by David Bowles
“Ah-hah,” she cried dramatically. “The secret to last night.”
“Funny. Yeah, I believed in love. Only person who half-way respected that was my pappà, but after he left…”
As his voice trailed off, he saw the ship growing smaller and smaller, lost in the blue.
“Where did he go?”
Brando paused for a moment as the irony hit him. “He became part of the CPCC’s first organized non-corporate colonization team.”
Tenshi sat up. “Your father is on Oceania?”
“Yeah. Left us behind. I was fifteen. Bastard’s probably remarried.”
Her hands clenched at the sheets. “Ever try to contact him?”
The paintings kept drawing his eyes away from her. It was easier to talk about his dad this way, staring into the rainbow maelstroms that the-Four-knew-who had smeared on those canvases. “Nah. Figure that’s what he wanted, so why bother him?”
He felt her fingers on his jaw as she pulled his face gently but firmly back toward her. “I’m right here, Brando. Those paintings won’t erase that.”
Reaching up to his own stubbly chin, he took her hand in his. “Sorry. It’s just hard to talk about him.”
“Yeah. When people you love abandon you, especially when you’re young, that wound never really heals. I was eighteen when Isabella got the job offer. We’d lived together for two years, after meeting on the Southern Continent.”
Brando pulled her hand to his chest. “When you were working on a clean-up crew?”
She nodded, two of her locs slipping down over one eye. “She was twenty-four, fresh off her doctorate, doing field research on organisms in the Inland Sea. I was sixteen, a precocious rebel, looking for meaning. One thing led to another. We ended up renting a flat in Station City, till she accepted the position on Oceania. Seems her father had called in some favors. She found it impossible to say no.”
Taking a deep breath, Brando tried to wrap his brain around the coincidence. “I’m a skeptic, Tenshi. Not sure I believe in fate. But it boggles the mind that your Italian girlfriend and my Italian father both abandoned us to go live on the same planet.”
There was a moment of silence, then Tenshi shrugged. “Very weird.”
“The Ogdoad, drawing us together,” Brando quipped.
She punched him lightly. “Don’t make fun of my religion, kesekki. Anyways, going back to you and sex.”
“Oh, spang on!”
“No, not like that.” She pushed him away playfully. “Isabella was my first real love, and she was eight years older than me. But she told me it was normal, that Wiccan Catholic teens spend a year partnered with an adult.”
“Not everyone. But there’s a lot of peer pressure to become some adult’s lover. By the end of that year, any innocence you had, any childlike joy you were getting out of life, it’s squelched, and you become calculating like all the other grown-ups. Even though I became an outcast because of it, I rejected that shite.”
She regarded him intently. “Why? I mean, you were just a kid. How did you know it wasn’t right for you?”
“Mothergod, this—” he fumbled for the words “—is hard to explain. Our parish assigned me to a twenty-five-year-old. I went over to her flat, and she unceremoniously took off her clothes and pushed my head toward… well, you get the picture. It was unnerving. So cold. She reminded me of my mom. I kept imagining my mom there, on the bed.” His eyes started drifting from Tenshi’s face again, drawn toward the ceiling fans. “Shite. This sounds stupid, I know. Sick, even.”
“No, I understand. It wasn’t real to you, and you backed out. You weren’t ready, and she wasn’t the one for you. Sounds like the best decision.” Maybe sensing his discomfort, she slipped back into a joking tone. “But you must’ve gotten laid somewhere along the line, because virgins don’t get as lucky as you did last night.”
“Ha! I dated people at college that were fascinated by my lack of experience. Was a new thing for them. And I guess I brought a passion to it they weren’t used to anymore. You start screwing everyone round you at thirteen, by the time you’re twenty you’ve done it all. Leaves you cold, like I said. People whose only goal is having sex—a wonderful activity, don’t get me wrong—they seem to me the saddest creatures.”
“Oh, I agree,” Tenshi nodded, her locs bouncing darkly against the silver bedclothes. “There’s so much more to do. Spend all your time on sex, you miss out on nine-tenths, well, maybe seven-tenths of what makes life worth living: commitment, effort, construction. Situation sounds like Jitsu, kind of. We’re so centered on ourselves that sex is like two people using each other to masturbate. No connection, just isolated semi-sexual gnosis, you know?”
Brando smiled with sly concupiscence. “Not sure. We should try connecting again, see if we gain some enlightenment.”
She smiled her goddess smile, and they slid together eagerly, a pair of outcasts forging a society of two.
After showering and eating a quick breakfast, they headed to the fairgrounds. Tenshi took him on a tour of the various galleries and museums, where the history and art of Jitsu was displayed beside works from other human populations.
“This planet has art?” Brando asked, squinting at the most abstract pieces.
“Ha, yes,” Tenshi said, giving him a little shove. “Of course we do. The majority of it was created by anshyano or other satorijin. Because they’ve reached basic enlightenment, they get to dabble in transitory acts.”
“Like university study,” Brando added, nodding. “Yeah, it was in the orientation.”
“You see,” Tenshi continued, “we’re preparing ourselves for gnosis, the second stage in the creation of our souls.”
“Ah, you’re a satorijin. Makes sense. Your architecture is part of your journey of self-knowledge, right?”
She winked. “Yup. But I’m not Dominian. For me, exploring of the intersection of interior and exterior isn’t a preamble to rejecting the world, just the image of myself the world attempts to force upon me. Generally, though, satorijin move beyond such exploration and research, becoming arojin, the other-born. Leaving behind all ‘fleeting pursuits,’ they help run the planetary government, striving to attain quantum enlightenment before they die.”
“Running the government seems a pretty fleeting pursuit to me,” Brando quipped.
“Well, to them it’s a holy edict,” Tenshi explained. “During their search for enlightenment, regular folks must be protected and provided for by those closer to the goal. The Oracle expects arojin to pursue not only their own quantum enlightenment, but to provide unencumbered physical lives for all other Pathwalkers in their care.”
After a while, they came upon a hub-shaped building that housed a zoological garden of the remaining native species of fauna. Brando had become accustomed to the sight of the kaeruma, a local six-limbed beast of burden of roughly camel-like appearance with a popping gait, a comically wide mouth and three eyes atop its roughly triangular head. Here he became familiar with the moritori, a flying, reptilian creature with wide, butterfly wings, colorful sheets of skin suspended on either side of its serpentine body between four of its six extremities, the other two of which served as legs. The bizarre hoshika left Brando with mouth agape: it resembled nothing less than a squid, with six legs evenly distributed around its globular body in a seven-sided geometrical configuration. Its conical head sported three visual patches for panoramic vision, and, as a holographic biologist assured onlookers, an orifice centered on its underbelly served as both mouth and anus.
The zoo also sported a faux-life of the planet in its pristine, pre-Soltec condition. Visitors were treated to the sight of the enormous, fifteen-meter long monsters called jagen, which had roamed Jitsu’s vast wastelands for a million years, but which were now confined to the devastated southern continent. Tribes of feathery haired oni, upright, meter-high monkey analogs, converged on a jagen in the recording, swarming over every inch of its bulk, except its snapping jaws. The jagen hadn’t noticed their
approach because they’d smeared themselves with its dung to stifle their scent; the twenty-five of them dispatched the behemoth quickly.
In the zoo itself was one of the last onis still alive on the northern continent. It was old, balding, and extremely sad. Barking what sounded suspiciously like “shirarugaro”—crude Baryogo for leave—at the visitors, the lonely creature seemed at the brink of self-destruction as it shuffled from one edge of its little island to the next.
As Tenshi and Brando approached, the oni scooped a handful of excrement from the ground and made as if to throw it at them. But instead it lifted its arm above its head and began to spread the greenish substance on its face, arms and torso while staring at them blankly.
Brando couldn’t help but read a message into the act.
Jagen cannot smell oni when they’re covered in jagen shite, as if the oni didn’t exist for that jagen.
An oni that stinks of its own waste ceases to exist for itself.
Tenshi leaned heavily against the railing, her locs hanging down about her face so that it took Brando a moment to realize she was crying. His hand at the small of her back, he softly asked what was wrong.
“Nothing.” She dug her left palm into her eyes as if embarrassed.
“Come on, Tenshi. Something about that upset you; tell me.”
“Don’t want to talk about it. Won’t do any good.”
His hand slipped to her side and he pulled her toward a bench.
“Course it’ll do you good. Get it off your chest, at least. Come on, I want to help, okay? Give me a chance.”
Tilting her head back, she released a burst of air in a lip-pursing sigh.
“Fine. Just don’t like unloading on you like this. My omenim, my twin sister Samanei, she’s…”
“The Oracle. Yeah, I know.”
She shot a glance his way: hard and indignant, but softening nearly instantly.
“Ah, of course you’ve heard. How could you not? Anyway, we’re exactly the same, except for one detail: she has a mental illness.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, and I don’t mean it in a hyperbolic way. When we were little, you couldn’t tell. Both of us, we looked and acted the same. In the sikoro, the teyopan’s religious school, she behaved better than me, but other than that, we were indistinguishable. Then, when we were about ten, she got sick. Nobody knew what had happened: they found her outside my grandma’s house, curled into a ball. Bunch of neighbors, they tried to make her react, come out of her trance, making loud noises. Santo came out of Grandma’s house, beside himself with anger, wanting to know what happened. Told them he’d take care of Samanei. I pieced this together later, by the way.”
“And, what, she came out of it?”
“Yeah. At first, she seemed normal, went to school, was quiet, studied Domina’s diary with the rest of us, sucked on tubes, meditated, played with the kleinballs, uplinked to the hypercube exercises, all the regular preteen Pathwalker stuff, you know. Maybe you don’t. Whatever.” Tenshi tugged roughly on one of her locs, her eyes blinking rapidly. “Thing is, at home, she began acting really strange. Smacking her own face and arms and legs for no apparent reason. Talking alone. Staring into space, eyes open, not meditating, no moku or anything. Just blank. Umma tried keeping it secret, told me not to tell anyone. Apa was usually out making runs to the platforms, so he had no idea.”
“But at school, she was the same as before?”
“Until our twelfth birthday. That’s when things took a turn for the worse. We had just started to menstruate. No big deal, just a little hard any girl to adapt to. But Samanei… it was like a complete change came over her for two weeks every month. Started screaming obscenities at Umma, in different voices. Throwing things around. At school, she’d get up and kick kleinballs across the room when the anshyano weren’t around.”
Brando gave a judicious nod. “So she wasn’t that gone, eh? She knew when to stop?”
“For a while. Then our bibi—grandmother—died. The cremation and honor ceremony were long, elaborate things. Our family was the heart of Kinguyama. Santo was the giya, Apa—the mishonari—brought pilgrims’ offerings, and Bibi had been a pillar of the teyopan for some fifty years. So everyone was there, silent, meditating. Santo went on about his blessed umma’s translation. Samanei started to chuckle. Then she started to outright laugh. I mean, she got reallu loud, belly laughs that made tears stream from her eyes.”
Tenshi forced a sketchy, insincere smile, but her hand kept yanking on her hair.
“Oh, shite. So now everyone knew?”
“Umma dragged her off, made up some excuse I don’t even remember, except that it was pretty weak. People shrugged and moved on, but I saw Santo’s face. I didn’t like the glint in his eye. The next week, Umma and I flew out to Station City, took Samanei to see a psy-tech. Incipient schizophrenia, he told us. Possible disassociation. Treatable. Curable. Just not on Jitsu. Umma pleaded with him. He said he’d see what he could do. Months later he called: he’d gotten the necessary information and equipment to do the gene therapy. But by then it was too late.”
Tenshi closed her eyes, as if visualizing the past, or trying to block it out.
“Umma started keeping Samanei out of school, forcing her to take moku every three hours so she’d be manageable. Apa was out of system for one of those long-distance treks the mishonari do every seven years. Santo started showing up every day, harassing Umma in that slick way of his, not seeming to cut, but leaving you bloody anyway.”
Brando nodded. It sounded a bit like his own mother’s behavior.
“Did he catch her doing something?”
“Let me finish. His visits got increasingly insistent and abusive, in a mental or emotional way. We were on edge, because Samanei started doing extreme things, even when drugged, like rubbing feces on her face and screaming like a pig at slaughter. Every time, Umma and I would struggle to her cleaned up and calmed down in case Santo happened by. At last, I couldn’t deal with it anymore. He was being a total arse to Umma one day, and I went berserk, ran him out of the house. He was genuinely scared. Petty little giya. I put his arse in its place.
“I’d missed too many days at the sikoro, and various teyopanjin, including Santo’s wife Maryam, came to take me the next day. I was walking out as Santo rolled up and stepped inside. The teyopanjin more less dragged me along: I wanted to go back in. I was sure something terrible was coming. I hadn’t seen my twin all morning. That’s when it happened. Umma told me later. He opened the door to our room, and there she was,” Tenshi’s voice faltered for a moment, then she swallowed heavily and went on, “standing naked, smeared with menstrual blood and her own waste, laughing at him, calling him ummano toto, mama’s baby, for some reason. But it was her condition that cinched it, you understand?”
Brando tried to grasp what she meant, but couldn’t.
“Blood and shite, Brando.” Her hand left her hair and gestured with futility in the air. “Schizophrenia. Don’t they teach religious history on Earth?”
Chilling understanding dawned on him. “Domina Ditis. She was schizophrenic.”
“And her uncle made her cover herself in feces and menses.”
Dominian Pathwalker stigmata. He swallowed dryly, nodding. Kikwete’s speech the day before had reminded him of the plight of Domina Ditis, and now a shudder went through Brando at some of the parallels. Nausea rose in his gut as he imagined Santo getting away with whatever scheme he was planning, leaving Samanei like Domina, a martyr under the feet of a deadly sociopath.
Tenshi’s fists clenched and unclenched impotently. “They took her away from me, Brando. He and Maryam walked her out the door of my house as the teyopanjin held me still. She kept screaming my name, looking back at me as if pleading for my help. But I could do nothing. They took her before the Close, who confirmed she was the next Oracle. Then they sealed her away where I’ll never find her. Santo has used her for twelve years to amass more power. Meanwhile, she’s all alone, like that oni
over there, all alone and I couldn’t do a thing.”
She broke off, sobbing, and buried herself in his arms. Overwhelmed by his inadequacy, Brando simply held her, hoping that the embrace was what Tenshi needed. They remained that way for several minutes as waves of sorrow gently wracked her, slowing and lessening in intensity till they stopped. Only then did she pull away, red-rimmed eyes regarding him with something akin to shame, perhaps at her own weakness. She didn’t avert her gaze, however: they stared at each other in mute comprehension, having understood something essential that they would find impossible to put into words.
“Thank you,” she whispered hoarsely.
Brando gave a slight nod, running a thumb under her left eye and bringing the tear it had collected to his lips solemnly. Then he took her head in his hands and whispered:
“Don’t blame yourself for things you can’t control.”
She put her hands over his.
“That’s just it. I don’t want there to be things I can’t control.”
lunch hour arrived, and they snacked on karunita, specially seasoned hunks of pork served over cold noodles. Everyone at the stand where they’d bought the meal was excitedly talking about the Jitsu-Mars soccer match that was going to be held in an hour at the western game field. Brando, an avid soccer aficionado, excitedly convinced Tenshi that they should go watch the game, which promised to be a fascinating clash of cultures and styles.
After browsing through the marketplace section of the fair, they noticed a large mass of people making their way toward the west along the path where Brando’d first met Tenshi. The couple wound their way under several trees, passing the bench at which they’d first exchanged words. Brando grazed it with tingling fingers, smiling, and followed Tenshi into the throng that flowed toward the playing field.
Neither of the lovers noticed the black transports fly overhead and set down illegally beside a row of unoccupied food stands slightly ahead of the crowd. They didn’t see Chago’s crew creep out, konk rifles unslung and lazgats popping into palms, nor did they catch the cap’s signals for several of his men to climb atop a pair of Tenshi’s breathtaking buildings that flanked the main stone-cobbled path to the field. The fact that half the crew spread out in front of the anxious fairgoers fazed no one: most assumed these were simply officers of Civil Security, keeping their typically unnecessary vigil. The yegsters, cold criminals of the demimundo, that sealed off the path behind the crowd were ignored for more obvious frailties of the human mind: once your back is turned, what’s behind you has ceased to exist.
