Kiini Salaam - Ancient, Ancient

Laki’s face was frozen in an expression of horror.

“You’re thinking only about the pain, La-Laki. Don’t. It is pointless. Every drop of pain is balanced by waves of pleasure.”

“Pleasure?”

“Pleasure. Pleasure at your successes. Pleasure in watching the children mature. Pleasure with the other mothers. Emotions you never imagined.”

“But what if I never find those pleasures. What if I wasn’t made to be a mother?”

The mother burst into laughter. “No one was born a mother, Laki. Yet all of us are able to mother if we allow ourselves to be guided by the needs of the children.”

“But the babies…”

“Laki, you do not need to think about babies right now.”

“But tomorrow—when I join my mother-unit, will I get babies? Will I have to take care of the wombs?”

The mother shook her head and rubbed Laki’s back.

“Tomorrow you will meet with the others in your unit. You will begin the process of melding the cloak. Were you not listening to anything we told you in preparation for the mother-unit?”

“You didn’t tell me about the wombs!” Laki tried to wound the mother with an accusation, but the rage died in her throat. Every word that came out of her mouth was softened by the power of the mother’s love.

“We told you what you need to know before you join the unit. No one learns about the babies until after they join their unit…which you won’t until tomorrow. This is your last day at home. Why are you wandering around the house? There’s no more training today. Take off your uniform. Enjoy the rest of your time, go see your friends.”

Laki didn’t answer. She imagined herself hanging in a sling suspended over a huge womb. Panic welled up in her chest; she found it hard to breathe. The mother hugged Laki.

“Go,” she said.

Laki turned away from the mother and ran down the hall, choking on the urge to scream. When she reached her room, she waved her hand over the sealed entrance. The wall thinned and parted down the middle. She stepped over the threshold, and a softly modulated voice rang out:

“One day to maturation.”

Laki winced. Grabbing the edges of her robe, she yanked the white fabric from her shoulders. Her elbow flung out wildly, triggering the voice to repeat itself:

“One day to maturation.”

“Shut up!” Laki snapped. She stumbled toward her wardrobe portal while pulling off the robe and dropping it on the ground. As she fumbled to release the waist of her dress, she caught sight of her reflection. Startled, she fell still. Swathed in mother-unit whites, she could be any girl on the brink of maturation. A young mother, perhaps, anyone but herself.

Just beyond her reflection, Laki saw a message globe float into the room. She looked at it over her shoulder, then turned back to the reflective wall. She squinted her eyes and tried to imagine what she would look like draped in her mother-unit veil. She envisioned a group of faceless women gathered around her. A disgusted hiss spilled out through her lips. She waved her hand over her reflection, and the reflective wall went dark.

When Laki walked to the wardrobe portal, the message globe followed her. She passed her hand over a flat, round disc embedded in the wall. A rod slid out from where the disc had been and presented her with a row of cloths dancing around on hangers. Even her wardrobe had ceased to be an accurate reflection of her. Mixed in with her customary black cloths, were the mother-unit whites, permanently shaped into formless robes and dresses that, after tomorrow, would become her daily uniform.

At the thought of tomorrow, Laki felt a tightening in her chest. The terror that she had been carefully containing flooded her body. She rifled through the cloths, seizing anything white and flinging it to the ground. When there was nothing left but black cloths and empty hangers, Laki collapsed to the floor. Every wild scheme she had concocted to avoid her fate trampled through her memory. Breathing heavily, she looked around the room manically as if through feverish effort she could find the secret and escape her future. The message globe chirped, and her panic deflated. She let out a resigned sigh. She was powerless to change the thrust of her future, and nothing she did could alleviate that fact.

The globe drifted down to hang next to her shoulder. She blew on it, triggering the release of its message.

“Greetings elder sister,” a high-pitched voice chanted.

Laki shifted so that she was sitting cross-legged on the floor and opened her hand to accept the message. The globe floated down to rest in her palm. An image of her sister—cinnamon-colored skin, freckles, a dark mouth—sprouted in her mind. She heard Se-se whispering, “I think it’s going to work. We’re going to get you out of the mother-unit. You have to meet me later. I’ll send another message.”

Laki rolled her eyes. Even up to the final hour, Se-se was full of optimism. Laki pinched the message globe and it deflated. She flattened it against the wall with the palm of her hand and watched as it melded into the wall. She took a deep breath and climbed to her feet. She peeled off her white dress and threw it on top of the heap of discarded white cloths. She plucked a short length of black fabric from her clothes rod and wrapped it around her body. With the heat from her hand, she fused the cloth’s edges to create one seamless dress. She pinched along the waist, the dip of her back, and under her bust to give it shape. She picked out a shorter length of cloth to wrap over her shoulders and melded it to the dress, creating sleeves. There was a lump around her middle revealing the silhouette of a marriage belt resting on her hips. Nothing to be done about that.

She pulled a blank message globe from the wall and closed her eyes. She projected images of a wild party into the globe, purred “the rendezvous-less zone,” then sent the thought, “Maturation tomorrow.” She opened her eyes.

“Twelve messages,” she said. The message globe split into twelve tiny spheres—each carrying an identical invitation. She touched each sphere while saying a name, and they zipped away to deliver her invitation.

Laki walked to the pod landing room with a grim look on her face. She didn’t look like a woman going to a party, she looked like a prisoner headed to her execution. In the pod landing room, she stood briefly in reverent silence. This , she thought, is the end of my life. She decided to savor every second. She treasured the whirling sound of her pod ballooning to full expansion and the whisper of the exit portal opening in the roof. She craned her head back and reveled in the pull of velocity as her pod shot away from home up into the upper atmosphere.

When she had left her domed city behind, she reached for the sound module. With quick fingers, she programmed it to record the sound of friction, a static-like screeching bristling between her pod and the thick weightlessness of space. She amplified the sound, adding an echo, then slowed its frequency to match the beat of her pulse. She flipped through her archives and sampled sound snippets before selecting a loop of her siblings laughing through the hallways at home. She mixed in a distorted recording of her own voice, and the jumble of sound built into an aural assault. At Laki’s signal, the sound module found a unifying tempo and tamed the layers of noise into a repeating melody. Laki blended it with one of her preferred beats and blasted the mash-up into her pod—a newly created soundtrack for the moment.

For a painfully short stretch of time, the music obliterated Laki’s worries. She turned the music up until she could feel it vibrating the soft translucent walls of her pod. She started by swaying her head back and forth. By the time her pod was approaching the twinkling lights of the Velvet Stretch, her limbs were flailing, her hips were swaying, her knees were gyrating. She had given herself so completely to the music that there was no space for anxiety, heartache, and other demons.