Khe (2 page)

Thedra rolled her shoulders to loosen the kinks, cleared her throat and started to sing. She chose a fitting song, considering what day it was.

“
First Warmth’s at its end, the fruit’s in the tree.

Resonance calls, my heart answers free.

Soon I will come, a good mate to find

At the end of the journey, in Resonance time
.”

Thedra had a beautiful voice and knew it. Sometimes I hated her for that.

Our unitmate Jit rushed up just as Thedra finished the first verse.

“Don’t sing that song,” she said, her arms pulled in close to her body as if she were cold. “I heard there was a doumana in Chimbalay who sang that song the day before Resonance started and she didn’t feel it.”

“Didn’t feel it,” Thedra scoffed. “What does that mean?”

“Resonance,” Jit said. “She didn’t feel the tug. She didn’t see her color. She couldn’t mate.”

Thedra tsked. “That’s just a scare-story, Jit. Everyone feels Resonance.”

“No. It’s true,” Jit said.

Thedra and Jit could argue all day about nothing and forget it all in an instant.

“I’m starving,” I said to change the subject.

“Resonance hunger,” Thedra said, as if she knew more about everything than anyone else.

“And my last chance to do something about it,” Jit said.

A rush of heat whipped across my throat and the emotion spots on my neck lit bright blue in excitement. Thedra and Jit had the same color glowing on their necks. I felt a rush of love for my sisters, seeing our harmony of feelings.

“Double portions for me tonight,” Thedra said.

“I’ll go triple after this day’s hard work,” Jit said.

I rubbed the knuckle of my right thumb over the place just above my left wrist where two small blue dots were visible. Our first dot appeared at Emergence, the day we left our hatchling state behind and joined society as mature doumanas. A new dot appeared every year after that, on Commemoration Day, which fell on the new moon of First Warmth Season. My unitmates and I now had two dots each and were old enough to experience Resonance.

“Where’s Stoss?” I asked. We couldn’t go to the communiteria until all the members of our unit were together.

Jit hitched up her shoulders in a shrug. “I thought she was right behind us.”

Thedra tsked. “You know how Stoss is. She probably ate most of what she plucked and is trying to get at least one basket actually filled with leaves. Then she’ll tell us how hard she worked today and have a very creative excuse to explain why she harvested less than the rest of us.”

In spite of myself, my mouth crinkled in agreement.

“Stoss,” Thedra called. “We’re hungry.”

In the corner of the field, Stoss’s face, round as an orb and pink-red, appeared over the green and yellow tiko leaves. She hastily wiped her mouth, stood up all the way, and stared toward us.

***

In the communiteria, I stared down at my plate and pushed the thick mélange around with my spoon, to make it look like I’d eaten more. Jit and Stoss sat on either side of me, gobbling their meals like they hadn’t eaten in days. Thedra was in line for another helping.

I glanced at Hwanta, sitting across the table. She was small for a doumana. With the extra layers of fat she’d put on in preparation for Resonance, she looked nearly as round as an awa fruit. Her skin was about the same shade of fire red, too, and her eyes were as small and black as awa seeds. I started to giggle. My spots flared maroon.

Hwanta shook her head and muttered, “Resonance madness.” She eyed my plate. “You must have eaten faster than the rest of us if you’re finished already, Khe.”

Thedra plopped back down in her chair. "I don't like mélange but I can't stop eating it."

Hwanta reached across the table. “I’ll just help you not waste the last of yours, Khe."

Stoss pulled her head up from the plate that had absorbed her attention until that moment. “It’s hard to believe that tomorrow I won’t feel hungry at all, but that’s what they say.” She pushed back her chair and went to stand in the slow moving line of doumanas at the food stalls.

“Tell me about Resonance,” I said to Hwanta, who was older and knew things.

“Didn’t you pay attention during the vision stage presentation?”

“I did,” I said, “but that orindle on the stage was so dry, she made Resonance sound almost boring.”

Jit looked up. "How could anything about Resonance be boring?"

“Fttt,” Thedra said. “Just listen.”

Hwanta pulled her back straight and adopted that blind gaze and the Listen-carefully-this-is-important tone that speakers on the vision stage have. All the first-year doumanas at the table stopped eating and paid attention.

“In response to changes in the planet’s magnetic fields, a small gland housed where skull meets spine—the Resonance sac—secretes a chemical allowing us to perceive the Resonance force visually and follow it back to the place where we were hatched.”

I clapped my thigh. Hwanta sounded exactly like the boring vision stage orindle. Hwanta beamed at her accomplishment.

“Simanca said that there were hundreds of nesting sites,” I said. “She said that we might share a site with some of our commune-sisters, but that if we did, we probably wouldn’t see them there, the crowd would be so large.”

I’d lived all my remembered life with the same fifty-two sisters. The thought of being among stranger doumanas and seeing a male for the first time excited me. My emotion spots felt suddenly warm.

Hwanta wiped her mouth and set down her spoon. “The force is there all the time, we just can’t see or feel it. When the magnetic field of the planet changes, and that only happens every other year during the fifteen days of Resonance, our chemical and electrical levels change too. Then we can see the colors of the force and follow it back to the right nesting ground.”

I leaned forward. “What is it like, feeling Resonance?”

Hwanta’s lips crinkled. “Wonderful. Something that can’t be described. You have to live it to know. The only thing better is mating.”

Every doumana at the table had bright blue excitement spots flaring on her neck. Males stayed in their own communities, living no differently than we but among their own kind, as was right and proper. Simanca had said that if females and males lived together, they would always have the urge to mate. The creator had separated us so we wouldn’t be distracted from our work.

In the same way, the creator had devised three types of communities—the country communes where food was produced or raw materials like ore or wood were gathered, the large klers where finished goods and policy were made, and the corentas, nomadic trading communities that transported raw materials and finished goods back and forth between commune and kler.

Hwanta pushed her chair back and stood up. “I’m ready for another bowl. How about you, Khe? More?”

I didn’t want more, but I stood up and followed Hwanta anyway.

***

The morning light cut through the window like a knife. The three cots where Thedra, Jit, and Stoss slept were empty. My stomach rumbled in hunger. I bolted up into a sit and threw off the thin blanket I’d slept under. This wasn’t right, wasn’t possible.

“Jit?” I called. “Stoss? Thedra?”

My voice was shaky. I’d never woken in an empty room before. My stomach rumbled again.

No one felt hungry once Resonance began. In the days before individual transportation vehicles, journeys to the nesting grounds were often long. Needing to stop for food was inefficient, and the creator had relieved us of the burden. When Resonance ended, hunger returned.

But my hunger had not gone. And I felt no crazier than I had yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that. Felt no lust surging in my blood, no egg quickening in my sac. Saw no colors in the air to guide me anywhere.

Broken
.

Impossible, I told myself. Desire would come. My own special color would shimmer in the air.

I climbed off my cot, planted my feet on the warm stone floor, threw back my head and held my arms wide, waiting to feel the pull.

Nothing.

Only hunger.

Broken. A drain on my species.

What good was I?

Chapter Two

Praise your sisters who soon will be dust.

From dust does rise the creator’s breath.

--The Song of Returning

The world had swung once around the sun since my commune-sisters had gone to Resonance and I had not. Everyone knew. They’d seen it in my emotion spots when they’d returned. No one spoke of it to me, not even Simanca.

No one spoke to me about Resonance either. Of the tug, the journey, the joy. I heard plenty, though. Sisters in the field, in the commons—the first-year doumanas could hardly stop jabbering on. Until they caught sight of me. Then all was silence.

I tried to ask Thedra about it.

“There’s no point, Khe,” she’d said. “It would be like telling a grass eater what meat tastes like.”

I’d asked Jit, too. She’d only crinkled her lips in a smile, hummed a bit, and said, “It’s wonderful.” Her eyes had opened up wide. “It’s not all that grand,” she’d said quickly. “You didn’t miss anything.” Then her eyes went all misty again.

I didn’t bother asking Stoss.

***

The fires were already lit and the kettles set on when we crossed over the pale-green brick threshold into Emergence House, all fifty-three doumanas of Lunge sikra fitting easily into the large room. Sweat trickled down my sides. No one liked the long, pale-green gowns that swaddled us throat to ankle and were too hot on a morning like this, but we didn’t complain. Not on Commemoration Day, the day our hatchlings would have their downy outer skin peeled away, allowing the fully developed doumana within to emerge—a ceremony everyone loved. It was also the time we celebrated Returning to the creator with the aged doumanas, which I didn’t like so well.

In the windowless room, large cast-iron cauldrons filled with spice-scented water bubbled, filling the air with steam to help soften the hatchlings’ skins and make peeling easier. The scent made me woozy. I felt hot and prickly, as though I were a hatchling again, nervously waiting to withstand a rite everyone promised would be wonderful, but that I had my doubts about.

The hatchlings who would emerge today were off-resonance young who hadn’t hatched in the year they’d been laid, but had grown more slowly, needing extra time to develop enough strength to break out of the egg. Off-Resonance hatchlings tended to be weak and often died before they could emerge as doumanas. Of course, they cost less, too. That we’d brought these three through in complete health made the prospect of seeing them emerge even better.

“Praise now your second birth,” we chanted. Simanca seized a hatchling firmly, dug her bony fingers into the loose flesh behind the hatchling’s neck, and began peeling away long strips of yellow skin. The hatchling wriggled beneath Simanca’s hold, her eyes wide, her face set in a mix of excitement and fear.

“Be still,” Simanca said, squeezing the hatchling’s shoulder—which only made her wriggle more.

“Be still,” Simanca insisted, and the hatchling settled down.

She had said the same thing to me on my Emergence day and pinched me hard enough to leave a mark, but peeling tickled. It had been hard to stand motionless, as we had been told to. I’d wanted to please Simanca and to make my sisters proud. Instead I’d hopped around like a bird with both feet on hot coals.

When Simanca finished with the hatchling, a much-changed being stood before us. Her body covering of yellow down was gone. Her skin glistened with sweat and moisture from the steam that nearly choked the air from the room. The newly emerged doumana stretched out one arm, admiring the lovely smoothness of her skin, her new light-red color, the single blue dot on her wrist.

I sneaked another look at the new, third dot that had appeared that morning on the inside of my left wrist. A thrill ran through me, as though my dot showed real accomplishment, not just the passage of time.

We weren’t like the beasts whose fur whitened with age or the birds whose feathers grew straggly over time. A doumana looked the same from the moment she left the hatchling state behind until she returned to the creator. To know how old a doumana was, you had to count the dots on her wrist.

“I present to you,” Simanca said, “the doumana, Denil. Welcome your new sister.”

To grow a happy heart
, say The Rules,
till well the fields of celebration
.

We all stomped our feet and shouted welcomes and praises. Our commune and our kind would continue.

***

The paint on the murals lining the walls of our community hall was flaked and the colors had turned dull. The painted doumana harvesting kiiku had lost most of one hand and parts of her shoulders. I don’t know why I suddenly noticed; the mural must have looked the same all of my life.

Once Lunge commune had thrived. Then the commune’s weather-prophet had failed to see the coming of a series of hailstorms that destroyed most of the harvest. That was in the days when each commune had its own weather-prophet, before the Powers started examinations and certification and centralized the prophets in the klers.

Food production went down at Lunge in each of the next three years. With each decline, fewer hatchlings were assigned, making fewer doumanas to work in the fields, which meant production went down—a cruel circle that our community seemed unable to break.

“Praise to the creator,” Simanca said, drawing my attention back to where we were and why. She stood on a riser at the front of the hall—the textbox belt around her waist, the embroidered shawl of leadership over her shoulders, her arms held out as if she could enfold us all in their embrace. Her unitmates, Tav, Gintok, and Min stood behind her.

We rose from our seats, calling, “Praise to the creator who gives us life and plenty. Praise to the creator who will soon receive our sisters into its soul.”

From the back of the room, the four Returning doumanas walked in a single line down the center aisle toward where Simanca and her unit stood. My unit sat in the front row. I couldn’t see the coming doumanas’ faces clearly over the heads of my commune-sisters sitting around us, but I knew who they were.