In the Rainy Season
by Hanne BlankThe rain gathers out there, beyond the wide tiled balconies of this house where I lie abed. Isti sways as she sits on the low stool, muscles moving gently beneath her leathery, dust-colored hide as she tugs the ropes that keep the fans moving, stirring the turgid air. I look at her and smile as best I can despite the terrible itching. Her eyes, round and black as a squirrel's, betray no emotion, but her flews twitch with concern, revealing brief moments of small sharp teeth. She takes the fan ropes in her long nimble toes while she reaches for the basin. I watch the broad, flat blades of the fans as she dabs my arms with the oily citrus-scented stuff. It helps, a little. The rhythm of the fans never changes.
It will be over soon, I tell myself. Like before, it will begin when the rains do, the tiny jewel-like bodies emerging, whole and shining, pink and blue and green and silver and orange, metallic droplets falling to the smooth broad stones of the floor and scuttling for the wide cracks between. Like rain from the roof they will pour from my fingertips, one after another, barely big as peas, dropping plap plap plip-a-plap as the itching finally, mercifully begins to fade. Finally I will be able to sleep, and it will be no small gift. The week before the rains come is nearly unbearable, much longer than I had ever imagined a week could be. Isti and the others tell me that's exactly what the stories say, and they make the noise that passes for laughing here as they stroke me like they would stroke a child of theirs, gently, with the tips of their long tails.
The first time this happened, I was terrified. The second time I was disgusted, then resigned. Now I just concentrate on not giving in to the itching, not caring about the way the taut skin burns, and wait. Were it not for that torment, I almost wouldn't mind. It's not as though it wounds me. I won't even bleed. The first charit will burrow their way out through the skin of my fingertips painlessly, as if in a dream. I can feel them as they make their channels in my flesh, preparing, but the sensation is only curious, not unpleasant. There is no torn flesh, no ooze, none of what I feared the first time.
Besides, I can smell greenness as the storm thickens. From the bed I can look out beyond the veranda toward the hills and see the expanse of dead earth in the distance, sullen dark red beneath the clouds. But rivulets of life have trickled out even as far as there now, thin fingers of spiny grey-green grass prodding the edges of the reluctant soil. Closer in the green is denser, more vivid. Here and there, there are whip-thin saplings that come up to my knees, and low-growing shrubs of a type I haven't found in any reference have begun to clump and spread, much to Isti's delight. She and Thirr say they're fruit-bearing, and who am I to argue?
When Isti got here earlier, her ears were perked and she held her tail high. The vines had officially made it all the way up the stone columns beneath the house, she said, creepers wrapping up as far as the balcony rail. Her pleasure was contagious. For a voluptuous instant, no more than the length of a breath, I forgot I itched.
I cannot move for itching and dare not try to use my arms. But I can smell the greenness, the succulent wet of unfolding leaves. Isn't that what I came here for?
The Tanna were never very good at pronouncing my name. When a delegation arrived one day and informed me that it was time for me to be given a new one, I was charmed, and proud. All the defiant insularity of a people crushed face-first against the cold brick wall of impending extinction had made them difficult to crack, hard to get to know. I had arrived, thin-skinned and tailless and delicate, on their barren, difficult world, to a deafening lack of interest. It was only to be expected. They had no reason to trust any Coalition biologist. Particularly not from my division. Not after what had happened there. I had been surprised that negotiators had even gotten them to agree to allow me to land.
When they took me up the narrow steps to the house in the center of the compound I tried not to show my satisfaction at this turn of events. I would show them all, back on Kyrie. They'd admired my results in the past, envied the way I always managed to get the best out of the people I worked with. But Mabat? I had to be crazy. It had been a hard nut to crack even before Xenakis-Midland had gotten there with their big talk and their deep pockets. They proposed a massive soil improvement project in exchange for land. The Tanna resisted. They asked for a test plot, nothing huge. The Tanna said no. The agros didn't listen. There was too much undeveloped planet, too much potential. They boredropped 20 hectares of uninhabited boondocks by night to show the Tanna what they were missing out on. Standard lab-growns for M-class, standard delivery. They gave Mabat a microbe it couldn't refuse.
It had been a textbook case ever since, a cautionary tale trotted out for generations of university students. Every effort to fix Mabat failed, sometimes spectacularly. The planet's minerals were strange, the microfauna and mycological elements stranger. Things reacted on Mabat in ways they never reacted elsewhere, perverse, inconsistent. The Tanna watched but did not engage or react. Sometimes they would answer questions with questions, other times with cryptic words that sounded for all the world like poetry. Mostly they went about their business until the outworlders shrugged, gave up, and went away.
Time had whittled Mabat down to almost nothing. The only continent still habitable was barely so, the land yielding barely enough to keep a few thousand people alive. Actual cultivation was useless. The Tanna had spread out by necessity, forming clan compounds in what had once been the choicest bits of their cities. They hunted and gathered and did their best, and from time to time they stood on the verandas of their houses, raised on stone stilts so that the waters could flow below them in the rainy seasons, and watched the slow death of their invisibly colonized world.
I decided I was going to try to pull the hat out of the rabbit. I was the best anyone had seen in a long time. I'd made rank in the division in record time. I'd done things on Paraba, on Ula Gaon, and the northern continent of Spinter's World that everyone said couldn't be. I made friends among enemies. Surely the same could be done on Mabat. There had to be some element that had been overlooked, some factor that could be changed, controlled, modified to bring the balance around, to build a détente between the worldkiller and the world. I would go alone, a four-year assay, and see what I could learn from the land and from the beings who lived, if only just barely, off of it. Four years should be enough to tell me whether it could be done.
At the party before I left Kyrie, colleagues of many years wished me luck with their lips, but their eyes spoke louder than their mouths. Perhaps I would learn nothing but what we already knew -- Mabat was dying and the Tanna wanted to be left alone. I insisted on trying anyway. The division heads were skeptical, thought I would be more useful elsewhere, but in the end they'd let me go. No doubt none of them had imagined that the day would come that I would be led into a Tanna compound, up the stairs and into the dim, smooth-floored interior of one of their homes. It took me nearly two years of hard work to get them to accept me, but I was there. I had been given my toehold, my prayer, my shot in the dark.
Sintu Charit. That was the name they gave me as I stood nervously in the center of a circle of Tanna. The blunt ends of digging sticks, treasured objects of dense, rare wood, thudded on the stones in rhythmic unison. I knew only some of the Tanna by name, Thirr and Udi and the one whose name I couldn't pronounce, the senior female of the clan, the one I thought of as Auntie. Auntie stood draped in a dark cloth that made a cowl over her face, her tail twined with the tails of the Tanna who stood to either side of her, reciting a long, rhythmic poem in a dialect that bore only glancing resemblance to Day Tanna, the age-old planetary lingua franca I had learned prior to arrival.
"Sintu" I could figure out. Close enough to "sintik," meaning "haul" or "carry." So I was a carrier, a bearer of some kind? Perhaps. I had spent many hours helping the maintenance crews, stripping tiles and stones from disused buildings, carried them to inhabited ones where they'd be used to patch roofs and shore up columns. I beamed from ear to ear at the recognition. Perhaps now they might be more willing to share something, anything, whatever they knew that might help.
The dry months passed. I listened carefully for hints, waited for some veiled story or song, but the Tanna offered as few clues as the sky did clouds. If I wanted to know, it seemed, I had to ask. The furnace of the late afternoon provided an excuse; nothing but the occasional beetle stirred outside during those hours of scathing heat. Sitting with Auntie or her daughter under their stout stone roof, I filled the air with questions.
Auntie's patience for listening to my questions was boundless, but her energy, like her willingness to answer, had its limits. From the far side of the room her daughter Isti chittered her teeth at her gently. "You're about to fall over," she chided. "Go rest, mother. I'll take over."
Auntie grumbled all the way to the verandah, tail dragging crankily along the stones. Isti was easier to talk to, less formal, less reticent. She was the closest thing to a friend I had on Mabat, although such friendship had clear limits. What bonds we had managed to forge existed solely because her mother had given me a name. But just because I had a relationship to the clan did not mean I was part of it. Being "Sintu Charit" had its priveliges, but it also had its limits: I could ask anything I wanted, as long as it could be answered in Day Tanna.
"Isti, does the other language have a name?"
"Of course it does."
"Can you tell me what it's called?"
"Not in Day Tanna."
" 'Charit' isn't a Day Tanna word."
"No, that's true."
"So why did you name me that if I'm not allowed to use that language?"
She looked at me bemusedly, with an expression that said she was just barely refraining from laughter. "You must have asked my mother what it meant."
I blushed. I had. Auntie hissed at me for asking her to explain something she couldn't. I knew the rules, why did I insist on breaking them?
"Well, I figured out what 'Sintu' means. I think. I just wanted to know if I was right."
Isti's big black eyes rested coolly on me. " 'Sintu' isn't Day Tanna."
"I just want to know what my name means, that's all. Is that so wrong?" Words in the ritual tongue had taken on the sheen of pearls for me, each secret enrobed in nacre hard as stone. Occasionally, it seemed, I could be allowed to wear them, but never own them. "It's important to me. Where I come from, names are significant, symbolic. My birth name, Sophia, means 'wisdom.' My mother was Ursula, 'little bear,' a kind of powerful animal."
Isti scratched her neck and shifted position on the bench. "Our names are often symbolic that way, too."
"I guess I feel like if I'm going to go around with people calling me Sintu Charit, I think I deserve to know what they're saying. That's all."
Her bare feet making gentle patting noises against the stones of the floor, Isti paced slowly toward the open side of the room and walked out onto the balcony, gazing out toward the southern horizon. "Sintu Charit isn't symbolic. It's descriptive. Like calling someone 'mother.' It describes a function. Not what you're like. What you do."
I watched Isti carefully as she came back toward the table. Picking up the water bottle, she reached to me with her tail and stroked it across my knuckles. She'd never done that before. The stopper made a grinding noise as she twisted it out of the bottle's mouth. "You'll know when you see storm clouds on the horizon. A few months from now." The short soft hairs on the tip of her tail brushed my lips as I opened my mouth. "Don't ask. I've said too much already. I'm sorry."
I shut my mouth. Isti tilted the bottle and poured water on the floorstone at her feet, watching it run to the edges and drip down through the gap between one stone and the next. She'd explained the custom to me before. I watched, confused, as she symbolically asked the floods to come and wash her words away.
Udi scrambles in, breathless. Isti and I have been watching the cloudline form in the distance, like a wall across the sky.
"A shuttle has come down," he pants. "Confederation. Three. Outside the city, northside. None speak Tanna, but they have a VoiceBox. They want to see you, Sintu Charit."
I sigh as Udi squats with his hands on his knees, waiting for his breathing to settle. He watches my face with care.
Typical Confed timing. I lift my head and look down along my quivering body, at the bulging, bumpy skin of my arms, my chest, my belly. My hands are distended, charit moving now and then beneath skin so thin and pale I can see their colors. They're everywhere, of course, but in my hands and wrists I can see them, and sometimes I watch for hours, mesmerized, as the colors bloom beneath my skin. My fingers are fat, stuffed like sausages. I could not bend them, or my elbows, if I tried.
I would write a message and ask them to come back in two weeks, tell them that I am at a crucial point in my work and must not be interrupted. But writing is out of the question. Not that they would agree to leave without seeing me. Isti's ears flatten, and she looks away.
"They were upset not to find you in your workshop. They went there first. I think they think we've hidden you. What do I tell them?" Udi stinks of fear. I wonder if they pulled weapons on him to get him to talk. There are those in the Confederation who regard reticence as insolence.
"Tell them that I am ill." Isti twitches when I say the words. That was what they had told me, the first time. You are ill, Sintu Charit, but we know this illness. We will tend you and you will be well again. I watch her as she refuses to look at me. "Tell them that I am ill and that it is contagious. If they wish to see me despite that, tell them that prudence dictates that they send only one person."
Udi gone, I am sponged apologetically with the cooling oil. Isti still remembers how I raged after the first time, still bears the scar above her eye from the fight where I grabbed Thirr's digging stick and slashed at anyone who came near. We have forgiven one another since, though for the longest time I thought I never would.
They knew what was going to happen to me. They didn't say a word until it was far too late for me to send an SOS, until I thought I was going to die, until I was mad with the itching and the sleepless nights, bulging with parasites, bedridden, skin so taut with charit that had I fallen out of bed, I would have burst. They waited until the cloudline grew close, and then they told me.
Sintu charit means "one who bears the Growers."
"As near as I can figure, the microbe mutated, maybe several times. The Tanna were infected just like the soil. The charit couldn't incubate in them any more. But I hadn't been infected yet. Somehow the charit got to me before the microbes could." Thirr and Auntie hover, protective, near my feet. Isti sits at the head of the bed, ready with the water cup and the oil for my tormented skin. Mohan Asto perches stiffly on a bench across the room, dressed in Confederation blues. Silhouetted against the darkening sky, he tries not to betray his repulsion at the sight of my occupied body.
"This is nowhere in the references regarding Mabat. And nowhere in your reports."
I roll my eyes and grit my teeth. Interrogation is a bad companion to the almost unbearable itch of the massing forces beneath my skin. "And if the Tanna had shared their stories with the Confederation? If they had told you that their world was green because when the rains came, some of them got sick and then poured tiny parasites, bugs, little symbiotic animals, from their fingertips? If I had told you that it was happening to me?"
Mohan rests his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, fingers knotting into his thinning black hair. It is not the first time in the discussion that I've raised the question, nor the first time he has refused to admit he knows the answer as well as I. When he speaks, he bites the words, as if saying them that way would help me understand. "We could have tried to treat it. We could have at least tried. We can still try if you'll just let me take you up."
My neck hurts from turning my head to look at him. As they grow heavier, I let my arms dangle over the sides of the bed, cartoonishly fat, the skin undulating of its own accord. There is a rumble outside and we all look up at once. The charit seem to hear it too. It won't be long now, I say inside my head, not at all sure whether it is them or myself I mean to reassure. For nine months at a time I am my own woman, but for the past four I have been increasingly theirs.
"Mohan, listen to me. I don't want them to try. There is nothing wrong with me that I want to have treated. I am in perfect health. This looks like an illness, but it isn't. Not really. This is..."
"...the future of Mabat," he interrupts, anger in his voice. "Don't you even see that you've gone native? You actually believe that being infested with... with these things is doing the planet any good? It's not. I can tell you that. I've been in the air, I've seen it. It's a dying planet. Green here and there, yes. And very green right here, I admit. But a few patches of foliage do not recovery make. You've had four years, Sophia. Why can't you just admit that you've failed?"
Auntie and Thirr watch me not like hawks, but like ground squirrels who have learned to fear things that come from the sky. Isti calmly holds a cup to my lips, and I drink.
"All right then. I've failed. Are you happy now?"
"Let us take you up to the ship."
I shake my head.
Auntie whispers to Thirr. I hear my name, but the rest is the ritual tongue, gibberish to me. Thirr's fingers tighten around his digging stick, and his thumb strokes the blade.
"I don't want to have to order you to comply."
"So don't."
I hear and feel it in the same instant, the first drop of rain and the first of the charit. My whole body shivers. The clouds open my fingertips. It pours. I do not bother to look at Mohan. I do not want to see what he sees. I want only to feel the way the water moves the air and the way the charit pour from my body, swarming out to join the rain, to remind their world how to grow. Isti strokes my forehead. Auntie makes a bowl of her hands and lets the charit flow into them, lifts them high, commends them to their task, then pours them out where I can see the cascading sequins of their tiny bodies. I smile. Auntie pats my foot and lets her fingers linger in quiet reassurance.
There is a short, shrill scream. Mohan holds out his arm, petrified. Like a silvered gauntlet, charit cover his bare wrist, twitching. He flails at them, shrieking. We see iridescent smears on the back of his hand, on his palm, and Isti keens in alarm. The point of Thirr's digger stops just prior to slitting Mohan's throat. Thirr's arm is lithe and brown and steady. Mohan chokes on a scream.
"No, Thirr. Let Auntie." I look at her, hoping there is something she can do.
Mohan sobs out loud as she leads him away from Thirr's blade, toward the corner of the balcony. Isti tells me in whispers how Auntie takes his arm, thrusts it beneath the downspout. I hear him say "Oh, thank God," and he retches. After a moment, Auntie comes back. Her bearing tells me all is well. Then there is silence but for the falling of charit and rain.
"What do I tell them?" I hear finally, weakly, from the doorway. He's not about to come any closer.
"Tell them I quit." The itching is fading, and itchlessness is so delicious, so exquisite, that I feel as if I am floating. I turn my head with effort. Rivers of jewels stream from my fingers, ruby and emerald and tourmaline, tumbling to the floor, extravagant. I watch them for a bit, knowing he watches them too. Later I will go back to the lab, try to figure out what it is that they do once they leave me, how they teach the plants to grow. Perhaps one day I will know them from the outside as well as I know them from the inside, although I have no illusions that that day will come soon.
"I can't just tell them that. They'll demand reasons."
"Then tell them I'm making progress and they should come back in ten years." I am high on fatigue and emotion and the rich scent of rain.
"Ten years?" The way he says it, I can tell that Mohan is imagining my doing this again and again and again. The idea repulses him. I don't care.
"Ten years, and for God's sake, don't come in the rainy season."
I close my eyes. The charit can take care of themselves from here on out. I have only to lie still until I am emptied. Isti's hands smooth my forehead, her teeth softly chattering as if to a child. Mohan says nothing, but I can hear the rustle of his cape as he dons it. The sound of boots on floorstones grows distant, then is swallowed by the rain.
From the foot of the bed I hear Auntie's voice, feel her tail curl reassuringly around my ankle. "Sleep well, Sintu Charit."
And I do.
©Hanne Blank
Hanne Blank is the author/editor of five books, including Unruly Appetites: Erotica
, with a sixth, Virgin: The
Untouched History on the way from Bloomsbury USA. You can find her online
at www.hanneblank.com.