The Faarian Chronicles: Exile

by Karen Harris Tully

  “Well, what was your favorite thing about Earth?” someone else asked.

  Feeling stuck in a spotlight, I made myself smile and gave the first answer that came to mind. “Parasailing in Hawaii was fun. I’d love to do that again.” I tried to keep my answer just long enough not to be too rude.

  A few inane adult questions later and my new Great-Aunt Nico asked the best one by far.

  “So Sah-nee,” she said. “You prefer to be called Sah-nee, yes?” I nodded. Close enough, and she was the only one besides Ethem who had bothered so far. “Sensei here mentioned that you had boyfriends on Earth.”

  I squinted at her in surprise. “If you mean friends that are boys, then yes. I mean, I guess so.” I nodded warily.

  She waved one hand as if brushing an annoying bug aside. “So what’s the holdup then? Why do you have no daughters yet to carry on the Katje line?”

  What? Was this daft old woman asking why I wasn’t a teen mother?

  “Aunt Nico!” my mother reproached while I stared at her, dumbfounded. “You know we don’t encourage our girls to have children so early anymore!”

  “And why not?” she demanded. “It was good enough for this family when I was a girl; it’s darn well good enough now.” She turned back to me. “Why, by the time I was your age, I’d already brought one strong girl into this Kindred and given the warrior yell of our ancestors.” She pounded a fist against her flabby chest. Even in old age, she had that kind of physique that you could tell used to be muscular.

  “I had a dozen virile young men at my beck and call.” I had to cover my mouth as I almost giggled at the word "virile”. Her scowl in my direction was ruined by the ridiculousness of her claims. The woman was no Sophia Loren. No, she was more Roseanne Barr plus thirty years of wrinkles.

  “Be that as it may, Aunt Nico, you know it’s been found to be better for a woman if she waits until she’s older before she becomes a mother.”

  “Ridiculous, I say!” Nico banged her fist on the table. “We need our young warriors at their best, and you’re not even encouraging the one thing that will make them get the job done and come home. I should have known that you would lead us all down the path to ruin when you selfishly refused to have even one child. Instead you ran off to Earth, almost not coming back in time to help the Kindred in our most dire hour!”

  My mother looked calm up until then, but then I saw something I’d experienced myself, but never seen before. A ring of pure silver flashed outward from the edge of her pupils and in its wake, what remained was wheat-fields-in-August gold. She didn’t shut her eyes or turn away like I would have, but fixed the old woman with an unblinking stare.

  “Don’t pull that weird eye-flashy thing on me, girl,” Nico said. “Just because you’ve abandoned the old ways, Vaeda, doesn’t mean that everyone should.”

  “So, um, hey. Question,” I interrupted their stare down. “Why would me being an unwed teen mother make me a better fighter? Cuz like, I already kick butt,” I joked, trying to lighten the mood.

  Everyone who’d been silently observing the argument between Vaeda and Nico turned to stare at me uncomprehendingly. What? Was my pronunciation that bad? Sensei laughed, taking some of the tension from the group. A few others joined in politely.

  “That’s not how motherhood works here, Veridian,” my mother said with a slight frown at the corners of her mouth. “All children are raised collectively by the Kindred. There is no expectation for a woman to marry or even stay with the father of her child, unless she really wants to, and there's no judgment against her if she doesn’t. A woman never has to raise her children alone.”

  “Becoming a mother makes a girl become a strong, responsible woman, and strengthens her ties to the Kindred,” added Nico, jabbing her finger into the table to emphasize her point.

  “We are not going to encourage our girls to have children before they’re ready for the sake of tradition, Aunt Nico. Just because we used to do it that way doesn’t mean it’s the best or safest for our girls today. I want them to grow up and learn responsibility before becoming mothers.” I could tell this was an old argument between the two of them.

  “Humph.” The old woman threw up her hands and went back to her rotten squash, but anyone could see her mind remained unchanged.

  Personally, I didn’t care what lunatic traditions they had around here. There was no way I was ready to pop out a kid. Uh-uh, no way, no how, and maybe not ever.

  She looked up and pointed at me with a bony finger. “Eat more. You’re too skinny.” Ugh. And there she went with the weight comments again. She mumbled something that sounded like, “just what we need, another runt.”

  After dinner, people started clearing the benches from one side of the room and pushing tables together against the wall, creating a makeshift stage, and the big cats started fighting in the opposite corner of the room. Snarls and growls drew my attention, and I saw the big black one and my mother’s spotted monster face off while the other cats watched.

  They pounced and clashed, rolling and biting in a blur of claws and teeth and fur. Some people watched as if this were their regular entertainment, egging the cats on from the sidelines.

  “Um, why isn’t anyone stopping them?” I asked no one in particular.

  “You want to step between those two, you go ahead,” Great-Aunt Nico snorted.

  “They’ve already eaten…” Ethem began.

  “For which we are all grateful,” someone added. “It’s gross.”

  “…So, they start the trials without us,” Ethem continued.

  “Um, trials?” I leaned over and asked Sensei quietly.

  “The Kindred holds trials every so often for people to test their combat skills against each other. The General and her warriors rate each combatant’s progress and determine if they move up in rank, similar to our dojo on Earth. As this dinner is in your honor, you’ll be expected to participate and get ranked. Almost everyone starts out as a simple trainee.”

  I opened my mouth to tell her what I thought about that and she cut me off, getting up suddenly and dragging me away from the table.

  “Hey!” I complained loudly and rubbed my arm.

  “You are not on Earth any longer, Sunny. This is your mother’s culture, a warrior culture. Pacifism is not a virtue here. No one expects you to be an expert yet, but you need to be able to hold your own. Your acceptance and status here will depend on how well you can fight. Why do you think I was sent to train you?”

  “Just because it’s important to them to be able to beat people up doesn’t make it important to me.”

  She huffed and threw up her hands. “It’s not about beating people up, Sunny; it’s about building warriors! The haratchi aren’t going to spar with you for practice.” With that, she walked back to the table, swooped up her glass, and went to join some friends a few tables away.

  Whatever. I was not going to put on some demonstration of Earth-girl fighting skills for my absentee mother’s entertainment and approval.

  As I sat back down, my mother stood and clapped her hands once to make an announcement. As if a switch was flipped, everyone quieted and the cats stopped trying to take each other apart. Brainwashed, definitely brainwashed.

  “Members of the Kindred,” she addressed the crowd. “My daughter, Veridian, has finally joined us from Earth.” The crowd stomped the floor and pounded the table in applause as the people on either side of me grabbed my elbows and hoisted me upward. I stood and waved awkwardly for a moment before taking my seat again as soon as possible.

  “In honor of her homecoming, Ethem has arranged for the play of our Kindred’s history.” She gestured toward the makeshift stage set up to one side and sat once more.

  I tamped down the disappointment that welled in my chest. Was it unrealistic that I’d expected her to say welcome or something?

  Little kids in costume climbed onto the table stage while a colorfully tattooed man narrated. I recognized the story at once as one the Robot had made
me read over and over again for practice one year. But here it wasn’t a story. It was “Kindred history.”

  A child, face painted and wearing grayish-green from head to toe, played the small alien who’d come to Earth a couple thousand years ago, ending up north of the Black Sea. He was one of the last of a dying symbiotic race of ancients known as the Annunaki. He'd come to Earth to find and bring back intelligent beings to act as new hosts for their symbiots.

  Instead, what he found in that forest was a quick death at the jaws of a stalking tiger, played by another little child, painted in familiar orange and black stripes as if she were going to a Bengals football game. Unknowingly, the tiger became the defacto host for its dead victim’s tiny, spider-like symbiot, increasing the tiger’s intelligence ten-fold.

  A young hunter named Anme-Nammu (gift from Nammu) came upon the tiger. She belonged to a fierce clan of warrior women known on Earth today only in myths and stories as the Amazons. As Anme-Nammu attempted to kill the dangerous predator, a strange and amazing thing happened. The tiger was able to communicate with the young warrior through a growing mind-connect. Throughout their week-long contest of wills, they tested and gradually began to respect one another, and in the end, neither could bring themselves to kill their opponent. They hunted through the forest together and became a fearsome and unbeatable team.

  Sheesh. It sure would’ve been nice to know that was real and still continued to this day, I thought to myself.

  The warrior shared with her new partner fears of the growing conflict between her people and the seemingly all-powerful Greek empire. They were outnumbered a hundred to one and would soon have to submit and assimilate or be destroyed, and the warriors would never submit.

  The symbiot tiger shared an alternative to inevitable death at the hands of Alexander the Tyrant: visions of a lush planet with no humans, full of challenge and opportunity. She offered to take the people of Anme’s Kindred to this new and unsettled paradise.

  After much explanation and negotiation with her clan, Anme convinced them to leave Earth for Macawi.

  The children’s depiction of the warriors’ chaotic journey through the wormhole was funny and uncomfortably reminiscent of my own experience earlier that day, but the secret to normal human survival through the wormhole had been lost for centuries.

  “After this initial immigration,” a little boy intoned solemnly in his high child’s voice, “the Annunaki offered our ancestors the opportunity to stay and learn from them, but the price the Annunaki demanded was too high and our ancestors refused. They fearlessly set out on their own across unknown lands and perilous mountains to finally settle here in the land of Afaar.”

  A little girl took over. “The Annunaki continued to visit Earth and recruit other peoples who saw the ancient aliens as gods, and stayed with them as servants. Some humans saw the truth and chose not to accept the expensive gifts and loss of freedom the Annunaki offered. They bravely made their way in small groups across the mountains to join us here in Afaar.”

  The final little girl stepped to the front of the stage. “Of all the different peoples and cultures represented here at the Katje Kindred, the most important thing we all have in common is that we are all human. And that is enough. Thank you.”

  Despite a serious lack of acting skills, the kids took their bows to thunderous pounding of boots echoing off the stone floor.

  I remembered the Robot talking about the Ancient Sumerians being overtaken by the Babylonians, then the Greeks, and then the Romans, with some others thrown in there too that I didn’t remember. Their gods and goddesses all got renamed with each new regime. My favorite was Inanna, the goddess of love and war, because it was cool that she could be both. She later became Ishtar, Astarte, Aphrodite and Athena, and Venus and Minerva. To think she could have been real, one of these Annunaki who ancient humans thought were gods!

  “So are these… Annunaki still here?” I asked my mother.

  “No,” she answered. “By all accounts they’ve been extinct now for hundreds of years. At least, they’re believed to be,” she said. “They killed themselves off through infighting and the power of their own egos.”

  "Oh." I wanted to know more, but didn’t know what to ask. Instead I excused myself to find a bathroom, but had to quickly come back. Despite our earlier disagreement, I bent down next to Sensei, since she would probably be the only one who would understand my question.

  “Sensei,” I whispered so no one else would hear, “there’s no water in the toilet.”

  Except that I’d underestimated the amount of ambrosia she’d consumed. There was now a mostly empty bottle in front of her and a mostly empty glass in her hand.

  “What?” she asked, blinking at me owlishly. I repeated myself quietly. “Oh, the toilet,” she said loudly then lowered her voice to a mock whisper. “She doesn’t know how to use the toilet.” She flapped her hand dismissively. Judging by the laughter that followed, everyone in the vicinity had heard.

  “Here!” I emphasized hurriedly, turning bright red. “I don’t know how to use the one here! It’s different from the ones at home.” More laughter accompanied us as Sensei stood and swayed in place for a moment before starting determinedly down the hall.

  I’d never seen Sensei drink so much before, I realized as I watched her stumble along. People had kept toasting her return and refilling her glass with something resembling the coconut-pear juice I had. Hers definitely hadn’t been juice though. Once we were out of sight of the main hall, she stopped and leaned against the wall.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. Maybe I ought to have asked Thal for help after all.

  “Jus gimme a minute for m’head to shtop shpinning, k?” She rested her head against the wall and hiccupped. “I forgot how po’ent the ambrosia is here. Why don’ you go on wih-out me?” She waved me forward with one hand and slumped even more against the wall.

  I sighed, “But Sensei, I need your help.”

  “Oh righ, the wa-er.” She stumbled as she jerked herself forward again, running one hand along the wall for balance till we came to the bathroom. She propped herself up on the counter and pointed to the small pad above the sink.

  “Punsh your thumb dere.”

  I did. Nothing happened.

  “Oh, neer mind, I’ll do it.” She put her thumb on the pad and once again, nothing. “Whas wrong?”

  “How should I know?” I asked as we heard running footsteps down the hall outside.

  “Sorry, sorry!” Ethem trotted into the open doorway and stuck out his phone. “Here, give me your thumbprint, Sensei.” She circled her thumb over the pad, shutting one eye and biting her tongue in concentration. Finally, her thumb hit the mark.

  “Haha!” she chortled in triumph.

  “And a link for you, Sunny. Hold your thumb on the pad for five seconds to initialize it to your thumbprint and brainwave pattern.”

  “Link?” I asked, accepting one of the iPhone-like devices that everyone else had, and pressed my thumb to the squishy, nubby pad at the bottom.

  “Data Link,” he said. “It takes both thought commands and verbal cues. Okay, you’re set. Now your thumbprint will register on the pad near any water-using device to allow you to turn it on and off.” I put my thumb to the pad next to the sink and waved my hand above, below, and around the water spout with no success.

  “The control is on the floor.” He pointed to the button under the sink. Okay that worked, but what did it have to do with the toilet? “Use as little per day as possible and you’ll be fine. We are in the desert, after all!” He gave me a big smile.

  “Okay, great, but can you please, please tell me how to use the toilet?” This was getting painful here. I pointed to the dry bowl. “Does that even work? There’s no water tank!”

  “Yes it works. Why would there be a water tank?” He shook his head and continued. “The thumb pad is on the wall. And there’s a force field on the bowl, see?” He tried to put his hand into the toilet bowl, but it bounced right o
ff an invisible field with a static charge arcing across the surface where the water would usually be. “Only inanimate objects can enter. The force field creates a vacuum under it and anything that goes in is sucked out to compost. After you do your business, press your thumb to the pad to tell it what you want to finish up.”

  “Oh. Okay, thanks.” I herded them out the door.

  “Wait. How does it work on Earth?”

  “Uh, much differently,” I replied.

  “Come on, I’ll exshplain it to you,” Sensei slurred as they finally left. “Firs, the water shwirls around the bowl and everything gets pulled out by shi-… shi-… siphon. An’ they have this toilet paper….”

  “Paper?” Ethem asked incredulously as I closed the door and dashed back to the toilet.

  “Uh-huh. And it’s dishposable!”

  “No!” He sounded shocked as their voices receded down the hallway. This made me look around from the throne; no toilet paper? What was I supposed to use then?

  Well, too late to stop them and ask. He’d said, press your thumb to the pad and tell it what you want to finish up.

  I pressed and said, “toilet paper,” into it, like an intercom, hoping some might appear from somewhere. Something swiped my bum from underneath and I shrieked, jumping off the seat to see a spray of water shoot up into the air at me. Thankfully, I had good reflexes and had jumped out of the way or it would’ve gotten my clothes all wet.

  “Stop, stop!” I yelled at the toilet. It heard and stopped spraying water across the room at me. Ugh, so it was a voice-activated bidet too. I sighed in resignation and sat myself back down.

  “Continue.”

  Chapter 12: Trials

  No one remained at the table when I re-entered the dining room. Everyone was now over at the side of the room where the big cats had been fighting. Drummers played instruments made from various-sized gourds with dark animal skins stretched over them, and a few others played vertical xylophones made from a combination of golden tubes and hollow bones that created an eerie melody.