Pump Six and Other Stories(29)

Raphel turned to watch them, remembering when he had dashed down the self-same alley, chasing friends, pretending that he was a hook-hand crusader, pretending he himself led the war against the Keli. It seemed a long time ago. The boys' red flapping robes disappeared beyond the kill-slot, leaving Raphel alone in the alley.

Raphel cleared his throat and swallowed several times, trying to relieve its constricting dryness. He inhaled again, deeply, hungry for the scent of his native place. His scarf crackled and he breathed sterile air.

"A Pasho's responsibilities are often convoluted. How can one know in advance the consequences of an action? It is a Pasho's duty to peer into the nooks and crannies of possibility and only proceed with caution. Slow change is a virtue. For a society to survive the upheavals of technology, the race and culture must adapt. It is not enough that clever fingers learn to work a plough in a few short days, the culture must also be readied for its expanding population, its shift to agriculture, the willy-nilly follow-on ripples of technology introduction. Without proper preparation, moral and philosophical, how can any culture be trusted with a technology as casually violent as a gun?"

—Pasho Giles Martin, CS 152.

(Lectures on Moral Change)

"You must be very proud, Bia' Pasho." Bia' Hanna smiled at Raphel as she spoke. Gold flashed in her mouth and the crow's feet at the edges of her desert eyes deepened.

"Proud?" Raphel's mother laughed. She took a pot of newly boiled tea from the hearth fire and turned to eye Raphel where he sat separated from them by three meters, electrostatic scarf covering his face. "Proud that my only son abandons his family for ten years? Proud that he turns from his family in favor of Keli and its thousand lakes?" She shook her head and poured tea into Bia' Hanna's clay cup. The thick black liquid, its source leaves dried and fermented over her own hearthfire, sent up smoke-laden scents as it splashed into the glazed clay.

"But a Pasho, a Jai Pasho." Bia' Hanna's marriage bangles clinked as her wrinkled hand reached for the steaming cup. She and all her friends sat in Raphel's family home, clustered around his mother, a bright seething mass of laughing blue-swathed married women all happy and excited to be invited for the occasion of a family reunion.

Bia' Hanna's gold teeth flashed at Raphel again. She was proud of the dental work she had received at the border of Keli and smiled willingly and widely. "Yes, you must be so proud. Your son returned to you and a Pasho already, at his age." She sipped her tea appreciatively. "You make the best smoke tea, Bia' Pasho."

"Stop already with this 'Bia' Pasho' nonsense. I was Bia' Raphel before. I am Bia' Raphel now, whatever my foolish son has done." Raphel's mother turned to refill another woman's cup, one hand deftly holding the blackened steel pot, the other twining around the blue folds of her skirts, keeping them from dragging on the floor.

Bia' Hanna laughed. "So modest. But look how handsome he is with his attainment marks." She pointed at Raphel. "Look at his hands, Jai Bia'. The script on his face, so much knowledge on his skin, and that only a tiny portion of what sloshes inside his shaven head."

Raphel ducked his head and stared at his hands, vaguely embarrassed at the women's sudden attention. On the back of his left hand were his first attainment marks: the old alphabet in tiny script. From there, lettering the color of dried blood marched up his arms and stole under his robes. Denotations of rising rank, ritually applied over the years, the chanted mnemonic devices of the ten thousand stanzas, hooks into the core of Pasho knowledge, each one a memory aid and mark of passage. They covered his body in the spiking calligraphy of the ancients, sometimes a mere symbol to hook a bound tome's worth of knowledge, something to recall, and ensure that all Pasho trained later might have access to an unchanging spring of wisdom.

Raphel looked up in time to catch the quirk of a smile on his mother's face. Bia' Hanna also spied his mother's quickly hidden pleasure. Bia' Hanna slapped his mother on the hip as she turned to pour for another woman. "Ah there! You see, Jai Bia'? You see how the mother flushes with pride at the son's accomplishment? You watch, she'll be seeking a wife for him before the sun touches the basin rim." She cackled, her gold teeth glinting in the dim light of the family haci. "Lock up your daughters, Jai Bia', she'll want to harvest them all for her tattooed son!"

The other women laughed and joined in the teasing, commenting on Bia' Pasho's good fortune. They shot smiles and evaluating glances in Raphel's direction His mother laughed and accepted their jokes and adulation, Bia' Raphel no longer: Bia' Pasho. Mother of the Pasho. A great honor.

"Look! He thirsts!" Bia' Hanna cried, and motioned toward Raphel's empty cup. "You ignore our new Pasho!"

Raphel smiled. "No, Bia', I only wait to speak between your outbursts."

"Cheeky Pasho. If we didn't keep Quaran, I'd redden your bottom. Don't forget it was I who caught you uprooting bean plants when you were no higher than my hip."

The women laughed. Bia' Hanna played to her audience, waving her arms in outrage. "He said he only wished to help—"

"It's true!"

"—And what was left? Nothing but shredded greens! As though the dust devils had torn through it. It's a good thing he has a new profession, Bia' Pasho. Your fields would never survive his return."