Foragers

by Charles Oberndorf

  The first time she undressed for him on the Way of God‚ he had carefully watched her remove her tunic, then her sinteeyen‚ and her breasts were not the same. They didn’t hang down like a mother’s breasts, but they didn’t have the allure they had had when he was a child. She took his hand and placed it on her left breast, and he, uncertain what he should do with his hand there, said, “Do you remember how you once bathed with my mother and aunt and I did nothing but stare at your breasts?”

  “You were too young,” she had said, “to stare at breasts.”

  “I did.”

  “I remember Ju/wa men talked more about butts than breasts. You must be making this up.”

  When Hwan//a had lived at Dobe‚ his family visited /gausha only once, and N!ai’s chest was still like a boy’s. Years later ≠oma and N!ai had sat by old rock paintings and had giggled about the little lines drawn between the hunters’ legs. It looked like she had tiny buds on her chest. On the next visit her breasts were shaped like tiny melons. Dark angled lines, like those of a zebra, had been carved into her cheeks, marking her as a woman, and her parents’ siblings and cousins joked about how they should have chosen someone older so she would be married by now. When they were married, her breasts looked like those of other young women, and how he had wanted to hold them in his hands. After nights and nights of waiting to have sex with her, many of those nights spent alone (N!ai having left to spend them with her mother), N!ai finally curved her bottom toward his abdomen and let him awkwardly find his way into her. After a while she enjoyed this, and they would go out to gather alone, to be less respectful and quiet because anyone in the face of the huts knew what you were doing. One afternoon he had held her breasts and delighted in the touch. But she had taken his hand away and said, “This is for your child’s food. Your food is here.” Sex was called food, and he felt the thrill as she pressed back toward him, her hand reaching between her legs, finding his penis, guiding it in. Never had she wanted him to take her breasts, caress them, hold them, take the nipples between his lips, tug up gently, touch teeth to their delicacy, and he remembered Pauline guiding his hand, his head, whispering instructions, until he was in her and she had pulled her body taut beneath his, straining against him until she found release.

  He knelt to examine a slazan track that the rain had not yet erased. According to the new-eyes, it didn’t match any on the trail. He continued walking, the rain diminishing to a drizzle, then stopping. The skies above were still gray. Two sets of rations left him feeling bloated. He had made it halfway around the swamp and found nothing. He was going to find nothing, and then what?

  It had started to drizzle again by the time the tracking disc alerted him that he had reached the point where he had ended his search yesterday. He looked around. Nothing looked familiar; or, better, it looked as familiar as everything else he had seen. He kept walking and walking, finding nothing but water and mud. The rain dripped through the canopy with maddening persistence, sounding once against leaves, sounding next against his hood. The chill of the day had sunk into his bones, the constant shivering hollowing out his emotions.

  He almost didn’t see the figure at first, its dark form, the way it was hunched over something in the swamp, looking much like a collapsed body. He was slogging through the swamp, water rolling away from him with each step, and he was almost halfway there when he recognized the figure for what it was: a broken-off tree trunk, rising out of the water, snapped off by some wind, the rest of its body angled away, submerged in the water. Pauline had been wearing her chameleon suit; this couldn’t have been her.

  By the time he had circled the swamp and found nothing, by the time the gray in the sky had darkened with approaching night, he had started to hear the song’s refrain over and over: tree broken broken. He heard the thumb piano, the soft thwang of several notes carrying across the quiet night air. Tree broken broken. A hunter had gone to hunt by himself and after a long time saw another hunter. He ran to the other hunter, only to find the broken stump of a dead tree. Tree broken broken. He had sung that song over and over those nights early in their marriage when N!ai had left their hut to go and sleep like a child beside her mother.

  Esoch circled the swamp twice and saw nothing. He called out, Pauline! And he called out Hwan//a! Until his voice was hoarse. He finally made his way back to the shuttle. He knew that if he still had that tiny thumb piano, he would be able to play it until the bitterness sounded in the music and was carried away by the wind.

  The rain had let up by the time he neared the clearing. From a distance he could see no sign of Watcher’s fire. He reached the hillside and found the clearing to be dark and empty. The clouds overhead blocked out light from both moons; to the east a few stars shown in the dark-blue gap between trees and cloud. A sudden breeze from the east carried an unpleasant odor. His eyes tried to focus on the darkness of the clearing, and he knew what the smell belonged to. He had never reburied the body, and now the rain had filled the hole, perhaps soaking through enough of the dirt to allow the dead body and its stink to rise to the surface.

  Esoch increased the intensity on the torch, and a shaft of light stretched from him to the black clearing floor. He ran the light across the clearing floor to the grave, and had to run it back. There, in the center of the clearing, was the body, laid out neatly, no sign of mud on its figure, the ground around it spotted. The slazan’s mouth was open, as were his eyes, and dark beetles crawled over the body. Deep in the woods some animal howled.

  Watcher must have dug him up, must have left him lying there. Had Watcher done it to free the dead man of the grave, or was Watcher sending a message to Esoch? Another gust of wind, and the nausea overtook him. He was on his knees and retching, everything sour coming out of him. He kept heaving up nothing but gasps of air, and he thought that maybe Pauline was the lucky one.

  He didn’t remember how he’d made it past the body to the shuttle or how he’d stripped and hooked up his body to the medcomp. All he remembered was lying naked in bed, waiting for the //gangwasi to come. When he awoke in the morning, he couldn’t remember any of them.

  The Thirteenth Day

  On a number of screens he could see the body, no longer neatly laid out; nighttime scavengers had left it torn and bloody, with gaping holes in the chest, and legs and arms jutting out as more bones than flesh. Even with the air filtered and recycled, the shuttle seemed to bear a trace of decay.

  After showering and eating, he loaded the memory from the new-eyes and did a search for Dikobe’s and the slazan’s tracks. There was nothing. Pauline had eluded everyone’s pursuit. How far south would she go? Where would she settle? Is this what she had truly wanted?

  Later he reviewed the images collected by the shuttle. After he had departed, Watcher had left her fire, crept along the hillside, and checked the path where Esoch had walked. Watcher also walked down the path. So Esoch had been followed, but not for long: Watcher returned within twenty minutes. Without hesitation he walked straight toward the shuttle, knelt down by the dug-up grave, and with the palms of his hands, began the slow tedious process of scraping out the dirt. Esoch watched with morbid fascination the way Watcher gently brushed the dirt off the man’s body, the way he cupped the dirt up from along the body’s sides, his legs and arms, to give Watcher room to reach down and lift the stiff body out of the grave.

  And this is what struck him: the tremendous strength it must have taken to reach down and lift up that weight. Was Watcher male or female? All he had seen grown men do was avoid each other, except for that one moment when that man had picked up the running infant and had carried him away from Pauline. He had seen women touch their children. Had he seen adult slazans touch each other?

  He called the index on N!ai and called for the moment when she had knelt over the dying man and tied her pubic apron around his thigh. Standing above N!ai was Watcher. Watcher wasn’t staring off into the distance. The stance was that of one who was on guard, but she was looking down, her eyes on the man
’s face. Esoch couldn’t help but think that Watcher was female. Were she and the dying man kin or were they mates? What else could explain the intensity of that look?

  Now Esoch knew that everything they had taught him about slazans had been a lie.

  All he wanted to do was sit in the acceleration couch and let this great sodden depression take over his life. He forced himself up, he forced himself to go through the jumbled contents of the lockers and reset everything in place, calling out each item to the computer until he had a complete inventory.

  He had enough food to last a month.

  And then what?

  The Way of God was not due back to E-donya for over a standard year. If a second mission was sent, it would be at least another half year before it arrived here. And if ibn Haj had told Pauline the truth, there would be no second mission.

  He could use the shuttle, fly overhead, try to track Pauline down using all the sophisticated equipment he had. He already knew Pauline’s reaction to that. But how else was he to find her? At some point she would have to settle down; at some point to survive, she would have to ally herself with some network of slazans. The only way Esoch could find her was through other slazans.

  He found the hood: brown fabric, faint electric lines, two dark round eyepieces, and a mouthpiece, part oxygen regulator, part sensory provider. When he had learned Arabic and Nostratic‚ he’d worn one of these. When he had gone through military simulations, he had worn something more elaborate and had sat in a sleekly designed reality couch, whose surfaces had been smudged with hours of use.

  On the Way of God Pauline had handed this hood to Esoch. “There are two of them,” she had said. “Learn slazan with me. Then you can accompany me planetside.”

  They had been two months away from their destination. Esoch still spent every night in the same cabin, his mat next to Pauline’s, but they rarely made love. When she curled up next to him, placed a possessive leg across his legs, he felt a tremendous need to be apart. He had started to look forward to her leaving, to things going back to normal, to talking with Hanan. He had decided that he would not sleep with Hanan—she did have a husband to return to—he just longed for the joking and the companionship.

  He stared at the hood now. If he had learned slazan‚ if he had gone down with her, none of this might have happened. Perhaps the slazan warrior had been monitoring her presence—she had been on the planet for five days, the Way of God had been in orbit for six—and when she’d shut down transmission, the slazan warrior had been alarmed, had felt he had to take some action.

  Esoch was afraid of the hood. He had heard stories of diplomats who had tried to learn slazan but instead had gone crazy. He had watched it change Pauline.

  But if he didn’t learn slazan‚ he would surely go crazy. How many more days could he live without any kind of contact? He had been on his own eight days now. He couldn’t bear many more. If he learned pan-slazan‚ if he could speak with the locals, then perhaps he could find a way to get them to accept his odd presence: he could hunt down an animal, offer the meat as a gift, anything so one of them would talk to him, making it possible to talk to another, then another, until he used their slender, solitary networks to find Pauline.

  He ate a full meal. He voided bladder and bowels. He laid out mask. He laid out gloves. He set down the prosthetic device that would fit in his mouth so he could more capably make the sounds that comprised pan-slazan‚

  And then he considered how distant he would be from the world while learning another language. He set the alarm to go off if any slazan came down the hillside and approached the shuttle. There were four alarm lights that would blink on and off with the alarm, and he could set their colors: the military love of code. Red for N!ai. Yellow for Watcher. Green for any other slazan. And what if Pauline came back? He didn’t know if the shuttle would recognize her in a chameleon suit. He set the alarm to go off if a humanoid figure with most of its body covered by fabric came down the hillside, and he set it to go off if it recognized Pauline. He chose the color blue, and the alarm was set.

  The following is taken from the notebook Pauline Dikobe kept during her 200 day study of the slazan foraging population on Tienah.

  Day 21

  I haven’t written in this notebook for days, for what is there to write? I go out in the day, wearing pubic apron, chi!kan‚ and sandals, and I walk the same paths, establishing a predictable home range. I gather nothing but notes, which I whisper quietly, and which are, in turn, sorted and categorized by the intelligence into material I can later go over, rearrange, and rewrite as necessary in the evening.

  I watch footprints, but I don’t trail them, having neither the technology nor the skill, nor wishing to appear any kind of a threat. I listen to the distant long calls of the males, and I move in another direction when any come close. I have tried to place imaging pins into trees that stand near the intersection of trails, but they are all destroyed. Jihad has transmitted to me a map of the area, highlighting where fires are maintained at night, and I have used that to track down their shelters. I approach them, making as much noise as possible, and the encampments are empty when I come to them. I never cross the circle of tree or brush that surrounds an encampment. I watch from afar. I have not been invited. I see what food they have hung out to dry, what artifacts they have made with elaborate care.

  I have found elaborately constructed nests, but the imaging pins I leave near them are destroyed. We have a few images of an adult male climbing up a tree and making his way into the nest. Why would a male sleep alone, perhaps run the risk of sharing a tree with the black-skinned predators that come out at night? Is this his way of proving his strength and fortitude, the way male bucks carry heavy antlers and certain birds risk predation by showing bright colors to a potential mate? And why would a slazan female choose strength and fortitude while her hominid sisters choose men for their abilities as hunters, for their prestige, and for their abilities to care for their own children?

  But all I have are questions.

  All I have are field notes.

  The result has the value of an archaeological dig. You can make fine, wonderful guesses based on the artifacts, the layout of tools, the number of fires, the number of food types they hang out of scavengers’ reach, but if you don’t see the behavior that goes along with it, they are nothing but guesses. Certain nights I grow tired of field notes, I grow restless with guessing. I think about my imaginary slazan and his music box. I muse about who he could be and why he plays music. Gza‚ I know, is a slazan word which means both music and healing. As far as we know, both meanings are never used in the same context, but that may not have always been the case.

  Day 33

  I have a rash on my shins. Some plant waves its greeting as I press by, and my skin is reacting to some chemical. The medcomp has synthesized different salves. The first two do nothing; the third one causes a sting that still won’t go away. I tell Jihad to get out of my head, to let me cry for a while in peace. I hate these slazans. I hate the way they avoid me. I hate the way they take no interest in my presence. I hate them because they probably have no interest at all in the way this pain is driving me crazy.

  Day 38

  Three days ago. I feign several naps near where paths intersect. I implant imaging pins into the tree as I rise, using the tree trunks as support. No one notices. Two days later the imaging pins are untouched.

  Today we begin to collect visual information.

  The first recording of a slazan is this: a lactating female with two naked juveniles, both female. The adult female stops. A second adult female approaches from another direction. She wears a pubic apron and what looks like a kaross bundled up behind her. Who made this kaross? This second adult, or someone else?

  The adult female says one word. The second adult says another word. The intelligence confirms what I thought I had heard each say. They spoke pan-slazan‚

  Daughter.

  Mother.

  Both adults look di
rectly at the imaging pin, or more appropriately, to where I had been sleeping, and the four walk off. It’s three days later, and no one else has walked directly along this intersection of paths.

  Now the names. The second adult, the one without breasts, was an adult female, the same stature as her mother. Issue one: they use titles rather than names. The urban slazans on New Hope used names, locations, but never did we hear titles. Issue two: I walk around like a Ju/wa woman, my breasts visible. I look like a lactating female. Do they wonder what has happened to my child?

  Day 39

  Just when I’ve grown accustomed to walking in the wilderness, my breasts bared to view, I’ve grown selfconscious. I have asked al-Shaykh to get someone on The Way of God to make a facsimile baby I can carry.

  Day 42

  Nothing new. It’s almost as if they avoid the intersections where I have placed the imaging pins. What do they say to each other? Who tells whom?