Paradise Tales (26 page)

“Faithful,” Jinny says, aloud. She smiles hazily to her Predator friends, shrugs off the blanket, and crouches down on the edge of the roof. “As you see, I connected.” She means with the Sharks.

“Yeah, I can see.”

“It was a lot of work.” I think she means she went back and spent a lot of time eyeballing them. She either has a lot to share with me or a lot she can’t be arsed to share.

“More of a challenge than someone it’s easy to connect with.” I’m trying not to look disappointed. No, I’m trying not to look hurt.

No, I am trying not to cry. In the street. If there is a single particle of cruelty in her, it will come out now.

Those gnawing teeth highlight the downturning of her mouth. Somehow she’s suddenly flipped down from the roof onto the ground

“Don’t be like that,” she says.

“Like how?” The words swell out of my throat like knocked elbows.

“Angry,” she says. “Look, come on, let’s walk.”

Mr. Cranky says, “You’re not wearing anything, it’s early, it’s windy.”

“Well, yeah, so we better walk to warm up. Come on.” She flicks her fingers towards herself. “Come here.” She puts an arm around me, and pulls. “The Sharks don’t want to push the Herbivores out this time. They want to move. After all, they’re Sharks, they have to keep moving to breathe.”

I taste our dust in the air; it’s spicy, the taste of home.

She gives me a little shake. “They’re the kind of people who wanted to go to the stars. The Bears, the Pumas, the domestic Cats …”

Then she footnotes how Dogs are really wolves, noble beasts who care for their own and live in packs, the most sociable of creatures, how they keep each other warm. Jinny’s arms are cold, so I hold her and her shoulders and arms feel smooth and soft. I chafe them a bit, and we start to walk, bouncing files back and forth between us. And all around us, the fleshsails fill with sunlight, the windmills turn, our purple skins seethe with sugars fueling the eyes, the implants, the GMs, the receiving bones, all that information babbling powered away.

“Anyway we’re not Herbivores or Predators anymore. That’s just leftover emotional garbage.” She smiles again. “We’re more like plants.”

Sometimes it all comes right. Sometimes something like love is possible. We come to the edge of the town.

I feel humorous. “I’d just like to confirm that rampant fancying combined with a kind heart are possible.”

“Then,” she says, “the future’s good.”

Even young, before bearing age, she was serious and adult. I remember her as a filly, slumped at the feet of the stallions as they smoked their pipes, played checkers, and talked about what they would do if they knew how to make electricity.

Leveza would say that we could make turning blades to circulate air; we could pump water to irrigate grass. We could boil water, or make heat to dry and store cud cakes. The old men would chuckle to hear her dreaming.

I thought it was a pointless game, but Leveza could play it better than anyone, seeing further and deeper into her own inherited head. Her groom sister Ventoo always teased her, “Leveza, what are you fabricating now?”

We all knew that stuff. I knew oh so clearly how to wrap thin metal round and round a pivot and with electricity make it spin. But who could be bothered? I loved to run. All of us foals would suddenly sprint through long grass to make the ground thunder, to raise up the sweet smells of herbs, and to test our strength. We had fire in our loins and we wanted to gallop all the way to the sun. Leveza pondered.

She didn’t like it when her first heat came. The immature bucks would hee-haw at her and pull back their feeling lips to display their great white plates of teeth. When older men bumped her buttocks with their heads, she would give a little backward kick, and if they tried to mount her, she walked out from under them. And woe betide any low-grade drifter who presumed that Leveza’s lack of status meant she was grateful for attention. She would send the poor bag of bones rattling through the long grass. The babysquirrels clutched their sides and laughed. “Young NeverLove wins again.”

But I knew. It was not a lack of love that made my groom-mate so careful and reserved. It was an abundance of love, a surfeit of it, more than our kind is meant to have, can afford to have, for we live on the pampas and our cousins eat us.

Love came upon Leveza on some warm night, the moon like bedtime milk. She would not have settled for a quick bump with a reeking male just because the air wavered with hot hormones. I think it would have been the reflection of milklight in black eyes, a gentle ruffling of upper lip, perhaps a long and puzzled chat about the nature of this life and its consequences.

We are not meant to love. We are meant to mate, stand side by side for warmth for a short time afterward, and then forget.
I wonder who fathered this one?

Leveza knew and would never forget. She never said his name, but most of us knew who he was. I sometimes I caught her looking toward the circle of the Great Men, her eyes full of gentleness. They would gallop about at headball, or talk seriously about axle grease. None of them looked her way, but she would be smiling with a gentle glowing love, her eyes fixed on one of them as steadily as the moon.

One night, she tugged at my mane. “Akwa, I am going to sprog,” she said, with a wrench of a smile at the absurdity of such a thing.

“Oh! Oh Leveza, that’s wonderful. Why didn’t you tell me, how did this happen?”

She ronfled in amusement, a long ruffling snort. “In the usual way, my friend.”

“No, but … oh you know! I have seen you with no one.”

She went still. “Of course not.”

“Do you know which one?”

Her whole face was in milklight. “Yes. Oh yes.”

Leveza was both further back toward an Ancestor than anyone I ever met, and furthest forward toward the beasts. Even then it was as if she was pulled in two directions, Earth and stars. The night around us would sigh with multiple couplings. I was caught up in the season. Sex was like a river, washing all around us. I was a young mare then, I can tell you, wide of haunch, slim of ankle. I plucked my way through the grass as if it were the strings of a harp. All the highest-rankers would come and snuffle me, and I surprised myself. Oh! I was a pushover. One after another after another.

I would come back feeling like a pasture grazed flat; and she would be lumped out on the ground, content and ready to welcome me. I nuzzled her ear, which flicked me like I was a fly, and I would lay my head on her buttock to sleep.

“You are a strange one,” I would murmur. “But you will be kind to my babes. We will have a lovely house.” I knew she would love my babies as her own.

That year the dry season did not come.

It did go cooler, the afternoon downpours were fewer, but the grass did not go gray. There was dew when we got up, sparkling and cold with our morning mouthfuls. Some rain came at nighttime in short, soft caresses rather than pummeling on our pavilion roofs. I remember screens pulled down, the smell of grass, and warm breath of a groom-mate against my haunches.

“I’m preggers too,” I said some weeks later and giggled, thrilled and full of butterflies. I was young, eh? In my fourth year. I could feel my baby nudge. Leveza and I giggled together under our shawls.

It did not go sharply cold. No grass-frost made our teeth ache. We waited for the triggering, but it did not come.

“Strangest year I can remember,” said the old women. They were grateful, for migrations were when they were eaten.

That year! We made porridge for the toothless. We groomed and groomed, beads and bows and necklaces and shawls and beautiful grass hats. Leveza loved it when I made up songs; the first, middle, and last word of every line would rhyme. She’d snort and shake her mane and say, “How did you do that; that’s so clever!”

We would stroke each other’s stomachs as our nipples swelled. Leveza hated hers; they were particularly large like aubergines. “Uh. They’re gross. Nobody told me they wobble in the way of everything.” They ached to give milk; early in her pregnancy they started to seep. There was a scrum of babysquirrels around her every morning. Business-like, she sniffed and let them suckle. “When my baby comes, you’ll have to wait your turn.” The days and nights came and went like the beating of birdlike wings. She got a bit bigger, but never too big to stand guard.

Leveza gave birth early, after only nine months.

It was midwinter, in dark Fehveroo when no one was ready. Leveza pushed her neck up against my mouth for comfort. When I woke she said, “Get Grama for me.” Grama was a high-ranking midwife.

I was stunned. She could not be due yet. The midwives had stored no oils or bark-water. I ran to Grama, woke her, worried her. I hoofed the air in panic. “Why is this happening now? What’s wrong?”

By the time we got back, Leveza had delivered. Just one push and the babe had arrived, a little bundle of water and skin and grease on the ground behind her rear quarters.

The babe was tiny, as long as a shin, palomino, and covered in soft orange down so light that he looked hairless. No jaw at all. How would he grind grass? Limbs all in soft folds like clouds. Grama said nothing, but held up his feet for me to see. The forelegs had no hoof-buds at all, just fingers; and his hind feet were great soft mitts. Not quite a freak, streamlined and beautiful in a way. But fragile, defenseless, and nothing that would help Leveza climb the hierarchy. It was the most Ancestral child I had ever seen.

Grama set to licking him clean. I looked at the poor babe’s face. I could see his hide through the sparse hair on his cheeks. “Hello,” I said. “I’m your Groom-Mummy. Your name is Kaway. Yes it is. You are Kaway.”

A blank. He couldn’t talk. He could hardly move.

I had to pick him up with my hands. There was no question of using my mouth; there was no pelt to grip. I settled the babe next to Leveza. Her face shone love down on him. “He’s beautiful as he is.”

Grama jerked her head toward the partition; we went outside to talk. “I’ve heard of such births; they happen sometimes. The inheritances come together like cards shuffling. He won’t learn to talk until he’s two. He won’t walk until then, either. He won’t really be mobile until three or four.”

“Four!” I thought of all those migrations.

Grama shrugged. “They can live long, if they make it past infancy. Maybe fifty years.”

I was going to ask where they were now, and then I realized. They don’t linger in this world, these soft sweet angelic things.

They get eaten.

My little Choova was born two months later. I hated childbirth. I thought I would be good at it, but I thrashed and stomped and hee-hawed like a male in season. I will never do this again! I promised. I didn’t think then that the promise would come true.

“Come on, babe, come on, my darling,” Leveza said, butting me with her nose as if herding a filly. “It will be over soon, just keep pushing.”

Grama had become a friend; I think she saw value in Leveza’s mindful way of doing things. “Listen to your family,” she told me.

My firstborn finally bedraggled her way out, tawny, knobbly, shivering and thin, pulled by Grama. Leveza scooped my baby up, licked her clean, breathed into her, and then dandled her in front of my face. “This is your beautiful mother.” Choova looked at me with intelligent love and grinned.

Grama whinnied the cry that triggers Happy Birth! Some of our friends trotted up to see my beautiful babe, stuck their heads through the curtains. They tossed their heads, chortled, and nibbled the back of her neck.

“Come on, little one. Stand! Stand!” This is what the ladies had come to see. Leveza propped Choova up on her frail, awkward, heartbreaking legs, and walked her toward me. My baby stumbled forward and collapsed like a pile of sticks, into the sheltering bay of my stomach.

Leveza lowered Kaway in front of Choova’s nostrils. “And this is your little groom-brother Kaway.”

“Kaway,” Choova said. Our family numbered four.

We did not migrate for one whole year. The colts and fillies would skitter unsteadily across the grass, safe from predators. The old folk sunned themselves on the grass and gossiped. High summer came back with sweeping curtains of rain. Then the days shortened; things cooled and dried.

Water started to come out of the wells muddy; we filtered it. The grass started to go crisp. There was perhaps a month or two of moisture left in the ground. Our children neared the end of their first year, worthy of the name foal.

Except for Leveza’s. Kaway lay there like an egg after all these months. He could just about move his eyes. Almost absurdly, Leveza loved him as if he were whole and well.

“You are a miracle,” she said to Kaway. People called him the Lump.

She would look at him, her face all dim with love, and she would say her fabricated things. She would look at me rapt with wonder.

“What if he knows what the Ancestors knew? We know about cogs and gears and motors and circuits. What if Kaway is born knowing about electricity? About medicine and machines? What he might tell us!”