Gibbon's Decline and Fall by Sheri S. Tepper

wouldn’t laugh. I think you’re very sculptural.”
    â€œNot a quality I would ever have claimed for myself! I’m worried about Faye. She didn’t look well last time I saw her.”
    â€œAnd the skinny one beating the tom-tom? She looks like a lemur.”
    â€œShe does, a little. It’s the huge eyes behind the big glasses. Ophelia Weisman Gheist, M.D. We always called her Ophy. She married Simon Gheist, the journalist. They wanted children but were never able to have any. It’s a pity, she’d be a great mom. She’s still in New York City, trying to save lives in that battle zone she calls a hospital.”
    â€œAnd this gorgeous one with the panpipes is Sophy.” The pictured face was serene beneath her finger, the dark hair smooth as silk. “Indian, wasn’t she?”
    Carolyn took the photograph into her hand, letting her eyes slide quickly across Sophy’s face, managing to say, “I think ‘Native American’ would be the correct term, though even that would be a guess.” She stroked the picture with a forefinger. “It’s so hard to believe she’s gone.”
    Stace stared at the pictured face. “She looks like an invention. No real person looks like that.”
    Carolyn snorted, amusement turning into agreement as she considered it. That great flow of silky dark hair, those huge, all-seeing dark eyes, that elegant bone structure, the utterly perfect skin with the roseate fires burning beneath it. She looked no older than thirty, but they’d all been in their fifties when this picture had been taken. Sophy might have been almost anything: a fairy-tale princess, a femme fatale, a demon succubus—she had the looks for it. Their friend, whatever she looked like.
    â€œShe was beautiful, but what I remember most is her absolutely hypnotic speaking voice. She used to tell us stories. We’d sit there, enthralled, loving her voice, no matter what she said.”
    â€œWhat kind of stories?”
    â€œSome were … like folktales, from her people. There was one about girls going to the dragon for wisdom, how they went in groups and the dragon would always threaten to eat one as the price for enlightening the others because only when one is at risk is one truly awakened. And there were stories about women and the moon and the tides. And there was one about how sex got started. And then, later, when she began to travel, she’d bring stories to us about the women she’d met. Her stories weren’t mere accounts; she was a spellbinder. Like it or not, one felt involved. Often we didn’t like it because she dug up some really painful stuff.…”
    Stace grimaced. “Like what?”
    â€œShe was interested in women’s lives, how they lived, all around the world. So one story was about mothers forcing their little girls to undergo genital mutilation in Africa, and one was about mothers in India who fed unhulled rice to their girl babies so they’d choke to death, because the parents couldn’t feed them.”
    â€œReal entertainment,” said Stace, sounding sick.
    Carolyn thought about that. “I don’t think entertainment is what she was after. I picked up the notion she came from a matriarchal culture—some Native American peoples are—that wanted to understand the rest of the world, and she was looking for the key or the code word or whatever. She was always asking us to explain things to her.”
    â€œHow did you explain all that?”
    Carolyn frowned at her image in the mirror. “We couldn’t explain it, so Sophy found her own explanation. Sophy said the tradition of women as property is still deeply ingrained andthat many women assume they’ll be used in some way without their consent. Since she roomed with Aggie, she’d picked up a lot of religious vocabulary, and she called it the Hail Mary Assumption.”
    Stace laughed shortly.