She looked to Far Hunter, to Chest Scars, to Arm Scars, to Lean Against Tree, and none of them said a word to her or to the almost-a-man. She would not let him die, so she knelt by him again. His blow was unsettling, but it was not strong enough to unbalance her. His stay-away call was even fainter. His leg, then her hands, was slippery with blood, but soon she had the pubic apron tied tight around his thigh, above the torn puncture.
She sat a respectful distance from the almost-a-man and sang a healing song, which was of no use. He soon died.
The animal had left the clearing, and the opening to the boulder had disappeared.
Night was approaching, and each woman was gathering up her things. If a child spoke, she was hushed. No one wanted to be on the hillside when night came, and no one would return until each full moon had passed overhead. By then Clever Finger’s true body would leave to find its proper solitude in the sky, far away from the world. No one would stay there that night, and there would be no fires to keep away the jackals. By the next morning there would just be skin, some meat and sinew, and bones. I did not know if she could bear to return while those bones and rotting remains were part of the clearing.
The animal was back in her boulder. Maybe she too would never come out.
The following is taken from the notebook Pauline Dikobe kept while traveling to Tienah on The Way of God.
Day 28
We are weeks into the journey, and the corridor walls rarely feature images taken from the University district of Wadi al-Uyoun. Now the images are selected from psyche-profiles‚ whatever will enhance tranquillity, ease homesickness: idealized deserts, moonlit landscapes, busy marketplaces, savannahs lush with green after a good spring rain.
Day 30
We have left hyperspace to make another jump in another direction. There’s no evidence that we’re being followed. The glare of energy that accompanies each jump can be plotted by distant astronomers, but no slazan will see this light for decades.
Perhaps it was a mistake centuries ago to remove generals from battle, to set up buildings full of people collecting intelligence to advise the generals. All those minds at work, with no direct threat to their immediate survival. They have too long to think, too long to worry about each step of a process.
So we follow a Byzantine path to a planet without name or number.
Day 33
I am tired of looking at images of slazans. I am tired of going over the shuttle and equipment.
I feel like I’ve lost track of the days.
What will I be like on the planet, when I’m by myself, my only companionship Jihad’s voice sounding in my ear?
Day 35
I study one image.
It’s a slazan mother and her child in an expansive park, one of many that snake through the largest slazan city that once existed on New Hope. The child looks at the mother. I am having the shuttle’s intelligence compare their facial expressions with any other images of mother and children. It’s already been done by other researchers, but I’m experience-developing the intelligence, giving it past experience that it can rely on when we’re planetside and it has to do such searches on its own.
The image itself was taken one year before the war broke out on New Hope. I wonder if the mother and child left the planet beforehand, or if they were destroyed in the cataclysm that followed.
All I do is wonder. I do not feel the commensurate ache from their possible deaths. I want to feel something, some sense of loss. I feel nothing.
Such is the way that a researcher’s heart is hardened.
Day 40
Tamr’s comrade-in-arms is named Maryam. She is a thin, willowy woman who rarely speaks. She’s been a second-shifter, so she’s off duty when Tamr is working with me and on duty when Tamr and I have dinner, often with Jihad and Jihad’s comrade-in-arms. Today the captain has shifted the roster, so different people are working together. I eat dinner with the two of them together for the first time. Whenever Tamr gets so involved with some digression, it’s Maryam who reminds her of the original train of thought. Whenever Tamr forgets the end of a joke, it’s Maryam who tells the punchline.
Later I ask Jihad if Maryam is anything more than Tamr’s shadow.
“Sure,” Jihad says. “If you want something fixed, you go to Maryam. She’s the best engineer in the fleet.”
I want to ask what she’s doing on The Way of God‚ but instead I ask, “Why isn’t she the chief engineer, then?”
“Because Maryam couldn’t give orders to her own dog.”
Day 45
Intellectual thought is a warm blanket, or better, a nurturing womb that can protect us from the vicissitudes of social life. Everything that happens on this ship, this self-contained village, allows me to And comfort in evolutionary thought.
The overriding assumption has been that humans in the Pleistocene gathered, scavenged, and hunted in small groups, the size of the groups expanding and contracting with available resources. It’s been assumed that most humans at that time knew up to forty people well.
The ship’s population is thirty-one, including me. Ten people are on duty during any one of three shifts. So the contact population is between ten and twenty, much like that in a small Ju/wa village.
But here there are no children and no men.
Here, there is rank.
But in spite of the hierarchy, there is no boasting allowed. There is the teasing to keep people in place.
But here there are cabins and veils. There are no open huts, no constant exposure to the public eye.
Day 51
I can’t sleep. I’m restless. I head to the washroom. I want to splash some water onto my face, clear my head.
The door slides open. A woman is naked, standing bent over the sink, washing something. Her back is thick, her backside curving out in adiposal comfort. I think it’s Tamr.
The woman turns at the sound of me stepping in. It’s Tamr. She only has on her veil. In her hand is a masculine prosthesis. She turns away, obviously embarrassed.
I want to make the moment light. “After a month in space, I sure could use one of those.” Then I head back to my room, as embarrassed as she is.
Day 53
If I had known the rule two days ago, I wouldn’t have embarrassed Tamr, who for two days has spoken with me about everything but our little encounter.
But, as is true of most unspoken rules, no one thought to tell me.
At the beginning and end of a shift, everyone walks in and out of the communal washroom as if the room were as public as the dining hall or gym. Since there are lavatories near the bridge and the dinning hall, and a washroom by the gym, the main washroom gets little use during a shift. Today is the first day I saw a crew member enter the washroom in the middle of a shift. She knocked first, waited, knocked again, then entered.
I hadn’t knocked; Tamr had not expected to be seen.
But the prosthetic she held raises questions. Did she use it on herself when desire got to be too much, or was it something she used with willowy, shy Maryam? It’s not clear which comrades-in-arms sleep with their mats apart, like roommates, and which sleep with their mats together, as lovers. If it’s an item of gossip, no one spreads the news while I’m within hearing.
Day 56
This evening, under my pillow, I find one, just like Tamr’s. It’s in a box that has been wrapped with a ribbon. I’m embarrassed to touch it. I can’t ever imagining taking advantage of its form.
Is this a gift from Tamr? Or did she tell someone else, who somehow got a lock override to plant it under my pillow? Or maybe it’s less a gift and more a practical joke.
Day 60
No one’s said anything about the surprise under my pillow. I wait for Tamr or Maryam to say something, for Jihad to pull me aside, for her gossipy comrade-in-arms to make some comment and snicker. No one says a thing, no one makes a joke, no conversations suddenly stop when I appear. Who gave it to me and why?
How will I understand alien sl
azans I’ve never met if I can’t understand the secretive behavior of humans I have known for sixty days?
I write this rather than write up my research notes.
I feel failure in the air.
Chapter Seven
The Eighth Day
Whatever alien microbes had upset the balance within his own cell structure, and whatever alien amino acids in the local food were confusing his digestive tract, and whatever reactions his body was making to the contradictory stimuli of the past days of heat, cold, and rain, all of them came to a head the moment Esoch saw the inside of the empty shuttle. He leaned against an acceleration couch, his arm hooked around the headrest, and he breathed heavily, trying to orient himself. The sheets on the bed were twisted and reeked of sweat. All sorts of instruments were strewn across a workstation. A basket as finely woven together as the nest sat empty by the bed. All the controls were lit up. Each vidscreen was on; each showed something being broadcast by one of the imaging pins: inside a shelter, near a fire, a path in the woods. Tiny lines of Arabic crawled across the bottom of each image. Back on the Way of God‚ those nights he had stayed with Dikobe, her cabin had always been neatly kept, a few Ju/wa knickknacks neatly arrayed on the tiny desk, the two mats unrolled, the blankets neatly turned down. Why was there so much disorder now?
Just ten or so days ago he had helped Pauline do a final inventory, and in silence they had gone through locker after locker, speaking only when she had named an item and its location and he had verified it was there. Thus, he knew where to find the shovel. It was perfectly clean, no sign that she had used it to dig up and refill that hole beside the shuttle. Did slazans dig graves? Had they buried her? Why would they kill her? As he walked out of the shuttle—surveying the hillside, unmoved by the reds, oranges, yellows, and seeing no one—and as he slipped blade into soil, he knew that he first should have awakened the ship’s intelligence and set up a defense perimeter, but he truly didn’t care. He wanted to dig away at this dirt now, he wanted to know now if it was a grave, if Dikobe was at the bottom.
He had once learned that the slazans on New Hope buried the bodies of criminals and burned the bodies of good people, the good soul being set free from earthly life. Had he heard it from a military trainer or from Dikobe? Would that idea apply to these particular slazans? Had the person in this grave done something terribly wrong while she was alive? Each time Esoch bent over, the snakelike creature back in the nest bit again and again into his belly; each time he thrust shovel into soil, metal scraped hard against palm and swollen wound; and each time he lifted out dirt, the muscles of his lower back became taut, hard, dense with pain. The sweat was more feverish than cooling, and the late-afternoon sun cast a grim light on everything. He stopped, looked up at the hillside that surrounded the shuttle, and saw no one. He returned to his effort and dug and dug, and the hole deepened slowly.
He tried to imagine who would have buried Pauline, and he couldn’t. When his old name—his grandfather—had died, it had been his father and his uncle and two cousins who had buried the body in a giant anthill. In Chum!kwe a murdered woman had lain in the street for a day, her mouth open, flies swarming, the settlement director demanding that everyone see the product of their violence, then handing scrip to Bo and ≠oma to carry the body far out into the brush where the jackals would find it. After Ghazwan had died, the casket carrying his body had been shot toward the war zone, so that centuries later it could join the dust of his slain comrades.
The shovel struck something, and that something gave. He imagined it was Dikobe’s head, and he sat until nausea passed. When he stood, the light-headedness had doubled. It would be better to go inside, to hook himself up to the medcomp‚ to have his blood analyzed and cleansed. Instead, he crouched, his head spinning now, and he carefully lowered himself to hands and knees. He reached down into the pit and scooped away at the dirt—brown, dark dirt mixed with hard blackened bits like from burned pottery. And flesh touched what metal had struck. It was a foot. A naked foot.
This time the nausea came as great waves within his belly and bowels, and he considered going to the other end of the grave and digging until shovel reached skull when it occurred to him that if the foot were a human foot, then this would be Dikobe’s grave. He brushed away the dirt until he could feel skin more readily than soil. Then he cleared the top of a shin to remove the doubts that persisted, even though the feel of toe, the curve of ankle said everything. The skin was cool, leathery, inhuman, not the skin he was accustomed to, and every time he touched it, his hand involuntarily jerked back as if shocked by electricity.
And then he sat by the grave for the longest time, knees pulled up to chest, arms wrapped around legs, and he took in everything. Pauline was not buried here. Pauline could still be alive. Who had buried the slazan? Pauline? Someone else? Had she left on her own or had someone taken her away?
He counted days in his head. Twice to make sure he had counted right. Three afternoons ago Pauline—or the enemy, if he existed here—had shut down the shuttle’s transmissions. Three nights ago the Way of God had left Esoch in a blinding flash of light. Esoch should have been here the next morning.
He finally forced himself into the shuttle, closing and locking the hatch behind him. He sat in one of the acceleration couches. It was the one he had always sat in when he had done simulated run-throughs with Dikobe. If she was alive, he was going to find her now.
“Maher,” he said. It was her son’s name, and the name of the intelligence.
There was no response.
He keyed in the name.
Again, nothing.
He keyed in first one message, then a second, then a third. A screen lit up, and Arabic letters quickly flashed one by one, like a row of falling dominoes, onto the screen.
Please key in password.
Password? He didn’t know any password. And if he guessed the wrong one, the intelligence might be closed to him for good.
Esoch let himself fall back into the acceleration couch. No wonder Jihad had been unable to get through. The intelligence was dormant, unable to communicate. Dikobe had to have done this. But was it just her own personal madness, or had there been some external threat?
He meant to sit up, but instead the dizziness overtook him.
He noticed first the dull throb in his palm, the equal pain in his gut, then the shipwrecked queasiness that eased through him like water lapping at the beach. He opened his eyes. The small screens showed night. Several transmissions from imaging pins showed fires. He should be curious as to who was sleeping by those fires, but he wasn’t.
He sat up and tried to concentrate. He had to find Pauline.
He first found out that he could call up individual programs. Data would be collected, sensors would work, but Maher, the intelligence, wouldn’t be there to associate one set of data with another; it would be like having eyes without deductive reasoning, language without social skills.
Esoch called up various help menus. He must have blanked out because he found himself staring. It took him several hours, but he located the program that hooked into Pauline’s implant. He would use the implant to locate her position. On-screen he had a large-scale map of the area, a magnified, clear version of the maps he had on the tracking disc.
There was no blip representing Dikobe.
He whispered her name, he spoke it, he called it. Pauline, Pauline, Pauline, it’s Esoch; Hwan//a‚ it’s ≠oma. But nothing. No trace. He finally found a log of implant use. Her fifth day here. At 1638. She had shut the implant off along with everything else. It had never come back on-line.
He tried to find a record of the implant itself. A military implant couldn’t be shut off. A civilian one could—privacy rights and all. But the record told him nothing.
Esoch stared at the screens, the lights, the switches. All this equipment, and he had no idea where Pauline was, or if she was even alive. And he was too sick and it was too dark to try to find her.
The medcomp was locat
ed by the bed. He kicked the basket away, watched it roll once, then totter, then spin upright. He pulled off boots, onesuit‚ supporter, leaving them in a pile by his feet. He leaned forward, the dizziness like an empty halo in his skull, and stared at the blank medcomp screen, the buttons, switches, and lights. He should know how the thing worked, but he couldn’t remember.
He lay down, and stared at the gray ceiling. He smelled Dikobe’s sour sweat, the sheet under him still damp. Here is where Dikobe had lain, here is where she had fought the adaptation sickness. And then what happened?
Each worried thought followed one right after the other, but he felt no anxiety, just the gentle approach of sleep, as if he had only been counting backward to ease his mind.
He woke in the middle of the night, the faint lights of the controls casting a glow around each shadow. The bed conformed to his back, with the same firmness of the desert sand. He felt like he was both secure and floating. The solitude he felt was tremendous, and for some reason—the buried dizziness, perhaps, or the exhaustion—he found himself lying in the hut his parents and N!ai’s parents had made for the two of them in //gausha. N!ai’s mother and several other women had carried her there, and she had screamed for them to let her go: she didn’t want this man they had given her, and her scream was so loud that he, on the other side of the face of the huts, could hear her clearly. His friends had to drag him to the hut. And he sat outside the hut, on the male side of the fire, his friends joking with her friends on the female side. And finally he went in. Her oldest cousin sat beside her, to ease her fears of sleeping with a strange man she had seen only when their parents had visited each other to exchange gifts. He lay beside her. She lay down and cried. The cousin, a woman who always coughed, who was so thin that you could see her ribs even when the food was good and other women had skin glossy with fat, lay down on the other side. The cousin left later for her own husband. He watched N!ai‚ just a shadow, get up and head to her mother’s hut.
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