The Serrano Connection (92 page)

Now that she could force herself to her feet again, she was expected to help with the work. But she had never cared for an infant, let alone in these primitive circumstances. The wrapping of diapers baffled her completely.

"It's as if she never did anything until now—can you believe a grown woman not knowing how to peel vegetables? To put a child to breast?" The warden complained to the other women, who nodded and hissed in response.

Brun seethed. She could have told them why she didn't have their backwards, primitive skills. She had not been trained to make beds and clean toilets and chop vegetables and wipe the bottoms of dirty little brats. She held pilots' licenses on half a dozen worlds; she could ride to hounds with the Greens; she could take down and reassemble the scan systems of a medium cruiser as fast as any technicians . . .

And here her skills were worth nothing. They thought she was stupid or crazy, because she couldn't do what they did so easily.

"She's an abomination. Of course the heathen don't teach their daughters properly." That was the warden's explanation for everything she did wrong.

She was not a heathen, nor an abomination, but surrounded by those who thought she was, she found it harder and harder to remember her real self. It was easier to scrub the floor the way the warden insisted on, even if it would have been more efficient the other way. Easier to change the babies the way she was told, to cut vegetables the way she was told.

If only she had been really stupid . . . but her intelligence, recovering from the birth, awoke again. Recipes were boring, perhaps, but she remembered them just the same, automatically assigning them to categories. Sewing was even more boring than recipes, poking a needle in and out of cloth over and over. Why did they have to do everything the hard way? Not everything, she reminded herself . . . just the work assigned to women. Electricity for light, running water . . . but only men had access to computers and all that computers stood for.

Scraps of history she had hardly listened to in class floated up from a retentive memory. There had been other societies which resisted making life easier for women, because then they might turn away from the traditional role of wife and mother. Way back on Old Earth, cultures which didn't let women drive groundcars or fly or learn to use weapons—others which forbade women to teach in mixed classes, to become doctors. But that was long ago and very far away . . . and this was here and now.

In the quick glimpse she caught of the street when she and the babies were transferred to the nursery, she could not distinguish any landmarks. It was a chill, raw day; she shivered in the wind that whipped down the street. She was put in the back of the same kind of closed groundcar, where she could see nothing of her route, and driven some incalculable distance with four definite turns.

The front of the nursery looked slightly more welcoming, with shuttered windows instead of blank stone overlooking the street. A distant roar—Brun looked up to see the obvious plume of a shuttle launch in the distance.

"Eyes down!" said the driver, slapping at her head. But she exulted . . . she knew now where the spaceport was, or at least what direction.

Inside, the matron greeted her less harshly than the warden at the maternity house, and she could hear women's voices in the distance. Women's voices? The matron led her to a room large enough for a bed, two cribs, and a low wide chair with a leg rest that was obviously intended for nursing. She had a small closet, a chest, and the inevitable sewing basket was on a bedside table.

The matron helped her settle the babies in their cribs, helped her make the bed, and then led Brun off to show her the house. In the upstairs rooms, the more privileged women could look out through slatted shutters to the streets below—but Brun had only a glimpse before the matron pulled her away. An upstairs sewing room had rear-facing windows that looked out on a long, walled garden full of fruit trees; a few apples hung from some of them. Beyond the wall—Brun tried not to stare, told herself she would have time to look later—beyond the wall she could see a street, and the buildings across it . . . and beyond more buildings, open land, rough fields and distant hills.

The women in the nursery had slightly more freedom. They were supposedly regaining their strength for another pregnancy; they were encouraged to walk out in the orchard, as well as do the housework and cooking. Not all the women were muted, either. They had come, Brun learned, from other maternity homes or from private homes . . . servant women whose children would be reared elsewhere when they returned to their duties. The women who supervised them inspected the babies and mothers daily for cleanliness and any sign of illness, and supervised the preparation of household chores and cooking, but otherwise treated their charges with pleasant firmness. The muted women had perhaps less pleasantness and more firmness, but no active unkindness.

They continued to teach Brun the skills they thought all women should have. Brun had not known that such things were possible, but she watched the other women produce socks and gloves and mittens from several wooden sticks and balls of fuzzy yarn. She was handed a pair of sticks, and shown—over and over—how to cast on, how to knit a plain stitch. It was the most boring thing she'd ever done, the same little movement of the hand over and over and over, even worse than sewing seams. Then they handed her another stick, and taught her to knit a tube. Something clicked in her mind—this sort of thing, done with finer yarn and on a machine, made some of the things she'd worn. Sweaters, for instance: three tubes sewn together. Stockings . . . leggings . . . tubular knits. It was interesting in an intellectual way, one of the few things that was.

It got colder, and Brun shivered. The other women, warm in their knitted shawls and sweaters, shook their heads at her.

"You must work faster," one of them told her. "You will be cold if you have no winter clothes." In winter, they explained, they wore long knitted stockings under their skirts, held up with a peculiar arrangement of straps and buttons. The stockinged feet did not break the rules against shoes, because they were not hard-bottomed. In households, some women even wore backless clogs in wet or snowy weather, if they needed to go to market, but here they would not.

Here also Brun was formally introduced to the beliefs of her captors. They assumed that outlanders had no morals, and no beliefs worth mentioning. So they began with the basics, as Brun assumed children were taught. God, a supernatural being who had created the universe. Man, the glory of creation. Woman, created to be Man's comfort and help. Evil powers, rebellious against God, who tempted Woman to usurp Man's position.

For once muteness had its utility; Brun could not be made to recite the Rules and Rituals, as the other women did. And since women did not "discourse"—a word which they interpreted to mean speaking or writing about Godly matters—she was not asked to write answers to the questions asked ritually of others. Women were not encouraged to read or write anyway—although recipes and compendia of other household knowledge were permissable. But they clearly feared contamination by anything a heathen abomination such as a Registered Embryo might commit to paper, or do to a book she read from. She was not allowed to read or write anything at all. They could not test her memory, or her understanding.

But she had an excellent memory. She could not hear the same words over and over without storing them away. The words of the prophets . . . the word of God Almighty. The rules and their corollaries . . . quite reasonable, if you accepted the premises, which Brun did not. If in fact you believed that women had been created as men's servants and comfort, then . . . anything women did which was not serving men would clearly be wrong. And this was not something women could determine. Only God could make the rules, and only men could interpret them.

It all made sense, except that it was ridiculous, like the ridiculous logic of paranoia. The notion that she was not as much a person as, say, her brothers . . . or, to go one step away, that Esmay Suiza was less a person than Barin Serrano . . . was absurd. She knew that. She knew how to demonstrate that, if only she could have explained; she was sure that every woman in the nursery would understand, if only . . .

But she was mute, all her knowledge and intelligence locked away. In her world, in the world she knew, the individual's voice was honored; parents and teachers and therapists like those who had worked with Lady Cecelia tried to ensure that each person had every opportunity to communicate. She remembered Cecelia's struggles, and the many who had helped her. Here, no one thought an abomination had anything useful to say. As long as she could understand and obey, that was enough.

She ached, burned, to free this world's women . . . to show them that they were as human as men. In her mind, in the dark hours, she made all the speeches, wrote all the lectures, proved over and over and over again to an audience of shadows what she could never say.

In the daytime, Brun forced herself to walk on the gritty paths, toughening her feet as well as her legs, whenever exercise was permitted. She walked in all weathers, even when frost and snow numbed her to the knees before she was halfway to the first trees. The twins weighed her down—but she thought of them like the heavy packs in training. Additional strength would come from lugging them around . . . she would be stronger sooner, and more able to escape. Twice a day she walked the length of the orchard and back . . . soon she could walk farther, in the lengthening days that must mean a warmer season was coming. She even welcomed the hard work of mopping and cleaning, as she felt herself growing stronger. In the evenings, in her room, she attempted the exercises that had once come so easily. At first she worried that they would notice, and forbid them, but no one commented. Other women too, she discovered, did exercises to tighten their slack bellies, to recover flexibility.

In the darkest times, she practiced the swift movements of unarmed combat . . . only two or three strokes each time, in case of observation, but a little every day. She matched hands and feet against each other, the quietest way she could think to achieve the hardening she needed for a killing stroke.

The showings, where proven breeders were displayed for men who might choose them next time, were less humiliation than she'd expected, and more worrying. In the showings, she did her best to look exhausted, weak, helpless, broken. It wasn't hard to look tired . . . she pushed herself to shaky exhaustion every day. But she could feel the muscle building on her legs again, in her arms, in her abdomen. Would they believe that came from carrying the babies? From walking in the orchard? From the simple exercises the others did?

But they could not expect what she intended to do with the muscles she built with such effort. Eyes squeezed shut, she reminded herself which basic moves would build the strength and speed she needed for killing.

The other women did not so much avoid her as ignore her. When the babies were wriggling happily on quilts on the floor, they exclaimed over the strength and vigor of her boys as they did over the qualities of their own. The staff gave her directions—which chores to do—in much the same tone as anyone else. The speaking women naturally talked most to each other; the muted women had a private language of gesture, and a public one of broader gestures and elaborate lipspeaking and hisses. The speaking women would include the mutes if one of the muted women made the effort to get their attention. Some even befriended one—for cooperative baby care made friendships useful for both. But Brun could not enter into the lipspeaking of the other muted women. Occasionally, if she were alone with another woman, and faced her directly, she could make herself understood with a combination of gesture and mouthing—if the topic was something obvious.
Where is the sewing basket?
or
What is that?
They were willing to show her where things were, or how to do a chore. But she had no topics in common with them, except babies, and she did not care that much about the babies, any of them. They were all—hers and the others'—proof of what she hated. And she knew they saw her as a dangerous person . . . tamed by muting, but potentially a source of soul-killing deviancy. Her lack of interest in the babies was another proof, to them, of her unnatural, immoral upbringing.

The babies were moving from creeping to rocking on their hands and knees when a new mother arrived at the nursery. She was very young, and had a slightly dazed expression. The other women spoke to her in short, simple sentences, a little louder than usual. Brun wondered if she'd been drugged, though she had seen no evidence that women were given drugs. On the third day, she approached Brun. "You're the yellow-hair from the stars?" She had the usual soft voice, but a little hesitancy in it.

Brun nodded. Up close, she decided that it wasn't drugs, but some innate problem, that gave the girl that odd expression and halting speech . . . and the social unawareness that let her approach the unapproachable.

"You traveled with another girl—more my size—and two brats?"

Brun nodded again.

"She said you was nice. She liked you. She said."

Brun looked hard at the girl. She had to be talking about Hazel. Where had she seen Hazel?

"She's doin' fine. I just thought you'd like to know." The girl smiled past Brun's shoulder, and wandered off, leaving Brun tethered to the twins.