by Robert Reed
“What is preventing you?” he asked, curious.
Silence answered him. Amara frozen in her chair, while Narita shifted uneasily in hers. Chaurin watched, reading the currents that flowed between them. It wasn’t long before the muddy waters began to clear. “You do not talk to me, which is unsurprising, as I am a stranger—but you do not talk to each other, either.”
After a long moment, Narita said, “We are afraid if we do talk, we will find ourselves in too great disagreement.” Amara nodded, and then lifted her cup to her lips, precluding speech.
Chaurin was intrigued. “You fear you stand on opposite sides of a ravine, too far from each other to reach across. That may be, but how will you know unless you stretch out your hand?” He was happy to fall for a moment into the role of matchmaker again, relieved to have something familiar to do, in such a strange place. Chaurin had read about human matchmakers, who worked only until the first mating, and then considered their job complete. That had bewildered him; mating was never easy; if one took on the responsibility of making a match, surely it followed that one owed the pairing some guidance in the early years, some help going forward? His own mate would surely have slain him by now were it not for their matchmaker’s gentle interventions. “Narita, what is it you desire?”
She bit her lip and then said, “I want a healthy child.”
“And Amara?”
The shorter woman hesitated. “I want that too. Of course I do.” Her voice sharpened as she continued, “But—how healthy? What do you mean when you say healthy?” And then it broke. “Are you sure you don’t mean beautiful?”
Narita said, with some urgency, “You are beautiful.”
Amara shrugged, old pain evident in the set of her shoulders. “Not as beautiful as I could be; not as beautiful as you are.”
Interesting—Chaurin had little conception of human beauty, but he could see that Narita’s features were more regular, her skin smoother. Was that beautiful?
Narita leaned forward across the table, reaching out to take Amara’s hand in hers. “Beauty isn’t some absolute. It is specific; it is the details of your face. I wouldn’t change a single feature, not a line on your face, not a curve of your body.”
“I don’t think I believe you,” Amara said softly, lines creasing her forehead.
Chaurin was not sure what those lines meant, but he didn’t think they were good. He sighed. “That is a bigger muddle than we will clear quickly—and I am not staying to work with you. But surely you have someone you may contact?”
There was silence again, for an endless moment. Then—“The devadasi?” Amara offered, tentatively.
Narita laughed, sounding startled. “Really? You want her? There are plenty of other counselors we could call.”
Amara shrugged. “After we fought together that night—I trust her. The fact that you slept with her occasionally, in the years when we were apart, feels . . . irrelevant.”
Narita frowned. “She’ll want us all to be naked for the conversations, you know. It’s part of the devadasi practice; she thinks it helps lower barriers.”
“Maybe she’s right,” Amara said, a small smile lurking at the edges of her mouth.
Narita squeezed her mate’s hand and then released it, sitting back. She turned back to Chaurin. “I’m so sorry. You’re helping us, and I’ve been so impossibly rude. Rude is a kind word for it. You must think me obscene. I just—“
She bit her lip again, and Chaurin wondered what that gesture meant. Shame, perhaps. Which was appropriate enough, for her request was, if not obscene, then borderline sacrilegious. But how could you expect proper respect and appropriate behavior from aliens? And wasn’t that what this war was about, after all? If the gulf between species was, in truth, too vast to be bridged, then perhaps the pure human movement was right after all. Better to go back to our separate worlds, like quarrelling children sent to their separate rooms.
But didn’t one ask more, expect more, from adults?
Chaurin wished Gaurav were here. He would know what to do. After the funeral rites, Chaurin might know as well, might hold that knowledge inside himself, a small, glowing kernel.
He sighed. In truth, he already knew what Gaurav would do—that was why he had agreed to come here, to this small, homey kitchen. Gaurav’s choice was clear, in the way his little brother had lived his life—going out to tour the Charted Worlds, instead of staying safe at home. Staying on this planet to live and work, instead of trying every expedient to get back home. It was clear in his death most of all—Chaurin had read the police reports. His brother could have fled when the fighting began, but instead, he had run towards the battle, had gone to help the aliens, the strangers. When the stranger asked for help, Gaurav gave it. Could Chaurin do less?
He asked, “You can cook the soup here?”
Narita nodded, her eyes wide. “We can make it right now, if you want. And then I can take it to the lab, freeze-dry it into cubes, so you can easily take it back home. If you dissolve the cubes into a larger pot of water, it should give as many mouthfuls as you need. We would be very happy to help you with that.”
“Then, if you like, I think I can spare a few mouthfuls to share with you,” Chaurin said, gently. It felt . . . right. He was still angry, on some level, even enraged. But these two were not the proper target of his rage. That rage, he would direct at those who sought to divide them, those who took bloody action in that cause.
Amara swallowed visibly; Chaurin could scent her revulsion. Narita said, “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to.” But Amara shook her head, swallowed again, and said, “No. I want to honor Gaurav, in the way of his people. I’d like to do this.”
They were so strange, these humans. But brave too. Chaurin did not want to go back home and hide in the tunnels. If they stood on the edge of the abyss, he chose to reach out his hand to the stranger. Perhaps they would find a way across.
About the Author
Mary Anne Mohanraj is the author of Bodies in Motion (HarperCollins) and nine other titles. Bodies in Motion was a finalist for the Asian American Book Awards, a USA Today Notable Book, and has been translated into six languages. Previous titles include Aqua Erotica, Wet, Kathryn in the City, and The Classics Professor. Mohanraj founded the Hugo-nominated magazine, Strange Horizons. She was Guest of Honor at WisCon 2010, received a Breaking Barriers Award from the Chicago Foundation for Women for Asian American arts organizing, and won an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Prose. Mohanraj has taught at the Clarion SF/F workshop, and is now Clinical Assistant Professor of fiction and literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She serves as Executive Director of both DesiLit (www.desilit.org) and the Speculative Literature Foundation (www.speclit.org); the latter promotes literary quality in speculative fiction. Mohanraj’s newest book is a Kickstarter-funded science fiction novella, The Stars Change, November 2013 from Circlet Press. She lives in a creaky old Victorian in Oak Park with her partner, Kevin, two small children, and a sweet dog.
Lambing Season
Molly Gloss
From May to September Delia took the Churro sheep and two dogs and went up on Joe-Johns Mountain to live. She had that country pretty much to herself all summer. Ken Owen sent one of his Mexican hands up every other week with a load of groceries but otherwise she was alone, alone with the sheep and the dogs. She liked the solitude. Liked the silence. Some sheepherders she knew talked a blue streak to the dogs, the rocks, the porcupines, they sang songs and played the radio, read their magazines out loud, but Delia let the silence settle into her and by early summer she had begun to hear the ticking of the dry grasses as a language she could almost translate. The dogs were named Jesus and Alice. “Away to me, Jesus,” she said when they were moving the sheep. “Go bye, Alice.” From May to September these words spoken in command of the dogs were almost the only times she heard her own voice; that, and when the Mexican brought the groceries, a polite exchange in Spanish about the weather, the health of the dogs, the fecun
dity of the ewes.
The Churros were a very old breed. The O-Bar Ranch had a federal allotment up on the mountain, which was all rimrock and sparse grasses well suited to the Churros, who were fiercely protective of their lambs and had a long-stapled top coat that could take the weather. They did well on the thin grass of the mountain where other sheep would lose flesh and give up their lambs to the coyotes. The Mexican was an old man. He said he remembered Churros from his childhood in the Oaxaca highlands, the rams with their four horns, two curving up, two down. “Buen’ carne,” he told Delia. Uncommonly fine meat.
The wind blew out of the southwest in the early part of the season, a wind that smelled of juniper and sage and pollen; in the later months it blew straight from the east, a dry wind smelling of dust and smoke, bringing down showers of parched leaves and seedheads of yarrow and bittercress. Thunderstorms came frequently out of the east, enormous cloudscapes with hearts of livid magenta and glaucous green. At those times, if she was camped on a ridge she’d get out of her bed and walk downhill to find a draw where she could feel safer, but if she was camped in a low place she would stay with the sheep while a war passed over their heads, spectacular jagged flares of lightning, skull-rumbling cannonades of thunder. It was maybe bred into the bones of Churros, a knowledge and a tolerance of mountain weather, for they shifted together and waited out the thunder with surprising composure; they stood forbearingly while rain beat down in hard blinding bursts.
Sheepherding was simple work, although Delia knew some herders who made it hard, dogging the sheep every minute, keeping them in a tight group, moving all the time. She let the sheep herd themselves, do what they wanted, make their own decisions. If the band began to separate she would whistle or yell, and often the strays would turn around and rejoin the main group. Only if they were badly scattered did she send out the dogs. Mostly she just kept an eye on the sheep, made sure they got good feed, that the band didn’t split, that they stayed in the boundaries of the O-Bar allotment. She studied the sheep for the language of their bodies, and tried to handle them just as close to their nature as possible. When she put out salt for them, she scattered it on rocks and stumps as if she was hiding Easter eggs, because she saw how they enjoyed the search.
The spring grass made their manure wet, so she kept the wool cut away from the ewes’ tail area with a pair of sharp, short-bladed shears. She dosed the sheep with wormer, trimmed their feet, inspected their teeth, treated ewes for mastitis. She combed the burrs from the dogs’ coats and inspected them for ticks. You’re such good dogs, she told them with her hands. I’m very very proud of you.
She had some old binoculars, 7 x 32s, and in the long quiet days she watched bands of wild horses miles off in the distance, ragged-looking mares with dorsal stripes and black legs. She read the back issues of the local newspapers, looking in the obits for names she recognized. She read spine-broken paperback novels and played solitaire and scoured the ground for arrowheads and rocks she would later sell to rockhounds. She studied the parched brown grass, which was full of grasshoppers and beetles and crickets and ants. But most of her day was spent just walking. The sheep sometimes bedded quite a ways from her trailer and she had to get out to them before sunrise when the coyotes would make their kills. She was usually up by three or four and walking out to the sheep in darkness. Sometimes she returned to the camp for lunch, but always she was out with the sheep again until sundown when the coyotes were likely to return, and then she walked home after dark to water and feed the dogs, eat supper, climb into bed.
In her first years on Joe-Johns she had often walked three or four miles away from the band just to see what was over a hill, or to study the intricate architecture of a sheepherder’s monument. Stacking up flat stones in the form of an obelisk was a common herder’s pastime, their monuments all over that sheep country, and though Delia had never felt an impulse to start one herself, she admired the ones other people had built. She sometimes walked miles out of her way just to look at a rockpile up close.
She had a mental map of the allotment, divided into ten pastures. Every few days, when the sheep had moved on to a new pasture, she moved her camp. She towed the trailer with an old Dodge pickup, over the rocks and creekbeds, the sloughs and dry meadows to the new place. For a while afterward, after the engine was shut off and while the heavy old body of the truck was settling onto its tires, she would be deaf, her head filled with a dull roaring white noise.
She had about 800 ewes, as well as their lambs, many of them twins or triplets. The ferocity of the Churro ewes in defending their offspring was sometimes a problem for the dogs, but in the balance of things she knew it kept her losses small. Many coyotes lived on Joe-Johns, and sometimes a cougar or bear would come up from the salt-pan desert on the north side of the mountain, looking for better country to own. These animals considered the sheep to be fair game, which Delia understood to be their right; and also her right, hers and the dogs, to take the side of the sheep. Sheep were smarter than people commonly believed and the Churros smarter than other sheep she had tended, but by mid-summer the coyotes had passed the word among themselves, buen’ carne, and Delia and the dogs then had a job of work, keeping the sheep out of harm’s way.
She carried a .32 caliber Colt pistol in an old-fashioned holster worn on her belt. If you’re a coyot’ you’d better be careful of this woman, she said with her body, with the way she stood and the way she walked when she was wearing the pistol. That gun and holster had once belonged to her mother’s mother, a woman who had come West on her own and homesteaded for a while, down in the Sprague River Canyon. Delia’s grandmother had liked to tell the story: how a concerned neighbor, a bachelor with an interest in marriageable females, had pressed the gun upon her, back when the Klamaths were at war with the army of General Joel Palmer; and how she never had used it for anything but shooting rabbits.
In July a coyote killed a lamb while Delia was camped no more than two hundred feet away from the bedded sheep. It was dusk and she was sitting on the steps of the trailer reading a two-gun western, leaning close over the pages in the failing light, and the dogs were dozing at her feet. She heard the small sound, a strange high faint squeal she did not recognize and then did recognize, and she jumped up and fumbled for the gun, yelling at the coyote, at the dogs, her yell startling the entire band to its feet but the ewes making their charge too late, Delia firing too late, and none of it doing any good beyond a release of fear and anger.
A lion might well have taken the lamb entire; she had known of lion kills where the only evidence was blood on the grass and a dribble of entrails in the beam of a flashlight. But a coyote is small and will kill with a bite to the throat and then perhaps eat just the liver and heart, though a mother coyote will take all she can carry in her stomach, bolt it down and carry it home to her pups. Delia’s grandmother’s pistol had scared this one off before it could even take a bite, and the lamb was twitching and whole on the grass, bleeding only from its neck. The mother ewe stood over it, crying in a distraught and pitiful way, but there was nothing to be done, and in a few minutes the lamb was dead.
There wasn’t much point in chasing after the coyote, and anyway the whole band was now a skittish jumble of anxiety and confusion; it was hours before the mother ewe gave up her grieving, before Delia and the dogs had the band calm and bedded down again, almost midnight. By then the dead lamb had stiffened on the ground and she dragged it over by the truck and skinned it and let the dogs have the meat, which went against her nature but was about the only way to keep the coyote from coming back for the carcass.
While the dogs worked on the lamb, she stood with both hands pressed to her tired back looking out at the sheep, the mottled pattern of their whiteness almost opalescent across the black landscape, and the stars thick and bright above the faint outline of the rock ridges, stood there a moment before turning toward the trailer, toward bed, and afterward she would think how the coyote and the sorrowing ewe and the dark of the July moon and
the kink in her back, how all of that came together and was the reason she was standing there watching the sky, was the reason she saw the brief, brilliantly green flash in the southwest and then the sulfur-yellow streak breaking across the night, southwest to due west on a descending arc onto Lame Man Bench. It was a broad bright ribbon, rainbow-wide, a cyanotic contrail. It was not a meteor, she had seen hundreds of meteors. She stood and looked at it.
Things to do with the sky, with distance, you could lose perspective, it was hard to judge even a lightning strike, whether it had touched down on a particular hill or the next hill or the valley between. So she knew this thing falling out of the sky might have come down miles to the west of Lame Man, not onto Lame Man at all, which was two miles away, at least two miles, and getting there would be all ridges and rocks, no way to cover the ground in the truck. She thought about it. She had moved camp earlier in the day, which was always troublesome work, and it had been a blistering hot day, and now the excitement with the coyote. She was very tired, the tiredness like a weight against her breastbone. She didn’t know what this thing was, falling out of the sky. Maybe if she walked over there she would find just a dead satellite or a broken weather balloon and not dead or broken people. The contrail thinned slowly while she stood there looking at it, became a wide streak of yellowy cloud against the blackness, with the field of stars glimmering dimly behind it.
After a while she went into the truck and got a water bottle and filled it and also took the first aid kit out of the trailer and a couple of spare batteries for the flashlight and a handful of extra cartridges for the pistol and stuffed these things into a backpack and looped her arms into the straps and started up the rise away from the dark camp, the bedded sheep. The dogs left off their gnawing of the dead lamb and trailed her anxiously, wanting to follow, or not wanting her to leave the sheep. “Stay by,” she said to them sharply, and they went back and stood with the band and watched her go. That coyot’, he’s done with us tonight: This is what she told the dogs with her body, walking away, and she believed it was probably true.