Master of None (13 page)

Then, of course, pronunciation only added to the fun. Along with all the usual tangled diphthongs and umlauts, certain tonal words differing only by whether they rose or fell on the accent, the Vanar could make at least a half a dozen sounds with their throats and nose Nathan hadn’t a prayer of ever being able to imitate.

“
Think
, Nathan,” Yaenida scolded. Her reader was open, the Vanar script oversized for her failing eyesight. He sat with his own reader in his lap, taking notes in Hengeli. “If the inflection of the relative pronoun is in question, then in what cases can the passive participle be substituted?”

His headache blooming rapidly into a full-flowered migraine, he rubbed his palms into his eyes. He gave up trying to think, it had all become gibberish. “I don’t have any goddamned idea,” he grated between clenched teeth.

“When relative clauses are not indicated by a nominalizing particle,” she answered, then snapped her reader shut. “You are going to have to learn to speak better Vanar than this before we can even think of tutoring you for your marriage. The Changriti are not happy with your progress as it is, nor am I. Really, you’re making it harder on yourself than it needs to be. It’s easier for you to learn Vanar than it would be for a woman. You only have to learn to whom you are speaking. As a male, you only need to remember one personal form, and that is far easier than it is for women.”

“When you’re on the bottom, every way is up,” he said sourly. “Exactly,” she said, missing his sarcasm. Or, more likely, choosing to ignore it. “Pay more attention to the way children speak, Nathan. It would be useful for you.”

Two days previously he had seen a seven-year-old girl slap a five-year-old boy in the face for daring to call her
mitratam
. Normally, it simply meant “friend,” but the boy had not only unintentionally insulted the girl by addressing her in far too low a status, he had had the temerity of using a form exclusively reserved for one girl to address another. The boy had learned a valuable lesson: some children were allowed to grow up to become adults. He would not be one of them.

One of the children’s stories he had been given to teach himself to read had been about a wicked frog and a colony of virtuous ants. Although the frog was bigger and stronger than the ants, he ended up fleeing in terror because he knew that to protect their colony, the righteous ants would swarm over him and tear the living flesh from his bones, an inexorable force he could not resist. The underlying moral to that particular tale, Nathan understood, was that the individual would always lose to the community, no matter how strong he was, and that the individual with the strength of the community behind her would always crush the one without it.

“Poor little bastard,” he muttered to himself

“Who?”

“Me. This is giving me a headache,” he said, recovering. “Learning is sometimes painful,” Yaenida admitted.

Nathan rubbed his forehead. “I’ve learned enough Vanar history by now to know this language was invented hundreds of years ago,” he complained. “But why did you people have to make it so unbelievably complicated?”

“If that is a serious question, I will give you a serious answer.” She waited.

He sighed. “All right, it’s a serious question.” Anything to get out of endless recitations of verb tenses.

Yaenida stared at him and closed her reader, grimacing with pain as she leaned back into her chair. “Language reflects a culture, and reinforces it. The original language of our ancestors was created by and for men, just as Hengeli was. The original word for ‘husband,’ for example, translated literally as ‘master,’ while the word for ‘wife’ was ‘an invisible or worthless servant.’ ”

“I thought the first Vanar didn’t need a word for ‘husband’ anyway,” he said without smiling.

She took it as humor anyway. “Quite so. Without men, the colonists no longer needed men’s language. It wasn’t invented out of thin air, that would have been far too tedious as well as unnecessary. The first Vanar simply reshaped their language as they reshaped themselves.”

He kept his expression neutral.

“Families are the basis of our economy, so our language developed over time to conduct complicated business transactions. The authority to speak for one’s House depends not only on what status you have, but the changing flow of positions and ability to adapt. That is the nature of negotiating: give and take, balancing compromises. We even have several more private dialects used within Families that keep non-Vanar from understanding us too easily. When off-world companies are negotiating between different Houses, it works to our advantage when we can fall back into a tongue they can’t comprehend and work out our subarrangements on the spot.”

“How does anyone manage to ever learn it all?”

“You must be born into it. If it is any consolation to you, Nathan, you will never be fluent in Vanar. Never.”

He stared at her for a moment before he snapped his own reader shut, cutting off his endless notes. “Then what the hell am I doing?” he demanded. “Why are you putting me through this if you think I’m incapable of learning it?”

“I didn’t say you are incapable of learning it. I said it’s not possible for anyone to learn Vanar entirely fluently this late in life. If I had been able to say it in Vanar, that nuance would have been quite clear, and there would have been no misunderstanding.” He sat in silence for a moment before she went on in a more indifferent voice, this one more dangerous.

“So don’t take it personally.”

She snapped her fingers arrogantly and pointed her chin toward the water pipe in the corner. He kept his resentment off his face, pushing away from the large table to retrieve her pipe. As he set it up in front of her, she stopped him, one hand on his wrist. Her eyes were narrowed, annoyed. “Get used to it, Nathan,” she said, and he wasn’t sure if she meant being ordered around or resigned to his language limitation. Or both.

No doubt, had he been able to speak Vanar, he would have been able to discern the nuances.

He sat down and waited as she filled the pipe and lit it, sucking blue smoke through the silty water. “You’re trying too hard. It’s only important that you are able to speak basic Vanar and understand what is said to you,” she continued, more relaxed as the drug infused her bloodstream. “You will not be involved in any business, so that part of the language is unnecessary for you to learn. You have only one personal pronoun inflection to learn, that cuts your study even more. You won’t be expected to debate philosophical theory or current politics or any particularly deep speculation on the nature of the universe. As a respectable Vanar man and husband, you are merely required to be a polite conversationalist and make the proper noises of an attentive listener. In fact, you are expected to be silent most of the time, which I should have thought might come as some relief.”

He tried to unclench his hands from the fists they had curled into hidden under the table.

“Besides,” she said softly, trying to take the sting out, “many people consider your accent and mistakes to be rather charming.”

“I don’t want to be ‘charming,’ ” he snapped. “Being ‘charming’ is just one more way of keeping me a prisoner here.”

She squinted at him speculatively as she blew out a fine stream of smoke. It hung in thin gauzy layers in the still air of the room. “Nathan, when you have few assets, it’s wise to protect the ones you do have with great care.”

“Easy for you to say.”

She laughed. “But it is. Believe it or not, I was once considered ‘charming’ by your people. Worse than that: ‘cute.’ ” She batted her eyes at him with a coquettish smile, the affectation made grotesque not only by her ancient features, but by the sharp-edged sarcasm beneath. “But I never made the mistake of thinking it proof I was stupid or naive. Many of those who couldn’t see past my charming accent learned that lesson to their financial ruin.”

“Is everything like this?”

“Like what?”

“All business? Is friendship based on honesty and respect so impossible without a monetary value attached to it? Don’t you have any friends? Can’t people here love each other?” As he said it, he suddenly saw Lyris’s tear-streaked face in his memory, a strange echo in his ears. He pushed the image away.

“Of course we do,” she said. “But I suppose you mean love between men and women, don’t you?” She shrugged. “I love my children, all my children, sons and daughters. I love my kharvah, what’s left of the poor man. I have responsibilities to them, they have responsibilities to me. I even love you, Nathan”—she grinned, sharp-toothed—“in my own way. And
everyone
knows their place, it’s all written down in laws and contracts and traditions. It’s in our Families and our history and in our language. Places are not static, they go up and down like a dance.”

She inhaled again, murky water bubbling. “That you should understand. You enjoyed the dancing, didn’t you?” He didn’t answer, his drunken antics hardly something to boast about. “And what happens when one person screws up? Everyone else falls down. The closer they are, the harder they fall. Energy wasted in standing up, finding a new place, getting the music started again.” She
tsk
ed in the odd Vanar manner he found so annoying, sucking air sharply between her front teeth. “Better everyone knows their role in the dance. It’s more enjoyable that way.”

It wasn’t the dance he minded. He just wasn’t sure he liked the music.

IX

F
OR THE MOST PART, HIS LIFE BORDERED ON DEADLY DULL. FEW
Vanar men actually held jobs, and higher-status men of the Nine Families were not allowed to work at all, either outside the House or in it. Like the city, nearly all of the estate’s menial labor was carried out by machine, all of the cleaning, washing. Even gardening, to Nathan’s dismay, had been largely automated. He almost missed the physical exertion when he had been a mere naekulam hustling odd jobs from merchants.

Now he kept his body in shape by spending hours in the baths and swimming or exercising in the gymnasium. Whenever they weren’t intent on the condition of their physical bodies, endlessly sweating off the slightest hint of fat on their stomachs, men were expected to occupy the rest of their vast amount of spare time with learning to play musical instruments, in complicated dances and singing, painting, writing lyric poetry Nathan could barely follow. The music was pleasant but bland, the dance physically demanding but ritualistic, painting skillful and innocuous. It was increasingly apparent that men’s main preoccupation was to become as valuable an asset as possible for rarely seen mothers, wives, and daughters. The more valuable a man became, the more secure his position.

Within the House, there was little contact between the sexes, at least not overtly. Nathan found the segregation and obsessive atmosphere of the men’s house stupefying, the enforced community grating. Until his marriage, he would sleep in the boys’ communal room, wake early for a quiet breakfast laid out in a self-service manner in the men’s refectory. There were no tables or chairs, men ate in groups clustered around the cold food, or carried off their portions to eat in the enclosed garden.

After a time, he noticed how various cliques had staked out their own “territories,” jealously guarded and respected by most, while within each clique the pecking order became more evident. Whatever criteria was used to establish oneself within any of the cliques, Nathan fit none, and so remained an isolated observer. On rare occasion, hostilities would break out, oddly subdued arguments and gentle shoving matches too nominal to be called a fight. Staring with a scowling face too close to another, a finger pressed against a shoulder, minor “accidental” injuries until the pattern quietly rearranged itself, losers sullenly accepting the loss of their chosen spot. Nathan was intrigued that while Vanar men went to great lengths to develop strong, muscular bodies, the slightest whiff of any real violence met with instant alarm. Nor did it seem Vanar men were aware of the incongruity.

The rest of his companions quickly discovered Nathan was content enough to back away from their aggressive posturing. He found a corner no one seemed to want and ate alone if not in privacy. The constant mass of people surrounding him day and night began to be oppressive. He remembered with ironic regret hating the lonely isolation of his tiny room. If he ate early enough, or late enough, he could avoid the main pack, but risked either having to wait for the food to arrive or there being nothing left if he came too late.

After breakfast he spent two hours with Yaenida before Nga’esha business booted him out. He wandered what grounds were allowed to him, like the pacing of a caged animal, and it was on one of these neurotic prowls he found the hole in the wall.

It was not so much a hole as a low spot half hidden behind a group of ornamental shrubbery, the fallen stonework forming natural steps. Tucking his sati up to free his legs, he climbed to the top and stared over. Stones sloped toward the other side, and once over, he would have no trouble climbing back in. The indigenous jungle was still far in the distance, although this part of Yaenida’s property had not been well kept. No doubt this part of the estate was offlimits. He looked around quickly, then scrabbled over the wall, bare feet landing on a thick layer of dead leaves. He waited for several minutes, his heartbeat rapid, but no one came to stop him. For the first time in two months, he was alone. The solitude was a welcome relief.

This became his private retreat. Each day he went a bit farther until he found the wide river cutting him off from the rest of the Nga’esha’s enormous property. An old oak tree, thick trunk split in two, served as his seat, the crotch filled with a litter of detritus for a cushion. He could sit with his back against the rough bark, his feet comfortably propped against the opposite fork, listening to the rush of water. Somehow, it made the memorization easier.

“Vaktaemi be
, I (low person, male) speak.
Vaktaevah
, we (two low persons) speak.
Vaktaemah
we (low persons plural) speak.
Vaktaeasi, vaktaethah, vaktaeyam
, you speak.
Vaktaevaha
, you two (high persons) speak. . . .” He could sit with his eyes closed, reciting softly to himself, playing the study beads jammed in his ear, or simply stare off across the water longingly toward the distant wild jungles, rich with native flora in all their forbidden secrets.