First to Dance (19 page)

Dakarai looked embarrassed and then he shrugged his shoulders. “The houses all look the same to me. I’ll figure it out later. Right now I’m really hungry. Do you want to join me?”

Ayita smiled,
then turned to walk with him. Her arms were full of clothes, but she didn’t mind. When they got there, she put them down under a desk and sat down to eat with Dakarai.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do all winter,” he said. “We can’t go swimming anymore.”

“We’ll find something to do,” she said.
Maybe he’ll want to go exploring with me. We could go through the park, and…
Ayita shook her head.

“
Is something wrong?”

“No,” s
he said. “I’m fine.”

They finished eating and Ayita
led him to the house she slept in the night before. When they went inside, she looked fondly at the stairs leading down to the basement.

“What’s down there?”
Dakarai asked.

“Probably nothing,
” she said. She opened the door and went down the stairs. It was a large, empty room. Ayita closed her eyes and pictured the way the basement looked at home. Half the room was missing because it was hidden behind a wall with a secret door. She opened her eyes again. It probably looked like this at home now, too, since her room was discovered and destroyed. 

They went back upstairs and Ayita
circled the living room after setting her new clothes down on the floor.  She walked over to the fireplace and took a handful of the ashes, letting it sift out of her hand.  She thought of the book which had burned here at home.  The ashes left a dark stain on her hand and she brushed her hands together until most of it came off. Dakarai looked around a little before sitting down on the floor.  At home, that’s where the end table would be.  Ayita smiled a tightly drawn smile, then sat on the floor where the couch would be.  It felt weird to have him here in her living room. Already she mentally claimed this house as her own, and she realized that she didn’t want to share it with anyone, even Dakarai. It felt too weird to be living in Zozeis on Adonia. Her whole demeanor changed when she entered this house.

“I better figure out where I slept last night,” he said. “I don’t want to lose my belongings.”

Ayita nodded. “I’ll help you.” They walked from house to house, and whenever he saw one that he thought might be it, they went inside and checked. Most of the houses were empty but occasionally they opened a door to find several people settling in for their winter stay. On Zozeis these houses were used for two to four people each, but here on Adonia they were being filled up to twelve people per home. Finally, Dakarai found where he had slept and happily gathered up his things. He was mostly relieved to find his instrument, and he started to play a joyful song when he picked it up. Ayita smiled. “I love it when you play,” she said.

They
started walking back to her home, but Ayita took Dakarai instead to the house next door.  It was a one story house with only one bedroom. “It will be so weird to sleep here,” Dakarai said. “There is a wall over my head. I can’t see the stars. I know this happens every winter, but it still feels so strange to me.”

Ayita nodded in agreement. Everything felt strange here. She didn’t know how to interact with
Dakarai in this environment. Everywhere she turned she felt her mind being sucked back to Zozeis. It was a different mentality, and she didn’t know how to mix it with the people of Adonia.

“I’d like to go
back to the library,” she said. “Will you come with me?”

He looked oddly at her,
then agreed because he had nothing better to do.  They walked together down the same path Ayita always took to class. She felt herself pulled toward the park again and decided she should probably start walking a different way from now on. She tried to push the thought out of her mind.

Ayita felt herself coming alive again when she stepped into the room full of books
. There were so many of them, and she wanted to read them all. She wondered how many she could read before the winter was over.  Any that she didn’t read now would have to wait until next year.

Dakarai
had no interest in books. He learned how to read when he was young, thanks to Etana’s videos, but books didn’t fascinate him the way they sometimes fascinated others. He did have a journal which he wrote in a few times a year, but more often he forgot to write in it and forgot to read what he had written. He saw the joy on Ayita’s face and smiled, though. He didn’t understand her love of books, but briefly he was able to love them simply because she loved them.

As Ayita started pulling down books to see what they were about, she noticed something which she’d missed earlier
in her initial excitement. Many of these books were beginner readers and children’s books—perfect for a forgetful society that only used the winter months to learn this skill. Then she saw another detail.  Earlier when she looked at the pages of copyright information, she noticed that the books were written on Earth. Now she noticed also that they were written in years ranging from 3600-3800. Ayita remembered the photograph of Etana, taken in 3143. These books were written and published hundreds of years after that picture was taken. Someone had brought these books here long since then. Ayita wondered if it had been Etana herself. If she traveled often enough at a relativistic speed, she would have aged only months at a time while decades passed on Earth and Adonia. Maybe Etana was still alive, even now. Maybe Ayita could actually meet her someday.

Ayita didn’t notice that
Dakarai had already left the room until after she gathered a handful of books to take back and was ready to leave. She looked around but didn’t see him and she walked with the books in her arms back to her home. She took a different path this time so she wouldn’t have to walk past the park, and when she got home she took the books up to her bedroom. She sat down excitedly, ready to read, but then it was as if a cloud came over her head and she didn’t feel so excited anymore. She couldn’t bring herself to read the books here. It just didn’t feel right to be reading about Earth in her bedroom. Ayita gathered up the books again and brought them all downstairs to the basement. This building even had windows in the basement, small narrow windows up near the ceiling, and they let in plenty of light from outside.

The
room was nothing more than a big empty space, but Ayita knew approximately where her secret room would have been and where she used to sit and lie down when she was reading. She curled up in that spot with her pile of books and read.

These books took Ayita to worlds she never knew existed before,
and then she found out they didn’t. Among the books Ayita had from the library were a dictionary and several books that looked like they were about space travel and other planets. They were indeed about space travel and other planets, but there was a label on each book that, after seeing it often enough, she finally decided to look up in the dictionary.

Fiction (noun):

1. A class of literature identifiable by imaginative narration
   
2. A story that is made-up, feigned, imagined or invented
   
3. An imaginary thing or event, proposed for the purpose of argument or explanation
   

Ayita puzzled for a long time over this concept. She could hear
Aira’s voice telling her that these were books of lies, and now she realized they really were. She didn’t know what to think about that. People wrote books about things that weren’t true, and yet they were published and read on Earth anyway. On Earth it was actually okay to have a true book of lies and for everyone to know about it. The stories were fascinating, but once Ayita realized they weren’t true, she couldn’t quite bring herself to continue reading them.

Ayita gathered up the books to take them back to the library. It was getting late, and she was hungry again. She stopped next door to see if
Dakarai would join her for dinner, but he wasn’t there. She walked alone to the library where she returned the books, and then in the hallway she bumped into Ziyad.

“I wondered what happened to you!” he said. “You disappeared yesterday
and I was concerned you might get lost. I’m glad to see you found your way!”

Ayita smiled. “
Oh yes,” she said. “I just couldn’t wait to find out what these houses were like.”

“So?” he asked. “What do you think?”

“It’s…just like home,” she said.

He could see a hint of sadness on her face. “Is that a bad thing?”

“I’m not sure yet. It feels very strange.”

She asked him about their customs here and also asked about the room with
Etana’s video. He didn’t know how it got there, but he explained that because of the cold, there was not very much to do here, so frequently the children and anyone else who was interested would end up in that room watching the videos and learning to read. He didn’t know how the building had power either, nor had he previously wondered about it. It was simply something they all accepted, but Ayita wasn’t ready to accept it without understanding the facts. If that building had power, there was probably some way for the other buildings to have power as well.

Ayita
then asked if he would help her find each of the kids they worked with over the summer and encourage them especially to watch the videos each day. She suspected they might pick it up a lot faster than the other children simply because they spent time exercising their memory over the summer.

Ziyad
and Ayita ate dinner together and then Ayita walked back to her home with a new stack of books, this time books that were not labeled “fiction.”

When she got home it was
already dark out. Ayita put the books she’d collected down in the basement, but it was certainly too dark now to read. She ascended the stairs and stepped into her bedroom, closing the door behind her.  It still surprised her that the room wasn’t pitch black with the door closed and the light off.  She looked at the window and wished to cover it up so that this might feel more like home.  But did she really want that?  She wasn’t sure. 

She lay
down on her back where her bed was supposed to be and closed her eyes.  She focused on her breathing and inhaled, exhaled.  She could feel the way her body positioned on the floor and she imagined that she was in the water, floating on her back with Dakarai’s hands holding her up.  Her eyelids felt less heavy and she smiled. Then she wanted to cry again. Why did she always want to cry when she came to this room? She looked up at the window. She’d wanted a window in her room ever since she found out they existed on Earth, but now she just wanted it to be gone. It didn’t belong here, in this house.

Then Ayita could faintly hear
Dakarai playing his instrument. It was muffled by the walls, but he always played rather loudly. Ayita stood up and opened the window to let the song come in. She closed her eyes and imagined that she was back at home, under the tree.

Home.
She sighed. Where
was
home? She’d read a phrase in one of the books, which said, “home is where the heart is,” but Ayita’s heart was torn between so many different places. Her heart was beside the lake, with Dakarai. It was on Zozeis with her family, Acton, and Aira. And her heart was also the passenger of a spaceship headed for Earth.

One thing she knew for sure, this specific house was certainly
not
home. It felt like home, but it wasn’t. But that fact didn’t take away the heavy reminder that there were people on Zozeis who weren’t free to express themselves. Unless someone took action, they never would be. As Ayita pondered this, she started to realize she would never be truly satisfied with settling for a life here on Adonia. Dakarai was right—she wanted to be out there more than she wanted to be here.  If she discovered that she truly did have a way to leave this planet, then eventually, she would take it.

12

Four
days after they settled in, a second group of people showed up. A few days after that, two more groups showed up, and finally, about a week later, a fifth group of people arrived. The town started to feel more like a town, with people filling up most of the houses and regularly roaming the streets. The room full of clothes quickly emptied, and the classrooms that were previously empty were now filled up with food.

Ayita talked with
Ziyad and he explained to her that sometimes, after the winter was over, a few people would switch places and go to another settlement for the warm seasons.  “Some want a change,” he told her, “others honestly don’t know where they came from.”

When the fifth group of people came, it happened that several of them decided to settle into the house Ayita considered her own. She felt herself becoming angry at them, as if they were intruding upon her, but then she realized she was the foreigner here—if anything, she was the one intruding upon their regular customs and culture. Privacy didn’t exist in their world, and they would find her unreasonable if she demanded it. She gathered her things off the bedroom floor and planned to return later for the books she had in the basement.