Amy Thomson: Through Alien Eyes

Ukatonen listened in disbelief. Even Eerin felt this way. It was as though he had opened the door to another world. How strange to look at the world as humans did, as a thing to fight against, to alter, as though it were made of clay and could be molded without consequences. This sudden glimpse of human nature frightened him more than the casual brutality his captors had shown them, more than the ravages humans had inflicted on their planet’s ecosystem, and even more than the fear he had felt as he saw his planet dwindle into an insignificant speck in an immense and starry sky. He felt as though the world itself had turned upside down, and suddenly nothing made any sense at all.

“I think I shall go hunting,” Ukatonen told them. “Will you be all right here?”

Eerin said they would, and the enkar swung off into the trees, lost in thought. Human ideas burned in his head like live coals. What if the Tendu kept trying to change their world? What would Tiangi be like? He paused in mid-swing, and hung swaying from the branch he was on, to think it over. Would we have cities and streets and huge buildings! Would we live as out of balance as the humans! The idea made him uneasy. No, not on Tiangi, never. But if he could change Tiangi, what would he change?

Very little, seemed to be the answer at first. But then, as he resumed swinging through the trees, the idea returned, niggling at him like some annoying insect. He thought of the villages, mired in tradition, of how hard it had become to find promising elders who wished to become enkar. He only knew a handful of enkar under seven hundred years old, and most of those were ones he had taught.

More and more villages refused to travel and trade with the sea people, preferring to rely on traders to bring them whatever they needed. And there were fewer and fewer new quarbirri being created and even fewer Tendu willing to perform them. Their world was a stagnant, drying mud puddle compared to humanity’s quarrelsome, complex network of cultures.

His people were becoming as stiff and inflexible as a sun-cured hide. This is what he would change, if he could. But at what cost? Change always cost something. His time among the humans had taught him that much, at least. Humans had paid and paid and paid for their ceaseless rush to change their world. If the Tendu changed Tiangi too little, then humans were killing their world with their ceaseless desire for change. If only humans and Tendu could give to each other some of what they lacked. There were the seeds of a new harmony somewhere in that idea. He needed to find them, and plant them in fertile soil.

A flicker of resignation passed over him. Someday, perhaps, but not today. Now it was time to concentrate on finding food. Tomorrow they would start heading out of the forest. The question was, what to do with Tomas. There was nothing more to learn from him. Eerin insisted on bringing him back to the authorities, who would punish him as the humans saw fit. It didn’t matter, really. Uka-tonen had already punished him. He had made it impossible for Tomas to tell a lie.

Juna sat at the window of their hotel room in Brasilia. It was hard to believe that just two days ago they had emerged from the jungle with Tomas in tow. The trek out had taken a week and a half, mostly because Tomas kept running away, and they had to track him down. Finally, Ukatonen had turned Tomas into something like a zombie, unable to do more than follow them blindly through the forest. It had bothered her, to see him so unmanned, but it had been necessary. After another day’s wandering they found a road, which led them to a village where Juna convinced a surprised local policeman to contact the Survey office.

After that things began to happen very quickly. They were flown by helicopter into Brasilia. Tomas was taken into custody. Juna turned his computer over to the authorities. With the information on Tomas’s computer, the authorities were able to arrest hundreds of people, some of them extremely well-placed. The BirthRight movement was dealt a blow that would set them back several decades. Most of the people implicated in the terrorist wing of the movement were arrested, and several major illegal contraceptive reversal networks were broken up. General Burnham, faced with the information on the computer, resigned. Bruce was arrested, and charged with conspiracy to commit kidnapping. Word of this had left Juna and the Tendu deeply saddened.

A knock on the door made her flinch. She was still jumpy, despite the security detail outside her door.

She peered through the peephole, cried out in joy, and flung open the door. “ Isdl Netta! Toivo!” She threw her arms around them, feeling the threads of paranoia part and frizzle away to nothing. “It’s so good to see you! How is everyone?” She paused, struck by a sudden horrifying fear that they had come to give her bad news. “Is Mariam okay?”

“She’s fine,” her father said. “It’s you we’ve been worried about.” He paused and looked at her, “For someone who’s been through as much as you have, you look good. How are Moki and Ukatonen? I heard that they were hurt.”

“You know most of the details already,” Juna told him. “Moki’s all right, despite his arm. It will grow back. It’s Ukatonen that I’m worried about. He was all right while we were getting here, but now …” She shrugged helplessly. “Now all he has to think about is his injury. He spends most of his time brooding about what he’s lost. I’m worried that he’ll decide to die.”

“Let me talk to him,” Toivo offered. “Maybe I can help.”

Ukatonen sat in his darkened room, pondering his situation. At home on Tiangi, he would tie up all the things he had left undone, or pass along whatever he could not complete to the enkar that he had trained. He would then retreat into the forest for several weeks, thinking over his life, and then emerge for a final ceremony of leave-taking with his enkar brethren. Then he would become one with the forest, alive only in the memory of the Tendu.

But he was far from home, and alone. There was no one that could take up his obligations. It might be years before he could go home again. He had to bear the dishonor of living like this. But how?

There was a knock on the door that connected his room o Eerin’s. Ukatonen ignored it. He wasn’t in the mood for company. The door opened anyway. He looked up, angry, and to his shame, a little afraid.

“Toivo,” he said. “I didn’t know you were here.”

“We just got in,” Toivo told him. He paused, “I wish I could heal you the way that you healed me, but— ” He spread his hands in a gesture of resignation. “If there’s anything I can do to help you, en, please tell me.”

Ukatonen sat silent for a few moments, wrestling with his dignity. “How did you manage, living like that? How could you do it?” he said at last.

“It was never easy, en,” Toivo told the enkar, sitting on a low stool across from him. “You know I tried to die. My family loved me too much to let me go.” He looked down at his hands as they rested on his knees. “At first, I was so angry that I couldn’t speak to them. That was when I moved out to the zero-gee satellite, where I could die in peace if I wanted to. And then”—he looked up at Ukatonen—“suddenly I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Not there, not so far away from everyone I loved, everyone familiar. Then, a few months later, Juna came home, and I had to see her before I died.”

Toivo was silent for a while, his eyes shadowed in the darkened room, clearly remembering that time. “I guess— ” he continued, meeting Ukatonen’s eyes, “I guess you just take it one day at a time. Don’t think of the long run, focus on today, focus on now. If you think of spending ihe rest of your life as a cripple, well, you’ll go crazy.”