Insects might have six legs here and mammals had four and flying creatures had two, and the look of some of those animals might have analogs back on E-donya and Earth and Nueva España and long-dead New Hope, but larynxes, tongues, vocal cords, mouths and beaks and snouts were shaped to different proportions—the roars, the croaks, chirps, songs, gurgles, distant buzzings‚ were, taken together, so different from anything he had ever heard before that he could no longer remember how things should sound in the world he once knew.
He should have a comrade-in-arms at his side. Every training exercise, every simulation: he and Ghazwan‚ side by side, back to back, working together. If your comrade-in-arms was killed, you joined with someone else. Those who fought alone, died alone.
All he had was a tracking disc and a pistol. All that existed between him and Dikobe was this forest. The sun was high in the sky; it was midday. The forest canopy filtered out that light; inside was dark and cool. He started walking.
He pushed brush and branches aside. An abrupt rustling startled Esoch. Next, a pocket of quiet. He waited for a moment. Everything was tight around him. There were so many places a slazan could hide, so many places from which he could launch an ambush. If the slazans had a contingent of warriors here, they could easily have laid mines.
He didn’t believe there were mines, even though the fear persisted. He pressed forward, pushing away at branches and brush until he stepped out onto a path. He looked at the tracking disc. He couldn’t get this path to correspond to a red line on a screen. He followed the path for a moment, but it took him east rather than southwest, where he wanted to intersect with the river.
He cut through the woods again. He told himself that there were no slazans waiting in ambush, that he was better off making as much noise as possible, that he didn’t want to startle anything with jaws. Small animals scurried up trees, and birds or flying reptiles called out and flapped away. He looked up and could barely see traces of sky. Some treetops swayed with the breeze, but all was quiet where he stood. His green dot was closer to the river.
There was less brush now under the canopy. But soon he came upon a network of trails, and he walked through a number of clearings where the brush returned, reds and oranges and yellows and greens stretching out toward the sun.
In one clearing he stopped to examine a tree. Around the waist the tree had been notched, bark and tree carved out. Esoch looked up. The leaves were withered and pale. This tree was obviously dying. Scattered ash covered the ground.
The tree next to it hadn’t been notched, but its branches and its trunk were full of tiny holes. He touched one of the holes, and something stung him. He was holding his finger while he looked. A tiny brown insect darted out one hole; a second from another; then a third. He tapped his boot against the bottom of the trunk. Suddenly there were several insects on his foot. He kicked his toe into the ground until they were off. Tree protectors. The tree must keep them well fed.
As he walked, he saw few protected trees, but he noticed more notched trees around clearings, more scattered ash, more and more grasses growing in the clearings, poking up through the nutrient gray. In a larger clearing sun poured in like water, giving the space a park-like effect: grassy areas surrounded by trees lush with color, and no brush.
He remembered the desert reserve: the fires walking toward the horizon like a slow wind, burning up nettles and thorns, and from those ashes fresh grasses and berry plants grew, drawing the meat animals to food. He tried to imagine these slazans working in groups to set such fires, and he couldn’t.
One large clearing stank of mildew and decay. At its edge was a shelter much like the ones on the beach, but it was collapsing, its reeds dark and rotting. Behind it, farther in the woods, was the former inhabitant’s middens, separate piles for refuse and shit. There were bones in the refuse. The bones he could see had been cracked open, the marrow gone. Whoever lived here had eaten well.
He walked carefully, looked constantly, and tried to take in everything. He landmarked each spot of interest on the tracking disc with a small violet dot. He rehearsed in his mind the things he would tell Dikobe. If she was alive and well, if the Way of God still existed, he wanted to have this data as a peace offering, a way to shape their relationship for the next two hundred days, to make himself something more than Dikobe’s aide, or, as he had once overheard: Dikobe’s boy.
But the doubts were as persistent as insects. He couldn’t communicate with Dikobe. He hadn’t heard from Jihad. And it became harder and harder to keep an eye on everything in the forest. When he had walked through the desert reserve, plucking berries or gathering nuts with others in a //gxa grove, or stalking a kudu with his father and a cousin, or simply moving with family from one encampment to another, he had walked with secure knowledge: he’d known which bushes had thorns and which snakes looked like branches; he’d known how to avoid lions and jackals and where to find water when the heat became impossible.
But what did he know about this forest? Had the dark animal that drank from the lake been a predator? Did it take an interest in bipeds? What insects liked to land or crawl onto slazans and take a bite? Which plants released irritating oils, which ones protected themselves with thistle and thorns, and which ones leaked juices that might ease the bite of a wound? The landscape became too much for him, and a kind of sleepy autopilot kept trying to take over.
His green dot had almost met the blue line of the river when he came to another clearing. At the edge was a quiet shelter, and in front were two separate fires, both with blackened logs and wisps of white rising into the air. Someone lived here. A tiny beep sounded in his head: motion detected by the tracking disc.
Esoch gazed about, saw nothing. He watched the shelter. Was someone inside? He imagined the slazan crouched there, something sharp in his hands, ready to spring.
He gave the clearing a wide berth as he walked around it. The tracking disc didn’t sound again. No one came for him. If Esoch had been the slazan‚ he would have hidden, he would have hoped danger would have passed by. Why had he expected something different from the actual slazan?
Three hundred meters away was the river. The water was wide and moved with the ease of its width. It was dark green and sparkled where the sun touched it. Up ahead the river tumbled and fell over a line of rocks, and the sound of water rushing, falling upon water, eased a tension that had become so common that he had forgotten it was tension.
He walked until he felt he was far enough away from the last shelter before settling against a nearby tree. It was then he noticed the scratches on his hand, felt their minor stings. He opened his pack to remove his dinner: one ration and a drink packet. Eating rations here, by the river, made him feel like it was a training exercise, that all this would end. He missed Ghazwan‚ the talk, the teasing. He longed for company. With someone at his side he would have walked farther, feared less. If he had been a slazan‚ this hike would have been easy.
He was still thirsty, and the flow of nearby water accentuated the need. His back against the tree, leaning into his own exhaustion, Esoch remembered past thirsts. His older sister crouching on stone, her hands lowering the hollowed ostrich egg into the small waterhole‚ the bubbles of air rising to the surface. His father leaning over the hollow of a broad //gxa tree, cupping water, bringing it to his lips. His mother handing him a bitter root; the air was hot, and the wetness of the fiber spread across his dry tongue.
There were other memories, and he didn’t want them called forth. He knelt by the river and rinsed his hands in the water, splashed the sweat off his face, and resisted the temptation to drink. He checked his tracking disc. The straight white line that connected the two green dots now measured 31.5 klicks. He reshouldered his pack and moved on, this time staying close to the river.
During the last month of the voyage, when he had returned to sleeping in his own cabin, Esoch often wound up in the converted armory that served as an observation lab. He found it easier to talk with the scientists than w
ith the ship’s crew, and he liked to sit next to Hanan and watch her at work.
He really had nothing much else to do, since he had no role on the ship other than as Dikobe’s aide, and she had given him only one task. The general had provided her with a tanned antelope hide so she could emerge from the shuttle dressed more like a native than an astronaut. She wanted him to fashion a pubic apron, then a chi!kan‚ one she could fasten around shoulder and waist and use to gather like any Ju/wa woman. “Make one,” she said, “as good as the one you would have made for your wife.” The only time she had called him back to the loading dock and the shuttle was to help her with the final inventory.
In the mornings he sat on the metallic floor of his cabin and with metal adze and knife gave shape to the chi!kan. Against the bulkhead a mat was unrolled, and there lay Ghazwan, his pockmarked face at rest, his breathing raising and lowering the blanket with a gentle ease. He had turned the image back on when he’d returned to sleep on his own mat.
In the afternoons he could often be found in the lab, sitting by Hanan’s workstation, and he had been sitting in that spot when the first images from the shuttle’s eyes had been transmitted to the lab screens. On the second day he and the four scientists watched quietly, in awe, when one large slazan male entered the clearing, then turned away. Dikobe ID’ed him, and the four turned to Esoch for an explanation when a Ju/wa name appeared on the screen: Hxome. “I knew two men with that name,” he said. “Pauline’s probably thinking of the one who was called Hxome Lion because he once took meat away from a lion.” The second slazan who came down was a veritable giant, and he ambled into the clearing, glared at the shuttle, then ambled away. Dikobe named him //koshe. “His visits were always short,” Esoch said. “He was always boasting, and everyone found him insufferable.”
Then a third slazan male came down. Except for the lack of throat patches, he was a smaller, younger version of the first two. His hair was colored bright red. (“It must be a dye,” came Dikobe’s voice over the speaker. “No one’s seen a slazan with red hair.”) This slazan walked down the hill with a large metallic object cradled in his arms, a strap around his neck taking some of the weight. “There are no throat patches,” Dikobe said. “This slazan’s female.” The name N!ai appeared on the screen.
“Who’s Nai?” Hanan asked, pronouncing the name without a click.
“It’s a woman’s name.”
“Is something wrong, Esoch?”
“No,” he said, hating the lie. “Pauline’s just using the names of everyone I used to know.”
The slazan stopped several meters from the shuttle, unstrapped the object, and placed it upon the blackened ground. The object was obviously battered, its metal surface pockmarked and discolored. It looked like a giant version of the thumb piano Esoch had played as a youth, except this one had three rows of keys, which the slazan—Esoch was sure he was male—began to play. The music sounded awful, and Esoch couldn’t hear any logic in the progression of notes. Dikobe, her voice still coming from the speaker, was talking with Jihad on the bridge. The instrument must be something that the original colonists had brought with them, but why had a portable piano been allowed to survive the generations whereas everything else the locals carried was native to the environment? Jihad had the ship’s intelligence do a library search of known slazan instruments; she also had it analyze the music, listen for tonal quality, for the mathematical structure of the relationship between the notes.
Esoch lost track of the conversation. He was listening more and more to the music, which began to jar at his nerves, making him anxious, irritable. But at the same time he was in awe of what this red-haired musician was doing. Something large and impossible had landed in the middle of this man’s life, and he was playing music to it.
That night Hanan sipped wine, and he drank tea in the tiny ship’s café, and he told her how he had come to own a sleek, tiny tin piano. He had been as tall as his father’s chest the day they both had gone to track a wildebeest his father had shot the day before. They had found the animal lying upon the ground, and he had gotten too close. It kicked out, cutting a gash across his leg. After a day or so the gash began to bleed white, and the healers had danced hard, had called up the n/um within them, but the white blood remained. His father finally hiked alone to the edge of the reserve and brought back a medico, his skin turned red by the sun. The medico did not think the young man would live, and then several days later, when the heat burned through him and clean sweat cooled his clammy skin, the medico gifted him with a thumb piano that had been made outside the reserve, its metal smooth like all things made by the reds, the notes evenly spaced, having a sound unlike that of thumb pianos people had made of wood, bone, and animal sinew. Esoch told Hanan how much he had loved playing that thumb piano, how its music had comforted him on nights when he’d felt overwhelmed by being with others and doing everything you had to do to keep everyone else happy.
Afterward Esoch walked Hanan back to her cabin, and they stood their in the night-lit corridor and said nothing. The wall projected a full moon rising above a minaret. He wanted to lean forward to kiss her; he knew she had a husband and a child awaiting her return, and he didn’t know how to interpret her silence, the look in her eyes. Months ago he had stood here just like this, and he had stepped back and said good night. This night she looked to him with the same eyes and took his hand and led him into her cabin.
Her kisses were warm; there was none of Pauline’s urgency. She called him Esoch, not ≠oma‚ and he told himself that in a day or two he would tell Hanan who N!ai was. When they were naked, Hanan did not ask about the deep blue lines along his chest and arms and beneath his left shoulder blade; instead she traced the length of the scar along his leg.
Did the Way of God still even exist?
He walked and he walked, and his mind established its own pace. He followed the river, wove his way around trees, climbed over fallen trunks, walked thin trails between tall bushes, and he remembered that time he had almost kissed Hanan and had decided not to; he remembered the nights that followed, the longing he could feel in his skin, the way she laughed but no longer reached out to touch his hand, and the night Dikobe had come to his cabin, how they had talked, how her palm against his cheek, the simple longed-for touch, made it easy to lean toward her.
But it was no longer Dikobe’s face he saw, but N!ai’s. She was smiling. His fingers touched the deep-blue tattoos, the zebra lines across each side of her face, the bold line cutting down across her forehead. They alone were in a //gxa grove, the low trees shading them from the sun; her chi!kan‚ now lying on the ground, was full of the trees’ nuts; his leather bag, which lay nearby, was bloated with them. N!ai giggled, averted her eyes, then removed her pubic apron. This was the first time she had gone gathering with him alone, and her sister had joked with both of them about what kind of food they’d really be eating, and her female cousin had joked, loud enough for him to hear, about how they must be in search of wild honey. Some older women laughed loudly, and he had been afraid that N!ai would change her mind.
The river thinned out, and water rushed loudly over rocks, a sound much like that of a distant fountain. He did not want to think about N!ai‚ that part of his life was gone; even though then and now were separated by a year and some months, his time with N!ai was as distant as his childhood.
Now, crossing through an open clearing, where everything was cast orange with the setting sun, then moving under trees, where everything took on a cool grayness, he couldn’t understand what had happened, how the anger had taken hold of him, how if he had given the thumb piano away, if he had stopped believing that its keys were meant for his fingers alone, then he would still be on the reserve, N!ai might have a child, and someone else would worry about Hanan on the Way of God and Dikobe in her shuttle.
Exhaustion tugged at him. Looking ahead, he could see the way the land sloped in fits and starts, but as he’d followed the river, the uphill gradient had been invisible except to h
is calves and thighs. He wanted to rest for a moment, but when he stopped, the world wavered.
He started to walk again to put an end to the dizziness. Something large crashed through the forest. Far off, he heard the long call of a slazan male: starting low, increasing to a quavering bellow, then fading. Esoch felt a palpable chill, as if a cold wind had slipped down his spine. He had to move on, but even with the torch, how far would he get? He had to be sensible. If he didn’t rest, he’d collapse.
But where to sleep? If he stayed on the ground, he was at the mercy of anything that slithered, crawled, or walked. He could build a fire, which would keep away some of these potential guests, but he didn’t want to invite the attention of any local slazans when he was at his most vulnerable.
He almost walked past the nest, but it was too big not to register. He turned to have another look. It was about as high off the ground as a man is tall. The nest appeared empty.
He could always sleep in a tree. Human evolution, Dikobe had told him in one of her many postcoital ramblings‚ was the movement out of the trees and onto the ground: nests under the bottom were replaced by roofs over the head. He might as well go from primal to primate.
Esoch stepped closer. The nest was shaped of vines and some kind of reed that had been bundled tightly into thick rope.
The two materials were interwoven in such an intricate way that he couldn’t help but raise his finger to trace the patterns through the air. The shelter near the river had been built with equal care. Ju/wa shelters were built quickly, if at all. During dry seasons sometimes a large stick was pounded into the ground to declare an area as home and to divide the male and female sides of the fire. The more elaborate huts, made to withstand the rainy season, could be built in a day and would be abandoned within weeks.
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