Annah and the Children of Evohe

by Clay Gilbert

  “Sounds like something Holder would have said. And I agree with both of you.” Goodman looked down at Annah again, her head resting against his shoulder. Her eyelids were drooping, and she looked as though she was barely conscious. “Sleepy?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Yes, very. The meeting was fascinating, but I am exhausted. I am worried, too, but that will wait until later. Kale, what are you-” He had stopped listening to her again, Annah noted with irritation.

  “Ssh. Listen.”

  The transmission on the green band had gone choppy, as Goodman noticed happened a lot on the Edge, even on the military frequency, which was stronger because Homesec paid for it to be. But there was still plenty to hear.

  -”the voice of a real patriot, a real Homeland hero-Gardner Sewell.”

  Who the hell? Goodman thought, and the ‘com answered him as if it’d read his mind.

  “-on the front line of defense at the Battle of Holdfast Portal-Earth patriot Gary Holder’s wingman at that battle-” If Annah had been tired before, hearing Holder’s name from the speak-box in the ship brought her fully awake almost at once. “Kale, did I hear that correctly?”

  “Yeah, you did. But I don’t know what kind of game they’re playing. Holder didn’t have a wingman on that trip,” Goodman said. “When he placed those charges, he was alone. So the question is: who is this guy?”

  Goodman was halfway out of his seat when Annah caught his arm, bringing him back down as if he’d been belted in. He forgot how strong she was, sometimes. “Where do you think you are going?” she asked him.

  “I’ve got to make a call back to the station. I’ve got to see what they know about this.” “Kale, any call you have to make that concerns Holder, you can make in front of me. I want to know what is going on, too. I do not understand why males seem to think females need to be sheltered. My people are just as bad as yours about it.” She fixed her gaze on Goodman, and her eyes seemed for a moment like the ice-blue of a winter sky. “My father once scolded my mother for teaching me to defend myself. He said I was to be ‘a flower’. Do I seem like a flower to you?”

  Goodman hesitated. “Not entirely,” he said, and smiled. Annah’s face softened, and she broke into laughter. “Well, that is good. The part of me that is like a flower-I am much more than that. And I hope that it has not blinded you.”

  Now Goodman laughed, and shook his head. “Come with me. We’ve got a call to make.” They slipped from the cockpit together, and Goodman waited until they’d gotten a few yards from the ship before he activated the voceiver Turner had given him before he left Holdfast. “Holdfast Station, come in. Blackhand, are you there? This is Swiftwind.”

  Bey’s voice answered almost instantly. “Swiftwind, Blackhand here. Good to hear your voice. Did you get your errand done?”

  “Not sure yet. Everything all right there?” “Funny you should ask. Things are almost too all right here. The HPF’s not real concerned with pirates right now, or seemingly anybody out in the black. They’ve got their eyes focused on good old Mother Earth. Got themselves a new poster boy, now.”

  “Sewell.”

  “That’s him,” Turner said. “Bad news travels even to the Edge, huh?”

  Goodman chuckled. “They were talking about him on the green band news last night. Who is he?” “No one really knows. They say he’s some kind of hero, but I have to tell you, we’ve done some digging, and we’ve found nothing. News last night was saying he’d been at the Portal when Holder-”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Goodman said. “Well, we both know that’s bullshit.” “It’s too bad a lot of people back on Earth don’t know it. Sewell’s been helping the HPF enforce those new laws of theirs—trying to make every human scared of ‘aliens’ down here.”

  “Just what we need,” Goodman said.

  “Yeah. Gets worse, too.”

  “How?” Goodman asked. “The HPF put out this big announcement saying Sewell helped them get hold of a weapon to ‘make Earth safe for Earthers’ once and for all. You know what that means.”

  Goodman paused a moment, thinking of Annah and of Evohe-and of Holder. “But they don’t have it.” “No. It’s still safe. But they might know where to look for it. We’re on full alert here.”

  “Do you want me to come-back?” Goodman had been about to say ‘home’, but that word didn’t feel right, now. I don’t really know where my home is anymore. God, I’m glad that—thing--isn’t down here now.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Turner said. “Probably best to keep at least one of our people out of the HPF’s sights, anyway.”

  “All right. But you let me know what’s going on out there. I’ll be there if you need me.”

  “They want you to go back, do they not?” Annah asked as soon as the ‘com went silent. Her face was full of worry. “Not now. But they’ve got troubles up there. I’m a part of all that. I can’t just hide. I told you I’d be leaving, eventually.”

  “Yes, you did.And I told you I did not need you to stay.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Annah.” She turned away from him. Goodman tried not to notice the shine of her skin and hair in the moonlight; the curve of her leg, stretched just slightly behind her as she stood there, or the way she twitched her feet when she was nervous or angry, as she was now. “Why not?” she asked. “I am not afraid to be alone.” She was silent for another moment. “I heard something about the-weapon. The one you brought here in your ship.”

  Great. Something else for her to be angry about. “It’s not here, Annah. It’s on Holdfast. I left it there with my friends. Do you really think I’d bring it back here?” Annah sighed. “No. But what does all of this have to do with Holder? I could not hear everything the man you called ‘Blackhand’-”

  “Bey. His name is Bey. ‘Blackhand’’s just a code, in case someone’s listening in.” He grinned at her, trying to make a joke.

  Annah’s expression didn’t change. “Code names, last names, first names—nothing is simple with your kind. I could not hear everything this Bey was saying, but I heard him mention Holder. What does Holder have to do with this? Does this Bey know where my Holder is?”

  Goodman realized that he had begun to think Annah might have started to feel differently about him, since Holder had been gone so long, and since it was nearly a certainty that he was dead--and after what had happened between them. She even says that she loves me. She did make it clear it wasn’t the same as how she feels about Holder. And it’s not like we’ve had sex again since-I just haven’t been listening. “Some creeps back on Earth have been throwin’ Holder’s name around,” Goodman said. Sayin’ he and this new guy of theirs, Sewell, were war buddies.”

  Annah frowned. “I did not know Holder had any ‘war buddies.’ Except for you, of course.” Goodman smiled. “He didn’t. He was never even in any wars. But you can make a guy seem like anything you want once he’s dead.”

  * * *

  “Sewell, it’s time to wake up now. There’s breakfast, and then there are things that need to be done.” The blinded man—who still had no real memories of who he was, but who had come to think of himself as Gardner Sewell-found himself blinded, for the first time in his conscious memory, not by darkness, but by light. It seemed the room he was in did have windows, after all; huge, hydraulically-controlled portals of shockglass that opened and shut at someone’s distant command.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman’s voice said, not really sounding sorry at all. “That’s probably too much for you right now.” The squares of bright white pain shrunk, first to a more manageable intensity, and then to a level that allowed Sewell (as good a name as any, he thought, even if he didn’t remember it being his) finally to make out his surroundings, including the faces of the people in the room with him.

  The woman who had spoken, and whom Sewell had heard several times before, stood closest to his bedside. She was tall; only about three or four inches shy of six feet tall. She had short, dark hair and dark eyes. She wore a Homesec unifo
rm Sewell recognized instantly as that of the Presidential Guard. What would one of them want with me? They’d never taken any interest in him before; if they had, maybe he’d have had a better job, and Shannon could have had a better job, or maybe they could have afforded for her to stay home, and everything would be different now— what the hell did they want?

  “Captain Sewell,” the woman said, “I’m Admiral Jessica Starger.”

  “I’m not a captain. I never made it past commander.” “That has all changed. We’ve seen to it. It’s the least we can do for the service you’ve rendered your homeworld, and for what you still have yet to do.”

  “What have I done? I don’t remember any of it. I barely remember my own name.” “That isn’t surprising,” Starger said. “The shock of what happened to you at the Portal was more than enough to distress your memory. The shockwave your ship was caught in knocked you unconscious. Of course, your shipmate Gary Holder was less lucky. You were both very brave. If it had not been for your mission, Earth might even now be in the hands of alien sympathizers.”

  The words ‘alien sympathizers’ struck an odd chord of recognition in Sewell’s mind; he found he could almost hear someone else’s voice saying the words, yet in a different, almost joking tone-a familiar voice, but one which, like so much else about his past, he was utterly incapable of remembering.

  “What was our mission?” Sewell asked Starger. “Holder’s and mine?”

  “To protect Earth, and no less,” Starger said. “Even more-to protect humankind.”

  “From what?” Sewell asked, feeling as though he were still surrounded in featureless darkness. “From them,” Starger said, spitting the word as if it tasted like the grave. “They’re everywhere, even with the laws we’ve passed. This is our world—humanity’s world—and they want to take it from us.”“The way they took Shannon from me,” Sewell said. That much was clear in his mind, even if he didn’t remember the mission-or his own little boy’s face or name.

  “Yes,” Starger said. “They’ll do it to others, if we let them. They’ll do it to the whole world.” “I’m sure that’s how Holder felt, too,” said one of the others, a tall man in a black suit, who would have looked like the stereotype of a government agent from some bad movie if it hadn’t been for his long, pale-blond hair and the fact that one of his eyes had clearly been supplanted, at some point, with one of the cyborg replacements grown in the organ factories on Saturn. The craftsmen out there did a good job, Sewell noted, but the retinas of the eyes always shone too much, like finely polished glass, even though the material of which they were made was wholly organic. “Hello, Sewell,” the man said. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Alan Reid.”

  Sewell shook Reid’s hand, and was shocked by an instant chill. “Pleased to meet you, too,” he managed, although he was anything but.

  “Doctor Alan Reid,” Starger said. “He’s the HPF’s resident bioweapons specialist.” “Wasn’t my original field of study,” said Reid, sounding apologetic. “I got into biochemistry to cure cancer. Ended up with the cure for AIDS as a consolation prize.”

  That was where he knew the name from, Sewell realized. “You’re the inventor of the Reid Initiative?” Reid laughed. “One and the same. I did end up getting my chance to cure cancer, though. Well—-a cancer. The offworlder threat’s the biggest cancer our race knows now. And I’m on my way to delivering a surefire cure.”

  Sure sounds proud of himself, Sewell thought. Sewell had never liked ET’s, but it made his skin crawl to hear someone sound nearly giddy over the notion of wiping out whole races and species simply because they didn’t originate on Earth. Especially a guy with an eye grown on Saturn.

  “If he succeeds,” Admiral Starger said, “Dr. Reid is a shooin for the Patriot Prize. Some people think he should get it for the research alone.”

  “And what is this-cure?” Sewell asked, studying Reid; surveying his seemingly calm, strangely amiable face. Taking stock of details; cataloguing: Compelled by duty. Strong ambition. Can probably be kind, but only to his kind. Sewell found he could relate to that. Offworlders had done a lot to him, too. But-

  “It’s a poison. A smart poison. It’s built to attach itself to DNA strands; to analyze the strands, and when it finds anything that doesn’t evaluate as human-to take it apart.”

  Sewell imagined some being’s body being unmade, like a grisly red flower blooming backwards from life into a brutal death. He choked back the column of sour fire that rose in his throat at the thought. “Efficient,” he managed, somehow keeping his tone even. He thought of the alien female with the strange skin and oddly-shaped head; the one who’d carried the bomb that killed Shannon—did even she deserve to be disassembled like that? “Is that-fair?” Sewell asked Reid.

  Reid stared back at Sewell with his odd unassuming eyes— a philosopher’s eyes, not a killer’s eyes. “Isn’t self-defense fair?” Reid asked. “Was the Cassiopeia Penalty fair? The Planetary Council on Jupiter seemed to think so, in the day.”

  The Cassiopeia Penalty had been one of the main things that led to the last Big War. A sightseeing party from Earth—all humans—had come to that particular moon of Jupiter, famed throughout the charted sectors of the universe for its unparalleled astronomical phenomena, among which were gorgeous double sunsets and a curious atmospheric condition similar to the Aurora Borealis back on Earth, except that the sky-lights over Cassiopeia made the horizon seem to melt. These travelers had come, at least according to their entry visas, to see these wonders and nothing more. But that hadn’t turned out to be true.

  Cassiopeia was also home to the chimaera, one of the most prized game animals in the known universe. It had been named for its resemblance to a dragon-like beast from Earth mythology-a name that had also come to mean ‘illusion’. Besides being beautiful, and producing meat that was considered a delicacy, the chimaera had one other trait that made it irresistible to hunters: the creature’s blood, ingested, was one of the most powerful known narcotics. The hallucinogenic effects such consumption brought about were another reason the beast bore its particular name. But the most important illusion about the chimaera was that it was merely an animal. In fact, the species was highly intelligent, but communicated only through empathic mental impressions, which human hunters often mistook for hallucinations. When the sole survivor of the Earthers’ hunting expedition showed the Planetary Council precisely what had happened, there was no mistake left to be made.

  At the hearing’s conclusion, the Council had decided to make an example of the Earthers. Capital punishment in the Jupiter system had recently taken a new turn. Its advocates called the new technique the cleanest, least painful form of the death penalty practiced on any world. Its opponents claimed that even such primitive execution methods as the electric chair and the guillotine were more humane. The Cassiopeia Penalty was also called the Tabula Rasa Technique for the effects it had on its subjects. First, it erased the mind of all memories but those of their crimes, leaving the guilty parties like sleepers trapped in a recurring nightmare-state-although fully awake. Only then were they put to death; a death that found many of them already driven to madness before their final release came.

  When word of the ‘tourists’ execution had broken back on Earth, the overwhelming response had been one of outrage. The Human Preservation Front had arisen out of the chaos; its original slogan, “Never again, Cassiopeia.”

  “You know it wasn’t fair,” Sewell told Reid. “Not completely, anyway. But do we have the right-”

  “This is war, Sewell,” interrupted Reid. “Remember what they did to your wife and son. Wake up and remember.” Yes. If it hadn’t been for the ET’s, Shannon and-and-well, they’d both still be alive. “What do you need me to do?” Sewell asked.

  “We need you to go back. Back to Holdfast Station. We have it on good authority that the pirates there have something that belongs to us.And we want it back.”

  * * * Annah knew from the look of the sky that it was nearly first-light
, but a shadow as dark as the well on her parents’ homeground had stolen across her as she slept, and the troubling Vision it hd brought with it had hold of her even now. Perhaps I should have awakened Kale, she thought, but he had not been the first one to come to her mind. There had been more than one face there, actually-Holder, of course; before the Vision had come, she had been dreaming that he had come home to her at last-and that he was untouched by the war, safe, and just as he had been. She had thought of Kale, too; had known he would comfort her, if he knew what had happened. But when she awoke in the ship, with him still asleep beside her and the deeper darkness still clinging to the edges of her mind, another name, another face had come to her.

  “I am so glad you came, Chelries,” Annah said, as the golden-eyed, russet-haired young seed-maiden made her way up the path to meet her.

  Chelries smiled. “I was glad you called to me,” she said. “And,” she added in a lower voice, “I was having trouble sleeping too. I almost called for you.”

  “Do your parents know you are here?”Annah asked.

  “They do. They have changed since Charan has been gone, Annah. And they would actually like to meet you.” “That would make me very happy. But now, we should go up to the heart-place.” She paused, looking into Vision. “Most of the others are already there.”

  Just as Vision had shown them both, Annah and Chelries found Serra and the others waiting for them on the hill, just outside the gate of the heart-place. It was still not quite first-light, and Annah hurried to open the gate she had woven to protect the sanctuary from discovery. Since the Shaping she had used to make the gateway was keyed to her own heart-song, she remained the only one who could open it. Today, she thought that was a good thing. The faces and eyes of those around her reflected the same vision that had awakened both she and Chelries from their rest—an oncoming darkness of division; a storm whose seeds lay in the time before the world’s Breaking, and threatened to keep her people from ever returning to the peace and unity they had once known.