We were starving, you know. We lived so well for so long that we’d forgotten how to plump ourselves on the earth that we’d tilled with our own hands. But the war changed all that, and those of us who survived learned how to adapt or we died. My first son died. My daugher, Eve, lived, a strong little tree of a child, so small and so quiet. Our mysteries, our history, and our religion, if you could call it that, we had to weave into our planting stories. Our technology, once so renowned for its speed, its likeness to thought and seeming weightlessness, we had to hide. It stayed underground for so long that few thought it would even work again and that our travels to other worlds would never resume as they once had during the golden reign of the Queen. But then again, we were starving. The Predators never ceased their demand for sacrifice of earth, blood, and spirit.
I would not see my daughter become their feast through starvation, or through blood ritual. So we left. One day when the stars were right for travel, when our beautiful home was spinning in just the right way and when the winds commanded flight, myself, my family, and the last of the tribe of Eloah boarded ships out of our world, never to return. My daughter was only six. Like your immigrants, we sailed across an ocean charted only by legend, our navigation a fairytale, a promise unmet.
It was ten years before we reached the New World. Our ancestors had left us metaphors rather than maps, but our technology helped us more than we thought. A climate we could adjust to, water, shelter, and food, and yes, inhabitants—it was at least free of the predation we faced back home, for the time being.
I’ll never forget flying in over the land. We reached the one-mooned planet at sunset, while the white crescent in the sky mirrored the green one down below. Two great rivers formed the cleft of the land’s womb, lush and thick with vegetation. One to the south, the thickest, looked like a great silver snake with a giant splayed head expelling mercurial oceans into the gulf. The young planet’s rotation was such that we had to enter just right, or our ships would streak red through the sky, our pyre and our fate sealed in a false golden dawn in the cusp of night.
We spun, wildly, into the atmosphere, thirty three degrees and spiraling, till the cleft of the crescent rose up sharply and engulfed us in its thick forestation. My daughter, now sixteen and having lived most of her life among the artificial, inorganic world of the ship, was silent with awe. Her dreams, I knew, had told her of this place; that unspoken world between us told me she’d seen legions of her destinies in the cold years on the ship, surrounded only by a net of stars and the heartbeat of the Dreaming at the center of the galaxy.
We were not alone, of course. They looked like us, only smaller, not as bright. Well, some of them were. The stories of our ancestors which spoke of seeding this world talked of its inhabitants and the tools they’d given them. Mostly though, it was the water creatures they’d taken time to develop, according to their stories, they spliced their seed with the largest mammals to create a race of peaceful beings who would teach the rest of the planet our ways, and so prevent the cycle of madness we’d come so far to escape. The creatures we found, however, were still trying to make fire. They understood time and death, but not eternity. They swarmed about us with their chanting and their stilted speech. Enak, my husband, and the leader of the fleet, said that we should teach them, and that we should always strive to live in peace with them, rather than dominate them as we ourselves had been dominated for so long.
A year passed. We built our homes from the world’s fresh land. We taught its people about form and function, how star maps could be used to build long lasting city streets, aqueducts, and shelter. Much of it was lost on them, but they tried very, very hard. Eve even grew out of her shell-shock, and loved teaching the little children our language and writing. They looked at her long, thin limbs and beautiful blueish skin without judgment. The youngest female of our company, she had no other companions, and as a girl becomes a woman she develops her heart on the companionship she creates. But I could see the sadness in her eyes, the loneliness sinking in. She would never find an equal as she would on our world, where love chose its recipients unabashedly and unashamed.
Another year passed. The cities ran smoothly, as all major decisions were made by a circle of six of us and six of them. They almost always deferred to our judgment. We taught them about our world, and Toth, our scribe, wrote our histories in the soft mud tablets that we entrusted to the brightest of them. Our lives almost began to look normal again, and my husband and I would smile at each other once more at sunset, and love each other again under the sky.
Then one day, a stranger came. He was one of them, but not, at the same time. Adem, they called him, meaning Tall Red Earth, or Red Mountain. He was from the North, and he had ruddy hair that shown like a halo around his thick frame. He claimed he’d walked from a place where the sky froze and fell to the ground because of a dream he’d had of winged gods landing in the navel of the world. He spoke with Enak and I at length.
“My people claim that our gods came from the sky many, many eons ago. They taught us tools for building, for keeping food, and for summoning the elements. We in the North have kept much of their tradition, what we can make of it. The writing is lost, however. We travel once a year to the sacred places where they left their writings in the belly of the earth, and our shamans divine Their Will from deep inside, through fasting and eating strange herbs. When I began getting these dreams, of a great white winged chariot filled with our gods of old, I told my father, the shaman of our tribe. He went to the belly of the earth and was told to wait for a sign. We saw the star fall two years ago, and on that night my father bid me to follow it. I’ve come to offer my service to the gods.”
“Adem, son of the star watcher, we are grateful for your presence,” said Enak. “I will personally teach you all we know, that you may teach your sons and your sons’ sons, so that this story will never be forgotten again.”
And with that, the tall, thin, blue man took the hand of the red one in the corridors of our great ziggurat. From the corner, I saw Eve, entranced, behind a pillar; her eyes met mine, and she disappeared into the shadows.
I knew she loved him like a woman knows she’s with child; Eve glowed when he was near, and though she cast her eyes downward, I could feel his desire for her returned in sideways glances. And who could blame them? Misfits, cast out of their world for the sake of dreams, they were perhaps the only ones in the world with any bond to be forged. He was predisposed to architecture and mathematics, and studied it daily with Enak, and Toth taught him the glories of the written word. Adem picked up everything we gave him readily. And like any bright pupil, in the beginning his will was open and his mind fresh for planting. But as time went on, he began to learn too quickly, and grow too impatient with our more tedious tasks. Our kind is one of extreme patience; everything done by the spiral of the first leaf of spring, but not a moment before. And this frustrated him to no end.
We accepted his frustration only with openness and love. His kind was young to our ways, and we all thought he would come around.
I knew she’d gone to him one night as I woke up, startled from dreams of violence of the Old World. I hadn’t dreamed of that place in so long that the blood and screams of the devoured pierced my gut like a cold wet knife. Eve wasn’t in her room. I went out to the porch of our home and scoured the city for any sign of life, but all I heard was the distant cry of an owl screaming down on its prey.
After that, things began to change. Eve was headstrong, and declared she would marry Adem with the dark moon. Adem got even more overconfident in his quest to synthesize our teachings too quickly, without any attention to the simple passage of time. Enak chastised him, and the people began to fear him. When he’d oversee his architectural projects, he began to strike out at the first person who showed signs of ineptitude. His quest for perfection didn’t stop there, however. He believed he could, by marrying Eve, discover the secrets of our kind’s longevity. And marry they did, despite protests from Enak and I.
Toth picked up on it first. The planets were telling of a great crime, a great sacrifice. Regime change, he said. None of us knew what he meant. But it happened so fast that even he didn’t realize the enormity of the situation—until Enak was found, body hacked to pieces, sacrificed on top of the great ziggurat.
I thought my lungs would collapse from screaming. I knew in my heart of hearts who had done it, and I ran, blood covered from clasping the remains of my beloved’s body to my breast, to Adem’s house.
He emerged with more power and presence than I’d ever seen him with in all our time together in the Crescent. He looked like one of our predators, back home, who’d just had his fill of life essence. Blood cracked at the corners of his mouth, not from a struggle, but from consumption. Eve was no where to be found.
I beat my hands against his chest, “WHY WOULD YOU? HOW COULD YOU AFTER ALL HE’S GIVEN YOU, AFTER ALL THE LIFE WE’VE GIVEN YOU, HOW COULD YOU? I LOVE HIM, I LOVE HIM, I LOVE HIM YOU WORTHLESS MORTAL! YOU WILL BE BANISHED! UNFORGIVEN! YOU ARE CURSED FOREVER!” my sobs became shouts, and soon the whole city was awake and surrounding us.
“I am the First Man, the God of Men, and you are just messengers from your world, sent to teach us your ways so that my people may surpass you. You are not creators, like I am. You merely hold your teachings for eternity, and do not try and improve on them. I have devised a new method for farming this land, and for building, and I intend to create my own city in the South to do so. I’ve built a ship, and tonight I am taking my wife and the first fifty most willing souls, those who wish to strike out and forge a New World, a world where Man rules the earth as God, where our creations become reality, and where our lives are grander than any you had in the heyday of your world. I will take my immortal wife and our children will populate this planet, and we will live forever in creation and peace,” Adem proclaimed as the masses gathered round.
But it was of no use. My compassion towards the natives was greater than his, and to see my heart so broken sent them into such a fit that I had to stop them from ripping Adem limb from limb. Anub, the judge of all goings on in the city, he who held court for civil disputes, was brought forth. A trial was held, with a jury of six native elders and six immigrant elders. It was decided that Adem should be banished from the Crescent and sent to live in the south, where the air is dry and there were fewer inhabitants to manipulate and corrupt.
He was supposed to go alone, but Eve was already with child. He used this on her to tie her to him, and she, humbled, not skilled in the ways of our women who break from men who abuse them, lept up onto his ship at the last minute, unable to stand a lifetime alone among family. We never saw them again.
I blame myself, really. I should’ve made sure that she knew the ways of a woman’s strength. My relationship with Enak was so tender, so patient, and so fluid that she never saw conflict. And I know a woman’s heart, and how it loves that which is most volatile. That which she can try and tame. But Adem, nothing could tame. Not after he’d drank the blood of an Eloah. They craved our blood in the Old World for its powers of longevity, because it made them feel like gods. Nothing can stop that kind of mad power.
But something in me tells me to hope. That Eve landed in a place where Adem had to realize he was not a god, just a man gifted with foresight and long life. Where he had to realize that to survive, he and Eve would have to work as one, as equals, in harmony. I hope her firstborn learned the lessons of his father and the innate wisdom of his mother. I hope she is grandmother to a nation of wisdom, of curiosity tempered by patience. I hope, and I pray, but in my heart of hearts, I cry for her.
