Khe

by Razevich, Alexes

  “In the Before,” she says, “doumanas and males lived together. But in the chaos, the partnership shattered as each sex blamed the other for the problems. That’s when doumanas and males began to live apart, the way we do now.”

  My eyes ache from staring. Corentans are without faith, but I say what I know to be true. “The creator set the sexes apart. So we wouldn’t be distracted from our work.”

  Mees touches my neck. “What we believe is not always the way things are.”

  “What good can it do the Powers to keep the sexes apart,” I ask, and hear the anger in my voice. Not anger that we are apart. Anger that these doumanas make everything I believe into a lie.

  “In the Before,” Azlii says calmly, “doumanas and males were like a body’s two arms, working together to keep the world in harmony. When we began to live apart, we became a one-armed body, out of balance, less able to fight off an attacker. Can you think of a better way to control us than to push one half away from the other?”

  I am quiet, thinking over what she’s said.

  “Why did the Powers want to destroy our world?” I ask.

  “They didn’t,” Azlii says. “The chaos was simply the effect of their presence. They came, so they said, only to observe.”

  I’ve caught Azlii in a contradiction. “You said the Powers couldn’t be seen or heard. Then how did they make themselves known and speak with the sentients? Were there vision stages then?”

  Azlii tsks her tongue on the roof of her mouth. “When they wanted to, they had ways of making themselves known. The Powers communicated the way all sentients spoke to a differing type, by directing pulses of thought energy to the receiver. To the sentients, the Powers seemed to be directed energy. When they came to apologize for the chaos they’d caused, they were perceived as a shimmering in the air, something like a heat mirage. Their words weren’t felt like the usual quiet whisperings between the minds of sentients, but like a great wind or a thunderclap.”

  My head aches from trying to understand these strange ideas. I rub my neck. Azlii keeps talking.

  “The Powers told the sentients that they’d come to our world only to learn about it. They said they were sorry to have caused such disorder, but that what was done was done and could not be put back. The Powers said they would stay and observe what happened over the next few generations and then leave. They promised to do their best to cause no more unforeseen changes. It was all lies, of course.”

  “Lies only seen now, looking back?” I ask.

  Azlii shrugs. “I think that the sentients back then were so relieved to know what caused the chaos, and of more importance, to have order restored, that they likely would have granted the Powers anything they’d asked. To give the Powers their due, they upheld their promise for several generations. But over time, they began tinkering. Perhaps it was just their nature and they couldn’t help but ask themselves What if, and put things in motion to find the answer. Perhaps they’d meant all along to turn our world into a place to carry out their experiments. Whichever it was, they deliberately began to change the way we lived.”

  “How?” I ask.

  “They made deals with corenta guides, convincing them to give up the traveling life and live in klers or communes. In return, the guides gained total control over those living in their domain, became not guides but leaders.

  I think of Simanca. She was neither guide nor leader, but a whip driving us toward her own goals.

  Azlii lifts her glass and empties it in one swallow, tilting her head back to let the liquid drain down her throat. She sets the glass down gently, but her hand is squeezed tightly around it.

  “The Powers also convinced the commune and kler leaders to forbid anyone telling the hatchlings about life in the Before,” she says. “In one generation, all kler and commune dwellers lost the knowledge that they’d ever lived another way. In two generations, set-place life was accepted without question. This gave the Powers steady populations to study. They wanted their subjects to stay put during a life-span, not migrate across the planet, making them hard for the Powers to track.”

  “But there are still corentas,” I say.

  One spot on Azlii’s neck lights bright green with pride, then winks out. “Not everyone agreed to do the Powers’ bidding. We are the offspring of those who refused to give up their freedom.”

  I glance at Mees, Tanez, and Inra, and then at Larta. They are kler-dwellers, the offspring of those who agreed. As I am.

  “Why did the Powers let some stay in the corentas?” I ask. “It seems it would have suited them better to have everyone in a kler or commune.”

  “Corentas are useful. Once most of the soumyo had settled down, they needed a way for commune dwellers to get their goods to processing sites in the klers. Corentas provided the way. We became traders.”

  I think about all that Azlii has said. Thedra once said that most doumanas were like flocking birds—give us a leader and we’ll follow. I can understand why so many went peacefully to the klers and communes when the Powers asked them to. And I think that really, the way things are now isn’t so bad. If it wasn’t for the discovery of my ability, I’d have lived my whole life at Lunge and been happy.

  I tell Azlii this. She pulls herself up suddenly from her pillow and paces the room. Nervousness slides through my belly. I rub my neck and wait.

  Azlii sits back down. “I told you that the Powers seem unable to stop tinkering with our world. Once they’d gotten a society that suited them, they began changing the soumyo, tinkering here and there, looking for perfection. You are one of the results of their curiosity.”

  Her words are like a blow.

  “The Resonance restoration project?”

  Azlii nods. “They seem fascinated with our way of reproducing. In the klers and communes, doumanas are taught that reproducing is the most important deed we do, but it wasn’t always that way. In the Before, harmony of life was the goal. In the corentas, it still is. The Powers want more and more hatchlings—more victims for their tinkering.”

  “I wasn’t a victim,” I say. “I’m grateful to feel Resonance, however that happened.”

  “I can see why you would be,” Azlii says coolly. “But ask a babbler if she’s grateful for what was done to her.”

  I know the answer to that question.

  “Azlii, how do you know all this about the Powers and things that supposedly took place a long time ago?”

  She shrugs. “I’m corentan. We keep the history, passing the stories from generation to generation. Except for these doumanas here and the few others like them across the planet, only corentans, all corentans, know the truth of what happened. My community is old. We have structures that existed in the Before.”

  She says this last as if it means something special, but I can’t grasp the importance.

  “Our wall,” she says, “some of our buildings, were there, Khe. They witnessed it first-hand. Structures never forget anything.”

  Mees looks up. “Oh, dear me. I’ve been listening so hard that I forgot the hatchlings will be down soon for mid-day meal.” She pulls herself up from the pillow and strides across the room toward the cooking area. Inra gets up to help her. Pots clang. Chests open and close. The rest of us sit in silence.

  I turn to Azlii and fix her with a stare. “Who are you? You and the doumanas in this house? What are you after?”

  Leaning forward, Azlii spreads her hands on the table. “We believe the Powers have been here too long. Our aim is to destroy their hold on our world. We want you to help.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  To hear the creator’s song, quiet the rebellion in your heart.

  --The Rules of a Good Life

  My heart thumps in my breast, the sound growing so loud that the room echoes with it. Then I realize the thumping is in the stairwell off of the little communiteria.

  “The hatchlings are coming down,” Inra says over her shoulder. “Take Khe back to the sleep quarters. Mees and I will join you so
on.”

  Larta, Azlii, and I thread down the green-and-white hall. My chest feels tight, as though I’m underwater. We want you to help, Azlii said. They want me to drown with them.

  “Did you follow everything I told you?” Azlii asks when the door to the sleep quarters whooshes closed behind us. Azlii, Larta, and I stand just inside the door, as if each is waiting for another to go first.

  “The history, yes” I say. “But I don’t understand how doumanas can use pulses of energy to communicate with plants and beasts.”

  “Sending is much like using a firestarter,” Azlii says. She strides the short distance across the room and settles on the cot where I’d slept the night before. Larta remains standing just inside the doorway. “Instead of concentrating the electric energy of your body on the starter, you send the energy of your thoughts to another sentient. Learning to listen is harder. You have to accept the pulses being sent to you and know how to translate them. Plants and beasts don’t use words the way structures or we do. They send and receive thought energy as pictures. It can get a little confusing sometimes.”

  I sit on the other end of the cot. The sheet is dyed contentment green. It’s been a long time since I felt contented. “I don’t understand the idea of communicating with walls and structures at all.”

  Azlii frowns. “You must stop thinking that just because something is made of wood or bricks or stones and mortar that it’s not aware. Corentans learn to speak with all sentients almost as soon as we’re assigned to a community. My dwelling and I worked together to get it built, so that we were both pleased with the outcome.”

  The soft yellow-green of skepticism begins to light on my neck, but the memory of making the sled stops the color from blooming fully. I want to tell Azlii and Larta how the sled had seemed to talk, but worry if I do, they may decide I’m a babbler after all.

  “Can anyone talk with the sentients, or only corentans?”

  “I think any hatchling could learn to do it,” the corentan says. “Once she emerges, it seems to be too late. Inra can communicate a bit, but I think that’s because she’s an empath. Mees and Larta have tried. They’re useless.”

  I glance at Larta, who is still standing by the door. One of her spots fires orange, showing her embarrassment. I like and trust the guardian more for that emotion. She bends her knee and balances her foot against the wall.

  “I think Azlii and Inra hear what they want to hear,” Larta says. “They claim that everything in a corenta is sentient, but where’s the proof?”

  “Larta prides herself on doubting anything she can’t see, hear, touch, or smell,” Azlii says cheerfully, “though she believes in the creator and the Powers easily enough.”

  “Trah,” Larta says. “I don’t have to see them to see their effects, and that’s enough for me.”

  “Can you talk to this structure?” I ask the corentan.

  “I’ve tried,” Azlii says, “but the kler structures don’t respond. I hear them muttering to themselves, but I’ve never heard one speak to another. There seems to be something here that pains them. They grumble about being uncomfortable. I think that whatever hurts them also muddles their consciousness.”

  The more they talk, the more I feel at ease with these two. I want to trust them. Need to trust them.

  “When I was in the wilderness,” I say slowly, “I built a small sled to haul my goods. When it was about half done, I ate some wild fruit that made me sick. I fell into a delirium and dreamed the sled spoke to me, telling me how it wanted to be made. When I woke up, the sled was finished.”

  “What kind of fruit was it?” Larta asks, leaning forward from the wall.

  Talking sleds don’t seem to surprise her; it’s the fruit she’s interested in.

  “I don’t know what it’s called,” I say. “It was about the size of my fist, with an outer brown husk. The flesh was bluish-pink and creamy looking. At the center were five small white seeds in a star pattern. The bush it grew on was about waist high and had purple leaves.”

  “Aruna,” Larta says. “Aruna can have effects similar to villisity.”

  One of my spots flares an anxious blue-red. Marnka said it was villisity that made her lose her mind.

  “You were lucky to get away with nothing more than a dream,” Larta says. “Aruna can kill you.”

  I wipe my hands against the hip wrap Tanez provided and try not to look as frightened as I feel, though my neck spots betray me.

  “Trees don’t like to be cut down for nothing,” Azlii says. “It would have wanted you to make the best sled of it that you could. Maybe the mind-changing qualities of aruna opened your internal ear to the sentients around you.”

  Azlii is quiet a moment and then says, “Inra says that you’re an empath, too, but don’t know it. She says that if you let yourself, you’ll realize you’ve always known things that others didn’t.”

  My blood feels hot beneath my skin. “What kind of things?”

  Azlii shrugs. “Inra said to ask you about the preslets.”

  “I don’t like them very much.”

  Azlii says nothing. From the corner of my eye, I see Larta, her foot still braced against the wall behind her. She stares at nothing, as though not listening to Azlii and me. In the silence, I remember the preslet that Stoss offended and my insistence that she apologize. How could I have known the bird was offended and not merely surprised or frightened by Stoss’s sudden appearance? But I did know, as clearly as if it were a commune sister.

  I think about Azlii’s description of how to talk with other species. It’s not so different from how I did the growing. I spoke to the plants with thought energy, and it did often seem that they spoke back to me, throwing a picture into my mind of how big and strong they would become.

  “Are you an empath?” Azlii asks.

  My head aches as though a rope is being twisted around my forehead and pulled tight. I look at Azlii, but she seems far away and seen through a mist. My neck burns as all my spots flare greenish-blue with hope. Not my hope—Azlii’s.

  Blood pounds in my temples and my ear holes ache. It’s enough to have my own emotions. I don’t want to know what others feel. My temperature drops. I feel as cold as snow. My breath comes in short gasps. I try to breathe the way Tav taught me to calm myself, but can’t.

  The door whooshes open. Inra rushes to me, shoves Azlii aside and wraps her arms around me.

  I lean against her but can’t slow my breath. The air feels like embers scalding my throat and lungs.

  “Don’t fight,” Inra says. “Close your eyes. Put your heels flat on the floor and your arms over your head. Good. You’re doing well. Now slowly blow out your breath.”

  I do as she tells me. My heart slows its frantic beating. When I open my eyes, I feel oddly refreshed.

  Inra glares at Azlii. “You should have waited.”

  Azlii shrugs. “For what? The next Commemoration Day, for Khe to gain her thirty-fifth spot?”

  “Until I could have been here with her,” Inra says.

  Azlii tsks. “Khe chose the moment, not me.”

  A tremendous energy rages in me, like the need to move that I’d felt at Morvat Research Center after my surgery. The air seems alive, electric. I have the crazy thought that if I concentrated, I could see through the walls. I jump to my feet and stalk the room. I feel Inra’s concern for me, Azlii’s confidence in herself, and Larta’s interest, but knowing their emotions no longer hurts. I feel their deeper emotions as well, the forces that push them to rid the world of the Powers. Azlii feels like anger, Larta of humiliation, and Inra of grief. I feel their care about me, their desires for me to be safe and well.

  “Sit down,” Azlii says sharply.

  I stop and stare at her, but I don’t sit. How can I sit with this energy rushing through me?

  “Please, Khe,” Inra says. “You’ll make yourself sick this way. You need to control what you’re feeling.”

  “Sit down,” Azlii says again, “and get your feet up f
rom the floor.”

  I do sit then, pulling my feet up and sitting cross-legged. The careening energy in me seems to die down to a hum. I feel warm and strangely peaceful, given all that I’ve heard and experienced in this dwelling. My mind feels clear, my thoughts as sharp as broken glass.

  I look at Azlii. “You think I have something you want.”

  Azlii rubs her chin, thinking, before she speaks. “We’ve known for a while that some of the doumanas in the Resonance restoration project had shown new talents after their surgery.”

  I’d known this, too. Pradat had told me.

  “We’d hoped,” Azlii says, “That one of these doumanas would come forward and tell her tale. But all the doumanas we’d heard about, the new talents drove them mad.”

  Like the one Pradat said heard the future in the wind?

  Like me, eventually? Is that what this sudden blast of energy means—that I’m becoming a babbler?

  Inra takes my hands in hers. “You’ve passed the crisis time. If you were going to go insane, it would have happened years ago.”

  I let out the breath I’d been holding. “Where are these changed doumanas now?”

  “They were in the research centers at first,” Azlii says. “Perhaps they are with the Powers now. We think that they are probably Returned.”

  My anger burns like a light through the fog. Those doumanas wanted what I did, to feel Resonance, to find a mate and lay their egg. And went mad in the pursuit.

  “Khe,” Azlii says, “we have the same enemy.” She leans close and whispers, “Join us.”

  “And do what?”

  Her mouth crinkles in a grin, which disappears as fast as it had come, as if satisfaction is not an emotion she allows herself to feel for long.

  “We will tell your story across the planet. When the soumyo see what the Powers’ tinkering has brought, they will rise up against them.”

  I blow out a breath. “Rise up how?”

  “By refusal,” Azlii says. “Once the truth is known, the orindles will refuse to continue torturing their sisters in the Powers’ experiments. Commune and kler leaders will refuse to send their doumanas to the research centers. If the Powers try to take someone by force, all her sisters will stand with her and defend her. If the Powers ask for beasts or plants, we will refuse them that. We will reject them again and again, until they see their defeat and go.”