Inheritance

CHAPTER 11

Amber was waiting at the visitors’ center when Reese, David, and their parents returned from the ship with Dr. Brand. She was still sitting in the chair where she had sat during the press conference, and when she looked up, seeking out Reese, she had an anxious expression on her face. She stood, smoothing out her dress, and headed toward Reese. There were about a half dozen reporters still in the area, waiting for their turn to tour the ship, and Reese noticed them swivel around to watch as Amber approached. She was wearing black patent leather pumps with her gray sheath dress, and the heels left little holes in the lawn as she walked. Reese’s chest tightened as Amber came to a stop a few feet away.

“Hi, Reese,” she said.

“Hi,” Reese said. She felt as if she were bracing herself for something bad.

Her mom touched her arm. “Honey, we’re going with Dr. Brand to talk to the ferry captain about getting you and David here for those lessons, okay? We’ll be back in a bit.”

“Okay,” Reese said.

“Nice to see you again, Amber,” her mom said as she was leaving.

Amber’s cheeks reddened. “Nice to see you too.”

Reese, Amber, and David stood in awkward silence as their parents left.

“So you’re going to meet with Eres Tilhar?” Amber said.

“Yeah,” Reese said. She wasn’t touching David but she could tell by the way he was standing, his body slightly turned away from Amber, that he wasn’t eager to talk to her.

“That’s good,” Amber said. “Eres is a great teacher. I’m glad you decided to do it.”

Reese didn’t say anything. She was waiting for Amber to get to the point.

“Reese, can I talk to you? Alone?” Amber smiled apologetically at David. “Would you mind?”

David gave a brief shrug. “It’s not up to me.”

The smile on Amber’s face faltered. “Of course not. I just meant—”

“Why can’t you talk to me here?” Reese asked.

“Please. Just for a few minutes. Walk with me down to the cove.” She gave Reese a pleading look.

Despite her defensiveness, Reese was curious. “Fine,” she said finally. She glanced at David. “I’ll be right back.”

“Thank you,” Amber said, sounding grateful.

Reese started down the path toward the cove, and Amber had to hurry to keep up. “What do you want to talk about?” Reese asked.

“I know you’re still angry with me,” Amber began.

Reese shook her head. “That’s a funny way to put it.”

“You’re not angry?”

“Of course I’m angry,” Reese snapped. She lowered her voice as they passed the reporters, who were still watching them. “So what?” she added in a whisper.

“I want to apologize,” Amber said softly.

“You already did that.”

“But you don’t believe me.” Amber sounded miserable.

“What does it matter if I believe you?”

A flash of desperation passed over Amber’s face. “Because we’re going to have to see each other here. And I can’t stand it if you hate me.”

You should have thought of that a lot earlier, Reese wanted to say, but she bit off the words and looked away. They were already at the edge of the lawn, and the asphalt path curved around the cove directly in front of them. If they turned right they’d head toward the dock, and Reese didn’t want to run into her parents, so she turned left, skirting the edge of the water. Amber’s heels clicked on the pavement as they walked. At the end of the path was a bench overlooking the water, and Reese sat down. They were still in full view of the visitors’ center, and if she looked back she knew she’d see David waiting there. Amber sat on the other end of the bench and crossed her legs. Her shoes gleamed in the sunlight, but there was a clump of dirt on the right heel.

“I’ve had to lie my entire life,” Amber said quietly.

Reese kept her gaze on the water so that she didn’t have to look at Amber. “Is that an excuse?”

“No,” Amber said sharply. More softly, she continued, “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m trying to explain why I lied to you. I was born here, but for as long as I can remember, my mother warned me not to tell anyone about us. I slipped up too many times before I really understood what she meant, and we had to leave Earth for a while.”

“When?”

“I was five. We went back to Kurra for several years, until I was old enough to—to lie properly.” She paused, and Reese finally let herself look at Amber. She seemed sad, her eyes cast down to her lap. “I went to middle school in Arizona and I didn’t tell anyone who I really was. Nobody knew. It was… lonely.”

“You never told anyone? Not even—did you have friends?”

Amber gave Reese a tiny smile. “Yeah. I had a best friend, but I didn’t tell her. I wish I could have. I really do.”

It was said so simply, with such raw emotion, that Reese was taken aback.

“When I was fourteen, we had to go back to Kurra,” Amber continued. “Every fifteenth birthday is sort of a big deal for us, so I stayed on Kurra until after I turned fifteen. When we returned to Earth, I went to a private school in Massachusetts. I didn’t tell anyone there, either. By then it had become sort of normal for me. Like, I had this life at school, and it didn’t have anything to do with my mom’s work. I could pretend I was totally human, you know? Like I was actually going to apply to colleges and worry about financial aid and figure out what I wanted to major in. But none of it was real.” Amber sighed and looked out at the cove. The sunlight made her blond hair glow.

Reese wanted to be angry at her, but she found herself feeling sorry for her instead. She sounded so wistful.

“And then when I met you, I knew I had to keep lying,” Amber said. “It was understood that I would. It’s what I’ve been trained to do.” She turned back to Reese. “I’m sorry. I don’t blame you for being angry with me. But I wanted to explain to you why I did what I did.”

Reese felt the tightness in her chest again, as if her heart was straining against her rib cage. “I told Sophia Curtis that you lied.”

Amber blinked. “The TV journalist?”

“Yes. David and I had an interview with her. It airs this weekend. She asked if I knew you, and I told her that you were sent to keep an eye on us. And that you didn’t tell us who you were.”

Amber considered Reese for a minute. “Did you tell her anything else about us?”

Heat spread over Reese’s skin. She suddenly remembered leaning over the table at the Indian restaurant on Valencia Street, kissing Amber in full view of the other patrons. “No,” Reese said, her throat feeling constricted. “I didn’t tell her anything else.”

Reese couldn’t read the expression on Amber’s face. Was it dismay or acceptance? All she said was “Okay.” She lowered her gaze again, and Reese noticed she was wearing purple-gray eye shadow, the exact color of a bruise. Her lips trembled for one second, a movement so small that Reese saw it only because she was staring.

Amber said, “I’m really glad you’re talking to Eres Tilhar. She taught me when I was little.”

The change of subject left Reese momentarily disoriented. One word hung in the air between them. “She? Is Eres Tilhar a woman?”

Puzzlement flashed across Amber’s face, then cleared. “I forgot, Eres must look different to you. Eres is ummi, a teacher. Teachers are not male or female. They’re… ummi.”

Reese thought back to her conversations with Bri last year when she had been on her gender theory kick. “You mean she’s—he’s—Eres is a third gender?”

Amber seemed to struggle for a moment to find the right words. “I guess you could say that ummi is kind of a third gender, but it’s more like gender doesn’t matter to ummi; it’s no longer relevant to them.”

“But you called Eres ‘she.’ Should I do that too?”

“I doubt Eres cares what English pronouns you use. I used ‘she’ because you have to use pronouns in English and it’s easier to say ‘she’ than ‘it,’ which sounds awful. Sometimes I call Eres ‘he,’ though.” Amber’s forehead wrinkled in thought. “I guess it depends on what Eres is wearing. She’s not always in her ummi uniform.”

“Isn’t that totally offensive?” Reese asked. Bri had drummed into her that she should never assume which pronoun someone preferred. “Shouldn’t you ask Eres which pronoun she or he wants to use?”

Amber seemed a little amused. “You can ask if you want. But it’s not like that. I mean, ummi are basically beyond that stuff. They spend their time teaching susum’urda, which means they’re in other people’s consciousness a lot. It’s kind of like they’ve experienced so many other lives that they’ve become all different genders.”

Reese tried to wrap her mind around what Amber had said, but she was still fixated on how to refer to Eres Tilhar. “So in Imrian, what pronoun do you use with Eres?”

Amber paused as if realizing something. “Actually, in Imrian there is no him or her. The pronouns in Imrian are gender-neutral. Ene means him or her.”

“How do you know if you’re talking about a man or a woman?”

“Usually you know who you’re talking about. You use their names.”

“But if you don’t know their names when you’re talking about them, how do you know if they’re male or female?”

Amber gave her a funny look, as if Reese wasn’t getting it. “It doesn’t matter.”

Reese’s forehead furrowed. “All of you, except for Eres Tilhar, are so obviously male or female. If it doesn’t matter, why don’t you all look like Eres?”

Now Amber seemed perplexed. “Eres is ummi; all ummi look sort of like her. They wear the same kind of clothes, the same—they’re sort of like monks, I guess. Except they’re not celibate. The rest of us wouldn’t look like ummi; that would be like you dressing up like a priest.”

“Okay.” That part made sense to Reese. “So the rest of the Imria—the ones who aren’t ummi—does gender matter to them? If there’s no him or her in Imrian… I guess I don’t understand how that would work.”

Amber considered Reese for a long moment, as if trying to make up her mind about something. Finally she said, “Well, language is only one part of this. There are other languages that also use gender-neutral pronouns—like Chinese. In spoken Chinese, there’s no audible distinction between him and her. You can work around it. Does that make sense?”

“I guess.”

“Okay. So then…” Amber flashed her a tentative smile. “You know that sex and gender are different things, right?”

Reese raised her eyebrows. “You mean biological sex, like male or female, versus gender?”

“Exactly. Biologically, sex is about whether you create eggs or sperm—that’s all. Gender is about everything else. The way you dress, the way you move, the way you act. Among humans, gender is usually correlated with sex, so women are supposed to look a certain way, like wear dresses and heels or whatever.”

“But there are also transgender people,” Reese said. “And other people who don’t follow those norms. It’s not that simple.”

Amber nodded. “Yes, absolutely. I’m talking about generally. Generally, humans understand gender as an expression of sex, even though that is changing in some places. But Imrians don’t have a similar concept of gender.”

Reese thought about what Amber had said. One element still puzzled her. “Is there biological sex among the Imria?”

“Oh, yes. Imrians are still male or female, in the most basic biological sense.”

“So why don’t you have gender?”

Amber looked thoughtful. “I think… you know, I’ve never explained this to anyone before. I think it’s because of susum’urda. Male and female Imrians still have different physical bodies, and you can never escape that, but susum’urda allows you to see that the physical differences are really superficial when it comes to who you are as a person.”

Reese remembered what it had felt like when Eres Tilhar touched her: a kind of boundlessness. Whether or not the teacher had male or female body parts had been the farthest thing from Reese’s mind. “All right, I think I can see that,” Reese said. “But if susum’urda sort of erases the importance of gender, why do you all look like men or women? Maybe you don’t look like Eres Tilhar because you’re not ummi, but you totally look gendered.” She gestured at Amber’s outfit.

Amber shifted and the hem of her dress inched up. “We’re trying to make ourselves intelligible to humans.” She gave Reese a nervous smile. “Can you imagine how weirded out all of humanity would be if you couldn’t tell whether we were men or women? So we dress like human men or women. It’s easier to fit in that way. Like… if you were going to visit a foreign country and you didn’t want to stick out like an American tourist, you’d avoid wearing shorts and white sneakers.”

“What about when you’re not here on Earth?”

“Well, there are definitely… styles of presentation. There’s an Imrian word for it: ga’emen. I guess that’s the closest we come to gender. Someone’s ga’emen is their external identity, but it’s not connected to their biological sex. It’s just an external expression of their self. Like in all those movies about high schools, where people are nerds or jocks or stoners or whatever.” Amber spread her hands. “Except ga’emen is a lot more complicated than that, but it’s a start.”

Reese glanced at Amber; her gray eyes reflected the color of the bay. “What would you look like if you weren’t on Earth?”

Amber seemed taken aback. “I’d look like me.”

Reese wanted to ask, And who is that? During their date at the Indian restaurant, they had talked about coming out and being queer. Amber had seemed very certain of who she was, but something she had just said about susum’urda raised a question for Reese. “If sharing consciousness lets you see that physical differences are so minor, how come you said you don’t like guys?”

Amber’s cheeks turned a little pink. “You can’t escape your body. I mean, you live in it every day. And I like female bodies.” She shrugged. “Maybe it would be different on Kurra. But I’m here, not there.” She bent down and brushed the clump of dirt off the heel of her right shoe. Amber’s fingernails were painted silver, and they flashed in the sun. “Does that make sense?” Amber asked, straightening up. “All of it?”

There was something vulnerable in Amber’s gaze, and Reese remembered the reason Amber had wanted to talk with her alone, before they had been sidetracked by Reese’s questions about Eres Tilhar. Amber had tried to explain why she had lied. Reese looked away. The water of the bay sparkled beneath the cloud-scudded sky, and in the distance a ferry was chugging away from Tiburon. “Yeah, I guess,” Reese said reluctantly. “It’s complicated.”

They sat together in silence for a long moment, and Reese felt herself tensing up, muscle by muscle, every second that Amber didn’t respond. Finally Amber slid across the bench toward her. “Reese,” Amber said gently.

Being so close to Amber set off every single alarm in Reese’s body. “What?” she said stiffly.

“I’m glad we talked. I hope—I want you to know that I’m really sorry about what happened and I just hope you don’t hate me.”

Reese’s heart seemed to twist inside her, as if someone were squeezing it in their fist. She looked down at the ground, at the pebbles embedded in the gray concrete, at the toe of Amber’s shoe and the curve of her ankle. “I don’t hate you,” Reese said.

“You don’t?” Amber’s voice was tiny.

Reese turned to face her. Amber looked brittle, as if a word from Reese could shatter her. “No. I don’t hate you. But I don’t trust you, either. You lied to me about a big, big thing. It’s not only that you hid who you are—you hid who I was. You knew what had happened to me and you didn’t tell me. We can’t just be friends now.”

Amber went pale. “I know. I know, I’m not saying that.”

“Good.” Reese stood up. She couldn’t sit there anymore. She was brimful of anxiousness and fear and a desire to just look at Amber, and that was what frightened Reese the most. “Then you know where we stand.” Reese forced herself to walk away, putting one foot in front of the other, leaving Amber behind.