"Yeah. Okay. No problem. I’ll figure something out for you."
John stood and headed back down the stairs, feeling ten years older than he’d been five minutes ago. As he shambled his loose-limbed way over to the main house, he heard Emilio’s call drift out the dormer window: "Thanks, John." He waved a hand dispiritedly, without looking back, knowing Emilio couldn’t see him. "Sure. You bet," John whispered, and felt a nasty crawling sensation on his face as wind off the Bay of Naples dried the tears.
7
City of In broker
2046, Earth-Relative
THE ERROR, IF THAT’S WHAT IT WAS, LAY IN GOING TO SEE THE CHILD. Who knows what would have happened if Supaari VaGayjur had simply waited until the morning and, unsuspecting, freed his child’s spirit to find a better fate?
But the midwife came to him, sure that he would want to see the baby, and he was rarely able to resist the uncomplicated friendship the Runa always seemed to offer him. So Supaari strode toward the nursery importantly: heavy embroidered robe rustling as softly as his slippered footsteps, eyes focused on the middle distance, ignoring the Runa midwife’s chatter with his ears cocked forward, not deigning to reply to her pleasantries— all in conscious mimicry of an aristocratic Jana’ata crammed full of incorruptible civic virtue and monumental self-regard.
Who am I to sneer? Supaari asked himself. A jumped-up merchant prone to unfortunate commercial metaphors in conversation with his betters. A third-born son from a backwater town in the midlands who made a fortune brokering trade among the Runa. An outsider among outsiders, who’d literally stumbled onto a pack of impossible foreigners from somewhere beyond Rakhat’s three suns, and parlayed that experience into this exacting facsimile of nobility that nobody but the Runa believed in.
He’d known from the moment the Reshtar agreed to his proposition that he would never be more than who he was. It didn’t matter. Isolation felt normal to him. Supaari’s life had always been an interstitial one, lived between the worlds of Runa and Jana’ata; he enjoyed the perspective, preferred observation to participation. He’d spent his first year among these exalted members of his own species studying the habits of the men around him as carefully as the hunter studies his prey. He came to savor the growing accuracy with which he predicted the snubs. He could anticipate who would refuse outright to attend a reception if he attended, and who would come for the sport of baiting him; who would fail to greet him entirely, and who would do so but with a gesture more properly due a second. Firsts preferred direct insult; seconds were more subtle. His eldest brother-in-law, Dherai, would push past Supaari through a door, but the second-born Bhansaar would merely stand as though Supaari were invisible and enter the room a moment later, as though it had just occurred to him to go inside.
Inbrokar society, taking its cue from the Kitheri princelings, ignored Supaari or gazed at him contemptuously from corners. Sometimes the word «peddler» would rise above the general conversation, sinking a moment later beneath gentle waves of well-bred amusement. Privately entertained, Supaari had borne all this with courteous detachment and genuine patience: for the sake of a son and a future.
The nursery was far into the interior of the compound. He had no idea where Jholaa was. The Runa midwife Paquarin had assured him of his wife’s health but added, "She’s worn to tatters, poor lady. It’s not like that for us," the Runao said thankfully. "For us, the babies come out as easily as they get in—it’s a mercy not to be a Jana’ata. And the Kitheri women are so small in the hips!" she complained. "Makes the job harder for a poor midwife." Paquarin admitted that Jholaa was upset by the birth, when Supaari asked. Naturally. Another reason for his wife to hate him: he’d gotten a deformity on her.
Busy with his thoughts, it was only when Supaari heard soft, huffing Runa laughter and cheerful, harmless Runa chatter drifting out of the kitchen with the smell of spices and frying vegetables that he realized Paquarin had led him through the nursery and past it. Passing through one last louvered door and entering a barren courtyard at the back of the compound, he noticed a small wooden box pushed into a corner of the yard. This was what he’d been brought to see, and he stopped in midstride.
No lavish embroidered nest net, no festive ribbons fluttering in the breeze to catch the child’s eye and train attention to movement. Just a rag from the kitchen draped over the crate to shade her, to hide her shame— and his own—from sight. It was not a new box, Supaari noted. It was ordinarily used for Runa infants, he supposed. A cradle for a cook’s child.
Another man might have blamed the midwife, but not Supaari VaGayjur. Ah, Bhansaar, he thought. A hit. May your children become scavengers. May you live to see them eat carrion.
He had not expected this, not even after a year of affinal insult and effrontery. He accepted that his daughter was doomed. No one would marry a cripple. She was more hopeless than a third, first-born but fouled. Of all the things he had learned of the foreigners’ customs, the most incomprehensible, the most unethical was the notion that anyone could breed, even those known to carry traits that would damage their offspring. What kind of people would inflict known disease on their own grandchildren? Well, not us! he’d thought. Not Jana’ata!
Even so, Dherai might have overridden Bhansaar’s pettiness and allowed the child a decent nest in the nursery for her single night of life. Daughters who serve travelers, Supaari thought savagely. Cowards for sons, Dherai.
He strode to the cradle, snatching the cloth away with a hooked claw. "It’s not the child’s fault, lord," the midwife said hurriedly, frightened by the acrid smell of anger. "She’s done no wrong, poor thing."
And who is to blame? he meant to demand. Who put her in this detestable little—. Who brought her to this wretched—
I did, he thought bleakly, gazing down.
Bathed, fed and sleeping, his daughter had the fragrance of rain in the first moments of a storm. He was dizzy with it, actually swayed before kneeling. Studying her tiny perfect face, he raised his hands to his mouth and bit hard, six times, severing each long claw at the quick, bewitched by the need to hold her and to do so without harming her. Almost at the same moment, he realized that he’d just committed a humiliating and irreversible gaffe. Clawless, he would have to let Ljaat-sa Kitheri carry out the father’s duty after all. But his mind was not clear, and he lifted his child from the box, bringing her awkwardly to his chest.
"Those Kitheri eyes! She’s a beauty, like her mother," the Runa midwife observed guilelessly, happy now that the Jana’ata had calmed himself. "But she has your nose, lord."
He laughed in spite of everything and, careless of his robes, shifted on the damp clay tiles that were still shining from the morning’s drizzle, so that he could rest the baby in his lap. Aching, he ran a hand along the velvety softness of her cheek, his stubby fingertips feeling strangely naked, and as unprotected as his daughter’s throat. I was not meant to breed, he thought. Her twisted foot is a sign. I have done everything wrong.
With all his considerable courage, his own throat tight, Supaari fumbled at the wrappings that concealed her, forcing himself to look at what had destined this child to die in infancy, taking all his hopes with her into darkness. What he saw pulled the breath from him.
"Paquarin," he said very carefully, in a voice he hoped would not alarm her. "Paquarin, who has seen the child, besides you and me?"