Gene Wolfe - Lake of the Long Sun

"Did you really?" Maytera Marble smiled in return, her face lifted and her head cocked slightly to the right. "You should have joined us then. It would have been all right."

"I had Oreb, and he was frightened. You had reached the anamnesis, anyway."

Silk nodded to himself. There was nothing of Kypris in Chenille's face now, and the already-hot sunshine was cruel to it; but Chenille would not know that term. He said, "I hope that Chenille wasn't too much of a bother to you last night, Maytera?"

"No, no. None at all. None. But you'll have to excuse me now. The children will be arriving before long. I have to unlock, and look over the lesson."

As they watched her hurry away, Chenille said, "I make her nervous, I'm afraid. She'd like to like me, but she's afraid I've corrupted you."

"You make me nervous, too, Chenille," Silk admitted. As he spoke, both of them noticed Maytera Mint, waiting with downcast eyes in the diffused shade of the arbor. Softening his voice, Silk inquired, "Was there something you wished to speak to me about, Maytera?" She shook her head without looking up. "Perhaps you wanted to say farewell to your guest; but to tell the truth, I'm not sure she won't have to stay with you and your sibs tonight, as well."

For the first time since Silk had met her, Maytera Mint actually startled him, stepping out of the shadows to stare up into Chenille's face with a longing he could not quite fathom. "You don't make me nervous," she said, "and that's what I wanted to say to you. You're the only grown-up who doesn't. I feel drawn to you."

"I like you, too," Chenille said quietly. "I like you very much, Maytera."

Maytera Mint nodded, a nod (Silk thought) of acceptance and understanding. "I must be fifteen years older than you are. More, perhaps-I'll be thirty-seven next year. And yet I feel that- Perhaps it's only because you're so much taller ..."

"Yes?" Chenille inquired gently.

"That you're really my older sister. I've never had an older sister, really. I love you." And with that, Maytera Mint whirled with a swirl of black bombazine and hurried off toward the cenoby, swerved suddenly halfway down the path, and cut across the dry, brown lawn toward the palaestra, on the other side of the playground.

"Bye-bye!" Oreb called. "Bye, girl!"

Silk shook his head. "I would never have expected that. The whorl holds possibilities beyond my imagining."

"Too bad." Chenille sighed. "I have to tell you. To explain. Silk. Patera. We ought to be talking about the other thing. Getting money from Crane. But I ... We've a problem. There with poor Maytera Mint. It's my doing. In a way."

Silk said, "I hope it's not a serious problem. I like her, and I feel responsible for her."

"So do I. Still, we may. We do, I know. Perhaps we could go back to your little house? And talk?"

Silk shook his head. "Women aren't supposed to enter a manse, although there are a whole string of exceptions - when an augur's ill, a woman may come in to nurse him, for example. When I want to talk with Maytera Marble, we do it here in the arbor, or in her room in the palaestra." "All right." Chenille ducked beneath the drooping grape vines. "What about Maytera Mint? And the old one, Maytera Rose? Where do you talk to them?"

"Oh, in the same places." With a slight pang of guilt, Silk took the old wooden seat across from Chenille's; it was the one in which Maytera Marble normally sat. "But to tell you the truth, I seldom talk very long with either of them. Maytera Mint is generally too shy to reply, and Maytera Rose lectures me." He shook his head. "I should listen to her much more closely than I do, I'm afraid; but after five or ten minutes I can't think of anything except getting away. I don't intend to imply that either isn't a very good woman. They are."

"Maytera Mint is." Chenille licked her lips. "That's why I feel bad. As I do. Silk. It was . . . Well, not me. Not Chenille."

"Of course!" Silk nodded vigorously. "She senses the goddess in you! I should've understood at once. You don't want her to tell-"

"No, no. She does, but it's not that. And she won't tell anybody. She doesn't know herself. Not consciously."

Silk cleared his throat. "If you feel that there may be some physical attraction-I'm aware that these things take place among women as they do among men-it would certainly be better if you slept elsewhere tonight."

Chenille waved the subject away. "It wouldn't matter. But it's not that. She doesn't want . . . She doesn't want anything. Anything from me. She wants to help. Give me things. I understand it. It's not . . . discreditable. Is that what you'd say? Discreditable?"

"I suppose it is."

"But all this ... It doesn't matter. None of it. I'm going to have to tell you. More. I won't lie." Her eyes flashed. "I won't!"

"I wouldn't want you to," Silk assured her. "Yes. Yes, you do, Silk. Silk. Possession, you . . . We talked about it last night. You think a god . . . Me? I mean Kypris. Or another one. That horrible woman with the snakes. You think we go into people. Like fevers?" "I certainly would not have put it like that." Chenille studied him hungrily through heavy-lidded eyes that seemed larger than they had been outside the arbor, dark eyes that glowed with their own light. "But you think it. I know. We ... It goes in through the eyes. We gods aren't. . . Something you see? We're patterns. We change. Learning and growing. But still patterns? And I'm not Kypris. I told you that. . . . You thought I lied." Oreb whistled. "Poor girl!" And Silk, who had turned away from the frightful power and craving of those dark eyes, saw that they had begun to weep. He offered his handkerchief, recalling that Maytera Marble had given him hers, here under the arbor, before he had gone to Blood's villa.

"I didn't. I don't. Not much. Not unless I've got to. And I'm not. But what you call possession- Kypris copied a part, just a little part of herself." Chenille blew her nose softly. "I haven't had one little sniff. Not since before Orpine's .. . This's what it does, Patera. Not getting it, I mean. Everything you look at you think, that's not rust, and everything's so sad."

"It will be over very quickly," Silk said, hoping that he was right.

"A week. Maybe two. I did it, one other time. Only . . . Never mind. I wouldn't. I won't now. If you had a whole cup full of rust and held it out for me to take as much as I wanted right now, I wouldn't take any."

"That's wonderful," he said, and meant it. "And that's because of the pattern. The little piece of Kypris that she's put inside of me, through my eyes, in your manteion yesterday. You don't understand, do you? I know you don't."

"I don't understand about the patterns," Silk said. "I understand the rest, or at least I believe" I do."

"Like your heart. Patterns of beats. Yes, yes, no, no, no, yes, yes. There's this thing behind everybody's eyes. I don't understand everything myself. The mechanical woman? Marble? Somebody too clever learned he could do it to them. Change programs in little ways. People made machines. Just to do that. So that people like Maytera Marble would work for them instead of for the State. Steal for them. He...? Pas, you call him. He had people study it. And they found out that you could do something like it with people. It was harder. The frequency was much higher. But you could, and so we do. That was how it all began. Silk. Through the terminals, through their eyes."

"Now I am lost," Silk admitted.

"It doesn't matter. But it's flashes of light. Light no one else can see. The thuds, the pulses, making up the program, the god that runs in Mainframe. Kypris is the god, that program. But she closed her eyes. Mint did. Maytera Mint. And I wasn't through, it wasn't finished."

Silk shook his head. "I know this must be important, and I'm trying to understand it; but to tell you the truth, I have no idea of what you mean."