(no subject)

[tylik]

So, for those of you who don't know, corivax and infodump have a writing game journal, teratogenesis. A while ago a comment was made about perhaps they should have some bonus holiday content, and one of my recommendations was "Away in the Manger".

Oddly enough, both were willing to write vignettes on this theme, here and here.

And of course, neither were anything like the creepy little sketch I'd doodled on the theme, and both were much cooler. However, thinking about it more, I decided I didn't like that creepy little sketch, so inspired by a really interminable O Chem lecture, I tried reworking it, giving a bit more background in the world. The result is way too expository, and needs a lot of fleshing out, but I'm lazy and posting it now anyway.




Merlaine laid the blanket across Anna's shoulders. The girl, the young woman, she had to allow now, the young woman who within the next day or so would become a mother, was lying quietly now. The contractions had let up, and she had drifted off to sleep. Nadga, who had seen whole generations of babies born to the herd here at Bywater had gone to find her own bed, but Merlaine stayed, sitting at the side of her student and friend.

She only dimly remembered the birth of her own children, thirty years and more ago now. She had lain in far grander chambers than these, attended by Ser Roget's has-leech, with Roget himself looking in, for she had been a favorite. The pains of labor were softened by medicines. But Roget had found her peevish and fretful during her pregnancies, and after the birth of one son, and one daughter, children who had been given to wet nurses from the beginning and whom she had never known, he declared that she would be bred no further. She had thanked him, and returned to her mathematics and astronomy with relief.

And yet here she was, attending a birth in a bare board stable room in the rural manor at Bywater. It was, she supposed, the fate of… her species? Her race? The words did not come easily to her, but at last she settled on her people. She had been born and raised far away from all this, bright child of a line bred for their intelligence, far from any mention of the herd, where even culls were usually gelded and given to menial positions. For forty years she had been Roget's pet calculator, traveling in his retinue and with her own room in whatever house he resided in. Forty years of numbers and stars and books, of limitless supplies of paper, ink, candles and lamp oil. Pamphlets and papers bearing her picture, and her name, Merlaine dir Roget Ganaliee had been published, and she was given the best lenses, the newest tools of measurement, and free run of his library.

When six years ago, upon Ser Roget's death, she was given to his third son, Eduard, and added to his relatively meager estate, she had been at first outraged and insulted. She had counted herself among his most prized possessions, and was not pleased to find herself shuffled off into rustic obscurity. In six years, though, her anger had turned first to depression, and then slowly to a pained appreciation. Ser Eduard kept his lands and kept to his lands, but maintained an old fashioned order and charm, and remembered her from his boyhood with honest affection. The world she had been born into had changed, changes she had hardly heeded under Roget's protection even as she absently noted them. Roget had perhaps given her, in her twilight years, the safest haven she could have.

Anna moaned, and she squeezed her hand, but the younger woman stayed asleep. Merlaine had never before slept in the stable, but in this old country house there were no room for has with the family. But the rooms were sound, and the gellies given light work, good food, and sunshine. Ser Eduard had her not only keep the accounts, but also called her in for discussions of management and philosophy. When she had, out of boredom, begun teaching Anna her numbers some years ago, Anna had proved an apt student and Eduard had encouraged her in her tutelage.

Roget, she knew, would not have. To him, the distinction between has, hunaa and herd was absolute. To Merlaine, too, at one point it would have been one unthinkable to breach. But in these days, the hunaa as such were disappearing, their places in the fields and factories increasingly taken over by machines. Has, contrarily, were no longer the sole purview of the wealthy, but were more broadly kept, even by the emerging middle class city families, as pets, companions, menials and even, some claimed, surrogate children.

The herds, she knew, were also increasing, driven by new wealth, new management, and a new appetite for meat. She had read, briefly, secretively even though she had in theory access to all of Ser Roget's books, denunciations of the new farms, the crowded conditions, the terrifying, mechanized slaughterhouses. For hundreds of years, the herds were always small, always dispersed, kept according to time tested customs. Even now, children were raised with tales of stampede, where large herds would drive themselves into a frenzy of destruction, taking down each other and their handlers alike.

The laws that had built Roget's world, the world Merlaine had grown up in, were falling. Hunaa, savvy to the ways of machines, accustomed to cities and to a degree of comfort, were turned out into the herd. The herds grew, and the old ways of ensuring their complacency faded. A pampered house-has was sent to live among the gellies of a small country herd, and learned that their children could be taught to read and figure. One had to look into ancient history to find the older, deeper, fear, not of stampede, the mindless destructive force of livestock gone mad, but uprising.

Merlaine wondered sometimes if the rest might also have changed enough. Even a smarter, larger, more desperate herd, armed with sticks and iron bars might not stand so well up to the machine guns. In her mind, trained to weights and measures, she could feel the equations, shifting, building, overturning and seeking a new balance.


Later, Nadga laid the squirming baby on Anna's breast, red, wrinkled, and healthy. A girl, who would not be taken from her mother before she was weaned and slaughtered for the table; Anna was tired, but satisfied. “Artha,” she murmured, “My daughter.”

When Artha has sucked her fill, Merlaine took her, wrapped in a blanket and laid her in a trough drug in from the main stable, a wooden feed box in which fruit was piled for the gellies every few days in the fall.

“Why,” asked Nadga, winkling her nose in disapproval, “Are you putting her in that?” But when she saw the expression on Merlaine's face she subsided.

Nevertheless Merlaine answered. “So that she will know. So that from the very beginning, she will know.”