up and ask my pardon nicely.” She looked pleased though.
Felicity scrambled to her feet and whispered an apology.
Helen came and linked her arm through mine, saying loudly, “If it was somebody’s ancestor, it must go find food at the house of its proper descendants.” In a lower voice she continued, “Monitors have been found under some of the spilled serving dishes; Netchkay will know you are here. You must leave for a mission church away from Singlet, just until my engineers have finished work on your ship. One of my freight sleds will take you. It goes at mid-morning tomorrow to tour the market towns. By the time you return—”
“Helen, listen, I can’t just take off again like this. My cat is still hanging around here someplace—”
“Oh, cat, cat! You must get your mind to business now.” She fiddled impatiently with her ear speaker. “Do you think I can keep track of all that happens here? I have a dozen wives to attend to. This is only an animal, after all.”
“Ripotee is my friend.”
“Then you must hope for the best for your friend, and meanwhile go and rest; you have a journey tomorrow.”
And she walked away and stepped into the center of one of the lines of dancing women, stamping and whirling and flipping her head to the different parts of the complex beat, lithe as a girl.
When Barnabas came to my room, it was not to tumble into my bed.
I had fallen asleep, still in my sari, despite the music and voices from the courtyard. He shook me awake in the half-lit room—it was quiet now, near dawn—and whispered, “Dee—you can stop worrying about Ripotee. I have him safe for you, outside with a friend of mine who found him.”
His breath smelled of liquor, but he seemed steady and alert, and I could have hugged him for the news he brought. I followed him downstairs. Some one murmured, from within another room with its door ajar, “Barnabas?” A woman’s voice; and I thought, ha, he has other beds to sleep in at Helen’s house than mine, no wonder he can visit as he likes.
I ran with him across the courtyard, holding up my hem to keep from tripping. As we passed out of the gateway, a long air car swept silently toward us and stopped. A door opened. I bent to look inside, and Barnabas grabbed both my arms from behind and thrust me forward into the interior, where not Ripotee but someone else waited. I tried to twist away, but Barnabas shoved in beside me, pinning me hard with his hip and shoulder. The other person was Nita, my sister.
While I was still caught in the first breathless explosion of shock and incredulous outrage, she slapped a little needle into my neck. She may be a lambchop, my sultry sister, but she is quick. Quicker than I am, who had never stopped to wonder in my sleepy daze why Barnabas hadn’t just brought Ripotee up to me himself.
“—Too much in the needle,” Barnabas was saying in underwater tones. I could feel breath on each cheek, and on one side was a tinge of wine odor: Barnabas. I was sitting wedged between them. It occurred to me that the antipoddies I had taken might have buffered the effect of the drug. I hoped so; and hoped that Barnabas, out of practice at the transition from space to land, would forget about the effects of antis.
“You’ve never fought with Dee,” Nita said. “She’s strong as a servo, and I’m not taking any chances.” She fidgeted next to me, trying to get at something tucked into her clothing, doubtless another needle.
Barnabas said firmly, “If you give another needle, this is all finished. I will go back to Helen and tell everything. Mr. Netchkay and I made particular agreement that there would be no risk of harm to Dee.”
