Edge of Infinity (37 page)

Pitar himself was a native son of Mercury. He too had long, frail bones, and had mineral toxins in his liver. As a man, he knew for a fact that he did look older, after ten years of marriage. He certainly wasn’t going to broach that subject with her, however.

Dangerous questions were a woman’s way to fish for insults. Hell lacked demons like Mercurian women scorned. Any rudeness, any act of dishonour, provoked endless feral scheming within the airlocked hothouse of their purdah. Intrigues would ensue. Scandals. Duels. Political schisms. Civil war.

“How very many golden links!” Lucy remarked, blinking. “Your mangalsutra necklace will reach from my neck to the floor!”

“Five hundred and seven links,” said Pitar through reflex.

“Why so many, Mr. Peretz?”

“Because that is the number of times that you and I have occupied this Anteroom of Profound Regret. Including this very day, our tenth anniversary day, of course.”

Lucy’s hands froze. “You
counted
all our conjugal liaisons?”

“I didn’t have to ‘count’ them. They were all in my appointments calendar.”

“How strange men are.”

“We did miss some scheduled appointments. Because of illness, or the pressure of business. Otherwise, logically, there would be five hundred and twenty links on our tenth anniversary.”

“Yes,” Lucy said slowly, “I know that we missed some appointments.”

Another silence ensued. The mood had darkened somewhat. They busied themselves with the marriage chain. At last it was complete.

Lucy linked the open ends with the catch that Pitar had provided – a modest, simple loop of big studded rubies. One long, golden, serpentine, female adornment. Lucy draped the chain repeatedly around her tapered neck.

“Madame,” said Pitar, seizing the moment, “that mangalsutra necklace, which I built for you with my own assembly devices, is as yet incomplete. As you can see. One end remains open, deliberately so. That is so that you, and I, can add new links to it, in the future. Many new links to this golden wedding-chain, Madame – from this fortunate day, until our final, fiftieth, Golden Anniversary. This is my pledge to you, in bringing you this gift. Deeds, not words.”

Lucy turned her blushing face away. She tugged the billowing skirts from the glass chair, and tiptoed toward a framed portrait set in the granite wall.

Pitar followed Lucy’s gaze. The personage in the portrait was, of course, famous. She was Mrs. Josefina Chang de Gupta, one of the colony’s great founding-mothers.

Mother de Gupta was a culture-heroine for the women of Mercury. This forbidding old dame had personally nurtured sixty-six cloned children. She was the ancestress to half the modern world’s million-plus population.

Clearly, Mother de Gupta dearly loved motherhood – mostly, for the chance that it offered her to boss around small, helpless people. Pitar had been taught the grand saga of Mother de Gupta in his crèche-school. A school where domineering women controlled every detail of childhood, preserving and conveying society’s cultural values.

Pitar had never forgotten his stifling days in that airless nursery school. Mother de Gupta’s husband, the equally-famed Captain de Gupta, had been the author of Mercury’s purdah laws of gender separation. It didn’t take genius to understand that old man’s motives.

Lucy was serenely ignoring the savage old matriarch behind the glass. She was studying her own reflection in the tilted, shining pane.

“I have earned every link in this chain,” she declared. “Five hundred marital liaisons! How awkward my postures were, and my body damp with secretions... But now I truly understand why marriage is a sacrament! Look! Look at my beautiful mangalsutra! I always wanted one! It is classical! I have dignity now! With a chain around my neck, I can hold my head up high!”

With a heroic effort, Pitar made no response to this strange outcry. First, Lucy had miscounted their number of liaisons; and second, he had always suffered far worse from the burdens of marriage than she.

Women had it easy in marriage. Basically, all that was required from women was to lie on a bed and point their knees at the ceiling. Society forced him to wrap himself in a veil, to skulk like an assassin into the women’s quarters – as if his identity, and his purpose there, were dreadful secrets.

A custom of total secrecy, for actions that were legally required! When incompatible worldviews collided, these were the monsters engendered. Ten dutiful years of marital intercourse, creeping in and out of airlocks – and yet women called men hypocrites.

“I have done my duty for ten years,” Lucy declared to her own reflection. Suddenly, she turned on him, eyes flashing. “Sometimes it’s all I can do not to laugh like a fool.”

“At least, after ten years of marriage,” offered Pitar, “they don’t make us listen to those silly love-songs, any more.”

A thoughtful silence passed, and then she fixed her gaze on his. “This arranged marriage is a vehicle of political oppression!”

Pitar tightened his lips. The women of Mercury were particularly dangerous when they started harping on their alleged ‘oppressions.’ They rarely died of being oppressed, but men were frequently beaten to death for that subject.

“You told me, once,” she said, “once, here in this very Anteroom, that marriage was an oppressive moral debt that we owe to the founders of this world.” Lucy stroked her gleaming, golden neck. “I never wept so much! But, of course, you were telling the truth – the truth as men see it, at least.”

Stung, Pitar rose at once from his dainty chair, which toppled to the stone floor with a discreet glassy clink.

“Our ancestors must have been insane,” Lucy said, with the serene expression of a woman uttering things no man would dare to say aloud. “They gave us this bizarre, twisted life – a life we would never have chosen for ourselves. Our marriage – our oppression – is not our fault. I don’t blame you, Pitar. Not any longer. You shouldn’t blame me, either. You and I are victims of tradition.”

Pitar steepled his fingers before his face and touched them to his moustache. “Mrs. Peretz,” he said at last, “it’s true that our ancestors had profound, creative ideas about a new society. They tried many new things, and many experiments failed. It was hard to create this world, our world, the living world, from bare rock. I myself have huge technical advantages over our ancestors – and yet I make mistakes, building this world, every day.”

Lucy gazed at him, blinking. “What? What are you talking about now? Aren’t you listening to me? I just told you that none of this is your fault! You, being my husband, that is not your fault! Can’t you understand that? I thought you’d be happy to hear that from me, today.”

“Mrs. Peretz, you are not taking my point here! I have a larger point than any merely personal point! I’m saying that we can’t blame our ancestors, and vilify them, until we come to terms with our own human failings! Consider the legacy that you and I are leaving to our own future! You can see that, can’t you? That is just and fair. That’s obvious.”

Lucy was not seeing the obvious at all. Or rather, Lucy was seeing the obvious in some alien, feminine way, in which his denial of their immediate suffering was an evil lie. He had offended her.

“Did we surrender too much?” Lucy demanded. “Did we say ‘yes’ too often?”

“Do you mean, Mrs. Peretz, that day, ten years ago, when I said ‘yes,’ and you also said ‘yes’?”

“No, no, you never understand anything that’s important... All right, yes, fine. Fine! That’s what I meant.”

“Do you mean to say that I should have rebelled? That I should have refused our arranged marriage?” Pitar paused. He attempted to look composed and solemn, as he thought furiously.

Lucy spoke up meekly. “I meant to suggest that
I
should have rebelled.”

“What, you? Why?”

Lucy said nothing, but she was clearly marshalling her thoughts for another unplanned outburst.

The anniversary morning, which had started so calmly, had taken a dreadful turn for Pitar. If men knew that he was talking in this way to a woman – especially his own wife – he would be challenged to a duel. And he would deserve that, too.

“All right,” Pitar said at last, “since this is our anniversary, we need to discuss these issues. It was brave of you to bring those up. Well, I happen to think that the two of us are excellent at marriage.”

Lucy brightened. “You think that? Why?”

“Because it’s an established fact! Look at the evidence! Here we are – you and me, husband and wife – living four kilometres under the surface of the North Pole of the planet Mercury. Our air, water, food, our gender politics, everything that we value, is designed and engineered. And yet, we thrive. We are prosperous, we live honourably! We are two respectable married people! Anybody in this world would say that Pitar Peretz and Lucy Peretz have a normal, solid, and fruitful relationship. We gave the world a son.”

His wife scowled at this firm reassurance. “They’ll want other children from us. No day passes when the lady elders don’t nag me about procreation.”

“They have to say that to us. They did their part, and now that duty is ours.” Pitar raised his hand, to forestall another outcry. “Now, I know – before Mario Louis Peretz was built – I felt some qualms about my fatherhood. Maybe I over-expressed those emotions to you. That was my mistake. I was young and foolish then. I didn’t know what fatherhood was. We can’t always know what is good for us in the future. If you asked a boy or girl to consent to puberty, of course children would never grow up! They’re just children, so they would rebel, and say no.”

His wife made no reply to his wise and reasonable discourse. Instead, Lucy was gazing, with a damp look of dawning surprise, at the blast-scarred stone wall. The idea of annulling puberty seemed to have fired her imagination.

“Even though our children are built, it’s a wise social policy that children should have two parents,” Pitar said doggedly. “Maybe we were forced to conform to that tradition, for the sake of futurity. But the truth is, fatherhood was good to me. Today, there’s a boy, eight years old, who depends on me for guidance in this world. So now I realise: life can’t be all about me. Me, and my own favourite things: interaction design, aesthetics, robotics, metaphysics... When you and I built a child, that forced me to realise how much this life matters!”

This heartfelt, responsible declaration would have gone over splendidly in any male discussion group; with Lucy, though, it had simply dug him into deeper trouble. Lucy looked bored by his worthy sentiments, and even mildly repelled. “So,” she said at last, “the boy made you happy?”

“I wouldn’t claim that I’ve achieved the Peak of Eternal Light! But who among us has?”

“I’m glad that you’re happy, Mr. Peretz.”

Pitar said nothing. He recognised one of those passive, yet aggressive remarks that women deployed for advantage.

Whenever women said the opposite of what they so clearly wanted to say, hell was at hand.

It was no use reasoning with women. Their brains were different. He had to change his tactics.

“How can I be happy,” Pitar offered at last, “when I’m sitting here in the ‘Anteroom of Profound Regret’?”

“Husbands never regret leaving their wives here. The formal name of this Anteroom is merely a social hypocrisy. One lie among so many in this world.”

“Mrs. Peretz, please stop being so politically provocative. Who can’t be sorry in this miserable Anteroom? Can you deny that this room is gloomy, stuffy and in very poor taste? Be reasonable.”

“Well, yes, this ugly Anteroom of yours is ugly, but not in the way you think... This room is harsh, and cold, and repulsive, but that’s all the fault of you men.”

“We men never asked for this Anteroom! Never! If it was up to us men, we’d go straight to the Boudoir. The Boudoir is augmented and ubiquitous, and it has beer and snacks, too!”

“Mr. Peretz, you are living in pure male delusion,” Lucy said sternly. “That Boudoir, where you and I have conjugal relations, that isn’t even my room! I have a private room of my very own. It’s much nicer than that tacky bordello where we have to interact.”

Pitar was dazzled by this brazen assertion. “Other men sleep in my own marriage bed?”

“Sir, that is not ‘your’ bed! And anyway, it’s very sturdy.”

“Sturdiness is not the issue there!”

“Well, it is to us women.”

“Fine, be that way!” Pitar cried. “If you want a surprise, you should see my barracks! We men live in luxury now! We have gymnasia, saunas, tool-sheds, anything anyone would want.”

“I’ve never seen your male barracks,” said Lucy thoughtfully. “That place where you sleep, without me.”

This was a dreadful thing to say. Only the lowest, most dishonourable woman, a woman lost to all shame, would violate purdah, risk everything, and creep into a man’s room.

The remark shocked Pitar, so he retreated into silence. His wife said nothing as well. The silence between them stretched, as their silences always did, and Pitar realised, with a long, tenuous, ten-year stretch of his imagination, that he liked it when Lucy shocked him.

It touched something in him. He felt metaphysically authentic. Shock put him in stark confrontation with life’s unspoken realities. It took daring to become real.

This was like that vivacious disaster, eight years ago, when he’d been in a duel for Lucy’s honour.

Pitar was a thinking man, but sometimes even the most reasonable man couldn’t back down from an insult. Pitar had not won that duel – in fact, he’d gotten a solid beating from his punctilious opponent. But in standing up for her, and for honour, he’d won a moral victory.

Furthermore, after the duel, Lucy had been allowed, by a long unspoken tradition, to leave her female purdah, and visit him in his clinic. Lucy came there publicly, flaunting herself, sometimes twice a day, to ‘heal the defender of her honour.’ She could stay there in the medical ward as long as she pleased, and express herself on any topic, and no one would dare to object.

Neither of them had known quite what to do with this unexpected intimacy, for they were only nineteen years old. But that incident had been truly exciting – a different side of life. Another mode of being. The scandal had changed him, and she had changed too, in her own way. A marriage under threat had depth, breadth and consequence.