The Color of Distance (47 page)

Moki turned brilliant blue at the news that they were going fishing. Juna felt a pang of guilt. She really had been overworking him. He looked thin and a bit worn. They hadn’t linked fully in a couple of weeks.

“This was a good idea,” Juna remarked as they unrolled their nets and assembled their fishing spears. They were fishing at a wide spot in one of the placid, slow-moving jungle rivers that flowed through the enkar’s territory. The surface of the water was covered with drifts of golden pollen, flower petals, and bits of fluff shed from the ika tree. Inside each bit of fluff was a small seed. Slanting beams of late afternoon sunlight illuminated streamers of lianas cascading down from the branches of the trees.

“I wish we could stay here for a while,” she said wistfully.

“Why not?” Ukatonen said.

“I promised Naratonen that I would show him what I’ve recorded of his classes in my talking stone,” Juna replied, pointing with her chin at the computer recharging in a pool of sunlight.

“Don’t worry about it,” Ukatonen told her. He waded over to a half-submerged log, and dripped a few drops of clear liquid on it. Several large wide-winged insects settled on the spot almost immediately. Ukatonen picked one up and set it on his spur for a couple of minutes, then waved it off his arm. It flew off in a straight line. He repeated that with several more insects before returning to Juna.

“I’ve invited Naratonen to bring Ninto and Anito out here for a couple of days, and told him to let the others know that you wouldn’t be teaching for a while.”

“Those insects carry messages?”

“Yes, it’s called a meaki. I sent them back to the enkar gathering. When one of them gets there, it will start doing a special dance. Someone will catch it and read the message I have given the meaki. Then it will be passed on.”

“How do you make the message?”

“I make it in my spurs, and feed it to the insect. It spreads throughout its body and sends the message-bug where I tell it to go. When it arrives, an enkar will link with the insect and read the message in its cells. Then the enkar will turn off the message, feed the meaki well, and let it go. Naratonen will get my invitation before nightfall, though we probably won’t see him until tomorrow.”

“I never saw the villagers do that,” Juna remarked.

“Only the enkar use meaki. The chief elders use birds to let us laics when we’re needed. I was responding to such a message when I met yc. and Anito.” Ukatonen picked up a spear. “Now, enough talk. Let’s fish he said.

He waded out to a submerged rock, and stood as still as a fishing bird, waiting for a fish to come within range of his spear. Moki headed downstream with the net. He was young and hungry, eager for a big catch Juna took her spear and knelt on the log where Ukatonen had summoned the message bug.

Silence fell as they waited for the fish to forget about them. It was a silence filled with living things, resounding with the distant calls of birds and lizards, and the buzzing of the matas, strange insects with wings like leaves and bizarre, elongated heads that served as resonators. Occasionally another meaki would come and circle around, drawn by the fading scent of the attractor Ukatonen had dripped onto the log.

She had been here among the enkar for three and a half months now. Teaching the enkar was demanding work. It was good to take a break. A shadow moved beneath the log. Juna waited, poised and still, until the fish edged within range of her spear. She threw it, striking the fish. Grasping the shaft of the spear, she impaled the struggling fish against the sandy bottom until its struggles ceased.

She pulled in the spear and removed the fish. It was a pugginti, a sweet, succulent fish that fed mostly on fallen fruit. She held it up and Ukatonen flickered approval.

Naratonen arrived with Ninto and Anito in tow the next day. He sent his two students off to practice, and sat with Juna while she showed him how to work the computer. Once he knew what he was doing, she left him to study while she and Moki went swimming with Ukatonen. They floated on their backs, watching the light flicker through the trees. The river pushed them past the bank where Ninto and Anito were practicing their quarbirri.

Ukatonen rolled over and splashed over toward them.

“No, no, no!” he told them. “Like this.” He grasped Ninto’s arm and moved it through the gesture she was trying to perfect. “Your hand needs to be bent further back, so we can see your spurs, and your elbow stays down.”

Irritation flickered across Ninto’s back. Her patience was beginning to wear thin. Juna rippled amusement, rolled over and dove deep beneath the surface, then leapt up out of the water. Moki followed her, and the two of them played like otters until they were panting and out of breath.

They pulled out onto a sun-heated rock to rest. Moki held out his arms and they linked, reaffirming and strengthening the bond between them. Juna’s skill at linking had increased during her time among the enkar. Sometimes in the link, she seemed to feel the presence of the forest around her, pulsing with the threads of many lives. It was impossible, of course. Linking was merely a deep awareness of another’s physiology, a form of incredibly direct biofeedback that seemed to involve a greatly heightened form of chemo-reception via the allu.

Still, linking with Moki made her feel at home on this world, made her feel a part of the jungle around them. It was probably entirely subjective, but it made her happy. She lay back in the sun and closed her eyes.

Ukatonen finished working with Ninto and Anito, and wandered over to see how Naratonen was doing with the
computer.
Ukatonen shook his head. The new creatures had such strange skin speech. Eerin had explained that they used sound to communicate most of the time, but the
humans’
skin speech was easier for the Tendu to learn.

He tried to imagine a room filled with people like Eerin, only brown and pink, their skins still, their mouths producing sounds like the ones she made occasionally. They must sound like a room full of mating yirri, he thought. It was hard to believe that sensible, intelligent people could communicate in this way. How could they possibly understand each other?

Naratonen was hunched over the computer, studying the pictures of himself that Eerin had made. He looked up as Ukatonen squatted beside him.

“This is fascinating. I can see how I move, it’s much clearer and sharper than skin-speech pictures. I’m learning a lot about how I teach.”

Ukatonen looked over Naratonen’s shoulder as the computer played and replayed a phrase from the quarbirri he was teaching. Ukatonen had dismissed Eerin’s talking stones as a curiosity, but here was Naratonen, pink with excitement at seeing himself on the thing. Ukatonen looked away, uneasy at the sight.

Eerin came over and squatted on Naratonen’s other side. “Well, en, what do you think of it?”

“It’s wonderful!”

“I have a few full quarbirri performances in here somewhere,” she said, reaching down and fiddling with the controls. The picture changed, and she pointed at something; then the picture changed once more and she pointed again, until the screen showed her what she wanted. Ukato-nen had seen her do this before, but never really paid much attention.

“Here, watch this,” she said.

The screen darkened. There was the sound of a shell horn being played. A tall enkar was blowing on it. Then a lyali-Tendu responded with a run of notes on her flute. Ukatonen recognized her. It was Narito, leader of the band of lyali-Tendu that Narmolom had traded with last year. Uka-tonen’s stinging stripes tightened as he realized that he was watching himself performing the quarbirri of the origin of the lyali-Tendu. Frightened and intrigued, he observed himself moving through the performance, his skin alive with words. He-glanced up, and saw that Naratonen was watching with a critical eye. Ukatonen was glad that he had performed well. The truth of the talking stone wouldn’t shame him.

As the quarbirri proceeded, he was drawn into watching himself, evaluating his technique, for the most part pleased, but noticing certain things he wished he had done differently. When the recording drew to a close, he wanted to watch it again, as Naratonen was doing. He began to understand the fascination that the talking stone held for Naratonen. It bothered him. He scooped up his hunting gear, and swung off into the forest to think it over.

Ukatonen perched in the top of a tall ika tree, looking out over the canopy. Eerin had said that her people would bring change. He hadn’t wanted to believe her, but here it was. The talking stone had fascinated both him and Naratonen. It wasn’t decent, it wasn’t healthy to be fascinated by a dead thing like that. This obsession with dead things could spread among the Tendu. What should be done about it? He could destroy the talking stones, or hide them, but that would anger Eerin and her people. He could ask her to hide her talking stone, but sooner or later something else would come along that would hold the same fascination.

He needed to talk this over with other enkar, with Naratonen, with Anito, and with Eerin. What should be done?

An unwary quanji landed in a nearby branch. Ukatonen lifted his blowpipe and shot it as the bird spread its wings to fly. He caught the bird neatly as it fell. He butchered it and went swinging back through the trees to rejoin the others.

“Well, what should we do?” Ukatonen finished. Anito sat back, rich ochre with concern. “I don’t know,” she said. “Change and adapt, I suppose. You’re right, we can’t hide from it.”

“Yes you can,” Eerin said. “You can ask us to leave you alone.”

“Why?” Naratonen asked. “It would be wrong. There’s so much we can learn from you. The Tendu have never turned away from knowledge. Why should we start now? We’re enkar, not some head-in-the-mud villagers. It is our job to learn and study. It is our atwa to bring our knowledge to the other Tendu and share it with them.”

“But,” Ukatonen responded, “it is also our atwa to protect and guide them, to steer our people away from things that can hurt them. It is our atwa to judge for them. Our lives, our honor, rest on those judgments. Remember, we do this so that those ‘head-in-the-mud’ villagers can continue to live like that.”

“And is it right?” Naratonen asked, getting up and pacing around, his colors bright wilh urgency. “Is it right that their heads remain in the mud? Is it right that the villagers stay so much to themselves? Is it right that the villagers would rather die than face exile when it is time to give their place in the village over to their bami? Is it right that we have to trap the villagers into becoming enkar through obligation? There are fewer enkar all the time, and this is not good for the Tendu.”

“We’ve had problems like this before,” Ukatonen reminded him. “We’ve always managed to solve them ourselves.”

Anito listened to the enkar debating, and thought of her sitik, how much she wished that he had chosen to live. She thought of her time among the enkar, of all the things she had learned. She was sure that Ilto would have loved being an enkar. It would have given him the room to satisfy his curiosity. She and Ninto had been too busy learning new things to miss Narmolom.

“No,” Anito said. “It isn’t right that the villagers are uninterested, but then, it isn’t right that the enkar should make the villagers change. They like their lives.”

“The villagers are our atwa,” Naratonen argued. “Like other animals, the Tendu must either change or die out. Sometimes it seems like the Tendu are like a dying pond left behind by the flood. Our world gets smaller and smaller. How soon before we stagnate and die? I look at the new creatures, and I see them bringing things to make our world large again. Already, I am learning better ways to teach. I watched some of the new creature’s
plays
and
movies.
There are ideas and techniques that we could use in our own performances. I’m tired of teaching the same traditional quarbirri over and over again. We make a new one every twenty years or so, but no one wants to learn them, because they’re not traditional! It isn’t enough. I want more!”

Anito sat, mesmerized by Naratonen’s words, which were almost a quarbirri in themselves. He was right, but so was Ukatonen. How was she, barely even an elder, supposed to guide the Tendu through this? How could she bring harmony out of this chaos? She realized then the terrible frightening task that the enkar had taken upon themselves. No wonder most people shrank from becoming enkar. Who would want the responsibility of determining the future of the Tendu?

Eerin stood and laid a gentle hand on Naratonen’s arm. “Excuse me. en, but it isn’t that simple. Knowledge is a knife with two edges. It can cut cord, or skin game, but it can also hurt and kill. Not all the things my people know are as benign as this
computer,”
she said, using the new creatures’ word for her talking stone. “Even this computer contains things that might be harmful for your people to know.”

“What sort of things?”

“Hunting equipment that can be used to kill another Tendu.”

Anito looked at Eerin in puzzlement. What she was saying didn’t make sense.

“Why would we wish to hunt ourselves?” Ukatonen asked, his skin deeply purple in puzzlement. “That would be silly.”

“My people have always killed each other in anger,” Eerin said, her skin deeply brown with shame. “Sometimes they have killed each other in large numbers. It is what we call a
war.”
She looked away; water was flowing from her eyes. Her skin was a muddy turmoil of shame, anger, fear, and concern. Moki put a protective arm around her.

“My people are different from the Tendu,” Eerin went on. “We don’t wish to hurt you, but we do bring ideas that might cause harm.” With that, she got up and walked away into the forest, shrugging off Moki’s attempts to follow her.

Juna sat on a rock by the river, letting the low, constant murmur of its flow soothe her. The Tendu needed to know about her people’s flaws as well as their virtues, but she felt deeply ashamed. Even now, there were wars on Earth. When she left Earth, the news net had been full of bulletins about the escalation of an ethnic conflict in Punjab.