Back then, she said, you were more likely to meet up with a sunskin than with another woman. But each woman knew that Wisdom had come to live near this part of Winding River with one woman and another who had shared her mother. One woman gave birth to I’s mother and to Flatface, the other to Crooked’s mother. Wisdom had given birth to three daughters who grew into women. Two had left together for the south, where there would be more lightfoot to hunt and more water berries to gather. The daughter who remained had a daughter who had daughters. Understandably, Wisdom was often tired. She had decided to sit against a tree. “If you drop a rock into the mud, it makes a hole in the ground. Mud flies everywhere. Why is the ground still flat? Why is it as black as meat you’ve left too long in the fire?”
“Because it is,” said Squawker.
Wisdom did not even look at Squawker. “That sun boulder, that big rock, doesn’t belong there. It fell from the sky, you say. But it must have landed softly. So maybe it can get up and leave.”
Flatface looked to I, but I did not know what to say. She knew the thing wasn’t leaving. She also knew that no one would do anything about it.
“It must be evil,” said Childless Crooked. “It’s burned up the grass. Fewer lightfoot will come here.” Ever since the first time she had been pregnant, Childless Crooked’s bones had ached like the bones of an old person. The child of that pregnancy and all that followed had been born too early and had died without breathing. She now saw evil in every accident and heard hatred in every joke.
“When it’s hot, the lightfoot will come to drink,” said I. “It’s not a nightskin and it won’t eat them.”
“What will it do?” asked Childless Crooked.
“Sit there,” said Flatface, “and scare you.”
“Maybe it won’t leave,” said Wisdom. “Maybe it should be moved. Yes, maybe it should be pushed to the edge of the clearing and then down the hill where no one goes.”
“And who will do that?” asked Squawker.
“One man and another and maybe another could move it.”
“It’s too big to move,” said Childless Crooked.
“One woman and another,” said Flatface, “will work as women. One man or two won’t work as men. If it can be moved, women will have to do it.”
“Young men before they leave their mothers will work as men,” said Squawker. She patted her son’s head.
“But not for long,” said Flatface. “Old Sour Plum will surely come by. He’ll get them to stop. He’ll tell them their strength depends on solitude. No man wants to be called a woman.”
“Old Sour Plum doesn’t talk much anymore,” said I. They had started calling Sour Plum old just before Flatface’s youngest had been born. Flatface’s eldest daughter in the flush of her first desire had tried to mate with Sour Plum. He had driven her away with loud words the first time she opened to him, and the second time as well. The third time he let her mount him and then bit off one of her fingers.
“What if a first soul is in there?” said Squawker’s son, who now had one eye open, the other shut, and was staring at the thing in the clearing.
I looked at the thing again. It looked too solid to have anything inside it.
“Hush,” said his mother. “Women are talking.”
“If a first soul is in there,” said Flatface, “we will have to move very far away.”
“Why would a first soul be in there,” said Wisdom, “when it has all the sky to roam? Here people have to get too close to each other; here living things die. And that thing… that thing is much too small for a first soul to live in.”
“But if a first soul can become a wetnose or a tree,” said Squawker’s son, “can’t it fit in a big rock, too?”
“Boys can be so smart,” said Wisdom, “until they find their penises.”
Squawker was not one to put up with words aimed toward a child of hers, so she reminded Wisdom of all the things the first souls had turned themselves into so that everything alive would have something to eat and air to breathe. Flatface had never heard a story about a first soul who became a tree so there would be enough air, and Childless Crooked laughed at the notion of breathing trees. Each was talking the way a child did when comparing mother-told stories with another woman’s child.
“I will play music for it tomorrow,” said I.
Each stopped talking and said what a good idea it was that the healer would play music for it tomorrow.
“Who will watch it during the night?” asked Childless Crooked. “It could do something while we sleep.”
“It’s a big rock,” said Flatface. “We are behaving like our sons and daughters when Wisdom tells them her swamp story.”
“I am not part of your we,” said Squawker. “I will ask a man and another to watch this while we sleep. A man would like the solitude and bravery it will take.”
“It’s a rock,” said Flatface. “It fell from the sky. It hasn’t done anything else. It doesn’t move.”
“Go touch it, then,” said Childless Crooked.
“Let’s wait until the healer plays,” said Flatface.
The healer barely slept that night. She spent the wakeful moments playing her gzaet, pressing each key slowly, drawing out each note, testing it, hearing it, listening to it carefully, separating what sounded healthy and what sounded ill the way her eyes would search out bushes for both berries and thorns. She then played rapidly, listening for each note, and slowing her fingers when the notes ran together like water, waiting until they were as distinct as drops of rain; then she played rapidly again.
And then she stopped, because the thoughts wouldn’t. If she did sit down in front of the giant rock, and if she did play the gzaet, would the music tell her anything? If a first soul was inside, would the music bring it out? One first soul had dug rivers out of the flat land and piled the dirt onto hills so a woman could look at the hills and know from which water she and her daughters could drink without taking water from another woman. Did I want to meet such a powerful first soul?
And if she were to die tomorrow, there would be no daughter left behind to play the gzaet. This time, when the body craved touch, she would not mix her remedy of bitter herbs or play music to ease her desire; this time maybe she would mate with someone.
The Second Day
The next morning I arrived at the edge of the clearing in time to watch Roofer stride down to confront the boulder. Roofer had gathered his food along Winding River since he had been as tall as a woman. When he had first arrived, many springs ago, he had tried to get mating close to any woman who was ready, but each in turn would refuse him. He thatched roofs together as gifts, but he was still refused until he had grown as tall as a man and could issue the call that could be heard through the woods.
And here was Roofer, showing his bravery for I, the only woman on the hill. He stepped out onto the clearing and walked until he was halfway between the bottom of the hill and the sweep of blackened ground. He stood there for a moment, facing the thing, and then walked calmly back as if nothing were there.
Not much later Old Sour Plum had to prove he was braver. He was a head taller than Roofer, his chest sagging with the extra weight that came with age, and he ponderously walked down to where Roofer had stopped and took three extra steps before returning and walking off into the forest.
Up in the woods, on the other side of the clearing, was Hugger, who had never outgrown his boyhood. He had shared Squawker’s mother, and he had the same squat body and the same dark hair. Right now he paced back and forth, making lots of polite noise so no one would be surprised by him. When he wanted to hug someone, he could sneak up as quietly as a woman tracking a lightfoot.
I considered playing for the thing up here, on the top of the hill, near the woods. No one cared how brave she was. A child laughed in the distance. Through the trees she could make out Flatface carrying her youngest daughter, her waist-high son walking along beside them. Soon Childless Crooked would be here, as well as Wisdom and Squawker. Sh
e did not want anyone watching.
I faced the boulder and took careful steps down the slope, cradling the gzaet in her arms, the leather strap digging into her neck. Several times one foot or the other would slip, but she didn’t lose her balance. She stopped halfway down. A woman has to be brave on the hunt. A woman has to be brave to give birth. A woman should be brave enough to get as close as Old Sour Plum did. She took several more steps until the slope flattened out, then several more to where the ground had been blackened. Nothing happened. She sat down and placed the heavy gzaet in front of her. Sunlight reflected off the boulder and forced her to squint. Maybe, she thought, it’s less like a rock and more like water, which is soft.
She began to play, first the top two rows of keys, easing her mind, loosening her fingers, testing out the notes. Then she shifted her right hand to the lower keys, sending out music, waiting for the resonance, feeling it in the keys. The music played against the thing, and it was hard, hard as a rock, but there was still a resonance, a faint echo that rocks shouldn’t have. The resonance was vaguely familiar; she’d felt it before. Sometimes she played her music against one thing, then another—a tree, a bush, then a dead sun-wings—to understand the full feeling of the music. She had felt a resonance like this when she’d played music against a shell or a hollow tree. If the boulder was hollow, was there something inside?
She stopped playing. She untied the gzaet’s straps and stood up. She wanted to touch the boulder, see what it felt like. She had taken several steps forward before she was overtaken by the same fear that had left her huddled in her shelter, cradling the gzaet. She inhaled, listened to a music pattern with her mind’s ear, exhaled, and took another few steps. Then a few more. Childless Crooked had said it looked slippery. Flatface had said it was just a rock. But it was a hollow rock. Along it were pieces of dull crystal, but each was as round as a melon, as tiny as a seed. I took four quick breaths, then touched the rock. She had never felt anything like it. She touched it again and slid her hand across the surface. It wasn’t slippery the way a newborn child was slippery, but the palm of her hand slid over it as easily as it did a well-worn rock. She slapped it. It felt like the gzaet, only heavier. The sound was dull.
How could this thing be made of the same thing as the gzaet? She stepped back. The gzaet, her mother had said, had been made by people with magic no one had anymore. The idea of such magic had frightened I when she had been her mother’s daughter, and that fear returned to her now. She ran to the gzaet, picked it up, and tied one strap around her neck, the other behind her back, and walked as fast as she could back to her shelter. She didn’t care that Roofer or Hugger saw her. She didn’t care that Flatface was watching. She wanted to be alone with her thoughts.
The following is excerpted from a draft of Pauline Dikobe’s memoirs, a project she started and abandoned while The Way of God made its return trip to E-donya E-talta.
My answer should be no. I should say, I can’t trust you. No one but university people talk about negotiating an end to this war. I have visited the town where I grew up. I watched my compassionate father seethe with anger when I said the galaxy was big enough for both human and slazan. I listened to my mother, who speaks like the angel of mercy even when swatting at flies, list the new kinds of weapons humans would deploy in the same tone she would talk about new methods of exterminating insects.
But General ibn Haj isn’t my father. He isn’t here to debate. He hears the silence and offers me several days to think about it.
Before he will leave, I have to thumbprint several documents. They’ve lent me secrets I’ve never requested, and they’ll foreclose on my livelihood and reputation if I share them with anyone else. Nowadays, it seems, you sell your soul before you’ve accepted the prize.
Once they’ve left, once Fawiza and I are the only two sitting in her living room, our tea too cold and its taste of honey too sweet, I look to her and expect to hear why she lured me in, why she betrayed me like this. But she thinks that I’m overwhelmed by the enormity of the offer, that I’m only looking for comfort. She says kind things about Ascherman and ibn Haj, about how there are others who would respond very differently once they had found a colony of slazans. She knows I’m a nonpraticing Muslim, and she pours me a glass of wine, and she shows me more images the Raman probe had brought back.
I stay for the images, to see more of the slazans. I stay because it takes me an hour to find a polite way to leave, to get as far away as I can from what I’ve been asked to do.
Once outside, I know I cannot return to my tiny flat. I fasten my veil, cross to the female side of the street, and I walk. All I do is walk, past towers and domes, by institutes and centers, through parks, along footbridges. An occasional recruiting flyby glides above my head, flashing images of women who fly starships, who work in busy offices, who direct the organization of groups, and the words following the images ask me to help preserve the human community. The flybys come in pairs: the ones shooting over male pedestrians show infantrymen in training and simulations of future land battles and images of dark, smiling slazans; the words promise to train their strength, to enhance their endurance, so they can help humanity fight back the slazan enemy.
Parks, like libraries and temples, are classified as zones of contemplation, so flybys are prohibited. I head for the nearest one. I want to be away from reminders of battle. I want to think clearly about the foraging slazans who live so far away from the war. But the images Fawiza and ibn Haj and Ascherman showed me come back only as fragments of a vivid, fading dream.
I think of one image in particular. I try to concentrate and make it whole in my mind. There is one slazan. It is the size of a young adult. It does not have throat patches, so it is not an adult male. But it doesn’t have breasts, either. Is it female? Her upper body is draped with an animal skin that is tied off at the waist and around the shoulder, much like the chi!kans worn by Ju/wa women. Along the fringes a series of curved lines are woven into the leather. Who made this? The chi!kan worn by Ju/wasi women are made by their husbands. Does this slazan use it the same way, to carry home the fruits, nuts, and roots that have been gathered that day? Do the females gather? Do males hunt? How do members of a solitary species go about sharing the fruits of their labor? And why have these slazans decided to gather and hunt in the forest rather than at the market? Have these slazans settled here for the same reasons the Ju/wasi settled in the desert reserve?
Several generations ago a group of men and women from the University grew disillusioned with the conventional notion of utopia. Utopian colonies might design their societies around extensive maps of human behaviors, but only the colonists saw their lives as utopian. Ethnotechs from Nueva España might hire themselves out to a community, they might redesign a culture or resolve some culture’s internal contradiction, they might alleviate some measure of pain, but in turn they plant the seeds for some other problem that will be harvested a decade later. Religions might use every social science at their command to appeal, cajole, and coerce their congregations into better behavior, but for every devout person doing good, there was someone who employed devout phrases to cloak less-than-devout behavior.
These disillusioned university men and women decided that utopia was impossible, that there were too many contradictions in human nature. They wondered, however, if there was a way of life that accommodated human nature—one that encouraged the human propensity for friendship and sharing while fighting against the equally human propensity for competition and greed. They found the answer in simple foraging societies that had once existed: they cooperatively shared the provisions of life; they had no true leaders and worked out group decisions in a subtle form of consensus; other than age and sex, there was little status or ranking, and those who weren’t kin could be made kin; among such people wealth wasn’t found in possessions or in freedom from disease or in a quiet easing through of life; rather, wealth was found in one’s relations, it was earned through daily encounters and exchanges, and it wa
s born when a child clenched his fist around a tiny share of meat, as if to say mine‚ only to find the mother take hold of his hand and say, give.
These University men and women, these primal Utopians, chose a foraging group whose existence had been well documented, whose blood had been drawn and stored, whose genetic records still existed. They raised funds and purchased an ideal spot of land on the Southern Continent. They terraformed the area so it looked more like the Kalahari Desert of southern Africa than the place they had found. They took centuries-old scholarship and images, and from those they designed and sat through reality workshops to learn the language, to learn which fruits to gather, to learn how to track meat animals. Then they left the University and gave themselves the name of their spiritual ancestors: Ju‚ meaning person, /wa‚ meaning true, proper, pure, and si, making it plural. Their children were gene-tailored, given light brown skin, a small bone structure, flat faces, so that when their parents looked at their children, they might see only the curve of a cheek, the corner of a smile, a certain stubbornness, that told them, yes, this child is mine.
So, like Ju/wasi‚ they live light upon the land. When the season is dry, they come together in groups around permanent waterholes; when it is wet, they spread out, a family or two together, taking advantage of what is lush and ripe. When weather is bad in one place, they visit another, tied together by kinship and by marriage, by a series of exchanged favors and gifts, by their shared knowledge. So they walked from camp to camp, alert for snakes and predators, gathering the right foods at the right time, hunting large animals in small groups and dividing the meat up along proper lines of kinship and obligation, going through the days joking with the right people and avoiding the right people, sitting around a fire telling stories, recounting the day, making complaints, discussing, arguing, and breaking up fights before someone got hotheaded enough to reach for his arrows tipped with poison.
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