Master of None (10 page)

“Yes.”

She then handed him back his datacard, the square of blank white plastic seemingly unchanged, along with a thin booklet written in the incomprehensible Vanar script, and delivered a small lecture he couldn’t follow, finishing with
“Pasyáthme?” Understand?

“Hae’m, l’amae.”

She stared at him, her eyes shifting back and forth as she studied his face. He looked away, embarrassed as he saw she knew he did not. She tapped the card in his hand, and spoke to him slowly, simple words a child could follow. “You come. We pay. You are only naekulam, not kharvah, not sahakharae. Not big money. Little money. Okay? Now you understand?”

“Hae’m, l’amae. Pasyáthsi.”

She nodded, satisfied, then tapped the booklet. “Read it,” she ordered, and stood up, finally allowing him to go.

He clutched his card and the booklet, thanking her as he bowed and walked backward, impatient to leave. It was already near sundown by the time he was ushered back out onto the street.

The same woman was at the gate, and she pressed a small coin into his hand. It was not money, but a Family token, presumably hers, for what he had no idea. He thanked her hurriedly, stuffing it in the sleeve of his mati.

“Come again soon, young bhraetae,” she called after him.

Not bloody likely, he thought determinedly as he walked quickly away.

VI

J
UST WHEN HE WAS BEGINNING TO DESPAIR THAT YAENIDA HAD FORGOTTEN
her promise, his pahlaqu arrived with a stout middle-aged woman in Nga’esha watered-blue saekah and kirtiya. He had not even the tiniest regret to be leaving the lifeless room in the charity shelter, and it took him less than two minutes to pack. The Nga’esha woman stood in the doorway, arms crossed across her robust chest, and glared ominously as he quickly threw his possessions into the wicker box: his spare sati, his few toilet articles, the battered reader and collection of bookcubes, the patched umbrella, the small potted plant just beginning to bud into flower, the few odds and ends he had collected since he had been released.

His heart thumped as he added a small box he’d scrounged from the rubbish, worn and stained with berry juice, expecting her to make him open it. It contained the dried leaves and seeds of what few unknown plants he had been able to collect for study. She didn’t, and when he closed the lid, she merely grunted and turned away. He carried the wicker box down the stairway and out into the bright sunlight. She had kept a taxi waiting. The driver took his luggage from him, tossing it carelessly in the open back before she indicated Nathan should follow suit. The pahlaqu and Nga’esha woman sat next to the driver inside the protected cab, their backs to him. He was only grateful he wasn’t expected to carry the damned box all the way on foot.

They drove through the massive gates of the Nga’esha Estate, the pahlaqu disappearing into the women’s quarters while the heavyset woman indicated for him to follow her before striding off without a backward glance. He picked up his luggage and trotted after her through the men’s gate. The star-shaped courtyard was deserted, the koi in the fountain sluggish under the rain-gray clouds.

He was shown to a large room in the House littered with large, embroidered pillows. A low, narrow bench ran both lengths of the long room, holding both a collection of rolled-up sleeping mats and wicker boxes much like his own. She led him to an unoccupied mound of heavy cushions, the farthest from the window. He stood in front of it, the wicker box still in his arms. After a moment’s hesitation, the woman muttered to herself, took the box from him, and dropped it unceremoniously on the shelf behind the rolled bedding.

When she left, boy’s faces materialized as if by magic, bright eyes watching him. None of them were over ten, which explained the bed’s minuscule surface area. He unrolled the sleeping mat and settled into his small space, arranging pillows under his back against the wall. Trying to ignore the giggles and whispers, he studiously reread one of the few books he had in Hengeli for a few hours before Yaenida finally sent for him.

Vanar medical genetics and submolecular technology matched or surpassed any of that of other modern worlds, the preservation and manipulation of bloodstock common for producing such utilitarian castes as the Dhikar. But that was as far as Vanar doctrines took genetically designing their offspring. Although mothers were quite capable of controlling the sex of their children, most chose not to, at least not those in the Nine Families. Vanar kinship expanded into complicated networks, the individual subsumed into the huge community of relatives. Child swapping and adoption were common and children raised with little attention to their genetic parentage. Daughters were needed to continue running the family business. Sons were valued for the profitable alliances the family could make with other business families. Those families with no daughters, rather than resort to a medical remedy, often arranged with another to adopt a younger infant from one blessed with too many in order to carry on the adoptive family’s financial interests. It was always better to be the only adopted daughter than the one competing with two or three other natural-born sisters.

Neither castes nor position within the family were rigid. Competition in the Common and Middle Families was fierce, as a woman of outstanding talent from the lower classes could always hope for marriage or even adoption into the High Families, supplanting a less-talented natural daughter. Business was paramount to blood. The households of the Nine Families were well supplied with such
taemorae
, unmarried professional women hoping to find either patronage or high-caste men who would make advantageous marriage partners.

For him, his adoption was far less complicated than the marriage would be. Only the peculiar circumstances entangled what was normally a relatively simple matter. As Nathan was neither an infant nor daughter and with Yaenida blessed by an abundance of family, including several sons as well, there had been a heated dispute over the necessity of adoption. He had had no family to negotiate for his side, or even to sign the legal papers. The argument continued, up to the last minute. After much vociferous haggling, he was made a temporary ward of the state for the two minutes it took his pahlaqu to sign the adoption consent papers, and Yaenida paid the token sum determined to be his fair childprice.

Nathan watched from the sidelines, along with dozens of Yaenida’s family and friends who gathered, he suspected, more out of curiosity than for the celebration. He understood little of the heated debate, despite Yaenida’s running commentary to him in Hengeli, although he felt vaguely affronted by this haggling over his childprice value and his lack of any legal rights. But neither would an infant have much say about the proceedings, and the contortions the Vanar Court found itself having to perform in order to satisfy its own laws amused him.

Yaenida asked for his datacard, and he pulled it out of the little holder around his neck he kept tucked inside his sati. The chief legal clerk slipped it into her reader to transfer the data to his new card, this one a pale blue ringed with High Family gold. Anyone could wear a blue sati, but it was harder to forge an identity card, his DNA encoded in the strip making it useless except to the one person whose genetic prints matched the card. The new card was adjusted to reflect his new family alliance and suddenly elevated status. There was some confusion and argument, which Nathan understood once he was brought over to the reader. The space allowed on the form to record an infant’s handprint was far too small to accommodate his adult-sized hand. Finally, they were satisfied with his thumbprints only. No one seemed particularly interested in the fact that he was literate enough, even in Vanar, to have signed his own name.

Her hand had to be supported on the reader, but Yaenida signed with a bold if shaky signature, then turned toward him with a brash smile. “Welcome, my son,” she said with a touch of irony. “Come and kiss your mother with the respect she is due.”

He kissed her brow, then the palms of her hands, before he knelt on the floor beside her chair, receiving congratulations and gifts from friends and family. Some were traditional: cloth and foodstuffs for the new mother, and an herb to lessen teething pain for him. The young woman who offered it stiffly was nearly vermilion with embarrassment, obviously unaware of the nature of the “child” when she had received the invitation. She couldn’t know how much Nathan valued it: he would examine the herb later, his botanical interest kindled by its medicinal properties.

Some gifts were practical: a full sati and matching mati for him in pale Nga’esha blue that would identify him thereafter as an unmarried member of Yaenida’s family. When he married, the mati would be changed to Changriti burgundy. Yaenida’s daughter, Yronae, laid it in his lap smiling at him arrogantly, her expression both chilly and faintly amused. Yronae may have been his new sister, but she was also Yaenida’s heir, the next pratha h’máy of the formidable Nga’esha Family. He also knew she had not approved of her mother’s odd arrangement. He thanked her in carefully deferential if stilted Vanar.

The amount of jewelry he received surprised him, until he later understood it was useless as none of it actually belonged to him. It was a sort of dowry, adding to his personal value as a spouse. Although he would keep it the rest of his life, he would be expected to wear it only at certain times, family ceremonies and spiritual holidays, as an advertisement of his quality for his wife’s benefit. The rest of the time, it would remain in Yaenida’s coffers until his marriage, when it would be transferred to Kallah’s. If he was lucky enough to father a daughter, most would be given to her first husband on her marriage day.

Two of her granddaughters supported Yaenida’s surviving kharvah as he tottered toward him, a man even more aged and frail than Yaenida herself, and one not in full control of his mental capabilities. “This is your new son, Grandpapa,” one of the women said gently, and placed the old man’s hand on Nathan’s face. It was dry and cold, feeling Nathan’s features with a tentative lightness, like the brush of insect wings.

“Welcome, my son,” the old man quavered, a bewildered look on his blind face.

Nathan kissed his brow and hands. “Thank you, Father,” he said, and the old man looked even more confused by his new son’s strange accent as he was steered away toward his own seat surrounded by his male relatives.

The afternoon’s feast, he later knew, was not as sumptuous as it might have been, but then, he was not really a child. Nor was he a girl, thus the celebration might have been unseemly were it too lavish. But Yaenida was the matriarch of one of the most important Families on

Vanar, and, bizarre or not, it was necessary to congratulate her for the new addition to her family.

It would also have been an unforgivable insult to Yaenida had Eraelin Changriti not showed up, but the hostility was palpable as she stepped in turn to praise Yaenida’s new progeny. Nathan had the brief impression of the evil fairy hovering over Sleeping Beauty’s cradle, predicting horrible death by spinning needle, as the Changriti pratha h’máy recited her formal admiration of Yaenida’s “infant” in a cold monotone. When she finally turned away, he shivered, reluctant to admit even to himself just how badly the woman unnerved him, still shaken by the murderous attempt on his life.

Her daughter, his future bride, smiled apologetically. Kallah dva Ushahayam Changriti, heir to one of the wealthiest and most powerful women on Vanar, who would someday become pratha h’máy of the Changriti branch of the Nine Families in her turn, was slightly over-weight and more than a little plain. She pressed a small box into his hands, her own trembling, before moving on. That touched him until he remembered he would be her third kharvah, lowest man on the totem pole. As they had not been included in the day’s ceremony, he had yet to discover their feelings about her marrying him.

He opened the box surreptitiously, and glanced inside. A small gold brooch in the shape of a fat beetlelike creature nested in the colored paper. Its body was a polished dark red stone, its middle legs designed as a clasp to hold the folds of his sati secure. It looked old, and very expensive.

“How nice,” Yaenida said quietly from her vantage point above him, and he shut the box quickly in reflex. “It’s yours, by the way,” Yaenida added in the same hushed stage voice. “You can keep it. It’s not part of your marriage value.”

He slipped it into the folds of his sati.

The feasting went on until late into the night. Yaenida had dozed off, snoring gently, cocooned in her chair with her fingers curled around the stem of a cold water pipe. His new father had been led away hours before by his small entourage. Nathan remained where he was, seated cross-legged on the overlarge cushion by Yaenida’s chair, adrift on his life raft in a sea of women.

They kept his glass full, and his head buzzed, pleasantly inebriated. His facial muscles began to hurt, and he realized he had been grinning rigidly for too long. He drained his glass, and rested it on his knee while he watched a group of women dance together at one end of the room, arms linked, feet weaving enthusiastically if somewhat erratically in a complicated pattern to the music. When one stumbled, and at that stage of intoxication it happened frequently, the line rippled like dominoes on a string, the dancers laughing as they flailed for balance. It was fun to watch. He nearly dropped his glass when someone filled it. Startled, his head jerked around. It was Kallah. She nodded to him stiffly and sat down beside him.

“Hello,” she said in hesitant Hengeli.

That surprised him. “Hello,” he returned.

After a few moments, she said, “How are you?” with the cadence of someone who has memorized phonemes by rote with no understanding of their meaning.

“Fine, thank you. And you?”

She looked around, obviously at a loss, before she smiled, her eyes squeezed by the flesh of her cheeks, and shrugged. “That’s all I know,” she said in Vanar. That she had bothered to make the effort surprised him.