Ibyabek Page 3

  “Fine,” said Suor. “Don’t go too far. The pier, at most.”

  “The pier,” nodded Kyeo. “Thank you, Father.”

  Suor nodded and turned his attention back to his companions. Kyeo trotted back downstairs. “Father says it’s all right. We should be able to see all right from the pier.”

  “There’s a pier?” asked Sarham.

  “Sure there’s a pier. Why wouldn’t there be a pier?” Kyeo asked, leading the way to the door.

  “I didn’t think there were a lot of… boats,” said Sarham vaguely.

  “I’m not sure if there will be any boats, but we don’t need any boats, just to go out on the water far enough that the buildings aren’t in the way of the sky,” replied Kyeo. They had a six-block walk to the water, and Kyeo cut through the park instead of past the cannery; it was more scenic. “I know how to find Stella Kular and Caeruleus Kular, but they’re in our winter stars, it won’t be out tonight. I can show you Xeren’s star and Olach’s though, they’re in the same constellation as each other.”

  “What’s the constellation called?”

  “Glorious Leader’s Eye,” said Kyeo.

  Sarham didn’t say anything else for the rest of the walk. It was a nice night, almost cloudless, warm in the moments between breezes and cool when they blew. There was a streetlight on every corner, and they were on tonight, so their eyes couldn’t adjust very much until they got to the shore.

  They walked out to the end of the pier. Kyeo sat, and Sarham followed suit only to flop backwards onto the wood. Kyeo was concerned about the state of his borrowed clothes and refrained, though he was tempted. Slowly, more and more stars faded into view; the closest streetlamp was blocked from view by a sign on a building and of the other two nearby lamps one was burned out and the other smashed. There was no moon. Nobody in their houses had lights on, and there were no boats tied to the dock with their own lights either. The Glorious Leader’s Eye became visible, and then the Five Virtues, the Dancing Woman, the Scallion - Kyeo only knew the most famous constellations, because though he hoped to fly ships one day constellations were not actually of much use in navigating space. They were too relative, too deceptive.

  He pointed. “There’s the Glorious Leader’s Eye. Xeren is the almost reddish star at the top eyelid, with one star very close to it on the left and the next one on the right farther away.”

  “I see it,” said Sarham.

  “Olach is the one near the pupil of the eye on the upper right.”

  “The kind of little one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it just a coincidence they’re both in the Eye?”

  “Do they not teach you astronomy? It’s only sort of a coincidence; they’re both very far from Ibyabek but in about the same direction. I guess one or the other of them could be in a different constellation if we’d named them differently, but that one really looks like an eye.”

  “Yeah, I can see where that came from. The stars are lovely here.”

  “Your planet must be too polluted,” guessed Kyeo.

  “- yeah,” said Sarham. “There’s places you can go to see our stars but it’s a whole production, you can’t just walk down the block. It’s. Too polluted.”

  “Is it nice not to wear a particle mask all the time?”

  “…yes. I prefer not to wear a particle mask all the time,” agreed Sarham.

  “I wonder how long your family is staying.”

  “Even if my father works here for a long time I might not stay that long. I’ll need to go back to school.”

  “We have school here.”

  “I know, but… I’m expected back at a school in Kular.”

  “Hmph,” said Kyeo. It didn’t seem quite right that someone like Sarham could get so close to a real education and not be able to get one. “When?”

  “I can stay six months, if that makes sense, but I can also leave early and stay with my aunt and uncle if my parents stay behind.”

  “Why’d they bring you in the first place?” wondered Kyeo. If Sarham wouldn’t be going to school here, couldn’t stay very long, had an uncle who’d take him in, what was the point?

  “…uh,” said Sarham, “so they would get to see me and so I could travel?”

  Kyeo didn’t see his father more than once most years since he’d started high school, and sometimes saw only his father and not his mother, depending on where they managed to see one another. “But you’re my age.”

  “Yes, but they’re still my parents… is that not normal here?”

  “Most people our age are in school, or even have regular work already,” said Kyeo. “Some of them are even already engaged. They don’t have time to be visiting their parents all the time.” Maybe some people wound up on the same work projects as their parents, or had parents who were teachers, but otherwise it would be unbearably babyish to rush home to visit for no reason.

  “Engaged? This young?” said Sarham. “I don’t know anybody our age back home who’s engaged already.”

  “Well, if you wait too long you won’t be able to have many children,” said Kyeo. “Since women get less fertile over time. I only have one sister, no other siblings, and this is a little embarrassing for my parents, though they married when they were -” He did the arithmetic. “Twenty.”

  “Oh. You want children?”

  “Everyone wants children,” said Kyeo. “No one would want to be a dead end. When I’m in university I’ll probably get introduced to my friends’ sisters and things like that till I find someone to marry.” He had vague hopes that his classmate Imyu’s little sister would be a lot like Imyu; he thought he’d get along with someone just like him and be happy living in a house with another Imyu for a long time.

  “I don’t think I want children,” said Sarham. “I guess I might change my mind.”

  “Why would you even think you wouldn’t want them?” asked Kyeo. “What else are you going to do?”

  “I might want to have a really demanding career?” said Sarham. He said it like a question even though it wasn’t; Kyeo chalked it up to his accent.

  “But you’d have a wife,” said Kyeo.

  “Maybe my… wife would also have a really demanding career,” said Sarham. “Anyway, if I were going to have kids I’d want to be able to spend a lot of time with them even if somebody else had all the time they strictly needed.”

  “Why would you want to spend a lot of time with them?” wondered Kyeo. “Raising kids is the mother’s job, and you’re a man.”

  “I… just don’t see the point of having them if you’re not going to enjoy them,” said Sarham. “I guess if you marry some girl who likes them a lot and don’t mind having kids you barely see that’s… fine if the kids don’t mind never seeing you.”

  “It wouldn’t be never, but I’d have a job and she wouldn’t. It’s not like I don’t know who my father is.”

  “If that works for you. You have a sister, you said?”

  “Just one. Older sister,” said Kyeo. “She’s married, I haven’t seen her in a while.”

  “She doesn’t - write or anything?”

  “I don’t get mail at school. Maybe she writes to Mother, I’m not sure.”

  It was hard to see Sarham’s face in the dark, but the quality of the silence was such that Kyeo felt it was important to make out that invisible expression, to divine what Sarham was thinking. What weird planet did Sarham live on that sucked men’s attention into babies and tried to squeeze women into jobs? No wonder they were weak. He couldn’t see much by the starlight. Sarham’s eyes might have been envious or only confused.

  Kyeo went on, “So does it usually work the other way in United Kular? The men watch the children and the women have jobs?”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” said Sarham. “I don’t really know quite how I’m supposed to explain it.”

  “Supposed to?”

  “- I don’t want to make a diplomatic faux pas. We’re here as diplomats, and even though Father’s the one who has the actual training and job title I don’t want to do anything to sabotage that.”

  “I’m not a diplomat.”

  “I know. I just don’t know all the things you know about how it’s all right to talk around here.”

  “If you say so.”

  They relaxed on the dock without further words for a few long minutes. In the distance a bird called. At length, Sarham said, “I want to go see if the party’s wrapped up enough that we can go to bed now.”

  “All right. I can show you back,” said Kyeo, rolling up to his feet. “I think sometimes these go late, but I don’t know if they’ll make you and your mother stay for the whole thing.”

  “That makes sense,” Sarham said, following down the pier and onto the street. “- Do people bike around here? I haven’t seen a lot of cars, just a handful.”

  “Bikes are obsolete since the car was invented,” blinks Kyeo. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.”

  “I have a bike,” said Sarham.

  “Oh, dear,” said Kyeo. Poor Sarham. Wasn’t a diplomat’s son important enough to get picked up and dropped off where he needed to go?

  “I like it,” Sarham added. “Biking, I mean. A lot of people have bikes in Kular.”

  “That’s good then.”

  “Can you drive?” Sarham asked.

  There was something Kyeo wasn’t sure he liked about the question, like Sarham thought he already knew the answer and thought it proved something. It was uncomfortable.

  Kyeo lied. “Of course. I drove down here from school. I take a school elective on how to drive a bus, since that’s different, but soon I’ll be able to do that too.”

  “You’re going to be a bus driver?” asked Sarham, sounding surprised.

  “No,
no, it might come up when I join the military,” said Kyeo. “Buses to transport other soldiers and equipment and stuff.”

  “Oh,” said Sarham, softly.

  They reached the party venue. They went up the stairs and sifted through the crowd for whichever father turned up first. They found Umi, who was sitting at the border of the party, sipping a drink and having somehow convinced a Morale Corps girl to sit with her even though she wasn’t part of their target audience, and she was able to direct them to her husband. He was having a light, inconsequential conversation about the quality of the hors d’oeuvres which he was happy to suspend to give his son a hug - Kyeo was embarrassed for Sarham - and agree that they could go back to their guest house in fifteen minutes, giving them time to circulate and make their goodbyes politely enough.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” Kyeo smiled at Sarham.

  “Yeah,” Sarham smiled back. “See you in the morning.”

  * * *

  Kyeo stayed at the party until his father left it, at well after midnight, he didn’t know exactly how late. He managed to get out of his borrowed clothes, once he’d staggered up to his childhood room after the festivities, but that was all. He tipped over into bed and slept like the dead until the sun poured through the holes in the curtains and he couldn’t close his eyes hard enough to fend off the spots of warmth it made on his bare skin.

  He allowed himself five breaths - no one was demanding that he be up yet - then rolled to his feet and stretched, arms and legs and back, and padded to the bathroom for a shower. The water was warm; he stayed in the spray till he heard his mother Yuin’s knock, and then got out of her way, wrapped in a towel.

  Assuming his father would tell him if he had to wear something in particular, Kyeo put on one of his school uniforms; everything in the closet, if his mother hadn’t already given it to friends with younger sons, was from years back and would no longer fit. He didn’t even have his work clothes from the time he’d made bricks, those had been returned to the foreman when he went back to school.

  At breakfast, which Yuin had laid out before soliciting the shower, there was real butter for the bread and two poached eggs, one each for Kyeo and Suor on the plates at each of their places at the table. Maybe she’d eaten hers already, maybe there’d only been two in the house; whichever it was, Kyeo ate his egg on his bread happily. The butter and the yolk soaked into the crumb all bright and yellow, rendering the texture less stale and more puddingy. There wasn’t a vegetable in sight, but there was a dish of dried apples, not portioned out, in the middle of the kitchen table; Kyeo munched to fill up, not knowing when to expect lunch.

  Suor appeared, nodded to Kyeo, and ate his egg and bread and butter but declined the apples. Probably Yuin had gotten a thirty pound sack of dried apples at the market months ago and Suor was sick of them now. Kyeo smoothed out a wrinkle in his sleeve only to immediately see it reappear when he bent his elbow again, but even drawing attention to his uniform didn’t prompt a command to wear something else, so that was probably all right. Suor drained a cup of water.

  Kyeo glanced at the place where Aipen used to sit on the fourth side of the table. “Have you heard from her?” he asked. He didn’t have to specify.

  “I saw her husband last month when I was in Rukei Valley,” Suor replied. “He mentioned she was well. Aipen doesn’t need her baby brother fretting about her, Kyeo. She has a husband now.”

  “We’ll meet her children when she has them,” Kyeo decided. He didn’t know if they’d actually have a chance to do that. He was not sure, off the top of his head, if he’d met every uncle he had on his father’s side, let alone his mother’s. But it would have sounded pathetic to bid for reassurance that he’d know his nieces and nephews at least to the minimal degree of photos and names. Better to announce confidently that what he wanted was already so, and then save face with silence if it didn’t turn out that way, as though the prediction were never made.

  Suor didn’t undermine the statement. He did say, “Are you going to track down your fifth cousins next? Glorious Leader and the People are there if you need anything, you don’t need to rely on Stone Age kinship bonds for your needs now that we have civilization and a real philosophy of interdependence. They aren’t teaching you well at school.”

  “I -” Kyeo was about to say something self-deprecating, blame himself and not his teachers; of course they’d talked about primitive social safety nets and how they’d been supplanted. Suor interrupted him.

  “You’re going to go with Sarham to the Museum of Fine Art. The parents will not be accompanying you; they have a meeting elsewhere on the planet. You may take him somewhere else appropriate if he becomes bored with the museum, but your judgment will need to be at its best, of course.”

  “Yes sir,” said Kyeo.

  “I will have you driven to the house, and you will also be driven to the museum, where you will also be collected. If you leave the museum, circle back to it around sundown so you and Sarham will be able to join us for dinner.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Kyeo got into the car when it arrived - it might have been the same one, with the same driver, that had taken him home from school, though he hadn’t gotten a good look at the chauffeur’s face last time so couldn’t confirm it now without asking and wasn’t curious enough to make such an inane remark.

  Pedestrians parted when they heard the car coming and they were soon out of the neighborhood where the Sebe Luk household stood and venturing away from the city. There were shabbier houses, and a bridge over the river, and then farms, and then, between an orchard and a stretch of land that didn’t seem to be planted with anything except wild scrub and little trees, there was a miniature village. The houses were full-sized, but there were only eight of them, each in a charmingly distinct shape and color and each with a garden in front. A gardener, some middle-aged man with sun-browned skin and a wide straw hat, was pruning a hedge. On the porch of a different house, a woman was sitting on a porch swing with a book open, swaying back and forth. A third house’s front walkway was being doodled densely in chalk by a pigtailed girl about eleven years old. The houses stood in a semicircle, and in the center of the semicircle there was a store; Kyeo couldn’t see its interior through the tinted windows of the limo, but the baskets out front had fresh fruit and what looked like spices and candy on the left, and a display of various electronics on the right.

  The car stopped at the fifth house in the row. Kyeo got out. The car idled in the road.

  Kyeo knocked.

  Presently the door swung open and there was Sarham, smiling at him. “Hi, Kyeo!”

  “Hi!” Kyeo replied.

  “This is where they have us staying,” said Sarham, gesturing not at the house behind him but at the microvillage around it. “What do you think?”

  What a weird question. What did he think? Of the village? “It’s pretty,” Kyeo replied. “Do you buy groceries in the store or are they providing those separately?”

  “They have us getting them in the store. Without paying for them. It’s not what we’re used to,” said Sarham. “Come in -”

  Kyeo stepped in. “I mean, necessities are free on Ibyabek,” he said. “And food’s a necessity.”

  “So you don’t pay for food?”

  “Of course not,” Kyeo said. This was even true, considering Kyeo alone - at school and on work assignments meals were provided, at home his mother did the shopping. She probably sometimes picked up government sack of flour, but things like the dried apples, let alone the eggs, he assumed she paid for with real money in the marketplace. Then again, the Sebe Luks were rich. It was hardly impossible to live on free groceries and lots of people did it at least some of the time.

  “Huh,” said Sarham, thoughtful. He showed Kyeo to a couch against the living room window and plopped onto it. He patted the seat beside him.

  Kyeo almost went to join him but then his sense of responsibility intervened. “I’ve got a car waiting outside,” it sounded better if he said it like that, like he commanded the presence of the car, “to take us to the Museum of Fine Art today, if you’re amenable, Sarham.”

  “Oh. Yes, I’m amenable,” Sarham said, hopping up again. “Am I dressed right for it?”

  “You’re fine,” said Kyeo, looking him up and down. Sarham was wearing his own Kularan clothes, layered to Ibyabekan standards of modesty. They looked expensive and well-maintained and that was all Kyeo could discern about the formality level, so he expected nobody else would be very likely to take issue. The summery fabric followed Sarham’s outline closely enough that Kyeo could tell he didn’t do a lot of physical labor; any muscle there was deliberately placed with exercise, not a practical necessity. Offplanet idleness translated into a sort of exotic softness that some Morale Corps girls and almost no boys displayed within Ibyabek. “You look nice,” Kyeo added.