I had been the apple of my father’s eye, the treasure of his hopes and now it was all ashes. Burned by panic stricken villagers as I stumbled blindly away into the bush, choking on my own blood. Ebola had come to our place and I was glad… glad that the others would no longer ridicule me for not being a man when I knew they were right.

I didn’t know why I was crying, maybe it was grief for myself because I was sure I was dying, maybe it was anger at my parents… not so much at them as at the culture that ensured they could never accept me.

I wanted to go away, so badly…but my family needed me. On my frail 10 year old shoulders lay the legacy of my line. I could never manage to tell them that I would not be the father of the next generation… Never had the courage to tell them I was their daughter.

Now none of that mattered.

Everyone I had ever known was dead or dying and I was going to join them.

I wanted to do it on my own terms. My parents were dead, my sisters were dead, the entire village was dead or dying.

There was no one left to care.

90 years later

I awoke from my flashback/nightmare once more, sheets sticking to me as I tried to recover my presence in the moment. That had been 90 years ago and it had never lost its power to bring me to a horrified awakeness…

It had been worse since Absalom died. We had been so certain we would live for an eternity when the Phage came and took almost everyone with sudden shocking finality.

For some reason the antibodies generated by Ebola survivors(any variety) resisted the phage and we survived… a bare few thousand…

Enough.

Enough to ensure the salvage of all but a very few backups. Most of humanity would be back when we finished growing their clones to the appropriate neural maturity. You can’t download an adult mind into a child body, the brain simply isn’t well enough developed to get a complete read. You can’t download a child’s body into an adult brain either, the individual winds up with fairly severe negative effects in many ways, emotional and physical.

As a result our children remained in their storage, dormant while the world slowly regrew itself. Early on we had made the commitment to each other that everyone who could be restored would be. They would be missing whatever time had happened since their last backup but in most cases that was a mercy.

Who wants to remember the world dying? I would love to scrub it from my brain if it didn’t mean that I would lose the last of my love, our very last days we would ever have together.

Absalom had been one of the ones whose backups were destroyed. There was only the first one, taken long before we met when he first emerged from his Amish community and accepted the nanos that would grant him endless life and perfect health.

Long before the Mercy Corps finally overcame the straggling remnants of deliberately primitive and murderous religious fanatics to help the last of them survive an epidemic disease that had been cured everywhere else decades before.

My mind flew back over the years to that summer in Provence. I was just 23 and still learning to enjoy being free, being myself. Learning to enjoy the sun upon skin that I was finally happy to show the world.

It had taken 13 long years to become just a little less fragile, a little less wounded. To grow into myself. No they didn’t force me to grow up as the wrong gender, that would have been cruel and cruelty in any form is not something our society will allow any more.

At my young age the change was actually fairly simple and they did it as soon as I was healed and they could be certain. By 11 I was complete and soon to embark on the travails of puberty. It took years for me to be able to put aside the burqa though, the role of women in the sick society of my father had been beaten into me so thoroughly that as soon as I realized I was now properly female I demanded the garment.

Over the years I had progressed to a less obscuring burqa, then just the hijab and all skin covered. By the time I entered college I was almost comfortable wearing mid length skirts and was even daring sleeveless tops.

By graduation I could manage shorts and a tank top and here I was now celebrating my first postgrad degree with a well-deserved summer off and sunning myself in a bikini. Not in public, I was still far too self-conscious for that… but it was nice to feel the sun upon my skin and to see how the uncovered skin darkened a little, leaving slightly lighter areas where the cloth had covered me.

Wildflowers nodded at me as the breeze ruffled through the meadow where I lay and caused the vines up the hills to voice a rustling pleasure. I was so relaxed that I barely even noticed a car pulling up in front of the cottage I had rented just down the hillside.

Even less did I notice the soft tread that approached me… at least until a voice that scraped the edges of my world with a pleasant burr sounded from a few meters away.

“I’m sorry to bother you but I’m looking for Kadijah? I wasn’t given a last name…”

“Nor will you be. I have no ancestors, I am simply who I am. Kadijah.”

I propped myself on one elbow, shading my eyes with the other hand to see a man with an oddly flat wide brimmed hat and rough but clean dungarees and shirt. They looked like he had made them himself and not well.

“We are the same then. I too have no ancestors, no surname to lay a burden upon me. The burden of my given name is enough.”

And your name is?” I arched an eyebrow at him. Strange how I wasn’t having my normal reaction to men… I wasn’t scrambling to cover myself, not trying to hide behind my clothes or my hair….

“Absalom”.

He gave nothing more and his face was equally silent.

“That is a name I have not heard before. What burden lies upon it that you find so heavy?”

“Probably something like yours…. Although to be fair mine is a dishonorable weight and yours is one of glory.”

I repeated the arch of an eyebrow. I knew full well where my name came from and I had discovered that the woman whose name I took was so much more than my father had taught me…

“Kadijah, first wife of the prophet, the mother of Islam. She gave women power over their own lives when they had none.”

“Well you know your Qur’an…”

“And the Torah, and the bibles… all of them. The Bhagavad Gita, the Books of the Dead, Tibetan and Egyptian. I have studied all of the Holy Books and yet… there is just one person my research led me to, one who could perhaps share my… rootlessness.”

By now I had sat up, drawing my knees up to my chest.

“How could I possibly share your experience?”

“I am… was… Amish. I grew up in much the same way, no technology that wasn’t muscle powered, no medicine, nothing but faith… when faith was not enough I left and found out just how strange and wonderful the world is. It was my Rumspringa, my time to discover my path.”

“And what did you find on your path?”

“Loneliness… joy, pain, grief…. An endless desire to serve others. And I found you, finally.”

“What were you seeking?”

“Happiness… peace… someone like me in a world that has no room for wounded souls. Just… something... someone… who would be able to understand me.”

I rose from my position and began walking toward the house.

After a few yards I turned to the man who still stood there looking lost.

“Are you not hungry?”

He came to himself with a visible start.

“Hungry?” His question was betrayed by a rumble from his midsection.

“Where have you come from?”

“Kentucky.”

“Where is this Ken-Tuck-Eee?”

“North American Union. Mountain country.”

“Do you like it there?”

“It is… has become… home. Beautiful green mountains, the oldest range on earth. It suits me.”

“I would like to see this place.” I shocked myself a bit with that one. Why was I being so forward with this man I had just met?

“We can be there in two hours… If you want…”

“2 hours?”

“Well we have to road out for a good 30 minutes and the same at the other end. My car is LEO rated so a suborbital hop is no problem.”

For some reason going to these green mountains with this man didn’t make me nervous. I knew somehow that he would not make advances I didn’t invite.

“First we eat. Then we go to these green mountains you speak of. Do you mind a Croque Messier?”

“A what?”

“A sandwich. I will show you.” I walked down the hill toward the cottage and noticed I was deliberately swaying my hips a little. I could feel his eyes following me and my skin heated where I knew his gaze was drawn, bringing up the old need to cover myself. I managed to restrain the familiar impulse, leaving my blanket and wrap where they lay.

The walk back to the cottage seemed to take forever. I could hear the soft footfalls behind me, the rustle of cloth that told me he had retrieved the items I left behind. Somehow that simple gesture renewed my determination to build bridges with others. I had left the burqa behind but the weight of my past still hung on me.

Neither of us spoke as I made our sandwiches. He thanked me when I sat his down in front of him and we ate, still in silence.

I had no idea what to say and I was beginning to realize how much he was also robbed of words. I examined his face, the muscles in his jaw bunching against a faint stubble as he chewed. He seemed to be all sharp angles, the only smoothness where living had worn his skin to the look of soft leather. An untidy mop of shockingly dark hair dangled a curl onto his forehead like an answer searching for its question.

When we finished he went to wash the dishes without asking and I picked up my wrap and blanket. As I climbed the stairs to pack a few things I marveled at myself, that I had not hidden myself, that I could actually be around a man and not be afraid… there was no understanding within me of how this could be but I was willing to see where this lead.

13 years is a very long time to be so utterly alone in a world that held no place for me.

When I came down everything was washed and dried, back in its place. Absalom was sitting where he had been, examining the play of sunlight and shadow from the windows. He said nothing still, simply took my 2 heaviest cases and walked out to put them in the boot of his car. I took a few moments to ensure I had forgotten nothing and closed the door behind me, the charming little cottage becoming a toy in the rear mirrors.

The silence was comforting somehow, as though we simply didn’t need to speak. I will admit to a little bit of a squeak when he abruptly cut in the boosters and pointed the nose of his car straight up as soon as we left the ground, wings fully retracted. I’d been on commercial suborbital hops and they were considerably more gentle than this!

I wasn’t frightened, for some reason I couldn’t seem to summon up that feeling just now. What was left was a thrill as we rose above the atmosphere and transitioned to more level flight for a few moments before cutting thrust. The thrill of microgravity followed. I have never been able to be like some of the business travelers I see, to me being weightless is like a childhood dream of flying.

I grinned over at Absalom and he returned the expression, equal delight obvious on his features. He slowly rolled the car so we could see Earth speeding by over our heads and we drank in the sight until he had to roll back for reentry. The slightest bump signified the release of the tail assembly so it could slow our speed without the fiery reentry that used to plague spaceflight.

Things got a little bumpy for a moment as we entered the atmosphere and began to fall into thicker and thicker air, slowing progressively until we were barely doing 250 knots and the flight systems crawled the wings out for a little more lift. The wheels touched pavement with a feather kiss, barely noticeable amongst the sounds of the car reconfiguring itself to surface mode.

We were on a small two lane road, surrounded by shockingly green rolling hills. The wrinkles of mountains seemed blue in the distant air, inviting and brooding at the same time. The brooding seemed to lessen as we made our way out of the foothills and the mountains showed themselves to be just as vibrant.

Soon we were leaving pavement for a gravel road which turned into a dirt track and then just… ended. The whine of the car’s turbine dopplered down into silence and the majesty of forest rushed in to fill the void.

I sat for a moment, drinking it all in and breathing the air, redolent with the scent of wildflowers. There was no sign of human habitation other than the remnant of road and the car we sat in. Absalom came around to my side and opened the door, offering his hand to assist me out. I didn’t need it but I took the hand anyway and felt a little thrill as our skin touched for the first time.

“So you live in the forest?”

“Yes… and no…” He lifted my bags from the boot and walked into the forest, following a barely visible track that looked more like a game trail than something humans used. I followed, noticing how he left almost no trace of his passing and being equally careful to cause no disturbance, skills I had not used since childhood.

After a few minutes we broke out of the forest into a small meadow. The far end seemed to vanish into nothingness and a babble of water collected in little rocky pools, stepping down in multiple small cataracts before rushing to its freedom in the misty air.

I stood rooted to the spot, unable to move or speak. How could this be? How could I have painted this very scene over a decade before? As crude as my skills had been then I could remember the mental image, the dream from which I had drawn it.

“Kadijah?” That soft burr caressed my ears again and broke the spell, allowed me to move.

“It is a place of great beauty…” For some reason I dissembled, not wanting to share just then.

“It is.” He agreed and turned to walk into the forest on a slightly different trail. Within a few feet he vanished behind a screen of greenery and I joined him to see a set of gnarled looking wooden stairs that looked almost as though they had grown that way.

“I will show you the rest shortly but I thought you might want to settle in first.” I followed him up those tricky stairs. The footing was just fine but the eyes blurred things, made it look like the few visible steps of the untidy spiral were all there was.

Suddenly the stairs debouched into a large open space but this time it was obvious the trees had been coached to grow into a deck with railings and even benches all made of living wood, branches growing from it and bursting with life. Above us graceful arches of living wood formed the bones of structures which were linked by hidden aerial bridges, a cluster around us and another above.

“Upper deck or lower?”

I took a moment to consider. Being here in the canopy was wonderful but I could see clear sunlight slanting onto what looked like another of those grown decks.

“Upper I think… I am enjoying the kiss of the sun.” I was glad of my dark skin right then since it made my intense blush at thinking what or who else I might enjoy kissing my skin a little less visible.

He seemed not to notice as he led me up into the sunlight and into one of the deceptively diminutive looking structures. It was simple inside in a comfortable homespun way. A large and comfortable looking bed anchored one wall and sunlight spilled into the room through a transparent roof. There was no ornamentation, just that supplied by nature putting forth shoots from the living trees which formed its bones.

A door on one side opened into an adjoining structure which turned out to be a luxurious bathroom. The tub was easily deep enough to be covered up to my chin and large enough for two. Everything was formed to look like it had simply grown that way, even the fixtures were camouflaged.

“This is magnificent. Thank you Absalom.”

“My pleasure.” He seemed to want to say something more for a split second before he turned to stride out onto the deck.

A few moments later, having taken care of the necessary, I followed him out onto the deck. The sun was burning golden almost directly overhead and it was quite warm but the treetops rustled around us as the wind combed through leafy tresses and provided a breath of coolness.

“It is very warm, would you care for a swim before I make lunch?” He faced out over the railing, his boot propped on the lower rail.

I took a moment to admire the way his figure cut against the green. His clothes might not fit that well but there was no disguising the physique underneath. Strong shoulders tapered down to a narrow waist and hips and I blushed a little as I realized I was noticing how powerful his legs and butt looked, a little flash of what he could do with those muscles running through my mind.

“Will you swim with me?”

“If you wish. I was prepared to give you privacy if you wanted it.” He didn’t turn around but a little muscle at the corner of his jaw flexed.

I had to take a moment to steel myself. I have never so much as had a friend and yet I was incredibly attracted to this man who seemed almost as damaged as I was. I wanted him to swim with me… wanted to see his body without the rough homespun cover that blurred his sensuality, muted it… And yet I was afraid.

Afraid of him, afraid of me… Just afraid. The same fear that had kept me buried in my studies, in a way the fear that was responsible for how far I had come from the illiterate 10 year old fleeing flame and terror.

Somehow I had been able to accept Absalom’s invitation, to come to this magical place… to begin to overcome the fear. Maybe I was healing a little bit?

“Yes, I would like a swim.” I stepped toward him, caught his arm and pulled him around to face me. “I would like a swim with you.”

He tried to keep the look of relief out of his face but I could tell somehow that beneath that impassive exterior lay as much turmoil as within my own heart.

“10 minutes then, I’ll meet you at the bottom of the stairs.” He turned and made his way deliberately toward the stairs, vanishing into the greenery with almost no sound.

15 minutes later I stared into the full length mirror in the bathroom with a critical eye. I had taken the time to apply just the tiniest bit of waterproof makeup to my eyes and lips and to don the bikini I had been wearing earlier.

I was on the bony side of thin, fried eggs for breasts, hipbones jutting through my skin. I had never been able to eat well, the guilt always overcame me. That was so much stronger than the religious thing…

Starvation leaves marks upon the psyche even if the rare person manages to weather it without physical damage. Physically I was perfectly healthy, the deficiencies of my childhood having been repaired with no visible trace.

Emotionally? Before Ebola destroyed my father’s culture the damage was long done. I had shared most of my food with my younger sisters until they died… The weight of being able to eat my fill was so hard to bear when faced with such horror.

I tried to eat… tried to force myself to snack between meals. I knew I was 15 kilos underweight and on my frame that translated to looking like Aeon Flux from the animated series. Sharp angles, bony hips, ribs defined as visible slashes. Strings of muscle and tendon clinging to bone accented the darkness of my skin.

He couldn’t be attracted to my body. Everything about me was unattractive, ugly even. For years my therapists had told me this was untrue, that I was in fact beautiful. I will admit that everything seems to be where it should be and it is quite symmetrical. Since bilateral symmetry seems to be one of the major factors in whether a person is considered attractive I suppose I had to grant them that much.

Still, I was not blind. The women I saw in advertisements, even the women I saw on the street were something I was not. Rounded curves where I had flat sharpness, faces soft while my own was made of angles and planes. Hair that was so shiny and glossy and entirely unlike the tightly kinky hair that seemed to want to stand straight out from my head in every direction.

Oh well, I did not become myself to be beautiful. It was a matter of survival, do or die. Well actually die again since I’d already done it 3 times. I had not understood at the time what they were telling me. To my very limited knowledge dead was dead and there was no coming back from it. I understand now that they were telling me I had been so sick I very nearly died and was clinically dead for several minutes each time.

So much about the world had been beyond my grasp then. I did not even have the most basic framework, the cultural grounding to understand. In many ways I was like a time traveler might be if they journeyed into the future. Until I was 10 I had lived in a world straight out of the 7th century. No electricity, none of the comforts of modern life. The only modern things were guns and a few satphones scattered amongst the warriors and to me they were magic.

Something so basic as taking a bath had been wondrous and new. To turn a handle and see the water come spilling out, hot or cold as I chose, filling a large basin that was made of… something… The smells of the soaps and the foamy caress of something called bubble bath. The sheer pleasure of being able to lie there in water so hot I could barely stand it until it cooled if I wished.

Then I had been guided, dripping and with bits of foam clinging to me, over to a small room where the same hot water poured out from every direction and overhead. Standing there in hot rain while the water scoured my skin with needles of fine spray made me begin to understand how much there was yet to learn.

Now it was again time for me to learn, to discover an unknown world. I slowly descended stairs that I had realized were in fact living wood, marveling at the time this must have taken, the infinite care.

Absalom rose from his seat, what looked like a fallen log until the eye traced it and discovered that it too was living wood.

“How long?” I gestured around and above.

“58 years.” He turned and walked down another invisible path into earth and living stone, another staircase that looked like the stone had simply eroded into the shapes needed. 25 or so meters down the stairway abruptly opened onto a large, airy looking space which looked out from the cliff face and into soaring emptiness, the wall of green which marked the other side of the valley in the distance.

Part of the brook that babbled its way to freedom had been channeled down here to fill a large pool and then on over the edge, not trapped but dallying for a while in cool rocks and vibrant greens. Everything looked as though it had eroded into its current shape.

“This is…” I was unable to complete the thought.

“As you dreamed it?”

His words shot through me, a thrill up my spine and over my scalp.

“I know because I dreamed it too. I read the description you gave in your story and it was like you wrote my dream. I found… made… this place from my own dreams long before then.”

He fell silent for a moment.

“I dreamed you…”

I was shaking now. Everything, even this moment, just as I had dreamed it so long ago, so many times through the years.

“I… You… I never told anyone, never wrote about you… that part of my dream. I could never see your face, only ton chapeau… your hat.”

“I could only see your hair…”

I self-consciously touched the unruly puffball that stood out from my scalp at least 20 centimeters. It sprang immediately back into shape as I let my hand fall.

“I think it is beautiful.” He cut off my attempted protest. “I think you are beautiful.”

I had no idea how to respond to that.

“I’m sorry…” he looked sheepishly at me through a mop of hair. “I shouldn’t have said that…”

“Its ok. I wanted to say the same to you.”

“Me?” The idea was clearly as foreign to him as it was to me.

“In my mind you have always been a part of this place. Perhaps the most important part. It is not complete without you.”

For a moment he stood beside me, looking out toward the green.

“You were just 15 when I first read your dream. It took 8 years for me to get the courage to approach you.” He turned toward me and caught my gaze with his eyes. For a moment I simply stared. One eye was grey, the other blue.

“When I read your thesis I knew I had to come. I think I can build your picoplane projectors.”

So much to take in in such a short time… and now this final piece of the dream… It was almost too much. There was no way the universe was this beneficent.

“I feel like I am still dreaming.”

“If you are I’m glad you dreamed me. Or maybe glad I dreamed you, I don’t know… it is surreal. I know that I am happy to share this dream, finally.”

“Je suis heureux aussi…”

“What?”

“Sorry… English is still a little foreign to me. I am glad too.”

I turned back toward the pool. “Shall we enjoy the water?”

No reply but he had his shirt off in record time and his trousers followed. I could just see him out of the corner of my eye and was reluctant to look openly at him so I slipped down a gentle incline into the pool, gasping a little as the icy water embraced me.

With my head just above the water the pool seemed to simply disappear into space at its outer edge, the ripples I caused vanishing into air. I heard him ease into the water behind me and waited while he swam over to stand on a hidden ledge under the water and prop his elbows on the liquid line.

The water was crystal clear and I could see now that he was wearing very tight swim briefs. The musculature I had admired earlier was even more defined and suddenly the water wasn’t so cold. I joined him looking over the edge. From here I could see that the edge of the pool was maybe 4 meters back from the cliff face and there was another level several meters below. One more validation of the dream…

“You were focusing on using hypersolid holography.”

I wasn’t sure where he was going with this. “I could not find a way to generate the density required.”

“It has to be spread spectrum. Your gamma ray projection has to be modulated with far infrared holographic pulses. That gives the density required and results in a cycle time of just over 3 Terahetz. I’m not sure about the yield, the math gets beyond me at that point.”

“9.38256% efficiency.” This was it! “I’ve never been able to get above .000001 percent…”

The implications of this spread out before me, a vista even more dazzling than the one my eyes beheld. This would provide the power needed for a growing human species just building its first arcologies on the moon and mars, the prospectors who were slowly spreading through the Belt. It would make fusion power look bulky and clunky by comparison.

“Kadijah?” He touched me gently on my arm, his finger a torch.

“Oui?”

“You’ve been frozen like that for over an hour, you have to be cold.”

“Je ne sens plus mes pieds. Je pense que je besoin d'aide.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand?”

“My feet, I cannot feel them. Help please?”

He swept me up into him arms and carried me out of the water as though I weighed nothing. His torso against me blazed with heat and I suddenly began to shiver uncontrollably.

“Si Froid…”I was just barely able to focus as he gently carried me through a rock passage and into a bathroom. Like everything else it had been made to look like natural formations of stone. He gently laid me in a huge tub and began running water that felt as though it would scald me.

“Trop chaud! Il me brûler!”

At his look I had to take a moment to translate. “The water is too hot, it will burn me!”

“The water is not hot. It is 87 degrees. Any hotter would burn your skin. I will warm it up gradually as your core temperature rises. Do you think you can stand it?”

I managed to shiver out a nod.

“I’m going to get you something to warm you from the inside, ok?” I heard him but I was not really able to respond just yet.

A moment later he was back with a steaming cup of something. I still could not manage to grasp it although the shivering had eased considerably. I lay there and allowed him to bring the cup to my lips, slurping a tiny bit of viscous scalding liquid and allowing it to explode across my tongue. Potatoes and… something else I could not identify. A little like cucumber but not quite…

I must have looked surprised because he chuckled at me.

“Borage. The blue flowers with the fuzzy leaves in the meadow. They like direct sunlight. I didn’t use the flowers in this because they can act as a mild laxative but the leaves have other medicinal effects.”

He proffered the cup and I took another sip. After a few moments of this the cup was half empty and he ran hot water into the tub for a minute until it was just at the level I could bear. The shivers had finally eased enough to allow me to hold the cup on my own and I continued to sip.

As I gradually finished the rapidly cooling soup the cycle of adding hot water went on twice more and the shivering finally eased completely.

“I did not know you could eat Starflower. I am afraid you saw the limit of my cooking skill back in Provence…”

“My sister Hannah taught me. She left on Rumspringa 4 years before I did and did not come back. I missed her so badly and could not understand… until I finally got to Normandy. She moved me in with her and out of the student hostel where I was staying and that night I discovered one of the reasons she had not returned.”

“One of the reasons?”

He chuckled at me again. “Well ok, two of the reasons. Her wife Angelique and their beautiful little daughter Yvette.”

“So Amish do not accept the LGBT?”

“They do not accept many things. Even now they will not accept most medicine, including the nanos.” Sadness creased his features. “Last year my youngest sister died of old age. She was the last of those I knew in my youth and even though I had not seen her for almost 70 years it was… difficult for me.”

“I am sorry for you. I know what it is to be alone…” My eyes prickled and I felt tears run down my face. For a moment I was lost in the blood and flame, the screaming…

“I do not want to be alone, not any more.” The tears came fast and hot.

“You are not alone. You never have to be alone again if you do not want to be…” There was a hopeful note in his voice and I finally began to understand how very much alike we truly were.

To Be Continued…