I stay there that night. The walls are thin. I hear them make love, even though they try to be quiet, and I find myself yearning for touch. I imagine myself with the general, and I force my mind to go blank, to deny myself that kind of desire.
At breakfast her lover is embarrassed by my presence. I watch them eat. I tempt and test myself. She must see the look in my eyes, and she kindly offers to make me something. “She’s got a day left,” he says. “Don’t ruin it.” He’s an anthropological historian. He’s studying pre-Contact cultures, how they lived just before Europe’s people touched every part of the globe, before world history ended all local histories. He wants to try out his learning. He asks me all sorts of questions. He wants to know if what I’m doing is like a vision quest. Am I starving myself, going out into a metaphorical wilderness alone until I see some kind of totem to guide me? I have to disappoint him. “I’m doing penance,” I tell him.
We walk out together. They kiss before fastening their veils. She gives him a shy wave, and he crosses the street. I offer thanks and farewell, and I watch them walk away, each one now and then glancing across the street to the other, the other always knowing when to look back. What in love makes such timing possible?
I make my way to the giant cathedral that was built in Wadi al-Uyoun’s early days. Inside, a line of people kneel up front, their mouths open, the priest laying the host upon each of their tongues. The wafer is such meager food, quickly dissolved and gone. I don’t want to hear the priest’s sermon. I have heard hatred in the guise of holiness, and hatred in the guise of justice. I don’t want to hear it in the guise of love.
So I stand alone on an empty street beneath an empty sky. All I have is hunger. Why do I cling to this? I try to walk. I refuse to sit down. I can sense how my body weaves even though I imagine my course is straight. I frown at those who stare at me. I finally sit, and I take pleasure in forcing myself to walk again. Every restaurant yields smells I can taste. I dine on such smells. I yearn. I keep walking. My throat is dry. I dream of beer, a good Christian beverage. The spring sun is warming. The sweat breaking out on me dries when I rest, forming layers of sweat for future archaeologists to dig through.
Perhaps Maryam’s lover is right. Perhaps I await the hallucination, the one from inside, the vision that will tell me what to do. I should have left the city, headed for the wilderness, risked snakes rather than cars, because the only vision I see is that of a lonely anthropologist with adequate talents who has produced one well-received monograph and a series of articles, one who has only mildly bored her students and who now can be known for decades because she studied the right people at the right time and has never had the nerve to join either side of the ideological battle. But do you say no when they offer you such a moment, do you say no when you believe in knowledge, when you believe the right words could remove the hatred from their hearts; or do you acknowledge that words are just words, that no matter what you do, this war will drag on until too many have died and too much has been spent, or until one side gets the proper advantage over the other; or do you spend days without food and water, finding some way to say yes that makes you whole, that gives you moral cause?
On the way home I walk through a small Hindu enclave that houses scientists and businessmen from the northern continent. A woman stands outside her door and scatters rice grains in front of her. She speaks in Hindi. I know a textbook version of what she might be saying. “May the ants, worms, insects, and whoever are hungry, receive this food offered by me.” She looks up and smiles warmly to me. She asks in stilted Arabic if I’m okay. Does she later go in and wish death to slazans?
I return to my flat. Everything about it is so familiar that it’s ugly. I sit at my desk. There are two images of my son. There’s the young boy, the old infant actually, the cheeks still pudgy with the last of baby fat, dark hair, the smile that caused his eyes to light up; we never got a shot of that stubborn frown, the upper teeth biting lower lip when something didn’t work the way he wanted, the frustration hardening into anger. The other image is a projection: how he might look now. Each day, when I remember, more often at the end of week, I read into his file the food he would have eaten, the major physical and emotional experiences he might have had at home or at school, and the computer, starting with genotype, calculates the shape of experience and projects phenotype: his smooth, thin face, the dark skin, the serious set of the lips, the determination in his eyes. I know if I ever see him again, the projection will be a lie, but I tell myself this lie is no worse than any other projection a mother has forced upon a son.
I expect to start crying, but I am too sick and exhausted. I lie down in bed and stare at the ceiling, the white paint a road map of familiar cracks.
My husband and I met at the University. He lived in the Christian district with his agnostic parents. He converted to Islam so my father would approve the marriage. When I was away studying the Ju/wasi‚ he read extensively about Hinduism. After I became pregnant, he was circumcised and studied the Torah. When our son was born, my husband was baptized and found a life in Christ. My small doubts were a threat to his one very large doubt, which in turn became a threat to our son. During a one-month trip I made to the reserve, my husband sat down my son and told him that I had been accidentally struck by a poisoned arrow and that they couldn’t get me to a medic in time. My son grieved, and his father explained how they’d start a new life somewhere else. He left me a note—the first thing to light up my screen when I got home and turned on my console—and then left for some religious commune on some orbital in some other stellar system, disappearing in a maze of digitized trails full of different names, different ID numbers, all for my son’s own good.
So I am frozen in time with my son, who’s still at the point where words are becoming sentences, where he can walk by my side, my outstretched hand resting so easily on his head.
We share so little. We speak Arabic. We veil ourselves in public. Women walk on one side of the street and men on the other. We pray to the same God, but we read to him from different books. We return home to our flats and speak with different friends, plug into different networks, and walk along our individual paths until not even love can hold us together.
I yearn for the desert reserve. I yearn for the steady struggle with life itself. To move about with the seasons, spreading out when the desert is lush with life, coming together in the dry days when cooperation is the same thing as survival. When the things that bring us together are clear and certain, so that on certain nights we will dance together under the night sky, and as the women clap and sing, men with n/um summon the boiling energy within them and reach out to heal everyone.
Here in Wadi al-Uyoun‚ on E-donya, all we have in common is the war.
No wonder a group of diverse people left for the desert and turned themselves into Ju/wasi‚ to have one life, one language, one shared daily struggle to take them through life’s routine failures. Did a group of slazans do the same? Did they tire of the compromises that civilization imposes on their nature: the larger groups, the lesser solitude? Did they fly far away from where any slazan lived in order to start again, to be truly themselves?
The next morning, a new week begun, all sabbaths over, I shower and break my fast. I meet with ibn Haj at Fawiza’s flat, and I accept Ibn Haj is ecstatic. He plies me with food and coffee as quickly as Fawiza can prepare it He laughs heartily and eats as much as he offers. He grows drunk on excitement and food and caffeine. He tells me how we will find the best-trained crew to fly the mission to this secret world. He tells me how we’ll pick the best four scientists in the military to carry out research on the planet itself, to take down its natural history. He asks me how we could perhaps find a Ju/wa man or woman to accompany us, a true forager to interpret the behavior of other foragers. All this will happen once the general who ranks above ibn Haj approves his budget and his plan. The mission will make scientific history as well as peace. Ibn Haj’s smile is as generous as his vision.
My fast has taken its toll. All this food, and hunger still gnaws at me.
Chapter Three
The Sixth Day
Among the people of the desert reserve, where Esoch had lived as a child, the sun was considered a death thing. After the rains ended, the sun drank the water from the summer pans, from the inside of berries and fruits, from the roots hidden beneath the ground. The sun drank so much that leaves turned brown, then shriveled, and human flesh wrinkled and withered before a man had stopped hunting or a woman had stopped bearing children. In space, where he had been trained, the sun was also a death thing. Its light may well have lit up outstretched solar cells and ignited the chlorophyll in the orbital farms, but its radiation toyed with the insides of cells and cut at the strands of double helix within.
But here, on this planet so distant from anything Esoch had known, the sun was a giver of life. It sparkled across the tiny waves that hushed each other when they ran up the beach where he crouched; it warmed his bruised and chilled body, naked now that he’d discarded his soiled briefs; and it drew out of the distant leaves bold colors rising from the trees’ dark trunks. The sky’s blue was deep, but he could no longer remember what kind of blue stretched over the veldt where he had lived his youth.
He stared at the sun a moment, and its brightness stung his eyes, left them glowing with a red afterimage that pulsated against black every time he closed them, and then he knew that this sun was the same kind of thing as the different sun that had sucked his life dry.
Alone, without comrade-in-arms, he crouched on the deserted beach, the same way he had crouched on the curled metal probe, cold water washing over his ankles with each wave: his thighs resting upon calves, his bottom almost touching his heels. The beach stretched out and curved away, until all that was in front of him was water of such depth that its presence here seemed permanent compared to the short-lived existence of the summer pans. Behind him the beach sloped upward, turned gray, grew long reeds, then shrubs, until finally, almost like an extensive wall, were the first trees of an endless forest, the reds, the oranges, and the yellows more imposing, more alien, than the twisted trunks of impossibly shaped trees would ever be. Several hundred meters to the west the form of a hut, presumably empty, rose from the sand. In the other direction, barely visible, was another. Esoch had swum ashore, his strokes poorly learned and incompetent, more struggle than stroke, made worse because he lifted his head clear out of water to exhale and suck in new air and to look for the inhabitant of either hut, who he had been sure would come out to await him, spear in hand.
Nothing of the sort had happened.
Which only emphasized how alone he was.
Only once before in his life had he been this alone: when he had hiked out of the desert reserve, walking one night and one day, expecting to be devoured by a lion and, instead, arriving dehydrated and delirious at a small village full of people like himself, people who had left the reserve for some other kind of life.
How much longer was he going to wait? He had waited for the sun to rise above the horizon before he swam to shore, and he had waited for his skin to dry before he ate his rations. Now he waited for good measure before he unsealed the pack once again and pulled out what he needed. He dressed in supporter and onesuit‚ strapped wrist and ankle cuffs tight, pulled on the lightweight hikers, slipped the pistol onto one waisthook‚ the torch onto the second, the palmtalk onto the third, and the tracking disc onto the fourth.
He faced the water one last time. The decoy probe was drifting westward and toward the distant shore. The silk chutes had long ago filled with water and sunk from sight. The sun was high in the sky, and the morning breeze had warmed to the point where he could no longer feel it. Waves brought in the fresh smell of water, as if the air could surround and clean his personal scent of fear and exhaustion. Some kind of flying reptile circled above and flew on. A fish—at least he assumed it was a fish—leaped from the water and returned with a splash. Far off, a dark quadruped emerged from the brush and made its way to the lake to drink.
Esoch turned to confront the forest. Red, orange, yellow, and within, everything dark and green.
Somewhere, at least thirty kilometers in, was Pauline Dikobe’s shuttle craft. He raised the palmtalk to his lips. Just to speak for a moment, to know if she was still alive. But there had been that flash of light, the disconnect, the abruptness of the parachutes. If there was a slazan warrior, he could pick up the transmission, locate Esoch, locate Pauline, if he didn’t already know where she was. The captain had ordered radio silence. Jihad had assured him that she would make contact if Dikobe had reopened communications, if everything was all right. Jihad’s voice had yet to sound in Esoch’s ears.
He replaced the palmtalk on the waisthook and picked up the tracking disc.
It fit snugly in his hand, and he held it for a while, its screen blank. The maps he called up could take many forms, and their images had been derived from many sources. A topographical map flashed onto the screen. The landscape was white, and the thinnest of black lines outlined the slope of the hills. Thick blue lines, like veins on the back of a hand, branched off into thinner blue lines and spread across the screen: the river and its tributaries. Red lines wove along and through the black topographical ovals: possible pathways. All this data had been provided from images collected by the Raman probe. When it had flown overhead two years before, it had been winter, the ground visible enough for computers to estimate the contours of land hidden by shadow and snow. A touch of a switch, and a transparent layer of green—the forest canopy as recorded several mornings ago by the mapping satellites—overlay the other lines.
Near the top edge of the screen was the length of shore, split apart where the mouth of the river emptied into the lake. Near the bottom edge of the screen, a small dot represented Dikobe’s shuttle. The dot was fluorescent green, brighter than the greens of the forest. The dot stood out in its solitude. Just before she had left the Way of God‚ when Esoch had tried to apologize for the bad feeling between them, Dikobe had faced him, her eyes dark and hard: “This is what I want,” she had said, “I want to be as solitary as a slazan.”
Now all Esoch needed was to make quick contact with the three mapping satellites above the horizon to triangulate his own position. If Jihad had been right, if a slazan warrior existed, if he had attacked and destroyed the Way of God, then surely he would have destroyed the remaining human-made satellites. If the satellites were gone, the current display wouldn’t change.
His thumb pressed the tiny switch. A green dot appeared on the tiny screen’s beach. A straight white line cut over beach, grass, trees, angling southwest to the fluorescent-green dot. The tiny readout window presented the measurement: 41.52 klicks.
Two things occurred to Esoch at once. One thought was this: at least three mapping satellites were still in place. What had created the blinding flash? If the Way of God still existed, was it out there now, playing a game of cat and mouse with a slazan warrior, maintaining radio silence to protect Esoch and his mission? Was Hanan still alive?
His second thought overlay and complicated the first: if things had gone as Jihad had originally planned them, the decoy probe would have landed within ten klicks of the shuttle, and he would have been there hours ago. Now he had a several-day hike through a forest he didn’t know.
Yesterday, when he had been called in to be briefed by the captain, she had assured him that she thought Dikobe had shut things down, that the adaptation sickness had compounded her previous feelings. But Jihad respectfully disagreed. “The slazans have developed a rather sophisticated device for shutting down all electromagnetic transmissions. It works only for a moment; our backups take over right away. But you know, Lieutenant, it was enough for them to get to the colony in the Nueva España system. It might have been enough to shut down Pauline so someone could take over the shuttle.”
Esoch thought Jihad was getting carried away. Like the captain, Esoch had been sure that Dikobe had shut down t
he shuttle. So sure, that he had barely thought of her when he and Hanan had shared a last meal, when Hanan had led him back to her cabin, when he had pulled Hanan close and told her how badly he wanted to stay with her. But now he began to wonder if Jihad had been right, if a slazan had made it to Dikobe. Or if the sickness had gotten progressively worse and had left Dikobe alone and dying. He was already beginning to think of Dikobe in the past tense, and now he wished he had loved her better.
* * * * *
The geography was simple. Five klicks west of where Esoch stood a wide river fed into the lake. Less than five meters from Dikobe’s shuttle a tiny stream cut through the clearing, ran down a steep hill, nursed a tiny river that meandered northeast, which in turn flowed into the main river.
He called for a close-up of the area surrounding the green dot that represented his position. The tracking disc immediately overlaid the screen with scrawls of red. But the detail on the tiny screen was so dense that he couldn’t make out the different pathways. He could follow the red lines through the forest until he hit the main river. If he could follow the paths, he would stick to them. If not, he would follow the river. It would take longer, perhaps, but even with the tracking disc he feared that he would end up walking in circles.
Esoch set the tracking disc to beep a warning if it detected a discrete motion within one hundred meters, and he set off. He cut across beach and across grassland, his feet slipping with the sand, forcing him to walk a touch harder to build his momentum, to take him through scrub and wood.
But the forest itself stopped him. He stood on its edge, and it towered above him, full of shadows within. It smelled cool, damp, and alive. Whatever surge of adrenaline had brought him here, whatever boost he had received from the glucose and sucrose in his rations, had all disappeared. Exhaustion and the new world overwhelmed him.
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