Children of the Divide

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  “How’s dinner coming along?” Theresa asked.

  “The kujin is going to be dry and he’s overcooking the yulka bean pudding again.”

  “Yes, well, it’s tricky to hit yulka’s sweet spot for everyone. Your father’s first experience with it was… memorable.”

  “He threw up on Chief Tuko.”

  “Near Chief Tuko,” zer mother corrected.

  “That’s not how the people in G’tel tell it,” Benexx said.

  “Stories tend to grow in the telling,” Theresa said gently. “Be nice, Benexx. Your father is working very hard on this. It means a lot to him.”

  Benexx rolled zer eyes. It seemed to come naturally to zer, even if ze had discovered just how human a gesture it was during zer first summer in G’tel. Theresa saw, but studiously ignored it in favor of pushing the conversation forward. “So, how’s Sakiko? Did you two have a chance to catch up?”

  “I guess. She’s sounding more and more like Uncle Kexx every day.”

  “Well, she is taking over zer job in a few years.”

  “I know, I just miss the way it used to be.”

  “We all do, sweetie. That’s part of growing up. What would she say?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Who would Sakiko say you’re sounding more like?”

  Benexx paused, unexpectedly thrown out of zer train of thought. “Um, I don’t know.”

  “I’m sure you could think of something,” Theresa pressed. “Just try to see things from her point of view.”

  “Food’s on! Come and get it!” zer father announced, saving zer from answering the question. Ze and Theresa stood from the couch and moved to the table at the back of the family room that served as the dining area. The table was more accustomed to bearing clutter than food, but again, zer father was making a show of them eating tonight’s meal together, as a family.

  He brought out the first course; mashed fenta root served on Cuut’s tentacle vine leaves. The silverware remained in the drawer. Traditional Atlantian dishes were eaten with bare fingers, as they were the first part of the body to experience the food, checking it for toxins, impurities, ripeness, or proper cooking before the more sensitive taste buds in their mouth explored the full bouquet.

  What Benexx’s fingers tasted made zer rather wish for a fork. Ze reached across the table for the salt and applied it liberally. Atlantians descended from an aquatic, invertebrate ancestor that had been the first to leave the ocean behind. They could still drink seawater straight, having never lost the use of the small filtering organs in their ears. Benexx could afford to drown out the bitter fenta until the salt overwhelmed everything else.

  “How’s the root?” Bryan asked.

  “It’s fine, dad. Just a little bland,” ze said.

  “Never ceases to amaze me how much salt you can put on everything. If I took in that much sodium, I’d stroke out in a week.”

  Benexx sat and quietly chewed on tough fenta. The trick was to soak it for a day in a brine of kuka juice before mashing the roots, although here in Shambhala many chefs had taken to using lime juice, which was just as effective at breaking down the tough cellular walls of the husks, but imparted a unique flavor humans found more agreeable.

  But Bryan apparently didn’t know this and tried to overcome the problem by simply beating the roots into submission with a potato masher, and eventually a meat tenderizer. Zer father was not a subtle man.

  “So, how was your summer vacation?” Bryan asked, testing the waters between them.

  “It was fine,” Benexx said between mouthfuls of fenta. “We tracked the dux’ah migration for almost a week, most of the way to Xekallum. Then we spent a few days on Lake Tumlac. I caught a xezer fish. Well, actually,” Benexx laughed at the memory, “it caught my foot, thinking my toes were bait worms. I just squealed and pulled it out of the water. Sakiko caught it as it flopped around on the beach. We laughed and laughed until Uncle Kexx told us to let the poor creature go back to its home.”

  “That sounds hilarious,” zer mother said. “Did you get any of that recorded?”

  Benexx shook zer head. “Sorry, mama, but I was too caught up in the moment. Besides, it’s not like Lake Tumlac has a repeater tower.”

  “Not yet,” Bryan conceded. “But it’s in the queue.”

  Benexx sighed without even trying to hide it. “Everything is ‘in the queue,’ especially on Atlantis.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means Shambhala gets first priority in the manufacturing queue and everyone knows it, dad. And only certain parts of Shambhala, at that.”

  “That’s not fair, Benexx,” zer mother said. “The Ark’s factories are running at full capacity and have been for fifteen years.”

  “Sure, on vanity projects like the Alcubierre drive prototype and the telescope network,” Benexx said, zer mouth full of bitter junma flowers. “Meanwhile, the road network is still using dux’ah drawn carts for the majority of their trade.”

  “The Early Warning network is not a ‘vanity project,’” Bryan replied. “How are we supposed to know if another attack is coming without it?”

  “So what if one is?” Benexx said. “It’s not like we can all hop back aboard the Ark and hike on out to the next solar system. Even if you believe the stories.”

  “Stories?” Bryan said more quietly.

  “Well, yeah. Not everybody believes the Nibiru legend, you know.”

  “It’s not a legend, Benexx. It’s our history. Somebody threw a black hole at us, and there’s no telling if or when they’re going to do it again.”

  “You know how crazy that sounds, right? Most Atlantians don’t even understand the concept of a black hole, much less how anyone could throw them around space. Hell, you don’t have a proper explanation for how that’s even possible.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re buying into some wild conspiracy theory about Nibiru never existing.”

  “No,” Benexx insisted. “But it doesn’t matter what I believe, does it? These are the questions being asked over there. And here, for that matter.”

  “You mean in the Native Quarter?” zer mother asked. “Is this what your students are asking?”

  “Some of them. They don’t know what to believe. But they see how long it takes to get anything done on their street, and keep getting told about all these amazing things we’re building up in orbit that they’ll never use. It’s easy for resentment to build up when your house has been waiting for running water for two years and keeps getting pushed down the priority list so that the humans can build telescopes to look for something that you say can’t be seen in the first place.”

  “It’s a lot more complicated than that.”

  “I know that, dad, but they don’t. Not having to carry a couple of buckets of water back to their houses every morning before they go work all day in the fields is an immediate benefit that they can understand. What am I supposed to say to them?”

  “The truth,” zer father said. “That we’re working as fast as we can, and that there’s good reasons why we’re prioritizing the projects we are.”

  “Daddy knows best,” Benexx said, then pushed back from the table. “I’m going for a walk.”

  “But we haven’t even gotten to the dux’ah tenderloins yet,” Bryan protested. “Is there something wrong with the food?”

  “No, dad, your food is fine. I’m still a little airsick from the flight home.”

  Theresa gave zer a look that said she recognized the lie for the polite fiction that it was, but zer father continued on, oblivious. Really, it was hard to believe that he’d ever been a detective.

  “Oh, well OK then. I can whip up something quick to settle your stomach.”

  “It’s fine, dad,” ze called over zer shoulder. “I just need some fresh air.”

  “Be home before ten,” zer mother said as ze reached the door.

  Dammit, Benexx thought, zer hopes of a curfew-free night dashed at the last possible moment. �
�Of course, mom,” ze said instead as ze closed the door. Benexx stood under the awning covering the home’s front door and sighed.

  Feeling adrift, ze picked a direction and started walking. Where wasn’t important, just so long as it put literal distance between zer and the house that ze felt increasingly distant from. Ze chose left, towards the Museum district. The Native quarter was to zer right, and ze would be spending plenty enough time there in the coming months as ze returned to tutoring the kids there. Besides, ze craved human junk food.

  Zer feet carried zer down the street as the sun faded and the solar lamps warmed up to take over the important work of illuminating the way home for the evening’s drunks in a few hours, human and Atlantian alike. Inebriation knew no bounds in Shambhala, or stigma. Only the chemicals necessary to induce the high varied between the species. Alcohol had little effect on Atlantians beyond a slight dulling of their natural bioluminescence, while the drinks made from fermented bak’ri mushrooms were a lethal poison to humans. Of course, so was alcohol, but bak’ri lacked any of the more desirable side effects prior to killing the victim, either in hours or decades.

  Bak’ri was a mild aphrodisiac back on Atlantis where users would simply chew the dried fungus tips. But here in Shambhala, human chemistry and Atlantian vice had conspired to concentrate and distill it into a potent drug that was causing all kinds of problems for the population of the native quarter, which is why Benexx avoided it entirely.

  With the summer sun fading, ze only had a couple of free hours to spend before ten o’clock rolled around. Ze thought about calling a pod, but decided to just let zer feet carry zer deeper into the city. Soon, the Beehive was off to zer right, still buzzing with activity despite the late hour. The gears of government ground inexorably onward, even if no one outside its walls could tell the difference.

  Ze turned left when ze reached the museum, closed for the night so the interns could wipe away all the snotty nose and fingerprint smudges school kids had left on the display glass and clean and restock the bathrooms for the following day’s visitors.

  At least that had been Benexx’s experience. What the curator and her handful of employees did while the interns toiled, ze couldn’t say. Ze’d been under the not-so-tender loving care of Devorah Feynman in her last year as curator. Benexx had rather liked the cantankerous old woman, but the other interns were absolutely terrified of her, as were a healthy percentage of her actual employees. Still, in her last few years, Devorah had worked hard to negotiate and trade for ethically collected items from Atlantis to showcase in a new wing of the museum. She’d even successfully negotiated with Chief Kuul to open a satellite museum in G’tel to showcase humanity’s past to curious Atlantians.

  When pressed by the budget committee chairman to justify the costs of her pet project, she’d famously said, “Well how the hell are we supposed to move forward together if we don’t know where we’re starting from?”

  She’d also instituted a policy of recruiting half of the museum’s interns from the city’s Atlantian population. For someone always looking back, Devorah could be surprisingly forward-thinking.

  Benexx turned away from the museum and headed down the Golden Mile, as the boulevard of shops, cafés, and pubs was called. In truth, it was scarcely a quarter mile long and held very little gold. What it held instead was hundreds of humans and Atlantians scurrying about the dozens of storefronts, vendor stalls, and even food carts, either to shop, sit down for a relaxing dinner with friends or partners, or just to grab a quick kabob on their way back home from a long day of work.

  Soon, the Atlantians would thin out as the sun set and the day’s heat began to leech from their bodies, although even that was beginning to change. Atlantians traditionally wore very little in the way of clothing, both because their homeland was subtropical and the cold was seldom an issue, and because their skinglow was such an integral part of their language.

  Among the younger adults in Shambhala however, it had become trendy to wear human clothes tailored for their svelte shape. The jumpsuits helped them retain the heat of the day deeper into the night so they could stay out eating, socializing, and yes, drinking with their human friends, even if none of them were old enough to do so legally.

  Their language had changed as a result. They learned Atlantian at home, English in the classroom, and Mandarin curses in the streets. Like Benexx zerself, few of them even bothered learning the skinglow part of their language, a trend the wearing of clothes had only accelerated. The Atlantians of Shambhala were fast becoming their own distinct society, as different from their people living in G’tel or Pukal as they were from the humans living across the street.

  But it was a rudderless society, trying to navigate the transition without guidance or direction, partly because no one had traveled their path before, but even more distressingly because the city had a severe shortage of elders to watch over the flock.

  And while this shortage was perhaps less of a problem than it could have been because of the Atlantian tradition of a more community approach to child-rearing than practiced by humans, it still left a lot of young adults without enough direct supervision, which meant delinquency, vandalism, fights, and–

  “Hey baby, you got a curvy back. Want me to fill it up?”

  –street harassment.

  “You’ll need to find an elder desperate enough to rub wrists with, dux’ah shit,” Benexx shouted back reflexively without even looking over zer shoulder to see which infantile jackass had said it.

  Zer retort was met with a chorus of oohs, daayms, and frosteds from the offender’s little posse of friends. Benexx glanced back just long enough to see them mocking zer by rubbing their wrists together in zer direction, the Atlantian gesture for masturbation. Everyone loitering around the café table laughed freely. Everyone, that is, except the harasser who Benexx had burned up like a meteorite.

  Zer harasser, unable to handle or contain zer embarrassment, jumped up out of zer chair and stalked off towards Benexx as ze calmly walked down the boulevard. Ze reached out a four-fingered hand, slapped it down on Benexx’s shoulder, and let the thousands of tiny suckers coating it adhere to Benexx’s skin like glue.

  Ze spun Benexx around to face zer straight on. Benexx recognized zer then. Jolk. Ze was one of the oldest of Shambhala’s Atlantians, besides Benexx zerself who had been the very first. But Benexx was a bearer. Zer body had developed fast, but tapered off while the other children kept growing right on through their first transition. Jolk was almost a full head taller than zer, and stronger.

  Benexx laughed anyway.

  “What’s so funny, changfu?”

  “Oh, so not wanting your larvae wriggling around in my back makes me a changfu? I think you’ve got that backwards, loser.”

  The skin on Jolk’s face flickered and darkened in anger. “The only thing I’m going to have backwards is you bent over that table,” ze said, dripping with a repulsive mix of false machismo and bruised ego.

  Benexx kept smiling. “You’ll need to be fast, then.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to–”

  A hand came down on Jolk’s shoulder, a human hand. Unlike the modified tentacles gripping Benexx’s shoulder, this hand drew its strength from sinuous tendons leading to muscles in a bulging forearm. Humans made up for their lack of suckers through sheer, crushing grip strength. Strength that clamped down on Jolk’s shoulder like a vice. Atlantian bodies lacked the calcified bones of humans, and therefore lacked their “pressure points”. But what Atlantians did have was a decentralized nervous system that extended out from the brain and main spinal trunks to each of their four limbs. These limbs operated under a great deal of local control, to the point that, if severed in combat, an arm would continue to choke its enemy until the oxygen in its muscles burned up.

  However, while this system held distinct advantages for the practiced and educated few, it also held a severe disadvantage. Namely, if you knew exactly where to press, the neurons trying to coordinat
e between the brain and the peripheral nervous system would fall into a paralyzing, and exceedingly uncomfortable, feedback loop.

  Which is how, despite being almost twenty centimeters shorter than the Atlantian, Korolev brought Jolk to zer knees with no apparent effort.

  “Is there a problem here, Benexx?” Korolev asked his best friend’s adoptive child.

  Benexx looked down at zer harasser. “No problem, uncle. Jolk here was just making me laugh.” Ze didn’t bother trying to hide zer distain. But, the lesson had been taught. Letting it linger served no purpose. “Let zer up.”

  Korolev nodded and released his hand.

  Jolk shot up, rubbing zer shoulder. “Not fair shorting someone out from behind like that. No honor in it, ruleman.”

  “Ruleman” was a contraction of “rule” and “human,” an insult the Atlantians threw at Shambhala’s constables and soldiers, the ones they didn’t think earned the respect of the title “truth-digger.” All were equal under the law in Shambhala, which made no distinctions between human and Atlantian. But the constable force was primarily human, which had led to tensions and accusations of racial bias more than once.

  Korolev shrugged. “Like how you threatened to take my friend from behind, big guy?”

  “We were just playing around, ruleman. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Oh, I think I understand just fine, Jolk, was it?” He leaned in until his chest was almost touching Jolk’s. “And anytime you feel like ‘just playing around,’ you come find me.”

  Despite his smaller size, the implied threat carried real weight. Humans were solidly built, stocky, and simply full of rigid bones. Their hands didn’t have the grip of an Atlantian, but they made up for it by curling into bone-filled clubs set into spear shafts for arms. Not to mention their sharp elbows, feet, and punishing kneecaps.

  A skilled Atlantian fighter could grapple a human opponent into a pretzel. A skilled human fighter could beat an Atlantian opponent to a bloody pulp. Pick your poison.

  The trouble with policing the Atlantians in Shambhala from zer Uncle Korolev’s point of view was simple; they didn’t have plants, and therefore didn’t fall down when he pulled out his stun stick. Which meant he, and the rest of the force, had to get very good at hand-to-hand combat. Which, being serious about his job, Korolev had. Between patrol and the football field, he’d probably been in more scraps with Atlantians than any other human alive. He’d come out ahead in those fights more often than not, and made sure everyone knew it.