The Color of Distance (45 page)

As a result, Juna found herself thinking more often of home and the people she missed. She began spending more time alone, sitting on the edge of the cliff staring out at the ocean.

She was sitting on the cliff, watching the lizard-headed seabirds wheeling against the setting sun, and thinking of home when Ukatonen came up and squatted beside her. He picked up a handful of pebbles and began pouring them from one hand into the other.

“Moki is worried,” he told her. “You spend all your free time dreaming of your home. It scares-him.”

Juna looked away, staring out over the alien sea for a long moment. “I’ll have to go home when my people come,” she said at last. “I miss talking in my own language, eating familiar foods. I miss mating. I need those things, en. I have a—” She stopped, realizing that there was no word for “family,” or “home” in skin speech. “I have a sitik, a tareena, a village of my own. They need me. When my people come, I will go with them. What will happen to Moki then?”

Ukatonen shook his head, a human gesture, learned from her. “If Moki cannot live without you, then I will die.”

“I don’t understand,” Juna said. “Why will you die if Moki can’t live without me?”

“Because I have rendered judgment on this matter,” he told her, tossing pebbles over the edge of the cliff one by one. “I am an enkar, and when we render a bad judgment, then we are obliged to die.”

Juna looked back at the setting sun, now half sunk in the ocean. She felt as though the ground had opened up beneath her. Every time she began to feel that she knew the Tendu, something like this would happen, revealing how little she actually understood.

“I’m sorry, Ukatonen,” she said, laying a hand on his arm. “I didn’t know.”

His skin rippled in a shrug. “It doesn’t matter. If Moki cannot live without you, I will die. Your lack of understanding doesn’t alter that. What we must do is try to help Moki. The more you sit here”—he flung the remaining pebbles over the cliff—“and dream of your people, the more worried your bami becomes. You are neglecting your bami, and it must stop.” He stood, and offered her his hand. She took it and he pulled her up.

“But what will we do about Moki when I have to go?”

Ukatonen stared at her for a long moment, his eyes cold and distant. “I don’t know. Moki is your bami. You are the one who must find a solution.”

Moki adjusted his backpack as the others waved goodbye to the villagers of Lyanan. He was glad to be leaving. Lyanan represented failure and loss to him. He had failed to be adopted here, and it was here that he would lose his sitik when her people came back to claim her. The new creatures had looked like swollen corpses in their puffy white suits. It was hard to believe that Eerin had been one of them.

Eerin had shown him pictures of the new creatures on her talking stone. It was called a
computer,
he reminded himself, spelling out the word in Eerin’s skin speech on the inside of his arm. Out of their suits, the new creatures,
humans,
looked perpetually embarrassed or surprised. Eerin had told him that they didn’t have skin speech, that they were always the same color.

She showed him a picture of herself, before Anito’s sitik had transformed her. It was a stranger who stood there, her body concealed by finely woven wrappings in bright colors. The things they wore on their body were called
clothing,
and were made out of
cloth.
There were two people with her in the picture, her
brother,
and her
father. A brother
was like a tareena, only their sitik
(father)
had two bami at the same time, instead of one after the other, as was decent. And they usually had more than one sitik at a time; sometimes several adults took care of each other’s bami, which they called
children.
It was a strange and confusing world. How could Eerin want to go back there?

Perhaps, he hoped, her people would forget, or their
starship
would get lost on the great sky ocean, and Eerin would be able to stay here. He liked Ukatonen, he was kind and funny and a good teacher, but Eerin was his sitik, and no one could replace her. She had been so strange at Lyanan, wanting time alone, listening to her
computer
make noises, and sometimes noises and pictures at the same time. Sometimes she would make strange noises as she listened to the
computer.
Other times she would sit on the edge of the cliff, her skin grey with sadness, staring out to sea. If he tried to distract her she would ignore him, or worse, order him to go away.

He was glad they were leaving. Once they were away from Lyanan, perhaps she would start behaving more normally. He was eager to head back to the safe familiarity of Narmolom.

But instead of heading north toward Narmolom, they turned south along the coast.

“Where are we going?. Moki asked.

“We’re going to visit the enkar,” Ukatonen told him.

“Why?” he asked.

“If we headed straight back to Narmolom, we’d get there less than a month before mating season. We’d only have to leave again when mating starts. I’d rather let Anito have some time alone in the village before she has to leave. Besides, you and Eerin are disrupting the harmony of Narmolom. It would be better to visit the enkar, and leave the villagers alone. It is more important that the enkar get to know you. They are the ones that Eerin’s people will be dealing with.”

“Won’t Anito be worried?”

“She knows you’re with me,” Ukatonen said.

Moki’s ears flattened against his head at the news. He liked Narmolom. Once they left with Anito, they could never return. Instead, they would be living among the enkar, who lived like ghosts and hermits, dead to their villages. Like the enkar, he would belong nowhere.

Eerin touched him on the shoulder. “I’ll miss Narmolom too, Moki.”

They headed south, away from the coast, toward the distant mountains. There was snow on the tops of the tallest mountains. Eerin told him that there was snow like that in the village of her sitik’s sitik, her
grandfather.

Moki was busy absorbing the idea that her grandfather had lived in a different village than her sitik, her father, had, when Ukatonen spoke up.

“Why didn’t your sitik’s sitik die?” Ukatonen asked her.

“Die? Why would he die?” Juna asked.

“The snow kills us. It’s too cold. We go to sleep if it gets too cold.”

“It can kill my people too, but we cover our bodies with warm coverings that keep us from getting cold.”

“How do you keep the coverings warm?”

Eerin flushed purple in puzzlement for a moment. “What do you mean?”

“The covers, they keep you warm, yes? How do they make heat?”

Eerin made that funny barking cough that she sometimes made when she was amused. She called it
laughing. “
The covers don’t make heat, en. They keep in the heat that our bodies make, the way a bird’s feathers do. That’s why there are so many birds way up north, where it gets cold and snows part of the year.”

“You’ve been in the Cold Country?” Ukatonen asked her, his skin a brilliant, incredulous pink, his ears spread so wide that they quivered. “Tell me about it!” he demanded.

They stopped there for the rest of the afternoon and the night, eating dried food from.their packs instead of hunting, while Ukatonen listened to Eerin’s tales of the Cold Country. Moki built their sleeping nest by himself. The others were too engrossed to heed him.

Moki couldn’t blame Ukatonen. The stories were fascinating. There were great, open spaces as wide as the sea, covered only by grass and bushes. Giant birds roamed these terrifyingly open spaces, eating grass or each other. They were as tall as Eerin, and weighed twice as much. You could look for many yai in all directions and see only grass and animals, no trees.

Moki closed his eyes and tried to picture the Cold Country. It was cold and open and utterly terrifying. Seeing his fear, Eerin put an arm around him, and drew him close to her warm body.

Juna drew Moki close to her. Her descriptions of the northern steppes seemed to have frightened him.

“There is a quarbirri, one of the earliest, very simple, very moving, that describes death coming from out of the Cold Country like a wall of white,” Ukatonen said, when she was through describing the steppes.

He took a simple wooden flute from his pack, stood, and drew himself up, becoming a performer. Placing the flute across his nostrils, he blew a haunting melody, discordant and tuned to an alien scale. It made the stinging stripes along Juna’s back tighten. Compared to the elaborate quarbirri performed by the villagers and by the lyali-Tendu, this was as simple and stark as a classical butoh dance.

The enkar moved with the slow, fluid grace of a tai chi master. First he was a Tendu villager, then a sudden cold wind, blowing from the north. The jungle withered and died, and then he became a group of enkar, journeying north to see what had happened. One by one, the cold struck them down, except for the last, who was visited by the spirits, who gave her a secret power that enabled her to continue on toward the end of the world, until at last she found herself staring at a wall of whiteness streaked with earth and pieces of the sky. She turned back, her spirit power failing her just as she reached the borders of the remaining jungle. She lived long enough to tell the other enkar what she had seen, that they might prepare for the coming of the great wall of death.

The story at an end, Ukatonen sat back down, clearly tired. Moki handed him a large chunk of honeycomb. Juna fumbled for her computer. She had been so caught up in the performance that she had forgotten to record it. Some part of her was relieved that the Survey would never see it. The memories of this quarbirri were hers alone. She paged to the geologic survey record. The most recent ice age had occurred about 25,000 years ago. Her stinging stripes tightened again as she realized just how old the quarbirri had to be.

“The Tendu have a very long memory,” she told Ukatonen. “According to what my people know of your world, the last wall of ice was many thousands of years old. If this story dates from that time, then it is older than any memories of my people.”

“This is not a story from the last great cold,” Ukatonen informed her. “It is much older than that. It has helped us survive four Great Cold times.”

Juna’s stinging stripes prickled as she examined the geological record. If the Survey’s record was accurate, then the quarbirri was well over a hundred thousand years old. Even if the geological surveys had overestimated the time between ice ages, the story that she had heard was older than all but the most ancient prehistoric digs. It pre-dated the disappearance of the Neanderthals, she realized, paging through a summary of human history. She shivered and crumpled up the computer, overwhelmed by what she had just learned.

“How do you know when our last Great Cold was?” Ukatonen asked her. “Your people got here only last year. How did they know what happened before they got here?”

“They went up, almost as far north as you can go into the cold country, and cut into the—” She searched for a term for glacier. “Snow mountains” was the best term she could come up with. “The snow mountains do not melt in the summer. Each year a new layer of snow falls on them. Each layer marks a year. We examined the layers, and could tell by their size what the snow was like in a certain year.”

Ukatonen pondered this for a moment. “Your people are very clever, even though they are young,” he said at last. “There is much that we can learn from each other.”

They traveled for the next two months, visiting three gatherings of enkar. Juna answered questions and described Earth and the Survey for the enkar, teaching them the Standard alphabet and some rudiments of Standard. They stayed only a few days in each gathering, but, as before, they acquired a group of enkar who followed them to the next gathering. These were soon capable of carrying on simple conversations in Standard skin speech. Soon Juna was able to delegate most of the introductory classes to them and concentrate on her advanced students.

Finally it was time to return to Narmolom. They did not hurry, even though it was well past mating season. None of them wanted to take Anito away from Narmolom. When at last they reached the village na tree, Ninto came out to greet them. She was polite, and claimed to be glad to see them, despite the mournful color of her skin.

“Anito is out distributing the last of her narey among her na trees,” Ninto told them. “She will be back at nightfall. She’s already shown Yahi everything he needs to know to replace her. We can be ready to leave tomorrow, if you like.”

“I want to make sure that you get a good farewell feast,” Ukatonen said. “Five days should be enough time.”

“As you wish, en,” Ninto said. “I will go and tell Miato that we will be leaving.”

Anito was returning to the village with a basket of fresh-caught fish, when she saw Ninto. The color of her tareena’s skin told her what had happened.

“He’s here to take me,” Anito said, going grey with grief.

Ninto brushed her shoulder. “He’s here for both of us, Anito. I won’t let my tareena go alone.”

“I wish you’d change your mind,” Anito said. “You don’t have to go.”

Ninto shook her head, rippling a denial. “Baha is ready and I’m ready. I’ll miss Narmolom, though.” Her mourning colors deepened, and she looked away. “It’s better than dying. Perhaps it’s selfish of me to want to go on living, but I do. I like life. I never could understand those who would rather die than leave Narmolom. Even our sitik. He would have made a wonderful enkar, if he’d had the courage.”

“Ilto was not a coward!” Anito blurted, forgetting to avoid her sitik’s name in her eagerness to defend him.

“No, he was very brave, but he was afraid to go on living if it meant leaving the village. He told me so himself. You were not the only one who tried to talk him out of dying. It was more than fear, though. He wanted to stay here, to be buried with a na seed in his belly, to be part of Narmolom forever. If it were only a matter of fear, then Ilto would have become an enkar. He did what he wanted, and I’m doing what I want. I only wish you didn’t have to go as well.”