The Kanshou (Earthkeep) (14 page)

Bosca eased the padded chair back so as to catch more sun on her thin figure.  "Zude, are you a materialist hold-out?"

"Am I -- what?"

Bosca frowned, then said, "Ideas.  Where do you think ideas come from?"

Zude settled the cushcar once more into a lightly-monitored circle over the grey-blue sea.  "Ideas come from reality," she said earnestly, patting the bulkhead beside her.  "This is solid, real.  I can't walk through it.  Our ideas, anything we think or believe, all of that comes from this solid world, from the way we perceive it through our five senses."  She patted the bulkhead again, then looked at Bosca.  "So no sermons about the spirit, please.  The only 'spirit' I have is my body.  Here 'tis."  She slapped her thigh.  "And when it dies, it dies.  Poof! It just rejoins the nitrogen cycle."

"But Zude, where's your sense of magic?"  She drew herself to an upright position.  "You fly!  I mean, you have flown with -- you do fly with your -- your--"  She faltered.

"Why, yes, but--"

"Well, that ability contradicts physical laws.  How do you explain it?"

"I don't," Zude said sharply.  "Nobody does.  Although everybody tries."  She shifted in her chair.  "Bosca, there's a good explanation for why women can fly together.  We just haven't discovered it yet."

"How about all the other things that defy logic and physical laws, those witches who found the desalinization formulas, for instance?  Spontaneous healing?  Levitation?  Precognition?  Some people can mindstretch--"

"Bosca, people are always exceeding themselves," Zude said, struggling for patience.  "Once there was no such thing as a four-minute mile.  Once we wrote with quill parchment, but only because we hadn't yet discovered the information we needed in order to make writing easier.  I'm not denying that we have undiscovered capacities.  I'm just saying that what's knowable becomes known according to set laws.  Maybe we'll all be able to fly someday, or to mindstretch.  But that won't mean that there's some kind of supernatural power apart from us that has suddenly reached out and endowed us!  When mindstretchingbecomes common we'll have a physical explanation for it.  And for flying," she added.  She suddenly wanted to light up a cigarillo.  She chewed on her lip instead. 

"I understand," Bosca said. "You're a little old-fashioned, maybe, but--"

"Old-fashioned?" Zude exclaimed.  "Old-fashioned?  Bosca, that is about as current and as common a belief system as you'll find anywhere on the planet!"

"Relax, please, Magister Adverb."  Bosca's voice was steady.  "I just meant that it's pre-Earthclasp thinking.  There's nothing really wrong with it.  It's just sort of. . .a throwback.  And a little limited."

Zude ducked her chin and eyed a distant cloud.  "And clung to by a big part of the world all the more desperately, I guess, in the face of millennium spiritualism.  Yes, I admit that."

Zude bore the silence for several of her own agitated breaths, then broke the tension.  "I've never been much good at talking about spiritual matters, Bosca."  She leaned forward, trying to catch her passenger's eye.  Bosca studied the status panels that blinked and pulsed before them.  Zude tried once more.  "I'm certainly not good at spiritual growth."  She sought Bosca's eyes again.

Then Bosca laughed.          

Zude was vastly relieved.  Heartily, she continued.  "I have always been sort of spiritually incorrect.  You know, always bored by meditation, always blocking the cosmic energy--"

"Always kind," Bosca observed pointedly.  Zude shot her a glance.  "I didn't expect it," Bosca continued.  When Zude frowned, Bosca swiveled her seat toward her.  "I never expected a  Magister to be kind."

Magister Adverb was plainly disconcerted.  Once more she sky-parkedthe ship over the ocean.  She studied her guest.  "Bosca," she said, "I'm uncomfortable with this whole conversation.  For all kinds of reasons.  But I'll try to hang with it because it's apparently important to you.  And," she shrugged both hands into the air, "who knows?  It may be important to me."

"It is," Bosca said, her voice curtailing Zude's extravagant gesture.  Zude froze.  Bosca continued.  "It is important to both of us."  She held Zude's eyes.

Intimacy flooded Zude's veins.  Her palms were sweating.  "Bosca, I'm--"

"Zude."  Bosca held up her hand.  Then she dropped her eyes, as if all courage had failed her.  Zude kept absolutely still.  A breeze rocked the hovercraft, urging it out of its parked status.   Automatically Zude steadied the steering orb. 

ThenBosca's voice lost any hint of hesitation.  "Zude, I had no reason to come to Los Angeles.  No purpose, I mean.  It was a spontaneous decision if ever I made one.  And now I know why I came."  Zude said nothing.  "Magister  Adverb."  Bosca turned her chair directly toward Zude's.  As she did so, she gently pulled around Zude's swivel seat to face her own.  "I came to ask," she said, "if I can be your friend."  Before Zude could respond, Bosca elaborated.  "Not your lover, and certainly not your co-worker, though there is some important work we have to do together.  Not to intrude on any of your present relations.  Just to be your friend."

The hovercraft hovered.  Zude sat flabbergasted.

"Well," Bosca finished, matter-of-factly, "you can think about it."  She sat back and smiled.  "Will you tell me about this family of yours so I can at least call them by name when we meet?"  She turned her chair forward again, toward the panorama of sea and sky.  "They're all from Old Mexico?"

Zude blinked.  Deliberately she shifted her mind toward  Bosca's change of subject.  With only a little difficulty she found her voice and the hovercraft's forward impulse tab.  "No," she said, "no, only Kayita.  She left her brother leaning against a slot machine in Oaxaca sixty years ago.  She's been looking for him ever since.  Be ready to be quizzed."

"Zude, I have been to Oaxaca only once in my life--"

"It doesn't matter.  What matters is that you're from Kayita's part of the world.  You tell her about your home, about Tres Valles.  That will be sufficient."  Zude turned the cushcar toward land, explaining as they flew how her adopted family spanned four generations: Kayita the matriarch; Eva, her daughter who would soon be back in Australia for two more years; Ria, or Gabriella, the daughter of Eva who lived with Kayita and the children; and finally her chosen children, Regina and Enrique, and their one hundred cousins all of whom would undoubtedly greet Zude and Bosca when they arrived.

They were approaching land and the cushcar was decelerating with gentle jerks when Zude broke off her narration.  She turned to her companion.

"What work do we have to do together, Bosca?"

"Work that you will refuse at first," Bosca replied.

"But only at first?"

"Only at first."

"Will you tell me what it is?"

"Will you promise to consider doing it?"

"I promise," Zude replied.  "To consider it," she added hastily.

Bosca looked straight ahead and spoke calmly.  "I'm being told by my guides that I must show you the considerable extent and force of your psychic abilities."

Zude guided the cushcar very carefully, revealing nothing of the flood of memories that filled her mind.  Harsh accusations and bitter quarrels, fierce arguments and sweet reconciliations.  Swirls of frustration and pain -- all of it set about by the words, over and over again: "
Yes you can, Zude!"  "No I can't, Bella-Belle, I can't do it
!"  "
You mean you won't!" 

Magister Adverb had no intention at that moment of submitting to any psychic development program.  

She grunted in response to Bosca's announcement, then brought the cushcar over the beach, rocking her passenger a bit with the airjets' transition to the multicolored sands beneath them.  She chose a route over smooth low grass that would allow them to sail at a height of about twenty feet.  She locked into a free lane.  "There," she said, pointing to a complex of low white buildings.  "That's the South City Employment Center where Ria works.  She's the daughter--"

"The daughter of Eva," Bosca recited, "who works in Australia, and birthmother to Reggie and Enrique who have one hundred cousins."

"Correct," said Zude, smiling in spite of herself.

Bosca watched the Center flow by.

When Zude dropped the cushcar in a whisper to the pad atop an adobe house, whoops of delight broke from the safety door, now open and expelling a herd of children onto the roof.  They led Zude and Bosca to an old woman down in the patio who eyed them carefully before pointing to two chairs.  "Good," she nodded.  "Now you will say about Oaxaca."

6 - Dicken - [2087 C.E.]

We bind him hand and foot under an eyeless hood similar to our own masks, and drive him under dark skies to the deserted clearing in the high grove.  He cries for mercy all the way, and his sweatsmell fouls the flex-wagon.  Spread-eagled on the sacred ground he hears the litany of his deeds against women.  Shaqya removes his hood and Rutana draws down the fire for the charging of the crystals.  We chant our ritual-of–intent.  I stand guard at a distance as my sisters begin their work. 

I hear only his screams. 

--Barya's Speaking from
The Transcribed Tellings Of The Mothers's Resistance
, August 14, 2087]

The pavilion lesson with Aba's students had left Bess Dicken uncomfortabe in a part of herself that she did not wish to explore.  Shaheed's desire to tame horses had reawakened her memory of the hut on the Jamaican mountainside where, when she was ten, Panzon Wundu had raped her and bludgeoned her mother.  Accompanying the intertwining of the images of breaking horses and violating women, Shaheed's defiance still rang in her ears, "What will you do with people like me?"

Typically, when she found herself this disturbed, Dicken would commit her body to programs of strenuous physical challenge in which she would outlift stevedores, outsplit woodwomen, outclimb professional sheer-scalers, or outdance dervishes.  But that kind of chastening and clarifying was not available to her in this village by the Red Sea, and she entered the activities of the evening accompanied by an irritating frustration.

Bess Dicken did not stand easily in second place, particularly to a woman so light-skinned, a woman so universally simpered after, as Jezebel.  A fierce love of freedom shot through her days, legacy of her bearing motherwhose ancestors had been cimarrón or maroon, slaves who had fled both the Spanish and the English to live for centuries without recapture or interference in the mountains of Jamaica.  Though she had lived in Birmingham since she was ten with her donor mother, Dicken had never lost the fire of that cimarrón heritage.

Moreover, Dicken was no stranger to the dynamics of leadership and personal power, having headed up such bureaucratic agencies as the mill board of Nueva Tierra Norte's steel manufacture and, later, that same satrapy's Hemp Standardization Bureau.  She had attracted Jez in the beginning not only with her grace and energy (and her dancing) but as well with her commitment to making global electronic communication an efficient, convenient, and non-intrusive reality.  It was Bess Dicken who at that very moment held the unofficial but most widely trusted overview of Little Blue's every natural resource, and who carried in her head the one hundred complex compucodes that could locate in swift seconds the repositories of styrene in Akron, for example, or of ilmenite in Rostov.

And yet, to the person of Jezebel Stronglaces, Dicken was glad to yield the conch, for Jez most clearly articulated Dicken's political purpose and fired her creative imagination.   She understood that Jez looked upon her as her buffer zone of protective sensitivity as well as her love- and learn-together; Jez had assured her that Dicken read her health, her needs, and her desires in ways no other had ever done.

Happily, Dicken's uneasiness subsided at the evening meal, when someone put a drum in her hands and urged her to join the village musicmakers.  To appreciative clicks and applause, she also rendered her variations on seawomen's ballads and taught the group a hambone riff adaptable to any dactylic cadence. 

Jezebel made her contribution to the meal by instructing villagers in the fundamentals of breathshine.  With her guidance, Zari created a low flicker of light in an idle glolobe with only her breath, her mind, and her tiny hands.  When Dicken and Jez at last departed for their spin with Asir-By-The-Sea's sub-demesne web, the foodcave was alive with the efforts of adults and children alike to coax into life whatever inactive glolobe
s
could be found. 

After the webspin, the visitors said reluctant farewells to Aba and the Asir websters.  Jezebel was determined to fly that night across the desert's edge down to Brandnew Salalah in Oman.  She and Dicken would ziprocket from there to Bombay where Central Webster Dhamni Diu Pradesh would host them for two days.  They were readying their packs to the background of go-to-bed noises in the distant village when Dicken caught in her lover's voice the unmistakable edge of profound fatigue.  Fatigue, when during these next weeks the two of them were bound for a gruelling tour of satrapy and demesne webs in all parts of the world. 

She moved behind her lover, slipped her arms around her waist, closed her eyes, and released a long sigh.  She rested her chin on Jez's shoulder.  "After we see Dhamni in Bombay, let's take some rest time, maybe only a day or two, before we see Thurlanki in Tabora."

"Depends on how critical Dhamni thinks--"

"Depends on how much you want to push that fatigue . . . maybe even risk one of your old seizures."

Jez smiled.  "What did you have in mind?"
Dicken shifted her weight very slightly back and forth, from one foot to the other; Jez' enfolded body swayed with her.  "When I was doing my field time with the Teakwood Searchers," Dicken said, "I met a Rememorante Afortunada who took me to a beach that was a combination playground and shrine.  Over a hundred giant tortoise shells were there, just lying in the sun.  Some were oiled and polished to preserve them; others had little temples built around them.  Some were beaten up and worn down where children had scrambled in and out of them.  One was completely covered with small gifts and notes.  The notes said, 'Please come back,' or 'We didn't mean to hurt you,' or 'I think you are beautiful, Ms. Tortoise.'"