The Braided World by Kay Kenyon Read Free Book Online Page A

staring,” Zhen said. “Don't be an idiot.”
    The canoe was out of range now.
Thankfully
, Nick thought, picking up the Dassa saying. He truly would have chosen not to be confronted with Dassa intimate moments. But it wasn't as though the Dassa were looking for an audience; they simply had no boundaries. They were free of shame—and, some of the crew said, decency. Free as they were in this respect, the act of swimming in the variums— every morning, no less—had become so culturally charged that release was assured in those brief dips. It was intriguing. Disturbing. That the getting of children began in so stark, so lonely a manner.
    Zhen growled, “I suppose you're in anthropological heaven.”
    He let that pass. Normally quiet and eerily focused on business, Zhen had a mean tongue when in a bad mood. He wondered that the old woman had chosen her for the mission. But Zhen was a big-time scholar, with a reputation in microbial biology.
    “Goddamn muddy hells, answer me, Venning.”
    Cai Zhen called everyone by their last name, since she went by hers.
    “Keep your nose in the tent,” he answered. “I wouldn't want our crew virgin to get excited.” He couldn't imagine Zhen doing it with anyone, publicly
or
privately.
    “Up yours, Venning.”
    He let her have the last word, and that seemed to satisfy her for now.
    The Puldar tributary—
braid
was a better translation from the Dassa—was here defined by huts hugging the banks, hundreds of houses on stilts, some leaning against each other for support, as though their legs had gone wobbly. Most were humble affairs, single-story huts that were not much more than boxes. Some were connected by rope bridges or continuous porches. Underneath them coursed the Puldar, still a full meter from the wood floors. It was at its zenith, the Dassa said, or they would not be so relaxedabout the flooding. Carried along the current were masses of leaves, algae, dead birds, and limbs of trees, which the boaters nimbly dodged, nearly crashing into each other in the process. The middle of the river was for nobles, and in this trough Nick's canoe sped along.
    The effortless movement of people and goods on the river system was just one example of the harmony and sustainability of the Olagong. Also, in Nick's view, there was the political stability of the Three Powers, the efficient distribution of wealth, the absence of poverty, the well-being of all children, and apparent freedom from disease. It was perhaps because of this ideal life that the concept of religion had never taken hold. The closest the Dassa came to worship was a sense of veneration for the rivers on which their lives depended. But even the rivers were not so much
sacred
as
treasured.
On the other side of the ledger, there was the chronic state of war, or at least unrest along the borders, and the fact that all this prosperity could in large part be attributed to slavery, an institution based on both race and gender in an inescapable linkage of social role and reproductive mode.
    After a while Nick had the urge for company again, even Zhen's. “So what do you think you're going to find? With the imaging.” He waited to see if Zhen would hurl a stone or just converse.
    “I try not to
guess
, Venning. It's called science.”
    “Sure you do. It's called a hypothesis.”
    “OK, my
hypothesis
is that one of them has a uterus and one of them doesn't.”
    “Can't you tell by a, what is it—pelvic exam? You did those, right?”
    “Yeeees,” Zhen said, as though winding up.
    “And you thought that the hoda, at least, has one.”
    “Need a visual to be sure.”
    A dead monkey floated by. Though it looked like an Earth monkey, it had broad webs of skin between its limbs, which served for brief glides in the tree canopy. Its armswere extraordinarily long, used for brachiating from limb to limb. A quasi-monkey then. They'd also seen quasi-river rats, with eyes, ears, and nostrils on the top of their heads so they could swim