The Kanshou (Earthkeep) (11 page)

Zude didn't push her.  Still ecstatic at Jez's apparent openness, she chanced some levity.  "Confess it, best beloved," she teased, "you got off tonight on some . . ."  She caught herself.  "Jez, I mean-- "

Jez had halted their progress.  She stood looking at Zude.  "Yes," she said evenly.  "Yes, I did."  Neither breathed.  "And I was sickened by that, by my reaction."  She moved away abruptly to the support of a nearby cypress tree.  When she turned back to Zude she was flushed.  She spoke through a flood of tears.  "Zudie, don't you see?  What went on in that warehouse tonight was just an imitation of men's control games!  I don't want that between us!"

Zude moved toward her lover.  "They're not men's games, Jezebel.  They're
human
games!"

"Wrong!"  Jez exploded, the thin fabric of her composure finally rent asunder.  She warded off Zude's move to touch her.  "And who the hell are the Kanshou anyway, that they spend their lives fighting men's violence in the streets and then glorify it here?  How can they pontificate at the academy about the horrors of slavery . . . and about men's abuse of animals! . . . and then put the very women they say they 'love' in cages and collars and leashes and chains?  Zude, I don't want I don't want to turn into that!" 

She struck the tree with her fist.  Then she looked at Zude, her voice soft.  "And you think Amahs and Vigilantes and Femmedarmes are going to rid the world of violence?  Never, Zudie!  They're taking us right back to where the men had us in the first place!"  She leaned, head down, against the cypress.

Breathe,
whispered her Future Self. 

In that same moment Zude bent close to Jez's ear.  "Jezebel," she said softly, "we have a room at the Hideaway.  I'd like to go there with you now."  She took Jez's hand.  "No roles, no toys, no games.  Just you and me."

Jez lifted her head and searched Zude's face.  Slowly, she straightened, then yielded to the breath imprisoned by her rage.  It blew freedom through her guarded body and rarefied her thickened mind.  It sent her, a zephyr of desire, into Zude's astonished arms. 

When they had moved clear of the cypress trees, Zude stepped behind her lover and drew the long body tight against her own.  They bent their knees and closed their eyes, breathing themselves into an intimate alignment.

"By all the dreams we've walked together," said Zude.

"By all the love with which we've filled the vessels of our lives," said Jezebel. 

They intoned a harmony, tumbled inward, and touched familiar reaches of a vista that opened to the stars.  They lifted Earth-free feet and leapt above the rolling boats to sail together over Hong Kong's twinkling lights. 

4 - Parting – [2069-2087 C.E.]

Cadets and Sea-Shrieves aboard a light transfer craft were downloading ancient munitions from a cargo vessel for the Kowloon Military Museum when a midship explosion set off serial on-deck fulminations.  The conflagration that followed threatened the cargo vessel and attending personnel.

Unexpectedly, choppy harbor waves poured over the cargo ship, rolling it to a near-capsize but extinguishing the flames completely.  One of the eight cadets cast overboard had to be resuscitated, and six more were treated for burns.  Miraculously, no lives were lost.

Two eye-witness reports concur that almost simultaneous with the explosion, Third Form Amah Cadet Dolalicia "summoned waves of water" from the calms of Hong Kong Harbor, shaped them into a wall that rose above the ship,and thus drenched the conflagration.

--Amah Academy Service Log 1423, 10-3-2069

Dossroom Three of the Tsui Building was cantilevered into the willow trees that flanked the gateway to the Hong Kong Amahrery Cadet Academy.  In the winter afternoon light, leafy patterns flung themselves through the skylights onto forty crisp-cornered cots footed by forty red lockers.  Forty dress uniforms of red and black hung in plastasis to the right of forty stiff pillows, and forty long windows separated the areas from each other by a few feet.  Above each bed, neatly concealed ceiling chutes held drop shelves of wardrobes and toiletries.  Idle glolobes, with focus or spread capacity, hung suspended in midair over each bed.

Animal figures, astonishingly lifelike and in a variety of postures, graced almost half the beds: stalking tigers or wolves, eagles or hawks in full flight, dolphins, foxes, turtles, snakes, bears, and a number of other species, including one spider.  Some were full-sized, others reduced in size but no less imposing.  They guarded their modest human fiefdoms with the dignity appropriate to their status as totem, companion, or spirit-guide.

The floor chronometer barely whispered its pulse.

From the upchute, arguing voices resounded in the empty dossroom.

"Just tell me how you did it, Jez, and I'll leave you in peace!"

Jez shot out of the chute with Zude just behind her.  "Psychic bench presses.  Mass hypnosis."  Jez raced down the central row of silent cots to her own berth.  She began working her way out of her ryndon comfortsuit.

"And when the dust clears at the dock and everybody's back here talking about it forever, what do I say?"

"You say what you saw.  Zude, you're not my keeper!"

Zude caught Jez by the shoulders and turned her toward her.  "Right.  I'm your lover!"  She shook her.  "Remember me?"

Jez pulled away from her and began climbing into a woodswarmth tunic. 

Zude leapt in front of Jezebel, flinging her arms wide.  "
Listen to me
!" she shouted.  Jez froze.  Zude pointed to herself.  "I'm your Faithful Zudie, and I've been traipsing after you for weeks!  But every time I think I've caught you, you just pat my hand like a nanny and then discorporate like a cloud!"  She leaned toward Jez.  "I bring you a kiss-cola and a rose, because you're off on a 90-k trek and all I get from you is a glassy-eyed stare.  Then to top it all off, this afternoon I watch while this strange woman who is supposed to be my best beloved picks up half the South China Sea and puts out a fire that otherwise could have killed eight people!"

Zude paused.  Jez held her gaze.

The willows had stopped waving.  The chronometer hushed.  Neither woman breathed.  Nothing stirred in the sunlit dossroom.  Seventeen silent witnesses regarded the scene with wise eyes. 

Jez's shoulders rounded.  She dropped her head. 

Zude's hand hovered an instant by Jez's shoulder.  Then she sank to the cot, her arms resting on her wide hipbones, her limp hands filling the emptiness between her thighs. 

"You're going." 

Jez released a soft whimper.  Then her arms stiffened and she threw her head wide to the ceiling, moaning in an upward glissando to a full-bodiedroar. 

Zude closed her eyes.  The breath she exhaled rasped awkwardly and then flooded like a wild tributary into Jez's rising wail.  The sounds ceased simultaneously as the two women  collapsed sobbing into each other and into the narrow space between the cots, wrapped in a familiar holding.  On the white tiled floor of Doss Three, they sat rocking back and forth until the sun had tilted another inch in the sky.

When at last they could look at each other, Jez freed one of the twin rampant unicorns which was caught up in her lover's black hair.  Zude lowered her eyes and then closed them, leaning back against the bed, her body lifeless for perhaps the first time in its waking life.

Jez's whisper reverberated in the empty dossroom.  "Come with me, Zudie."  She pressed Zude's limp hand.

From the bottom of her belly a cynical laugh rose silently out of Amah Cadet Lieutenant Adverb.  Then she gave the laugh its voice.  "Come with you?  Me?"  Large tears began rolling down her cheeks.  "And what would you do with me, Bella-Belle?  Carry me with you from fair to fair, the Beautiful Witch Jezebel's bonzai handmaiden, who holds her greatcoat while the miraculous lady performs acts of wonder?"  The tears poured effortlessly now, drenching Zude's tunic.  "Maybe I could get a job dispatching flex-cabs to bring the old and the infirm to your magic healing shows."

Jez flushed.  "Unkind, Zudie."

Zude nodded.  She pressed her forehead to Jez's and whispered, "True.  It was unkind.  Erase, please."

Jez placed Zude's hands on her own brown head and then took Zude's head in her own hands, completing the ritual.  "Erased."  They held their brows together for a long moment.

Zude wiped her hand over her face, then on her loose-fitting pants.  Jez caught a wet tear on Zude's chin.  She wiped it on her own tunic. 

"Zudie, it may sound crazy, but I'm reaching for a part of you that questions all this just like I do."

Zude opened her eyes. 

"All this," Jez whispered.  "The academy.  The Kanshoubu.  And all that they stand for."

Zude searched her lover's face.

"Look," Jez said, "I'm not leaving because I have some place to go.  I don't know where I'll go.  I'm leaving because I can't stay here.  Every day I'm putting up another wall against what I truly know within myself, blanking out options, limiting possibilities"  She wiped tears from her own eyes.  "Killing my spirit."  She pulled herself close to Zude's face.  "And, my love, you're doing the same thing."

Zude grew completely alert, moving into a verbal protest.

"Hush."  Jez put her finger on Zude's lips.  "Zude, my best beloved, if enough of our friends, our academy cadets, were to throw away their weapons and look deep inside themselves, they would discover powers that would put to shame the combined military arsenals of this planet's entire history."

She shifted so that Zude would have to look at her.  "Zudie," Jez whispered.  "I've seen you touch bigger parts of yourself, just like I have.  They scare you senseless, but you know they're there.  You fly, for the Love Of Inana!  You fly!  Where do you think that power comes from?"  She scrunched closer.  "Every time a spark of nonrational power sneaks up on you, you snuff it out.  You talk about my psychic gifts, like I'm something special.  But in your gut you know that it could have been you who picked up that water today and saved our friends."  She drew her hands through Zude's black hair, soothing the head backwards.  "The only difference between you and me is that I let it in.  I practice it, and you don't."

Zude took Jez's hands between her own.  "You've been frustrated, I know.  I'd have to be blind not to see it."

"Why won't you come with me?" Jez persisted

Zude flared.  "I understand why you've decided to go.  You've got a path to follow and so have I.  Two roads to the same place."

"Not the same place at all!"  Jez drew in her sprawled legs.  She knelt on one knee and drove her words at the figure beside her.  "You're obsessed with having a world that's
just
.  I want a world that's
healed
.  Not the same thing at all!"

"Healing, healing, healing!"  Zude tiredly pushed herself to a kneeling position on Jez's level.  "You can heal all you want, Jezebel, but if we don't agree to some mutual respect, some justice, then we're going to keep on spilling blood."

"And a ton of your justice won't guarantee a drop of love or compassion!  Or a whit less cruelty from violent men!"  Jez moved squarely in front of her lover.  "And what if you had your just world, Zudie?  What if there were all the individual freedom and self-determination that the Kanshoubu is charged with protecting?  If it isn't grounded in compassion, it'll be hollow as a drum.  The healing, the love, the compassion, the empathy -- however you name it, it's first.  It's fundamental and most important.  It's sine qua non.  It would make your justice unnecessary."

"That's enough, Jez," Zude said quietly.

"Zude, you---"

"I said that's enough."  Zude's voice drained the warmth from the pools of sunlight on the floor. 

Jez stayed still, watching Amah Cadet Lieutenant Adverb get to her feet.  Then, in the silence, she pulled herself up and sat wearily on the bed that neighbored her own.   

Zude dusted her breeks, her swipes across the black cotton cloth the only sounds audible in the large room.  She picked up a toppled elephant and set it upright on the bed.

She spoke evenly to Jezebel.  "Jez, do you remember the Oath?"

"The Oath?  Zude, every Shrieve  -- and every cadet -- walks her day within the Kanshou Oath."

Zude nodded.  "The Oath that every one of us will make a lifetime commitment to when we become Kanshou, the Oath that every cadet -- Amah or Femmedarme or Vigilante -- studies as her prayer for peace, as the guidance she'll live by for the rest of her life."

Jez waited.

Zude began the recitation of the Oath's final phrasing. 

"While I honor the Kanshoubu and its component forces -- the Amahrery, the Femmedarmery, the Vigilancia -- and while I set my feet . . ."

Jez took up the recitation, ". . . and while I set my feet upon the principles of the Kanshoubu and my hands and mind to its practices, I hold in my heart the vision of a world where peacekeeping forces are unnecessary."  She paused.

"Go on," Zude urged.

Jez stood, propelled by the words themselves.  "Thus my primary and unalterable purpose in becoming Kanshou will ever be to render obsolete my own profession and the Kanshoubu itself."  Her voice was strong, her eyes focused beyond one of the narrow windows. 

Neither woman spoke for many seconds.  Seventeen witnesses waited calmly. 

Zude drew a long breath.  "Show me any man's police force, any man's army, in all of military or social history that has named that as its purpose: to make itself obsolete."  Jez turned slowly to face her.  Zude continued.  "That's radical, Jezebel.  It may never happen.  Certainly not in our lifetime.  But the vision, the
intent
is there."

She took Jez by the shoulders.  "Love, you're right about the choice the Kanshoubu has made, the choice to contain much of today's violence with the old male methods.  And sometimes I think that we've turned out to be the most effective peacekeeping force in history only because we've handled the men's tools better than the men did.  We're stronger, smarter, and more sophisticated.  We have more courage and less need for ultimate control.  But you know just as I do that
it's because the Kanshou are women
that we've changed the image of peacekeepers all over the world.  Our purpose has honestly been different from men's.  And that difference shows.  Police aren't feared anymore.  We're trusted.  And respected.  In some satrapies we're even loved.  That's different, Jez.  Qualitatively different from the ten thousand years of men's law-and-order.  At least admit that."