trajectory.
He was nearly on top of them when they began to try patterns. Now, this was bad, this might work for them. “Are you unarmed?” he asked his brother.
“Of course I’m unarmed, I’m a sports car!”
“Just asking. Hold on!”
“My keel hurts, I can feel my keel going!” If an ensoulable machine’s nervous system was properly designed, the soul inhabiting it would sense it the same way it did a body.
Wylie leveled out. He was now speeding across open land, directly toward some aristo’s hunting estate. It was fashionable, he could see the house like something out of the English countryside. His brother said, “I see twelve bogies coming down on us.”
Wylie went into the forest, among the trees.
“You’ll wreck me!”
He took some advice from Martin’s son, Trevor. Just let yourself happen. His hands moved as they shot down a forest path, then up a stream. This far from the city, it wasn’t so polluted, not even on the Corporation side where mentioning global warming drew a death sentence. But then again, practically everything drew a death sentence. Executions were not only a form of population control, they kept the masses both entertained and fed.
Then he saw a wall. The wall, the one the Corporation had built around the Union. It was gray, immense, and dead ahead. He pulled back on the sticks and hopped it, and suddenly everything changed.
Here were fields of swabe and borogrove and orchards full of trees heavy with lascos and spurls and nape. Everything was green, the sky was dusty blue rather than dirty brown, and he knew that there would be stars at night, a few stars. Here, it was illegal not to mention global warming.
“I’ll take me back,” his brother said.
“Yeah, since I don’t know where I’m going.”
“I’m pulsing our code but we could get a look—see from the Air Force, so if we do don’t take evasive action. We are home, Brother.”
Wylie’s heart ached as he watched the rich green Union land speed below them. Home. And look at the houses, he could even see pretty shutters. Most unionists farmed. He had farmed, and he could see that the harvest was still coming in here and there. “Harvest is late.”
“Winter’s late, it’s too warm. If only an eighth of the planet fights the good fight, we can’t win, we can only lose slowly. The Gulf Stream stopped for four months this year. Avalon nearly froze while here in Aztlan, most of the maize crop burned.”
“What about the Corporation? They must be feeling it, too.”
“Farming’s illegal there now.” He paused for a long time. “I suppose you noticed what they’re eating.”
“I noticed.”
They came down on a pebble driveway before a modest old sandstone, its worn carved serpents of luck and joy barely visible in its ancient walls. But this was home, all right, a place he now realized that he had felt as an absence in his spirit for his whole time away.
He got out. “I wish you could come in, Brother.”
“When this tour’s over, I go back to my natural body forever, and I am looking forward to that, Wylie.”
“I don’t want to rattle around in the house alone!”
The arched wooden door opened. A figure stood back in the shadows, one lovely, tapering claw on the doorjamb.
Oh, it was impossible.
“Talia?”
“Aktriel?”
“Yes.” His response was so automatic that it required no thought. Aktriel was his real name, and he was a Department of Defense information officer. After pilot training, his work had been involved in the issuance of directives and proclamations, and he’d been sent to the human world because of his writing ability and his communications skills.
As she came out into the light, the car’s horn beeped twice and it took off into the sky, turned, then raced back toward Corporation territory. For a moment, Aktriel watched it go, watched sadly, wishing that his brother would come out, understanding why he could not bear to live in the freedom of his real body even for a short time, only to have to return to that miserable thing and go back to his hellish work.
She came to him, her eyes lowered, tears flowing. He took her in his arms, and truly he was home again, and from such a far, far place. “I’d forgotten everything,” he said.
She nodded against his shoulder.
“But where’s your husband, Talia? Your family? Surely you have one. It’s been years.”
Arm in arm, they went into the dim, comfortable interior of the house. Memory flooded him as he walked into the broad central room with its white walls and sky blue ceiling, and the climbing flowers painted everywhere. His mother’s hearth was here, his father’s tall harvest boots still by the closet where he’d always kept them. Beside them, smaller, shorter boots. When he’d waded for the tender swabe, he’d worn them.
“Do you still farm?”
“It will always be a farm.”
“Of course.” The Union’s goal of environmental balance meant that changing land use patterns was not done without major reason.
She took his hand. “Do you want me?”
He threw his arms around her, felt her heart beating against his. This love—how had he ever managed to leave it? She was his dear, dear one, the alpha and omega of his soul. When he could have farmed here forever and never left her side, why had he ever gone?
Then he remembered his little Kelsey and proud, strong Nick, children of two worlds. His kids, and they were out there on the front line with their mom, and if he stayed here they would be abandoned.
It was as hard a moment as he had ever known. The beauty of his wife was stunning, her scales so tiny and so pale that she looked like a doll, her hair a wisp of delicate white smoke around her head, her eyes bluer than a fine earth sky, and deeper than the deepest ocean.
How he loved this woman, his friend of his youth and childhood, his dear companion.
But there were vows of the lips and vows of the blood, and his vow to those children on one-moon earth was a vow of the blood.
“I’m so glad it’s over,” she said. She gazed into his eyes. The Corporation seraph were remembered by man as nephilim, as archons, as demons. Mankind called Union folk angels or daikini, sky dancers.
“I’m glad it’s over, too.”
“But you sigh, husband.”
He drew her close to him. These were simple houses, a central great room, with kitchen, dining, and storage in one wing and sleeping quarters in the other. They had been living in these houses forever, almost literally. They had no age, nothing here did. The Union was with God. There was nothing to count.
But he had forgotten how good a woman’s hair could smell, sprinkled as hers was with the dust of flowers. It fell, sometimes, on that brilliant, glowing brow, that was almost as soft as human skin. She was almost as beautiful as Brooke, really, but the truth was that even to seraph, the humans were incredibly beautiful. It was why Corporation types had gone to rape them in the first place. It was why Unionists cherished and protected them as best they could. There was something about the humans that was close to God, very close, and you felt toward them both a desire to protect and a desire to worship.
Kelsey, Nick, Brooke. His buddy Matt. Cigars and absinthe. The fun of it all, of being in the human form, of looking like them and being able to kiss human lips and walk their pretty streets, to look up into the sacred blue of their skies, to lift his face to clean rain and listen to wind in the night, to watch TV, to go to the movies and eat popcorn, to feel warm human hands on his human skin, to sink into the dark of her.
“You’re far away,” Talia said.
“I’m just in shock. Seeing you again. Remembering you. Realizing—oh, my Talia, all that I’ve forgotten.” He took her again, held her close. “All that I’ve missed.”
She saw the truth, though. She knew him so well. They had been children together, born in the same basket, their eggs warmed by the same egg ladies. Their families had entwined their destinies long before they were
