The Color of Distance (32 page)

Slowly the group link separated into subgroups and affinities, then separate crews, and finally family units of bami and sitik. Anito found herself linked with Ukatonen and Moki. Moki’s pain flared again with painful intensity. They attempted to reassure him, but he remained inconsolable. At last, defeated, they broke the link.

Eerin stood waiting by the raft. Anito repressed a sudden surge of anger at the new creature. If only she could make Eerin understand how much pain she caused Moki, and through Moki, the entire village. If only— A flicker of irritation flared on her spine. “If only” never accomplished anything. As soon as they were settled for the night, she would speak to Eerin. Her refusal to link with Moki affected the balance of the whole village. It could no longer be tolerated.

Anito used her anger to help push the raft off the beach. She swung aboard, grasping her oar, rowing the boat into the swift, powerful current. The river banks rushed by as the river sped up. She heard the rapids ahead, a steady, rising whisper. Moki stared apathetically at the deck in front of him, his oar ignored. She nudged him with a foot.

“Wake up!” she told him. “It’s rough ahead.”

Anito hauled on her oar, holding the raft straight as they shot through a narrow passage between two rocks. The river rounded a sharp bend and a roaring stretch of white water surged toward them. They shot into it, and Anito’s attention was taken up with steering between huge waves and fangs of black rock. A huge boulder appeared suddenly behind a standing wave. They pulled left, just missing it, then banged into a hidden rock that turned them crossways to the current.

Moki stared at the wall of water rushing toward him. The oar was torn from his grasp and he was swept up against the bow railing. Anito watched helplessly, straining her oar against the full might of the river to turn the raft off the rock. If she tried to help him, they would all be lost. Finally, the raft turned with a huge, grinding shudder and was swept off the rock and into the rapids. Eerin managed to grasp Moki’s arm, when another wave crashed across the bow, tearing Moki from her grasp and sending the bami sliding back across the deck, crashing into the stern. The raft banged into anether rock. A sudden surge of water swept Moki into the raging rapids.

Eerin cried out, and reached after him as the raft slewed against another submerged rock.

Anito nudged Eerin with her foot. “No!” she said in bold red-orange patterns, outlined in black. “Row now, or we all die!”

Eerin grasped her oar and pulled hard. The raft heaved off the rock. Moki’s head bobbed up in a sudden surge ahead of them and then vanished. They shot forward around a cluster of boulders. Moki appeared again, to the right of the main channel, sheltering from the force of the current on the downstream side of a large rock. They pulled hard on the oars, trying to get close to him, but the river had them in its grasp and it swept them on past Moki and over the short, broad waterfall that marked the end of the rapids.

The raft struck the pool with jarring force. As soon as they got control of it in the quiet water below the falls, they pulled into an eddy beside the waterfall. Ukatonen grasped an overhanging branch, and pulled himself up into the trees beside the river. Eerin and Anito followed, leaving Ninto and Baha to steady the raft.

Moki huddled on top of a rock, a flaming orange spot of terror in the midst of the foaming white and green river. They watched from the tree-tops as a raft tried to steer toward him, but was pushed away by the force of the river. The remaining five rafts also tried to rescue the bami and failed; one nearly capsized in the attempt.

“He’s going to have to swim for it,” Ukatonen said.

Moki clung to the rock, small and helpless in the midst of the raging torrent.

“He’ll never make it! He’ll drown!” Eerin exclaimed.

Anito looked startled by this. The least of Moki’s problems was breathing the oxygen-rich white water.

Then she realized that Eerin didn’t understand. She didn’t know that Moki was in more danger of being crushed against a rock, or getting eaten by one of the giant fish that waited below the rapids, than he was of being drowned.

“He won’t drown, Eerin,” Anito said. “He can’t drown. He can breathe the water through his skin.”

“But how can we get him out of there? He can’t get out by himself!”

“He may have to,” Ukatonen told her. “We can’t get a raft to him, and he’s too far out to reach by rope.”

Moki saw them and waved. He looked up expectantly, ears wide, asking for help and guidance.

Ukatonen shook his head. “You must swim,” he said in large patterns. “Try for the bank, just above the waterfall. We will be there to catch you.”

“Be careful!” Eerin added.

Moki nodded. “I go,” he said, his words barely visible against the intense orange of his fear.

He leaped into the river. They stared anxiously at the churning white water, waiting for him to emerge. Then Ukatonen grabbed Eerin’s arm, pointing with his chin.

“There!”

Moki’s limp form surged to the surface. They scrambled down to the bank, and reached for his body as it floated by. One arm trailed in the water, obviously broken. He was either unconscious or dead. Ukatonen’s fingers closed around one limp ankle and pulled him in.

They laid Moki gently down on the soft sand. His skin was torn and bruised; in places it resembled chopped meat. His arm was broken in a dozen places, but he still breathed. Eerin knelt by his head, making crooning noises.

Ukatonen looked at Anito. “Monitor me.”

Anito flickered acknowledgment. They linked and entered Moki’s body.

The damage was not as bad as it looked. Moki had a mild concussion and had lost a fair amount of blood. Several internal organs were bruised. The broken bone in his arm had pierced his allu. That would be the trickiest thing to repair.

Ukatonen closed hemorrhaging blood vessels, and eased the building pressure in Moki’s skull. Anito was dimly aware of someone outside the link straightening and splinting Moki’s broken arm. The most urgent injuries attended to, Ukatonen tried to reassure Moki, but the bami’s presence remained huddled and unresponsive, walled off by the depth of his grief. A wave of bitter sadness welled up from Ukatonen as he broke the link.

“Well?” Eerin asked, as they emerged from the link. “Will he live?”

Ukatonen gave a dubious, muddy ripple of affirmation. “He’s not seriously injured, but I don’t think he wants to recover. He’s lost the will to live. He wants you, Eerin. He needs to link with you. You’re his sitik. No one else will do. You must link with him every day. Without your strength, your presence, he will die.”

Eerin turned pale orange and looked away for a moment. Her jaw worked, and then suddenly, as she reached some inner decision, her skin deepened into a sudden resolve. “Show me what I must do.” A flicker of fear, quickly suppressed, ran across her torso.

Anito laid a hand on Eerin’s shoulder. “First you must remember that Moki is your bami, and would never do anything to hurt you. You must not be afraid. Linking is natural. Moki needs it. Even when he’s healthy he needs to link with you every day. Now he needs it more than ever.”

Eerin touched Moki’s uninjured arm, near his allu. She looked up at Anito and Ukatonen. “Should I—can I link with him now? It won’t hurt him?”

Ukatonen nodded and looked at Anito. “Will you help her, kene? I’m too tired.”

Anito held out her arms. She guided Eerin’s arm to Moki’s uninjured spur, and then linked with Eerin. Together they entered Moki. Anito watched as Eerin enfolded Moki, flooding him with reassurance and encouragement, and some other thing that was wholly alien, wholly part of the new creature. Moki uncoiled from his knot of despair, returning the alien flood of feeling. As the two of them mingled, Anito helped Eerin’s body give Moki strength. Then she broke the link between them.

Several other villagers helped carry Moki to the raft. They needed to keep going. Fortunately they were through the worst of the white water. The river was smooth except for a few small patches of rough water. Even so, Anito doubted that she could do much to help steer.

Ninto touched her shoulder. “Yiato wants you and Ukatonen to ride with her. Dalo and Kadato will take your place.”

Anito agreed numbly, hardly noticing the packet of food that Baha handed her. Death’s silvery sheen seemed to dance on every sunlit ripple. She was so tired. If Moki died, she would follow him and Ukatonen into death.

Juna stared down at Moki’s unconscious form. His splinted arm was bound up in a fishnet sling. His uninjured arm lay outstretched. Golden sun dapples of early morning light lay across his bruised body like fallen petals. Yiato had declared a day off to give the other villagers a chance to repair rafts battered by yesterday’s trip through the cataracts.

Anito and Ukatonen were clearly exhausted. Juna gathered fruit and caught fish to feed them. Fortunately the fishing was good; she pulled in half a dozen good-sized fish from small, quiet pools underneath the trees. One of them was a new species, which she duly recorded, before knocking it on the head to kill it.

Anito flickered approvingly at her catch, helping her skin, gut, and fillet the fish. Juna smiled briefly to herself. At last she was doing something right. Ever since Lyanan, life had been one mistake after another. She shook her head in frustration, drained and tired by all that had happened.

She heard a rustling in the treetops, and looked up. Ukatonen was climbing down from the nest. He squatted beside her, and linked briefly with Moki.

“How is he?” Juna asked when he emerged from the link.

“See for yourself,” Ukatonen said, holding out his arm for a link. “He needs you.”

Juna swallowed her fear, remembering how Moki had reached for her in the link. He had been like a starving child. He clung to her as she soothed him, vaguely aware that Anito was manipulating them through the link. Strength had flowed from her to him, and he relaxed, contented at last. Juna continued to enfold him, deeply moved by the strength of his need for her. His need for a link with her was a deeply physical one, as profound and absolute as a human infant’s need to be held.

But what about her own needs? Every time she linked, Juna felt as if another layer of her humanity had been stripped away. Worst of all, she enjoyed it. Each link made her want more. Would she become addicted to allu-a? Would she still be human when the Survey found her?

Juna’s spurs linked with Moki’s and Ukatonen’s. She was plunged into the touch-taste-smell inner world of the aliens. Her old panic threatened to overwhelm her. Then Moki greeted her with the joyful abandon of an overeager puppy. A surge of fondness rose in her. Moki echoed that fondness, amplifying and returning it to her. The two of them spiraled higher, each cresting off the other’s emotional peaks until Ukatonen gently but firmly stopped the emotional upsurge. He let them rest in their sea of emotions, then guided them gently apart.

When she was calm again, Ukatonen showed Juna the beating of her own heart pumping steadily away in her chest with a steady one-two, one-two rhythm. Ukatonen nudged her heartbeat briefly faster, then slowed it. Then he showed her how to control her own heartbeat. Juna felt her heart race and slow like some small animal inside her chest. She held her life in her hands like some fine thread made of electricity, pulsing with the beat of her heart. It was simultaneously exhilarating and scary.

Then Ukatonen guided her inside himself, showing her the steady one-two-THREE beat of his three-chambered heart. When he was through, Juna understood his heartbeat and her own in an intuitive, sensory way that went beyond anything she could have learned from dissections and observations using instrumentation. Ukatonen showed her Moki’s heartbeat; it was thin and thready, not beating as strongly as his own, but it was already stronger than yesterday.

They emerged ffom the link.

“Well?” Ukatonen asked her. “How is Moki doing?”

“He’s improving,” Juna replied.

Ukatonen nodded. “It will be at least ten days before his arm is out of that splint.” He paused and touched Juna’s shoulder. “But it was your linking that gave him the will to live.”

“Thank you, en.” Juna looked away, trying to hide her fear.

“Linking still frightens you. Why?” Ukatonen asked.

“It’s too—” She looked away, searching for words. “I feel overwhelmed, en. It’s like I’m drowning. It’s too much for me. I’m afraid I won’t be able to stop, that I’ll forget who and what I am.”

Ukatonen ducked his chin in thought. “I don’t understand. How could you forget who you are?”

“Because your presence is so overwhelming, en. I can’t control what is happening to me.”

“When you swim, do you control the water you swim in?” Ukatonen asked.

“No.”

“You swim by being in balance with the water, by understanding its flows and shifts. You learn to move with it. You must learn to do this in allu-a.”

“How?”

“You are already starting. Today I showed you the life-rhythm of the heart. You learned to change the balance of your heartbeat. Each life-rhythm you learn will teach you more balance in allu-a. You must be patient. It’s as hard for Anito and me to teach you as it is for you to learn. We do such things instinctively. Thinking about them is like trying to follow the course of one bird in a large flock.”

“I hope it works,” Juna said.

“So do I. Now, let’s go and eat. You must be hungry.”

They spent the next day on the beach beside the river, resting and repairing their rafts and checking their cargo. The following day they loaded up and set off again.

Two days later they encountered the next rapids. Yiato surveyed the rapids, and reported that the water was high and the channels were clear. The safest passage was to the left. Then the villagers formed a circle for another group link. Juna shook her head when Anito invited her to join. She could barely tolerate a link with Moki. The thought of exposing herself to the entire village was too much.