Flowerdust, page 1
part #2 of The Last Days of Ranaganar Series
FLOWERDUST
Gwyneth Jones
3S XHTML edition 1.0
scan notes and proofing history
contents
|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|
|Epilogue|
Tor books by Gwyneth Jones
Divine Endurance
Flowerdust
White Queen
TOR(r)
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
FLOWERDUST
Copyright (c) 1993 by Gwyneth Jones
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor (r) is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc. Design by Nancy Resnick
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Gwyneth A.
Flowerdust / Gwyneth Jones.
p. cm.
"A Tom Doherty Associates book."
ISBN 0-312-85894-9 I. Title.
PR6060.05163F57 1995
823'.914--dc20 95-15454
CIP
First Tor edition: July 1995
Printed in the United States of America
0987654321
Wayang
Oh Lord let me be a wayang in Thy hands
Whether I be hero or demon, king or commoner,
animal or plant or tree. Let me be still a
wayang in Thy hands. Then shall I speak your
tongue, whether I be valiant in the turmoil of battle
or small as a child at play amongst the waringins
This life of mine on earth is filled with toil
and strife, and my enemies who are many, mock me.
Their ridicule flies to its target swifter than
plumed arrows; their words strike deeper than
krisses. My struggle is not yet at an end.
And soon Thou wilt take me and I shall lie
amongst the others whose plays are over.
I shall be amongst the thousands in darkness.
And my struggle was not yet at an end:
Still my enemies dance.
Lord, let me be a wayang in Thy hands
Then after a hundred or a thousand years, Thy hand
will bestow upon me life and movement once more.
Then, one day when my time has come for Thy eternity,
Thou wilt call me to Thee again, and I shall speak
and contend anew.
And one day my enemies will be silenced, and the demon
will lie prostrate on the ground.
Oh Lord, let me be a wayang in Thy hands
Noto Suroto, Wayang Liederen
(translated from the Dutch)
Flowerdust
1
^ >>>
On a day of baking sunlight in the middle of the third month, a small person in white clothes presented herself at the Cold Storage building, on the causeway side of the city of Ranganar. The Butcher volunteers recognized her and let her in as soon as she asked. The cat, Divine Endurance, slipped under the gate. She never felt the need to ask permission to do anything.
Inside the building it was stuffy and dim. Harassed young Samsui hurried about, the sleeves of their blue cotton jackets rolled and trousers tucked up to the knee for coolness. Their rosy, earnest faces were crumpled with worry. The Koperasi had made a delivery of supplies yesterday. The men were being very generous. No one knew where this food came from; but there was heaps of it, and not in good condition. The Kops had simply driven their treader into the yard and dumped its contents, in no kind of order. It was a struggle merely to sort out the perishable from the nonperishable--and by the time you'd done that, of course the perishable had perished!
"Silly fools," commented the cat. "They collect all this food, leave it to feed the rats, then they don't eat the rats. Humans are absurd."
"It's meant for the people from across the causeway."
"Meant to be wasted? Now that makes a kind of sense."
Cho looked at the cat sidelong, and pattered on through the ranks of torn cartons and oozing bales of grain. She stopped, and crouched to peer into the innards of the defunct ice plant. "Poor thing."
The doll called Chosen Among the Beautiful and the toy cat called Divine Endurance had traveled far, in time-- it seemed--as well as space, to reach Ranganar. In the city where they were created, time had been standing still for who knows how long. Since the mysterious catastrophe when the toymakers vanished, the machines in the factory had labored on alone in a desolation: tireless, faultless, helplessly obedient. When they finally ran down, the cat, who had been the factory mascot, set out with Cho, the last of the machines' creations, in search of the toymakers and of the third remaining doll, Cho's "brother," who had made this journey long before.
They had found the human race, or at least a ragged and divided remnant thereof. One division lived here, on the fertile Peninsula jutting down from the Asian landmass into the ocean--with this island of Ranganar lying off the southern tip. The other people, who ruled the Peninsula, lived at sea on artificial islands.
The dead ice plant was an uncomfortable reminder for the two survivors from another age. They were machines themselves, however marvelous, and machines were not wanted here. True Peninsulans had learned to do without them. Even in Ranganar, where machinery was supposed to be acceptable, mechanical things were somehow neglected and falling into final decay.
Out on the Rulers' Islands, things were different. Something of the toymakers' civilization survived there, clear, simple, clean. Divine Endurance admired the Rulers. She found the Peninsulans messy and muddled, and their attitude to machines insulting. In her opinion, Cho's place was out at sea.
But Cho had been made to be the perfect companion of one special human. On the Peninsula she had found her person. Her loyalty was settled; her journey was over.
"Come on," grumbled the cat. "I thought you had an errand with these particular smelly degenerates."
The camp was for refugees. A long causeway joined Ranganar Island to the mainland of the Peninsula. People had fled across it because of an outbreak of rebellion in the north, against the Rulers' occupying army. Cho gave Divine Endurance another mistrustful glance. She knew that the cat could twist the inbuilt rules that bound them both to serve and protect all humans. And she knew how much Divine Endurance resented having been abandoned. When the cat started encouraging her to help her human friends, Cho was suspicious.
"Why are you following me around? I thought you were on the other people's side."
She squatted, slim arms folded on her knees, watching the cat narrowly. Divine Endurance did things that were not allowed. It was Divine Endurance who'd insisted they could leave the factory by themselves. Cho knew that special art-persons, geisha, like herself, were not supposed to do that. You ought to be taken, by the person you were going to belong to... The thought of that disobedience still troubled her.
The cat's diamond-blue eyes slitted smugly.
"I am looking after the Rulers' interests. Don't worry."
Cho decided it didn't matter. She didn't mind if somehow she was helping the Rulers as well as her own side. She made no distinctions. Her purpose in life was to make humans happy: first her dear companion, then all the rest. Her joy was the certainty deep within her that she had the power to do so. However complicated or strangely simple their needs might be, Cho could do anything that was required. An angel doll can grant, will grant, every wish of the human heart... She had heard that said of herself, and she knew it was true.
"The Samsui women are having trouble with the refugees. Something bad is happening."
The doors on the other side of the huge shed stood ajar. The miasma of the camp drifted through: laden with wood-smoke and the stink of urine, shit, ripe garbage. "Something bad?" The cat's whiskers twitched derisively.
"Derveet says we have to find out what it is. Urgently. Otherwise the Samsui will let the Kops take over the camp."
The Koperasi, the Rulers' occupying army, were themselves Peninsulans: renegades and collaborators. They were hated up and down the Peninsula. But on Ranganar island their presence was accepted, if not welcomed. They shared the running of the city with the Samsui women.
"Derveet! Pah!"
The cat glowered over this name, tail twitching sourly-- the name of the insolent human who had stolen Cho's loyalty and interfered with Divine Endurance's plans. A figure, a skeletal shadow, blocked the bar of sunlight that fell between the shed doors.
"Who are you?"
It was a woman, a Peninsulan. Cho looked up uncertainly. The Samsui, the city women, were heretics. The refugees were orthodox Peninsulans, who shouldn't use machines. Cho wondered if she was welcome in the camp. If she was not, it would be difficult to do as Derveet had asked. Derveet would not want her to defy the dapur, the women's rule that was law in the Peninsulan states.
"I'm Cho."
The woman came up. She was unveiled, which was unusual. Her step was wandering and loose-jointed, as if she were half-asleep. She crouched and touched Cho, who quietly let herself be examined. Skinny hands pinched her flesh, wobbled her wrists, traced the whorls of her ears. She saw that the woman's pupils were hugely dilated. The whites of her ey
"What are you? Some kind of doll? Some kind of device? You've come to the right place. This camp is a machine. Most of it is invisible. Whatever you do, you are part of its works."
Cho was astonished. But it was a relief, for once, simply to be herself. Most humans--in this strangely changed world--didn't allow her that. They knew what she was, or they soon guessed. But they didn't want to think about it.
"I am a product of the Tumbling Dice Toy Factory. Our humans died long ago. Divine Endurance says that means we can do what we like, but I don't believe her. I know I'm still meant to belong to someone, and to do what I'm told, and never to do harm."
The woman laughed loudly. "How can you do anything but harm? You belong to the Rulers."
"I don't!"
"You must. We all do. Oh, God, if this were over. Death by slow torture, why endure it, the end is certain." She grabbed with bony hands at her spiky cropped hair, as if her head were likely to fly off if she didn't hold it. "I've heard of the magic doll. You are famous. Is it true you can grant wishes?"
Cho was delighted: she nodded. "Anything you like."
"Is the scholar awake?"
Ramli the stud rolled over in the slack webbing of his bed. Endang heard the jingle of his rings and chains, the animal susurration of a man-length sheaf of braided hair. He lay still in the hot, sweaty gloom, in the miasma of the night's terrible visions, trying to breathe evenly. Ramli replied, propped on one elbow, his gleaming V-shaped back to Endang's mat: "He's quiet, at least. He keeps me up half the night, whining and flinging about. He has bad dreams."
"There's a job for him. No, don't wake him," as Ramli shifted on his bed. "Call me when his eyes are sane. I don't want to waste my breath on a gibbering lunatic."
At home in the hills of the Timur border, this family was rich for their kind. The stud had a house of his own in the main courtyard. Here in the camp he had to share his pen, in the back portion of a shambling makeshift shack. Ramli had no need to fear the "extra male." None of the family's women would touch Endang, the polluted. But his malice didn't need that excuse. He hated the interloper. They all did: the stud, the boys, the women, too.
Endang lay curled on his side listening fearfully, his eyes open a sliver. What kind of job? He could see the outline of the speaking boy, through a drift of dirty gauze that modestly veiled the stud's quarters. These Timur peasants had pretensions, and wealth. Their matting mansion was the size of ten of the ordinary refugee huts. It was cluttered with the screens and veils of orthodox custom, to keep the women and the stud and the neuter boys decorously apart.
He couldn't hear what the two were saying. Something about the Garuda dam? They were muttering about a "he" who was not Endang: a "he" who was being talked about everywhere in this heretic city of Ranganar. Endang realized that they were discussing not a man but a woman. A failed woman, one who had been proved infertile, was known as "he" in the Peninsula. "The man-woman Garuda--" he heard, and a dismissive snigger. They were talking about the lone survivor of the Peninsula's greatest royal family: a woman who had been fighting long and secretly for the lost cause of Peninsulan independence... lost until this very year, when the last Garuda's fortunes had suddenly changed. Endang could have laughed. Times really must be changing if Ramli the stud was taking an interest in politics!
Peninsulan women, who ruled society from the dapur, the sacred hearth, made boys of most of their male children. Civilized people did it with drugs or meditation. Less refined folk used the knife. The chosen few, the studs, were kept whole: enclosed, petted, ignorant. In the worst case, they were little more than prize animals. This family called Endang "the scholar" (with a sneer) because his fate had been different. Once, he had been to college at Sepaa, the big Koperasi base town on the south coast of the Peninsula. And before that... He closed his eyes, mouth twisting bitterly.
Once, I was a gentleman ...
The Timurese would have hated him without his education if he was as mindless as a Timur stud should be. He was not one of their own. He had been born in Gamartha, a northern state, into a devout, traditional family of small landowners. They were, in their way, liberal, and kind to their young consort-to-be. But when he was fourteen he was left an orphan. His mother-sisters, the fertile women of his immediate family, were dead. His "uncle," the man Endang should one day have supplanted, dutifully took the traditional route for a gentleman who has outlived his use. Endang didn't want to die. He ran away, and flung himself on the mercy of distant connections in the neighboring state of Timur.
They were very different from his own people, that household in the rich base town on the coast of Timur. They were enlightened Peninsulans who admired the Rulers, and accepted the ever-present Koperasi pragmatically. Endang was an "extra male." He was too old to be made a boy, and they didn't need him as a stud. When he pestered them, they saw no harm in his having an education.
The Koperasi, the collaborators, had become a nation on their own account after generations of foreign rule. They were not governed by women. They were an army of men. They had no dapur. They increased their numbers by buying, stealing, trading. There were plenty of unwanted male children in the traditional states. In the occupied territories, which had once belonged to the Garudas, there was a population of plantation workers--slaves, Endang had unwisely learned to call them. The army recruited from their ranks too. There were boys among the Kops, but few in the higher ranks... It was exhilarating--a whole world of studs, men like himself, walking around free: with cropped hair, with authority, with strange fancy gadgets that gave them powers the dapur denied to the orthodox.
But the Koperasi college had been Endang's downfall. He started out with heartfelt gratitude towards the Kops, and to the Rulers, whose benign influence had saved him from death. He began to read, he began to think. He began to think a little too much, he became involved in politics.
For a subject people there is only one kind of politics, that of resistance. His guardians caught him expressing dangerous opinions. They sent him away into the country--for his own safety, they said. So Endang the scholar became a domestic animal.
He had escaped, three times. He didn't go back to his relatives. They knew what fate they had condemned him to. They would not interfere. He had tried to survive in the underworld of the coastal towns, with the other outcasts: the failed women, and the extra men, who had been reared as insurance alongside the chosen stud and then thrown out by their families. But Endang had too little courage or too much imagination for that world, and he didn't know how to hide. Each time, he had been tracked down by the husky boys his "ladies" sent after him. The peasants of Timur are known for their avarice. Endang was property; they wouldn't let him go. Besides, the women were afraid of his relatives, who had paid them to keep Endang off the streets.
Each time, when he was brought back, it was worse.
He wondered what was happening in Timur now. He was kept enclosed, but he was sure there had been no violence around that squalid village in the border hills. The rising against the Koperasi was in the north, in Gamartha, Endang's old country. But there was such a general feeling of unrest and uncertainty this year, it didn't take much to get people moving. The inland Timurese had fled from rumors, by instinct, like the slaves on the run from their plantations--and they had all converged on the causeway, and arrived in Ranganar.
Endang's "guardians" were not so innocent. They had come to Ranganar for their own reasons, content to leave their farm untended for a season. They wouldn't lose by it. Their wealth wasn't in the land. They were moneylenders, these women: not ashamed to handle the Koperasi currency that was pollution to the truly orthodox. Hateful creatures, parasites! That a gentleman of Gamartha should have fallen so low... He almost groaned aloud at the miserable humor of the thought.
The muttering stopped. The speaking boy had gone from behind the gauze. Endang's heart thumped. Now he'd missed his chance to be forewarned. What job? The women had started using him as an errand boy since they'd arrived in the refugee camp. Their errands were alarming. But the pay was good. He swallowed the taste of nightmare in his mouth, thought longingly of peace and escape: what job?
Ramli sat up and kicked. He was a powerful young man. He was allowed space for physical exercise at home, and he kept his body in beautiful shape. Endang grunted in pain and pulled himself away. He was chained by one wrist to a staple hammered into the floor. He could probably pull it out, but there was no point. He had nowhere to go. The stud stretched against the matting wall behind his bed, smoothing his pierced foreskin back from a stalwart erection. Ramli always woke like that, and he eased himself, which strictly he should not do. Endang looked away.
