The Kanshou (Earthkeep)

by Sally Miller Gearhart

  Then Bosca laughed.

  Zude was vastly relieved. Heartily, she continued. "I have always been sort of spiritually incorrect. You know, always bored by meditation, always blocking the cosmic energy--"

  "Always kind," Bosca observed pointedly. Zude shot her a glance. "I didn't expect it," Bosca continued. When Zude frowned, Bosca swiveled her seat toward her. "I never expected a Magister to be kind."

  Magister Adverb was plainly disconcerted. Once more she sky-parkedthe ship over the ocean. She studied her guest. "Bosca," she said, "I'm uncomfortable with this whole conversation. For all kinds of reasons. But I'll try to hang with it because it's apparently important to you. And," she shrugged both hands into the air, "who knows? It may be important to me."

  "It is," Bosca said, her voice curtailing Zude's extravagant gesture. Zude froze. Bosca continued. "It is important to both of us." She held Zude's eyes.

  Intimacy flooded Zude's veins. Her palms were sweating. "Bosca, I'm--"

  "Zude." Bosca held up her hand. Then she dropped her eyes, as if all courage had failed her. Zude kept absolutely still. A breeze rocked the hovercraft, urging it out of its parked status. Automatically Zude steadied the steering orb.

  ThenBosca's voice lost any hint of hesitation. "Zude, I had no reason to come to Los Angeles. No purpose, I mean. It was a spontaneous decision if ever I made one. And now I know why I came." Zude said nothing. "Magister Adverb." Bosca turned her chair directly toward Zude's. As she did so, she gently pulled around Zude's swivel seat to face her own. "I came to ask," she said, "if I can be your friend." Before Zude could respond, Bosca elaborated. "Not your lover, and certainly not your co-worker, though there is some important work we have to do together. Not to intrude on any of your present relations. Just to be your friend."

  The hovercraft hovered. Zude sat flabbergasted.

  "Well," Bosca finished, matter-of-factly, "you can think about it." She sat back and smiled. "Will you tell me about this family of yours so I can at least call them by name when we meet?" She turned her chair forward again, toward the panorama of sea and sky. "They're all from Old Mexico?"

  Zude blinked. Deliberately she shifted her mind toward Bosca's change of subject. With only a little difficulty she found her voice and the hovercraft's forward impulse tab. "No," she said, "no, only Kayita. She left her brother leaning against a slot machine in Oaxaca sixty years ago. She's been looking for him ever since. Be ready to be quizzed."

  "Zude, I have been to Oaxaca only once in my life--"

  "It doesn't matter. What matters is that you're from Kayita's part of the world. You tell her about your home, about Tres Valles. That will be sufficient." Zude turned the cushcar toward land, explaining as they flew how her adopted family spanned four generations: Kayita the matriarch; Eva, her daughter who would soon be back in Australia for two more years; Ria, or Gabriella, the daughter of Eva who lived with Kayita and the children; and finally her chosen children, Regina and Enrique, and their one hundred cousins all of whom would undoubtedly greet Zude and Bosca when they arrived.

  They were approaching land and the cushcar was decelerating with gentle jerks when Zude broke off her narration. She turned to her companion.

  "What work do we have to do together, Bosca?"

  "Work that you will refuse at first," Bosca replied.

  "But only at first?"

  "Only at first."

  "Will you tell me what it is?"

  "Will you promise to consider doing it?"

  "I promise," Zude replied. "To consider it," she added hastily.

  Bosca looked straight ahead and spoke calmly. "I'm being told by my guides that I must show you the considerable extent and force of your psychic abilities."

  Zude guided the cushcar very carefully, revealing nothing of the flood of memories that filled her mind. Harsh accusations and bitter quarrels, fierce arguments and sweet reconciliations. Swirls of frustration and pain -- all of it set about by the words, over and over again: "Yes you can, Zude!" "No I can't, Bella-Belle, I can't do it!" "You mean you won't!"

  Magister Adverb had no intention at that moment of submitting to any psychic development program.

  She grunted in response to Bosca's announcement, then brought the cushcar over the beach, rocking her passenger a bit with the airjets' transition to the multicolored sands beneath them. She chose a route over smooth low grass that would allow them to sail at a height of about twenty feet. She locked into a free lane. "There," she said, pointing to a complex of low white buildings. "That's the South City Employment Center where Ria works. She's the daughter--"

  "The daughter of Eva," Bosca recited, "who works in Australia, and birthmother to Reggie and Enrique who have one hundred cousins."

  "Correct," said Zude, smiling in spite of herself.

  Bosca watched the Center flow by.

  When Zude dropped the cushcar in a whisper to the pad atop an adobe house, whoops of delight broke from the safety door, now open and expelling a herd of children onto the roof. They led Zude and Bosca to an old woman down in the patio who eyed them carefully before pointing to two chairs. "Good," she nodded. "Now you will say about Oaxaca."

  6 - Dicken - [2087 C.E.]

  We bind him hand and foot under an eyeless hood similar to our own masks, and drive him under dark skies to the deserted clearing in the high grove. He cries for mercy all the way, and his sweatsmell fouls the flex-wagon. Spread-eagled on the sacred ground he hears the litany of his deeds against women. Shaqya removes his hood and Rutana draws down the fire for the charging of the crystals. We chant our ritual-of–intent. I stand guard at a distance as my sisters begin their work.

  I hear only his screams.

  --Barya's Speaking from The Transcribed Tellings Of The Mothers's Resistance, August 14, 2087]

  The pavilion lesson with Aba's students had left Bess Dicken uncomfortabe in a part of herself that she did not wish to explore. Shaheed's desire to tame horses had reawakened her memory of the hut on the Jamaican mountainside where, when she was ten, Panzon Wundu had raped her and bludgeoned her mother. Accompanying the intertwining of the images of breaking horses and violating women, Shaheed's defiance still rang in her ears, "What will you do with people like me?"

  Typically, when she found herself this disturbed, Dicken would commit her body to programs of strenuous physical challenge in which she would outlift stevedores, outsplit woodwomen, outclimb professional sheer-scalers, or outdance dervishes. But that kind of chastening and clarifying was not available to her in this village by the Red Sea, and she entered the activities of the evening accompanied by an irritating frustration.

  Bess Dicken did not stand easily in second place, particularly to a woman so light-skinned, a woman so universally simpered after, as Jezebel. A fierce love of freedom shot through her days, legacy of her bearing motherwhose ancestors had been cimarrón or maroon, slaves who had fled both the Spanish and the English to live for centuries without recapture or interference in the mountains of Jamaica. Though she had lived in Birmingham since she was ten with her donor mother, Dicken had never lost the fire of that cimarrón heritage.

  Moreover, Dicken was no stranger to the dynamics of leadership and personal power, having headed up such bureaucratic agencies as the mill board of Nueva Tierra Norte's steel manufacture and, later, that same satrapy's Hemp Standardization Bureau. She had attracted Jez in the beginning not only with her grace and energy (and her dancing) but as well with her commitment to making global electronic communication an efficient, convenient, and non-intrusive reality. It was Bess Dicken who at that very moment held the unofficial but most widely trusted overview of Little Blue's every natural resource, and who carried in her head the one hundred complex compucodes that could locate in swift seconds the repositories of styrene in Akron, for example, or of ilmenite in Rostov.

  And yet, to the person of Jezebel Stronglaces, Dicken was glad to yield the conch, for Jez most clearly articulated Dicken's political purpose and fired her creative imag
ination. She understood that Jez looked upon her as her buffer zone of protective sensitivity as well as her love- and learn-together; Jez had assured her that Dicken read her health, her needs, and her desires in ways no other had ever done.

  Happily, Dicken's uneasiness subsided at the evening meal, when someone put a drum in her hands and urged her to join the village musicmakers. To appreciative clicks and applause, she also rendered her variations on seawomen's ballads and taught the group a hambone riff adaptable to any dactylic cadence.

  Jezebel made her contribution to the meal by instructing villagers in the fundamentals of breathshine. With her guidance, Zari created a low flicker of light in an idle glolobe with only her breath, her mind, and her tiny hands. When Dicken and Jez at last departed for their spin with Asir-By-The-Sea's sub-demesne web, the foodcave was alive with the efforts of adults and children alike to coax into life whatever inactive glolobes could be found.

  After the webspin, the visitors said reluctant farewells to Aba and the Asir websters. Jezebel was determined to fly that night across the desert's edge down to Brandnew Salalah in Oman. She and Dicken would ziprocket from there to Bombay where Central Webster Dhamni Diu Pradesh would host them for two days. They were readying their packs to the background of go-to-bed noises in the distant village when Dicken caught in her lover's voice the unmistakable edge of profound fatigue. Fatigue, when during these next weeks the two of them were bound for a gruelling tour of satrapy and demesne webs in all parts of the world.

  She moved behind her lover, slipped her arms around her waist, closed her eyes, and released a long sigh. She rested her chin on Jez's shoulder. "After we see Dhamni in Bombay, let's take some rest time, maybe only a day or two, before we see Thurlanki in Tabora."

  "Depends on how critical Dhamni thinks--"

  "Depends on how much you want to push that fatigue . . . maybe even risk one of your old seizures."

  Jez smiled. "What did you have in mind?"

  Dicken shifted her weight very slightly back and forth, from one foot to the other; Jez' enfolded body swayed with her. "When I was doing my field time with the Teakwood Searchers," Dicken said, "I met a Rememorante Afortunada who took me to a beach that was a combination playground and shrine. Over a hundred giant tortoise shells were there, just lying in the sun. Some were oiled and polished to preserve them; others had little temples built around them. Some were beaten up and worn down where children had scrambled in and out of them. One was completely covered with small gifts and notes. The notes said, 'Please come back,' or 'We didn't mean to hurt you,' or 'I think you are beautiful, Ms. Tortoise.'"

  Still holding Jez's hand, Dicken leaned against the room's makeshift table of crates and boards, then continued, speaking more and more slowly. "There they were, all those shells, empty of life since the day the big turtles died in them. We climbed up on top of some that had been stacked together, and the old woman spread out huge red palm leaves for us to sit on. She taught me how to play the zeze. It was the holiest place I've ever been in. I want to take you there."

  Jez stared at her lover. "Dicken," she said, framing the big face with her hands. "Where is this place? Is it near?"

  "Very near. It's Aldabra Island. In the Seychelles."

  "Right off the Tanzania coast. We'll go!" Dicken's face outshone the sun. "It's practically on our way back from Bombay."

  "And," Dicken grinned, "we have a nice out-of-the-way mud hut here, and a bright starry sky. I think we should stay here for the night. Fly out early tomorrow for Brandnew Salalah. We can still make Bombay by next day."

  With a deep laugh, Jez kicked her pack aside. Dicken gave an extinguishing tap to the glolobe, plunging the earthen room into blackness. Starlight from the open doorway gradually made visible the outlines of Jez's naked body. Dicken shed her caftan and trews, then drew her lover down to the pallet, laughing her own deep anticipation.

  In the affairs of bodily pleasure, Bess Dicken had made a goodly number of women happy; and a goodly number had made her happy as well. But nothing else ever gave Dicken the sheer joy she got from making love with Jezebel. In their best times together, they would arrive together at a "Crystal Gate," beyond which their loving was a highly conscious and mutual act, a place of tender and almost unbearable intimacy. Once entered, the Gate cast Dicken's softself into Jez's body and Jez's softselfinto Dicken's, so that each woman inhabited the extraordinary dual reality of being in every moment both toucher and the touched, both lover and the loved.

  Now, in the chill of a desert night, Dicken began the precious ritual of gliding toward the Gate and the softself exchange, discovering all over again every niche and plane of the bared body before her. She found a pocket of extra-fine brown hair just behind Jez's ear, noted a starboard list in the tissue of Jez's erect nipple, drew her tongue down an intercostal channel, and calculated in the back of her mind the probable moment of Jez's inevitable burst into full-body sweat.

  "Stop, love."

  At first Dicken ignored the whisper.

  Then it came again. "Dicken, stop a minute. Something's out of kilter."

  Bewildered, Dicken muttered, "Out of kilter?" Then she flared and pulled away from Jez. "Out of kilter!" She sat up.

  Jez lay looking up at her. "Clearly," she observed pointedly. Then she too sat upright. She rested her hand on Dicken's arm. "One of us is not all-present." She closed her eyes.

  All of Dicken's latent uneasiness from the schoolroom encounter rose up out of her pores. She held her hands over her ears.

  Jez slid behind her, her chin on Dicken's shoulder. "Let's just back off a minute." She settled herself against the wall and held out her arms, making a place in them exactly the size of Dicken's throbbing head.

  Dicken hesitated, then reluctantly stretched out again. She felt strong fingers massaging her scalp. When Jez pushed a stiff thumb into the tiny muscles that connected her skull to her neck, Dicken howled.

  "That's what you're blocking," Jez soothed her lover's brow even as she maintained pressure on the delicate spot.

  Dicken stiffened with a gasp. She felt her resistance ebbing away, and with it, her conscious control. A scent of bixin assailed her nose and a red crystalline liquid dripped from a bibcock by her pallet, staining her cotton skirt. The floor was wet and slippery with piles of annatto seed pulp. Through the half-open door a shaft of candlelight flickered and bounced.

  She was in the dye room -- asleep, or so her Momah thought. How could she sleep with the man yelling, with Momah's cries? It was Wundu again, back from the cockpits.

  Dicken crept to the door. Momah was lying on the floor among scattered dishes and pots. She held her arm over her face while Wundu kept hitting her with the flat of his hand.

  "What you gon do, fancy woe-manna? You gon calla kan-show? Huh?" He held her by her hair, jerking her whole body with his shaking of her head. "You gon make them take me 'way? What you gon do wi' me, woe-manna?" He brought his fist down from above, smashing against her temple.

  Dicken felt the shriek rise in her throat as she lunged across the room.

  "Bess, stay back!" her mother cried, staggering to her feet. "Get back, child!"

  Wundu turned his soggy face to Dicken as she flung herself on him. "Hah!" With one mighty backhand he sent Momah's thin frame sailing through the air, her head thudding into the corner of the stove. She fell limp. Then he turned his attention to the wild figure clinging to his neck, and clawing at his eyes.

  In a second Dicken was on the floor with his thick bulk holding her motionless, his rank rum breath hot on her face. She heaved and writhed,trying to find air, pushing at his eyes with her one free hand. Wundu snagged her fingers between his teeth, twisting his tongue around them, sucking and biting.

  Then he pinned her free arm and let his lips drag damply over her face. "Oh, Miss Prick Teaser, you gotta this coming oh, for so longa long time!" He shifted his weight to the side, puffing and grunting as he untied his belt with one hand and pulled one leg free of his pants, all the
while keeping her immobile with his chest and his other hand, his wet face next to hers.

  Dicken closed her eyes and screamed. She screamed with all the breath she could draw, with one long scream drowning his foul talk, his moist whispers, as he struggled with his clothes.

  "You wanna suck my cock, don you, don you Miss Tease?" She spat at him. He guffawed and wiped the spittle across her cheek, adding his own slobber as he reached her mouth and tried to pressure it open with his teeth and tongue. Dicken twisted her head away, her mouth a tight line. Wundu fumbled under her skirt, then with an angry jerk he tore her underwraps from her body. Dicken forced a curse through her raw throat. He was on her again, rocking and rubbing. She could feel his hand between their bodies massaging his cock. He panted, eyes closed, pushing faster and faster. "Oh, Miss Priss," he moaned, "you gon get oh sucha big meat! Gon fill you up, hard!"

  Dicken felt him spreading her legs with his own, his grunts louder now, his fingers sliding and poking into her vagina as if he were trying to widen the opening. When Wundu changed his body weight so his cock could fit between her legs, Dicken glimpsed the immensity of what was in store for her young body. She rebelled again, trying in vain to throw him. As she felt the blunt weapon at the edge of its intended sheath, she drew a long breath, stifled it, and sent her awareness out of her body, upward and out beyond the hut and the annatto trees, over the coconut groves, the streams, the vally sinks, up past green mountains and the eastern coast of the island.

  "Dicken!" Jez's voice rode the distant cloud cluster. "Come back to me!" Jez was rocking her, shaking her gently. Dicken swallowed; her throat was sore. Jez held her closer, humming a stilling chant into her ear. Dicken opened her eyes. She heard herself panting loudly.

  "Jez!" She clung to Jezebel, heaving and shaking with her own attempts at calm.

  "Dicken, my love." Jez hummed and held and chanted.

  When Dicken could speak, she gasped, "Wundu." Then, "Fucker!" Her rage still shook her.

  "I felt you leave your body," Jez said softly. "That's your block, when you dissociate."