Khe (28 page)

Not only are the males visiting Kelroosh, but many of the doumanas of Hawnya kler have ventured into the male's corenta for trading. Some of our doumanas—curious to see the inside of a kler—have gone to Hawnya. Tanez went this morning. She says the kler is smaller than Chimbalay and poorer in the wonders that a kler can offer. Still, I would like to walk its streets and stare up at its tall structures, to see a kler with eyes that are wide open and fear-free. Azlii and I plan to go there together soon.

The lumani are gone. All of them. I didn’t count the explosions at Chimbalay, but know in my heart that all twenty-seven are dead. Everything feels different now—as though during all of my life a storm had raged across the planet, but now it has passed. I wish Inra were here. I would like for her to know how sweet this peace feels.

Word about Chimbalay has come over the vision stage. The explosion didn’t destroy it, as I’d feared. The energy center completely collapsed and the buildings on either side of it were badly burned, but the rest of the kler escaped relatively unharmed. Tanez, Azlii, and I watched the presentation together, in what is now our home. When the smoldering shell of the energy center was shown, Tanez hid her head against my shoulder. When the rest of the undamaged kler was presented, she breathed a loud sigh at the same moment Azlii and I did.

The snows of Barren Season have melted. With First Warmth upon us, the slumbering trees have awakened and pushed their roots deep into the rich soil outside Hawnya. Seeds from plants that live only one year have sprouted, their shoots stretching up and up, reaching for the light. I sit outside often. Sometimes the plants and I talk, but mostly I simply watch the pictures of their thoughts as they chatter among themselves.

All the doumanas here speak with the plants, but it seems they can’t help them to grow. While Pradat watched in amusement, I tried an experiment with Azlii, Nool, and two of Nool’s homemates. After I explained how I thought the plants into growth, we each planted ten seeds in identical soil and asked them to sprout. None of the corentans’ seeds showed above ground in less than seven days, but the seeds I tended came up the day I set them in the soil. We tried the experiment other times with other doumanas. The results were always the same, except with Tanez, who seems to have a bit of the grower’s touch.

Kiiku grows in the garden here, along with denish bulbs, golden-flowered fedephloc, aromatics, and other staples. I’m using my talent to push the plants a little, to insure that Azlii and Tanez have an abundant crop this Bounty Season. Probably both would disapprove if they knew what I’m doing, but I reason I’ve earned the right to do as I please with the gift I’ve been given.

Pradat would likely disapprove as well. After recalibrating her machines to account for what the lumani did to me and running a series of tests, she is convinced that if I save my strength, I won’t return to the creator until I reach my true thirty-fifth year. Sometimes I’m afraid that she’s right. I fear that Weast has kept its promise to extend my life and that I will live a long, long time the way I am—with legs that can no longer support me well and arms that can barely lift. Pradat says I should eat, but admits that I am no thinner despite having taken almost no food since we returned to Kelroosh, forty-five days ago. She says that although my muscles are weakening, otherwise I am as healthy as any doumana. She has no explanation for what is happening to me.

But I know. The lumani’s tinkering did this. I am changing from the inside out, my muscles and bones melting—the elemental bits of me pushed into faster energy orbits. The longer I live, the more I will become like the lumani.

And yet I am not lumani, anymore than I am soumyo. I am something else. The lumani existed by consuming electricity. The soumyo eat plants and animals. I am nourished by the planet. Each time my feet are on soil, I sense the pulse and flow of the planet surging through me, feeding me, keeping me alive. The same pulse and flow I felt during Resonance.

I think that maybe the reason we do not need food or drink during Resonance is that the planet sustains us then, but we are too blind with the desire to mate to notice. All that extra eating we do in advance isn't necessary. Corentans don’t gorge before Resonance and come back none the worse for not eating, though they don’t know why.

Home makes the soft
kroot, kroot
sound that means it wants my attention and sends:
Tanez is coming
.

Thank you
, I reply, and shift my chair around to be facing the door when she enters.

Tanez and I share these sleeping quarters. Azlii and Home wanted to build one more room, to give us each one of our own. I said that seemed unnecessary since I would be with the creator soon, and have no need. Azlii’s face had darkened and her spots lit red-blue in frustration.

“Pradat says that you might be with us another twenty years. That’s a very long time to share such small quarters with someone,” she’d said.

Spoken like a true corentan. But I am commune-bred and Tanez is from a kler. I have slept alone under the stars, but neither Tanez nor I have ever had, or wanted, sleep quarters to ourself. We like having our sisters near.

“I came to help you dress for Commemoration Day,” Tanez says, striding across the room. My heart leaps up when I see her, as it always does. “Pradat and Larta will join us later for the walk to Community Hall.”

The signs of her ordeal with the lumani are completely gone. To see her cheerful face now, you’d never know that she’d felt a moment of sorrow or pain. And yet her face is changed, grown wiser somehow. The face she wears now is exactly the one I would have wished for her.

As she comes across the room, a gold cord as thick as her wrist stretches out from her chest and reaches toward me. I saw this gold cord for the first time the day Pradat, Azlii, Larta, and I returned from the destruction of the lumani. It was only a thread then, but it leapt from her with great force, sped through the air, and wrapped itself around my waist. A similar gold thread reached out from me back to Tanez.

Gold is a color with no emotion we name attached to it, but gold is the color of my feelings for Tanez. There is no word in our language for the love I have for her—this kind doumana with a face that seems to merge mine with the male of my second Resonance.

“Green or scarlet?” Tanez asks, standing by the gown chest.

I know what she’s asking. Scarlet gowns are worn by returning doumanas only. ‘What do
you
believe?’ is her unspoken question. Do I expect to feel the tug of the creator on my soul this year, or not for another twenty?

I want to reach for the green. I want to believe that my life will go on. I want to know what happens next.

I’m curious to see if Kelroosh’s guide, and the guide from the males’ corenta will decide, as some have suggested, to join their communities together. If Pradat will accept the offer to stay in Kelroosh and begin training orindles and helphands here. If Larta and Tanez will choose to stay in Kelroosh or return to Chimbalay.

Of them all, it’s Tanez’s future I think about most. Tanez, patiently standing before me with a gown in either hand—a green and a scarlet. I look at her and the gold strand of my nameless emotion leaps from my chest, reaching for her like a hand.

“The scarlet,” I say, because, in truth, I already feel the touch of the creator, feather light, the blessing of acceptance and peace. If I am wrong, next year I’ll gladly wear the green.

Tanez frowns. She starts to say something, but changes her mind. Gathering up the gown to make it easy to put on, she slips it over my head. It’s an effort for me to stand, but I do, and tug the gown down until it hangs in a flowing red sweep to my ankles. I sit again, and gaze up at Tanez. She gazes back and shrugs.

Tomorrow Pradat and I will head out to search for Marnka. I owe the babbler a debt, and hope to pay it with restored sanity for her. Pradat had some success using aruna with the babblers in Chimbalay. She has a new idea, using a naturally fermented aruna, which she thinks will work even better than the compound she used at Chimbalay. The wilderness is a long way, but Pradat and I will find a way to get there. Maybe Kelroosh's guide can secure a vehicle for us.

“Are you a mistake?” Marnka once asked—before she found her name again, when she was simply a babbler living in a cave and I was an angry doumana fleeing those I believed had wronged me, running toward a hope of salvation.

Perhaps I was a mistake. Certainly those who made me what I am never meant me to be the source of their destruction.

“Who are you?” Marnka, and later Azlii, asked. I say now what I said each time then: I am Khe. There is no answer beyond that.

About the Author

Alexes Razevich lives in Southern California with her husband and one of her two college-aged children. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys playing ice and roller hockey and travel. This is her first novel.

Contact: [email protected]