Stoneskin Page 2

  “Msichana, I apologize.” The lawman had rolls of fat beneath his chin, and these bobbled as he spoke. “I didn’t mean to give you a scare.”

  Tembi stared at the lawman. He didn’t sound sorry, but lawmen never did.

  “The lawman is busy, Tembi.” It was the note of irritation in the Witch’s tone, soft and subtle but nonetheless there, that got Tembi moving. She slid down the pipe and joined the Witch.

  This close, Tembi could see the lawman’s skin was smooth from easy living. In her part of the city, the law had skin as thick as tanned hide and twice as rough. She wondered if this round little man had ever been in a fight, or a chase, or anything more difficult than walking up and down a gold stripe along the road.

  The lawman watched Tembi with dark eyes. His own ears were tipped backwards, as if a storm were coming in and he knew the dust was about to roll over him. “Where do you live, msichana? In the Stripes?”

  “No. In Tuff,” she replied.

  He nodded, and turned his attention away from her, back to the Witch.

  Good. The lawman had been right: she didn’t live in Tuff; she lived down in the Stripes, in the neighborhood of Marumaru. No thin-skinned lawman from Gold needed to know that.

  There was more discussion between the two adults. Tembi didn’t join in, but she drank in their conversation like water on a dry day. The lawman was all but bowing to this green alien woman and…

  …Tembi couldn’t be sure, but the Witch still had her head covered by that scarf, and…

  …yes!

  The lawman didn’t know the Witch was a Witch!

  How? If the Witch had thrown back her scarf and shown off those painted winter branches, then yes, of course the lawman would bow. The law would scrape along on the ground for a Witch. But this?

  No.

  This made no sense to her. None at all. When the Witch and the lawman parted ways, Tembi followed her. The Witch was walking in the general direction of Marumaru, not even caring if her feet touched upon the gold stripe running along the road.

  After some time in silence, the Witch glanced down at Tembi. “They have this on other worlds, did you know?” She pointed towards the gold stripe, and then held up her right hand. “If you have an Identchip under your skin, it tells the officers you’re someone who belongs, not someone who should be… What did you call it? Popped?”

  Tembi nodded.

  “Have you ever been popped?”

  Tembi touched a spot on her left shoulder. It was covered by her robes, but the skin was still thick from where a lawwoman had set her stick. Tembi had been caught picking pockets; she could still remember the shame of lying in a pool of her own urine, unable to move until the effects of the popstick wore off.

  “No,” she told the Witch, her chin and ears high.

  “I was born in a place very much like this.” The Witch sighed as she gestured to the too-tidy buildings around them. “My parents named me Pihikan, their oldworld way of saying I was a baby girl who would grow to become a soft, gentle delight.

  “When I was taken from my home and put in school, I chose the name Matindi,” she said. “You can call me that instead.”

  Tembi didn’t much enjoy this new knowledge that the Witch had a name. It was like bumping into your teacher when you were both on your way to the public water supply—maybe you knew, deep down, they were just like you, but the reminder set your teeth on edge.

  (Besides, at the heart of it, the name Matindi sounded very much like the name Tembi, with lots of sharp short vowels piled on top of each other, and there was a question rolling around in that comparison which the girl wasn’t ready to ask.)

  They walked along the gold stripe until it was joined by first a red stripe, then a blue one, then that shade of disgusting crimson that the Witch—Matindi—called maroon. The buildings grew shorter and rougher, and Tembi began to recognize landmarks here and there along the roads. Her steps grew eager; Matindi’s slowed.

  “I can find my own way home from here,” Tembi promised the Witch. The green-skinned woman was drawing more attention the deeper they went into the Stripes. She was not talking half as much as before, but when she did, she seemed to be arguing quietly with herself in that two-toned voice. It was beginning to chew on Tembi’s nerves.

  “One last favor,” Matindi said in something of a rush. “Do you have frozen cream on this world?”

  “Don’t you know?” Tembi was surprised. She had decided the Witch knew everything about everything. She had made the lawman step down, even!

  “The Deep doesn’t have any need for food,” Matindi said. “So while it might not care about sweets, I certainly do. I try them on each world I visit. Would you share some with me?”

  Tembi’s stomach turned over in its need to cleanse itself of those false pancakes. “Well…”

  “You could show me your favorite restaurant.” The Witch was staring at the sky. “I would pick up the cost, of course. To thank you for such an interesting day.”

  Well. That was different! Of course Tembi knew a place to buy frozen cream! It was a quick run back the way they had come, and a couple sharp turns up the blue stripe. The frozen cream parlor was a blaze of pink and purple in the middle of a row of shops, and children running wild with distraction within.

  Another group of children sat on the curb outside the shop. They were younger than Tembi, and watched those who went in and out with too much hope on their faces. There were almost enough of them to call the law down for a fast chase-off; Tembi hoped they knew better than to stick around.

  The shop was cool, with fans spinning the hot air up through glossy black vents. When she and Matindi entered, the adults turned to watch the green-skinned woman with her enormous feet and her white-and-silver clothes. Some of them, the ones who looked like they did business up in the gold, nodded to her.

  The children in the shop noticed Tembi. Some of them laughed.

  Tembi memorized their faces. She knew where they played after school; their too-soft skin needed some pounding. She tipped her chin and ears up again, and walked straight to the counter, ignoring the queue. “You want mango,” she told the Witch. “We eat mango here. And chocolate. And vanilla. But not together. Ackee and salt—those go together!”

  The Witch ordered ten different flavors.

  (When Tembi asked how she had paid, the Witch explained she had swiped the Identchip in her wrist across the counter so the clerks could take credit from her account. Tembi had stared at her until the frozen cream had arrived, her mind blown apart at learning about the existence of this…this magic!)

  The servers brought their orders to the table, smiling at the green-skinned woman, and even nodded politely to Tembi! As they sat at a shiny metal table in the center of the restaurant, surrounded by scoops of frozen cream on cold stone tiles, Tembi didn’t mind at all that the children were still watching her.

  Tembi tried every flavor. Most of them twice. The mango and the vanilla, those she ate until the spoon scraped across the tile.

  Matindi tried most of them too, but kept returning to the ackee. It was different, she said, and that was rare enough in the galaxy for a Witch. She was still very quiet, but at least she had stopped muttering to herself—when Tembi asked what was wrong, she said she was enjoying the experience.

  As Tembi put her spoon down, full to bursting, she heard Matindi mutter, “I’m getting to it!”

  “What?”

  “How old are you, Tembi?” the Witch asked quickly.

  “Eight,” she replied. “My birthday was last month.”

  “Oh, you are out of your mind!” Fury, almost as fierce as when she had first appeared in the street back on Miha’ana, snapped Matindi’s eyes tight once more.

  Tembi jumped down from her chair, ready to run.

  “No, Tembi, stop!” The Witch dropped her head into her hands. “I’m not angry with you, no. Gods, no! This is…

  “Come,” the Witch said, standing. She left the store, her robes snappin
g as she moved past the children still gathered on the curb.

  Tembi followed. She wasn’t sure why. She caught up with Matindi at the first corner, and the Witch paused to allow the girl to fall into step with her.

  “I’m sorry, Tembi Moon. I don’t know how to talk to you about this,” Matindi said. “Do you know what a Witch does?”

  “You make the Deep take you anywhere you want to go,” Tembi said.

  Matindi made a pained face. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose… Yes, that’s one way to look at it. And do you know why Witches are important?”

  “Because you talk to the Deep,” Tembi said. “I just said that.”

  “Do you know what a supply chain is?”

  The girl’s first thought was that the Witch wanted to know where to buy jewelry, but that made no sense, so she stared at her own feet and didn’t say a word.

  “You don’t choose to become a Witch,” Matindi said. “The Deep chooses you. And the Deep doesn’t choose many people to become Witches.

  “Once I was just a normal girl,” Matindi continued. “Just like you. The Deep found me, and it wanted to be my friend.”

  No. Oh no, oh no, Tembi didn’t like this conversation at all! She began to kick an empty carton down the road. It bumped across the marbled white stripe that marked the boundary of Marumaru.

  “I had to go to a special school for many years.” The Witch was still talking. “I had to train my mind to understand how to talk to the Deep. And there’s much—so much!—a Witch needs to know about how the galaxy works, and—

  “Tembi.” Matindi dropped to her knees in a swirl of white-and-silver cloth. “I was older than you—I was fourteen years older than you when the Deep chose me! I had the chance to be a child, and…and…”

  Tembi began to cry.

  “I can’t do this,” the Witch said softly.

  There was a quick rush of air.

  When Tembi looked up, Matindi was gone.

  _________________________________

  choice away

  choice fight

  Excerpt from “Notes from the Deep,” 9 March 3294 CE

  _________________________________

  Chapter Three

  The homes in Marumaru were boxes, metal containers that had begun their lives on starships. Once emptied, these were moved from the docks to the edges of the city, then piled on top of each other and bolted together to form a stack, five, six, sometimes seven units high. The Moon family lived at the top of a stack: their unit had a small weather cage over a garden on the roof, and a window that faced the city below. Tembi ran up the street, raced to the top of the stack, threw open her door, and found…nothing.

  She had expected…something. It shouldn’t be possible to disappear and reappear across the galaxy—twice!—without…something. But even though Tembi waited patiently on her doorstep for her family to find her, her mother got home from work as she usually did, and then her sisters got home from work as they usually did, and Tembi realized it had all happened within the space of an afternoon and she hadn’t been missed at all.

  Had it happened? She had nothing to prove that she had gone to Miha’ana or met a Witch or eaten straw-flavored griddle cakes. There was a paper napkin from the store where Matindi had bought frozen cream, but Tembi had picked up enough of those from the streets without any involvement from a Witch. She kept working up the courage to go back and ask if a green-skinned woman had come in with a little girl, and kept turning away when she caught sight of the other children begging in the street.

  It didn’t take too much for Tembi to convince herself it had all been a dream. In fact, when she went to bed at nights, she felt as if she were still dreaming: the Deep, all of its beautiful multicolored self, came and sang to her. She never saw more than a small part of the Deep at once—it was too vast, and her mind couldn’t catch the whole of it. It was never more than a leg, or a wing, or a wide, broad back, and never ever any part of its face. But its songs? Those were always complete and clear. It sang her stories about faraway places, with heroes who fought battles, and heroes who kept battles from being fought.

  (The Deep kept insisting the latter were the more important of the two, but they made for dull dreams.)

  Weeks passed. Tembi went to school when it was in session, and ran in the streets with her friends when it wasn’t. They rolled marks and picked pockets, and sold what they stole to Mad Ysabet behind the markets. And sometimes, when her frustration about the Witch and the trip to Miha’ana became too much for her to bear, she would go out and fight with anyone who made the mistake of thinking a skinny little girl would be an easy toss.

  When the storms beat down and the channels stopped working, Tembi would hide at home and reread the old book with glossy paper pages, the one with the images of the planets in the Orion Arm. She always stopped on the page with the planet carved from unmistakable greens and blues.

  Earth.

  It had been renamed Earth Prime, and then Old Earth, and then a mess of complicated designations as its children tried to puzzle out the new shapes of their galaxy. But, inevitably, it shrugged off the cumbersome names and went back to its roots. It was, and would always be, Earth.

  At night, in her dreams, the Deep showed her every planet except Earth.

  There was a library in the Stripes. Not the nicest place, to be sure, but one of her sisters worked nearby and knew some of the local law enough to ask them to keep an eye on her. Tembi started reading what she could about Earth, and the other worlds down in Orion. After that, she found Perseus, and then located Miha’ana. The library had a rickety old public information ’bot, and it helped her turn the leagues between Miha’ana and her own home planet into numbers she could understand. That night, she climbed through the window and lay on her back in the family garden, trying to see the stars.

  There was no way of knowing where that path would have led, as Tembi went to school the next morning and found that her teacher had been replaced by a green-skinned Witch.

  Matindi walked into the classroom with Tembi’s old teacher in tow. She was wearing another scarf over and across her head, this one in dull reds and browns. The painted branches had been scrubbed away. Her robes were red and local, and she wore no shoes on her too-large feet. She stood beside the old teacher and smiled at Tembi, as she did the other students. As if the girl was just another body in a seat. As if she hadn’t brought Tembi sixteen thousand lightyears—

  The Witch winked at Tembi.

  Oh!

  Tembi sat a little taller and listened to her old teacher talk about unforgettable opportunities in other cities, and cultural exchange programs, and the problems of finding local (Emphasis on local—please please please tell your parents this is only a temporary arrangement!) replacements this late in the term. Then, Tembi’s old teacher went to sit in the back of the classroom to make sure this strange creature wouldn’t devour his former students on her first day.

  “Well,” Matindi said, and pushed up the sleeves of her robes to show her wrong-jointed elbows. “Let’s get this out of the way.”

  The Witch put her arms behind her back, then swung them up and over her head in an impossible motion which set the students to squealing. Then, she placed one of her bare feet on the teacher’s desk. “Why am I green?” she asked. “And why are my feet so big?”

  The class giggled.

  “One word,” Matindi said. “I know you know it. It’s in all the fictions on the channels.”

  Isaac, a boy who made nothing but trouble and bruises for Tembi, shouted: “Terraforming!”

  “Very near,” the Witch said. “First comes terraforming, then comes bioforming.” She pointed to the display screen at the front of the classroom. A planet appeared, mostly browns and blues. “This is my world, Miha’ana, when humans found it.”

  The image of the planet shifted to green with dense streaks of blue. “This is what it looks like now,” she continued. “Terraforming can bring a planet very close to Earth-normal
, but it’s nearly impossible to get it exact. There will always be something about a planet that makes it uncomfortable for an Earth-normal person to live there.

  “Once terraforming is done, you bridge that distance with bioforming. An Earth-normal human body is changed just enough to make it so we can live comfortably on an alien planet.”

  She bent her arms over her head again, and the class squealed anew.

  “Sometimes it takes a lot of work to live on a new world,” she said. “What do you think Miha’ana is like?”

  “Green!”

  “Weird!” That was Isaac again; the other children giggled.

  Tembi remembered those moments of panic when she slid around the quick-growing plants in the alley. “Wet?”

  “Yes!” Matindi pointed to Tembi, the briefest acknowledgment, then moved her attention across the classroom again. “Miha’ana had more deep underground water stores than expected. When terraforming brought that water to the surface, the local vegetation had new opportunities to grow. It became aggressive—so aggressive that the settlers who paid to have the planet terraformed decided to sell it instead of moving there.

  “My ancestors couldn’t afford a planet that was closer to Earth-normal. They bought Miha’ana and paid to have their genes bioformed instead. They allowed themselves to be changed to give their children a chance at a better life.”

  “Are you a plant?” Not Isaac this time, but one of his friends.

  The Witch took the boy’s question with levity. “Our green pigmentation began to emerge several generations after my people moved to Miha’ana, so no, I am not a plant,” she replied. “I do have some biomarkers to warn the plants on Miha’ana that I’m dangerous to them, and that’s how our green pigmentation emerged, but it’s a little too early in the day for the lesson on allelopathy. Instead, why don’t you tell me about your world?”

  The students were happy to talk about their home world. Adhama, beautiful Adhama, at turns dry and rainy in their proper seasons, with windstorms that ripped across the planet. When those storms passed through, it was time to hide! They showed their new teacher how they could move their long ears to protect their hearing in case of blowing dust, and how their skin could harden in response to threats. Isaac tried to drop a chair on his hand to prove it; their old teacher, who knew something like that was coming, intervened.