Ibyabek Page 4

  “Thanks,” said Sarham. “- are you wearing a uniform?”

  “My school uniform,” acknowledged Kyeo.

  “Isn’t school out of session?”

  “My other clothes don’t fit any more.”

  “You don’t have downtime during school where you can wear other things?”

  Kyeo blinked. “Why? - Let’s go out to the car.”

  Sarham let Kyeo lead him into the back of the limo, and they drove the rest of the way around the circle of street that formed the village. The gardener had moved to another section of the garden, but the girl with the chalk was doggedly scrubbing her designs away, and the lady on the porch was still rocking, still intent on her book. “Why what?” asked Sarham, once they were sitting in the backseat.

  “Why would I change clothes in the middle of the day for no reason? We change for gym, but otherwise uniforms are fine for everything.”

  “To…” Sarham trailed off, like he’d never really thought about it before. “I’ve just never worn a uniform all day long before and don’t think I’d like it. Is it more comfortable than it looks?”

  “It’s fine,” said Kyeo. “It isn’t like we can go around naked.”

  Sarham went inexplicably pink in the cheeks. “I suppose not, but some clothes are comfier - or just more you.”

  “What do you mean, more me?”

  “In - do you watch movies -”

  “Sometimes, sure.”

  “In movies the actors wear all different clothes so you can tell who they are, right?”

  “Sure, but I don’t need to always be sure to wear a white and crimson color palette so I can be recognized easily in crowd scenes,” laughed Kyeo.

  Sarham giggled. “No, but like, if somebody’s always wearing a hat, or their socks don’t match, or their clothes are a little too small on them, that tells you something about them - or if they’re dressed like some profession -”

  “I’m dressed like a student. I am one,” Kyeo pointed out.

  “Yeah. I guess so. Maybe we’re the weird ones,” said Sarham.

  “What weird Kularan things do you do with clothes?”

  “A lot of schools don’t even have uniforms, kids just go in whatever they want as long as it’s not… printed with swear words or something,” Sarham answered.

  “…printed with swear words?”

  “Yeah, we have to save those for after school,” Sarham said, winking.

  “You’re making this up,” Kyeo said.

  “I’m honestly not! I don’t have any profane clothing personally but I have friends who do. I’m usually in, like, long shirts with color gradients, and this kind of pants that clings to your legs that’s popular lately and way more comfortable than they look - I left all that stuff home, my father didn’t think we’d have a lot of chances to wear informal outfits, so this is the sort of thing I’d usually wear to a dance or the theater or something.”

  “I had school uniforms and gym clothes, and I used to have a couple event outfits but I’ve outgrown it. I was borrowing what I was wearing last night from my father, I might get new things if there’s more parties like that we go to. There are… popular pants?”

  “Yeah, there are. Doesn’t anyone here get to like… wear pants that are in fashion?”

  “Some people don’t wear uniforms, but I think they just wear whatever’s practical.” Whatever was cheap, whatever was given away, whatever would stand up to their work assignments. “I wouldn’t have the first idea how to pick my clothes - maybe the sorts of things my father wears to parties are like you’re thinking but he’s never talked to me about it.”

  “Huh,” said Sarham. “Does the art museum have textiles at all?”

  Kyeo had never been. “I’ve only looked at the paintings before,” he said, confident there would be enough paintings to while away a hypothetical visit he might have made in the past. “We can look at any departments you like once we’re there.”

  When they arrived it transpired they’d been assigned a tour guide, a girl who might be Morale Corps but wasn’t admitting to it at the moment. She touched Sarham’s arm whenever she spoke. They followed her through halls of sculpture, walking slowly so she could talk about each one.

  “There aren’t any plaques,” Sarham remarked, when they moved from the first room to the second.

  “Plaques?”

  “In museums I’ve seen before they write down all the stuff she’s saying, so you don’t need a tour guide.”

  “That must put a lot of tour guides out of jobs,” said Kyeo.

  “I think that’s not how jobs work,” says Sarham. “It frees up people who would have been tour guides to go do something else, is maybe how my mother would put it. Or it frees up the money the museum would pay them but maybe museums here don’t work that way.”

  “How your mother would put it?”

  “She knows about jobs and things like that - there’s a word for the subject but I don’t know the Ibyabekan for it. She’s the one I’d ask, I don’t know that my father would have anything interesting to say about tour guides.”

  “I’d tell you the word if it came to mind,” said Kyeo, who had no idea what Sarham was talking about or why anyone considered tour guide employment to be an important subject to teach the women of United Kular.

  “Thanks. I like this one,” Sarham added of a painting showing some farmland from high altitude, turning his attention back to their neglected tour guide who did not appear herself to know the word for the topic of her trade, or at least didn’t consider it within the scope of her duties to supply it. “Did the artist sketch it out from a helicopter or something?”

  “Yes, of course,” beamed the tour guide. Kyeo had never seen a helicopter and if he’d had to guess he would have guessed the artist was working from a map, but maybe it had been a helicopter. If Sarham preferred to imagine a giant government vehicle being used for something that frivolous there was no harm done in letting him think it. The tour guide went on about the painter and his supposed helicopter ride and pointed out another painting in the room by the same man.

  Sarham was quiet for the next several rooms of art. “Do you like these?” Kyeo asked him, when they came to a set of metal sculptures, abstractly twisted around themselves, titled things like “Historic Settling of Ibyabek” and “Right Philosophy” and “Glorious Leader Salutes the People”.

  “They’re -” began Sarham, and after a delay he concluded, “nice.”

  “Art must be very different on Kular,” said Kyeo.

  “It is. - how are you thinking it’d be different, specifically?”

  “Well, everyone has to pay for everything they need to live, so probably you don’t have very many artists,” Kyeo replied. “Because who will pay for art when they need their money just not to starve, or to be seen in the hospital if they’re sick? And the artists can’t do it without being paid, because they need food and medicine too, so probably there is almost no art.”

  “Huh,” said Sarham, almost more of a breath than a response. “Well, there are art museums anyway.”

  “Maybe they fill them up with Ibyabekan art, since our artists don’t have to worry they’re going to starve,” speculated Kyeo. “I think sometimes we give other planets art objects as diplomatic gifts, do you know if Kular has any?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sarham. “I suppose Father might know. I haven’t been to every art museum in Kular.”

  “You don’t travel much?”

  “- well, not enough to have been to every art museum in Kular, at any rate.” The tour guide kept touching Sarham’s arm. Sarham kept taking steps away from her whenever this wouldn’t take him directly backwards on their route through the halls.

  They’d seen several wings of the museum after a few hours, and then the limousine took them to lunch. The restaurant had two other occupied tables, one with a couple and their nine-year-old daughter, one a group of older men. The waitress (was she also Morale Corps? Kyeo had never run into so many probable Morale Corps members in a row before) seated them by the window, not close to the other diners.

  Sarham was frowning at his menu.

  “Do you not like this kind of food?” Kyeo asked. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to gracefully pull off a relocation to another restaurant, they probably weren’t all prepared for diplomatic visits even insofar as this qualified. Maybe the chauffeur would have an idea if Kyeo ducked out to ask him.

  “I’m not a picky eater,” Sarham said, “I’m just not as good at reading Ibyabekan as I am at speaking. There isn’t a lot to read in Ibyabekan when you’re studying the language in Kular.”

  “Why not?” wondered Kyeo. “We write plenty of books and share them with everyone so they can pick up some right philosophy and so on.”

  “Well - yes,” said Sarham. “I’m sure it would take a really long time to read all the books published on Ibyabek. I guess what I mean is - I don’t know the word I’m missing. Do you have a word for a particular kind of book, or kind of music, or kind of anything really, where people have tastes between the different kinds?”

  “Not off the top of my head.”

  “Then I guess the easiest way to put it is that I didn’t happen to run across Ibyabekan books I liked very much and wasn’t sure how to find ones I’d like more,” said Sarham. “They all seemed sort of… alike. The movies were more fun, but didn’t teach me to read. So I’m having to sound out everything on the menu.”

  “If you’re not picky I could just choose something for you,” Kyeo offered.

  “Oh - yes, if you don’t mind, that would be easier, though I should probably read through this for practice anyway,” said Sarham.

  “Of course,” said Kyeo. He skimmed the menu and flagged down the waitress and ordered
Sarham a rack of lamb with rice, and himself pigs’ trotters and potatoes. “I hope you’re hungry,” he mentioned, when he gestured that the girl shouldn’t take Sarham’s menu, “the desserts look good too.”

  “I’ll probably have managed to read that far by the time we’re meant to order some,” said Sarham.

  “Who’d you learn to speak Ibyabekan from?” Kyeo asked.

  “Oh, I had a tutor. The tutor was from - Outer Sohaibek, but the language hasn’t diverged that much, so a few conversation partners who had - been to Ibyabek before got me the important differences in dialect even without full time tutoring.”

  Kyeo wondered at the pauses, but probably Sarham was just fumbling for words, and if they didn’t seem to Kyeo that they were the sort of words that would be hard to remember at Sarham’s fluency that was probably just his ignorance from never having had to operate in a second language. Probably Kyeo would be forgetting the words for bread and the sky and so on, now and then.

  Their food arrived very quickly, and while Sarham looked a little puzzled at his first bite of rice, it was Kyeo’s most appealing meal in recent memory; the meat was rich and the potatoes were smooth and none of it was dried or pickled. “Is your food to your liking?” Kyeo asked, when he couldn’t resist asking any more.

  “Oh, it’s - good.” Surely “good” was not a very advanced vocabulary word but maybe Sarham was reaching for shades of meaning he didn’t know how to express in Ibyabekan. “Do you want to trade half of mine for half of yours? I’m not used to this style of rice, I think.”

  They exchanged meal-halves and Sarham seemed better pleased with the potatoes; Kyeo, indifferent, let him have it all and took the rest of the rice. It seemed fine to him. “How do they do rice on Kular?”

  “It comes out softer,” said Sarham. “There aren’t many people eating here, are there?”

  “Probably it’s work hours for most people in the area.”

  “Then why is the restaurant open at this time at all?”

  “Maybe they were asked to stay open an extra hour,” guessed Kyeo, “specifically for us - you’re an important guest, of course. Or maybe it’s not work hours, it’s that people are hanging back to avoid crowding you.”

  “I suppose that’s why the museum was so empty, too.”

  “Was it? I don’t know how full museums should be.”

  “It seemed like it to me but it’s harder to tell, when there aren’t tables and chairs standing empty,” Sarham replied. “Slow day.”

  “Yes,” Kyeo agreed.

  They ordered dessert - Sarham had indeed read through the entire menu by then and wanted pumpkin custard, and Kyeo got flan, and they tasted but didn’t outright trade from each other’s plates. Kyeo had to attend to himself very carefully to keep from wolfing down his entire flan in a wretchedly inappropriate manner. Sarham didn’t seem to be having that problem, which Kyeo imagined had to do with diplomatic training. Perhaps he’d been drilled on behaving with desserts after fasting all day long or something outlandish like that.

  Kyeo toyed with asking, but didn’t, and instead let Sarham ask him questions about his school - did they play thus and such sports, did they cover thus and such math? - and replied as properly as he knew how, with some exaggeration of his personal skill at both math and sports but an accurate rendition of what they covered in gym lest he be called upon to prove it. If he were prevailed upon to play ball with Sarham he could hardly object to the requirement and had better not turn up ignorant of a claimed curriculum. Kyeo considered it less likely that he was about to be quizzed on calculus.

  Sarham did not whip out any such test. They finished their desserts - Kyeo timed things so his last bite began just a moment after Sarham’s did. They climbed back into the limousine to return to the museum for the rest of their tour. The same guide met them and conducted them through the remaining sections of the tour.

  “Are you all right?” Kyeo asked them, as they passed through a room with a water feature clad in elaborate tiles. Sarham had barely said a word, seemed to be all out of questions.

  “I’m fine,” said Sarham. “Just - I’m fine.”

  “All right,” said Kyeo, but he didn’t miss Sarham’s glance at their beaming guide.

  The limousine carried them to the same restaurant again after their museum tour was over. As he’d implied, Suor was there, with Yuin along at his elbow smiling at her son and at Sarham, and Mr. and Mrs. Peng were along too, the former clapping his son on the shoulder in greeting when they walked in. It was still quiet in the restaurant. There was a couple at another table toward the back, and an older man dining alone in a corner, but that was all.

  Sarham didn’t comment. He smiled back at Kyeo’s parents and they all sat down; they weren’t given menus, just a series of small plates brought in batches, removed as they emptied, for the six of them to share. Kyeo noticed that Sarham and his parents both helped themselves to pickles and bread even though there was meat and fruit and eggs and even fish to be had. They kept doing it even when it turned out that vegetables were replaced with more vegetables and rolls with more rolls. Maybe even those things were hard to come by in Kular for some reason; Kyeo knew that Ibyabek was fortunate in having particularly good growing conditions over most of the planet. He tried not to think about poor Sarham eating synthetic protein cubes or something awful like that back home.

  Suor took charge of the conversation, keeping it light without straying into gratuitously insubstantial topics like the weather. He wanted to know what the boys thought of the art museum, whether the elder Pengs had had pleasant flights to and from their appointment, whether everyone had heard the Glorious Leader’s latest public address. Everyone answered his questions in turn. Kyeo found himself with very little to say. While he was consistently able to manifest interest in what Sarham was inscrutably thinking, and didn’t mind telling Sarham what was on his mind to the extent it was reasonable conversational material, Kyeo’s father kept the conversation too firmly on his rails for it to be engaging. Fortunately with half a dozen people at the table he didn’t have to say much to be doing his share of the talking, and if Sarham was quiet too, his diplomat father filled in for him just fine.

  * * *

  The limousine took all six of them back to the Pengs’ guest house after they’d had dessert (a rich lemony cake that Kyeo was glad his mother had portioned for him, because he would have had serious trouble being restrained about it if he’d been serving). Suor and Wulaar were talking about the climate on the peninsula by the time they stepped out of the car.

  “Kyeo?” said Sarham, hesitating to approach the house.

  “Yes?” said Kyeo.

  “Do you want to go for - a walk, out into the fields, is that okay?”

  “It’s fine,” said Kyeo. He loped after Sarham, who ducked between two of the miniature village houses and struck out in a random direction over some relatively traversible native plants with that characteristic purplish blush to them. “Do you like taking walks?”

  “I actually don’t at home,” said Sarham. “At home I have a bike, remember?”

  “Right. Isn’t it hard to ride? With only two wheels?”

  “It took some getting used to but it’s not hard any more. - I think my mother’s not happy here. She might want to leave soon and take me.”

  “Will your father let her?” wondered Kyeo, bewildered.

  Sarham looked over his shoulder at Kyeo. “Let her take me or let her leave at all?”

  “Either.”

  “Yeah. He’ll let her,” said Sarham. “I guess he might try to convince her to stay if it’s important but I’m not sure it is.”

  “But -” said Kyeo, maneuvering over a trickily uneven piece of ground, “- don’t you want to stay?” Sarham didn’t answer. The polite thing to do would be for Kyeo to pretend that he’d never asked the question, but it sat in the air, heavy between them. “Don’t you like it here?” Sarham wasn’t just overwhelmed by things being more beautiful and comfortable than he was used to, right, he’d seemed more even-keeled about it than that.