Khe (12 page)

“But how could this make you a babbler?” I asked.

“The drugs,” she said, as if this were something I should have known.

Knowledge tickled at the back of my mind—drugs and babblers. Then I had it. “Did they use villisity?”

Marnka nodded. “Imagine how we felt. Our offspring would be more talented than we were, make fewer mistakes. They would free us all from hunger caused by unexpected draught or too much rain or unpredicted storms. We were proud to do this for all who would come after us. We gobbled our villisity and waited to feel the tug of Resonance.”

She fell silent. Her head dropped to her chest again. It seemed a terrible effort for her to drag it back up and look at me.

“One of my sisters started showing the effects first,” Marnka said. “She grew restless, pacing the large room where we were housed, touching things. She picked up a cup of water, and set it down without drinking. She picked it up again and threw it against the wall. The water ran down in a rush. She touched her face, arms, head, and neck, over and over. She ran her fingers over the edges of chairs, cots, and windows.

“Another doumana, from a different kler, I didn’t know her name, joined my sister on her uneasy walk. I felt unsettled too, needing to move. I thought it was the start of Resonance, but I was so angry. I wanted to strike out at something, anything. It took all the control I could gather not to. I joined the pacing doumanas.

“My sister started screaming. Other doumanas began to scream and howl like beasts. Doumanas were banging on the door, calling for help. No one came. Some of us began to push and shove the others. Fights broke out. Vicious battles. Someone was killed, I think. She looked dead, her head smashed against a wall and her brains leaking out.”

Marnka said this in the same unconcerned way that she’d told me about breaking the orindle’s legs, as if nothing that happened during a spell mattered.

“I suspect,” Marnka said, “that the orindles watched us through hidden eyes or emotion paintings that weren’t what they seemed. I was angry that they wouldn’t come. I picked up a chair and hurled it against the wall. A doumana was in the way and she was hit. Blood pounded in my head. The pain was … I thought I would split in two. I heard myself laughing. The room filled with the scent of dead leaves and a harsh green fog.”

***

Night had fallen and Marnka kept talking. The fire threw thin shadows on the walls of the cave. The air smelled overly sweet from the burning jipini branches. I wanted to cover my ear holes and block out the rest of this tale.

“I woke up fine,” Marnka said cheerfully. “The green fog was medicinal. I was cured of that madness. All of us were. Seldid came to apologize for our discomfort. She told me that while I’d been in that altered state, I’d picked a mate and laid my egg. I went back to my unit and back to work, no different than before.”

I rubbed my neck. “Then how did you wind up here? Why do you have spells?”

Marnka shrugged. “The season passed. During Cooling of that year, my prophet-sister who’d been at the Research Center with me started acting strangely. She would be tasting for upcoming weather or talking or singing, and suddenly stop, as if turned to stone. A few moments later, she would pick up where she’d left off. One day, a guardian came and said my sister had been assigned elsewhere. Rumors started that she’d turned into a babbler.”

Marnka shifted position, folding her legs under herself. “By Barren Season, rumor was that six weather-prophets in other klers had turned into babblers. In Chimbalay, another prophet-sister started acting strangely. Suddenly, she was gone too. Then it was my turn.”

“I awoke in a blackened room.” Marnka’s voice was quiet. She stared at a spot above my head. “There were others there. I could hear them breathing in that slow way of the sleeping or the unconscious. I tried to move, but I’d been bound to the cot on my back with bands. The bands were tight. I couldn’t roll over. There was a voice in the room, a murmuring that never went away. I concentrated on the voice until I could make out the words. The voice said, ‘Calm. Calm.’ Sometimes it would say, ‘We are not at fault. You are guilty. You have failed.’ Sometimes it said, ‘You hate Chimbalay. The sight of a doumana sickens you. You may go.’”

The fire was dying down. I put on more wood. The flames flared high, sending a sudden brilliance into the chamber.

“They took me to another room, a smaller one,” Marnka said. “The orindle Seldid was there. No one spoke, but I had become used to silence and this didn’t bother me. My thoughts were on escape. I schemed for ways to overpower Seldid and her two helphands. I waited for my chance.

“Finally Seldid spoke. She said, ‘You have been seen by reliable witnesses losing consciousness and being unaware that you have done so. You have been heard cursing the creator. You are guilty of insanity. All of your goods and your position as a weather-prophet are forfeit. You will be taken to the gates and will leave Chimbalay and never return. You will forget everything that happened here.’

“Her words brought my anger back, but I hid it well. The helphands undid the straps that held me. I pulled myself slowly to my feet, testing my legs, wondering if the helphands would let me stand on my own. They did, and they let me walk across the small room toward Seldid. I gathered every bit of strength I had and pushed her through the window. She landed in the hard dirt two levels down. When I saw the leg bones sticking through her torn flesh and heard her screams, I laughed.”

My neck burned and my emotion spots burst into fear color. If the snow was still stopped tomorrow, I’d get away from Marnka before she hurt me like she had the orindle.

Marnka watched the color play across my neck, but said nothing.

“In some ways, I was lucky,” she said. “Chimbalay edges onto the wilderness. I didn’t have to pass any communes or other klers to get here. The madness I’d felt in Chimbalay passed quickly. I was able to find food and water, to find this cave.”

“Is Chimbalay the kler I saw across the plain?” My heart pounded.
Chimbalay
. Where the orindles who might save me lived.

Marnka nodded.

I leaned toward her. “You have to go back to the kler and tell the doumanas there what happened to you.”

Her face hardened like a fist. “What good would that do? Would it make me normal? Chase away my spells? Would it stop the orindles from making more secret experiments?”

“If no one speaks out,” I said, “the orindles can keep doing their awful work.”

Marnka laughed under her breath. “Who would believe such a tale from a babbler?”

But I could see that she was thinking it over.

“No,” she said. “They track me; they know where I am. I’d never get inside Chimbalay’s gate.”

“Marnka,” I said softly, “did you never think that perhaps in Chimbalay they’ve found a cure?”

Her laughter turned as harsh as the Barren Season winds. “I told you, they know where I am. If they’d found a cure, they’d come for me. I am too valuable, my skills as a prophet too high, to let me rot in the wilderness if they could still use me.”

That made sense, if they really knew where she was.

“How do they track you?”

She looked around and then whispered, “They come in my dreams.”

I sighed. Was everything she’d told me only ravings after all?

Marnka’s dark eyes sharpened. “Why haven’t the Powers come for you? You have value—the Grower of Lunge Commune. I wonder why they let you go?”

“I don’t think anyone knows I’m gone,” I said. “Simanca was probably too ashamed to admit a doumana in her charge had run away. I doubt she told anyone.”

“Maybe,” Marnka said. “But I’d wager the orindle Pradat told the Powers about you. You’d be a good candidate for breeding. Oh, yes, they’d like to get a hold of you, I’m sure.”

“Too late for that,” I said with a bent sort of satisfaction. I might be forced to the fields or roosts for another season or two of growing, but the thirty-four dots on my wrist meant that my last Resonance was already past. Unless…

“Pftt,” Marnka said. “You’re a fool.”

She jumped to her feet and stalked over to where I sat. She loomed over me, a dark shape. “Who are you?”

I shrunk away from her. “You know the answer. I am Khe.”

“And what is that? A frightened runner? A timid doumana seeking only to cower in the hills until her time runs out? A sad soul longing for her commune and the comforts of ordinary life?”

I stared at her, and then hung my head. “Yes. All of those things.” I snapped my head up. “And no, none of those things. I left Lunge to find the orindles in Chimbalay. In hope that they might give me back my life.”

I felt Marnka’s breath on my skin. “The orindles have cures for many ills.”

My spots flared greenish blue, the color of hope.

“On the streets,” Marnka said quietly, “doumanas talk. If you listen, you hear things, learn things you’re not meant to know.” She picked up my hand, pressed it to her mouth, and set it down gently. “You must go to Chimbalay. It is your only chance.”

***

When I woke in the morning, Marnka had gone. She’d fixed a meal of cold mélange for me. I could hardly eat it for the nervous twists and kinks in my stomach. She’s also heated melted snow water, which I used to clean up my clothing and myself as best I could. When I was done, I didn’t look nearly so raggedy.

I left my sled and most of my goods for her—keeping only the spear and one of the two dull knives. The rest I wouldn’t need in the kler, and she could use them. I lay the firestarter on top—my special gift to her.

I was foolish to hang my hopes on Marnka’s vague thought that the orindles could cure me. Still, I clutched her words to my heart as I walked the ice-patched wilderness toward Chimbalay. Perhaps I was mad as a babbler to believe her, but I’d convinced myself that she spoke the truth—the orindles could save my life. Believing is easy, if you want to badly enough.

A sharp whistle cut through the air and was answered by another a short distance away. My neck burned where my spots flared muddy gray with fear.
Beasts
. I looked over my shoulder. A pack had caught my scent. Three. Four of them, judging by the whistles. Maybe more were hidden behind the low hills. The beasts were far enough behind that I might make it if I ran fast. If I didn’t slip on the ice. If the gates of Chimbalay were open.

I ran as fast as I could, my eyes on Chimbalay’s gate. My heart pounded in my chest as if it might burst. I could hear the beasts calling to each other, making their plans to catch me. One sped past me and turned, trying to drive me back towards its companions.

A sudden wind seemed to rise, tearing across the plain. My cloak was nearly torn from my shoulders. Fearful, I glanced back and saw the walls and buildings of a corenta sliding across the icy plain. My heart beat faster. Corenta or beasts—which was more deadly?

The sound of the raging wind grew louder. The whistles of the beast changed, coming faster. The calls came so quickly together that they were almost a continuous sound—one voice springing from seven points, fighting to be heard over the wail of the rising wind in the still air.

Anxiety made me slow and look. I had to know what the beasts were doing. One and then another beast stopped, staring at the corenta rushing across the plain. The mobile trading village hovered a hands-breath above the land, streaming toward the open space between the kler and me, the way vehicles moved. It was close enough that I could make out the outer wall and some of the buildings behind it.

The beasts had stopped to stare at the corenta as well. Their whistles changed to fast, high-pitched clicks. One threw back its great shaggy-feathered head and howled. The beasts feared the corenta as much as I did.

I turned and ran.

The wind roared. The corenta slid across the valley. The beasts wailed and scattered. I would have run away from the corenta too, if the safety of Chimbalay were not at hand.

I ran and ran and reached the closed gates of Chimbalay before either the beasts or the corenta caught me. I pounded on the gates, and they swung open. A deluge of doumanas poured out, sweeping me away. I pushed and shoved and sidled and swore and made my way past them. Into Chimbalay.

The place of the orindles.

Chapter Fourteen

CHIMBALAY KLER

PRESENT TIME

There are secrets in the sky

And whispers underground.

--Tales for Hatchlings

The buildings of Chimbalay rise in front of me—black-glass towers reaching toward the sky. I stare transfixed. Chimbalay’s doumanas swarm around me like water around a stone. One bumps into me and I am nearly knocked off balance, but she doesn’t apologize. Around her neck she wears a thick, white collar. They are heading for the corenta.

A hand seizes my shoulder from behind. I whirl and see a red-orange faced doumana in a fur-trimmed, hooded cloak, a white collar on her neck.

“Are you recently emerged, Sister?” she asks. “If you’re not heading for the corenta, you’d best get out of the main path.”

“Thank you,” I say and duck my chin and hurry off, making my way up a stretch of open dirt behind the backs of one and two-level glass buildings. Now that I’m close, I see that the glass isn’t truly black, but a very dark gray. True black wire, as thin as a single hair from a hard-furred beast, form a bottom-to-top grid through the walls. At Lunge, small panels like this glass captured the magnetic force of the planet and translated it into power for cookers, water and room heaters, and irrigation pumps. What is in the kler that it needs so much power to run?

The street is full of doumanas heading toward the gate. I’d cleaned up as best I could before leaving Marnka’s cave, but I feel conspicuous among these kler doumanas in their fine cloaks and foot casings. There is little room between the structures, but I squeeze between two of them and hide. After dark, it will be easier to move. Then I will find the research center.

I must have been mad to come to Chimbalay. What made me think that the orindles that caused Marnka’s insanity might be able or willing to help me? But I am here now, and every bit of me hopes the orindles will save my life. I huddle in between the building and wait.