Gama and Hest: An Ahsenthe Cycle companion novella (The Ahsenthe Cycle)

by Razevich, Alexes

  I hadn’t set out to destroy them; I’d wanted only to escape Simanca and her relentless pressure to push the crops to greater yield, even when she knew it was killing me. I’d wanted to find the orindles who might heal me. I’d found Pradat, but the lumani had found me, and had changed me into an abomination.

  Pradat adjusted another light. I flinched at the sudden sting.

  I had other reasons to stay away from Chimbalay. There were those there who might think what Pradat and I were trying to do was wrong. Those who would say that I’d had my rightful time — ‘see, count the age dots on her wrist’ — and it was unnatural to try to stop the returning to the creator that all doumanas embraced during their thirty-fifth year. But it wasn’t yet my time. It was only thirteen years since I’d broken free of the egg and stood on the world, first as a downy hatchling, and then as an emerged, smooth-skinned doumana. I wanted those years back. It was the most natural want there could be.

  The day was growing old and the room felt chill. Pradat peered at her palm, consulting the instrument she wore strapped around her hand.

  I watched her neck, but with Pradat you rarely knew what she felt unless she told you. It wasn’t that she was unfeeling, not like Simanca or her cold-necked unitmates back at Lunge commune. Pradat had told me once that orindles spent years learning to keep emotions from showing on their necks. A patient could be frightened or get a wrong idea about her health because of an orindle’s fleeting worry or concern. Orindles stifled their emotion spots out of courtesy to their patients — a sacrifice they made for their sisters. No orindle could be certified until she’d proven her control. I’d asked once what the trials were, but she’d pulled her lips into a thin line and refused to speak. I’d not asked her about it again.

  A light-blue circle of light that focused on a spot between my eyes darkened to nearly purple. Heat on the back of my neck and base of my spine told me Pradat had lights focused there, too. I coughed again, harder and longer this time. She came around and stood in front of me.

  “I’m fine,” I said. The shame of that lie didn’t show on my emotion spots. The lumani had changed me so no one would ever see my emotions again.

  Pradat ran her hand over her smooth scalp, turned, and dialed off the machinery.

  I sighed, glad it was over.

  “There’s a chance this worked,” she said as she gently pried the tubes from my arms. “The calculations predict a probability, but I can’t make promises.”

  I rubbed the spots where the tubes had been inserted. My throat prickled again, started to burn. I brought my hand up to my mouth, but couldn’t stop coughing. It went on and on, a deep choking cough, my upper body pounding against the chair-back with each convulsion.

  “Khe?” Pradat said.

  Her voice sounded far away. My earholes felt on fire. A ringing in my head grew louder and louder. I couldn’t breathe.

  No! Not yet.

  Thirty-five dots showed on my wrist. I’d known this was coming — had chosen to wear the scarlet gown of a Returning doumana last Commemoration Day. I’d thought — I’d believed — I would shoulder right up to that day before I fell.

  Pradat moved quickly, laying things on the back of my neck, trying to put something in my arm. I was coughing so hard and shook so violently she couldn’t set in the tube.

  The room spun and grew dim, the walls and floors fading from my sight.

  The smooth, gray silence settled over me again. The smell of loam, of Lunge commune. I welcomed it, and sank into the silence, breathing the word, “Nez.”