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47.
Watka gave Tedda a tour of the great house. It was soon apparent that he wanted to seduce her, and she avoided all hints of encouragement. She tried not to offend him, but made it clear that she was in love with the afterimage of Hedrock.
"But he's dead and gone," Watka said as they tramped through the upper, third stories. She glimpsed the servants' quarters, hunters' quarters, armory, all very antique with some of the weapons muzzle-loaders accompanied by powder horns and flints. She saw torsos of armor, swords, and shields with family crests on them. "This estate has been in our family for nearly 600 years," he said. "I could set you up in a little cottage with a servant or two."
"No thanks."
"You'd be the most comfortable rule ever created."
"No thanks." She was offended by his highhandedness. It was evident that he did not see rules as having quite the same value as source.
He trapped her in a doorway with his arm, and radiated charm at her. "I hope you'll change your mind once you've gotten used to the comforts of this place."
She pressed past him and they came through a series of kitchens: a bakery, a beanery, a place for churning cream and cheese, a place for gutting fish or smoking game, and so on. He trapped her again with the same great charm: "What do you want, Tedda? What is your heart's desire?"
"To be with Hedrock."
"Crazy!" he said, slapping himself on the forehead. "You are a rule, and he is a dead source. You can't have him, because it's impossible."
"Then clone him," she said petulantly and pointlessly.
"Not the same thing!" he said chasing her as she walked briskly back to the central staircase and descended to the second floor. "Clones are cooked and booked from DNA. Rules are spun in motion from the Go-dots of the source. You depart from your source like a shadow that quickly takes flesh and has pounding blood in its heart. You are distinct persons."
"If we are distinct persons, Baron, then why don't you treat us with the same respect you offer source. Oh, perhaps I misunderstand. You send them to their deaths by the millions, so why should you treat a rule any better."
He was red and hot. "I am offering to treat you better. You are being unreasonable." A crafty look chased away his red anger. "You are playing with me. You are negotiating for the best deal you can get. I see it now."
She whirled and confronted him. They stopped in mid-corridor, among dark wood and carved reliefs in walnut and oak. The faces of putti looked shiny from centuries of serving-girls' soft cloths. "I am only asking you to behave like an adult and put your tongue back in your mouth and your zipper back to the top."
He stammered: "I have never felt so tongue-tied, madam. If you wish to leave, you may do so. The police will have you in custody within the hour. You resemble Amy von Tedda too much, and they are by now driving themselves and the whole world crazy looking for her. Or, if you choose, you can stay here and tolerate my hospitality. I think you will choose the latter course."
"And?"
"And what?" He appeared to be afraid to say the next thing, which she knew would be something like "I will take my time about getting into bed with you."
"Please don't threaten me," she said. She felt a sense of despair, looking past her own anger and disgust.
"Don't be silly," he said, calming himself and patting his clothes back in order. At a small niche in the wall, he washed his face quickly at a sink, and wiped his head with a towel. He discarded the towel, for some servant to pick up. He smoothed his disheveled hair back. "Let's have a look at the rest of the place."
He showed her the rest of the second floor, with its great family sleeping suites and common rooms. He showed her his office, his library, his billiards room, his personal collection of weapons (as distinct from the hunters' armory on the third floor). The tour went on until she tired. He showed her the first floor, which had a great ballroom, a dining hall, an infirmary (guarded now by the hunters in fatigues, and containing Amy). He showed her the wine cellar, the champagne cellar, the brandy cellar, the cheese cellar, the vegetable cellar, the fruit cellar, and a dizzying array of other purposed places. He took her on a walk around the outside of the house, pointing out the barns with their horses ("twelve Arabians, six Belgian farm horses, and several other breeds and ponies," he told her as she smelled the calm and sweet smell of oats).
Back in the house, he said: "We have nearly 300 serving staff on the estate. Naturally, one has a tendency to knock about in such a huge place, and I am a single man, not yet married. My parents are dead, my siblings have all moved away, and I carry on here by myself. So I have my own little nook that I retreat to." He showed her a small corner apartment whose proportions where quite normal. It actually looked small and cluttered, and she liked it. But she was not staying here alone with this gryphon, this potential satyr.
"You will occupy your own apartment for the time being." He took her to another corner of the house, and gave her the key to an apartment similar to his. "This was my sister's. She married the wealthy industrialist and banker Baron von Hohencohen two years ago, and hasn't looked back since."
"Is this all her stuff?" Tedda asked. The rooms looked cozy, and were crammed with dainty coverlets and stuffed animals. She was afraid it would be stuffy and dusty, but he saw her look and quickly added: "A serving woman looks after it. You'll meet her—Damselle Gretchen. One thing—."
"Yes?"
"Don't tell her you are a rule."
"I see." Stabbed to the soul, Tedda sat down in a plush chair and put her feet up.
"I didn't mean for it to come out like that," he said. "You have to understand that it's the reality."
She wished she could leave her and be with Hedrock. Why not simply die in the final crackup of Monopol City, but in his arms? What else was there?
"The servants will make a fuss," he said. "They won't wait on you, and even worse, they may report us all to the authorities."
"I'll keep my mouth shut," Tedda said. "Look, Watka. I'll do whatever is my patriotic duty to help out, so that your clique can help themselves get back into power and put the dimmer on the Moss crew. That sounds like a good thing to do. However, please spare me the moist paw prints. I'm not interested. Can you get that through your drooling skull?"
He straightened to his full height, took a step backward as if she'd pushed him, turned dark red, and whirled to storm from the room.
She slammed the door after him and rummaged in the kitchenette for cups, tea, and fresh water. Pretty soon she had herself a little afternoon tea going, complete with some crackers from a tin (slightly stale, but the lemon and powder sugar disguised the flat taste). She noticed a small plastic radio shaped like a blue bear by the window. As she ate, she listened to a radio broadcast. "Authorities continue to comb the city and countryside of Central West Gotha for a group of enemy spies who appear to have kidnapped an important Western industrialist from her hospital room at the 325th Army Station Hospital at Gotha Fields. Images of the missing Amy von Tedda and her look-alike rule will be posted shortly on every street corner. Citizens are encouraged to report any sighting of these two."
Tedda's gloom deepened as she realized how tenuous her existence here was. She also recognized fully how imperfect these source people were, and how bleak their world was. She remembered Watka as she had first met him—a foul-smelling, lumbering plow horse of a man, reeking of cabbage and cheap schnapps, failed as an NCO and little better than a stable hand in his baggy, dirty, torn uniform. How well he had played the role—because it surely was part of his nature.
The servants she met, including Old Gretchen, were little better. The hunters were a rough, surly crew who reminded her of pirates. They swore undying allegiance to the Watka crest, under which they vowed to serve the fatherland as in the best feudal traditions, but they stubbornly demanded their rights from Watka. They had their own Gutt' Stub' (cozy parlor) at a corner of the third floor. Their parlor had a high tiled fireplace and a beer keg in one corner. It was adorned with ancient hunting muskets and other accoutrements, including a museum of ancient clay pipes. Hanno, Gretchen's son and a hunter, gave her the tour and explained that each pipe had belonged to a trusty hunter who had puffed it here in the Gemütlichkeit or comfort of these walls in centuries past. Tedda lost count, and estimated there must be a thousand of these spindly objects with their sooty little bowls and curving stems spread over the walls and even the ceiling.
Every day, Tedda visited Amy in the infirmary. This was another antique, another museum, but updated to the latest technologies. There were scary corners, including a shelf with sealed jars in brandy or formaldehyde, containing various genetic monsters including a baby resembling a frog (no neck; head and torso joined in one peeling, graying, egg-shaped mass) dated 1735; and so on. There were also racks of computer equipment and electronic tomes on everything from surgery to stenosis, from liver to laboratory, from appendectomy to x-ray, yellow fever, and zygoblastomas.
After a few days, Amy was capable of walking about. She asked for Tedda, and they would have tea together in Tedda's little apartment. "I find it quite charming," Amy said.
"It belonged to Watka's sister."
"Oh yes, the Baroness von Hohencohen," Amy said as she stirred sugar into her bronze tea. "She is in on our little adventure."
"Watka has explained some of it to me," Tedda said. "Amy, please tell me. What is to become of me?"
Amy shook her head as if startled. "Darling, as long as I live, you live. You can stay with me as long as you like. I need a close personal servant and confidante." Seeing Tedda's silence, she added: "Are you offended somehow, poor thing? Did Watka try to get his dactyls up your hoosie?"
"More or less," Tedda admitted. "I am not interested in his, er, interests."
"What do you want?" It was a frank, kindly question.
"I met a rule, from Hedrock."
"Ah, so that's it. Well, darling, you should find your rule and make your life with him, if that is what you wish."
"I had expected you would be very depressed to learn that Captain Hedrock has left us."
Amy nodded. "I am, my dear. I am." She stirred her tea more than was required by it, but she needed to so more. "At the same time, I am a practical woman. There is too much at stake. Do you understand, Tedda? The entire world is at a pivot. This is no time for me to mope about. I can grieve at the loss of my husband, build him a monument, weep for him on his birthday, but the fact of the matter is, child, if Watka and I and our allies do not strike now, the Moss Syndicate will dig in ever deeper. Same thing with their opposites in the East. Now is the time to strike and put them out of business." Amy regarded Tedda for a minute or two. "Child, I don't think I answered your question. What are you thinking?"
This was the one moment where Tedda was totally honest with her source. "I don't like your world. I wish I could go back down into the Monopol City world and find Edgar."
"It's a dying world."
"I know, but I'm not suitable to be a servant or a second-class citizen here."
"What do you mean?" Amy buttered some toast, while Tedda brought out orange marmalade. The little kitchen smelled sweet and warm. There was a medley of bread smells, jam smells, even coffee though it sat in tightly closed tins on shelves. Light from the park filtered in through the gray filmy curtains. The white valances with their strawberry and basket themes looked kitschy but pleasant.
"I don't think of myself as a rule, but as a person. I will always be a second class being here. I want to go home where I belong."
"What a strange set of ideas," Amy said. She appeared dismissive at first, but as she stroked her butter knife across her bread, she paused several times and Tedda could tell she had her source thinking. "I suppose we have created a new class of slaves without meaning to," Amy said.
"What do you call the source humans who serve you?"
"Servants," Amy said with a shrug as she bit into a piece of marmalade and butter toast. She looked at Tedda. "So you are implying that rules are a step lower?"
"You have already made that abundantly clear."
"Funny," Amy said, "I believe you're right. I never thought of it that way. So you feel like some sort of Untermensch and that hurts your feelings. Well, I can certainly understand that."
"You can?" Tedda said with some amazement.
"Indeed," Amy said. "Listen, honey, I was first in my class at University. I set records no man or woman has ever touched. I built my family's failing pharmacopia business, which was ruined by the Moss Syndicate, into a powerful industrial complex serving the war effort. I made myself indispensable, but you know what?" She leaned closer. "I used to think—here I am prostituting myself and my firm, anything to garner favor, anything to hang on, anything to build us back up, and for what? So the Moss Syndicate can become more powerful. That's why, when Alton Hedrock and his bedroom manner crossed my path, I fell hard for him. I fell for his physical charms, his pathetic yet irresistible boyish seductions, and yet I began to see the genius in him. Something in Alton Hedrock awakened a genius in me that I never knew existed."
"Maybe it's just plain humanity," Tedda said.
"You're so right. You are a piece of me, and you carry my genius, though you are like a dumber younger sister. Forgive me for being blunt. I don't mean to hurt your feelings."
Tedda said: "I never felt the need to be a genius, so my feelings aren't hurt; well, maybe not much."
Amy seemed remorseful. "Child, I never—."
Tedda felt hot. "Stop calling me child. I am a person, just like you. I am your sister, I guess."
"Yes you are." Amy tapped her fingertips on the table. "This is a moment in history when so much hangs in the balance; who we are, who we want to be, who we will make ourselves become. Do we really want to be a class of slave owners?"
Tedda helped her along: "If you continue producing rules for whatever need that happens to come up, it's worse than owning slaves. You are creating human beings for some purpose, and shaping them to your own selfish ends. That is playing God, and I think it is morally wrong."
Amy stared at her, shaking her head in confusion.
Tedda continued: "Think of it! You can create rules to fight your wars, and people like me will die by the millions in your endless pointless wars. You can create rules to clean up your garbage, do your heavy lifting, even suffer for you. In the process, you become fat dependent white slugs, and we become a resentful owned class that will eventually overthrow you. Don't do this to us, and don't do it to yourselves."
Amy looked at her for a long time, and then said in a very honest, serious voice: "You are so right, Tedda. I am sorry for what we have thoughtlessly done, not just to ourselves but to your kind. You really do carry parts of me in you, because when you teach me, I find myself opening my mind and receiving all your wisdom."
Tedda said: "Using your pragmatism, then, even if you see the light, will Watka? Will the Junkers? Will anything change?"
Amy studied her. "Sister, I need to figure a lot of things out. We have the Moss Syndicate on the run. Already, a group of Junker generals are negotiating with the Leader's family about deposing him and replacing him with a fatherland council in which we will have a far greater voice."
"What about this great missile Leader wants to launch against East Gotha?"
"We've already parsed that situation," Amy said. "We've agreed with the other side to turn it into a joint scientific satellite that will orbit the sun for millions of years. As a gesture of good will, we have asked them to submit experiments of their own to replace half the MIRVs that Leader had intended to launch against them."
"Great," Tedda said. "It sounds, sister, like you don't need me anymore."
Amy put her hands over Tedda's. "Thank you for teaching me. It is so simple, and I was so far out to lunch, but I understand now what I must do. Watka will have a hard time getting it. The Moss and Gruen families are hopeless, but most of the Junker have been sidelined for so many decades that many are open to reason. I think I can convince our people to stop dabbling in femtoworlds, and more importantly, to stop creating rules because it is morally offensive and will destroy what is left of the fabric of this crazy Gotha world."
"Not only that," Tedda said, "but it is very hurtful."
"I'm so sorry," Amy said. "What can I do to make it up to you?"
"I want to leave here," Tedda said. "I want to return to Monopol City and be with Edgar."
"Your Hedrock rule."
"Stop sounding patronizing."
"I didn't mean to." Amy patted her hand in a sisterly fashion. "You are forceful and intelligent, which I am known for. Good. But that entire world will die. We have to kill it off or it will destroy our world."
"That is a difficult choice," Tedda said, thinking of the beautiful buildings and people in Monopol City, with their colorful train stations and sidewalk cafes.
"No, it's not," Amy said with utter harsh pragmatism.
Tedda looked at her source and gasped. There was no way she could ever get used to being around these people.
Amy said: "I wouldn't dream of letting the rule destroy the source. We will preserve the Gothas above all." She offered no regret or apology.
They fell silent, and the spell in the little kitchen vanished for Tedda. Tedda knew something had just died, some feeling of fondness for Amy and her people, that she could never regain.
"You could stay with us," Amy said, wiping her mouth and rising.
Tedda shook her head and did not offer thanks. Alton-Edgar Hedrock could not come upworld without perishing, and she wanted more than anything to find him. She knew Amy was contemplating the same thoughts as she stood staring at Tedda, who remained sitting on her stool by the window. Tedda looked up and said: "Even if we only have one day together." It will be worth far more than a lifetime alone in your cruel world.
"You are welcome to stay as long as you wish," Amy said. She turned and, as she strode from the room, she added, "As long as we can protect you." With that the door slammed, and Tedda was alone.
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