The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (40 page)

“I arrived two hours ago,” Bayninan said. “A short sleep, and here I am. Fresh and fine and happy to be here in your time of need.”

Hala threw her arms around the taller woman.

“I thought I’d never see you again,” Hala said.

She pushed back the tears and the joy that threatened to overwhelm her.

“It took a long time to get myself into the representative’s good books, and
equally long to get myself enough credits to come here. I did promise I’d find you,” Bayninan said. “You do remember that, don’t you Hala?”

Hala smiled up at her. There was silver in Bayninan’s hair, but the arms that embraced her felt strong and sure.

“How many years has it been?” Hala said. “I’m old and in need of a tune-up. You, on the other hand, look distinguished and very fine.”

“You’re
not old,” Bayninan replied. “You’re at the right age.”

Hala grimaced. Trust Bayninan to pick out what Hala was most insecure about. Even when they were growing up, Hala never needed to put her feelings into words. Bayninan simply knew.

“I’ve been the right age forever,” she said. “And look.”

She tucked her hair behind her ears so Bayninan could see where the shapers had given her more connectors.

“There’s a slot at the back as well,” Hala continued. “That’s for maintenance when my receptors get foggy or some such technical thing that I don’t really understand.”

“My poor Hala,” Bayninan said. “You’ve suffered by yourself.”

“It hasn’t been all bad,” Hala said.

Bayninan smiled and leaned down to touch her forehead to Hala’s.

“Well, I’m here now and I’ll be here for as long as you need
me.”

Colorful clothing is worn by the upperclass, including the Munhawe, the Mama-oh, the Mumbaki, and the Chief of the Once-tribe. Belts carved from the teeth of the wild boar or from
the crocodile are also an indication of class status. The white woven blouse with colorful embroidery is a later addition to traditional wear. Before the coming of the Compassionate, the women of the Once-tribe
adorned their upper bodies with intricate beadworks. Breasts were displayed with pride.

The elder poet Sunyang wrote of the breast that sustains the life of the young.

“A woman’s breasts are her adornment

Honorable and pure

They are the expression of the woman’s modesty

For they are also the fountain of life.”

—Artifact Hala on Life in the Once-tribe—

It was the same spiel and yet it was
different somehow. Bayninan was here. Her heart leapt and sang, and her joy in their reunion manifested in a projection of goodwill.

“A beautiful poem,” the organizer said.

Her words pulled Hala from the haze of joy. She was on the podium and the first sequence of her presentation was over. Beside her, the organizer beamed while the audience nodded and murmured to each other.

“Yes,” Hala said.
“The poem is lovely.”

“And you agreed to show us a dance,” the organizer prompted. “Indeed,” Hala said.

How could she have forgotten? She had intended to show them the communal dance, but her heart cried out for something more.

“It will be a celebratory dance,” Bayninan said from beside her.

“Oooo …” the organizer said. She clapped her hands and her heads bobbed with excitement.

Hala stood
there, her eyes riveted on Bayninan.

“Where will you find the garb of a warrior?” she choked out the words.

“I brought my brother’s gear,” Bayninan said. “It will do just as well as my own.”

Was there a tinge of sorrow in Bayninan’s voice? Hala wanted to ask her why she had Lakay’s clothes with her, but before she could speak, the organizer swept Bayninan away.

“You must prepare,” the organizer
twittered. “How exciting and how fortuitous that you arrived on this day.”

Hala listened to the organizer’s excited announcements. She’d thought she had taken all the shock she could take in a day. But here was Bayninan looking every bit the warrior. The loincloth revealed the muscled length of her legs, her breasts were barely covered by the warrior’s vest. A blanket was slung around her shoulders
and the ivory of her belt bore the yellow sheen of age.

“I never thought I’d see you wearing this again,” Hala said.

“Two women in skirts cannot dance the dance of blanket-sharing,” Bayninan replied. “For tonight, let me be your warrior.”

Was this Bayninan? Hala wondered. She watched as her friend walked with an easy gait to the other side of the podium. She bent down and picked up a shield
and a spear. There was a smile in her eyes when she turned to look at Hala who stood there staring at her.

“Well?” There was the lift of the eyebrow and the sardonic twist of the mouth.

She’d never seen Bayninan like this before, never thought of what it meant for Bayninan to be one of the fighting women of the Once-tribe.

First, the warrior dances to show off his prowess for his chosen one.
He leaps and jumps around the fire and with his gestures, he lets the chosen one know that he has hunted for her, he has fought for her, and he has triumphed for her.

—Acts of Courtship compiled by
Munhawe Sunyang Chulipa—

It was the courtship dance. Even as her lips spilled out the words, she could not stop staring at Bayninan.

In Bayninan’s hands, the prop became a weapon. She thrust at the
ground in rhythm with the gongs. It was like watching the rite performed as it was in the days when the Once-tribe still was its own. The Warrior leapt and spun and landed in a crouch, her eyes were fierce beneath the hooked beak of the bird’s head she wore as a headdress. Bayninan was the warrior now, and when Hala met her eyes, she couldn’t explain why she suddenly felt as if she were prey.

Thrust and retreat. Bayninan’s muscles gleamed like polished mahogany beneath the domed lights. There was the flex and the give and she drew the blanket from around her shoulders to shake it out.

It was the invitation.

Hala’s hands twitched. She fed music into the air through her array: the song of the lover’s flute twined with the rhythm of the gongs. Her feet shifted. Bayninan’s eyes gleamed
at her over the edge of the blanket.

A lover’s dance, Hala thought.

She looked at her old friend in wonder, and allowed herself to succumb to the call of the gong. As she circled the imagined fire with the coyness of a maiden, she couldn’t help but think of how very right Bayninan was. What better dance was there to celebrate this moment? Here, in the shadow of the gods, she was reunited with
the one she loved the most. Bayninan’s blanket closed around her shoulders, and she turned to accept its embrace in the way a maiden accepts the invitation of her first lover.

If I opened my palms to you

Would you touch your palms to mine?

If I reached out my hands

Would you take them

Would you give me the meaning to this life?

—Song of the Maiden, Oral Records of the Once-Tribe—

Rain seldom
came to Silhouette, but it was here now. It poured down on the glass dome and spilled over into the ground beyond the domes where Silhouette’s forest thrived in an atmosphere that was alien to and yet somehow similar to the Once-country they’d left behind.

Their celebration dance reached its end. Bayninan’s hand was warm around her own. They clasped hands briefly before they parted and Hala stood
alone again. She turned to face the wall. The crowd was at her back, and she could hear the wave of whispers. From soft wonderings the whispers grew into a crescendo of awe.

This, she thought, is for the Once-tribe.

She allowed her sight to blur as she accessed her array and passed through into the memory of the veils.

Here, in the space where the dance was born, she was alone. Here was the
wind and the sky and the earth beneath her.

She paid obeisance to the sun as the song of the distant gongs coursed through her and filled the hall with their resonance. Her limbs trembled as the rhythm moved through her.

Tong-a-lit.

Her naked feet warmed the grey stone floor.

Even here, so many light years away from the Once-country, her spirit was connected to the earth and the sky. To the
remembered horizon filled with the majesty of mountains and the green, green gold of ripening rice. She raised her arms in a gesture of remembered welcome.

“Come wind,” she whispered.

Energy moved in her. It traveled through her bones, it moved through her flesh. She was aquiver with fire and lightning, bursting to the brim with the stories of beginnings.

Her ears resonated with the voices
of the tribe sisters, and the et-et-du of the Once-tribe.

The gate to the veil’s inner sanctum opened up and she walked into its familiar embrace.

Her people had wandered the Once-country long before the Compassionate came. It wasn’t that they owned the land so much as the land owned them.

They tended her with care, they plowed her fields, and channeled her waters, they built their homes from
what the land gave them and ate what the land brought forth. Season in and season out, the cycle went on in that way. Small wars were fought, alliances were made, and the Once-tribe grew as the gods meant it to. Their borders extended, their influence increased, their warriors were able hunters, and their women were strong in spirit and resilient in their minds.

The land was fecund and green
and all manner of life grew there; even the spirits thrived and made their homes in the caves hidden by falls of water, and in rocky shelters where ferns and wild orchids grew.

There was the yell of children as they sprang from cliff into deep pools of green. Green, green, and around them, the bright smell of tiger grass and wild lilies – here the pitcher plants grew in profusion and the maiden’s
slippers swung in the wind as if waiting
for the day when they would be released from the stem.

Beyond the pool of deep green, tall trees towered into the sky, and further in—

A voice called to her from the familiar green. A voice filled with melancholy and remembrance, summoning her and telling her to shed her fears and embrace what waited beyond the portals of this place.

“Sacrifice,” the
voice whispered.

At the sound of that voice, she blinked and she was back again. The hall was quiet. Sometime during the performance, she had turned to face the crowd. Now everyone was staring at her, and the look in their eyes sent a frisson of fear through her.

She had never experienced anything like this before. What had she said? What words had she chanted?

Below her the organizer’s four
heads had their eyes closed. Their mouths hung open and the multitude of hands stretched upward, open as if waiting for some gift.

“I …” her voice failed her and the crowd stirred as if waking from a deep, collective dream.

“It’s all right.” Bayninan was there again.

Hala felt suddenly tired. As if all the energy she’d stored up had been spent and she was nothing more than an empty husk.

“You did well,” Bayninan whispered. “Just lean on me.”

She was grateful for the words and grateful for her friend. She stared down at the crowd. They were wearing smiles now, but all she could think of was the look in their eyes when she’d come out of the trance. Like predators waiting for the first twitch.

She shivered and Bayninan wrapped the blanket around her.

“Here,” Bayninan said. “A pod
is waiting for us. We can go home now.”

Hala woke to the sound of Bayninan’s chanting. She burrowed deep in the cocoon of blankets and sheets, feeling as if she were young again and on the verge of a discovery.

“Et-et-doh-oh-oh, hi Bugan najawitaa-aha-aan …”

When they were younger, they followed the words of the chant, longing for the day when they would join the other chanters.

“Learn the
words,” her auntie said.

But by then the old language was so overlaid with the new that
the words to the chants might just as well have been in an entirely different tongue.

“It doesn’t matter what they mean,” her auntie replied when Hala asked what the words meant. “Just memorize the words.”

Hala had grown tired of it, but Bayninan had loved it. She remembered the serious look on Bayninan’s
face, her dedication to the exact holding of a tone and the measured beat of the chant.

Bayninan would have been a far better
Munhawe.
She would have fulfilled the duty with skill; no matter that she was not of the blood, Bayninan would have remembered the things that Hala would have forgotten without her augmentations. But the blood did not run in Bayninan.

“I love the chants,”
Bayninan had
said.
“But I love the hunt and the chase more than I love the movements of the dance.”

Even when she’d been chosen, Hala had been conscious of her shortcomings. She was not a full-fledged
Munhawe,
and yet with the implants in her body, she could fulfill that role perfectly.

Lulled by the warmth and by the sound of Bayninan’s voice, she fell back asleep, sinking into a dream of a bygone time.
Her mother stood by the fire, stirring a pot filled with warm porridge. Her mother had no grey in her hair and she was chanting as she always did when a great event was about to take place.

“Coming of age,” her mother said.

She looked up from the pot. Her smile was gentle and she beckoned with her hand to Hala.

“Come, inhale the spices,” her mother said. “The smoke will cleanse your spirit.”

“It’s just porridge,” Hala said.

“Is it?” her mother asked. “Is that all you think it is? Or is that all you will allow yourself to see?”

“I don’t understand,” Hala said.

“Come,” her mother said. “You must look deeper and understand if you don’t wish to die.”

“Death,” Hala said.

She closed her eyes and thought of death. She wondered if a dirge would be sung for her and she wondered if Bayninan
would sing the
hudhud
for her burial. Would the Compassionate even
allow it? A three-day dirge for an Artifact from the Once-tribe, for an exile from the Once-country – pain pierced her kneecap as she fell to the ground, and her eyes flew open.