Terra Nova: An Anthology of Contemporary Spanish Science Fiction Read Online Free PDF Page A

anything more. But you need to know
that when what has to happen finally comes to pass, I’ll be at your
side. Helping you with the soft stick when I have to,
okay?”
    Charni caressed Deva’s
palm with her finger to tell her that what she said had satisfied
her. And, suddenly, she felt a pinch and then a slight but constant
pain below her navel. She clenched her teeth and swore
silently.
    How could it be? Three hungers had gone by.
For more than three cycles she had trained her body to empty solids
before the second hunger, never in the third or later. How?
    “ What’s happening?” Deva
asked when she perceived Charni’s tension.
    “ Nothing, don’t worry. I’m
going home.”
    “ Okay. Should we touch
hands?”
    “ Yes. When?”
    “ I don’t know. Within one
urination?”
    “ Mmm … better after one
water.”
    “ Fine. But I have to be
home before the fourth hunger.”
    “ Right. Me too. We’ll
touch hands.”
    “ Touch!”
     
     
    When Charni got home, she found her mother
attending to her duties as queen. At thirty-six cycles old, her
contour no longer served to help men see, so she had more time to
organize, help, and advise other women.
    Charni decided to wait until the meeting was
over to greet her as she ought. Meanwhile she looked for her little
sister, four cycles old: the last thing her mother had produced
before men made her sense that the contour of her breasts and the
stretch marks around her belly and thighs made it hard for their
seeing organ to be satisfied.
    “ Speak with textures,” she
heard her mother order the women who were whispering. “What exactly
are you asking me to do?”
    “ We’d like you to talk
some sense into Chaid Khasat. He keeps wanting us to help him see
when it is more than textured that he never will.”
    “ That’s nothing new,” her
mother replied with a snort. “Men are like girls who need to share
information with their mother all the time to adapt to this world.
Chaid Khasat is incomplete besides, and he and every man like him
is furious and afraid because he’ll never sense again the way he
did before. It’s our duty to ease his fear from time to time
although we know that our bodies, no matter how hard we try, will
never give him back his sight. So I don’t sense any urgency to talk
sense into him as your tone seems to suggest.”
    “ But seven cycles have
gone by and he doesn’t seem willing to admit that we can’t help him
see the way we did before he was an invalid. Other men didn’t take
so long. And he still wants our attention just as often. Kesha, we
can’t keep letting him spill information into us this way. If a man
becomes an invalid that quickly, it means that he’s weak, and so he
can’t help us make strong guardians. Old men can, but he
can’t.”
    “ Well, that’s what the
peacemakers are for. To calm them down without the fear that their
information will develop inside them and make weak men.”
    “ Kesha …” a second woman
interrupted with a cough to make her presence known, “that’s not
the only problem.”
    “ Then texture it so I
understand you and can help you as I ought.” Her mother was
beginning to lose her patience.
    “ You can touch me, Kesha.
As always, we try to have as many peacemakers in the invalids’
house as we can so that it will be hard for them to make a woman
produce a weak man. But Chaid Khasat isn’t calmed down by the women
we send there to ensure that the invalids don’t die of hunger or
get sick from lack of cleanliness. He’s begun to enter nearby homes
and force them to help him see with more and more
violence.”
    Complete silence filled the house. Not a
breath could be heard. Charni grabbed her sister and held her even
tighter against her chest to sense her better and not to feel alone
in a world that could seem unlimited and terrifying to a little
girl.
    “ Violent? How?” my mother
asked in an almost icy tone. “Some men are very impetuous when it
comes to satisfying their