The stars were glittering through the trees as Frede and I lay side by side, sweaty and relaxed, and watched the moon rise over the sawtooth silhouette of the mountains. It was a tiny moon, far and cold and bleak, hardly throwing any light at all onto the wide, silent landscape.
“What are you thinking about?” Frede whispered to me.
I shrugged my bare shoulders. “Nothing.”
“Nothing, hell. You were thinking about her, weren’t you? The woman you’re promised to.”
There was no point in denying it. “Yes,” I breathed.
“While we were doing it, too?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” she said.
“Good?”
“They don’t tell you in training, Orion, but it’s not smart to make friends. Not among soldiers. Don’t get yourself emotionally tangled. Even if we live through this, they’re just going to pop us back in the freezers for retraining. When we come out we’ll be assigned to other partners.”
“Do they wipe your memories when you’re in cryosleep?”
“Sometimes,” Frede said. “Depends. Mostly they just lay new training on you, add new data on the next mission.”
Very much as Aten did to me, I thought.
“So don’t get emotional about this,” Frede said, very matter-of-factly. “It’s not smart for soldiers to make friends.”
Her tone of voice was so flatly unemotional that I wondered how certain Frede was about what she was telling me. She sounded like someone trying to convince herself.
I lay silent beside her for a long while. Then Frede slid a hand along my thigh.
“Ready for more?” she whispered.
I was, and so was she.
Afterward, I idly asked, “What happens when a soldier gets pregnant?”
She was silent for a moment, then replied softly, “That never happens, Orion. We’re all sterilized. For a soldier, sex is just a way of letting off steam. We’ll never have children.”
And for the soldiers’ masters, I knew, sex was a way of maintaining their army’s aggressive/protective instincts. I remembered the bitter words of an old man who had been a storyteller, blinded by Agamemnon after the siege of Troy: “Lower than slaves, that’s what we are, Orion. Vermin under their feet. Dogs. That’s how they treat us.”
I shook my head. Dogs are allowed to breed, at least.
I slept that night, curled up with Frede. And dreamed.
I could not tell if it was truly a dream or one of the Golden One’s communications. Often Aten or one of the other Creators would summon me out of space-time to some other place in the continuum to speak to me, to give me orders, or to berate my performance.
In this dream—if a dream it was—none of the Creators appeared. I was alone, walking on the hard-packed sand of a wide white beach, breaking surf hissing and booming as the waves ran up to lap my booted feet, a hot sun burning in a sky of molten bronze.
At the edge of the sand was a line of tangled bushes, some of them bearing flowers of red and blue. And beyond them, the stumps of buildings, looking like candles that had burned down almost to their ends, melted and blackened. Ancient buildings. Somehow I knew that they had been abandoned for untold ages. Abandoned, just as I was.
A voice called to me. I did not hear the voice, I felt it in my mind. It did not call me by name, it did not even use words. But I sensed a presence that was reaching out to me, touching me mentally, examining me. I felt an intelligence, a curiosity—and then a loathing, fear and anger and disgust all mixed together. A rejection. The presence in my mind disappeared, winked out as suddenly and completely as a dolphin diving beneath the waves.
I stood alone on that distant beach and felt a yearning, a desperate desire for understanding, a sadness about who I was and what I was, a hollowness at the core of my existence.
“Anya!” I cried out. “Anya, where are you?”
No answer. The surf rolled in. The wind blew in my face. The sun beat down on me. For all I could tell, I was alone on that dream beach, alone on that planet, alone in the universe.