6

The Chronicler

The day they put Socorro back in my arms I cried harder than she did. Goal had brought her sister. She took the baby back and started to walk around the bed to calm her even as she occasionally patted my hand reassuringly. Finally, after succeeding in putting her little sister to sleep, she laid her down next to me. It felt like heaven. I moved to caress Socorro’s hair with one hand and gathered one sheet up to my face with the other in a shaky attempt to clean up my face. Goal took the sheet and helped me, then climbed next to me on the other side and like a little angel laid her head on my shoulder.

When I could breathe more normally, she lifted her head and stared at me gravely, but I didn’t dare turn away.

“You won’t do it again, right?”

I shook my head, echoed back, “I won’t do it again.”

She didn’t ask me to promise. She sensed that I was serious. I felt another great wave of emotion wash over me. I choked out, “I didn’t think about you. I’m sorry.”

She put her head back on my shoulder and let it go at that. I leaned over and kissed the top of her head, repeating, “I’m sorry.”

A little while later Doctor Peg appeared at my bedside. She surveyed us for a moment, then announced, “Ray is about to see his physical therapist now, Goali. Take your little sister back home.”

Goal lifted her head and stared the old doctor down in one second flat. “He wants her here.”

I stirred and whispered, “Obey the doctor. I’ll be okay now.” She hugged me then, long and as hard as she could, kissed me goodbye, walked around the bed, and picked up Socorro. Goal shot a haughty glance at the doctor on her way out.

“You’ve done a good job with the girl, you know,” Peg remarked while glancing at her machinery over my head. I suppressed an absurd need to thank her for the compliment, and could feel my emotions pressing around my throat again. Peg added, “She even gets on brilliantly with her father. You don’t know it, but that bodes very well for you.”

“Bodes well for me?”

“I’m assuming you want to maintain contact with them both.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh it’s too complicated to explain. It involves our family customs. Now that you are here, you will have to adapt.”

Leila had tried to communicate something like that during an early lucid period, and I had thought it applied to Goal. Socorro’s survival was still too new for me to start making plans. The day of reckoning between Leila and I was coming closer, but any thought that it would involve the children was unbearable. I repeated to myself silently, These people are not monsters. And yet a new suspicion burrowed into my mind: Did they bring me here for some kind of sick experiment, to see what stresses a human can take before he chucks it all? But no, I had it the wrong way around. I had chucked it all and they had saved my life.

The irony of that last thought sank in, and I started to laugh quietly. They saved my life, my life! They hadn’t left it at that either. The balancing act to which I had devoted well over half of that life, my love affair with heroin, had ended. The Alnese opium had served as a way-station to sobriety. Doctor Peg cast a quick glance my way, intuited that I wasn’t about to say anything, and left me alone.

For the next ten days a succession of people brought Socorro to me every day. They didn’t expect me to react to anything but the baby. I secretly observed every single one of them. They all looked human to me, even the bluer ones. They all had two legs and two arms and a human face with the same play of emotions. I had the same feeling about the two therapists who started working with me, getting me up and moving every morning until I was ready to leave my sick room.

I was taken to a bright, cheerful suite that I took to be my new prison. The huge compound, a labyrinth of rooms and hallways, echoed with the activity of dozens of people. The first day, I stayed put in hopeful anticipation that my daily visits with my girl would go on. When one of the many people I had seen in my sick room showed up with her, I could have thanked him on my knees. Controlling myself, I took the baby from him and cherished my hour with her.

On my second day in the new suite I met Dragon Ashewe. She came with Goal, who leapt up at me and clung around my neck until Dragon felt compelled to warn her, “Ray is still weak, girl, don’t go throwing him off balance!” She held out her hand to me and said, “Hello, I am Azetmir Dragon Ashewe. I am called Dragon. I want to give you a tour of this place.”

At first glance, I had assumed her to be another Alnese, but she spoke English. After taking a second look I wondered aloud, “Is that an African accent I hear?”

“It is. I learned your language in Nigeria and Ghana. I spent about three years wandering about the Sahel to round out my Earth education.”

“You’re not human?”

“I am from O’bonne. Has anybody mentioned O’bonne to you? No, I can see they have not.”

“They mentioned Kobra.”

“Yes, they would.”

We examined each other. Health and strength emanated from every pore of her, especially from her smooth dark skin and onyx eyes. Her face looked regal, a quality also mirrored in her bearing, and her long limbs and movement seemed the embodiment of grace and style. Next to her, I must have looked pitiful.

She gestured toward the door and asked, “How about the tour?”

“Yeah. Let’s.”

She led me to a big hall in the middle of the labyrinth before she began, “This is the center of the compound, the clan room. It is used for clan meetings, for alliance celebrations, something akin to weddings, for other big celebrations. Tradition dictates that it always remain at the center, so if a clan adds on rooms or apartments, someone always needs to be mindful of the proportions. Compounds traditionally have at least three more dedicated areas: the area of the keepers, something like a temple, usually in the southwest wing; a study area, a cross between a school and a multi-media library; and a garden or greenhouses of some kind. The Pallas compound has the typical roof greenhouses of Zyss in addition to four courtyard gardens. Traditional compounds usually house thirty-two apartments throughout the building. The largest ones have more than double that, smaller ones typically house eight. Everything on Alnos is done in eights or fours, you know, though thankfully, they adopted the Kobran decimal system for practical applications about three centuries ago. Ideally, the apartments are planned and added in fours, but that is one area where sticking to the holy numbers gets a little tricky. The Pallas compound in Zyss houses sixty-four apartments of various sizes. It is quite large. The clan is an old one.”

Just like my suite, the hall had a heated floor. Several skylights angled towards a central circle around which disorderly collections of seats and pillows clustered. Tapestries on one side displayed a number of people in an icy environment, while adopting more varied themes on the other. I moved to one of the central portraits on the ice-wall and contemplated a middle-aged gray-blue woman enveloped in layers of indigo fabric whipped by a fierce wind. She was standing on a cliff over a menacing glacier, pointing the way towards the rising sun.

“Pallas, the clan mother,” my tour guide informed me.

“The one who first saw Alnos.”

Goal, who had been running about us like a puppy, piped up at this point, “She saw this was God’s world for us in a dream, and then she led us here.”

“And I am with her clan now?”

Dragon nodded.

“Goal’s father is a Pallas?”

“He is now. In Earth terms, he married into the clan.”

“Leila is a Pallas?”

“Yes, though of course as an Alnese, she has three other primary lineages, a second one from her mother, and two from her father. If I remember it correctly, it’s Pallas Xhania Nambo Tsenyx.”

“Sounds like a lot of relatives.”

“Enough to fill sixty-four apartments here, and several other compounds around the planet. Although … well, Tsenyx wasn’t Alnese, so that would reduce the number a bit.”

Dragon made a move towards one of the doors, and we followed her as a more complete tour of the Pallas labyrinth followed. The compound felt like a cross between a Club Med resort and a New York neighborhood. It was obvious to me that many days would pass before I could make head or tail of the place. At the end of the tour, we ended up in a small living-dining area that Dragon identified as her own, where she prepared some coffee for all of us. I sat down on what she called a settee, a low couch-like contraption that seemed to mold itself to my body and felt warm and incredibly comfortable. Goal joined me.

“In case you have not already guessed it, I am to be your guide in other areas besides the compound,” Dragon informed me as she handed me my cup. For Goal she had prepared a bowl of milky, sugary coffee designed to lessen the ill effects of the brew.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I confessed almost absent-mindedly.

“You don’t have any questions about what you are doing here?”

I stole a glance at Goal and lowered my voice, “I am obviously here because of Leila. She could have let me go. When she wants me to know why she did what she did, she will tell me.”

Dragon sipped her coffee and pondered my reply before she said, “I don’t think that she knew what she would put you through, Ray.”

“How could she not know!” I snapped back.

“I suppose she only thought about her child.”

I didn’t answer.

She continued, “You don’t protest? But you must have questions.”

After I didn’t take her up on the offer, she added, “Remember, I am from O’bonne.”

That prompted me to examine her again. I shrugged and asked, “What’s it like?”

“Warm,” she sighed with great longing.

I couldn’t help but smile. She smiled back and said slowly, “I have more insight into your situation than you could possibly know, Ray. I would consider it a great honor to gain your trust.”

Goal meandered around the room. We watched her find her way to the windows. Something akin to cushioned seats were built into the bigger window frames, and Goal settled down in one of these nooks to stare out the tempered panes.

I turned back to Dragon, “How long have you been here?”

“It is the middle of my second year.”

“And what do you do here?”

“The simplest answer to that is, I study. O’bonne people are scholars. I’ve been studying Alnese legal systems, shadowing various people involved with it.”

I leaned back, “Hm. I’m supposed to become a chronicler.”

Dragon nodded slowly, “Yes, there is a similarity.”

Goal started to move back towards us, crawled onto a second, much shorter Alnese couch where Dragon rested, and looked royally bored.

“Honey,” I said, “you should find something to do. Or go out and play.”

She giggled, “Out? Not here! When we’re back in Eden Hamlet, maybe.”

Dragon pushed Goal playfully and admonished her with, “Girl, your uncle has never been here, and he has just come out of intensive care. What he does not need is a smart mouth.”

As usual, the reprimand washed off Goal like water off a duck. She slid off of Dragon’s settee and moved back towards mine, sat down next to me and wrapped her arms around me as if to show her who was queen here. I put one arm around her shoulders and asked softly, “Where can you go?”

Her nonchalant reply was, “To see Odd and Ill.”

Dragon protested immediately, “I don’t want you to use those names.”

“Okay, okay!” She wrinkled her nose rebelliously, but complied, “To see Odysseus and Illias.”

“Go to it, then.”

“What’s the big deal?” She felt compelled to protest, “They don’t understand it anyway.”

Whereupon Dragon concluded, “Thank Goddess for that! Off you go, girl.”

After Goal had left, Dragon turned to me and said, “I know it has only been ten days since they have restored your daughter to you, and so you are still reeling from her loss. You may think she could be gone again by a snap of somebody’s fingers. The Pallases do have that power. Some have been tempted to simply leave well enough alone now that you have recovered, perhaps ship you back to Earth quietly and keep you out of all further negotiations. Leila put an end to such ideas. I believe Leila deeply regrets that she let you think your daughter had died. And she didn’t do it because it was convenient, whatever you may hear in the future.”

“Yes, of course,” I interrupted, “She did what she thought was best.”

Dragon shook her head, replied quite oblivious to my sarcasm, “I don’t think that she thought at all. She just acted.”

More than anything, her tone of clinical detachment made me back off. “I don’t blame her for my part, Dragon.”

That caught her off guard. She examined me with renewed curiosity, then said slowly, “Could it be that this emotional firestorm burned you that clear?”

I tried to egg her on wordlessly, but she only fluttered her fingers, “All right. Leila made her decision: You are, as she says, a part of the package now.”

I rose and stepped to the same window Goal had sat by. Outside, I could see a ring of mountains. “I guess you better tell me about the package, then.”

“The package, yes. Where do I start? Well, you know that Leila has a husband, Eden.”

I shrugged, “Leila’s ex? Goal’s father?”

“Well, he is not exactly her ex. Leila and Eden entered into an Alnese alliance twelve years ago, an alliance consummated with Goal’s birth.”

“Leila’s still married to Goal’s father?”

“Well, not exactly married, no. Leila and Eden have entered into a contractual relationship establishing a tie between their Houses, or their clans, with Goal as a concrete representation of that tie. That’s what an alliance is, what an alliance does. Two clans quite literally create a blood tie through the conception and birth of a child, an alliance child. Other societies have, well, arranged marriages, so the concept is hardly new, but the Alnese have managed to come up with some unique twists. On Alnos, an alliance child forms a living link between clans. Of course a contract involves all kinds of clan politics, about who will move into which residence, how the clan that loses its member will be compensated, whether the two most directly affected parties are well matched, but in Alnese terms, the clan that gets the child wins, and that’s what it all comes down to in the end. The Alnese count lineages as on of their four wealths. They are also quite convinced that an abundance of lineages leads to an abundance of the other three, knowledge, trust, and hospitality. Concretely, that means children.”

I mapped the explanation onto the people I cared about, “Sooo, the Pallas clan won with Goal.”

“Precisely. Now an alliance is not like a marriage in that it really does not concern the couple. A good relationship is desirable, and of course, they do need to get on well enough to create the new life between them, but it is of no great importance how long their relationship lasts once the alliance has been established through the birth of the alliance child. After that, as long as they fulfill their clan obligations, the relationship between an Alnese husband and wife is what the Alnese consider “personal,” something that concerns only them and that they can arrange as they see fit. The new relationship between the two clans is what does matter. In fact, it is paramount, and an entire cycle of favors and mutual support begins between linked clans.”

I let the wheels turn a bit, then turned back to her. “And Socorro?”

“If she stays here, she could become a second link between Pallas and Thor, Eden’s clan of origin.”

“But she’s not his!”

“No matter. According to Alnese custom, any child of Leila’s cements the alliance between Thor and Pallas, even if she acknowledges an additional lineage. Leila would have to specifically disavow Eden, as a matter of fact. Pallas Eden is an important person now, and Leila obviously feels differently than she did when she left him.”

Then I have lost her! A stab of anger swept through me, followed by the same bitter taste that welled up when I contemplated my recovery. I had started using almost every week after Leila got pregnant, and after Socorro got sick, I just couldn’t function without my daily dose. Well, function was hardly the right term. I ran to my drug, started using so heavily I hovered just this side of an overdose. And yet I could stand here and feel robbed! I was so full of it.

Dragon, who had let my emotions play themselves out, rose from her Alnese settee and joined me at the window.

“Is that why they never divorced?” I asked.

“You cannot divorce two clans.”

There was logic to that statement.

“But of course, Leila didn’t conceive your daughter as an alliance child. Alnese women control conception, you know. They learned how somewhere on their odyssey through space, and ever since, Alnese children are born when Alnese women choose. And they choose to conceive a child for one of two reasons: To establish an alliance between clans, or out of love.”

Something in Dragon’s added explanation didn’t sit well. I hadn’t exactly thought that Socorro was an accident, but what other explanation could there be? Who would plan to have a child with me? I wasn’t husband material, not someone you take home to your parents. Except … well, here I was.

“I’ll take you back now. You’re supposed to have a job, and I want to get you started. The job was a lucky break, you know. It gives you a connection, and what a connection! You are working for Lady Ciani, the rulor of the planet!”

It was a bit abrupt, and I wasn’t quite ready to go back to my suite. I followed her there anyway. A short while later, my time with Socorro had arrived. I wondered who besides the O’bonne scholar would ever call her mine again.