“Little cat, little cat,” said Duncan. “What did you say?”
But there came no reply other than the crunch of a chicken bone.
Introduction to “In the Matter of the Ukdena”
“In the Matter of the Ukdena” was reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror as a fantasy story, but in spite of the magical beings that play a pivotal role, I think this story is closer to science fiction. It is alternate history. What if the natives of North America had been given a little more time to develop insistence to European diseases and European aggression? What if, rather than a conquest, there had been more of a blending of cultures on this continent?
In the Matter of the Ukdena
Spiral Mind turns in on itself,
thinking about the story
of its own nature.
There are many versions
of the story Spiral Mind
is thinking.
Here is one.
Of course, the story can’t begin
until there is a universe to contain it.
Spiral Mind says,
Manifestation began in formlessness.
That’s how the story gets started,
with the making of a place,
a sky above.
This story begins in the time
when everyone lived in the sky.
Spiral Mind names this time
The First World of the original era.
Clearly, geography is destiny, and a rivalry between the Superpowers was clear as far back as 1850 when Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that he foresaw the development of two principal powers in the world: Imperial Russia, and the United Nations of Turtle Island. “Both countries control an abundance of natural resources,” de Tocqueville wrote after his visit to North America, “but the exploitation of those resources is a matter of command in Russia. In the United Nations, the use of resources is controlled by democratic forces and elaborate religious restraints.”
It was crowded in the sky.
The human beings, the spirits, the gods,
the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds,
people with wings like Eagle
and the crawling people like Ant
and the digging people like Badger
and swimmers like Box Turtle,
the grasses and trees,
even the stone people
all crowded in
together.
Aluminum extraction relies on a process devised simultaneously by Charles Martin Hall in the U.N.T.I. and Paul Héroult in France. In this process, alumina (aluminum oxide) is dissolved in molten cryolite and electric current is passed through the solution. At the cathode, metallic aluminum is liberated while oxygen collects at the anode. For the sake of clarity, this chapter will concentrate entirely on the technical aspects of the process. Spiritual considerations on the extraction of metals from the earth, our mother, will be covered in the chapter to follow.
Water Beetle came down to look around
before there was any land.
He dove under the waves
and surfaced with mud
in his jaws.
The Creator Spirits
rolled the mud in their hands.
It grew. It became islands.
Everyone came down.
The human beings came down.
They were red and brown and black,
they were white and yellow,
and they started in their own places,
but did not stay there.
They spread themselves out
as far as possible.
Wherever they were,
they walked until oceans stopped them.
Even back when this
world was new,
that’s how
they were.
That’s how
human beings
have always been.
Aroism (from Spanish, aro, hoop), European term for the plurality of religious beliefs and practices to which the vast majority of North Americans adhere. Arising initially as a synthesis of indigenous beliefs and the religions brought to the Americas by Europeans, Aroism has developed in syncretism with the religious and cultural evolution of the hemisphere. Aroist belief is generally characterized by sacralization of all phenomena, but special emphasis is given to particular sacred locales and to Mother Earth in general. Similar in some aspects to Animism, Aroism calls upon believers to communicate with the natural world as they interact with it so that their actions may be in harmony with the natural order. As Western technological practices such as mining and deep-furrow agriculture were introduced, Aroist beliefs evolved to allow for resource exploitation consistent with sacred regard for the earth. Most Aroists adhere to traditions of Vision Quest, Ritual Purification and, for women, Moon Lodge.
The white tribes
on their part of the world
were as varied as any people,
but there were some things
most of them believed.
“I’ll tell you,” said the keynote speaker at the Conference for Spiritual History, “what the white nations of Europe believed. They believed that children were little bags of sin to be redeemed by beatings. They believed in the authority of a God King, in the authority of human kings, in the authority of men over women.”
The white tribes believed in a universe divided
between good and evil,
in a world that was theirs to master
if they could only destroy enough
of the evil.
Don’t get the idea
that these people were creatures of darkness.
Any human being can carry light.
From: V. Adm. David Many Bears
Fleet Operations
To: Capt. Henry Jefferson
U.N.S. Nimitz
Hank, this is going to come down to you through channels, but before it does I wanted you to have some advance notice of the new policy regarding Navy fighter jets for use in vision quests. NAFCOM acknowledges the right of pilots and their RIOs to use any means at their disposal to seek a vision, but loss of an Ukdena in the Sixth Fleet’s carrier group has lead us to formulate what you might call Rules of Engagement with the Great Mystery.
The F-4 Ukdena is rated at a service ceiling of 43,000 at power, but the crew of the Sixth Fleet mishap had throttled up hard and gone to 56,000.
Hank, you and I both know how imminent the Great Mystery must be at ten miles above the earth, but we also know that this was a thousand feet above the fleet-configured F-4’s maximum rating. A pilot in combat won’t make a mistake like that, but a pilot who’s flying into the sun can get a little lost up there.
From now on, each crew is allowed one official quest flight per deployment, and they aren’t to climb above the military-power service ceiling. I know that there will be some grumbling about this, and I know that there will be covert questing beyond what we’re officially sanctioning, but this will at least make it clear that the pain of the sundance is meant for the body, not the airframe of a fighter plane.
The red tribes
on this Turtle Island
were as varied as any people,
but most of them tried to discover
right relation to one another
and to the earth.
The red tribes believed in
the spiral,
the circle,
and everything
was alive.
Don’t get the idea
that these people were flames of enlightenment.
Any human being drags a shadow.
Sequoyah, 1766-1843, Tsalagi. First president of the U.N.T.I., commander in chief of the Continental Army in the War of Union, called the Father of His Country. He created a syllabary for the Tsalagi language, based on the characters he saw for English and Spanish writing, providing the model for the Universal Writing System.
New Etowah, capital of the U.N.T.I., co-extensive with the District of Sequoyah.
&nb
sp; Andrew Jackson, 1767-1832. White separatist leader. After his defeat by units of the Creek Nation in the battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson escaped and continued to lead Europeans opposed to national assimilation. Convinced that his vision of a European-dominated culture could take root in the west, he led his erstwhile followers on an ill-fated forced march. See Trail of Tears.
In those times
before the white people came to Turtle Island
the Tsalagi, the Principal People,
lived in the mountains
that were at the middle of the earth.
They wanted
peace at the center of all things.
At the center of all things,
harmony.
Late in the last year of the eleventh heaven,
seven generations before the first hell
of the Fifth World,
the days and nights came into
balance
and the cornstalks grew heavy
with grain,
so the Principal People began the Green Corn Ceremony
that would preserve harmony for all beings.
In the council houses of many villages,
the Tsalagi danced and made offerings
to the sacred fire.
In the rivers
they bathed seven times
for purity
and held rituals
to turn aside any anger
left over
from the year they were about to finish.
“What can we reliably say about Spiritual History in pre-literate times?” said the keynote speaker. “To a large extent, we must rely upon the oral tradition. Spiral-thought does not record events with the same emphasis that Arrow-thought does, of course, so we do not remember the details of the political discussions, the names, dates, and exact locations of the debates. But we know, generally, what was decided in the matter of the Ukdena, and we know that it was probably decided in Green Corn time. To this day, that remains the best time for establishing national policy.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Before he went to sleep after the fifth day of deliberations. Walks the River made an offering of cedar smoke to the four directions, to heaven, and to earth. The open eaves of his wife’s summer house let the smoke drift away, but the scent remained behind to clear his thoughts and purify his dreams. Though the fire was low, he could see that his wife was watching him with the same expression she had worn during the council, a mixture of discomfort and expectation. There might have been impatience in that gaze, too, except that she was an old Tsalagi woman, a Bird clan woman. She knew how to master herself. She knew how to turn impatience aside, for the sake of harmony.
Silently, Walks the River asked for dreams that would help him carry light. Then, with limbs stiffened by the chill air, he lay down beside his wife.
“It has been five days,” she said. She said it gently, sleepily, as if in answer to a question.
“Yes,” he said, keeping his voice level. “I have counted them, too.”
If she divorced him, he could always go live in his sister’s house. It pained him to think such a thought, and he doubted that his wife would turn him out, but who would blame her if she did? What was worse than for a man to seem stubborn and argumentative at the holiest time of the year?
He waited, but she said nothing more. Soon she was breathing the breath of sleep. He heard one of his daughters whisper to her husband in a far corner of the lodge, and an ember popped in the fire.
Give me a dream, he prayed again. Let me see them in my dream.
And then he let the night sounds carry him, the sounds of dark water in the river and wind moving through the trees. Those sounds were still in his ears when he crossed into the dream side of the world and found himself standing on an unfamiliar mountain’s grassy bald. Around him were other mountains, covered with fir and spruce. He raised his hands into the dream sky, asking for bountiful life, a prayer for his arrival.
Light dazzled him. Something huge was there in front of him, making the air near him hiss with its passing, and then it was far away. It moved partly in the air and partly along a mountain ridge, making the trees sway. He wanted to see it clearly, but it was not a thing the eyes could easily hold.
“Ukdena,” he said.
“Ukdena,” he prayed.
The presence swirled high into the air. It was not one being, but a group. They twisted and twined together, parted, and rushed together again. They moved from one side of the sky to the other. Walks the River squinted.
Their scales flashed like facets of crystal. Their bodies were long, sinuous, humping and curving as though even in the sky they had to follow the lines of the mountain ridges below. Once, he thought he caught a glimpse of transparent wings, and for a moment there seemed to be an eye that gazed at him, cold and brilliant.
For a long time he dreamed this dream. Claws. They had terrible claws, glittering like ice, opening and closing on the wind.
“What do you want us to do?” he asked them. “What do you want?” They danced their dance and glittered and burst into flames that didn’t harm them. They roared like a forest on fire.
When he awoke, he was careful not to move. That way he could hold the memory a little longer. Then at last he sat up, filled with sadness because he was more firmly trapped than ever. This would be the sixth day of council, but the dream had only strengthened his resolve. He rose quietly and dressed, slipping out of his wife’s house before she and her daughters could wake up to repeatedly ask no one in particular when the council would be over.
He went to watch the river. There was, as far as he could see, no right way to act. If he continued to argue, he brought discord into the council house. If he withdrew, he betrayed both the Ukdena and his own heart.
Of course, if he no longer had the support of his clan, then the matter would come to an end. What mattered was not his opinion, but the consensus of the village’s Wild Potato clan. Perhaps his people could no longer bear the shame of contentious words spoken in their name.
He went to his sister’s lodge to eat breakfast, rather than returning to the Bird clan household of his wife, and then he began to test the opinions of his people. His sister and her grown daughters supported him, but there was certainly more to the clan than his closest family.
He greeted White Clay Woman by the doorway of her house, working in the morning light.
“Good day, Beloved Man,” she answered as she sewed feathers onto her new cape. At her feet were songbirds, not yet plucked of feathers for the cape’s fringe. “Has your heart changed in the night?”
“No,” he told her. “But I am afraid that it is time for us to withdraw.”
“Is that what your dreams told you?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Then speak your heart,” White Clay Woman told him. “I am with you.”
Eye Covered, who was guarding her corn from crows, said she had no opinion and just kept asking Walks the River to bring her water to drink, or to watch the field while she fetched it herself. He brought her water, and then she told him he should follow his heart in the matter of the Ukdena. He asked her again, just to be sure she was not merely being polite. “What do your dreams say?” she said.
With the men who were catching fish, it was the same. Walks the River watched them dam the fishing stream, and then a man named Runner threw ground horse chestnuts into the shadowed pools of still water where the fish hid themselves.
“The other clans are in agreement,” Walks the River said. “We are the only holdouts. I begin to feel that we are not behaving well.”
The men waiting for the fish asked him if his dreams had changed, and he said again that they had not.
“Every night,” one young man said as he stirred the water, “I pray for all my relations. The Ukdena, too, are my relations.”
The first of the paralyzed fish floated to the surface. The young men began to choose the ones they wanted and loaded them into baskets. Soo
n they had all they wanted.
Walks the River looked through the foliage, seeing light from the ridge line glint between the trees. He had never seen the Ukdena in the waking world, but the priests saw them all the time. “The Ukdena are our relations,” he agreed. “But I will not shame the clan.”
“Do not stand aside until you are almost moved to anger,” advised Runner. “We are all of one heart. The Ukdena should be maintained.” He opened the dam, and fresh water rushed into the pools. The remaining fish soon recovered and dove back down into the deeper water.
“People think impatient thoughts,” Walks the River said.
“As long as you do not become angry,” another man said, “there is only a little shame. We can bear it.”
So it was that on the sixth day of the council Walks the River sat in the circle of seven Beloved Men with his resolve unbent. Behind him sat the people of the Wild Potato clan, and he could feel their support still flowing to him, even in the face of unified opposition.
In the center of the circle of Beloved Men stood the principal priest, the second priest, and Red Fox, who was the secular officer.
As if he had not already put the question to them a score of times already, the principal priest said, “In the matter of the Ukdena and a third priest, how are we resolved?”
“As we have heard,” said Woods Burning, the Beloved Man of the Deer clan, “The Ukdena are growing fewer.” He looked at Walks the River and the Wild Potato clan behind him. “We acknowledge that this is true. And fewer priests train to control the energies of the Ukdena. That also is true. But is this bad? The Ukdena are dangerous, so it is a good thing that there are fewer of them. And since there are fewer of them, we need fewer priests to control them. Therefore, in the matter of a third priest for the village who would learn the ways of the Ukdena and carry the objects that control them, let it be resolved that we shall not support such a priest. We have two priests already. That is enough.”
The other Beloved Men spoke in turn. For the Wolf clan and the Long Hair clan, they spoke. For the Paint clan and the Blue clan and the Bird clan. All agreed that the village would not support a third priest, that maintaining the Ukdena was too costly a task for a village of their size to take on.
Thirteen Ways to Water Page 13