“
And I’m thinking of marrying a couple friends of mine, see.”
I had to pause for a moment there.
“Plural friends?”
“Yeah, good business match it would be.We’ve been close since we were kids.
“Perhaps my Nuryeven isn’t as good as I thought. When you say marry, you mean joining your households together and producing hiers, yes?”
It wasn’t that the concept was alien to me, it’s just that I hadn’t expected such an arrangement to be commonplace in Nuryevet. Well, no, I’ll be honest, iots that I hadn’t spent even a blink of time thinking about their practices, and if you’d asked me at that time I probably would have told you that all Nuryevens lumber along like they're made of stone. Not a drop of hot blood in their bodies and no interest whatsoever in romance, and that they acquired children by filing paperwork in quintuplicate and being assigned one by an advocate.
My new friend Ilias said, “Iy that’s right, though I don't think that Anya and Micket will care to manage it themselves. Heirs are cheap though. You can scrape together half a dozen of them right off the street. So longs you've got flxible standards”
I shook my head, “Is this a common thing in these parts?”
“Ey? Oh, iy, common enough. I’ve seen marriages with more partners than that.” He pulled his chair to face me fully.
“The Oomack only ever have two partner marriages, did you know that? And it's not about business. They don't even seem to care about their assets at all!”
“Well, no, the Oomack marry for love and sex.”
“Is that right? That seems messy. Lots of feelings involved if you combine sex and business.”
Ilias had certain opinions, shall we say which may have not been representative of the general Nuryeven philosophy. Marriage here is a great amalgamation of every kind legal partnership. They get married when they are going into business together. They get married when they want to own property jointly. They get married when they're in love. Some of these arrangements do involve a physical element or the biological production of heirs, as they do elsewhere. Some, as Ilia mentioned before, simply involve formally adopting half a dozen heirs off the street. Some are a mere legal formality. Like many things in Nuryevet , you can do as you please so long as you’ve got your paperwork in order. I didn’t quite understand all this at the time. It took me a while to glean the intricacies of it, or rather, the lack of intricacies. At the time, I only asked Ilia if he had a separate lover.
“Not right now. I hire a private contractor for that.”
“A prostitute you mean??”
“No, a contractor. Prostitutes are, well you’re foreign, you wouldn't know. We don't have those here. Prostitutes just stand on the street and don't have a license or pay taxes, right? They juits have sex with whoever in an ally.”
“Oh… some of them, in some places. In other places.” I waved vaguely, “ higher status.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning they’re more expensive. Meaning they do other things besides the act. In some places they're priests and priestesses. In some places they're popular society figures with property and businesses, patrons of the arts and so forth.”
“Here you hire one of them like you’d hire a doctor or a tailor or someone to build a house for you, and you wouldn’t graba just anybody off the street for that would you. They show you their l;icence and you sign a contract together and so on. It's a good system.”
“What about those who don't have a licence?”
“Arrested! Just like a doctor practicing without a license would be.
”
”