‘This Ber Lusim is a monster,’ the girl said, her throat still tight and sore from the acid she’d forced back down.
‘Perhaps.’ Kuutma sighed heavily. ‘After this atrocity, we spoke the hrach bishat, the execration, over him. As you know, that curse was once reserved for those thought to be possessed. It meant that Ber Lusim was henceforward to be considered a demon, rather than a man. He had finally earned the title that had already been accorded him.’ Kuutma seemed to hesitate. ‘Tell me, little sister, when you were growing up, in the orphan house, did you ever experience cruelty, or discrimination, on account of your origins?’
The girl stared at him, false-footed by the sudden change of topic. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, at last. And then, ‘That was a long time ago.’
‘The other children called you names?’
The girl thought back. Yes, of course they had, but it had meant very little. It was the teacher-nurses who’d hurt her, by their coldness and contempt. Until she learned to find the place inside herself that they couldn’t touch — and to love colour and tone and texture and pattern more than she loved people.
‘What did they call you?’ Kuutma asked.
‘It was a long time ago,’ the girl said again.
‘But you remember, I’m sure,’ he prompted her.
‘They called me bastard.’ And mixer, by-blow, whore-sore, bleed, drop-in, mongrel, Kelim-fart, crossbreed, Adam’s apple. A hundred things, all variations on the same thing. Your mother went out into the world and spread her legs, waited for some passer-by to impregnate her, and now here you are.
‘Ber Lusim was also the child of a Kelim woman. It may be that the abuse he suffered as a result was what hardened his heart against the Kelim.’
Kuutma raised his glass, as though to take another sip of his water, but then merely stared into it, and for the longest time said nothing.
‘Perhaps Shekolni was right, in one respect,’ he murmured at last. ‘Change … change may come to us, whether we want it or not. I’m not even sure that this would be a bad thing. Stagnation is possibly our worst enemy at this point. Stagnation and decadence.’
He shook off the sombre mood with a visible effort, looked at the girl and raised the glass a little higher in a salute. ‘I shouldn’t speak this way,’ he said, ‘on this day of your triumph. I’ve watched you through your training. I don’t know if you were aware of that?’
She was very well aware, of course, but she made some modest disclaimer.
‘Yes,’ Kuutma said. ‘I’ve watched you and I’ve been pleased. Proud. Delighted. You’ve suffered all that’s worst in us, and you embody all that’s best. I hope to live to see you rise to the heights you deserve.’
The girl was uncomfortable with so much praise. ‘What am I to do?’ she asked, both as a way of changing the subject and because she was desperate to know.
‘I’m sending you against Avra Shekolni and Ber Lusim,’ Kuutma said simply. ‘I want you to find out how many men now follow them, and where they are, and what they’re doing.’
‘And bring them home to be judged?’
‘No.’ Kuutma shook his head. There was a sheen of sweat on his bald forehead, which made it gleam even in the room’s dim light. ‘Or at least, not immediately. Ber Lusim is a formidable opponent in his own right, and we don’t know for certain how many others stand with him. You could scarcely hope to prevail against them alone. Consider how you would be handicapped, in any such meeting. Consider how little you could hope to achieve.’
‘Then give me helpmeets strong enough for the task,’ the girl said. It never occurred to her to doubt that she’d be the leader of any such team: she didn’t underestimate her own abilities, and in any event Kuutma wouldn’t be talking in this way to a mere footsoldier.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will.’ And as he explained his plan to her, she began to realise why he had offered her the option of saying no to this. But she had no intention of refusing. She knew that Kuutma’s scruples on her behalf were mistaken and that the things he thought would be hard for her would come more easily than he could ever imagine.
He finished his speech and waited in silence for her to respond.
‘I’ll need a new name,’ she said at last.
Kuutma was taken aback at this apparent non sequitur.
‘None of this will work if I tell them who I am,’ the girl explained, holding his gaze to show how little the specifics of her brief had shaken or abashed her.
Kuutma appeared to consider. ‘No,’ he allowed. ‘Perhaps you’re right.’
‘So I’ll be Diema,’ the girl said. It meant sycamore seed, something light that travels a long way on the wind. She meant it both literally and ironically. She would be going a long way, but she intended to move by her own volition.
She’d never liked the name Tabe, in any case. It reminded her too much of her mother.
18
Diema went among the Nations and she learned their ways. She thought she already knew them, but there was a difference, she now found, between the self-contained trips conducted by her teachers and this — she searched for a word — this odyssey, this great journeying into the unknown.
To survive in the Adamite world, completely alone for much of the time, Diema had no choice but to match velocities with it — which was bruising and existentially terrifying. She immersed herself in random encounters, casual social gatherings, loose and trivial connections. Self-help groups, speed-dating parties, karaoke nights, business seminars, rock concerts, evening classes, public meetings and prayer circles: she shot through them like an exotic particle through a bubble tank, accreting mass and spin, learning her role.
Being young and (it seemed) fairly attractive, and not yet entirely in control of the social signals she was sending, she found herself more than once in situations where she might have been in danger of rape or assault. But she was adept at curbing the men who threatened her and judicious in her response, leaving them damaged but not crippled. Each of these incidents was a learning experience. She had never guessed how important sex was as social currency among the Nations, how large a part of their everyday interaction was based on it.
This part of Diema’s task, which Kuutma had called acclimatisation, was open-ended. It was up to the girl herself to decide when she was ready to move on. She took three months. Part of her rebelled against the loss of time and impetus, but she’d learned from her teachers how crucial it could be when you fought to have a firm footing. If you leaned outside of your centre of gravity, even a weak adversary could topple you. She wasn’t going to make that basic mistake.
Or perhaps she was just stalling. Some of the things she’d discovered out here, in the wasteland that was the Nations, affected her in wholly unexpected ways.
Television, for example. The first time she turned on a TV in a hotel bedroom, feeling the need for some background noise, and found herself staring at a stylised cat chasing a stylised mouse through a house that was magically endless, she stood there for five minutes like somebody hypnotised. How could these anarchic, insane little masterpieces exist? What idiot savants made them?
Cartoons became Diema’s one vice. Whenever she had to kill time in any place where there was a TV, she’d flick through the channels until she found some children’s network and sit for hours, guiltily but thoroughly absorbed in this world of talking rabbits and ducks, bombs labelled BOMB, non-permanent death, tragicomic peripateias and the wonderful Acme company, which made everything you could ever want and sent it to wherever you were.