“This is making loving very dull,” said Gandro Bao, with a seductive smile at Mouche.
Mouche ignored the smile. “Only for husbands! Say for them rather it is very stern and thoughtful. We are taught it is better that posterity be engendered with coolness, with much deliberate intention. Once that task is completed, however, women are entitled to compensatory joys, and for that they require a Consort who does not make it dull! Someone to indulge their lusts, but not engender children. You see?” Mouche had become carried away with his explanation and had said a good deal more than he intended.
Ellin said to herself, Oh-ho , so here is what compensation is offered. She and Bao looked at one another, eyebrows raised. Mouche and Ornery waited.
Finally, though he was sure he already knew, Bao asked, “What is being Consort?”
“A man trained to cosset women,” said Ornery. “Like him,” and she jerked a thumb in Mouche’s direction.
Mouche merely blinked at her, refusing to be drawn by her chiding tone. From beyond the recently trimmed hedge, they heard the approach of persons, loudly talking to one another. Hastily, Mouche and Ornery rearranged their veils and turned to their work, busily raking while the two agents went thoughtfully back to their window, far above.
“What is hardbread?” Ellin asked.
Bao didn’t know. He summoned a servant. “What is hardbread?”
“A kind of dried cracker that sailors eat, sir. Hardbread and tea. Or so they complain.”
“Sailors, not gardeners?”
“Not gardeners, no. Gardeners eat garden stuff, and bread from the kitchen. Ships have no kitchens, so between barbecues and fish fries ashore, shipfolk eat hardbread.”
“Interesting,” said Ellin. “A sailor and a … a Consort. I would have guessed he was an actor. How did the two of them get to be friends?”
“I think they were meeting for first time not long ago,” said Bao, “but men are striking up friendships quickly. Particularly in adversity. It is having survival benefit.”
“I don’t know what women do,” she said thoughtfully. “Every time I thought I had made a woman friend, they switched me somewhere else. Even the dance classes. They kept moving them around, shuffling them. Sometimes you didn’t see the same people for two shifts running.”
“Forget what is past. Now I am being your friend,” he said.
She gave him a somewhat suspicious look, finding nothing in his expression but placid good will. “Careful, Bao, or you may stir my insatiable lusts!”
He flushed, rubbing with a finger at the furrow between his eyes. “This is not my desire.”
She scarcely heard him. “Besides, are there male-female friends who are truly friends? I’ve never heard of any.”
“There are such friends,” he said firmly. “And if there were never being any, we could decide to be the first.”
When Ellin and Bao learned the nearest infant school was in Sendoph it was already quite late in the day. Accordingly, they postponed their interviews with children until the following morning. The Questioner emerged from her room in the early evening, seeming somewhat changed. Ellin and Bao had been with her shortly after a maintenance session aboard ship, and they were prepared for the slight uncertainty her appearance evoked.
“It’s the machines,” the Questioner had told them while aboard ship. “The mind is affected by the files and the maintenance machines and so is the body. If I were human, I would change with time, so the machines change me a little, perhaps to make me aware of time passing.” This sounded good, though she felt it probably wasn’t true. Since receiving the information about her donor minds—though certainly “donor” wasn’t the proper word—she had found maintenance more than usually uncomfortable. Now that she knew about her indwelling minds, the buffer that held their memories from her own had been breached. Each time she came from maintenance she had learned more about their lives, and each time she felt more angry. Those who had killed her indwelling children were dead these several hundred years, but she hated them still! Hated them, was furious at them, and knew her duty required her to set all such feelings aside.
Ellin launched at once into a report of their conversation with the gardeners along with the inferences she and Bao had drawn from it, all of which Questioner entered into her memory, commenting, “So the one was a sailor and here he is, cutting away at the little hedges. And the other man is, according to the first, a Consort … “