Songmaster (26 page)

Kya-Kya’s arms were too thin. She noticed it again as she touched the keys on her computer terminal; if she ever had to use her arms to lift something quite heavy, they would break. I am not meant to bear burdens, Kya-Kya reminded herself. I don’t look like a substantial person, which is why I am forced into such insubstantial work.

It was a rationalization she had tried before and never more than half believed. She had graduated from the Princeton Government Institute with the fourth highest score in the history of the school; and when she tried to find work, instead of being flooded with prestigious job offers, she found herself forced to choose between a computer-pumping job at the Information Center in Tegucigalpa and a city manager’s position on some Godforsaken planet she couldn’t even find on the starmaps. “It’s an apprenticeship,” her adviser had told her. “Do well, and you’ll rise quickly.” But Kya-Kya sensed that even her adviser didn’t really believe it. What could she hope to do well in Tegucigalpa? Her job was in Welfare, the Department of Senior Services, the Office of Pension Payments. And it wasn’t an imperial office—it was planetary. Earth, of all places, which might be the capital of the universe but was still a provincial backwater at heart.

If Kya-Kya could once convince herself that she had not been given a better position because of some wrong impression she gave, of weakness or incompetence or undependability, she could then believe that, by her proving that she was strong and competent and dependable, her situation might improve. But she knew better. At the Songhouse it had been the Deafs and, not quite so much, the Blinds who had had to take a second- or third-class role in the community. Here on Earth, it was the young, the female, the gifted.

And while youth would take care of itself, there was nothing she particularly wanted to do about being female—changers were even more heavily discriminated against. And her gifts, the very things that could make her the most valuable to government service, made her an object of envy, resentment, even fear.

It was her third week there, and it had finally come to a head today. Her job took, at best, a third of her time—when she slacked. So she began to try (on the assumption that she needed to prove her competence) to find out more about the system, to grasp the overall function of everything, the way all the data systems linked together.

“Who programs the computers?” she innocently asked Warvel, the head of Pensions.

Warvel looked annoyed—he did not like interruptions. “We all do,” he said, turning immediately back to his desk, where figures danced across the whole surface, showing him exactly what was going on at every desk in his office.

“But who,” persisted Kya-Kya, “set up the way it works? The
first
programming?”

Warvel looked more than annoyed. He stared at her intently, then said savagely, “When I want a research project on the subject, you’ll be the person I appoint. But right now your job is taking inflation tables and applying them to classes of pensions for the budget year starting in only six months, and when you’re here at my desk, Kyaren, it means that neither you nor I is doing his job!”

Kya-Kya waited for a few moments, watching the slightly balding top of his head as he played with the numbers on his desk, querying the computer on questioning procedures. She could not understand the violence of his outburst, as defensive as if she had asked him whether it was true he had been castrated in a playground accident when he was five. When he noticed she was still standing there, he reached over and pointed to a spot on his desk where no figures appeared at all.

“See that blank spot?” Warvel asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s you. That’s the work you’re doing right now.”

And Kya-Kya returned to her desk and her terminal and began punching in the numbers with her slender fingers on the end of slender arms, feeling weaker and slighter than she had ever felt before.

It was not just Warvel, not just the work. From the moment she arrived, it seemed that none of her co-workers was interested in making her acquaintance. Conversations never included her; in-jokes left her completely in the dark; people fell silent when she came near a table in the lunchroom or a fountain in the halls. At first—and still—she tried to believe that it was because she was young, she was frail, she did not make friends easily. But actually, right from the start, she knew it was because she was an ambitious woman with remarkable scores from the best school on the planet; because she was curious and wanted to learn and wanted to be excellent, which would threaten all of them, make them all look bad.

Petty bureaucrats with infinitesimal minds, she told herself, jabbing at the keys on the computer. Small minds running a small planet, terrified of someone who smacks of potential greatness—or even potential averageness.

They had all watched her return to her desk from her interview with Warvel. Even the women had looked her up and down in the contemptuous way they had on Earth, as if the act of surveying her body expressed their opinion of her mind and her heart. There wasn’t one sympathetic look on anyone’s face.

She stopped punching keys and got hold of herself. Think that way, Kyaren, she told herself, and you’ll never get anywhere. Must do my best, must try to be good at it, and hope for a change, hope for some opportunity to shine.

Her terminal glowed at her, unwinking, as steady as her ambition, as blinding as her fear, and she could not concentrate on it anymore. And so she punched in her lunchtime, was given clearance—there were enough tables open in the lunchroom—and left her desk to go eat. The eyes followed her again, and after she left, she could hear the buzz of conversation begin. The office was unbearably silent when she was there; when she was gone, everyone was friendly.

It was in the lunchroom that day that she met Josif.

The setting was the good thing about Tegucigalpa. The Information Center was almost invisible from the air—all the roofs were planted with the same jungle growth that was lush on the hills. But in the complex itself, everything was a miracle of green and glass, huge transparent walls on hundreds of buildings rising twenty or forty or eighty meters into the air. The lunchroom was at the edge, on a slope, where it could overlook much of the rest of the complex—even had a view of the village that was all that was left of the ancient city. As Kya-Kya—or Kyaren, as she had taken to calling herself when she first discovered she was going to work on Earth, in an effort to sound more native—took her food from the dispensers and carried it to an empty table, she watched a dazzlingly bright bird float down from the roof of the Income Department and land on a small island in the Chultick River. During its descent, a wild thing living in a perfectly wild habitat, the bird had passed in front of the glass windows where dozens of people worked sucking information out of computers, twisting it around, and spewing it back in. A jungle, with electricity manipulated amid the trees to hold all the knowledge of a world.

It was because she was watching the bird and thinking of the contrasts that Josif was able to set down his tray unnoticed. Of course, Josif was quiet, too—as silent as a statistic, Kyaren would later tell him. But as she watched the bird walking around in a seemingly purposeless dance on the island, she became aware of someone watching her.

She turned, and there was Josif. Deep but open-seeming eyes, delicate features, and a mouth that perpetually smiled as if he knew the joke and would never tell anyone, because it wasn’t really funny.

“I hear Warvel ate you alive today.”

Gossip travels quickly, Kya-Kya thought—but couldn’t help being flattered that this total stranger would even care; couldn’t help being pleased that someone was actually speaking to her about something besides business.

“I’ve been chewed,” Kya-Kya said, “but I haven’t been swallowed yet.”

“I’ve noticed you,” Josif said, smiling at her.

“I’ve never noticed you,” Kyaren answered, though it was not really true. She had seen him around—he worked in Statistics, Department of Vitals, Office of Death, which was on the floor below hers. She just hadn’t cared much. Kya-Kya had been raised in the Songhouse, and the close association of the sexes had somewhat numbed her to the attractions of males. She briefly wondered, Is he good-looking? Is he beautiful? She wasn’t sure. Interesting, anyway. The eyes that looked so innocent, the mouth that looked so world-wise.

“Yes you have,” Josif answered, still smiling. “You’re an outcast.”

So it was that obvious; she resented hearing it in words.

“Am I?” she asked.

“It’s something we have in common. We’re both outcasts.”

It was a line, then, and Kyaren sighed. She had become expert at deflecting lines—bored students had tried many times to spark up a dull evening with attempts at seducing Kya-Kya. Once or twice she had gone along with it. It was never worth the effort.

“With that little in common, I doubt we have much of a friendship ahead of us.” She turned back to her food.

“Friends? We should be enemies,” Josif said. “We can help each other, as long as we hate each other.”

She couldn’t help it. She looked up from her lunch. She told herself that it was because she was tired of the lunchroom’s attempts at local color—Honduran food was wretched. She pushed the food away from her and leaned back in her chair, waiting for him to go on.

“You see,” Josif went on, assured of an audience, “while you’re busy rejecting me, you can have the satisfaction of knowing that you’re part of the majority around here. I mean, you may not be
in
, but you sure as hell know who’s
out
.”

She couldn’t help it. She laughed, and he cocked his head at her.

“So much for the frigid bitch theory,” Josif said.

“You should see me in bed,” Kyaren said, joking, and then was appalled to realize that instead of averting his attempt at seduction she had brought up the topic instead. He avoided any of the obvious repartee, however, and changed the subject.

“Your big mistake today was asking Warvel about history. How would he know? He could stand in the middle of a war and not know that anything had happened. For him there aren’t any events—only trends. It’s statistical myopia, a disease endemic to our trade.”

“I just wanted to know. How it all works. He blew it up out of proportion. I’m amazed that the word spread so quickly.”

Josif smiled at her, reached out and touched her arm. She did not appreciate the intimacy of the gesture, but tolerated it. “I’m awfully bored, aren’t you?” he asked. “I mean, bored with the whole business.”

She nodded.

“I mean, who the hell cares about any of this? It’s got to be done, like sewage and teaching children how to read and all that, but no one really
enjoys
it.”

“I would,” Kyaren said. “At least, I would enjoy it at a higher level.”

“Higher than what?”

“Higher than punching pension information into a terminal.”

“Go up fifteen ranks and they’re still all asses.”

“I wouldn’t be,” Kyaren said, then realized she had sounded too intense. Did she really want to confide her ambitions in this boy?

“What are you, immune from asshood? Anybody who presumes to make decisions about the lives of other people is an ass.” Josif laughed, only this time he seemed embarrassed, made a gesture as if to draw a mask down his face, and, as if he had actually donned a mask, his face went frivolous and innocent again, with any hint of deep feeling gone. “I’m boring you,” he said.

“How could you bore me? You’re the first person to talk to me about anything other than statistics in three weeks.”

“It’s because you reek of competence, you know. A week before you got here, everyone heard about your scores on the Princeton examinations. Pretty impressive. We were all set to hate you.”

“Now you say
we
. You
are
part of the group, aren’t you?”

Josif shook his head, and his face went serious again. “No. But in the opposite direction from you. You they shut out because you’re better than they are, they’re afraid of you. Me they shut out because I’m beneath contempt.”

When he said it, it occurred to Kyaren that he believed that assessment of himself. It also occurred to her that if she let this conversation go on any longer, she would not be able to get rid of this man easily.

“Thanks for the company at lunch,” she said. “Actually, though, you needn’t make a habit of it.”

He looked surprised. “What did I say? Why are you mad?”

She smiled coldly. “I’m not.” Her best you-sure-as-hell-can’t-get-in-bed-with-me voice was enough to freeze a tropical river; she imagined the icicles forming on his nose as she turned her back on him, walked away, and instantly regretted it. This was the most human contact she had had in weeks. In years, in fact—he seemed more personally concerned than anyone she had known at Princeton. And she had cut him off without even learning his name.

She did not know he was following her until he caught up with her in the glass corridor that crossed a strip of jungle between the lunchroom and the work buildings. He took her by the arm, firmly enough that she could not easily pull away, but not so firmly that she even wanted to. She didn’t slow down, but he matched her pace perfectly.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“About what?” she answered, coldly again.

“About not being friends. I need a friend, you know. Even a cold-hearted, suspicious, scared-to-death lady like you. While of course your social life is so full that you’d have to look months ahead in your appointment book to find an evening you could spend with me.”

She turned to him, prepared more by reflex than by desire to cut him dead, retrieve her arm, and go back to her office alone. But an inadvertent smile ruined the effect—she said nothing, just tried to stifle the grin, and he mimicked her, struggling comically to force his face into a frown and finally failing. She laughed out loud.

“I’m Josif,” he said, “You’re Kyaren, right?”