When she stepped out of the ground transport and onto the paved walk leading past the Tauret ComSchool to the faculty residences, the deep turquoise sky awed her. It had been so long since she saw this sky. The air was hot and wet. She wished it would rain.
Banana and papaya trees lined the path, and plots of squash, maize, and sweet potatoes grew in the gardens outside the little round houses. The houses had been grown, each one alike in their white wash, with round tinted windows and slanted solar roofs.
She had not been home in three hundred and sixty-six days.
When she palmed open the door of her house, her husband, Jahi, looked up at the clock and calendar above his desk and said, “I see.”
It was his second most tepid greeting. The first had been her last deployment back home, when he raised his head, nodded at her, and simply gone back to his work.
His desk took up a space at the rear of the circular house, grown to fit the curve of the wall. A dozen manuscripts in translucent airtight boxes were stacked at his feet. One of the boxes was open, its contents spread across the desk, and Jahi bent over a flat black recording paper, scribbling something onto its surface with a stylus.
As she stood in the doorway, the hot air at her back, the cold conditioned air of the house in her face, she thought, it should have been you, and then she stepped inside the cool dim of the room. The door slid shut behind her.
“Did you make dinner?” she asked.
“You can print something,” he said. He did not look up from his work.
“I’m tired of printed food,” she said. It’s all she had been eating for three hundred and sixty-six days. He knew that.
Neith carried nothing with her, only the clothing she wore, the black sleeveless shirt and loose tan trousers - standard issue for Tauret. She walked past the dining table and its four chairs to the cooler. She palmed the cooler open, found the remnants of a sweet potato, one ration can of half-eaten salted pork, and half a squash that had begun to mold. She pulled out the sweet potato and sat down at the table, pushed a dozen airtight manuscript cases aside to make room, and stared out the window by the door.
“They cut rations again,” Jahi said.
“You look skinnier,” she said – which wasn’t true. She had not noticed, or even thought to look. She was too full of her own thoughts. The pain of the deployment. The steady sinking feeling she was already beginning to feel now that she was back.
He was quiet. She listened to the soft rustle of old manuscript pages. He always wanted the hard copies. He told her it was like touching the past.
She ate some of the potato. It needed salt.
“Reports say Maibe had a victory last week,” Jahi said.
Neith stopped eating. She had a bellyful of emptiness, but she was not hungry.
“You know how official reports are.”
“Manipulated truth?”
“It’s written truth. What’s written is all the truth you need to know.” He was the only man who had ever questioned her truth.
She heard his chair scrape against the floor, heard him get up. Before she could think of somewhere else she could move he was standing at the head of the table. He rested his hands on the tall chair.
She finally looked at him.
He was thinner. His face had taken on a gaunt, severe look, but the square jaw, the wide cheekbones, deep set eyes the color of burnt cinnamon, that was all the same. His hair was cut short and close, but she remembered how it was when they were younger, how he grew it out until it puffed out around his head like a cloud.
“Masi was called to the front two weeks ago,” Jahi said.
“He taught psychology, didn’t he?” She picked at the pale potato.
“History. My department, Neith.”
“Regrettable,” Neith said, and wondered what he wanted her to say.
“There’s talk that in a year they’ll have no more men in the department. Are you listening, Neith?”
She remembered how like him their sons were, how much they liked to talk and think and reason. How much they loved to debate truth and history and a dead past they could not touch. Could I have watched you die? she thought. Could I have stood so still and indifferent? Or would I have strangled those Observers, broken open that glass? Would I have pulled you out and held you to me the way I held my sons when they were babies? Would I have forsaken the war for you, blown up my ship and my crew and those genetic monstrosities for you? I slaughtered my sons for you. What is there in this world I would not sacrifice for you?
“Neith? Neith, would you talk to me? There have been things happening down here, rations cut, university men drafted for the front. The breeding schools can’t keep up, and they’re taking more private children. We lost six more faculty families while you were –”
“Are you saying you don’t want to die for the cause?” Neith said.
“I gave two sons and a wife to the cause,” Jahi said. “I think that’s enough.” He walked back to his desk, to his books, to piles of brittle paper written by dead people.
“You want truth? It’s writhing in the belly of our fighters,” she said. “That’s the truth of war. I’m sorry you can’t see that. But it’s better to hide it from you for as long as possible. It’s coming for all of us, this war.”
Jahi gestured sharply at the manuscript cases. “I can see those. I can touch them. I can understand them. But I can’t see you. I can’t touch you.”
“It should have been you,” she said.
She saw the pain open up in him; the pain that was her gift to him, and in that moment, she watched her husband die. It was not enough that she murdered her sons. She watched the pain in Jahi’s heart open, enfold him, and consume him.
“I have an appointment,” she said, trying to swallow the lump in her throat. “The President asked me to speak with someone from the Consortium.”
Neith had entered the house with nothing, and she took nothing from it when she left. She did not look back.
She stumbled into air that hung so heavy moths weighted down by the moist air collected on the porch and under the eaves. She walked down the twisting paths that wound through the faculty housing - past dark, empty houses and neglected gardens gone wild with weeds and infested by bugs, their masters all gone, called to war, dead in the belly of fighters somewhere far from home.
She had always wanted sons. The sons of Firsts did not go to the front, not then. Jahi had wanted daughters, smart girls who could command fighters, but Neith grew up with all girls at the breeding school. She wanted to raise boys in her little round house under the banana trees.
Now the breeding schools were no longer able to supply all the troops needed. Two years ago, the President had called Neith into her office, sat her down in a chair made of yellow wood, and asked her to choose.
“Choose,” Nabirye told her. “Choose between your husband and your sons.”
Nabirye could offer to spare one or the other, but not both. It was a private decision, and Nabirye would tell neither Neith’s sons nor her husband that she offered Neith this choice. Every woman had to make a sacrifice for the cause, whether she was a First or a councilor or the president of Akil.
Nabirye had sent her sons.
“It is a small sacrifice,” Nabirye had told her. “You can always have more children, Neith, but the privilege of marriage is only granted once. You will never again find a man who loves you as Jahi does.”
But Neith had killed them all with that decision. Her sons. Her marriage. She had not been strong enough to endure her sacrifice.
Neith went up the winding walk up to the ComSchool to meet the off-worlder. She palmed open the gate of the schoolyard. She was not expected until evening, but she was tired of waiting for the promised storm, tired of thinking about a decision she could not alter, a past she could no longer touch.
There were no children in the yard – classes were out for the day, and the children were all ba
ck in the residences on the other side of the hill.
Neith walked down the paved path to the rotunda. Cold conditioned air wrapped around her as she entered. A handful of administrative staff stood along one side of the rotunda talking in soft, hurried voices. One of them, the assistant principal, Hasina, ran over to Neith, clasped her wrist, smiled a wide smile that showed off her white teeth, and Hasina was talking, talking:
“— good you arrived. We didn’t want to interrupt your leave, but the diplomat from the Consortium was most disturbed, most distressed, and First Neith, she has so many questions and she’s so strange —”
Neith knew the corridors of the ComSchool better than Jahi, or even Hasina. This was her school, her place. It was a girls’ breeding school – she wasn’t raised as a private child, but she had met a number of them, all daughters of Firsts and former presidents and council leaders.
Hasina chattered at Neith over her shoulder as she led. “The Maibe fired on the ambassador’s transport. A mistake, I assure you! There was a male Dhevai presence on board. Most distressing! The Consortium hasn’t sent ambassadors for years. Perhaps a peace treaty is in the works again, you know, they always poke their nose into our business every fifty years or so of the war. Too much time on their hands, if you ask me.”
Hasina took Neith to the infirmary, a spacious room with pale walls and thirty-two beds covered in blue disinfected sheets. The sun poured in from a hexagonal window at the far end of the room, throwing orange light across the floor.
Only one bed was occupied. A slim red-brown figure sat up in the bed, talking to two tall, dark Akilians standing next to the bed.
“Is she supposed to be that color?” Neith asked.
Hasina lowered her voice. “I expect so. I didn’t feel it would be polite to ask. If it was a problem, I’m sure she would have said something by now.”
Neith nodded. She walked into the room, and as she approached, the woman in the bed turned to look at her. Her stark white hair fell long and straight to just past her shoulder. She was, perhaps, the oldest woman Neith had ever seen. Her eyes were a peculiar shade of ashen gray, and the petite features of her face, the sharp nose, tiny ears, the almost complete absence of a defined chin, all those were features so foreign Neith was not surprised that this strange woman had been in the presence of a male Dhevai.
Neith halted at the end of the bed and introduced herself.
The old woman fixed her gray gaze on her and smiled. “So, you’re Neith. Is Neith an appropriate title between unfamiliars? Or should I use the whole name?”
Her accent was odd. She had a tendency to draw out her “r”s and clip the ends off her words.
“Neith’s fine. What are you called?”
“The one you’d probably find easiest to pronounce is Safiya.”
“You’ll probably want some privacy, no doubt,” Hasina said, but Safiya held up a small, slender hand.
“I’m feeling well, actually. Neith, I was hoping we could discuss matters upstairs before the President arrives. These young women tell me there’s a windowed room here with a spectacular view of Tauret. Is that right?”
“There is,” Neith said. She had not been up in the atrium for years.
“Wonderful,” Safiya said, and she pulled off the blue bed sheet with her little hands and swung her red-brown little feet to the floor.
The old woman stood on shaky legs and held tight to Neith’s left arm. Her head barely reached Neith’s shoulder.
“You’ll have to excuse my clumsiness,” Safiya said, “but a decade on a starship and a decade on a bit of orbiting dust does terrible things to the bones. There’s a lift, isn’t there? Wonderful.”
Neith led Safiya to the lift outside the infirmary.
“Have you ever been up to this room before?” Safiya asked.
“My husband used to take me up here,” Neith said as they entered the lift.
“Oh! That’s right. You’re married.”
“I have the privilege.”
“How very lucky!”
Neith pressed the button for the eighteenth floor.
“You command a starship?”
“A fighter, yes.”
“It must be difficult, facing such violence every day. What is your ship called?”
“Bakarai.”
“Such a strange name. Isn’t that a sworn oath of some kind?”
“The root of it is Bakar, the oath a woman takes when she becomes First of a fighter. It’s also the name of my oldest son.”
The lift opened.
“A son? How very lucky. This oath, it’s taken now that this Asiana affair is over, is that right?” Safiya shuffled out of the lift.
The atrium made up the whole of the eighteenth floor. It was a hexagonal room with tall glass walls on all sides but the one that housed the lift. Surrounding the outside of the atrium was an iron balcony. A pair of glass doors set into the wall directly opposite the lift opened out onto the platform. The room itself was meant primarily for study, and a half dozen low tea tables and deep-seated chairs were arranged around the room. The tea tables all had interfaces that connected to Akil’s world archives and an extensive network of private collections. The floor here was made up of green and amber tiles that sparkled in the soft orange glow of the sun burning low and hot along the horizon.
“The oath was one of the codes of conduct set down in `The Woman’s Art of War’ document, written after the Asiana affair,” Neith said as she led Safiya to a table. The chairs here were just tall enough so you could see above the balcony to the spiral-shaped city of Tauret. The shiny solar paneling on the buildings and residences caught the dying orange light and set it glittering across the rooftops. From here you could see the big black landing square where the transports loaded and unloaded goods, and just before the eye lost itself in the haze of the horizon, you could make out the dim line of the Garai River running out through the verdant jungle that swallowed the world between Tauret and her sister city, Masika.
“It’s a truly remarkable view,” Safiya said as Neith helped lower her into one of the chairs.
Neith gazed out over the city. “It’s home,” she said, and as she said it she saw a dark band of clouds mounting on the horizon to the east. She smiled. You see, she thought, you only have to stop waiting for the rain, and then it will come.
“I’m amazed such terrible acts are committed by the people of such a beautiful country,” Safiya said. “Do you regret the role you play in them?” The little gray eyes remained clear, unreadable.
“The Dhevai escalated the conflict,” Neith said. “My role is only to end it.”
“Should that be a peaceful solution? As opposed to a violent one?”
“The Dhevai chose to break away, terraform Dev, and fight for Akilian resources. Their genetic tampering led to the larval gestation of Dhevai offspring and –”
Safiya laughed.
The sound was so unexpected that Neith closed her mouth. What kind of diplomat was this? Diplomats always let her natter on about the conflict, give her side of the story. They would nod and agree and shuffle off again, satisfied that there was nothing to be done.
“I apologize, Neith,” Safiya said. “But you must understand that I think this humorous, since I was told your husband is a professor of history. Very ironic, I think.”
“You find the eradication of a people funny?”
“Genocide? Certainly not. But I find it funny that you, an intelligent woman, refuse to admit to me that the Akil are dying out because of this war, and you will soon have nothing to fight for. You still follow the dead laws of dead men and watch your sons and husbands die for it.”
“You don’t know anything,” Neith said.
“I meant no harm, Neith,” Safiya said. “I came here to learn from you.”
Neith walked to the opposite wall. On either side of the lift was a handwritten copy of “The Woman’s Art of War”, sealed in airtight frames of
transparent plastiseal. Here was the document that told her her place, outlined the extent of her sacrifices, made her into a weapon of war just as effective as Dhevai children.
“It’s only words on paper,” Safiya said.
Neith looked back at her sharply.
“They aren’t just words,” Neith said. “They’re words we live by, words that have kept us alive for six hundred years.”
“Why can’t documents be living things, like the societies that create them?”
“What?”
“You’ve made those words your truth, those words written by a dead man who tried to win a war by killing his own people.”
“You haven’t seen the way the Dhevai fight. You haven’t seen the way they propagate.”
“Come sit with me.”
“Why are you here?”
“The Dhevai children,” Safiya said, and she did not look at Neith now, but remained staring out at the dying sun, “those children who are born as weapons of war - they are outcast, you know. Sent away to work in the mines and in the guts of starships. The Dhevai creation of a child that gestates like a parasite came after the Akilian sent their Asanas to Dev.
“Those Asanas were women engineered to look like Dhevai women. They carried the viruses that destroyed the male Dhevai. It was only after that that the Dhevai thought to alter the genetic makeup of their children and use them, also, as weapons of war. Weapons that are killing your men.”
“Why are you here?” Neith said. “Why did the Consortium send a diplomat to give us a lecture on the rules of –”
“Such a polite and patient people. Weren’t the transport’s records reviewed?”
“The Maibe crippled a diplomatic transport—”
“Oh, it was a diplomatic transport. And I was the only survivor on it, and you assumed, then, that the only survivor was the diplomat. Where do you think that diplomat traveled before he came to Akil?”
Patreon Year 3 Collection REV Page 18
