Akuin thought he was unnoticed. But the gardener turned suddenly, straightened, and glared at him with yellow eyes. Akuin waited motionless and silent. He might be a little odd, but there was nothing wrong with his manners.
“You’re new,” said the man finally. “Where from?”
Akuin told him.
“Inland. Why aren’t you on the beach? Or exploring the school? We have a fine museum, full of things which former students have sent back.”
“I like gardens,” Akuin said.
The man glared at him a second time, then beckoned, using his good hand. The boy came forward into the garden.
The man’s name, it turned out, was Tol Chaib. He’d gone to this school years before, gone into space, then come back to teach. He said nothing more about himself in that first encounter. Instead he talked about the difficulty of growing healthy plants in sand. Partly, he said, he worked to change the soil. The school provided him with compost and manure. More than that was needed. “If there’s anything certain about boys and tsina, it’s that they will produce plenty of fertilizer.”
Some of the excess went into lawns and ornamental borders. The rest was sold to local farmers.
Mostly, he found plants that fit the local soil and weather. “Nothing else works. This is why it’s so difficult to grow our plants on other planets. The light is different, so is the invisible radiation. The soil has the wrong minerals, or minerals in the wrong proportions. A plant always grows best on its home planet, unless — as sometimes happens — it proliferates unnaturally in a strange place.”
Akuin had been feeling lonely and afraid. How could he survive five years in school? At the end of his school years stood a fate even worse. Few hwarhath men remain on the home planet. From twenty to eighty, their lives are spent in space, exploring and preparing to meet the enemies who will inevitably appear. The universe is a dangerous place, and the hwarhath are a careful species. So the men go into space, looking for trouble, while their female relatives stay home, raising children, and practicing the arts of peace.
Sixty years in metal corridors, with only brief visits home. Hah! The prospect was terrible.
Now, listening to Tol Chaib, he felt a little comfort. Maybe he’d be able to survive school. He could certainly learn much from the crippled man.
The school had a curriculum, of course. There were classes, labs, field trips, military exercises. Most of what Akuin did was required. But when he could decide for himself, he went to Tol Chaib’s garden or to the greenhouses where Chaib kept flowers growing all winter.
That was a comfort on days when snow lay over the campus and a knife-wind blew off the ocean. The glass walls were covered by condensed moisture, making the world outside invisible. Inside was damp warm air, the smell of dirt and growing things, flowers that blossomed as brightly as a campfire, the gardener’s dry harsh voice.
At first he told Akuin about the plants around them, then about the gardening he’d done in space. Gardens up there — Tol Chaib waved at the ceiling — are necessary for five reasons. Men are healthier if they eat fresh fruit and vegetables. The plants help keep air breathable by removing carbon dioxide and providing oxygen. “This can be done by inorganic chemical reactions or by microbes, but a garden is more pleasant and produces air with a better aroma.”
In addition, Tol Chaib said, every station and ship is supposed to be self-sufficient. “Ships become lost. A station might be cut off, if the war goes badly. If this happens, the men on board will need ways to provide themselves with air, food, and medicine.”
“You’ve given me three reasons for gardens in space,” Akuin said.
“Health, clean air, and self-sufficiency. What are the other two?”
“Joy,” the gardener said. “Which is not usually produced by vats of microbes or inorganic chemical reactions, and hope that we will finally come home.”
Toward the end of winter Akuin learned how Tol Chaib had been injured.
He’d been the foremost gardener in a small station designed for research rather than war. A supply ship arrived, and the pilot made a mistake while docking — several mistakes, since he panicked when he realized the coupling of ship and station was going badly. The station’s outer skin had been punctured. There was sudden loss of pressure, and — Tol Chaib grinned. “The air lock system in my section of the station was new and had improvements, which did not work as planned.”
When the rescue workers reached the garden, they found most of the plants gone, sucked into space. The garden’s equipment was mostly in pieces. Tol Chaib lay under a heap of debris, next to a lock that had finally closed.
“They think—I don’t remember — that I was pulled from one end of the garden to the other, through several rooms. Most likely I hit things on the way. I certainly hit the airlock after it closed; and the debris hit me.”
What a story! Akuin shivered.
“The pilot of the ship killed himself. The engineer in front of the air lock design team asked to die. But his senior officers decided the problem with the system had not been caused by anything he did, and could not have been foreseen.”
“What was the problem?” Akuin asked. “Why did the system malfunction?”
“I never learned. At first, I was in no condition to pay attention. Later, I didn’t care.”
“Did the pilot have permission to kill himself?”
“That’s another thing I don’t know,” Tol Chaib said.
The pilot had panicked in an emergency. That was the one thing Akuin knew about him. Maybe, after he saw the damage he’d done, the pilot had panicked a second time and made the decision to die on his own. A terrible idea! “If he asked for permission and got it, then what he did was right,” Akuin said finally. “And it was right for the engineer to live, after permission had been refused to him, though — hah! He must have wanted to die.”
“Maybe,” said Tol Chaib.
There was another thought in Akuin’s mind, which he did not express.
“You’re wondering why I’m still alive,” Tol Chaib said. “I gave serious thought to taking the option.” He paused, his good hand gently touching the frilly edge of a tropical bloom. “I was a handsome man. Many approached me or watched from a distance, hoping for encouragement. Hah! It was fine to know that I could make another man happy by saying ‘yes.’
“Then I woke and discovered my leg was gone. What a surprise! Where was the rest of me?”
Akuin felt uncomfortable. No child wants to know that adults can be unhappy. Heroes in hero plays — yes. They can suffer, and a boy Akuin’s age will be inspired. But a man like Tol Chaib, a teacher and crippled, should never reveal pain.
“I had no desire to limp and crawl through life,” the teacher said, his dry voice inexorable. “I wanted to be quick and lovely and loved.
“One of my senior male relatives came to visit me while I was in sick bay. I asked him for permission to die. He said, ‘Wait.’ So I did. My male relatives consulted with each other and with the officers in front of me. This is how such things are done,” the dry voice said. “Except in hero plays.”
“I know,” Akuin said. In a sense he hadn’t known. Before this moment, the rules for killing oneself had been unreal, something learned as one learns formulae one is never going to use. How fine that I can use sticks and triangles to determine the height of that tall tree! Do I want to know the tree’s height? No.
“In that kind of situation,” Tol Chaib added, “the kind that occurs in hero plays, when a man is entirely alone or the people around him are confused and wrong, it makes sense for the man to take his fate into his own hands. What choice does he have? But it’s a good idea to be sure that one is a hero and in a heroic situation, before acting in such a way.
“It was decided I ought to live — for various reasons. My skill as a gardener was remarkable; and I’m good at teaching. Also, I’m an only child; and my mother is well-loved in our family. It was thought she might grieve too much, if I killed myself.�
��
Akuin left the greenhouse soon after, trudging back to his dormitory through a new fall of snow. Overhead the sky was full of stars. For once the air was almost still, though stabbingly cold. The boy walked in a cloud of his own breath.
He reached the middle of a playing field and looked around, first at the snow, unmarked except by the trail he was in the process of making, then at the sky. How brilliant! How many-colored! How difficult to measure!
All at once he lost his sense of position and direction. Up and down seemed no longer different. The ground beneath his feet was gone; so was his body’s weight; he was falling into the innumerable stars.
It was a terrible sensation. Akuin closed his eyes. For a moment, the sense of falling continued. Then it was gone, as quickly as it had come. When he opened his eyes, everything was ordinary again.
Later, he wondered if this had been a vision. Most likely not. He’d never shown any signs of having a diviner’s ability, nor did he want it. Seeing what other people can’t see is unsettling. Diviners tend to be odd ungraceful folk, who go through life out of step and off balance, never fitting into any group. No rational boy wants a fate like this.
More likely, Akuin thought, he’d been tired and disturbed by his mentor’s story. In any case, the experience was over and did not recur.
He completed school in the usual period of time. Education is not a race for the hwarhath. No one finishes before the others. How can they? Every hwarhath male goes into the army as soon as he graduates; and no one can enter the army until he has reached the age of adulthood. 2
At twenty, Akuin left school, going home for a long visit. As usual, on visits home, he worked in the family garden. His mother watched with her usual concern. He had turned into a lovely young man, slim and graceful; his pale stippled pelt reminded her of sunlight moving over metal, or water moving over stones. But he was too quiet for a youth his age, too thoughtful and too in love with the plants he tended.
With luck, she told herself, he’d be assigned to work as a gardener.
The teachers at his school had recommended this. According to her male relatives, the officers in charge of making assignments often paid attention to such recommendations. Though not always, of course.
A little before harvest, Akuin’s assignment came. As expected, it was in space, though where in space the message did not say. He packed the one bag permitted him and said goodbye to his family. It wasn’t easy to bid his mother farewell. Unlike humans, the hwarhath do not express grief by excreting water from the corners of their eyes. Nor do they have the human love of making noise. Given any reason — grief, anger, happiness, a flash of irritation, a momentary surprise — humans will be noisy. An uncomfortable kind of behavior. Maybe it comes from their ancestors, who spent their time (we are told) screaming at the tops of trees. The hwarhath must be descended from animals who spent more time on the ground, where they could see one another, and where noise might attract unwelcome attention. In most situations, they are quiet, at least in comparison to humans.
But what man wants to see a look of grim endurance on his mother’s face?
It was a relief to get outside. The plants that bordered the garden were waist-high now. Their long sharp leaves seemed (to Akuin) like a fence of swords, inlaid with precious metals and encrusted with jewels, so they shone red, blue, yellow, green. The green especially was a shade so intense and pure that it seemed to pierce him. Hah! He could feel it in his throat and chest!
Bugs with the same rich late-summer colors floated in the hot air. Bending down and peering, Akuin could see ripe fruits and vegetables nestled among the leaves of the plants raised for food. He found a few last pests, pressed them to death between his fingers, then turned toward the waiting car.
One of his female cousins drove him to the nearest rail line. They parted quietly. He went by train to the regional airport, then by plane to one of the rocket islands. From the island he went (by rocket of course) to a keeping-pace-with-the-place-below station.3 At each stage of this journey, his environment became more closed-in and artificial, till at last in the station it was a maze of grey metal corridors. No windows opened out on space. If they had, what would he have seen?
His unreachable home planet.
Akuin felt his spirit shrink like a plant shriveling in a drought. How was he going to survive? His grandmother’s voice, speaking in his mind, gave the answer: through loyalty and discipline. In his imagination he made the gesture of acknowledgement.
An FTL transport carried him (along with other men) to a station in the most remote region of hwarhath-explored space. This was not a place where the hwarhath would usually have built a station. It was too far out, and the route that led to it was not easy to follow.
But when the hwarhath came to this region, they found many stars in close proximity. By itself this would have been interesting. The stars in hwarhath space are, for the most part, scattered as thinly as trees on Great Central Plain; and in general they are solitary rather than communal. It’s rare to find more than two or three together.
If ordinary stars are like a bottle tree, standing alone on the dusty plain, with at most a couple of offshoots or companions, then this group was like a grove or thicket, gathered around some hidden reason for their gathering: a spring or sunken pool.
Of course the hwarhath scientists wanted to study the grove, and they had enough influence to get the station built. But they did not get the resources they wanted. Remember that a war was on. This region was far distant from the hwarhath home planet and from the region where humans were a recurring problem. The work done here did not seem important to the men who made decisions. Akuin’s new home was inadequately funded.
Imagine a metal cylinder orbiting a dim and dusty, unimpressive star. The cylinder is small and plain, with none of the additions characteristic of the great stations, which unfold over time like flowering plants, producing metal stalks, blossoms, and pods. Around them move attendant bodies: maintenance craft, shuttles, satellites devoted to research or specialized manufacture, so the great station seems enveloped in a cloud of glittering bugs.
Akuin’s destination was nothing like this. There was only the cylinder, a simple geometric shape, orbiting its primary, which had no planets. In the distance were other stars, packed closely together, all of them dim and red.
“Like an army camped on a plain,” said one of the new arrivals. (Not Akuin.) “How long the night has been! The army’s fires have burnt down. Now they are almost out.”
“It may look like an army to you,” another soldier commented. “To me it looks like a group of stars.”4
Scattered through the star-grove (or if you like the image, the army-camp of stars) were other bodies, which the new arrivals could not see. These came in several varieties. Most were burning-into-darkness stars, which had exhausted their fuel, turning into the stellar equivalent of cinders. Others, less numerous, were breaking-into-pieces stars, which had become so dense that gravity had crushed their matter, so it became a kind of puree or thick soup. The last group, least numerous of all, were called falling-into-strangeness; and these were the stars that interested the hwarhath scientists. 5
Akuin paid little attention to the grove (or camp) of stars. Instead he noticed the interior of the station: a cramped maze of corridors and rooms. There were no windows, of course, and most of the holograms (there were some, though not as large and splendid as the ones in a great station) showed more impressive parts of the galaxy.
At the end of one corridor a huge planet turned, surrounded by moons and braided rings. At the end of another corridor was a human ship, which exploded over and over, hit by hwarhath missiles. Hah! It was a thing to see! Dramatic and encouraging!
He was assigned to a room with four other young men, also new arrivals. Each got a bed, a storage locker, and a niche in the wall, where a hologram could be installed. Three of his companions put scenes of home, as did Akuin: his grandmother’s garden at midsummer. The last man,
a thin lad with the most amazingly ugly markings on his pale grey fur, put nothing in his niche.
The ugly lad was named Gehazi Thev. He seemed remarkably calm and friendly, for a man who looked as if he’d been used to blot up ink. How could any family have kept a child like this one?
“Easy enough to explain,” Thev said on the second or third day that Akuin knew him. “My mother is a mathematician, the best in our lineage; and the semen used to produce me came from a family — the Thevar — who are famous scientists. They also have a tendency toward splotchiness, which shows up rarely. It’s a defect they have tried to eliminate.
“In any case —” No question that Thev was a talker. “My mother had a terrible pregnancy. Not only did she feel sick, but her ability to think about math vanished almost entirely, either due to her queasiness or to some change in her hormones.
“When I was born, they thought of killing me. Just look!” He ran one hand over an arm disfigured by a great dark blotch. “How could I possibly have a normal life? But my mother had already announced that she would never allow her family to breed her again. These were her good years, when she could do original work. She wasn’t going to waste them on motherhood. So –” The calm friendly voice sounded amused. “My relatives could kill me, and lose my mother’s genetic material, or they could keep me. There was no reason to believe that I would be stupid.”
“It doesn’t bother you?” asked Akuin.
“My lack of stupidity? No. The Goddess has made sure that the universe is well provided with stupid people. As far as I can tell from their behavior, humans are as dim as most hwarhath. What is this war about, for example? How can we fight people when we can’t even talk with them? What has war been about, through our entire history? The taking of land! The acquisition of women and children! But what good are human females to us? If they even have females, as we understand that term. For all we know, humans may have five different sexes, none of them producing children in a way we understand. As for their land, how can we use it? It isn’t likely that our plants will grow on their planet. So, what are we fighting for? Women who cannot mother hwarhath children, and land which is — for us — infertile. The humans are just as stupid. Unless, of course, they have another reason for killing people.” Thev tilted his head, considering the idea of a new reason for war.
The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004 Page 86
