Lifemates (Tales of Wild Space Book 1)

by Brandon Hill

  She blinked once, slowly, as if I had been previously invisible, and had just appeared before her, like a ghost. At that moment, the child’s image overlapped itself upon the Felyan’s face, and recognition awakened within me.

  “Vani?” I whispered the nickname I had for her, a name that I had not said in a decade. “Sar’vana?

  “Jules …?”

  She spoke my name as if it had been a long time since she had spoken English, with a voice that was as quiet and filled with as much trepidation as mine had been.

  I don’t think that we could have stopped our smiles if we wanted to. And before I could even think, we rushed into each other’s arms, laughing and speaking over each other with our enthusiastic, “how have you been”s and “I haven’t seen you in so long”s. Somewhere in the middle of it all, we separated from the embrace, but Sar’vana still clasped my arms, and was hopping up and down excitedly. I think she embarrassed herself once she realized she had been doing this, as she stopped quickly. She turned away, her laugh now sheepish and self-deprecating.

  “Oh, It’s been too long, Jules,” Sar’vana said once having recovered. She was grinning from ear to furry ear, and she leaned forward to nuzzle my cheek with her own. This was a common greeting among Felyans and she had done it to me countless times when we were children, but something happened this time that had never happened before. A gentle purr began to rumble from her inner throat. It was a soft, soothing noise, and not at all unpleasant, but I saw quickly enough that this also flustered her as she quickly pulled away from me and gasped. Seeing my confused expression, she somewhat regained her composure, perhaps realizing that I didn’t understand the reason for her embarrassment. Still, her grin remained somewhat sheepish, and she muttered a soft apology.

  “Sorry for what?” I said.

  “Oh, you don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Ah, never mind.” Sar’vana shook her head. “It’s a Felyan thing.”

  I accepted her explanation, though I had no idea what she meant by it. Her English, I realized, was actually much better than I remembered it being. She spoke unsurprisingly with a Tantagel accent: a dialect with more rounded vowels than what was common on Zynj. It had been popular in the days of the Old Imperium due to its ability to make one sound vaguely erudite, and Re’Kya Felyans seemed to embrace it over all other dialects, making them sound like the ruling caste they were in Felyan culture.

  “I’m guessing the ship was your father’s,” I said, still stupidly grinning. “I should’ve known that you’d be the only one to find me here. You really made my day.”

  “Don’t you remember who helped you find it?” Sar’vana asked with playfully feigned consternation.

  Now it was my turn to be embarrassed. And Sar’vana giggled at my expression.

  “Why didn’t you try to contact me?” I asked, recovering quickly. “If I had known it was your dad’s ship, I would’ve gone out to the space port to meet you.”

  “That’s sort of my fault.” Sar’vana traced a line in the grass with a back and forth motion of her finely manicured toes. “Father wanted me to call you when we got into orbit, but I wanted it to be a surprise.”

  “Well, you sure succeeded at that,” I said, “and it couldn’t have been more pleasant.”

  “You’ve grown a lot, you know.” Sar’vana’s hand, with its tiny claws, trimmed just as immaculately as her toes, went to my face, touching the bristles of my almost-beard. “And you’ve gotten hairier since we last met. Are you trying to look like us?”

  “Only if you want me to,” I joked.

  Sar’vana glanced appraisingly at my arms, which were almost as hairy as my face. “Well, you seem well on the way.”

  “Good thing or bad thing?”

  “Depends on who you ask.”

  An amused chuckle escaped my stomach at Sar’vana’s coy remark. “I see you’ve grown a lot, too,” I said. We had been about the same height as children, and about the same age as well, as Felyans aged at the same rate as humans, but lived just a little bit longer. Now, Sar’vana, though about half a head shorter than me –Most Felyan females were shorter than human males–, had grown into a truly lovely specimen of her kind. I had forgotten that they grew in the chest as human girls did, and in this avenue, Sar’vana had become quite ample. “But on the whole, you’re just like I remember you.”

  I held back on saying more, even though I thought that she was quite beautiful, even by human standards. I didn’t want to give her the wrong idea, nor did I want to say something that I would later regret. Still, she seemed impressed by my compliment as her hand slipped gently into mine. I felt a strange, yet not unpleasant warmth move into my arm and spread to my shoulder at that touch.

  “Hey, this place is nice and all, but you know what I really want to see?” She asked.

  “What would that be?” I asked, though I had a pretty good idea about where she wanted to go.

  “You remember the skylight at the top of the dome? Is it still there?”

  “Last time I checked,” I said. As children, the skylight had been one of our favorite spots, even more secluded than this private glade. “Want to see it?”

  “Please, can we?” Sar’vana’s voice squeaked several octaves higher, making her sounding very much like the little girl I remembered. The grin on her gray-white muzzle was a funny sight indeed, almost like when a dog or cat “smiles” at you, but oddly more human-looking. The whole thing bordered on adorable, and I fought back against the urge to laugh.

  “Do you remember the way?” I asked, walking ahead of her, my hand still clasped with hers. “They’ve dug a few more tunnels beneath the dome since you were last here.”

  “If I can find my way down here, then I can find my way to the dome,” Sar’vana said, following me back through the woods and to the elevator.

  I felt my stomach knot somewhat as we passed a few couples who had just recently arrived. Seeing our conjoined hands, they fixed me with gazes that ranged from incredulous to downright baleful, but I was unable to let go of Sarvana, as in her excitement, she quickly moved ahead of me and took the lead, nearly running towards the elevator, brushing past each couple, oblivious to their stares.

  Once inside the elevator, I discreetly slipped my hand out of her grip, unable to help feeling some lingering ghost of shame at doing this. We were no longer in public, and I realized, much to my surprise, that I felt more comfortable with our hands as they had been. Still, in the presence of my own people, I needed to maintain a certain decorum. Chester’s catastrophic attempts at playing cupid were bad enough, but would be nothing compared to what might happen if people got the wrong idea about me and Sar’vana.

  I glanced her way, and felt myself overcome by a distinctive sadness. The Felyans were the only reason why there were humans still on Zynj after the Imperium Wars; their technology was the only means by which our toxic planet still had any life at all. It was common knowledge that some humans on the other Colonies took Felyan mates, but these were An’Kya Felyans, and this was Zynj. My people had enough trouble tolerating Felyans among us, and our government chafed at having to rely on their technology for survival. I shuddered to think of how they would react to any citizen who had the temerity to take a Re’Kya Felyan mate, let alone hold an interest in one that was went deeper than simply platonic. Then again, people would probably talk at even that.

  “You’re quiet,” I heard Sar’vana say.

  “Sorry. Had a lot on my mind,” I said. It was not a lie, but it was hard to think of anything to say at the moment. Her sudden reappearance in my life had quite thoroughly left my head spinning.

  “You really have changed,” Sar’vana said, taking it upon herself to eliminate the silence. “I remember you being more talkative. You used to prattle on and on about anything and everything, every time we talked. Of course, you were learning Felyan from me at the time.”

  “I still remember it,” I said, recalling how often I had practiced th
e language with her. I was, in fact, nearly fluent by the time she left. “Well, some of it, at least.”

  “You stopped studying?”

  Her disappointment made me somewhat chagrined, and I flustered for a moment. “Well ... ah, there wasn’t really any ... you know, reason to keep learning,” I said. “No Felyans have come since your group left, after all.”

  Then, out of some strange desire to impress her, I switched to my now very rusty Felyan. “I… speak it still well… or well enough, me think.”

  “You’re right, you do, for someone who’s been out of practice for ten years,” Sar’vana said, impressed, and at the same time amused, though I’d no doubt butchered the language.

  I had used this particular elevator car countless times, and nothing about it ever had been nostalgic. But Sar’vana’s presence with me was beginning to bring fond recollections to mind. It was vague and fuzzy, as some childhood memories are, but happy, or at least partly so. I thought back on one incident where I had been in this same elevator car, running like mad round and round, trying to tell Sar’vana in Felyan about hawks, and how I saw one flying in circles above the canopy in the arboretum, right below the sun lamps. I had her laughing hysterically until the door opened for another passenger. I don’t remember who she was, but I recalled how she stared down her nose at us with the most disdainful look you could imagine. It was an expression that unnerved us to silence even after she disembarked.

  The elevator stopped, and opened up to a long corridor of red stone with no doors, and only a series of fluorescent lamps above to light our way. The stale, acrid smell of the nearby toxins in the soil was the first sign that we were fairly close to the surface. At the tunnel’s end was the door to the primary elevator that lay inside the massive main support column for the dome. Its interior was partly glass, which added an aesthetic view of the city in all its glory: a latticework of light upon geometric structures of steel and karr, a Felyan material that was stronger than concrete, and, in its early stages, more malleable than putty for easy application. It all stood against the dim backdrop of the solid gray of the dome and the dimmed sun lamps upon its interior that replicated night. But we came to see a real night.

  Silent with expectation, Sar’vana stood beside me as the elevator rose to the top, towards the skylight level. It opened to one final, short corridor, with slots that contained emergency respirators right beside the final door. We opened the door, and Sar’vana stepped out onto the platform. She leaned against the railing that separated us from the glass, her wide eyes gazing transfixed upon the sight before her.

  “It’s so beautiful!” She said after a long time.

  I had to agree as I watched the auroras rippling before us in the starry sky. For a world as inhospitable to life as Zynj, the radiation in the atmosphere caused some of the most spectacular nighttime vistas when the conditions were right. Tonight was such a night. High above the scarred, blasted, windswept plain, the unusually clear night sky was a symphony of light, with massive curtains of multicolored iridescence firing against a backdrop of countless stars. The three moons were full tonight, bright and serene; even the dead and shattered moon seemed less tomb-like in the midst of the electromagnetic symphony.

  “It’s something to be said for an environment that can kill you in less than ten minutes,” I remarked, just as taken with the view as I had always been. It was something one never grew tired of, but it gave me even more of a thrill now, since I had someone to share it with. People hardly ever came up here, and I had no idea why. But its solitude was something I had always cherished.

  “For me, it would be an hour,” Sar’vana said, at last shifting her gaze from the fiery sky to me. I began to feel hot, and flustered with embarrassment before I mustered the words that shaped my thoughts.

  “Oh, right,” I finally said, remembering that Felyans had a stronger resistance to toxins and radiation than humans. “I forgot how much you liked this place.”

  I remembered the first time she had seen it. I sat on the railing and watched her stare, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, utterly paralyzed at the sight of it like a cat staring at a string dangling against its nose before pouncing. She stared until I started to laugh. I think I upset her when I did that, but that didn’t stop her from asking to come back to this place whenever I could find time, and when the weather was right.

  “It seems you liked it as well,” Sar’vana said.

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  She gestured towards the bench to the left of us, beneath which another coffer lay, filled with more of my unfinished artwork, tucked discreetly away in a heavily shadowed place. The metal of the coffer was as black as the shadows that concealed it, and so you would never know it was there unless you were looking for it. I had been about to ask how she could have found it, when she touched her tiny, pink nose.

  “Your scent is all over the place here. And I can smell the materials in your artwork.”

  I was impressed. “Your sense of smell wasn’t that keen when we were kids.”

  “We grow into it.”

  “I hope I don’t stink.” Despite my having recently taken a shower, her comment had stricken me abruptly with a distinct sense of self-consciousness.

  “No. You don’t.” I felt her hand, furry and soft, with a velvety palm touch my own. She bent forward pressed her nose gently upon my arm, and my head swam. I steeled myself, reminding myself how this was normal for Felyans, how they were, as a race, quite touchy-feely, but with no underlying intent. I felt her inhale and exhale upon my skin, tickling the hairs on my forearm.

  “You smell just fine,” she said, letting my hand slip out of her own, “not quite like I remember, and yet just the same.”

  “I guess that’s a good thing?”

  Sar’vana smiled. “Oh, it is,”

  With more trouble than before, I shifted my gaze back to the skylight. I steadied myself, slightly reeling after what she had done. I shook myself free of the misinterpretation of her actions and what I would soon realize was a growing conflict within myself. This happened during a silence that weighed upon us rather uncomfortably. At last, I stole a glance at her, and after spending an embarrassing amount of time staring at the split in her dress, which revealed a white half-stocking that covered the gray stripes of her upper thigh to her upper calf, I forced my eyes to move further down. That was when I noticed the anklet.

  A wave of emotion passed over me at the bittersweet memory this sight had evoked, erasing my previous discomfort. The Felyans had completed their work and Sar’vana had to leave. My dad had given me a small supply of copper he’d swiped from the mining site, and I impressed even myself by weaving an anklet whose workmanship surpassed anything I had previously sculpted. I gave it to Sar’vana as a gift the day before her departure. To see it there, still fastened about her ankle, still in perfect shape, was something that touched me in a way that I was completely at a loss to describe.

  “God… you still have it, Vani!” I said in a soft, excited breath. I knelt to her leg and examined the anklet, glancing up to see Sar’vana’s expression change from confused to pleased.

  “Of course I do,” she said.

  “I guess it’d be kind of stupid for me to think that it wouldn’t mean so much to you,” I said, and felt quite stupid indeed.

  Sar’vana shifted her foot to a tiptoes position, and the anklet shifted accordingly. “Yes, I think it would be,” she said, and giggled. It was a sweet, musical thing. “But I forgive you.”

  “It’s bigger than I made it.”

  Sar’vana laughed. “Well, of course it is. I had to have it adjusted as I grew.”

  I remembered how it had just barely fit her ankle when I gave it to her; now it was a perfect fit, with a sufficient looseness that no longer threatened to slide off of her foot. “Good thing copper’s such an easily moldable metal,” I said, and rose to my feet. “You had it done on the homeworld?”

  “That and other places,” Sar’vana said
. “Jewelers are pretty common wherever you go.”

  “What’s it like?” I asked.

  “Making Jewelry?”

  I snorted a loud guffaw, realizing how the question had come out. “No, no. I mean your homeworld. An’re’hara. What’s it like there?”

  “Oh.” Sar’vana smiled again. “What brought that on?”

  “Curiosity.” I shrugged.

  “I’ve told you about it before.”

  “Ten years is a long time, Vani,” I said. “My memory’s sort of fuzzy.”

  “The tables are turned, then, as humans say,” Sar’vana remarked with a grin that seemed to betray her knowing something I didn’t. She leaned against the railing beside the skylight, assuming a pensive stance.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, curious at her last phrase.

  “As I recall, I was the curious one when we were little,” Sar’vana said. “Zynj was my first time living around humans.”

  “Ah.” I settled myself next to Sar’vana. “Well, I know that it’s certainly a lot different from An’re’hara.”

  “This planet is nothing like An’re’hara,” Sar’vana said with a sincerity that had me taken aback at first. “On my world, we have forests that cover almost the entire planet, not stuck in holes miles below the surface. Nowhere does it look like this,” she gestured almost dismissively to the ravaged, barren landscape below the kaleidoscopic sky. “And our forests aren’t like the forests that you see in movies, news reports, and such either. Those are wild. The forests of my home are tamed.”

  “Tamed?” I asked.

  The forests are our natural home,” she explained. So we’ve been able to breed trees that grow into homes for us. And we can also graft our homes into already existing trees.”

  I had seen pictures of Felyan homes from the few photos of An’re’hara that were available. I remember that they had always struck me as odd-looking: a bit too organic … but to learn that the Felyans actually grew them was something else entirely. And suddenly, I was jealous.