The Color of Distance (36 page)

One of them clasped her, and she felt her back arch further in response. She everted her cloaca, felt the male’s cloaca touch hers, and the sudden warmth of his sperm flooding into her, clouding the water around them with a chalky, bitter, musky flavor, heightening her excitement. Strange new muscles she had never felt before began to contract, drawing the sperm further inside her, toward the cluster of waiting eggs. The male released her and she felt another one clasp her. Thought deserted her; she was consumed by instinct and arousal.

She mated again and again, not knowing how many males grasped her. It was dark when she emerged from the ocean, drained, hungry, and exhausted. Her back was sore from arching it. Her belly felt heavy, full of eggs and sperm. Her cloaca throbbed with a pleasurable ache. Some part of her still wanted to arch, and be clasped again, but the feeling receded as the cool night air chilled her darkening skin.

Ninto was waiting for her on the beach. She put her arm around Anito as she emerged from the ocean, supporting her all the way to the nest.

“I’m sorry I left your food behind,” Anito said as they passed the patch of churned sand where the females had waited.

Ninto rippled in amusement. “It would have only gotten in the way,” she said, “but you looked like you needed something to hold onto this morning.”

“Where are Ukatonen and the others?” Anito asked.

“They’re sleeping somewhere else tonight. I thought you might like some time alone.”

Anito flickered her thanks. She did want to be alone to let the last remnants of her heat dissipate in sleep. So much had happened. She wasn’t ready for company, not until she had slept. Ninto unwrapped a package of fish eggs and seaweed and handed it to her. Anito took a huge bite.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” Ninto asked.

“Ask me tomorrow,” Anito said, chewing her food. “I’m too tired and hungry now to think straight.”

Laughter rippled across Ninto’s chest. “I know how you feel,” she said. “I once did a sea-mating, when I was young. It’s much more tiring than mating among the villagers, but it is a lot more intense.” Blue-grey nostalgia rippled briefly over her. “I enjoyed it, but I like mating with my own people better.”

A mist of regret clouded Anito’s skin. “I wish that I could have mated at Narmolom this time.”

Ninto brushed Anito’s shoulder with her knuckles. “Don’t worry, you’ll have many years to do that.”

Anito looked away, grey with sadness.

“What is it?” Ninto asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t have that much time left in Narmolom. Ukatonen is going to take me away to become an enkar. I’ll have to leave Narmolom in a year or two.”

Ninto laid a hand on Anito’s arm. Her skin was still for a long moment, dulled with sadness.

“Would he— Would Ukatonen take me in your place?” she asked at last.

“No, Ninto,” Anito said, deeply moved by her tareena’s offer. “I couldn’t ask that of you. Besides, he wants me.”

“Why?” Ninto asked. “Is it the new creature?”

Anito flickered agreement. She looked away, overcome with sorrow and anger at her fate. “He thinks the new creatures are too important for me to remain in the village,” she said, turning back to Ninto.

“But it isn’t right. You’ve only just become an elder. If he took me, it would make more sense. Baha is ready to become an elder. Let me as! Ukatonen to take me instead.”

“No,” Anito said. “I promised myself in exchange for a judgment or whether Eerin could adopt Moki. Besides, I think he’s right. The new creatures are important. If you could have seen what they did at Lya-nan—” Anito shook her head and looked away. “They need someone tc bring them into harmony, before they cause more harm. No one else knows Eerin like I do, like Ukatonen does. But—” she added, looking back at Ninto, “I don’t want to. I want to stay in Narmolom. If I had a choice, that’s what I would do, but it would be a selfish choice.”

Ninto turned away for a long moment. “I admire your courage,” she said at last, “and your devotion to duty. If there’s ever anything that I can do to help you with this, just ask me.”

Anito flickered acknowledgment and thanks. They clasped hands and Ninto slipped off into the darkness. Anito settled herself in the nest, piling leaves over her tired, aching body and fell asleep thinking of her tareena.

Juna watched Ukatonen lead a small group of land-Tendu males down to the ocean to mate with the females of the sea people. Yesterday Anito had mated with the sea people for trade goods. Today she lay in exhausted slumber. This sudden flowering of alien sexuality disconcerted Juna. They had seemed so sexless. Now they were suddenly bartering sex for trade goods.

She shook her head. The theoretical xeno-anthropology text on her computer had told her that alien contact was a continual process of discovery and reevaluation, but she hadn’t realized how often she would be reevaluating everything. She was tired of surprises. She picked up her gathering basket and digger and motioned to Moki. They needed breakfast, and there was no one but themselves to gather it. Fresh seafood was a pleasant change from raw fowl and reptile, but she missed the fruit, honey, and greens that made up so much of the land-Tendu diet. Their honey had been traded away for seaweed, salt, and other trade goods. Fruit was scarce on this small island. They could only have one piece a day.

They reached the beach, and walked along, the waves washing past their ankles. Moki was watching the sand intently. Finally he nodded. Juna set the basket down, and followed his gaze.

He touched her hand and she turned to look at him. “See all the bubbles coming up from the sand?” he said. “That’s where the shellfish are.” He stood over a cluster of small holes in the sand. “They can hear you coming. You have to stand very still and wait for them to forget about you.”

They waited while several waves came and went. At last he said, “Get the sieve ready.” Juna nodded and held the sieve out.

When the next wave began to recede, Moki exploded into motion, digging furiously, throwing sand into Juna’s high-walled sieve until the next wave came flooding in. Juna submerged the sieve in the wave and shook it, letting the sand wash out, leaving behind a collection of small beach stones, and whatever was living in the sand. Moki came over and helped her sort through the contents of the strainer.

“Good,” he said, hording up an odd-looking shell segmented into eight parts. “This one’s delicious, and we got four or five of them. Do you want to show it to your talking stone?”

“That’s all right, Moki. I think it’s seen that kind already. I found a dead one on the beach the day after we got here. Thanks, though.”

It took only five digging sessions to gather enough shellfish for a decent breakfast. They gathered and washed some seaweed, and carried their food back to the nest, where Anito was still sleeping.

They had the food all ready when she woke. She stretched slowly and painfully. Moki handed her a gourd full of fresh, clear water. Anito poured it over herself with a slow, vivid flush of intense turquoise.

“Thank you. That feels wonderful!”

“We got breakfast for you,” Juna said, holding out a leaf piled high with shellfish and seaweed.

Anito flickered thanks. “You’re a good teacher, Moki,” she said.

Moki looked away, darkening with embarrassed pride.

Anito touched Juna’s hand. “And you learn quickly. Thank you.”

Juna looked down, pleased and surprised by the compliment.

“Thank you, kene. Eat. You must be hungry after all you did yesterday.”

Amused agreement flickered over Anito’s skin as she popped a tenta-cled sand-squid into her mouth, sucking in the squirming tentacles. Juna smiled at the sight.

They finished breakfast in companionable stillness. Then Anito sent Juna and Moki off, instructing them to enjoy themselves for the rest of the day.

“Tomorrow the hard work begins. We have to process all of the seaweed that the lyali-Tendu harvest for us.”

Juna and Moki spent the morning exploring the small, rocky island. They sat in the trees and watched the mating Tendu leap and dive, explored the sea caves where the sea Tendu stored their trade goods, and went swimming in a freshwater inland pool.

In the afternoon, Juna recorded some of the endemic island wildlife and updated her linguistic and ecological notes. There was so much to write about. The two or three free hours she had each day were not enough to adequately document everything. Now she was going to have to help dry seaweed. She sighed, wishing there were more hours in the day.

“What’s wrong?” Moki asked.

“Nothing. There’s just so much to do, and never enough time to get it all done.”

“Let me help,” Moki offered.

Juna shook her head, brushing her knuckles affectionately across his shoulder. “Thank you, Moki, but there’s nothing more you can do. I have to teach these talking rocks so that they can remember what I learn and tell it to my people.”

“Show me how to teach them. I’ll help you,” Moki said, blazing with eagerness.

Juna shook her head, thinking of the Contact Protocols. “There’s so much to learn. It could take years.”

“But I’ll be your bami for many years. Teach me,” he urged “You need help. The Tendu need help. Teach me. I am your bami. I learn from you and help both our people.”

Juna stared at Moki. Time and again he surprised her with the depth of his understanding. Her bami was not a child. Furthermore, he was right. The Tendu were facing a major change, and they needed all the help they could get. Moki could be extremely useful as a translator. Still, it would involve a further breach of protocol, but— She looked at Moki. She had already broken and bent so many of the rules, adopting him. What would one more matter?

“All right, Moki. I’ll teach you.”

Moki sat in front of her, ears wide and ready to learn. Juna realized that she didn’t know where to start.

“We’ll start tomorrow. I need to think about
how
to teach you.”

Moki nodded, and took her hand. Juna wadded up her computer, and the two of them went swimming.

The next day, the sea Tendu began hauling nets full of seaweed up to the beach. The land Tendu washed the seaweed first in salt water, then fresh water. Then they ground the seaweed coarsely between two flat rocks and tossed it into a pool of fresh water. They screened the ground seaweed out of the pool with special sieves that left a paperlike sheet of seaweed behind. The damp sheets were laid out on drying racks made from raft poles and mats. It was a long, laborious process, interrupted by frequent afternoon rains. When rain threatened, the villagers gathered the drying sheets of seaweed and carried them into the sea caves. As soon as the weather cleared, they brought the seaweed back out again.

Moki sat with Juna during the mid-afternoon break. While the rain poured down around them, Juna tried to teach him Standard. It quickly became apparent that Moki couldn’t make most of the necessary sounds. Juna wiped the rain from her face and climbed out to the end of the branch, staring out at the steady hard drizzle.

“It’s no use, Moki. It’s*just not possible. I can’t teach you my language. Your mouth won’t make the right sounds.”

“You show me words,” Moki insisted. “I learn.”

“I’ve been trying, Moki,” Juna said. “It doesn’t work.”

“I see you look at words on your talking stone. Show me those words. I learn them.”

“Reading,” Juna said aloud. “Of course!”

“All right, Moki,” she said in skin speech. “Make this shape.”

Moki learned the alphabet before the rain stopped. As they carried out the mats of drying seaweed, he practiced making the letters over and over again. The other bami stopped and stared at him in puzzlement.

“I’m learning new-creature talk,” he told them proudly.

“What does it mean?” one of them asked. It was Pani, one of the youngest bami in the village.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“How can you learn something if you don’t know what it means?” Pani wondered.

“I’m just beginning,” Moki said. “Eerin will teach me more tomorrow.”

The next day, several bami sat and watched Juna’s lessons with Moki. Today she was teaching him numbers. He quickly grasped numbers, and simple addition and subtraction, though he had trouble with the base 10 numerical system used by ten-fingered humans instead of the Tendu’s eight-fingered counting. The bami looking on learned almost as quickly. When the lesson was over, they ran off, numbers coursing over their bodies like moving tattoos. Eerin smiled at them as she returned to work.

The next day Ukatonen watched as she began showing Moki and the other bami how to take letters and combine them into words.

“What are you teaching them?” Ukatonen asked, after she sent her pupils back to work.

“I’m teaching them the skin speech of the new creatures.”

“But you don’t have skin speech,” Ukatonen said. “I thought you talked with your voice.”

“We have a way of putting our words down so that we can see them. Moki wanted to learn how to speak like a new creature. He can’t learn to talk the way we talk, with sounds, but he can learn this. He wanted to learn, so I am teaching him.”

“Anito and I should learn this too. Will you teach us?”

So Ukatonen and Anito joined the lessons as well. Then other elders joined. Soon all the Narmolom villagers began flashing simple phrases in written Standard back and forth at each other.

At first Juna became concerned that her teaching might be harmful to the aliens. Then she realized that it was a game for the Tendu. They were delighted by the shapes of the letters, and the alien grammar. Even the lyali-Tendu came up out of the ocean and sat on the beach, learning written Standard from the villagers. By the time the seaweed harvest was completed, a full-blown pidgin of Tendu skin speech and written Standard was developing. The lyali-Tendu leaped and swam alongside the rafts on the journey back to the coast, their skin a brilliant jumble of letters, words, and phrases, chosen for the Tendu’s delight in their appearance rather than their meaning.