MOST women’s homes in Keslo were enormous and tended to get bigger as generations of women and children branched and expanded. Rooms were added, porches enclosed, neighboring dwellings annexed and connected by inventive and oddly constructed temporary hallways that acquired permanence and extensions of their own. Back yards became internal patios, became parlors, became bedrooms and kitchens and even bathrooms depending on need and whim and available materials. This was the pattern in every Civilized Wood throughout both archipelagos, expansion and adaptation rather than contraction. Rina knew this from conversations with the other children in her extracurriculars. Twice each tenday she took lessons in painting, and three days after each of those she had rhetoric. Eight others of her age, both boys and girls, Eleph and Lox, learned brushstroke and color theory and regularly came home with garishly bright sheets for mothers and aunts to exclaim over. In addition, she took classes with four other Fant, all girls and all Eleph and all at least two years older, acquiring techniques of verbal sparring and persuasion on topics as weighty as technology versus simplicity and as frivolous as the best time of day to eat fruit. Every fourth session the five students engaged in formal debate, each in turn holding the orator’s spot on one of Keslo’s public performance spaces. Family members flocked to these forensic events, and each girl had at least ten guests from their overcrowded homes occupying the benches in the audience.
All except for Rina.
Other households overflowed with mothers and aunts, siblings and cousins, sometimes to triple digits. The house Rina occupied had originally been a rarity on Barsk, a single-family dwelling. In the beginning, Tolta had lived there with her husband, the pharmer Arlo, and occasionally—when the mood struck him—their son, Pizlo. But Arlo was dead, had died well before Rina had been born, and Pizlo didn’t really exist to almost everyone on the planet. Often as not he lived outside of the normal spaces of the Civilized Wood, and only sometimes remembered to visit his mom. Tolta had invited Rina’s own mother, Dabni, to move in after she’d bonded with Jorl and become pregnant. Tolta wasn’t kin—though Rina had called her “aunt” all her life—but as Dabni had no other ties in Keslo, all of her family being back on Taylr far to the east edge of the eastern archipelago, that circumstance had been sufficient to expand a widow’s household to include a pregnant friend. Though not unprecedented, it was uncommon, and as Pizlo didn’t officially exist, Rina was the only child in the household.
Because her mother operated a small bookshop, and because her house lacked the usual mob of sibs and cousins to provide daily distractions, Rina spent most of her free time in a corner of the store, reading through the stock in a random and serendipitous order. Other times she took supplemental lessons in history and governance with her father, Jorl, drilling down into levels of detail that the coursework at her gymnasium never came close to. Sometimes he took her for walks throughout Keslo and spoke of dead people, both Fant and not, and the conversations he’d had with them in recent days. Rina followed much of the formal lessons and her young mind grew keen from them, benefiting not just from her father’s expertise as a historian but also as Barsk’s first senator to the Alliance. At least as applied to the material on civics.
Her father’s tales of the dead though, these landed on her like fables whose true meanings lay just beyond her reach, wisdom that she couldn’t quite grasp when he told them, but which would burst in on her without warning to illuminate something else that was happening around her. Though no one had taught her the words, she’d acquired an indirect understanding of simile and metaphor and it colored everything in her life. It gave her a greater appreciation of her father than most girls her age. Her mother was wonderful and together her parents seemed perfect, but taken on his own the range of her father seemed vaster to her than anything else in the world.
That awe for him could have grown worshipful, but Dabni dealt it a stunning blow each season by dropping Rina off to spend a few days at the vast house where Jorl’s own mother lived. That woman, aided by an unending supply of sisters and cousins, told tales of her father’s youth that stripped away his status as scholar and senator and Aleph-Bearer. In that place he was repainted as a boy who got into enough trouble to become the subject of other people’s stories, often as not in the company of Arlo, the boy who would grow up to become Tolta’s husband.
But of all the people in Rina’s life, the one who came to her late at night and woke her from her sleep with his quiet conversations was whom she loved the best. Each evening, after finishing her supper and laying out her things for the next morning, after her mother and Tolta had both come to her room to kiss her good night and bid her sweet dreams, Rina would close her eyes and pretend to be asleep. And wait. Pretense often gave way to reality, waiting to dreaming.
That’s when Pizlo would come.
He visited most nights for as long as she could remember. Sometimes he also stopped to see his own mother, sometimes not, but always he came to sit on the floor by her bed and tell her a story until her eyelids grew heavy again and she had to finish the tale in her dreams.
Rina knew that her bedroom had once belonged to Pizlo, that his mother had repurposed and redecorated it after Dabni moved in a season before she’d been born. Pizlo had to have known, too, but he never mentioned it, nor gazed wistfully about at this lamp or that wall hanging as Rina imagined she would surely do if their situations were reversed.
That night she had dozed off and didn’t see him as he’d arrived.
“I met a Panda once,” Pizlo said, his voice soft as new leaves but the rhythm of it pulled her to wakefulness and caused her eyes to flutter open. It couldn’t have been more than seconds since her mother had kissed her forehead and slipped away and yet Pizlo had crept in and taken a seat by her bed. Or perhaps he’d been in the room all along, hidden away and silent, moving to sit there only after she’d settled. Or maybe she’d just fallen asleep and lost track of wakefulness and he’d arrived with plenty of time to get situated and watch her sleep while he decided on a story to tell.
“You didn’t,” she replied, though in fact she knew he had because he’d told her at least part of the story before. She reached under her pillow and found her doll, Kokab, and set it up on her shoulder to listen to Pizlo’s story too.
“I did. It was the same day that Jorl became a senator. The day up on the station when he’d saved all of us, everyone on Barsk, and no one knew it.”
Rina crinkled the nubs of her trunk. Of all of Pizlo’s stories, the ones featuring her father made her happiest. “I thought he saved everyone by beating that Yak, the one no one remembers. Not a Panda.”
Pizlo fell silent, and for a moment Rina feared she’d done something to cut story time short. But then he whispered, “I remember him,” and shook himself, his pale ears flapping and wrapping closely about himself. “The Yak didn’t live on the station, he was just there to cause trouble. But Pandas lived there. The station doesn’t need a lot of people, machines do most of the work. And I don’t know why, but everyone who did live there when I visited was an Ailuros. I didn’t think about it at the time, but it was kind of funny.”
“Funny how?”
“The station had no color. Nothing grew. Everything was dull plastic and ceramic and metal. And now I wonder if the Ailuros were there because, being all black and white themselves, living in that kind of a world didn’t feel like a hardship to them, or if whoever assigned them there thought it was a joke. Monochromatic humor.”
He smiled at her and she smiled back and tapped his wrist with the tip of her trunk. “Now you’re the one making a joke.”
“Maybe.” He smiled with his voice, something she didn’t understand how to do but delighted in when he displayed his skill at it. “Anyway, the Panda I met helped me settle into the yacht that Jorl had just acquired. Or inherited. Depends on whom you ask. But that’s not important. Anyway, your father had a lot to do that last day, talking to the forgotten Yak, and to a bunch of senators who’d gotten mixed up when everyone forgot the Yak. And also some dead people, because Jorl is always talking to dead people. And also, a lot of this time he was working things out with his new Brady assistant.”
“Druz!” exclaimed Rina. She’d never met her father’s senatorial aide but had heard about her, and now Pizlo was talking about the first time, when the Sloth had forgotten the Yak and in that gap of memory deduced that she worked for Jorl.
“That’s right, Druz. And because I wasn’t much older than you, when neither she nor Jorl could spare the moment to keep watch on me, Druz assigned an Ailuros to the job.”
“Did you mind? Being treated like that? Like you would get in trouble without a minder?”
“I might have,” said Pizlo, his lips working around something he’d just shoved into his mouth. He’d produced another handful of succulent leaves from one of the pouches on his bandolier, gave her a guilty glance as he remembered his manners and offered her some. She shook her head and he happily ate them himself, chewing and swallowing before continuing. “I already had marked myself with several moons by then…” He gestured at his bare chest and the ink from his latest redrawing of the seven dark circles he’d painted upon it. “But no … so few people ever talked to me, even fewer then than now, that just really being seen by someone was incredible. And that it was someone who I could never expect to ever meet on Barsk just made it more so. In the moment, it never occurred to me that really Druz was assigning me a babysitter.”
Rina responded with a scowl of understanding. Although nothing like the wildling upbringing that Pizlo had enjoyed, she’d grown up inventing much of her own structure, free of the socializing and rules of age mates in a large house, lured instead into flights of imagination courtesy of the books in her mother’s shop. Those few occasions when Dabni or Tolta felt compelled to hire some local teen to watch her for an evening still bristled and burned. But yes, being minded by someone from another world would take away all the sting.
“So what was he like?”
“The Panda? Well, you’ve read up on them in your studies, right?”
Rina nodded. “Uh huh. They’re big, taller than Fant but not as thick. And furry of course. And I think their ears are cute.” She giggled and then covered her mouth with both hands, embarrassed.
“Cute? Those tiny things? Well, I guess. Anyway, this Ailuros was all that, like all of them are. Except, he also wasn’t. He talked to me, a bit. I could see he didn’t want to, I think he really disliked having to even be on the same space station as Jorl or me, let alone the same room, but once he and I started talking that changed.”
“Changed how?”
“He started out by calling me a ‘tiny monster’ as soon as Druz left me with him. I thought he meant on account of my being different, the way everyone on Barsk treats me—”
“Not everyone!” Rina trumpeted and then blushed and gripped her offending trunk with both hands.
“Well, no, not everyone. That’s true.” The smile had returned to his voice making Rina smile in turn. “But anyway, he meant because I was a Fant. He thought Barsk was a planet full of monsters. He admitted he’d never really thought about it though, and as we talked he realized it didn’t make any sense and he apologized for calling me a monster.”
“A tiny monster.”
“Right, he was sorry about that, and he started calling me ‘tiny Fant’ instead.”
Rina giggled. “Not ‘tiny Lox’?”
“Nope. I think because both Eleph and Lox look so different from all the other people in the Alliance, and so much like one another, that no one but us really understands we’re different races.”
“But that’s … that’s just dumb.”
Pizlo nodded, shrugged, and continued. “I told him my name, and asked him for his. I’d never done that before, asked someone for their name. I mean, when would I have? Anyway, he told me. Ciochon. Not like any name I’d heard before. So I said, ‘Hullo, Ciochon. My name is Pizlo.’ And he scowled at me.”
“Why would he do that?”
“That’s what I asked him. And he said if he called me by name, then I’d stop being a Fant.”
“That’s dumb, too,” said Rina. “What else could you be?”
“No, see, he didn’t mean it like that. Like before, when I asked you what you knew about Ailuros. Everything you said was true, but none of it really told you anything about Ciochon, about his life and his family, about his hobbies and his favorite foods, or his hopes and plans. It was like that. He said that if he called me by name that I’d become a real person to him, that he couldn’t see me as a monster any more.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“It bothered him. He said that when you live on a space station you spend a lot of time in your own head, thinking about the same stuff over and over. And that if he came to see that the one Fant he’d actually met wasn’t a monster, than what did that say about all the other monsters on our planet? Because he’d roll it all around in his head and eventually have to accept that an entire planet was a lot of people to be wrong about. And not just that, but it called into doubt other things that he knew to be absolutely true, taught to him by the same teachers and leaders who explained about us being monsters. It’s like talking to me, admitting I was real, would end up breaking everything he knew. He started rocking and sniffling. I mean, he was thinking real hard, but it was making him feel pretty upset, not like when Jorl causes me to think about stuff.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, it looked like he was having some kind of panic attack, winding himself up tighter and tighter, more and more unhappy. Only back then—remember I was about your age now—I didn’t know what that was. All I could do was watch it happen. It made me feel so helpless. I wanted to help him but I didn’t know what to do. But then one of the hundreds of thousands of things Telko had said to me earlier that day popped up in my thoughts—”
“Telko the moon, right?”
He grinned at her. “That’s the only Telko I’ve met. Anyway, Telko had told me something that I didn’t understand, with names that made no sense, but I just repeated it to the Panda, because I knew that Telko knew it was what Ciochon needed to hear at that moment.”
Rina gasped and clutched her doll with excitement. “What did you say?”
Pizlo’s voice dropped as he spoke in a monotone. “I know where Su and Lin sleep. I know where they play. Every moment of every day, I know.”
“I don’t understand. Who are Su and Lin?”
“They’re Ciochon’s daughters.”
“Ewwww! Why would you say that? That’s creepy.”
He nodded. “Yeah. The Panda fell out of his chair and scrambled away from me. He had a weapon on his belt and he reached for it but didn’t draw it, only kept a hand there. And he was shaking and asking ‘How do you know my daughters’ names? How could you know anything about them?’”
“And what did you say?”
“What Telko had told me to say. What Ciochon needed to hear. I said, ‘It’s because I’m a monster. Just like everyone on Barsk.’”
Rina frowned and shrunk back against her pillow, clutching Kokab to her. “Pizlo! That’s terrible. Why would you do that? You said he was seeing that Fant weren’t monsters, that you were a real person and that all those bad stories were wrong. You threw all that away. Why?”
Pizlo rubbed at his face. He looked away and fiddled with a scab on his elbow and said nothing.
“You can’t end a story like that,” said Rina. “And you never do anything without a reason. So why did you do that?”
He looked up at her and sighed. “It’s … it was what he needed. I didn’t see it clearly for a long time, which I guess is why Telko helped me with it. But see, he had to make a choice: if I was real, then that meant maybe everything he knew was wrong, that his life was a lie and maybe nothing else was as he understood it to be. Or, if he could see that maybe I’d tricked him—cuz monsters are tricky—and fooled him about not being a monster for just a short while, then his life could go on as before and everything would be fine again.”
“But—”
“Jorl had just caused everyone but me to forget someone. The entire galaxy forgot him, and there was a hole in everyone’s memory. And now here was this Panda who had never done anything to any Fant, and just by talking to him I might have broken his life. Can you imagine? Like everything you know, in your whole life, suddenly becomes wrong? That was no good. I wouldn’t ever want to do that to someone on purpose, and here I’d done it by accident. Telko’s words let me fix that. Besides, nearly everyone on Barsk calls me an abomination, so being a monster for one Ailuros wasn’t much of a burden.”
Rina climbed out of her bed to wrap her arms and trunk around Pizlo and hugged him. “You did it so the Panda could be happy.”
“Well, yeah, that’s one way to end the story,” he said.
“You’re not a monster, Pizlo.”
He laughed. “No, that’s what I learned from the Panda. It’s part of the moral of the story.”
“What’s that?”
“None of us are monsters.”
“None?”
“Nope.”
She let go of him then, chewing on her lip as she climbed back into bed and processed what he’d told her.
“You said that was only part of the moral. What was the rest?”
“The other part? Oh, just that all of us are monsters. Not just Lox and Eleph, everyone, in all the galaxy.”
“But you just said—”
He was grinning at her. “I know, right? See, I told you monsters were tricky.”