Mist, her daughter, and her niece disembarked from the train at its terminal in the Valley of Living-Water-White-Light. The flashing multicoloured lights pulsated in rhythm to the choreographed water fountains. Dancing young girls in ribbons marched gaily beside their mothers who walked regally behind, their clothing proclaiming the number of children they had borne. Mist was dressed in the green science caste colours, shells, and flowers. And Shadow-of-Light-Turning had crowned Mist’s plaited hair with a floral wreath and adorned those arms that had once held a child and given a new immortal soul to the Creator with gems and semi-precious stones. Her mother-in-law’s kindness to her was a new thing. And she felt young again. New birth and change were everywhere.
The parade route followed the river valley, meandering through the hilly cliffs. Visiting Earthers stood atop the ridges or near the ridges with their VID-machines in their hands, giggling and recording the festival as if the people on Mist’s planet were some strange backward civilization. She tried to ignore them.
She reached towards Flowers-in-the-Sun. “The procession of the older mothers is about to start. In ten years you’ll be married with your own children and I won’t be able to come to the Mother-Infant festival anymore. You’ll be all grown up.”
Flowers-in-the-Sun looked at the festival-goers and at the Earthers with their VID-recorders. Her eyes stared pensively out at the passing villagers.
“Mother Mine,” she began, then paused.
“What is it, Daughter Mine?” Mist asked, staring at the tattoo on her daughter’s neck. “The implants have healed, have they not? You aren’t in pain, are you?”
“It’s very loud,” Flowers-in-the-Sun signed. “Everywhere. It hurts my ears. We are a very loud people.”
“By whose standard?” Mist asked, annoyed. “I hear the Earthers are fixing our air, making the world less noisy for you implanted ones. I doubt, though, that the air density can be changed.” She extended her hand towards her daughter. “Coming?”
Flowers-in-the-Sun did not take her mother’s hand. She glanced at her cousin, then turned to her mother. “Perhaps,” she signed, “we should not hold hands.”
“We must hold hands,” Mist answered. “It’s part of the festival. The Mothers and Daughters walk the procession together until we reach the town square. Then we do the responsive dance.”
Flowers-in-the-Sun shrugged. “Mother, look around. The Earthers are watching us. And the girls my age aren’t holding their mothers’ hands.”
Mist lifted up her eyes and studied the crowd around her. It was true –true and strange – the mothers of older children were definitely not holding their children. They weren’t even walking with them. In fact, the mothers all seemed lost, forgotten, childless as they stood on the edge of the road, their backs against the high walls of the cliff. Their lost eyes watched dejectedly as their children chattered on in animated mouth-talk with other children.
In her new green dress and green marriage scarf, Mist stood in the middle of the road glaring at Flowers-in-the-Sun. “Am I to be like those women?” she asked. “Standing on the sidelines like a childless woman, while your life passes me by?”
She grabbed Flowers-in-the-Sun’s hand and the child stared up guiltily into her mother’s eyes and began walking by her mother’s side. But as her mother marched ahead, she looked behind at her cousin, smiled, and whispered something her mother could not hear.
Ven Begamudré was born in Bangalore, India, emigrated to Canada when he was six, and has lived in Mauritius and the United States. His six books are The Phantom Queen (2002), Isaac Brock: Larger than Life (2000), Laterna Magika (1997), Van de Graaff Days (1993), A Planet of Eccentrics (1990), and Sacrifices (1986). His half-dozen appointments as a writer-in-residence include the Canada-Scotland Exchange. An earlier version of “Out of Sync” appeared in Laterna Magika (Oolichan Books).
Out of Sync
Ven Begamudré
They were at it again. I listened closely, and I knew. It was more than just the wind.
I must be the only adult in Andaman Bay who falls asleep unaided. Sometimes, though, when the wind rises in pitch and windows shudder, or when it slides down the scale and walls rumble, I flick on the white noise. Its soothing hiss can block out everything, even thoughts of the Ah-Devasi, out there in the aurora. No one wants to believe the aurora is alive. That’s only a tale, we claim, invented long ago to keep children from wandering too far. Especially north, where the mountains rise so high an entire search party can lose its way in the canyons. I sighed, got out of bed, and pulled on my robe. From the doorway of the children’s room I listened to the twins’ breathing, the rise and fall of their breath out of sync. I’m sure they dream of birthdays. They’re hoping for a Khond magic show at their upcoming party, and how can I refuse? But, oh, that Cora! She must have been teasing during all that talk about the Khond murdering us in our beds. Teasing even when I asked her point-blank:
“Could you really kill me and the twins?”
“Oh no, Miss,” Cora said. “I could never kill the family I work for.” She put breakfast in the oven. “But someone else’s children –”
“That’s enough!” I ordered.
“Yes, Miss.”
Now I closed the door to the children’s room and slipped their breathing monitor into my pocket. Like me, they rarely need white noise to sleep. I double-checked the alarms before leaving the flat, and the lift arrived at once. Inside I pressed the button for the dome lounge. Even through the whine of the motor, I could distinguish two sets of breathing. It comforted me, as it does even now.
Leaving the lights off in the lounge, I sank into the padded observation chair and strapped myself in. I raised it until the lights on the arm shone dimly in the top of the dome. Around us rise the domes of other buildings, forty-seven in all. More are under construction. In another ten years, the population of Andaman Bay will double. Architects call this planetary sprawl. A hundred kilometers to the east, the lights of Tonkin Bay twinkled in the night. I turned the chair south. Here I could see a faint glow. A cloud of ammonia crystals reflected the lights of Corinth Bay. I turned the chair west and saw nothing. There’s no bay out there. Not yet. Then something flickered in a corner of my eye, so I turned the chair north. I was right. It was more than just the wind. The Ah-Devasi were at it again.
The aurora hangs in the sky like a drape spanning the spectrum from yellow to blue. Its shimmer hides the stars in the whole quadrant from northwest past north into northeast. The aurora begins fifty kilometers up and falls in strands. They weave in and out, sometimes even braid, but only for a moment before waving free again, reaching out, curling up, crossing yellow on green. I watched the blue. Sometimes, where the aurora dips below the Pyrrhic Range, I’m sure I can see a strand pull away: one that glimmers in blue shading to indigo. Violet. I wait for shades of violet. I think I saw a violet last month, there at the end of Bight Pass. A violet so faint it verged on ultraviolet. I couldn’t be sure, though, since earlier that day we had cremated Cassie Papandreou. We were all upset.
Cassie’s husband, Spiro, pleaded with the coroner to rule her death an accident. Anything but a suicide. The coroner did, for her children’s sake. Everyone understood. For who could deny Cassie had been troubled? We’d seen it each time she’d said, just as she had the week before:
“I’m telling you we don’t belong here. They don’t want us here.”
“Then there’s no argument,” Zhou Feng said. “We don’t want to be here either.” Most of the guests laughed with him because he sits on the bay council. Other guests laughed at him. He doesn’t care. The main thing is to make people laugh since he has his eye on the governor’s suite.
“Don’t patronize me,” Cassie snapped. “You know what I mean.” Spiro looked past her at an empty crystal goblet on the sideboard. The goblet reflected light from the chandelier. I wasn’t the only one who sensed his unease.
Still, Zhou Feng couldn’t let things rest. He called down the table
to our chief of maintenance, the lone Demi on the bay council. “Harun al-Rashid,” Zhou Feng called, “do you want us to leave?”
When Harun smiled, everyone looking directly at him protected his or her eyes. “Sorry,” he said. The glow faded with his smile. “Cassandra, dear lady,” he insisted, “it is not a question of leaving or staying. Your people have been here for nearly a century. Your parents were born here, no?” He made his voice a pleasant bass to reinforce his gravity. Most times it’s difficult to know when he’s being serious because his natural tenor carries the strong, laughing lilt of his people. The Demi are famous for their sense of humour.
“That’s just what I’m talking about,” she cried. “Every time I have to deal with a Khond it looks right through me as if I’m not even there. I know exactly what it’s thinking. ‘Why don’t you people leave?’ Not you, Harun. You’re not really one of them. I mean. . . .”
“I know exactly what you mean,” he crooned. “These same Khonds call me a diamond when –”
“A what?” Spiro asked.
Oh, that Spiro! Sometimes I wonder whether he takes his eyes from his spectrometer long enough to notice the colour of the sun. I told him this once, when he asked for advice about Cassie, but he didn’t want to hear he might be neglecting her. “Sometimes I wish you’d keep your eyes on the spectrometer more,” he said. “But I suppose you’re too busy trying to guess what colour the sun will be.”
It’s been some time since people coddled me for being a widow.
“Like the gem itself,” Harun was saying, “though I am one of the few privileged to savour its beauty.” He nodded at Zhou Feng’s wife, Zhou Li.
She was fingering her necklace. She basks in knowing she’s the only woman in Andaman Bay wealthy enough to own such a necklace. Small things keep her happy.
“They call me a diamond,” Harun continued. “Dull on the outside like a human, blindingly bright inside like –”
“Like your Khonds?” It was Zhou Feng again, trying to be humorous. The Khond are Harun’s only on his father’s side.
Everyone except Cassie and I laughed. She was staring at her hands, clasping and unclasping them on the damask tablecloth. I was raising mine to my ears. I wanted to be ready for what might follow. It did, and I was. The moment Harun opened his mouth to laugh, a dazzling light flooded the room. The moment he did laugh, china rattled and the chandelier swung in the shock waves. The empty crystal goblet burst. After he stopped laughing, all of us lowered our hands and blinked to clear our vision. He shrugged an apology to Zhou Li for breaking the goblet.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
“I can tell you,” Harun said at last, “what I tell the others. Humans gave us form.” Raising his left hand, he tilted it to display its translucence. “You gave us time, even if most Khonds are rarely on time for anything. But then it is not always easy for a Khond to synchronize its existence with yours. Unlike we Demi, the Khond are born out of sync.”
Again, everyone except Cassie and I laughed. He can be such a show off sometimes.
“We were spoiled,” he said, meaning those on his father’s side. “We thought time did not exist the way it does in the rest of the galaxy. We thought we were immortal.”
“Aren’t you?” Spiro asked. “I mean, aren’t they?”
“In some ways, yes,” Harun said. “In other ways, we are created and destroyed just as humans are born and die. Or in your case,” he said, addressing me, “reborn. You are still a practising Hindu, I believe?” Everyone knows I am, to some extent. Harun continued: “By bringing us the concept of time, you brought us the realization we were not the only beings in the galaxy. It was a hard lesson to learn but with it we also learned –” He wiped his lips with a serviette, then studied its brocade. “– to love.”
“Come again?” Zhou Li asked. It’s her duty at these gatherings to ask questions no one else can ask unless they want to look gauche.
“I simply meant,” Harun said, “that when there is no urgency of time, there is no urgency to love. Your long-dead Bard of Avon put it so well.” Harun’s voice dropped lower in pitch so there was no mistaking the gravity of his words:
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Zhou Feng applauded softly.
Spiro complimented Harun on his gift for recalling obscure literature.
Harun reminded Spiro that, as everyone knows, the Demi are famous for their inability to forget. “It comes from having to live so long,” Harun said.
When Cassie slammed her fists on the table, her place setting rattled as violently as when Harun had laughed. “You’re not listening!” she cried. “Damn you,” she said, looking at the rest of us. “Damn you most of all!” she added, glaring at him. “We have to do something before the Ah-Devasi help the Khond destroy us! We have to leave while there’s still a –”
Spiro tried to uncoil her fists. “You’re just tired,” he said. “The aurora beings –” He paused. “The Ah-Devasi just want their land back.”
She began to laugh, a laughter others joined nervously until hers became a cackle. “You fool,” she hissed, “they don’t need land. They don’t even have bodies.”
“That’s enough,” Zhou Li said. Her necklace glinted when she turned. “Cassie, dear, you’ve been up in the dome again. Spiro, you’re still listening to fairy tales. The beings you’re both talking about don’t exist. The aurora is not made up of the spirits of this planet’s ancestral –”
“No?” Cassie demanded. “Haven’t you ever listened to the wind? I have. Haven’t you ever watched the way the strands dip down behind the mountains and the blue breaks away into indigo? I’m telling you people, one day that glow is going to roll down Bight Pass and the whole of the plain will be red. With our blood!”
No one dared to laugh then, just as no one laughed a week later at the cremation. Cassie had driven her Morris up into the Pyrrhic Range. The search party had found her two days later, halfway through Bight Pass, with the Morris on its side and her life support system drained. No one wanted to believe what really might have happened: that she’d gone out there to speak with the aurora. Only I believe it, just as I’m the only one who knows the fatal error she made. She hadn’t been driven by a desire to make contact. She’d been driven by fear.
I unstrapped myself even as the observation chair lowered me from the dome. The vinyl creaked uneasily. What was I doing, staying up so late again? If I’m not careful I’ll end up as obsessed as Cassie, whose ashes Spiro scattered to the wind. Now he’s trying to raise the children with help from his new domestic. Cora’s sister. Is that how they’ll do it? Will Cora kill the Papandreou children and her sister kill the twins? I found myself wishing the lift could go faster. Downstairs, even as I entered the flat and reset the alarms, I heard the wind rising. I pocketed the monitor and checked on the twins. No one will hurt them. The plain will never be red with blood. Not theirs.
I decided to make some Horlicks. But halfway to the kitchen, I stopped. I’d left my bedroom door ajar and the blackness around it glowed. I crossed to it and eased the door fully open.
Harun floated near the ceiling. He lay on his side with his head propped on a hand, his elbow casually propped on thin air. Not thin to him. When my eyes met his, he trilled on a make-believe flute. He does this when I look annoyed. I told him once about my favourite incarnation of Lord Vishnu: Krishna Gopala, the cowherd who played his flute for gopis, those cowgirls of Ancient Indian Earth. I closed the door behind me and locked it. Then I switched on the white noise.
Harun grimaced, but no one could hear us now.
“How did you get in?” I demanded.
He tapped the ventilation grille.
“And what do you think you’re up to?” I asked.
“Tsk, tsk,” he replied, shaking his head. “Don’t you know?”
It’s a game with us, a re-enactment of the first time he appeared lik
e this, unannounced. As he did then, he floated down to offer his hands. This time, though, I threw off my robe and flung myself onto him. We rolled across the bed, and I clung to him so I wouldn’t fall off the edge. Then he pulled me back, over him. While I pressed his left hand onto my face, the hand grew even more translucent, and I breathed deeply. I tried to breathe particles of his very fabric into myself. He smells like jaggery, the palm sugar I loved to eat as a child. When I raised his hand to kiss his fingers, they grew opaque.
Everyone knows what the Demi are famous for: their sense of humour and inability to forget. But few humans have discovered what the Demi should be famous for. I like to think I’m the only woman, perhaps the only human, who has ever made love to a being of another species. I know this isn’t true. Where did the Demi come from, after all, if not from the union of early settlers and Khonds? Now humans love only humans. Most of them. The Khond reproduce as only they can. And the Demi? They claim they have little use for others. Not my Harun. When I’m alone with him, no white noise can shut out the wind as well as he can. He can shut out the world.
He wrapped his arms around me and lifted me off the bed. He always does this. Provided he doesn’t let go, and he never has even in jest, he can slip my nightgown up and over my head more easily in midair. More easily than when my elbow or thigh pins the fabric beneath me. The nightgown felt suddenly heavy. I pulled it away and tossed it into a corner. We floated down onto the bed. I nudged him onto his back and felt him grow opaque to support me. Then he rolled me onto my back and grew translucent so I could breathe. Translucent everywhere except on top of my thighs, where I like to pull the weight of him down. His clothing always seems to evaporate. One moment it’s there, the next moment his flesh quivers on mine. I clamped my legs over the small of his back and pretended to draw him in. I still need to pretend he can enter me there first. He began to glow. The more he glowed, the warmer he felt. The warmer he grew, the farther I could draw him in. And not just there. He filled my body. His flesh pushed up under the surface of my skin. Finally, when every particle of our bodies mingled, he laughed. The room filled with blinding, violet light. I squeezed my eyes shut, I clasped my hands over my ears, and I shrieked.
So Long Been Dreaming Page 27