After the meal, Hanna showed me their bathroom—merely a chamber pot with a seat for a toilet, but a lovely hot spring basin for bathing. The warm water bubbled in from below, and continuously ran over the edge into a channel that carried it off somewhere. My bedroom, which she showed me next, was a pillow-lined alcove separated from the rest of the house with a bead curtain. Nearby, a little waterfall played. After the cave, it seemed idyllic.
The meal, the safety, the comfort had made me stuporously tired. I apologized to Hanna and told her I needed to sleep. “I hope we can talk more in the morning,” I said.
There was a puzzled silence, and for a moment I thought I had violated some custom. Then Hanna said curiously, “Morning?”
The ordinariness of the house had made me forget that there would be no morning. They lived in a world without the renewal of day, without even time markers—an eternal Now.
“After I’ve slept,” I said.
“Oh. Good dreams to you.”
* * *
I dreamed of Orem.
A hot wind touched my face, scented with cooking odors, diesel fumes, and sewage. I was in one of the narrow back streets, sand-colored stucco buildings rising on either side. It was twilight, the only time of day when the women of Orem ventured onto the streets, and there was not an adult man to be seen. “Come quickly,” Ashana said at my side—though it was hard to tell it was her, so wrapped she was in brightly printed shawls: one over her head, one around her shoulders, a third around her waist, despite the residual heat that radiated off the walls around us. I gripped my own shawl under my chin and followed her through the jostle of textile lumps under which women were buried. The light was fading fast, and soon the moon would be up; then it would not be safe for any woman to be caught outside the walls of a compound.
Ashana seemed to know the part of the city we were in, though I had always avoided it for its reputation as the haunt of prostitutes and thieves. The half-crumbling buildings seemed full to bursting. Lumpy, well-swathed women leaned out windows to empty garbage cans onto the street, shout for their children, or conduct shrill arguments. I dodged a pile of well-baked rubbish, glad that I had worn shoes, not sandals. At last Ashana led me down three steps to a rickety, urine-stained door. I could not imagine where she was taking me.
Inside, a beaded crone took our money, and we dumped our shawls on the floor where mounds of them were already piled. “Don’t worry, this is a place no man ever sets foot,” Ashana reassured me as if I were unused to men seeing me undisguised by yards of cloth. She shook out her sweaty hair, and I followed suit. The ceiling was so low I had to stoop, and the gas lamps cast a smoky light, but the scent of burning sage told me we were in a shrine. The wooden door into the next room squeaked on its hinges. We passed through and joined the end of a line of women shuffling forward around the perimeter of the clay-walled room. In the center, women crouched in praying position. The air was full of whispered devotions. On Orem, it was uncommon to see such a mingling of ages and social classes as in this group, united only by their femininity.
As we inched forward, I saw that we were waiting for a chance to peer through a peephole into some sort of cupboard whose contents were hidden behind carved wooden doors. The sight seemed to move the women ahead of us profoundly. One broke into tears; another’s legs gave way beneath her and she had to be helped away. “It is the power of Witassa, the Shameless One, that fills them,” Ashana said to my bewildered look. “You will see.”
When my turn came, I pressed my eyes to the hole and saw into an alcove lighted with dozens of candles. An ancient wooden sculpture stood there: a woman with arms upraised in wild triumph, holding a snake in one hand and in the other a drymen, a ceremonial bronze ax with a crescent-shaped blade. She was clothed, but sensuality radiated from the image. Her breasts were swelling globes that seemed to press against the flimsy fabric of concealment, her skirt clung tight around voluptuous hips and thighs. The idol was viciously hacked by what looked like ax marks, and there had been no effort to repair it. The scars of wanton violence were shocking, but in her defiant pose, the goddess seemed to rise above them.
Ashana and I joined the women on hands and knees before the hidden altar. For a while I knelt silent, trying to work out my reactions. Then I moved my head close to hers and whispered, “Why is she kept behind the doors?”
“Her power would be too great, if she were not secret.”
“Why are only women allowed to see her?”
“Men go crazy with terror at sight of her. Did you not see the ax marks? They have tried to destroy her, but she cannot be destroyed. Those are the marks of helpless male fear.” She spoke with a fierce pride I had never expected from her. Ashana had seemed the model of docile obedience.
“Do men know that women worship her?”
“Of course. They try to stop us.”
The women were here for a glimpse of raw power such as they might never know. It was intoxicating to them, in their circumscribed lives.
“Why is she called the Shameless One?” I asked.
Ashana turned her head to look directly at me. “Figure it out yourself.”
Shame was the primary method of social control on Orem, I thought. A woman without shame was a woman without restrictions. One whose innate power could exert itself—at terrible risk.
Too great a risk. These women would all go home to their compounds swathed in shawls, never daring to emulate their goddess. I felt my fists clench, and looked down at them. They were oozing with blood, but I felt unsurprised at the sight, as if I had expected it. An urgent prickling sensation passed through me, and I became aware that someone was kneeling behind me, so close I could feel the warmth of her body. She wanted to speak, had to speak, and so I listened.
“It is our power,” she said. I could feel it then, surging through me, currents of sexual magnetism refusing to be concealed. “We are the hunters, they are the hunted,” she said. Her voice was the sound of a once-placid river in flood. All around me the air was filled with shrill ululations, and I was transported by the sound. Then the river receded, and I found that I was standing with my hands raised. I looked at them, and they were no longer bloody. The women were turned, gazing at me in astonishment, and I was seized by fear that I had spoken. I sank back down.
“Did I say something?” I asked Ashana, shaken.
“No,” she said. “Witassa spoke through you.” She glanced at me sideways, her eyes appraising. “She picks some to be her voice.”
“Why me?” I said.
“Perhaps you have less to lose than the rest of us.”
“Get me out of here,” I said. I was suddenly terrified that something so primitive, so preverbal, could have happened to me—me, a practitioner of apathi, despite all of my training, all of my control. Or because of it.
* * *
When I woke, I lay for a while in the grip of the dream. The emotions were raw and fresh. Did it truly happen to me, or was it a fabrication of my overstressed mind? I opened my eyes, and after the bright, visual dream, the unchanging blackness of the cave left me feeling stifled and oppressed.
At first, I was completely disoriented. I remembered where I was, but had no sense of my body’s relationship to the space around me. Was I lying in the same direction I had laid down the night before, or had I shifted 90 degrees, or even 180? My uncertainty about something that had always been instantly knowable filled me with panic. Frantically I groped around, trying to find something to anchor me. My hand brushed the bead curtain, making it clack loudly. I then tried self-consciously to still it, fearing I would wake someone else with my thrashing, and have to explain.
I forced myself to examine my fear. It was almost a reflex, a physical reaction of the deep, primitive brain. My senses longed for light the way a starved person longs for food. Do not people in sensory deprivation start to hallucinate and grow paranoid? And yet, the inhabitants of Torobe function perfectly well. If they can do it, surely so can I. I am an emissary
of the Capellan Magisterium.
For a while I sat listening. The soothing rush of the little waterfall near my bed provided a kind of white noise that drowned out most other sounds, giving my room a kind of acoustical privacy. Perhaps that was what it was for. As I kept listening, I could hear chickens rustling and squawking nearby in a quiet, conversational way. Someone was moving around, so I rose and groped my way past the bead curtain. Having removed my boots the night before, I now discovered that the floor was intricately textured under my bare feet. When I came to the edge of the woven floor mat I stopped, knowing there was furniture ahead. “Hanna? Moth?” I said.
“Here, Thora.” It was Hanna’s voice. She was moving around in the kitchen, just as she had been the night before. Or was it days before? I felt a time-disorientation to match my previous space-disorientation. I had no idea how much time had passed.
“How long did I sleep?” I asked.
Hanna did not answer at once, and I realized I had posed another senseless question. “Longer than my babe,” she said from close by. She pressed a mug into my hand, and I found that this time it was full of something hot, an infusion like tea.
“Were thy slumbers peaceable?” she asked pleasantly.
“No,” I said. “I had a strange dream.”
“Ah.” She took my other hand and placed it on a piece of furniture. “There lies the settle,” she said. I think I managed to sit down without spilling any of my drink, though I could not be sure.
“Do you wish to tell your dream?” she asked formally.
“No.” I was embarrassed by it, and it would mean nothing to her anyway. But there was something troubling that the dream had brought back to mind, though I could not tell why. “I want to ask you about something that happened to me, just before I found myself here.” I then described, as precisely as I could, the strange moments before I found myself in the cave.
She was silent a while after I finished, and I finally laughed nervously. “You probably think I’m mad.”
“Nay,” she said. “I think thou hast touched the Ground.”
Thinking back, I had fallen to my knees, and probably did touch the ground. “What does that matter?” I said.
“Not the ground,” she said, slapping the floor to show what she meant. “The Ground. All answers lie there, they say, but not plain for the taking. On this side, all we see of it seems like riddle and delusion; on the other side, all is clear.”
I could not tell whether she was repeating a folk belief, or describing something real. “How can I get back there—touch it again?”
“Thou can never find thy way deliberate,” she said. “Thou cannot seek it, only allow it to come. It is a great gift. There are places where the world is thin between us and it, but those places must be within thee, as well. To reach across, a person must reach inside. Allow happenstance to happen.”
“Have you ever … touched the Ground?”
“Aye,” she said, and her tone was a little bitter. “It gave me no comfort. Sometimes it seems the least worthy find what they seek there, and those who long for solace are barred. I speak not of thee.”
“No offense taken,” I said.
I was puzzled, but very intrigued, by this information. I now must consider the possibility that these blind people are perceiving something about their environment that we cannot. Perhaps they have evolved a new sense, something that allows them to survive and even flourish in this inhospitable place, despite their handicap. It may be that they are sensing something real, but explaining it in the language of fable, as other traditional peoples explain things they cannot fully understand.
I am now determined that as soon as I can escape this cave, I will come back—this time with a light—to study the people of Torobe. I am tantalized by the thought that they can lead me to something I have been seeking for a very long time.
chapter six
“A native?” Sara said. “A human native?” Her head was too crowded with questions for anything else to make its way out.
On the screen of her terminal, Bakai said nervously, “Yes, a human. That’s absolutely all I know. They’re bringing it up here to treat its injuries. You’ll have to ask David for the rest.”
There were not supposed to be any natives. No scans had found fields or villages; there were no plumes of cooking smoke or infrared traces of human body heat. The expedition would have been designed entirely differently if there had been. Linguists, anthropologists, and diplomats would be on board. Not just a single exoethnologist with other assignments.
When Sara emerged into the hall, she saw that the rumor had already gotten out. Little knots of people were gathered in the hall, talking. They looked expectantly at Sara, hoping for news, but she passed them with only a shrug, heading for the lightbeam wayport.
The room outside the translation chamber was now transformed into a decontamination area. David was already there, floating weightlessly, with a wheeled stretcher. A security guard posted at the door tried to prevent Sara from entering. “This is a quarantine area,” he said. “No entry.”
“David!” Sara called out past the guard’s broad shoulder.
“Let her in,” David said. “I’ll need her.”
She floated forward, trying not to collide with the doctor in the excitement.
“Have they arrived yet?” she asked.
“No, they’re on the way.”
“How bad is the native’s injury?”
“Stun gun,” the doctor said, disgusted.
“Oh dear God,” Sara groaned. The first indigene they met, they stunned and kidnapped. This was going to get things off to a good start.
Bakai arrived with an armful of isolation suits. She shoved one in Sara’s direction. Sara took it, but hesitated to put it on. “You know the rules, Callicot,” David said, breaking out his own suit.
“This alien is already traumatized,” Sara said. “We’ve injured him, then dragged him into space; now you want us to greet him wrapped in plastic?”
“It’s for your own good,” he said implacably.
Reluctantly, she pulled on the suit. Before she could seal it, she felt a touch on her arm, and looked up, startled. Atlabatlow had arrived and had floated up behind her, ominous in a black uniform. His hand was icy cold. So was his voice. “Magister Callicot, I must ask you to leave.”
Sara fought back an unprofessional urge to raise her voice. “This is a First Contact situation, Colonel. I am the only one on this ship trained for this. In fact, I must ask you to leave.”
There was an almost imperceptible lift of his chin and lowering of his lids that gave him an expression of raptorlike predation.
There was a commotion at the door as Penny Sutton arrived and pushed her way in past Atlabatlow’s guard. Ignoring Sara and David, she turned to the colonel. “Fill me in,” she ordered.
His tone of slight aristocratic condescension was so subtle Sara doubted that Sutton even heard it. “We are attempting to set up a quarantine, as the Director ordered,” Atlabatlow said. “I am trying to clear the area of nonessential personnel.”
Sara didn’t wait for an invitation to speak up. “The First Contact would go more smoothly if there were no weapons, soldiers, or other signs of aggression. Security has already done enough damage.”
Atlabatlow said, “The alien presents an unknown danger. It would be reckless to expose the scientific personnel.”
Sutton’s eyes shifted from one to the other of them. That they were enemies was plain now: Sutton saw it, David saw it, even Bakai saw it. Sutton hesitated, then said, “I need to speak to the Director.”
“There are established protocols for a First Contact,” Sara argued. “If we violate them, there will be hell to pay. There is nothing to decide here. We need to follow the guidelines—or at least, get back to them now that they have been thoroughly trashed.”
Sutton looked at Atlabatlow, then back to Sara, and said, “Both of you stay. But Colonel, have your guard wait outside the door. A
nd Colonel…” Her voice grew hard. “The Director is going to want an explanation of how this happened.”
Stiffly he said, “You will have a report as soon as I am able to question my men.”
“Good. Let me know when you have more information.” She turned away to the door, gesturing the guard to come with her.
In the ceiling above them, the hatch into the translation chamber slid aside. Bakai shoved an isolation suit at Atlabatlow, and Sara heard him pulling it on. She was watching the ceiling.
First through the hatch was one of Atlabatlow’s guards, looking poised for combat inside his isolation suit. He scanned the room, saw his commander, then signaled someone else beyond the hatch. Together they guided a small, limp form through the opening. David guided the stretcher into position, and they gently strapped the unconscious alien onto it.
Sara pushed forward to see. It was a girl just on the cusp of adolescence. She wore a woven gray shirt and short pants over rangy, barefoot legs that the rest of her body hadn’t quite grown into. Her limp hands had blunt, dirty fingernails. Her face was impossible not to smile at—pudgy cheeks and little snub nose decorated with freckles, framed by dark ringlets of hair that looked carelessly neglected now. In a few years that hair would be her greatest beauty—that and the long, dark eyelashes that were now motionless against her cheeks.
The doctor bent over her, testing vital signs. Sara looked at the guard. “What happened?”
The guard glanced at Atlabatlow, and apparently got a nod to tell the story. He addressed his commander, his voice muffled by the isolation suit.
“We were continuing our IR grid search over the forest when we got a return indicating a human presence. We immediately landed in a nearby clearing and formed a perimeter circle, when—there she was, right in front of us. No one saw her come out of the forest. Private Ktar was so startled he fired. After that, we didn’t know how badly she was hurt, so we elected to evacuate her for medical treatment. There was no one with her.”
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