June withdraws it from the case with care, and I can feel the hunger for it rolling off Rondo like a scent. The woman brings the instrument to her chin inside the lip of the cloak and then gently lays the bow against the strings. She pauses, waiting for something. From here I can only see a sliver of her face not obscured by the hood, and just as I’m beginning to think about the purpose of the cloak, and if she wears it for similar reasons to Albatur, she begins to play.
The notes are soft at first and seem to circle in on themselves. They circle and circle, an almost hypnotizing pattern that grows in strength the longer she plays. I can’t help but sway to the sound, and so do the eyenu.
They only sway at first, their brilliantly colored bodies rocking almost imperceptibly out among the flat green-yellow grass, as if moved by a gentle wind. But then it’s as if that gentle wind moves them toward us, the notes from the izinusa gathering them, petals on a still lake suddenly drifting on a course charted by breeze. They circle like the notes, the small groups of the animals coming together in larger knots, dispersing and regrouping, always flowing toward the outcrop where June stands playing her melody. She rocks from foot to foot under the mass of the dark cloak, her eyes closed, her unsmiling lips somehow smiling. Around us, the music seems to multiply.
When the eyenu are close enough to stand before us, a small sea of vibrant feathers, I realize that the song has swelled because the eyenu have joined it. The disjointed music of their cries has smoothed, finding the melody of the izinusa and clinging to it like tributaries joining a rushing river. Their beaks are barely open, but their throats convulse to emit the music, a haunting melody that fills the meadow with a sound as vivid as vision.
Their throats are swelling. With music, yes, but with something else as well. The curtain of feathers that hang down from their necks becomes tighter, and the music becomes more resonant. The izinusa plays on as before, but the sound the eyenu offer thickens, amplifies. Their throats convulse, as if the music is too much to bear, as if there is something greater than music that they wish to speak but are unable.
The eggs drop one by one. Not the way I have seen other birds lay eggs, and I know immediately that these eggs are not meant for nests. These luminous balls carry another meaning, and they slide from the mouths of the eyenu like stars emerging from black holes. The eyenu bend their long graceful necks one at a time, allowing the kawa to drop gently from their beaks to the ground around the outcrop. June plays on. She plays until the birds have all offered their gifts, and the music from their throats fades to a hum. Only then does she stop, and when she turns to us, all I can see beneath the cloak is her broad smile.
“They were hungry,” she says. “But now they are fed.”
Chapter 25
When night has fallen and we have helped June guide the eyenu into the natural stone quarry where she says they like to sleep, all of us but Hamankush sit around a warming oven inside a qalm that June calls a cabin. Hamankush is outside somewhere. I’d asked where she was going and all she said was “To watch.”
Kimbullettican sits closest to June, and if a week ago I’d been told that there was someone pushier with their curiosity than Alma, I wouldn’t have believed it. But here we are, Kimbullettican asking endless questions, while I try to get a word in wherever I can.
“Have you never been to Mbekenkanush?” Kimbullettican says. They are eating from a smooth wooden bowl, one of four or five that June passes around, all with a different food that we each eat a bit of before passing it along and accepting the next bowl. Kimbullettican barely eats; they’re too busy asking questions and soaking up the answers.
“Once. A long time ago,” June says, and I know she’s talking about the memory I had seen. She eats with a shiny, slender instrument I’ve never seen, a rounded hollow at one end with tiny spines extending from the hollow at the bottom. She alternately uses the tines to skewer the food or the hollow to scoop it when applicable. I’ve never seen anyone not eat with their hands or with bread as the vehicle for getting food from bowl to mouth. I almost laugh when I see her use the tool the first time.
“Why only once?” Alma breaks in, taking advantage of Kimbullettican’s stopping to chew.
“Those I need to see come to me,” June says. She doesn’t bother to wait until she’s finished chewing to speak.
“You don’t get lonely?” Rondo asks.
“When you’ve lived a life like mine, child, loneliness is a waste of resources.”
All these are things I want to know, but I’m impatient as my friends pluck the answers from June like berries. In my mind, there is only one question that matters in this moment.
“Your flock,” I say. “The eyenu. They make kawa?”
“Make is an interesting choice of word,” June says. She looks at the ceiling as she chews now. “Make. A machine makes.”
“Not necessarily,” Alma butts in. “A person makes a child, for example.”
“Creates,” June says, her eye swooping down from the ceiling as if on wings, alighting on Alma with a fierce but cheerful shine. “A person creates a child.”
Alma’s lips crack as if to offer argument, but they close again, opening only to mutter, “Pedantic.”
I shoot a look at her to hush. “So the eyenu create kawa?” I say, turning back to June, who never seems to stop chewing. “How?”
“You could say that,” she says. “They do many things.”
“You feel strange in the Artery,” Kimbullettican says. “Different.”
If they had said anything else, I’d be annoyed at their interruption of my line of questioning. But at this I pause, waiting for June’s explanation. I had felt it too—the way her presence in the Artery feels stiff and oddly shaped, like a tree that grew around a boulder, taking the stone into part of its trunk: warped but still very much a tree.
“That’s because I was the first alteration.” June chuckles. A chewed shard or two of zarum is ejected from her mouth but she doesn’t seem to notice or care. The qalm is illuminated by piles of kawa, not all of which glow, but those that do are like globular lanterns, and June’s square teeth reflect some of this light at Kimbullettican when she smiles at them. “When I met your family for the first time, it was a long way from here and we had to try to communicate the old-fashioned way. Oh, I was a young thing then. Twenty years old! I’d never seen anything like your family but we took a liking to each other right away, and they invited me to come back here with them.”
“You mean from another planet,” Alma says, her voice soft. Between us all, the oven, glowing with warmth as it bakes the flatbread June had arranged inside, makes a hissing sound.
“Yes, baby. The same one your people are from, unless there is another place in this universe that creates children who look like us.”
“How?” I say. “How is this possible? You’re telling us the Faloiv came to the Origin Planet before we ever landed here? Before the Vagantur ever crashed here?”
“The Origin Planet,” she repeats with a laugh. She reaches up to scratch her head and her fingers seem surprised to find that she still wears the red headwrap. She unwinds it carefully, layer by layer, and when the cloth has fallen away I’m staring at coiled white hair, thick locs like the ones that once hung from my mother’s scalp. She laughs again. “Is that what they call it?”
“The Origin Planet, yes,” Alma says. “Why? What do you call it?”
“I call it by its name, child!” She laughs, and uses the red headwrap to whisk away the crumbs from her lap. “I call it Earth.”
“Earth,” I echo, and I think Alma and Rondo say it too, the round heavy word like a single stone dropped among us in the small cool qalm. Like earthquake. Like soil. A basic thing, a thing from which things and ideas grow. It’s so simple, but it makes sense in my mouth and in my mind.
“Why did they bring you here?” Kimbullettican says, their confusion apparent. “An extraterrestrial with no knowledge of Faloiv?”
“I can’t say,”
June says. She accepts the bowl Rondo is passing to her and uses her small shining tool to scoop up some waji. “I suppose because I wanted to come. There was nothing for me there, or so I thought. No family, at least. I left behind much more than I thought, of course. You think you have everything you need except that which you want when you’re twenty.”
“How old are you now?” I blurt.
June’s shiny eating tool pauses halfway to her mouth and her eyes pause on me. “I’m one hundred and eighty-two,” she says, and then grins as an afterthought. “Give or take a few. It didn’t occur to me to keep track right away.”
“How?” Alma breathes.
“I have my flock to thank for that,” she says. “I give something to them, they give something to me.”
“Symbiosis,” I say.
“That’s right, baby.”
“My nana calls me baby,” I say softly, mostly to myself.
“How old is your nana?” she says, putting her eating tool down.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “I think she was in her thirties when the ship crashed. They say we’ve been here forty years.”
“Yes, forty years.” June nods. “I remember when you came. I’d been here many years by then. It was a shock to see those people come off that ship. At first they wore their yellow suits, their high-tech masks. Then they learned the air was good. I saw the masks come off and it was like my heart leaped through space.”
“You must have been happy,” Alma says, “to see someone like you. Your own kind.”
“To tell the truth, I was terrified,” June says, chuckling, a low sound that has less humor in it than another laugh might. “I didn’t know what kind of people these would be. I’d seen all types on Earth. A lot of bad ones.”
“They say that’s why we left,” Alma says. “To escape the ruin that they made of the planet.”
“Say again?” June says, her eyes refocusing. Her gaze had wandered, blurring as she stared at the stove, her thoughts elsewhere.
“That’s why the Vagantur left . . . Earth?” Alma says, trying the true name out again. “To escape what had been done to the planet?”
June’s harsh laugh startles me and I almost drop the bowl I’d been cradling. I snap my eyes up to her face, alarmed. “So that’s what they’ve been telling you all this time!” June says. “Well, honey, I don’t know much, but I know a scam when I hear one.”
“A what?” Rondo says. He’s put down the bowl in his hands, listening intently. I follow suit. Kimbullettican sits motionless, listening.
“A scam! A con. They might have ruined the planet, but that’s not why they came. Not to escape. No, no. They came for something to take back. At least, some of them did. From what I’ve heard told.”
“What do you mean?” I say. We’re getting close to something important.
“This was my understanding as well,” Kimbullettican says, their spots clustered in a knot at the center of their forehead. “I understood the humans’ plight to be that their planet died, and that Faloiv was a haven of coincidence.”
“Staying here was the coincidence,” June says. She toys with her eating tool, its hard, shiny material catching the light of the many kawa. “Staying. For some of them. I might even take the risk of saying most. But every ship has a rat, I guess you could say.”
I blink, this reference lost on me. “Hamankush said she didn’t think the Faloiv remembered humans as having been this way,” I say. “I didn’t think this is what she meant.”
“Hamankush doesn’t often say what she means,” June says, chuckling again. “She’s a puzzle, that one.”
The food around us is forgotten: the past has filtered in through the skin of the qalm and casts a dizzying spell on us all, even Kimbullettican.
“One thing I’ve learned about this place,” she goes on, “is that symbiosis is survival. To exist here—truly exist—you must have something to give. I worked in a library on Earth. A silly thing to love. They stopped caring about such things long before I was born. But I liked putting things in order.”
June’s eyes have taken on the preoccupied quality I recognize from the sole time I’d stood in my father’s office in the Zoo. Blurred with the past, memories and places far away swirling in to take the place of the here and now. I have no idea what a library is, but I say nothing, waiting. I’m afraid Alma or Kimbullettican will jump in with one of their questions, but they sense it too: the feeling of standing at the edge of something important, rocking in an invisible wind.
“Your family,” she says, gesturing vaguely at Kimbullettican. “They are scientists of a respectful nature. Exchange, always exchange. I have been the keeper of their exchanges these last two hundred years. What they take, I look after. All here with me.”
“What do they take?” I say, barely louder than a whisper.
“Oh, so many things. I’ve never been a scientist, not really. What catches a scientist’s eye is a mystery to me. I love the eyenu because they’re beautiful, and I know what makes them tick. Perhaps we only truly love that which we understand.”
Her gaze wanders from where it’s been fixed on a space beyond the oven, eventually landing on my face. We lock eyes and I take in the wrinkles of her skin, the even hairline, the wide arch of her nose. The ache I’d heard in Alma’s voice, the ache that has been slowly sprouting in my stomach, surges into a full flower. One hundred and eighty-two years old. And here she is.
“Can we see the archives?” I say without fully meaning to.
She purses her lips, still studying me. “I was going to show you tomorrow . . . ,” she says, and some flash of disappointment must flicker across my face, because she trails off. “But none of you look all that tired just now. So we might as well go on down.”
“Please,” I hear myself say.
“Let me just take this bread out before I burn down the cabin.”
“Please,” Kimbullettican says, sounding alarmed.
“Don’t worry,” June says, misunderstanding. “We’ll eat it on the way.”
A moment later, June wraps each of her hands in thickly woven cloths and grasps either side of the oven she had used to bake the bread. Rondo and I both move forward to help her, but she waves us off, scooting the clay oven to the left a little at a time. Beneath is a colorful mat that she kicks aside.
A hole. Almost perfectly round, and completely dark from where I sit, as if below the qalm we all rest inside is not the ground, but an endless nothing that we’re floating above. I crane my neck, looking for a hint of light, but June is already blocking the way, lowering herself into the maw, gripping what must be a ladder by the sound of her echoing feet. When none of us move to follow, she pauses, only her head visible above floor level now, and casts a quick glance around.
“We could wait until tomorrow if you’re too tired,” she says, but she sounds like my mother when she says it; there’s an order in that statement that makes me rise quickly from where I’d been watching her. A moment later I’m descending into darkness, the light from the qalm above blotted out after me by Rondo and the others as they follow us.
The ground under my feet is soft, not squishy like mud but loose, as if the soil had been recently dug up and hasn’t yet resettled. I can’t see anything, just the halo of light from the qalm glowing down on us but not strong enough to reach the ground. I pause, motionless, noting how my suit seems to enjoy the cool air that smells of minerals. June disappears into the dark to my left, the sound of her footsteps muted in the sinking soil.
There’s a sudden glow in the shadowy space we all stand within, a floating orb of light that appears like the abrupt birth of a moon. As it floats toward us, I realize June holds it between her palms, and it’s not until she gets closer that I see it’s not a power generated by her hands but light emitted from a nearly round kawa.
“Do you want me to carry it?” I say, and my words sound loud in what I can now vaguely make out as a cavern. “It looks heavy.”
“It is,” she sa
ys, her smile ghostly above the glow of the egg. “But I can bear it. Besides, it needs me in order to stay lit. This little one was shaped by my cells. And we’re not going far.”
“You are altering the kawa that the eyenu produce?” Kimbullettican says. I can feel their brain doing the complicated things it does that I can sense but not understand. They read the biology of the kawa like a line of text.
“Altering isn’t quite accurate,” June says, turning away from us, the kawa held in front of her like a torch. “Influencing is more precise.”
“How?” Kimbullettican says, the first to follow as the woman moves slowly down what I realize now is a tunnel. Only in certain movement does she feel ancient. “This is not something I have learned in Mbekenkanush.”
“No? That’s why they have Hamankush on the job, I’d expect. We’ve spent a lot of time learning this process together.”
“What process, exactly?” Alma pipes up. We cluster close on June’s heels in the low-ceilinged passageway, our voices echoing tightly around us.
“The kawa, I’ve learned, are incredible conduits for power,” June says.
“Yes, I know,” Kimbullettican and I say at the same time.
“But,” June continues, with a tone of patient impatience, “they can be convinced to absorb other kinds of things too. Light. Memory. Heat.”
“Convinced?” I say.
“Yes.”
The sound of our footsteps in the passageway spreads in my ears, a signal that the tunnel is widening.
“Wait,” June says, and moves forward without us. The halo of light from the kawa shrouds her but only her: straining my eyes at what awaits beyond in the dark is useless. The globe of the kawa seems to float down toward the ground as she bends, lowering it into what I can just make out as some kind of crater.
“Just a little wiggling,” she says to herself, her voice drifting back over her shoulder to where we wait eagerly. The darkness of this place is complete: it’s hard to believe that somewhere above ground is the sky and its stars, a moon that lights the jungle. This kind of dark is a mouth; it swallows us all.
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