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Empire of Time series

= NIGHT SONGS AT UM =

a science fiction short story by John Argo

2.

He turned and looked at the smallish blonde woman who sat still as a statue on an elevated wooden chair—Menet Flaun, his consort, his gogyrl, his contract fem, whatever ancient words described her function—recently he’d been hard pressed to keep the odds and ends of his personal life making sense to himself.

Menet stared out across the sea, in a rare display of gravity. He’d never seen her looking this regal, he thought—a shame there was no chance she could become Governess. It was against the law for a gynefem to rise to First Status (truly human, genes never tampered with). They’d shared the past five years in considerable harmony, though she had a habit of interrupting him at work, stealing his pencils and erasers with which he hated working anyway since he was an outdoorsman and disdained desk work like writing (low engineer or high formal State). In fact she, highly schooled and skilled in the Arts, had become his ghost writer, even in letters to the State detailing the annual budget and so forth. Only in shape prints did he excel; he had an engineer’s passion for combing through two dimensional slices of picture elements and visioning the final 3-di engine or building or dam or hydroponics canal. Menet laughed and ran away when she saw him working at his giant holostat in the drawing rooms downstairs.

For such a playful monkey, she looked dead serious tonight. She looked regal—a smallish woman of 22, with skin still firm and perfect with youth, even with a light tan the color of forest honey. Her hair was like corn silk, fine, hanging straight like braiding and cut straight around at the neck. Her features were plain and fresh and healthy, her eyes blue when she was happy and gray when she was angry. Rarely was she sad, and that was a light gray-green like a cold sea. He’d only begun to notice that in her recently, as the time of her freedom arrived.

By law, they were master and bonded servant. Terraforming was no place to take a wife and family, so said society. Better to take a plaything and wait for later to get serious. Her parents had conceived and borne her for the express purpose of living as a contract gynefem in bond to a wealthy man who hopefully would treat her decently, perhaps even awarding her a stipend of retirement when her term was up. Most gynefems (and somewhat more rarely, their male counterparts, known as bondboys) were released after ten years. If they settled in urban worlds they tended to blend in and work productively, unmolested by rumor and innuendo. If they settled in rural places, they were expected to work alongside the rest and if they didn’t need to, like some who were well- stipended, they were soon hounded offworld. It was worst for them in small, mean towns where people shared very similar values and did not easily accept outsiders who were different—especially, in some religiously zealous places, a woman-creature of no parenting usefulness who had been owned and then discharged by a man. Kery had already been in touch with his family to ensure that a place would be found where Menet could thrive. He wanted her to have comfort—he could provide a small stipend, since he was newly made and not from wealth or nobility—and he wanted her to have the chance to meet a man and make her life with him. This, despite her limitations, since she’d been engineered not to have the female reproductive cycle and could never have children. That explained her somewhat slight, small-breasted body—she was wiry and athletic, and could outrun Kery, outswim him, and generally outwrestle him when she started her mischief—and she was pretty imaginative in bed. And easy to please. And difficult to hurt, not that he’d made any effort to, but he was a brusque, clumsy man, not very well spoken, and he seemed never to know the right thing to say, or the moment for saying it. Even with her monoflow hormone cycle, being an artist, she could sometimes dissolve in tears and fly from a room, to lock herself in her room and paint with her watercolors for an hour or two, to nap exhaustedly, and then to emerge yawning and tousled—looking first for him, to get a hug. She would make someone a decent wife, he thought. Some gynefems were said to adopt, so there were such hopes. Others met a quick and tragic end according to certain dark customs.

For himself, society had decided that he was worthy of becoming a State Governor, and that meant no gynefem could hang on his arm. He looked on these things without any particular egotism, just with a kind of relief—having experienced the pain and terror of childhood beatings, hunger, and fear, he was glad to have built a life for himself. As great and powerful as he had already become, he still carried within him the hurt child curled in a ball, hiding in a closet. In that way, Menet was his superior, for she was brash and whimsical and in the open. Her genetic status was acceptable in most urban centers, and she’d had loving parents and a good education before paying her dues at 20 by becoming his bondwoman.

Kery had been an Engineer III on a previous assignment, lovely big snow world several nebular clusters away in this arm of the galaxy, and there, being younger and brasher, he’d had three bondwomen. The limit was ten, but three was all he could afford on his salary. The three gynefems had fought constantly with each other, and then they’d turn on him all together, and he’d been forced to go to a Learned Counsel and do a swap which had left him one of the witches—he was as much under contract as she, though he had all the advantages—and finally he’d rid himself of that one in a swap for Menet Flaun. They’d courted briefly, as was required by law, and he’d been delighted by her sunniness. She’d agreed to accept bondage with him, and she’d told him afterward how relieved she was that he was really quite a fair, easygoing man, not at all cruel, though he could be temperamental at times, and insensitive at others. She’d told him one night in bed, after they’d had sex, and she was stroking his hair: “That’s part of my job, is to make you civilized. Just like you take these planets and turn them from wastelands into great lush worlds, so it’s my job to give you pleasure and to tame you. I’m your terraformer!”

“You are a monkey!” he’d said and tickled her, she’d squealed and run around the bed, and he after her.

Tonight it was different. The carefree nature of their contract was gone.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

She barely nodded.

“Tomorrow then?” he prodded, remembering the three witches and beginning to realize it was time for this one to go away.

Her eyes glittered sea-green.

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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.