Mary Rosenblum (11 page)

Fan’s eyes flicked instantly to the wall, and she froze, her distress a sour smell on the afternoon air.

“I … It was here only this morning, Elder Sister.” Fan bowed deeply. Frightened. “Or perhaps I was not observant and failed to it was not in place.”

She reeked of fear now, and Ahni remembered that she had an only son in the top engineering school in Beijing, only there because he was a member in good standing of the Huang family. His future was assured upon his graduation. But if his mother was disgraced … She sighed. With the limits required in order to keep the planet clean and healthy, career choices were often restricted, and family connections counted. “Have the staff search for it,” she said. “If it is return promptly, I will not need to bring it to The Huang’s attention.”

“I … will make sure it is found.” The woman flushed darkly. She bowed so deeply she nearly fell, then fled the room, stepping quickly into her sandals at the threshold.

Who had taken it? This small theft threatened to destroy her self -control.

She left her brother’s rooms, cut across the end of the courty to her own room. The weather shield was on and the air inside was deliciously cool and arid after the thick moist heat of the courtyard. Ahni pushed through the carved latticework doors and into the spacious simplicity of her room. Handwoven rugs covered the tile floor and a vase of flowers stood on the low wooden table in the middle of the room.

Pale yellow lilies, she noted absently. Her favorite flowers. But they looked strange, as did the room.
It is
the right thing
, her mother had said.
I am a stranger here
, she thought.
I am a stranger to myself
.

A bowl stood on a carved stand backed by a silk embroidery. She picked the bowl up, turned it over in her hands. It wasn’t the perfect curve of the Ming tea bowls in her mother’s rooms, but a bit lopsided.

The colors of the painted decoration–a simple mountain and village in browns and greens – was faded, as if mist shrouded the landscape.

Four thousand years ago, someone had shaped this piece on a primitive wheel, squatting perhaps beneath a rough shade-roof of poles and thatch. What had that long ago man thought about? The rains to come? A marriage, a birth? She ran her fingertips along the rim of the bowl and for a second felt the ghostly touch of his fingertips against hers as he shaped that rim. And Koi? She smoothed a tiny roughness where the glaze hadn’t fired perfectly. What would he feel if he touched this bowl? Anything?

Would those millennia of lives matter to him at all? Would they even be real to him? Unbidden, Dane’s face appeared in her mind. They were his children, Koi’s people. She suddenly wished she could tell him everything that had happened here. He might see what was so hidden to her. He might understand her mother’s cold rage.

Feeling utterly alone, she stripped off her singlesuit, wrinkling her nose at the smell of travel. Dropping it into the split-willow basket in the corner she walked into her bath. The soaking pool at thee end of the room wisped steam into the air, screened from a thick planting of grass bamboo by lacquer latticework.

“Local winndows open,” she commanded and the rich green scent of the garden scent rolled over her as the weather shield shut off.

She stood under the wide shower head, the water washing away the grime and adrenaline sweat of the day, sluicing it across the ochre tiles. She sank into the soaking tub, closed her eyes with a sigh, not wanting to think about Xai, about her mother’s terrible, cold words. She heard the outer door open, the whisper of feet on the carpet … came halfway out of the water, muscles tensed before she recognized …

“Tania?” Ahni gasped, then laughed aloud as arms went around her neck, and a river of tawny hair smelling of coconut and ginger tumbled around her face.

“Boo!”

Just like … the old days. Ahni’s heart leapt at that English sylllable, but there was pain in that leap, too, and confusion as this moment and the last time this had happened overlapped, folding months and years between them. “What are you doing here?” She twisted around to smile up at Tania’s broad, unselected Dutch Indonesian face. “I didn’t know you were here! My mother didn’t tell me.” She used English because Tania had always been better with English than Mandarin and couldn’t handle Old Taiwan speech at all. “Did you quit the monastery?”

The words spilled from her heart, and the moment they emerged she regretted them. “I’m sorry.” Ahni looked away. “I–it was automatic. It’s just … I haven’t seen you in … years.”

“You know where I live.” Tania said the words with a determined lightness. “You’re still soapy.” And she shoved Ahni’s head under the water.

Ahni came up sputtering. “Ha. Even a Daughter of the Gaia can get wet!” She reached up and tumbled Tania into the pool, her shift ballooning around her, filled with trapped air as Ahni caught her on her hip so that she didn’t bruise herself on the pool’s edge. Tania laughed and tried to duck Ahni, got ducked herself and came up laughing, her fair hair plastered to her face, a wave of warm water sloshing over the edge of the pool, splattering like rain onto the grass bamboo beyond the screen, startling the small ground-scratching birds there. For an instant they were kids together again, wrestling breast to breast, the thin wet cotton of Tania’s shift the only barrier between them. Tania’s nipples, dark as her eyes, hardened beneath the thin gauze and for a moment, as her eyes met Ahni’s, her arms tightened around her, her belly and breasts hot against Ahni’s naked skin.

Ahni tensed, then turned away, Tania’s hands falling from her shoulders.

“I’ve missed you.” Tania sat back in the pool, pushing wet hair the color of old straw out of her eyes. “1

was sorry when you left to oversee the European concerns.”

“I’ve been back here to visit.” Ahni stepped out of the pool, water sheeting from her onto the tiles to drain away into the bamboo garden. “Did you come to see your father?”

“I came to see you,” Tania said softly. “Your mother told me. That you were in danger.”

“My mother?” Another newness here. Ahni reached for one of the soft cotton towels hanging on the wall. “I … am surprised.”

“Oh, we’re friends, Ahni.” Tania laughed as she stripped off her wet clothes and perched naked on the edge of the pool. “She knows I’m no threat, now. Did you kill him? The person who killed your brother?

The one your father sent you to kill?”

“No.” Something was wrong here. Ahni threw the towel onto the floor near the pool, crossed to the closet and pulled out two silk shifts, one blue, one sea green. She tossed the blue one to Tania who now stood arms akimbo beneath the blast of warm dry air from the dryer. “Xai’s not dead.” Her voice quivered in spite of her control as she pulled this shift over her head. “My mother … I don’t understand.”

“Tell me.” Tania’s arms went around her and this time, they offfered only comfort.

The words tumbled out. Xai. Her plea.

“You don’t see it, do you?” Tania murmured, her cheek against Ahni’s hair. “What your mother gave up?”

“What has she given up?” Ahni pushed away, wiped tears with her forearm. “She’s one of the best-known artists on the planet.”

“She gave up power, Ahni.” Tania stroked Ahni’s hair back from her face. “Before she married your

father, she was nearly his equal in the families. But after … ” Tania shrugged. “The Huang has a very traditional Chinese ideal of ‘wife.’ Do you really think artistic success would outweigh loss of her power?”

Ahni recalled her mother’s bitter words. “I never considered it,” she said slowly. “She never seemed …

unhappy. How did you find all this out?”

Tania laughed and shook her drying hair back from her face. “I wanted to find a reason for blackmail,”

she said. “To punish her for coming between us. Instead, I found a woman I could admire. She anderstands our goals, Ahni.”

Our. The Gaiists.

Ahni sighed and ran both hands through her cropped hair. “Let’s not go there.”

“We’re changing things, Ahni. Us. The Gaiists.” Tania came up behind her, put her hands on Ahni’s shoulders. “You don’t hear about it in the media because we don’t want you to hear about it. But we are.

What is your father doing but making money? I know you think we’re a bunch of ostriches with our heads in the sand but that’s just because we don’t draw attention on what we are doing. We–our planet came close to the edge a couple of generations ago. The sea was dying, the land was dying. And now we pat ourselves on the back about how much progress we’ve made, but it’s not enough. We still pay attention to our human wants first. She must come first, the Mother who gave us birth.”

Tania drew a slow deep breath, her nipples brushing Ahni’s shoulder blades. “Humanity hasn’t really evolved. We came down from the trees as apes and our technology froze us as a species, even as it made us comfortable. We have stopped, Ahni. We are a dead end. If we want to move beyond that, we need to be in balance with our Mother. We help the process along, help Her, one small act at a time. The oceans are coming to health again and the animals are coming back. Bird watchers have reported loons in Canada, and lions walk the savannah in Africa. They were extinct, Ahni. With Her power we brought them back to life. Six years ago, when I left for the monastery, you almost came along. Do you remember that?”

But not because I believed. Ahni looked away.
Because I loved you
.

Fanatic. It was so easy to dismiss her, but Ahni thought of Dane, the fervor behind his words when he spoke of Koi’s people. “So what should I do, Tania?” Ahni closed her eyes. “What do I say to my mother?”

“Xai chose his path.” Tania’s breath tickled her ear. “Let him walk it. Become your father’s heir. You will be a better leader for the families than he is. You will give your mother back the life she gave up for you.”

Ahni shivered as Tania’s lips brushed her neck. “Don’t,” she whispered. Shivered again as Tania’s tongue traced the corner of her jaw. “That’s over, Tania.” She stepped from beneath Tania’s hands.

“Ahni? Daughter, are you there?” Her mother’s voice. Urgent.

Tania sprang back, was examining the antique bowl as her mother appeared in the doorway.

“Your father has arrived.” In the wash of moonlight and floods tuned to simulate moonlight, her face looked taut and expectant. “He flew directly back when he … was informed of your arrival. Tania, please excuse us? This is a family matter.”

“Of course.” Tania bowed and a look passed between the two women.

“At least you had time to wash and dress.” Her mother took her arm and escorted Ahni along the paths of river-polished stones.

To Ahni’s surprise, a dinner waited, not in his private dining chamber, but in the banquet hall, normally reserved for visits and special occasions. Her father waited, hands clasped behind his back, head tilted back to study a scroll from tlle Forest of Stone Tablets in Xi’an, a hand rubbing from one of the stone texts kept there, blackkened with ink, a chiseled archive of the evolution of Chinese writting over thousands of years. History, she thought. What would we be without its weight? Thought again of Koi.

Ahni studied her father’s rigid shoulders, seeing Xai in the curves and planes of his flesh, aware of her mother’s tension.

“Your daughter is here,” her mother murmured.

Ahni bowed.

He returned her formal greeting briskly. At his nod, one of the house servants began to carry food to the table. “We’ll eat,” he said, and it was a command.

The kitchen had done a very good job on short notice, Ahni thought absently. She nibbled at the small dishes of bamboo tips with sauce, fresh green soy beans, and tiny fried fish with chilis. It wasn’t banquet fare, but the steamed fish sliced artistically and layered with thin squares of fried bean curd, and the dish of braised pork with white fungus were special for a family dinner. Ahni, starvving an hour ago, picked at her food, her appetite vanished. Her mother ate calmly, she noticed, her eyes fixed on her food. The meal ended with clear lotus seed soup, seasoned lightly with sugar. It was only then that he pushed his bowl away, drank some tea, and faced his daughter. “Have you fulfilled the task 1 gave you?”

Ahni looked down at her tea cup, aware of her mother’s attention like a prodding fingernail in her back.

“I did not kill my brother’s killer,” she said carefully.

“And yet you returned.” His palm slammed down on the table. “You have turned your back on our family honor. You are worthhless. Less than worthless.”

His rage would have stunned her, only days ago. She had seen, felt, that same rage as her brother flung his cup across the orbital hotel room. Anger scalded her.
My mother is right
, she thought.
This is
between you and Xai
. She had not decided about what she would and would not say. She decided now, pressed her lips together and bowed her head.

“I have not prepared you adequately.” Her father’s voice shook with anger. “This is my failing. But I will make amends for this lack on my part. I am posting you to our southern station.” The Huang rose to his feet, staring down at her. “You will leave for our main factory ship,
The Soo Li
, in the morning. I will contact our manager there. You will replace him to oversee the krill harvest. He will reeturn on the flight that brings you there.”