“Easy, your body is still adjusting,” Eve said.
Austin turned to look at Eve. The sound of her voice, of Roxanne’s voice, made its way through the fog. He pushed his body up into a sitting position. “What happened to me?”
“You were in a deep slumber,” Eve replied.
“For how long?”
“Twenty-nine days.”
An entire month he’d been lying in bed. He flexed his leg muscles. They felt stronger than he would have expected. He tossed the blanket off and swung his legs over the side. Placing his hands on the mattress, he pushed himself up. The room didn’t spin, his knees didn’t buckle. In fact he felt a surge of energy sweep through him, which was frightening more than pleasing. He rubbed his face, his eyes. And then he remembered and rushed to the bathroom. An unshaven face greeted him, and eyes that were blue as the sky with no signs of black specs. He ran his hand over his beard and then over his head through his hair already an inch long. He returned to the bedroom.
“You’re still human,” Eve said, noting his expression of relief.
“Is that all I am? When you bit me, what did that do to me?” He rubbed his wrist where the marks were no longer visible to the naked eye.
“It was supposed to change you, to become an Adita, but your body rejected the transformation. You are stronger than I’d thought possible for a human.”
“Why do I feel so strange?” Austin asked.
“Parts of your brain, those once dormant, are no longer. Your body is also functioning on a higher level. You are an improved human.”
“That’s why I feel so... so strong?”
Eve nodded.
Austin thought this over. He had so many more questions, but didn’t know where to begin. “How old is he?” Austin nodded at Caleb.
“I’m seven,” Caleb announced, not content with being ignored after having waited so long to meet his father in person.
Austin turned to Eve. “How is that possible? We were on Bliss only two months ago.”
“He will be fully grown by the ninth moon,” Eve responded.
“And when is that?”
“By the ninth month of Earth’s calendar,” Caleb replied.
Austin marinated on this for a moment. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
“You want to know if he’s human,” Eve stated. “He’s not. He’s Adita, with a few human traits. Those that were the best of you.”
“I’m a species that has never existed before,” Caleb announced in a proud voice.
Austin knelt on one knee and looked Caleb in the eyes. They were the same clear blue as Austin’s, not a speck of black anywhere. His hair was blonde and his complexion healthy, human. He saw nothing of Eve and despite his desire to find something of Roxanne, she wasn’t visible in the boy’s features either. In him, Austin only saw himself. Austin pulled Caleb to him, hugging him tight. His heart ached for many reasons. This was his son, yet he felt him a stranger. As a father he would never experience sleepless nights, diapers, or first steps to video and send out to friends and family. Austin leaned back from Caleb. He hadn’t thought about his own mother in a long time. She’d abandoned him as a child, never to be heard from again. He’d never tried to find her and she’d never contacted him. She was Caleb’s grandmother and he’d no idea if she was alive. He hugged Caleb again, vowing his son would not grow up without his parents, like he and Eve, like...like Roxanne.
Roxanne. He repeated her name, pondering over his thoughts, over a specific thought, one he hadn’t considered until now. Roxanne had been born in Russia and was orphaned when only a baby. An American couple adopted her, but again tragedy struck when she was five and they were killed in a plane crash. From there Roxanne bounced around the foster care system until she turned eighteen and vanished from the state’s records. No one cared. It was one less in millions for the overworked, underpaid social workers to worry about.
Agra had said Austin never knew the human Roxanne. Had he been the maestro behind her parent’s death, planning for Austin to fall in love with her and have a child? Had Agra targeted Roxanne because of her lack of family ties? Or was Agra responsible for the tragedies that orphaned Roxanne? The questions swarmed around inside his mind. He didn’t have the answers, but she did. Eve did.
Austin kissed Caleb on the forehead and stood up. “Who are you? Who are you really?”
Eve heard his unspoken questions, understood his anxiety over the past. “If truths are what you desire I will tell them.”
“Yes. I want to hear them, all of them,” Austin replied without hesitation.
Eve didn’t mock him with a doubtful smile. In her experience humans were skilled in denying the truth, were quick to turn deaf ears to the truth and, even more so, were incapable of comprehending the meaning of such. For Austin, though, the truth might be all that was acceptable, no matter how difficult hearing the words might be for him. He would listen with an attentive mind and understand the meaning behind her words. She directed him out to the living room where they sat, he on the couch, and she on a chair facing him. In between, Caleb, who knew most of the story, occupied himself with his toys.
“Most all of what I am about to share I learned after arriving on Paru. Some parts were told to me by Agra and Arati, others I found through listening to those around me. I have few memories of my own from the time before my people left Earth,” Eve began. “Agra told you the Adita are one of the oldest civilizations to exist and the first to occupy this planet. This he spoke in truth. As he did about the human’s disease causing my people to flee. However, in the period prior to the spread of the disease the Adita prospered and multiplied. Not all unions were pure. Many Adita males took to keeping human females as servants. Many of these ownerships produced offspring, as the males often mated with their servants. In the beginning the Elders granted permission for these offspring to live. But from these unions a stronger human evolved, one that questioned their place in the evolutionary chain. The Elders decided having them continue to breed was a threat to the Adita’s way of life. From then on all Adita males were forbidden to reproduce with humans. The Elders took this decree a step further by ordering all humans carrying the Adita gene to be eradicated.”
“Eradicated?”
“Beheaded and burned. Any Adita caught disobeying was beheaded. Humans were burned, usually alive.”
“Like the witch hunts back in the fifteenth century.”
Eve nodded, but knew that witch hunts, in one form or another, occurred all throughout human history, including modern day. “Shortly after the eradication, the disease began to spread. Thousands of Svan and Adita perished. My people evacuated the planet, leaving me behind. At this point my own memories begin, at this point I first heard the voice. My father of course, but I didn’t know who or what he was, only that I should listen and obey his commands.”
“And it was Agra that led you to me?”
“Yes. Although many were tested before you, I knew as soon as I saw you, and smelled your blood that you were the human he’d been searching for.”
“And Roxanne?”
“Agra’s doing. He instructed me to take on her persona, her features, her characteristics. He identified her as being a good match, one you would be attracted to.”
Austin mulled this over. “So what about Caleb? How was he possible?”
“Our union was the first of its kind. An Adita woman would never consider carrying a human’s spawn. It was beneath them. Of course my father didn’t tell me this until after we met face to face.”
Austin laughed, sarcastic and disbelieving. “Otherwise you never would have,” he paused, “never would have mated with me.”
“No I would not have. Not in those days anyway.” She looked over at Caleb. “Things do change.”
“Was any of it real?” Austin asked and wished he hadn’t.
“You want to know if Roxanne loved you. I was her, so the answer is no.”
“Ouch, that hurts.” Austin’s han
d went to his heart in jest, but the pain he felt was genuine.
“Adita do not love, we survive.”
“Charming people.” Austin couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice, the wounds of the past were too fresh.
“Charms get you nowhere. Knowing your place in the universe is all that has meaning. Humans do not know why they exist. You function on emotions and without real purpose. We function on instinct our purpose is to survive above all others. You squander the strongest agile specimen on fields of sport, playing silly games. You hunt not to provide food, but for sport. Your soldiers are led by governments not generals, and are ill-equipped--”
“Hold up there,” Austin interrupted. “Our military is not ill-equipped.”
“On a level playing field I would agree with you, but you are no longer on that field and the rules have changed. You have no idea of what is out there, beyond your planet, beyond your comprehension. Do you think the Adita are the worst thing that could have happened to your people?”
After a minute of thought Austin shook his head. Eve was right, things had changed. Up until a year ago he’d never given the universe much thought, but he now understood how little he knew about anything out beyond the stars. “What happened before you came to Deadbear?”
“I walked the Earth from the deserts to the seas to the mountains searching, for what I did not know. I knew not who I was or where I came from, but I knew I wasn’t like those around me. I listened to a voice that guided me and at times abandoned me. During the dark years the voice was all I had for company.”
“The dark years?”
“Many thousands of years after my people departed the planet, the human population had dwindled close to extinction. Only a few thousand remained. My life source was vanishing before my eyes and I was powerless to stop the ebb. With no other means of survival, I faced a death, but in the worst imaginable way.”
“What about animals? Couldn’t you survive on their blood?”
“The seas had diminished to almost nothing, turning the planet into a barren wasteland. Few animals remained, but the humans needed those to live. Survival is a powerful motivator.” Eve paused, recalling Chase and admiring his strong desire to live. “The voice told me to leave, to travel in search of food. The only way I knew how to travel was on foot. Knowledge of my powers was kept hidden from me. I trusted in the voice like a blind child.”
Austin took notice of her tone, the hint of tension in her voice. Her face was relaxed and her eyes, as always, unreadable, but he knew he hadn’t imagined hearing the underlying anger, maybe even hatred. “Go on,” he encouraged.
“I traveled from the only home I knew, the place you call Egypt, to a place named Cape Dezhnev located at the tip of Russia. I walked nonstop for one hundred and fifty days, seven thousand miles, leaving behind my only source of food. It was a death march through the land of the dead. At the point I thought the journey a failure and my death imminent, I came upon a small pack of humans. They were struggling to stay alive and losing. The smell of their blood was so overwhelming and my hunger so consuming, but —”
“But you didn’t kill them,” Austin finished.
Her lip turned up at one corner, not in a smile, but maybe something denoting twisted amusement. “No. I didn’t kill them. I persuaded them to journey with me to the Cape. Three hundred miles remained before reaching my destination. If I had arrived at the Cape and found it no more hospitable than the land I’d left behind, my future would have been decided.”
“They were your back-up plan,” Austin noted. “To ensure you wouldn’t starve to death.”
“Bravo captain,” Eve commended him. That he understood the gravity of her situation was surprising, that his voice carried a note of empathy she had not expected. Most would have called her actions inhumane or barbaric, to which she would have pointed out she was neither.
“What did you find at the Cape?”
“An abundance of life. Colonies of people, wildlife, crops, everything needed for sustained living. They were saved and so was I.”
“I guess ten thousand years ago Russia wasn’t the frozen tundra it is today?”
“It was lush and thriving. Like the planet where my people currently wait. Bliss as your generals called it. Paru as we know it.”
“Why won’t the Adita stay on Bliss, or Paru? Why come back here?”
“This is home.”
This answer seemed too simple, but Austin sensed she didn’t have another to offer. “So what happened next?”
“I live amongst the humans in Russia. They worshipped me as a god, offering up their own as sacrifices. I did not ask of them to do this, they did so on their own accord. They thought of me as their protector, which suited me better than hiding in the shadows, taking lives at random. I stayed for several thousand years, before returning to Egypt and then to America. The humans in your Russia grew in number, spreading out, repopulating the planet. Soon racial lines blurred, new lines were created while others faded away.” Eve glanced over at Caleb. “I knew the old from the new, the strong from the weak.”
“How?”
“Your genetic code, DNA sequence you might call it. Each unique to the owner, and what you can’t see, I can. Those with the strongest genes are easy to distinguish and always prevail.” Eve took Austin’s arm and turned it over. Using her finger tip, she traced his vein. “Your genetic sequence is very old. It’s the strongest human sequence in existence, to ever have existed. You are the descendent of a great warrior from a tribe of great warriors. They survived the dark days on Earth, but as is always the case with your species, they didn’t safeguard their lines. Eventually the superior genes were lost amongst the inferior. Except for yours.”
Austin stared at his vein unimpressed. “How does Caleb fit into Agra’s plan?”
“His plan,” she paused, choosing her words with caution before continuing. “His plan is to protect the Adita’s way of life by improving their DNA sequence, making it stronger than before.”
“You don’t sound like you’re on board with his plan.”
“On board?”
“That you agree with his vision for preservation of life,” Austin clarified. “You say ‘their DNA’ not ‘our DNA’. As if you don’t think of yourself as one of them.”
“I am one of them. And I believe in the preservation of life.”
That wasn’t his question or the answer he was looking for, but it occurred to him that she knew exactly what he’d asked and answered by saying exactly what she’d meant. Eve didn’t mince words.
“Tell him about the Svan mother,” Caleb suggested without looking up, continuing to play despite her displeasure and reluctance to discuss the subject. He didn’t know why it had to be secret. He wanted to know more about them as well, but his mother wouldn’t discuss these things with him until he was an adult.
“What about the Svan?” Austin asked.
“They’re a very old and an important part of the Adita’s culture. There isn’t much more to tell.”
“Are they part robot or computer? Zack dissected one that had died. Inside he found wires and something like a computer chip.”
“Some of the Svan have been mechanized, but I don’t know much about that process,” she finished abruptly, having said more than she wanted to about the Svan. Caleb did not fool her pretending he wasn’t hanging on her every word.
Austin sensed her unwillingness to discuss the Svan, and rather than press for information, he asked to hear more about Roxanne.
“When I arrived at the hospital where they’d brought Roxanne, I was too late. She’d been in an accident and her internal organs were badly damaged. Although they tried, your doctors couldn’t save her.”
“You could have saved her,” Austin said.
Eve shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. If I had saved her you two never would have met, for she would not have been human any longer. An outcome that would not have served Agra’s purpose and is against Adita la
ws.”
“Of course. Always Agra’s purpose,” Austin replied, knowing his sarcasm was wasted on Eve. The memories of Roxanne were so real to him. Roxi was so real to him. “Why?”
“My natural form did not make me desirable for procreation. Agra instructed me to become human by absorbing Roxanne’s thoughts and memories. I used her physical features to appeal to your human desires.”
“When you came to Deadbear, I never knew if you were real or not,” Austin said, feeling guilty, and not sure why. “You never spoke to me. And when you came back, you showed me death and destruction and nothing else. But you never explained any of it.”
“I was preparing you for the future. For the end of mankind as you know it.”
“As I know it? What does that mean?”
“Evolution. Nothing lasts in continuum. Species evolve and change. The strongest of these will survive. The Adita are the fittest, but we have not always been such and if we do not take measures we will not remain as such. I know you are not so naive to think your species will survive the test of time without trials, without the possibility of extinction. If not us, another would have eradicated you or you would have destroyed yourselves.”
“Mr. Luke is on his way to see you father,” Caleb interrupted.
Austin heard footsteps approach and stop outside his door. He heard Luke talking to himself.
“Why don’t you let him in?” Eve instructed, to which Caleb ran to the door.
Eve turned back to Austin. “I must resume my guise as your wife.” She transformed into Roxanne.
“My wife? What...”
“You’re awake!” Luke exclaimed.
“That I am.” Austin spun around, hiding his shock behind happiness at seeing his friend. They hugged. Austin stared over Luke’s shoulder at Eve or Roxanne, he wasn’t sure anymore who he was seeing. When Luke stepped back, Austin continued to glance in her direction, expecting the image of his wife to vanish.
“Hello Mrs. Reynolds.” Luke nodded his head her way.
“Please call me Roxi,” she said, giving him a sweet smile. “How was your trip to Wyoming?”
Eve of Man (The Harvest Book 2) Page 15
