The next day he heard N!ai’s mother chide her: “You are too old to sleep with your mother. You are married to a good husband. He is the one you should sleep with.” But N!ai protested. Her friends went off to gather or to play, and she was there, with a husband she didn’t want, and she said so, shaming her mother, angering her father, who threatened to hit her, though ≠oma knew her father never would. So at night he slept without his wife, or she slept far away from him.
His older sister, Kwoba‚ had been married before her breasts had grown, before she had menstruated, so he had understood why she had kept running back to their mother, why she hadn’t wanted a husband. And whenever he met N!ai‚ whenever he joked with her and found joking so easy, he was glad he wasn’t so much older, nor she so much younger; he was glad that when they married she would have breasts and she would have menstruated, and he wouldn’t have to lie beside her like his brother-in-law beside his sister and dream about some future night when they could make love.
When his parents left /gausha and returned to Dobe‚ he wanted to return with them and forget all about this marriage business. But he said nothing, and he stayed. His relationship with N!ai and N!ai’s sister was kai: they could joke and play and insult the other’s penis or labia without anyone getting angry, but toward N!ai’s father and mother, he felt kwa‚ and he was to treat them with the utmost respect, rarely speaking to her father, never speaking to her mother, not even looking directly at her, if possible. With N!ai’s brother there was supposed to be some kwa‚ which made it hard, because when he hunted with her father or her brother, there was no joking. Her father joked with his friends; her brother joked with his friends, and ≠oma found he did not know what to say, that he was quiet most of the time, that the jokes made by N!ai’s sister rarely made him laugh, that he was a touch afraid of laughing, and anytime he felt angry, he buried it the same way that you buried a dead body in an anthill—everyone knows its there, but no one sees it. So at night he played his thumb piano and quietly sang his mournful songs, and afterward he slept in his hut, N!ai more and more often there, but sleeping under a separate blanket, her body distant from his touch.
One night she slept under his blanket, but she moved away when he touched her hip. Another night she slept under the blanket, and he did not touch her. Another night, and she pressed her back to him, and he found himself both full of desire, and awe, and fear. She giggled when it became clear that for all the talk, all the stories, all the play, he was quite uncertain just how to go about this.
The next morning she smiled at him across their fire, and her father spoke to her and her mother spoke to her and he wanted to return to Dobe‚ where talk was easy, where he didn’t have to worry about giving offense.
Here, on the shuttle, he could talk to the walls.
The Ninth Day
Esoch awoke with the vague resolution to track down Dikobe. But the resolve of the lying down is not the resolve of the standing. Once he was on his feet, his head once again felt weightless. He barely made it to the sanitary closet, and what came up was a few strands of bile and air. His whole body shook, and it tried to expel nothing, and the nausea remained, as if his stomach were full of foul matter. Shitting was equally unsuccessful and painful. He sat in the tiny shower cubicle, and the water supply ended before he had the energy to soap himself. The recycler went on, and it would take ten minutes to prep the water for another shower. He soaped himself during the second shower, wounds on belly and palm stinging fiercely, and he sat, weak and dejected, during the third. He wouldn’t be hunting for Pauline today. He sat until he felt well enough to make it back to the bed and to the medcomp alongside it. It took him a while, but the medcomp was set up much like the med-kits he’d been trained to use, so soon one IV was drip-feeding him while another withdrew blood as needed, first for analysis, second for recycling.
By midafternoon the first blood recycling was finished, salve was spread over wounds on belly and palm, and Esoch had figured out what he wanted to do. He was back in the acceleration couch. The screens were alive with images. The clearing was empty of slazans. No one was on the hill. A quadruped—long legs, front knees bent—was drinking water from the stream. Hanan had liked this animal in particular.
He didn’t want to think about Hanan. He wanted to find Dikobe. He re-entered the system, called up help screens, and found his way to the index of the visual record.
After reviewing the instructions he keyed in the date—thought for a moment; remembered the numbers ticking off at the lower right-hand corner of the visor—then keyed in 0330, the time of the probe drop. There were no images of Pauline Dikobe on record. He called up a composite of external images. There were none. The screen was blank. He searched for the next available image: the clearing, at night, the fires upon the hillside, each one distant from the other, the shadows that sat or slept on either side of the fire. He keyed in for a relighting of the figures, and now he could make her out, standing in the clearing itself. Pauline was wearing nothing more than the pubic apron he had made for her, and she held her arms tight to her chest, to warm herself in the night chill.
Esoch was relieved to see her. It meant she had been alive and relatively healthy while they had been so worried. She must have shut off transmission. There was no sign of an enemy. No sign of a threat. Why had she come out at night to stand alone, almost naked, in the clearing?
He searched and found the readout logs. He discovered a five-minute span for which there was no imaging. After some sorting he found the log on power usage, which graphed and displayed levels of use and sources of power. The imaging of Pauline in the clearing had been powered by the emergency battery. He backed along the graph, to 0334.21, when the power had dipped to almost the zero-line: the emergency battery activated, but not used. Here was the end of the five minutes. At 0329.08 the graph’s line shot straight up a cliff, to the level of power the small nuclear reactor supplied at night. He now read the graph forward in time. At 0329.08, the level of power dropped. The reactor had been shut down: Jihad’s wish. With the nuclear core shut down, the shuttle would have been harder to detect. Who did Jihad think would detect it?
He imagined Pauline in the shuttle, asleep. The sounds she’d been accustomed to, the low-level light she’d maintained, all of it gone; the sudden silence, the abrupt darkness would have woken her. The pure blackness must have been disorienting, the day’s dizziness returning, everything wavering. The only sound was the whispered breathing of the ventilation. She must have tried to reactivate systems. She must have tried to contact the Way of God. And with everything caving in around her, she must have stepped outside, to where everything was open, where the black sky afforded a little light.
On the screen Dikobe had dropped to her knees, had fallen forward. Her fists pounded on the ground. She looked up, her mouth open, and even though there was no sound, Esoch knew she was screaming. He reversed the image to where Dikobe was walking out into the clearing. He watched her check the hillside, then look up into the sky. There was a touch of light upon her face, and she covered her eyes with a forearm. He reversed the images to where she had shielded her eyes: 0338.52. He went through the catalog of the shuttle’s own eyes and chose an eye that had been positioned atop the shuttle in order to watch the contours of cloud and the shape of flight. He replayed the recorded images starting at 0335.
It was a night sky, and he strained to see a spot of light that might have represented the Way of God or one of the probes being dropped. Just when he thought his eyes had found them, and not some distant shimmering planet, he saw what had caused Dikobe to shield her eyes. He watched the tiny balls of light expand outward, bright red at first, then shifting to blue and sinking to nothing. Nuclear explosions. But one ball of light was much bigger than the others: a tiny, cold sun, then nothing.
He reversed and again watched these transitory stars: ballooning red, contracting blue, then night and distance. He watched a third time, as if by watching carefully he could come up w
ith some alternative explanation, some better way to explain to himself the glint of light off metal, the Way of God pulling out of orbit, the blinding whiteness across his reality visor, and the sudden explosion of parachutes. Each time he watched—and he watched it a number of times—he saw the same thing and arrived at the same conclusion: a slazan warship had attacked the Way of God.
On the adjacent screen Dikobe was screaming at the sky, pounding on the ground. She didn’t know how the captain and Jihad had worried about her. She didn’t know that they had just dropped a decoy probe, that they had sent someone down to her. She screamed and pounded. The Way of God had been destroyed, and all she knew was that she was truly alone.
On the first screen tiny flashes of white streamed across the sky: debris burning up as it entered the atmosphere. Then: a thicker stream of white, something bigger falling through the atmosphere, burning on its way down. Esoch did a careful scan of the sky. Nothing survived except two tiny blips of light. They were quickly identified as two mapping satellites. They would orbit for years before they, too, slid from the sky and burned up in the atmosphere.
He was with Hanan. She was lying on her back; he was on his side because that was the only way they both could fit on her sleeping mat. He placed his hand under her breast, liking the warmth, the dampness of her skin. “I don’t want to go down,” he said. “I don’t want to be away from you. Not for six months.”
She smiled. It was obvious she was touched, but the smile didn’t have the warmth of someone who fully believed the generosity of the words. “Men are so sentimental. You know, I’ll still be here when you get back.”
At first it was impossible for Esoch to do anything. He sat in the acceleration couch and stared without seeing. Twenty-eight people were dead, many of them who hadn’t known how to like him: he hadn’t worshiped the god of Abraham, he wasn’t Semitic enough, he wasn’t a woman—he was Dikobe’s boy, and that last word, boy‚ traveled back a millennia and across languages where his size, his stature, the shape of his skull, the manner of his subsistence, were all used to deny that he was a contemporary human, to deny that he was a man. And there was Jihad, who had issued his last instructions, and Tamr, who had wished God’s blessing, and the captain, who had called him by his self-given name and asked if he was all right. Amalia and Viswam would never share their mats again, and Rajeev would not have to spend the night at his workstation and feign his dedication while Viswam was screwing away in the cabin the two men shared. Hanan was gone, and so were all the months he had squandered when he could have been with her.
How do you grieve?
When he received news of his father’s death, he and N!ai had walked the several days back to the n!ore where his parents had lived. It was !gaa‚ the hot, dry season, when food was scarce and you could see a woman’s ribs. When they arrived, his father had already been buried. Many different families had gathered together within easy walking distance of the Dobe waterhole. He remembered spending the cooler hours of morning and evening clearing a new village, building new huts, and transporting the few things they owned because they could no longer live where someone had died. He remembered the abrupt wailing, his mother, his sister, his aunts, and several female cousins. He sat around fires and talked with other men, and he listened to them tell stories about his father. Every time he tried to speak, he was overtaken by tears. At night he played his thumb piano and sang a mournful song he had made up: when his second child was old enough to gather with its mother, he would come to live at his parents’ n!ore. Now his father wouldn’t be there.
His father was now among the //gangwasi‚ the spirits of the dead, and soon after his death, he made his oldest daughter, Kwoba‚ terribly sick and tried to take her away with him so he wouldn’t feel so alone and miss so much everyone he had loved. During a healing dance ≠oma’s uncle had to leave his body and go after his brother and convince him to return Kwoba to the land of the living.
Later that year his mother moved to N≠ama to be near her brother, who would hunt meat for her until she remarried, so now Dobe‚ where he had grown, was a place where uncles and cousins lived, not parents, not siblings. One loss, and everything had changed.
In another sense nothing had changed—he would go back to /gausha with N!ai and hunt for her parents while she gathered food for him—but now it all felt different.
At Chum!kwe‚ nothing changed, nothing felt different. Someone died, someone got cut up and put in the infirmary, and still you lined up for mealie-meal at the regular hours, and the bottle shop opened in time for evening consumption. Night surrounded Chum!kwe like any other place, but the only //gangwasi were the ones you had brought with you.
Death seemed to change nothing anywhere else. After Ghazwan’s death, after Esoch’s compassionate leave, which he spent planetside‚ in Wadi al-Uyoun‚ where he saw only masculine faces that reminded him of the face belonging to his comrade-in-arms, Esoch returned to the military orbital and found new faces marching to the same old orders, following the same old schedules. It was as if Ghazwan had never existed.
But here, in Dikobe’s shuttle, there was no routine to return to. He sat and he wanted to cry. He wanted to scream. He wanted to pound against the controls or upon the metal deck. But he sat and contemplated his solitude.
That evening he called up for the last recorded image of Pauline Dikobe. She was walking away from the shuttle. She wore a chameleon suit and a pack much like the one he had worn. She reached the foot of the hill and stopped. She turned to face the shuttle, raised her hand into the air, and waved, her hand sliding back and forth as if wiping clean a sheet of glass. Her face was blank, and he tried to read something into her expression. But she wasn’t waving to him or to the dead crew of the Way of God. She was waving to a hunk of metal, her source of protection. She pulled up her hood, tapped the chin strap into place, and turned away. In an open clearing the chameleon suit was colored a light brown, the color of soil mixed with sand. But once Pauline was in the woods, the tiny sensors embedded in the suit’s fabric caused the suit’s colors to darken, to match the browns and greens of the surroundings. From a distance it looked as if Pauline had disappeared.
She couldn’t be tracked by equipment. The suit radiated the same heat as the surrounding environment, so she was impossible to find using infrared. Radar was useless in such dense woods.
He stared at the screen, the trail empty, the day and time registered in Arabic at the bottom of the screen. She had left yesterday. Just hours before he’d shown up. If he had swum ashore sooner, if he had not stared at the wall of forest, if he had not lost his tracking disc, if only he had ignored Jihad’s instructions, if only he had ignored his fears that the enemy existed on this planet and had called her on the palmtalk…
A slazan entered the image. It turned to look at the shuttle, then to look up the path. Esoch magnified the image and recognized him. It was the young slazan male with the music box and bright-red hair, the one who had approached the shuttle on the second day and played the music, the one Dikobe had given a woman’s name: N!ai. Esoch could feel again the same anger during those first five days when Dikobe had ID’ed each slazan individual with a Ju/wa name, appropriating the names of his life for her own purposes.
The slazan whom Pauline had named N!ai was crouching now, and it was clear that he was examining the spoor left by Pauline’s boots. Esoch remembered crouching beside his father, who, with his uncle, was examining a kudu’s spoor. The two men talked back and forth, using secret words for the kudu because to mention its name might give it strength, just as drinking water or drinking melons might make it possible for the kudu to urinate out the poison from the arrow they had shot into it the day before. They talked, one right after the other, the different words forming one trail of thought: the kudu was zigzagging from tree to tree to stay in the shade, so it must have passed here during the hottest part of the day, and look how it was hobbling, weak from the arrow’s poison. N!ai‚ the slazan‚ looked like a solitar
y version of those two hunters. He rose, gazed along the trail, then followed after Pauline’s footsteps.
He remembered what Viswam had said while they were in the loading dock, working on the probes: “While you and Hanan were getting some, um‚ rest” (the um was intentional, followed by a grin), “Pauline went out to lay down some imaging pins, and the redhead you liked, the one with the music box, talked with two or three of the women, then went to follow Pauline.” So this was the second time Slazan N!ai had trailed Pauline. After the first time Pauline had stumbled back into her shuttle and shut everything down.
Even though the images had been recorded yesterday afternoon, his body reacted to them as if Esoch had witnessed a contemporaneous event: adrenaline flowed, and with the chemistry came a desire for action, a refusal to let another delay make a difference. He stood up, grabbed his pack, and was ready to load it with supplies from the lockers, when all of the past days’ symptoms took over again. He sat down to stop his head from spinning, to keep the bile down. He wasn’t going anywhere today. He slammed a fist against the deck, and he started to cry.
It was the ninth day of Dikobe’s mission. There were 191 more days scheduled for her research. Then a four-month direct-return trip to E-donya. That made it more than a year before anyone would suspect that the Way of God was in trouble; how much longer until the warship was registered as missing in action, how much longer until they sent another ship?
Foragers Page 23