El and Onine (13 page)

Minosh ran around her garden, toppling over the grass
and falling between rows of lavender—like my dream. She smiled and
giggled, as her long black strands danced in the wind. She pushed the hair from
her face without a care and when she turned to look in my direction, she waved like
she could see me. I wanted to wave back but my arms were too heavy to lift. I
tried to speak but nothing came out. I didn’t know she couldn’t see me until she
mouthed the words
come, Onine,
come to me.

Onine stood in her garden as plain as the eye in the
sky. I hadn’t seen him approach and he looked different—her reflection,
not mine—but I knew it was him. Minosh reached out her hand and I gasped
when he took it. She pulled him in and he wrapped his arm around her, holding her
in an embrace before leaning down to kiss her on the neck. She blushed and
pulled away and led him into our shanty. I couldn’t see inside. As hard as I
tried to peek through the open windows, my view was shut out.

I stood on the outside and watched sparks traverse
the walls of our little home, as I came into being. My moment of inception was played
out in front of me as though I were there to witness it, to see my beginning,
my induction into the world of gold—the first offspring of an interspecies
union, I am Venusian too.

***

I cannot resist you any
longer, my precious sapient. Kypria has sent me to you. I must come for you
now. Do not be afraid. I will show you the same compassion you have offered me.
I will be gentle with your sapient core, your fragile heart, your loving spirit.
I will plant my fire within you and you will feel nothing but the ecstasy of my
being. I have waited a lifetime to see you again, to peel away your covering,
to know the inside of your clay-born frame. Anticipation has ruled me for too
long. Now the time has come and I will suspend you in Venusian desire until my
spark is safely planted in you.

I hope she has your eyes,
sapient. I hope she has your will too.

***

“You are more than one of us,” Saturnia’s sister
said. “You are greater than all of us.”

The Kyprian bather had unlocked me from my
restraints and taken me off the platform. I stood in front of her now in the
hall of stones.

“I brought you here to show you,” she said. “He
believes you are ready.”

“Who?”

We spoke Kyprian, and it seemed, at that moment, I
couldn’t remember how to speak any other way.

“The one who has given you sapient life.”

Onine
.

“Yes,” she said. “Onine.”

“Minosh?” I wanted to see my cultivator once more,
to feel her caress, to know her tenderness. She was foremost in my heart.

“My little Pchi,” she said. “She is with
us—you—always.”

Despite my induction into her language, her meaning
eluded me. I hadn’t felt Minosh for many lunar cycles, since her egress. “Can I
see her?”

The cygnet Venusian glided across the room with her
elegant limbs. She was radiant and I admired her beauty. She giggled and tossed
her head to the side.

“My little Pchi,” she said, “stop staring at your
own reflection. It is your beauty you see in me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, averting my gaze.

“You will learn, my little Pchi. It is all yours.”

Every time she called me by that name, I thought of
my creator. The vision I’d seen of her and Onine was so real, I couldn’t
imagine it was a dream.

“It was not a dream,” Saturnia’s sister said.

“I saw them?”

“Yes,” she said. “You chose them.” She was patient
with my inability to understand. “Now you have another choice to make—sapient
or Venusian?”

“What do you mean?”

“You can only regenerate one race,” she said. “Will
you choose ours, Kypria, or theirs?”

Kypria?

“It is time, goddess. You have sacrificed your
purity for this existence and now you must choose. Venus or Terra?” The glass
ceiling on the hall of stones cracked and Saturnia’s sister squealed as though
she too were cracking. “They are coming,” she said. “Choose.”

“Who’s coming?”

“It has started, goddess,” she said.

I didn’t know what to do, what to choose. I didn’t
know what choice she was asking me to make. As I pleaded with her to tell me
what she meant, her mouth closed and a rough, ridged surface rose up her neck
and sealed her face beneath it. Her elegant limbs grew stiff and her golden
skin turned the color of ash. Her beauty fell away, as thick rind covered her
lithe legs and torso and her feet burrowed into the golden floor of the hall,
breaking its slate surface and tearing into the soil beneath it. Her arms
stretched up through the open windows in the glass ceiling, as though reaching
for the eye. Like the lavender in my dream, Saturnia’s sister metamorphosed, as
branches grew from her torso and head, and from those branches green shoots
sprouted. She moaned until the final layer of rind nestled itself across her mouth
and she was silenced.

As a horrified witness, I watched the supernal being
change into an olive tree, living and green. I reached out and touched her new
skin. It was as real as I—cold and hard, but alive. I’d only ever seen a
living tree once—the Kyprian tree of life. Now it had a companion and
Terra’s forests would boast of more than trees of gold. I touched the bark, paying
it the reverence it was due.

I was pulled from my rapture when a clan of what
could only be newly arrived Venusian rushed into the hall of stones. The one
nearest me used his stick to put my wrists in clamps before I could drop my
hands from the tree.

“What are you doing?” I cried.

I’d never seen the Venusian before, a troop of ten,
each one more stunning than the next. The leader spoke to the others in shrieks
but I’d lost my ability to speak their tongue as easily as I’d found it.

I looked around me then, and my eyes drank in the
splendor of the hall. It had changed in subtle ways. Light from the eye above
found its way in between the branches of Saturnia’s sister and was refracted by
the large jade stones, forming webs of colors all around us. The gleam off the
jade split, fracturing into pieces which found their way back together again
and again. The colors danced around the troop of Venusian as though wanting to
penetrate their alien flesh. The ten of them stood before me without coverings
and I witnessed bare Venusian form for the first time. I looked for the tree
with the wax flowers but all I saw was a dead shrub with dried limbs whose
blooms had dropped off long ago.

“Come, sapient,” the leader said. “I have chosen for
you.”

“My keeper,” I said. “Where’s Onine?”

The entourage moved closer to one another and it
looked like their bodies melted together, becoming one single source of light.
The sight blinded me and the Venusian shrieks made me deaf. As their screams
rose up in chaos, I felt the danger in the very depths of my being. They
weren’t there to bring me somewhere. They were there to take me. The clamps on
my wrists tightened and I pulled on them but couldn’t free myself.

“Do not resist,” the leader said. Their voices were
one. “We have chosen for you.”

I didn’t blackout but the light kept me from seeing
their crime. I wasn’t saved from the sensation of it though. The disorientation
of being tossed on my back, the humiliation of being pinned down, the weight of
the beings around me, on me, in me. The sound of their shrieks, the heat of
their fire burned me from the inside out, and I screamed until my vocal cords
were raw, until I had no voice left. I called for my creator, my maker, my
goddess, my end to come. The smell of my singed flesh wasn’t as horrible as the
scent of their secretion staining my sapience.

The pain was palpable and I asked the goddess to
turn me into a tree. I begged for the rind to numb my body and let me be
covered in the ridged bark Saturnia’s sister had endured. I opened my eyes only
once and saw the white light of my violation. The Venusian shattered my body
and splayed it in two and I was no longer whole. When they’d each grazed on my
treasure, they evaporated as though they’d never been there and I was left on
the slab of stone, alone and ruined.

***

I woke outside the hall of stones, somewhere on the
path between the golden forest and the Bathing Temple. Luna was high in the
sky, full, bright and beautiful. She smiled on me with her blue light, cooling
me with her reflected rays.

I recalled my agony and shame. I was still in my
frock but it was torn and singed. I wasn’t wearing a veil and didn’t remember
losing it in the wind on the mount. My memory was fuzzy and I’d no idea how
much time had passed since I’d seen Bendo in my garden. I needed to find Tal.
The last time I’d seen him, I was in his arms, as we sailed through the air
away from the beast.

When I got up from the path, I looked back at the
hall of stones. It was shrouded in darkness but I saw the outline of a large
tree that hadn’t been there before. In my heart, I knew it was her, standing
alive and green. I’d imagined none of it.

I ran down the path, beyond the silo of liquid
luster and water pumps, past the cylinders of fire all the way to the courtyard
of the Bathing Temple. I didn’t fear running into the perpetrators of my crime
since it was night, but my freedom seemed overrated now, as I was no longer
free, sentenced to relive an experience I wanted to forget.

I headed out on the cobblestones quickly at first
and then slowed my pace when the heaviness of my limbs set in. I felt pain in
the pit of my stomach, the ravaging aliens deep in my bones. As I replayed the
trauma over again, the weight of my sapient flesh became too much for me and I
keeled over to expel the horror from my gut, vomiting on the stones. The sticky
serum and herbs I’d ingested in the cavern were the first to come up and out of
me.

“Their implant did not take.” The voice was nowhere and
everywhere all at once. I released a cry from the depths of my stomach.

“Onine,” I said with the weight of my agony.

The Venusian stood over my crippled body in the dark
as he had when he came to my garden. His face was lit with Luna’s blue light
and her brilliance gave him a halo.

“You are safe for now,” he said. “They have not
taken you.”

“I—I—don’t understand.” I was unable to
resist the indulgence of my sobs.

“We must go.”

“Am I?”

“Yes,” he said. “And no.”

“But I saw—”

“Be patient, clay-born goddess.” At some point our
exchange was in Kyprian, as though our language had never been another. “You
will know everything again. It will come back to you when you choose.”

Like Saturnia’s sister, I understood the words but not
their meaning.

“I’ve seen things,” I said. “I’ve seen things I
can’t forget.”

“Yes,” he said. “But we cannot change anything now.
We must move forward with the plan.”

“The plan?”

“Be patient, goddess. Let me bring you home.” Onine
bent down and reached for me. He didn’t have his stick and was without gloves.
He picked me up with his bare Venusian hands and held me in his arms.

“Is this a dream?” My voice was a muted shriek.

“No,” he said. “This is real.”

I let myself fall into him and hoped for nothing but
his embrace. We walked in silence and though I had a million questions to ask,
I voiced only one. “Am I your youngling?”

“No,” he said. “But you do come from me.” He looked
away with resolve, as though the confession was too much.

“I am ruined … spoiled by their invasion.”

He pulled me closer to him. “You are perfect.”

I fell asleep in his arms and woke on my bed of
silks. He was still with me in the shanty. “How are you here with me now in the
darkness?”

“I have prepared for this and will be gone soon.”

“Please stay,” I said.

“It is still dangerous. Midan is here and you will
have to choose.”

“Choose what?” My voice evinced my utter frustration
at the choice I was to make.

“You saw what happened to Saturnia’s sister?” He
stood over me, as I sat on the bed of silks. I was too weak to stand.

“She—she—”

“Yes,” he said. “She revels in the pleasure you have
given her. She knew you would choose them.”

“Who?”

“Sapient.”

I don’t know how I knew but suddenly it was all
clear to me. The choice was between what I am and what I was—sapient or Venusian.

“Who were the others?”

“The unpledged ones,” he said. “Midan’s troop.”

“Who is—” I stopped myself because I knew who
Midan was. I remembered the ambassador, the slick jade trader, the dark
passage, the destruction of my planet—Venus.

“I am Kypria.”

“Yes, goddess. You are Kypria.”

“And I must choose between the new species I will
forge, and my Venusian retinue, my beloved—you.”