The Color of Distance

Chapter 23

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.”

“There’s no point in wishing for that. My fate is to leave Narmolom before my time. I’ll just have to make the best of it.”

Ninto brushed her shoulder, and the two turned back toward home.

The village bustled for five days, preparing their farewell feast. Tinka scrubbed feast dishes. Bami and adults streamed in and out of the tree with huge baskets of food. The storeroom was ransacked for preserved delicacies.

Anito wove a funeral coffin. Because she was leaving, a tinka would be sacrificed to take her place. At least, she thought, it would be a wild tinka from the forest, not one from the village. She tried not to think about Moki, but the memories of his valiant struggle to follow them kept springing to mind.

“Rot and infestations on that bami!” Anito muttered, pushing the coffin away and pacing across the room. “If it wasn’t for him, killing a tinka wouldn’t bother me!” She grabbed her gathering sack and headed for the forest. She swung through the trees, flying from branch to branch, fleeing the image of Moki lying in the coffin she was making. Moki was a bami now, and safe from such a sacrifice, but a tinka would be killed to take her place in the coffin.

She paused, panting, beside a waterfall on the river. Someone touched her on the shoulder. It was Ukatonen.

“What’s the matter, Anito?” he asked, his skin speech pastel with gentleness.

“It’s the tinka, en. The one who will be going into my coffin instead of me. It—” She paused looking for a way to explain that wouldn’t make her sound stupid.

“It bothers you,” Ukatonen prompted.

“Yes, en. I keep seeing Moki in that basket. I know it won’t be him, but—”

“It bothers me too.”

“It does?” Anito said.

Ukatonen looked away, turning brown with shame. “It’s the new creature. She’s made me look at the tinka differently. It’s one thing to let the tinka we can’t adopt die a natural death, but this—” He paused. “I’m going to talk with the other enkar and see if we can change this.”

“But that won’t save the life of the tinka who will take my place in the coffin.”

Ukatonen clouded over with sadness. “No.”

“I could always just leave, instead of going through with the funeral 5east.”

“Would you leave Narmolom out of balance?”

Now it was Anito’s turn to look embarrassed. “I guess I can’t just leave. What can I do?”

“Try some subterfuge,” Ukatonen suggested, and then leaned forward to explain what he had in mind.

Anito flickered polite thanks as one of the elders congratulated her on the unusual design of her coffin. Mounds of funeral offerings were piled over the small body of the tinka inside it. At last the speeches were over, and it was time to weave the coffin shut. After that was finished, she and Ninto, whose coffin also held the body of a tinka, shouldered the few belongings that they were taking with them, and followed the procession to the holes where the coffins would be buried. The villagers acted as though they weren’t there. Once the coffins were woven shut, Ninto and Anito were dead to the village.

They stood off to one side, watching as the two coffins were buried near each other in neighboring sun breaks, the two tareenas as close in pretend death as they had been when they lived in the village.

Watching the villagers, Anito felt as though she really had died. There was an impenetrable barrier between her and Narmolom. Even if she returned as an enkar, the villagers would not recognize her. She would be a stranger to them. As far as Narmolom was concerned, she was dead.

Baha, soon to be Bahito, lingered a while after the others had gone, carefully arranging the branches piled on Ninto’s grave. At last he turned to leave. He paused on the edge of the clearing, and looked for a long moment at the spot where his sitik and Anito were standing. He lifted a hand in a brief, forbidden gesture of farewell, then vanished into the forest.

Anito turned to go. Ukatonen, Moki, and Eerin would fall back from the procession and dig up the tinka in her coffin and revive it. The tinka’s breathing rate was slowed so far that it wouldn’t suffocate in the short time it was buried.

Ninto caught at her arm. “Anito, I have a favor to ask you.” She was faintly brown with embarrassment.

“Yes?”

“Will you help me dig up my grave? I didn’t kill the tinka in my coffin. I-I want to set it free.”

Anito rippled laughter. “Yes, Ninto. I will help you. If you will help me dig up my coffin, and free that tinka. But if we wait, Ukatonen and the others will help us both.”

“You mean you—”

“I didn’t kill the tinka either. There’s a makino with a na seed underneath it.”

“That was clever of you. I didn’t leave anything. No tree will sprout from my coffin.” A mist of regret passed across Ninto. “I just couldn’t leave the tinka to die.”

Anito rummaged in her pack and drew out a large brown nut the size of her fist. It was a na tree seed. “It’s from one of Ilto’s trees,” she said. “I was taking it along to remember him by, but this is a better use for it. Let’s dig up the tinka and go kill something to plant the seed in.”

A soft rain began pattering down as they set to work. Ukatonen and the others arrived to help just as they uncovered Ninto’s coffin. Ninto stooped to undo the weaving, and lifted the tinka out. It was alive and unharmed. She set it gently at the base of a tree.

“It’s getting dark,” Anito said. “Let’s go hunting. The others can open my coffin.”

It was fully dark by the time they returned, dragging a large hikani bird between them. Moki was squatting beside the two tinka, watching over them while Ukatonen and Eerin finished piling the branches back on Anito’s grave. The two of them slid the ground bird into the coffin, piling the garlands over it. Ninto rewove the coffin shut, while Anito held a glow-fungus to light what she was doing. Then they reburied the coffin.

“Well, that’s done,” Ukatonen said. “We’d better go. Let’s take the tinka with us. We can leave them near the next village. It’s not likely that anyone would recognize them, but it would be better not to take that chance.”

They slung the tinka over their backs, and set off through the dark forest. Near dawn, Anito stopped.

“We’re near my sitik’s tree,” she said. “I want to visit it.”

“Go on,” Ukatonen told her. “We can wait.”

“I’ll come with you,” Ninto offered.

The young na tree rising from Ilto’s grave was now a thriving young sapling, rising toward the canopy.

“It’s doing well,” Ninto said, indirectly praising Anito’s care of the na tree.

“I hope Yahi takes good care of it,” Anito said.

“I’m sure he will, Anito. He’s a good bami. I’ve asked Baha to look after it as well.”

Anito flickered thanks. “He was a good sitik,” she added after a long pause.

“Yes,” Ninto said, putting her palm against the slender trunk of Ilto’s tree.

Anito placed her hand just below Ninto’s. They reached out with their free hands and linked, their shared sadness mingling and dissipating. Underneath Ninto’s sorrow there was an eagerness to find out what came next. Anito let that feeling flood into her, creating a seed of hope to carry inside her. She was glad that they were doing this together. It was good to have a tareena. Ninto echoed Anito’s gratitude as they slid from the link.

Day was breaking. Long rays of dawn light were turning the mist at the top of the canopy to gold.

Ninto touched Anito’s arm. “Let’s go join the others.”

Anito shouldered her pack, rested her palm one last time on Ilto’s tree in a final gesture of farewell, and turned to follow her tareena.