First to Dance

by Sonya Writes

  Dakarai smiled. “That’d be nice. Kind of cold out for swimming, though.”

  They sat on the bench together for a long time, talking quietly as the sun furthered itself behind the trees. This evening was warmer than usual, and Dakarai’s arm around her shoulders was a pleasant comfort. They continued talking to each other until the sun was gone from the sky. Neither of them suggested going in for the night. After a pause entered their conversation, Dakarai opened up his coat, and he pulled from it the hollow wooden instrument he so loved. He’d taken to carrying it with him wherever he went so he wouldn’t lose it. He brought it to his lips and played a long, slow song. For a while Ayita just sat and listened. Then, she wanted to dance, so she did. She danced in the park, in her heavy coat and pants. They were bulky and she wasn’t very graceful in them, but she didn’t care. A light snow started to fall and the snowflakes kissed her cheeks. She smiled and closed her eyes, standing still to feel the snow and listen to the music. When she opened her eyes, she saw Zozeis, the park, and an endless sky, but when she closed her eyes she could feel her heart.

  The next morning she saw Dakarai again at breakfast and was feeling far more secure in herself and in their friendship. She did not ask if he remembered her name, nor did she wonder about it, because that morning to her it didn’t matter. She was happy enough knowing that he knew her, and she him. She subtly reminded him that the library was a quiet place to stay without a lot of traffic, but when he left he gave no indication that he would move into this main building instead of travel from house to house each day. Ayita thought about walking with him to spend the day together, but it was very cold outside, and he didn’t invite her.

  Shortly after he left, Panya came in to eat. She had her journal in her hand, and Ayita asked if she was going to sit in on the reading videos today.

  “I watch those videos sometimes, but I carry around my journal because I like to re-read it every winter,” she said. “I know I’m more prone to forget other people this time of year. It helps me remember who people are, even if I haven’t seen them for weeks at a time.”

  Ayita found herself thinking of Panya’s child, and she wondered if Panya had seen her or tried to spend time with her yet this winter, but she decided not to ask. They got to talking, and Ayita casually brought up her concerns about her relationship with Dakarai and his new friendship with Kesi.

  “Dakarai and Kesi kind of go way back,” Panya said. “They were together for a while.”

  Ayita looked startled. “They were?”

  Panya nodded. “Yeah, but I don’t think either of them remember it. When they run across each other, they remember being attracted to each other, but that’s about it.”

  Ayita sighed. “So, what kind of relationship did they have?”

  “A very short one. They’re always forgetting about each other. And Dakarai likes her more as a distraction than as anything serious. I don’t think he ever even kissed her, but I couldn’t say for sure.”

  “A distraction from what?”

  Panya shrugged. “It’s winter now. Perhaps she’s just distracting him from boredom. The first time, she was distracting him from heartbreak.” Panya glanced down at her journal and smiled. “It’s really interesting to be able to read this and remember things that happened so long ago. It’s almost like living them all over again. Of course, reliving the happy memories is much better than reliving the sad ones.”

  Ayita didn’t like what she was hearing. Kesi might be distracting Dakarai from boredom, but she was also distracting him from her. But, thankfully, Ayita hadn’t seen Dakarai with Kesi at all in the last two days. Perhaps they’d forgotten each other again.

  Ziyad came in later that day, and Ayita got an idea when she saw him. He’d done a great job of guiding the children toward Etana’s videos when he saw them, and the kids they worked with over the summer were excelling in many ways. Now the winter was half over, and one of the rooms generally used for food storage was completely empty.

  “What if we used that room for public reading?” she asked. “Would you help me organize it?”

  He smiled. “Sure! What are your ideas?”

  “Well,” she said, “the kids who are learning to read could start reading stories to anyone who wants to listen. There are plenty of books for every reading level. It would be good practice for the kids and possible entertainment for everyone else. Even the younger kids who aren’t reading yet might enjoy it.”

  “That sounds like a great idea.”

  They started working together to make it happen. Ayita looked through the books in the library and picked out a few from each reading level, including some she thought the kids would particularly enjoy. She took all these books to the empty room and lined them up along the wall. Meanwhile, Ziyad walked around the town inviting everyone to come and listen to stories that evening. Everyone was welcome to listen, and anyone who could was welcome to read.

  Ayita started reading the first book when there were only a few people in the room. She read a short children’s book with lively illustrations, and as she read it she wished someone had read to her like this when she was a child. Books like this didn’t even exist on Zozeis. Next another adult stood up to read. After that a child proudly read a very short book with few words but many pictures. More people came as time went on, and more people stood up to read a book to the room. It wasn’t long before the room was very crowded.

  Ayita stood in the back of the room and smiled, but she was disappointed that Dakarai did not show up. She went outside and looked for him, but she couldn’t find him. She hoped he would find out through someone else and be there anyway, but he wasn’t. Ziyad showed up, though, after spending a lot of time going door to door to invite as many people as he could find. He was surprised to see how many actually came. He found Ayita in the back of the room and stood beside her.

  “I think this is a good thing,” he said. “It’s good for everyone.”

  Ayita nodded. They agreed to do this again every evening. Eventually it would become a habit and the people would come without needing to be invited. Someone would start reading books whether Ayita was there or not. It would be their new habit, their new custom. Something positive to pass their time in the dead of winter. Ayita silently thanked Etana for teaching them all to read and giving them this opportunity to remember their lives. If more of them became interested in reading, more of them might write in journals. They could remember more and improve their lives because of it. The many stacks of blank journals would eventually run out, but, Ayita hoped, by then perhaps their habits would have changed enough that they could start to remember their lives without the crutch of pen and paper.

  Ayita looked diligently, but she did not find Dakarai for many days. There were too many places to look, and it was too cold out to spend more than a couple of hours at a time walking from house to house. Eventually, about a week after they started it, Dakarai walked in to listen to the stories being read. He walked right past Ayita and did not seem to notice her. She ran up and sat beside him on the floor in the audience.

  “Hi Dakarai,” she said.

  “Hello.”

  It bothered her now that he didn’t apologize for forgetting her name. “Ayita,” she said.

  “Ayita.” Dakarai smiled innocently.

  Ayita hoped he might say something else to her, but he did not. The room was full of chatter as they waited for a story to be read, but Dakarai was silent. Then from the corner of her eye she saw Kesi approaching. Kesi sat down on the other side of Dakarai, and his face lit up. Ayita was glad that he did not remember her name, either, but his attention being hers now was a point of bother.

  The room fell quiet as a young man started to read from the front of the room. He had picked a rather long book and brought in a chair to sit on as he read. It was the story of an adventuresome boy who never failed to get himself into, and out of, trouble. The room laughed many times throughout the story, but he didn’t finish reading it because the boo
k was so long and people started leaving so they could go to bed. No one else read that evening, and the young man set the book on the chair so he could finish the story the next day.

  When Dakarai left, Kesi followed him. He left quickly and did not remember to say goodnight to Ayita before he left. She sighed, despondent, and reluctantly walked alone to the library. Then she turned around and picked up the book they listened to that evening. She guessed that the next day the young man would probably forget to finish reading the book, or he would remember but start at the beginning again because no one else would remember what happened so far in the story. It was a book of lies like many others here, a fictional novel, but the idea bothered Ayita much less than it had when she first discovered these kinds of books. Ayita read the end of the story and replaced the book upon the chair, then retreated to the library to go to sleep.

  Ayita continued looking for Dakarai every day, but she could never seem to find him. There were too many houses to check, and he was always on the move. Just because he wasn’t in a particular house yesterday didn’t mean he wasn’t there today.

  Then one day she saw him. He was at the park, sitting on the bench where they sat together only a few weeks before. Kesi was beside him. She walked up to them. “Hello Dakarai,” she said.

  “Do I know you?” he asked, as Kesi reintroduced herself to Ayita. “You do seem familiar.”

  Ayita suddenly felt very light-headed. “Yes,” she squeaked. “We were friends over the summer.” She felt a lump in her throat and couldn’t bring herself to say anything else. He wasn’t forgetting her; he’d forgotten her. She was back to square one. She closed her eyes to hold back the tears that were ready to fall, and turned to hide her face.

  “Are you okay?” Kesi asked. She had such a sweet and motherly voice, but hers was not the voice that Ayita wanted comfort from.

  “Better than you,” she snapped at her, and then walked past them, darting into the woods. The tears started to fall and she continually wiped her eyes so she could see. She wished she could erase her memory of him the way he had of her. She brought her hand to the turtle hanging from her neck and held it tightly as she walked. Her impulse was to take it off and throw it away, but she stopped herself from doing that. What they had over the summer was real, and she would carry that with her wherever she went. Even though he seemed to have forgotten her completely, she still loved him.

  There was only a light layer of snow on the ground, no more than an inch, and the temperature wasn’t particularly cold this day. She was disappointed with herself for the way she spoke to Kesi. It wasn’t Kesi’s fault. But the whole time she walked she was hoping that Dakarai would get up from his seat, follow her, and leave Kesi behind. She hoped by some miracle that he would suddenly remember who she was and run after her to bring her back. All he needed to do was follow her footsteps.

  “Follow me,” she whispered as she walked. “Please follow me.”

  But it was not Dakarai who followed her. When she heard the footsteps behind her she stopped in her tracks, closed her eyes and smiled. She wiped them dry and whispered a “thank you” to the sky. The footsteps were coming closer. Say something to me, she thought. Tell me to stay.

  “Where are you going?” Ziyad asked.

  Ayita felt her heart fall a little when she heard his voice. It wasn’t Dakarai. She turned around to answer him. “I’m going for a walk,” she said.

  “Through the forest? You could get lost.”

  “Why are you following me?”

  “I saw you at the park with Dakarai, and it looked like you were upset. Then you just took off into the forest. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  She took a deep breath. “I don’t know if I am or not,” she said. “Dakarai has forgotten me. I don’t think he’ll ever really remember me, the way I would like to be remembered.”

  Ziyad shrugged his shoulders. “You knew that about him before it ever started,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “I thought it could work between us, but it’s not.”

  “You wanted acceptance when you left home,” he told her. “You’ve come here, and you found acceptance, but it’s difficult for you to accept our forgetfulness.” Ayita was about to say something, but he cut her off. “On the other hand, I don’t blame you one bit for wanting someone who’ll remember you. Who doesn’t have to be reminded your name, Ayita, who remembers that you arrived here from the sky and crashed into the lake. Someone who remembers why you left your home and that though you left, you miss it too. You found Dakarai, who can put a smile on your face, but there will be other smiles in your life, and they may not all be from the same place, or the same person.”

  “You don’t think I should bother with him,” she said.

  “It’s your decision. You know Dakarai isn’t going to change. Not in the ways you want him to.” Ziyad sighed and his shoulders fell. He felt a spot of guilt over pointing Kesi in Dakarai’s so many times this winter. He knew the attraction between them would distract Dakarai from Ayita. He wondered now if it was wrong to do that, but then he reminded himself that he was only speeding up the inevitable. “Dakarai doesn’t even remember who he is, let alone you,” he said. “He can‘t remember his own past, so how much more difficult would it be for him to remember yours? It’s not his fault, but it’s not going to change, either. He is who he is.”

  Ayita thought about this and nodded her head. “You’re right,” she said. She continued walking.

  “You still haven’t told me where you’re going,” he said.

  “Maybe nowhere,” she told him. “Or maybe someplace very far away from here.”

  “Alone? In this cold? How are you going to survive? What will you eat?”

  She smiled. “Don’t ask, do,” she said quietly, and she wished Dakarai were the one having this conversation with her. “I’ll figure out the details as I go.”

  “Well, I’m going with you,” he told her. “I can’t just let you wander around in the forest all by yourself. I wouldn’t sleep tonight knowing I’d done that.”

  “That’s fine,” she said. “You can walk with me.”

  They walked for a long way, and the trees started to thin out. They both stood still when they saw it. Ziyad did not yet know what it was, but Ayita knew.

  “Wow,” Ziyad said. “What are the chances of this? We take a random route through the forest and find…” He stopped and looked at Ayita. “It wasn’t random, was it? You knew this was here.”

  She nodded. “I told you the city was just like home. I didn’t know if this would be here or not, but I suspected it.”

  “So this is…”

  “Yes,” she said. “The space center.”

  Suddenly Ziyad understood what was happening. “Don’t go,” he said. Now he wished her relationship with Dakarai hadn’t fallen apart. He regretted pointing Kesi in his direction. It seemed like the perfect solution at the time, and Ayita would never know because everyone else involved would forget, but he realized now that if Ayita was through with Dakarai, she was through with Adonia. He was losing her not only as a potential lover but also as a friend. “Please don’t go.”

  Ayita looked down at her feet. Dakarai wasn’t the only friend she was leaving behind, and she knew that. “I won’t leave yet,” she said. “I’ll come back. I’ll say goodbye to you and Panya before I go. But right now I need some time to be alone here.” She looked up at him. “I promise I’ll find you and say goodbye before I leave,” she said.

  Ziyad nodded, but he wouldn’t look her in the eyes. He gave her a hug and turned back around, following their tracks in the snow to find his way home. When he was out of sight, Ayita went down the hill and into the space center.

  It was exactly the same as the one on Zozeis. There were three platforms: one empty and two with spaceships seated atop them. One of the spaceships was fully charged and the other was at 95%.

  When Ayita sat down at the computer, she felt scared. She’d been in this situation
before, and whoever was tracking her actions had caused her to crash. What if it happened again? She pulled open the History Log and sure enoug, the computer was still tracking her, even here on another planet. She read fondly through her life here on Adonia, her memories with Dakarai. Then she went to the search box, and she almost typed in his name, but she stopped herself. She didn’t want to change the way she remembered him by filling in all the details of how he spent his time with Kesi. Instead she searched a different name. She searched: Etana.

  13

  Etana arrived on the planet Azias as a young single woman. The planet was named after the man who discovered it, Dr. Timothy Azias. His birth date was deceiving. He was born on the planet Earth almost two hundred and fifty years earlier, but he only looked to be about 35 years old. Traveling faster than time itself as often as he did made him a bit of a legend. He had accomplished quite a lot in his 35 years, but the people on Earth had been watching him for well over 200.

  When their large spaceship of 45 passengers prepared for landing, Etana sensed almost immediately that something was wrong. She didn’t see any houses here—only a multitude of warehouses and the space center they landed in, which had dozens of docking boards for other spaceships, some already landed and some still arriving. Everyone was quickly ushered into a large waiting room. There were so many people that they were packed in with barely any room to move. Once all the spaceships had landed and everyone was out, they received the news one by one and were directed back into one of the spaceships.

  In the screening process to leave Earth and live here on Azias, everyone had undergone personality tests and psychological evaluation. They all had to be approved in order to have a home here. Now, they found out, they would not have a home here at all. Their personality profiles were being used to assign them each to homes on other planets: planets that none of them had ever heard of, sixteen in all.