Annah and the Children of Evohe Read online

  “I’m not that old, Annah. And I’m different from my people, too.” It does not matter, anyway. Do we count the ages of the stars? Age is only a number. We have all lived before, and will again; you and I, and everything else in creation.

  “You’re pretty wise. To be a ‘seed-maiden.’” He gave the last words a teasing emphasis; he already knew he did not think of Annah by her age, a quality that would more than likely be meaningless to his own kind.

  Oh, I know , she said, laughing again. I think sometimes that I frighten the others. Have you not wondered why none of them come to look for me?

  Holder grinned. “You said they were sleeping,” he reminded her.

  I said, most of them. Even the ones who are awake keep their distance from me. And the others could awaken.

  Holder couldn’t quite tell whether she was joking, or not. “And then what would happen?”

  I do not know. I am not sure. I am sorry.

  “Don’t be,” he said. “You haven’t done anything.”

  Lie down and rest, Holder. You look very tired. And you are still not healed.

  “Is that what you want to do, Annah? To heal me?”

  Yes, she said. Although I cannot heal my own hurts, I can help to heal yours.

  “That’s a tall order. And I’ve heard it before, from others.”

  I am not your ‘others’, Gary Holder. It was the first time she had used his full name. He hadn’t even been sure she knew it. But he found he wasn’t surprised.

  I will heal you, Annah told him. As much as I can. It is what my people do. At least, it used to be.

  “Will you let me see you?”

  Soon. Still shy.

  “Why? If I’ve done something wrong-” No. It is only me. No one besides my Grove has ever seen me. I am—-strange, even to my own kind. I do not look as most seed-maidens do. You are not even of my kind. I am afraid of what you will think of me.

  “You don’t need to be. I’m not like that.” I was raised from a seed-pod to be afraid of your kind. Fear of you is in my cells; planted in the soil of my very atoms. If one of my Grove had found your ship, they would have left you for dead, or killed you.

  “Then why did you help me?” My Grove would say it is because I am young, and I do not know the ways of the worlds. But I say that I do things as Spirit compels. Your spirit called to mine.

  This kid is crazy , thought Holder, smiling. I like that. But you know, she’s not a kid. She’s a young woman, if that’s the right word, around here. And she knows her own mind.

  ‘Ditto,” he said, not even thinking about how it would sound, until he heard her questioning reply.

  What? “It means, ‘I feel the same way.’” Kale Goodman sat in front of the console at Homesec’s central office, in the heart of the place that had been Washington DC, back in the days when there had been nations. Days that Goodman was happy enough not to have lived in. He knew their history well. Men were better off under one leadership, he thought: fewer factions, fewer wars. And that sure made it easier, when there was a war, to make sure who won. Not that he’d ever be in charge. He didn’t really want to be. Staying behind the scenes, close enough to the folks who were in charge, made it a lot easier to get credit for what went right, and avoid losing your head over what went wrong. The trick, Goodman knew, was to do what you were told.

  This morning, doing what he was told meant keeping track of the return home of the latest Recon mission. It was important to Homesec that the missions went as they should; as trivial as they could often be, you could never tell when something could turn up that might be important, or even dangerous.

  Everyone was accounted forwait, no. There’s one missing. Gary Holder. No big loss, thought Goodman. Holder was a has-been. He’d never seen any combat, and from his record, it looked like he liked it that way. His spacing career wasn’t anything that would distinguish a man. No real military work. He’d failed the med exam; probably on purpose. Just freelance stuff. Goodman knew a real man got himself a medal or two, or got himself wounded, earned a nice honorable discharge, and parlayed that into a comfy desk job and well-paid state service for the rest of his life. Goodman himself came from a line of career military and war heroes, and, at only twenty-four, had enough medals to have attracted the attention of the Commander himself. Holder hadn’t read the manual. Too freaking bad.

  “What’s the word, Goodman?” the Vice-Commander’s voice sounded from the main ‘com.

  “All accounted for but one, sir. It’s Holder, sir.” “Maybe the old boy finally bought it this time,” the ViceCommander said. “Holder was pretty solid in his day. Nothing special, but solid. But his best days were behind him.” If a man was going to make a name for himself in space, or in the service in general, he’d best have done it by the time he was thirty. Holder was past his sell-by date, and there wasn’t much hope he’d be any more than he was.

  “Where’d he go down?” the Vice-Commander asked Goodman.

  “I’ll check on that, sir, and get back to you.” As the screen went dark, Goodman was already surveying the itinerary for that particular Recon jaunt. Bad area, Goodman thought. Lots of boulders in that area. There’d been more than a couple of battles there in the last war. But why? Didn’t look like there was much there but gravitystorms and floating rock. Why bother about a spot like that?

  He scanned through entries in the logs, looking for something, anything to make sense of this. Homesec might waste money sometimes, but they didn’t usually waste military resources on a no-man’s land during wartime. Oh, shit.

  According to Homesec, there’d been nothing there for a hundred years, not since the end of hostilities in the last War-but there had been something there, back then. It’d been the scene of the last battle: a planet called Evohe.

  Evohe. It was pronounced “Ay-voh-ay”, and the records said the word meant ‘praise’ or ‘hail’ in ancient Greek, but Goodman knew a lot of alien cultures were a lot older than Earth, and had been visiting since before they’d started being invited, so who knew where the Greeks had gotten the name from. There were at least two stories about the name, anyway. Some of the troops who came back from the last war said that the creatures who lived there were fierce warriors capable of turning the very forces of nature against their attackers. This was a power Homesec thought they could harness to help bring the war to an end. There were also those who’d said this was the sound of the war-song the creatures lifted up as they destroyed their enemies.

  Either way, when Homesec failed to harvest Evohe’s secret, they’d strafed the planet to a scattering of stones. It’d happened in the closing hours of the war. If Holder had gotten stranded in that sector of space, he’d never see home again. Goodman clicked the record closed, and next to Holder’s name, typed Deceased.

  “Are you awake, Holder?” I am now, he thought. “Annah?” It was Annah’s voice, all right, just the way it had always sounded in his head. But she was speaking out loud.

  “Yes, I am here.” She laughed. She did that a lot, Holder had discovered, and he found the sound of it infectious. And now, he could hear that out loud, too.

  “How did you do that?” he asked. Although he could hear her now, she was still somewhere beyond his field of vision.

  “When I found your ship, I also found the teaching-discs inside it. I have been studying your language, ever since then. I knew a bit of it already, as many of my people do. It was enough for me to be able to speak with you, mind-tomind. But I wanted you to be able to hear my voice, and I did not want to sound too-foolish. I am sorry; some of the words-even some of the small ones-are still difficult for me.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “You speak very well.” The way she spoke reminded Holder of the halting precision with which he’d heard other Offworlders communicate in Standard. No Earth-born person talked that way anymore, not since Homesec had made sure the whole planet knew Standard practically from birth, but even Homesec couldn’t control how they talked on other planets.
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  “Thank you,” she said. “I am sure I do not, but thank you.” He sat up, pulling the blanket around his shoulders, which were still sore, but not nearly as much as they had been. It was hard for Holder to keep track of exactly how long he’d been in this place; on this world that didn’t appear on any of the star-charts in his ship’s memory, nor how long the mysterious, still-unseengirl, he thought, that’s good enoughhad been tending to him.

  For the first-hours, days, weeks, who knew?-he’d been too weak, too sick even to care. He dimly remembered dreaming of someone’s arms lifting him, someone’s hands rubbing some kind of paste or salve over his many wounds; someone bathing him with cool water, and something that had felt like a sponge. He remembered, but he knew he hadn’t dreamed it. And there was something else. The strange memory of music. For some reason, she had sung to him.

  “Threeweeks,” Annah said, stumbling over both the word and the measurement of time it represented. “You have been here for three weeks. The other day, when I first spoke to you-it had been already two weeks, then.”

  “God. That long?” he asked. “I must have been on death’s doorstep when I got here, then.” “Yes,” she said. “But you are feeling better now, are you not?”

  “Yeah. I am. I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “There is no need to thank me. I could not have done otherwise.” It is truer than he knows, Annah thought. I still do not understand it, myself.

  “Well, thank you, anyway.” That laughter again. What an amazing sound.

  “You are welcome, Holder. Truly, it is good not to be alone.” “I still don’t understand why you are. I mean, you say you’re different from the others. They just don’t like how you think?”

  “I told you, it is more than that. Most seed-maidens-they are-close to the groundshort, you would say-and theirbreasts, and-hips, and-bellies are all rounded and curved, like hills of soil, or the bed of the stream.”

  To Holder, Annah sounded as though she were nervous, her words spilling out one after the other before she had time to regret saying them, or maybe before he had time to regret listening.

  “I am too tall, although not as tall as you, and I stand too straight. My breasts are too small, and my belly too flat. My mother is not short, it is true, but her hair and eyes are the color of the soil, as those of many females are. It shames me to say it, but my hair is-”she paused again, looking for the words-“golden-as though the First Ones had been awakening the sunlight on the morning I was bloomed and born, and some of it spilled upon my head.”

  “There are those who say that is why I think too much in general, and too little of the matters of grove and soil and bringing forth buds, as a seed-maiden should. My head is different, too-larger than those of others, and not shaped like theirs. I have no mate, as yet, and I am honestly not sure if I even want any bloomlings of my own. That, too, is dishonor. Even worse than that, perhaps, is that my eyes—my eyes are-blue, the color of the Great Sea, which I cannot seem to keep from dreaming of, like the Sea of Stars above us, which I long to see, no matter how many times I am told such dreams are wrong. At least my skin is the same as the rest of my kind.”

  Holder heard her give a long sigh.

  “You are probably as frightened to see me now, as I am to be seen.”

  “Actually, I would very much like to see you. I promise, it’ll be fine. Really. But only if you want to.” “I do not know why, but I do. I have to tell you again, though, I am very strange-looking. Even ugly. But I hope you will not care. I have been alone a very long time, and it is good to have someone to talk with who seems to listen more than most.”

  “Can I ask you something, first?”

  “Of course.” “Where are your parents? The-ones who gave you life?” “My-mother and father-they are sleeping, with most of the rest of their age, in the Elder Grove. They went to their rest when I was very young, and I do not know when I will see them again.”

  “I’m sorry, Annah.”

  “Do not be. I will see them again, one day. Do you still want to see me?”

  “Yes, I’d like that very much.”

  “Very well,” Annah said. Holder heard a movement in the woods, just beyond his view; the sound of footsteps-light, soft footsteps-coming closer. His first glimpse of her came in a flash of brilliant blue eyes, large and oval-shaped, with no pupils that he could see, so that when, after a moment, she blinked, it was like someone switching the sky off and then back on again.

  The sight was startling, but beautiful. Then her fingers, slim, small and pale, parted the branches, and her head came into view. It was oddly shaped; large and ovoid, like her eyes, but there was something about its size and asymmetry that made Holder think of his own larger-thannormal head, for which he’d been teased many times as a child, before height and weight made it blend in more. Maybe this is just the way her kind look. Difference did not mean ugliness.

  The rest of her features-high cheekbones and a chin that was both gently curved and not quite rounded, and a small mouth with pale pink lips that curved into a smile as she watched him taking stock of her-all combined in such a way that he knew, perhaps, why she was thought strange to look at, and yet knew that the ones who said those things were unaccustomed to seeing beauty except in its most familiar shape. Her face was framed by long, curling locks of hair, golden as she had said, but containing flashes of auburn, like sunlight set on fire.

  Then her skin caught the light, and Holder could see that it was iridescent-seemingly pale, nearly white, but containing in its whiteness all the captured colors of the rainbow. One slender but muscular arm parted the branches further, and she stepped fully into view. She was naked, and Holder started to look away, but she caught his hand. There was nothing about her body that struck Holder as ugly, however different she might be from the ideal of beauty on her world, or on his. She was slim, small-breasted, and smallhipped as she had said.

  Her legs were slender, but there was the same strength there as in her arms. Her belly was nearly flat, with only a small curve before it dipped into the hairless delta of her sex, the opening of which was an opalescent pink. In fact, besides the fire-gold nimbus that crowned her head, Annah’s body had no hair at all. She might be tall here, but on Earth, she would have been only of average height for a young woman. She stood at a little over five feet tall; still a good bit shorter than Holder’s own 6 feet and two-inch height. When she came to stand in front of him, her head only reached his chest. She looked up into his face, the luminescent blue eyes shining at him, and smiled. “Hello, Holder.”

  He smiled back, almost involuntarily. “Hello, Annah.”

  * * * Annah and Holder dug out a fire pit from the soil near where Holder’s ship lay, circled it with stones, and made a fire from some branches and grass they gathered. By the time they were done, it looked much like many of the campsites Holder had made on Recon missions-when he’d bothered to land, that is, and not just make the necessary observations from orbit. Holder found a lighter in the ship, and, momentarily, they had a strong fire going.

  “I have never seen such things,” Annah said. “Here, we make fire with sticks or rocks. There are rocks which, when struck together, work nearly as well as your-”

  “Lighter,” Holder said. “Yeah, it’s just a shortcut. People on my world don’t like to do things the long way or the hard way if they can possibly get around it.”

  They brought some of the sweetglobes with them, and spread out one of the blankets from the ship on the ground, far enough from the flames to avoid any stray sparks, but close enough so they could keep warm, and sat down together.

  “Thank you for letting me see you,Annah,” he said. She smiled. “I wanted you to. I am tired of hiding-and I suppose I wanted to know if someone who does not know the usual ways of this world would find me strange to look at, or ugly.”

  Annah did look somewhat odd, Holder thought-she certainly looked different from a human girl. But Holder had seen offworlders before-a Recon man d
id get around, even if he hadn’t seen as much as someone in Active would-and as he watched her, and talked to her, he felt his initial sense of strangeness fading away. He saw the firelight play on the mingled colors of her snowy skin, glimpsed the glimmer of moonlight in the deep blue of her eyes, and caught the shimmer of golden hair in firelight. “You are not ugly, Annah.Anyone who says that can’t see.” “Thank you for that, Holder. No one, apart from my own parents, has ever told me. And they have been away a long time. I was afraid for you to see me. But you do not seem afraid, or disturbed.”

  He smiled. “Those are certainly not words I would use. Aren’t you cold?” Despite the fire, there was a brisk wind, and Holder himself was a bit chilly. “I mean-don’t you wear clothing? I probably shouldn’t have asked that.”

  She laughed. “No, I am not cold-but thank you for caring about my comfort. My body temperature is higher than yours, even though I do not quite understand how to convert the way we measure such things, and the scale of ‘degrees’ your ship tells me that you use. And no, we do not cover our bodies. Does it discomfort you, to see me like this?”

  “No,” Holder said, feeling a little shy now himself, especially since Annah was still nearly a stranger to him. “It’s just that, well, on my world, it’s just not the way things are done.”

  “I could cover myself, if you would prefer,” Annah said. “In the Grove, they would think it very strange, but we are not in the Grove, and I do not want you to be troubled.”

  Holder smiled. “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “I’m not a-bloomling, as I was saying before. I’ll get used to it.”

  “I am glad that you do not find me ugly,” she said, smiling again. They made a supper of the sweetglobes, and some grasses that Annah told him were good to eat. They were of varying colors: there were some that were light purple and tasted like mint, and some russet-colored ones that had a tang similar to a mix between onion and curry powder.

  “How far away is your world, Holder?” Annah asked him, when they had finished eating and were sitting on the blanket, looking up at the stars. He pointed toward the Milky Way, barely visible on an Edgeworld like this one, but just visible enough. He pointed to just about where he figured the Earth would be, given the difference in position of the stars. “It’s thousands of light-years away,” he said.