Kiini Salaam - Ancient, Ancient

But it is never enough.

In the migration of ants, there is always one.

During third meal, Laki was fidgety. She shoveled down her food without registering taste. Being part of a large birth group had trained her to eat quickly but, for once, her siblings were not the cause of her haste. Today, she was eating alone, and it was an odd sensation that she did not enjoy. There was no one to tell her to slow down or to ask for her leavings. She had finished the whole meal before she realized that no one, not even Se-se was going to join her. With a heavy sigh, she folded her platter in half and pushed it into the dish slot in the wall. The slot sealed itself, and Laki left the kitchen to find some company.

The hallways were incredibly empty, emptier than Laki had ever remembered them being. She walked with one arm outstretched so that she could trail her fingers along the wall. Halfway to Se-se’s room, she stopped and turned to face the wall. She placed her palm flat against it and closed her eyes. She imagined there was still a room behind the wall and that her sister Yasla was there, waiting to talk with her.

For Laki, Yasla had been a twin spirit, a guiding light, a soft embrace in a world that had begun to show Laki its sharp edges. And her departure had been devastating. In the year since Yasla’s maturation, Laki had battled disappointments, panic, and rage. While some girls wandered their way toward maturation confused and uncertain, Yasla had always known what she wanted. Before maturation she had applied for and won a top-secret appointment in the mesosphere’s weaponry and transportation department. Laki would have loved to follow in Yasla’s footsteps, but she would not be so lucky.

Laki’s first experiences with maturation had left her indifferent. Watching her older siblings depart into adulthood never troubled her. There were too many of them to build bonds with. She saw them as troublesome competitors who ruthlessly pushed each other around in wild ploys for dominance and attention. But by the time the birth group had been halved, Laki began to see her siblings differently. They became more precious to her; she saw them as friends rather than competitors, and she felt a deep loss whenever one of them reached maturation.

Without Yasla, Laki felt completely alone. She turned away from the sealed entrance to Yasla’s room and walked to Se-se’s room. She called out to Se-se, but there was no answer. She wandered on, making her way to the end of the hall where she stopped and placed her ear against the wall. She listened for echoes of the playful battles that had been waged up and down the halls outside her brothers’ rooms, but there was nothing behind that wall but silence.

Laki’s house never did sustain empty rooms for long. It was an economical entity, completely lacking in nostalgia. After sealing off unused rooms, it cannibalized them, using the raw material to build new rooms. One of Laki’s only at-home pleasures was pressing on walls in search of tiny patches of recycled material. To Laki, walls were like stretches of skin; each patch had its own history embedded within. When she found a new room, she could fuel weeks of ecstasy, methodically working her way around the new walls, judiciously releasing memories and relishing in the company of her beloved siblings—even if only in the fleeting and ghostly form of remembrance.

Laki felt as if the emptiness of the house would drive her mad. Even the hallways leading to the pod landing room were vacant. Where had Se-se gone? What could the mothers be doing, hidden out of sight? Laki walked toward the mothers’ private chambers, still trailing her fingers along the hallway walls. She was a few paces away from the entrance to the mothers’ rooms when she felt the wall buckle beneath her fingertips. She paused. These hallways were no strangers to her hands. She had poked, prodded, and rubbed every inch of wall that she could reach. She had uncovered and released every memory that was to be found in this quadrant of the house. There should not have been a room there.

Laki held her hand over the spot where the wall had buckled; her fingers tingled with expectation. As she waited for the wall to thin, she closed her eyes, anticipating the bliss of immersing herself in the company of her siblings. A moan escaped from the room, causing Laki’s eyes to snap open. She quickly pinched above and below the slit that had begun to part the wall.

She peered through the opening. The room within was full of mothers—more mothers than Laki knew she had. None of them were gathered into a unit. Most of them stood in a circle in the center of the room, dark red orbs hovering over their outstretched hands. Other mothers stood around the edges of the room with their backs against the walls.

The moan snaked through the room again, but Laki could not see who was making the sound. She put her hand over the top edge of the opening and elongated it. She leaned in closer and looked up. There, hanging from the ceiling in a shimmering sling, was a woman. Her head was tilted back, her lips parted in a painful grimace. Laki was so struck by the woman’s expression that a few seconds passed before she realized that the woman was unshrouded. The woman grasped the sling and groaned again. She shifted her body sideways and revealed a long purplish tube attached to her stomach.

Entranced and frightened, Laki followed the tube’s path downward and saw that it was connected to a large globe that was floating just below the woman. The woman gritted her teeth, and the tube pulsed. In synchronicity, the mothers inhaled and exhaled. It seemed as if the room itself were breathing. Silky white strands shot out of the large globe and attached themselves to the small globes that were hovering over the mothers’ hands. The globes filled with light and, for a brief second, Laki could see the curled up forms of embryos within the globes. She let out a loud gasp. A few mothers turned and saw her as the globes’ glittering illuminated the room with an explosion of incandescence.

Before Laki could see anything else, a body blocked her view. The small opening she had made parted completely. A mother glided out of the room, the expression on her face unreadable behind her veil. The mother sealed the room, took Laki by the hand, and led her away from the mothers’ quarters. She stopped at the hallway that led to Laki’s room and turned to face Laki. Laki opened her mouth, but found she could not speak. The mother waited patiently.

“That was one of my mothers, wasn’t it?” Laki asked.

“Yes,” the mother sang. She took both of Laki’s hands and pressed against Laki’s palms with her fingers.

“How many do I have?”

“Nineteen.”

Laki was briefly shocked into silence. “I thought there were only six of you.”

“How do you think we can be everywhere at once?”

Laki heard a smile in the mother’s voice, though she could not see it through the blur of the mother’s veil.

“What is happening in there?”

The mother brushed her hand over Laki’s bald head.

“We received new babies today,” she sang. “We are nurturing them.”

Despite the mother’s calming presence, Laki’s heart began to beat rapidly.

“Will I have to do that? Hang from the ceiling…”

“You will not have to, it will be your choice.”

“But it’s hurting her.”

“It hurts, yes, but it’s not hurting her. She asked to nurture them.”

Laki looked at this lone mother incredulously.

“You will learn, Laki. Mothering makes you want to give, even if it exhausts you.”

Laki shook her head.

“You don’t need to understand now, Laki, but that feeling will find you. Weeks or months into your time with the babies, it will sneak up on you.”