by Nōnen Títi
“Stop it or I’ll call Kiren. I’ll call for help and everyone will know.”
Out of breath, he stopped, his body shining with perspiration.
“Okay, now listen to me.” She inhaled not only air but strength: If she said the wrong things now, she’d lose him forever. “I never promised I’d do it for you. I can’t do it. Not because of any rules; I just can’t. I don’t think you’re weird. I don’t think it’s sick or dirty or whatever people may say. I don’t think there is anything wrong with you or your needs. I just can’t help you with this.”
He was listening, not trying to fight her anymore, holding his breath on and off. She had to keep talking to keep his attention, but she slowed down and softened her voice. She repeated what she’d said, told him it was okay to feel like this, to need this. “I don’t care what anybody else thinks, Anoyak, trust me. When I say I want to help you, I mean it, but not physically.”
He was no longer angry, just frightened and sad and in pain from her knees on his legs.
“If I could, I would do it for you, but I can’t. Can you understand that?” He needed to know this was her shortcoming, not his. She’d like to take him into her arms, but it was too early.
“Look, I need you to talk about this. I know it’s difficult, and I know you’re scared, but that’s okay.”
Oh Bue, if she could only get through to him. Nobody had ever written guidelines on how to do that. A hidden subject, even in Closed House; if it was ever mentioned, it was about how to suppress it. No story ever addressed these situations because they couldn’t be heroically solved at the end; they were too complex, too vulnerable, and too real.
She wouldn’t be able to hold him down much longer either, but she told him she wouldn’t let go until she got a response. She repeated that it was okay, that people always turned away from what they didn’t understand, but that was merely a reflection of their own fears; she told him that everything on DJar had been considered wrong, that people fought hardest against what they knew to be true but didn’t want to admit. She was getting numb and let her knees slip onto the floor on either side of his. She used them to push his legs together, aware, like he was, of what was there.
“Talk to me, Anoyak. Do you need to hit yourself when you’re scared? It’s okay, just tell me.”
He mumbled something she couldn’t understand, but it was a response. It became a bit easier then. She found the right questions; closed questions which required no sentences from him. He relaxed a little. She let go of his arms.
Slowly, question by question, she started to get a picture of what went on inside his head. Where Nori had used her few words to state that she didn’t exist as a given fact, Anoyak struggled to express it. He could reason that he did, but he felt unworthy. He hovered between a reality he could not deny and the feeling that everybody was playing an act when he talked to them, to the point where he had convinced himself his existence was offensive to others. They didn’t really want him, even if they said they did or offered him something; they didn’t mean it. He felt that every bit of food he ate was a crime, every word he said a nuisance. So he had denied himself everything to avoid someone saying they’d not wanted him to have it.
Where Nori had replaced the physical reality completely in order to survive in her own, Anoyak was stuck, ashamed of his existence. It was hard for him to admit, even to Jema, what he had learned was a sign of mental illness, a sin, a perversity, or anything else DJar had stigmatized. He had no feelings, he said. He could not feel hunger or cold.
The first time he looked at her was when she asked about his home life. His parents were makers, good people. They’d given him everything. No, his parents never had fights, had never beaten him, never decommitted; they were very conscientious.
So how had they become users?
He wasn’t sure. It had something to do with the points awarded at work; fraud maybe. Many people in the office had been involved.
Did he remember having these feelings before that?
He had, but not to this extent. He’d never had any friends; not at the home either. Yes, it had been good to them on DJar. The carers had been kind.
With the picture becoming clearer, Jema could ask better questions. Remembering what he’d given Ilse, she asked the first open question: “How did you know?”
“She was one when she came in. All she’d get would be a change of clothes.”
He had recognized Ilse’s need, and stepped over his own non-existence to give her a little. The answer was there, then.
“What about your parents, Anoyak? Do you remember them ever touching you?”
He answered they must have. He always had clean clothes, a clean mat, combed hair, but he didn’t remember.
He didn’t need to; Jema knew by now. His parents had lived by the rules, sterile and hands-off, because their conceptual society frowned upon feelings; it expected parents to be emotionless, to never get angry, and children to learn right from wrong without ever experiencing the feelings attached to those; because everyone was afraid of being accused of touching in some improper manner, because the abuse police was present in every member of the community. Anoyak’s parents had not physically hurt him; they’d emotionally destroyed him long before becoming users. He’d preferred to be beaten; it was better than nothing at all. Yet he’d been there for Ilse and, for that, had been accused of sexual abuse.
Jema told him what she was thinking, to make sure she wasn’t wrong and because he needed to know it wasn’t his fault. In the meantime her eyes burned with resentment for the loss of so many lives. Generations of unnecessary suffering because people had swallowed the words of some emotion-phobic rational thinkers with a few letters behind their names for the truth. “I love you, Anoyak. I’ll never leave you alone.”
After that there was no more need to talk. He let her hold him, finally, and curled up as small as he could make himself; physically a man, emotionally a child, trying to make up for years of neglect, but it wouldn’t be enough. It would never be enough unless he could somehow start over and relive being a little child, being given what any child should be entitled to. How many Anoyaks were walking around, silently suffering? How many were here, running from DJar? How many Noris died every year without even knowing what it was to be held, to exist?
Kiren called at the door to make sure they were okay. A little later she heard the older children go to their rooms.
“We’ll make sure it never happens again, Anoyak. Not on Kun DJar.” Even if she’d have to fight every new law, every one of Frantag’s guidelines.
Long after it went quiet, they left the washroom. She put Anoyak on her own mat; she wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway, desperate to trust to paper what would otherwise make her head explode, her stomach in dire protest from a whole day without food. “There is nothing wrong with you,” she’d told him. Was she absolutely sure of that? Would she be able to help him through this? What if she couldn’t?
“What did you two do in that washroom all evening?” Kiren asked Jema the next morning.
“Talk.”
“So did he beat himself again?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe before I came in.”
“Did he want you to?”
How much did Kiren know? “What makes you ask that?”
“I don’t know. Just that I got that impression when he asked for you.”
“I didn’t do it, Kiren, but in the future don’t ask, okay?”
None of the kids mentioned it. Not to her and not to each other, at least not where Jema could hear it. She went to Learners with mixed feelings, happy that she was still able to and guilty for having had Daili bail her out once again. But she couldn’t concentrate, too busy thinking about Anoyak and wondering what to say to Daili when she went there. At the end of the day she stuck around to make sure Anoyak was okay around the others; better talk to Daili when she had rested.
The next day she decided to go to Learners first so she’d have time to prepare wh
at she’d say to Daili, who must have talked to Frantag by now, and know that Jema had gone to see him and not her. Daili might not even want to see her anymore. Who could blame her?
Jema helped Anoyak move back into his own room and made sure the other boys were okay with that. Tomorrow she’d surely go to Daili.
Not before Learners, though. She’d write a note first, in case she couldn’t say what she wanted. Suppose Daili would turn her down? It was too easy to leave it another day, another excuse.
When Learners closed on Thirdday, Daili was there to pick up Laytji. It startled Jema. She wasn’t prepared for a confrontation so she fled to the back room. She’d go later when all the kids were gone. Only she didn’t.
With every new day and every good intention she ended up postponing the visit, and the longer she left it, the harder it got.
Prefabs and Fuel Tanks
It was one thing to take a single lander with a bunch of scientists down to the surface to have a look around, but it was quite another to move a mas of people down permanently. Each of the lander-risers could take half a gran, four sets each, and each was designed to fly four times and had the fuel to do so. Getting the people down to the surface was Aryan’s concern, but it was only part of the problem; all would need food, drink, and a place to sleep.
“We won’t shut down the systems until we’re absolutely sure that we’ll be able to live off the land,” Kalgar said. “Until then, SJilai will be an orbiting weather and information satellite and a food production centre.”
Every person going to the surface would have a spinner to stay in touch with each other and with SJilai. The kabin would continue producing photonbars. The already-existing supply could provide food for a period of time – a year, maybe – but not forever. The pouches, also ready to be transported down, wouldn’t last nearly as long and needed water to be edible. The prefab town was to be built near a river so that drinking water would be available immediately.
Aryan sat through hours of discussions about waste disposal, food storage, and locations for cattle and crops. Once on the surface they’d have no mode of transport; nobody had considered the need to move the supplies from the lander site to the new settlement. On top of that, they’d decided to land in a crater big enough to fit a whole town.
Kalgar remained optimistic. “The sooner the better. We’ll take enough people to build the shelters first, next the farmers and then the rest, so they can move straight into their homes. That’s the easiest way.”
Easy! It all sounded so casual, but Aryan kept remembering the effort it had taken to move his legs.
“What about the Habitat Three people?” Frantag wanted to know.
“What about them? Didn’t we have an agreement they’d be no different from anybody else on Kun DJar?” Maike asked.
“They’ll come down the same way as everybody else,” Kalgar confirmed.
Aryan couldn’t help thinking that was pretty obvious; you could hardly throw them out of an airlock instead of using a lander.
“What’s so funny?” Maike asked him.
“Nothing. Just carry on.” He’d have shared his thought if she’d not been so irritable. All of Habitat Three was on edge, afraid the promises wouldn’t be honoured, afraid they’d end up doing the dirty work once again.
“Do you want one of us to come and talk to them?” Benjamar asked.
Both Maike and Roilan said yes. “Anything to calm their nerves.”
The same nervous anticipation was in the pilots and technicians, but for a different reason. During the period of descent, roughly two Kun DJar moons or one SJilai station, a lander would go down every other day. Aryan had been holding training sessions ever since coming back from that first mission. They had discussed every detail of the landers, the fuel tanks, and the checks needed on the surface. Each pilot would have to act on his or her own. He was relentless. In the end, he congratulated Ottag; the kid was solid in both his knowledge and his confidence.
The first two landers went down a SJilai moon after the return of the second mission, one day behind each other, putting one-eighth of the population on the surface. Most were young men from Habitats One and Three. Kalgar and Maike went with them. That was still a lot of people to feed and house, but the intention was to get as many shelters up as quickly as possible. Gabi and Ulli each took a lander with Heddo and Sisi as seconds. They kept in touch through SJilai’s audio system, because for some reason, the spinners didn’t work.
A kor later, Aryan flew the third lander, with another half-gran of people. He also carried drinking water – since the river water made people sick – and a large amount of dried zibot dung for use as fire fuel.
“It takes over an hour to walk up to the rim and another half an hour to where they’re building the settlement,” Gabi told him.
There were enough men there to help with the transport. Aryan watched them go up the trail, like ants in a row, each carrying a load. The bigger pieces were hauled up the steeper west-wall with a rigging system made of cables and pulleys.
Aryan had, of course, known the size of the crater, but the realization of how big it really was only came when he stood at the bottom of it. It would be great to get to the top and look down, but not just yet. Luckily, the pilots and technicians could sleep inside the lander; the others slept in tents or in the few already-standing shelters. How exactly they coped, Aryan didn’t know. The temperature was mild, but the mist that hung over the crater the next morning, so low that the rim was invisible, had him soaked through within minutes and the incessant wind made him shiver. Fires, even if not needed to keep warm, would have been handy to dry moist clothing, but this planet offered no vegetation that could be burned; there was nothing that resembled wood. When they did get a little fire going with the dung, the wind made it impossible to sustain.
That wasn’t the worst of their troubles. Aryan had carried down tanks full of drinking water for the over fifteen hundred people now on the surface, and the next landers would do the same, but they couldn’t survive like that. If the planet didn’t offer a safe source of water, they would have to leave. Aryan questioned the logic of continuing with the flight schedule.
Kalgar, optimistic as always, answered that they would collect rainwater and he had assigned people to dig a water well as their first priority. In the meantime, the chemical tablets had to keep the stored water safe for drinking.
Aryan didn’t argue with him; he concentrated on the landers. One had a bit of damage to the outer protection shield; it was minor, but it could be a weak point, so for now he decided it would stay on the surface as a permanent communication base for contact with SJilai, since it had now been established that the interference from the thick cloud cover was what prevented the spinners from working; they’d have to build communication towers.
On the third day, Aryan climbed the trail to see the erection of the prefabs. They had chosen a location for the settlement that was as protected as possible from the wind: To its south-east sat the crater, and to the north and west were mountains from where the river flowed – the river that did not provide safe drinking water. The flat was large enough to build a town.
It all looked like DJar, but Aryan was warned that things were not what they seemed: The low hanging clouds in the distance could be moisture, or something else. He was told to keep his hands off anything that looked like a blue coloured rock as they weren’t rocks at all and would burn his skin. If the fog sat low on the ground near the crater, it was better to wait; never walk into it. It not only clouded people’s vision, but also their minds.
“Some welcome,” he said to Maike.
She was as optimistic as Kalgar, proud to show him how many shelters already stood. “They’re happy to do some real work and not feel useless,” she said of the workers.
“I thought it was the prospect of having to do the dirty work that made them cause trouble?”
“Behind those dunes is the sea, do you want to take a walk?” she asked, indicatin
g the other side of the crater, and then continued to answer his question without waiting for a response to hers. “After Benjamar held his speech, it wasn’t so bad anymore. He more or less told them it was their choice, but those not wanting a part in the building would be stuck on SJilai for many stations. Besides, all work seems to be dirty work at the moment.”
Once they had passed the north of the crater, heading east, the ground changed from hardened soil to sand, but the sand was orange, which seemed to be the planet’s favourite colour. A low humming sound filled the air around them.
“It comes and goes, worse in some places,” Maike said, and kept walking. The dune was not as high as Aryan had feared and it was worth seeing the horizon over the vast expanse of red water.
Maike sat down in the sand. His legs more than thankful for that, Aryan followed her example and briefly enjoyed the normality of her initiating an amorous encounter, until she mentioned the difference between here and Dry Land: The memory of that first trip, when he had stumbled over the blobs, made him get back up – who knew what was under the sand here?
“Hey, why in such a hurry?”
“I’m not. Just prefer to stand,” he answered.
“I thought you’d have liked to be together. Didn’t you always say nature was the best place for love?”
Nature, yes! The parks on DJar, cleared of bugs. He shook the sand off his pants.
When she realized he wasn’t going to sit back down, Maike also got up, but her silence on the walk back told him she was annoyed. Well, so was Aryan – with himself.
He went back to the crater where Gabi and Sisi were preparing their lander for its flight back that evening. From now on, the descents and ascents would follow each other every SJilai day. Lisa had worked out the original schedule in SJilai time and the timedisks inside the landers were set to match that.