Chapter 2
Frieda stood in the center of the meadow—her meadow—for a long time. It looked different now that Sasha had explained to her what everything really was. What she originally thought was the sky looked exactly like the surface of water seen from underneath, with the sun refracting through the waves in a myriad of shimmering patterns. The dark shapes outlined against the brightness looked like strange sea creatures drifting across the upper layer of water. The trees really did resemble giant seaweed waving in the current.
Sasha never explained about the wall, and Frieda couldn’t stop her mind from gravitating toward the people near it. They would be like Fritz and Sasha and her—human, at least in appearance and speech and behavior.
After all, what more was there, when it came to interacting with people? She had more in common with these Aqinas than she had with the Lycaon, with their pointed ears and sharp teeth, and the Avitras, with their bright feathers and birdlike eyes. Sasha was right about that part. When it came to relating to people, to making connections with them and enjoying their company, she could find everything she needed here as easily as anywhere else.
Still, she couldn’t get her mind to accept the reality that this place was under the sea, that she was underwater right now, that some black algae was allowing her to breathe. The warm sun on the brittle summer grass, the perfume of the wildflowers, and the shadows of the trees moving across the ground—it all seemed so like Earth. She was home here. She was home after almost a year on this strange planet.
Maybe that’s why she never made a home for herself with the Lycaon or the Avitras. They were too alien. The Earthlike familiarity of the planet couldn’t hide the alien nature of the people. She couldn’t overcome her own prejudice against them.
She wouldn’t have that problem here. Fritz didn’t look alien at all. He was tall and handsome and charming. No wonder Sasha chose him as her mate. Frieda’s eyes gravitated toward the wall again, but even before she had time to wonder if there were any other Aqinas men like Fritz over there, someone split off from the group and came toward her.
Frieda’s heartbeat quickened. What would he be like? Would he be tall and handsome and charming like Fritz? Why did she think that when she hadn’t even wanted to bring a man toward her? She only wondered.
He brushed his hand over the grass the same way she did when she first met Sasha. The motion put her at ease. She wasn’t the only one who felt that comfortable familiarity with this place. He stopped in front of her, and Frieda stared at him. He couldn’t be older than Fritz, but his eyes radiated a calm born of maturity and experience. Fritz struck her as young and untried. This man had seen it all, even though he couldn’t have been much older than Frieda herself. He stood still and regarded her with his mellow brown eyes while she scanned him up and down.
Her curiosity got the better of her. “Do all Aqinas wear their hair in those ropes down the back of your heads?”
He didn’t smile. “Yes. The algae embeds in our hair and keeps it tied like this so it can access every part of our skin. This way, it has maximum surface area to transmit oxygen into our blood.”
“Why does it do that?” she asked. “How did you adapt to get the algae to colonize your skin?”
“It’s a symbiotic relationship,” he replied. “The algae are small plants. They consume the carbon dioxide we produce, and they get rid of their waste oxygen by diffusing it into our blood stream. This way, we don’t have to breathe at all.”
Frieda blushed. “I’m sorry. I should have introduced myself to you first. I’m Frieda. I apologize for being rude.”
“You have nothing to apologize for,” he replied. “You just got here. It’s natural you have questions about us.”
She paused. “So what’s your name?”
He didn’t close his eyes and bow the way Fritz did. He stared straight into her eyes, and yet his gaze didn’t disconcert her the way she expected it to. She stared back into his eyes with frank acceptance.
“My name is Deek,” he replied.
“Deek!” she repeated. “That’s an interesting name. Do all the Aqinas have one-syllable names?”
He studied her. “I really don’t know. I don’t know all the Aqinas.”
His manner fascinated her. He couldn’t have been more different from Fritz if he’d been a different species. “How many Aqinas do you know?”
“I know my family and my friends,” he replied. “And I know all Fritz’s family, and a few other families connected with them.”
Frieda frowned. “Fritz’s family is the leaders of the Aqinas. You must be talking about families with some political connection. Are they the ones that run this faction?”
He put his head on one side and nodded. “I understand. You came from the factions, so naturally you think we behave the same way, but we don’t have a faction. We don’t have families with political connection. No one runs the Aqinas.”
“Then who makes decisions concerning what you’ll do and how you’ll run your lives?” she asked. “Who’s in charge of that?”
“No one makes decisions concerning what you’ll do and how you’ll run your life except you,” he replied. “Some of the families make decisions as groups, but no one tells anybody else what to do or how to do it. We don’t function that way.”
Frieda thought that over. “Tell me more about the connection the water makes between your minds. Sasha said you know everything everybody else is thinking and feeling at all times because the water makes them one homogeneous chemical solution.”
“That’s one way of describing it,” he replied. “For example, right now I can see shadows of the life you had when you were on land. I can see the factions where you lived and the men who led them. I can understand why you think the Aqinas might be the same way. I would have no frame of reference for that if the water didn’t make it clear to me.”
Frieda blinked. “Are you saying you’re reading my mind right now?”
“You can do the same thing if you want to,” he replied. “You can see images of my life among the Aqinas, and you can understand better how we live.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” she asked. “Right now, all I see is you standing in front of me.”
“Stop thinking so much,” he told her. “Stop seeing with your eyes and try instead to see with a different part of your mind. If you try, you’ll find the information is already inside you. The water puts it there, but it doesn’t put it into your mind. It puts it through your skin and your mouth and your ears and your fingers. Try it and you’ll see.”
For a moment, she only stared at him. What did he mean by seeing with her skin and ears and fingers? That made no sense at all. Then the information came to her. Images of the Aqinas world, with its wavy watery lines, came to her as if from a forgotten dream.
A version of the meadow, but without its Earth like quality, flickered at the edge of her awareness. Instead of waving grass in the summer wind, sea plants studded the ocean floor. The wildflowers decorating the expanse were anemones and polyps turning their purple and yellow cups toward the sunlight filtering down from above. A mass of caves in a coral bank stood in the shadows of the seaweed, and people moved in and out of them.
So this was what the meadow looked like to the Aqinas. They didn’t need any image of Earth, or even the Angondran surface, to make it home to them. As Frieda watched, a woman stepped out of one of the caves and waved across the expanse to her—except she didn’t wave at Frieda. She waved at Deek. Frieda was Deek in that moment. The woman was his mother, and that cave was their family home. She saw the place through Deek’s eyes and knew it as the Aqinas knew it. Her own home looked like a house because she was human, but that cave was the most comfortable place for an Aqinas.
Frieda closed her eyes against the image, and when she opened them again, the meadow surrounded her once more, with its grass and daisies and yarrow and dandelions. She turned back to Deek and sighed. “I see.”
“You can do the same thing with any Aqinas you meet,” he told her. “You can understand just about anything about them you want to understand. The water tells you.”
“Then what’s the point of talking to them?” she asked. “If you know everything about them, you have no reason to have anything to do with them.”
“You’re talking to me right now,” he pointed out. “You just saw for yourself what my world looks like to me, and you know my family, and a lot of other information about me, but you’re still talking to me.”
“I guess I just want company,” Frieda remarked.
For the first time, he smiled. “There are some things the water can’t give us. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of things the water can’t give us.”
“But what do you talk about?” she asked. “I’m talking to you because I don’t know anything about you. Okay, I know something about you, but I’m a stranger here. What do people talk about who’ve known each other their whole lives?”
“What do you talk to your parents about?” he asked. “What do you talk to your sisters and your cousins and your dearest friends about?”
Frieda blushed again. So he knew that much about her, too. He knew she had sisters and cousins. He knew she didn’t have any brothers. He was still reading her mind. He could glean all this personal information and a lot more besides, but that didn’t bother her.
“I talk to them about what I’m doing,” she told him, “and where I’ve been, and what I’m thinking and feeling about my decisions and my plans. But you don’t have to do that. The water tells people everything they need to know about you.”
“Not everything,” he replied. “And even if it did tell us everything, it can’t take the place of talking to each other about it. We would still have to do that.”
Frieda nodded. “I can understand that. There’s nothing like talking to someone your trust about everything on your mind. I wouldn’t want to give that up for the world.”
“You don’t have to.” He turned toward the forest. “Would you like to take a walk?”
She stared at him. “Take a walk? But there’s nowhere to walk to. We won’t go anywhere.”
“It’s still nice to take a walk, isn’t it?” he asked.
She took a step after him. “I guess so.”
She fell in at his side, but she didn’t watch where they were going. They could walk a million miles and never leave that meadow. They would never come to the edge of the forest, any more than she and Sasha could get to that wall over there.
That gave her an idea, and she turned back. “What’s that wall over there? Is it a city of some kind?”
“That’s the shore,” he replied.
“The shore!” she repeated.
“It’s the edge of the water,” he explained. “That’s where the ocean ends and the land begins.”
“But it’s a wall,” she countered.
“To you, it’s a wall,” he replied. “It’s the limit of our territory. Maybe that’s why it looks like a wall to you.”
“So why are all those people over there?” she asked. “Why aren’t they walking in the meadow, too?”
“They are,” he replied. “Each one of them is walking in their own meadow. To you, they’re walking far away because they’re far away in your mind. When your mind brings them closer, they will come closer.”
Frieda looked down at the ground. “That’s what Sasha said.”
“Don’t you believe her?” Deek asked. “You can trust Sasha. She wouldn’t deceive you.”
“I trust her,” Frieda murmured. “It’s just so different from the world I’m used to. It’s going to take me a while to get used to it.”
He gazed into her eyes with a distant expression on his face. Then he shook himself and started walking again. “I can only understand that in a marginal way. I’ve lived with the Aqinas my whole life, whereas you’ve lived on land where everyone is separated from everyone else by an unbridgeable gap. All I can say is it must be a very lonely world to live in.”
“It isn’t lonely when you’re used to it,” she told him. “You find other ways of connecting with people. It’s like you say. The water can’t do everything. Some things you have to do for yourself by coming face to face with people. I suppose it’s not so much different on land as it is here.”
“Still,” he replied, “I much prefer it here.”
Frieda tried to keep her voice steady. “I don’t know if I can get used to this.”
“You can go back any time you want to,” he replied. “You don’t have to stay here if you don’t feel comfortable with it.”
“I’m sure your people would be insulted if I left after the way you helped me when I fell out of that tree,” she remarked.
He shook his head. “No one would hold it against you. We understand how strange this world must seem to you. None of us would want to go live on land, either.”
“What about Sasha?” she asked. “She’s chosen to make this her home.”
Deek shrugged. “She mated with Fritz. If she hadn’t, she might have chosen to return to the land and her own kind. I wouldn’t blame her if she did, and no other Aqinas would, either. We only brought her here to save her from her injuries. By the time she recovered, she’d made a connection with Fritz and his family. That’s why she decided to stay.”
“She must have felt comfortable here,” Frieda pointed out. “She must not have found it all that strange.”
He cast a sidelong glance at her. “Do you feel comfortable here? Do you really find it all that strange?”
“You know I feel comfortable here,” she returned. “That’s exactly what makes it so strange.”
He stopped walking and regarded her with wide eyes. “I don’t understand you. What do you mean?”
She waved her hand over the wide meadow. “All this—it’s beyond comfortable. It’s familiar. It’s home. That’s what makes it strange. That’s exactly what makes it so disconcertingly foreign.”
He frowned. “I don’t understand you.”
She sighed and started walking again so he had to hurry to catch up to her. “Never mind.”
He laid his hand on her arm and turned her toward him. “Stop. I want to understand this. Explain to me what you mean. How can it be comfortable and familiar and home if it’s disconcertingly foreign?”
She couldn’t stop herself from smiling. “Only you could fail to understand that, with your homogeneous chemical solution.” She burst out laughing.
He frowned even harder. “What do you mean? I don’t understand you at all.”
She smacked her lips. “All right. I’ll explain it to you. I’m on an alien planet, hundreds of thousands of light years from my home world. At least when I was with the Lycaon, and with the Avitras, I had the people to look at and understand exactly where I was and what happened to me. The sight of the people anchored me in space and reality. I never had to question where I was. All I had to do was look at the Lycaon’s hairy necks or the Avitras’ feathers to get my bearings.”
“And you don’t have those bearings now?” he asked.
“I do,” she replied. “Those trees over there don’t look like any trees I ever saw before.”
“Then what’s the problem?” he asked.
“You,” she blurted out. “You are the problem.”
He furrowed his eyebrows, and she almost laughed at him again.
“You look like any human man,” she explained. “The only part of you that looks alien is that hair of yours. If it wasn’t for that, I could convince myself I was somewhere back on Earth.”
“Isn’t that what makes this place comfortable and familiar?” he asked.
“Exactly,” she replied.
He frowned again, but Frieda turned and started walking again. “Never mind. You won’t understand, but that doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter,” he told her. “If something makes you uncomfortable here, you should get it out into the open. We can find a way to change it to make you more comfortable.”
“There’s nothing you can do to make me more comfortable,” she told him. “I’m perfectly comfortable. That’s exactly the problem.”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Let me put it this way,” she explained. “You’re alien. You’re ten times more alien to me than the Lycaon or the Avitras ever were. They live on land, and they’re separated by that unbridgeable gap, the same way my people are. I could relate to that. Now I have to learn a whole new alien way of being. I’ve been on Angondra for almost a year, and nothing prepared me for this. It’s going to take some adjustment. It’s going to be harder for me to adjust to this than living with the other factions.”
He nodded. “That makes sense.”
The trees blocked out the sunlight, and all at once, Frieda noticed they stood at the edge of the forest. “How did we get here?”
He looked around. “You tell me. You must have wanted to come here.”
“I never wanted to come here,” she shot back. “I was walking along thinking about something completely different.”
“Then how do you explain how we got here?” he asked. “We couldn’t have got here if you didn’t bring us here.”
“I’m telling you I never wanted to bring us here,” she snapped. “All I wanted to do was take a walk.”
His eyebrows went up. “I’m just saying....”
Then a glint of color caught Frieda’s eye. Her gaze fell on the house at the edge of the forest—her house. Her blood ran cold. Why had she wanted to come here—with him?
She glanced at Deek, but he only regarded her with his calm expression. She took a step forward. “I better go.”
He nodded again and took a step back. “It was nice to meet you.”
She looked back over her shoulder, but he was already walking away. She never had a chance to ask if she would see him again, but she could always find him again in the meadow if she wanted to. She went into her house and sat in the chair.
The chair sucked her down with an irresistible pull. As strange as this world was, she couldn’t bring herself to feel out of place here. The reality of the Aqinas world had become her reality.
Maybe the water eroded her resistance until she became one with the Aqinas and their world of mirages. The water constructed out of her own thoughts and memories the most perfect environment for her she could possibly imagine.
Nowhere else in the galaxy would she find a place so exactly suited to her tastes and sentiments. Even the people stepped out of her dreams to surround her with care and companionship.
She sank deeper into the chair—her own chair. A sudden wave of exhaustion washed over her and threatened to drag her down into unconsciousness. She barely managed to stretch herself out on the bed before she fell into dreamless sleep.