“How am I supposed to do that?” she asked. “Right now, all I see is you standing in front of me.”
“Stop thinking so much,” he told her. “Stop seeing with your eyes and try instead to see with a different part of your mind. If you try, you’ll find the information is already inside you. The water puts it there, but it doesn’t put it into your mind. It puts it through your skin and your mouth and your ears and your fingers. Try it and you’ll see.”
For a moment, she only stared at him. What did he mean by seeing with her skin and ears and fingers? That made no sense at all. Then the information came to her. Images of the Aqinas world, with its wavy watery lines, came to her as if from a forgotten dream.
A version of the meadow, but without its Earth like quality, flickered at the edge of her awareness. Instead of waving grass in the summer wind, sea plants studded the ocean floor. The wildflowers decorating the expanse were anemones and polyps turning their purple and yellow cups toward the sunlight filtering down from above. A mass of caves in a coral bank stood in the shadows of the seaweed, and people moved in and out of them.
So this was what the meadow looked like to the Aqinas. They didn’t need any image of Earth, or even the Angondran surface, to make it home to them. As Frieda watched, a woman stepped out of one of the caves and waved across the expanse to her—except she didn’t wave at Frieda. She waved at Deek. Frieda was Deek in that moment. The woman was his mother, and that cave was their family home. She saw the place through Deek’s eyes and knew it as the Aqinas knew it. Her own home looked like a house because she was human, but that cave was the most comfortable place for an Aqinas.
Frieda closed her eyes against the image, and when she opened them again, the meadow surrounded her once more, with its grass and daisies and yarrow and dandelions. She turned back to Deek and sighed. “I see.”
“You can do the same thing with any Aqinas you meet,” he told her. “You can understand just about anything about them you want to understand. The water tells you.”
“Then what’s the point of talking to them?” she asked. “If you know everything about them, you have no reason to have anything to do with them.”
“You’re talking to me right now,” he pointed out. “You just saw for yourself what my world looks like to me, and you know my family, and a lot of other information about me, but you’re still talking to me.”
“I guess I just want company,” Frieda remarked.
For the first time, he smiled. “There are some things the water can’t give us. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of things the water can’t give us.”
“But what do you talk about?” she asked. “I’m talking to you because I don’t know anything about you. Okay, I know something about you, but I’m a stranger here. What do people talk about who’ve known each other their whole lives?”
“What do you talk to your parents about?” he asked. “What do you talk to your sisters and your cousins and your dearest friends about?”
Frieda blushed again. So he knew that much about her, too. He knew she had sisters and cousins. He knew she didn’t have any brothers. He was still reading her mind. He could glean all this personal information and a lot more besides, but that didn’t bother her.
“I talk to them about what I’m doing,” she told him, “and where I’ve been, and what I’m thinking and feeling about my decisions and my plans. But you don’t have to do that. The water tells people everything they need to know about you.”
“Not everything,” he replied. “And even if it did tell us everything, it can’t take the place of talking to each other about it. We would still have to do that.”
Frieda nodded. “I can understand that. There’s nothing like talking to someone your trust about everything on your mind. I wouldn’t want to give that up for the world.”
“You don’t have to.” He turned toward the forest. “Would you like to take a walk?”
She stared at him. “Take a walk? But there’s nowhere to walk to. We won’t go anywhere.”
“It’s still nice to take a walk, isn’t it?” he asked.
She took a step after him. “I guess so.”
She fell in at his side, but she didn’t watch where they were going. They could walk a million miles and never leave that meadow. They would never come to the edge of the forest, any more than she and Sasha could get to that wall over there.
That gave her an idea, and she turned back. “What’s that wall over there? Is it a city of some kind?”
“That’s the shore,” he replied.
“The shore!” she repeated.
“It’s the edge of the water,” he explained. “That’s where the ocean ends and the land begins.”
“But it’s a wall,” she countered.
“To you, it’s a wall,” he replied. “It’s the limit of our territory. Maybe that’s why it looks like a wall to you.”
“So why are all those people over there?” she asked. “Why aren’t they walking in the meadow, too?”
“They are,” he replied. “Each one of them is walking in their own meadow. To you, they’re walking far away because they’re far away in your mind. When your mind brings them closer, they will come closer.”
Frieda looked down at the ground. “That’s what Sasha said.”
“Don’t you believe her?” Deek asked. “You can trust Sasha. She wouldn’t deceive you.”
“I trust her,” Frieda murmured. “It’s just so different from the world I’m used to. It’s going to take me a while to get used to it.”
He gazed into her eyes with a distant expression on his face. Then he shook himself and started walking again. “I can only understand that in a marginal way. I’ve lived with the Aqinas my whole life, whereas you’ve lived on land where everyone is separated from everyone else by an unbridgeable gap. All I can say is it must be a very lonely world to live in.”
“It isn’t lonely when you’re used to it,” she told him. “You find other ways of connecting with people. It’s like you say. The water can’t do everything. Some things you have to do for yourself by coming face to face with people. I suppose it’s not so much different on land as it is here.”
“Still,” he replied, “I much prefer it here.”
Frieda tried to keep her voice steady. “I don’t know if I can get used to this.”
“You can go back any time you want to,” he replied. “You don’t have to stay here if you don’t feel comfortable with it.”
“I’m sure your people would be insulted if I left after the way you helped me when I fell out of that tree,” she remarked.
He shook his head. “No one would hold it against you. We understand how strange this world must seem to you. None of us would want to go live on land, either.”
“What about Sasha?” she asked. “She’s chosen to make this her home.”
Deek shrugged. “She mated with Fritz. If she hadn’t, she might have chosen to return to the land and her own kind. I wouldn’t blame her if she did, and no other Aqinas would, either. We only brought her here to save her from her injuries. By the time she recovered, she’d made a connection with Fritz and his family. That’s why she decided to stay.”
“She must have felt comfortable here,” Frieda pointed out. “She must not have found it all that strange.”
He cast a sidelong glance at her. “Do you feel comfortable here? Do you really find it all that strange?”
“You know I feel comfortable here,” she returned. “That’s exactly what makes it so strange.”
He stopped walking and regarded her with wide eyes. “I don’t understand you. What do you mean?”
She waved her hand over the wide meadow. “All this—it’s beyond comfortable. It’s familiar. It’s home. That’s what makes it strange. That’s exactly what makes it so disconcertingly foreign.”
He frowned. “I don’t understand you.”
She sighed and started walking again
so he had to hurry to catch up to her. “Never mind.”
He laid his hand on her arm and turned her toward him. “Stop. I want to understand this. Explain to me what you mean. How can it be comfortable and familiar and home if it’s disconcertingly foreign?”
She couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “Only you could fail to understand that, with your homogeneous chemical solution.” She burst out laughing.
He frowned even harder. “What do you mean? I don’t understand you at all.”
She smacked her lips. “All right. I’ll explain it to you. I’m on an alien planet, hundreds of thousands of light years from my home world. At least when I was with the Lycaon, and with the Avitras, I had the people to look at and understand exactly where I was and what happened to me. The sight of the people anchored me in space and reality. I never had to question where I was. All I had to do was look at the Lycaon’s hairy necks or the Avitras’ feathers to get my bearings.”
“And you don’t have those bearings now?” he asked.
“I do,” she replied. “Those trees over there don’t look like any trees I ever saw before.”
“Then what’s the problem?” he asked.
“You,” she blurted out. “You are the problem.”
He furrowed his eyebrows, and she almost laughed at him again.
“You look like any human man,” she explained. “The only part of you that looks alien is that hair of yours. If it wasn’t for that, I could convince myself I was somewhere back on Earth.”
“Isn’t that what makes this place comfortable and familiar?” he asked.
“Exactly,” she replied.
He frowned again, but Frieda turned and started walking again. “Never mind. You won’t understand, but that doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter,” he told her. “If something makes you uncomfortable here, you should get it out into the open. We can find a way to change it to make you more comfortable.”
“There’s nothing you can do to make me more comfortable,” she told him. “I’m perfectly comfortable. That’s exactly the problem.”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Let me put it this way,” she explained. “You’re alien. You’re ten times more alien to me than the Lycaon or the Avitras ever were. They live on land, and they’re separated by that unbridgeable gap, the same way my people are. I could relate to that. Now I have to learn a whole new alien way of being. I’ve been on Angondra for almost a year, and nothing prepared me for this. It’s going to take some adjustment. It’s going to be harder for me to adjust to this than living with the other factions.”
He nodded. “That makes sense.”
The trees blocked out the sunlight, and all at once, Frieda noticed they stood at the edge of the forest. “How did we get here?”
He looked around. “You tell me. You must have wanted to come here.”
“I never wanted to come here,” she shot back. “I was walking along thinking about something completely different.”
“Then how do you explain how we got here?” he asked. “We couldn’t have got here if you didn’t bring us here.”
“I’m telling you I never wanted to bring us here,” she snapped. “All I wanted to do was take a walk.”
His eyebrows went up. “I’m just saying....”
Then a glint of color caught Frieda’s eye. Her gaze fell on the house at the edge of the forest—her house. Her blood ran cold. Why had she wanted to come here—with him?
She glanced at Deek, but he only regarded her with his calm expression. She took a step forward. “I better go.”
He nodded again and took a step back. “It was nice to meet you.”
She looked back over her shoulder, but he was already walking away. She never had a chance to ask if she would see him again, but she could always find him again in the meadow if she wanted to. She went into her house and sat in the chair.
The chair sucked her down with an irresistible pull. As strange as this world was, she couldn’t bring herself to feel out of place here. The reality of the Aqinas world had become her reality.
Maybe the water eroded her resistance until she became one with the Aqinas and their world of mirages. The water constructed out of her own thoughts and memories the most perfect environment for her she could possibly imagine.
Nowhere else in the galaxy would she find a place so exactly suited to her tastes and sentiments. Even the people stepped out of her dreams to surround her with care and companionship.
She sank deeper into the chair—her own chair. A sudden wave of exhaustion washed over her and threatened to drag her down into unconsciousness. She barely managed to stretch herself out on the bed before she fell into dreamless sleep.
Chapter 3
Frieda studied the meadow from every angle in much greater detail than she ever had before. In the end, she faced the wall and watched the people. Whatever else she experienced here, those people were the crux of her life here. Whatever answers she wanted or needs she needed, the solution would come from them.
If she thought about them long enough, someone would come toward her. Who would it be this time? Would Deek come to visit her again? Even as she wondered, a cluster of figures left the main group and Frieda recognized them right away as women. They wore the same long white shift Sasha wore, and their hair hung smooth and lustrous down their backs instead of bound in ropes like the men. Their white gowns drew Frieda’s attention to her own clothes. She still wore the woven shirt and pants she had on when she arrived in the Avitras village with Anna.
Before Frieda could say a word, the women surrounded her with warm smiles of greeting. “We’ve been waiting for ages to meet you. Did you find your house? Is it comfortable enough for you? Do you have everything you need? When are you coming to the convocation? Were you injured when you fell? We have a medicine woman who handles injuries. We don’t get many, but if you are injured, she’ll fix you.”
Two women took Frieda’s hands on either side, and the others pressed her on all sides and bombarded her with questions. “No, I wasn’t injured. Thank you very much for taking me in.”
The woman on her left brought her face close to Frieda’s and murmured low. Her hair shone with the same glossy brown as the others, but something around her eyes told Frieda she was older than the others. “It wasn’t we who took you in. You came to us through the water. We didn’t know about you until you called to us to come for you. We wouldn’t have taken you otherwise. We would have left you where you were for your own people to find you.”
Frieda shook her head. “The Avitras aren’t my people.”
The woman frowned. Then Frieda recognized her from her vision. She was Deek’s mother, who waved to him across the undersea meadow. She frowned the same frown as Deek. When they frowned, they looked exactly alike.
“They aren’t?” the woman asked. “That’s strange. We thought they were.”
“I only just came to live with them when I fell out of the tree,” Frieda explained. “I thought I might find a home there, but I hadn’t yet. I.....I don’t really know where my home is, to tell you the truth.”
The woman pursed her lips and furrowed her eyebrows. Frieda could have laughed out loud, she looked so much like her son. Then her expression cleared. She smiled and pressed Frieda’s hand again. “Well, never mind. You’re here now. That’s all that matters.”
“I never called you,” Frieda insisted. “I didn’t even know about you then.”
The woman waved her hand. “None of that matters. You’re here, and you are Frieda, as we know. I am Jen, and this is Trin.” She indicated the woman holding Frieda’s other hand. “She is my daughter.”
A light came on in Frieda’s mind. “So you must be Deek’s sister.”
The women surrounding her exploded in a hubbub of talking and exclaiming and laughter. “Yes, yes! We’re all Deek’s family. That’s why we’ve come to welcome you.”
/> Frieda blushed. “That’s very kind of you. I didn’t mean to call all of you at the same time.”
Jen waved her hand again and beamed. “You didn’t, but we did, and here we are. We’ve been waiting so long for a chance to welcome you, but Sasha said we ought to let you understand the place a little better before we....What was the word she used? Oh yes, I remember. She said before we mobbed you.”
Frieda chuckled. “Thank you, Sasha.”
The group burst into fresh gales of laughter. Frieda would have been embarrassed if the whole scene hadn’t been so jolly. Every word out of her mouth delighted the women no end.
“So,” Jen went on, “do you understand the place well enough to let us mob you now?”
“I think so,” Frieda replied. “I must, if I called you to do it.”
Jen tugged her hand. “Good. Then come with us. We want to show you around.”
Frieda let them lead her forward. “Show me around? I thought this was all there was to it. What else is there to show me?”
They didn’t answer, but led her across the meadow and around the forest to another open area Frieda hadn’t seen before. Behind the waving seaweed trees, an embankment rose out of the ground as high as the tallest tree. Tiny houses exactly like hers and Sasha’s dotted the surface. A carpet of greenery covered the hillside and the round domes, and colorful flowers decorated the landscape.
Frieda stared at it for a moment before she recognized the cave-pocked corral bank she’d seen in her vision. So this was where the Aqinas lived.
Jen murmured in her ear. “This is our village.”
“But why don’t I live here with you?” Frieda asked. “Why is my house all the way over there by itself? And Sasha has her house in the forest.”
“That must be the way you want it for now,” Jen replied. “Maybe that’s how Sasha knew you didn’t want a mob greeting right away. She saw your house standing all by itself and thought you might need space to settle in at the beginning. She’s been living there for months. She hasn’t come to live in the village yet.”
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