Fish Tails by Sheri S. Tepper Page A

letters on top—­or if one allowed oneself multiple throws, any multiple of ten—­to spell an answer. The number of throws was determined in part by the complexity of the question asked.
    At that point Lillis believed she had fulfilled every obligation she had incurred, every duty she had sworn. Now she could relax and delight in the simple pleasure of having a close and loving friend.
    Though Lillis had never felt comfortable enough with the Oracles to penetrate very far into their “House,” she had always had access to an area just inside the cave complex where various complicated machines were kept; some were food machines that could take any recipe and turn it into a meal. Some were information machines that answered virtually all questions; others would allow one to look at and listen to various places, if one knew the code locations of those places. Lillis learned the location numbers for the villages in Hench Valley, for a town over the mountain called Saltgosh, and for areas beyond that called Artemisia, as well as several other towns near roads where ­people traveled. One could see who was going where; one could hear what was being discussed. By using the device, she was able to find out what was happening in Tuckwhip or Grief’s Barn or anywhere else in Hench Valley by listening to the women at the well. Whether by foresight or good fortune, each village obtained its cooking and drinking water from its own good well. Men did not go to the wells, and women could speak freely only there, so everything suppressed and buried came boiling out at the wells.
    Lillis learned that Gralf had fathered, or “Pa’d” as the locals said, a baby on Trudis as quickly as any twelve-­year-­old female could manage it—­though she was actually not far from thirteen when the baby was born, a girl. This baby lived until she started to crawl, her neighbor reported. She crawled into the creek and drowned. She was too young to have acquired a name. Not quite a year later, Trudis set the second daughter outside in her basket, got to drinking beer with Gralf, ended up in bed, and “fergot ’bout the baby,” so Trudis said at the well. “Basket ’uz bloody. Wild dogs, prob’ly,” said Trudis, dry-­eyed, quoting Gralf. “Mebbe bobcat. Mebbe uh owl.”
    Many men made a strong town: that was the sum and total of truth. Nobody really wanted the bother of rearing girl babies and no one in Hench Valley planned for a future in which those females might be wanted. Gralf chastised Trudis after each female birth and again after each one died, though not as severely as for having had them in the first place.
    After that came four boy babies, two sets of twins. None of them had suffered fates similar to the girl babies because Gralf kept an eye on them, though Trudis did not. Trudis didn’t keep an eye on much—­except perhaps Gralf himself. Time went on. After the second set of twins, Trudis did not conceive again. As the boys reached their sixth or seventh year, they joined the pack of boys who lived out in the wild. “Parenting” in Hench Valley consisted of a Pa pointing at a dirty, probably hungry, mostly nude boy and saying, “That-­un’s wunna mine.” Lillis believed they recognized their sons by smell. She could not think of any other possible way. The boys took refuge where they could during the winters—­often in the tunnels the Hench Valley men had dug into the buried city that lay beneath the valley, often earning their food by helping a Pa extend his “treasure tunnels” farther into the buried city. Eventually, if not killed in a fight, they went off “hunting women” and didn’t return. If anyone had bothered to remember, it had been more than twenty years since any man from Hench Valley had gone off hunting a woman and had actually brought one back.
    It seemed Trudis’s childbearing