Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

“Paul, KlausMaria Dalven asks that you come to her quarters. She wishes to speak with you,” the server repeated in its droning voice. Paul sighed and turned from the window. A minute later he crossed the invisible line that separated the rest of Teichman from the women’s quarters.

The air was much fresher here—his mother said that came from thinking peaceful thoughts—and the walls were painted a very deep green, which seemed an odd choice of colors but had a soothing effect nonetheless. Someone had painted stars and a crescent moon upon the arched ceiling. Paul had never seen the moon look like that, or stars. His mother explained they were images of power and not meant to resemble the dull shapes one saw on the navgrids.

“Hello, Paul,” a woman called softly. Marija Kerényi, who had briefly consorted with his father after Paul’s mother had left him. Then, she had been small and pretty, soft-spoken but laughing easily. Just the sort of pliant woman Fritz Pathori liked. But in the space of a few years she had had two children, both girls. This was during an earlier phase of his father’s work on the partho-genetic breeders, when human reproductive tissue was too costly to import from Below. Marija never forgave Paul’s father for what happened to her daughters. She was still small and pretty, but her expression had sharpened almost to the point of cunning, her hair had grown very long and was pulled back in the same manner as Father Dorothy’s. “Your mother is in the Attis Arcade.”

“Um, thanks,” Paul mumbled. He had half-turned to leave when his mother’s throaty voice echoed down the hallway. “Marija, is that him? Send him back—”

“Go ahead, Paul,” Marija urged. She laughed as he hurried past her. For an instant her hand touched the top of his thigh, and he nearly stumbled as she stroked him. Her fingers flicked at his trousers and she turned away disdainfully.

His mother stood in a doorway. “Paul, darling. Are you thirsty? Would you like some tea?”

Her voice was deeper than it had been before, when she was really my mother, he thought; before the hormonal injections and implants; before Father Dorothy. He still could not help but think of her as she, despite her masculine appearance, her throaty voice. “Or—you don’t like tea, how about betel?”

“No, thanks.”

She looked down at him. Her face was sharper than it had been. Her chin seemed too strong, with its blue shadows fading into her unshaven jaw. She still looked like a woman, but a distinctly mannish one. Seeing her Paul wanted to cry.

“Nothing?” she said, then shrugged and walked inside. He followed her into the arcade.

She didn’t look out of place here, as she so often had back in the family chambers. The arcade was a circular room, with a very high ceiling; his mother was very tall. Below, her family had been descended from aristocratic North Africans whose women prided themselves on their exaggerated height and the purity of their yellow eyes and ebony skin. Paul took after his father, small and fair-skinned, but with his mother’s long-fingered hands and a shyness that in KlausMaria was often mistaken for hauteur. In their family chambers she had had to stoop, so as not to seem taller than her husband. Here she flopped back comfortably on the sand-covered floor, motioning for Paul to join her.

“Well, I’m having some tea. Mawu—”

That was the name she’d given the server after they’d moved to the women’s quarters. While he was growing up, Paul had called it Bunny. The robot rolled into the arcade, grinding against the wall and sending up a little puff of rust. “Tea for me and my boy. Sweetened, please.”

Paul stood awkwardly, looking around in vain for a chair. Finally he sat down on the floor near his mother, stretching out his legs and brushing sand from his trousers.

“So,” he said, clearing his throat. “Hi.”

KlausMaria smiled. “ Hi .”

They said nothing else for several minutes. Paul squirmed, trying to keep sand from seeping into his clothes. His mother sat calmly, smiling, until the server returned with tea in small soggy cups already starting to disintegrate. It hadn’t been properly mixed. Sipping his, bits of powder got stuck between Paul’s teeth.

“Your father has brought an argala here,” KlausMaria announced. Her voice was so loud that Paul started, choking on a mouthful of tea and coughing until his eyes watered. His mother only stared at him coolly. “Yesterday. There wasn’t supposed to be a drop until Athyr, god knows how he arranged it. Father Dorothy told me. They had him escort it on board, afraid of what would happen if one of the men got hold of it. A sex slave. Absolutely disgusting.”

She leaned forward, her long beautiful fingers drumming on the floor. Specks of sand flew in all directions, stinging Paul’s cheeks. “Oh,” he said, trying to give the sound a rounded adult tone, regretful or disapproving. So that’s what it was, he thought, and his heart beat faster.

“I wish to god I’d never come here,” KlausMaria whispered. “I wish—”

She stopped, her voice rasping into the breathy drone of the air filters. Paul nodded, staring at the floor, letting sand run between his fingers. They sat again in silence. Finally he mumbled, “I didn’t know.”

His mother let her breath out in a long wheeze; it smelled of betel and bergamot-scented tea powder. “I know.” She leaned close to him, her hand on his knee. For a moment it was like when he was younger, before his father had begun working on the Breeders, before Father Dorothy came. “That’s why I wanted to tell you, before you heard from—well, from anyone else. Because—well, shit.”

She gave a sharp laugh—a real laugh—and Paul smiled, relieved. “It’s pathetic, really,” she said. Her hand dropped, from his knee to the floor and scooped up fistfuls of fine powder. “Here he was, this brilliant beautiful man. It’s destroyed him, the work he’s done. I wish you could have known him before, Below—”

She sighed again and reached for her tea, sipped it silently. “But that was before the last Ascension. Those bastards. Too late now. For your father, at least. But Paul,” and she leaned forward again and took his hand. “I’ve made arrangements for you to go to school Below. In Tangier. My mother will pay for it, it’s all taken care of. In a few months. It’ll be fall then, in Tangier, it will be exciting for you…”

Her voice drifted off, as though she spoke to herself or a server. “An argala. I will go mad.”

She sighed and seemed to lose interest in her son, instead staring fixedly at the sand running between her fingers. Paul waited for several more minutes, to see if anything else was forthcoming, but his mother said nothing more. Finally the boy stood, inclined his head to kiss her cheek, and turned to go.

“Paul,” his mother called as he hesitated in the doorway.

He turned back: she made the gesture of blessing that the followers of Lysis affected, drawing an exaggerated S in the air and blinking rapidly. “Promise me you won’t go near it. If he wants you to. Promise.”

Paul shrugged. “Sure.”

She stared at him, tight-lipped. Then, “Goodbye,” she said, and returned to her meditations in the Arcade.

That night in the dormitory he crept to Claude’s bunk while the older boy was asleep and carefully felt beneath his mattress, until he found the stack of pamphlets hidden there. The second one he pulled out was the one he wanted. He shoved the others back and fled to his bunk.

He had a nearly new lumiere hidden under his pillow. He withdrew it and shook it until watery yellow light spilled across the pages in front of him. Poor-quality color images, but definitely taken from life. They showed creatures much like the one he had seen the night before. Some were no bigger than children, with tiny pointed breasts and enormous eyes and brilliant red mouths. Others were as tall and slender as the one he had glimpsed. In one of the pictures an argala actually coupled with a naked man, but the rest showed them posing provocatively. They all had the same feathery yellow hair, the same wide mindless eyes and air of utter passivity. In some of the pictures Paul could see their wings, bedraggled and straw-colored. There was nothing even remotely sexually exciting about them.