Liora
A year since we came here. We know the pattern now. Moon-cycles they are. Today is the twelfth. We will keep counting. Aiming for ten-thousand.
The outing is my initiative, and I’ve decided to keep it small. Just the three of us.
Before sunrise, I visit the garden where they now live. The one next to Eldon’s old patch. Nothing yet like that full-grown paradise also tended to. Humble beginnings on the new shared plot. The humans do enjoy arguing about the way to go, about next steps, seed choices, layouts. They’re old-fashioned. The real challenge is on the valley floor. Absolute beginners we are.
They’re ready as I arrive. Auryn wearing climbing shoes, Eldon barefoot like me. We find our way through the sleeping labyrinth of new garden-gates, half finished tunnels, little bridges and fresh holes in the walls. Crawlers scurrying, doing their long haul thing to the grid. As we exit, it is still dark, close to dawn. Even though there’s no light yet in the emerging structures, some contours have started to soften, hinting at a very different set of rules for their new project. I think the little creatures don’t even know. Nobody does.
Eldon stops and listens. He’s grown a beard. Hiding the jaw still giving him trouble. The limping is better, faded to a hobble as he walks. I don’t hear anything. Are his ears better than mine now?
Then the first bird calls out. Faint. Close by, another answers. The smile that man can produce. I get why Auryn won’t let go. Despite him preferring to spend a lot of time on his own. And not just in the garden. His expeditions into the wider realm get longer each time.
I do think Auryn is a sucker for the sweet reunions after the separations. They have rhythm, I think that’s the word.
She has her secret outings too. Scouring the leftovers of the Ledon estate on the hillside. Sometimes staying overnight. Always returning with treasure. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day she moved up there.
We walk single file. Do not talk much as it will be a stiff climb. At least for me. I have never been up there. And I’m nervous. I know She is regular as a clock, but as sure as I was the first time, so stained is my trust every new month. And it is getting worse. Miracles deviate from agendas, don’t they? What if there is a larger pattern? Say eleven in a row, and then a hiatus of ten centuries. Could be. Auryn can’t convince me. Eldon smiles and considers it plausible, but not likely.
We walk through the spillway. The reservoir’s arterial cave. The granite’s zinging patterns spoiled by the headlamps of the two elders up ahead. It’s okay because I enter the canyon at the end of the tunnel just as the pale moon sets. The full disc is a super-moon. Inflated to a near-burst. Appearing big and ultra-violet to me. The deep gorge is sensuous. The first signs of green returning.
We climb. An old concrete path with steps winding its way up. It’s the back of the dam. The unbroken side. The remnants of a platform. And then we step up to the view.
It’s disappointing. Nice to see the overview, but not what I expected. Long shadows mark the stuff on the valley floor. Nice, but also just another sun about to rise in a meticulous sky. Well, we didn’t come for the vista as it is.
Khan didn’t make it. We didn’t have the means for her type of genan. We couldn’t help her recover. But the last few months, she was a different woman. Encouraging other women to develop skills of their own, to develop a real identity. She sat with newcomers, to listen to how they managed to come here. Honoring their stories. She will be remembered today, and for a long time to come.
We do a little ritual. Eldon brought a tiny box he made especially for this. It holds a single dandelion in just the right phase. This is her day, he says, as he opens the lid that pushes up the fluffy sphere. The mechanics are so satisfying. He gives it to me.
“May your seeds find dirt and rain,” I say and gently blow it like a candle. The launch of ten-thousand settlers. A plant that has learned to fly. That has a deep root and wanders the earth.
Behind me the eternal layout discussion flares up as they point out locations for future orchards. A small lake would be nice. When will they ever learn?
They’ve been up here. Seen it before. I haven’t. I brought them with me for me. I might shut down. I am nervous. Scared. I close my eyes and surrender. Ask Her to hold me for another day. To be here with us. She’s about to wake up. Comes when called.
As I end the prayer, my parents have joined me in my silence.
We’re a bit early.
I’m on the left, Auryn’s in the middle. I now feel solemn. I am prone to ritual. The tendency to dress up is latent in me too. I don’t because of Auryn. Maybe I am too hyped, but I feel she is quiet today. I sense nothing particular, just turned inward. Eldon is his usual self. His aura would be bordering on boring were it not a quadraphonic sphere of velvet wiggle-worms. A dive-in cushion the size of a village-square. He’s good to be around. Like a clear pond to swim in.
“Did you see?” Auryn asks a bit flat.
“See what?” I ask. She’s coming in sideways, with an amuse, not the main dish.
“The critters have found their way here too.”
No, I didn’t see.
“Through the pipes, probably,” she murmurs, more to herself than to us.
I expected nothing less. Of course they would include the dam. There’s a lot to cover here. The ugly bastard could use a make-over.
Something’s brewing next to me.
“I found the lab,” she says.
Here we go.
Eldon looks at her, gives me a glance. Her face is stoic in the morning sun, unreadable.
“He developed them here on site,” she says.
“At the Ledon estate?” Eldon asks. Slow nod from Auryn.
“Blueprints, embryo-farms, scaffolded minds. And something else. Proto-designs. Experiments that didn’t crawl. A small production facility, deep underground.”
She’s still not at the core of what she wants to share. This is just the lead in. I am not surprised that the crawlers were created here. By a man crazy enough to try. Rich enough to keep trying, and keep getting it wrong until something slipped through the net. Until it escaped and took root outside the fence.
“I was in there,” she says, turning from the view. Arms folded. No smile.
I don’t think she means she was in there literally.
“I found myself in that lab, Eldon.” Auryn says, but looks at me.
“I was one of his investments, one of his projects.”
She walks away. Kicking a pebble from the deteriorating concrete. Big sigh.
“I’m sorry I never told you, but I knew I wasn’t human. Not fully. I knew I had no parents, knew I wasn’t a full normal woman. I didn’t bleed, wasn’t too interested in sex or relations, not made for procreation. But I didn’t know I was being monitored from the start. I didn’t come here by accident. I was led. Lured. Groomed.”
She’s pacing. Eldon checks if I’m alright. I am. Things fall into place, make more sense suddenly. And a lot is up for reconsidering. But I feel the distance is reduced. She’s closer to me. I smile at her. And when she sees, the barriers finally crumble. She breaks down and I can hold her. A full embrace. Completed with a superimposed umbrella-hug by papa-bear himself.
The singing starts.
Me and my sisters call it singing, but it’s a below-hearing buzz, like a giant beehive preparing to move house. Bees the size of cars.
I know many of us are out to witness. Many eyes on Her now. This month is a water-moon. It used to be blood. But I re-named it. This is the first water-moon. Not sure what to expect.
I look at the cathedral and see the first signs.
Imagine the trunk of an ancient tree. Just the trunk. It has been cut. The tree is gone. And maybe there’s been some new shoots, but they too are slashed. And that thing is now made of bone, of marble. A polished work of art in the middle of a valley. A small town at its foothills. A castle-size temple with exaggerated arches and spikes and thick towers that seem a bit unfinished. Hints of gargoyles and finials, almond-shaped semi-openings that could hold colored glass, were it not the whole building is translucent occasionally. Filled with light conducing tracks and bundles that form networks, that have learned to communicate. A slow increased complexity. A body with organs and skin and sensitive nerve endings.
The builders made and remade, went wider for more parallel spines, and deeper, forming roots and tunnels and veins and capillary ducts, digging further down until they found the aquifers filled with deep-water. Learning the underground tides. And then the day comes that this pump is primed. Who knows how cloud and earth aligned, but they did, filling the upper regions with the water it needed to start the circulation, the breathing. She’s a steam engine raised by the many. A community tree nurtured to mythical size. As the sun heats the above-ground parts of the tree, the upper process begins to take shape. The miracle.
Vapour coils from her highest vents, winding upward with impossible elegance. A trunk forms in slow motion. A thick column of rising airborne water seeded with the dust nuclei harvested from the depths travels higher and higher until it curls outward as thick leafy branches. They are pushed away from the newly forming over-story. A mushroom cloud of water vapour. And as the layer thickens, the bottom starts to cool and descends until rain is shed. The cloud tree covers the whole valley, parts of the gorge too, but dissipates quickly beyond our bowl’s ridges.
She and the valley, sky and soil, form one body. One whole movement of water.
The torus is created and I am stunned. The morning sun piercing through. The cathedral extended upward with the lightest possible material. Living and moving and changing. She’s a goddess, a new world wonder that embraces this valley, and gives, and restores life.
We can see the first rain watering the slopes on the far side. We feel the wind in our faces of the cooled air. The smell of wet soil imprinted in our memory visits even before a drop has ∴
landed here. But the rains will come. True summer rains that fall like curtains. They can be a bit much. But we learn to brace, to harvest and retain, to receive when it is given.
Chaos isn’t chaos. It’s randomness. The universe worked its ass off for proper randomness. And we kept trying to order it to death again and again and again. Order is grown. Like culture. Not designed, or implemented, or imposed, or planned. Those ways do not listen.
We will try. And try again. And maybe something will slip through a crack, and once again begin to flow.