Charlinder's Walk (20 page)

"Charlinder, what's the matter?" Vilma asked him the following day. She'd caught him standing out in the back garden with a grazing Lacey.

"Nothing," he reacted. "Just making sure Lacey gets enough to eat."

"There's only so long you can spend doing that. Come inside and talk to me."

"A couple of people found me by the lake last night," he began inside Vilma's kitchen, while his hostess continued preparing that day's lunch. "They told me some things."

"Did you get their names while they told you these things?"

"A man named Randall, and his daughter Cleo."

Vilma stopped in the middle of the onion she was chopping. She didn't look up at Charlinder, but he saw enough.

"I take it you know them."

"Suppose I do. What did they tell you that's got you so worried?"

"Mainly about the history of your town. They told me pretty much how your friend Jansen got to his position."

"Jansen does his job very well."

"I'm sure he does," he said sincerely.

Vilma continued with her cooking. "I don't think you're so concerned because Jansen inherited his office."

"Not really. Though it does occur to me, since the Hyatts are white, and they get their positions by inheritance, there's no one in power here to take any interest in the brown people's concerns."

"What are these 'concerns' that Randall and Cleo told you about?" Vilma demanded.

"The rule against browns inter-marrying with whites," he answered, though he suspected she knew already.

"That's a restriction on all of us."

"On paper, sure, but in practice it’s a lot tighter on them."

"Okay, so it is."

"Listen, I'm not about to tell anyone we've had this conversation, if you're worried about offending someone," Charlinder assured her.

"Okay, then. I suppose Randall and Cleo told you the reason our browns are in such bad shape is that they're all related to each other now?"

"Yeah, that's their explanation."

"And it's probably right. So tell me: what do we do about it?"

"Let them marry whomever they choose, so they won't have to inbreed anymore."

"Then someone would have to choose them back, and who's going to do that?"

"Someone who's not related to them? I'm not seeing the problem here."

"Would you want to risk having
your
children come out looking like that?"

Charlinder only gaped for a second. "So, what are you telling me; the whites here are repulsed?"

"It's not about that. Did Randall and Cleo tell you no one’s tried leaving town so far?"

"I've been wondering about that. No one's tried looking elsewhere?"

"No one's left in known memory. Of course," she began, with an air of something just occurring to her, "hardly any of us know how far to go to find anyone outside. Just going outside the town borders is one thing, but only Jansen’s staff are ever authorized to go as far as another settlement, so the rest of us don’t even know what else is out there. So, yes, it would be risky for them to look elsewhere. It wouldn’t be safe to come back, anyway."

"How do you know what they’re afraid of?"

Perhaps that was too far; Vilma glared at him from under a sharply raised eyebrow. "We can’t have families together, but we’re allowed to talk to each other."

That was fair enough, though from the way Randall and Cleo described it, most of the whites were not so willing to have that conversation as Vilma. "Okay, I apologize. If talking is okay, then has anyone tried going to the Hyatts and asking them to reconsider the law?"

Vilma shook her head. "Not to my knowledge. The browns think they don't have a chance, and the whites haven’t given this any thought, so who else is there?"

"I guess there's no one else. Is there any risk to protesting the rules?"

"Not that I’m aware of," she said with a shrug. "If someone went and asked the Hyatts to change the laws on marriage, they'd just hear the same as we get from the clergy. They don't want everyone in our town to be the same color. If someone decided to pack up and move out, the risk is all on their head. No one in power would go after them, but they have to worry about what'll happen to them in the wilderness."

"So the risks are," Charlinder began, "disappointment and...starvation."

Vilma nodded again. "Or freezing to death, or falling off a cliff, or getting eaten by bears." She read the look on Charlinder’s face in response to the last part. "Are there any bears where you come from?"

"No."

"Have you seen one yet?"

"No."

"They have plenty to eat in the summer," Vilma assured him. "Stay out of the way, keep your livestock on a short lead and you're fine."

Surprises were something Charlinder in general principle tried to avoid. He got a fresh reminder that evening of why he felt this way when Vilma and Peter told him after dinner that it was time for the weekly prayer session, and instructed him to come with them to worship.

"No, I can't do that," he said.

"Why not?" asked Peter.

"Well, I don't believe in God, so it wouldn't be honest of me to pretend to pray to Him," he explained.

The whole family looked at him like he was about to set their house on fire.

"How can you not believe in God?" demanded Jacob, their oldest son.

Vilma shook her head as if trying to get water out of her ears. She grabbed Charlinder by the hand. "Come on, you have to come to the prayer session. Everyone expects to see you there."

Charlinder was about to protest and press his case. Then he remembered where such conversations usually went. The prayer session, at least, could only go on for so long.

Of the few prayer meetings he'd attended in the Paleola village, all he could remember was that they were maddeningly dull and tedious affairs that tested his patience far more than his non-belief. This one was no different, only better organized. They went into the church, which was little more than a gigantic, high-ceilinged room outfitted with row upon row of long wooden benches. The room was packed with people; there must have been a thousand townsfolk in the church that night, if Charlinder had ever seen that many people in one place before.

"Is tonight a special occasion?" he whispered to Vilma.

"No, why do you ask?"

"It looks like the whole town is here."

"They are; it's in the rules."

"Are you
still
required to come to these things?" Charlinder asked, now slightly alarmed.

Vilma looked back at him, impatiently wide-eyed. "Yes!" she hissed. "Now be quiet! The pastor's coming!"

Charlinder was very glad he didn't believe in any deity, as he would otherwise have been afraid of what would happen to him if he were caught with such thoughts in his head as "this is freaking ridiculous" and "I could be reading Eileen's journals right now." It was very inconvenient how the pastor kept making them stand up to sing hymns which Charlinder didn’t even know, as it kept distracting him from thinking about what Sunny would do if caught in this situation.

Randall found him leaving the church with his hosts when the service was finished. Vilma and Peter didn't mind, so he agreed to join Randall and his family for a mug of cider outside. He introduced Charlinder to his wife, Dina and son, Luke. Cleo was there and introduced him to her best friend, Hattie.

"Good sermon tonight, wasn't it?" said Luke. Charlinder didn't respond, as he'd decided against sharing his lack of religious beliefs with anyone else.

"Yeah, Pastor Raymond was smart enough not to say anything about...
us
, tonight," Randall agreed.

"I'm sorry," Charlinder offered, "what does Pastor Raymond usually say about...
you
?"

"It's not just him, it's all the clergy," said Dina. "They wanna say anything about us and our 'problem' except for what’s obvious."

"Twenty years ago," Randall explained, "they started saying we must have done something to get God all pissed off at us, and this is our penance."

"Only even the Hyatts’ best pals thought that was disgusting, so they changed their tune," said Luke.

"Yeah, now the story is," Dina began, "God is testing our faith, and we need to rise to the occasion and prove that we're believers, or something."

"And they like to make out like it's everyone, including the whites, getting 'tested'," Luke went on, "even though nothing's happening to them except we make them uncomfortable."

"How much do most of your town know about genetics?" asked Charlinder.

"What's 'genetics' mean?" asked Hattie.

Drawing from Eileen’s tome entitled
Biology for the Rest of Us
, he gave them a quick explanation of gene theory and how inbreeding could reinforce undesirable traits.

"Yeah, sounds like Grandma was right," said Luke, "but no, we don't know about that stuff."

"I don’t think anyone around here learns about it," said Cleo.

"Did the original survivors keep any written information after the Plague?" asked Charlinder. "How many of your community can read?"

"No one here learns how to read except the clergy, and some of the staff working for the Hyatts," said Randall. "And I doubt they have any books lying around about information stored in our bodies."

"Has anyone else in your community asked to learn how to read?" Charlinder asked.

"Nobody around here
has
anything to read except the Bible," Dina pointed out. "So even if we could read, how much could we learn from it?"

"You're right, there's no reason," said Charlinder.

It was a warm night and Charlinder didn’t want to sleep inside. He asked Vilma and Peter if he could take his blankets out to the back garden and sleep on the grass next to Lacey, and they said that was fine.

He liked Vilma and her family, and he liked Randall and his family, but he wasn't exactly impressed with any of them. His neighbors back on the Paleola weren't nearly as wealthy as this settlement, but they were so much happier, so much more comfortable in their own skins than this settlement’s people who'd apparently been divided into the blinkered and the trapped. The gene to solve problems was seemingly bred out of them. He would much rather share a one-room cabin with Roy and own almost nothing than live between so many invisible walls.

Something woke him up, but it was still dark. He rolled onto his side to find Lacey was not there. Instead there was a woman sitting in the grass on each side of him, backlit in the moonlight. He'd been awoken by their stroking his stomach and chest.

"Who's this?" he demanded in a squeaky and small voice.

"It's okay, Char," said the woman to his right, a newly familiar voice. "It's Cleo. Hattie’s here with me. Do you remember her, from the prayer session?"

"Okay," he returned in that squeaky voice, "What exactly are you doing?" Although he could well see where they were going.

The women exchanged a look. "You," said Hattie, as if it should have been obvious.

"Wait. Cleo, don't you have a husband?"

"Yeah, we both do, but they don't mind."

He couldn’t say anything over the sensation of his brain tying itself in a knot, so he changed the subject while he scrambled backwards. "Where is my animal?"

"She's fine, we just tied her to the fence around the horse pasture," Cleo promised. "Now, don't worry, baby," she purred, "we're gonna take good care of you."

Charlinder didn't have to wonder when these two nearly unknown women had become attracted to him, as he knew what they had in mind. Their husbands knew exactly what they were doing and in fact fully supported them. It was the quickest, simplest way to get around the rules.

"What if...what if the Hyatts see..." he protested, less than coherently as they were now kissing his face and taking greater liberties with their hands, "that your kids look like me?"

"Oh, you were right about him, Cleo. Nothing gets past him," Hattie whispered. They did not, however, pause in their advances.

"They don't look at us that closely," Cleo whispered in his ear.

He knew the local regime's treatment of them was not just destructive, but needlessly so. In the weak light, he couldn't see anything that made them different from his friends in Paleola, and they were both very good kissers. In fact, now that he thought about it, his friends back at home had gone and done exactly the same thing, though for different reasons.

And that brought the difference crashing back up around his eyes. He had let his best friends come onto him, and enjoyed it, because he didn't feel sorry for them.

"Stop," he said, his voice a sharp slap in the darkness. He pushed Cleo's and Hattie's hands away and stood up. "I can't do this."

"Of course you can," Cleo argued. "Just lie back and we'll do all the work. It won't hurt a bit."

"I'm not doing this," he said. He was now at the right angle to see their bewildered faces, and at that moment, he could almost laugh from the jumble of images playing through his head. He pictured himself trying to explain to anyone, like Kenny, for example, that he’d had two women together come onto him, and that he’d turned them down. He tried to picture himself explaining that he, who thought nothing of letting five women have their way with him in under two weeks, could look a threesome in the face and say no thanks. He almost felt like he owed Cleo and Hattie an explanation. "I need to find my animal. You two should go home."

"You don’t have to worry about anything," Cleo stated. "You can just move on like you planned, and never think about us again," she promised. "We just want to do this, tonight."