What? Oh, some psycho is slobbering because he can't control me, a total inadequate, needs to control me because he has absolutely no control over himself, an incontinent mad monkey, therefore. Probably thinks love is female. But he knows the words of power, he knows that if he tells the garbage he is furious, outraged, they will think it quite appalling that a candidate for Broadmoor be thus distressed.
No, women do not write about gross male sexual dysfunction I really don't think they like me writing about sexually dysfunctional men, the psychology of gender, flexibility of orientation, men and women, boys and girls who regard each other as people. Can't think why not.
“Isn’t there a movie?” asked Hass.
I jerked in what I was later to call my trapped animal routine. And Mel just sat there looking at me with intense curiosity.
What do I say, in the name of anything, what do I say, I’m just a harmless little sadist who never never in my admittedly shitty life – “I know what you guys think of people like me. Con-sen-su-al! I swear I never ever did anything to anyone that wasn’t – “ But that wasn’t true any more.
“That doesn’t apply to Jaizal,” objected Hass.
“Coffee,” said Berek and disappeared.
“Let’s go and sit down,” said Mel.
Where to start!
“I knew I had kinks,” I said, “right from when I was a kid in Zur. I nursed them, traded on them. Now I pay.”
“Take your time,” said Mel.
They cannot be this bloody civilized.
Hass asked me general questions – what do my parents do, where did I go to school but there were no harmless questions here, my whole life was on the line.
“I hated Zur! Got out as soon as I could.” Essentially what I told them was that I came to the City to be as depraved as possible – except that I had had a fairly innocent notion of depravity and I had never joined the Cult. “I was always on the fringe. Your father knows about my sex-shops.”
Cantilip continued to say nothing. I could tell from her face what she thought. It’s a mad monkey. They must all think that.
Berek laying out cups and saucers looked up.
“Edge-play. You just fell off.”
“I was pretty naïve,” I said. I expected them to howl with laughter, but they politely waited for the ape to explain what it was babbling about. “They took over the set.”
“I am so surprised,” said Mel, looking at me almost with affection but certainly as though I were something from another planet. I supposed he’d been taught about people like me but never previously had the misfortune to find one in his sitting-room.
“My original conception,” I began. Yeah, Lattic, right.
“Artistic integrity,” murmured Hass.
I flushed scarlet again.
“Soft focus hard core.”
“What exactly,” asked Mel,”was in your mind?”
This is very hard for me, I felt like whinging.
“The Cult have a simplistic, a fantasy Jaizal. I’m not saying – he was too intelligent for – for it to have been how – if you read what he wrote – there was so much about him that – “ I cannot say this.
“That?”
“Rehabilitating Jaizal,” said Mel.
The abyss opened under me.
..............
I Lattic back on the page.
"Who is that bastard!" I yelped. Mel was laughing. "Please…"
Mel put a brotherly and asexual arm around me.
"Come on, sit down, calm down. Just some dude Hass met."
"Don't be kind to me." Through gritted teeth.
"Be kind to you if I want to be."
"Mel - all my life I have been made aware - people don't think much of me. I have brushed it off. I find I am no longer able. You refuse to - hurt me." I can't think these things, let alone say them.
"You understand there might be something wrong with you."
I am terrified. Of myself.
"If you had made it clear obedience wasn't optional."
He laughed.
"Cracked the whip? Suppose I say you've been frightened since you were six. You think being petrified is a natural state of being." I am much too snuffly for this. I say nothing. "Eliminate the feminine. Why do you think love is female, Lattic?" I become rigid.
"There was nothing left! Even I…"
"You have a few crossed wires," said Mel. "Better untangle them, hadn't we. Nothing that can't be sorted." He looked at me a moment. "Say it," he said softly.
"I love him!" I said.
"So?" said Mel.
"Mel, I want nothing more ever than to be his fucking slave! Tolerate me, Mel," I said. "I may be insufferable. I need the control, the powerlessness."
"Your freedom was embedded in not caring what happened to others."
I looked away.
"All my life - all of it I remember, anyhow. I wanted physical control and no nice people would give it me. If my dad had handcuffed me and dumped me on Tar's doorstep when I was 17 - I mean really, really, would he! I wanted someone to take me in hand because I couldn't control myself, wouldn't control myself because controlling myself was being sissy, scaredy-cat, frightened of the edge. I have tried to push you to hit me more times. All it gets me is your bloody detachment. It's like you're not there, Mel, but at the same time you are. I know I want to make you lose control. I have learned, thank you, my lord and master, command of oneself is not sissy. It just so happens that I can't do it. Unless you - "
"You want me to scare you shitless? I can do that."
"Flogged, caged, whatever, with no more thought than you'd give to putting a lunatic in a strait-jacket. I want to be his door-mat, his concubine, his bloody boot-scraper. I don't suppose I'm the first guy or I'll be the last."
"He disciplines you," said Mel.
Provoke taunt mock I would not could not.
"Sarat scares you shitless for another reason," said Mel.
I don't think my skin changes colour but I feel I'm blushing somewhere at the base of my spine, in my intestines.
"His Imperial Highness," mused Mel, "is a ruthless in a manner you understand, if dimly. I am ruthless in a manner you do not understand. Sarat emits the aura that causing him the slightest discontent will result in instant demise. No games. No torture. Extinction. 1. It is of course nonsense. 2. A somewhat raw mental state is required to perceive it. How do you explain that?"
"You scare me most of all. You're the one with the power."
"What the hell is the point of having it if you won't use it. Sarat has presence, I - absence?"
"You don't care!" A bit squealy, that.
"About what? He does?"
"Bloody detachment."
"If I don't care whether you live or die, suffer."
"Little informal chats," I sneered.
"You of course want to be dragged in chains to the foot of the Anile Throne."
"Not really," I admitted.
"So?"
"Real life is scary. Real life is nasty scary. Fantasy is nice scary."
"What do you want right now?"
To have my master's arms around me, to rest against his chest, to call him 'sir' because I fucking worship him. To have him fuck me, to worship him with my mouth. I Lattic stripped of power, defenceless, become the perfect submissive - a loving little girl. Or something.
I knew he knew and definitely kept my eyes downcast.
"The little girl," said Mel, "is the last defence, no? Behind her - "
"Mel!"
No more, no. Beat me, taunt me, torture me. Just keep it physical.
"He drives you, doesn't he."
Yeah, yeah, man. I know that.
"You know he's got it wrong and you try to protect him."
"Strip me, Mel. Rape me. Oh, you're so bloody civilized. What do you think is the difference?" He looked at me. "Sorry," I muttered.
"Sarat calls him the male monster, but he's not a monster, is he, just a bit confused. He doesn't understand male."
"You grew up alpha!"
"I grew up."
"It was the only way I knew to be male."
"Let me - unpaid labour, doing the washing-up. Using you. It has to be something supposedly unacceptable if you have choice. That you have chosen it ties it up in a neat little bow. Proof of submission."
"I'm safe. I need not to be."
"Why?"
Safe is boring, safe is domestic, safe is warm, safe is loving, safe is sissy.
"Jaizal would have loved you." .
"You practised initially consensual slavery. But it wasn't enough, a joke. To be ruled by your slaves. You wanted the real thing."
"It's a fantasy world! It was still a joke."
"But death was the ultimate reality."
"I didn't kill her."
"The slave trusts the master will not order anything the slave does not desire. And if subconsciously he desires extinction? You keep saying that."
"Then respond to it! It matters. It doesn't matter. It mitigates. Mel, please, I'm a shit, I'm a head-case, I'm a piss-artist, I'm a psycho. I am not a cold-blooded murderer."
"Hot-blooded? They can't work on nothing, Lattic."
He held me tight. That's supposed to help?
"Then stop hugging me when you ought to be - "
I jerked away, half-turned to the window, turned back. Trapped animal, gala performance.
"If I demand my own execution?"
"Say it."
I liked it. It was the real thing.
"I beg you. Take my life."
"No."
"I need punishment."
"Oh really."
I lost it.
"Every solid citizen in Dabida would string me up and you say oh really! What the fuck game is this! Maybe I'm just about tired of being used to show bloody Searc how wonderful you are. Do something real, for fuck's sake."
"Your revulsion at the sight of yourself is not my problem."
"Then what the fucking hell is the point of any of this!"
"Sit down. Shut up. Listen."
Sarat: Lattic (3)
am going to get to the bottom of this! thought Saski. She arrived in the City and hunted down Maya.
"Venga, darling."
Maya put her book down and gazed wide-eyed at her aunt.
"What is it you want to know? Do tell."
"Darling, the six of you. I understand you have an unusual relationship."
"Tttt-ttt-ttt," said Maya. "Strictly boys only. Ladies are ladies."
Saski struggled to keep her face straight.
"This is the modern gallantry? Sarat engaged in what one must really - and you didn't mind?"
"Tuition," said Maya.
"It is over between them?"
Maya laughed.
"Of course."
"Why of course?" retorted Saski.
"For a start Sarat and Mel aren't gay."
"Ladies get pregnant," observed Saski. "In the best regulated households accidents may occur."
"That too," said Maya. "For which reason, should that be your concern - we shall not. You can see," she added, warming to her subject, "it would be just a little difficult if Cantilip's baby looked like Sarat and indeed was Sarat's. There is the issue of sovereignty."
"Maya!"
"Yes?"
"One can see," said Saski, taking the final plunge, "when the young men concerned are fundamentally heterosexual. It never worried you Sarat and Hass - ?"
"It never worried me.
Incest! thought Saski. Does this worry me? I am sure - say rather Venga's concubines. I like that thought better?
Saski to Mel, Hass, Sarat: *A moment of your time alone, gentlemen."
Aw, mom, thought Mel
Project complex image, overture to a ballet, three lithe naked young men, not unfamiliar, and a fourth, also lithe, also naked, older, in charge, sort of choreographer.
Saski was rewarded by the cheeks (of their faces, that is) of hey man, three of the coolest dudes in town becoming suffused with a pretty pink glow.
"Your relationship with Venga, darlings. I have spoken to Maya - "
Sarat sort of moved. The physical space he occupied didn't change but he rippled.
"Let me finish, Sarat. My sons were unattached, perhaps I should say otherwise unattached. You were not. I wished to ascertain Maya's perspective. I wished also to know if she had felt threatened by you and Hass - "
"Oh mum," said Hass. "You are sweet."
"Thank you, darling. You and Mel have been lovers, darling?"
"I see," said Mel. "Yes, but not how you think it."
"How in the world - ?" began Hass.
Sarat said: "You've missed out a couple of chapters, Saski. Who are Maya's cousins?"
"Sarat - they would beat you to a pulp if they were in love with you?"
"Don't see why not," said Mel. "Maya would! Mummy, do you think you could you shut up for five minutes and listen? Start with my lady Maya. All four of us, we talked about it, and I really do not think it occurred to her she was vulnerable, having known us all since she was born, and it's not Maya to conceal doubts, but I know she didn't as well as I can know because she discussed it with her bessiest friend at the time who happened to be Fal who discussed it with me, and if you have to ask me did Fal and Maya - the answer is yes. With whom else may one freely experiment if not with people as close as family, which brings me to Point Two. Hass and Venga then Sarat and Venga and Sarat and Hass, except it was fluid and all at once, then I surprised them and ended up joining in and exactly how much of this I wish to share with my mother - however….Hass and I were lovers in the sense we were in the same bed as part of a foursome, infinite and circular, and not surprisingly our bodies touched from time to time, we hugged each other, planted sloppy kisses on each other's noses because we were happy. We did not make love to each other at any orifice."
"There was always someone else in between," said Hass. "If Sarat was on top of Ban-vesit, and Mel was underneath, then I - "
"I understand you," said Saski, perhaps rather hastily.
"We talked about that, too," said Hass. "We're frightfully cerebral."
"A rite of passage," said Mel with a straight face.
"Isn't this just displacement?" demanded Sarat. "I mean isn't the real problem Venga, the Mysterious Older Man who seduced us. For a start he didn't."
"Are we not adults of quite startling moral rectitude?"
"You were obviously gay, Hasiyata. It's not quite the same."
"Worse, surely!" said Mel.
"When she calls me by my full name," whispered Hass.
"What did you and Tar think was happening?" asked Mel.
"The H-W vouched for him."
Our heroes enjoyed a brief wordless mental exchange finally articulated by Sarat: *This is getting hair-y!*
Don't tell me - " Mel, briskly. " - that either you or Tar thought we undressed behind screens and made love in the dark."
"Were undressed," said Hass.
"Dressed," said Sarat.
"Darling, your father and I…" Brief mental movie.
Mel grinned.
"Well, then! Mum - you're really not making too much sense. Anyway, we weren't children."
"Because if we'd been children," said Mel with mock patience, "we'd have been removed PDQ and Venga done for child-molesting. I was 19, mummy. I know we're your little boys for ever…"
"Lattic!" said Sarat. "It wasn't like that!"
"Darling," said Saski, "what was it like?"
"He hates anyone hurting anyone ever. Since people do hurt each other, we had to learn about it. Mel and I. We learned obedience, we learned desire, we learned everything we should not otherwise know. We learned constraint, we learned submission, we learned absolute power, we learned to understand what mechanisms the Cult preys on. Most of the time in was in the head. He showed us the wiring. He showed us what it feels like."
"He taught us union," said Mel. "He taught us real sex, not the gross divisory - most of the time we were not repeat not indulging in BDSM, mental or physical, we were lying in each other arms, we were kissing each other's cheeks and we were talking and learning, chasing reality down the stranger creeks of the universe, and of course as a matter of fact most of the time Sarat and l weren't even there."
"Even when we were," said Sarat, "we subverted it, we hammed it up, we rolled about with laughter. Saski - all of us have a sense of humour."
"Here, sense of humour," said Mel with a wicked laugh. "There no sense of humour."
"They take themselves so impossibly seriously," sighed Hass.
"You have clarified a great deal," said Saski. She ruffled his curls. "I appreciate such conversations with your dear grey-haired old mother…I shall talk to Venga."
"Mummy - it does no harm to young men in our position to obey."
"I understand that, darling, of course. Hug?"
Hugs.
"Mel and you, Sarat."
He sighed.
"He said I'd be Anile Emperor. He didn't say he'd gazed into his crystal ball. It was just what would be."
"He is irturbi."
"Oh so that's what," breathed Sarat. "And he put the idea into my innocent little head?"
"Much worse than that," said Hass.
Oh no, thought Mel. Shall I be sensible and rational or will that make it worse?
"If Venga had wanted to manipulate me, don't you think there were easier ways?"
"Entrée," said Mel briskly. "Does one not think he had the entrée?"
"Sarat, my sweet," said Hass, "could you possibly explain to my idiot of a mother - ?"
"Hasiyata!"
"Yes?"
"Sarat?" growled Saski.
"Nothing to do with my infant feet taking their first tottering steps in Narulis' house, of course. Do you know it had never once occurred to me that I was the Anile heir?"
"Sarat…" said Saski through gritted teeth.
"Any time you have five hours, I'll tell you the whole story. Suffice it to say…We say the Anile throne has a symbolic significance, regardless of whether there's anyone sitting on it. I think, you know, if you haven't - it's awfully important you all understand - the Anile throne is very important to me, whether I'm sitting on it isn't. That is basically where I'm coming from. That's the model I grew up with, if you like. I know it might seem to some people Dad - anyway, the point is that it was mostly a question of, in the realm of, the other matter. Not entirely: from the time I was old enough to know anything I knew about Kadun PANTHER. Kadun made herself an issue, one that could not of its nature not be anything to do with me. But I was going to be a vet. So what's my involvement going to be, animal welfare? Dad said something very important to me once. He said the world would try to define me and I had to resist that and stay Sarat. So there is Sarat, free-born citizen of Fidub, who's going to be a vet…And refusing to also be the Anile heir. BV said I was the Anile heir, that it was the mainspring of my being. I argued to hell and back again. It's just a label! It's 600 years! He said I'd sit on the chair and Mel and I would be the two most powerful men on the continent. That has a very obvious meaning, but we lived in the world of multiple meanings and sitting on the chair did not to me mean sitting in the Throne Room of the Jumzit Palace. We teased him terribly about it. What was going to happen, if/when I sat my delicate behind on the all-singing, all-dancing throne, sound of thunder, lightning flashes across the sky…He made me whole. Or at any rate he opened the door. I had sigh to do all the work myself.
"Thank you," said Saski.
"It's counterpoint?" asked Mel.
"Yes," said Sarat, sounding strangely shy. "If you ask me by what piece of mythic garbage little me gets to be counterpoint to a piece of equally mythic garbage in a black cloak with a scythe, I know not, but Cho, the Denzines, PANTHER archivists, anyone to whom one might reasonably talk about so bizarre a subject, are agreed: it's counterpoint. Doom of Death. What do you do with it!"
And Saski wrote to Tar: They have bared their very souls to me and I am far too old and mean to apologize for the asking of it. Besides, it was so interesting!
Sarat: Lattic (2) http://sarat.elequity.com/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=241
Life goes on, as Kai had so caustically observed. It goes on whether you want it to or not. That is not (puh-lease!) a declaration of a suicidal tendency. It’s just that there are some frames you’d rather freeze.
I mailed Reakoed and Maitlan
Have you got an evening, guys, for some light relief? I need to move on here.
Reakoed This is automated response from Matchmakers Unlimited. Anything that propels you in the direction of Kyse automatically has top priority. Anything that may advance the Fal-Tet axis on the other hand – I’m biased, I told you.
Me: Or how about I stay single?
Reakoed: Now you’re getting interesting.
Maitlan: They allow me out most evenings. Office-hours, you know, a bizarre innovation.
Me: Eek! You’re still on the hill?
Maitlan I found I rather liked the job. The captain is intelligent. I meekly requested the transfer we made permanent and to my enormous surprise my request was granted.
Me: Cutting the cord was enough then. You could come back as your own man.
Maitlan: You have been thinking!
Me: I have been thinking mega.
I took a deep breath.
"They say the spectators see most of the show. I’m going to bend your ears with my life-history and Caithan’s opinion of it – "
"Cai – "
"I seem to have acquired a new female friend. The significance of that is about the only thing not relevant here. This," I sighed, "is about the men in my life."
"The passage of time," observed Maitlan, "and a maturity Mel notably lacked leaves one slightly appalled. Did you actually invite all this crap? Mel, please tell me everything you think is wrong with me."
"I was a major pain in the arse."
"We were all like that," said Reakoed. Maitlan raised his eyebrows. "Except for those who weren’t?"
"You admit it?" he asked Reakoed. "Did you ever think he was subconsciously attacking you?"
I felt my face go blank.
"No. Not possible. Not possible that was it, not possible I thought that. You have to see it in the context of the trip. Aspects of the bloody Whole."
"I do not recall," said Maitlan, "having to physically drag you off Hass. Were you a major pain or was that Mel’s verdict?"
"The prosecution counsel takes the stand," murmured Reakoed. "So you joined the H-W, and Bandi turned you inside out and passed you fit. So WTF?"
"It’s different."
"What’s different?"
"Me from you, for a start! You don’t have to be mega-realized to do what I wanted to do."
"I do know the regulations!"
"Stop grinning like that!" I said to Maitlan.
"I have said nothing. I too have no interest in the farther reaches. My own feeling is it came from Hass."
Reakoed started, then laughed.
"He’s not just a snazzy uniform, you know!"
Maitlan smiled.
"I should say that to this day there are some things – some kinds of things - he runs by Hass. These were Hass’s thoughts."
"They came out wrong because they came – via Mel."
"Dogmatic instead of fluid. If a guy who’s just working on being gay starts to talk about being – uncertain, it has a different feel to it to someone you think of as wholly hetero, wholly male."
"If Hass didn’t want to talk about it with you, Mel would have taken that as major."
"To the best of anyone’s knowledge - " he looked around at us, " – Hass has never been to bed with a woman, yes?" We nodded. "I should imagine most gay men haven’t. There is nothing whatever remarkable about that except in the context of the blah, rites of passage. I should also guess that you holed Hass below the waterline."
"I’d guess," said Reakoed, "Hass was strongly attracted at one level."
Maitlan ruffled my hair.
"Beauty."
"In the wrong shaped body!"
"The whole theory fell apart, didn’t it."
"To be reborn," murmured Reakoed, "as you correctly surmise, as guy-stuff. Interesting you couldn’t cope when the scales should have fallen from your eyes."
"What scales!"
"I had the grave misfortune – " Maitlan’s eyes were dancing. " – to be at sea."
Reakoed made a moue.
"I wasn’t invited."
"It was a pact. While the grey and hoary sat around conference tables, Mel had his own unique approach."
"Doesn’t that make the Matter of Kadun guy-stuff?"
"The Matter of Kadun is the exemplar of guy-stuff."
"OK," I said. "I’m going to float something that 1) I hate and 2) I think is crap. What am I missing! What is – supposedly – obscure to me as a female but obvious to all the rest of you?"
They grinned.
"I shall pretend to think deeply," said Maitlan.
"It’s a hard one," agreed Reakoed.
Maitlan looked at me doe-eyed.
"I never slavered, Fal. Truly."
"It’s basically a question of aesthetics," said Reakoed airily. "The eye naturally follows the line of the legs to its source."
"You were going out with – oh, what was her name, big hair with streaks – "
"Danit! A childhood construct…There were other people in Zur."
"That seems," said Maitlan drily, "to be very much Caithan’s point, with which I fully concur. There are other people in the world. Let me say something obvious even to a female." He ducked quickly. "Time passed. I do not find it coincidental you recall Mel at his worst. You found the adolescent male a raging nightmare. Every adolescent male."
"Did Mel hurt you?" asked Reakoed.
"Physically? No, and that’s a bit too obvious."
I turned to Maitlan.
"Everything you say except it doesn’t work."
"If," said Reakoed, "one’s mind and body are not fully engaged in the matter at hand, there isn’t much else to think except, this is weird."
"Quite the wrong question," I said. "It was his first time too. He said he didn’t know what he was doing. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t just feelings generated by Mel or rather not generated by Mel. It was I didn’t feel anything (much) generated by me. Desire is the word. Just looking at Sorg made me – "
"The juices run," said Maitlan innocently.
"You have such a sensitive way of putting things."
"Do you understand what you did to Tet?"
"Tell me."
"Tet is not a trusting person. He trusted you, Fal, with his vulnerability, his insecurity, his disability. Then what did he say? What, really is eating you?"
"He said Mel was right about me. Do not touch with barge-pole."
"You think that relationship has a future?" asked Maitlan.
"It would have been all right!" I said. Tears ran down my cheeks. "Aaargh!"
"Tissue Alert!" Reakoed jumped up.
"On the dresser. We were really, really happy."
"But darling girl, you weren’t, not really, really, really, totally perfect happy."
"I wish I could be sure of that. It’s too pat. There’s one more thing."
"No, no!"
"There’s nothing more they can do to hurt Dabida. Isn’t there really?"
Maitlan got up and stood behind my chair, put his arms around my neck and kissed my forehead.
"That would devastate us all."
"I’m sure Maya could have sorted me out." Unconsciously I echoed Sarat. "She’s not here any more."
"There’s one more thing," muttered Reakoed. "Face it, Fal. You do not want to die."
"What!"
"I’m an idiot, I should have realized."
"What are you talking about?" I thought I understood. "I am not looking for a way out!"
"That’s not what I mean."
"Well, what do you mean?"
"Does apple-stock have medicinal properties?" asked Maitlan.
"Only to knock you out. There’s some brandy in the kitchen cupboard."
"You have been having a truly absorbing time grappling with your future. It has become all-important. Vital you clarify. Critical you decide. I suspect this is because it’s hit you that you may not have a future. At least Kai had the bloody sense to tell you to stop trying to manipulate."
"I want to scream that that is total crap but I don’t think I can."
"We all play a game. Kadun will have free elections. Kadun will have a democratically elected Senate. Such are our charms to ward off evil. These things will happen. That is true. What is not true is that their occurrence will mysteriously mean that Kadun has become safe. You – oh my darling girl, you are not alone in – it was impossible no-one died. That didn’t mean people would go on dying."
Maitlan returned.
"The kettle is on."
"Like the rest of us," said Reakoed, "you can only do what you have to do. It’s not exactly surprising you’d like someone’s arms around you while you do it. Like the rest of us."
Sarat: Fal and Kyse and mostly Fal (3) http://sarat.elequity.com/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=76
