We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology (17 page)

There are other bodies. Look closer and you will see that the floor is nothing but bodies. That you can’t see the floor at all. That you cannot, in fact, be absolutely sure that the floor is even there. If you walk into this room, you’ll walk on the dead. So we don’t invite them to walk inside, and without invitation they never do. We all stand in the doorway and I deliver the information I have to share about this place, and then there is silence.

I feel their discomfort. I was raised in the
jodenja klimenji—
the Way of Welcoming. It is our highest calling to give comfort to a guest, to put them at ease. But it is also our highest calling to give them whatever they ask for, within reason. And if they ask to come here, I cannot do anything for what I know they must feel. I cannot unmurder the murdered. I cannot change who did the murdering. And I cannot tell them how they should feel, a generation after the fact. There are things I wish I could say, things I
would
say if everything were different, but I also cannot change who I am. So we stand in silence, and the dead are also silent, and I wait for one of the living to speak.

The first sun is low and tosses our shadows out in a long diagonal across the room. The second sun is rising behind us. The light is shifting and strange, and it makes it difficult to be sure just how big the room is. How much death it can hold.

The taller one—I think his name is
Aaron—
points to a stack of crates in one corner next to a row of bookshelves. Another corpse is slumped against it, scraps of dried paper skin, the head gone. “Shairoven, what are those?”

“Goods,” I say. “Clothes, probably. Foodstuffs. They thought that they could buy their lives from their attackers. You must understand that such things are not strange to us; in our culture there is an idea of a blood price. Life has monetary value.”

“Why didn’t the colonists take them?”

I shrug—it is a very human gesture but I can’t help it. Five full cycles as a
klimenjiani
—what I have heard them call a
tour guide—
and I have adopted many human habits. “There are many things about what was done in those months that we do not understand.”

What I do not say is that I suspect that the killing distracted them. It must have been very distracting. It must have been very tiring, also. It’s said that all throughout the time of killing, the rank and file were urged on by overseers of death with bullhorns and amplifiers. They were given rhythms by which to work, to make it easier for their bodies to move without the burden of thought.

I have tried to understand this. When I run I think of the beating of my own heart. But then I think of blood and falling bodies and my imagination fails me. How can they be the same?

How could they have done it? Were they blind?

The flowers nod in the breeze that comes in through the open windows. It should not be as lovely as it is—all those long bones. The large, elongated skulls. The vines and the blossoms. Graceful and clean. Even the faded blood on the walls looks like an abstract mural in dark swoops and swirls. I have heard the humans say that our people are beautiful. I wonder if that is a truth that is not always true.

“We should go,” I say gently. At my sides, my hands are clenched into fists. I hope they will not see. It would shame me. “You will be late for supper at the hotel.”

Much like the killing itself, it remains a puzzle to us, that the humans come to Lejshethra for this. Why they come. Why they want to look. These are not their dead. They pay no respects, they make no offerings. They just stare with their tiny eyes, and I can never say for sure what they’re thinking.

They have told us that there are entire pathways of schooling back on Earth that deal with nothing but the killing, that try to pull it apart like a corpse and understand how it happened, why so much murderous hate could arise so suddenly in the human colonists. I have heard that they believe that it was not sudden. That it built over years, that there was tension where my people could perceive none. Two cycles ago when I first heard of this I took it to my body-sire and told her of it, and I think I was lucky to escape the back of her hand.

“Ignore such things, Shairoven,” she said to me. She turned back to the
tijath
she was cutting for the meal of second sun. “The humans fixate on what’s past, even after blood-price is paid. Mind your manners and ignore their habits. They can’t help what they are.”

My body-sire’s right arm is missing. Her back is a mass of crisscrossing scars. We were told—not by her, for she never speaks of those months—that she survived the massacre of her district by hiding herself under the corpses of her neighbors. There were many who survived that way, but we don’t speak much of the ones with visible scars. The blatantly accusing nature of the evidence they carry with them is a form of rudeness that can’t be erased or undone.

My body-sire makes her place secure through her denial.

I have never discovered how to tell her that this makes me so
sad-angry-trapped
all at once, that it makes me feel as though I am buried under a pile of corpses and I am being cut with long knives and I do not understand why. We have no word in our language for such an impolite emotion.

I arrive at the hotel after the meal of first sun to collect the humans. They have told me that today they wish to travel to the city center to see the memorial that the human government erected to the dead of the killings—or to the killings themselves, but the difference has never been adequately explained to me, and I am afraid to ask. I am afraid that my people would see it as overtly accusatory, and I am afraid of what the humans might say.

In the groundcar on the way from my home to the hotel, I think about all the questions I would like to ask and never will.
Why do you remember? What do you think? Do you feel guilty? Do you think that you should? Do you hate us now? Will you hurt us again?

Their leaders said, of course, that they did not hate us and that the killings will never be repeated. But I am not sure I find this convincing. I am full of doubt both impolite and inconvenient, and it pulls at me like a hungry child. Many hungry children. There were camps full of them after the killings, orphans all with no mate-sire or body-sire and often missing siblings. I have seen images, and in those images what stands out most are their enormous eyes. All the confusion of an entire people could be held inside such eyes.
Why?
This is what they would ask the humans I am going to see. In this we are alike.

I would also like to ask whether the humans live with ghosts as we do. I wonder whether it is forbidden for them to acknowledge or speak to the ghosts. I wonder whether they can put the ghosts here aside and leave them behind. In the end most of them return home to Earth; very few humans live here now. They thinned our numbers, but in the end they were the ones who ran.

In the groundcar, the humans and I ride in silence. My head is still buzzing with questions. My mouth is sealed by my raising.

Every time, this is a little more difficult.

“How long have you been a guide?” Jacob asks me eventually, and I am relieved because this is a question that I can answer without offense. I tell him five cycles, and he smiles and pats the knee of his companion.

“We’re lucky to get someone so experienced.”

I incline my head at the compliment.

“Aaron and I have been studying the massacre since college,” Jacob says after another few moments of silence. “We’re both writers—did we tell you that? We’re doing a series on what it’s like for the children of the colonists now, so this is excellent material.”

I nod again. “I am glad to be able to help,” I say, and inside the eyes of the hungry children are growing and growing and for an instant I am afraid they will swallow me. I am glad that the groundcar is on automatic because I could not see to direct it now. Everything is questions, beating against the inside of me, smothering me like a mound of corpses, and really all the questions are a single question:
Why
?

Why did you kill us? Why do you come here now? Why did you build the monument, why are you writing about it, why are you sitting here and smiling at me like that when my body-sire has lost her arm and my life is all of the ghosts I will never welcome, and instead I welcome you?

We keep the houses of the dead but we would never go there if it weren’t for you and every time I am there I feel that I might fall apart into hacked-up pieces and lie there among the dead because I cannot make any of these other pieces fit.

I smile at them, at these writer humans who walk oblivious among the ghosts. It is said among my people that the
jodenja klimenji
is the most demanding of all the disciplines, and the most pure, because it means the utter denial of self. And every moment of it I wonder if I am really strong enough.

And every moment of it I wonder if it is right for me to be so.

The memorial itself is a single black spike one hundred feet high. It impales the sky. Every time I come here, I think,
It looks so angry.
And I am never sure where the anger comes from or where it is going. Perhaps it is my anger that I am feeling. Inside the spike, it is apart from me and safe to face. It stabs and stabs blindly, forever.

The spike is bounded by a circular plaza dotted with stone benches. There are no trees. We three are the only ones there. We stay for a few minutes, and then we return to the hotel in silence.

There is a river that alternately circles around and cuts through our city. Its banks are part of what make this region so excellent for farming, and I understand why this was the initial locus for the human colonization. The river is the center of many things. After second sun, after I have returned to my home and bathed and oiled my skin, I dress in the lighter clothing of repose and walk down the broad path that leads from my street to the river where it touches the edge of my home district. The bank is paved here, lined with flowerbeds and hanging colored lanterns.

It is lovely. It is all that I remember seeing here, but I have been told by humans and by human texts that the paving and the flowerbeds and the lanterns are all recent additions. Before, this was all rich red soil and black rocks, like other points along the river’s bank, and then at the time of the killings it was paved with bodies as people tried to flee across it and were cut down or trampled or carried away and drowned.

There was a major sanitation problem in the weeks after the greatest bloom of killing, which added to the already rising tide of human refugees flooding back to Earth ahead of their fear and their shame. The water was choked with bloated corpses and undrinkable. This is what I have been told, by humans and by those of my own people to whom I know I should not listen. But though they tell the same story, the humans and a few of my people, the telling is so different that I cannot think of it as the same.

It is the river Laijan, which means purveyor of life. I stand at the edge of the paved bank and I look into its depths. In the twilight the water looks like black blood, calm and placid and flowing without a heart to pump it.

Tomorrow is the last day that the humans will be here, and before I said goodbye to them today they asked me for a favor. It is not the first time I have been asked for what they want. But I have always said no,
impossible, it cannot be done, no one will agree to it
.

And I have been lying.

And today I said that I would try.

I do not know if this is dishonor or a fulfilling of my raising. I am pulled between what I have been taught and what I have been taught; again I think I could fall to pieces, and then I think that maybe I have always been in pieces, broken apart from myself, and so there is no more damage to be done.

I look into the flowing black water and I think of empty eyes and outstretched hands reaching up from those depths and beckoning me. There were many bodies that were swept away by the river in the growing-season flood that year and many were never found. They are all still there in the life of the river. There are other people strolling, idling along the bank in the cool of the evening; I could call,
Don’t you see them? Don’t you hear? How can we deny our own spilled blood, whatever price has been paid?

My mouth is full of ghosts. I place my hand against it and hold them in until they are silent again, and the ones in the water fall silent as well.

I am in pieces but I am alive. Tell me how this is a reasonable thing.

Before first sun I am awake and back in the streets, leaving my body-sire and my two siblings sleeping at home. They do not know what I intend; if they did they would try to stop me, for this is not shame of any accidental kind but shame that is sought for, and that is the most profound shame of all.

The streets are still mostly deserted but I keep to the shadows, moving as quietly as I can. I live in one of the more affluent districts and I am passing into places that are clearly less so, with waste uncollected by the entranceways and roofs in need of repair. And on, further, into a place of real destitution, where the cracked and dirty street is dotted here and there with people who have no roof at all but sleep surrounded by whatever they can carry with their mangled limbs—in whatever sleep their rage allows them.

This is the district of the self-exiled. They Who Will Not Release Their Grasp. I was taught to pity them and fear them, for they carry the specter of what was done to us in their minds and bodies like a plague and they will not give themselves over to denial as my body-sire has done. They stand and they insist that we look on them, and the pain is too great, and we fear what the humans would do or say, despite the fact that the humans themselves seem to want to see such things.

Sometimes I think our ways have become confused, like tangled limbs that no longer fit the body to which they were attached.

Three cycles ago I came here for the first time because of a request like the one that sends me here now. I turned away then, at the cusp of fulfilling what was asked of me. I could not bear it. I am not sure what has made me decide to try again, but I know that all night I tried to resist it and it would not be held back.