Butler, Octavia - Survivor

He was silent for a moment, then he nodded. “Does it bother you to talk about it, Alanna? It’s awfully soon for you and I don’t want to…”

“It doesn’t bother me to do anything I have to do to help the people get free of that poison.”

He smiled briefly, then looked apologetic. “The others… do you know how long it took them… to die?”

“No. But the Tehkohn left us shut up together for what they told me was five days. By the end of that time, everyone else was dead.”

“Only five days?” said Jules.

“I don’t think it took me even that long to get through it. But five days is the traditional Tehkohn cleansing period.”

“But so little time…”

“You dry up,” said Alanna. “You lose water in every way you can and drinking doesn’t do any good because you can’t keep anything down until it’s over—or until you get more meklah. What you feel first though, before the thirst, is hunger, craving.” She let herself remember for a moment. “I know what it’s like to starve. Back on Earth, before I came to the colony, I got hungry enough to eat some things you’d probably think were pretty disgusting. But I think coming off the meklah is about the worst kind of hunger I’ve known.” She shuddered more with apprehension than from remembering. “But it’s the water loss that kills. The Tehkohn said they had seen some Garkohn die of it in only one day. Sometimes it hits them harder than it does us—hits them all at once.” She looked at Nathan. “The Tehkohn have made the same experiments you have—except for the intravenous feeding. They made them on volunteers from among their own people who had been addicted by the Garkohn. I would have told you about their results if you hadn’t already found out for yourself.”

Nathan’s calm vanished. “You saw Tehkohn animals making experiments?” he demanded. “You saw them using drugs to sedate each other?”

“No,” said Alanna. “I heard some of them talking about it and I went to a healer to see whether or not it was true. It turned out to have happened generations ago. The healer read it to me from her grandfather’s records.”

“Image of God! Now you’re saying they read and write as well as practice medicine.”

“Yes,” said Alanna quietly.

“It’s impossible. They couldn’t…”

“You have reason to hate them, Nathan. I don’t blame you. But can you afford to underestimate them? Can any of us?”

He looked at her strangely and she met his gaze. She spoke softly. “The Tehkohn have a civilization that is hundreds of years old at least. They were once part of an empire that covered more than half of this continent. They work metal and stone and wood. They read and write. They make medicines from herbs and from the body parts of certain animals. And most important, Nathan, they only rarely die in meklah withdrawal.”

“Because they have such a strong will to live,” said Nathan with heavy sarcasm.

“Are you saying that the will to live isn’t important?”

“Of course not. But it isn’t the cure-all that your Tehkohn friends think we’ll be stupid enough to believe it is. If we followed Diut’s advice and depended on nothing more than will power to keep us alive, we’d be committing mass suicide.” He looked at Jules. “Sounds convenient, doesn’t it? We kill ourselves off, then the Tehkohn only have the Garkohn to deal with.”

Nathan’s voice had been rising as he spoke. Jules answered him quietly. “If that’s so, Nathan, we’ll need your help more than ever. We need any answer you can come up with.”

Nathan closed his eyes for a moment and seemed to calm himself. Then he looked down at his plate of thin brown meklah pancakes, stared at them grimly. He reached for his cup and took a swallow of hot meklah tea. Finally he spoke, his voice low. “Jules, of the rabbits I withdrew cold, over half died. Now that’s better than the figure for Alanna’s prison room, but it’s still nothing that either of us would like to see happen to the settlement.”

“Are you saying there’s no way to break free?” asked Jules.

Nathan continued staring at his plate. “No quick way, certainly.”

“Shall we wait then?” said Alanna. “Shall we see whether the Garkohn can absorb us faster than the Tehkohn can kill us?”

Nathan raised his head to glare at her but it was Jules who spoke.

“What are you holding back, Lanna?”

She looked at him in surprise.

“I’ve seen you desperate,” he said. “And you aren’t now, though you’d have reason to be if things were as bad as they seemed.”

She moved uncomfortably in her chair. She didn’t like being read so easily. But at least it was only Jules doing the reading. “What I was holding back—in the hope that someone else would come up with it first—was an idea that may not help, but at least it will give us something else to try.” She drew a deep breath. Now was her only chance to present what she knew as her own idea rather than as Tehkohn custom. But there was hope for the Missionaries in the success the Tehkohn had had with their custom. A history of success. If only Nathan could be made to see its value and accept it. She had to take the chance.

“It’s something Diut didn’t tell you about because we’re not a Kohn people. He probably didn’t think it could be applied to us. It’s the returning ceremony that the Tehkohn give one of their own who escapes from the Garkohn. They have it just before the tehjai… the…” She stumbled searching for the right English word. “The returnee. They have it just before the returnee is left alone for withdrawal. It’s a religious ceremony really.”

“A heathen ceremony, you mean,” muttered Nathan.

Alanna turned to face him, looked at him silently as though waiting.

Nathan took another swallow of tea, then spoke angrily. “All right, get on with it. What do they worship? The sun? A stone idol? The Tehkohn Hao himself, perhaps?”

Only Alanna’s memory of Nathan’s loss and of his importance to the colony kept her from exploding at him. “The returnee is not accepted at once,” she continued. “He’s unclean. No one speaks aloud to him. No one touches him. The only communication with him is through a code of brightening and darkening coloring. Light signals, they call it, because some of the time they’re using their natural luminescence.

“The returnee goes to the home of the First Member of his clan and his First Clansman escorts him to one of the prison rooms. Then, no matter what time of the day or night it is, the First Clansman summons the returnee’s family, his friends, and Diut. With this group, he returns to the prison room and the group forms a circle around the returnee. They’re all seated on the floor. One by one, each person in the circle goes before the returnee to give him some personal message of encouragement in the code. That his wife or mate awaits him, that he has proven his fighting strength by breaking free of the Garkohn, that as he has survived some other difficult struggle, he can survive withdrawal, whatever. The successes of his life are recounted; the failures aren’t mentioned. When each message has been delivered, when the returnee has been reassured that his people want him back in spite of the humiliation he has undergone, the whole group begins a kind of prayer—a plea to the returnee’s strength, to his power as represented by the blue in his coloring to free him from the poison and restore him to his people. If the plea was verbal, it would be a chant. It’s repeated over and over, always ending with the assurance that the returnee is Tehkohn, and therefore, he will prevail.

“It goes on and on until the returnee is caught up in it. Until he is flashing it himself, apparently without realizing what he’s doing. Finally, he collapses. When that happens, the ceremony is over and the others leave quietly. I’ve heard that it’s usually several hours before the returnee even moves.”