by Amy Thomson
Anito flickered acknowledgment. They linked and entered Moki’s body.
The damage was not as bad as it looked. Moki had a mild concussion and had lost a fair amount of blood. Several internal organs were bruised. The broken bone in his arm had pierced his allu. That would be the trickiest thing to repair.
Ukatonen closed hemorrhaging blood vessels, and eased the building pressure in Moki’s skull. Anito was dimly aware of someone outside the link straightening and splinting Moki’s broken arm. The most urgent injuries attended to, Ukatonen tried to reassure Moki, but the bami’s presence remained huddled and unresponsive, walled off by the depth of his grief. A wave of bitter sadness welled up from Ukatonen as he broke the link.
“Well?” Eerin asked, as they emerged from the link. “Will he live?”
Ukatonen gave a dubious, muddy ripple of affirmation. “He’s not seriously injured, but I don’t think he wants to recover. He’s lost the will to live. He wants you, Eerin. He needs to link with you. You’re his sitik. No one else will do. You must link with him every day. Without your strength, your presence, he will die.”
Eerin turned pale orange and looked away for a moment. Her jaw worked, and then suddenly, as she reached some inner decision, her skin deepened into a sudden resolve. “Show me what I must do.” A flicker of fear, quickly suppressed, ran across her torso.
Anito laid a hand on Eerin’s shoulder. “First you must remember that Moki is your bami, and would never do anything to hurt you. You must not be afraid. Linking is natural. Moki needs it. Even when he’s healthy he needs to link with you every day. Now he needs it more than ever.”
Eerin touched Moki’s uninjured arm, near his allu. She looked up at Anito and Ukatonen. “Should I—can I link with him now? It won’t hurt him?”
Ukatonen nodded and looked at Anito. “Will you help her, kene? I’m too tired.”
Anito held out her arms. She guided Eerin’s arm to Moki’s uninjured spur, and then linked with Eerin. Together they entered Moki. Anito watched as Eerin enfolded Moki, flooding him with reassurance and encouragement, and some other thing that was wholly alien, wholly part of the new creature. Moki uncoiled from his knot of despair, returning the alien flood of feeling. As the two of them mingled, Anito helped Eerin’s body give Moki strength. Then she broke the link between them.
Several other villagers helped carry Moki to the raft. They needed to keep going. Fortunately they were through the worst of the white water. The river was smooth except for a few small patches of rough water. Even so, Anito doubted that she could do much to help steer.
Ninto touched her shoulder. “Yiato wants you and Ukatonen to ride with her. Dalo and Kadato will take your place.”
Anito agreed numbly, hardly noticing the packet of food that Baha handed her. Death’s silvery sheen seemed to dance on every sunlit ripple. She was so tired. If Moki died, she would follow him and Ukatonen into death.
Juna stared down at Moki’s unconscious form. His splinted arm was bound up in a fishnet sling. His uninjured arm lay outstretched. Golden sun dapples of early morning light lay across his bruised body like fallen petals. Yiato had declared a day off to give the other villagers a chance to repair rafts battered by yesterday’s trip through the cataracts.
Anito and Ukatonen were clearly exhausted. Juna gathered fruit and caught fish to feed them. Fortunately the fishing was good; she pulled in half a dozen good-sized fish from small, quiet pools underneath the trees. One of them was a new species, which she duly recorded, before knocking it on the head to kill it.
Anito flickered approvingly at her catch, helping her skin, gut, and fillet the fish. Juna smiled briefly to herself. At last she was doing something right. Ever since Lyanan, life had been one mistake after another. She shook her head in frustration, drained and tired by all that had happened.
She heard a rustling in the treetops, and looked up. Ukatonen was climbing down from the nest. He squatted beside her, and linked briefly with Moki.
“How is he?” Juna asked when he emerged from the link.
“See for yourself,” Ukatonen said, holding out his arm for a link. “He needs you.”
Juna swallowed her fear, remembering how Moki had reached for her in the link. He had been like a starving child. He clung to her as she soothed him, vaguely aware that Anito was manipulating them through the link. Strength had flowed from her to him, and he relaxed, contented at last. Juna continued to enfold him, deeply moved by the strength of his need for her. His need for a link with her was a deeply physical one, as profound and absolute as a human infant’s need to be held.
But what about her own needs? Every time she linked, Juna felt as if another layer of her humanity had been stripped away. Worst of all, she enjoyed it. Each link made her want more. Would she become addicted to allu-a? Would she still be human when the Survey found her?
Juna’s spurs linked with Moki’s and Ukatonen’s. She was plunged into the touch-taste-smell inner world of the aliens. Her old panic threatened to overwhelm her. Then Moki greeted her with the joyful abandon of an overeager puppy. A surge of fondness rose in her. Moki echoed that fondness, amplifying and returning it to her. The two of them spiraled higher, each cresting off the other’s emotional peaks until Ukatonen gently but firmly stopped the emotional upsurge. He let them rest in their sea of emotions, then guided them gently apart.
When she was calm again, Ukatonen showed Juna the beating of her own heart pumping steadily away in her chest with a steady one-two, one-two rhythm. Ukatonen nudged her heartbeat briefly faster, then slowed it. Then he showed her how to control her own heartbeat. Juna felt her heart race and slow like some small animal inside her chest. She held her life in her hands like some fine thread made of electricity, pulsing with the beat of her heart. It was simultaneously exhilarating and scary.
Then Ukatonen guided her inside himself, showing her the steady one-two-THREE beat of his three-chambered heart. When he was through, Juna understood his heartbeat and her own in an intuitive, sensory way that went beyond anything she could have learned from dissections and observations using instrumentation. Ukatonen showed her Moki’s heartbeat; it was thin and thready, not beating as strongly as his own, but it was already stronger than yesterday.
They emerged ffom the link.
“Well?” Ukatonen asked her. “How is Moki doing?”
“He’s improving,” Juna replied.
Ukatonen nodded. “It will be at least ten days before his arm is out of that splint.” He paused and touched Juna’s shoulder. “But it was your linking that gave him the will to live.”
“Thank you, en.” Juna looked away, trying to hide her fear.
“Linking still frightens you. Why?” Ukatonen asked.
“It’s too—” She looked away, searching for words. “I feel overwhelmed, en. It’s like I’m drowning. It’s too much for me. I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop, that I’ll forget who and what I am.”
Ukatonen ducked his chin in thought. “I don’t understand. How could you forget who you are?”
“Because your presence is so overwhelming, en. I can’t control what is happening to me.”
“When you swim, do you control the water you swim in?” Ukatonen asked.
“No.”
“You swim by being in balance with the water, by understanding its flows and shifts. You learn to move with it. You must learn to do this in allu-a.”
“How?”
“You are already starting. Today I showed you the life-rhythm of the heart. You learned to change the balance of your heartbeat. Each life-rhythm you learn will teach you more balance in allu-a. You must be patient. It’s as hard for Anito and me to teach you as it is for you to learn. We do such things instinctively. Thinking about them is like trying to follow the course of one bird in a large flock.”
“I hope it works,” Juna said.
“So do I. Now, let’s go and eat. You must be hungry.”
They spent the next day on the beach beside the
river, resting and repairing their rafts and checking their cargo. The following day they loaded up and set off again.
Two days later they encountered the next rapids. Yiato surveyed the rapids, and reported that the water was high and the channels were clear. The safest passage was to the left. Then the villagers formed a circle for another group link. Juna shook her head when Anito invited her to join. She could barely tolerate a link with Moki. The thought of exposing herself to the entire village was too much.
Juna leaned against a beached raft, watching the villagers join together. The noisy silence of the jungle deepened, heavy with the calls of insects and birds, the rush of wind through the trees, and the occasional rustle of some unseen animal moving through the trees. She was alone for the first time in weeks. She turned on her computer and watched a comedy. The show was one of her favorites, but the jokes and laughter flowed past without touching her. It all seemed so far away and improbable. Juna paid more attention to the hot food on the table than the words of the actors.
Frustrated, she shut the program off. A soft rain began to fall as the villagers sat like a ring of green stones, totally lost in their silent communion. Humanity seemed so remote, here among these alien creatures. Juna felt a terrible gulf separating her from both her own people and the Tendu.
Eventually the villagers unlinked and pushed off onto the river. Juna sat in the stern of the raft, struggling to match their tightly coordinated rhythm. Then they were in the rapids, pulling hard around large rocks and snags. They were nearly through when someone on the raft ahead of them got swept off into the river. Ninto pulled hard on the steering oar, and they drew near the swimming alien. As Anito grasped his arm, there was a sudden tug that nearly yanked her off the raft. Baha and Ukatonen grabbed Anito and helped her pull. The Tendu shot out of the water and into the raft. It was the elder Miato. Blood gushed from his leg. His left foot was gone. It had been severed just above the ankle.
The flow of blood from Miato’s stump slowed to a trickle as the river swept them into the slow water below the rapids. They beached their raft beside Miato’s. Miato’s bami and his crewmates lifted him from the raft and stretched him out on the smooth sand, their skins ochre with concern.
They linked with Miato, and the raw flesh at the end of his stump healed into new, tender skin. Juna recorded everything she saw, watching in amazement through the viewfinder of her computer. Even though she had seen healings like this before, they still seemed miraculous. The aliens unlinked and bandaged Miato’s stump with moss and fresh leaves.
Juna got out her fishing gear and began to fish from the end of the raft. She caught several medium-sized fish, all of them familiar species. Anito emerged from the jungle with a gathering sack full of oblong spiny fruit.
“For Miato, and the Tendu helping him,” Juna said, holding up her catch. Anito colored approvingly and squatted beside Juna to help prepare it.
“How terrible for Miato, to lose his foot like that!” Juna said.
Anito flickered agreement. “If only I had been a little faster. I could see the kulai coming for him, but I wasn’t able to reach him in time.” She sliced open the fish and neatly removed the guts, still in their translucent sac. “That almost happened to me, when I was a bami. My sitik pulled me out just before the kulai got me. It followed me onto the raft. The other elders had to club it back into the river.”
“How will Miato manage with only one foot?” Juna asked. In all her months among the Tendu, she had never seen a single maimed or crippled individual.
“It will grow back.”
“Grow back?” Juna asked incredulously. “His foot will grow back?”
“Of course,” Anito said. “He couldn’t get around very well with only one foot.”
“How does it grow back?”
Anito rippled a wavy multicolored pattern that seemed to be the Tendu equivalent of a shrug. “He tells it to. He’ll put mantu jelly on the stump. It will become part of his leg. His foot would grow back without the mantu jelly, but it would be a lot more work and take much longer.”
“Can other animals grow back missing limbs?” Juna asked.
“Some lizards can grow back their tails, but other than that, nothing with a backbone can grow back a limb. Sometimes we will heal an injured animal to maintain the balance of the forest. That’s why we healed that taira you hurt. We needed more taira to keep the puyu from killing too many young trees. We rarely heal any animal as badly injured as Miato. It’s too much trouble, and it’s too hard on the animal.”
“It’s different for my people,” Juna said. “We can’t grow back an arm or a foot if we lose one.”
Anito’s ears lifted in surprise. “What do you do instead?”
“We make them a replacement limb, if we can.”
“What kind of animal do you use to grow a replacement limb?” Anito asked, looking puzzled.
Juna shook her head, startled by the question. “The replacement limb isn’t alive. It’s made out of dead things, like wood or stone. It doesn’t work as well as the real limb, but it’s the best that we can do.” She couldn’t explain further; the Tendu had no word for plastic or metal in their language, and she had no idea how to explain mechanical objects to them. They thought her computer was some strange kind of half-alive stone animal.
Yet the Tendu were capable of prodigies of biotechnology. Her transformation and the amazing feats of healing she had seen proved that. She shook her head. It was hard to square their primitive lifestyle with their incredible abilities. She wondered how much of their biological skill was instinctive, and how much of it was learned.
“How much training-do you need in order to heal someone?” she asked Anito. “Could Moki heal someone now, or would he have to be trained?”
“He is helping to heal himself. All bami know how to do that.”
“What will Moki have to learn in order to become a sitik?”
Anito shook her head and spread her hands and ears wide. “Many things. He must learn something of the balance of the atwas, he must learn the history and customs of the village, and he must learn to heal himself and others well enough to be worthy of a place among the elders. Even then he will not be ready. He must be able to make the difficult decisions required of elders. He must be responsible. When he becomes an elder, he will share in deciding what the fate of the villagers will be.”
“How many years does that take?”
“It varies. I was with my sitik for many years.”
“How many years?”
Anito shook her head. “I don’t know. It was a long time. Long enough for a sapling like that one”—she pointed with her chin at a seedling that was little more than a slender twig with a handful of pale, shiny leaves— “to become a tree like that.” She pointed at a mature canopy tree.
Juna looked at the tree and turned bright pink in amazement. It was at least fifty or sixty Standard years old. If her ears had been mobile like a Tendu’s, they would have been spread wide. Anito was older than she was and she was barely an adult.
“How long do your people live?” Juna asked. “How old was Ilto when he died?”
Anito laid a hand on Juna’s arm. “It is not polite to call the dead by their names,” she informed her. “My sitik was the oldest Tendu in the village. He grew up in the tree our village lived in before this one. Ninto was his bami. When an elder died without a bami, Ninto was chosen to fill her place. Because of this, my sitik lived longer than most Tendu. He did not have to die or be exiled when Ninto became an elder.”
“I don’t understand,” Juna said. “Are you saying that an elder must leave the village or die before their bami can become an elder?”
“Of course, except when an elder dies without a bami, or if the bami dies before it can become an elder.”
“Why?” Juna asked. The implications of this were beginning to sink in.
“There are only so many elders in a village. It depends on the size of the tree, and the fertility of their jun
gle.”
“How big are most villages?” Juna asked.
Anito shook her head. “Ask Ukatonen. He knows more about what things are like in other villages.” She picked up a leaf full of neatly sliced fish. “We should take this over to Miato and the others. They will be hungry.”
The conversation was over, but Juna was full of questions. If her estimates were right, the Tendu lived at least 120 years, despite their primitive technology. Was this due to some intrinsic genetic characteristic, or was it due to their healing abilities? How would she be able to tell the difference?
Juna set a generous portion of the sliced fish and a basket of fruit beside the villagers who were working on healing Miato. They accepted it with a flicker of acknowledgment and thanks. She took a smaller portion of fish and some fruit over to Moki. He picked it up awkwardly with his uninjured arm, and fed himself. She peeled back the spiny rind of the fruit, exposing the translucent white inner pulp, and handed that to him.
A bami could not become an adult until its elder died or became an exile. What did this mean for her and Moki, and for Ukatonen? Could Moki become an elder after she left? Would Ukatonen have to die to make way for Moki? Where would Moki become an elder? She didn’t belong to any village. She had no place for Moki to fill. Juna sighed, and offered Moki another peeled fruit. Had she made a mistake?
“What’s the matter?” Moki asked, in shades of concern. “You seem sad. Is there anything I can do?”
“I’m just worried about what’s to become of you, with a strange sitik like me. What village will accept you?”
Moki rippled reassuringly. “Ukatonen would not have let you adopt me if he didn’t think it could work.”
Juna sucked out the gelatinous pulp of a fruit. “Perhaps you’re right, Moki. I’ll talk to him,” she said with a confidence that she didn’t feel.
Ukatonen came up as they finished eating. He helped himself to a bite of fish.
“How is Miato?” Juna asked.
“He’ll heal nicely,” Ukatonen said in skin speech as he chewed.
