Little ≠oma loved that thumb piano. And he played it every night, and he steadfastly refused to give it away in the extensive gift-giving network that ties the Ju/wasi together. There were at least two arguments when I was there, and once his family was forced to move to another waterhole where his uncle lived until things cooled down. When they called him Owner of Music, it was both envy and insult: he played so well; he shared so poorly, as if he could own music itself.
The older ≠oma‚ the one who called himself Esoch, did not tell me why he had left his people. He said he had lived for some time in a settlement camp called Chum!kwe‚ located near a dried-up waterhole on the northern edge of the reserve. The north is the driest part of the reserve. There are more people than the land can carry, and occasional Ju/wa migrate out, hoping to find another source of sustenance. But the entire region is depressed. So those who come to Chum!kwe stay there and live on government rations of mealie-meal and work odd jobs paid for in local scrip. Nutrition is low, a tuberculosis analog is on the rise, and anger is everywhere. I stayed there one week, among the dishevelled huts and the dust. There are too many people, and when angers flare, there’s nowhere to move. As many people have been murdered here in five years as in the entire reserve over five decades.
The government provides two ways out. For those with a qualifying talent, there are training programs for primal peoples who want to rejoin and contribute to contemporary societies. For the young and strong, there is the military.
≠oma said he had gotten in a fight with a man and afterward joined the mili. He thought he would use his anger well in war but was surprised to find how frightening the simulations were. He hoped they never found a slazan homeworld for the infantry to invade.
More and more I visualize his serious face, lay its image over that of the twelve-year-old ≠oma Owner of Music, and I remember the sly youthful smile. When I am planetside‚ when I am laid out flat by adaptation sickness, I will dream of him making his way through alien forest and coming to my rescue. I will lie there, sweaty and miserable, and feel unworthy of rescue. And the real Esoch al-Schouki will be on a military base that orbits E-donya‚ he will be assigned a new comrade-in-arms, and together they will await a new assignment.
Chapter Five
The Seventh Day
Esoch didn’t die of snakebite that night. He dozed off readily, dreamed, remembered, until some sound, or the shape of the nest—which hadn’t been designed for a human body, and perhaps wasn’t well designed for a slazan body, either—kept waking him. Each time, he opened his eyes to the darkness, then let them shut again, curling up, on the edge of sleep, a victim of his wandering mind.
He kept seeing Hanan, her black hair, the gentle curve of her cheek, the way her black eyes stayed with you when you spoke, and his mind kept intruding with Dikobe’s face. And later he dreamed he was on the reserve. Dikobe was wearing her pubic apron and chi!kan. She was sweating with sickness and leaning against Hanan. He started to dance while someone he couldn’t see clapped out the rhythm; his feet pounded the sand until the n/um began to boil within him, his stomach tightening, everything around wavering until he could see the //gangwasi‚ the spirits of the dead, out in the night, beyond the fire. There was his father, his body thin and frail, having spent the last years of his life coughing and coughing. He was walking toward Dikobe, and Esoch implored, “Don’t take her. She’s got so much work left to do.” But his father didn’t touch Dikobe. “You’re the one,” he said, “You’re the one I’ve missed for so long. You’re the one I want to see.”
And his father stopped there, so he could dream it all over again, dancing his way into !kia‚ until he felt the pain in his belly, the energy boiling through his body, then he reached forward to pull the arrows of sickness out of Dikobe, and always his father, walking toward him, until it started to rain on them all, the water drenching their bodies, soaking their clothes, his father about to speak when something exploded, once, then twice, and the water poured in, washing Dikobe away, and Esoch was a kid again, running in the rain, the other kids, none his age, running through the chu/o—the face of the huts—dodging hearths and logs, fires sizzling into gray and black because the rains were washing the heat away and soon everything would grow, greens sprouting from the ground, from the limbs of trees, flowers opening with the season’s ripeness, but here everything was black, and Esoch could only feel the rain: heavy drops—he imagined—sliding through the canopy, sounding almost like waves lapping against the shore, then cascading down, rustling leaf after leaf. The rain was cold, and he lay there, unable to see a thing, muscles cramped, an edge of the thatching sticking into his lower back. His hand touched the center of the nest; a small puddle was collecting there. He wasn’t sure how long he remained curled up, miserable, listening to and feeling the cold rain, before he sat up. This rain pounded against the ground; he could hear it like tiny footsteps, not the snake hissing he’d heard in his youth when the sand eagerly drank in the falling water.
The torchlight, a bright tunnel against the darkness, made the rain look as if it were suspended, just a series of elongated drops that hung there without falling, but then he shined the light upon the ground, watched in amazement the way the ground refused the water, the way tiny brown rivers rolled downhill, forming the tiny tributaries to the long thin streams, all rushing headlong. If the rain weren’t so loud, he imagined, he would hear the nearby river swelling and frothing. He sat there, eyes open, his onesuit drenched and sticking to his body. He shone the light on his wounds. Each was swollen and dark. The rain had washed the blood away.
Dawn was invisible in the forest, but as soon as the gray light made it possible to see without a torch, Esoch consumed a ration and clambered out of the nest and down the tree. The white line connecting his green dot to Dikobe’s had been reduced to 25.1 kilometers. He headed off, following the curves of the river. He had walked over three kilometers when he remembered that he had wanted to retrieve the dead snake, to save it for its antivenin. He rechecked the tracking disc; the white line connecting him to Dikobe had been reduced by a little more than a kilometer. So much walking, and he was hardly any closer. He didn’t have time to turn back.
He continued on, following any path that stayed close to the river. He passed through areas where the ground had been burned clean and where fresh grass and bushes grew. He passed through old cleared areas wild with brush. The sky above remained heavy with gray. Leaves everywhere remained green, and the lack of color seemed foreboding. It smelled as if it would rain again, but he didn’t trust his senses.
The forest thinned out: fresh grasses and fewer trees, gray light filling up a hole in the distance. Esoch found himself drawn away from the river and toward the light.
The clearing was large, and in the clearing was a village. Standing at the edge of the clearing, hidden behind the brush, Esoch could see shelters as elaborately designed as the nest in which he had spent the night. Paths wove around all the huts, each path bordered by elaborate thin ditches, half-filled with sluggish water. The village paths were littered with leaves and branches, fresh from the storm, but there was no sign of other debris. There were no hearths. No black smudges left by fire. No sign of life. The only sounds came from the forest, giving the village a haunted quiet.
Who would build a village so carefully, who would maintain its paths and drainage ditches and shelters, and then leave it empty?
Even under gray skies the thatching had a golden glow. It then occurred to him: the shelters were close together, too close together for a slazan village. And such carefully structured villages suggested a people rooted in place by the plants they cultivated. But there were no signs of fields, nor had the forest been picked bare by a concentrated populace. He was reminded of empty mosques between calls to prayer, the quiet hush of sacred places.
Pauline would want to see this place. He marked it on the tracking disc—a dark violet blip. He felt as if he were marking the future, a way of insisting that there wo
uld be a Pauline, that she would later want to see this place.
Esoch retraced his path, and not much later he came to a fork in the river. One branch was the main river itself, the other a tributary. Was this the tributary that would take him near to Dikobe’s clearing? He couldn’t make sense of all the lines of the tracking-disc screen—the blues, the blacks, the reds. The skills he’d learned in training had diminished with his increasing exhaustion. He’d grown up without flatscreen maps; the knowledge of landscape had been built upon years of experience: everything was pictures in your head, not drawings upon a screen.
He sat down. He ate his second-to-last ration. He drank from his third-to-last packet. He wished Ghazwan were here; during simulations Ghazwan only had to glance at that tracking disc to know which way to go. Esoch studied the map several times with several different overlays. He decided this tributary wasn’t the one, he had to go farther southeast.
He wondered how the locals crossed the river, but he saw no signs of bridges, no nearby fallen trunks, no rocks to form a stepping path. From their waisthooks Esoch removed pistol, then torch, then tracking disc, then palmtalk (which he held on to for just a moment while he considered breaking radio silence, contacting Pauline, but there was the Way of God leaving orbit, the flash of light, the possibility that the enemy could be listening in), and he sealed the four items in his pack. He carefully lowered himself into the river, dirt and small stones digging into his palms, then waded through the water, which rushed up to his chest. As he groped to climb the opposite bank, mud splattered over his chest, smeared across his knees, and covered his hands.
His wounds now stung. He rinsed his wounded hand clean, but a thin layer of dirt had been etched into the broken skin. He couldn’t get to the wound on his belly without removing his onesuit‚ something he briefly considered doing.
He emptied the water from his boots, returned everything to the waisthooks, and set off again. A kind of hunger worked through his body. He felt removed from everything, his limbs weak. The occasional gust of wind, or the accidental run-in with a bush, rustled the leaves like last night’s storm and showered down a proportionate amount of rain. His skin was cold, clammy, and he felt he would never be dry again. The pain in his hand remained. The onesuit fabric rubbed against the wound on his belly.
Clearings where slazans had cut away wood were fewer, but none was bathed in sunlight: overhead loomed gray, darkening clouds, and by mid-morning the rains resumed.
The rain, he told himself, was safety: predator and prey would be hiding; neither would be out seeking food. Slazans would be huddled in shelters or under trees, and no one would be seeking him. And Dikobe? Was she safe and warm inside the shuttle? Or was she out in the wilderness, sick and dying?
He waded through a second tributary, the water speckled by rain, ripples of water overwhelmed by the river’s flow. This time the water rose to his waist. Someone had carefully placed a log over the third tributary, and he crawled along it so he wouldn’t slip. Whoever had found or placed it there had carved elaborate designs into the wood. He marked his tracking disc for Pauline.
He stopped to lean against a tree. Water dripped from his hair, ran cold down across his eyes, along cheeks, over ears, down the back of his neck. He bent his legs, then stretched, but the tension in the back of his thighs would not be eased away. He longed for a familiar landscape: the wide spread of yellowing grass and dull-green bushes, an occasional tree rising up and spreading out its limbs, all of it merging in the distance like a low wall. And when the rains fell, they didn’t fall forever like this. They often fell over distant land. He once stopped at the edge of the reserve and turned to look in the direction he had come. His attention was held by the dark, faraway clouds, and—his throat dry, the land where he stood parched—he watched the rain’s hair falling from cloud to land.
The rains died slowly, but afterward tiny brown streams still carved their way through the growth, washing down to the river, and trees still showered down sudden bursts of water. Esoch ate his last ration and drank from the second-to-last drinking packet. He was still hungry, still thirsty. Sounds returned: birdsongs, trills, garbles, croaks, a distant roar. Rain-sparkled green and reds and yellows began to glow, and up above, thin cracked lines of blue outlined the highest leaves and branches.
As the afternoon progressed, so did his sense of weakness.
It became harder to walk. The wound in his hand was darker, the swollen skin harder. The pain along his belly was its own separate fire. He came to a tributary, a wedge of hillside where the two waters met, the waters a momentary rush of turbulence, the air carrying a scent of cool water, as fresh as last night’s rain. He was sure this tributary would take him to Dikobe. The red lines on the tracking disc seemed to waver. The white line measured 10.8 kilometers. He was close. He should feel something. He followed the new stream of water.
After a while all he wanted to do was curl up and lie down. He drank from the last packet. The light-headedness wasn’t abated. He took no more than five steps before he dropped to his knees and vomited a liquid, rank bile. He continued heaving. If this was adaptation sickness, if this was his body adjusting to everything new in the atmosphere, then he could see why Dikobe’s behavior had become erratic, why she had snapped at Jihad, why she had shut off all transmission just to be alone. All Esoch wanted to do was curl up and let his body somehow live through this moment.
He remembered Chum!kwe: the dust, the too many people, the government-built shelters, the gray recruiting station, the long lines leading to where they distributed the mealie-meal‚ the crowded, pockmarked clinic with the sallow-faced medico who had no medicines but who could diagnose anything, the man who gave you minor jobs and paid you in blue slips of paper, the fat woman at the bottle shop who took the blue slips in return for bitter whiskey, and Bo—long legs and hard eyes—who shared the whiskey with him, and the morning he had found himself lying alone in the mud, his body curled in pain. How could he have kept drinking after what he had done to Bo?
He’d been trying to end a life then; but now he’d been entrusted with a life. Somehow, he stood up. Somehow, he walked, following paths that curved in and around areas, staying close as he could to the winding river. He walked three kilometers to get one kilometer closer to Pauline, another three to get a little less than two. He kept looking down at the black disc in his palm, at the tiny numbers on the readout screen. The numbers held his attention. The numbers helped him stay upright and ignore the pain, because the white line between his green dot and Dikobe’s green dot kept getting shorter and shorter.
A beeping started in his head, becoming background noise with all the other noises. By the time he heard the rustle of leaves, the sound was close enough for him to realize that something was running toward him. He stopped and listened. He hardly heard the beeping. Instead he heard footsteps. Running footsteps. Two sets. They sounded so human. His wounded hand was already at the waisthook‚ already lifting the pistol, already switching the safety off.
The first one emerged ten meters in front of him and stopped. The slazan child couldn’t have been higher than Esoch’s chest. It stood there, naked, semi-erect penis between legs, and this very human part of its body enhanced the alien quality of the rest of him. A slazan girl stopped right beside him. Her head was even with the boy’s shoulders. She too was naked. She too stared at him with eyes equally wide. Surprise? Wonderment? Fear? Why didn’t they turn to run?
A voice sounded in the woods. He hadn’t heard any kinds of words in so long that he found himself turning to face the speaker even while his grip on the pistol tightened, the metal pressed against his swollen palm. An adult slazan‚ not too much taller than the boy, stepped in front of the two children. Esoch couldn’t tell if it was a woman or a man. The skin of the breasts looked withered, like those of an old man. A pubic skirt hung from a waist band. Looped over the shoulders and tied at the waist was a huge skin that was shaped much like a chi!kan a Ju/wa woman wears to carry food,
to transport ostrich eggshells full of water, much like the one he had made Dikobe, but this one had elaborate designs all along the edges. The chi!kan made Esoch decide this was a woman, a gatherer, but, then, what was she doing with that quiver full of arrows? The arrow the slazan woman withdrew from the quiver and notched in her bow was impressive: the shaft was thicker, longer, than anything a Ju/wa would use, the arrowhead large enough to do substantial damage.
Here was the enemy, preparing to kill him. It would be so easy to fire the pistol. The burning in his hand distracted him. The harder he gripped the pistol, the more it hurt. The adult slazan took no notice of the gun. Why should she? She wouldn’t recognize it. So why hadn’t she let loose the arrow? He was the enemy. She should kill him, he thought, and, at the same time: she’s only protecting her children.
Even though she held bow and arrow, and even though Esoch had always associated arrows with men and with hunting, he found it easy to think of this slazan as a woman, as a mother, and he found it easy to step back, once, then twice, then three times.
The two children watched him. The arrowhead remained steady. He took one more step, then another. The farther away, the lesser the target. But a kind of controlled anger replaced the fear. What was to stop him from raising the pistol and demonstrating his strength? Esoch hated himself for the thought, for the way it came to him so readily the more he retreated into safety. This woman’s face, these children’s faces, belonged to the face of the enemy, and he felt like a coward, he felt like he must shoot them. What was brave in shooting them? The idea was alien to him. Until he’d joined the mili‚ bravery and murder had had nothing to do with each other. Murder was sudden anger, and he had no reason to be angry.
Now he was a good ten meters away, the intervening trees and brush making him a poor target for bow and arrow. He still held the pistol, and the swollen wound still stung. What was one more death? They weren’t human.
Foragers Page 17