“Has she complained? Has she cried?”
“No.”
Bluecrane sighed. Damn the woman, and all the Chornyaks, and for that matter, all the linguists. Only linguists would have allowed Delina’s back to go untended. Only linguists would have had enough power to get away with it; it had to be a violation of a dozen laws protecting children. He had far too much to do to have this nuisance added to his list. But when the sun falling through the skylights began to slant toward midafternoon he said, “Call the law. Tell them we don’t want them to do anything. Tell them she has her family’s permission, improbable as that seems; the Chornyak men must all have gone out of their minds. Tell the law not to come—we don’t need them.”
On the third day he himself went out to talk to her, hunkering down beside her and looking carefully off into the middle distance so she wouldn’t be embarrassed.
“Daughter,” he said to her this time, because she had begun to earn his respect, “how long is this going to go on?”
“As long as it takes,” she said. And then, “As long as it takes, Grandfather.”
His breath was long and slow in the silence. All around them the grasshoppers were making leaps, their landings much louder than could be justified by their size and weight. He had always thought that they sounded like popcorn popping. A big rust-colored one sailed onto his right thigh, and he let it sit there; it wasn’t bothering anything, and grasshoppers don’t eat bluejeans.
“You are an Anglo,” he said.
“I know that,” she said. “And you are an Indian. There’s nothing either one of us can do about it.”
“Our ceremonies are useless to Anglos.”
“I don’t think so, Grandfather. Anglos are human beings. They are just like you, and just like all your relatives.”
He frowned, distracted for a minute, wondering why the rain didn’t bother the grasshoppers, sure that when he was a boy grasshoppers had sheltered from the rain like any other creature with good sense, wondering when the grasshoppers had changed and why he hadn’t noticed. And then he said, “But their souls are very different from ours.”
“I don’t think so, Grandfather,” she said again. And she added, “My greatgrandmother Nazareth Chornyak didn’t think so, either. And she’d better be right, or we are all in terrible trouble.”
Will Bluecrane’s mouth tightened, deepening the net of wrinkles all around it. Bringing her greatgrandmother into this was pulling rank. She was getting above herself, doing that. And he got up and went back into the domes and left her there.
The next day the sorters had something new to tell him. “She’s stopped drinking water,” they said. “And last night she did not lie down.”
“Not at all?”
“Not at all. She sat there all night, just as she has been sitting all through the days. She made the necessary trips into the trees … except for that, she didn’t move.”
“She is being a lot of trouble.” the old man said crossly, and they nodded their full agreement. “But let me tell you … she won’t keep this up for very long. Not without water.”
“Maybe the law should come take her away. For her own good.”
“Not yet,” said Will Bluecrane firmly. “She is a very determined woman; unless she learns this lesson, she will just come back and try again.”
“I don’t like this,” said the older of the two sorters. He was Will’s own grandson, George William Bluecrane, and he had a tendency to presume on that relationship when he was worried. “This is not a way a woman should behave. I am absolutely sure it’s going to lead to trouble, sooner or later.”
“I don’t like it either,” Will told him. “But George—liking or not liking it has nothing to do with anything.”
“What will the Chornyaks say, if one of their women dies outside our door, while we do nothing?”
Joe Brown, the other sorter, laughed softly. “What will the Pan-Indian Council say,” he asked, “if the Chornyaks don’t come and take their demented woman away from our door—where she is a great nuisance—and look after her properly?”
Will Bluecrane rubbed his hands together slowly in the silence that followed this exchange, until his grandson broke it by asking him straight out: “Why haven’t the Chornyaks come? Why are they letting one of their women do this foolish thing?”
“Because,” Will told him gently, “they are in great trouble, and they don’t have the time or the heart to deal with her.”
Their faces told him that he hadn’t explained anything and that it would be best if he did, and he said, “Look … the linguist males have always known themselves to be critical to damn near everything that went on in the entire universe … the economic universe … and now nobody needs them any longer. They’re useless now. Superfluous.”
“They know as much as they ever did,” Joe Brown pointed out.
“That’s so. Sure. But without Aliens, who needs speakers of Alien languages? It must be like losing both your legs at once, with no warning—very disorienting. The men are paying Delina Chornyak’s behavior no attention because panic, not reason, rules them right now. Give her another day; give them another day. We will see what happens.”
“Maybe they’re hoping she’ll die here. It would be one less problem for them to deal with. You know how the linguists are.”
“Joe Brown,” Will snapped, “don’t you add to my burdens! Have the decency to keep your bigoted ideas to yourself.”
The next morning it was raining again, a cold steady rain that felt more like November than August, and he went out again to talk to stubborn Delina. He saw that her lips were dry and cracked and that she had begun to shiver inside her quilt. She had made no trips into the trees the night before, he knew.
He didn’t hunker down beside her this time, and he was no longer concerned about sparing her embarrassment. He stood just far enough back so that she could look at him without craning her neck, and he glared at her fiercely through the rain. “Delina Chornyak,” he said to her sternly, “you are being a damn nuisance.”
She grinned up at him. “Yes,” she said, “that’s true. But be fair, Grandfather! I did warn you.”
“I am not your grandfather.”
“The well-bred Indian does not make fun of the ignorant Anglo woman who means well,” she said, her lips twitching at the corners in a way he had always approved of in women.
“You will die out here, if you go on without drinking water.”
“I don’t think so, Grandfather.”
“And now you are talking nonsense!” he snapped. “You are delirious with thirst, you foolish woman! As you said yourself, Anglos are human beings. Pay attention to me now: if you don’t take water, Delina Chornyak, you will die.”
“You won’t let that happen,” she said gently.
“I will.”
“I don’t think so, Grandfather.”
“You look foolish, too,” he told her, with as much scorn as he could manage. “There’s water running down your face and dripping off your nose. You should see yourself; you’d be embarrassed! Pull your quilt up over your head and keep yourself dry!”
She dropped her eyes, but she made no move to shelter herself; the rain poured over her head and streamed down her back from the ends of her long brown hair. She looked half-drowned, and she was so pale through her sunburn that she had the color of faded yellow leaves; it was not a color that suited her. It seemed to him that her left shoulder, the one that was lower than the other, was pulled more sharply toward the ground than it had been when she stood before him in his office; it seemed to him that the quilt had hid her crookedness up to now, and that it was an ominous sign that it did so no longer. He didn’t like the way she looked. It worried him, and he resented the way that the picture she made, sitting there in the rain, was being burned into his memory.
He went away again, and went about the business of being chief of the PICOTA. It was a lot of work, it always had been, and it required all his attention, but his mi
nd kept wandering. And when night came and Delina still had neither gone away nor taken food or water, half of what he should have done that day was not yet done and the other half had been done badly.
The woman who came to see him just after dark was neither young nor beautiful. Nor was she respectful. “Will Bluecrane,” she said to him, arms akimbo and both hands braced on her ample hips, “this has gone on long enough! That child is going to die on our doorstep, and how are you going to live with yourself then?”
“She’s thirty if she’s a day,” he said, “maybe forty. Did you notice her neck?”
“Do not try to distract me,” she told him grimly. “I’m serious.”
“She may be pretending, Anne,” said Will. “There may be a device in her quilt that puts water directly into her veins, for instance. There may be—”
“You’ve talked to her! Does she look to you like someone who’s had water lately?”
“Ah, but Anne, remember … she’s a linguist. From birth they’re trained in bodyparl, trained to use it the way you’d use scissors or a computer. They can look any way they like, and no layperson can spot them when they choose to be deceptive.”
His wife snorted. “Myths!” she said. “Claptrap! Government propaganda! Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“And Anne,” he went on, ignoring that, “she has to be in touch with Chornyak Household. Because not one of her people has come near her in all this time or so much as called to ask how she’s doing. Do you really believe they’d do that if she wasn’t reporting in regularly? As Joe Brown says, love, they may hope she dies out there—but believe me, they wouldn’t risk being perceived as neglecting her. Not the linguists.”
“But, Will—”
“Furthermore, it’s true that the Aliens have gone away, but they might come back; and if they do, the Chornyak men will need Delina again. She’s valuable property, and they always hedge their bets.”
“Will Bluecrane, you with the wooden head, will you rein in your mouth, please, before it runs off with you? I can hear people now … ‘Poor old Chief Bluecrane … he used to be somebody you could look to for guidance. He used to be a man with a good mind. And now just look at what he’s become, in his second, or maybe his third, childhood.’”
His eyebrows went up; she wasn’t kidding. “What is it?” he asked. “I’m right, Anne; you know I am.”
“That’s all beside the point. Maybe she could be fed somehow … be given water somehow … without our knowing. I’ll grant you that. Maybe she can shape her face to the lines of thirst and misery, as you say. I don’t think that’s happening, but I’ll grant that it’s possible; I’ve heard the stories. And the linguist women spend … spent … half their lives shut up in interpreter pods … for all I know, it’s no hardship for her to sit out there day after day. But there’s something else.”
“Oh, lord,” said Will mournfully, covering his face with his hands, “let there be nothing else!”
“How much do you know about the women of the Lines?” she demanded. In what he had always referred to as her “I am Anne Jordacha Walks Tall Bluecrane—hark!” voice.
“Not much. And I have no wish to know more, considering the example that sits outside.”
“Then let me tell you this: they are never idle. Never.” She put the palms of her hands flat on the table and leaned toward him. “By the time a linguist female is twelve years old, if her hands are not needed for some other activity, they are busy at needlework! Always! No woman of the Lines sits more than three minutes without taking out a needle or a hook or some other tool of the crafts they practice. And Delina Meloren Chornyak has sat out there four days with her hands folded in her lap. Folded!”
Will was stunned. She was right. This was the piece of information that mattered, and it had gone right past him. Like an untrained boy, he had neglected the first and most basic principle of knowing-what-is-going-on: ANY MISMATCH IS A WARNING SIGN. He’d known, but he hadn’t thought of it; to his shame, he knew that he never would have thought of it. The woman could have turned ninety, sitting wrapped in her quilt by his door, and he would never have realized that she should not have been sitting there idle. He put his chin in his hands and talked to the table top, talked to his wife’s spread fingers and the blue veins on her hands. “I am not fit to be chief of the PICOTA any longer,” he muttered.
“True,” said Anne decisively.
“I’m old. My mind wanders.”
“That, too.”
“I will go out and talk to her again,” he said. And then he jumped, startled, as Anne smacked the table with the flat of her left hand.
“Addlepate!”
“But—”
She did it again, and ignored his scowl. “Will, for heaven’s sakes, let me go bring her in here where you can be comfortable while you talk to her!”
“Oh, no!” He shook his head firmly. “She expects me to go out there and hunker down and do monosyllables and wise grunts and noble platitudes at her, and she’s earned that. I’m not about to disappoint her.”
His wife cocked her head and stepped back, her hands once more on her hips, and stood there looking at him as if he were a very rare and exceedingly nasty bug; she blew through her lips in total exasperation.
“I don’t care,” he told her. “This is an Anglo woman, and she is busting her tail trying to be her idea of a Native American doing a sacred fast, and I’m not going to make her feel like a fool by acting normal. I will go out there and meet her expectations as best I can.”
“And then?”
“And then I will bring her in here. Where we can both be comfortable.”
“But only for a couple of hours,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“Will, that poor child came here asking for our help with a vision quest. She’s already done most of one on her own. If you wine her and dine her and tuck her into a nice soft bed for the night she’ll have to start all over. That’s not only ridiculous, it’s cruel. Bring her in, mumble significant mumbles, give her a little plain water, find out what is to be done next, and then get on with it.” She sat down on the edge of the table and looked at him hard, but her voice was tender, and as she talked he began nodding his head, because she was right. “My love,” she said, “this is a very brave young woman, but she can’t go on forever. Nobody does two fasts, back-to-back … and I’m afraid she would try, if she thought it was expected. Think, please, dear man, and take care.” When he dropped down on his heels beside Delina this time, he knew by the ache in his heart that he was getting old. He was supposed to be tough; he wasn’t supposed to go all over liver and lilies like this. She would have been disappointed in him if she’d known.
“Granddaughter,” he said, keeping his voice stern, “you have convinced me.”
“It took long enough,” she answered, her voice both hoarse and cross.
“Yes, I agree; it did. But you must realize … for centuries we’ve had Anglos dropping in wanting to … oh, dance with a kachina, maybe. Wanting to spend the Christmas holiday in a sweat lodge—an outdoor sweat lodge, mind you, not the kind we use. Wanting to hang by a hook from a tent pole. You know the kind of thing. And they always foul it up. And then they have to be rushed to the experts. And we have to do extra ceremonies—at great expense of time and money and energy, which we cannot afford—to purify all the things they’ve made messes of. It would be one thing if it did them any good, Delina Chornyak … it never does. It’s important for us to discourage them.”
“I understand,” she said. “But I’m sure this isn’t going to start a new fashion, Mr. Bluecrane. You’re not going to have Anglos dropping in by the dozens wanting to sit outside the door for a week, fasting. There’s no call for it. And I am not going to foul it up—I promise you.”
“There was a story about you on the comset,” he said.
“The world has turned upside down, and they call me news?” She was shocked; the possibility had never occurred to her.
“What are they saying?”
“It’s pretty much a muddle, but I think the gist is that you believe some PICOTA insult caused the Aliens to leave, and you’re doing a protest demonstration.”
She laughed, and he found that comforting. If she could still laugh, she wasn’t too badly off.
“One of your relatives will have planted that tale?” he said.
“Probably. I should have expected it, I guess; it’s a lot less embarrassing than the truth would be.”
“Will you come inside now, child?” he asked her. “And sit for a little while in comfort, while I send for the people who know how to do the ceremony you want? Can you stand up?”
“Perceive!” she said, and she stood, with the quilt still draped around her. The quilt—blocks of black and white sea waves in the dolphin curve that evokes love’s most ancient and basic chord in humankind, on a ground of dark blue—was as bright as if no single drop of rain or ray of sun had ever touched it. “Perceive—I’m standing up!”
It was true. She wasn’t steady, and she wasn’t graceful, and her head was as bedraggled as the quilt was fresh and fair, but she was on her feet. And he had not had to help her.
“Come along,” he said gruffly, turning his back so she wouldn’t see the tears in his silly damn eyes, and he led her inside to get on with it, fast, before she grew any weaker.
He sincerely hoped that she was going to live through it. He sincerely hoped she was going to survive the sweat lodge, which she would undoubtedly insist on doing outdoors, in the rain. He sincerely hoped he wasn’t going to have her death on his conscience, and on his wife’s tongue, for all the rest of his life.
“Delina,” said Nazareth, “this is really excessively dramatic.”
That hurt. The sound Delina made was a tiny gasp of pain, as if she’d been suddenly slapped. Not even “Hello, Delina Meloren.” Just “This is really excessively dramatic.”
The dead woman stood near a line of big cedars, in a thicket of sumac blazing scarlet and lemon-yellow and burnished gold around her, close enough for Delina to see and hear but well beyond any possibility of touch. “Do not approach her,” the medsammys had said, “and if she approaches you, do not back away. Find your place, and stand your ground.” The spot Delina had chosen was well out into the middle of the field where, if she tipped back her head, she could see the tall buildings of the city rising up in all directions beyond the trees and hills that bordered the PICOTA lands; she hoped it was her place.
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