Annah and the Children of Evohe

by Clay Gilbert

  “So, what now?” she asked. “The most important thing. This.” He stretched his hand toward Annah, so that she could see the small, silver disc he held.

  “Oh,” she said. “Is that the-ka-pash-it-orr?” She was embarrassed at how her tongue stumbled over the word. She’d come a long way in her knowledge of Holder’s and Goodman’s language, but just when she thought she had mastered it, there was some new challenge to be conquered.

  Goodman nodded. “Yep, that’s it. We’re lucky I had one in the repair crate in my ship. Honestly, there’s probably still stuff in there that I’ve got no idea about.”

  Annah giggled. “Should you not know what is in your own ship, Goodman?” she teased. “Probably,” he said. “But it’s not really mine. A friend of mine found it for me, when I knew I was going to be going on the run.” He thought of the Maestro; hoped the old pirate was still flying under the HPF’s radar, or at least managing to hide in plain sight. “I guess it’s mine, now. But anyway, here. You put this in.”

  “Where?”Annah asked. Goodman pushed aside a panel in the side of the ship, and pointed to a cluster of wires surrounding a small chrome cradle that looked like the setting of a jewel. “In there.” “All right,”Annah said.

  “Go on, you won’t break it.”

  “All right, Goodman,” Annah said, looking back at him and frowning for a moment as she slid the disc into its slot. He could be more understanding. Holder would not be so impatient with me.

  “Knew you could do it,” Goodman said, as Annah backed away from the ship, nearly bumping into him.

  She smiled. “Is it ready now?”

  “Well, no. But that’s a big step. It’s enough for today.” “That is all right,” Annah said. “It is almost last-light, in any case, and I want to find something to eat while I can still see it clearly.”

  * * * “Thank you for helping me with the ship, Goodman,” Annah said, between bites of the soup she had made for them out of ripe meat-bark, succulent spice-grasses and fresh streamwater.

  “You’re welcome,” he told her, still chewing on a chunk of the bark, which he thought would be a big hit back on Earth, both with vegans and with offworlders who had, as some did, allergies to the meat and other byproducts of Terran animals. Tastes a damn sight better than tofu. And the spicegrass does, too. “You’re a good cook,” he said, and he thought he saw her redden a bit, though the flickering firelight made it hard to tell for sure.

  “Thank you. It is at least edible. I have had to learn to do that much on my own.” As if to deflect the compliment, she added, “I am also a fairly good hunter. That is a skill some of my people have lost, living in the Groves, but my mother took me tracking in the woods and wilds, when I was younger.”

  Goodman found himself trying to imagine a teenage girl back on his world, in his culture, shadowing some animal in the forest and trying to bring it down for dinner while her mother watched. Too much work. The boys wouldn’t bother, either. He laughed.

  Annah gave him a puzzled look. “It is custom among my people. You surely do not think my father would be out hunting in the green, do you?”

  Goodman grinned. “ That would be custom among my people, if anyone was going to do it. But mostly, on my world, in my culture, seeing it on a screen is as close as most of us get to that kind of life. We even do most of our killing with the push of a button, now.”

  “Do you miss your life back there?” Annah asked, her eyes searching his face, this man who was her mate’s best friend, and who in some ways was much like him. “Out in the Sea of Stars, or back on your world?”

  “I don’t think I’ve been gone long enough to miss it yet. But it’s what I know. And I’ve got a job to do, out there. I came here for you, and for Holder. But I’m going to be leaving soon.”

  Annah looked at him with surprise. She had known he would, but it was something she hadn’t thought about. “I see.”

  “I’m sorry,” Goodman said. “The people I’m helpingthey’ll be expecting me back. I only came to tell you about Holder-and to make sure you were all right.”

  “I am fine,” Annah said, looking away. “If you are needed elsewhere, you should go. I do not need you to stay.” “You don’t have to stay, either,” Goodman said. “I’ve heard you say how different you are from most of your people. They can get along without you, can’t they? Holder should never have left you here.”

  “I wish he had not,” she said, her eyes glistening in the firelight. “But he was thinking of my safety. If I had gone with him, perhaps, somehow, he might have been kept safe.”

  “Come with me,” Goodman said. “The people I’m with don’t care what race someone is, or what planet they’re from. You’d be welcome. You could help us.”

  “How, Goodman?” Annah asked. “I know nothing of wars, and I do not want to know of them.”

  “That’s not true, and you know it.” He is right, she thought. They are in my Memories, and in our histories. I know of them from Vision, and from my dreams. “Then I do not want to know more of them than I know already.”

  Annah was sitting on the opposite side of the fire-pit, and Goodman noticed her stretching her hands toward the flames, as if her fingers were cold. From what Goodman knew of her kind, though, they very rarely registered any reaction to changes in temperature—-and, whether because of her higher body heat or the energy field Holder had told him about, Annah’s hands were always warm.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  “I do not know. I see things happening around me. Some of them I would like to change, but I do not know how. Others I do know how to change, but am afraid to try. And some things-some things I do not want to change, but I do not know how to keep it from happening.”

  Goodman reached out and stroked her hair, and to his surprise, she did not stop him. “Don’t give up, Annah,” he said. “I think you’ll manage, somehow.”

  She smiled, but there was sadness to her expression, too. “Oh, I will do what I know I must, but it is hard at times.” She looked at Goodman. “You must know what that is like.”

  “I do.” Goodman watched the reflected firelight in Annah’s blue eyes. “I spent years doing what people told me to do, and I got so used to it that it scared me when I realized I just couldn’t, anymore.”

  Annah nodded. “But you knew what you had to do, and you did it.”

  “Sure, when that crook Piscene gave me that marble, and my back was up against the wall. But you and Holder took the real risk taking me in.”

  Annah laughed. “Holder did that. I came to see that he was right. It was a strange thing to me. My people have always kept to ourselves. We look to the soil, and the trees, and the streams and sun, but never beyond.” She looked back at the fire.

  “Except for you,” Goodman said. “Perhaps I am the only one who looks to the stars,” Annah said, “but I am not the only one who dreams, as I thought I was. And I am not alone in seeking to be a Shaper.”

  “Really?” Goodman asked, in genuine surprise. “Yes!” Annah exclaimed, and for the first time since he’d arrived, Goodman thought she seemed the same as she had the day he’d first met her. “I am the oldest of them. Besides Serra, of course,” she added, laughing. “I am to meet them on the hilltop in the morning.”

  “Sounds fun,” Goodman said. “And it sounds like you’re finding your place here, Annah.” “I am not sure I want to find ‘my place’ anywhere without Holder. But I am going to meet them in the morning, so I should sleep. Will you help me more with the ship when I return, tomorrow?”

  Goodman smiled. “Sure.” Maybe with this Shaper business going on now, she’ll put whatever crazy idea she has about that ship out of her head. But it won’t hurt to go along for now, if it makes her feel better. He got to his feet, stretching. “I guess I’m pretty tired, too.”

  “Where are you going?” Annah asked. She was already lying down, curled close to the fire. “I’m going to sleep in my ship,” he said. “I’m not used to sleeping
outdoors, really, and—it doesn’t really seem right.”

  “I would not bother you,” Annah said. Goodman smiled. “No, I’m sure you wouldn’t. Have-fun, tomorrow, if I’m not up when you go. I’ll still be here when you get back. And we’ll work on the ship, if you want. Goodnight, Annah.”

  She nodded, her eyelids growing heavy. “A fair evening and a pleasant rest to you, Goodman,” she managed, barely getting the last words out before she fell asleep.

  Is this just a dream, or the Shaper’s trance? Annah wondered. There were times when it was hard to tell, especially now. She wanted it to be a dream, this darkness all around her, deeper than a cloudless sky and more frightening; as if the First Ones had decided to unmake the stars. She could not feel her body- neither the emptiness of her stomach nor the fullness of her bladder; neither the warmth of her bedding-blanket nor the strange material of the seats in Holder’s ship, where she’d finally fallen asleep after tossing and turning for what seemed half the night by the fire. Nothing remained but her thoughts, as if her mind was all that was left of her.

  Annah felt her thoughts racing, the way she knew her heart would be if she could still feel it. She searched for her still point; found it slipping from her again and again, like a slick stone beneath her feet in a stream-bed. So much darkness, she thought. Can hardly see; can hardly move. Where is this vision coming from? Whose eyes am I looking through? Serra says that sometimes the First Ones test Shapers with their own fears-perhaps that is what is happening.

  When she was a bloomling, around her seventh or eighth cycle, she had stayed late one evening in the Elder Grove after the learning-circles had dispersed. In those days, she had just begun listening to the voices of the Old Ones who slept in the Grove, and she heard them everywhereand so much music, her dreaming mind remembered. She had lost track of time, and it was past last-light before she even glimpsed the lengthening shadows in the grove.

  At that age, her parents had not been in the habit of allowing Annah outside their homeground that late. There had been a few times, though, she thought with a smile, when she had managed it. Most of the people of Laughing Waters Grove would have noticed a wandering bloomling, but Annah spent so much time in the green, listening to the voices and songs she always heard there, that she could slip into the branches and the shadows better than most, and she could usually find her way along the paths of grove and field without getting lost as many her age did. At least most of the time, she thought, remembering.

  On that particular evening, something had happened that Annah had only heard of in whispers at the learning-circles, and which had always sounded to her like tales parents told their bloomlings to keep them near the homeground. Great rolling swells of thick white fog billowed forth from the surrounding woods and hung there, obscuring everything familiar from her view. Mistfall, she thought. It’s actually real. Oh no, she thought, her initial wonder at the sight dissipating as quickly as the fog around her was not. For a moment, she didn’t know whether the damp chill on her skin was the touch of the mist or her own rising panic. Old Ones, keep me safe. She reached out to the sleeping ones whose minds she had felt whispering to hers only an hour before—-a time that seemed so distant, in her fear, that it might have been a whole cycle in the past.

  Annah had heard stories from some of the other bloomlings in her learning-circles that Mistfall was really the breath of the Old Ones seeping forth from the Elder Grove, but she thought this made little sense. “They are always there,” she had told her mother one day, after returning from her circle, where she had heard the story once again. “Would they not always be breathing? Why does Mistfall only happen sometimes, then?”

  Danae had smiled, running her fingers through her daughter’s hair. “There are mysteries to the world that are not easily uncovered, my Annah. I do not know what it is that causes Mistfall, but what the young ones in your circle say is what my own parents told me when I, too, was small.”

  “Hmm.” Annah had looked up at her mother, who to her knowledge had never lied, and still felt the answer was wrong somehow. She had thought, at the time, that she might ask the Old Ones themselves, but she had forgotten. Now, lost in the mist, she thought that the Old Ones’ breath might be a more comforting answer than this-this dark unknown.

  “It is the same place, Annah,” a voice said somewhere in the shrouded darkness-a comforting, gentle male voice, like her own father’s, but different, too. She had heard the voice in the grove before, although it was not as familiar as some. “Think of the way the creatures of the ground and air sometimes shift their forms-the way we ourselves do, in times of rest and change. And no, child, it is not our breath, any more than the air itself is the breath of all things. Remember to see this place as you always do.”

  Annah had tried, willing her feet, mind, and eyes to find the paths they walked on clear days and nights, but after a time, she had found herself lost once more. Her parents’ homeground was on the outer edge of Laughing Waters Grove, and some mornings it seemed a long trek from home to here, where all of the learning-circles were held. But, Annah thought, it had never seemed this far. She knew the green, she told herself. She knew the footpaths, knew the sound of the stream, and she could hear it now, but she could still see nothing.

  What is that? Before her, in the misty distance, she could dimly see the shape of familiar branches and the swell of what she thought should be the great tree that stood only a few short paces from her parents’ homeground. MotherTree! She had given it that name, when she was very young, both because of its shape as well as where it stood, and now she could not imagine calling it by another name. The sight of it filled her with joy, and she began to run through the mist toward the arc of its welcoming branches.

  She had not taken three full strides before a sharp pain buckled her leg, pulling her down, not merely to the ground, but into a deep blackness even more frightening than the pale fog of Mistfall. Looking down, she glimpsed the red of blood against her pale skin. I must get out of here, she told herself, her mind as clouded by worry as her sight was by the mist. No one will know where I am. I should have been more careful. Mother, Father, I am sorry. She began to cry, looking at the blood seeping from her leg, and wondering if the wet darkness of this place would be the last thing she saw.

  The next thing she knew, Annah found herself being lifted in her mother’s arms, out of what had turned out to be a small cave beneath a tree that, while not the Mother-Tree itself, was not far from it. She had indeed made it most of the way back home. “My explorer,” her mother had said to her, “I am glad you are safe. We have been very worried.” Annah had been glad, too, as well as a bit proud of herself for making it so far, but she had not wandered alone after last-light for some time after that, and even now, as a seedmaiden of nearly eighteen cycles, she still had a fear of closed-in spaces. And this darkness now, in her Vision, seemed as all-encompassing as the fog-shrouded wood had that night so long ago. Where am I? she wondered again.

  Annah? The voice in her mind calling her name was faint at first, and then it came again, louder. Annah? Beloved, I don’t know where I am. Can you hear me? I don’t know where this is. I don’t even know my own name anymore. I just know you-and I know

  Holder’s voice? Annah thought. In this darkness? But how? It must be a dream. Wherever he was—if he was—surely he could have reached her before now.

  “Annah.” Her name, called again, but this time, not in Vision, and this was not Holder’s voice. Opening her eyes, she found herself peering into the golden gaze of a seed-maiden who looked around fourteen cycles old.

  “Annah. I am sorry to awaken you, but they are waiting for you at the circle. This is my first morning there. I asked if I could be the one to come get you, because I wanted to meet you alone at first. To apologize for my brother; for both of my brothers. My name is Chelries, and I hope we will be friends.”

  Annah rubbed her eyes and looked back at Chelries, still feeling as though she were caught in the dream,
or vision, and still unable to decide precisely which it had been. Chelries’ eyes, Annah noted, were the same color Jonan’s had been; the same that Charan’s were. But the girl’s face had none of the coldness of theirs, and she, at least, does not call me ‘freak.’“How did you find me here?”

  “I am strong in Vision,” Chelries said. “It runs in our family.” Annah thought of Jonan, although she did not want to. “I am sorry, Chelries. I would never choose for someone to be without a brother.”

  Chelries reached toward Annah, making her draw back, afraid for a moment that the other seed-maiden might strike her. To Annah’s surprise, Chelries gently stroked her face. “You act as though I did not know Jonan,” Chelries said.

  “Perhaps you did not.” “I promise you, Annah,” Chelries said, “I did. He was always a loving brother to me, but that was easy for him. I was younger; he could protect me. And I wanted him to— especially when I was very small. I looked up to him, and for a while, I saw no faults in him. And he saw none in me. I was perfect to him. His perfect little sister. I am sure you know Jonan wanted everything to be perfect.”

  “But Jonan was not perfect,” Annah said, almost spitting the words. “No one knows that any better than me,” Chelries said. Annah looked into Chelries’ golden eyes. There was a sense of peace in them; a deep contentment, the kind Annah herself felt when she sang, or when she lost herself in the Shaper’s trance. But there was sadness too; a deep sadnessbecause Chelries did know.

  “Jonan always wanted perfection,” Chelries said. “But my brother was, himself, so broken.” “But why?” Annah asked. “When we were bloomlings, he and I—-he never seemed so. And why did I never know you and Charan?”

  Chelries looked ashamed. “We were afraid. After your parents went to rest, and after what happened to your guardian, our parents were afraid. And they made us feel the same way.”