So Long Been Dreaming (29 page)

Hava frowns at me. But he offers his hand. So I take my brother’s hand and we approach.

“You look so much alike,” the woman says. “You must be brother and sister.”

Up close, they don’t smell like Lopo. They smell like our knives after the rain has washed them clean.

The Lopo on the ground watch us with hatred in their small white eyes. We have killed many of them. They recognize us.

Hava looks at them once, then up at the woman. “What are you?”

They haven’t taken our weapons. They called us children, though we have been without parents since our tenth stride across the sands of life. Maybe they have come to steal our forest from us, to steal our beaches and our near waters, like the Lopo stole our villages.

“What are you?” Hava asks again, louder.

“We are your fathers and mothers,” the woman says.

“Our fathers and mothers are dead,” Hava says. He points to the Lopo. “They killed them. They came from across the waters and wiped the shores of our homes. They let our parents’ blood run with the waters and the rain. Is that what you are here to do?”

My brother’s voice is a kitten mew compared to the smooth strength of the woman’s. She is tall enough to pick him up by the back of his neck like the big cats do with their little ones. Yet Hava doesn’t waver. And I grip his hand to feel him, not for him to feel me.

“No,” the woman says. “You were lost for too long. Now we’ve remembered.”

“How is it that you speak our language?” I ask. “How do your boats fly? Where do you come from, if not from across the waters?”

“There is too much to say,” the woman says, like a sigh. She holds her beetle head in her hand. It is hollow inside, and padded with a strange cloth, one that shines like the moon on the waves. She says, “You must come with us now, children.”

“Come?” Hava says. He lets go of my hand.

“Yes,” the woman says, and lifts her chin.

The other beetle people start to move in, silent like a footstep on the sand.

I see the Lopo sitting on the ground, weaponless. Overtaken. So swiftly, like we have never been able to do for all our attacks and killings. The Lopo just kept coming from across the waters, like fishes spawned from an endless egg.

But now they sit, and can do nothing.

The beetle people are many. Soon they will block our sight of the forest’s edge, where Umeneni and the others wait.

But now Hava raises his gun and that is the signal, and all of our twenty soldiers attack.

Though we fire our guns and stab with our knives, the beetle people do not bleed. There are enough of them to keep the Lopo encircled and still bat us away. They flick us away as though their arms are tails and we are nothing but rodents on their backs.

Soon we are all on the ground beneath the daylight of the inbetween creatures. I ache but I don’t know how I was hit. I remember lightning, though there is no storm, and the sound of it was louder than a summershock. Beside me, Umeneni cradles his wrist in his other hand. It is broken. Some of us cry, little voices in the silence.

But not my brother. He kneels on the ground looking up at the woman. And the lines of his spirit make marks down his cheeks, in red.

The woman’s eyes glow like stars.

“You must understand,” she says. “You cannot stay here. This world now belongs to the mothers and fathers of these people.” She points to the Lopo.

“You say you are our mothers and fathers,” Hava spits out. “Then you should help us kill the Lopo. This is
our
village. This is
our
forest. The sands are
our
sands.” He drives his fist into the earth. It leaves a mark.

“No,” the woman says. “You never should’ve been here.”

She speaks our language, yet I cannot understand her words as they are pressed side by side.

“Where else would we be?” my brother asks.

They have taken our weapons. There is nothing to do but sit.

“You need to be with us,” the woman says. “We are of the same blood. Look in my face. The fathers and mothers of the Lopo will come. This is their world now. We were fighting, and had forgotten, but now the fighting is over and we have found you. And you cannot stay here anymore.”

“Why not?” Hava says. Almost shouts. For this woman’s words are like the wind. As it passes our ears, it makes a noise and yet we cannot hold it.

“We have given this world to the fathers and mothers of the Lopo,” the woman says. Her face pinches as if she tastes something bitter, and she looks to the side, toward another beetle person. Not one of them has removed their insect heads. Only her. “The Lopo will never destroy any more of our villages. I come from a village too, but one that sits among the stars. My brothers and sisters –” She motions to the other beetle people who stand so still, and do not bleed or speak. “They were born among the stars. You were not meant to be born here. Your ancestors and the ancestors of these Lopo fought, and fell to this world, and were forgotten amidst the fighting. We fought as well, as you fight them here. But now it is over and now the Lopo are ours. Here they will all be kept.”

“But this is
our
village,” Hava insists. I can see in the woman’s unblinking eyes that somehow she does not understand us either, though we speak the same words. “You talk nonsense!” Hava says. “How are we to believe these words? They are written in the air.”

“It’s impossible to sit among the stars,” I say. “Our blood is of the sand. We walk upon the sand and when we can no longer walk, the waters will wash us away.”

But our words fall like crystal grains through our fingers, weightless against these insect kin and their daylight boats.

Another beetle figure steps up and removes the shell of its head. Underneath he is a man with the strong bones of my father. His hair is the dark red of a sunset, like Umeneni’s. His face is bare and there is a scar above his right eye that shines like a blade, not like the puckered pink of healing skin.

And his eyes are Hava’s eyes. Under the bright lights that push back the night, I can see the spirit of blood in his gaze.

This man says to my brother, “There are more years on this world than what passes when we are among the stars. Do you understand?”

“We will understand if you speak with words that stay together,” my brother says. He points to the man’s face. “How is it that you have the eyes of blood?”

I do not know why, but I begin to shake.

The man looks down at Hava. He reaches to his hip and I see a knife there, but it is long and glowing, like his eyes. Like Hava’s eyes. Red.

He pulls it from his side and I am too far from my brother to warn him, or protect him, and Hava does not move. He watches the blade. I want to cry out. Umeneni lets go of his broken wrist and grabs my hand. He won’t let me run ahead again. There is nothing in my grasp but the earth, nothing to fling at these beetle people but my words which they do not understand.

The red-haired man crouches in front of my brother. His black body shines with the light of the false day. He turns his knife blade down and sticks it in the ground. The red glow pools on the brown, as though the earth did bleed.

“You lead your warriors,” he says to Hava, “like I lead mine. So now you must lead them to their true home. It is my home too.”

My brother is silent for a long moment, looking at the ground. His hair falls forward like a wing and covers his eyes. He has led us through so many battles with the Lopo and never feared. Now he puts his finger into the earth and draws. I step closer to see, but only as far as Umeneni’s grip allows. I will not let go. My brother draws a familiar pattern in the earth. It is our forest, the edges of the trees, our shore and the waters.

“This is our home,” Hava says, looking up now. Red with strength. “We will not leave it.”

I feel Umeneni’s hand, how warm it is, surrounding mine.

I feel all the blood of our children, the children we may yet have, waiting to be born but afraid to be spilled. I feel it as though it is growing from the roots of the trees and twining through my bones from the planting of my heels on the ground.

Then the red-eyed man takes the flat of his blade and wipes it across the lines my brother made.

Once.

The blood path of our close futures, gone.

I cannot breathe. There is nothing but silence. Nothing but the smooth step that treads behind the blood. Not even Hava speaks. He is a small body beside the large black shell of this beetle man. He never looked small beside the Lopo.

Around us, blazing with light, the inbetween creatures open up their bellies. Some of the other beetle people begin to walk inside. Most of them surround us and the woman behind the red-eyed man points into the belly, where it shines an unnatural blue.

And I feel it as I feel Umeneni’s hand around mine.

My children will never know the warmth of sand beneath their feet.

“Enough of this,” the beetle man says. “You are children of our ancestors and you are coming home.”

And with the tip of his red knife, he carves it deep into the earth.

After spending most of his life in Los Angeles,
Greg van Eekhout
now lives in the suburban deserts near Phoenix, Arizona. His stories have appeared in
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
,
Starlight 3
,
Fantasy: The Best of 2001
,
New Skies
, and a number of other speculative short fiction venues. He maintains a website at
sff.net/people.greg
, and a frequently updated online journal at
journalscape.com/ greg
.

Native Aliens
Greg van Eekhout

1945

As Papa stands between the two rows of men holding rifles, he stands as a Dutchman. His shirt is starched white, tucked neatly into khaki trousers with creases sharp enough to cut skin. It is not especially hot today, but sweat pools under his arms and trickles down his back. The Indonesians with the guns are sweating too.

Papa’s skin is as dark as the Indonesians’, naturally dark and baked tobacco brown from years spent hammering together chicken coops and pigeon hutches in the backyard. He is a good carpenter, and people come to him for help and advice. But carpentry is not his job. He works as a bookkeeper for Rotterdamse Lloyd, the Dutch shipping company. He is a Dutchman with a Dutch job.

The men with rifles stand in two ragged rows, facing one another, before the entrance of the school where we learned our lessons, which now serves as a prison for enemies of the Indonesian revolution.

It is the imprecision of the Indonesians that angers Papa, their sloppy spacing, their relaxed and slovenly postures. They hold their guns as though they were shovels or rakes or brooms, and the Indonesians have no interest in hard work.

He recognizes almost all of them. This one sells satay in front of the train station. Papa’s money has helped him buy the shoes on his feet. Another, Rexi, has actually been in our home. When he was a young boy, not so long ago, he slipped on the rocks by the river and hit his head, and when we told Papa of this, Papa carried him in his arms and laid him down in the sitting room until the boy’s grandfather came for him. He has sipped water from our well, and now he waits for Papa with a gun slung lazily over his shoulder.

A hand shoves Papa in the back, and Papa, slightly built, pitches forward and goes down to one knee in the dirt. He uses this opportunity to mouth a very quick prayer before being yanked roughly back to his feet.

The man who pulls Papa up is one of those he does not know. He is one of those who pounded on our door in the night and demanded we all assemble in the front room of our sprawling house built on the hill. “Are these the only men?” he asks, indicating Papa and me.

Mama explains that, yes, we are the only men. Ferdinand remains in Tokyo, where he has mined coal for the Japanese since his unit’s capture. He mines coal no longer, though, because he was freed when the Japanese surrendered. When he is well enough to travel, he will return home. And there is Anthonie, the next eldest, but he is not here either. He is dead of tuberculosis, contracted in a jail cell of the Japanese occupation army.