13

The Chronicler

            What do you say to someone who has saved your life? You shouldn’t have? Especially after you first taste life again, really taste it, feel the sweetness of water on your tongue, feel cool air against your skin, feel a myriad sensations you thought you’d dulled out for good.

Leila was wary during that first meeting, wary and sorry. I could see it in her eyes, her caution, her silence. Like every other resident of this blasted planet, she walked in on me early in the morning, before I had even had time to braid my hair. What is it with these good people? Couldn’t one of them turn out to be a night owl? After a few minutes of awkwardness, we both felt compelled to talk. We started at almost the same time.

“I hear . . . ”

“So this . . . ”

She nodded for me to finish first, and I mumbled, “So this is your world.”

“It is.” She pulled a chair up and sat down. “How do you like it?”

“It’s all right.”

And as much as my father, and my mother, would have hated it, I felt myself agreeing with my grandmother: It does matter how someone looks to you. This time, stealing looks at Leila’s yellow eyes, I tried to make it not matter, and I couldn’t. I wanted to trace her body all over again, check every bone under that white skin with its faint undertone. And I had to ask, “How much blue blood do you have in your veins?”

But they don’t have blue blood; it’s red.

She volunteered her hand and I turned it up and down, staring. “Lady Ciani’s mother and my father were brother and sister, that’s why I have the same eyes. But many of the people in my family came from traveling.”

“A bunch of mutts, eh?”

“This is a planet of mutts.” After a second of reflection, she added, “Except for the heshtis who refuse to breed in. They’re so presumptuous!”

She withdrew her hand, sat back.

“What about Eden?” I wanted to know.

“What about him?”

“Well first, why does he look so European? And second, in view of his abilities, and his power, why hasn’t he slit my throat and eliminated the competition?”

“First, he is human, at least half, that’s why he looks it. Second, there is no competition.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Are you worried?”

That was the Leila I knew all right! For a second we had succeeded in dispelling the ghosts between us.

I continued with, “Who gave him that name?”

“I don’t know. I never asked him.”

Raymundo was my grandfather’s name, but I didn’t tell her that. Instead, I decided to bite the bullet, “All right, now what?”

The ghosts came back.

“I’m sorry, Ray. I shouldn’t have let you think she had died.”

I accepted the apology with an almost indiscernible nod.

I even offered her an olive branch, “Was it just one needle too many?” And I remembered our last few days on earth, Socorro hovering between delirium and coma, and me making sure I didn’t live a single conscious moment of it. I could understand Leila casting off the dead weight. In the beginning, she had announced that she didn’t really consider drugs a problem, much to my delight. Then, in the face of my steady descent from the occasional dalliance to frequent and severe binges, some of that Alnese tolerance wore off. Her protective interference (keeping both the smack and the needles clean) had become first more reflective, then more grudging.

“I didn’t think that you cared one way or the other.”

Well, I had set her straight about that.

“Now what?” I repeated.

“It’s up to you.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll have to choose. Do you want to stay with the children? Go back to Earth?”

“I left Earth before you brought me here.”

“You want to stay here?”

“Why not?” Then I asked, “How will that sit with your relatives?”

“Can’t you tell everyone here wants the baby? They’ll put up with you.”

My next question was not easy, “Is she . . . all right?”

She looked at me gravely, then said, “Peg worked hard. Now she predicts normal physical and mental development.”

I tried to communicate my gratitude without speaking it. I still hadn’t forgiven Leila, but wondered whether I had been forgiven.

“Would you like . . . to help me with my hair?”

One of Leila’s favorite morning rituals. She got up, found the brush, came to me and started. Her fingers slipped back into the familiar rhythm of untangling and brushing, untangling and brushing, separating the strands, then weaving a secure braid that wouldn’t have fly-aways after the first hour. When she was done, I put one hand on her knee to keep her next to me. I put an arm around her and tried to gather her to me, but she remained stiff and formal. And I realized that my anger wasn’t as strong as my need for something I had sacrificed to my addiction a long time ago: our comfort with each other.

I came to a decision then.

I slipped down to the floor in front of her and kneeling, I looked up, “What do you want in return?”

“I don’t know. Start by not making promises you can’t keep.”

“One day at a time, eh?”

“One day at a time.”

We stayed like until I felt her relax a little, as if she’d started exhaling again.

*

Kyet took it upon himself to introduce me to Alnese music. It had a vocal emphasis, a surprising fact considering the possibilities of their technology. Picking up on my reaction, he explained, “It’s the climate. Music here has always been intimate, something for the clan room at night. It’s hard to have a spectacle in an enclosed space.” Made sense.

He took me to a structure at the other end of Eden Hamlet’s garden, a dance studio on top of a boat house with a view to the lake. We hooked up the base and his keystrings and jammed together. He surprised me. He obviously knew enough about Earth music to come up with some interesting riffs. “You know any drummers?” I joked as we were winding down over choctea, the local morning brew, “We could start a local band.”

He thought I was serious, “We have some percussion, but nothing like your African rhythms.”

That much talent wasn’t needed. When I told him, he caught on to my tone, and we had a good time spinning our wheels, thinking up one more implausible scenario after the other. Then, when Goal popped in, we monkeyed around a bit. Goal got into the keystrings and, with Kyet’s help, composed some ditties which I mercifully erased once she returned to the main house. Before taking off, she dropped casually, “Dad’s back.” She stayed long enough to observe the unmistakable “oh oh” cross both Kyet’s and my face.

I felt comfortable enough with him to inquire, “What is it with you?”

“He’s probably here for Az- Dragon. You?”

“I’m not all that sure he wants his wife’s lover around.”

“Oh that! Not to worry!”

“And what does he want from Dragon? She’s made it clear she hates his guts.”

“It’s the heshti problem. I’ve heard there are armed bands around now. Eden is trying to defuse the situation, and he wants her to ask for O’bonne help. O’bonne are excellent mediators. They know how to find common ground, how to fix on the one thing both parties really want, and how to get them to drop everything else and start with that. I think he’d like her to start helping now, before the O’bonne mediators arrive, because she’s got Dragon eyes.”

“What’s that?”

“All O’bonne are empathic to some extent, and with her it’s truth sense. She knows if you’re serious, or if you’re trying to hide something.”

I could see the advantage in that.

“How long has this thing with the immigrants been going on?”

“You mean with the murders?”

“No, in general.”

“I don’t know. Before, we never had any problems with travelers. Now they want our planet, but they don’t want to respect our ways. Do you think that’s right?”

“I . . .” had heard statements like that before, both in San Anto and in Berlin, but he obviously hadn’t. I didn’t think he knew how far his attitude had been taken on Earth, so I decided to waffle, “I don’t know enough about it.”

He didn’t press me.

*

Kyet informed me that Eden had not come for Dragon after all, but to take a short break from his duties after the immediate crisis of the heshti shelling had been resolved. Rumor had it that our man was closing in on at least one of the original island killers, and that he needed resting up for that next confrontation.

I don’t know what it was that I had expected. A patriarch maybe, dominating this odd familial configuration, pretending to tolerate my presence even as he was plotting my demise. Days passed and there was no sign of Eden. It was almost as if he didn’t live in his own house. At first I took that to be an unspoken message to me, and I obliged by staying out of his way. Then I realized that he had a general aversion to people, and that the only ones he suffered—and then only at appointed times and for specific activities—were the hyperactive power-packs masquerading as children in our midst. Still, when he called me up to his monk’s cell, I put off going until he sent Goal down to get me.

“Come on Ray!” It was funny seeing a child her size bundle me up all those stairs. “I haven’t been there for days.” Her eyes were bright with excitement at the prospect of invading her father’s forbidden domain.

When I stepped into his tower room, his eyes were already on me. “Here,” he nodded towards the screen, “My intelligence officer finally cracked the code.”

He leaned back just enough for me to read the intercepted missive: The Pallas Justiciar is in a secret hamlet on the southern edge of one of the glacier-lakes at the foothills of the Midient Mountains, but we have been unable to penetrate their communications. Our suspicions are that the Earthling has disappeared there as well, although we still don’t know why he was brought to Alnos. We have not been able to get the story behind his secret hospitalization, or what brought the leader of the medical society as well as Lady Ciani herself to him. Officially, he’s a chronicler. Intelligence has been put on the alert to try to uncover the real purpose of his sudden appearance and subsequence disappearance.

“You’ve stirred some waves.” Eden remarked.

“What is it?”

“One of the many messages we intercept daily.”

“From spies?”

“Something like that. For the longest time, only O’bonne scholars would come here, but ever since the climate changed, there’s been an upsurge of interest in the former Space Gypsies. Even Kobra is wooing us.”

His voice dripped with irony, but it wasn’t directed at me. I read over the intercepted message again, concluded, “I didn’t know I was important enough to get noticed by interstellar spies.”

This time Eden smiled up at me, “Of course you didn’t.”

He turned around and the screen behind him dimmed, “Actually, while I thought it might be amusing for you to read it, I really wanted to talk to you about the implant.” Goal took advantage of the opening his new posture presented and crawled into his lap. He put an arm around her and said to her in Alnese, “You’re getting too old for this, you know.”

“The implant?” I echoed.

“Something we use. To learn languages, and . . . other things. Peg sent it over, and advised that you’re well enough to receive it. It’s something like a neurochip that sets up a feed-back loop with your neurolinguistic centers. Usually, you get fluent within weeks, and become near-native within months.”

“So this would be for my Alnese?”

“Yes.”

“And it needs to be implanted?”

“It’s a neurosurgical device. We implant it close to the affected brain areas. It’s made from material that eventually dissolves and is absorbed by your body. You needn’t be concerned about any immune reaction. We have tried it on humans.”

Looking at him like that, next to his daughter, I could see a physical resemblance that her coloring obscured. Her eyes had almost the exact same shape as his, only the color was green instead of steely-gray. Her nose followed the same straight line, her lips had the same fullness.

“If you have the implant,” he continued, “that could facilitate your accompanying Dragon, Vai and myself when we return to the islands. I shall need a chronicler again, and her ladyship is happy to lend you to me if I may so impose on you.”

I broke off my examination, “Go right ahead.”

“I’ll tell the hamlet’s physician. Thank you.”

There was a note of dismissal in the last words.

“You want to stay here?” I asked Goal.

She nodded.

He tousled her hair and murmured, “I think it would be better if you join me again for practice.”

“Okay.” She stood up and reached for my hand. As I later observed, Goal didn’t argue with her father. She didn’t argue with her mother, either. Just with me.

Practice was a daily ritual of his, usually together with Kyet. That night, I decided to accompany Goal and observe them.

We reached Kyet’s dance studio—which doubled for Eden’s practice sessions—right after they had started. They both wore skin-tight exercise garments that looked like a cross between spandex shorts and scuba diving skins, leaving legs and arms exposed. Kyet sported the powerful, yet lean musculature of a dancer, and moved with the kind of controlled grace I associated with that avocation. He was well matched by the older man, who looked, if anything, even stronger and more powerful. Kyet had tied his unruly curls back and wore a bright, multicolored headband around his forehead. Eden wore a simpler headband with the same stylized hunting bird I had noticed on his Justiciar coat. Tatooed blue wings spanned the length of each arm, with the final, longest feather pointing to each wrist.

They circled each other. Again, I admired the economy of every step. When Kyet lunged at Eden, the latter barely moved back, yet the youth found himself flying right past the older man. He had to make an obvious effort to stay on his feet.

“You gave that one away,” Eden evaluated coolly.

Kyet’s next attack was more effective. The men locked into a wrestling-like pose. Kyet pushed a leg under one of Eden’s and struck him off balance. Even as the older man was falling, though, he managed to land a painful blow on the younger’s midriff, and Kyet doubled over just long enough to let go of his quarry.

“Better,” came Eden’s judgment.

He followed up on it by pulling Kyet towards him, spinning him around and almost getting him down on the floor, but the youth broke Eden’s grip and twisted out from under him.

They circled each other again.

“Knives?” Kyet proposed.

Eden shrugged.

They went to a little table next to Goal and me, and each chose a weapon reminiscent of the one I had seen Eden use the day of Kuan Kim’s judgment. The next few thrusts and parries held an extra note of excitement. Each man was more careful, yet at the same time Kyet showed a grim determination to score points. He gradually grew bolder, slicing ever closer to Eden in his attacks. Sweat and heavy breathing started to permeate the studio. During a moment taken to adjust headbands, I heard Eden mutter, “Keep it that serious.” I saw Kyet nod in return.

The next time the two locked onto each other Kyet successfully used his leg trick to tumble Eden, who rolled off barely in time to miss the blade directed at his chest. He got back to his feet slowly, watching every move. Several near-misses followed, with either one or the other man managing to command an advantageous angle for a fraction of a second. The two knives even met once, and Kyet’s quicker twist drew blood from the older man’s hand.

After one more successful stratagem tumbling Eden to the floor, Kyet pounced again, but this time Eden was way ahead of him, so that Kyet found himself knifing empty space. The older man twisted into position behind the younger in the blink of an eye, shot one side-kick at the back of Kyet’s left knee, and grabbed his hair as he went down. I heard what sounded like a muffled oath. Eden snapped Kyet’s head up and placed his knife at the exposed throat. Kyet went rigid, then, as if to signal surrender, slowly relaxed under Eden’s knife. The victor removed the knife from the young man’s throat, “The hair really gives me an advantage, you know.” He said it as if to apologize.

“Never seems to give you one with my father,” came the cocky reply.

“True.” Eden held out a hand and I thought I could see Kyet weighing one last trick in his mind, then casting the thought aside. Eden looked amused, helped him up.

“You know, if you are really serious about being matched for the duel, you ought to call him back,” he proposed, stretching himself back into shape.

Eden rolled his own shoulders, “Not possible just now. He’s in deep ice.”

Goal grabbed two towels and walked out to them. “Time for my lesson!” she reminded Eden. The men took the offered towels and sponged off the sweat on their faces. Kyet twirled around to the other end of the studio and came back with a small, hand-held apparatus and a bandage for Eden. The little machine hummed briefly and the blood disappeared from Eden’s hand, then Kyet pressed the bandage on. “Ask your uncle if he’s interested,” Eden told Goal in English with one look in my direction.

I was, but it could wait for a one-on-one with Kyet. He came over and took Goal’s place next to me. I shook my head slightly.

Seeing Eden with Goal on that dance floor revealed more about their relationship. I could tell they were in the beginning stages of the training he had given Kyet, the end result of which had just been demonstrated. He was focusing on what he repeatedly called “body awareness,” teaching the “basic eights,” a Tai-Chi like routine as a centering preliminary to the faster, more precise steps of the fighting dance. Goal was her usual semi-cooperative self, and I had to admire Eden’s gentleness. She was awkward, impatient, eager to skip back into one of her more hyperactive modes. He demonstrated some of the basic steps again and again, waiting each time until she was ready to imitate him. He finally got her to perform a few of the connected steps, “Breathing, honey, breathing,” he murmured soothingly when she was about to burst into an excited shriek to celebrate her accomplishment. She held in the outburst, continued to breathe in rhythm with her father. Gradually, her focus increased. She would reach a centered state soon.

“Do you continue with her when he’s not here?” I asked Kyet.

He nodded, “But with us it’s irregular. She’s much more disciplined with him.”

It sounded as if Eden and Kyet were reprising a pattern Leila and I had established: Goal cooperated with the first, and seemed to relax more with the second. That thought gave rise to a deep satisfaction within me, which I did not examine too closely. And it alerted me to a jealousy I had not anticipated and was not ready to deal with.

Eden worked with Goal for an hour, and then we all sipped the customary choctea to wind down before we made our way back to the house.