Late the next morning, I pulled on my racing kamelaika and met my mother for breakfast at one of the cafes that line the Run opposite the flowing Hyacinth Gardens. ‘You’re racing Soli today, and you didn’t sleep last night, did you? Here, drink this coffee. It’s Farfara prime. I’ve taught you strategy since you were four years old, and you didn’t sleep last night?’
‘Bardo thinks I should let Soli win the race.’
‘He’s a fat fool. Haven’t I told you that for twelve years? He thinks he’s clever. Clever he’s not. I could have taught him cleverness. When I was four years old.’
From a delicate blue pot, she poured coffee into a marble cup and slid it across the table. I sipped the hot, black coffee, totally unprepared for what she said next. ‘We can leave the Order,’ she whispered, tilting her head as she quickly glanced at the two master mechanics sitting at the table next to us. ‘The new academy, the one on Tria, you know what I’m saying, don’t you? They need pilots, good ones like you. Why should our Order tyrannize the fallaways?’
I was so shocked that I spilled coffee on my lap, burning my leg. The Merchant Pilots of Tria – those wily, unethical thingists and tubists – for a long time had tried to break the power of our Order. ‘What are you saying, Mother? That we should be traitors?’
‘Traitors to the Order, yes. Better for you to betray a few hastily given vows, than to betray the life I gave you.’
‘You always hoped I’d be Lord Pilot someday.’
‘You could be a merchant prince. Of Tria.’
‘No, Mother, never that.’
‘It would surprise you. That certain pilots have been offered middle estates on Tria. Certain programmers and cantors, too.’
‘But no one has accepted, have they?’
‘Not yet,’ she said, and she began drumming her fingers against the table top. ‘But there is more dissension among the professionals than you know. Some of the historians like Burgos Harsha think the Order is stagnating. And the pilots. The rule against marriage is almost as hated as marriage is hateful.’ Here she paused to laugh at her little joke, then continued, ‘There is more disorder in the Order than you’d dream.’ She laughed again as if she knew something I didn’t, and she sat back in her chair, waiting.
‘I’d rather die than go to Tria.’
‘Then we’ll flee to Lechoix. Your grandmother will welcome us, even if you are a bull.’
‘I don’t think she will.’
My grandmother whom I had never met, Dama Oriana Ringess, had brought up Justine and my mother – and Katharine – properly. ‘Properly’ in the Lechoix Matriarchy meant an early introduction into the feminine mysteries and severe language rules. Thus men are despised and are referred to as ‘bulls,’ or ‘gamecocks,’ or sometimes ‘mules.’ Desire between man and woman is called ‘the sick heat,’ and marriage, heterosexual marriage, that is, is ‘the living hell.’ The High Damen, of which my grandmother is one of the highest, abhorring the belief that men make better pilots than women, support the largest and best of the Order’s elite schools. So it was that when my mother and Justine arrived at Borja long ago having never seen a man, they were shocked – and in my mother’s case, hateful – that such young beasts as Lionel and Soli could be better mathematicians than they were.
‘Dama Oriana,’ I said, ‘would do nothing that would shame the Matriarchy, would she?’
‘Listen to me. Listen! I won’t let Soli kill my son!’ She said the word ‘son’ with such a wrenching desperation that I felt compelled to look at her, even as she burst into tears and sobbed. She nervously pulled her hair from the chignon’s binding leather and used the shiny strands to dry her face. ‘Listen, listen,’ she said. ‘Brilliant Soli returns from the manifold. Brilliant as always, but not so brilliant. I used to beat him. At chess. Three games out of four before he quit playing me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve ordered you bread,’ she said as she held up her hand and motioned to the domestic. It rolled to the table where it placed before me a basket of hot, crusty black bread. ‘Eat your bread and drink your coffee.’
‘You’re not eating?’
Usually she had bread at breakfast; like her sisters on Lechoix she would eat no foods of animal origin, not even the cultured meats favoured by almost everyone in our city.
I reached for one of the small, oblong loaves. I bit into it; it was delicious. As I chewed the hard bread, she removed a ball of chocolate from the blue bowl in front of her and popped it into her mouth.
‘What if I succeed, Mother?’ I asked. She stuffed three more balls of chocolate into her mouth, staring at me.
Her reply was barely comprehensible, a burble of words forced through a mouthful of sticky, melting chocolate: ‘Sometimes I think Soli’s right. My son is a fool.’
‘You’ve always said you have faith in me.’
‘Faith I have; blind faith I have not.’
‘Why should it be impossible? The Entity is a nebula much like any other: hot gases, interstellar dust, a few million stars. Perhaps it’s mere chance that the Tycho and the others were lost.’
‘Heresy!’ she said as she picked apart a chocolate ball with her long fingernails. ‘Haven’t I taught you better? I won’t have you saying that word. It’s not chance. That killed the Tycho. It’s She.’
‘She?’
‘The Entity. She’s a web of a million meshing biocomputers the size of moons. She manipulates matter. And She plies energy. And She twists space to Her liking. The manifold inside Her is known to be strange, hideously complex.’
‘Why do you call her “She”?’
My mother smiled and said, ‘Should I call the greatest intelligence, the holiest life in our universe, “he”?’
‘What of the Silicon God, then?’
‘Misnamed. By certain of the older eschatologists who divide essences into male and female. She should be called the “Silicon Goddess.” The universe gives birth to life; the essence of the universe is female.’
‘And what of men?’
‘They are repositories for sperm. Have you studied the dead languages of Old Earth as I’ve asked you to do? No? Well, there was a Romance expression: instrumenta vocalia. Men are tools with voices. Magnificent tools they are. And sometimes their voices are sublime. But without women, they’re nothing.’
‘And women without men?’
‘The Lechoix Matriarchy was founded five thousand years ago. There are no patriarchies.’
I sometimes think my mother should have been an historian or a remembrancer. She always seemed to know too much of ancient peoples, languages and customs, or at least enough to turn arguments her way.
‘I’m
