Short Story: “The House of Boredom”

Markus Grady smiled and laughed and slapped backs and thanked people for a gift that he was not happy to get. His employers in the Ministry of Works, women and men whom he neither respected nor liked, had in view of his years of service seen fit through some advancement rule to favor and congratulate him with a promotion and a raise. He was twenty-two years, now, into his work procuring truesilver for the walls around Queen’s Bower. The usual career was thirty. His raise amounted, per year, to seventy ducats.

            Markus Grady was in his opinion the only true man in truesilver procurement. Everyone else now working in the office was either a woman or a fata, and fatae were almost women.

            Markus’s father, Grady Lask, had served with honor in the proud wars; moreover Grady Lask had grown up in one of those villages where everyone of a certain age had served in the great war against the Adamantine Host, including both of Markus’s paternal grandparents and most of his great-aunts and great-uncles. Men had been more manly then, and women had also, he averred.

            “—fourteen years in the Raj, in service there,” someone was prating. “Herbert was lost then, but—”

            Markus sighed and wandered into the kitchen, where Eswral, in her happy-promotion-Markus sash, was fiddling with one of the debugger cassettes for the coffeemaker. “You didn’t like your party much better, did you?” he asked Eswral.

            She flicked her head back and forth no and her funereal cypress-green wood-fata’s eyes looked enormous and exhausted. Before her own promotion she had mimeographed many of the same kinds of documents for the procurers that Markus produced; now she reviewed supposed errors in those documents, occasionally signed off on truesilver research and development for the Ministry’s Office of Futures, and seemed for the most part a lot happier. It surprised Markus to see her look so sad for him, or because of him.

            “You okay, Eswral?” Markus asked.

            Eswral Riel Síreth yanked at the magnetic tape in the debugger, murmured a few incantations, yanked at the tape again, then started winding it back int to left-hand side of the cassette. Once that was done she fed the cassette into the coffeemaker and turned the machine on. A pleasing burbling sound started up. “Feeling a bit better now,” she said.

            “Was it like this when you were younger?” Markus asked her. Then he said “Never mind.”

            “I wonder,” she said. The coffeemaker kept burbling. Out in the big room the person talking about Herbert’s service in Equatorial Albany was still going on and on.

            “Of course it’s Kingsport, on the Kingsflood, when a man is on the throne. Or a few other kinds of things too besides a man, I suppose. Anyway, Herbert when he was stationed in Queensport—”

            “Have you ever read some of Weatherhead’s adventure novels?” Eswral suddenly asked Markus just as their coffee was beginning to be expressed into the office’s battered old copper coffeepot.

            “My dad wouldn’t let me. He’d talk about all the things they got wrong.”

            “He fought in one of the wars against Smier?”

            “Not exactly against Smier. More some of the bush wars in Equatorial…yes.”

            “My parents are a lot like some of the people you hear about resisting Policy in the Equator,” said Eswral meditatively. “They didn’t want electrification, radiofication, water purification, alterenchantment, population policy, health counseling, resource rationalization, monarchism, communism. With them that has to do with their age, though. Mid-three-digits, and that was when I was born.” The coffeemaker dinged. “Hazelnut, right?” she said to Markus, raising her hands over their pair of cups.

            He nodded. Eswral—he looked at her the way he might have looked at a medlar, or at a demitasse, something small and serving mostly as a conduit of a larger force, a vivifying force like food or drink, into his existence. What force that was, in Eswral’s case, was difficult to define. It wasn’t sex; she was a fata, and probably a homosexual, and Markus was in any case mostly-happily married. It wasn’t death; fatae lived practically forever barring misadventure and Eswral’s work had nothing to do with blood magic or with war. It was a comfort, but some kind of public, civic comfort. Eswral was a bite-sized case of it. He supposed—and she would have agreed with them—that they were all bite-sized cases of many things, more or less, here in this office in the Ministry of Works without the grave problems that the Ministry of Cults, for instance, was having.

            “Tide goes in, tide goes out, things get bought, things get sold,” someone was intoning outside the kitchen.

            “They never have much to say, do they?” Markus asked Eswral. She just gave him a wry, tense smile, and continued murmuring the hazelnut incantation as they commenced to sip at the rims of their coffee cups.

 ❦

Neri Gwaient Gwaifin made them choose between lawn games and watching a movie for the “team” part of Markus’s promotion party, which was also supposed to make up for a lackluster birthday party. Everyone other than Markus and Eswral wanted to do both. Neri popped in a videotape of a historical war movie, not about the wars in which Grady Lask and his progenitor and progenitrix had fought but about something much further back, before Maldry had incorporated the fatae or begun establishing the Equatorial Provinces, before the Ministry of Works or the Ministry of Cults. Back when what you had happening in your life, what you were allowed or not allowed or ordered or not ordered to do, was purely a matter of your lord or lady, his or her vicinity. It had some things in common with the nostaliga that Markus and Eswral had just been talking about, but Eswral, seeing it dramatized and flickering, found that it now turned her stomach. She had no interest in telling Markus this, certainly less than no interest in telling Markus why.

            They moved on to croquet. Eswral and Neri, as usual, both played it ungraciously—sending each other constantly, sending Markus or Ledelly or Saran Gom constantly, sometimes even yelling “Fore!” when they did. Saran Gom got petulant about it. Something about his petulant tone of voice made Markus realize that he was the person who had been prating about tides earlier.

            Saran Gom’s job was to cross-check two or three different kinds of receipt that were kept of some of the truesilver procurement deals. There were almost never discrepancies in the receipts; he spent most of his time on the job singing, and he had a good voice, a lovely tenor that the others generally enjoyed hearing when the door to his office was open. It had not occurred to Markus that he might be a sore loser when it came to croquet, any more than it had occurred to him that he might say banal things about the tide when he did not have to.

            Eswral knew Saran Gom a bit better than did Marcus. His behavior surprised her less. The receipt cross-checking had almost a medicinal effect, as far as she had seen, on some of his more obnoxious habits of thought. It soothed him. He got both fatuous and frenetic otherwise, as today. She would offer, she thought, to go home with him—not for the usual euphemistic reason so many had or claimed to have these days—rather to sit with him and watch a movie together or listen to some music, that same lovely style that he liked to sing. He would calm down eventually, in a relaxed evening with a friend from work. They would put on Hold’s Harpers or The Last Auroras, something big and sweeping and dramatic and set in the distant past, and Saran Gom would eat popcorn and Eswral would eat grapes and cheese, and they would doze and he would relax and she would send him home.

            They had, as fatae, at once compressed and extended feelings of time. When she looked in her photo albums at the cat that she had had as a child, she was looking back more than a hundred years; the photos, were they to be taken out from behind the yellowed cellophane, would have been brittle to the touch. She experienced those hundred years as far shorter than a human being would have, yet she did experience them, and she was still young. The cat, Missy or Peachy they had called her, had been dead for eighty-seven years, and had not had a short life. She had suffered towards the end, and it had taken Eswral decades to be able to look at her kitten pictures without tearing up, yet those decades had been as a year or two, maybe, for an entity like Markus.

            “Imagine Maldry before all this, before the Ministry of Works, before the invasions of the Equatorial Provinces…” Neri was saying. “Well there are still older people around, fatae especially, who were there. It’s nice to think about going back to that. Would we really want to? People are more content when they don’t know how much better it could be. That might have been the case back then.”

            “I think it’s the case in some of the Equatorial Provinces even now, Neri,” Ledelly said. She had gotten her croquet ball, the red one, through one of the return hoops, and now stood ready to send Markus’s or Saran Gom’s, blue or yellow, into the tall grass.

            Markus was thinking again of the great war against Smier and the even greater war against the Manzamo Islands a generation before that. The Equatorial Provinces, Smier, Hatsuba, Qanprur, Noriel, Greycester, all those old tyrannical bastions of the monstrous or the divine. He worked in procurement. He worked for the Ministry of Works, not the Ministry of Cults. He was a man, not a woman or a fata.

            “Fore!” said Ledelly, smirking at Neri and Eswral as she sent Markus’s ball.