Khe (25 page)

Tanez and Azlii are watching me, both awake and aware now. Neither seems to feel any effect from the analyzer.

Turn it off
, Weast sends, and I feel its desperation.
Push the blank square
.

I want to do what Weast says. I want the pain to stop. Weast’s elements are swirling crazily, the orderly orbit of two bits around one falling apart, single pieces flying away from the main body. Weast’s companions are no better off. One of them spreads across the floor, its bits sparking. I push the button marked one hundred and thirty, and scream from the pain.

Azlii rolls off the cot and rushes to me. Her legs are wobbly and she nearly falls over me. She wraps one arm around my shoulders. Blood trickles down her arm, from where she’s torn out the tubes.

“Khe,” she whispers.

“Out,” I tell her. My breath is shallow, my throat squeezed. “The door isn’t locked. Larta is close.” I hope the door isn’t locked.

Tanez is sitting upright on the cot, trying to pull out the tube that tethers her to the machine.

“Can you walk?” Azlii asks Tanez when the tube is out.

She nods and swings her feet over the side of the cot. When she tries to stand, she sinks to the floor.

“Get Larta,” I tell Azlii, who seems the fittest among us. “Down the hall. In the room with the lavender-blue door.”

Azlii stumbles across the room and waves her hand in front of the wall near the door. The door whooshes open and Azlii goes through. The door stays open behind her. We might have a chance after all.

Weast has stopped sending to me. Its pain, the pain of each lumani, is worse than mine. I see their suffering like flaming yellow sparks careening through the room.

My legs give out. I grab at the stand supporting the analyzer, miss it, and crumple to the floor. Tanez crawls toward me. Our hands meet and clasp.

Then Azlii is at the doorway again, with Larta behind her. Azlii’s face is ashen, her movements stiff. Larta darts across the room, her arms supporting first Tanez to her feet and then me. That I can stand is a miracle. That my feet are moving, more amazing still. We walk down the hall toward the entryway—me leaning on Larta, Azlii and Tanez supporting each other. Helphands and orindles stare at us, mouths gaping, frozen in their places. The guardians point their stun-shooters at us.

Larta calls to the four guardians, “We are leaving Chimbalay. You will come with us to the gate and ensure our safety.”

Their weapons do not lower. Their emotion spots spark and glow with the orange-yellow of confusion.

“We are guardians,” Larta says to them, “sworn to protect our sisters from all harm. Look at these doumanas. See what the Powers have done to them.”

The guardians keep their weapons pointed at us. Larta’s jaw tenses. The colors of determination show on her neck.

A guardian slowly lowers her weapon and steps up to Tanez. “Lean on me. It’s a long way to the gate.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“Heat is a fine prod to action.”

--Azlii

The soft pink-yellow light of dawn awakens me. I open my eyes and see Pradat tapping away on her textbox.

“Tanez and Azlii?” I ask, as I’ve asked each of the two previous mornings.

Nool is sharing her sleeping quarters with the four of us. The room is cramped with cots. Mine lays closest to the outer wall. Pradat is sitting at an angle that blocks the rest of the cots from my view.

“Azlii is in the meal room,” Pradat says, looking up. “Tanez is sleeping.”

“Still?” Tanez has slept since we came to Kelroosh. She tosses and turns restlessly, muttering and sometimes crying out. I’ve spent much of the last two nights sitting on the edge of her cot, stroking her neck. It seems to comfort her.

“Do you want something to eat?” Pradat asks. When I shake my head, she frowns.

I have eaten some since we arrived here, but all food tastes bad to me, and none of it digests. It sits in my stomach like hardwood.

I sleep little now, maybe a fifth of the night, which leaves me plenty of time to think. My anger is so strong—I feel it will lift me from the cot. I am ashamed of what I have become, and wish that my spots still lit so others could know how I feel. But part of me merely notes each emotion with detached interest. It is this part that thinks about Weast and the other lumani; how they and I reacted when the machines changed the magnetic fields in the room we shared. It is this part of me that doesn’t want to drive the lumani from our world. It is the part that schemes to destroy them.

“You were my great success, you know,” Pradat says.

I sit up, to encourage her to go on.

“Of the one hundred and twenty-six doumanas I’d treated for Resonance dysfunction, eleven showed new talents. Ten went insane.” Pradat looks at the floor a moment, and then back at me. “But you didn’t lose your mind. Simanca kept me informed. I knew every time you went to mating. I knew you were using your talent to help your sisters at Lunge. I was thrilled when Simanca reported that you showed no ill effects from the restoration or from using your gift.”

“She lied,” I say quietly. The bitterness in my voice is like a shout.

“Yes,” Pradat says. “I know how many years have passed since you hatched, and I can count the dots on your wrist. It doesn’t take much to reason that something went wrong.”

“Pushing the crops to grow better aged me.”

Pradat winces as if I’ve struck her. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” I say. “You did a good thing. I’ve always been grateful for the chance to mate and lay my egg.”

“I tried twice more to come and see you,” Pradat says. “Simanca put me off. I should have insisted.”

I shrug.

“I didn’t insist,” Pradat says, “because I didn’t want to call attention to you.”

I listen, curious about her reasons.

“I’d kept you secret,” Pradat says. “As First of Morvat Research Center, I reported to the Powers. It was they who devised the surgery that let you feel Resonance.”

“I know,” I say. “Azlii told me.”

Pradat nods. “They tracked each patient with great interest. When the gifted doumanas began to go mad, the Powers ordered that all patients showing new talents, sane or insane, be sent to Chimbalay immediately. Once they were there, no one ever heard from them again. But there were rumors—”

I see the gray mist of sorrow rise from her shoulders, a match to the colors on her neck.

“Whatever happened to those doumanas isn’t your fault,” I say.

Pradat sighs. “To save you from the Powers, I never reported you. I’ve lived in fear that Simanca would let the information slip. When the Powers called me to Chimbalay, I thought they’d discovered my disobedience, but they only wanted me to work with the babblers.”

I think of Marnka and want to ask Pradat if she’d found a way to restore babblers’ sanity, but this is not the time.

“One day the Powers informed me that they’d found a doumana who they believed would make a good candidate for breeding with them.” Pradat rubs her throat to comfort herself. “This was too much, too great an insult to our species for me to help them. I’d already made up my mind to do what I could to spoil the experiment. When I saw that the doumana they’d chosen was you—I decided at that moment to get you out.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“I wish I’d gotten to you sooner. You are physically changed, Khe.”

I nod, but don’t say how changed I am. I don’t tell her that when I look at the lumani now, I see not the hazy bands that I saw at first, but all the individual swirling pieces that make up their form. I don’t say that I’ve hardly eaten or slept in six days and it doesn’t bother me. I don’t tell her the worst of it—that when I was in that room with Azlii and Tanez, I was truly curious and almost willing to let the lumani finish their tests, so I could know the answers.

“Pradat,” I say, “I came to Chimbalay in hope of finding a way to get back my normal life-span. Is it possible?”

Her mouth draws into a line. “We’d need to know if your body was truly aging, or if the extra dots were the result of something else. Your resonance sac was sealed. When it was opened, chemicals that had been kept from your body suddenly flooded in. Perhaps you are allergic to your own chemicals and the dots are a physical reaction to that, though there is no test or machine devised yet that could figure that out. Most likely, Khe, you are aging. I don’t know of any way to stop that.”

“Weast, one of the Powers, said that when they’d … changed me, I’d live longer than a doumana should. Almost double our lifespan.” I feel my heart begin to pound.

Pradat looks at me a long moment.

“Maybe,” she says.

***

There are seven gathered in Nool’s house for the night meal, including Tanez, who’s finally woken and whose first words were, “I’m hungry.” Restlessness rumbles through me, Resonance-like—that feeling that I must move.

“Nool,” I say. “I’d like to walk in the corenta. Is that allowed?”

“Go where you please,” Nool says. “If you lose your way, ask any of the structures to point you back here.”

Home sends:
Khe takes her own path
, and chuckles low, pleased with its jest.

Nool rolls her eyes and gives a faint shrug. “Structures have bent personalities.”

“What?” Tanez says, looking up from the meal she is devouring.

Nool waves her hand in dismissal.

I think that being able to hear structures “talk” when others can’t is like being able to understand beast or bird talk—a second language, unintelligible to others. I think it is a great gift.

***

No snow has fallen in a while. A hard crust of ice has formed on the ground and I see the white puffs of my breath as I walk. Each step I take on open ground makes me happy. I feel refreshed and full. Few doumanas are out on this frosty night, but I nod and greet each one as if she were a sister. They respond back in the same manner. I know where I want to go, and head straight there.

I was hoping you’d come again
, Community Hall sends as I climb the steps. When I reach the top, the tall wooden doors swing open.

I’ve come to offer a prayer to the creator
, I send.
To ask its great mind for help
.

You are welcome to pray, though there is no mind greater than me here
, Hall sends and chuckles, a sound like distant wind.

Afterwards
, Hall sends,
we will talk
?

I’d like that
, I send.

Good. I’ll be right here
.

My lips crinkle. Structures do have their own kind of humor.

I choose several aromatics I find in a box and put a small handful of each in the brazier. Cupping the firestarter in my hand, I concentrate on keeping the flame under control, and am pleased that I succeed. I breathe in the spicy/sweet scent and make a small prayer of thanksgiving for my survival so far, and ask that the creator show me the way to rid our world of the lumani.

I take a deep breath and let out.

Are you there, Hall?
I send.
You haven’t gone away have you?

I was thinking of leaving to visit some friends but decided to stay. Now, what shall we talk about
?

It’s truly delightful to speak with a structure, and there is much I want to know.

My curiosity feels very lumani, and the peace within me is swept away. Weast has succeeded well with me.

But I was always one to ask questions and to think my own thoughts. Maybe I’m not so lumani after all.

Can you see as well as hear and speak
? I ask.

Not so well as your species or the beasts, but better than the plants, judging by what I hear them say about it,
Hall answers.

How do structures become aware
? I ask.

Everything has consciousness
, Hall sends
. From the smallest grains of sand and tiny drops of water on up. Consciousness is not all the same. A grain of sand knows it is part of a larger world, but doesn’t know what that world is. The grain might know it was once part of a stone, but won’t remember what that was like. For structures, as we are built, the pieces that form us begin linking their consciousnesses, growing stronger as the structure grows larger
.

I try to imagine being a grain of sand as Hall describes, and find it’s not difficult. How different is that from my awareness when I lived at Lunge? I, too, knew I was part of a larger world, a world brought through the vision stage—with knowledge no larger than the instrument that delivered it.

At some point
, Hall sends,
consciousness becomes intelligence
.
When that happens and how aware the structure is varies, depending on the materials used. Mud structures aren’t great thinkers, but they have a fine sensitivity to the ebb and flow of the planet. Wall, being all baked mud and very large, is always the first structure to feel the change that marks Resonance for the doumanas.

Structures made of stone are more aware than mud ones, and those that include wood are better thinkers still. Mortar made from animal blood brings a different, more aggressive intelligence to a structure. I am the oldest and largest structure in Kelroosh. I am made of stone, wood and blood mortar. You may draw your own conclusions from that
.

I laugh under my breath.

Do the structures hate the lumani the way corenta doumanas do
? I ask.

Hall sighs.
Your question is like asking does your arm feel the same way about the lumani as your leg feels? Structures, doumanas, plants, tame beasts—we are one thing.

I shake my head.
Azlii or any corenta doumana isn’t your arm or leg. She is herself. You are yourself. How can you all be one thing
?

Halls sighs again, more deeply. The sound is like wind through a cave.
Perhaps in time you will understand
.

Time is something I don’t have much of, but I say,
Perhaps
.

Hall
, I send
, were you here in the Before?

Of course.

Over time, have you perceived any change in the feel of the lumani? Do they seem the same to you now as when they first came, or are they different
?