Imagined Slights Page 9

  They hoisted the driftling up and carried her to the sledge, resting her on its rim.

  "Ready?" said Jane/197.

  The other three nodded, and carefully they rolled the driftling over and lowered her backside-first into the sledge, bending and angling her legs so that she would fit.

  "Ugh!" exclaimed Jane/243, pointing at the knot of bulbous fleshy lumps that nestled at the driftling's crotch. "Mother, what is that?"

  Jane/211 prodded one of the lumps tentatively. "Some kind of wart?" she hazarded.

  "Tumours, by the looks of it," said Jane/197. "And one of them's split open."

  "That must hurt," said Jane/211.

  "What about this?" said Jane/208, indicating the driftling's face.

  They all peered at the fuzz of hair that coated her cheeks and jaw.

  "Some of the elders have that," said Jane/211.

  "But none as dark and bristly," said Jane/208. "And besides, it can only be about a hundred bleedings since she was a girl."

  "There's another of those lumps at the front of her throat," said Jane/243.

  "And see the shape of her breasts?" said Jane/211.

  "Are they breasts at all?" Jane/197 wondered, eyeing the muscular, hirsute planes of the driftling's chest.

  "She has teats," Jane/208 remarked doubtfully.

  "All very strange," said Jane/197. "Come on, let's get her back to the village and away from these damned birds. They're making such a racket I can't hear myself think."

  They took it in turns to push the sledge along the beach. The driftling was heavy and the sledge's runners ploughed deep into the shingles, making the going hard. They rested on several occasions and gnawed on strips of fish jerky for strength. A train of seagulls followed them all the way home, gliding in their wake like wind-blown thistledown.

  It was decided that Jane/208, who had found the driftling, should have the responsibility of looking after her. Jane/202 was not best pleased at the idea of having to share their shelter, cramped as it already was, with a third party, but Jane/197, whom Jane/202 respected, convinced her that there was room, reminding her that duty to others came before anything else. Jane/208 rolled out the bed matting on the shingle floor and they placed the driftling gently there. The driftling had not stirred or uttered a sound since Jane/208 had discovered her. The sleep that held her was profound, deathlike. But still a pulse beat in her neck, faintly, like a kelp flea hopping.

  They wrapped her in a patchwork blanket, hiding her unnatural flat-chestedness, her angular, hairy body and that deformity between her legs. Then they went outside, sat in the shade of the shelter's awning and debated in low voices.

  Jane/208 was all for someone going to Mother Cave and asking her advice. Jane/211 agreed, since it was well known that Mother Cave had all the answers.

  "Maybe," said a surly Jane/197, "but it seems to me she's forgetting more and more of them every day."

  Three bleedings ago Jane/197's sharer, Jane/190, broke her ankle and was taken to Mother Cave to have the injury tended to and mended. She did not return, and when asked Mother Cave could not explain what had happened other than that she had made some sort of error. She did not apologise; she seemed confused but not at all perturbed. Jane/197, understandably, had been deeply suspicious of Mother Cave ever since, and never missed an opportunity to cast doubt on her wisdom and infallibility.

  "Perhaps Mother Cave isn't all she used to be," said Jane/208, "but she still has more knowledge about more things than the rest of us put together."

  "Who says?"

  "Everyone, Jane/197."

  "Not me. Not a lot of the Parthenai I talk to."

  "Still," said Jane/211, "what harm can it do if one of us goes?"

  "But which one?" said Jane/202, in a tone of voice that suggested she was hoping it wouldn't have to be her.

  "You're so keen, Jane/208," said Jane/197. "You do it."

  Jane/208, realising that if she didn't go no one else would, begged Jane/202 to accompany her. Jane/202 was initially reluctant, saying she had far better things to do, but Jane/208 was persistent, and finally Jane/202 sighed and said all right, she would walk with her as far as the entrance to Mother Cave but no further.

  Jane/211 wished them good luck, and together they set off up the beach.

  Finding the driftling had driven from Jane/208's head all thoughts of gifts and asking Jane/202 to be her sharer, but now, in turn, her excitement and curiosity were ousted by trepidation. A visit to Mother Cave was always associated with pain and difficulty. The Parthenai went to Mother Cave for one of five reasons: to get advice, to conceive a child, to give birth to a child, to be cured of an ailment, and to die. All of these involved some degree or other of suffering.

  Mother Cave stood at the top of the beach overlooking the village like a giant, empty eye-socket. The well-tended rockpool garden that surrounded the cavemouth could only be crossed by a series of stepping stones. The bed of the delta-shaped rockpool was purple with pulsing anemones, its waters speckled with silvery winks of sprats.

  Mother Cave herself hollowed unfathomably far into the cliff. No tribeswoman had ever dared to investigate beyond the first two chambers, but it was generally believed that on the other side of the second chamber's door Mother Cave continued for ever, like the beach, like the sea, whose only limits were those that the eye imposed.

  Pausing at the edge of the rockpool garden, Jane/208 begged a good-luck kiss off Jane/202, then turned and walked across the stepping stones.

  The cavemouth, three times as tall as she was, yawned around her, and she felt very small and pitifully nervous as she ventured into the darkness within.

  In still air, hush and shadow she paused to allow her eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom. Gradually the dim outlines of stalactites became clear, and she could detect the faint hum of Mother Cave dreaming. She moved slowly to the centre of the first chamber, her feet whispering on the smooth floor, and there, before a rusted, thronelike chair, she halted and inclined her head respectfully.

  "Mother Cave?"

  There was a groaning and a stirring from deep within Mother Cave's walls, and something sputtered and sparked, and a glass sphere half encrusted with smooth nodules of sedimentary deposit flickered and began to glow. One bright green eye snapped into life on the side of a large metal box, and the rusted chair shifted its arms and seat like a living thing, its joints whirring. In the next chamber along lights stuttered then shone, illuminating a steel table over which needles and scalpels were poised on armatures, all lustreless and corroded. Jane/208 averted her gaze from that room. You didn't have to know what went on in there (although she did) to tell that it had played host to more than its fair share of agony. Dark stains patterned the floor.

  Name/number?

  Mother Cave's voice reverberated achingly through Jane/208's skull.

  "Jane/208, daughter of Jane/151, granddaughter of Jane/93," she replied, speaking softly, because then Mother Cave would adjust her volume accordingly.

  State your purpose, said Mother Cave, her boom subdued.

  "We need advice on a certain matter, Mother Cave."

  Sit.

  Nervously Jane/208 lowered herself into the chair. Its cold, damp surfaces chilled her skin, sending waves of gooseflesh undulating across her arms and legs. She braced herself.

  The chair altered its dimensions to accommodate her tightly, then, with a squeal of servomotors, a helmet shaped like a jellyfish descended from between two stalactites and came to a halt a hand's breadth above the crown of her head. On pointed tips its tentacles danced over her face and scalp, searching, testing, and she winced in anticipation, clenching her teeth.

  "Ah!"

  She gasped as her skin was pierced in a dozen places at once. Pins of pain prickled around her eyebrows, ears, temples and at the top of her spinal column. She forced herself to keep calm. This was the worst of it. What came next was unpleasant but at least did not hurt.

  She closed her eyes, and with a sudden w
hoosh she was wrenched out of herself, hurtling upwards into the soul-womb of Mother Cave, diving dizzyingly up through a darkness lit with mercurial flashes of white. A surge of sparkles, like stars being cast across the heavens, fading to black, and then she was floating suspended in a warm, dark place where there was no sense of up or down, no night or day, just an eternal, lulling, tidal rhythm, and when Mother Cave spoke again, her voice came from all around Jane/208 and inside her.

  What would you ask of me?

  Jane/208 made a conscious effort not to frame her thoughts in words and to think in images, but all the same she suspected that her body, wherever it was, was speaking aloud. She explained to Mother Cave about the driftling woman, going over the events of the day in detail - her actions, her feelings, even, regrettably, her reluctance to report what she had thought to be a beached dolphin - until she felt she had provided every scrap of relevant information, and then she let her mind go blank to indicate that she desired a reply.

  Mother Cave was silent for an unusually long time.

  Then she said: A threat is posed to the tribe. The system will not continue to function peacefully and harmoniously while this random element remains unchecked. However, further deliberation is called for before an appropriate course of action can be determined. Consult me again when this "driftling" regains consciousness. Disengaging.

  A vertiginous plummet, and Jane/208 was back in her body again, feeling sick and woozy. The helmet disconnected its tentacles, and she reached up and rubbed the tiny tingling swellings on her skin where they had been attached. Then she clambered shakily to her feet, hurried out of Mother Cave, darted across the rockpool garden and fell, trembling with relief, into Jane/202's arms.

  "And?" said Jane/202. "What are we to do? What has Mother Cave decreed?" She laid a gently sarcastic emphasis on the last word.

  "What we would have done anyway," Jane/208 replied. "We look after the driftling. For now."

  For three days and three nights the driftling lay on the bed matting, breathing shallowly, scarcely moving. In all that time Jane/208 never left her side. Visitors came to the shelter and were allowed to peer in through the door flap, but most found their curiosity easily assuaged. Wrapped in a blanket, the driftling's most unusual features were hidden, leaving only her facial hair and the lump in the centre of her throat as visible evidence of her strangeness.

  Her provenance was another question altogether, one that was frequently discussed by the Parthenai as they went about their daily business. Since she wasn't one of them, that meant she must come from another tribe, another island. The received wisdom was that there were no other islands out there, that the Parthenai occupied the last spit of land left high and dry by the ocean. So Mother Cave maintained, at any rate, but plainly she had been misguided. (Some of the tribeswomen, not least among them Jane/197, suggested that Mother Cave might even have been lying.) And if there was one other tribe out there, might there not be several more? And if so, what were they like? Were they friendly? Hostile? The implications were enormous, and the village buzzed with speculation.

  But for Jane/208 this kind of talk was irrelevant. For her, everything was reduced to the simple issue of whether the driftling lived or died.

  She tried feeding her bladderwrack broth, spooning it between her salt-cracked lips, but the driftling swallowed only a few drops and the rest spilled out of the sides of her mouth. She massaged her limbs regularly, trying to work some warmth into her cold, resilient flesh, and at night she snuggled up to her, hoping to impart some of her own body heat. In this practice she managed to persuade Jane/202 to join her, although Jane/202 said she felt awkward and stupid doing it.

  In fact, Jane/202 was enjoying the attention that the driftling was bringing her. Around the evening fires, when the whole tribe gathered for a meal and songs and stories, Parthenai young and old would bombard her with queries about the stranger lying unconscious in her and Jane/208's shelter, and during the days she was constantly giving updates on the progress of the patient's recovery to anyone who enquired. That there was little change in the driftling's condition from day to day presented no problem. The nature of her freakish deformities alone was enough to provoke a lengthy discussion, and Jane/202's descriptions of her unusual hair and growths became ever more elaborate and exaggerated.

  Jane/208 was pleased that, even if only in a roundabout way, she was the one who had brought Jane/202 this popularity, but at the same time she wished Jane/202 would stop treating the driftling as just some bizarre novelty. For all her physical peculiarities, for all that she had been disgorged by the ocean more drowned than alive, the driftling was still a human being. She might not be Parthenai, but she was still a sentient creature.

  On the fourth day, the driftling awoke.

  It was noon. The air was still and unforgivingly hot, and most of the tribe sat under awnings or floated in the sea to keep cool. Jane/208 sweltered quietly indoors, naked but for a sheen of sweat. At first she didn't believe that the figure on the bed matting was moving; she thought confinement and the heat had begun conspiring to play tricks on her mind. Then the driftling gave a low groan and coughed twice, dryly. Her eyelids flicked apart. Her irises were green like the phosphorescence that glimmers within breaking waves at night.

  Jane/208 crawled to her side, knelt, and smiled down encouragingly. The driftling frowned back, puzzled. Blinking, she raised her head, looked at Jane/208's breasts, then slumped back on to the bed matting.

  The first word she said, in a voice like coarse shale, Jane/208 did not recognise.

  Barely a whisper.

  "Christ."

  The driftling then tried to raise her head again, but her strength ebbed and she abandoned the attempt. She rolled her eyes around, struggling to focus on the shelter's driftwood walls and the carved bone ornaments and the brittle dried-seaweed sculptures with which they were decorated. It all seemed to be too much to take in, so the eyes returned their gaze to Jane/208, asking questions that the driftling's throat, possibly on account of that solid-looking lump, was unable to iterate.

  "I'll fetch you something to drink," Jane/208 said, but by the time she had returned from the barrels with a cup of sea-cooled rainwater, the driftling had lapsed back into unconsciousness.

  When Jane/202 came in from bathing shortly afterwards, Jane/208 told her what had happened and asked her to keep watch over the driftling while she went and consulted Mother Cave again.

  "Must I?"

  "Unless you want to visit Mother Cave instead," Jane/208 replied, a little more irritably than she might have liked.

  "But why should I have to do anything for her at all?" Jane/202 whined. "She's your responsibility."

  "Now there's a surprise. The way you've been going on about her these past couple of days, anyone would have thought she was yours."

  "We can't all be as dedicated as you are to helping others, Jane/208. Some of us have lives to be getting on with."

  "I've only been doing what Mother Cave told me to do."

  "Some of us think that too much store is put by what Mother Cave tells us to do. Some of us think we should make decisions for ourselves."

  "By 'some of us' you mean Jane/197."

  "Among others," said Jane/202. Jane/197's opinions were gaining currency among the Parthenai, not because they were right, necessarily, but because Jane/197 stated them with an irresistible authority and charisma.

  "I'm not going to get into that now," Jane/208 said. She was too tired to prolong the argument. "I'm just asking for one small favour, Jane/202. Please?"

  Reluctantly, sullenly, Jane/202 consented.

  Yes?

  In the chair, in Mother Cave's soul-womb, Jane/208 mentally replayed the driftling's awakening.

  That is good. Still, there is insufficient data to formulate a plan of action. More time and information is needed. The driftling must be brought to me for examination and interrogation.

  Jane/208 made it clear that she had done her best but the drif
tling was still too weak to communicate with Mother Cave.

  Understood. For now, continue to look after her. In addition, do everything you can to ensure that she has as little contact as possible with the rest of the tribe.

  Jane/208 wanted to know why, but Mother Cave could not be coaxed to elaborate.

  If anyone asks why you are keeping the driftling from them, say it is because I told you to do so. That will be explanation enough.

  Jane/208 hoped so, but in her heart of hearts she was none too sure.

  The driftling was lying on her side with her eyes open when Jane/208 re-entered the shelter. Jane/202 was hunkered on the shingles in the opposite corner, staring at her. The driftling was staring back. Between them hung an atmosphere of bemused antagonism.

  "She squeezed me," Jane/202 said.

  "What?"

  "I had my back to her, I was kneeling, bending over, wringing out my hair, and suddenly I felt this hand on my buttock and she squeezed me."

  She sounded so mortally affronted, Jane/208 had to laugh.

  "It's not funny."

  "No, of course not."

  "Real."

  Jane/208 looked over at the driftling. "I'm sorry?"

  Hard-scabbed lips struggled to shape words. "Real. Had to see if she was. Real."

  "Oh yes," said Jane/202, "she talks, too. Though I can't say I much care for her voice."

  "Who are you?" Jane/208 asked the driftling. "Do you have a name?"

  The driftling weakly waved a hand: either she couldn't remember or it didn't matter.

  Jane/208 would have pressed her further had Jane/202 not chosen that moment for a dramatic exit, getting up and flouncing out of the shelter, tossing the door flap aside.

  "Wait!" Jane/208 followed her out, seized her by the arm and turned her around. "Wait. Where are you going?"

  "I don't know. All I know is, I'm not staying in there with her a moment longer. I'll find another shelter. Arrange for a new one to be built, if I have to. I don't like having to share our space with a freak who doesn't have any respect for another person's body."