Ancient, Ancient

by Kiini Ibura Salaam

  A feeling of flight, of progress after prolonged struggle, blossomed in the chests of all who heard Mahini’s song. Their message was wordless, but forceful: be free, be free, be free. Mahini encircled Laki, causing their melodies and harmonies to cocoon her. The song dislodged her calm composure and sent her pulse racing.

  She had been careful to avoid the embrace of Mahini’s veil, but once she was undone by their song, she lost awareness of her surroundings. When their veil brushed against her skin, she felt as if it were her own veil being thrown over her. The sensation wasn’t all encompassing like the memory of Fogo. Instead, Laki felt as if she were in two places at once. She was dancing with Mahini, feeling the delicious expansion of possibility flowing through her limbs; she was in training with her mothers, feeling suffocated by the veil. She arced an arm overhead, and she was in the past, nothing more than a child grabbing at the veil, letting it tickle her tummy as her mothers dressed her for bed. She spun around, and she was imprisoned in a web of her own panic as the veil was being laid over her for the first time.

  The veil was nothing like Laki had thought it would be. She had thought the veil would make the world look hazy, shrouded; instead it made everything sharper. When she was inside the veil, the things that required her attention acquired a glint, a shine. She imagined the veil would feel light and weightless, which is how it looked when the mothers were rushing down the hall to deal with something urgent. But instead of floating over her, the veil had pressed against her skin, sticking to every part of her.

  The memory of that first moment with the veil washed over her. She shut her eyes tightly and screamed in terror.

  “Relax,” the mothers had sung, “it won’t suffocate you.”

  But Laki had felt suffocated. She had felt like it was plastered against her, crawling over every inch of her body. She had clawed at her neck, trying to pull it away from her throat.

  “It can’t be grabbed,” the mothers had sung. “It can’t be touched with your hands. You can only move it with emotion.”

  Laki had yelled louder.

  “Laki, my love, the cloak is not your enemy. It can’t kill you.”

  “Breathe, Laki.”

  Laki had taken deep gulping breaths. But every time she had opened her mouth to speak, the cloak flowed into it and garbled her voice.

  Now Laki raised her hands high in the air and shook her head back and forth. The women of Mahini mimicked her actions. She began whirling and dipping, trying to move faster than memory, but she could not outpace her fears. They stayed with her, panting inside her ear.

  She felt it again: the cloak probing her eyes, nose, and armpits. She heard her mothers trying to ease her panic.

  “It won’t always feel this way,” one mother sang, stroking her back.

  “Each cloak is unique, it becomes a part of you,” sang head-mother. “It will take from you and become you.”

  “Then when you’re in your unit it will…”

  “…meld with the cloaks of the other women.”

  “It will be an extension of you.”

  “You will grow to rely on it…”

  “…and it will know you better.”

  As she continued to dance, Laki became more aware of the sounds Mahini was making. Not the sounds of their voices, but the sounds of their breathing—and of their bells. Laki looked at their faces as she swayed with them. Each of them, she thought, had lived through their first day in the veil, and each of them had survived.

  Se-se heard Mahini before she saw them. She had located Laki’s pod, counted pods until she reached hers, then entered her pod. She had disconnected her pod from the party and reconnected it to Laki’s. When she had done all that, she stepped into a completely different party. The abandon and frenetic energy were gone, instead everyone was swaying as if eerily entranced. For a second, Se-se thought she had made a mistake. She went over her actions in her mind, but this was no mistake; there was no other party this could be. She walked back to where she had left Laki and came to a shocked halt.

  Laki was no longer lying half naked on the floor. She was clothed, and dancing with…a mother-unit. Se-se’s shoulders drooped, and her knees went soft as her body prepared to bow before the unit, but then she stopped. She didn’t feel the emotions she usually felt when she was in the presence of her mothers. She took a step closer and saw that these women had revealed their faces. Her mind was a jumble as she tried to understand what she was seeing.

  Se-se was momentarily immobilized, transfixed by the veil. It writhed with a predatory autonomy, as if it were an independent creature—haunted and hungry for new mothers. Suddenly Se-se felt the urge to grab Laki and run. She shifted forward, but when she reached for Laki, Laki slipped to the floor. Mahini reacted immediately, smoothly transitioning from chanting into a soft humming. Laki rolled back and forth with soundless sobs, while everyone in the party stood frozen in stunned stillness.

  Mahini crouched over Laki and began a whispered accompaniment of sighs and hisses. Se-se crawled over to her sister and pulled on her arms, calling her softly. Laki’s eyes were unfocused and vacant. Every few seconds Laki would yelp, clawing at her face and neck. Se-se grabbed Laki more firmly and shook her, yelling Laki’s name. Mahini closed a circle around Se-se and Laki. As garbled sounds started to spill out of Laki’s mouth, faint trails of blue smoke wafted from her body. Se-se could see the mark of tears on her sister’s face.

  Although Laki seemed paralyzed, she was fighting for her sanity within. She battled hysteria by forcing herself to remember her victories. “I can thin the cloak,” she murmured to herself. “I can show my face like Mahini does. I can stretch the cloak for long distances. I can do all the proper maneuvers for privacy. I can sit for hours with the cloak on, it doesn’t hurt me.” But you can’t get out, a voice whispered in her head. But you can’t get out.

  The mothers described it as a particular wave of emotion—sudden fear when a child is in danger, a sharp tenderness associated with duty, or heartbreak when a child is in pain—that could part the veil. Once parted, the veil would release a mother from the unit’s bond, and she could temporarily detach, with her own unique section of the veil draped over her.

  Laki was full of emotions—primarily anger and rage—but those were useless in a mother-unit. At each training session, she thought of gruesome situations, awful things that would put the lives of innocent babies in peril, but it never worked. No matter what she tried, the cloak remained unmoved.

  Maybe it was the pull of Mahini’s voices, maybe it was Se-se leaning over her, but suddenly Laki broke through the mania of grief. She felt the sensation of the cloak falling over her again. But this time, instead of clinging to her, it laid cool and soft on her skin. It felt like the comforting presence her mothers had promised it would become, the gentle companion it had been becoming in Laki’s last days of training.

  The memory of the one time she had parted through the veil burst into her consciousness, and pulled her further out of her turmoil. She had been under the veil, drowning in failure, when the thought had blossomed: “I bet Se-se could do it.” Her fear of never learning how to exit the veil was buried under a forceful flood of tenderness for her sister. Then it had happened—a small hole of unmoving air had appeared in the middle of the cloak’s shimmer.

  Laki, smiling at the memory, was surprised to feel her dread of the veil slip away. Yes, she could not escape the veil, yet the grip of failure relaxed. She allowed that simple success to part her panic and slice open an exit through her grief. She was suddenly buoyed by the certainty that, with Se-se guiding in her, she would always learn the way out.

  Laki heard a whispering, felt someone cushion her head. Her eyes fluttered open. Seconds passed while she stared at the face before her, a few more seconds passed before she realized it was Se-se.

  “I thought…” Laki said, swallowing back tears. “I thought I’d dreamed that you were here.”

  “I’m here, Laki.”

  Laki
looked at her sister and felt both relief and a soft sadness descending. In the wake of those all-too-real memories with the veil, sadness was a sweet emotion—a reprieve from her mother-unit anxieties and a welcome respite from her rage. She gripped Se-se’s hands and smiled apologies and love at her. Time and space suspended as everything around them fell away. When their hearts had been silently emptied, Se-se and Laki snapped out of their trance.

  Laki let go of Se-se’s hands and looked around. “What happened to the party?”

  None of Laki’s guests had left the party, but there was no dancing, no laughing, and no fondling. Everyone was gathered around, watching the sisters. Everyone except Mahini—there was no sign of them.

  “Can someone put the music back on?” Se-se asked.

  Someone put music on, but the mood was permanently broken.

  Se-se helped Laki sit up. “The pods are ready. Are you ready to go?” she whispered.

  “Go? Where are we going?”

  Before Se-se could answer, the party started to dissolve. A friend of Laki’s came over with outstretched arms. Laki rose from the floor, fully recovered from her outburst. She was, once again, animated and enigmatic. She was passionate with her goodbyes, effusive with her embraces. A few times, she jokingly pretended to faint as punctuation in conversations, and each time Se-se jumped, arms outstretched, ready to catch Laki before she fell.

  When the party had shrunken to just a handful of pods, Se-se linked her arm with Laki’s and guided her toward their pods.

  “Mahini was at my good-bye party!” Laki murmured.

  “Am I the only one who didn’t know they were a mother-unit?” Se-se asked.

  Laki burst into soft laughter as Se-se pulled her away from the center of the party so they could disconnect from the other pods together. As they left behind the stragglers, partygoers who were unconscious or profoundly high, Se-se looked Laki deep in the eyes.

  “I want you to follow me.”

  “Follow you where?”

  Se-se didn’t answer. She peeled a patch of material from the interior of her pod’s wall.

  “Where’s your navigation panel?” she asked.

  Laki waved her hand over a nondescript curve of her pod’s wall, and the navigation panel folded out. Se-se pressed the patch from her pod onto Laki’s navigation panel and waved it shut.

  “Just follow me,” Se-se said.

  Laki sat down on the floor and watched Se-se walk to the opposite side of their joined pods.

  “Tomorrow I take the veil,” she said to Se-se drowsily and lay down on the floor.

  As their pods separated, Laki slipped into sleep. She remained asleep as her pod followed Se-se’s around star bars and conjoined pods into the far reaches of the rendezvous-less zone.

  Laki opened her eyes when she felt Se-se shaking her. She stayed awake long enough to see that they were still in the Stretch, then she put her head back down and fell asleep again. Se-se sighed. She began waving her hands over various segments of Laki’s pod, looking for the gas module. Her random searching finally coaxed a bulb-shaped protrusion from the wall of Laki’s pod. When Se-se squeezed the bulb, the funky scent of ancient incense squirted into the pod. She turned the bulb and squeezed again. The sweet scent of newborn babies wafted out. She turned the bulb once more. This time a sharp menthol scent shot into the pod. Se-se coughed and rubbed her nose. She squeezed the bulb two more times and pushed it back into the wall. When the pod was filled with the tang of menthol, Laki started to stir. Finally her eyes snapped open.

  “I’m up, are we home? Are the mothers awake?”

  Se-se pulled Laki to her feet. Laki saw the darkness of the Stretch and groaned.

  “I’m tired, Se-se. What are we still doing here?”

  “You’ll see soon.”

  She fiddled with the robe Laki had fashioned from Mahini’s cloth. She pinched around the waist until it fit so tightly that the marriage belt protruded through the cloth.

  “Can you shorten this?” Se-se asked, tugging at the hem.

  “Do I have a date?” Laki asked. She looked around the darkness of the Stretch searching for another pod.

  “Turn around,” Se-se said.

  Laki turned and saw a pod unlike any pod she had ever seen. The walls had a smoky opaqueness that was definitely against regulations.

  “This is creepy, Se-se.”

  Before Laki had finished speaking, the strange pod started moving toward them. It bumped into their pods gently and began to fuse with them. The new pod’s opacity seeped into their pod walls as if assimilating them. With the loss of transparency, they lost their ability to see by starlight. Both Laki and Se-se waved their hands over the light modules in their pods. When the three pods had fully fused, Laki saw a shrouded figure standing in the middle of the opaque pod.

  “Enter, please,” a steely voice commanded.

  Se-se grabbed Laki’s hand to guide her forward, but Laki held her back.

  The shrouded figure walked toward them, entering their pods. The figure stopped in front of Laki and overtly inspected her.

  Laki turned to Se-se, eyes glittering with anger. “What is going on?”

  “Shhhh,” whispered Se-se.

  The steely voice spoke again.

  “You were right, she is stunning.” The figure threw off her cloak and stretched her hand out to Se-se. “I accept your offer.”

  Uncloaked, the figure was a woman. She was dressed in shimmering robes, and long strands of colored jewels hung from her ears. She had a look about her that suggested she was unfamiliar with the word no.

  Rage rustled up from Laki’s chest and flared in her throat. She glared at the woman, then dragged Se-se away.

  “Who is this woman?”

  “She’s going to tell you if you give her a chance.”

  “I’m asking you to tell me.”

  “She’s someone who can change your life.”

  Laki shook her head. “You never give up. Tomorrow I’m going into a mother-unit. I’m not running away and hiding out in the Velvet Stretch, I’m not marrying one of my male friends, and I’m not digging around for my hidden inheritance. It’s over Se-se.”

  “This is not another fantasy, Laki. I swear. At least talk with her.”

  “May I see the belt?” the woman said cutting into Se-se and Laki’s conversation.

  Laki looked at the woman then shot Se-se an icy glare.

  “Show her,” mouthed Se-se.

  Laki lifted the hem of the robe and stuffed it into the space between her waist and the belt. She pulled the hem down so that the belt now rested in plain view. She crossed her arms and waited for the woman to approach. The woman walked over to Laki and lifted the belt. She tilted it forward as if to inspect the quality of the beads. Then she twisted the belt so that she could read the markings inside. A smile spread over her face. She hugged Laki.

  “You may call me Strabaha,” she said to Laki.

  “Wife Strabaha, what is the meaning of this? Why all the mystery? What do you want from me, and how do you know my sister?”

  “Excellent questions.” The woman grinned at Laki as if Laki were her star student. “I met your extraordinarily persistent sister only yesterday. She told me this improbable story of a young woman wearing my son’s marriage belt. This young woman, she said, would soon be joining a mother-unit. She advised me to meet the young woman before her maturation, otherwise I would never get the chance.”

  “So this is some type of weird fetish?”

  “No, this is a wonderful offer.”

  “I need to sit,” Laki said. She turned to Se-se suddenly. “Do the mothers know where you are?”

  “Of course they do!”

  Se-se and Laki sat on the floor. The woman quickly braided her cloak and rolled it into an impromptu seat.

  “I can see that you are tired,” the woman said after she had seated herself. “I’ll try to make this quick, although I do have some questions.”

  “Such as?”
r />   “You are intelligent, beautiful, strong…”

  “…and an orphan,” Laki said.

  “Well, I’m sure if you had a wife mother, she would never allow you to toil in a mother-unit. But no father, no father’s sisters, no mother’s father?”

  “My father and my wife mother died when I was a baby. I don’t remember them, and I assume their families don’t remember me. The wife mothers of my brothers and sisters allowed me to stay in the birth group. The mothers raised us all the same. They were able to provide me with cloths and food, but when it came to my school fees, there was nothing that could be done.”

  “So they trained you to be in a mother-unit.”

  Laki nodded.

  “Even though she’s not fit for mothering,” Se-se piped in.

  “The mothers say no one is fit for mothering. They say I will fit to it; it will make me what it needs me to be.” Laki’s tone was firm as if she were disciplining Se-se.

  “And you believe that?” Se-se asked, sounding more like a bitter Laki than her usual chipper self.

  “You have not thought of marriage?” Wife Strabaha cut in.

  “She’s had plenty of offers, but she would rather go into a mother-unit than take a marriage belt dishonestly,” Se-se said before Laki could speak.

  “Dishonestly!?” Wife Strabaha laughed. She put her hand on Laki’s. “No one marries for love. It was a romantic idea of past civilizations. It didn’t work. Unfortunately, your wife mother was not around to teach you this.”

  “There’s nothing you can say to her about it, Wife Strabaha. She can’t help herself, it’s just the way she was made.”

  “Wife Strabaha,” Laki interjected, “you said you had an offer?”

  Wife Strabaha cleared her throat.

  “Yes, I invite you to come and live in my home as my son’s wife.”

  There was silence as Laki tried to make sense of what Wife Strabaha had said. Then she turned to her sister, suddenly understanding Se-se’s plan.