Nothing Human

EPILOGUE: GAIA

Gaia emerged from the canyon, carrying an armful of prickly pear fruit she’d stripped off the cacti. Rhea loved juice wrung from the sweet, purplish fruit, and Gaia planned to pulp the pears and boil them into jelly for her sister. This was partly guilt; lately Gaia hadn’t been spending much time with Rhea or Dion. She didn’t know why, but more and more she wanted to go off alone to explore, to taste, to… what? Something. Now she was further from home than she’d ever been.

“I have immortal longings in me.” Uncle Scott had taught her that, before she could read it for herself. Gaia had loved the old man more than anyone else on Earth, except her mother. He had been so good. The good should never die.

She dumped the prickly pear fruit into a pile and pulled a stoppered earthen jar from her backpack, the only thing she wore except for her shorts. One by one, she squeezed the fruit above the jar, every motion quick and strong. A bit splashed back, onto the new breasts which had suddenly started swelling on her chest a few months ago. Impatiently Gaia wiped the juice off with her tentacles.

Someone was coming over the rise to her left.

Gaia immediately flattened, ready to retract into her shell, but just as quickly she rose again. Her gray, gold-flecked eyes widened.

A stranger. A boy. Like her cousins, but it wasn’t Stone or Raindrop. She smelled him advancing, not because he was sending her a greeting; he couldn’t do that. Rather, she smelled his body on the wind. Instantly, without volition, Gaia was smelling back to him.

He could receive. He stopped cold and looked for her.

For just a second, so brief that later Gaia thought she’d imagined it, the terrible look appeared on his face, the one that Gaia saw sometimes on Alex’s face until she got closer to him. She’d learned to accept it from Alex, although she avoided him as much as possible. But she couldn’t have seen that look on this boy’s face because the next moment he was striding toward her, his face with all those unnecessary holes more alight and curious and interested than Alex had ever been.

“Hi,” the boy said. “I’m Troy Freeman. Who are you?”

“Gaia,” she smelled to him, and his cluttered face contorted into surprise. Cluttered, but beautiful, especially his dark eyes, darker even than his skin, which was the color of rich, wet earth.

“How did you do that, Gaia? Make your name in my mind?”

“That’s how I sometimes talk,” she said. Her breath was coming faster. So, she thought, was his.

“That’s cool,” he said, and Gaia knew what he meant because Lillie sometimes used that word in that way. It made sense. Cool places were always good.

Troy’s body was covered against the sun: long pants, long sleeves, hat with neck drape, poor thing. Gaia said politely, because the others always needed it, “Would you like to sit in the shade?”

“I’d love to sit in the shade with you.”

They moved into the canyon and sat in the shade of a rock overhang, their backs to the rough stone. Troy offered her some water, and she took a few sips. She couldn’t understand what was happening to her. Her body had never felt like this before.

She said aloud to him, “You’re from Jody’s farm.”

His eyes widened. “You can talk. How do you know about our farm?”

“Only what my mother and Uncle Scott told me. My mother is Lillie Anderson.”

He frowned. “I think I’ve heard that name, maybe somebody mentioned it once… but I can’t remember who.”

“She used to live at your farm, before some of us moved to the mountain. It’s cooler there, or at least it used to be.”

“We’ve moved, too. Pretty far away, the forest at Lincoln.”

“I’ve never been there,” Gaia said.

“You’re almost there now. Want to see it? I’ll show you.”

“Yes,” she answered, but neither of them moved. The feeling inside Gaia was stronger now, almost overwhelming. And she knew it was inside Troy, too.

He put his hand shyly, carefully, on her short, gray-green leg. “Gaia… I’ve never met anyone like you. You look so different, but you’re so… so…”

She leaned over and “kissed” him.

Troy “kissed” her back, their arms going around each other. Ah, Gaia thought, so this was what she’d been looking for, roaming all over the mountains and plains. This was what she’d wanted, what Shakespeare had meant: “Now join your hands, and with your hands your hearts.”

“What was that?” Troy said. Abruptly he pulled away from her.

“What?” She hadn’t heard anything. Her big ears swiveled questioningly.

“In the sky! Didn’t you see it? A big silver thing, huge, flying overhead! I just glimpsed it over the canyon wall!”

And then Gaia smelled it. Clear images in her mind, unmistakable.

Troy said, “The pribir are coming.”

“Yes,” Gaia said. She reached for him again.

“We have to go find them!” Troy said. “They’re calling us!”

It was true. Gaia felt it, the insistent command. Somehow it was in more than her mind, in her muscles and lungs. She slid toward the message… and stopped.

No. The pribir could wait. She wanted to stay here, “kissing” Troy.

Only they wanted her to go to the ship…

Gaia sat very still. This had never happened to her before. First her body driving her to Troy, and now the pribir pulling her toward them… she felt a stab of fear.

Except that the two things were not the same. Her body was hers, was her. If it wanted to “kiss” Troy, to mate with Troy, that was she, Gaia, wanting to do that. The call was inside her. But these pribir were not inside her, and she didn’t have to do what they said, she wasn’t joined to them, hand or heart. She could choose, even though they were trying to dictate her choice. Well, they weren’t going to choose for her. She was.

Carefully, she tested her own mind. Could she not answer the pribir call? She considered the question. The cells of her body released chemical cascades she had never drawn on before, had not even known were there. Her brain fired patterns of new neurons. Her mind surveyed its capacities in ways unimaginable to the boy beside her. When all this was done, Gaia knew the answer to her question.

Troy was scrambling to his feet. She pulled him back down beside her. “Stay here, Troy.”

“But we have to go!”

“No, we don’t. Not really. Anyway, the message is dissipating now, don’t you feel it lessen? In a minute it will be gone.”

He said quietly, “It will come back.”

“Maybe. But we still don’t have to listen to it.”

He gazed down at her. So big, so much taller than she, so beautiful. The most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Maybe he couldn’t resist the message —Raindrop and Lonette couldn’t do things she could do, either. But she could resist the pribir for them both. She could choose, and she would choose everything good for Troy, everything he wanted or needed, always. And if the pribir wanted something different for him—well, too bad for them. The pribir didn’t scare her. She had taken inventory of her own resources. Pribir didn’t live on this world, and she did.

Gaia reached again for Troy. He responded eagerly, intensely. When the next message from the pribir came, a few hours later, Gaia held him tightly until it dissipated on the wind. No message could last too long outdoors, in the free hot wind.

Gaia was completely happy. The shadows in the bare stone canyon lengthened, and the steamy thick-aired night fell, and the few plants in sight gasped in the drying soil. And for Gaia and Troy, wildflowers bloomed and nightingales sang.