Fifty-nine
Myla watched in utter fascination the formation of
Hive warcraft following. They were her honor guard and her protectors.
Centuries of oppression and hopelessness had ended. Now, The Hive was not
only harmless, but benevolent, and Myla could not remember exactly how
that had come to be. Memory of her other life could not hope to be
contained within her new, entirely human existence. She would never be
able to sort out everything that had happened.
And then she turned her attention to their approach
to Covonia. The world had healed in the short amount of time the colony
had been away. The Hive had removed Jeep's spacecraft, and the burned
forest had replenished itself. Myla parked Dikki in orbit and let Jeremy
pilot them to the surface in a skiff. He set down near a sink hole Myla
thought to be the one belonging to her mud dragon, but she saw nothing of
the creature. "Too bad it's not smart enough to remember you," Jeremy
quipped. "This could have been a happy reunion."
A fresh growth of feather trees twisted to keep the
sun in view. Immamat rose ponderously in the sky, a ghost of a giant
behind the deceptively blue sky. During their visit, the sun passed
behind the gas giant, and the winds kicked up in the wake of the dusk
light. Myla wandered close to the forest of umbrella trees, but laughed
at Jeremy's tongue-in-cheek suggestion that she show him the carnivorous plant to which
she had fallen prey.
At dusk, a band of glitter arced across the sky,
Myla's orbiting armada shielding her from every conceivable harm. "They
don't know how helpless they really are," was her comment when they
stopped to witness the spectacle. "They're not a whole lot smarter than
mud dragons when it comes right down to it."
The approaching darkness made Jeremy nervous. "We
won't be able to spend much time here, not until the cities return. The
wilderness is a bit too risky."
Myla had already noticed. Her avatar self had been
so much tougher than her new flesh and blood self. "Where else can we
go?" she said. "Back to the way things were? Do you miss being a Tech,
Jeremy?"
He decided not and shook his head. "I feel trapped
between what was and what could have been. Maybe we can find somewhere
else to go, some other colony. There are other, Earth-like worlds we
could visit, other Nat colonies that live off the land and hardly use any
tools at all. Life can be very simple in the right place."
"We could go back to Bolphan and ask around," she
said. "We'll always have Dikki and the courier to take us where we want
to go. It's going to be one of the advantages of being a celebrity, maybe
the only one."
They returned to the skiff before nightfall and
orbited Covonia a few times, watching the stars and the sun rise and set
behind mighty Immamat. "It was all so much prettier when I was an
avatar," Myla said. "I could see so much more."
"So, you do regret being human?"
The question alarmed her. "No! Jeremy, you were
right! I would have lived practically forever, but I would never have
grown up to do all the things that human beings do. We are going to be
lovers and have babies now. That's what life is for."
"And grow old and die." Jeremy reached for her hand
in the dark.
"Yes, and that, too, but we still don't understand
death any more than we understand life, or people wouldn't believe so many
different things. We don’t even know who or what we are!”"
"A sure sigh of confusion," he concurred with a
smile. "Shall we go back now?"
There was nothing else to do. After everything that
had happened, even the journey of a lifetime to their reclaimed paradise
had been strangely anticlimactic. Myla had expected more than this. She
had wanted so very much more.
"Myla, I have new coordinates," Dikki announced
quietly a few minutes into the return flight.
"New coordinates?" She glanced at Jeremy for an
explanation. "What was wrong with the old coordinates?"
Jeremy leaned over the control panel. "Wow. Where
did these come from?"
"Unknown," Dikki said. "Shall I engage?"
Myla studied Jeremy's growing excitement with
blossoming hope of her own. "How far away are they?"
"Dikki could specify within three hundred million
light-years." Jeremy stared at the control panel and then glanced around
at her. "It's a lot further than that."
Myla leaped to her feet, trying to contain her
overwhelming joy. Jeep hadn't forgotten about her after all. What else
could it be? She gave Jeremy a shrug of helplessness. "There's only one
way to find out."
Jeremy wet his lips with his tongue. He gave a
tension-wrought nod of the head.
"Dikki," Myla said. "Tell the Hive that we have
received an invitation and are going to visit an old friend. It's hard to
say when we'll be back. I'm sure they'll wait very patiently, however
long it takes."
Myla raised an eyebrow. Jeremy gave a final nod of
agreement.
"Engage," she said. "Take us there, Dikki."
The stars twisted and were gone. In their place,
Myla could see only a few distant galaxies.
Jeremy studied the view for a time. "Not the same
place as before. Where is this place? What’s going on?”
Myla stared into the void feeling helpless and
vulnerable, and then thinking that power was only a matter of perspective
like everything else. Her Mysaelia self had been like a goddess, but a
child compared to Jeep. Jeep had showed her that even the lowly mud
dragon had choices to make, and that each choice ruled an entire
universe. Real power came from just being conscious, and after all, being
a simple human being had been a path of many billions of years of choices
and exploration and a thing to be respected in itself, even if there were
other, far stranger universes for the Technocrats and their Mysaelian
bodies and augmented brains to inhabit.
It appeared to view, finally, a hole in space and a
patch of dense starlight lying beyond. Myla pointed to it. “There it
is.”
Jeremy eagerly altered course. They waited hand it
hand for passage to a familiar place, and leaped into one another's arms,
screaming with delight as the corridor of silver needles took form about
them.
Their journey continued, and their adventure began
anew.
