“But Albatur just got elected,” I say. “That’s what I don’t get. Everything feels so sudden.”
Her lips purse a little, twisting, and this face and what it means comes swimming back up through my memory. It’s the face she makes when there’s a lot she wants to say but is choosing her words carefully. A face my mother inherited.
“It’s never just one person,” she says. “But Albatur came here with a purpose. He didn’t expect the planet’s effect on his biology. He spent a lot of time just trying to survive, like the rest of us, while N’Terra’s roots were laid. But he never wanted to stay here. Never envisioned this as the last stop for humanity.”
“I saw . . . war,” I say. “Did they come here after the Acclimates left? With buzzguns?”
The weak smile transforms into a soft frown.
“You have been talking to Hamankush,” she says. She prods my mind and I’m almost surprised, forgetting that she, like my mother, is able to speak in the tunnel. She seems to welcome changing the topic. “It is called the Artery,” she adds, noting my surprise. “The place where you speak the quiet language. If you are looking for something to call the language itself: Arterian.”
“Arterian.” I nod. “What about Grandfather?”
She shakes her head. “Not all the Acclimates are able to. There needs to be what the Faloii call a willingness in the brain. You are a little different. My gift—and your mother’s—was given. Yours was inherited.”
Before I can ask more questions, she redirects me to the matter of what I’d seen.
“Now,” she says. “Hamankush?”
“Yes, Hamankush showed me a memory. The trees’ memory. People . . . died.”
She nods and pushes herself a little higher in the cot, sitting up slowly.
“Yes,” she says. “Including a friend of mine. Her name was Anna. We were close on the Origin Planet. When we landed here, the Faloii requested that a group of us live among them, to learn the ways of living in harmony with Faloiv. Your grandfather knew right away the value of respecting the Faloii, and I think he knew as soon as he set foot on Faloiv that there was something special here. We knew that if a future here was possible, it began with peace. Anna helped us convince others aboard the Vagantur that living in Mbekenkanush was wise. The ones who came with us didn’t see living with the Faloii as captivity but an opportunity to learn more quickly. More safely.”
“But not everyone.”
“No. Not everyone. Not all scientists are curious, Afua. And plenty are arrogant.”
“But you went to N’Terra,” I say. “You didn’t come here. Not right away.”
“That’s right. Jamyle didn’t want to bring your mother into such a circumstance if it turned out the Faloii had ulterior motives. And someone had to keep an eye on Albatur and his followers. Your mother and I stayed, and the plan was that we would join him here when the time came. But many things changed. Change happens quickly. But slow too.”
“Hamankush said N’Terra wouldn’t let the Acclimates come back. Is that when they . . . when they killed Anna?”
“Yes. This is what I mean when I say Albatur has been building toward this. It began far before he was elected. Far before we left the Origin Planet.”
Something in the room pulses. It’s not light, and it’s not sound either. It’s a current of some kind, which I recognize traveling through me as if I’ve touched an electric wire. When it fades, my toes tingle.
“The qalm,” Nana says. She raises her arm from her side and rests her palm against the wall, which shudders almost imperceptibly. “It must be raining.”
We pause to listen, and sure enough I can hear the distant thrum of a storm. I hadn’t seen any clouds when Rasimbukar had brought me back here from the jungle.
“In N’Terra you know three days before it rains,” I say, looking up as if at the sky. “The clouds start to gather far out over the trees and then slowly roll in.”
“Yes,” Nana says. “But Mbekenkanush is where the rain begins.”
When the vines part a moment later I expect to see Rasimbukar, but it is Kimbullettican, the youth who had expressed sympathy in the school qalm. They enter and greet my grandmother silently. Then they hail me, also in Arterian.
It is raining, they say.
I know.
The qalm has agreed to grow a room for you. Rasimbukar informed me that you might like to observe.
Observe?
I hesitate, glancing at my nana. I haven’t seen her in years and now we’re getting interrupted—I can’t help but wonder if it’s on purpose. She seems to notice my indecision and shoos me off her bed.
“We will catch up,” she says, her N’Terran accent creeping back in with the voice she uses for comforting. “Go on now.”
I follow Kimbullettican out through the vines back into the corridor. They lead me down in the opposite direction I’d entered from, and I can’t help but compare my surroundings to the Zoo. A maze of tunnels, similar in that way. But the membrane of the ceilings allows in the sun, slightly muted, and the floor isn’t a hard artificial barrier between foot and ground. The soil is a comfort under my feet. The lines here are not straight either—not like the unforgiving angles of N’Terra’s labs. Everything curves. All is irregular, the shape of breath, as if the qalm exhaled and the tunnels followed the whim of the air. When Kimbullettican leads me to an opening where the vines have not yet grown in, I see this imagining isn’t far off.
The room before me grows with every pulse that throbs gently through the qalm. It’s the rhythm of a wide green throat swallowing water: with each swallow, the space swells. The room is barely a room, existing only as the thinnest green membrane, but it thickens with each pulse. A moment ago I was looking out at the city through the thin layer, but with every passing second the details become more obscure, the rounded green bubble before me thickening and strengthening. Only the roof remains thin, but not enough to see the sky: just the faint shadowy shapes of raindrops, which land and then slide down the curved sides before dripping to the ground. Inside the membrane, a shape rises from the floor, inch by inch, growing taller and more substantial. I eventually realize it is a sleeping platform, grown from the very ground. Another structure, flat and broad, emerges, which I believe is a small desk. Compartments appear in one wall, holes like the ones I remember from our kitchen in N’Terra. I imagine my father sitting there alone and my heart sinks in my chest.
“It is finished,” Kimbullettican says out loud. “There may be some adjustments over the next few days. But you may lie down and treat this space as your own.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you smell it?” they say, turning their eyes on me. They lack the endlessness of Rasimbukar’s: there is the glimmering quality, but not quite the galactic bottomlessness of Rasimbukar’s, Hamankush’s, and the other adult Faloii’s.
I do smell it, though I’m not sure what “it” is. A smell that seems familiar but subtle.
“I have communicated to the qalm that the room will be yours. It absorbed some of your scent while you sat with your grandmother. This is how you will identify your room in the future, as there are no other notable external differences.”
“Thank you,” I say. “For explaining.”
“You cannot know what you do not know,” they say, and flash their teeth. It reminds me of the words Alma and Rondo and I had exchanged so often in the Greenhouse: we don’t know, but we will. Kimbullettican doesn’t seem to notice my sudden sadness at the thought of my friends; they seem pleased with themselves, and I decide that this smile the Faloii perform is certainly a trait they have learned from humans, and Kimbullettican is pleased that they inserted the gesture correctly.
“How old are you?” I ask.
“Your friend Jaquot asked the same question. My age is irrelevant, as it is not comparable to your measure of time. My chronology might seem quite long to you, but we mature very differently from humans. We are similar, you and I, in terms of maturation. I b
elieve that is what you would really like to know.”
“Yes,” I say. “And do you remember when the Acclimates came?”
“I do not,” they say, and that’s all.
“That’s okay.” I sigh.
“It must be.” They smile again. I think this phrase, this joke, is something they have picked up from humans as well. My grandmother has their accent; they have our smiles. They stare at me for a moment and then the smile falters. “Hamankush says the plants like you.”
“She did? I mean, they do?”
“I think she is right. Do you feel the curiosity of the qalm? The way it observes you?”
I had not noticed, at least not consciously, but when I stop and listen, I can feel the energy of the room I stand in focused on me, like a beam of sunlight directed by a magnifying glass.
“I do now,” I say, baffled. “But what does it mean?”
“I am not sure if it means anything,” Kimbullettican says. “Only that when you inherited the biology of your grandmother, it may have mutated slightly in you.”
“Mutated?” I say, concerned. I know not all mutations are bad, but when my mother told me I’d been given a gift, I hadn’t thought of it as a mutation.
“Do not be worried,” they say. “It is merely interesting. It may make your life on Faloiv even easier than your peers’. Or even more difficult. It is hard to say with humans.”
I don’t know what to say to this. Between the intensity of their eyes and the focus of the qalm on my consciousness, I feel overwhelmed.
“I am sorry,” Kimbullettican says, sensing my discomfort. “I realize now that this may not have been a kind thing to say.”
“It’s okay.” I sigh. “You don’t owe us any kindness.”
“That may or may not be true. But I understand that this all must be very strange—discovering a side of your people that you never knew existed.”
I think of what Hamankush had shown me—this is what they do not want you to see—and the fact that Rasimbukar has been shielding N’Terra from Mbekenkanush’s consequences, but hide this thought from Kimbullettican.
“You mean the fact that the Acclimates are here, or what is happening at home in N’Terra?”
“They are the same thing,” they say, looking at me with what seems to be a quizzical arrangement of their facial spots.
I will leave you now, Kimbullettican says in Arterian before I can decide how to reply. Rasimbukar says you will need to rest.
I almost ask them not to leave me—it’s hard to feel alone with the consciousness of the qalm swirling around me. But that would be ridiculous; and after I bid them good-bye, I carefully climb onto the sleeping platform, which is higher than at home. Home. What is home now? Not just N’Terra but this whole planet: What is home?
Chapter 4
I wake to the sound of Jaquot’s voice and startle, nearly falling out of bed. I’m curled at the edge of it, still in my skinsuit, which I’ve been wearing for entirely too long. I look around for Jaquot but don’t see him, only a vine hanging from the ceiling, a blue cup-shaped flower at its end. I think it’s a communication device of some kind, and reach for it, but the flower comes off in my hand. I jerk my hand away as the vine retracts into the ceiling. The flower quivers in my hand, then slowly opens. Then from its center, softly, drifts the sound of Jaquot’s voice. I realize the only thing he’s saying is my name.
When I hold the flower to my ear, Jaquot’s voice continues, soft and smooth as if the sound is brought to me by the wind.
“Octavia,” he says, and I realize it’s some kind of recording when he continues. “Rasimbukar wants you to come with us on our assignment today. They’re taking your grandmother to the pink lake, so don’t worry about her. Rasim said she made sure you have clothes in one of your wall compartments. Meet us at the school when you wake up.”
Then the little flower is silent, only a vague echo stirring in my ear. I take the flower away from my face and study it, trying to understand if it’s organic or some kind of elegant technology. I place the flower on my cot, half expecting it to self-destruct, but it just rests there, blue and innocent. I turn to the wall compartments, wondering if Rasimbukar had come into my room as I slept, silent as a shadow.
But, no, I find; the clothing that rests inside the compartment is the work of the qalm. The material is membraneous like the first shell of the room as it had grown, and attached to a slender stem that connects to the inside of the compartment. I give it a gentle tug and withdraw what appears to be a suit much like the N’Terran one I already wear. I would like to bathe, but there’s no one to ask, so I remove my white skinsuit and use the material to swipe under my arms and the back of my neck. When I pull on the new clothing, I realize right away how different it is.
There are no stitches or seams: it doesn’t appear to have a beginning or end, but the neck hole seems entirely too large; my whole chest wrap will be exposed, I think, fitting my arms and legs through the appropriate holes. But as it fits to my body, I realize the opening is gradually closing, knitting itself together across my chest and back, slithering up toward my neck. My panic is involuntary. I stumble backward, halfheartedly clawing at the material and trying to get my fingers between it and my skin before it overtakes me entirely. But there is no space: it has bonded with me, more of a second skin than the N’Terran suit could ever be. And then I feel it: the sensation that soothes my panic like salve on a burn. Breath. My body breathes through the material in a way that makes me more aware than ever before of the pores of my skin, the hairs on my arms and legs and in my armpits. All of these things, these tiny human details, have a purpose, and the suit seems to understand this.
“Hello,” I say, and feel stupid for saying it, but it’s as if I’m greeting my body for the first time. And the hello is also for this wonderful, amazing suit. My skin drinks oxygen greedily like it’s never fully enjoyed breathing on Faloiv while clothed before now. I’m running my hands over my arms and legs and chest, admiring the strangely sparkling material—like the scales of a morgantan, but plantlike—when I hear a voice from nearby. It takes a moment for me to realize the voice is speaking in Arterian, an unusual smudge of conversation that I’m somehow overhearing.
It is inevitable, the voice says. And when the Isii is consulted, the humans must choose.
Wearing the new suit, I slip on my shoes by the door, and rest my fingertips on the wall as I’d seen Rasimbukar do. The minuscule vines part immediately.
In the hallway, I find Hamankush, staring intently at another Faloii person, with whom she is having a silent conversation. I only hear one harsh word before the tunnel snaps shut, a reprimand of her companion.
Careless.
“Octavia,” she says to me out loud. She moves toward me and the person she’d been addressing disappears through another vined door. “You will be joining your peers in the jungle today. You have heard?”
“Yes,” I say, trying to look like I wasn’t eavesdropping, even accidentally. “I was just on my way. If I can remember how to get there.”
She shows me the path in the tunnel. The way she speaks Arterian is different from Rasimbukar: quick and rushed.
“You see?” she says, and I nod, holding the series of images and instructions in my head. “Good. Your suit fits you well. Your hands are bare?”
My hands are indeed bare.
“Uh, yeah, I guess so. I just didn’t want my hands covered. I guess it understood.”
She studies me. “You are an unusual human,” she says.
“How?” I ask. The spots on her forehead, so still compared to Rasimbukar’s constantly shifting pattern, are like a puzzle I wish to solve.
“Unusual,” she says. “Where some see ocean, you see water.”
She turns away, moving toward the vine door her companion had gone through.
“Hurry now,” she says. “I will see you shortly.”
I find my way to the school with the help of Hamankush’s instructions, but I di
scover that she needn’t have guided me. The city isn’t as overwhelming as it had seemed yesterday, when the newness of it all had rained down on me like a meteor shower. And aside from the difference in appearance, the activities of the Faloii don’t seem at all different from what I might have observed in the dome of any compound of N’Terra. Except rather than animals, everyone appears to be in deep concentration examining the various plants and vegetation in the city. I recognize Adombukar, standing near the trunk of a young tree, one palm on its bark, listening intently.
It’s strange to see the Faloii all around me after mystery shrouded their existence for so many years. My N’Terran upbringing had prepared me for something akin to monsters, but their difference is only that: different. It’s stranger, in fact, to see the humans among them—walking, talking, studying, all in the qalm-grown suits but still sticking to the shade the trees provide. The Acclimates are outnumbered, but seem unbothered by this as they go about their work. Some of them study alongside the Faloii, but many more seem to be involved in taking care of the qalms: water here, bringing different species of insects and birds. A woman my mother’s age stands near one as I pass by, applying what appears to be a thick green paste to one section of the qalm’s wall.
“What are you doing?” I venture to ask, pausing.
She turns, an expression of surprise on her face. “A branch fell in a recent storm, damaging the qalm. I am using a bit of phinusa to help heal it.”
“It can’t heal itself?” I say.
“Yes,” she says. “But why should it? When we can help?”
“Is that what you study here? Healing the qalms?”
“Study?” she says, raising an eyebrow. “I do what needs to be done.”
She seems eager to return to her work, and somehow I understand from the qalm that it is eager as well. Even if I can’t fully comprehend its language, I understand that it feels . . . pleased.
When I finally wind my way through the city and arrive at the school, Jaquot and the same group of others stand waiting in the shade of the qalm. A habitual part of me looks for Dr. Espada, and the memory of his death is like the sting of an insect, so sharp I almost gasp.
An Anatomy of Beasts Page 4
