He was babbling. A string of contentment, a string of sounds. He was sure he sounded like no baby a human or slazan mother would recognize.
He was trying to walk. He stumbled and fell. He tried out words. Just one or two. Floor. Then mother. The adult in him wanted to hear the word father, but it was absent. No father from work, no father from the teahouse or mosque, no father from his hunting trip.
There were faces and names.
There was the child who shared his mother.
There was the young woman who shared his mother.
There was grandmother and great-grandmother and their sons and daughters.
There was no father.
He started to hear another word. The young woman who shared his mother said it to him. It came with a lot of other words. The child who shared his mother said it to him. They said it when he wanted to nurse more. It was something he didn’t have. He didn’t understand a lot of the other words or the reasons why they were spoken. But he learned this word: solitude.
When Dikobe had gone through the experience, she had sat in a full-sensory reality couch, which had been set up in the loading dock, right next to the shuttle craft. Esoch had sat beside her, monitoring the medcomp’s drip and her vital signs, her face invisible under the brown fabric of the hood, the words she was learning as inaccessible as the expressions on her face. She came out of her second session with a look he had never seen before in her eyes. She took him by the hand, led him into the shuttle, and locked the hatch, something they hadn’t done since they’d first become lovers. Her embrace was so warm, and the kiss was like no other she had ever given him, not the partly open mouth, the slight touch of tongues, but a wide-open mouth as if she couldn’t get enough of him, her arms locked tight as if she were trying to make him part of her own body. He had never felt so much love so intensely, and it had frightened him. She was looking to him with a soft sheen to her eyes, and she was saying something about how it was good not to be alone and how it was love that made us human, and all the while he diplomatically tried to extricate himself from her grip. The warmth vanished like a shock. Her eyes narrowed as if she were looking at him for the first time.
“Fuck you,” she said. And she left him there.
In her cabin, after dinner, she apologized and explained that it was just the tapes that were affecting her.
Now their lovemaking was like etiquette, or like chemicals, something they did so they could wake up next to each other at the end of the night.
Here, in the shuttle, Esoch stared at the screens. It was night out. He didn’t feel like sleeping.
A strange man who had been speaking to his mother now spoke to him. He did not understand.
His mother said, “He says you behave well.”
He felt himself smile at the mother’s compliment.
He tried to say new words.
No. Proper. Improper.
Each word is a short, easy syllable.
Respectful. Disrespectful.
I am here. You are there.
Hot. Cold.
Share. Go away.
He spoke around words. Ball. Bird. Mother. He tried other words with those words. Go ball. Ball gone. Here ball.
My ball.
Share words. Words are shared. Meat share.
You give away I go.
The night was cloudy, the darkness absolute. If it had been this kind of night when the Way of God had been destroyed, then Pauline may have taken longer to become aware of the warship’s destruction, the solitude she had been subjected to; she might still have been here when Esoch had arrived.
He ate too much again and brooded, erection in hand, knowing as he felt both a touch of pleasure and an absence of desire why they called this self-abuse. He had the medcomp give him a mild sedative, and he lay in the bed, restless still, remembering how Pauline had brooded over him while going through the language learning. After that second session she seemed in control of herself. After each tape was over, she would take him by the arm to the dining hall, and she would work hard on talking with others, as if socializing was a kind of medication. But as time went on, as the language learning progressed, she grew more silent. At first she seemed to listen more often. Then she looked about, as if the words didn’t make sense, as if she wasn’t quite sure why one person said something particular to another person. Each night she insisted they make love, even though it was obvious she felt no desire. She refused his caresses, wanted him in her no matter how dry she was. There was no pleasure in such friction, and the pain tightened her face. “Let’s stop,” he said. “You want to be with Hanan, don’t you?” she said, her voice soft, the tone almost friendly, all accusation located in the words themselves. He felt young and overwhelmed by the years of her accumulated pain; he didn’t know if he should stop or continue; he didn’t know which would lead to the greater accusation. When she reached her moment, her body stretched out under his, her hands above her head and clasped together as if she were imprisoned, she began to sob; she cried to herself and took no interest in his attempts to comfort her.
And then one day, after a long session under the hood, she said nothing at all. She looked at each person, and she looked frail, suspicious, as if about to be betrayed. That night, in her cabin, she asked him again to take the hood, learn slazan‚ come with her planetside. His silence was both evasion and answer. In her cabin she pulled him fiercely to her. Her eyes slammed shut, she reached her moment quickly, a brief struggle against the day’s solitude, and he kept holding her, his penis hard within her, waiting for her to tell him if she wanted to rest or if she wanted him to go on. She opened her eyes, and they were dark and hard. Her palms were against his chest, and she pushed him off her, rolled from mat to floor, and crawled away from him, until she was against the bulkhead, where she curled up, arms over breasts, knees brought up to arms. “What’s wrong?” he whispered, knowing no other words to ask. She said, “I want to be alone. I don’t want you to go, but I want to be alone. Oh, how horrible a feeling.”
In the sanity of morning she leaned into him, worked on his desire, and afterward said, “Please, come planetside with me. I can’t bear six months alone. It’s why the general assigned you to the mission. You’re my reality check.”
He had never heard her talk like this before, and he felt disappointment more than pity. And he knew then he couldn’t go down. Then he would truly be Dikobe’s boy. And just by refusing to put on this hood, the one he now held in his hand, he had made it impossible to join her; he had made it possible to stay up here with Hanan.
And then, like now, he wished he had loved her better.
He had once been a child who had loved a strange woman who would listen to him play the thumb piano. Why, decades later, he had fallen into her open embrace, he could not say.
He dreamed there was a heavy pounding on the door. Again and again, a loud cry of pain, a loud cry of Let me see you.
He stepped out of bed, in the dream, his body still surrounded by the warmth of the thermal sheet, and the lights rose to a dim lighting, and he made his way to the hatchway. The hatch slid open, and in his dream he knew Pauline should be standing outside, returning to him, but in the morning light he saw that no one was there.
The Fourteenth Day
He didn’t feel much like eating after the medcomp had awakened him with some chemical that would help him concentrate. He paced the floor, considered eating as a delay tactic, held the hood, then saw that a green light was blinking. It was the default alarm; light but no sound. There had been a visitor last night. He remembered the pounding in his dream. The words. Had he heard Arabic words? He called up the appropriate image and had the comp filter the image to compensate for the night’s darkness.
A slazan subadult male made his way down the hillside, carefully stepped around the remains of the dead body (which the comp graciously did not clarify), and walked up the shuttle. He pounded on the hatch. He called out. Esoch listened several times until he could make out the
words. Let me see you‚ He cried out loudly, as if he wanted the whole forest to hear. Then he turned and strode away, glancing over his shoulder once or twice.
Esoch reviewed the images until he had a clear one of the slazan’s face. He had the comp do a search for other images. It was the slazan who had approached Pauline after she had bathed, the one who had stepped up to her and touched one of her breasts, the one who could not face her direct stare and so sped away. Had he come to find Pauline again? Or did he want to see the new creature who lived in the hunk of metal?
The next session was impossible. There were these taut one-syllable words that fit together with the rhythm of a multisyllable word. The girl who shares my mother was said in the space of time to it took to say my sister in Arabic.
Phrases were harder. As much as he tried, something kept him from understanding prepositions and tense—whatever words hooked phrases together changed at random. They had a logic that the child or adult couldn’t turn into sense.
Or maybe he couldn’t turn it into sense because he kept noticing things. Here was a woman. Here was a man. The older men were seen only in the distance. You never heard of a profession, or maybe he had to wait for a later session. Mother was always there. And like the child, he started to think it proper to go off alone. She smiled at his bravery as he tottered off on his own. The girl who shared his mother was kinder to him the more he ignored her. He started to like being alone. He was disgusted with his desire to be near someone, to hold someone in a warm embrace. His own human daydreams after the session now disgusted him.
He showered, washing off sweat and the thin film of semen that was left after he had wiped his abdomen clean. The water felt good upon his lethargic body, and he just stood there, knowing he was emptying out the tank, and he thought about the lack of desire, the lack of pleasure, and the persistent need, about how he yearned to be touched, about how he felt like doing nothing but that which made him feel worse.
“Go ejaculate on yourself,” was a way of teasing among those who had a joking relationship. Among those with reserved relationships, it was a terrible insult, the words implying that the other was alone, that there was no wife or lover who would take interest in him.
He was drying off when the beeper sounded. Naked, he stepped up to the console to check the screen, the red notification light blinking above it. Slazan N!ai stood on the hillside. She was wearing her pubic apron and a chi!kan for collecting. She was looking down at the shuttle as if waiting for something. If he stepped out, if he managed to utter something intelligible in her language, what would she do?
* * * * *
Upon reaching the crest of the hillside I saw two things. First she saw that the rock’s opening had not appeared. Second she saw why. Spread out in the cracked darkness of the clearing were Clever Fingers’ bones. Some meat that scavengers had not torn off still remained, and the dead eyes in his skull were open. Even though neither of the moons had presented its face, the true body should have left by now; if nothing else, the person who had dug up the body had breathed it in.
With this thought troubling her mind, I made her way to see Flatface, who greeted her and insisted I share of the several leaftails that she had snared. Each woman sat on opposite sides of the fire and each cooked her own two birds. The quiet, as well as the way Flatface kept her eyes on the fire and the cooking bird, made it clear that things were wrong here.
“Are there words to be shared?” asked I.
“Too many. Are the pregnant woman and her daughter still sharing your cooking fire?”
“She is no longer pregnant, and she is walking home with her daughter and her infant son.”
Flatface did not ask about the twin.
I watched the bird meat blacken near the coals.
“Childless has started mating. I have not seen my eldest son since Clever Fingers was killed.”
“Crooked wouldn’t open herself to your son.”
“She shouldn’t. Her mother and mine shared mothers. But it means my son…” Flatface said nothing more. It was odd to see a mother who now rarely shared food with her son grow sad when he had to leave and find another place to gather food and make things.
“Huggable—the woman with the animal’s teats—is mating, too,” said I.
Flatface lifted her eyes to meet the healer’s. “That is why there are too many words to share. Hugger called out all last night. It sounded much like Nightskin crying out. Perhaps it was Hugger’s imitation.”
“What do you mean?”
“Animal Teats—Huggable—is dead.”
I remembered the words: I have arrows. “Did Nightskin kill her?”
Flatface’s eyes half closed with a kind of disgust, the way they would have if I had named someone with whom Flatface shared food. How had Nightskin become so accepted?
“How did she die?”
“Hugger blames the animal.”
“The animal is gone.”
“You saw the animal leave. That does not mean the animal has left.”
“How did Huggable die?”
“No one cares.”
“A woman dies, and you don’t care?”
“There is one man killed, and the one who let loose the arrow then dies. She did not share a mother with anyone here.”
“Was she killed?”
“I have not seen. No one I know has seen. Why ask? There has been too much wrong, and this could be the end of it. If the animal has left as you say, then Hugger will never find her, and that will be the end of it.”
“That cannot be the end of it. What has happened to the daughter?”
“No one has told me.”
I was too astounded to speak. Each mother told at least one tale of how a mother had died and how a daughter or son had been taken in by another mother. For there to be a death, and no woman to act; for there to be a child without a mother, and no woman to act; for these things to happen, the world must have changed in some terrible way. I finally said, “The first animal is gone, but there is a second animal. It lives in the rock now.”
“That one will bring different troubles. Perhaps I really should find a new place to gather food and work on my wisdom. Perhaps you should find a new place to heal.”
I finished the leaftail‚ chewing without tasting the meat. Leaftails were smart and hard to snare; it was a loss to chew on such meat and not care about its flavor. But all I wanted to do was leave. The woman who sat across from her spoke with Flatface’s voice and looked to her with Flatface’s eyes, but I felt as if this Flatface who shared leaftail with her was a different woman.
I walked quickly to where Huggable had lived, sometimes breaking into a run. It seemed all too likely that her daughter would still be there, staring at the dead body, worrying that she would breathe in the true body.
She paused outside the brush that concealed Huggable’s hut and hearth. She did not know if she wanted to see this body, but still she found the thin concealed pathway and pushed back leaves and branches, making her way to cleared ground. She stopped. Almost directly in front of her was the body. Huggable was sprawled out on her back like something large had dropped her to the ground. Between her two teats was the hilt of a knife. The hilt looked like nothing I had ever seen before.
There was hardly any blood around the wound. The knife had gone in quick and sure: death had come with the blow. Huggable’s eyes were open wide, her mouth frozen in an impossible to understand expression.
Someone else was in the hut and hearth. Hugger was sitting in the opening to Huggable’s hut and facing the body. He had looked up to watch I.
I asked, “Who did this?”
“I don’t know.”
“I was told you had blamed the animal.”
“Look at the knife, Healer. Look at the hilt. It is like no knife a man has ever made.”
I looked again. Something that looked like thin strips of black reed had been wound about the hilt in an elaborate design. The curve of the hilt was odd, and she tried
to imagine its purpose. Huggable’s killer had to get mating close to thrust in that knife. Why would Huggable let the animal get that close? Unless it had snuck up from behind? Why would the animal have killed Huggable? How could it bear being that close? The Stranger had said, These animals flock together like birds in the sky. They cannot stand to be alone.
“Healer,” said Hugger, “you should leave. I have kept a fire to keep away the scavengers, but the body is beginning to rot. You should not be here if the true body comes out.”
“You should not, either.”
“I do not care. I am not sure it would be a bad thing if I breathed in her true body. Then I would still have her.”
Hugger spoke so much like a young daughter who had lost her mother that I did not know what to say. She thought of the dull sheen of moonlight, her blade against dead skin, and the cloth wrapped around her mouth and nose, making it hard to breathe. She knelt by the body and gripped the hilt. The hold was awkward. She repositioned her hand. The hold still felt wrong, as if the hilt had been shaped for a hand very different from hers. Odder still, the hilt carried the same warmth as if someone had held it a long time. She pulled out the knife; there was a soft sucking sound, a bubble of blood on Huggable’s chest.
I stumbled back, as if she could see the true body rising in the air. It took her a while to regain control of her breathing; then she looked at the blade of the knife. It was covered with blood, but the blood had not soaked in the way it did with certain kinds of bones, and the blade was far too thin to be made of rock. It was a very thin blade, and it had the same kind of look to it as the animal’s boulder. She couldn’t remember having seen the animal with a knife, but here it was. And the hilt fit comfortably in her hand. She opened her fingers. The hilt didn’t look that different. She closed her hand. It was a perfect fit, like it had been crafted for her palm. She did not want to hold it. She jammed the blade into the dirt by Huggable’s dead body.
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