The Color of Distance

by Amy Thomson

  Anito rippled amusement. “Neither can the rest of the village. I hope they didn’t notice how tired I was.”

  “You looked fine until you came in. Here.” Ninto tossed her a ripe green and yellow banya fruit and a leaf-wrapped package of kayu. “Eat. Rest.”

  Anito squatted against the wall, and bit into the banya, tasting first the tart, almost-bitter peel and then the intensely sweet inner pulp. It was wonderful. She finished the banya, spitting the seeds into her hand to scatter later along their voyage. There were never enough banya vines. She felt the sweetness of the juice and the fruit rushing into her blood, giving her energy. She peeled open the packet of kayu. The starchy seeds had been plumped with taira blood and flavored with crumbles of seaweed and chopped meat. Anito turned turquoise with pleasure at its delicious taste. She finished it quickly, licking up a few stray grains from the leaf wrapper, wishing there was more.

  Ninto rippled with amusement. “There’s more kayu in the food basket, greedy one. You can have some when we take it up to feed the others.”

  Anito picked up a basket of food and slung it over her shoulder. “In that case, let’s go. They must be very hungry.”

  As Anito, Ninto, and several tinka descended to Anito’s room, the villagers began hauling out baskets of food and leaves in preparation for the feast of welcoming and leavetaking. By the time they were ready, the banquet would be too.

  One of the villagers’ bami, noticing Anito’s gaze, flickered “Congratulations” at her in big, exuberant patterns. She looked more closely. It was Pani. Pani’s happiness was understandable. It meant that she would no longer be the youngest bami in the village. Someone would be her junior in status. Anito felt a flash of anger. She wasn’t the one who should be congratulated. Eerin and Ukatonen were responsible for the new bami. She would have to make that clear to the other villagers.

  Ukatonen and Eerin eagerly greeted the arrival of the food. They woke the sleeping bami. He ate and drank greedily. Anito rippled with amusement at his eagerness.

  “I remember how good that first food tasted,” she remarked. The other Tendu flickered agreement tinged with nostalgia, remembering their own transformations.

  “I was hungry all the time,” Ninto said. “My sitik was always complaining about how much hunting we had to do.”

  “I grew almost a full hand-span in the first month,” Ukatonen said, biting into a banya fruit. “But it was a week before I made any words. I was afraid to try.”

  “I thought that the transformation was complete,” Eerin said, interrupting the flow of nostalgia. “Is he going to change any more?”

  The bami, whose eyes had never left Eerin, turned a pale, worried orangeish-pink, and looked from Ukatonen to Anito.

  Anito’s ears tightened, and she suppressed a surge of impatience at Eerin’s ignorance. “The transformation is complete,” she explained, “but your bami will grow three or four-hand spans in the next year. He’ll be hungry all the time. You’ll be busy keeping him fed.”

  “But I don’t know enough!” Eerin exclaimed. “I can’t hunt, and I don’t know what to eat.”

  “It’s time that you learned,” Ukatonen told her. “I’ll help you when I can, and Anito will too. You are her atwa, and she must care for you. But,” he added, noting Anito’s flare of protest, “you must also learn to take care of your own responsibilities, Eerin. You are no ordinary atwa. You are like the Tendu. You can think for yourself. There is a limit to what Anito should do for you.”

  “I understand most of what you say, en, but I still don’t understand what an atwa is. I cannot agree to something I don’t understand.”

  Ukatonen ducked his chin in thought. Both he and Anito had tried to explain it to her, and had failed. “What do you know about atwas?” he asked.

  “I know that every Tendu has one or belongs to one. I know that many plants and animals are part of an atwa. I know that there are many rules about them, that plants and animals can’t be harvested sometimes because of these rules.”

  Ukatonen nodded. “Every elder chooses a part of the world to look after. That part of the world is their atwa. They make sure that their part of the world is in harmony and balance with all of the other parts. Your people are a new part of the world. Anito has been chosen to look after your new atwa. She must bring your people into balance with the world. Do you understand?”

  “I think I understand more, en, but not all. I’m not a plant, or animal. I’m a person. What I want, what my people want, must be listened to.”

  Anito spread her ears in amazement. “What you say is impossible! You eat, you drink, you shit. How can you say that you’re not an animal?”

  “Yes,” Eerin told her, “I am an animal, my people are animals, but we are different from other animals. We change the world we live in. We make things.”

  Anito’s ears spread even wider. The new creature seemed to believe that it was separate from the world it lived in.

  “Other animals change the world too,” Ukatonen said. “Even plants make changes in their world.”

  “But your people and my people are different from other animals. We decide how to change the world. Besides, your world is no longer alone. Your world and my world will touch, will change each other. Our two worlds are very different.”

  “All the more reason that someone should watch over you, to guide the changes.”

  Eerin shook her head. “It isn’t that simple. It isn’t something that one person can do alone.”

  “Anito will be the first of many. I hope that your bami will choose your people as his atwa when he becomes an elder.”

  Anito leaned forward. “How do your people keep the world in balance?”

  Eerin shook her head again. “I’m not sure that I can explain. My people and yours are very, very different.”

  Just then a booming beat was sounded on the buttress of the tree, announcing the beginning of the banquet. Ninto came in with an armload of headdresses. Anito helped her drape them over Eerin and the new bami. Taking a headdress of flowers with trailing streamers of iridescent blue beetles, she arranged it on the new creature’s head. The poison stripes on Anito’s back tightened as she looked into Eerin’s strange, deep-set eyes, with their small brown irises and round pupils. She remembered the odd emotions Eerin made her feel during the awakening. Could she ever bring such a creature as this into harmony with the world? She glanced down at Eerin’s new bami. Everywhere the creature went, wrong-ness happened. Perhaps it would be best if the new creature died before her people came back. Maybe then her people would leave Anito’s alone, and she could go back to being a simple village elder.

  “Thank you,” Eerin said as Anito finished adjusting her headdress.

  Anito looked away. Eerin had torn her life apart, but in spite of that, there was something about the new creature that made Anito care about her. It would all be so much easier if she didn’t.

  Juna followed Ukatonen and Anito up the tree toward the banquet. It was raining hard. Her headdress was already heavy and soggy. She tried not to think about the strings of insects brushing the back of her neck. She thought she could feel one of them moving, and she shuddered, making the headdress slip backward slightly. It took all her self-control to keep from ripping the thing off.

  Bugs had never been Juna’s strong suit. As a biologist, she preferred the larger animals, especially mammals. Juna sighed. She was on the wrong planet. The closest things to mammals on this planet were the warm-blooded marsupial birds on the northern continent. She smiled, remembering the big, stupid grazers covered with spotted fluffy down. Except for their nasty habit of vomiting all over anything that threatened them, they were silly and adorable, especially when the baby stuck its head out of the mother’s backward-facing pouch and peered between its mother’s hind legs.

  She really should catalogue the insects on her headdress when she had a moment. Survival had taken precedence over research for the last few months, but she owed it to her colleagues to sta
rt doing some work. It would help to have a large and impressive body of research behind her when the Survey discovered that she had adopted an alien child.

  She glanced back at her bami, climbing up the trunk after her. He needed a name. How did the Tendu name their bami? She would have to ask Ukatonen or Anito when they were settled at the banquet. All of the Tendu’s names were composed of a basic name sign. A bami’s name sign was repeated only once. An elder’s name sign was made up of the same pattern repeated twice. Ukatonen’s name pattern was repeated three times. Juna was fairly certain that this was an indicator of rank or status. Her own name sign was repeated only once. She wondered what this meant in terms of status. Was she only an adopted child of Anito’s? Or did it mean nothing because she wasn’t a Tendu?

  They reached the top of the trunk. As they emerged into the pouring rain, the assembled villagers set up a loud, celebratory trilling. Juna looked around her: the elders and bami were rippling in glowing colors. For a moment it resembled some weird bioluminescent seascape peopled by troglodytes. She smiled at the image, and flickered thanks back at the villagers.

  Anito and Ukatonen sat down. Juna paused, uncertain where she was supposed to sit. Her bami took her hand and led her to a high spot next to them, and sat beside her.

  “I help you learn,” he told her, in small patterns on the back of his hand. “You are my sitik.” His words were a bit blurry, but readable. He was learning to control his skin very quickly.

  Juna realized that her bami wasn’t a child. He had survived for years, alone and unprotected in the jungle. He had fought to earn his place among the tinka of Lyanan. He had risked everything in a desperate, impossible gamble that had nearly cost him his life. He knew the forest and his people better than she ever would. What could she possibly teach this young alien?

  She put her hand next to his, and concentrated to make her words appear there. “I will try to be a good sitik.”

  The tinka serving the food looked closely at the new bami, as though trying to learn how he had managed to be chosen. Despite their recent meal, the bami ate a great deal. Juna was also hungry. Linking always made her ravenous, especially for sweet, starchy food. Clearly, linking had its metabolic costs.

  The rain let up a little as they finished eating. The prepared food was served in covered baskets, though the fruit was left exposed to the rain. Juna picked at the last soggy bits of bloody meat and greens on her leaf, hoping the banquet would not go on much longer. She was tired. It had been a long and eventful day.

  Anito nudged her. When she looked up, she realized that the villagers were watching her expectantly.

  “They’re waiting for you to speak,” Anito told her.

  “What should I say?”

  “Thank them for the banquet, introduce your bami. Make your words big and try to be as formal as you can. Don’t worry, they aren’t expecting much. Anything you do will impress them.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Juna muttered aloud as she rose to speak.

  She adjusted her dripping headdress and looked around at the waiting aliens, lit by the pale light of glow baskets and the more diffuse wash of light escaping from the trunk of the tree. The aliens regarded her impassively.

  “Thank you,” she said, in the most elaborate and formal patterns that she could manage. “Never have I seen such a good banquet. The village of Narmolom has welcomed my bami with great kindness. I think you will find that he is brave and determined; and I hope that you will help him learn.”

  Juna sat down. It was a terrible speech, sounding woefully inadequate even to her own inexperienced ears, but the Tendu greeted it with ripples of applause. Ukatonen motioned her new bami to rise and be acknowledged.

  “That was a good speech,” he told Juna in small, private patterns.

  Juna shook her head. “It was terrible, but they weren’t expecting much.”

  “It was good enough,” Ukatonen assured her.

  Juna sat back and watched her bami speak.

  “My name is *kh,” her bami told them in large, simple patterns. “I thank my sitik, Eerin, for giving me life. I will try to be a good bami, and learn to be in harmony with the village of Narmolom.”

  He sat back down. Juna consulted her computer for a verbal analogue of her bami’s name sign. His name was Moki. He had named himself after an antlike insect with a painful bite. Juna smiled. She liked the name. It was easy to say aloud. That might be helpful when the Survey returned. She would need all the help she could get to resolve the problems she had created for herself. She rubbed her forehead. She shouldn’t have adopted him.

  Moki touched her shoulder. She looked down at him and smiled. She was no longer alone. Despite everything, she was glad that she had adopted him. Five years was a long time. Perhaps a solution would present itself before the Survey returned. For now, she would try to learn to be a good sitik.

  Chapter 16

  Anito sculled hard with the steering paddle, pushing the raft into the faster current of the main channel. The first five days on the river had been quiet and peaceful, with much feasting and trading with other villages on migration. Tomorrow they would reach the first major rapids. The land around them was getting steeper, sloping toward the sea. The river moved faster too; riffles of white water were forming on the upriver edges of islands.

  Anito glanced at Moki and Eerin, sitting together in the bow of the raft. New bami needed almost constant attention and contact. Sometimes it was hard on their sitiks. Anito had expected Eerin to tire of Moki’s constant need for company, but Eerin seemed to enjoy the attention.

  Eerin was a model sitik in every way but one: she still shrank from allu-a. Eerin’s refusal to link with Moki left him hurt and confused.

  Eerin must learn how to link properly, Anito thought with a flicker of impatience. Ukatonen was going to have to help her teach Eerin to overcome her fear. Moki needed to link with his sitik in order to remain in harmony with himself and others. He needed allu-a every bit as much as he needed food, water, and air.

  Moki reached into his net bag and pulled out a waterproof pouch made of a waxed fish bladder, the kind usually used to hold fishing equipment.

  “Let’s catch some fish,” he suggested to Eerin.

  Eerin turned dark green with approval. “Maybe we’ll catch some more sweet-fish,” she said. “They’re delicious.”

  Anito rippled negation. “You probably won’t. The river’s too fast here. Sweet-fish like slower water.”

  Moki and Eerin settled themselves on the stern of the raft. Moki pulled out the fishing line and watched intently as Eerin tied on a bone fishhook. When she was done, he examined the knot and then darkened with approval.

  “Very good,” he told his sitik. “You’ve tied it nice and tight this time.”

  Amusement rippled along Anito’s back at the sight of the small bami instructing the tall, angular new creature. Ukatonen had asked Moki to teach Eerin to fish. He took his task very seriously.

  She looked at Ninto, who watched the new creature and her bami with quiet amusement.

  “They’re good together. If only Eerin would link with him. He needs her so much,” Ninto said, her words greyed with sadness.

  Anito flickered agreement. “Especially with Ukatonen so busy choosing a new chief.”

  Ukatonen had spent most of the last five days swimming from raft to raft, talking with the other villagers, getting to know the most likely candidates for chief elder. He hadn’t been able to spend much time with Moki and Eerin. The burden of helping Eerin bond with her new bami had fallen mostly onto Anito’s shoulders. Fortunately, Ninto and Baha were understanding and helpful. Still, Anito needed Ukatonen’s help with the new creature. She couldn’t make Eerin understand how much Moki needed allu-a.

  Anito touched Eerin on the shoulder. “I’m going to visit Ukatonen. The river’s calm here, there shouldn’t be any problems.”

  Anito dove into the cool water, feeling the taste of the river on her skin. It was a taste as disti
nctive as the smell of the jungle, full of subtle, ever-changing flavors. Every stream and tributary altered the taste of the river. Now, during flood season, it tasted of mud and drowning vegetation, with a faint hint of rotting fruit. The shadow of a large fish swirled away from her into the murky depths. Anito flinched involuntarily, then relaxed. There were no large predators in this stretch of the river. Below the cataracts, however, it was a different story. She shuddered, remembering a narrow escape from the jaws of a giant kulai. Ilto had pulled her to safety just in time. The kulai had tried to leap into the raft after her. Two elders clubbed the kulai and it fell back into the rushing river.

  She hoped no one would die this trip. There had been too many deaths in the village this year. Anito surfaced beside the raft Ukatonen was visiting. She greeted the other elders on the raft, and one of them, Iketo, extended a hand and pulled her aboard.

  “Thank you for giving Moki the fishing tackle,” Anito remarked to Ukatonen after making the expected polite greetings to her hosts on the raft.

  Ukatonen rippled a shrug. “He’s my responsibility too.”

  “It’s funny, watching him teach Eerin how to fish,” Anito said with a ripple of amusement. “Sometimes Moki acts like he’s the sitik and Eerin’s the bami.”

  “Good,” Ukatonen said. “Eerin needs a lot of looking after. You’ve had to work much too hard. Let Moki help. It will make the bond between them stronger.”

  “Moki needs to link with his sitik,” Anito reminded the enkar. “I need your help to convince-Eerin to link with him.”

  Ukatonen flickered negation. “I can’t help you. No one can. Eerin must decide to link with Moki on her own.”

  Anito rippled a grey, rueful acknowledgment. “But it’s hard, watching Moki suffer. What happens if Eerin never learns to link with Moki?”

  Ukatonen looked away, his skin misted a greyish-purple with doubt. “I don’t know,” he said, looking back at her. “If Eerin doesn’t learn to link, it will kill Moki, but if their bonding is successful, then we will have a Tendu who understands these new creatures better than you or I will ever be able to. We need someone like that. The risk is great, but the rewards could be even greater.”