ignored her, depositing the pouches at the pilot's door, and left.
Zer hadn’t seen Leon all day and felt the distance when he greeted her.
“Please, stay. We have things to discuss.” He said nothing more, but puckered his thin lips between thumb and forefinger. He never discussed matters aloud yet liked company when making up his mind. After the ship rose, he sat at the controls, his back to her.
Zer nested among pillows and enjoyed, briefly, the larger view of space from the hub. The starship plunged after an asteroid calf, changing the calf’s rocky trajectory before it crashed into Mars.
“People’s thoughts solidify on Mars,” Leon said, without turning.
“Meaning what?”
But he didn’t speak again until after they landed on the planet, far from recently abandoned Earthers’ projects. By then, hundreds of Zenobians in pilgrimage-blue bodysuits dotted the landscape like a field of flowers. They stood on an old recessed landing site gouged from a crater. Leon tossed Zer one of the tough-fabric pilgrimage suits with its hooded mask. She pulled it on and clamped gravity weights on the footers.
When they crossed the old site, Zer experienced a peculiar sensation. Her tentative resolve about establishing Exotica on Earth grew firmer with each step. Leon was telling her of the ancient city buried leagues below Mar's surface. He cringed but not from the frigid wind. Around them blew bio-ancestral memories that evoked a sense of isolation.
Through clouded eye-shields, Zer peered at the Martian surroundings, the cold, dry club-shaped rocks and rust-orange desert dust. Dust had smothered older lava and poured over ancient shores, where the dead bloom of an earlier Zenobian civilization had lost to time. Zer shuddered and determined to grow at least one Exotica, a living tree, on Earth.
“I like the gravity,” she said, lightly. The atmospheric pressure approximated Zenobia’s.
“Yes, pleasant, more like Earth's than other planets in this solar system. The only resemblance.” He was baiting her. Would he never let up?
He didn’t want her believing Earthlings could get used to sentient trees gliding across the land. But Exotica refreshed people’s spirits. It was this desiccated planet that depleted people’s spirits, the disquieting, somber beauty of Mar's passage through time. Being here strengthened her conviction and need to help preserve Earth. This planet conferred a mantle of responsibility; she would plant Exotica on Earth. She had to. The premonition made her shiver. Why did Mars cause such a reaction in relation to Earth? Because a civilization died here?
From the ship, Zer had seen Mar’s eroded mountains and dunes and basins cratered by asteroids. She couldn’t imagine living in the shadows of giant boulders tumbling past or crashing, the constant battle, the wind that lifted rocks and slammed them against the ground. Maybe the legend of Zenobia was backward: Forebears first crossed the galactic breach heading toward Andromeda, away from the Milky Way.
“They had only a colony here,” Leon said, following her thoughts.
Unlike her, Leon never forgot to mind read. But though he often disagreed with people’s thoughts, he remained kindly. Like an elder. She stared at him.
“I’m glad we experienced this place,” he said.
“So am I. I’m slightly more responsible.” Zer smiled and tucked her gloved hand in his.
That evening, Leon changed into a black bodysuit with a long, black cape and danced for her while she lay on ruby and emerald-colored pillows. He slowly raised his arms, the cape forming the flanks of a mountain. Abruptly, he convulsed and howled as if he were an animal, head thrown back, raging and wailing. Zer sat up straight, her body reverberating with this dark intimacy. This was not the man she thought she knew so well. Through his howling, she glimpsed the darker rhythm of Mars, the once molten lava that rushed across the terrain. Tears glimmered on Leon's cheeks, and she saw land exploding, raining sulfur. His ancestry lived in him—as Exotica’s legacy lived in her—but he usually mastered his feelings. His vulnerability made her eyes well with tears.
“Remember,” he said, huskily.
“I will never forget.”
“Thank you for coming on this journey.” He whispered, sliding next to her. Petal by petal, he opened his heart to her and showed her a dark courage, giving her a reservoir to draw from. He was, she later realized, preparing them for the days ahead.
That night, the elders sent the voyagers a message to check matters on Earth, immediately. Leon emotionally pulled away from Zer, yet he held her tightly when she clung to him. She felt the dark rhythm that had shaped Mars take hold and shape something in them, something she didn’t understand.
“You’d better go.”
She left shaken loose from him and her moorings.
Brea stopped her on the work deck. “I know about your trees. I’ll wager you won’t be able to establish them.”
Zer hurried toward her console and Vatta as the starship zipped toward the Van Allen belt near Earth. Before settling in orbit, the core mothership and pyrids separated, a movement that subtly fractured the communal mind; the three hundred pyrids floated alone in orbit in octaves of space, their crews’ distant notes.
In Pyrid Six, a disoriented Zer forgot rules and was about to change dimensions to visit other crews when Leon telepathically called her a clinging symbiot, suggesting she’d jeopardize her trip to Earth. She thudded on a cushion, rematerializing in her personal cubicle, and lay there, fists clenched, while Leon caressed her mind with a brotherly touch, treating her as a child, as if events on Mars had never happened.
Zer stayed aboard but relished the moment another lonely soul mentally reached out till all Zenobians were pooling psyches: One mosaic brain resonated, circling Earth’s magnetic belt. Earth’s deep tone rippled through them.
Pyrids then pulled away and descended one by one, falling into planetary orbit, the crews scattering to Earth’s many biomes. On a world of plural geographies and customs, spacefarers like Zer expected to explore titillating facets of individuality cultures before returning home—preparing for the day they and Milky Wayans would share galaxies and maybe co-evolve.
However, the immediate future changed. From the mothership, stationed beyond the Van Allen belt, Elder Kalila relayed a report on miniscule flickers of activity manifesting a light-century ahead of expectation on the far edge of Earth’s solar system. Pyrid crews considered it the initial stage of an event that would affect no one in their lifetime except ultrasensitive elders. But a second report noted a significant orbital change of planet Mat in the region beyond Pluto: the cue the elders expected.
Zer recalled what followed the reports as a blur of events, revelations, and constant struggles against exo-painting that started after Vatta recited an obscure legend. It was about the origins of mixed bloods and Lilios that occurred after disaster in the Milky Way long ago, around the time a third strain of mixed bloods emerged. The tale touched on the elders' belief that at certain intervals, a voyage to another galaxy sounded the endnote of one era and triggered a new one—along with natural disaster. Thus, before photon and gravity effects reached a planet now deemed ripe for explosions, pyrid crews retreated, orbiting near Earth, to observe and await better conditions.
***
On Pyrid Six,
