The Color of Distance (20 page)

She touched Anito’s shoulder. “What say?”

Anito glanced at Juna, then turned to look at the chief. “Not much,” Anito said, in small patterns on her shoulder, which Juna recognized as the skin-speech equivalent of a whisper. “Glad Ukatonen is here. Says many nice things about Ukatonen, talks about how bad things are since forest destroyed. Many words, not much said.”

Anito’s summation made the chief’s address sound so much like human political speech that Juna smiled. Some things seemed to be universal.

At last the chief’s address came to an end. Green ripples of approval flickered across the villagers. Ukatonen and Anito joined in briefly.

Ukatonen waited until the villagers’ approval died away. Then he stood and moved onto the raised mound that the chief had spoken from. He waited until all eyes were on him, then launched into a formal speech. Anito provided Juna with a “whispered” translation on her shoulder.

“Greetings. Thanks for letting us stay in village, and many good things done for us.” That sentence summarized the first ten minutes of the speech.

“You ask me to
tengarra
to bring harmony. The new people have destroyed part of your forest. You want me to find a way to make Juna give your forest back. I say she cannot do this thing. She says that her people would not have done this if they had known that you were here. Also, she was not there when the forest was destroyed. Yet you want bad things done to her because your forest was destroyed in ignorance. When a fire destroys forest, or a big wind destroys forest, do you do bad things to the fire or the wind? No. In this case the new people were acting like the wind, ignorant of the harm that they caused. Your talk of harming the new creature comes from being out of harmony with the world. You must restore that harmony, but not at the cost of other people.”

Dark red ripples ran over the villagers’ skin. They were not pleased by this. A few villagers looked away, expressing their unhappiness with Ukatonen’s words. Ukatonen made a loud, shimmering sound, and the villagers’ skins became still.

“Your forest is destroyed. You must get back what you lost. I know this. Anito, whose atwa the new people are, knows this. Eerin knows this and her people know this. Eerin’s people told me that they would try to make the forest better, but we must begin to repair the forest before the flood season comes. Eerin must help. Anito must help, because the new people are her atwa. I help too. But Anito belongs to Narmolom and she wishes to return there. It would be wrong to make her stay. Here is how I have said things should be:

“Anito, Eerin, and I will come back twice each year. We will work one
pida
at repairing the forest each time we come back. I will ask other enkar to come and help as well. All obligations to the enkar will be owed by the new people. When they come back, we will talk to them about repayment.”

Ukatonen stepped off the mound, and sat down beside Juna and Anito. Juna looked around. The village was a wash of patterns and colors, some red, a few blue and green, many lavenders and purples. A mixed response, but that was an improvement over the uniform anger and hostility that she had seen before.

The head of the village got up and moved to the speaker’s mound. It stood there surveying the people of its village for a moment before speaking.

“We thank the enkar for his
tengarra.
We hope that it will bring harmony,” the chief said, and then turned and climbed up the tree.

That seemed to be a signal. The assembly began breaking up.

Ukatonen touched Anito on the shoulder. “You go upstairs,” he said, gesturing at Juna. “I come later.”

Juna followed Anito up the tree to their room. She began checking the computer’s record of Ukatonen’s speech to see if it had learned any new words. There were over a dozen new terms. Only eight of them had word-equivalents in any of the Terran languages she knew, but the computer had what appeared to be reliable definitions for almost all but one. Juna smiled. Her computer was finally beginning to put the language together. She wished she could speak the aliens’ language as well as it did.

Ukatonen came in as Juna was putting the computer away. He motioned her to sit down. Anito joined them.

“Did you understand what I said?” Ukatonen asked.

“I think so. I must work for this village twice each year one
pida
each time. You and Anito will help me. When my people come back, then they will talk to the village about how to make things better. I do not understand how long a
pida
is.”

“A
pida
is between twelve and thirty-two days long. There are eighteen
pida
a year.”

So a
pida
was a variable unit of time, roughly equivalent to a month. She would work no more than sixty-four days a year. That seemed extremely reasonable to her.

“When will we do this thing?” Anito asked. “I cannot stay too long. I must return to Narmolom before flood season.”

Ukatonen flickered agreement. “The month of Wuri is just beginning. We will work for the rest of this month. If we hurry, we can make it back to Narmolom before flood season.”

Anito flickered agreement, but Juna could tell that she was not happy about this decision. Anito’s behavior was puzzling. She didn’t seem to like Juna very much, yet she had accompanied her on this trip, and was remaining here with her. Why did Anito stay, even though she would rather be back at her village? Ukatonen seemed to think that Anito was somehow responsible for what Juna and other humans did. Why?

She touched Anito on the shoulder. “You want to go to Narmolom. Why you stay here?”

“I must stay and work,” Anito told her.

“You not destroy the forest. My people do. Why you work?”

“I must work because you are my atwa.”

Atwa was a common word, but one that Juna still didn’t have a good definition for. The computer indicated that it was either a relationship or a thing, but that was as far as it had gotten. Juna was no closer to a definition than the computer. It seemed to be an important term, and one that somehow applied to her relationship with Anito.

“What is an atwa?” Juna asked.

At that point, the conversation became very complicated, and difficult to understand. Every Tendu had an atwa, Anito said. Ukatonen corrected her. Only some kinds of Tendu did. Then there was a complex discussion between the two aliens. Afterwards Ukatonen agreed that all the Tendu did have an atwa for a while. Juna and the other humans were Anito’s atwa. Somehow Anito was responsible for what Juna and the other humans did.

Did Anito “own” her and the other humans? Was this more like a parent-child, or a master-apprentice, relationship? Juna shook her head. She wasn’t ready to ask such complex questions yet. She wanted to know a lot more about ownership and relationship terms before getting any further into this discussion. She didn’t want to agree to enslavement because of her own ignorance. Still, if Anito was responsible for her behavior, it would be wise to let Anito know that she would try to behave well, without agreeing to any kind of ownership on Anito’s part.

“I do what you say. I not make things bad for you, but I not your atwa. I am my own atwa. Understand?”

“I not understand. Everyone is someone’s atwa.”

“Whose atwa are you?” Juna asked.

“I am the atwa of Narmolom.”

“And whose atwa is Narmolom?” Juna asked.

“It is mine, and that of the other enkar,” Ukatonen told her.

“And the enkar?”

“The enkar are the atwa of the other enkar.”

“The enkar are their own atwa,” Juna said. “I am the atwa of my own people. I am not your atwa.”

“But the new people are Anito’s atwa. You are Anito’s atwa.”

“No!” Juna insisted. “I am not. I not want!”

“You not understand,” Ukatonen broke in. “You do what Anito say. We talk later, when you understand more.”

This seemed to be a reasonable compromise, for now. Juna hoped that it was clear that she was not willing to belong to Anito. She flickered unwilling agreement, then added, “I not say yes to being Anito’s atwa. Understand?”

Anito was about to say something, but Ukatonen laid a hand on her shoulder.

“Understand,” Ukatonen said. “You go to sleep now. Next day, we work hard.”

Juna wadded up her computer, washed, and crawled into her leafy bed, but she remained awake for a long time, worrying about what would become of her.

Next morning Anito woke her early. They ate a hurried breakfast, and set out with two of the villagers, scrambling along dripping wet branches through the heavy morning fog. Ukatonen stopped them, and they climbed down to the forest floor. He gestured to Anito and the two of them picked up something heavy. Juna looked closer. They were holding a ground limpet, a large sluglike creature with a thick, mottled shell the color of the forest floor. Their anomalous physiology had been the talk of the biology lab. The limpet’s skin and organs were normal enough, but the bulk of the creature was made up of enormous undifferentiated multinucleated cells with no apparent function.

“It’s a huge mass of cytoplasm, waiting to be told what to do,” Hernandez had remarked.

They carried four of the ground limpets back to the village tree, leaving them with Ukatonen. Then Anito led Juna to the bottom of the tree. The small green workers that the aliens called tinka were hauling huge dripping gourds of stinking mud from the bottom of the pool. Juna was put to work digging out giant tadpoles from the mud and tossing them back into the pool. The mud was then put into leaf-lined baskets, on ledges near the pool while the rest of the water drained out of it. It was unpleasant, backbreaking labor, and it took most of the rest of the day.

When they were done,.Anito took Juna to a clear stream to bathe, after which they returned to their room. All that remained of the ground limpets was a wooden trough full of jelly and a row of empty shells lined up against the wall like discarded shields.

Juna ate dinner and crawled into bed, too exhausted to work on the aliens’ language. Her last thought as she fell asleep was that Ukatonen had been right—they had worked hard today.

The days quickly fell into a routine. They woke, ate a hurried breakfast, and set to work. Juna found herself working with the tinka, cleaning the seeds from a vat of vile-smelling rotten fruit, rolling seeds in poorly composted dung, or hauling heavy loads of mud or seaweed. Even the smallest task was subject to correction and criticism. The compost was not properly mixed, or it smelled wrong, though Juna was unable to detect any difference. Then the thickness of the seed coating was wrong, or they weren’t drying properly.

It was horrible, frustrating work, and the villagers seemed to delight in making it as disagreeable as possible. Juna bore it as best she could, although the petty harassment sometimes made her want to scream with rage. She had no choice. Complaining would show weakness, anger was too dangerous. At night she was so worn out that she could barely finish dinner before she fell asleep. Her computer sat in a corner, gathering dust. She had no time for it now. Her entire existence consisted of meals, work, and sleep.

One day, near the end of the second week, Juna was carrying a heavy basket of compost and seaweed up a steep embankment, when she slipped and fell. Someone helped her up. Juna found herself looking into the pale green eyes of a tinka.

“Thank you,” Juna said in skin speech, touching the tinka’s shoulder.

The tinka fanned its ears open and closed in acknowledgment. The juveniles were incapable of skin speech, something that furthered Juna’s theory that they were really a different species. The Tendu treated the tinka almost as if they weren’t there at all. She doubted that any intelligent species would treat its young so callously. Were the aliens sexually dimorphic? She knew nothing about how they reproduced. She had never seen anything that could be clearly identified as courting or mating behavior. The tinka could be one of the two sexes. Perhaps they were some form of slave race or species.

Juna shouldered her load, and they started out again as though nothing had happened, but she felt that a connection had been made. She turned to help the tinka up over the crumbling remains of a fallen tree. It steadied her the next time she stumbled, saving her from another fall. She had earned a friend.

Acceptance by one tinka soon led to acceptance by all. She found herself surrounded by helping hands. They competed for her attention when the elders weren’t around. Sometimes she felt like a teacher with a class of enthusiastic ten-year-olds. If she sat down to rest, eager hands would reach out to help her take off her basket. They were constantly bringing her things: choice fruits, flowers, once even an enormous live butterfly. Its wings were a brilliant, shiny orange, edged with intense, iridescent blue, and it had a wingspan of at least thirty-five centimeters. She admired the insect’s vivid colors for a moment, wishing that she had brought her computer along to catalogue it, then let it go. The butterfly soared off into the canopy, occasional shafts of sunlight making it glow like a piece of living flame.

Just then, Anito and some of the village elders came up the trail. The tinka quickly scattered, picking up their loads. Juna, struggling to shoulder the heavy, dripping basket she was carrying, slipped and fell. None of the tinka moved to help her. Anito helped her up and tried to lift her basket. She could barely budge it.

“Why you carry so much?” Anito asked.

“They tell me to,” Juna said, gesturing toward the village elders. “So I do.”

Anito turned and said something to the elders. Juna couldn’t follow her words, but she could tell that Anito was angry. Was she sticking up for her? Whatever it was about, Anito didn’t like the outcome. She helped Juna lift the heavy basket onto her back.

“I talk to Ukatonen,” Anito said in small patterns meant only for Juna. “We find other things for you to do.”