“If you get him,” Esteban Francisco said, “Push him out a window. We’ll catch him. Easy.” He was grinning with a broad smile, showing all his teeth, as if to say he wasn’t serious, but I wasn’t at all sure he was joking.
“We don’t want to kill him. We just want to talk,” Esteban Jaramillo said. “Call us. Please. Call us.”
And with that, he reached up and put his goggles back on. Then Francisco reached over and tapped my goggles into opacity, and everything was dark. With one on either side of me, we boarded the transport—bus? Zeppelin? Rocket?
Finally I was led into a chamber and was told to wait for two full minutes before removing the goggles, and after that I was free to do as I liked.
It was only after the footsteps had disappeared that it occurred to me to wonder how I was supposed to contact them, if I did have a reason to. It was too late to ask, though; I was alone, or seemed to be alone.
Was I being watched to see if I would follow orders, I wondered? Two full minutes. I counted, trying not to rush the count. When I got to a hundred and twenty, I took a deep breath and finger-tapped the goggles to transparency.
When my eyes focused, I saw I was in a large disembarking lounge with genetically engineered pink grass and sculptures of iron and jade. I recognized it. It was the very same lounge at which we had arrived at Venus three days ago—was it only three? Or had another day gone by?
I was back in Hypatia city.
Once again I was surrounded and questioned. As with the rest of Carlos Fernando’s domain, the questioning room was lushly decorated with silk-covered chairs and elegant teak carvings, but it was clearly a holding chamber.
The questioning was by four women, Carlos Fernando’s guards, and I had the feeling that they would not hesitate to tear me apart if they thought I was being less than candid with them. I told them what had happened, and at every step they asked questions, making suggestions as to what I could have done differently. Why had I taken my kayak so far away from any of the other fliers and out away from the city? Why had I allowed myself to be captured without fighting? Why didn’t I demand to be returned and refuse to answer any questions? Why could I describe none of the rebels I’d met, except for two men who had—as far as they could tell from my descriptions—no distinctive features?
At the end of their questioning, when I asked to see Carlos Fernando, they told me that this would not be possible.
“You think I allowed myself to be shot down deliberately?” I said, addressing myself to the chief among the guards, a lean woman in scarlet silk.
“We don’t know what to think, Mr. Tinkerman,” she said. “We don’t like to take chances.”
“What now, then?”
“We can arrange transport to the built worlds,” she said. “Or even to the Earth.”
“I don’t plan to leave without Dr. Hamakawa,” I said.
She shrugged. “At the moment, that’s still your option, yes,” she said. “At the moment.”
“How can I get in contact with Dr. Hamakawa?”
She shrugged. “If Dr. Hamakawa wishes, I’m sure she will be able to contact you.”
“And if I want to speak to her?”
She shrugged. “You’re free to go now. If we need to talk to you, we can find you.”
I had been wearing one of the gray jumpsuits of the pirates when I’d been returned to Hypatia; the guard women had taken that away. Now they gave me a suit of spider-silk in a lavender brighter than the garb an expensive courtesan would wear in the built worlds surrounding Earth, more of an evening gown than a suit. It was nevertheless subdued compared to the day-to-day attire of Hypatia citizens, and I attracted no attention. I discovered that the goggle-eyed sunglasses had been neatly placed in a pocket at the knees of the garment. Apparently people on Venus keep their sunglasses at their knees. Convenient when you’re sitting, I supposed. They hadn’t been recognized as a parting gift from the pirates, or, more likely, had been considered so trivial as to not be worth confiscating. I was unreasonably pleased; I liked those glasses.
I found the Singh habitat with no difficulty, and when I arrived, Epiphany and Truman Singh were there to welcome me and to give me the news.
My kidnapping was already old news. More recent news was being discussed everywhere.
Carlos Fernando Delacroix Ortega de la Jolla y Nordwald-Gruenbaum had given a visitor from the outer solar system, Dr. Leah Hamakawa—a person who (they had heard) had actually been born on Earth—a rock.
And she had not handed it back to him.
My head was swimming.
“You’re saying that Carlos Fernando is proposing marriage? To Leah? That doesn’t make any sense. He’s a kid, for Jove’s sake. He’s not old enough.”
Truman and Epiphany Singh looked at one another and smiled. “How old were you when we got married?” Truman asked her. “Twenty?”
“I was almost twenty-one before you accepted my book and my rock,” she said.
“So, in Earth years, what’s that?” he said. “Thirteen?”
“A little over twelve,” she said. “About time I was married up, I’d say.”
“Wait,” I said. “You said you were twelve years old when you got married?”
“Earth years,” she said. “Yes, that’s about right.”
“You married at twelve? And you had—” I suddenly didn’t want to ask, and said, “Do all women on Venus marry so young?”
“There are a lot of independent cities,” Truman said. “Some of them must have different customs, I suppose. But it’s the custom more or less everywhere I know.”
“But that’s—” I started to say, but couldn’t think of how to finish. Sick? Perverted? But then, there were once a lot of cultures on Earth that had child marriages.
“We know the outer reaches have different customs,” Epiphany said. “Other regions do things differently. The way we do it works for us.”
“A man typically marries up at age twenty-one or so,” Truman explained. “Say, twelve, thirteen years old, in Earth years. Maybe eleven. His wife will be about fifty or sixty—she’ll be his instructor, then, as he grows up. What’s that in Earth years—thirty? I know that in old Earth custom, both sides of a marriage are supposed to be the same age, but that’s completely silly, is it not? Who’s going to be the teacher, I should say?
“And then, when he grows up, by the time he reaches sixty or so he’ll marry down, find a girl who’s about twenty or twenty-one, and he’ll serve as a teacher to her, I should say. And, in time, she’ll marry down when she’s sixty, and so on.”
It seemed like a form of ritualized child abuse to me, but I thought it would be better not to say that aloud. Or, I thought, maybe I was reading too much into what he was saying. It was something like the medieval apprentice system. When he said teaching, maybe I was jumping to conclusions to think that he was talking about sex. Maybe they held off on the sex until the child grew up some. I thought I might be happier not knowing.
“A marriage is braided like a rope,” Epiphany said. “Each element holds the next.”
I looked from Truman to Epiphany and back. “You, too?” I asked Truman. “You were married when you were twelve?”
“In Earth years, I was thirteen when I married up Triolet,” he said. “Old. Best thing that ever happened to me. God, I needed somebody like her to straighten me out back then. And I needed somebody to teach me about sex, I should say, although I didn’t know it back then.”
“And Triolet—”
“Oh, yes, and her husband before her, and before that. Our marriage goes back a hundred and ninety years, to when Raj Singh founded our family; we’re a long braid, I should say.”