by Amy Thomson
Ukatonen was puzzled. “Why would they try to do such a thing? Have I harmed anyone without realizing it?”
“By coming here and healing the sick and injured, you have given people who had no hope a chance at a miracle. But it is a very scarce miracle. You can only heal a fraction of the people who need it. That is what makes you so valuable as a hostage,” Dr. Andraia explained. “Dying people are desperate people, and some of them will resort to violence in order to get your help.”
“I don’t understand,” Ukatonen said.
“You’re doing things that are completely beyond our medical capabilities. That is what makes you so valuable, and why we need the security guards to protect you.”
“I see,” Ukatonen said. “So, Eerin, Moki, and I need security escorts because we are changing your world by healing people, yes?”
“I’m afraid so, Ukatonen,” Dr. Andraia agreed.
“I see,” Ukatonen said once again. “Then we have violated Contact Protocols by healing people. I must think about the implications of this.” He rose and walked out of the meeting, ignoring the doctors’ attempts to call him back. Eerin and Moki scrambled to follow him.
He said nothing as they were shown to their new quarters. He remembered the man who had grabbed his arm and begged him to heal his wife. He should have wondered why this human was acting so desperate, but he had been so eager to get to Earth, to set foot on a real world, that he had forgotten all about the Contact Protocols. He had violated his own judgment, dishonoring himself and casting doubt on all of the other enkar. There was only one honorable way out.
“En, tell me what you’re thinking,” Eerin asked when they had reached the privacy of their quarters.
“I had hoped that healing those people and working with the doctors would help us get to* Earth. I let my desire to go to Earth cloud my sight.” He paused, the deep brown of his shame clouded by grey regret. “I have failed in my judgment as an enkar. The only honorable thing for me to do is to die.”
“You can’t die, en,” Eerin told him. “We need you, Moki needs you.”
“It is a question of honor,” he said with a shrug.
“How are we going to explain your death to the Tendu?”
“The enkar will understand,” Ukatonen told her.
“And my people,” she said. “What about them? What do you think they’ll do when you commit suicide? They’ll slap a Non-Contact order on Tiangi. It’ll be impossible for Moki. Either he’ll be sent home without me and die, or have to stay here with me and never see another Tendu for as long as he lives. Yes, you tampered with the protocols, but that’s my fault as much as yours. I was the one who should have taken the protocols into account, not you.”
“Why didn’t you?” Ukatonen demanded.
Eerin looked down, her dark skin reddening slightly with embarrassment. She lifted her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “I wanted to do something that would show my people what you were capable of. I wanted them to understand how much they had to gain from the Tendu.” She shook her head ruefully. “I succeeded too well, I’m afraid. But,” she said, looking up at Ukatonen, “the point is that this is not your mistake. It is mine.”
“But I am an enkar. I should have seen this.”
“Ukatonen,” Eerin said, “you became an enkar because you knew your people and your world inside and out. You spent years in training, acquiring knowledge that the Tendu had gathered over many millenia. Humans are something completely new and strange to your people. We don’t work by your rules. There’s no reason for your judgment to be perfect. We humans survive and learn from our mistakes. So should you, Ukatonen.”
Ukatonen felt the first stirrings of doubt. He looked away, not wanting to hear any more. He was afraid she was right, and that made him feel like he’d been covered in dung. He was caught between his honor and his duty.
Moki touched his shoulder. “I need you to show me what it means to be a Tendu, every bit as much as I need my sitik to show me what it means to be human. What good will I be to our people if I am too much a stranger to them? Eerin is right, en. We must take what we learn back to our people. What you have learned is more important than your honor. Dying before you pass along what you have learned to the other Tendu would be selfish.”
The disadvantage to sound speech, Ukatonen realized, was that you had to listen to it. With skin speech, you could look away and not see it. A flicker of regret passed over his body, and he reached out and touched Moki affectionately on the shoulder.
“It is not often that a bami has something to teach an enkar,” Ukatonen said in skin speech, taking care to keep the colors of his words soft and gentle.
“Forgive me, en.”
The black bars of negation flickered over his skin. “Being right does not require forgiveness, Moki.”
“Then you are not going to kill yourself?” Eerin asked.
Ukatonen shook his head. “Not now.” He found himself turning the idea of living over in his mind, and discovered that he was relieved at the prospect.
Eerin let out an explosive sigh and relaxed. “Thank god,” she said. “You really scared me.”
“I know,” Ukatonen said.
“What now?” Eerin asked.
“I haven’t thought that far yet,” Ukatonen confessed, brown with embarrassment. “I was too busy dying.”
“I think– ” Eerin began.
Ukatonen looked up at her questioningly.
“I think we should stop healing people,” she finished. “We’ve shown what the Tendu are capable of, and that’s enough for now. The problem is how to break the news. We’ll need to speak to Analin about that.”
Seven
Ukatonen stood looking out a hospital window at the garden below, letting the small patch of green refresh his eyes and his spirit. This was their last day at Snyder Hospital. They were meeting with the doctors on their team to discuss the best therapies for the people he and Moki had been healing.
He had learned a great deal in this place, but little of it was what he’d expected. A grey cloud of sadness passed over his skin as he turned away from the window. He could do so much good here, but now was not the time to do it. Later, perhaps, when humans and Tendu were more in harmony.
“Our security escort is waiting,” Eerin said. “Are you ready to go?”
Ukatonen nodded and turned to follow her down the long hallway.
Suddenly a man darted out of one of the rooms and pulled Eerin inside. He pressed a scalpel against her throat.
“That’s my daughter in the bed there,” he said, “and you’re going to heal her, or”—he pulled Eerin’s head a little further back—“I’ll slit her throat.”
“I don’t understand,” Ukatonen said, puzzled and frightened. “Why are you doing this?”
“My daughter’s dying.”
“I see,” he said. “You want me to heal her. And if I do not?”
“Then I kill the woman.”
Ukatonen glanced over at Moki, whose skin was a roiling turmoil of red and orange. He reached out and touched the bami. “It’s going to be all right, Moki,” he said aloud. Meanwhile, in skin speech he was saying, “I’m going to try to get you close to the man. If you get a chance, grab his knife hand and pull it away, and sting him unconscious.” Ukatonen saw Eerin’s eyes widen fractionally as he said this, and knew that she would be ready when the chance came.
“Moki’s very scared,” he told the man. “I’m afraid of what he might do. It would be best if you let him stand near Dr. Saari. She’s his adopted mother, and he will be calmer when he’s near her.”
“Please, sir, don’t hurt my mother,” Moki said, in a frightened child’s voice. Ukatonen flickered approval; clearly Moki knew what he was doing.
“He’s only a child,” Ukatonen said. “It will make it easier for me to heal your daughter if he’s kept out of the way.”
“Ukatonen, what’s happening? Why is that man scaring my mommy?” Moki asked, an almost human quav
er in his voice.
The man’s eyes traveled from Ukatonen to Moki to the security escorts clustered around the door, weapons bristling, and then back to Moki again.
“All right,” he said, after a long, dangerous silence. “He can come and stand between me and the door. That way if the security people try shooting me, the bullet will have to go through him and his mother first.”
“Perhaps we would all feel calmer if the guards backed away from the door,” Ukatonen suggested.
The man nodded. “Do what he says. Get away from the door.”
The security guards backed away, and Ukatonen was relieved when the man instantly became calmer. This was like taming an animal. The more cornered the animal felt, the harder it was to get him to calm down.
“What’s wrong with your daughter?”
“Leukemia. Like that little boy you healed. Carlo.”
It had been Moki who healed the little boy, Ukatonen recalled, but that was all right. It meant that the man was underestimating Moki.
“I remember that,” Ukatonen said. “I’ll need to touch your daughter in order to heal her.”
The man hesitated for a moment. “All right, but if anything happens to her, the woman dies.”
“I will not hurt your daughter,” the enkar promised.
He stepped over to the bed. The little girl lying there was pale, and there were dark shadows under her eyes. Her eyes darted between her father and the door, quick nervous glances that were the only sign of her fear. “Hello, my name is Ukatonen. What’s yours?”
She looked over at her father for a second. He nodded.
“I’m Sarah. Are they going to hurt my father?”
“I don’t know, Sarah,” Ukatonen said. “He must love you very much to do this. Are you scared?”
She hesitated a moment, then nodded.
“So am I, a little bit, but right now I’m going to try to make you better. Do you want to get better, Sarah?”
Sarah’s eyes went to her father and then back to Ukatonen. “Yes, please,” she replied in a voice barely above a whisper.
“All right, then,” he said. “I’m going to hold your arm like this,” he said, taking her arm. “It will sting a little, like a shot, and then you’ll go to sleep. I’ll be inside you then, and I’ll find out where you’re sick and make it better. All right?”
Sarah nodded. “What about my dad?”
Ukatonen glanced over at the child’s father. He was watching them intently, Moki was apparently forgotten.
“We’ll worry about that later.”
Ukatonen linked with the child. He could feel the wrongness inside her as soon as he linked. The cancer was very bad. He cleared out what he could of the immediate damage, and left killer cells behind to eliminate the rest of the[[ i ]]cancer. He paused, looking over his work. It was good. The girl would seem to go into a gradual spontaneous remission.
Finished, Ukatonen pulled out of the link, leaving his[[ i]]eyes hooded and his body relaxed, as though he were still linked. He glanced sidelong at the child’s father. He was completely ignoring Moki, and his arm had relaxed a little. The sharp blade had fallen slightly away from Eerin’s throat.
“Now, Moki!” Ukatonen signed in skin speech.
Moki moved with reflexes honed by a lifetime of being both predator and prey. He pulled the knife away from Eerin’s neck, and stung him asleep almost before the man knew what had happened.
Security came rushing in, taking the man into custody.
“Wait!” Ukatonen commanded as they started to haul the sleeping man away.
To his surprise, the security people halted.
“Let me wake him up so he can say good-bye to his daughter.”
They looked at Eerin, who nodded, and they let Ukatonen sting him awake.
He looked blearily up at Ukatonen. “How is she?” he asked.
“Your daughter was very sick,” Ukatonen told him. “I’ve done what I could, but”—he paused. “I don’t know if it was enough. I can wake her so that you can say goodbye, if you’d like.”
“No,” the man said, shaking his head. “I don’t want her to see me like this. Tell her I love her, and that I’m proud of her.” He looked at Eerin, “I-I’m sorry to have scared you, but”—he glanced at his daughter sleeping in the bed—“she’s all we have. I couldn’t let her die.”
“I understand,” Eerin said. “But if Moki or Ukatonen had gotten hurt– ” She turned away, anger on her face.
The man looked down, “I’m sorry,” he said. He looked up at the security guards and nodded. They led him away.
“What will happen to him?” Moki asked.
“He’ll be put in jail, like I was,” Eerin told him. “But he’ll have to stay there for a long, long time. His daughter Sarah will be an adult before they let him out.” She looked away for a moment. “He gave up the chance to watch her grow up, in order to know that she would.”
“Why doesn’t he kill himself?” Ukatonen asked.
“That’s a difficult question to answer, Ukatonen,” Eerin replied. “In some cultures he might. In others, he would be tried and killed. Here, he will be expected to serve a long prison sentence at a penal colony far from his family. Eventually, he will be released and be free again. We think of that as punishment enough.”
“Doesn’t he have any honor?” Ukatonen asked, thinking of his own painful decision to keep living. He wished he could link with the man, and understand why he had done this. Perhaps he would never understand humans; perhaps harmony with them was impossible. He turned away from the thought. His spirit was already weighed down by despair. He couldn’t deal with any more of it.
“It is not so simple as that, Ukatonen. Even if he wanted to commit suicide, he would be stopped by the prison guards. Many of our religions prohibit suicide.”
“Every time I think I understand you humans, you surprise me,” Ukatonen said, purple with puzzlement.
Eerin grinned at him. “That’s okay. We surprise ourselves all the time, too. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Juna stood at the window of her bedroom, looking out over the rows of vines, their gnarled trunks obscured by tangles of last season’s canes. Midwinter was a quiet time on the farm. Most of the work went on in the vast vaulted cellars, racking and aging the wine in huge oak barrels, bottling the mature vintages. Juna felt like one of those barrels, waiting here with the baby maturing inside her. It was good to come home again and rest after their demanding work at the hospital.
Just then the baby stirred inside her. She smiled and put her hand on her abdomen. She had first felt the baby move the day before, when they were descending in the elevator from the shuttle dock to the terminal. At first she thought it was some internal shifting caused by the increasing gravity. But the little flutters and sudden shifts had continued at odd times ever since. The movement of the baby thrilled her, but it also reminded her of how little time she had before the baby arrived. She was starting to show. In another month, it would be time for maternity clothes. And she had done nothing about getting married since her visit to the Xavieras. She dreaded the task of looking for a family to marry into, but she was going to have to face it soon.
There was a knock on the door.
It was Toivo. “Hei, Juna, look! I walked all the way over here!”
“Oh, Toivo, that’s great! I’m so pleased!”
He flopped into a chair with a tired sigh. “Dr. Engle says that if I keep improving at this pace, I’ll be able to help with spring planting.”
“That’s good,” she said. “I’ll be so pregnant by then that I won’t be any use at all.”
“You can be our fertility goddess,” he said, teasing her.
Juna looked down at a pale square of wintry sunlight on the floor. “Oh, Toivo, what am I going to do?”
“I thought you were planning to go to Earth with the Tendu.”
“Yes,” Juna said, not taking her eyes off the carpet, “we are. But that’s not what I’m
worried about. If I don’t get married, they’ll take the baby away. I should be looking, but frankly, I haven’t a clue about how or where to start.”
The patch of sunlight blurred as tears clouded her vision.
“That’s what I came over here to talk to you about,” Toivo said, resting a comforting hand on her shoulder. “I’ve talked it over with the rest of the Fortunatis, and we were hoping that you would marry us. I know it’s not a romantic match, but we all love and care about you, and we’re fond of the Tendu, too.”
Juna stared at him for a long moment, blinking in surprise. Then she burst out laughing.
“It’s not a joke, Juna,” Toivo said. “We’re serious.”
She got control of herself. “I know you are,” she said, wiping tears of hysterical laughter out of her eyes. “It’s just– Well, it isn’t every day that I get proposed to by my own brother.”
“Come on, Juna, it isn’t like that.”
“I know, Toivo, but it is funny.”
“I guess so, but it’s not that unusual. There are lots of group marriages with sibs in them.”
“What about Isi and Netta-7ati? Have you talked to them about this?”
“Isi thinks it’s a good idea. He said that if you would marry into the Fortunati group, he will too. That way the vineyard would stay in the family.”
“And Netta?”
“Well, she isn’t as keen on it as Isi, but she understands. Anetta wants you to be happy, Juna. If this solution brings you happiness, then she approves.”
“I need to talk this over with the Tendu.”
Toivo nodded.
“How does the family feel about them?”
“The kids are all excited about having Moki around, and Selena practically worships the ground that Ukatonen walks on. The rest are fond of Moki and impressed by Ukatonen. The important thing is that they all want you, Juna. They trust you, and they’re willing to trust the Tendu.”
“Can you give us a day or two to think about it?”
“Take all the time you need, Juna. There’s no rush. As far as the Fortunati are concerned, the wedding is just a formality. You’re already part of the family.”
