Day 85
I have watched them divide the meat a number of times.
They hardly speak a word. They know exactly what to do.
I first consider: they must be kin. Each individual does her best to insure the survival of her genes. If the cost is not too high, gene survival is enhanced if kin helps kin. One ant—two, three, four ants—will die willingly because each other ant in the troop contains the exact same genetic material. If one dies, his genes live on. One bee can die willingly because her sisters are more closely related to her than her mother. A mammalian mother will take certain risks for her immature children because each carries half her genes. An individual will take a certain risk, pay certain costs, for the benefit of her sisters because she carries half the same genes.
But if they aren’t kin, then sharing takes on a new edge. Each would achieve a greater benefit at a lesser cost if they put in less effort to track and hunt the deer and butcher the meat and instead tried to walk away with the most meat. It makes the most sense to cheat and try to go undetected. But if these women will hunt together a second time, a third, then it makes more sense to share the burden, so that each will want to hunt again, so that each will trust the other.
The vampire bat who regurgitates the night’s gathering of blood for fellow members of his cave has a better chance of being fed in a similar fashion on the nights when his hunt for sustenance is less than successful. The hawk who distracts the monkey so the other hawk can swoop in from behind and pluck it from the branch has a better chance of sharing the prey than the hawk who hunts alone and frightens the monkey into hiding. A Ju/wa man hunts large meat animals with other men, he trades his arrows with other men so that the owner of the meat is not always the man who fires the fatal arrow, he divides the meat along prescribed lines, so that all share in the meat, so that he may share the meat others have killed those times when the tracks he finds are old and faded, when the animals he has felled are found first by lions, when the land is so parched that the animals have gone elsewhere.
But if there is only one hunt, if the hunters never see each other again, there will be no future need for their trust, no future need to deter their deceit.
So it’s not the physical environment that makes survival difficult, it’s the social environment. You have to know how to benefit yourself and how to benefit others so you will have a place in their company—a whole series of instincts, a set of Darwinian algorithms, developed to navigate the dynamic ocean of such questions—to detect people who break the rules of social exchange, who take more and give back less; to repress emotions and memories that would make living with others difficult; to manipulate the opinions of others; to behave in ways that make you appear more congenial than you are; to go along with the general consensus.
What kind of algorithms guide slazan life?
What general consensus do these women share?
What enforces their need to trust each other?
My husband, who had been agnostic, Muslim, Hindu, Jew, and Christian, took our son to some religious commune on some orbital in some other stellar system, disappearing in a maze of digitized trails full of different names, different ID numbers, all for my son’s own good.
Keeping a secret is an ideal in many human societies, but it is rarely a reality; large, complex societies have kept secrets only by releasing so much contradictory data that finding the truth becomes an expensive, exhausting chore.
I spent a year looking for my son, draining my credit and my credit rating. There are enough orbitals, enough different laws for where humans live, enough intelligences programmed by different needs, that it is easy to take away your child, lose your wife. There is no shared set of neighbors and relatives to turn on you, to force you to go back, to do the rightful thing. Everything is now trust.
I have this plastic baby who sucks from empty breasts so that the slazans will trust me.
Chapter Twelve
The Fifteenth Day
The one the healer called Hugger had sat two nights near the dead body of the woman whom she had called Huggable and he had called Soft Skin, and he still sat near Soft Skin’s body the morning he decided to seek out the animal who had killed her.
He knew he should have left the first night, after the daughter had been taken away, after he had pounded on the boulder and called to the animal to come out, but he remained near her, his throat raw from crying out. He fed wood to the fire and listened to the sound of an animal creeping around the hut and hearth.
The next morning the body lay there, untouched, unmoving. As a boy, he had thought that true bodies left so easily because the dead body was left out in the open so scavengers could tear at the flesh. If he stayed, if he protected the body, would the true body be forced to remain, would it cause her eyes to open, her lungs to lift her chest with air? First one nightwing landed on the outstretched limb of the sunset-fruit tree next to which he had built Soft Skin’s hut. Then there was a second one on a nearby tree, and each called to the other. Another alighted, and the calling didn’t seem to stop. One swooped down at her, and he grabbed her digging stick and took swipes at it, driving it off. Its beak had never touched her body.
She had not gathered recently, so there was little food, and hunger emptied his belly. The nightwings called to each other. A pointed-ears stuck its snout through the brush, and he swung the digging stick at it. It scurried away. He heard another rustle in the brush.
When the healer came, he wanted to ask her for food. But she looked at him with the same look each person who lived by the river gave him. It was the same look each gave the woman who had shared his mother, whom they called Squawker, and it was the look each had given his mother until she had died. And the look grew worse when he demanded that the healer put the knife back into Soft Skin’s chest so the true body could not escape. The sound of it was sickening, but now the true body was safe within her.
The healer left, and his hunger grew the way he should have grown. Before her death his mother had called him Small Gray because the pouches had never grown, he had never long called the way he should have. Only Soft Skin, who’d got the same look from each woman as had his mother, a half-eyed look, which showed lack of trust, a wish that you were elsewhere—of all the women, only Soft Skin had accepted his gifts and opened herself to him.
By night his head felt as empty as his belly. He needed to walk off behind the hut to empty himself, but the moment he did that, the pointed-ears would break through. He paced the hut and hearth, fought sleep, and swung the digging stick.
He did not remember curling up on the ground, and he did not remember falling asleep. He awoke to the sounds of snarling, of feet scuffling in the dirt. There were two pointed-ears tugging at different parts of her body. Their chests were red with blood. He rose quickly, found the digging stick, and pounded at them, until, yelping, they ran off, disappearing through the brush. The nightwings called to each other from the trees, one and another flapping hard as they moved to a closer tree limb.
He stood there panting. It was too late. Her body had been opened. The true body could be gone. He could be breathing it in right now. He knew it had been useless to try. Why had he? The bloodied knife had fallen to the ground. It was the animal’s knife. Not a good thing had happened since the animal had arrived. He picked up the knife and walked away.
Walking with a knife in hand, rather than in a sheath, was somehow strange. The hilt itself felt odd to the touch, but as he strode toward the clearing, it felt more comfortable in his grip. He kept telling himself that this would be for the best. It would be done, and he would leave and go elsewhere. And if he had breathed in her true body, then he might well die, which would be for the best. He had no place here by the river. Maybe he had no place anywhere.
And neither did the animal.
Esoch was thirsty. Everyone was thirsty. The sun burned away at everything. Everything but the /gausha waterhole had dried up. He couldn’t remember now, only several years later, if he h
ad been invited to hunt with N!ai’s father and her brother, or if he had chosen to go out with N!ai. Some !xwa vines were growing around a gan tree, and she had tried to dig out the root, but it was deep and big. He had dreamed that night of the !xwa root, rich in moisture, and of N!ai’s kindness when he dug it out and carried it back to the chu/o.
The next day, when they got back to the face of the huts, ≠oma was carrying the root, heavy with water, children running about, crying out, Dam found meat! Dam found meat! And indeed, N!ai’s father and his son had come back with the meat of a gemsbok. N!ai’s father told how thin the gemsbok was, how easy it was to find in the dry sand, how it had wandered alone to drink from the nearby waterhole. The arrow he had shot into the gemsbok was an arrow ≠oma had made and given him. He called out, laughing, “So Owner of Music is the owner of the meat.”
And there ≠oma stood with the meat. While there was quiet talk—yes, that’s the way to do it, be generous, don’t be stingy—he gave a forequarter to the two hunters, N!ai’s father and her brother, he kept the meat of the neck for himself, he passed a hindquarter to N!ai’s mother, the other to his wife, then the meat of the belly to another relative, the flanks to another, each receiver holding out cupped hands, never grabbing, always waiting; and each person turned to cook the meat, then hand out portions to other family members. He could feel once again the way he felt his heart beat, the way he felt the painful hunger he felt whenever everyone was watching him, waiting for him to do the right thing, and hearing, behind him, N!ai’s mother speaking to N!ai: “Your husband should have hunted, too. See how proud he looks.”
An alarm sounded, and ≠oma couldn’t understand why the shuttle alarm was sounding in the middle of the chu/o while he distributed meat. Her husband said: “It was a good arrow. It flew straight.” ≠oma knew he should deny that the arrow was any good, that he should say that if N!ai’s father had chosen another man’s arrow, then the meat would have been distributed more fairly. But he couldn’t say the routine words. He was overcome by the way N!ai’s father had spoken well of him, by the way everyone had meat and was eating it, complaining only about the heat and about how little fat there was on the animal this time of year, and he watched all this and the hardness in his belly wouldn’t go away, nor would the sound of the alarm.
He remembered where he was, and he remembered the proximity alarm. There was a slight surge of interest when he thought that Slazan N!ai could have returned. He walked across the deck, thinking how coffee would be nice (but that made him think of sitting across from Hanan in the ship’s café), when he stopped and gripped one of the accelerator seats.
Slazan N!ai’s return would be signaled by a red light. The blinking light was blue. He couldn’t remember what blue meant. What had he been thinking when he programmed a blue light to go off? How long had he been alone? Maybe he should just lie down again. Whatever it was, he was safe. The image on the screen just showed the crest of the hill. He could make out where the trails met, where tree limbs had been torn down for the fires. He saw nothing. Then he remembered he had set the blue light to go off for Pauline. Where was she? Had she stepped forward, changed her mind, and gone back?
A figure emerged from the shadows and stepped out onto the crest of the hill. Sunlight shone clearly. The tan uniform was one he had seen in so many training scenarios, but this one was ripped and stained, as if this slazan had made a long journey through the forest. Esoch remembered that he had feared that Pauline would return in the chameleon suit, that the system wouldn’t recognize her, so he had set the blue alarm to go off for any humanoid figure whose body was covered with fabric. And here he was, in the tan uniform of a slazan warrior. If this was the one who had survived the fall through the atmosphere, if there wasn’t a contingent of them hidden somewhere on the planet, then this was the slazan who had attacked and destroyed the Way of God.
The slazan warrior walked down the hill, his steps measured, calculated, as if walking through a minefield. His eyes were always forward, looking right at the shuttle, and, through lens and processors and visual reproducing, looking right at Esoch. He halted halfway down the hill, and he sat down, legs splayed, hands pressed flat to the ground.
When Esoch swallowed, he tasted bile. This was worse than when they had closed him in the coffin, worse than when he had confronted the alien forest for the first time. He had survived all of that, and now this slazan warrior was here.
He went in search of the pistol. He looked in cabinets and lockers, he fumbled through instruments and Pauline’s clothes and food, but he couldn’t find it. He slammed things shut, he cursed, and he looked, and the fear grew. And the fear had a recognizable form, like a flavor forgotten and then recalled: the simulated slazan who had come for him with the knife, the simulated slazan sniper, the simulated slazan who hid in the building that Esoch and Ghazwan had been assigned to take. But those were simulations. Ghazwan had not died in battle.
But here he had cause, here he had training, here he had fear, and he couldn’t find the gun. He stopped. He thought. He looked at the screen. The warrior sat on the hillside, perfectly still, eyes forward. Why was he here? Where was his weapon? What did he want?
Esoch then remembered: the patched onesuit lay crumpled by the bed. The pistol was still on the waisthook. His hands were so jittery that it was hard to get dressed, and the pistol grip felt awkward in his hand. The slazan warrior still sat on the hillside. What was Esoch going to do, dive out there and shoot the enemy?
He said names. Hanan Salib. Amalia. Viswam. Rajeev. Sarah Karp. Rachel Stein. Alifa al-Shaykh. He forced an image of each one into his mind, he tried to remember an event: Tamr and Jihad arguing with Pauline. Sarah Karp standing at Hanan’s doorway. The captain and executive officer going over the plans with him, Jihad sitting by her desk, calling up whatever maps the captain ordered. Esoch tried hard to conjure them up, to conjure up some degree of hatred. Where had it gone? Just a few days ago—how many had it been?—he had grasped hold of his pistol and aimed it at the slazan mother.
Why couldn’t he hate well? Hanan was dead; here was her killer. Esoch could set the hatch to open, lean forward as soon as there was space, and fire several quick shots. The slazan warrior would have no idea what hit him.
The slazan warrior sat there. Hands flat on the ground. Legs splayed. An easy target. His uniform was dirtied and torn. His head was down for a moment, then raised. Esoch could see his exhaustion, wondered if the warrior could also suffer from adaptation sickness. He had come this far, he had sought out this shuttle craft.
Where was his weapon?
Esoch slid pistol back onto waisthook. Another alarm light started to blink. It was the green one. He thought, remembered: green for the locals. He or she wasn’t visible yet. What would she think when she saw another slazan‚ someone just like them, but dressed in the clothes they had first seen on an alien?
He took the four steps to the hatch, but he didn’t hit the open button. If the warrior intended to kill him, if the warrior was successful, then he had just captured a human artifact, complete with a wide range of human technology. Both sides destroyed everything before capture; there was to be no trade-off, no learning, no given advantage.
The scuttle controls were the easiest to find. The paranoia of war. It was absurd to think he was doing this. But there was the enemy. Esoch could stay in here and wait and wait. The enemy would be out there. If he left, Esoch would be trapped. There would be no way to walk the forest again without worrying about ambush. He set the scuttling mechanism.
He was given three options.
The ship could be scuttled if a person misused a particular control module. Or it could be scuttled if a person used certain controls without keying in the correct password. He imagined Pauline returning and using the wrong control. So Esoch chose the last option. Time. If the hatch did not reopen within a certain period of time, the ship would scuttle itself. The hatch was keyed to open to his fingerprints and to Pauline’s. It wouldn’t open
for anyone else.
The comp asked for a time frame.
How long should he expect himself to be out there? Half an hour? An hour? What if the warrior captured him and led him away? If the shuttle exploded while he was gone, then his entire connection to humanity was gone.
He decided. Two complete local days. No, a little more. Let it go off at midday, when the sun was directly above. He had to calculate the figure in standard hours; then he keyed in the number. An hour before midday a loud siren would go off, just once. Minus two minutes the siren would go off again, and it would not stop its wailing until the shuttle had—he couldn’t let it explode here. He reset the whole mechanism, expecting as he keyed in the instructions for the warrior to grow bored, to stand up and leave. Now the shuttle would take off, and once it had escaped the planet’s gravity and left the world’s orbit, it would explode in space, leaving the people here safe.
Now it was time to confront the enemy.
I awoke with the dawn. She had slept by the cooking fire, having given over the hut to Flatface’s almost-a-man son, who was lying there asleep, three fingers on his right hand missing. He had been sitting by the waiting fire when the healer had returned, his hand swollen, pus oozing from the wounds. Crooked had mated with Newcomer, the almost-a-man who had been following her, and she had mated with Tall Enough, Newcomer’s older rival. Flatface’s son had tried to mate with her, and she had refused. He tried to force her, and she turned and bit off one of his fingers. Newcomer came to her defense, and in the scuffle Flatface’s son lost two more fingers, and Newcomer had one of his ears torn up. Flatface’s son had spent two days walking and sleeping in solitude before he could face the healer.
She had played music to calm him, she gave him water mixed with herbs to drink, and she played music again until he slept. Then, careful to touch him as little as possible, she cleaned the fingers and rubbed on a salve made from crushed short-stern leaves.
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