Clarkesworld Issue 75

by Sandra McDonald

The Island People.

  We called them Balanda, once. Five hundred years ago they stole our land. Two hundred years ago, they gave it back. Except for Shark Island, which they said was strategic and necessary for them to protect us from the wireminds that lived across the sea.

  Ten years ago, though, when the wireminds invaded from the other direction, the Island People were helpless to stop them. All of our initiated men gathered up their explosive-tipped spears and returning EMP boomerangs and went to fight.

  None of the men came back. Not my father and not my mother’s brother. I was one of the oldest children and I remember the weeping.

  The wireminds temporarily won for themselves what they thought was isolated territory, free of the modified, metal-mining ants that had ravaged the rest of the world. They saw us and thought we were proof. Little did they know we had been living with the ants for decades, that we were skilled in keeping our few precious electronic devices safe from them.

  Ants ate the wiremind shelters, their vehicles, exoskeletons and communications devices. They ate their wristwatches. Their boot buckles. When the soldiers lay down to sleep, they were woken by ants trying to bore through their skulls to get at the metal implants inside.

  Cut off from their commanders, they were too afraid of us to ask for help. Or perhaps they thought they had killed us all. They starved, died of exposure or poisoned themselves unknowingly with the flesh of native animals.

  For our land and seas were polluted with pesticides that had failed to stop the relentless march of the ants. Every animal that survived had adapted by sequestering or becoming resistant to the toxins. We could only eat the animals ourselves because of the vials of gut bacteria constantly supplied to us by the Island People in exchange for metallic gold, silver, copper and iron. The island that they had kept was their only refuge, their southern heartland destroyed, fallen into lawlessness.

  Just as I was about to give up and return to the beach camp, I heard the noise again from the direction of open water.

  With my hand, I gave Nosey the signal to circle behind prey; he went away silently, paddy paws light on the stilt-roots.

  Camouflaged by my coating of mud, I went in a straight line toward the source of the sound.

  It was a tall, skinny woman dragging a pair of pressurized gas tanks behind her. A pair of flippers were abandoned far behind her, where it seemed they’d become a liability in the mud, but she persisted with the bulky metal cylinders, though she must have known they would attract ants.

  She was pale, not from breeding, I thought, but from being kept in the dark. Her head was shaved. A square electronic device was strapped to her chest over the top of a soggy, sack-like smock. Bra straps stuck out over her shoulders. Her exposed arms were covered in fresh insect bites. Older bites on her legs were turned to weeping, mud-smeared sores.

  “This is Clan territory,” I said, and she jolted feverishly as though ants had already started eating her bra wire. “Are you lost?”

  I saw Nosey cut off her retreat to the ocean, sniffing interestedly at her flippers.

  “I got to find Rivers-of-Milk,” she gasped, naming the one who was birth mother to me and spiritual mother to the Clan.

  “I am Quiet-One,” I said.

  “You’re her daughter, then.”

  “You know me? What else do you know about us?”

  She laughed crazily.

  “I know you have vials of bacteria. I know that you trade for them. My name is Muhsina. They sterilized my gut as punishment. If you don’t help me, I’ll die.”

  Fires flickered on the beach.

  Rivers-of-Milk stood with her hunting dog, Bloodmuzzle, beneath the safe tree, where dilly bags of metals were hung like sparkling fruit.

  Each time we moved camp, a tree was chosen that harbored nests of fierce, meat-eating green ants. Green ants could not prevail over the metal-mining ants for more than a season; they had monstrous, crushing, acid-oozing mandibles, but their numbers were too small.

  Still, it was only a few days until the trade tide, and then our small guardians would no longer be needed. Children caught crickets and cicadas and pinned them to the bark of high branches to keep the green ants moving up and down the trunk, hyper-alert for intruders from any rival nest.

  Nosey ran straight over to Bloodmuzzle and started licking his shit-caked anus. Bloodmuzzle did the same to Nosey. Dogs were disgusting. The shaved-headed woman, Muhsina, shadowed me. I’d helped tie her tanks to a mangrove tree and submerge them so that ants wouldn’t get them.

  Mother accepted my mud-stinking bags. She didn’t mention my stung face. Her encouraging smile was the same whether I brought great chunks of metal or none at all, but eating me inside was the drive to deliver, just once, more metal than she had gathered herself.

  To prove myself.

  Skink’s mother, Brushfire, felt no need to be encouraging. The plump little woman leaned over to peer at the bags—her eyesight was failing—and cackled,

  “Not even enough for a full vial, girl. You want us hungry. You want to be Rivers-of-Milk yourself. Ha ha ha!”

  Skink would be my husband when he became an initiated man. He hid behind his mother’s legs now, a twelve year old boy with long eyelashes.

  Skink and I had no need to drink the vials of bacteria. The Island People said that sometimes, with children, the intestinal environment was suitable for the bacteria to breed by themselves.

  Whatever that meant.

  The point was, if we didn’t have metals to trade, it would be the adults who starved to death.

  I felt conscious of Muhsina close by me. She had not said whether she would require a single vial in order to survive, or repeated doses.

  The cooking smells were distracting and had to be making Muhsina’s mouth water. Poison toad, poison croc and poison barracuda; they roasted on long spits over the fires, but Muhsina could not eat, not without first drinking a vial, and only my mother could grant one to her.

  “What is your story, Island Woman?” Rivers-of-Milk asked, beckoning to Muhsina.

  Muhsina’s exhausted, shambling shape moved around me, to sit at my mother’s feet in supplication.

  “My name is Muhsina,” she said. “They said I was crazy, but I’m not crazy. People scare me sometimes, that’s what. Lots of people all in one place, breathing on me like wasp stings. All those women in the same room as me, sleeping, sucking up my oxygen, I had to kill them. It’s better out here.”

  “Of course it is,” my mother said without blinking. “Why did you take so long to come?”

  “Cause I’ll die, that’s what. After I killed those others, they put in a stomach tube and flushed me out with antibiotics. Left me in hospital to starve to death, but after I’d been starving for a while, I could fit through the bars. Didn’t think of that, did they? Stole the thing that the net-divers use, the thing that makes the electrical signature of the mother of all sharks. Kept me safe as far as the mainland.”

  “You asked for me by name.”

  “I heard them talking about you. Said you hid in the bushes and watched while all those metalminds starved, because you had no mercy for them not of your own kind.”

  “The metalminds killed our men.”

  “And I killed Island People, and you’ve got a treaty with them. Are you gonna let me starve? Because to me, Rivers-of-Milk is the name of a woman who feeds starving people.”

  Rivers-of-Milk put her hand on Bloodmuzzle’s head, smoothing one silken ear.

  “This dog serves the Clan and I feed him. How will you serve, Muhsina?”

  “Information,” Muhsina said with a glint in her eye. “And then I’ll be gone. Over the mountains and west. You’ll never see me again. You’ll never need to worry if I’ll bring harm to your young ones, because I’ll be gone away forever.”

  “Give her a vial,” Rivers-of-Milk said to Skink, who scrambled immediately up the tree to fetch one.

  And because we had saved her, Muhsina told us everything she knew, in
the firelight, as we ate poison toad, poison croc and poison barramundi.

  She told us more than we wanted to know about what the Island People had done with all of the metals we had given them.

  In the morning, I helped my mother prepare for the ceremony.

  Muhsina was already gone and my mind was with spinning with all that she had said.

  While Rivers-of-Milk made the sweet sugar-cane water intended to fill the drinker with the wisdom of birds, I ground drowned green ants between two rocks to make the citrus-acid water that filled the drinker with the wisdom of ants. Brushfire beat a malleable golden ant-core into the shape of a metal flame, fixing it in place of a spear-tip on a long, hardwood haft, and Skink prepared strips of dried turtle and shark meat, saying the words over them so they would give the eater the wisdom of reptiles and the wisdom of fish, respectively.

  “How can it be true,” I blurted at last, “that the Island People can manufacture a great wave, a great flood, such as the one Muhsina described?”

  “It is a great stupidity,” my mother said angrily. “Their machine will drown all of us but it will not drown the ants. Water will cover us but it will not cover the high mountains. The ants will come back, worse than before. Do they not know that mountain ants eat through living flesh to reach the minerals in bones? That they build their nests around white, bony cores? If the Island People kill the gold ants and the silver ants and the copper ants, the bone ants will come.”

  “The madwoman lied to us,” Brushfire scoffed. “There will be no wave. If the Island People are so clever why do they need to wait for the wet season before unleashing this great wave? Why not do it now? We need do nothing, Freshwater.”

  Freshwater was my mother’s name before she became leader. Before she became Rivers-of-Milk. Brushfire shouldn’t have called her that.

  “I must ask for guidance,” was all my mother said.

  “Let me help you with that, mother,” I said, wanting to show her that I paid attention, that I remembered how to make the bird drink. I took the rest of the cane from her.

  “You look too ugly for my son,” Brushfire said to me. “Your face tells me that you have the wisdom of ants already!”

  “The pelican is my sister,” I said, naming my spirit animal, thinking furiously: It will be the wisdom of birds that we need. The pelican flies far inland to nest. We should go far inland, where the wave will not reach us.

  We should go where Muhsina went. Over the mountains and west.

  When night fell, fifty-seven warm bodies gathered around the fire.

  Fifty-seven members of my great family began to sing, tossing dried coconut palm fronds into the flame to feed it.

  I stared across at my mother, imagining I was her. When Skink became a man and I became his wife, all of my mother’s tasks would become mine.

  Her chin was lifted. Eyes lidded. Hands outstretched. She was our protector. She was our mother.

  I was so hypnotized by her that I didn’t even see the golden flame fall. Didn’t know which direction it had shown to her until her lips moved.

  “What we need is the wisdom of ants,” she said, lifting the wooden bowl full of the elixir I had prepared. She sipped from it and passed the bowl to Brushfire, who sat beside her.

  Because I watched her so closely, I saw the flicker of fear on her face.

  I was shocked to realize she didn’t know what to say next.

  The spirits had not spoken to her.

  I felt in that moment I left childhood behind, though it was some time since I’d become a woman. The wisdom of ants which we waited for was nothing but my mother’s own wisdom. It fell to her alone to decide whether Muhsina was lying or whether the Island People had betrayed us; whether we could trust them and continue trading with them or whether they would use a machine made of copper, iron, silver and gold to make an underwater earthquake and an unprecedented tidal wave in the hope that the mainland could be made safe for their growing numbers and their metal-loving way of life.

  “The ants that live by freshwater,” my mother said, “build their leaf-nests high in the branches of trees. When the wet season raises the water level, the nests stay safe. The ants teach us that the trees are safe. When we go to the forest camp for the wet season, we will build wooden platforms high in the trees. They will keep us safe when the wave comes.”

  “And the Island People?” Brushfire demanded. “Will we continue to trade with them?”

  “We will give them no more metals,” my mother answered calmly. “Ants keep their gold and silver safe, close to their hearts. We shall do the same.”

  Fifty-seven warm bodies leaped to their feet, roaring in outrage. It was my mother’s death sentence. It meant the death of half the Clan.

  In all the commotion, I felt Skink’s hand sneaking into my palm and gripping tight.

  I squeezed his hand in return without looking at him. He would be shamed if anybody noticed his need for comfort, his future wife included. My heart thudded. I realized that my mother did not trust the Island People; had never trusted them, though they had kept us alive all this time with their magical vials.

  “Come here, Quiet-One,” Rivers-of-Milk commanded, and I quickly detached my hand and fell to the sand at my mother’s feet. She took the glass bottle that had hung on a cord around her neck since the men had gone away, and put it around my neck. “I give up the name Rivers-of-Milk. It is yours, now. I am Freshwater. I will take no more food from the Clan. I have died. I will go to the sea caves.”

  I stared at her, rivers of tears flowing down my cheeks.

  That is the new name I deserve: Rivers-of-Tears.

  Rivers-of-Mud.

  Rivers-of-Bodies, drowned in the flood, if I make poor decisions for the Clan.

  I reached for her, but she could not take my hand. She was gone; dead. She had said the words. Without trade, there would be no more vials, and instead of starving horrifically in front of the children, my mother and the other women would, instead, leave us with untarnished memories by starving alone in the caves.

  She made the motion with her hand for Bloodmuzzle to stay behind, and his plaintive whimper was the whimper I wanted to make.

  Don’t leave me, I begged her with my eyes in silence, but she turned and walked away.

  Brushfire’s teeth were bared in fury, but she spat,

  “I have died. I will go to the sea caves.”

  She turned on her heel to follow Freshwater into darkness. I remembered my mother eating ant-jelly in secret; she was supposed to give it to the dog but she couldn’t help eating it herself. I remembered Brushfire, talking to her husband’s totem, the turtle, telling it how much she missed him every day.

  When Brushfire caught up with Freshwater, she struck her old friend, hard, on the back of the head, but it didn’t matter what dead people did; they couldn’t be acknowledged by the living. One by one, the women said the words and went away from the fire, until there was nobody left but crying children and me. I was technically a woman but had been a child at heart until only a moment past.

  The bottle. I wrapped my palm around the glass. My mother had carried it since the warriors went away to die. Inside, a tiny, solar-powered voice recorder, sealed in black plastic, floated in seawater that would keep it safe from ants until the time came for Skink’s initiation. The voice of my mother’s dead brother would tell Skink what to do.

  “I will take care of you,” I said to the children. Some of them stopped crying, but most of them had to be pushed away by the dead people they were trying to cling to.

  It felt stupid. I couldn’t take care of them. I wanted to give Skink the bottle right now and send him away for his initiation. He would come back to us with a new name, Blood-of-the-Shark, and it would be his responsibility to see that the Clan obeyed the wisdom of the ant, that safe tree-houses were built when we moved to the forest camp.

  I looked around at what was left of us, twenty-eight little bodies around a smoldering beach fire, and I realized tha
t a bunch of children could never build wooden platforms in high treetops. We were small and still-growing.

  We were weak.

  “Skink, help me put them to bed,” I begged, and we tucked the other children into their bark tents and shushed them until they stopped crying and fell asleep. I tried not to think of all the mothers at the caves, in blackness, sitting in sand, watching the waves that would soon wash their spirits back out to sea, to the place where spirits came from.

  The wisdom of ants.

  “Two days until the Island People come,” Skink said as we banked the fire.

  “Do you think I should trade with them?” I asked him at once. If I could get more vials, the mothers wouldn’t have to die. I could save them. They’re dead, but I’m Rivers-of-Milk, now. I could give life back to them! Just this once, I could deliver something better than my mother delivered. Life, instead of death.

  “Ask the ants, I suppose,” Skink shrugged. “I suppose we won’t kill those ants anymore.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re like a totem for the Clan, aren’t they?”

  “The totem for the Clan is the shark. We still kill sharks.”

  “Only when making new men.”

  And I saw his mouth firm with determination, and felt shame at my cowardice at wanting to pass my burden on to this brave, shy little boy.

  The wisdom of ants.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said slowly. “Maybe we shouldn’t kill them any more. Maybe we should even protect them from the Island People.”

  “How?” Skink wanted to know.

  “Take care of the others,” I told Skink. “Keep Bloodmuzzle with you. I’ll come back in two days. I’ll be here when the Island People come. Don’t be afraid. And don’t let any of the children join the dead.”

  The first day, I waited in mud.

  Muhsina’s metal tanks were buried in mud except for the thin metal rims and twin openings at the top. It only took two hours for the first, fresh-hatched silver-ant-queen to arrive, with a cadre of winged workers, also fresh-hatched, to help her begin construction of a new nest.

  The tang of metal had induced the nearby nest to divide. It had drawn the new queen.