I had been told his advances were reasonably diplomatic and that he took rebuffs without loss of face or resentment; I was also told that in public he would act fatherly and protective, and that in many respects he was honorable, intelligent, and kind.
“But if you go to bed with him,” my mother told me as she helped me pack, “you’re sunk.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because he’s a conservative old sodder,” she said. “He professes to love women dearly, and he does in his own way. But — and this I learned from one of his partners- — he hates sex.”
“I’m confused,” I said, packing a cylinder of raw cloth into the single steel case allowed for the journey.
“He’s like a dog that adores the hunt but doesn’t enjoy killing the fox.”
I laughed, but Mother raised her eyebrows and pinched her lips. “Believe me. He lives for his work, and for an unmarried man of his stature, sex can be messy, irrational, and potentially dangerous. He has to live with this other self, a self he has never been able to control. But this is a prime opportunity for you.”
I made a face and folded my medicine kit into the case.
“Poke it,” mother said. I poked the kit and it squirmed.
“It’s fresh,” I said. “I didn’t know he was such a monster. Why does anybody put up with him?”
“A sacred monster, dear Casseia. If he didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him. Think of him as a family rite of passage. Resist his advances with humor and cleverness, and he’ll do anything in the world for you. And once he has your measure, he’ll stop pushing.” She surveyed the perfectly packed case with a critical eye, then nodded approval. “I envy you,” she said wistfully. “I’d love to go to Earth.”
“Even traveling with Bithras?”
“There isn’t a chance in hell you or I would go to bed with him.” She winked. “We have such good taste. But what an opportunity… Resist the beast, and come out the other side still a virgin, covered with gold and jewels.”
“Well…” I said.
Two days before we were to depart, Bithras summoned me to his offices in Carter City in Aonia Terra. I boarded the train in Jiddah and crossed to Aonia, removing my bag at the Carter depot. Carter was where most of Majumdar BM’s staff lived, the locus of long-range planning; it was Bithras’s home, as well.
I had never met Bithras and I was more than a little nervous.
Helen Dougal met me at the depot and escorted me as we took a cab through the transit tunnels. Helen was an attractive woman of twenty Martian years who appeared not much older than me.
Carter had a population of ten thousand BM members and several hundred applicants, most of them Terries immigrating because of Eloi laws on Earth. It was a big town, yet run efficiently, and the tunnels and warrens were large and well-designed. It didn’t seem crowded and haphazard, as did Shinktown, nor cleanly officious, like Durrey; but it certainly wasn’t cozy and familiar, like Ylla. The presence of so many Terries — a few of them exotic transforms — at times gave it a very unMartian atmosphere.
Helen fed my slate background on the subjects to be discussed and filled me in on the itinerary for the two-day visit. “Study it later,” she said. “Right now, Bithras wants to meet his new assistant.”
“Of course.” I detected no envy in Helen Dougal’s face. I wondered why Bithras wasn’t taking her instead of me — wondered if she thought I was moving in on her meal pan. Since I was a little younger in appearance… certainly in age…
With what I had heard, anything might be possible. I must have gone a little distant, for Helen smiled patiently and said, “You’re an apprentice. I have nothing to fear from you, nor you from me.”
How about from Bithras?
“And believe me, a lot of what you’ve heard about our syndic is pure dust.”
“Oh.”
“Advocates and family representatives meet this afternoon at fifteen. First, however, you’re going to join Bithras and me for lunch. Allen Pak-Lee is still in Borealis. He’ll be here the day after tomorrow.”
The lunch was held in a dining hall outside Bithras’s main office. I had expected moderate luxury, but the setting was Spartan: box nano food, hardly inspiring, and packaged tea served from ancient battered carafes in worn cups, on tables that must have had pioneer metal in them.
Bithras entered, clutching his slate and cursing in what I first took to be Hindi; later I learned it was Punjabi. He sat peremptorily at the table — it isn’t easy to sit down hard on Mars, but he did his best. The slate skittered a few centimeters across the table and he apologized in perfect, rapid English.
He was dark, almost purple, with intense eyes and handsome features puffing in his middle years. His head was topped with a short stiff brush of black hair lacking any gray. Thick arms and legs, well-muscled for a Martian, stuck out assertively from a short body. He wore a white cotton shirt and tennis shorts. Low-court tennis was Bithras’s favorite sport.
“It is pressing. It is pressing very hard,” he said, and shook his head in frustration. Then he looked up, his eyes glittering like a little boy’s, and beamed a broad smile. “Getting acquainted! My niece, my new apprentice and assistant?”
I rose from my seat and bowed. He did the same, and reached across the table to shake my hand. His eyes lingered on my chest, which hardly invited scrutiny beneath a loose jumpsuit. “You come highly recommended, Casseia. I have great expectations.”
I blushed.
He nodded briskly. “I had thought we would have time for a lunch alone, but not so — we start work immediately. Where are the advocates?”
The door opened and six of Majumdar BM’s most prominent advocates and managers entered. I had met four of them at social functions over the years. Three male, three female, they, too, wore white shirts and shorts, and towels draped around their necks, as if they had all been playing tennis with Bithras.
I had never seen so many crucial characters assembled in one room: my first taste of being at the center.
Bithras greeted each with a familiar nod. Introductions were ignored. I was here for my own benefit, not theirs. “Now I will begin,” he said. “We are an unhappy planet. We do not satisfy Earth. That is sad enough, but actually our progress is slow from any point of view; nobody can agree how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. It has been more than a year since the end of the Statist government, and all we have managed is to patch the Council back together and hold interim meetings. Economics have slid, and we are in worse condition than before Dauble threw her hammers. This has hurt trade. We do not have a single entity governing trade; Earth organizations must work with every BM separately, and contend with zealous district governors. We still run scared of actually cooperating in our own mutual interests, of being caught again in the Statist trap. So…“
He folded his hands. “We are hurting ourselves. There must be an end to recriminations as to who agreed with Dauble and who did not. We must stop punishing Lunar and Earth sympathizers with exclusion from the Council. As you know, I have been meeting with the syndics of the twenty largest Mars-based BMs for the past few months to put together a proposal for Martian unification, working behind and around the Council. I go to Earth with a package to present, and I present it to the Council for debate this evening. You have studied it… It is quick, it is dirty, it has handicaps. I’m giving you a final chance to criticize it, from a selfish perspective. Tell me something I do not know.”