The Faarian Chronicles: Exile (9 page)

Chapter 11: Family History

I picked myself up off the floor to find practically the
whole room laughing at me. All except my mother who was shaking her head and
frowning at me in disappointment.

“Did you have a good meeting?” I asked her with bite in my
voice as I wiped giant cat saliva off my burning face and took my seat again.

“No. It was a waste of time, like usual,” she said, looking
sharply at me. She took a breath and arranged her features into a more pleasant
mask. “But attendance by the farming representatives is critical. One didn’t
show up and we almost lost another seat because of it. Pendergrast,” she
mumbled unhappily to Great-Aunt Nico seated beside her, “seems happy to sit
back and let Glass City dictate the terms of our water rights." She shook
her head and turned to me.

“So, did someone show you around?”

I nodded, determined to bite my tongue and not think about
my ‘tour’ before I said, or did, anything else that gave away what I was
feeling.

“Well, good then. I’m glad you’re finally here,” she said
stiffly. It didn’t seem like she was all that glad as we sat down to dinner and
had nothing more to talk about.

“Oh, you two! You are so much alike!” Ethem gushed, wiping
at the corners of his eyes with a handkerchief. “Lean towards each other. I’ll
get a picture you can send to your father, Veridian. Sunny, I mean Sunny!” He
corrected himself quickly and snapped some photos with the same model phone
that everyone seemed to be carrying.

Dinner was served and people focused on their food, quickly
losing interest in me. I watched Sensei take her food and followed her lead,
relieved to find that the dishes, while unfamiliar, at least resembled
recognizable food. My system worked out well except for the scoop of
pink-orange mashed potatoes that turned out to be fermented squash. I coughed
it out into my cloth napkin as fast as possible and chugged my coconut-pear
juice while Sensei chuckled quietly at me.

Throughout the meal, I looked around the crowded room and
the first thing I noticed was that it was mostly women, like two to one.
Amazons. The name came from classical Greek, a-mazos: “without breast”. It
looked like all those ancient myths had been wrong about that, thank God. The
idea that they cut or burned off one breast so they could throw a spear or
shoot a bow and arrow had always seemed ridiculous. Even thousands of years
ago, women would have bound their breasts with cloth or something, not cut them
off.

The next thing I noticed was how diverse the gathering was.
I guess I hadn’t realized how overwhelmingly white my life was back home. Here,
there were people of every color sitting shoulder to shoulder on the long
benches, comfortably talking and laughing together. It was cool, except I felt…
like I stuck out, the only Earthling.

Women were generally tall, a lot of them taller than me, and
stockier than I was used to, like the twins. Teague was still on the mucho
grande end of the size spectrum, but overall, the women were roughly the same
size as the men and I was now average. Small even. I’d always hated being so
much taller than most girls, but now that I was surrounded by women who looked
like they could play for the WNBA, I didn’t feel like I fit in here either.

They were all in shape; I mean like everyone. Okay, Great
Aunt Nico across from me was kind of flabby and barrel-chested (and one of the
few old people here, though she was probably only seventy), but other than her…
they looked like athletes. They were all vegans like me, as far as I could
tell, and women and men alike were dusty and dirty from farming all day, which
would keep anyone in shape. At least the facial tattoos and dyed teeth
definitely seemed to be a male only thing.

Sensei seemed to be old friends with almost everyone. People
kept coming over to toast her return with glasses of ambrosia, and fill her in
on things she had missed in the years she’d been on Earth. They listened,
enraptured, to Sensei’s tales of Earth weather and her increasingly
embarrassing stories of life on Earth and, specifically, of me.

Dinner conversation moved on to talking about the apparent
drop in haratchi numbers in the past few years. My ears perked up. Sensei had
told me so much about these bird-pests, I couldn’t wait to see them in person.
Unfortunately, all I ended up finding out was that even here, adults could suck
the fun out of
any
topic.

 And then - they decided to draw me into the
conversation. “So, Veridian,” one woman began, “what was it like growing up on
Earth?”

“Um,” I hedged. Did she really expect me to sum up my entire
childhood for a bunch of strangers? “Um, snowy? No really, there’s lots of snow
in Colorado,” I finally replied and pretended interest in my food.

“Well, what was your favorite thing about Earth?” someone
else asked.

Feeling stuck in a spotlight, I made myself smile and gave
the first answer that came to mind. “Parasailing in Hawaii was fun. I’d love to
do that again.” I tried to keep my answer just long enough not to be too rude.

A few inane adult questions later and my new Great-Aunt Nico
asked the best one by far.

“So Sah-nee,” she said. “You prefer to be called Sah-nee,
yes?” I nodded. Close enough, and she was the only one besides Ethem who had
bothered so far. “Sensei here mentioned that you had boyfriends on Earth.”

I squinted at her in surprise. “If you mean friends that are
boys, then yes. I mean, I guess so.” I nodded warily.

She waved one hand as if brushing an annoying bug aside. “So
what’s the holdup then? Why do you have no daughters yet to carry on the Katje
line?”

What? Was this daft old woman asking why I wasn’t a teen
mother?

“Aunt Nico!” my mother reproached while I stared at her,
dumbfounded. “You know we don’t encourage our girls to have children so early
anymore!”

“And why not?” she demanded. “It was good enough for this
family when I was a girl; it’s darn well good enough now.” She turned back to
me. “Why, by the time I was your age, I’d already brought one strong girl into
this Kindred and given the warrior yell of our ancestors.” She pounded a fist
against her flabby chest. Even in old age, she had that kind of physique that
you could tell used to be muscular.

 “I had a dozen virile young men at my beck and call.”
I had to cover my mouth as I almost giggled at the word "virile”. Her
scowl in my direction was ruined by the ridiculousness of her claims. The woman
was no Sophia Loren. No, she was more Roseanne Barr plus thirty years of
wrinkles. 

“Be that as it may, Aunt Nico, you know it’s been found to
be better for a woman if she waits until she’s older before she becomes a
mother.”

“Ridiculous, I say!” Nico banged her fist on the table. “We
need our young warriors at their best, and you’re not even encouraging the one
thing that will make them get the job done and come home. I should have known
that you would lead us all down the path to ruin when you selfishly refused to
have even one child. Instead you ran off to Earth, almost not coming back in
time to help the Kindred in our most dire hour!”

My mother looked calm up until then, but then I saw
something I’d experienced myself, but never
seen
before. A ring of pure
silver flashed outward from the edge of her pupils and in its wake, what
remained was wheat-fields-in-August gold. She didn’t shut her eyes or turn away
like I would have, but fixed the old woman with an unblinking stare.

“Don’t pull that weird eye-flashy thing on me, girl,” Nico
said. “Just because you’ve abandoned the old ways, Vaeda, doesn’t mean that
everyone should.”

“So, um, hey. Question,” I interrupted their stare down.
“Why would me being an unwed teen mother make me a better fighter? Cuz like, I
already kick butt,” I joked, trying to lighten the mood.

Everyone who’d been silently observing the argument between
Vaeda and Nico turned to stare at me uncomprehendingly. What? Was my
pronunciation that bad? Sensei laughed, taking some of the tension from the
group. A few others joined in politely.

“That’s not how motherhood works here, Veridian,” my mother
said with a slight frown at the corners of her mouth. “All children are raised
collectively by the Kindred. There is no expectation for a woman to marry or
even stay with the father of her child, unless she really wants to, and there's
no judgment against her if she doesn’t. A woman never has to raise her children
alone.”

“Becoming a mother makes a girl become a strong, responsible
woman, and strengthens her ties to the Kindred,” added Nico, jabbing her finger
into the table to emphasize her point.

“We are
not
going to encourage our girls to have
children before they’re ready for the sake of tradition, Aunt Nico. Just
because we used to do it that way doesn’t mean it’s the best or safest for our
girls today. I want them to grow up and learn responsibility
before
becoming mothers.” I could tell this was an old argument between the two of
them.

“Humph.” The old woman threw up her hands and went back to
her rotten squash, but anyone could see her mind remained unchanged.

Personally, I didn’t care what lunatic traditions they had
around here. There was no way I was ready to pop out a kid. Uh-uh, no way, no
how, and maybe not ever.

She looked up and pointed at me with a bony finger. “Eat
more. You’re too skinny.” Ugh. And there she went with the weight comments again.
She mumbled something that sounded like, “just what we need, another runt.”

After dinner, people started clearing the benches from one
side of the room and pushing tables together against the wall, creating a
makeshift stage, and the big cats started fighting in the opposite corner of
the room. Snarls and growls drew my attention, and I saw the big black one and
my mother’s spotted monster face off while the other cats watched.

They pounced and clashed, rolling and biting in a blur of
claws and teeth and fur. Some people watched as if this were their regular
entertainment, egging the cats on from the sidelines.

“Um, why isn’t anyone stopping them?” I asked no one in
particular.

“You want to step between those two, you go ahead,”
Great-Aunt Nico snorted.

“They’ve already eaten…” Ethem began.

“For which we are all grateful,” someone added. “It’s
gross.”

“…So, they start the trials without us,” Ethem continued.

“Um, trials?” I leaned over and asked Sensei quietly.

“The Kindred holds trials every so often for people to test
their combat skills against each other. The General and her warriors rate each
combatant’s progress and determine if they move up in rank, similar to our dojo
on Earth. As this dinner is in your honor, you’ll be expected to participate
and get ranked. Almost everyone starts out as a simple trainee.”

I opened my mouth to tell her what I thought about that and
she cut me off, getting up suddenly and dragging me away from the table.

“Hey!” I complained loudly and rubbed my arm.

“You are not on Earth any longer, Sunny. This is your
mother’s culture, a warrior culture. Pacifism is
not
a virtue here. No
one expects you to be an expert yet, but you need to be able to hold your own.
Your acceptance and status here will depend on how well you can fight. Why do
you think I was sent to train you?”

“Just because it’s important to them to be able to beat
people up doesn’t make it important to me.”

She huffed and threw up her hands. “It’s not about beating
people up, Sunny; it’s about building warriors! The haratchi aren’t going to
spar with you for practice.” With that, she walked back to the table, swooped
up her glass, and went to join some friends a few tables away.

Whatever. I was
not
going to put on some
demonstration of Earth-girl fighting skills for my absentee mother’s
entertainment and approval.

As I sat back down, my mother stood and clapped her hands
once to make an announcement. As if a switch was flipped, everyone quieted and
the cats stopped trying to take each other apart. Brainwashed, definitely
brainwashed.

“Members of the Kindred,” she addressed the crowd. “My
daughter, Veridian, has finally joined us from Earth.” The crowd stomped the
floor and pounded the table in applause as the people on either side of me
grabbed my elbows and hoisted me upward. I stood and waved awkwardly for a
moment before taking my seat again as soon as possible.

“In honor of her homecoming, Ethem has arranged for the play
of our Kindred’s history.” She gestured toward the makeshift stage set up to
one side and sat once more.

I tamped down the disappointment that welled in my chest.
Was it unrealistic that I’d expected her to say welcome or something?

Little kids in costume climbed onto the table stage while a
colorfully tattooed man narrated. I recognized the story at once as one the
Robot had made me read over and over again for practice one year. But here it
wasn’t a story. It was “Kindred history.”

A child, face painted and wearing grayish-green from head to
toe, played the small alien who’d come to Earth a couple thousand years ago,
ending up north of the Black Sea. He was one of the last of a dying symbiotic
race of ancients known as the Annunaki. He'd come to Earth to find and bring
back intelligent beings to act as new hosts for their symbiots.

Instead, what he found in that forest was a quick death at
the jaws of a stalking tiger, played by another little child, painted in
familiar orange and black stripes as if she were going to a Bengals football
game. Unknowingly, the tiger became the defacto host for its dead victim’s
tiny, spider-like symbiot, increasing the tiger’s intelligence ten-fold.

A young hunter named Anme-Nammu (gift from Nammu) came upon
the tiger. She belonged to a fierce clan of warrior women known on Earth today
only in myths and stories as the Amazons. As Anme-Nammu attempted to kill the
dangerous predator, a strange and amazing thing happened. The tiger was able to
communicate with the young warrior through a growing mind-connect. Throughout
their week-long contest of wills, they tested and gradually began to respect
one another, and in the end, neither could bring themselves to kill their
opponent. They hunted through the forest together and became a fearsome and
unbeatable team.