Two
Sweet soil and undergrowth and a tumult of cascading water around her, Ariana awoke to heat, breeze and blazing sunshine.
Laying weak and exposed on top a cliff edge, the open air rumbled beneath her as she inhaled a crisp wind and a succulent forest.
Creatures stirred, foliage crinkled, and delicate flowers poured their long petals over thick tree branches which fell from the cliff edge.
Under her was a canyon of white, mountainous waterfalls which stretched wide and far into the thick, leafy terrain.
Ari was close to the edge but remained still and safe in her cautious position.
Her journey home would be difficult, but that was inevitable.
She had almost lost her grip whilst crawling across the cliffs the night before, but danger was part of everyday life in her pre-industrial society.
Taking several moments to absorb the warmth of the sun on her skin, Ariana watched a silvery, long-feathered bird sweep from the depths of the trees and into the grey-blue mist of the crashing falls.
A memory drifted into her waking thoughts, and sweeping her eyes over the torrents below, she sighed...
She heard an older woman’s voice; authoritative, and husky with insight and with age.
Seeing her childhood self sat on a low, grassy verge far below her position presently, Ariana remembered her chirpiest, most-beloved, four-legged friend nestled snuggly in her lap, her short auburn-haired and finely-adorned mother preaching science to her through the vapoury, open air.
Young Ari was interested in the sights and sounds but not in the science and mechanics, and her attention quickly moved onto the glittering rainbow which formed in the gushing water in the distance behind her mother’s head.
Her mother...
She would have to return to safety and to home sooner or later. No doubt she would be lectured about a young adulthood spent ‘Searching for spirits and otherwise wasting time’, as the grand leader once pronounced in a fit of frustration. But Ari didn’t let it bother her.
She loved the moons, and the earth, and the sunshine, and the spirits.
Ari didn’t care to be told by her mother, and the mother of their tribe, that no pursuit but the scientific was important.
To Ari, a landscape such as this one conveyed beauty and emotional and spiritual depth. It was not a specimen to be scrutinized as Katya Janeway and her followers believed.
Unlike her fellow countryman, Ariana was not a scientist. She didn’t see nor wish to see the world in labels or boundaries or the constraints of an ever-questioning and insatiable mind. Like her mothers.
Grand Leader Janeway’s intolerant criticism simply washed over her daughter.
But her father was more connected to nature.
He would surely want to mind-meld upon his daughter's arrival home, since exploration was increasingly difficult for him in his older age.
But Ariana lamented as her father’s aims were all too similar to her irritating mother’s.
Ari was not interested in chasing ‘the truth’. Alleged ‘scientific’ answers she believed to be deceptions, unverifiable and fantastical in their lack of further, sufficient explanation.
She did not require such flimsy reassurance as science in her short life.
Her mother Janeway was a microbiologist and biochemist, who dabbled in quantum physics and spent her free time issuing orders and begging conference with the stars. The stranger that married her, not for love, but for preservation, was Tuvol of Vulcan. A community of others who were said to exist on another plane of the largely unexplored, blue planet.
Her father had completed the long, dangerous journey from his meditative people as an intellectually dissatisfied, middle-aged man. Upon discovering Janeway’s tribe of eager research scientists, he assimilated quickly and embraced their explorative way of life.
Ariana was Katya and Tuvol’s first and only child.
The Vulcan explained to a young Ariana that she resembled his older sister Marta, though with her mother Katya’s auburn hair, which curled and contrasted strangely with Ari’s black, marble eyes.
From an early age, Ariana and the other children and young people were educated about the reincarnation.
A theorised process which was widely believed to explain the varied archaeological discoveries made throughout documented history on the planet.
But Ari was never too concerned with the history or explanation of her planet.
She accepted the theory of Reicarnation without further interest or investigation and embraced the possibility of a future where she may be reunited with her lost animals as well as her beloved grandmother Gretchen.
She imagined a reincarnation to be a new life after death, a life where her spirit would return to the universe and be redesigned for a new existence.
Discussing her uniquely interpretive and blatantly unscientific ideas with her peers during late evening meals, Ariana was always dismissed as a dreamer, though community gatherings were never usually too unpleasant, and Janeway’s “spiritualist” daughter was treated as a curiosity who provided mild comic relief to the forever-serious science folk.
A lone member of the little-known, human-hybrid Borg species took an interest in Ari, and the infamous young woman’s embrace of the spiritual over the scientific.
The two women were of a similar age, but Ariana did not warm to the hybrid woman’s robotic and condescending tone, Hansen of Borg reminding her too much of her uncompromising mother.
A solitary individual much like Ari, Hansen took leave of her violent community as a teen and attached herself to Janeway’s alternative leadership, as Tuvol also had.
She worked under the tutelage of both Ariana’s parents and had quickly become the most respected scientist and logistician in the small community.
Hansen was handsome and gentle and had offered her hand in friendship to Ariana, but the grand leader’s daughter would not accept it.
Having observed the now mature Borg as her interactions with Grand Leader Janeway began to change into an exchange of mutual desire, a jealous Ariana had long since liked Hansen less and less.
She knew her parents did not love each other but was uncomfortable knowing that whilst her father meditated for long periods outside, Hansen occasionally slept in her parents’ wedding bed.
Her mother never described the Borg woman’s thoughts and ideas as “ridiculous”, and would never ridicule her simply because she disagreed with her, but Katya would save these special favours for her one daughter.
Drawing her golden limbs and weather beaten satchel towards her, Ari stiffened.
Reluctant to leave the soft, forest floor, she breathed deeply and chastised herself for miserably resenting her mother’s chosen protégé. Instead, Ari chose to remember the things she loved about earth and about existence.
Her Grandmother Janeway had instilled an appreciation of nature and of life’s simplicity into her.
She had taught her young granddaughter to reject fear, to make and share cookies and cakes, and to care for the vast amount of wildlife which shared their habitation spaces.
At her grandmother’s knee, Ariana had learnt an appreciation for the paradise they had been given. Gretchen had assured her treasured, eldest granddaughter that she was right not to chase science for science’s sake, and as her self-important and haughty eldest daughter Katya always had.
But Grandma Janeway was a distant memory, and Grand Leader Janeway was the spearhead driving her community’s hopes and aspirations.
Over the years as research deepened and knowledge grew about the Borg Hansen’s blood chemistry and microscopic, internal machinery, the young woman soon took centre stage of Janeway’s ambitions.
Katya’s fellow chief researchers proclaimed that the hybrid woman’s mysterious heritage might itself hold the key to information sought about the planets “apocalyptic predicament”. The ever evolving and adapting nature of her nanoprobes reflecting almost exactly the behaviour theorised of particular cellular components discovered in living and fossilised tissue on the planet.
Hansen’s nanoprobes, never before discovered in documented planet history, were capable of organising rapid cellular evolution, the predicted precursor to reincarnation, and the small community was amazed by its discovery.
‘Reincarnation’ would be when all life would change, but molecular markers of past and of age would remain, for those who knew how to identify them.
It was not generally believed that memories were inherited, but this was also a topic often discussed between community members. Those who believed their dreams might be memories as many of them dreamt of worlds and of ages they had never seen.
The apocalypse which reincarnation delivered was labelled ‘the necessary death’, the death of the current world to make way for the next. But without the technology to further examine the Borg woman’s hybrid genetic structure, researchers could not predict when this death would come, nor improve their rough estimations based on fossil-dating.
Every community member lived with a stark sense of life’s finality, and many wished for the knowledge to stop the process which initiated reincarnation, believing their planet’s destructive destiny not to be a natural process, rather proof of alien interference.
Internal struggles and increasingly wild theories did not inspire Janeway’s daughter.
Ariana took no active interest in the research into Hansen’s “microbots” as she would impatiently mislabel them, seeing in her community a desperation for theory and knowledge without any real appreciation of the present and of their paradise.
She was sick of living with scientists, and ever-revolted by the spectacle of ‘Hansen Borg'.
The tenth or eleventh night that Hansen has stayed over at their home, Ariana’s patience broke and she stormed outside to join her father who sat stargazing on a nearby hilltop.
Amongst the vast and varied landscape of their communal, ever-flourishing, deep blue and green and purple, star-strewn haven, the scientifically-estranged and aggrieved Ariana asked of the father she loved, "Papa, why do you accept this?"
She spoke and was ashamed at the intrusion of her mother’s lover, and concerned at her father’s always calm façade.
Tuvol replied to her with the kindness and patience he would always reserve for his daughter, “Your mother’s private business is not my business.”
“But they are in our home!” protested Ari.
“The universe is our home” replied Tuvol, settling the matter.
The father and adult child sat silently regarding the spacescape of crescent moons and distant nebulae suspended over a silhouetted field of grand trees and long grass.
"... I await our next incarnation,” began Tuvol, seeing beyond the sky and contemplating the future ahead, “Though I fear that you will not be with me..."
Ari did not understand these words immediately, but they were now the reason she was perched upon a cliff above a pit of white water doom.
She was outside, and as close to the sky and the earth as she could be.
She listened to the wind, took comfort in the sun’s warmth and light, and tried to imagine the pulse of the earth through her skin.
Her focus would change from sun worship to anxiety, but she tried to calm her mind.
She loved both of her parents but like her father, Ariana knew her parents’ marriage was strange, and never meant to last forever.
Though it pained her to admit it, Ari knew the real reason she probably disliked Hansen so much was because the slightly older woman threatened her own very existence.
An existence she meditated on more than the fellow countrymen and women she derided for it.
She knew her mother and Tuvol were not a union to last through reincarnations...
Their intimate union was only a practical arrangement, one meant to help sustain the existence of humanoid species, but which, Ariana sadly reasoned, was unlikely to ever be required again.
The young woman concluded that she was therefore unlikely ever to return to existence.
Tuvol knew it as well, which is why he had chosen those such words, and betrayed a greater hurt than he would ever knowingly admit.
In that moment, he was saying a type of goodbye to his beloved daughter, and on a subconscious level, Ariana understood.
She had left her father to stargaze alone in darkness, walked past the home where her mother and Hansen were busy forging their own union, and left for the canyon.
Her journey through the forest was spent coming to terms with her own limited life.
Janeway and Hansen’s relationship was a union which would thrive in reincarnations to come.
It was not born of a requirement to reproduce, but of an intrigue, an attraction, and a passion.
Smiling resignedly, Ariana opened her eyes into the wide, blue sky.
Without ever knowing, in millennia to come, her scientist mother would re-enter the blue-amethyst atmosphere and the mystery of so-called ‘reincarnation’ would truly begin to unravel...
Quietly observing the natural world of cliffs, treetops and all the water and wildlife she could desire, Ariana allowed her senses to become saturated by stimuli.
From the grass at her fingertips, to the long-stemmed wildflowers circling her waist, to the water vapour creeping gently over her freckled face, and the orange sunshine melting through her closed eyelids, Ari breathed in deeply and rejoiced in her paradise.
She hoped she would learn continuing patience and acceptance in the matter of her removal from existence, and her comfort was her hope in being reunited in death with her lost loved one.
She was grateful for her one life, and asked with words which disappeared into the cool air, “Who really wants to live forever?”