I looked at her. “Did… did Jumpers tell you about Evacuation? About the selection?” My last words were spoken in a barely audible voice.
“Yes.”
I nodded, but Tania didn’t look at me.
What could I say to a person who’d been left behind? Left behind to die, like billions of other people who were not deemed valuable enough or rich enough to save—while I was the descendant of those who were?
I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to chase away this thought.
“Why did you then de-freeze—wake up—nine years ago?” I said, trying to change the subject.
She shook her head and pressed her lips together in negation. “I don’t know. Perhaps it was an accident, a mistake?” She looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. “Well, whatever it was, we survived. And I am grateful for it.”
Then she looked forward and continued walking.
We passed through a stretch of forest that didn’t have many trees but was covered in ferns. I slid my hand over the plants, touching the soft leaves, which bent under my palm and sprang back as I released them. My mind was still overwhelmed by the stunningly diverse vegetation of this place.
“This is all new to you, isn’t it?” Tania asked through a smile.
I nodded. “It is wonderful. I have never seen anything like this.”
“Come. I’m sure you will find the bath wonderful as well.”
After only a few more passes, we reached a small water surface, not more than four by four IPs. The water was clear and fairly shallow, with large dark stones forming clear patterns at the bottom.
“Is this a pool?” I asked.
“Well, not really,” Tania said, a grin on her face. “It’s more like a bathtub.”
When she didn’t receive any response from me, she continued. “You’re used to showers, aren’t you?”
“Yes. That is correct.”
“And you’ve never had a bath?”
“No.”
“Well, this is like a shower in that it’s meant to make you clean, but it’s much more enjoyable.”
Much more enjoyable. I repeated the words in my mind, wondering how there could be anything more enjoyable than the most pleasurable and intense tactile sensation I had experienced in Uni.
“You’ll need to take off your suit.”
I didn’t move.
“I will not look as you take it off, I promise. But I will have to watch you while you’re in the pool. It does get a bit deeper a few stones into the pool. And”—she glanced sideways at me—“I assume you don’t know how to swim.”
“You are right,” I said in a typical calm Senthien way. “I do not know this word.”
Tania seemed a bit surprised with my answer.
“Hmm, well, swimming is… I guess movements you do in water to keep yourself at the surface, with your head out of the water.”
“Out of the water? What happens if you do not do these swimming movements?”
“In most cases, you drown.”
“Drown,” I said flatly.
“Your head goes under the water, you inhale water into your lungs, and you die because of lack of air.”
“Oh,” I said with a little bit less Senthien authority than I’d planned. “I guess I never really thought about dying.”
“It’s because you’re young. Young people never think of dying. Unless something happens to make them think of death.”
She lowered her gaze for a moment and her facial features changed in a way I could not decipher. Then she lifted her head and said a bit louder than before, “You seem the age of my oldest daughter. How old are you?”
“I am three hundred ninety-two standard years old.”
“What?” Tania gasped, her eyes wide with bewilderment.
“You look extremely surprised.”
“I am extremely surprised! You look, I don’t know, like you’re twenty-three or twenty-four. Not more than twenty-five!”
“That is because of rejuvenation.”
“Rejuvenation?”
“Didn’t Jumpers tell you about rejuvenation?”
Tania shook her head.
“Rejuvenation is a cellular healing process. It regenerates your body, taking off several dozen years of age every time it is done.”
“Wow, I could use some of that.” She smiled. “How does it work?”
“I do not know all the details. It is not really my expertise. It was developed by Booleans—another Descendant species—and it uses a virus carrier that accesses and infects every cell in the body, triggering major cell division over the next several days. In this process, one daughter cell takes the majority of the excess metabolites and dies, leaving the body with only new cells and virtually no waste or harmful products. The dead cells are removed by macrophages and discarded. But the details of the process are known only to the Booleans.”
“That’s… impressive. And how long do Descendants live?”
“A thousand, two thousand years, maybe more. The technology has improved dramatically in the last one and a half thousand years, so most individuals that came after these improvements are still alive.”
“Don’t you get bored with living so long?”
“No,” I answered surprised by her question. “Everyone lives like that.”
“Yes, I guess it’s normal for you. I don’t know what I would do if I was granted another hundred years of life. But then again, if you know you’re going to live that long, you arrange your life accordingly.”
Tania placed the beige clothes on a dark stone just outside the water.
“I guess your population must be growing really fast, with children being born and people living so long…”
“Well, the birth rate is controlled by the Office of Progeny. They keep the number of new individuals slightly above the switch-off rate.”
“New individuals? You mean children?”
“Yes, children.”
“Interesting. So you guys have some kind of inbuilt contraceptive system?”
“Contraceptive?”
“So you don’t get babies when you have sex?”
I blinked at her. I didn’t understand anything she said.
“When you have intercourse?” she explained further.
“Are you referring to Interpersonal Coupling?”
She paused for a moment and then shrugged her shoulders. “I guess that’s the same thing.”
“Well, this process is done every fifty or sixty years, just after rejuvenation, and every person has…”
Tania looked at me and then burst into laughter.
After a few moments of staring, I said, “I do not understand your reaction.”
“I’m sorry, I just don’t see how people can refrain from having sex! Every fifty years? Seriously? Isn’t the orgasm one of the strongest drivers of evolution? Ensuring the survival of the species and all?”
I stayed silent, watching her. There were too many new concepts and terms for me to process in one sentence.
“Okay, let’s get you out of this suit and into the water. I feel this needs several hours of explanation, and if we do that, you’ll never get a bath.”
She turned her back toward me and said, “Tell me once you’re in the water.”
I tilted my head slightly and didn’t move, looking at Tania’s back.
“I do not understand,” I said.
“What don’t you understand?” She turned her head slightly so I could hear her but she kept her back toward me.
“Why do you not want to look at me if this might cause the event of my lungs being filled with water without the ability to breathe?”
She then turned fully toward me, and after a short pause she said, “I thought you wouldn’t want me to look at you while you’re getting undressed.”
“Why?”
“I thought you might be shy.”
“I do not understand.”
“Well, people are often shy about taking their clothes off in front of peo
ple they are not intimate with.”
“Intimate?”
“When people feel very comfortable with each other, when all the borders are down.”
“Like an IP border?”
“Yes, like for example an IP border.” She looked at me intently and continued, “Are all Descendants like you?”
I nodded and unzipped my skinsuit. Tania lowered her gaze.
“The other Jumpers,” I said as I took off my clothes, “the Zema4 Humans—are they like you, or like Descendants?”
“They are like us in the sense that they are shy to get undressed in public.”
“Hmm.” I thought about it for a moment, remembering images of my early life. “Yes,” I said more to myself and then walked to the edge of the pool.
“The temperature is very comfortable,” Tania said, following me to the edge, “but there are some springs on the sides of the pool that are quite hot and can burn your skin if you stay there, so be careful not to get too close to those.”
I turned around to look at her, nodded, and then stepped in with one foot.
Then I stopped. The feeling was like nothing I had ever experienced. It was like getting into very warm, dense air that pushed me from all sides the same way. Every so often small bubbles of air drifted upwards, following the contours of my leg. And it tickled.
I looked at Tania and smiled.
“You like it?” she said and smiled back.
I nodded, then looked back down, seeing the unclear image of my foot under the water. I stepped in with the other foot and stayed like that for several moments. It was such an immense feeling, I was sorry I couldn’t record it to my nanoprobes. I recorded the pool image, though, and then walked further into the pool, stepping down two more stones.
“You can now sit on the stone behind you. Your shoulders will still be out of the water. If you go deeper, you’d need to be able to swim,” she said.
I slowly sat down, enjoying the unexpected sensation as the water enclosed me in its pressure from my thighs to my shoulders. It was a very close and comfortable warm touch, and it was all over my body. Everything was defying the IP distance, but it was so good, I had no choice but to enjoy all the sensations I felt against my skin.
“Here,” Tania said, kneeling next to me and handing me a green bar. “It’s soap. Handmade. Totally organic.” She winked at me.
I kept looking at her, not understanding.
“Take it,” she said and shook the bar in her hand.
I took it, but it slipped from my hand and fell under the water to the stone floor next to my feet.
I bent down to fetch it, tilting my head up so I could still breathe. But my lower back moved into the stream of a hot spring and I yelped, moving my body away. My feet slipped from the stones below and the next moment, my head went under the water.
The sounds immediately changed. The clear and crisp resonance of the air turned into a muffled cadence of thousands of little green bubbles slowly floating upward. Above my head, I saw my long hair bending and twisting to a slow-moving tune. I tilted my head sideways, my hair following the motion, as I watched this fascinating performance.
The next moment, Tania grabbed me under my armpits and pulled me out.
I sat back on the stones and blinked a few times to clear my eyes.
Tania’s breathing was heavy. “Are you okay?”
I turned to look at her. “Yes. Of course.”
“It’s good that you stopped breathing!” she said. “It’s a very… instinctive response. For Humans.”
I looked at her, searching for deeper meaning behind her eyes, but I didn’t see any.
“Thank you. For lifting my head out of the water.”
Tania smiled broadly and shook her head. “You’re welcome, Dora. Any time.”
She then stood up and opened up a towel.
“Maybe that was enough excitement for one morning. Let’s get you dry. And it’s time for a fashion change, too.”
I stood up slowly, frowning at the words I didn’t understand.
“Earth clothes. They are much more comfortable than a skinsuit. Trust me.”
I doubted it, but decided to comply nevertheless.
Chapter 7
I walked very slowly, scanning and measuring every step before I placed my foot on the ground. I looked at my pale feet and my light green toenails as I pressed gently down on the dry brown soil laced with grass and fallen leaves. It didn’t hurt, but it was such a strong tactile experience that I could hardly focus on anything else.
I exhaled and then bent down to put on the soft leathery shoes I was carrying in my hand. I stretched my toes inside and lifted my head, letting in the surrounding sounds: the murmur of people talking, children yelling and laughing, an amazing instrumental concerto of numerous species of birds coming from way up in the trees, the buzz of small insects.
I looked up. Two birds, one following the other, flew from one high branch to another, hiding again among the lush green of this ancient forest—untouched, uncoded, and real.
I stopped next to a group of people, women and men with suntanned skin and gray-grizzled hair. I assumed this meant they were older, but with none of these physical markers visible in any of the Descendants, there was no way for me to tell their age.
They were all sitting in a circle. Each of them was bent over a bowl, holding a large smooth rock with both hands, which they used to scrape the bottom of the bowl. I stepped closer, interested in what they were doing.
“Would you like to try?” one of the men asked, a friendly smile behind the gray beard.
“Thank you, but I can observe the process from here as well.” My voice was even.
“I know you can see it. But sooner or later, you’ll need to do it yourself. Everyone gets a turn.” And all of them laughed.
“What are you performing?” I asked.
A woman turned toward me but continued her work. “We’re making flour. This one is from maize. We’ll use the flour to make bread.”
I leaned in closer. The bowls weren’t empty. At the bottom of each was a mixture of yellow grains and powder.
“Yes, I tried your bread yesterday evening. It was very good. Very dense.”
They all laughed again. I looked around the group, not understanding the laughter, and took a small step back. Then one man lifted up his hands up in front of him, his palms white with powder.
“Hey, it’s not my fault! It wouldn’t rise. What could I do about it?”
“Put in some yeast, perhaps?” said a woman sitting opposite him.
“I did!” The man shook his head and said in a lower tone, “As if that’s the first time I ever made bread.”
“Rafael, we’re joking,” said a woman. “I know it sometimes doesn’t work. And anyway, it was very good, perhaps even because it was so dense.” Then she turned to me and asked, “You liked it, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“There you go,” she said, looking at Rafael. He nodded and smiled.
The man who spoke to me first turned to Rafael and said, “There’s always some joy in making fun of a famous chef. You know that, don’t you?”
Rafael shook his head but was laughing now.
“You know, Tony, if I ever get to open another restaurant, you’ll need to pay double for the meals!”
Tony laughed. “That’s fine, buddy. It’ll still be worth it!”
Then they all laughed again.
I was lost. All of this was spoken in a friendly, bantering manner, but I couldn’t follow half of it, let alone understand the jokes they shared.
An alien.
After thousands of years of targeted genetic manipulation, remarkable technological achievements, and dominion over two hundred terraformed worlds, I am finally back on Earth, the original cradle of life and I’m—an alien.
Again.
I slowly turned away from the group and continued on my way, making even larger loops around other groups I met. None of them talked to me, but
almost all of them looked at me, apparently fascinated by my piercing green eyes. After a while, I stopped looking back at them, feeling self-conscious and alone.
As I continued walking through the tree village, I learned that it was quite large, or at least larger than what I expected. It was ellipsoid in shape, its main axis aligned with the path of the sun crossing the sky. My cottage was on the edge where the sun shone in first.
A short distance away from the tree village, there was a clearing: a large, square-shaped field where the vegetation was very different from the rest. It looked like a matrix where different plants grew in different parcels. I saw many people walking along the paths between these wards or crouching in the midst of them. I realized these must have been specifically planted, and I wondered where the colony had gotten the seeds from.
I shielded my eyes with my hand to see better. Some of the field parcels held rigid green plants that grew taller than any of the Humans. They had green tube-shaped structures that people seemed to be harvesting. Some other plants had broad but short leaves, reaching not even up to one’s knees. A few of them had been dug up, and I could see their round roots dirty with the dust and soil.
Thinking of food, I automatically touched my right thigh, the place where food bars were stored on my skinsuit. Instead, my hand touched the beige cotton material of the thin dress that flowed around my body, carried by the soft breeze. The top part of this dress had an uncomfortably wide neck opening, and long sleeves that almost reached my fingertips. The cut around my legs was so broad that I felt the fabric on the skin of my legs only while walking. Everybody was wearing something similar to me, but I still felt uncomfortable without my skinsuit: the sensory and tactile sensations from the Human clothes were truly distracting. The only thing I still had was my E-band. I had no real use of it because it lacked a connection to the mainframe, but in a strange way I needed the slight pressure the E-band strap made on my wrist. It was a link to the world I knew all my life. And it reminded me that this beautiful world was not just a dream.
“Are you Human?”
I heard a tiny voice on my right. I turned and looked down. A small girl—long brown hair, deep, dark eyes—looked at me intently.
The Senthien (Descendants of Earth Book 1) Page 7
