Foragers

by Charles Oberndorf

  It was late afternoon when he followed a series of tiny waterfalls, no wider than his two hands placed side by side, up a graded hill, his breathing hard, his boots slipping against the mud as he made his way up to the top and finally stepped onto the flattened landscape surrounded by a colorful wall of forest. There was the shuttle craft, all bright and smooth in the sun. The door was open. The clearing was deathly silent. He felt that the forest itself had seen him and hushed in surprise.

  “Dikobe!” he called out. His voice sounded harsh, awful, terribly accented.

  “Pauline!” He yelled it, but his mind remembered long ago when he had whispered it loudly, again and again, as he struggled for a moment of pleasure.

  He hesitated, wanted a voice that sounded right, without the accent and memory. “Hwan//a!”

  But no answer. He ran for the shuttle craft, for the open door, then stopped. The ground around the shuttle had been burnt black. The black flatness had been broken up by tiny rivulets from streams that must have formed during yesterday’s rain—or was it the day before yesterday?—and had been marred by footprints. But the ground was mostly black, except for an area alongside the ship. There was a swelling of dirt, longer than wide, the dirt fresh, not rained upon, brown flecked by black. Someone had dug a hole and had filled it back up. The hole was long enough to hold a body.

  The shuttle door was open, and it was far too quiet. He reached to the waisthook‚ flicked the fastener aside, and raised the pistol. The safety was off before the pistol was aimed at the doorway. He sidestepped several times, then rushed to the hull of the shuttle. Now he was out of sight of anyone inside. He looked up the hillside. Was he being watched? Was he vulnerable? There was no reason they should recognize a pistol, or was there?

  He slid one foot forward. Was this how it was done? He pressed his back so hard against the hull that it hurt. His pistol was leveled straight forward.

  No sound came from the inside of the shuttle: no shuffling, no heavy breathing. Was it only empty, like his worst fears, or was someone waiting? What if he leaped in, saw movement, and fired his pistol, and the movement turned out to have belonged to a sick and exhausted Dikobe, rising from the bed where she had been sleeping? What if it belonged to some exploring child, too scared by his approach to do anything but wait?

  He was at the edge of the doorway. All he had to do was step up, jump forward, pistol aimed, ready to scan and fire. “Pauline!” he shouted.

  No answer. So quiet.

  He leaped in, spun around once inside, spun twice before feeling empty and foolish. The cabin was empty.

  The following is taken from the notebook Pauline Dikobe kept while traveling to Tienah on The Way of God.

  Day Two

  I already want to cry.

  I like the way the neat lines of Arabic script travel across the page as I speak out. I like the way the program adjusts for the infelicities of spoken speech, the same way the mind adjusts to the uneven contours of our spoken sentences, a number of which would read as barely literate if written out word for word, sound for sound.

  I am calmer now. I can sort out my ideas.

  I am not welcome here. The respect and honor I received when I toured the ship with ibn Haj are now absent. There is common courtesy. There are manners. No one will get up from a table when I sit down, but rarely am I joined when I sit down by myself. I can exercise in the tiny gym, but no one invites me to play free-ball. It sounds like self-pity when you find you won’t be included. But inclusion is a human expectation; exclusion is the great changer of behavior to all but the most asocial.

  The captain told me this morning that there was little I could do but remain polite and wait it out. The crew is upset. Two crewmates were transferred off the ship so I would have a place to live. The crew credits the two with saving the ship when it came under slazan attack in the war zone. Everyone was primed to return to the war zone. Their half year of keeping E-donya safe was over. They expected another shot at honor and glory, not a two-year mission far away from the war.

  Day Three

  The captain or the executive officer sit with me during my meals. They tell me about military routine and what it’s like patrolling the war zone and what it’s like patrolling around E-donya. They ask me about my religious upbringing and my life in the University.

  The captain, in her cabin, over coffee, explains that they sit with me to demonstrate their support. It feels more like protective custody.

  Day Four

  A routine has formed.

  It took two days for the captain and me to work it out.

  During the morning shift, when I am most alert, I go over all the research materials the Division of Slazan Studies could provide. There are plenty of images. There are plenty of anecdotes. There are plenty of theories. You could probably print a pamphlet on what we know for sure.

  In the afternoon I work with various members of the crew. The ship’s intelligence translator teaches me to work with the shuttle’s intelligence, and she goes over my daily research plans to look for logistical problems. The engineer demonstrates the working of the shuttle and the equipment. The executive officer teaches me the piloting system because the regulations require it.

  I don’t see how we’re going to fill up five months of travel before I go crazy.

  Day Five

  I’m still not used to wearing a veil so often. Like all social rules, there are a number of exceptions. The exceptions, I am sure, make sound cultural sense, but they aren’t easily enumerated in any conscious rule book.

  In the town where I grew up, you wore a veil in public and at home when nonkin were visiting, a tradition that stretches back to the Mediterranean, where honor and modesty were once predominate values. But certain distant kin, and certain less distant male kin, weren’t considered close enough, and the veil remained on. Certain friends were so much like family that the veil was removed.

  In Wadi al-Uyoun you wore a veil in public places and for formal occasions. In your home and in informal gatherings you removed the veil. In the University, where it’s unclear what’s formal and informal—a student arguing a point is part of an informal conversation, but the setting, between professor and student, is formal—you saw different people take on different habits.

  I expected never to have to wear a veil again once I boarded The Way of God. And for the first several days I thought that they kept their veils on only because a civilian stranger was aboard. But, no, you wear veils in the corridors, in the gym, in the dining hall. Even in the washroom the veil stays on until just before you step into the shower. The veil comes off in your cabin, and when someone invites you to their cabin. And during meals veils come off while people eat. During intense conversations, the veil comes off. And in the mosque, on the sabbath, bowing before God, the veil comes off.

  Wearing the veil is a way of preserving dignity and privacy, as all thirty-one of us are so cramped together. I think of a group of Ju/wasi‚ five, or ten, or twenty together, always jabbering at each other, always telling stories, or arguing about a gift, or planning for the next day, or teasing someone else, and only at night do you get some rest from the proximity and the constant companionship and the constant surveillance. Maybe veils make sense, a way to maintain your solitude in a crowded ship.

  One of the key slazan words is solitude‚ but slazans don’t wear veils. You almost think they would.

  Day Six

  I like working with Jihad. I like her intense zeal. Her thoroughness is impeccable. Today she had one thousand and one questions about aspects of the anthropological programming we’ve loaded into the shuttle’s intelligence. She wants to know the difference between discriminate analysis and cluster analysis. She wants to know in case the intelligence needs any coaxing. “Intelligences always get confused the first time they do anything really complex. Their inexperience shows.”

  When we go over the logistics of the research, her zeal takes another turn. Every time I step outside the shuttle, whethe
r it be to stand in the clearing or to go out into the forest to plant imaging pins, Jihad wants to know what I’ll do in case of attack. She’s sure some slazan at some time will come after me, more likely sooner than later.

  I try to explain to her why she shouldn’t worry. Attack is a possibility, but it isn’t the norm. I give her all sorts of examples, from chimps who dart into the woods, to gorillas who shake branches, to humans who await gifts and money. Attack was the risk you took when dealing with the dullest of animals, like sharks, or with populations who had been previously attacked. We are sitting in Jihad’s cabin. Her comrade-in-arms has just served us coffee. Jihad is shaking her head. “We’re not talking animals or humans. We’re talking slazans.”

  Day Ten

  Tonight I sit alone in the tiny café. It serves wine. Because I am alone, no nearby believer to offend, I have the mixer pour me a glass, and I take it to a table. I can’t bear to face the solitude of my cabin. I can’t bear to face my solitude among the crew.

  Tamr comes in, and I am embarrassed. The engineer is the most devout of the crew. But she asks the mixer for a glass of wine and joins me. “Only drunks and nonbelievers drink alone,” she says.

  I don’t know how to react. She’s the same way when we work in the shuttle. She asks me where my prayer rug is when she doesn’t see it, she asks me where I’ve been when I don’t show up to the mosque for the afternoon call to prayer, she quotes the Quran when it comes time for wisdom. At the same time, she jokes about the stretch marks she has gained from fattening up during shore leave, and she makes ribald commentary about any equipment that has anything vaguely sexual about its nature. She’s a large, imposing woman, charismatic when she’s not domineering. She’s the last person on the ship I’d expect to see drinking wine.

  We sit quietly for a while. She finally asks, “Are you a believer?”

  I am tempted to be honest; I am tempted to lie. I settle for compromise. “I am a doubter.”

  “Were you a doubter before you entered the University?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know a lot about the slazans?”

  “I know some. We don’t know a lot.”

  “Will this trip of ours help us know enough to win the war?”

  I shake my head. “It might give us enough to know how to negotiate a peace.”

  Tamr stops drinking. “We can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Negotiating peace, it would make our struggle meaningless. You don’t fight seven years against evil and then tire of the fight.”

  “The slazans aren’t evil.”

  “Then you don’t know much about slazans. You haven’t paid attention to how they’ve fought this war. Maybe you’ll learn something important on that planet once we get there. I just hope they don’t kill you before we can get you back.”

  I want to tell her what I think of everything she has just said. But what will honesty do but make the voyage even more difficult? I have sat here, in my cabin, for the past hour trying to believe that, trying to convince myself I’m not a social coward.

  Day Fifteen

  Tonight, after dinner, Jihad invites me back to her cabin, and we sip tea and chat. We start talking about nightmares. Jihad tells me about the nightmare she had about a slazan. One warship, with one slazan warrior, outsmarts The Way of God’s intelligence, outsmarts her, and destroys the ship. Jihad’s comrade-in-arms, who seems to be the ship’s gossip, tells me about other crew members, about their nightmares filled with slazans. As I listen, as I hear again and again about the slazan warrior who travels alone, in the night, or across the night sky, and does his damage, I begin to wonder if these nightmares are the product of group empathy, or of military training.

  But the slazans they talk about are nothing like the slazans I know from text and image. How are these people going to feel when I try to befriend the enemy, when I try to find some role where I can live near one’s campfire and try to play some minor part in their lives?

  “But these are nightmares you are talking about,” I say to the two of them.

  Jihad says, “I’m sure the real slazans will be worse.”

  The following is an excerpt from “What We Know About Slazans‚” a small pamphlet that Pauline Dikobe put together along with visual imagery and left in The Way of God’s dining hall on the twentieth day of the voyage. Only five copies were taken. Someone disposed of the rest.

  What we have: we have lots of images, we have a slazan vocabulary including words for all anatomical parts, we have records and images from a few dissections (the recovery of slazan bodies is a genre of storytelling all its own). We know nothing of the slazan fossil record. We know nothing of other species within the same animal order, their primates, so to speak. There are hundreds of theories born from examining slazan DNA‚ but without populations to watch, behaviors to observe, all the theories are just words.

  When human and slazan shared New Hope, human and slazan representatives negotiated interstellar trade routes and exploration protocols. From the discussions it became clear that there were two stellar systems that contained slazan populations, but no human has visited a world that was exclusively populated by slazans. Because we don’t know the slazan homeworld or its ancestral history, we do not know the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness that revised some previous animal’s design until you have the current design of the slazan body and slazan behavior.

  Biology: slazans have the same general anatomical features and organs of mammals everywhere. We know they prefer solitary activity over social activity. We don’t know the biological roots of their solitude, or the benefits the solitude conferred on their ancestors.

  Language: there is, as far as we know, one panspecies language. How do slazans‚ with their emphasis on solitude, readily learn language without continual social input? It has been hypothesized that a social construct such as language might well have to be hardwired into their brains—syntax and vocabulary both passed on through the genes, but the theory isn’t very convincing, nor is such a language very adaptive: words and meanings have to be able to change when the natural or cultural environment changes. Perhaps, others have theorized, slazans have better retentive memory when it comes to pronunciation, definition, and syntax: making language change possible but less likely.

  While the slazans on New Hope were reticent to share much in the way of knowledge about slazan life and history, they were more than willing to share their language, first to prevent any unnecessary misunderstanding and second, during the several-year drought, to secure adequate trade agreements. Using the language reality workshops—so a diplomat can learn Nostratic or an anthropologist can learn Ju/wa—they created a workshop for humans to learn pan-slazan. From that we know the word for elbow‚ and the word for penis. We know there are two ways of saying my sister: one means the girl who shares my mother; the other, the woman who shares my mother. We know there is a genderless word for newborn‚ for infant‚ for child‚ but once you hit adolescence, there are different words with different roots for male and female; however, there is a word for son and a word for daughter‚ neither word associated with a word for “age.” The words hint, but never directly describe, the sexual dimorphism, the way the adult men shoot up in size until they’re almost twice as large as the adult women. We have a word, transliterated as gza‚ which means both music and medicine, but we have no idea why slazans have associated the two ideas.

  Technology: they have an advanced technology, comparable to ours. The social systems that make such cooperation possible are unclear. We know they prefer organic technology—fabrics and medicines derived from living materials—but they are adept at using metals and plastics.

  Social Customs: adults maintain a personal space of at least a meter, they look you in the eye only when they want to emphasize the words they are using, they look off in the distance when they mean no, and, oddly, they nod a very human nod when they mean yes. They speak of sharing words, but they have never off
ered to share an actual thing with a human. Their society and industry is built around computers—what better way to preserve personal space?—but they refuse to negotiate or finalize deals unless it is in person. When asked about how they organize their society, each slazan has looked away, off into the distance: no.

  We have images of large older males, and so we have heard their loud calls; we have never seen these males on the same streets where humans were permitted to walk. Other than the few buildings where humans were permitted to stay, we have not seen the internal arrangement of slazan homes, and the language workshop imagery focuses on the images of the things being learned and turns everything else as opaque as an old memory. The workshop, like the human ones, starts you off as the initial language learner, the child, so we have seen that mothers, when no longer lactating, lose their breasts and, aside from their hips, look almost the same as men of equal stature. Many of our dealings were with young men, but a number of slazans on New Hope wore tunics or robes that hid their necks. It’s not clear from the accounts if all our dealings were with men.

  But kinship? Economics? Politics? Law? They offered to tell us nothing. They told each human with whom they had business the name of the person to contact, but never the reason why. No one came with a title or a role—it was as if slazans had in mind a larger social map that did not require them to name roles and positions, to verbally parse their lives into understandable spheres in order to know how to deal with each other. What does this social map—if it exists—tell them? How does it help them conduct their lives as a social group? If group decisions are made, who makes those decisions? If they are rarely together, how do slazans living on separate worlds negotiate the conduct of a war? If individual slazans avoid each other, how does violence ever happen?