by Amy Thomson
A deep burgundy ripple of irony coursed over Ukato-nen’s skin. Before he’d come here he would never have thought of such a thing as wild places. On Tiangi, everything was wild. Here, there seemed to be almost no wilderness. How could the humans stand to be so cut off from the wild places of their world? He closed his eyes, taking a deep breath of the richly scented air, so different, yet so soothing. He felt more at home here than he had since he left Tiangi. The weight of these months of isolation fell away, and he slid into a deep, relaxed sleep.
He woke an hour or two after dawn, feeling as frisky as a courting tillara. Moki had already gone out and gotten breakfast. There was fresh fruit, some young fern shoots, and one of the slow-moving mammals they had seen the day before, neatly butchered and lying on the inside of its coarse, greenish-furred skin.
“I didn’t know what was protected here,” Moki said, “so I tried to take a little of several different things that seemed plentiful.”
Ukatonen flickered acknowledgement. “We will only be here a few days. I don’t think that we can alter the balance very much in that time. Still,” he added, “we should try to eat as little meat as possible.” He helped himself to a piece of fruit, swallowing it with evident delight.
Juna, meanwhile, was busy trying to calm diplomats horrified by the crumbling of their carefully planned schedules, and appease government ministers certain that the aliens were dying from snakebites or were slaughtering endangered species by the score.
Juna patiently stood her groutTd. She explained to the diplomats that the nature of her bond with Moki meant that the roaming Tendu would return in a day or two, and reassured the government ministers that the Tendu knew how to survive in the forest, and that they would avoid poisonous snakes, and would not wantonly destroy the forest. On the third day, she went out with the search party. They spent all day exploring the forest, using dogs to try to track the Tendu, with no luck at all. When they returned to camp at sunset, Moki and Ukatonen were waiting for her in her tent. They had slipped into camp several hours before, in a test of Moki’s skill at ang-ar-gora.
Juna briefed them about what had been happening at camp. Then they slipped like shadows through the dusk, back into the jungle. Juna finished freshening up and went to meet with Seiior O’Brian, to discuss what to do next. As she sat down, there was a loud crashing in the trees overhead. Moki and Ukatonen scrabbled down the trunk of a tree. Juna smiled inwardly at the racket they were making.
“Siti?” Moki called loudly, a very convincing note of fear in his voice, “Siti, are you there?”
“Moki!” Juna called. “I’m right here!” She ran to embrace him, and he clung to her as though he had not seen her for months. Ukatonen came up behind him. Juna reached out to embrace the enkar. Altogether it was a most touching and convincing homecoming.
“Is there any food left?” Moki asked. “I’m hungry. We’ve had nothing but fruit and greens for the last three days.”
Juna saw Seiior O’Brian and Ministro Gomez visibly relax at Mold’s words. It was another cleverly planned deception. It was easier than proving to the ministers that the Tendu would kill sparingly and only at need.
“Perhaps we should continue this discussion in the mess lent,” Juna suggested. “That way Moki and Ukatonen can get something to eat while we discuss rearranging our schedules.”
Seflor O’Brian agreed.
After Moki and Ukatonen had filled their plates full of meat and beans and rice, and before they began to eat, Ukatonen made Moki apologize to their delegation and to the governmental ministers. It was another face-saving gesture that Juna and the two Tendu had cooked up. Moki, as a “child” and an alien one at that, could not be expected to understand the importance of their schedule. Ukatonen claimed to have been looking for him until late the[[ ziy ]]before, and that it had taken them all day to find their way back.
Moki looked up forlornly at the officials and ministers. “It’s just been such a long time since I’ve been in a real rain forest. I was just so homesick,” he said, his ears drooping so miserably that Juna had to fight to keep from laughing.
Moki was a very good actor. Juna heard a murmur of apathy from members of their entourage. Good. Perhaps the diplomats would not push them so hard after this.
“Moki, it was very bad of you to run away like that,” she said. “You realize that I’m going to have to punish you. You’re not allowed to eat any sweets for a solid [[th.]] I expect you to help wash all the dishes here until leave. And you’re to pour tea and serve the ministers [[_. -il]] our next meetings. Is that clear?”
“Yes, siti,” Moki said, looking mournfully down at the ground.
“Don’t you think you’re being a bit hard on the boy?” Sefior O’ Brian said.
Juna fought back a smile. Dishwashing was the only real punishment, and it was a mild one. Moki only craved sweets when he was healing people, and he would be glad to be able to actually do something useful during those long, boring meetings.
After dinner, Juna met with the diplomats to repair their battered schedule. Actually, they had only missed a couple of meetings with the heads of state of Guyana and Suri-name, and a “day off” that included a military review, which she was frankly relieved to have avoided. She didn’t know how to explain war to the Tendu. The concept wasn’t part of their universe.
“Look,” she said, after the diplomats had debated the issue for several minutes. “These meetings and briefings are very hard on the Tendu. The whole situation is completely foreign to them, and very stressful. They need time off in wild places like this park. Otherwise we’re going to have more embarrassments like this last one. You’ve been expecting the Tendu to accommodate to human ways, and it’s strained them to their limits. It’s time we humans accommodated ourselves to the Tendu. After all, they’ve come a long way to see us.”
“Dr. Saari, we don’t have a lot of control over what the various governments choose to show to the Tendu,” one of the diplomats replied.
“But the Tendu can refuse to see the things that don’t interest them, can’t they?”
’To a certain extent, yes,” the diplomat replied. “But some things are unavoidable.”
“I see. But perhaps we can negotiate a few more visits to national parks and reclamation sites, and a few less displays of military might. And a couple more days off that really are days off. It isn’t just the Tendu I’m concerned about. There’s the baby as well. I’m exhausted, and I’m afraid that it might harm the baby if I continue to overwork myself like this.”
“We’ll do what we can, Dr. Saari.”
And to Juna’s surprise, they accomplished quite a lot. Part of their success was due to Moki’s running away, which had gotten into the papers. Analin’s spin on the incident underlined the extent of Moki’s (and by implication, Ukatonen’s) homesickness.
Suddenly their meetings took place outside, in gardens. Instead of parades and teeming crowds of people, Moki and Ukatonen were led through vast reclamation projects, forests of replanted saplings growing over the scars of old strip mines and industrial sites. In Brazil they were taken through the restoration of the great coastal forests. The members of the Central African Federation of Countries showed them the Green Sahel project, where they were slowly, painfully, pushing back the desert. The Chinese took them through the Huang He project, where they saw the vast factories devoted to rebuilding the long-vanished topsoil, and acres where that topsoil had been painstakingly laid down and held in place by plantations of clover and grasses, from which forests of bamboo, poplar, pine, and ginkgo were rising. Ukatonen and Moki conferred with the environmental engineers, and often were able to make useful suggestions. More importantly, the Tendu’s interest in these projects focused human interest on them as well. The last three weeks of their trip were much more fun. Ukatonen seemed reinvigorated; he listened to the people he met with a new intensity and focus.
Ukatonen sat in the hot, dusty bus, looking out the window at the ravaged land aroun
d him. This was their tenth tour of an environmental reclamation site in the last eight days. Every country seemed to have several. Some countries seemed to be nothing but reclamation zones.
The tours were always the same. First they would be shown the ravaged land, barren, eroded, sick with chemicals. Then they would be shown the repair efforts under way— decontamination, replacement of topsoil, and replanting. Then finally they would be shown the most advanced stage of regrowth— forest, prairie, desert, whatever. It always felt empty and incomplete. There weren’t enough birds or small animals rustling in the undergrowth. The plants weren’t quite right, too far apart, or growing in neat rows. It all felt subtly wrong, and there was never enough time to figure out what was the matter. And he never got to compare the reclamation site with a real forest or prairie or whatever. It left him feeling as incomplete and unharmonious as the sites he visited.
What made humans do this to their world? How could they foul their nest this way?
He began listening to the leaders more closely, asking probing, difficult questions that made the diplomats and even Eerin squirm uncomfortably. He knew he was being difficult, but he was an enkar, and understanding this conundrum was what he needed to do. With Eerin’s encouragement and help, he began watching videos and laboriously reading through history texts. It was hard work, as dry and dusty and dead as the reclaimed lands he had visited.
Gradually, a picture began to emerge. It was an ugly picture of greed and devastation on a scale so vast that he still had trouble believing it had really happened.
Within the space of two centuries these otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people had cut down their forests, mined their hills and poisoned their land, water, and air. Ukatonen found it painful to try to come to grips with this fact. Eerin had tried to explain the complicated tangle of greed, prejudice, narrow-mindedness, and shortsightedness that led to this, but he found it hard to wrap his mind around the necessary concepts.
The humans had paid a heavy price before they realized their mistake. Billions of humans had lived short, harsh, and painful lives, dying of the diseases inherent in starvation and overcrowding. Now, millions still lived hard lives, but at least they were getting enough to eat. The population on Earth had been shrinking for the last century. It was falling more slowly than Ukatonen would have [[_*ed]], but it was declining. They would reach a [[sustain-Kr4e]] level in another century or two. But it would take rven longer before every human’s life would be a com-ortable one.
Eventually Ukatonen gave up trying to understand why :r how humans had done this to their world. It was easier for him to help humanity restore their battered planet’s ecosystem than it was for him to understand why they had destroyed it. At least restoring the ecology felt familiar. It would take him out into the forest, where he was at home. And he would see to it that there were as few schedules jod meetings and little boxy rooms full of people as possible. He woke up the computer and began doing a little research, while the bus ground its way slowly uphill.
Juna shook hands with the team of diplomats who had helped them, thanking them and bidding them good-bye. Oddly enough, she was going to miss working with them, though she wasn’t going to miss the demanding schedules and the punctilious attention to protocol that went with this work. She was glad the diplomatic portion of their trip was over.
She watched Moki making his final farewells. As usual, he had made a lot of friends. She saw M. Pichot slip Moki a small round tin of the candied rose petals that he had become so fond of. Ukatonen, moving at a slower, more dignified pace, brought up the rear. People’s faces changed as they turned from Moki to Ukatonen, becoming serious and respectful. He might not generate the bubbly popularity that Moki did, but the diplomats and their staff clearly honored and admired the alien elder. Despite all the difficulties, the two Tendu had managed to accomplish an incredible amount of valuable face-to-face diplomacy on this trip.
Moki and Ukatonen finished their good-byes, and the three of them boarded the zeppelin.
Juna watched as Analin stowed her gear and strapped herself into one of the seats by the window of the cabin they would be sharing for the three-day flight to Darwin, Australia. Analin had performed one miracle of public relations after another for them. Her deft handling of the Tendu’s disappearance into the forest had turned the whole trip around. She was the one who made the world aware of how homesick the Tendu were for the forest, gently shaming the leaders of the world into accommodating the Tendu’s interests and needs.
“I wanted to thank you again for all your hard work. I’m afraid we made things pretty hard for you sometimes,” Juna told her press secretary when they were settled. “But you made us look good despite all our mistakes.”
Analin shook her head. “It wasn’t that bad. The three of you are fun to work with. And you tried to make my job easy whenever you could.”
“I guess we make a great team, then,” Juna said with a smile. “You made our work easier too. We’ll miss you. Are you looking forward to seeing your relatives in Indonesia?”
“I’ve never met them. They’re my grandmother’s family. Second cousins several times removed. My grandmother kept in touch with them, and my mother sent them cards at New Year’s and visited a few times.” She shrugged. “We may not have all that much in common.”
The zeppelin lifted off then. They watched the ground move away from them with a barely perceptible shudder of the engines. Juna had never traveled on a zeppelin before. She had never had the time or the money for such a slow, luxurious method of travel. But there had been enough money left over in their travel budget, and they were ready for a little pampering after all their hard work.
“You know,” Juna offered as a bank of clouds obscured their view of the ground. “We’d love it if you could visit us at the reserve. It would be nice to spend some time with you when we weren’t in the middle of a crisis.”
“I’d like that too,” Analin said with a smile. “I’ll try to come up and spend a few days with you and the Tendu. I’ve never really seen them in the jungle,” she said wistfully. “I was too busy in Costa Rica, and I think they didn’t really want to be seen.”
Juna nodded. “I wish I could climb with them, but this belly throws my balance off. And if I fell it wouldn’t just be me falling.” She sighed and then added, “but I’ll miss the treetops. It’s like another world up in the canopy. It’s wonderful.” Juna yawned. “I think this trip is catching up with me,” she said. “I’m going to take a nap.”
Juna napped her way across most of Australia, getting up only to eat and to pee, and to look down at the scenery or up past the bellying bag of the zeppelin at the incredible array of Southern stars. The distant drone of the zeppelin motors wove in and out of her dreams, becoming a small plane soaring by overhead in a bright summer sky, or the distant drone of a tractor on a long, hot summer’s day.
Shortly after they landed at Alice Springs, Ukatonen heard Eerin being paged over the zeppelin’s comm system. A few minutes later she tapped on his door. There were some Australian Aboriginal elders who wished to meet with him and Moki. Clearly Eerin seemed to think this was something special, so he agreed to meet with them.
They were shown to a small private lounge. As soon as they were settled, the doors opened to admit a pair of ancient elders escorted by respectful grandchildren. They wore nothing but their loincloths and their dignity, but they carried themselves with more majesty than most of the rulers the Tendu had met. The Aboriginals were the first people he had met on Earth who reminded him of Tendu. He longed to link with them.
Ukatonen struggled to follow their heavily accented Standard as they told him about their history, how their land had been taken and their people killed like animals, the imported illnesses that swept through their people, how their children were taken away from them and raised to be white. It was a fearful and frightening story.
“So far you’ve only talked to the people who won their struggles,” the male elder, Stan Ak
uka told him. “You’ve been talking to the wrong people, mate. Talk to the losers. They’ll tell you a thing or two. Be careful the whites don’t come to your place and steal your land.”
“It is very far away,” Ukatonen said.
“So was Australia,” the female elder said. “Once.”
“Tell us about your place,” Stan said. He sounded hungry, eager to hear about Tiangi.
Ukatonen stood. “There are no words for my world. I will perform a quarbirri for you, instead.” He pulled a small flute from his gathering bag, and began to play the melody for the quarbirri he had been working on. His skin flared and died as the music rose and fell. Then his skin and the music shifted into the main portion of the quarbirri. The main section of the quarbirri began by depicting the dawn as the sun rose from the sea over the Outer Islands on Tiangi. His skin speech gradually brightened as the sun rose, flaring big and brilliant as the first rays lit up the treetops of the island. Then he told them of swimming with the lyali-Tendu, the people of the sea, his words shimmering like schools of brightly colored fish against the blue depths of his skin. He depicted the coastal forests, singing and dancing their green mystery. He told them of rivers, wide and slow, and fast and treacherous; and of the ancient inland forests, sloping up into the bunched foothills. He sang the rugged rocky outline of the mountains, with their cool, misty slopes.
Then he showed them sunset on the shoulders of the mountain passes overlooking the dry savannas and deserts where vast herds of animals roamed. The savannas were lands of mystery and legend to the Tendu. They were visited only rarely by adventurous hermits and enkar. In the distance, further mountains loomed black against the red sunset. No Tendu had ever been there. As night fell, Ukatonen sang of the soft glow inside a village tree, and the sounds and sights of the villagers as they settled in for the evening. He ended with darkness and the distant sounds of the night forest.
