Saturnia’s sister learned of my desire. “Your curiosity is fitting. Be patient. You will know the chosen one soon enough.”
“For what is she chosen?”
“I cannot say yet, Onine.” She teased me with my new name, knowing I disliked it. “But you have a greater task on Venus before the one on Terra. The goddess prepares for our return.”
I had forgotten about our return. Our work had been instantaneous but we had to face Midan, unable to evade him much longer. Though we did not speak of the Venusian rebellion, Kypria’s role in the war was inevitable. Thoughts of the voyage back made me uneasy, though not for the reasons I suspected.
Shortly before our return to Venus, Kypria summoned me to the hall of stones. The crystal shrine was as beautiful as the one on our home planet since terrestrial jade was as rich as the stones from Menaleck. My goddess’s presence amplified the energy the jade emitted and I was soon drunk with Kyprian sublimity. I could barely dim my flame to greet her with the reverence she deserved.
“Your admiration warms me,” she said. “I will know it always.”
“I hope so, goddess. I exist to please you.”
She looked around the glass hall. “Even here.”
“Anywhere.”
Our new forms had changed us in subtle ways but we felt the burden of the one thing sapients possess that we do not. They are connected to their soil, inundated with the weight of their planet’s core and bound to it with a pull that makes them heavy. On Venus, our fire burned away impurities, but here we were forced to absorb them into our skins, a discomfort that took some getting used to.
“Have you ever wanted more?”
I misunderstood the question but tried to answer it anyway. “Kypria is all I shall ever need.”
“But what if,” she said, breaking decorum, “Kypria is no longer the same?”
Her suggestion was absurd but I refrained from telling her so.
“You will always be the same, goddess.”
“I will always be the same.” She contemplated what I said and repeated it as if she needed to speak it aloud. She shed her sapient tongue and spoke in the language most befitting our nature. “What do you think of Mara?”
I knew the goddess admired the sapient she had chosen. It had become obvious to all of us Mara was the connection between our goddess and Terra. If she had been unmoved by the creature, we would have been alone and without slaves. As it was, we discovered the sapient’s talent for procreation, which meant a long line of subservient beings to come.
“She learns well.” I had been surprised in fact how quickly she took to the tedious labor in the Temple. She proved a physical force and a help to most of the bathers.
“Not her work,” she said. “What do you think of her as a species?”
“Sapients have their attributes.”
“Are you not attached to your new form yet?”
I was not. “I have been told we are returning.”
“Saturnia’s sister has told you, has she?” My goddess wasted no time with innuendo.
“She has.”
“We will depart when Jupiter rises after the third moonscape.”
Kypria approached me then and I felt her fire. Her scepter was incapable of piercing my terrestrial form, but my knees buckled when her lips touched mine. The skin beneath my covering tingled and my breath quickened. She pulled away from our embrace and leaned close to my ear, whispering in sapient tongue. “Spend the time that remains with Mara.”
“Yes, goddess.”
Kypria made her choice in that moment, perhaps even before, and my world changed forever.
***
I obeyed Kypria and sought Mara out, but my goddess’s assignment only became clear in my final meeting with the sapient.
Since the eye had only begun its descent in the sky, when we finished at the baths I escorted Mara home. We had little reason to converse and when we reached her shanty, I simply turned to leave. I was surprised when she stopped me with her small voice.
“Would you like to meet Bendo?”
“Bendo?”
“My goat,” she said.
I had seen all the beasts that survived my goddess’s induction of gold. I had in fact chosen that particular species myself, knowing the sapient could live off its sustenance. On Venus, the molten trees gave us ours and I dreaded consuming sapient food until I discovered goat’s milk. “You have given the beast a name?”
Mara led me up the path to her shanty and around the back to a small patch of herb as big as a lava pond. She stepped onto the living green blades, letting her feet sink into the dirty soil. I refused to follow her and stayed near the edge of the stones.
“Come on,” she said. “Bendo is at the back between the rows of cabbages. She’s too small to see from there.”
I heard the baby goat’s bleats, as Mara disappeared between the stalks. I waited for her on the stone. When she reappeared, she carried a small bundle in the front of her frock. The beast wriggled in her arms, as she came to the edge of the stones, staying on the patch of grass and soil. It seemed as though neither of us wanted to give up our terrain. She held the goat out to me, as if offering it up. I shook my head and raised my hand slightly.
“Don’t you want to hold her? She’s soft.”
The thought of the goat’s warm pelt against my flesh made me queasy. Plus, I was afraid to burn it with my touch. “I cannot,” I said.
“Don’t you have goats where you come from?” Her question suggested more than one meaning.
“My planet is different,” I said. “But not without its creatures.”
She shook her head and looked away. “No goats?”
“We have zephyrs.”
“What’s that?”
I smiled at her curiosity. “I suppose it is similar to the beast in your arms but with much longer limbs and a thick coat of sabine skin.”
“What’s sabine skin?”
“Nothing like a goat’s pelt,” I said.
Mara laughed and her veil moved in the breeze. “Maybe I’ll see a zephyr soon.”
“Perhaps.”
She put the goat down on her patch of green and it found its way back to the cabbages. The eye had reached its halfway point, somewhere between the horizon and the sky and I felt the coolness coming in from the wheat field.
“I must go,” I said.
Mara moved nearer to the stones, letting her toes touch their edges. She was closer to me than ever. She smelled like the wax flowers on the shrub Kypria kept alive in the hall of stones.
“May I tell you a secret, keeper?” She took my silence for yes. “We are going to touch,” she said. “I thought it is why you brought me home but maybe I was wrong.”
“Has my goddess told you this?”
She shook her head and her veil swayed in the breeze again. The silk was just sheer enough to see her face beneath it.
“No,” she said. “I’ve seen it?”
“What?”
“The conception that’s coming.”
Her cryptic message confused me, as did her confidence in knowing it.
“Our contact,” she said.
“Do you know the potential danger of our touching?”
She held her breath and nodded and then she leaned forward and whispered her secret into the air between us. “The water shows me it’s going to happen.”
“The water?”
“I see things,” she said, “in the bath water.”
She meant to say the Venusian dust that shed from the bathers in the Temple. The celestial bodies arriving on Terra sat in the scalding liquid at least once a day until they had fully adapted to their new form. The molt of my Kyprian siblings gave Mara her visions, not the water. I wondered if my goddess knew about her gift for reading the future in the sediments of Venusian gold. I suspected Saturnia’s sister did.
“What have you seen?”
“Everything.”
Her confession worried me. “Be specific.”
>
“The first vision was a sapient but she was nothing like me.”
“How so?”
“She was beautiful. Like a Venusian.”
I thought her vision imaginary. “Are you sure she was sapient?”
“Yes,” she said. “She was mine.”
My goddess had yet to pair the sapients for procreation since they were still too young, but she promised to begin as soon as their change had come. She had enlisted a council of three to manage the repopulation. With Kypria’s guidance, they would select the sapient mating partners. Apparently, they were made for compatibility. I assumed Mara had simply seen her own contribution to the renewal of Terra’s population, even if she seemed to think hers would be beautiful. A creator would always admire its creation, I assumed, despite its lack of aesthetic appeal.
“She was yours too,” she said.
“Mine?” Mara nodded. “What do you mean?” The suggestion shocked me. We had never discussed an interspecies union—and certainly not one with me.
“She will be the product of our contact,” she said.
The thought of a sapient offspring—my offspring—made me ill. It seemed strange my goddess would consider it a boon to our species.
“It’s inevitable.”
“You are obviously mistaken,” I said. “I would never entertain the idea, let alone attempt such a dangerous endeavor. It is simply impossible.”
The expression on her face was hidden behind the veil but I imagined my fear was reflected there.
“We will survive,” she said. “We are made for it.”
“How?” Her dark eyes brightened and revealed the smile beneath her veil. “Your vision was imaginary, sapient.”
“Kypria showed me.”
“My goddess gave you the vision?”
“Yes,” she said. “She is the one who taught me to read the sediment.”
“My goddess knows about your gift?”
“She’s the one who gave it to me.”
The reasons my goddess wanted the sapient to possess such power baffled me. As I stared at her veiled face, the coldness from her covered skin seeped through the silk and clung to my flesh. It made me want to touch her. “Remove your veil,” I said.
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I can’t—not yet.”
“I must see your face,” I said. “I am not asking.”
Mara understood the command and reached for the veil, pulling it down around her neck. Her loose strands of hair whipped in the wind and licked her face, a change from the tidy way the Venusian kept their terrestrial manes. Her cheeks were red with the cold air coming in from the wheat field and I thought she looked like a mix of stone and lava, though more palpable than the volcanoes on Venus. I wondered if sapient flesh would seep through my form as lava did. Despite all the love I had for Venus, I wanted to touch the sapient, to taste the substance Terra offered.
Mara held out her hand to me and I studied her lean fingers, fat palm, coarse, dark skin before I lifted my clumsy limb to take her hand in mine. The sensation could only be described as electric, as a bolt ran up my arm into my neck and plucked on my forehead with an unending pulse. Pleasurable at first, it quickly turned torturous and soon the throbbing in my flesh became intolerable—as did hers. She screamed before I could unlock our grasp and stop our fusing skins from searing the bones beneath. The smell of burnt flesh teased us both.
“It burns,” she cried. “It burns.”
My burn was wholly different. Though my flesh was singed on the surface, my inner flame dampened with the coldness of her skin. The sapient wailed, as her hand blistered and turned plum then black. I was incapable of softening her pain and the horror forced me to back away. I was relieved when Saturnia’s sister came up the lane to meet us in the garden. She stopped on the stone beside me, standing an arm’s length away from the sapient. She pulled out a small satchel of powder and turned the pouch over to release its contents into the air. She blew the stardust at Mara’s hand and when the particles settled on the burning skin, the Kyprian healer waved her lithe arms in front of her to extract the pain. The sapient’s complexion changed almost immediately.
“You are fully healed, sapient,” she said.
Mara shared a smile with us before using the same hand to pull her veil back up to cover her face. “I did not mean to—”
“You have been brave,” Saturnia’s sister said. “But you are not ready yet.”
Mara dropped her eyes to the ground and mumbled something.
“Soon,” my Kyprian sibling told her. “It will come soon.”
We left Mara in the garden and rushed back to the greenhouses. The eye had nearly dropped below the horizon and we both felt our fires dampen. At the rise of Jupiter, we left Mara and her planet behind.
***
Our return voyage was more painful than our trip to Terra. It seemed stripping off the terrestrial form was harder than putting it on. The peeling clay racked the core of our being and tortured us until we touched down on Venus once more.
“The bonding has begun,” Saturnia’s sister said.
“Fire and clay,” my goddess said. “We must become fire and clay.”
Kypria embraced the twin planet, willing to become a part of it no matter what she lost. As soon as she entered her solarium, Midan came for her. His rule had begun and he wanted his queen. Persuasive and wrathful, the ambassador would no longer wait for Kypria to relinquish her retinue. I missed the worst of it, though, for I was sent away shortly after we returned.
“You will travel the cosmos,” Saturnia’s sister said. “When you reach the tenth sphere, you will know. That is where you will be reborn.”
“Reborn?”
“Into darkness.”
The details of my goddess’s plan were opaque, and until then I was unaware of my gift’s importance. When Ur had shaped my fire, the sire had implanted a womb that could transport a spark.
“You can carry another within you,” Saturnia’s sister said. “Safely within you.”
“I do not understand.”
“It is a gift that needs no explanation. You are a cultivator and thus may plant the visitant spark in another’s soil.” She used language influenced by our trip to Terra. Words like soil, cultivator and plant were strangers to Venusian vocabulary.
“But I—”
“You are to learn how to sustain your fire in darkness and keep it lit in the coldest of spheres.”
“How is that possible?”
“All things are possible through Kypria,” she said. “Let her be your guide.”
Saturnia’s sister touched the tip of my flame with hers and the spark lit me up. She pushed her fire a little deeper into mine and suddenly mine consumed hers. Like setting myself down in lava, my heat rose to explosion and I felt the pleasure of another within me, though I held my own, overwhelmed as I was by the sensation.
Saturnia’s sister spoke to me, as we held each other in one flame. “This is your gift, Onine—this is what you will know with the sapient but you will suffer first and when you think you cannot overcome, know that you must.”
When the healer pulled herself from me again, it took a moment to adjust to the tepidness of my sole flame.
“Do you see the possibilities?”
“I know what I must do,” I said.
“Go to your goddess. Tell her you are ready.” I nodded in assent and turned to go. “Remember this moment,” she said. “And know it is worth it.”
I left Saturnia’s sister with my newfound burden, the knowledge of my responsibility to all Kyprian and my goddess herself. Only through me could they find salvation.
Kypria entertained the ambassador in her solarium, and when I arrived the grotesque Midan was standing next to her pedestal, looking through her selection of liquid crystals. He spun the platter of melted minerals about on the slab of granite. His brutish voice choked my flame, as I made my way toward them. He was a novice to our language and his broken shrieks were difficult
to understand. My goddess was agreeable despite his impropriety.
“We have nothing of this sort on Menaleck,” he said. “I want this one.”
He pawed at the granite and plunged his pudgy dactyls into the liquid quintessence. When he pulled them out and licked them, I thought it better to leave the two alone but my goddess called me forward.
“You need to see me,” she said. “I assume it is about the borneo lava lands.” She concealed the real reason for my visit, knowing exactly why I had come.
With sounds that were closer to grunts than Venusian shrieks, Midan pressed his tongue up against Kypria’s flame and bid her farewell. “Vapid—these wasted matters,” he said.
He slithered away in a manner similar to a scaly four-legged creature I had seen on Terra, one of the species the goddess had liquefied with her fire.
“Come closer,” she said as soon as he disappeared from the solarium.
I moved beside my goddess’s pedestal and dimmed my flame. Pleased with me, she pulled me up onto the platform with her. The view at her height was splendid. The top of the solarium revealed a panoramic of Venus—my home, my forge. My flame brightened at the sight of lush lava and acidic manna, caves of liquid crystal and hot granite, dells of molten trees and amber stuccoed brush, fields of gold sand and plains of stilted infernos begging to be explored. Our planet was a vision of perfection, as was our goddess, and living on Terra for the rest of my existence seemed a punishment.
“No place for sorrow,” she said. “Your life will become something you have yet to imagine.”
“How could it, Kypria?” I immediately regretted my break in decorum. Only the sire could call my goddess by the name he had given her.
“No regrets, Onine.”
My flame was so close to hers, I had a difficult time containing it. I felt a desire to pull hers into mine or be thrust into hers. The feeling humbled me.
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