My mother’s brother came to talk to me, while I was enjoying the party in the Hotel Terran’s ballroom. It was the second night before my wedding, the night traditionally given over to partying on the part of the young couple - independently of each other, of course, before everyone got back down to the serious business of living.
As the party got started, and the last of the invitees turned up, my uncle Fyedarokh pushed his way past the bouncers and shouted something at me. I hardly heard him, which wasn’t surprising – the musicians were starting up. The band I had hired were just getting into amplified instrumentation, and when they got hot, they got loud.
He got up close to me and grabbed me by the arm. “Is there some place quiet where we could talk?”
I set my drink down on a table and nodded. “Come with me.”
We went out the doors into the courtyard - the doors shut behind us and shut out most of the music. Fyedarokh was a musician, true, but he was interested in combining the best of Earth jazz and the saddest of Keraii-Seraii Se-Tshairzh (The Kero City blues). The modern dance music wasn’t for him.
He looked troubled. I couldn’t guess what about. If it had’ve been the publishing house I was setting up, he would’ve used the usual channels, so it was hardly that. And besides, I did check the accounts before starting the celebrations. Or before proposing to Rhoda Apostolou, the beautiful and talented Earthwoman, the glorious and gorgeous daughter of the world’s first anthropologist.
And it couldn’t be anything to do with my blood-brother Ieghan - he was stolid and firm where I was accused of being rash and irresponsible. He wasn’t visible, talking to the hotel staff in the kitchens while I had stayed outside to welcome my guests.
The courtyard was dimly lit by the electric lanterns that had come into fashion recently, mostly as a result of the factories that my mother had managed to establish in Keraii-Sero city to manufacture all sorts of Earth technologies. And Rhodzaii Se-Teno the Sun’s Brother - Alpha Centauri Alpha, to use the Earth words - was rising behind the tall white tower of the Hotel Terran’s Left Wing, painting the long and low Right Wing a bright white.
Rhodzaii Se-Teno lit my uncle’s face, casting his eyes as caverns in his forehead above the length of his nose and the clean white tombstones of his smile. He didn’t seem happy.
“Tyeari, I wish there were some easier way to say this – but you recall some of your mother’s recent activities? The Technical Training, the Literacy Campaign and the three factories she established over the past five years?”
I grimaced. No, nothing had succeeded in weaning my uncle from the pretensions of using Erava when he felt he had something important to say. His wife was to blame for this, of course - she was distinctly an Erava-speaker. Though, mind you, so was Kenarant, Ieghan’s wife, and she was a member of the North Wall Family, the aristocrats who had maintained Keraii-Sero’s northern defences ever since the Three Cities had combined seven hundred years ago. But Kenarant was relaxed about Tanala-speakers, unlike so many other Erava-speakers.
“Yes, I do remember. I’ve tended to stay away from that, though. I see her every so often, but ... you know how it is!”
He sighed. Probably as much to do with me using Polyglaise, the Earth speech, as much as anything else. “You know how there was opposition to some of her ideas ... mostly from those who were afraid of Narena action?”
“Yes. So what! I knew that, so did practically everyone she talked to.”
He sighed again. “She knew that. So she told me to give you this, for when she died, or if she was killed ...”
The world seemed to stop. Sound died amidst the roaring in my ears. I stumbled forward. “What?”
“Your mother is dead. Poisoned, and the Narena Second Hand is suspected. She gave me this, a few years ago, with instructions to pass it on to you.”
And with that, he pressed a small rectangle into my hands. I dropped it. My hands rose.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this?”
He coughed and pushed my hands down. “Well, you know how it is - you’ve often complained to me about the downside of having a famous mother.”
“But ...”
“Take your hands off my throat!!!”
And someone opened the doors to the hall, and shouted out at us, was there anything the matter, was everything all right, could they help?
In the bright light washing out over the dark green groundweed, I quickly removed my hands from Fyedarokh’s throat.
“No, things are okay.”
They spoke amongst themselves, and shut the doors. Fyedarokh glared at me, then cast around for a seat. His eyes took in the colonnades surrounding the courtyards, and the windows facing it. He glared at the River Resitasaon flowing so innocently by the Towers. He sat under a short wine palm on the small seat, and waved me down. “Take a seat, Tyeari. There’s more. And pick up that handheld message.”
I picked it up and sat next to him. He grimaced. “Did you ever learn who your father was?”
“No. Mum never talked about him. Did she even know who he was?”
He laughed. He was so bitter. “Of course. But it shocked her, his death, and when she realized just how determined Narena were that Earth knowledge and Centauri needs would remain totally separate, she decided never to speak of him, or she would lose you to them as well.”
“Apparently it didn’t work ...”
“You’re still alive!”
“But she isn’t ...!”
“You lived for this long, and you’ve got a bride waiting for you!”
I decided to change the topic. “And how did my ever loving sister react to this news?”
“She - I couldn’t find Arolan. I thought she would’ve been at the Embassy, celebrating with your bride - I mean, she actually was invited, in spite of her anthropology thesis on the Earth customs the Embassy held dear! - but she didn’t turn up, and I went around some of the places she is reputed to hang out at, but they hadn’t seen her either.”
“Typical Anarol, again. Small loss!”
“I’ll never understand how Eferiane managed to put up with you stupid kids and your constant bickering! And no, she doesn’t know who your father is, either!”
I spat on the groundweed. “What did I ever have to do with it? Well, you seem to know who he is, and now Mum’s dead, you - and Mum - seem to think I finally deserve to know. Who was he?!?”
“Has it ever occurred to you that most Centauri, even those who have worked with Earth for longer than you or I, have had less luck than you in getting the sort of help that you’ve received?”
“Well, Mum was popular with the Earth Embassy - something to do with being a foster-child of one of the Earth women ...”
He smiled, then chuckled softly. I ground my teeth. “Close, but like Rieari with the sling, your enemy gets up and walks away. I don’t know why she kept this from you, but, Tyeari, you are regarded by Earth as an Earth citizen.”
I dropped the rectangular message again. You could’ve thrown me off the top of the Carpenter’s Temple with no effort, I was so shocked. “Drown me in the River twice for luck?! I’m - hey, I’ve been a citizen of Kero-Siritse for all my life! How did I become a citizen of Earth?”
“How do you think Sparky Dulles became a citizen of Earth, of its Yuwen Siritse?”
“He was born one, that’s easy!”
He laughed, softly this time, and when I looked closely at him, there were tears in his eyes.
“Your father was a brilliant - but shy - Earth geneticist named Eric Sibi. He taught Eferiane, back when she was only a young woman obsessed with knowledge. They fell in love and ... what a couple! People used to warn them, saying their love would get the goddess of love jealous and there was no telling what she would do to them ...”
“But, but how? I mean, Earth people and us Centauri humans can’t interbreed, can we?”
He replied, dryly, “You’re the one marrying the Earthwoman, Tyeari, not me!”
“Yes, but that’s different! She couldn’t keep her eyes off me, and we shared some experiences, and her parents being her parents ...!”
Fog started thickening along the river bank, and starting to flow up towards us.
“The world’s first anthropologists, you mean! Well, your mother was one of his close friends, and he agreed with her.”
I made to interrupt, and he added, “On this, I mean. She had an idea for a set of genetic transforms that’d make it possible for her and Eric to finally have children. Eric didn’t live to see it happen. He died in Kelsao-Seriza, the naiserizan territory, mountain-climbing.”
He bent down and picked up the message. “I didn’t hand this on to you for you to keep losing it. Go on, find out what your mother had to tell you.”
It would be improper for me to tell others what my mother had had to say to me, only to say that she showed me her lover’s face and explained why she had not been able to talk about him after his death. Why she had sworn her friends to silence and had carried the stigma of bearing an illegitimate child for all of my thirty years. (Twenty-one years by the weird Earth count of years. I don’t know how they manage that!)
He sat back with a sigh as I left for the ballroom.
I must’ve looked terrible when I wandered back into the ballroom. A ghost back from the grave, looking for a likely victim, a spectre haunting Hotel Terran.
The band stopped playing, as though they had seen a ghost. Then they started playing again, a dirge for a wake. In a minor key, dipping into despair with every note. They reproduced the wailing of the old women with uncanny accuracy.
I could’ve strangled them! With their own strings.
I wound up at the bar. I picked up a glass, filled with some punch. On the bottom, there would be an inscription, something calling it “Paris-Lead”, or so. One of the innumerable Earth-clone products that had hit the market after the Earth star-ship had drifted into the bisolar system, and had unwittingly brought the news that Centauri humanity now had an independent champion against the worst of Narena depredations. Centauri humanity and every other humanity in the galaxy that rumour claimed still existed, abducted from Earth so many thousands of years ago, for all sorts of reasons ...
Earth! Earth, that strange place, one of the brightest stars in the night sky, Earth, who we all derived from.
Earth, who I had loved as an idea of freedom, Earth who I had fallen in love with in the person of my Rhoda, Earth who had sentenced my mother - through me - to a death by poison. Probably at the instigation of the Narena, through their Second Hand, those fools who disbelieved that humanity should ever live independently from their ancient masters.
I don’t know why everybody had to stop dancing and stare. I wanted a hole in the ground, a place to hide and bewail my slowly-unravelling world. And as tears forced their way down my cheeks, I clenched my fist. I slammed the glass onto the bar.
Glass flew everywhere, as did the punch.
“Well, keep on dancing! Party on! Don’t worry about me! Stop staring at me! Stop staring!! Stop staring!!!”
I think that was why Ieghan, my blood-brother, came to the door of the kitchens, and stared at me. Some of the other blood-brother couples started talking amongst themselves.
I lifted my head to the ceiling and started wailing. I would never see my mother again. My mother would never see me and Rhoda wed each other. She would never pester me about grandchildren now – not that I had ever believed in that possibility, except now I knew what I knew ...
I looked at my hand, It was bleeding from the glass stuck in it. The washrooms were handy. I turned and went into them.
Ieghan was there before me.
“Tyeari, Tyeari, Tyeari. Whatever happened to you?”
He washed my hand and picked the glass out of it. A medicine cabinet provided him with a bandage.
“My mother died. Poison, probably Narena.”
I spoke like an automaton. A computer couldn’t’ve been more emotionless than me then.
I broke down again.
He clasped me close.
“Let me spend tonight with you, Tyeari. In the morning you’ll feel better, and you can talk about it then.”
I mumbled yes, though we hadn’t spent the night together since he had married Kenarant. She was a bit possessive. And women don’t like their men spending too much time with other men. Particularly this blood-brother bond.
But they are perfectly happy to exploit it once their husband dies, and they are free to claim their rights from the surviving blood-brother. The wife of the surviving blood-brother has no say in that, and I suppose it kept the city together in the past, but, but ...
Rhoda would kill me, if she ever realized this. Her father is an anthropologist, but she never took that much notice of it.
But the world was crumbling around me. And Rhoda wasn’t with me. I took the comfort available to me.
No, I never took much attention of what happened to the party after Ieghan shepherded me upstairs and into my suite of rooms. And what happened to my uncle - well, I was too upset about myself to care.
Ieghan waited until I had calmed down, and laid myself on the bed. Then he went back downstairs and the sounds died away, somewhat. He came back upstairs and slipped into bed with me, and - well, it happens all over the city. I don’t need to describe anything.
It was balm to my soul, that precious bit of stability, when you waver on the edge of sleep, your body worn out with love-making, and Rhodzaii Se-Teno lightens the night. Nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, exhaustion pushing and pulling you down that long slope until you give up resisting.
Some time during midnight, I woke to the feeling that he wasn’t with me anymore.
I raised my head and peered around. His clothes were still in the room, but he wasn’t. I got out of bed and looked in the other rooms, but there wasn’t any light showing.
I finally looked out onto the verandah, and the small light of the flat’s outdoors altar told me he was sacrificing. Probably to his favorite god, Rere’eri, the god of wisdom and faithfulness. A few whispers I could overhear told me I was right in my guess.
I don’t agree that I am the god of wisdom’s son, though. That’s surely needless flattery.
And then he opened the door and came in.
“There’s something strange going on, Tyeari,” he said. “I’ve actually been down to the ground on the fire-escape. There’s something lying there, unmoving. But the fire-escape’s locked – I mustn’t be guilty of breaking and exiting, must I?”
I laughed at his broad grin. Kenarant had made a good choice. If he could make me laugh in the midst of this anguish, there was no telling what he could do to her worries.
“And the mist’s still high! It should’ve dissipated a while back. I don’t trust it.”We went back into the bedroom and he smiled lopsidedly at me. “Anyway, I prayed for Ke and Ani at the altar. And for you, too.”
I think I took a bit more active role in the love-making that time. And so we slept.
In the morning light, the events of the previous night would’ve seemed a bad dream. Except that my mother wouldn’t be there to see me wed my Rhoda, and I started to worry about my uncle. I had left him rather abruptly, wound up in my own strife, and how had he spent the night? Where had he spent the night? (I hoped in the arms of a compliant female fan, which he had a few of at Hotel Terran.)
There was a breakfast laid on by the hotel, to celebrate my coming wedding and keep the guests - hopefully paying by this time - around. Ieghan and I went downstairs just as they were laying the tables, nice thick slabs of marble quarried from the mountain range to the south-east. I was hungry and the smell of the food being prepared in the kitchens made me drool.
Ieghan didn’t expect to see the Civil Guard in full regalia, with their pikes held stiffly in their right hands, waiting by the entrance and the courtyard entrance. Nor did I.
The ambulance lights were flashing bright red and blue outside the hotel entrance, and I wondered who the unfortunate was, and how it had happened. Just then two Civil Guard came in from the courtyard with a body on a stretcher. A small book-binder’s knife protruded from the hollow of his throat.
It seemed as though things, which couldn’t’ve got any worse, just had.
“Mr Tyeari, do you recognize this person?”
That was the Sergeant of the Civil Guard, striding towards me with his officer’s sword coming out of the scabbard.
“That’s ... that’s my uncle Fyedarokh!”
“We agree.” He held the sword towards me, point aimed at my belly. “Mr Tyeari, we were notified early in the morning, of this body in the Hotel Terran’s courtyard. When we arrived here, we find it is Mr Fyedarokh. We find he has been strangled. And some of the hotel staff recall seeing you shaking him with your hands around his throat last night.
“You also left the courtyard without him. And in the middle of the night, some other hotel staff saw someone descending the fire-escape.”
He sighed, a much-beset-upon hard-working Sergeant.
My mind was racing. My mouth dropped. Did they actually believe me capable of murdering my uncle Fyedarokh?
“The allegation is that you choked him and left him lying unconscious in the courtyard, then descended the fire-escape to knife him later last night. As you can see, there is a knife in his throat. And it is a knife of the sort people allege you are familiar with.”
“But ...”
Nothing was making any sense.
“Mr Tyeari, consider yourself under arrest.”
Then he did something very strange. He placed his hand over his heart and bowed, deeply, as he would for a Civil ceremony at one of the temples. He was muttering under his breath, “Forgive me, son of Re’erire. Forgive me, Re’erire, wise and faithful. I am only doing my duty.”
Ieghan’s confident voice interrupted.
“I’m afraid you’ve got it wrong, at least about the fire-escape. That was me.”
I looked at Ieghan, shocked. What did he think he was doing? And then some of the stories I had heard and read as a child came back to me - about how Rieari had offered himself as surety for his blood-brother Tyeokhnos once, and how that had almost led to his death ... about a time when Rieari - who I descend from, according to one of the lines of genealogy my mother’s family believes in - had offered his life for Tyeokhnos’s, about the heroism he had shown in defence of Tyeokhnos’s wife and son after Tyeokhnos had lost his life in trying to defeat some of his unforgiving and unforgiven kinsmen and kinswomen, about ...
Ieghan also claimed descent from Rieari. He had heard the stories from an early age as well.
He believed in them as well ... and the pain of the loss heaped upon me, crashed through in the roaring of my ears as the Sergeant, with a relieved smile, ordered his men to clap the hand-cuffs on Ieghan and take him away with them.
And the Civil Guard were not good with their suspects.
My world, like my mouth, went dry.
I raised my fists and slammed them down on one of the tables. Porcelain and stoneware plates spun and shattered. Cutlery leapt to the floor. The unbreakable cups and mugs - weren’t. I think I tried to break the table with my head.
I know only that the Hotel Terran later charged me for the table’s replacement, and others sought medical fees from me.
“Grab him, he’s cracking up,” I heard someone call out, as people rushed towards me. What did they care about? Did they matter anymore? Could they turn time and despair back into happiness?
I screamed, brokenly, “No, brother! No! No, not my brother too! No, no, no!!!”