The Sandal Maker * **Note: just so you know, the character’s name: Aíō is accurately pronounced “Eye-oh.” “Have you spoken to Ett?” You glance up from the glowing, rectangular face of your notebook, your gaze drawn by the gentle, musical lilt embedded in the question. Aíō meets your gaze, but only for a moment. It is crass intrusion to lock gazes among the Dōkōrō’jin. It is crude, animal hunger: greed of a species you scarcely understand, but Aíō lives in intimate understanding of this; and so, his focus shifts, dropping—stone-like—into the pit of his lap and the incomplete sandal resting there. He works—always at night—on the weaving of sandals by hand. They are a local specialty, an expensive novelty among the Worlds as far away as your own Earth. The Dōkōrō find endless humor in this and speak—playfully—of infantile fetishes whenever you walk just to the border of earshot. Our feet, they say, as if addressing you, but of course, they never are. They are so beautiful to off-worlders? So desired that even our most common shoes are of value? Their sandals—so popular on Centarēs, Proxam Secundus, Tel, and on Earth—have made them rich: tourists flock to their cities, their towns, their seaside villages. They buy sandals, woven by hand, for the novelty of it—surprised, it always seems, by the incredible orthopedic comfort of aboriginal handiwork. Dōkōrō sandals have made their way into the perennial fashions on more than a handful of planets. Aíō never makes footwear jokes, never voices mocking questions to your back as you pass him, never wiggles his toes as if enticing the strange off-worlder interested in paying more for local sandals than they are worth. Dōkō is not a formerly-lost colony world to them; it is home and it is Earth and Centarēs, Proxam Secundus and Tel that were lost, Earth who forgot the distant pre-Confederacy colonies of Dōkō, Azir Indus, and Scythia; it is Earth and her younger colonial children who dwell within the depths of extreme hunger for re-discovered things from the lost worlds…Dōkōrō sandals and carvings, woodwork from Scythia, temple ceramics from Azir Indus. Rarities. Alien things. Novelties. There is an odd, poetic grace in Aíō’s manner. It does not matter to him that you are Terra-jin; you are as human as any Dōkōrō, as any Aziri, any Scythian, and so you are worthy of the downward gaze: the exhaling eye. You are not an object and so the inhaling eye is beneath your dignity, an affront to your jin, your being. Regardless of what he thinks, or how curious he may be off the off-worlder under his roof, Aíō will never stare: not overtly, at any rate…never, you think, with an inhaling eye. “Ett,” you say, his question ringing through your mind. “The mute?” “The sculptor,” Aíō says. “She speaks,” he says, as if everyone knows that. You shrug as your notebook has taught you. Negation among the Dōkōrō is always carried in the gesture of shoulders raised and then lowered. “You will learn from her,” he says. “You should speak.” He leavens his suggestion with such earnest certainty that it is impossible to ignore the possibility he reveals. Speaking to Ett. The sculptor. The Mute. “I scarcely know her,” you say, feeling the complexities of Dōkōrō culture. You cannot simply approach her and demand to learn something. There are Observers who might—those who have, in the past; but the Dōkōrō are immune to them, invisible to their inhaling gazes and deaf to their incessant requests to pry, to gawk, to breathe everything in with cameras, with notebooks, and intrusive, unblinking eyes. There are those at the Academy, who have labeled you the quixotic fool, willing to chase impenetrable nothings on the Dōkōrō homeworld. They may be right, though this is doubtful. Aíō speaks to you, even as he shuns those who have come on-world with you, those who have stepped—with you—off of the shuttle at Port Akkaidō-Kobā; he has offered to share his roof with you, to show you the sacred manufacture of sandals, and now—an hour before evening’s tea—he tells you with knowing certainty, that you should speak with Ett…the sculptor…the recluse…the mute. She has something to say. It is important, if wordless. He knows—you think—that you will not inhale her with your crass, hungry gaze. Ett. She is a mystery. You wonder how you will greet her. * * * Everything dwells behind curtains of meaning and obscurity on Dōkō. There are veils. There are masks. —Things to shield sacredness and jin from the ravenous inhaling eye. Your notebook holds an extensive catalogue of veils, curtains, masks, screens, and shades. There is, however, an intimacy between you and Aíō, a kind of membrane that is, at its very core, the essence of permeability. An anti-membrane. You do not know what to call this; the Dōkōrō call it nandah, but the concept cannot find its truest expression when spoken. Nandah, as Aíō has explained to you, can only be said silently: spoken clearly, but without voice. There are no silent words in your own language, nor in any of the other languages you have heard. But here, among the Dōkōrō, you are confronted by the reality of a word no one has ever heard, not even the Dōkōrō, though they know how to pronounce it, when to use it, and how to refer—one to another—to it. You’ve asked Aíō about nandah. “It cannot be said,” he told you. “It is a forbidden word?” you asked. “Taboo?” He shrugged. “Have you spoken to Ett?” he asked. And now, hours after the question, you sit in idle contemplation of a holographic image embedded in a cube of glass: a human figure garbed in the dark formality of an Aziri spacer’s uniform. He is, you think, a bridge technician: someone with command rank or near enough, someone with clearance for the most sensitive sections of a ship: where the computers live, where the captain makes decisions based on the complexities of mathematics, hard physics, and volatile-consumption ratios. You do not know this dark person crackling with in-born Aziri hauteur. You can only guess at his relationship with this small, Zen-austere house, or to Aíō himself, with his straight black hair, dark eyes set within the delicate, almond-shape of oblique epicanthic folds, and lean, chiseled features. He is, you think, the descendant of samurai, of fishermen-poets, and sword-smiths at home in the ancient footprint of Earth’s Mount Fuji. His world is, however, alien to you, and so it is no surprise—in the deepest, existential sense—that he’d know another alien: an Aziri, as lean as he is, as…impenetrable and shadowed within the depths of yet another alien culture. You wonder at them: are they friends, lovers?Are they something more? Something different? Does this Aziri stranger wear sandals of Dōkōrō manufacture: woven—perhaps—at night, in Aíō’s lap? Aíō prepares breakfast, moving quietly behind you. Your gaze drops from the holograph. You make your way to the eating area, aware of the silence of your footsteps: you walk as the Dōkōrō walk: as quietly as possible. Breakfast begins with tea. It ends with fruit: something sweet and with a tart finish: something green, though its rind—tough and leathery—is as orange as the skin of a pumpkin. “It is a short walk to Ett’s work-home,” Aíō says. “We can walk if you wish. You can observe.” It is why you are here. To observe. To learn. The Dōkōrō have evolved in ways that challenge conventional comprehension. Centuries of isolation mark their social growth and the histories separating them from you. They have something in common with the Scythians and the Aziri, of course: a similar silence at odds with anything known on Centarēs, Proxam Secundus, Tel, and Earth. Silence. It is such a different thing here. Earth’s re-discovered orphans have a lot to say, a lot to show: but only—you think—to the exhaling eye. —More than sandals and the local variants of woodwork. Have you spoken to Ett? Today. You will do so, before noon. * * * Names change over time. Meanings shift. —And so, it is difficult for you to understand the exact nature of the things you pass on the road to Ett’s home. Spring has exhausted itself in a fury of rain, and now dry season weaves itself through dust and the brittle, papery husks of thorn brambles and seed pods. They rattle, like castanettes, with the passage of wind, the passage of animals you scarcely see, or they explode--pop!— with sounds that recall bubblegum. You avoid the popping stuff and the clouds of greenish-gray spore that always throw your eyes into stinging, itchy discomfort. You recognize succulent growth along the roadside: plants in the shapes of cabbages and brains and trees—squat and thorny—with fat, water-storing leaves. You think of kidneys when you see them; you think of bladders, livers, and strange, obscure viscera. You spot disks: golden-gray and mottled with black. They are another kind of life-form, a species of symbiont-hybrid that simply cannot exist on any world but Dōkō: Aíō speaks of them as if they are animals, but you’ve never seen one move. They are—as you look at them—a surreal profusion of flapjacks giving shelter to the bug variants living beneath them. You cannot see the bugs: nightmare things in the colors of midnight and squid-ink, but you know they are there. One or another of the pancake shapes, ripples with the motion of inhabitants nesting beneath it. You know their names: but you cannot understand why the pancakes are called hli, or why üōd’ō gives linguistic shape to those spiky trees, heavy and overgrown with a profusion of kidneys as red as any tulip, rose, or strawberry. You know this name of this road: Ogéha-Odáh but you cannot understand how the children of human colonists made the first voice shapes for everything around you. “Everything”—Aíō said, once—“on every world, is named in accordance to what that world recognizes. Yes. We are human, but we live here; Dōkō is different from the Ancestral World. You say so yourself: the gravity is different. Higher. And so, words mean different things: mountain is an Earth term, but how do you describe mountain and mean the same thing, when there are two moons in the sky and when it weighs more than it would on Earth, or when their snow-caps are yellow? Oh…mountain is the word for very large things made out of rocks, but they are based on the experience of lower gravity, a single moon, and snow without ii’ii’ta growing in it.” You remember how he laughed at the thought of snow without ii’ii’ta making it sticky. Ii’ii’ta lives everywhere on this planet: it impregnates nearly everything. You have not yet grown accustomed to drinking water that carries the color of a renal excretion. It is harmless stuff, a life-form with no variation you recognize. It is a plant form, as the Dōkōrō recognize it, but it swims and is immune to the human gastric environment. It passes through the human digestive system, unharmed, filtered into urine where it flourishes in faint bioluminescent flamboyance. You close your eyes whenever you drink. You do not look at the vague, firefly glow you leave in local toilets. And, you are thankful, when you reach Ett’s home, when she offers tea made from filtered water. It is proof, you think, that she receives off-world visitors with some regularity. She is older than you expect, a wizened gnome of a woman with skin the color of a walnut, and short-cropped hair as silver as moonlight filtered through the window of your childhood bedroom. She does not speak in a manner you can identify, and though you know Aíō well enough to call him a friend, he is something different now. Alien. He speaks with Ett, explaining things, asking things, sharing information, but in a way you cannot understand. Words flow between them, freely. You cannot hear them. Their lips are not moving, but their expressions shift, as if they are reading each other’s thoughts. Telepathy is not a proven human talent, and yet… …and yet… You are confused by the long stretches of silence, broken only when Aíō speaks aloud, translating things you cannot hear or sense in any way: one question or another from Ett. And, as you answer questions and ask a few of your own—trivialities, really—you begin to see the silence between Ett and Aíō; it is a dance, you think, Butoh, perhaps, though far less of a visual confrontation. It is posture and expression: hyper-controlled: inhuman, precise and immensely, immensely slow. There are no words among the Dōkōrō to mark their own ancient origins, but there is something you think: a vocabulary of gestures, an evolved response to higher gravity, perhaps, or something…you are not sure, but it’s there, in the slow, slow, slow contortions of Ett’s face and the subtle (and exquisitely-deliberate) movement of her fingers. It is there, as well, in the manner in which Aíō—in moments of wordless silence—grows still, his face locked in a complex, twitching rictus of miniscule, impossible contortions. You find something grotesque in the slow, slow, slow dance between them, and that’s what makes you think of ancient Butoh, but there is a different vocabulary of gestures as well, derived—you think—from Noh. You possess only glancing familiarity with these forms of theatrics and dance, but now, on Dōkō, and in an old woman’s courtyard-garden, you sense a connection. Vague. Embryonic. Skittish, at first. The three of you sit on reed mats in the woman’s sculpture garden: a sandy courtyard, fringed with plant-forms you scarcely recognize: cactus things, coral things, and whole colonies of diminutive pancake growths with bug-things moving beneath them. There is an austere beauty to the garden. There are statues here: dark, human figures. You recognize them. You recognize Ett’s distinctive style: the cryptic, unsmiling faces, the colors of oxidized metal. You’ve seen her sculptures in museums on Earth, on Mars, and on Centarēs. Hewn from the corroded hull plates of decommissioned starships and ocean-going vessels, you think, recalling dry, academic descriptions of her works. “Nandah,” Aíō says, after a long while. “Ett is amused that you are curious about this thing.” It is a shock to hear his normal, sonorous voice. “You wish to see it?” You nod. Observers aren’t supposed to blush, but you feel heat along the upper crests of your ears and along your cheeks. You are blushing. Observers are expected to greet everything with the inhaling eye, but you face Aíō with an exhaling eye, your gaze resting on the crests of his toes, on the reed mat upon which he sits, on the vague downwardness you’ve learned to gaze into when speaking to the Dōkōrō. Ett glances at you; she catches your gaze, locks onto it for only an instant, before dropping her gaze to some space just below your chin. She smiles and covers her mouth, like any demure schoolgirl might, any village girl taught proper manners. She rises to her feet in a single, fluid motion, and gestures for you to follow her. Ett leads you through her courtyard. Aíō walks beside you. “Nandah,” Aíō says again, pointing—now—to a duo of dark brown statues like ancient guardians of some forgotten temple. They are rough-hewn works: sullen and contemplative, you think. They are near-abstract representations of villagers in some village: local in the representations of their local dress. Old people, you think: Aíō’s grandparents or friends Ett has known and lost. Aíō smiles, a gleam in his eye as if he has a secret to tell you. “Nandah,” he says, again. The statues are situated near a wall to the old woman’s house and she vanishes inside, briefly, and emerges with reed mats, rolled tightly. She gives one to you, one to Aíō, and the third, she keeps for herself. You unfurl your mat, following Aíō’s example. You sit. “Look at them,” Aíō says, nodding toward the statues. “Think of what they are saying, and when we return home, tonight, we will talk about their conversation.” You sit. You stare. You think. * * * Thoughts take their shapes from the worlds on which they are born. You are from Earth and Dōkō is a troubling thing when it manifests in your mind, like a wrong word spoken in place of a correct word you cannot comprehend. Nandah is the word you do not know. You’ve never heard it. You never will. In its place, you insert calmness, sincerity…the verbalized feeling of wandering—alone—through a park and discovering crickets chirping in the undergrowth. Their sounds exist against the noise of traffic and children in the distance, laughing, playing, chattering—bird-like—to one another. They are unimportant. The moment belongs to you and to the crickets. No one else. Nothing else. You say this to Aíō, conjuring the sound of crickets from your notebook. You show him a cricket; they are alien creatures to him, as improbable as a living sphinx. What you have said, what you have shown him on your notebook: these are the only ways in which you can express—in any coherent form—what the statues (The Pair) have shown you. Night has fallen. You have shared evening’s meal with Aíō. You have shared tea, and now you’re seated across from him, showing him images of insects on your notebook screen, playing their recorded chirps and explaining—as best you can—that no crickets are not commonly kept as pets, though many—like yourself—hold them in sentimental regard: they dwell, idealized in memories of childhood, smile at you from classic cartoons. “The Couple,” Aíō says, and you know—immediately—that he speaks of the statues in Ett’s dry, austere garden. “They remind you of a moment with kreek-ettes?” His spoken emphasis on the wrong syllable makes you smile and—suddenly—in ways you’ve scarcely considered, Aíō is cute in an eager, boyish way. “Yes,” you say. “Ett is a brilliant woman,” Aíō says. “She made the Couple from the hull plates of a decommissioned Scythian cruiser: an exploration ship, I think. I make sandals: I have no desire to travel between stars. It is too lonely a thing, even if hundreds of others travel with me. I know this, because the Couple tells me, each time I see them, what it is like to live in the darkness between stars. They’ve been there, as parts of a starship. I have never left this world, but I know what it is like to travel to another. I know this in exactly the same way I know the things Ett talks about, when I sit with her, when I drink tea with her, or when I introduce her to the off-world Observer who lives under my roof.” You contemplate Aíō’s words, sure—in the silence—that he contemplates crickets; you watch him, forming shapes in the air, describing spaces and textures with his fingers. He does this, you think, without forethought. He is feeling something and it is then that something else occurs to you. You blink. “Nandah,” you say, quietly. “It isn’t a word.” Aíō smiles. “Nandah,” he says. “It is not a word. It is all of them.” But it isn’t a language either; it’s something else, an experience, an interaction. Something flexible, permeable, and never the same way twice. It is a garden with statues in it; the statues were spaceships, once, and today, they were parts of a spaceship and the off-world Observer trying to learn something from the woman who made them. They will be something else, tomorrow. All of this whispers though your mind, like wind escaped from a ruptured balloon. Nandah. You guess at ways to try and express what you are feeling and what whispers, now, behind your conscious thoughts. You can find no words for it, but you feel a movement: something subtle, something imprecise, and it shifts in your lap in the meat of your left, pinky finger. Aíō sees this and smiles. “You are learning,” he says, laughing now and pointing to your finger. “I will work now,” he informs you. “And you will observe.” It is your common, nightly custom. It is something you enjoy: watching him, obliquely, and listening to the things he tells you, about his village, himself, his world: like an onion, revealing itself layer by layer and with the slow patience of a snail. “Tomorrow,” Aíō says. “We will speak.” He obscures his mouth with one hand. “Like this,” and his words are muffled by his palm. Aíō’s words echo through your mind. Nanda…it is not a word, it is all of them. It is not a language either, you think, but only Dōkō—with it’s yellowed snow, visceral trees, and asexual flapjacks with bugs squirming under them—can say (with any certainty) what it is. Nandah is not an Earth-derived thing, and so you must allow another planet to teach you its meanings. You are an Observer. You are here to learn such a thing. THE END I’ve always had an interest in anthropological science fiction: stuff about other cultures, other people living their day-to-day lives, way the heck over there. It’s only natural that I’d dip into that particular and beloved sub-genre. The inspiration of this story actually came out of Tara’s (auntietk’s) gallery, and so in a way, she’s something of a collaborator here, or at least a muse. You can see the original, inspirational image here.