Khe (15 page)

The door to the receiving room yawns open and a new doumana comes into the room.

“This is Tanez,” Inra says, “who gave you your hip wrap and foot casings.”

If someone judged all doumanas by this new one and myself, they would think we came in only one size, shape, and color. Tanez’s skin is the same shade of red as mine and we have similar full mouths, though her eyes are a slightly lighter shade of brown. She sits across from Azlii, next to me. The other doumanas make me nervous, but Tanez feels like an open door that lets in the breeze.

I turn my attention back to the corentan.

“When was this?” I ask.

“The Before stretches to the beginning of time,” Azlii says. “It ends when the Powers came.”

“Arose, you mean,” I say. “The Powers arose from among us.”

Azlii’s mouth pulls taut. “The Powers
arrived
. And they aren’t soumyo. They’re … different.”

I tsk my tongue on the roof of my mouth. “I’ve seen the Powers on the vision stage. Not often, but enough to know they look like you and me.”

“What you’ve seen are kler doumanas who do the Powers’ bidding,” Azlii says, and shrugs. “Why not? No doubt you’ve carried out another’s command.”

“My commune leaders’ orders.”

Azlii smiles as if I’ve just proved her point.

“Well, then, how do these doumanas get their commands?” I ask her. “Do the Powers live in the klers?”

“No one knows where the Powers stay,” Larta says, answering instead of Azlii. She fingers the guardian insignia on a bracelet encircling her left wrist. “The orders come as text on a small, special vision stage in Administration House.”

These doumanas have quick answers for all my questions, quick enough that they sound worked out in advance.

“How do you know how the orders come?” I ask.

“Because I’ve seen it,” Larta says. “I’m First of the guardians in Chimbalay. It’s my duty to make sure the Powers’ orders and policies are enforced. The Powers believe they should directly contact the doumana responsible for carrying out their edicts. That way no one can blame her failures on having heard an order second hand.”

Mees sighs in exasperation. “Let Azlii finish her tale. Khe needs to know the truth.”

Azlii acts as through there has been no interruption.

“Everyone lived in corentas,” she says. “Then the Powers came. Some reports say the Powers arrived in a globe of blue flames. Others say they tore open the air and entered our world in a crack of thunder. However they came, they were perceived by the soumyo and the other sentients as a presence that couldn’t be seen or heard yet was there—a disturbance. When the disturbance began, the corentas came together, linking so that communications could be immediate. That was almost a thousand years back. More than twenty-eight generations.”

The time is so long, I can hardly conceive of it.

Azlii fills her glass from the pitcher but doesn’t drink. “Shortly after the Powers arrived, things began disappearing. A plain that had been covered in grain would be suddenly bare. Beasts disappeared from the corentas. Whole buildings disappeared. And soumyo. One moment your sister or brother would be standing with you, and the next, she or he would be gone. Nothing that disappeared ever returned.”

I try to imagine what that was like but can’t. It’s too strange.

“Some thought the world was ending,” Azlii says. “The beasts, plants, and structures demanded that the soumyo do something to stop the disappearances. Even in those days, soumyo were considered responsible for keeping the whole running smoothly. But there was nothing anyone could do. No one even knew how to start.

“The established order began to fall apart. Plants and beasts refused to be eaten. Buildings denied shelter.” The corentan leans toward me. “Try to imagine what it was like to see your sisters and brothers vanishing before your eyes. To seek shelter and find that your dwelling won’t let you in. To be starving with food all around that you could not eat.”

“Terrifying,” I say.

A small shiver runs across Azlii’s shoulders, as if she remembers those dread-filled times first hand.

“In the Before,” she says, “doumanas and males lived together. But in the chaos, the partnership shattered as each sex blamed the other for the problems. That’s when doumanas and males began to live apart, the way we do now.”

My eyes ache from staring. Corentans are without faith, but I say what I know to be true. “The creator set the sexes apart. So we wouldn’t be distracted from our work.”

Mees touches my neck. “What we believe is not always the way things are.”

“What good can it do the Powers to keep the sexes apart,” I ask, and hear the anger in my voice. Not anger that we are apart. Anger that these doumanas make everything I believe into a lie.

“In the Before,” Azlii says calmly, “doumanas and males were like a body’s two arms, working together to keep the world in harmony. When we began to live apart, we became a one-armed body, out of balance, less able to fight off an attacker. Can you think of a better way to control us than to push one half away from the other?”

I am quiet, thinking over what she’s said.

“Why did the Powers want to destroy our world?” I ask.

“They didn’t,” Azlii says. “The chaos was simply the effect of their presence. They came, so they said, only to observe.”

I’ve caught Azlii in a contradiction. “You said the Powers couldn’t be seen or heard. Then how did they make themselves known and speak with the sentients? Were there vision stages then?”

Azlii tsks her tongue on the roof of her mouth. “When they wanted to, they had ways of making themselves known. The Powers communicated the way all sentients spoke to a differing type, by directing pulses of thought energy to the receiver. To the sentients, the Powers seemed to
be
directed energy. When they came to apologize for the chaos they’d caused, they were perceived as a shimmering in the air, something like a heat mirage. Their words weren’t felt like the usual quiet whisperings between the minds of sentients, but like a great wind or a thunderclap.”

My head aches from trying to understand these strange ideas. I rub my neck. Azlii keeps talking.

“The Powers told the sentients that they’d come to our world only to learn about it. They said they were sorry to have caused such disorder, but that what was done was done and could not be put back. The Powers said they would stay and observe what happened over the next few generations and then leave. They promised to do their best to cause no more unforeseen changes. It was all lies, of course.”

“Lies only seen now, looking back?” I ask.

Azlii shrugs. “I think that the sentients back then were so relieved to know what caused the chaos, and of more importance, to have order restored, that they likely would have granted the Powers anything they’d asked. To give the Powers their due, they upheld their promise for several generations. But over time, they began tinkering. Perhaps it was just their nature and they couldn’t help but ask themselves
What if
, and put things in motion to find the answer. Perhaps they’d meant all along to turn our world into a place to carry out their experiments. Whichever it was, they deliberately began to change the way we lived.”

“How?” I ask.

“They made deals with corenta guides, convincing them to give up the traveling life and live in klers or communes. In return, the guides gained total control over those living in their domain, became not guides but
leaders
.

I think of Simanca. She was neither guide nor leader, but a whip driving us toward her own goals.

Azlii lifts her glass and empties it in one swallow, tilting her head back to let the liquid drain down her throat. She sets the glass down gently, but her hand is squeezed tightly around it.

“The Powers also convinced the commune and kler leaders to forbid anyone telling the hatchlings about life in the Before,” she says. “In one generation, all kler and commune dwellers lost the knowledge that they’d ever lived another way. In two generations, set-place life was accepted without question. This gave the Powers steady populations to study. They wanted their subjects to stay put during a life-span, not migrate across the planet, making them hard for the Powers to track.”

“But there are still corentas,” I say.

One spot on Azlii’s neck lights bright green with pride, then winks out. “Not everyone agreed to do the Powers’ bidding. We are the offspring of those who refused to give up their freedom.”

I glance at Mees, Tanez, and Inra, and then at Larta. They are kler-dwellers, the offspring of those who agreed. As I am.

“Why did the Powers let some stay in the corentas?” I ask. “It seems it would have suited them better to have everyone in a kler or commune.”

“Corentas are useful. Once most of the soumyo had settled down, they needed a way for commune dwellers to get their goods to processing sites in the klers. Corentas provided the way. We became traders.”

I think about all that Azlii has said. Thedra once said that most doumanas were like flocking birds—give us a leader and we’ll follow. I can understand why so many went peacefully to the klers and communes when the Powers asked them to. And I think that really, the way things are now isn’t so bad. If it wasn’t for the discovery of my ability, I’d have lived my whole life at Lunge and been happy.

I tell Azlii this. She pulls herself up suddenly from her pillow and paces the room. Nervousness slides through my belly. I rub my neck and wait.

Azlii sits back down. “I told you that the Powers seem unable to stop tinkering with our world. Once they’d gotten a society that suited them, they began changing the soumyo, tinkering here and there, looking for perfection. You are one of the results of their curiosity.”

Her words are like a blow.

“The Resonance restoration project?”

Azlii nods. “They seem fascinated with our way of reproducing. In the klers and communes, doumanas are taught that reproducing is the most important deed we do, but it wasn’t always that way. In the Before, harmony of life was the goal. In the corentas, it still is. The Powers want more and more hatchlings—more victims for their tinkering.”

“I wasn’t a victim,” I say. “I’m grateful to feel Resonance, however that happened.”

“I can see why you would be,” Azlii says coolly. “But ask a babbler if she’s grateful for what was done to her.”

I know the answer to that question.

“Azlii, how do you know all this about the Powers and things that supposedly took place a long time ago?”

She shrugs. “I’m corentan. We keep the history, passing the stories from generation to generation. Except for these doumanas here and the few others like them across the planet, only corentans, all corentans, know the truth of what happened. My community is old. We have structures that existed in the Before.”

She says this last as if it means something special, but I can’t grasp the importance.

“Our wall,” she says, “some of our buildings, were
there
, Khe. They witnessed it first-hand. Structures never forget anything.”

Mees looks up. “Oh, dear me. I’ve been listening so hard that I forgot the hatchlings will be down soon for mid-day meal.” She pulls herself up from the pillow and strides across the room toward the cooking area. Inra gets up to help her. Pots clang. Chests open and close. The rest of us sit in silence.

I turn to Azlii and fix her with a stare. “Who are you? You and the doumanas in this house? What are you after?”

Leaning forward, Azlii spreads her hands on the table. “We believe the Powers have been here too long. Our aim is to destroy their hold on our world. We want you to help.”

Chapter Seventeen

To hear the creator’s song, quiet the rebellion in your heart
.

--The Rules of a Good Life

My heart thumps in my breast, the sound growing so loud that the room echoes with it. Then I realize the thumping is in the stairwell off of the little communiteria.

“The hatchlings are coming down,” Inra says over her shoulder. “Take Khe back to the sleep quarters. Mees and I will join you soon.”

Larta, Azlii, and I thread down the green-and-white hall. My chest feels tight, as though I’m underwater.
We want you to help
, Azlii said. They want me to drown with them.

“Did you follow everything I told you?” Azlii asks when the door to the sleep quarters whooshes closed behind us. Azlii, Larta, and I stand just inside the door, as if each is waiting for another to go first.

“The history, yes” I say. “But I don’t understand how doumanas can use pulses of energy to communicate with plants and beasts.”

“Sending is much like using a firestarter,” Azlii says. She strides the short distance across the room and settles on the cot where I’d slept the night before. Larta remains standing just inside the doorway. “Instead of concentrating the electric energy of your body on the starter, you send the energy of your thoughts to another sentient. Learning to listen is harder. You have to accept the pulses being sent to you and know how to translate them. Plants and beasts don’t use words the way structures or we do. They send and receive thought energy as pictures. It can get a little confusing sometimes.”

I sit on the other end of the cot. The sheet is dyed contentment green. It’s been a long time since I felt contented. “I don’t understand the idea of communicating with walls and structures at all.”

Azlii frowns. “You must stop thinking that just because something is made of wood or bricks or stones and mortar that it’s not aware. Corentans learn to speak with all sentients almost as soon as we’re assigned to a community. My dwelling and I worked together to get it built, so that we were both pleased with the outcome.”

The soft yellow-green of skepticism begins to light on my neck, but the memory of making the sled stops the color from blooming fully. I want to tell Azlii and Larta how the sled had seemed to talk, but worry if I do, they may decide I’m a babbler after all.

“Can anyone talk with the sentients, or only corentans?”

“I think any hatchling could learn to do it,” the corentan says. “Once she emerges, it seems to be too late. Inra can communicate a bit, but I think that’s because she’s an empath. Mees and Larta have tried. They’re useless.”