Daughter of Orion Page 7

  ~~~

  About a month after the explorer had brought back artifacts of the Others, more excitement stirred Gam Tol: a living alien was coming to the city. Imagine the sweeping, putting away, and polishing that went on as the day of his coming neared! Lona and Van-Dor needn't imagine, as they were there. Par-On was, too, but I doubt that a three-year-old was worrying about preparing the city for a guest.

  Grandfather told me how the alien would reach Ul. An explorer would fly a crystal-ship to the earth and stay there while the alien flew here on autopilot — it took Grandfather a while to explain the strange English word to me — and stay here a month before he flew back to the earth to let the explorer come home. Envying both the explorer and the alien, I wished that I could grow up fast to go to the earth soon.

  Just before twilight one day, the city's inhabitants gathered on the mesa to watch a crystal-ship land on it. When the ship opened, out of it stepped a tall, bald-headed man with sand-colored skin. He wore what I now know was an Army dress uniform with a wealth of hard-earned medals. He was the Colonel.

  I'd received the high honor of being his official greeter. Kneeling on my left knee before him, I offered him a cup of water as I said, in carefully memorized English, "On behalf of the Tan, welcome to Ul! Please take this water as a sign of our hospitality."

  Smiling at me, he said something that I'm ashamed to say I can't recall; then he drank the water. All of it, though by custom he was supposed to hand most of it back to me so that both I and the Kan Tan could drink of it, too. I looked at Sor-On for direction. He mimed my drinking from the empty cup, so I held it to my lips and handed it to him.

  The crowd cheered as if all had gone well.

  The Colonel watched with approving eyes the evening sacrifice and ate of it as he sat on the high dais with the royal court and the ambassadorial corps. He ate Tan food with no harm, just as we Tani eat earth-human food with no harm. The common-origin theory looks ever better, but I digress.

  The Colonel spent much of his time in Gam Tol with the Kan Tan and my grandfather, and was gone from Gam Tol much of the time on a tour of the Desert. One day, though, I got to give the Colonel the grand tour of the city. Holding Par's hand with one hand and the hand of a shy little an girl named Dala, who'd come to live in the city, with the other hand, I led the Colonel from the eastern gate, where we Tani poured out water to Holy Light each morning, to the western gate, where we slew a gur or a har on high occasions.

  I showed him the stables for lex-i, the pens for gur-i and har-i, the greenhouses for each of the twelve species of plants, the granaries and the cellars, the cooling towers for precipitating moisture from the air, the manufactories for making useful items from wood, bone, and hides, the recycling pits, and the shops where an-i technicians used their gifts to turn varieties of quartz into the crystals that kept the Tan alive. The Colonel told me how impressed he was with the city's neatness and organization. "You Tani would make good soldiers," he said.

  He also, to my delight, praised how well I spoke English. He'd learned some Tan speech, but I found it easier to talk with him in his own language than to listen to him mangle mine.

  "I'm going to be ready for the earth when I go there," I said to him with my besetting sin of vanity.

  He gave me a delightful smile. "I bet that you will be, Mira."

  Years later he'd tell me that he saw me as the child that he and Mom had never been able to conceive. He'd get me as that child, at unimaginable cost.

  I took him also to see the statue of the Wise One and the Others' books. These had a special niche in the Hall of Evening Sacrifice. As he gazed at the statue and at the books' musical-note script, tears leaked from his eyes.

  Straining my English to its limit, I said, "It's kind of you to give strangers an offering of tears."

  He blinked at me. "What? Ah, right, Mira."

  He looked sad, too, when he felt tremors grow in frequency and intensity during the month of his visit. From the vantage of my nineteen years, I see that he, like Sor-On and Dor-Sad, knew full well what was going on.

  Soon none of us could deny that something bad was going on. The tremors, which had just been shaking dust from tunnels' ceilings, now began to shake things down. A crystal tower fell in the city's southeast corner. Sor-On declared parts of the city off limits; even in the rest of it we Tani eyed ceilings with unease. When a tunnel collapsed in one of the outlying settlements, eight persons died. When a water tank ruptured in another outlying settlement, a woman spent so long under water that she came out of it a corpse.

  We ambassadors, hearing of her death, spoke in whispers the English word drowned. Other Tani spoke to each other of an unprecedented phrase by the woman's name in the genealogies: wa-tak-il-a na-bul, 'she died in water.'

  Both by royal decree and on our own volition we survivors began to spend as much time outdoors as we could. That time grew ever less as days passed, for the wis-i bas, the sandstorms, grew ever more frequent and fierce. Mixed now with sand was a strange powdered rock that we'd never seen. Rumor brought word that rifts were opening in the world. From the rifts flowed rivers of melted rock; from the rifts gushed clouds of powdered rock. All learned to call a rift by the English word volcano.

  All of us looked to Sor-On and Dor-Sad to make things right. They were ever talking in private with each other or with Dor-Sad's loyal band of technicians. Many of these went on mysterious voyages in crystal-ships.

  These, the rest of us Tani guessed, were going to the earth. From there we expected deliverance. The earth-humans had, after all, given us the words tremor and volcano. The earth-humans, who knew of catastrophes like those afflicting us, must've faced and survived them. The earth-humans knew how to deal with them. Through the earth, we believed, Sor-On and Dor-Sad would save us.

  I was the most faithful in believing that they would. They did save me, along with the seven of you. To the rest of the Tani they gave only the illusion of hope. In memory I sometimes see the stay-behinds, ghosts of another world, gazing at me. Sometimes they say to me, Keep the Tan alive, Mira. At other times they say, Why you?