They all regard me silently. I don’t dare look into the Artery: I’m afraid of what silent judgment Kimbullettican and Hamankush exchange.
“If not the encampment,” Hamankush says slowly, “then where?”
“To the archives.”
Chapter 24
“There are more of the N’Terran beasts,” Hamankush tells me as we make our way through the thickest part of the jungle I’ve yet seen. Jaquot had said there were mountains to the north, but we pressed west and have met mountains here too. Rondo and Alma walk ahead with Kimbullettican, the path getting steeper and steeper. They look back occasionally as Hamankush and I talk, Alma frowning.
“I figured,” I say. “I didn’t think he would stop with just the vasana that killed my mother.”
“How many?” she says.
“I don’t know. I have no idea how difficult a procedure it is. But now that he has successful trials, he will probably just keep going.”
“For what purpose?”
I think back to the last day I had seen Dr. Espada alive, when my mother had dragged me to the Greenhouse to consult with him. “Weaponization,” my mother had said, and Dr. Espada had known exactly what she meant.
“I think the animals whose brains he’s tampering with are just part of his bigger plan. They’re tools to get what he wants.”
“Bigger plan,” she repeats.
“To . . . you know. Take over. He wants to strip Faloiv of its resources to take back to the Origin Planet after he gets what he needs to leave.”
“We will not give him what he needs.”
“I—I know,” I stammer. “I wasn’t saying you should.”
Hamankush walks on in silence.
“Is this a part of being human?” she asks eventually. “I do not think the Faloii remembered your people as having been this way.”
“Remembered? What do you mean?”
“From the Faloii’s first encounter with humans. I do not believe we would have let you stay if we had known.”
“You, as in, me?” I ask. “Or . . . us?”
“All of you,” Hamankush says, her forehead spots clustering with impatience. “If we had known this was your way, I do not think the invitation would have been extended.”
“No, probably not.” I sigh. “But it’s not what we remember either. I mean, I don’t know much about where we came from. It’s not something we talk about.”
“Why is this?”
“That’s the question Alma is obsessed with,” I say, gazing ahead at her. “And I guess me too, now. Our past has a lot of mystery. But I’m trying to put the pieces together. I think if I do, things will make sense.”
“Your people are people of science,” Hamankush says. “Your grandmother, your mother . . . they spent many years finding answers to questions. If there are no answers to questions about yourselves, then this is a willful ignorance.”
I want to argue, but she’s right. For so many years our only goal was uncovering the mysteries of this planet and, in the process, to forget about the one we came from. My ignorance about our own history feels like an unforgivable void in my mind.
“I can’t explain it,” I say. “There were questions it didn’t occur to me to ask. Alma asked, but never got anywhere. It . . . never occurred to me that they would be lying. Covering it up on purpose.”
Hamankush regards me sideways, her forehead spots rising, peaking above one eye. “When a people are cut off from their history, this can only damage their future.”
Something about the way she says this makes the words grow larger in my ears. A question burns on the tip of my tongue, and it’s as if she can see it glowing there, for her eyes remain fixed on me, even as we climb the steepening face of the mountain.
“I know Rasimbukar and Adombukar knew about the beasts made in N’Terra,” I say quickly, before I can change my mind. “He was in there with them. He knows what they did to the vasana.”
“Yes,” Hamankush allows. She’s not looking at me anymore.
“Why?” I say. “Why did they let your Elders think that the igua was something new? If they knew what N’Terrans were doing in the labs, they would have understood why you did what you did. That you had to.”
“I did not have to,” Hamankush says. I’m out of breath from the mountain’s incline, but she doesn’t seem to be fazed. “It was a choice, like many choices.”
“You know what I mean.” I try to catch my breath so that my next question is coherent. “Is this related to why Rasimbukar was mad you showed me the memory? The one about war?”
At this I think I catch a glimpse of her smiling. Perhaps it was an expression of exertion, but I can’t mistake the subtle rise of her facial spots.
“You are clever” is all she says.
“Not clever enough,” I push, frustrated. “Otherwise I would understand. Why does Rasimbukar keep so many secrets?”
“The same reason your people do,” she says. “Because sometimes the past requires protection.”
“From?”
“From everything.”
Ahead, Kimbullettican pauses on the path. In this moment, the entirety of the planet is one endless tangle in my mind: a knot of vines that I can only imagine making sense of with the slice of a blade. A lazy way of solving a problem, I think as Kimbullettican and Hamankush converse silently; slicing it in half rather than disentangling all the parts that make it a problem. But when I think of all that Albatur has knotted up in the creation of N’Terra, a blade seems, momentarily, like the only feasible solution.
“We are close,” announces Kimbullettican, assumedly after confirming this with Hamankush. Kimbullettican sounds cheerful, as if their eagerness rises at the same rate as the mountain. I wish I was carrying the map my grandfather had sent rather than its being tucked away inside my suit. I can’t remember now if he had sketched the archives on an illustration of a mountain. How had he mapped the whole planet? Had he mapped the whole planet?
Hamankush pushes ahead to surpass Kimbullettican. Kimbullettican follows eagerly, leaving me and Rondo and Alma to gather behind them, struggling up the path. Alma’s entire face is shining with sweat.
“How . . . much . . . farther,” she pants.
“Very near,” Kimbullettican says over their shoulder, their facial spots high and jovial.
“Thank . . . stars . . . for . . . this suit,” Alma says. “I would die.”
“We all would,” I say.
With the elevation, I expect the trees to thin the higher we climb, but they remain dense, even if less spongy somehow than the jungle below. My eye craves something that leaps out of the green like a fang, and I realize I’m looking for another capsule. The pod I’d already found, far behind us now in the clearing, must have mates. Its naming of “3” demands it, and the certainty of another’s existence is like a splinter lodged just under my flesh, aching to be drawn out and examined. But the only discernible change is that many of the roots of the trees jut above the ground before diving back below the soil: they resemble the brown knuckles of human hands, clinging to the mountain with clenched desperation. Rondo sees me looking and nods at the roots.
“Kind of creepy,” he says, his breath stretched with the effort of climbing. “I wonder how the Faloii picked Hamankush to live all the way up here? Alone? I wouldn’t want the job.”
“Ahead,” Hamankush calls. “You can hear it, if you listen.”
I’m so accustomed to “listen” being used as an instruction for the Artery that at first I think what I hear is there, and not my actual ears. But the noise carries down the mountainside the higher we climb, a chorus of rising and falling sounds echoing between the trees, both raucous and musical. Its presence is in the Artery too, of course, the consciousness of many animals, all the same species but still unique from one another somehow, in a way my mind isn’t sophisticated enough to perceive.
“Are those birds?” Alma asks.
“Yes,” Kimbullettican says, but does not elaborate
.
“I see a building,” Rondo says, pausing on the path to point at something farther ahead.
“These must be the archives,” Kimbullettican says with a tone of affirmation, but I sense a sparkle of excitement in the Artery. This is new for them too. I wonder if they’ve ever left Mbekenkanush before Rasimbukar had sent them through the jungle to my side.
“I will let the archivist know you have arrived,” Hamankush says.
“What?” I say. “I thought you were the archivist.”
But she is gone, disappearing around the next curve of the path, delving into the jungle that clutches the trail like mist clings to early morning grass. A moment later the boisterous sound of the unnamed birds stops abruptly, midnote, as if there had been a signal for silence that every beak obeyed.
“Yeah, definitely creepy,” Rondo murmurs. Something about the sudden silence raises goose bumps on my arms under the suit, every skin cell prickling as if to sense the danger the birds might have scented. Then I realize that we are probably the danger they sense—the truth of it slows my feet. Every step deeper into the planet feels like an invasion.
We have just rounded what I think must be the final corner between us and the archives when Rondo grabs my arms and jerks me backward with a gasp.
“Look out!” he shouts, and I’m immediately prepared to run, my body already turning, hunting for an escape route. But I catch sight of what Rondo thinks he’s protecting me from, and it’s as if all my fear transforms into something familiar, like a diagram in a text I’ve studied once before, my memory twanging as it tries to remember.
A figure in a dark cloak. They stand just before us on the path, the cloak’s hood obscuring their face, its folds hiding their body the way my memory hides the place where this figure originated in my mind. The things that make it familiar feel fuzzy the way details from dreams do, the edges lacking clarity, the way I had dreamed of my grandmother after I thought she had died. . . .
My mind latches on to the memory just as the cloaked figure’s hands rise to the material obscuring their face. I have seen this figure before, in one way many years ago, but not with my own eyes. Through the memory of the tree; the scene I watched unfold long, long ago, when N’Terran war touched Mbekenkanush for the first time. This person is the ageless presence, respected even by the trees.
The fingers that lift the edge of the cloak are deeply brown and lined, age giving them the appearance of wood, polished smooth by years. Behind the figure stands Hamankush, and I wonder how old they must be to have shrunk so in size: they only reach Hamankush’s chest, the cloak hiding the ancient body that I know must be curled by a century’s hands.
When the cloak falls away, I first take in the eyes. Not galactic and glowing like Rasimbukar’s, not even black with the beginnings of a universe within like Kimbullettican’s. The eyes are the shape of raindrops laid sideways, the color clear and brown, the whites only slightly yellowed with age. They peer out from a face that looks no older than my mother’s but which I am sure somehow has known more years than I can fathom. Their clarity is unmistakable. And unmistakably human.
“Who are you?” I hear myself saying, logic failing me. The person before me, the person I had seen in the memory of the tree, is human. My eyes rush over her face, looking for something that makes sense. She wears a headwrap under the cloak, dyed bright red and tied in a decorative knot. Her lips droop at the corners but she is somehow still smiling, her eyes lacking the galactic sparkle of the Faloii but still managing to dance.
“Here she is, here she is,” the woman says. She lets her hands drop to her sides again, the folds of the black-green cloak falling over them, hiding all existence of any part of her but this ancient face. It makes her look even tinier, with Hamankush towering behind. “A child of my home. A pebble of my rock. Hello!”
“H-hello,” I stammer. “But . . . who are you? I saw you . . . I saw you when the drones came to Mbekenkanush. . . .”
The lips that had somehow been smiling are not anymore, a light frown turning her mouth serious. “The drones? A little young, aren’t you? Confusing, confusing.”
“No, I mean, I wasn’t there . . . ,” I start, but Alma steps forward to interrupt.
“Hello,” she says, and her voice carries an ache inside it, an ache which silences me. “I’m Alma. This is Octavia, and he’s Rondo. We’re from N’Terra.”
The young-old woman’s eyes shift to Alma, a bit of the dance returning to them.
“Oh, seekers. That’s what you are, aren’t you? A herd of seekers. A seeker sees an old woman and sees answers. That’s all right. You’re not wrong.”
“An old woman?” Alma says, raising her eyebrow. She doesn’t see it? The fact that this woman is more than she appears to be? Does she not see her frailty? The years layered across her shoulders?
“But your questions will have to wait until I’ve fed the eyenu,” the woman continues. “Come now.”
“The eyenu?” I say. “My grandmother . . .”
“Soon,” she says.
And with that, she turns back on the path she had come down, her hands drawing the cloak up over her head again. With her back to us, she could be anyone, anything. A flowing mirage, the color of the jungle, traveling autonomously through the trees.
Who is she? I ask Kimbullettican as we follow.
“I am June,” the woman calls over her shoulder in a strong voice. At the sound of her name, its throaty single syllable, the raucous cries of the unseen birds rise again like so many handfuls of dust thrown into the air. Their sounds shower us, growing louder as we follow June up the mountain path, which is leveling out now. We’re nowhere near the summit, but we seem to have reached a landing of some kind, a place on the mountainside where the ground goes flat before rising again somewhere ahead, through the band of trees too thick for my eyes to break.
“There’s something strange about her,” Rondo whispers, pulling up between me and Alma. “I can’t put my finger on it.”
“She’s old,” I say. “Very old. She has to be.” I tell them what I had seen in the memory Hamankush showed me. “She was old then. And she felt . . . ancient? Part of Faloiv. Somehow I think she was here . . . before the Vagantur.”
“Impossible,” Alma says.
“I know,” I say. “But . . . the trees knew who she was.”
“Kimbullettican,” Alma says. “Who is she?”
“This is not a story I have been told,” Kimbullettican says, and by the look of their forehead spots, they’re as confused about the presence of this woman at the archives as we are.
“What’s that smell?” Rondo says, and I flinch, thinking of the stench of the violet flowers by the river and how it had meant the approach of the dirixi. Every smell, every sound on this planet seems to mean something, a meaning that often goes right over my head.
“The eyenu,” Kimbullettican says. They are quiet for a moment and then add, “But I have never seen one before.”
“Really?” Rondo says. “I would have thought you’d seen . . . you know, everything.”
“Faloiv is a small planet, but it carries many life-forms. I am aware of the eyenu’s existence but have never come into contact with one.”
“So this is exciting for you too,” Rondo says.
“Yes,” Kimbullettican admits. “It is. When I reach maturity, I will be permitted to travel the planet as Adombukar does, logging the species I have been assigned. Until now my experience outside Mbekenkanush has been limited.”
“Like us,” Alma says.
“Yes, I suppose that is true,” Kimbullettican says. I don’t think they like the idea that there are suddenly many things they don’t know.
“Here they are!” June’s voice rises again, louder still to be heard over the chorus of eyenu. “My little ones. My little, little ones.”
Ahead is another meadow of sorts, June standing on a rocky outcrop that looks out over the clearing. Since we left the meadow with the Vagantur capsule, we’d w
alked for nearly five hours to reach the mountain we’ve been scaling. Now the sun is almost at its highest point in the sky, and the meadow blazes near white with the heat of the day. The plants have changed with the altitude, I note: their green paler and their stems thinner. More thorns. Fewer bright swatches of color common in the lower jungle. But the eyenu are bright enough on their own.
They roam the meadow in small groups, not the birds I had expected. They are ground dwellers, probably flightless by the look of their massive legs and small wings, and are grouped into two colors: an intense aquamarine and a shade of fuchsia that almost hurts the eyes. Their necks are long like vasanas’, with shaggy feathers that hang in a curtain from their throats. Their beaks are long and spiked, and as they bend to the meadow ground, I find that they are using their beaks to root in the tough mountain soil. Though occupied with whatever they are searching for in the ground, there is a near-constant din rising from their numbers: melodic in a way, but off-key somehow, the notes ragged and disorderly.
“Beautiful,” Kimbullettican says, and I feel their consciousness doing something I can’t explain in the Artery: to describe it as taking notes doesn’t do it justice. They are recording, in a similar way, I think, that the ogwe had recorded the event of the Vagantur’s crash onto Faloiv and the following landing discussions. Kimbullettican’s mind is a sponge, soaking up the sight of the grazing eyenu in the meadow, sensing and recording biological details my mind isn’t even aware of. They are a living text.
“They are,” June says proudly. “They are!”
Her cloak flutters around her, a breeze from the mountaintop winding its way down and working its fingers through my hair. She reaches inside the flapping material of her shroud, fishes around, and then withdraws a black case.
“An izinusa,” Rondo says quickly. “You have one.”
“Why yes,” June says. “Necessary in my line of work.”
With that, she clicks open the shining black case, revealing the delicate instrument within. It’s smaller than the one I’ve seen Rondo play, but everything else is the same: the warm-hued wood, the ten waiting strings. The bow is nestled in the case alongside it, curving over the instrument itself like the path of a shooting star.
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