Foragers

by Charles Oberndorf

  The General does not say anything for a moment. He looks like he’s taking this in, trying to look for an ulterior motive. Ibn Haj’s eyes have lit up, but his face becomes instantaneously serious the moment the General looks to him. The General says to me, “Well, you are the expert on primitives, but I think it’s a shame that a good hunter cannot live off his goodness. But, you know,” he says, the tone of his voice switching with the subject, “we aren’t at war with primitive slazans. We are fighting a dangerous, resourceful, and very proud bunch. Each of their very effective warships is piloted by only one slazan. What could be prouder than that—to go out alone and destroy a civilian outpost all on your own? The slazan enemy is ruthless. And I don’t want you confusing some primitives with the ruthless warriors we are fighting. We must fight this war. We must win it. We must confine the slazan to only one or two worlds if we are to make life safe for human expansion.”

  I look to ibn Haj, who says nothing, who does not contradict the General. “But,” I say, “there’s a third world with slazans on it.”

  The General nods. “Yes, and you will document the obvious. It’s a failed colony that has no contact with rest of the slazan species.”

  “Failed? They might be rather successful at the way they live their lives.”

  “Maybe, but look around you. Compared to this, how can you call a group of primitives with bows and arrows successful?”

  “So what will happen to them?”

  “If God wills it, and we win this war, then we will ship them to a slazan homeworld.”

  “But they are on their homeworld.”

  The General looks to ibn Haj rather than to me. “We are spending a substantial sum to show that they do not belong on that world. God willing, that planet will be settled by humans when the war is over.” The General looks to me, his voice generous, not a trace of cynicism. “Your outstanding research is what will help make that possible.”

  After dinner ibn Haj is wise enough not to ask what’s wrong. He tells me there’s one café that serves wine during select hours after the last call to prayer. The café is small, and one perpetual candle lights each table. Only a few tables are occupied, but each tiny group leaves the moment they’ve finished drinking, each casting a covert glance or two to ibn Haj in his general’s uniform.

  There are no waiters or servers. Ibn Haj punches in a code, and a glass of wine is presented. I am surprised by its quality. While I sip the wine, looking forward to its mild effect, ibn Haj tells me not to worry about the General.

  “You lied to the General,” I say, surprised by how easily honesty comes. “Or you lied to me. You told the General this mission would help claim a world for humanity. You told me it would help us negotiate peace. Which is it?”

  “What I told you.”

  I say nothing.

  “Look, Pauline, we aren’t going to win this war. We aren’t going to drive the slazans back. They fight too effectively.”

  “In fact,” I say, “they’re winning the war. They’ve broken into one of our systems.”

  “They’re not winning. We’ve found one of their home systems. We think we got one missile through their defenses.”

  “This was before their attack?”

  “Yes. We want to hit a military target first before we announce we’ve hit a civilian target.”

  I’m thinking: The article by al-Kharrat was right. Judith was right. Their attack on the civilian outpost was retaliation, tit for tat.

  Ibn Haj misreads my reaction. “Look, the General is overly optimistic because of one missile. He’s not right. And, besides, he’s not a very good general. He rose to his current position because of family connections. But, look, he hasn’t been close to the war for over three years.”

  Ibn Haj waits for me to pick up on the significance of this. The standard military rotation is a half year in the war zone, a half year patrolling a human-controlled stellar system, then a final half year back in the war zone. It’s expected of every able-bodied person, enlisted or officer. It indeed does not speak well for the General if he’s been kept here on one pretext or another for three years. I smile faintly.

  “You see? If you do good research… if you can show us how the slazans resolve conflicts, how they establish leadership, how they work out territory and possession, you might give us enough to help negotiate a real peace. If we can’t make sure that slazan and human are discussing similar values, no peace can be settled. Knowledge can’t conquer. It can only convince. But if we don’t have the knowledge, we can’t convince anyone.”

  I want to be swept along by his charm and conviction. “But does it really matter what we know to be true? No matter how inept he is, he is in charge of the project, and he outranks you.”

  The next shift—morning as far as my stomach is concerned—ibn Haj escorts me to medical for surgery. They place the implant in my skull and microphone studs in each earlobe to record what’s around me. Ibn Haj returns after I have recovered. “Your ship will be ready in two days, but I want you to meet the captain and crew now.”

  Seen from the wall-viewers‚ The Way of God is enormous, but most of its enormity is engine, water, and food storage. The corridors are slim, the cabins tiny, the shared washroom dismal. Captain al-Shaykh is a thin, severe woman, but a well-mannered host, who offers coffee and makes me feel welcomed. The cabin she shares with her comrade-in-arms, the executive officer, is more spacious and has its own tiny washroom. She and the general lead me on a tour of the ship, and everyone is courteous and dignified around the captain and the general.

  Ibn Haj sets me free for the afternoon. There is so much to attend to. “I’m sure an anthropologist will see enough in a few hours to keep herself amused.”

  So I walk the station and feel terribly out of place. I am the age of the officers, and the bulk of the inhabitants are the age of those I teach. My skin doesn’t have the same lively sheen, nor do I have their well-sculpted muscles. I watch them march the corridors in pairs, their faces veiled, the women in uniforms of ship’s crew, office personnel, or orbital organizers, the men wearing the clothing of high rank, of infantry, of security personnel. But they all seem to move with the same hard, dull energy, and I am unable to tell if they walk with purpose or if they are pacing away off-duty hours, awaiting some new posting that would take them far away to where warships patrol the stars and occasionally battle the enemy.

  At least a third have had cultural tailoring, all of these youths with shiny black hair, dark eyes, and cheekbones angled like the wings of birds. But even with the variation—the fair skin, the light hair, and the hazel eyes—there is no one with a face as dark as mine.

  They stare at me all the time. In the dining halls, the cafés, the mosque, heads turn when I enter, and eyes watch with curiosity. It doesn’t matter that I wear a uniform that attaches me to a warship. There is no meanness or hatred; they are curious; they want to know why someone—who possesses neither Arab roots nor impressive rank—is on board an Arab station.

  I think of the ship I will be boarding, its wealth of Semitic faces, its crew trained in pairs, having served together for almost a year. There will be no place in their little society where I will easily fit. I will be with them for a year of voyage. I will be alone, planetside‚ by myself for two hundred days. I begin to wonder at the wisdom of my choice. Not because of the mission’s moral ambiguity, not because of the General, but because I don’t know if the human psyche has evolved to cope with so much solitude.

  At dinner ibn Haj and I dine with several majors and a general who is scheduled to return to the war zone. Ibn Haj wants me to see how readily he can talk with them, how easily they listen to his point of view. Fearing my future solitude, I am easily impressed. I allow myself to be drawn in by his prestige, by the strength he carries so readily, by his promises of peace.

  I let him serve me wine in his quarters. I let him sit as close as he wants. And I lean forward just enough so he knows to kiss me. I hint between kisses at how lon
g it has been, and the desire on his face is softened further by a new tenderness. I tell him because I want to be a chaste prize, I want something that will be warm and lasting.

  The Ju/wasi say that hunger for sex, like hunger for food, can kill people. Sex is called doing work, eating meat, drinking fat. Tain‚ the Ju/wa word for wild honey, is also the word for orgasm. Just when ibn Haj takes me into his full embrace do I feel the accumulated years of hunger, and I pull him to me with the same urgency a starved man may break his fast.

  Afterward I feel both sated and empty. The bed is warm, but I find I don’t want to be lying next to him, to have his arm around my shoulders. I speak into the darkness, wanting some kind of shared secrecy, some kind of intimacy that justifies his skin pressing against mine after all the desire is gone. “Muhammad?”

  “Hmmmmm.”

  “What happens if we don’t make it back? What if The Way of God becomes a statistic? What if we are lost in hyperspace, or hit by a meteor, or… whatever?”

  He says nothing for a moment.

  “Well? Do you send a rescue team? Or a followup mission?”

  “The rescue team would be too late. And there’s no money for a follow-up mission.”

  “So what happens?”

  “You get what you want. The slazans on that planet get left alone for a long time. All the data is in one place. If you’re missing and assumed lost, I’ll inform the intelligence that guards the data. If I follow the protocol I’ve established, all the data will be wiped out. It will be as if we never knew the slazans were there.”

  I roll onto my side to try to get a better look at him. “It’s all gone?”

  “It will be if you don’t come back. Your slazans will be left alone.”

  “Won’t you get court-martialed?” I say it with admiration. I’ve begun to feel differently, to reevaluate everything I’ve thought.

  “No. The General approves. If we negotiate a peace, a record of this planet’s existence can cause us problems, more problems than it’s worth without your study. The slazans might exert a claim once they know of its existence. Human space is located between slazan space and this world. It’s better to sign a treaty that includes its stellar system in our sphere of influence. We know where the Raman probe went. It wouldn’t take too long to rediscover the planet once the peace was stable. But that’s a good decade or two or three that your slazans will have on their own. With no war going on, they’ll probably get a reserve just like your Ju/wasi did.”

  My Ju/wasi did not get a reserve. A group of Arabs, Hindus, and Africans purchased a reserve and turned themselves and their children into Ju/wasi. The Ju/wasi on Earth lost their land, piece by piece, first to the Dutch, then to government planning, and finally to Bantu pastoralists‚ until there was so little land that only handfuls of people could gather enough food to survive. No one provided needed land for the Terran Ju/wasi. Who would ever buy these slazans a reserve?

  The next shift, after we breakfast, ibn Haj presents me two gifts, two packages that had been delivered to his quarters while we were out. I think, the first is for last night, the second is for tonight. Last night’s reward is a knife and its sheath. The sheath is made of finely tanned leather, inscribed with pan-slazan lettering. I remove the knife. The blade is sharp, curves nicely. The hilt is black.

  I hold it in my hand, let it respond to my warmth, reform itself to the shape of my grip. I can’t help but smile, and I can’t help but hug him. The slazan knives had entered the market months before the war started, just a year before New Hope was burned from planet into rock.

  “I can’t take this,” I say.

  “Take it as a talisman,” he says. “It was made by slazan hands—well, by slazan technology, actually—and you will be studying slazans.”

  “And the second gift?”

  The second gift is Ju/wa clothing meant for a woman. “Try it on,” he says.

  I feel suddenly shy, but I will be wearing these in front of alien strangers soon enough. The pubic apron, decorated with beads, brushes against my thighs; another apron of plain leather rubs lightly against my behind. I lift up the chi!kan‚ fashioned most likely from a gemsbok hide. I rub my hand over the red-brown leather and think of the work that has gone into it—the sun-drying, the scraping, the tanning, the hard rubbing that gave this skin the soft texture of suede. I tie one end over my shoulder then use a thong to tie the other end around my waist, more leather draping my backside, a pouch around me, where I can place what I gather. “Is this from the reserve?” I ask. The trust law requires that no Ju/wa craft be made for sale.

  “No. It was made here.”

  “By who?”

  “His name is Esoch al-Schouki. He’s a lieutenant in the infantry.”

  I consider the name. Al-Schouki is the name of a noted poet. Esoch has no meaning in Arabic or Ju/wasi. “How did he come by such a name? How did he know to make a chi!kan?”

  “He chose his own name. The garments he made himself. He grew up on the reserve.”

  “He’s Ju/wa?”

  “Yes. He was recruited after he left the reserve. We shipped him the supplies; he finished making these yesterday. He did good work, especially since he had no idea why he was asked to make them.”

  I stand before ibn Haj, bare legs, naked breasts, and I feel on display. “You know,” I say, “Ju/wa men make these for their wives.”

  “He must have been married once. The work looks good.”

  Ibn Haj leaves me to spend the day wandering. Final shipments have come in, the overhaul is almost done, and he must tie together the final strings of our plans to insure the mission will leave the next day. I walk the station, speak with no one, and take notes in my head as a way to feel in place and useful. Just before we are to meet for dinner, ibn Haj sends me a message that he will be up during the entire next shift tying off too many knots. I dine alone. I wander. After the final call for prayer, I go to the café that serves wine. I am not a general, so no one leaves.

  I find myself sitting near a man who looks equally out of place. He has all the features of the Ju/wasi—the short stature, the flat cheekbones, the epi eye folds, the peppercorn hair—and I ask him if he is Lieutenant Esoch al-Schouki.

  He is surprised. I tell him who I am. He does not seem to recognize my name or face, but he is more than happy to have someone to talk with. His Arabic is good, hardly the trace of an accent, but I want to speak in the tongue of all my romantic ideals of human sharing. I ask him his name.

  “≠oma.”

  “There are a lot of ≠oma’s. Did they call you anything else?”

  He hesitates, and in his hesitation I see the adult face of a Ju/wa boy I once knew, and desiring that fondness, I wait for this grown man to offer another name, Owner of Music. What he says, almost too soft to hear is, “No. Just ≠oma”

  He is alone in the café because his comrade-in-arms died in a war-games accident several months ago. He just returned from compassionate leave, and he is awaiting reassignment and retraining with a new comrade. He explains in Arabic, his tone matter-of-fact, devoid of self-pity. I feel like I see a deeper emotion in his eyes.

  I switch back to Ju/wa for conversation, and we share stories. I tell him research stories. He tells me hunting stories. He doesn’t want to talk about his family or where he grew up. But he tells his stories well, and I am drawn to him. He is as out of place as I am, because once he starts speaking in our shared language, he gains a kind of energy that belies the wine and the late-night hours. I take him to my cabin that night, and there is more tenderness than pleasure. After making love we sleep like a Ju/wa couple, his chest, belly, and thighs pressed to my back, and I don’t sleep for hours, just savoring the warm touch of human skin against mine, shoring up this memory for the solitude of the next two years. In the morning I awake with him inside me, his arms wrapped around my belly, and he calls me his wife when he reaches his moment, leaving a dull edge of desire where his body had once been.

  On board The
Way of God I keep thinking of him. We accelerate away from the sun toward our jump point. The walls of the corridor bear images of Wadi al-Uyoun streets, and the gravity and air composition match those of the University quarter. But rather than nostalgia for my scholarly flat, large in comparison to my cabin, or for my colleagues; rather than dream upon ibn Haj’s handsome form, or Ascherman’s failed honor, I think of the Ju/wa infantry man.

  And I think of his Ju/wa name, ≠oma‚ and in my mind I compare him with the boy who was called by the same name. I conjure up the adult face and compare it with a youthful face that bore similar lines and curves. The younger ≠oma was at the border between boyhood and puberty when I came to live among the people at the Dobe waterhole. He had been a pleasant boy, eager to please, already going out with his father on the occasional hunting expedition. He was anxious to kill his first male antelope, which would be the first part of his initiation into manhood, and as modest as the rest of them try to be, he told me how poor a hunter he was and how he would never catch anything and have to grow old and never marry. He said it with a sly smile. When he shot arrows into one of the giant anthills, they always sank in around the same spot.

  But there was already trouble. He had been injured once, and the reserve medico, taken in by him, had gifted ≠oma with a wonderful eight-keyed thumb piano. A music company on the Northern Continent had developed and sold such thumb pianos for those moderns who liked Ju/wa music, which was fashionable for a very brief time. These thumb pianos are more durable, their sound more assured and professional, than those made from traded metal and wood that the Ju/wasi build themselves and that reserve charter forbids them to sell.