Children of God

Sofia’s messages were always addressed to both of them, in spite of everything that had happened during the long years since they’d left the forest. After she’d read the latest, Ha’anala closed the tablet carefully. "Isaac? Do you want to go back?"

"No." He didn’t ask, Back where? It didn’t matter.

"Our mother wishes it." There was a pause. "She is old, Isaac. She will die someday soon."

This was of no interest. He held his hands close to his eyes and began to make patterns with his fingers. But he could see Ha’anala looking at him, even through his fingers. "I won’t go back," he said, dropping his hands. "They don’t sing."

"Isaac, hear me. Our mother sings. Your people sing." She paused, and then continued, "There are others of your kind, Isaac. They have come here again—"

This interested him. "The music I found is right," he said, not with triumph or wonder but flatly: clouds rain, night follows day, the music was right.

"They may not stay, Isaac. Our mother may go back with them." A pause. "Back to where your species comes from." A longer pause, to let him hear this. "Isaac, if our mother decides to return to H’earth, we will never see her again."

He tapped his fingers against his cheeks, on the smooth place where the hair didn’t happen, and began to hum.

"You should say good-bye to her at least," Ha’anala pressed.

"Should" had no clarity. He’d looked «should» up, but he found only noise about responsibility to others, obligations. He did not understand emotion that required two or more persons. His emotions took cognizance of his own state. He could be frustrated, but not frustrated by. He felt anger, but not anger at. He experienced delight, but not delight in. He lacked prepositions. Singing broke this pattern. He understood harmony: to sing with. That was how Ha’anala had explained her marriage to Shetri: "We are in harmony."

Isaac cranked his head back on his neck to look up at the tent fabric, studying the sunlight that made each tiny pixel between warp and weft glow. He had refused a new stone house because the tent was familiar and he liked the color. It moved, but not like leaves. He glanced down and saw that Ha’anala had not left, so he held out his hand and waited for the weight of the tablet to settle into his palm. The tent was a veil that no one pulled away. The tent kept dust and leaves out, unless there was a big storm. Even so, he got his sticks to check the rectangle, to be certain it still had the correct proportions.

Then: the feel of the latch against his thumb, the soft snick of the mechanism, the unchanging geometry of the cover. The whirr of power-on, the brightening of the screen, the keyboard with its serried ranks. A few keystrokes and a few words, there it was again, precisely as he’d left it, each note perfect and precise. He thought, I was born to find this.

He was, in his own way, pleased.

THE WIDOW SUUKMEL CHIROT U VAADAI NO LONGER HAD A FIRM OPINION about which god ruled her life.

In her youth, she had been inclined toward the more traditional deities: old, fussy goddesses who took pains to keep the suns in their proper paths, the rivers in their banks, the rhythms of daily life reliable. After her marriage, she had become rather fond of Ingwy, who ruled fate, for Suukmel knew the evils of lucklessness and was grateful to have been vouchsafed a husband who valued her. Many godlings took up residence in her untroubled household: Security, Luxury, Purpose, Balance. It was a rewarding life. Suukmel had seen daughters well married to husbands who met her private requirements, as well as those dictated by their lineal position and contemporary politics. She herself had scope for quiet accomplishment, and genuine contentment.

Then, in her middle years, Chaos ruled her. Chaos, dancing. Chaos, singing. Not a goddess but a man who had sent her treasure: life lived with an intensity that often frightened her, but from which she would not, could not turn away. Power came to her. Influence. She tasted the exhilaration of the forbidden, the unpredictable. Chaos demanded not the death of Virtue in her life but the birth of Passion. Joy. Creation. Transformation.

And now? Who rules me now? Suukmel wondered idly, watching as Ha’anala abruptly left her strange brother’s tent. A light breeze carried information confirming observation: Ha’anala was furious. Sweeping sightlessly past Suukmel, she strode beyond the confines of the settlement without a word to anyone, pausing only to snatch up the straps of a huge basket with one short hooked claw and sling it over her shoulder.

For a time, Suukmel simply gazed at the younger woman as she climbed jumbled glacial scree, and held her breath, hoping Ha’anala would not fall, balance thrown off and strength sapped by her fourth pregnancy. Sighing, Suukmel rose to follow, picking up her own basket and a tough old tarpaulin, heavy with wax and dirt and recent rain. Ha’anala seemed to welcome the attacks of the kha’ani when she was in this mood; Suukmel preferred to do her maurauding under the protection of a tarp.

There were a multitude of rocky outcrops in the mountains that surrounded the N’Jarr valley, and these crags were the favored nesting sites of the settlement’s most abundant source of permissible food. At the end of Partan, when the rain’s power diminished, the kha’ani bred early and often, in staggering numbers. Adults, darting and dodging, could rarely be caught, but during the dry season, their eggsaks were easy prey—leathery oval bags of protein with generous lashings of fat; that which nourished kha’ani embryos could also sustain Jana’ata if eaten in sufficient quantity. It was a monotonous diet and rather tasteless, but adequate and reliable, and it was varied now and then by other prey more worthy of the term, but also far more dangerous.

"Be warned," Ha’anala called, sensing Suukmel’s approach. "I am not fit company."

"When have I required you to be convivial?" Suukmel asked, coming close. "Besides, I’m here to harass kha’ani, not you." Suukmel hooked her claws into the tarp and gave it a vigorous flap, driving some startled adult kha’ani off, and then slipped under it herself, quickly rolling sak after sak into her basket in the yellowish filtered light of the fabric, humming as she worked.

"What am I to do?" Ha’anala demanded, her voice mixing with the kha’ani shrieks, and coming muffled to Suukmel under her protective covering. "What does she expect? Am I to walk into Gayjur with Isaac? Do you know what she said? All will be forgiven. She forgives me! They forgive! How dare she—"

"You’re right. You aren’t fit company," Suukmel observed, sweeping another nestful of saks into her basket. "Whom are you vilifying, if I may know?"

"My mother!"

"Ah."

"Three times we’ve opened negotiations, and three times our emissaries were killed on sight over six hundred cha’ari outside of Gayjur," Ha’anala fumed, flinging another sak into her basket, ignoring the shrieks and nips of the kha’ani who swarmed around her. "She speaks of trust! She speaks of forgiveness!"

"You’re going to burst the saks at the bottom if you fill that basket much more," Suukmel pointed out, emerging from her tarp. An outraged kha’an launched a flying counterattack and Suukmel took a swipe at it before shouldering her basket and hurrying a few paces away to a patch of grass. The little brutes were vigilantly territorial, but couldn’t see very well. We all have our weaknesses, Suukmel thought, commiserating with her prey’s parents.

She sat in the rare sunshine, warming herself, and took out a few eggsaks. "Come and eat with me, child," she called to Ha’anala.

Ha’anala stood for a time, making an easy target for the kha’ani, but finally lugged her basket over and dropped it next to Suukmel, who serenely kneaded an eggsak until its contents were well mixed. It had taken her some time, but she had worked out a way to manage these things neatly. You had to be deft. Compress the tough, fibrous outer covering in one hand to make the sak taut, and force a claw from the other hand into one end. Then suck out the contents quickly while being careful not to put too much pressure on the sak. Squeeze too hard and you’d have albumin all over your face.