Foragers

by Charles Oberndorf

  I worried that the Stranger might follow them, as he had followed them to their camp, so after a while she led Son Watcher and her daughter around in circles, along different paths. When they came to a shallow creek, she had them walk through the water for a good while before returning to a path. Son Watcher complained sullenly, fearful that she might slip on the creek’s muddy bottom, angry that I would worry about the Stranger now that they were so far away.

  The sun had left the tops of the trees and was heading for the center of the sky when they came to a clearing where Son Watcher wanted to stop and rest. Her daughter waited for the infant to start nursing before she asked her mother for food. I said she was going to gather a bit, even though they had more than enough. She walked quickly up the path, then circled away from it, using a few dark sharpleaf trees as landmarks to find the path again. She paused to listen carefully and heard nothing. She checked the trail, crouching low, tracing every person’s track with a finger. There was no sign of the Stranger.

  Later they came to the land where Talk Too Much’s eldest daughter gathered, and they saw signs that it had rained recently. I remembered that as a girl she had tried to convince her mother to walk to the edge of a rainstorm so she could stand where it was dry and watch it rain. Having many times sat in dryness and heard the approach of rain, always a few drops first, then many, she now knew there was no place you could stay dry while you reached out to touch the rain.

  She wanted to tell this to Lightfoot Watcher’s daughter, but the girl never once came close to the healer, and when she was too tired to walk, she walked slowly, almost dragging her feet as if they were too heavy to lift. I wanted to tell her that this would change. The son would grow up and think more with his penis than with his eyes. He would try to mate with a woman who shouldn’t open herself to him, and he would have to wander off to find some other place to gather food and seek a mate.

  The ground of I’s camp was dry except for several places where the shade of the trees remained all day. Before doing anything else, she stepped into her hut. The memory beads hung where she had left them. The blanket still wrapped the gzaet, and the two strands of beads crossed it in the same circular pattern. There was the spoor of at least two foodgrabbers.

  Son Watcher had not set her bow or quiver on the ground. She stood at the waiting fire, looking more like someone who had come to see the healer than someone who had shared the healer’s food.

  “There is still food here,” said I.

  “It is early in the afternoon. My daughter, my son, and I will continue our journey to the Small Lake.”

  “You should rest.”

  “I am not the first woman to travel after giving birth.”

  I said nothing. What could she say?

  “Perhaps,” said Lightfoot Watcher, “you would accompany us.”

  “My healing is here. I have been away too long.”

  “Do you want to stay? You know the Stranger will come looking for the animal.”

  “He does not know the way. He did not follow us.”

  “He found the Many Huts. He can find the boulder.”

  I said nothing.

  “Huggable is still here; as well as Nightskin.”

  “That may have changed.”

  “Let everything happen that will happen and then return. There is more solitude where I live and so there is more food. You can take all a bird’s eggs and know there is another bird who still has plenty. It will be safe. And there is no healer who lives by the lake. Each woman would treat you as if once you had shared a mother with their mothers.”

  I wanted to say yes. She even looked to her hut and thought of what she could carry and what Son Watcher’s daughter could carry. There was too much to carry for such a long journey. I averted her head no.

  Son Watcher told her about each man who lived by the Small Lake, what each made well with his hands, what kind of child each helped make if you mated with him at the right time.

  “I cannot accompany you,” said I.

  Son Watcher stood in silence for a respectful moment. “You have shared food with me and my daughter. You have played music for my son, and you made it possible for him to leave my womb. Whatever food I have is yours whenever you want it.”

  I said nothing, although she could have said how Son Watcher had followed her to the boulder and had followed her to the Many Huts, and how she had offered to share her twins. In her mind’s eye she still could see the patted earth under which the firstborn lay.

  Son Watcher, her son placed carefully in a sling within her kaross‚ walked off, her daughter following. There were no more words. The solitude I felt should have been welcome, but all she felt was a kind of loss.

  She rebuilt the fire in her hut and played the gzaet to ease her mind. After playing a few notes and a song, it became apparent to her ears that it had been too long since she had played. She thought of the rock and the second animal and almost stopped playing. But she did not. What good was the gzaet if she could not play it well? She played until she clearly felt the simple world around her, and now she wanted to play until she could lose herself within the music and forget even that. But there was her hunger, and there was the rock, and there was Huggable.

  I returned the gzaet to its place in the hut, and she picked up her kaross. She lifted it, watched it spread out to the ground, and prepared to drape it over her body when she saw the small insect holding tight to the hide. It was the color of night and looked as hard as a stone. She had never seen such an insect before, and she wondered what such an insect would find on a kaross. She knocked it away with her fingernail. She did not bother to watch the insect tumble dead to the ground or see it spread its wings and take flight.

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

  Day 55

  A small probe bearing gifts, guided down by The Way of God’s AI‚ quietly landed alongside the shuttle. Inside the probe were three insects and one baby. The insects were imaging pins attached to tiny flying mechanisms designed to look like a local bug. Maryam had designed them with Jihad in order to monitor three local encampments. While Maryam had made the six-leggers‚ Tamr had made a baby for me. “It’s our child,” she says when I look at it the first time, her voice inside my skull. “Maryam is jealous.”

  The baby looks like a human infant, potbelly and pudgy cheeks, and its skin is as dark as mine, its texture cool and smooth. There is a place to open its belly to load liquid and solids for it to excrete later. It has a tiny little penis, Tamr’s desire to give birth first to a boy. This boy gurgles when happy, cries when soiled or hungry, and shapes his lips into a comfortable O around my nipple.

  Using images I have of Ju/wa equipment, I use the stored antelope hides to make a sling to tie around waist and over shoulders. I set mosses in the sling to soak up the baby’s wetness, and set the sling itself into the chi!kan‚ and the baby into the sling.

  I start to carry him around. I stop to nurse him when he cries. The baby makes sounds like it’s suckling, but there’s no grip of tongue on nipple, there are no aching breasts, no chapped nipples, no tender looks, no addictive warmth. I speak to this plastic baby, my voice pitched higher, the rhythm and flow the beginning of all music, and I find myself speaking to my own son, long gone, who’s reached the age of decision now, if he’s still alive.

  Day 60

  Having the baby has done nothing but bring back memories. No local has come closer to take a second look.

  The insects brought more luck. Each has landed, and we are now recording images from three encampments. No, encampment is not the correct term. The slazan word best translates as hut and hearth. Each hut and hearth has three fireplaces. One is at the edge of camp and is nothing more than a circle of charred black ground; they call it the waiting fire, though no fire burns at any of the sites. The second is the cooking fire, which is in the center of the encampment and is kept going throughout t
he day. The third is located in the hut and, like the waiting fire, is nothing more than blackened ground, perhaps a dark memory of winter’s chill.

  Each hut and hearth receives visits from women, so far one per day. The woman, with her child or children, stops at the waiting fire and waits to be noticed. We now have slazan individuals, faces to recognize. We ID the women. We ID the women who visit them. We ID the children. I give them all Ju/wasi names—unprofessional, of course, but I’ll remember them.

  One woman, a slender woman with flat cheekbones, has been ID’ed as !U. Today a woman visits, and !U calls this woman Clear Eyes. For people who avoid eye contact, the name Clear Eyes destroys all our rigid hypotheses.

  I keep rewatching the moments when one woman visits another. Each woman speaks to the other as food is shared while one child shouts after the other as they play.

  Everything that follows is language. We are rich in data. We are wealthy with language.

  What I’d give to be able to sit by one of those cooking Ores and share food with one woman and another while I listen to them share words.

  Day 64

  Midsummer night’s musings:

  Close a large metaphorical hand—the invisible fingers and palm may be an appendage of the slave trade or a real-estate transaction—around a group of individuals; rip them away from their land, their knowledge, their subsistence, their daily habits; and set them down—perhaps they will tumble out when you unroll the fingers, lie there dazed before facing this new life—in a land where they don’t belong; set them there with others who have been uprooted by another hand belonging to the same economic creature, and make it so they have to talk much with each other and little with those who own their labor. They will speak a language of shared words, some from one language, some from another, all with shared meanings, but without language’s built-in structures: no articles, no prepositions to join phrases together, no method to mark present or past or future. Their children don’t speak this pidgin. Their infant brains are geared to take in words and to structure those words with syntax, to place phrases together in ways that relate specific time and meaning. The new language, the creole, has everything the pidgin lacked in order for it to be a language, just as their parents, in their native land, had the full range and complexity of words. The human mind is sculpted for language.

  And the slazan mind? Is it more finely sculpted? A man from Cairo, Egypt, on Terra would understand every word I write, but when I speak, he would strain to understand me, our different dialects, our different accents filtering out the possibility of easy understanding. But these slazans pronounce words and order their meanings much the same way as the slazans who are separated from them by generations, by light-decades‚ and by huts and buildings.

  Words cannot be preprogrammed. The word wadi in Arabic is valle in Spanish, but could as easily be gato.

  What sounds we choose have history, but in the beginning there is something arbitrary, when words have nothing about them that suggests at all what they refer to. Nothing about the sound duck creates the image of an animal with webbed feet who quacks, flies, and lays eggs. For members of a solitary species to preserve their language against drift and change, they may have to learn its music well, there may be survival value in hearing and accurately reproducing pronunciation, word order, tone, and rhythm, so that there is not a variety of accents, a deepening of sounds, a play with new words.

  But why language in the first place?

  Animals react to and learn from what has happened to them. Some nonhuman primates can go one step further and devise something new—fashion a stick to dig out termites, for example—on the basis of what’s in front of them. Language makes it possible to discuss what has not yet been experienced, to discuss things not present in the current environment. You can plan where to move, you can look at the sky and guess the weather, you can discuss tracks or where the best food will be to gather, you can gossip about each other’s behavior to enforce the morals you live by, you can tell someone her husband has slept with someone else, you can side with one woman against another, and you can convince your daughter she should marry the person you have chosen for her.

  But we are accustomed to thinking of language as the rootedness of our humanity, our sociability. Did language come to slazans and humans as some sort of spark of God, a well-intended mutation, or was there truly some selective advantage in speaking? Who benefited by being able to talk?

  Chapter Eleven

  The Thirteenth Day

  Everything was dark at first. Everything was calm. He barely felt the hood over his head, the gloves over his hands. He heard a beating heart. He heard a voice. Other voices were distant. He had gone through this twice before, first when he’d learned Arabic, second when he’d learned Nostratic‚ and he knew he should remain calm, that this would work only if he did not question the experience. He still wanted to grip the top of the hood and tug it off his head. The illusion went on, because now his eyes were open. Everything was patterns now, and one close pattern made a kind of sense. He felt himself focus on the pattern. The pattern moved. Its eyes widened. And so did his. Its lips moved, and he heard a sound he recognized. He wanted to listen more. He remained perfectly still and listened. This caused the eyes to stay open and the voice to continue. Remain still, pay heed, and this voice stayed with you. He loved the feeling.

  His eyes could follow things. They loved to follow the face that looked down to his while he drank from her warmth. He could hold a finger so tightly. He could touch the warmth from which he drank. He loved to listen, the way her voice went on, the words she spoke, her voice so different from when she spoke to anyone else. When she spoke to another, he lost interest.

  When her voice heightened, when her voice flowed, he listened to its music.

  The adult, who sat in an acceleration couch on an unnamed planet, who was learning pan-slazan‚ who before birth had been ready to relate one thing to another, heard this music, and overlapping it, he heard a mother whisper a lullaby in Nostratic, he heard an Arab mother talking singsong, and he thought he saw his own mother’s face and heard her say something, hearing the melody in her voice and not the words, his vision fixed on her smile, the brilliance of her eyes.

  He stopped for a moment, but the inside of the shuttle had the sheen of stale memories.

  He heard the music of sounds, and in that music certain notes, certain notes together, became familiar, became words: shoe, light, hand, milk.

  He could lift his head.

  He could roll over.

  He could sit up and watch.

  There were sounds and there were words, and whenever someone spoke to him, sounds and words were mixed lovingly together.

  But for the word no: always followed by a string of words, their rhythm harsh, emphatic.

  All he could hear were words mixed in with sounds. He felt like he should hear more, like certain words together should start to make sense, but they didn’t. It was a long river of sound traversing over the few rocks that were too large to be drowned by the torrent.

  He pulled off the hood, already exhausted. Any kind of reality experience was tiring; you were learning something new, you could almost feel the reshifting that goes on in the mind as it revises one or two thoughts, which in turn means it has to revise one or two others, on and on. So much easier the tranquil excitement of learning those things that deepen your sense of the world rather than change it.

  He remembered learning Arabic during his first week of military training. It seemed a language grown out of sand, herding, and God. There was submission, recitation, and holy struggle. There was sin and judgment: honor, purity, and shame. The word for burn‚ as in burning wood, carried the connotation of hellfire. But he had stepped out of the reality workshop, and he understood orders, and he learned to give orders. In the next set of workshops he sat before rows and rows of marks on a screen, and marks soon became letters, which soon became words he could hear in his head, which he could type out to s
peak with someone who wasn’t in the same place, making it possible for one’s thoughts to travel impossible distances.

  Learning Nostratic had been easier, only because the root of all concepts started with those first men and women who had foraged the savannah and shared language and argued over who ate the meat from the large animal they had just killed. And atop the interpolated language of foraging came the languages of the farm, the herd, the market, the city, the temple, and the courthouse, all languages he had never needed before.

  Words joined into phrases, which joined into notions, which joined into conversation or story or song.

  Here all he had was a few words.

  How was he going to find Pauline with a few words?

  He ate several ration bars and felt bloated. He walked around and felt trapped. He felt an intense longing, a desperate need to be touched, and after lying with himself—his eyes focused intently on the bulkhead above so he wouldn’t visualize N!ai or Pauline or Hanan or any moment that might enhance his desire—the longing still remained, accompanied by some unnameable loss. There were no thoughts to think. There was every reason to pull the hood back over his head. He just couldn’t bear to do it. The fabric felt like it was full of static electricity, but it wasn’t the hood. There was something charged in his body, something that made his hands shake.

  He started to make sounds. He moved his lips. He stretched his tongue. The prosthesis in his mouth shifted; he could feel it pressing against the roof of his mouth, along the walls of his cheeks, and the word he shaped sounded much different from the one he had heard in his head.