Entry tags:

writing, yuuzhan vong

Second Head, Fourth Word


It had been barely recognizable, small enough to cover with the palms of her hands, when Skande Ahll buried it in the nutrient feed with its body curled against its fat tail. In the logs, it was registered as a failed seed.
If the spindly female held it up to her dark eye, she could see it was her son. Or almost.
A pair of tiny arms clinging to her dark dress, afraid to let go. He was guilty for causing her to miscarry what would have been her second child, for exhuming the remains from the compost heap, for hiding them in his upstairs room in the townhouse they shared with five others. He hadn’t wanted a brother.
“Voh’nn,” she smoothed his messy mop of hair gently.
“I didn’t know he wanted it to grow! I don’t want it! I don’t want it!” he wailed pitifully, awaiting a swift slap to the cheek.
“It’s alright; Vasa must wait for the next time, if any.”
“I wish he would go away.”
“Vasa—I can’t tell him to leave. Especially not if your grandparents want him here.”
Only because he offered the genetic counselors bribes was he their favourite male.
“He’s not my father.” he pouted, crossing his arms.
“He takes care of you, doesn’t he?” Skande Ahll lifted Voh’nn off his feet, letting his legs dangle precariously.
“No! The crèche-nurse says that children come from— you know. So who was he?“ the little boy looked up inquisitively, eyes aglow.
“Someone. It was a long time ago...” she trailed off.
Whenever the subject was approached by the little boy, she stepped around it nervously. Oh, how did it begin?

---

He had no name, at least when they first met. Only a number adorned the entrance of his sleeping cell, and even then he could barely pronounce the first digit. He was an aging warrior, at least too crippled to fight, and kept alive only so he could be bred by the shapers, used. Over the years, his mind has scattered from an age-old injury sustained during battle with a younger foe. His family had given up, but oh...
But she was still a suitable mate for him, a prime scion of domain Seinheild. What a shame, they must have thought, that she had never produced a child! A date was scheduled, and Skande Ahll, darling of the sick bay, was led to the holding pen where they had moved him for breeding.
When they had met, he was the largest rhorqal she had ever seen, brooding in the dark and musk. Despondent and listless, he perked up like a companion animal when he detected another of his kind. She was not like the methodical caretakers in their coats of white, or the young r’urqa, who sneered as they passed, sharing dirty comments he could not understand but knew he hated.
Rather, she reminded him of someone he had loved, or lusted after, long ago, before the cold place with syringes and bottles and exercise courses. He hadn’t found a name for this one, but hers was good enough, and so he remembered another Skande Ahll, who had brought him as a gift a little moving bundle of miraque sucklings upon his first escalation. It was Skande Ahll who brought a basket of spring greens to his squadron in the mess hall during an intermission, and Skande Ahll who brought a stranger with a face sneering like a death mask, escorting him away one day, when his thoughts were feverish and his limbs heavy like stone hulls.
Skande Ahll—he could never pronounce her name right. It was no use to expect him to call it out, to prove his honesty, whenever they were alone and she let him touch her citrus-scented hair out of curiousity, to see if his nose was wet like a tracker whippet.

“Shkann….” He would say

Or the ever effective “Tsuppy, tsuppy!”

Wherever he had learned a word so obscene, she had yet to tell, but a great many things obscene remained unspoken when she left his company. Away writing wills for veterans wishing to die as cannon fodder, rather than wilt like cut blossoms in their beds. Bed…

Morning smelt of garlic and tasted of thirst when she had woken in her bunk and felt funny about this business of rising for work. Skande Ahll opened the little pamphlet under the pillow, bound primitively, and realized what it meant. Well, she was still…what was the word…a girl? And wasn’t it inevitable for any girl, albeit a very old one, who consorted with big, ugly males to pick up little guests? Pity pity, she was a nurse, and everyone knew how they knew immediately when a new parasite checked into the hospice. Her entire group of friends were hardly surprised when she reported in one day, swaddling Voh’nn in a community-issue blanket, nondescript in colour.
How they swarmed around her that day, commenting on the disadvantanges of natural birth, or what a fine specimen he would be, anticipating a handsome scar where she severed him in the birthing pool. If only he hadn’t had that other awful detail, he would have been the perfect warrior! She wrapped the sheets tighter.

---

“Let’s go.” She said, turning away from the mound where the mass that was almost a Yuuzhan Vong was buried.
Wide-eyed, trembling in his nursery gown, Voh’nn was lowered to his feet. They began to walk back to the hole in the wall where she resided by day, holding hands as if nothing had happened and nothing had died (for it was in the fickle nature of even the most precious parasites to perish by the thousands). She would not be returning to their commune-compartment, their usual destination after he was dismissed from class.

“Vasa won’t follow us, will he? After what he said about killing me for what I did?” he asked.

“No. He will not do that.”

Vasa was not welcome by her co-workers, and certainly not welcome to berate her for being so careless with his precious cargo. Were warriors, no matter how young, supposed to be unafraid of death, willing to bend to his wrath? Fool, if he had any honour about him, he would give a passing thought to the children he or his various, mostly unbearable, relatives, had no hand in siring. Or perhaps, he would not treat her as just another one of the lowly urchins that inhabitated the lower levels once she failed to be a useful womb.

You’re just as expendable as a lover, she thought.

---

The medical bay where domain Seinheild stored its documents was emblazoned with the perfume of sterility, a bitter, mechanical tang hanging in the doorvalve as she signaled it to open with the two remaining fingers on her right hand.
Clutching the other was Voh’nn, pulling the medical gown about him in embarrassment with his own right paw in familiarity. His exposed skin felt more vulnerable here. There were eyes watching everywhere, in the corners, behind the reception desk, mouths licking their lips hungrily, lethargic bodies with limbs contorted in pain from withering disease. The stench of death lingered; many came here to die, awaiting prompt escortation to the temple.
Skande Ahll sealed the entrance to the private room. Voh'nn curled against the warmth of his mother’s body as she lay down in her quarters, breathing heavily. Hung on platforms of different sizes and shapes were images; the eyes of saints with tails like sea-mammals, faces of mundane members of their lineage, storybook illustrations of the Ancestral Race, and younger versions of themselves happy and whole scrutinized the two bodies on the bed.
Fetching a sack of water from the rack under the portrait of the lecherous Saint Skannensis and his final beloved (for he had many, and it was his folly when she finally chopped off his tail and robbed him of his powers), Skande Ahll reflected on how this room had been that day, seven spitta ago.

---

In the middle of the room there had been a tub, fleshy pink, and her long, light-bleached hair spread about like the arms of a humongous sea frond in the warm water. Fifteen of twenty solar slivers had elapsed before she felt a climax to the pains she had been feeling, day by day, ket by ket, star by star on the astronomical charts, was in sight.
Outside sat two attending shapers in white unifroms, for she would allow no one inside until the child was birthed and severed. Up until now, they had hounded her endlessly, fascinated by her expanding belly and increasingly assertive behaviour in the way only those who had seen such sights hundreds of times before could. It was an obsession, an addiction, to see how quickly her temper roiled after constant scrutiny of her diet.
And now she had no one to turn her physical rage to, not even the nameless, mindless rhorqal who had impregnated her many moons ago, for his body had disappeared along with his identity in the back archives of the Dalli.
Enveloped in pain, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine someone watching as she entered the final spasms. Was she within the worldship, anywhere at all? For the split second before the pain ceased, she clung to a blankness, a void.
Perhaps it had been Saint Skannensis, with his sharp eyes and slick tongue, placing a wet cloth to her forehead, when in the pink haze of her mind a gash opened. Through it, she could see the water ripple, and a creature bobbing up and down in the black afterbirth, blinking in curiosity. Where had it come from? Then she saw.

By a sinuous blue cord it was tethered to its host, unsure whether it was supposed to swim away or come closer. With the hollow, needle-thin scalpel attached to her finger, Skande Ahll severed it effortlessly. For a moment, it sounded a cry more like a string of clicks, and then rested contentedly in the crook of her arm, baring two pairs of white milking teeth.

---

Three-fourths of a solar sliver had passed with the valve slid open, revealing Skande Ahll and the newborn, as yet to be determined in gender, resting in the gentle sway of the pool. A graveness had overcome her, her face drained of blue pigment, and her hair sapped of its vitality, dripping wet..

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she interrogated the first shaper.

“Whatever do you speak of?”

“About this!” she peeled back the robeskin enveloping the infant. A thin, whiplike appendage protruded where its backbone ended. A tail!

“It will be a perfectly healthy child, I assure you. In fact, in my domain it is a blessing from the ancestral race…” he tried to rationalize.

“You have very little idea of your own stupidity, do you? You should of informed me when I still had time to terminate. I have done more than waste my youth, which is vastly depleted. I am not a vessel for your petty values.”

“If you wish, I can cut it off.”

“No! You fool; it’s not the tail itself. Saint Skannensis does not allow his followers to reject his blessing, once it has been given.”

The shaper was truly ignorant of what had become of the last son of domain Seinheild who was born with a spindly tail coiled about him, and allowed to live past the date of sacrifice. The parents, the nursery…well, it had been too late to dispose of him then, when he had learned too much on how to escape his fate.

“Skannensis?”

“A commander from the Cremlevian War.”

“His image hangs in the nichè? I have seen a statue of a warrior with an adorphong tail in the temple. Wasn’t he heretical?”

“A devout follower of Yun-Yammka. It would anger him to take Voh’nn back so soon, and it would shame my domain to announce him as a fatally deformed child.” she corrected. The calf nestled against her belly slumbered peacefully where she had shifted him. She was sure now, gleaning over the little body.

“You wish to keep it intact?”

“I am sure he will die anyway; if I nurse him long enough, the stored toxins will be enough. Then there will be no need for the priests.”

“A son? You have named him?”

“It was the name I had planned to use two spitta ago. My plans did not come to fruition, due to various complications in the pregnancy.”

“You do not plan to send him to the crèche nurse?”

“No.” Of course, she would never have allowed it.

“May Yun-Ne’Shel be in your favour, then. You are required to fill out the forms, but you need not now, and I will leave you with the calf. I assume you need no further examination?” he looked over her prone form, draped only in an old robeskin.

“No.”

The Dal shaper nodded, and left the room. Skande Ahll remained seated, clutching her tiny son in the fading warmth of the pool.

---

In one armlength she left the past, once again sprawled on her bunk in the hospital wing. Voh’nn was peering through the ribs of the bedframe, oblivious to the past or future, not yet claimed by death.

It was on his eighth birthday, soon, when he would be one spitta closer to his fate. On that day, the blood harvesters with their cloaks of nothingness would lead him to the temple in penance for all the disappointment the Saint of Gimmel had bestowed him and his birth mother. How regretful, she thought, that he hadn’t perished in all the time that had passed since he had left her womb, succumbing to the toxins beneath her skin. How regretful, how the children crowded around him, staring in fear or mockery.

How regretful, she thought, that he had taken away what would have been the happiest day of her life, if not by the solar sliver, and replaced it with one measured by a hollow heaviness she could not describe, let alone find a word for! It was only a matter of time before he outlived his stay among the Yuuzhan Vong. Only a matter of time before Skande Ahll was left infertile, unadorned by the glory of battle, her youth far behind, her suitors departed. If only she hadn’t had to bury it, her second chance!

It had been barely formed, a tail, stubs for limbs, its dark pupil visible but unblinking, unknowing. A second head, an omen, representing their lives, how they would be severed like it had been from comfort, life, although it knew no anger or pride or love or the unnamed fourth. Yet still, it was incomplete, an unfaithful reproduction.

Only a theory, the shapers would have remarked, pointing to a false-color image of the universe, pointing to the spot in the qasah display where a name had been removed. There she would find sorr…….