El and Onine (9 page)

She meant to say the Venusian dust that shed from
the bathers in the Temple. The celestial bodies arriving on Terra sat in the
scalding liquid at least once a day until they had fully adapted to their new
form. The molt of my Kyprian siblings gave Mara her visions, not the water. I wondered
if my goddess knew about her gift for reading the future in the sediments of Venusian
gold. I suspected Saturnia’s sister did.

“What have you seen?”

“Everything.”

Her confession worried me. “Be specific.”

“The first vision was a sapient but she was nothing
like me.”

“How so?”

“She was beautiful. Like a Venusian.”

I thought her vision imaginary. “Are you sure she
was sapient?”

“Yes,” she said. “She was mine.”

My goddess had yet to pair the sapients for
procreation since they were still too young, but she promised to begin as soon
as their change had come. She had enlisted a council of three to manage the
repopulation. With Kypria’s guidance, they would select the sapient mating
partners. Apparently, they were made for compatibility. I assumed Mara had
simply seen her own contribution to the renewal of Terra’s population, even if
she seemed to think hers would be beautiful. A creator would always admire its
creation, I assumed, despite its lack of aesthetic appeal.

“She was yours too,” she said.

“Mine?” Mara nodded. “What do you mean?” The
suggestion shocked me. We had never discussed an interspecies union—and
certainly not one with me.

“She will be the product of our contact,” she said.

The thought of a sapient offspring—my
offspring—made me ill. It seemed strange my goddess would consider it a
boon to our species.

“It’s inevitable.”

“You are obviously mistaken,” I said. “I would never
entertain the idea, let alone attempt such a dangerous endeavor. It is simply
impossible.”

The expression on her face was hidden behind the
veil but I imagined my fear was reflected there.

“We will survive,” she said. “We are made for it.”

“How?” Her dark eyes brightened and revealed the
smile beneath her veil. “Your vision was imaginary, sapient.”

“Kypria showed me.”

“My goddess gave you the vision?”

“Yes,” she said. “She is the one who taught me to read
the sediment.”

“My goddess knows about your gift?”

“She’s the one who gave it to me.”

The reasons my goddess wanted the sapient to possess
such power baffled me. As I stared at her veiled face, the coldness from her
covered skin seeped through the silk and clung to my flesh. It made me want to
touch her. “Remove your veil,” I said.

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I can’t—not
yet.”

“I must see your face,” I said. “I am not asking.”

Mara understood the command and reached for the veil,
pulling it down around her neck. Her loose strands of hair whipped in the wind
and licked her face, a change from the tidy way the Venusian kept their terrestrial
manes. Her cheeks were red with the cold air coming in from the wheat field and
I thought she looked like a mix of stone and lava, though more palpable than
the volcanoes on Venus. I wondered if sapient flesh would seep through my form
as lava did. Despite all the love I had for Venus, I wanted to touch the
sapient, to taste the substance Terra offered.

Mara held out her hand to me and I studied her lean
fingers, fat palm, coarse, dark skin before I lifted my clumsy limb to take her
hand in mine. The sensation could only be described as electric, as a bolt ran
up my arm into my neck and plucked on my forehead with an unending pulse. Pleasurable
at first, it quickly turned torturous and soon the throbbing in my flesh became
intolerable—as did hers. She screamed before I could unlock our grasp and
stop our fusing skins from searing the bones beneath. The smell of burnt flesh teased
us both.

“It burns,” she cried. “It burns.”

My burn was wholly different. Though my flesh was
singed on the surface, my inner flame dampened with the coldness of her skin.
The sapient wailed, as her hand blistered and turned plum then black. I was
incapable of softening her pain and the horror forced me to back away. I was
relieved when Saturnia’s sister came up the lane to meet us in the garden. She stopped
on the stone beside me, standing an arm’s length away from the sapient. She pulled
out a small satchel of powder and turned the pouch over to release its contents
into the air. She blew the stardust at Mara’s hand and when the particles settled
on the burning skin, the Kyprian healer waved her lithe arms in front of her to
extract the pain. The sapient’s complexion changed almost immediately.

“You are fully healed, sapient,” she said.

Mara shared a smile with us before using the same
hand to pull her veil back up to cover her face. “I did not mean to—”

“You have been brave,” Saturnia’s sister said. “But
you are not ready yet.”

Mara dropped her eyes to the ground and mumbled
something.

“Soon,” my Kyprian sibling told her. “It will come
soon.”

We left Mara in the garden and rushed back to the
greenhouses. The eye had nearly dropped below the horizon and we both felt our
fires dampen. At the rise of Jupiter, we left Mara and her planet behind.

***

Our return voyage was more painful than our trip to Terra.
It seemed stripping off the terrestrial form was harder than putting it on. The
peeling clay racked the core of our being and tortured us until we touched down
on Venus once more.

“The bonding has begun,” Saturnia’s sister said.

“Fire and clay,” my goddess said. “We must become
fire and clay.”

Kypria embraced the twin planet, willing to become a
part of it no matter what she lost. As soon as she entered her solarium, Midan
came for her. His rule had begun and he wanted his queen. Persuasive and wrathful,
the ambassador would no longer wait for Kypria to relinquish her retinue. I missed
the worst of it, though, for I was sent away shortly after we returned.

“You will travel the cosmos,” Saturnia’s sister
said. “When you reach the tenth sphere, you will know. That is where you will be
reborn.”

“Reborn?”

“Into darkness.”

The details of my goddess’s plan were opaque, and
until then I was unaware of my gift’s importance. When Ur had shaped my fire,
the sire had implanted a womb that could transport a spark.

“You can carry another within you,” Saturnia’s
sister said. “Safely within you.”

“I do not understand.”

“It is a gift that needs no explanation. You are a
cultivator and thus may plant the visitant spark in another’s soil.” She used
language influenced by our trip to Terra. Words like soil, cultivator and plant
were strangers to Venusian vocabulary.

“But I—”

“You are to learn how to sustain your fire in
darkness and keep it lit in the coldest of spheres.”

“How is that possible?”

“All things are possible through Kypria,” she said.
“Let her be your guide.”

Saturnia’s sister touched the tip of my flame with
hers and the spark lit me up. She pushed her fire a little deeper into mine and
suddenly mine consumed hers. Like setting myself down in lava, my heat rose to
explosion and I felt the pleasure of another within me, though I held my own, overwhelmed
as I was by the sensation.

Saturnia’s sister spoke to me, as we held each other
in one flame. “This is your gift, Onine—this is what you will know with the
sapient but you will suffer first and when you think you cannot overcome, know
that you must.”

When the healer pulled herself from me again, it
took a moment to adjust to the tepidness of my sole flame.

“Do you see the possibilities?”

“I know what I must do,” I said.

“Go to your goddess. Tell her you are ready.” I
nodded in assent and turned to go. “Remember this moment,” she said. “And know it is worth it.”

I left Saturnia’s sister with my newfound burden,
the knowledge of my responsibility to all Kyprian and my goddess herself. Only
through me could they find salvation.

Kypria entertained the ambassador in her solarium,
and when I arrived the grotesque Midan was standing next to her pedestal,
looking through her selection of liquid crystals. He spun the platter of melted
minerals about on the slab of granite. His brutish voice choked my flame, as I
made my way toward them. He was a novice to our language and his broken shrieks
were difficult to understand. My goddess was agreeable despite his impropriety.

“We have nothing of this sort on Menaleck,” he said.
“I want this one.”

He pawed at the granite and plunged his pudgy dactyls
into the liquid quintessence. When he pulled them out and licked them, I
thought it better to leave the two alone but my goddess called me forward.

“You need to see me,” she said. “I assume it is
about the borneo lava lands.” She concealed the real reason for my visit,
knowing exactly why I had come.

With sounds that were closer to grunts than Venusian
shrieks, Midan pressed his tongue up against Kypria’s flame and bid her
farewell. “Vapid—these wasted matters,” he said.

He slithered away in a manner similar to a scaly
four-legged creature I had seen on Terra, one of the species the goddess had liquefied
with her fire.

“Come closer,” she said as soon as he disappeared
from the solarium.

I moved beside my goddess’s pedestal and dimmed my
flame. Pleased with me, she pulled me up onto the platform with her. The view
at her height was splendid. The top of the solarium revealed a panoramic of Venus—my
home, my forge. My flame brightened at the sight of lush lava and acidic manna,
caves of liquid crystal and hot granite, dells of molten trees and amber
stuccoed brush, fields of gold sand and plains of stilted infernos begging to
be explored. Our planet was a vision of perfection, as was our goddess, and living
on Terra for the rest of my existence seemed a punishment.

“No place for sorrow,” she said. “Your life will
become something you have yet to imagine.”

“How could it, Kypria?” I immediately regretted my
break in decorum. Only the sire could call my goddess by the name he had given
her.

“No regrets, Onine.”

My flame was so close to hers, I had a difficult time
containing it. I felt a desire to pull hers into mine or be thrust into hers.
The feeling humbled me.

“We will be close again,” she said. “You will know
me as no other has.”

“I am ready now, goddess.”

“Yes,” she said. “You are ready. And when you return,
I am yours.”

“I am already yours.”

She smiled and leaned toward me, holding my gaze in
hers. My violet eyes searched the endless abyss, as she penetrated my flame. The
pleasure was greater than the one I experienced with Saturnia’s sister, but it
lasted only a brief moment. “Go through the darkness to reach the sphere,” she
said. “Come back to me on the other side.”

Her voice echoed, as my form morphed into a single
flame, shooting up and out of the solarium past the crystal and into the acidic
atmosphere. From ecstasy to torment, I rose and rose, as my flame dampened,
leaving a trail through the emptiness of space before I reached the duct at the
edge of our star system. Sucked into darkness, my wails of excruciation were
silenced by the vast cosmic chasm. When I finally reached the tenth sphere, my
fire was almost extinguished and I was barely alive.

As soon as I touched down on the surface of Gelu, my
form changed. The icy plane and somber sky were strange, but the cold—the
cold was alien and scary. Lost and disoriented, I recalled my mission. My
goddess had sent me here to adapt to coldness, darkness, everything against my
nature. To survive this was the only way to endure what was to come—the
only way to save Kypria.

A cavalcade of Gelanese greeted me with little
courtesy, poking and prodding my coarse figure as though I were a simple
zephyr. I lay stiff on the ground, hoping they would relieve me of the burden.
I was rather satisfied when they picked me up and tossed me onto a large smelly
beast that exhaled gas from the tip of his trunk. The beast warmed my frigid
skin, as we strode across the powdered terrain—the nivis-laden Gelu had
been frozen since before time. A landscape more opposed to Venus than any other,
Gelu was a blue planet, one of shade and ice with a valley of cold that rivals
the one on Terra’s satellite.

My flame suffered beneath my bald flesh. My new form
was more brutish than my terrestrial body, and though the darkness prevented me
from confirming it, I was certain I had become a base species. I thought of
Mara’s goat. It could probably reason better than the creature I had become. At
least it knew it liked to lie between the cabbages.

The Gelanese communicated with grunts and snorts. If
I had wanted to understand them, I could have, but they had nothing worthy to
say, speaking only of the hunt to come. Fortunately, I was spared as the object
of their chase. I worried, however, that if my flame were snuffed out, I would
be relegated to the tenth sphere forever. I assumed my sentence on Gelu was fleeting
but my goddess could only call me back after I had perished and been reborn.