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“I am taking you to my home,” he says. “You must live in the village, dress as the others do. You must become my mate and take my seed and grow my babies.”
None of this is a request. It is all an order.
“I want to explore this world. I want to go and see…”
“You have explored enough, Tselia,” he rumbles. “You have fled all across the stars. Now it is time for you to make a home.”
“How do you know I have ‘fled all across the stars’?”
“The stories,” he says. “They tell of the star people. How they wander alone, looking for what they have lost.”
“Well, that’s not what I was doing. I was on a reconnaissance mission.”
“For what?”
“For knowledge.”
“Why?”
He asks simple questions sometimes. It would be easy to dismiss those questions as stupid, but I notice that I am struggling to answer him. I had my missions. I carried them out. I gathered data and I assumed there was meaning in it because I was told there was—but in the end, why? I don’t know what we were looking for, and I don’t know what would have been done if we found it. It seems to me now that the Patron rules over the remnants of humanity with an iron fist. He hoards experience, turns worlds and cultures and species into a data stream devoid of any of the emotion that makes life worth existing.
Even now, with my bottom welted and sore, my body pressed against Zion’s hard form, I am experiencing more than I ever did visiting dozens of worlds. I used to think that observing was the same as living. But it isn’t.
“They sent you alone into the stars,” he says when I fail to answer him. “I will not send you anywhere alone. You will be with me. You will come to be with the tribe. You will learn to live as we do. And when your star people come, they will not see you anymore, because you will not be one of them anymore. You will be one of us. There’s just one thing I need from you.”
“What?”
“Tell me where you came from, star girl. Tell me how you fell.”
I try to explain where I am from. I try to tell him how everything is so good and perfect and… totally fucking wrong. He listens, but I don’t know how much he understands. How can he? All he has ever known is this simple life, a world where he ruts the females of his choice, kills to eat, and dies in whatever way random chance decides for him.
He listens to me though, and I talk. I talk and I talk until he knows everything, even though I know he can’t comprehend it. I’m using words he could never have heard before. It doesn’t matter. He listens until I have no more words.
I have confessed all the secrets of the old world before he takes me by the hand and leads me to the new one.
Chapter Seven
Tselia
This time we do not go up the mountain. Instead, we go toward the valley, where a village is nestled in the cleft between two rises. There are huts built along little ridges. Between them, small rivulets make their way down the rocky ground and flow into the river at the base where crops are planted in the rich valley soil.
These people seem primitive to my eyes, but they know how to find solid foundations for homes, and how to cultivate foods.
Curious eyes meet me, older men and women working the fields, tending small goat-like creatures. There are several men working on stone tools, and at least one who appears to be smelting metal, liquid hot rocks melting in a crucible. It is as if I am finding this civilization on the brink between stone and iron ages. They are making the same progress our ancestors did many thousands of years ago. That fills me with hope and melancholy. I hope their technical journey does not lead them to the same place it led us. I hope they never reach the point where they neuter themselves and slide into frozen stasis in an effort to escape the endless horror of a life disconnected from living.
Zion holds my hand firmly, both to reassure me, I think, and to stop me from getting away. I am very much under his control. Part of me resents that, but a greater part thrills to it in some way. In this world, I am not alone.
“My house is at the ridge,” he says, pointing up to a construction that sits upon a ridge overlooking the village. It is the place of a lookout, and as we climb our way up to it, I find myself awed by the beauty. The blue hues of the grass are exquisite, and the wood and mud brick construction of the homes gives me a yearning feeling of nostalgia for that which I have never experienced before. The wood they use is a dark ashy gray. The bricks of mud seem to turn white in the sun, so there is great contrast between brick and wood, and the silvery thatch that adorns the roof.
