EXCERPTS
I resolutely chased the sound like a stealthy hunter chasing prey. Until I found the source: a young woman, on the lakeshore. She was holding a bone in her hands–from a large raptor I think. Holes pierced the bone which she held to her lips, while her agile fingers moved deftly over the holes. It was an audible enchantment. Soon she moved the thing away from her parted lips and produced an equally magical sound, so different from your usual guttural utterances. Her voice floated in the air and, like the notes of the flute, the sound moved through my human body to touch my other self.
Something must have betrayed my presence because she turned, startled. With a scream, she ran, her instrument clutched in her hand. I chased. She was fast, probably due to fear, and I reacted like any prehistoric man would; the hunter in me awoke and with one swift arrow into the centre of her back, she came crashing down.
She was still breathing, but more importantly, the instrument was undamaged. I snatched it from her hand and brought it to my lips, moving my fingers over the holes as she had. Nothing happened. I quickly surmised that, to make it work, I had to blow. The result was a frightful cacophony. Galaxies away from the splendid sounds the woman had made only moments earlier. My ears hurt as I varied my breath and finger movements. I closed my eyes, thinking to recapture the melody, but I couldn’t remember it. The splendour ceased; it was no longer in my ears and I didn’t know how to reproduce it. And I hadn’t even memorised it.
Still breathing, the woman lay at my feet. I knelt beside her, pointing to the flute and then to her, asking for another concert. She stared at me, uncomprehending. Cursing the primitive communication of your species, I watched her bleed to death. I pondered for half a day how to reproduce the sound. Then, I ate the woman. What else would you have wanted me to do… to have done… have had done?
__________
Asteria made Music for me; her hands would glide on the strings, diffusing magical harmonies. And those notes were for me, those melodies were for me–all created with love. I had nothing to offer in return. Greedy for her music, I drank from the wellspring, gluttonous, relentless. Every time she offered, I took. She never tired. The notes of her love erased both the suffering of my earthly existence and those of my previous lives.
She liked to talk, fluttering from one subject to another. When I denounced her lack of coherence, she shrugged it off and insisted that there was indeed a logic to her train of thought, but one I could not fathom because I was too narrow-minded, too used to thinking inside the box. And according to her, that was because I didn’t trust my intuition. She often said that intuition was intelligence taking a shortcut.
Asteria did not believe in the Olympian gods. She had her own god, but she never talked about him, however much I insisted. She never discussed religion. It was a principle she held, because, she said, it was tantamount to telling someone that they would never see their beloved dead again. She believed that religion, at its essence, was about inventing a consolation for death; for oneself and for others. She also said that I would not understand. And every time she said that, I felt bereft.
__________
The fear of losing him gnawed at me. From the moment I heard him call me Daddy, terror became my constant companion. If he climbed a tree or scraped a knee, I trembled. If he disappeared from my line of sight, I panicked. Every battle was an agony. I was distracted by the constant need to keep my son safe, with little thought for the enemy.
How can you bear the idea of death? How can you reproduce knowing it all ends in death?
My life, of course, became a living hell. In battle, I had one eye on the enemy and one on my son. The Kid noticed. He was smart, granted not as smart as his father, but smarter than most humans. He, too, was afraid of losing me, so he stuck close. To protect me, he said, from my new distraction.
Protecting him became an obsession, more powerful than my addiction to music. He begged me to leave him be. I should have listened. Galloping towards him through the carnage of battle, a spear knocked me off my horse. I knew immediately. As soon as I felt metal tear into my flesh, I understood. There was no else around us. It was just me and The Kid amid corpses. Our life together ended as it had begun, me and him surrounded by the dead.
A brief flash of white. I saw myself crumple off the horse. I didn’t want to. It couldn’t be true. I wanted it to be a nightmare. It would have been so easy to die then, but I did not want his body to disappear. I didn’t want to jump into his skin. I wanted him back. I wanted to go back.
I didn’t have the months of preparation like I did with Asteria. How can you reproduce knowing death exists?
__________
‘I’m Vodka,’ she said.
For a split second, I thought my brain had scrambled the translation, and I bit my lip to stop a grin.
‘Go ahead and laugh young man,’ Vodka said. ‘We know what “vodka” means in your language, but here, most names have no meaning, because we’d rather not burden a child with a particular message or meaning before they’re born. We pick our names for the way they sound. And we can change them whenever we want and as many times as we want.’
Vodka paused, then broke into a wide smile.
‘However, after our brief tour through your memories, I think I’ll keep mine for a while.’
I tensed at the mention of my memories.
‘Don’t worry, we didn’t go anywhere without your permission. Your privacy is intact, but we needed to know who you are and where you come from,’ she said. ‘You know, it isn’t every day that we see an alien fall from the sky.’
‘I fell from the sky?’
‘Yes.’
‘How? I couldn’t have just fallen without...’
‘Inside a metal ball.’
And suddenly I remembered the word ‘pod.’
‘In a pod?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This word you are using. A... what did you call it... plod?’
I could see that the word on her lips and the sound in my head were the same, but before I could correct Vodka’s pronunciation, she continued.
‘You are the first human... alien we’ve encountered, at least since our civilisation–the Our-Islanders–gained a collective memory.’
__________
‘You promise to take me to the stars, beautiful stranger?’
‘I promise to try.’
‘Angel Wings suits you. I swear it does.’
‘If that’s what you want to call me, then go ahead, my beauty.’ The mood changed. Cali jumped off the bed, livid.
‘What did you call me?’
‘Beauty? What, is beauty a bad thing down here?’
‘I’m not talking about that,’ she said, her eyes practically shooting flames, ‘you know perfectly well what I mean.’
I didn’t.
‘You said, my beauty. “My”. As if I was your property.’
‘Hey! Take it easy. It’s a figure of speech where I come from.’
‘Well, it shouldn’t be. Words have specific meanings.’
‘You’re right. My people often forget that,’ I said and smiled, having recovered from the surprise of her reaction.
Cali calmed down. ‘Okay, let’s talk like your people. My... beauty... is that what I should call you too?’
‘It can be my-anything, any word. For example, my heart.’
That made her laugh.
‘Some humans even say, my treasure.’
‘That’s awful,’ she said, wrinkling her nose.
‘Come to think of it, you’re right.’
‘Can I say, my blanket?’
‘Um... Why, my blanket?’
‘Why, my treasure?’ She shot back. ‘What about “my sour pear”, can I say that?’ Cali loved the game. She skipped around the tent, thinking up odd endearments like ‘my tree branch’, ‘my broken nail’, ‘my midnight craving’... Disconcerted, all I could do was smile.