Children of a Different Sky

by Jane Yolen

  I don’t think those men behind us in the queue at the market had ever experienced a gravity cut. Or would know how to deal with it.

  It made me feel superior. They would have seen that in my face. They would have resented it. I knew that. I kept my eyes lowered, looking down at my feet. It would not do to make them any madder. There was the tube ride and anything could still happen. Anything at all.

  “They don’t even make an effort,” one of the men said, clearly, loud enough for us to hear as we were leaving, meant for us to hear. “They just come here and expect to carry on exactly as always. There’s a reason their world…”

  And by then we were out of earshot, thankfully. My mother walked very quickly, and I could see that her shoulders were tense underneath her shawl.

  She had been told before, by them, that the shawls were an affectation, up here in the station. We weren’t on a world surface. There was no wind here. No climate. Nothing to “protect” against. So wearing them—continuing to wear them—they took the shawls personally, in some way. As though the women who wore them did so as a gesture of defiance, a thumbing of the nose, a statement that they would never willingly blend in, assimilate, become one of them.

  But that was what we were meant to do, supposed to do, expected to do. Assimilate. They had given us a refuge and in return we were supposed to shed everything that had once made us who we were, and become thin carbon copies of them. We were supposed to think like them, behave like them, look like them, believe like them. There was no room for our shawls on the station, let alone our gods.

  Adapt, they said. Belong. Particularly to us, the young ones, the ones whom they could see catching young, making sure of.

  Adapt. Change. Belong.

  Reject what you brought here. Take up this new thing. Be one of us. Be one of us or stay one of them but if you stay one of them you will never be one of us.

  How can you tell me how can you tell me how can you tell me…

  I wore the medallion with the face of the Spirit of the Winds, tucked away underneath the clothes they had given me, against my bare skin, against the place where my heart still beat in memory of the grandmother who had given me the medallion—the grandmother who had not made it out with us. She wasn’t even buried properly, down there, on the surface of a world pounded into dust. She couldn’t have been; there was nobody there to do it. But she sent us away, told us to go, while we still could. She died so we could have a chance at life. Could she have had any idea that the price of survival would mean forgetting her, renouncing her?

  Would I be any different if I took her medallion from its place next to my heart and threw it away, and pretended that I had never heard the voice of the Spirit of the Winds howling outside while I was safe and snug and protected in my grandmother’s house? Would I be any better? Would I suddenly speak their language without an accent to mark me? Would my hair be lighter, and my eyes less hooded, and my face a different color, a different shape? Would that matter?

  Would that be easier, to live like that?

  Should I buy hair dye in the store and bleach my hair, should I put in contacts that changed the color of my eyes (my grandmother’s eyes, they said)—should I cut my hair like the station women did, or wear all those rings like they did in their multiply pierced ears? Should I pay for life by changing, changing utterly? Would it be surviving if none of the original me actually remained?

  “Should I use their words?” I asked my mother at night, repeatedly, as she tucked me into my narrow cot. “Dream their dreams?”

  “I don’t know, shallah, little darling. I don’t know. I don’t know what is best. Just try and stay out of trouble, don’t get into their sights…” She sighed, smoothing my long hair, escaping from its braids like it usually did moments after it was bullied into a semblance of order. “I just want you to remember that…”

  “Remember what?” I asked, waiting for the words that never came.

  “Just don’t forget,” she said. “Don’t become a stranger.”

  Some of the other children, the older children, the ones more easily swayed by the opinions of their peers, had done that already. They had become louder, more dismissive, more given to cutting remarks or to simply rejecting things by acting out against them. Many wore the earrings already. It was the price of being even remotely accepted by them. And it was easy to understand why. On a world, there would be room to move away or move apart if one needed to, and stay oneself. Here, on the station, there was nowhere else to go. It was life under an inexorable pressure. They couldn’t afford to have anybody up here who was different, because different meant dangerous, different meant that someone might not have the bone-deep understanding of station security protocols, someone might leave an airlock open by accident, or crack an air hose, or block a ventilation tunnel, or muck about with the gravity generator.

  Everyone had to be the same here, to adapt, to belong.

  They hadn’t wanted to take us—but there was nowhere for us to go. Not yet anyway. So there we were, occupying the quarters nobody else wanted because gravity was iffy there, grudgingly given the worst jobs on the station which nobody else wanted to do because they were too dirty or too dangerous and paid less for doing them than they might have been paid because after all they were already paying us. By giving us a place to alight, by giving us ‘sanctuary’. No matter how unwillingly, no matter how easily it might be withdrawn at any time at all, no matter that the price of staying on would mean… giving up identity. Forgetting the way we cooked and ate, the songs we sang, the gods who had walked amongst us.

  Forgetting the language we still dreamed with, the language in which some of us would always dream.

  Adapt. Belong. Blend in. Release the dangerous differences. Become enough like us to become indistinguishable from us. Only then can you be trusted. Maybe. Perhaps.

  Maybe not even then. Not ever. People who were not-us. Not-from-here. People who might never lose their accents, who could never lose the color of their skin, or the texture of their hair, or the haunted look that lurked in the back of their eyes. And how could they be expected to live with that? With the constant reminder of the wars which destroyed worlds, the war which had destroyed our world, the war that could so easily, so easily, come to roost here and wreck the fragile existence they led up here in the station drifting in the stars?

  How can you tell me how can you tell me how can you tell me

  How can you tell me what to remember, what to forget? How can you tell me how to stop being me?

  If you ripped the medallion which bears the image of a holy Spirit that once walked our world from its resting place around my thin little neck, would that help you feel less afraid? Would it help if you saw the medallion flung out through that airlock door, and then drifting gently and weightlessly away into infinity, banishing forever the spirits which you have never seen or heard, never known, will never understand?

  Unless I do what you tell me, would it help you feel any better if you hadn’t taken the medallion away, had simply tossed me away, myself, while I was still wearing it? Whose fear is greater, mine, that I might not be permitted to hold on to anything of my own, or yours, that my being permitted to do so might somehow endanger or even just irrevocably taint everything that is yours?

  You are the one with the power here. In the school rooms to which we are sent, the children of the migration with our hidden medallions held tightly and secretly where nobody can see them, we are told how to change, how to become easier for the station which gave us sanctuary to handle, to bear. You don’t tell us how to do that without killing the people who we already were, the people who we might have one day become had things been different for us… and become reborn into creatures which you aren’t afraid of, creatures which you can take in and assimilate into this machine which gives you all life. Change, and we get to drift closer to the center, where the ‘real’ people live. Don’t change, and we get to drift in microgravity in the outer levels until our bones t
urn brittle and our eyes turn dim. Adapt, or die. The price of life… is memory, and identity, and all the dreams that once came in a language that they do not understand.

  How can you tell me…

  You can’t. You never can.

  I will smile. And I will learn to speak without the accent that marks my kind. And I will not take up the shawl that my mother wears, and I might even have my ears pierced.

  But my grandmother’s medallion… I will take inside me, and carry in my heart, in a place where you can never rip it from me. And the Spirit of the Winds will always be a whisper in the deepest places of my mind, and walk beside me, and be my friend. In time, I will learn how Her voice can help me move the stars themselves.

  I know you fear this.

  But you should not.

  How can you tell me to accept my extinction in order to ensure my continued existence…?

  Here, a promise. In return for this place of safety in a world gone to ruin, I will offer a gift in return. In a language you may never understand, I will tell you what it feels like to stand with your feet on the ground, in the dust; I will tell you of what it feels like to lift your face up and feel the rain come spilling down over your closed eyelids, down your cheeks; I will tell you what it feels like to have the Spirit tug at your shawl with her fingers, with the wind of the open country swirling around you; I will tell you what it feels like to dip your hand into a pool that was made by the gods and not by your doing, and drink the water that was the gift that those gods have granted to you. I don’t know if you understand that these are treasures, all these sensations, the knowledge of all these things. But they are only treasures if I am permitted to hold on to them, to remember them, to know them, to share them. If you dismiss them and deny them and demand that I abandon them they become worthless to both of us. And if I am to be empty, then the place of safety you offer… comes at too high a price.

  How can you tell me that the only way to live… is to die…?

  Their people couldn’t handle the realization that it was over, that Driftwood was their present and their future, until the last scraps of their world shrank and faded away.

  Marie Brennan

  Into the Wind

  Marie Brennan

  The tenements presented a blank face to the border: an unbroken expanse of wall, windowless, gapless, resolutely blind to the place that used to be Oneua. Only at the edges of the tenements could one pass through, entering the quiet and sunlit strip of weeds that separated the buildings from the world their inhabitants had once called home.

  Eyo stood in the weeds, an arm’s length from the border. The howling sands formed a wall in front of her, close enough to touch. They clouded the light of Oneua’s suns, until she could barely make out the nearest structure, the smooth lines of its walls eroded and broken by the incessant rasp of the sands. And yet where she stood, with her feet on the soil of Gevsilon, the air was quiet and still and damp. The line between the two was as sharp as if it had been sliced with a razor.

  “I wouldn’t recommend it, kid.”

  The voice was a stranger’s, speaking the local trade pidgin. Eyo knew he was addressing her, but kept her gaze fixed on the boundary before her, and the maelstrom of sand beyond. She didn’t care what some stranger thought.

  People came here sometimes. Not the Oneui—not usually—but their neighbors in Gevsilon, or other residents of Driftwood looking for that rare thing, a quiet place to sit and be alone. The winds looked like their shrieking should drown out even thought, but their sound didn’t cross the border, any more than the sand did. As long as you didn’t look at them, this place was peaceful.

  But apparently the stranger didn’t want to be quiet and alone. In her peripheral vision she saw movement, someone coming to stand at her side, not too close. Someone as tall as an Oneui adult, and that was unusual in Driftwood.

  “You wouldn’t be the first of your people to try,” he said. “You’re one of the Oneui, right? You must have heard the stories.”

  Oh, she had. It started as a dry, stinging wind, after their world parched to dust. Then it built into a sandstorm, one that raged for days without pause, just as their prophecies had foretold. Eyo’s grandparents and the others of their town had refused to believe it was the end of the world; in their desperation, they gathered up their water and food and tied themselves together to prevent anyone from getting lost, and they went in search of a place safe from the sand.

  They stumbled into Gevsilon. And that was how they found out their world had ended.

  But not entirely. This remnant of it survived, caught up in the cluster of fragmented realities known as Driftwood: the place worlds went to die. Gevsilon, their inward neighbor, had gone through an apocalypse of its own: a plague that rendered all their people sterile. There weren’t many of the Nigevi left anymore, which meant there was enough room for the Oneui to resettle. Just a stone’s throw from the remnants of their own world, and everything they’d left behind.

  Of course some of them tried to go back. The first few returned coughing and blind, defeated by the ever–worsening storm. The next few stumbled out bloody, their clothing shredded and their flesh torn raw.

  The last few didn’t return at all.

  “Why do you lot keep trying?” the stranger asked. “You know by now that it won’t end well. Is this just how your people have taken to committing suicide?”

  Some worlds did that, Eyo knew. Their people couldn’t handle the realization that it was over, that Driftwood was their present and their future, until the last scraps of their world shrank and faded away. They killed themselves singly or en masse, making a ritual of it, a show of obedience to or protest against the implacable forces that sent them here.

  Not her.

  She meant to go on ignoring the stranger. It wasn’t any of his business why she was here, staring at the lethal swirls of the sandstorm. But when she turned to go, she saw him properly: a tall man, slender and strong, his hair and eyes and fingernails pure black, but his skin tinged lightly with blue.

  In Driftwood, people came in all sizes and colors and number of limbs and presence or lack of horns and tails. Eyo didn’t claim to know them all. But she’d heard of only one person fitting this man’s description.

  “You’re Last,” she said. Sudden excitement made her tense.

  His eyes tightened in apprehension, and he retreated a careful step. “I am.”

  “You can help me,” Eyo said.

  He retreated again, glancing over his shoulder, toward the faceless wall of the Oneui tenements, and the nearest opening past them. “I don’t think so, kid. Sorry. I—”

  She stepped forward, matching him. She didn’t have her full growth yet, but she was quick and good at running; she would chase him if he fled. “You’re a guide, aren’t you? Someone who knows things, knows where to find things.”

  He stopped. “I—yes. I am.”

  One of the best in Driftwood, or so people said. He knew the patchwork of realities that made up this area, because he’d been around for longer than any of them. The stories claimed he was called Last because he was the last of his own world—a world that had been gone for ages.

  Clarity dawned. “Oh. You thought I was going to ask you to go into the sandstorm?”

  He gave the howling storm a sideways glance. “You wouldn’t be the first.”

  Because the stories also said he couldn’t die. Eyo scowled. “Someone asked you? Who? Tell me their name. I don’t care what the storm is like; the idea of sending an outsider in there, asking them to bring back the—”

  She cut herself off, but not before Last’s eyebrows rose. “Bring back? You lost something in the storm?”

  “It isn’t lost,” Eyo snapped. “We know exactly where it is.”

  Now she saw clarity dawn for him. “That’s why your people keep going in,” he said thoughtfully, gaze drifting sideways again. “Look, whatever it is—it may not even be there anymore. This is Driftwood; things crumble and fad
e away, even without apocalyptic sandstorms to scour them into dust.”

  Conviction stiffened Eyo’s crest, her scalp feathers rising in a proud line. “Not this. Everything else will fall apart and die, but not—” She swallowed and shook her head. “When we are gone, this will remain.”

  His shrug said he didn’t agree, but he also didn’t care enough to argue anymore. “So if you don’t want to send me into that, what do you want me for?”

  Eyo smoothed her crest with one hand, as flat to her skull as she could make it. If he knew her people, he would recognize that as a gesture of humility and supplication. “I want you to help me find a way to survive the sand.”

  ~*~

  “I told you it wouldn’t work!”

  In his fury, Last kicked the wall, which earned him a swift glare from Uaru. Eyo’s grandaime had helped build this tenement with their own hands after the Oneua fled the sands. If Last broke something, they would take it out of his hide.

  He gestured in apology, and Uaru went back to bandaging Eyo’s fingers, their touches as gentle as possible. Eyo bit her lips until she was sure she could speak without hissing in pain. “You said it probably wouldn’t work. I had to make sure.”

  “By sticking your hand across the border and letting it get torn apart? Use some common sense, In–Eyo! Get yourself a hunk of meat, wrap that up in the slidecloth, and see how it fares before you risk your own flesh!”

  She hadn’t thought of that. Her hand throbbed under Uaru’s ministrations, as if in reproach. By the Oneui’s best guess at keeping their old calendar, Eyo was an adult now; she’d gone through her rite of passage two triple cycles of Gevsilon’s moons ago, with Uaru and Eyo’s other hanaime kin drumming and singing the traditional songs. But Last still called her In–Eyo, as if she were a child, and it was hard to tell him to stop when she’d just done something that proved him right.