At the seventh level v1.., p.2
At The Seventh Level (v1.0), page 2
“Yes, Michael?”
“It is my shame and my sorrow that this should have been the result of your leaving your household in my care.”
The Khadilh reached over and grasped his hand firmly. “You are very young, my son,” he said, “and you have nothing to be ashamed of. When the females of a household take it upon themselves to upset the natural order of things and to violate the rules of decency, there is very little anyone can do.”
“Thank you, Father.”
“Now,” said the Khadilh, turning to face them all, “I suggest that the next thing to do would be to initiate action by the Women’s Discipline Unit. Do you wish me to have the Khadilha placed on Permanent Medication, my sons?”
He hoped they would not insist upon it, and was pleased to see that they did not.
“Let us wait, Father,” said Michael, “until we know the outcome of the examinations.”
“Surely the outcome is something about which there can be no question!”
“Could we wait, Father, all the same?”
It was the youngest of the boys. As was natural, he was still overly squeamish, still a bit tender. The Khadilh would not have had him be otherwise.
“A wise decision,” he said. “In that case, once I have bathed and had my dinner, I will send for the Lawyer an-ahda. And you may go, my sons.”
The boys filed out, led by the solemn Michael, leaving him with no company but the slow dance of a mobile flower from one of the tropical stars. It whirled gently in the middle of the corner hearth, humming to itself and giving off showers of silver sparks from time to time. He watched it suspiciously for a moment, and then pushed the com-system buttons for his Housekeeper. When the face appeared on the screen he snapped at it “Housekeeeper, are you familiar with the nature of the mobile plant that someone has put in my study?”
The Housekeeper’s voice, frightened, came back at once. “The Khadilh may have the plant removed—should I call the Gardener?”
“All I wanted to know is the sex of the blasted thing,” he bellowed at her. “Is it male or female?”
“Male, Khadilh, of the genus—”
He cut off the message while she was still telling him of the plant’s pedigree. It was male; therefore it could stay. He would talk to it, while he ate his dinner, about the incredible behavior of his Khadilha.
The Lawyer an-ahda leaned back in the chair provided for him and smiled at his client.
“Yes, ban-harihn,” he said amiably, having known the 16
Khadilh since they were young men at the University, “what can I do to help the sun shine more brightly through your window?”
“This is a serious matter,” said the Khadilh.
“Ah.”
“You heard—never mind being polite and denying it—of my wife’s behavior at the procession of the Spring Rains. I see that you did.”
“Very impulsive,” observed the Lawyer. “Most unwise. Undisciplined.”
“Indeed it was. However, worse followed.”
“Oh? The Poet Anna-Maty has tried for revenge, then?”
“Not in the sense that you mean, no. But worse has happened, my old friend, far worse.”
“Tell me.” The Lawyer leaned forward attentively, listening, and when the Khadilh had finished, he cleared bis throat “There isn’t anything to be done, you know,” he said. “You might as well know it at once.”
“Nothing at all?”
“Nothing. The law provides that any woman may challenge and claim her right to compete in the Poetry Examinations, provided she is twelve years of age and a citizen of this planet. If she is not accepted, however, the penalty for having challenged and failed is solitary confinement for life, in the household of her family. And once she has announced to the Faculty by signed communication that she intends to compete, she is cloistered until the day of the examinations, and she may not change her mind. The law is very clear on this point”
“She is very young.”
“She is twelve. That is all the law requires.”
“It’s a cruel law.”
“Not at all! Can you imagine, ban-harihn, the chaos that would result if every emotional young female, bored with awaiting marriage in the women’s quarters, should decide that she had a vocation and claim her right to challenge? The purpose of the law is to discourage foolish young girls from creating difficulties for their households, and for the state. Can you just imagine, if there were only a token penalty, and chaperons had to be provided by the Faculty, and separate quarters provided, and—”
“Yes, I suppose I see! But why should women be allowed to compete at all? No such idiocy is allowed in the other Professions.”
“The law provides that since the Profession of Poetry is a religious office, there must be a channel provided for the rare occasion when the Creator might see fit to call a female to His service.”
“What nonsense!”
“There is the Poet Anna-Mary, ban-harihn.”
“And how many others?”
“She is the third.”
“In nearly ten thousand years! Only three in so many centuries, and yet no exception can be made for one little twelve-year-old girl?”
“I am truly sorry, my friend,” said the Lawyer. “You could try a petition to the Council, of course, but I am quite sure—quite sure—that it would be of no use. There is too much public reaction to a female’s even attempting the examinations, because it seems blasphemous even to many very broad-minded people. The Council would not dare to make an exception.”
“I could make a galactic appeal.”
“You could.”
“There would be quite a scandal, you know, among the peoples of the galaxy, if they knew of this penalty being enforced on a child.”
“My friend, my dear ban-harihn—think of what you are saying. You would create an international incident, an intergalactic international incident, with all that implies, bring down criticism upon our heads, most surely incur an investigation of our religious customs by the intergalactic police, which would in turn call for a protest from our government, which in its turn—”
“You know I would not do it”
“I hope not. It would parallel the Trojan War for folly, my friend—all that for the sake of one female child!”
“We are a barbaric people.”
The Lawyer nodded. “After ten thousand years, you know, if barbarism remains it becomes very firmly entrenched.”
The Lawyer rose to go, throwing his heavy blue cloak around him. “After all,” he said, “it is only one female child.”
It was all very well, thought the Khadiih when his friend was gone, all very well to say that. The Lawyer no doubt never had had the opportunity to see the result of a lifetime of solitary confinement in total silence, or he would have been less willing to see a child condemned to such a fate.
The Khadilh’s sister had been nearly thirty, and yet unmarried, when she had chosen to compete, and she was forty-six now. It had been an impulse of folly, bom of thirty years of boredom, and the Khadiih blamed his parents. Enough dowry should have been provided to make even Grace, ugly as she was, an acceptable bride for someone, somewhere.
The room in the Small Corridor, where she had been confined since her failure, had no window, no corn-system, nothing. Her food was passed through a slot in one wall, as were the few books and papers which she was allowed— all these things being very rigidly regulated by the Women’s Discipline Unit.
It was the duty of the Khadilha Althea to go each morning to the narrow grate that enclosed a one-way window into the cell and to observe the prisoner inside. On the two occasions when that observation had disclosed physcial illness, a dart containing an anesthetic had been fired through the food slot, and Grace had been rendered unconscious for the amount of time necessary to let a Doctor enter the cell and attend to her. She had had sixteen years of this, and it was the Khadilha who had bad to watch her, through the first years when she alternately lay stuporous for days and then screamed and begged for release for days…now she was quite mad. The Khadiih had observed her on two occasions when his wife had been too ill to go, and he had found it difficult to believe that the creature who crawled on all fours from one end of the room to the other, its matted hair thick with filth in spite of the servomechanisms that hurried from the walls to retrieve all waste and dirt, was his sister. It gibbered and whined and clawed at its flesh—it was hard to believe that it was human. And it had been only sixteen years. Jacinth was twelve!
The Khadiih called his wife’s quarters and announced to her serving-women that they were all to leave her. He went rapidly through the corridors of his house, over the delicate arched bridge that spanned the tea gardens around the women’s quarters, and into the rooms where she stayed. He found her sitting in a small chair before her fireplace, watching the mobile plants that danced there to be near the warmth of the fire. As his sons had said, she was quite docile, and in very poor contact with reality.
He took a capsule from the pocket of his tunic and gave it to her to swallow, and when her eyes were clear of the mist of her drugged dreams, he spoke to her.
“You see that I have returned, Althea,” he said. “I wish to know why my daughter has brought this ill fortune upon our household.”
“It is her own idea,” said the Khadilha in a bitter voice. “Since the last of her brothers was chosen, she has been thus determined, saying that it would be a great honor for our house should all of the children of ban-harihn be accepted for the faith.”
It was as if a light had been turned on.
“This was not an impulse, then!” exclaimed the Khadilh.
“No. Since she was nine years old she has had this intention.”
“But why was I not told? Why was I given no opportunity—” He stopped abruptly, knowing that he was being absurd. No women would bother her husband with the problems of rearing a female child. But now he began to understand.
“She did not even know,” his wife was saying, “that there was a living female Poet, although she had heard from someone that such a possibility existed. It was, she insisted, a matter of knowledge of the heart. When the Poet Anna-Mary singled her out at the procession… why, then, she was sure. Then she knew, she said, that she had been chosen.”
Of course. That in itself, being marked out for notice before the crowd, would have convinced the child that her selection was ordained by Divine choice. He could see it all now. And the Khadilha had taken the child to see her aunt in her cell in a last desperate attempt to dissuade her.
“The child is strong-willed for a female,” he mused, “if the sight of poor Grace did not shake her.”
His wife did not answer, and he sat there, almost too tired to move. He was trying to place the child Jacinth in his mind’s eye, but it was useless. It had been at least four years since he had seen her, dressed in a brief white shift that all little girls wore: he remembered a slender child, he remembered dark hair—but then all little girls among his people were slender and dark-haired.
“You don’t even remember her,” said his wife, and he Jumped, irritated at her shrewdness.
“You are quite right,” he said. “I don’t Is she pretty?”
“She is beautiful. Not that it matters now.”
The Khadilh thought for a moment watching his wife*9 stoic face, and then, choosing his words with care, he said, “It had been my intention to register a complaint with the Women’s Discipline Unit for your behavior, Khadilha Althea.”
“I expected you to do so.”
“You have a good deal of experience with the agents of the WDU—the prospect does not upset you?”
“I am indifferent to it”
He believed her. He remembered very well the behavior of his wife at her last impregnation, for it had required four agents from the Unit to subdue her and fasten her to their marriage bed. And yet he knew that many women went willingly, even eagerly, to their appointments with their husbands. It was at times difficult for him to understand why he had not had Althea put on Permanent Medication from the very beginning; certainly, it would not have been difficult to secure permission tt> take a second, more womanly wife. Unfortunately he was softhearted, and she had been the mother of his eldest son, and so he bad put up with her, retying upon his concubines for feminine softness and ardor. Certainly Althea had hardened with the years, not softened.
“I have decided,” he finished abruptly, “that your behavior is not so scandalous as I had thought. I am not sure I would not have reacted just as you did under the circumstances, if I had known the girl’s plans. I will make no complaint, therefore.”
“You are indulgent.”
He scanned her face, still lovely for all her years, for signs of impertinence, but there were none, and he went on: “However, you understand our eldest son must decide for himself if he wishes to forego his own complaint. Your disobedience to him wasn’t your first, you know. I have become accustomed to it.”
He turned on his heel and left her, amused at his own weakness, but he canceled the medication order when he went past the entrance to her quarters. She was a woman, she had meant to keep her daughter from becoming what Grace had become; it was not so bard to understand, after all.
The family did not go to the University bn the day of the examinations. They waited at home, prepared for the inevitable as well as they could prepare.
Another room, near the room where Grace was kept, had been made ready by the weeping servingwomen, and it stood open now, waiting.
The Khadilh had bad his wife released from her quarters for the day, since she would have only the brief moment with her daughter, and thereafter would have only the duty of observing her each morning as she did her sister-in-law. She sat at his feet now in their common room, making no sound, her face bleached white, wondering, he supposed, what she would do now. She had no other daughter; there were no other sisters. She would be alone in the household except for her servingwoman, until such a time as Michael should, perhaps, provide her with a granddaughter. His heart ached for her, alone in a household of men, and five of them, before very long, to be allowed to speak only in the rhymed couplets of the Poets.
“Father!”
The Khadilh looked up, surprised. It was his youngest son, the boy James.
“Father,” said the boy, “could she pass? I mean, is it possible that she could pass?”
Michael answered for him. “James, she is only twelve, and a female. She has had no education; she can only just barely read. Don’t ask foolish questions. Don’t you remember the examinations?”
“I remember,” said James firmly. “Still, I wondered. There is the Poet Anna-Mary.”
“The third in who knows how many hundreds of years, James,” Michael said. “I shouldn’t count on it if 1 were you.”
“But is it possible?” the boy insisted. “Is it possible, Father?”
“I don’t think so, son,” said the Khadilh gently. “It would be a very curious thing if an untrained twelve-year* old female could pass the examinations that I could not pass myself, when I was sixteen, don’t you think?”
“And then,” said the boy, “she may never see anyone again, as long as she lives, never speak to anyone, never look out a window, never leave that little room?”
“Never”
“That is a cruel law!” said the boy. “Why has it not been changed?”
“My son,” said the Khadilh. “it is not something that happens often, and the Council has many, many other things to do. It is an ancient law, and the knowledge that it exists offers to bored young females something exciting to think about. It is intended to frighten them, my son.”
“One day, when I have power enough, I shall have it changed.”
The Khadilh raised his band to hush the laughter of the older boys. “Let him alone,” he snapped. “He is young, and she is his sister. Let us have a spirit of compassion in this house, if we must have tragedy.”
A thought occurred to him, then. “James,” he said, “you take a great deal of interest in this matter. Is it possible that you were somehow involved in this idiocy of your sister’s?”
At once he knew he had struck a sensitive spot; tears sprang to the boy’s eyes and he bit his lip fiercely.
“James—in what way were you involved? What do you know of this affair?”
“You will be angry, my father,” said James, “but that is not the worst. What is worse is that I will have condemned my sister to—”
“James,” said the Khadilh, “I have no interest in your self-accusations. Explain at once, simply and without dramatics.”
“Well, we used to practice, she and I,” said the boy hastily, his eyes on the floor. “I did not think I would pass, you know. I could see it—all the others would pass, and I would not, and there I would be, the only one. People would say, there he goes, the only one of the sons of the ban-harihn who could not pass the Poetry exam.”
“And?”
“And so we practiced together, she and I,” he said. “I would set the subject and the form and do the first stanza, and then she would write the reply.”
“When did you do this? Where?”
“In the gardens, Father, ever since she was little. She’s very good at it, she really is, Father.”
“She can rhyme? She knows the forms?”
“Yes, Father! And she is good, she has a gift for it—Father, she’s much better than I am. I am ashamed to say that, of a female, but it would be a lie to say anything else.”
The things that went on in one’s household! The Khadilh was amazed and dismayed, and he was annoyed besides. Not that it was unusual for brothers and sisters, while still young, to spend time together, but surely one of the servants, or one of the family, ought to have noticed that the two little ones were playing at Poetry?
“What else goes on in my house beneath the blind eyes and deaf ears of those I entrust with its welfare?” he demanded furiously, and no one hazarded an answer. He made a sound of disgust and went to the window to look out over the gardens that stretched down to the narrow river behind the house. It had begun to rain, a soft green rain not much more than a mist, and the river was blurred velvet through the veil of water. Another time he would have enjoyed the view; indeed, he might well have sent for his pencils and his sketching pad to record its beauty. But this was not a day for pleasure.
