Khe (19 page)

The distant thunder of Weast’s laughter floats through the room.
No. Nor do our young have an in-between stage like your hatchlings. Our offspring are smaller but exact versions of ourselves
.

My shoulders shake and I feel cold. A dark pain starts behind my left temple.

On our world
, Weast sends,
Lumani pair-bonds are based on successful mating. If two lumani mate and no offspring results, the bond does not hold. Each looks for new mates. If the mating is successful, the two lumani set up a house-ring together. If the other is already in another pair-bond, the third lumani lives in the same ring. If the third is in a pair-bond, the fourth shares the same ring, and so on. The bond dissolves when the offspring are born. The “doumana” side then raises the offspring to maturity, in about twenty of your years.

My breath catches in my throat. If Weast expects that I will see the half-breed abomination through to maturity, it offers me at least that much more life time—twenty more of our years, nearly twice our normal span.

The machines thrum. The pain in my temple is gone. I feel my body changing inside, can hear the blood rushing, my electrical energy pulsing. I’m changing, but I’m not frightened. They must be feeding me a drug that makes me accept.

I will not accept this.

But . . . I am relaxed, happy almost. Twenty more years.

Weast glides around the rolling cot and shrinks its band. The row of four brighter glows that I think of as eyes are next to the machine. Its sparks flare, then drop back to what they were before.

There is no way of accurately predicting how quickly our offspring will mature,
Weast sends.
Your species matures in a wisp of lumani time. The combining might not succeed, though our calculations indicate it will.

But you might not survive.
I need to keep my mind busy, focused. The relaxation drugs are stealing my resistance. If Weast Returns in the combining … What good is it to rid our world of only one?

Weast doesn’t answer. I know it heard me. I can see our thoughts traveling back and forth like grains of sand in neat lines, rising and falling on crests of invisible waves. The gentle movements fascinate me.

Yes
, Weast sends at last.
Which is why I must tell you everything that I want my lumanicate to know
.

I might as well be a textbox. Weast wants to fill me with information.

Is lumanicate the lumani word for offspring
? I send. Where are Azlii, Tanez, and Inra? If I can escape, how will I find them?

Yes, of course, but no
, Weast answers.
For us, the word lumanicate means not only the offspring of our bodies, but our hope for the future.

For us, also
, I send.
Egg and hatchling are our futures
.

The coil of Weast contracts in.
You abandon your young
.
You cast them out and let strangers raise them. Not even your beasts or birds do such a thing
.

I feel the lumani’s revulsion as clearly as if it were my own emotion. I feel anger rising up despite the relaxation drugs they’ve forced into me. My anger or Weast’s? I can’t tell.

We don’t abandon our offspring,
I send
. The gathers take them as soon as they leave the egg. The hatchlings are sent to the doumanas who have shown the best ability to raise them. We may not know which of our sisters raise our own offspring, but that doesn’t matter. We don’t know the doumana who laid the egg or the male who gave his essence to the hatchlings we raise, but we don’t love or care for them any less because of it
.

Yet even as I argue, I think how I would like to know my own offspring. I think of Tanez with her face so like mine, so like a male I once mated with, and how that familiarity warmed me to her. And perhaps warmed her to me, that she gave me her hip wrap and foot casings, and more—that she asked to come to Presentation House with us.

My heart thumps. Whatever her reasons or mine, Tanez is now somewhere within the lumani’s hold. Is it my fault?

All of this is of no importance
, Weast sends impatiently.
You must listen and remember what I tell you
.
We will start with the history of the lumani on this world
.

The glittering haze uncoils and stretches again to touch from ceiling to floor.

Nearly twelve hundred of your years ago, we discovered the first sign of sentient life outside our planet—here, on your world. Twenty-seven of our highest researchers were sent to this world. The trip was long. By time we arrived, those who had sent us were long dissipated. Nevertheless, we set about studying the native sentients and sending reports back, where others would interpret our findings and make practical uses of them
.

Twenty-seven lumani. Only twenty-seven of them, and they’ve changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of us.

Energy pounds in my veins. I need to sit up, to move. I push against the straps holding my body to the cot.

You are in need?
Weast sends.

Yes
, I send back.
The straps hurt me. Could they be undone
?

Escape will be that much easier.

Weast gives no response. I pull my wrists against the straps. It’s useless.

I’ll remember more of what you tell me if I’m not thinking about how much my wrists hurt
.

The vaporous band slides around the rolling cot, stopping to peer again at the gauges on the machines casting colored lights on my skin. Weast doesn’t send words, but I know the lumani’s pleasure at what the machines tell it. I think its pleasure should frighten me, but it doesn’t. I want it to frighten me.

I cannot do what you’ve asked
, Weast sends.

I clench my fists and turn my head away.

A helphand must do it
, Weast sends.
I will call
.

The thin line of Weast contracts and grows thicker. Hundreds of sparks burst, glow bright, and then dim inside its form. Weast contracts further, then seems to wink out, and is gone.

I yank at the bonds at my wrists and ankles. They tighten, biting into my skin.

Finally the door irises open and a different helphand bustles into the room, staring at me with wide eyes. She doesn’t speak as she turns the dials on the machines, or as she undoes the ties at my hands and feet, then undoes the broad straps across my body, but leaves in the chemical-carrying tubes. The moment I’m freed, she backs from the room almost at a run. Perhaps she’s heard how I attacked her sister.

The air immediately warms again. I’m busy rubbing the circulation back into my arms and legs when Weast reappears.

You are happy
? it sends.

Weast seems genuinely concerned. Likely my comfort has something to do with how well I can accept its essence. All the calming drugs in the world can’t stop the shiver that thought sends through me.

Why did you call for a helphand
?

The lumani laughs.
Can you not guess? Where are my bone and muscle tools to undo the straps that held you
?

I push myself up to a cross-legged sit.
Not having hands must be difficult
, I send, stalling for time. My body tingles from head to toe. Not from being bound, I think, but from the changes in my electrical energy. How long until Weast judges me ready?

Not difficult
,
but sometimes inconvenient. Not possessing hands became inconvenient when we’d realized we needed different tools from those we’d brought here to study the sentients. We could ask the question of ‘what do we need?’ and formulate the answer, but we could not build. We needed doumanas to build machines for us.

Why doumanas and not males?
I send.
Or do both work with you
?

The haze of Weast glides around the rolling cot again. I swivel my head, watching.

Only the doumanas. By time the machines were necessary, the sexes had moved apart. We asked ourselves, which will be most useful, and answered, the doumanas, who have more vitality and endurance
.

There were further problems
, Weast continues.
There are always problems with your kind. You were nomadic. This was not optimum for us. We needed our builders in one place until the machines could be finished. We needed helpers trained in our methods and procedures to conduct our experiments. We made the klers as places to keep the trained helpers and the builders. We put research centers in some klers, to keep our subjects in one place while each experiment was conducted. We had Chimbalay built to meet our needs, which allows us to live in your world. We conceived of the communes to provide food and goods for those who work in the klers
.

Weast is bragging. My spots flare gray-green with loathing at the lumani’s pride and at its blindness that it can’t read my spots and see how I feel. Now I know that Azlii was right when she said that the lumani, not the creator, made the three types of communities we live in.

But you left the corentas
, I send, wanting a fight. The drugs have suppressed my fear, but what should have been fear is anger.

Some wanted to eradicate the corentas, yes,
Weast replies.
Corentans are a great bit of trouble for us, but a necessity. We must have a control group—a way to view your natural changes
.

My spots riot on my neck, burning in fury. I’ve never felt this intensity before. It scares me. I breathe slowly, to calm myself.

What interests you most on our world
? I send. Perhaps what interests the lumani can be turned to destroy them.

So many things
, Weast sends. Its sparks are skating wildly inside its outline.
There are, here, a great variety of naturally occurring plants with medicinal effects. We are interested in the separation of the sexes. Lumani, being integrated, could never see the effects of that separation in our own kind
.

Weast breaks off communication. I try to send another question, wanting to fight with the only tool I have—words. Weast won’t respond. It’s like banging my fist against a wall.

I try again.
Don’t you see that it’s wrong to deprive the kler and commune dwellers of their natural way of living? You’ve made us into something we were never meant to be
.

It was necessary
, Weast sends with a force that knocks against me like a fist.
How else are we to learn? We hunger for knowledge the way you hunger for food. Without learning, we wither
.

I feel the lumani’s anger lessen, then drop away, replaced by pleasure.

The change in you is working
, Weast sends.
Listen to how you ask questions and push for answers; you are becoming more lumani already. When you are as fully lumani as you can be, I will teach you the excitement of knowledge gathering. The joy of it. Only mating comes close to the feeling
.

I stare at my hands and legs, half expecting them to have faded into a lumani-like haze, but they are solid. One of the machines shining light onto my skin begins beeping. My neck feels suddenly cold. A shiver trembles across my shoulders.

The time is near
, Weast sends.
One more dose and you will be ready. I will call an orindle to change the medication
.

Weast shimmers the way it did when calling the helphand before, then vanishes.

The door whooshes open immediately. I recognize the orindle, the pale red shade of her skin, the dark brown eyes that look too large for her small face. Pradat.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Rejoice! Rejoice! My sisters return weary from their work
.

--Commune song

I know Pradat recognizes me. She stops mid-step, plants her feet apart, knees bent, and yanks the textbox in her arms up in front of her like a shield. Her spots flare with the colors of surprise and fear.

“Khe,” she whispers.

My neck tingles but my spots don’t light. Is this from the drugs?

Pradat lowers the textbox. She lets her arms fall to her sides. “I often hoped to see you again at Lunge, but Simanca never invited me back.”

It’s good to hear spoken words again. I want to answer, to hear sounds coming from my throat and mouth. I try, but nothing comes out.

But Pradat is an orindle, a helphand to the lumani. She’s here to adjust the machines and medications, to shove me over the ledge and make me into the thing Weast is creating as its mate. I should attack her now. My hands curl into soft fists, ready to harden.

“They used a drug to relax you,” she says, her words slow and bland. “The effects should be almost gone. Keep trying to talk.”

I look away and then back at her. I don’t see Pradat, but her outline, and in that shape a swirl of colors pulsing slowly, old-leaf green mixing with pink. Blue-purple flows over the whole. A trickle of yellow-orange seeps down the sides of her shape. The colors confuse me. They aren’t tied to what I feel of her emotions. Is this how the lumani see? I blink rapidly and see Pradat again as she has always looked. My breath comes in short, rapid bursts.

“How long have you been here?” she asks, walking toward me.

I shake my head. I must be patient, wait for the right moment to overcome her and escape this place.

Her jaw tenses. “Try, Khe. We have very little time before the Power will grow restless. There are things I need to know. You have to speak.”

Do I trust her?

Pradat takes another step forward. “Did Simanca send you here?”

“No,” I say. The word comes out rusty. I try for more. “I was caught at Presentation House.”

Pradat nods in a way that tells me that she knew this and was only trying to get me to speak. She veers around the rolling cot, walks over to the machines beyond, and looks at each of them. She enters something into the textbox that must be more than a textbox, and frowns.

“Your natural energy pattern is completely altered,” she says in the maddening noncommittal voice I remember from Lunge and Morvat. “It can’t be undone.”

A lump rises in my throat. I am no longer Khe. I’m something else now.

Pradat moves quickly, making adjustments to the machines. She concentrates on the two that cast the circles of colored light. I wonder where Weast is, if it is watching us. The textbox that Pradat has tucked against her ribs with one arm is hampering her work. She sets it on the rolling cart. The screen is filled with numbers that mean nothing to me.