FALAHA'S JOURNEY: A Spacegirl's Account in Three Movements

Episode #39

The Lael are so fragile. They hurt easily, their lives are extremely short, and they forget things. My kind lives much longer than the stars; there are even those who live longer than some of the Flows of Jainaa. We are adapted to outer space and thrive where everything else dies, exposed to an environment hostile to all living things. We don't seem to have much in common, yet we both share the ability to experience deep and intense emotions and feelings, though we do so for much longer and probably to greater extremes. Love, hate, despair, anger, desire, need... The Lael are nothing like their cousins. That's why long ago they become outcasts, parting ways with the Alima Eni.

I loved my father.

When I was already two heads taller and bigger than him, he didn't see the differences between us. To him, I was his little girl. If he still had been with us, I doubt he would have changed even when I grew to be twice as tall as him. Even if I didn't look anything like him, I still had his genes of the black-haired, fair-skinned and blue-eyed little people in me.

I was also the only one of the Azuri, and possibly of all the Baali, to have blue eyes. Just like most of the Azuri, I was born with red eyes, but soon after my eyes turned crystal blue. Sangaru eventually decided to allocate this trait, but small things like this can give away a Sangu, because changes in our genome and phenotype are not natural. It's always a reaction to something, and only Sangu are capable of it.

My father might have been weak compared to a Baal, but he was a military man, a General to his people. I might be a demi-adult, but I'm still a Sangu.

Dakha is an old world. And numerous others existed before it, starting with the system created and settled by our Baali ancestor, Varga. That world was home to several small families of the Avlaora Baali. But they also shared that first planet with the Lael. These people came from a distant dying system to colonize a new world, not knowing it already belonged to someone else. They had nowhere to go, so Varga let them stay. Some Baali eventually had common children with the Lael, and soon two new hybrid katas appeared and spread out further—Azuri and Ashantri. As it turned out these colonists were a branch of the same species that our 'maternal side' of the genome originated from—the Alima Eni. Having Sangaru in our systems, common offspring weren't a problem for us. Of course, these kids were born pure Baali, like me.

To complicate matters further, Alima Eni also had mixed families with the newly allied black Baali, and the ties between the two grew stronger. Unlike the strong-willed, stubborn and dangerous Avlaora, these children were easy to keep on their side. Although Sangaru keeps track of all past events, the difference in opinions about those has created an unbridgeable gap between opposing sides.

Because of Sangaru in our systems we, the hybrids of the two worlds—the Maok and the Alima Eni—will remain like this forever. We are shifters, born with several folded bioforms, including that of the Alima Eni, a legacy from our Father and Yajur Sangu, Somg, who designed this lesser shell resembling the appearance of Alima Eni to communicate with them.

Unfortunately, due to His own circumstances, He had no choice but to do so. If He had never made a deal with Alima Eni, none of us would have existed, and they would still have been anything below interstellar, or maybe even have been wiped out. But suddenly this enormous and vast Jainaa became too cramped.

The part of our Father's history prior to His emergence in our Jainaa remained nameless and unspoken, because the species He belonged to, the Maok, had not developed anything similar to what we know as speech. His name, Somg, was later given Him by people calling themselves the Alima Eni. But even they, I'm afraid, have never understood completely what they had encountered.

Yet no one has known peace for very long since then.

To Dorgu and Shaamta I was a valuable resource. A resource to be had before anyone else took it for themselves, or destroyed before I became too strong to present a force to reckon with. The rest here were considered disposable biomass.

Our Enclaves are built to be indispensable.

A lot of Baali are not tied to Motherworlds. They prefer being mobile, living and breeding in these giant ships. Some segments of an Enclave family eventually become Asha—they leave the ship to establish a Motherworld and later build another Enclave of their own, when the inhabitants' numbers are growing fast. Most don't cut ties with parental Enclaves, having their protection. Some park their Enclaves close to the new worlds, remaining a part of the growing System.

Families from several Enclaves meet on the new Motherworld. Some are allies, some are competitors, and some are enemies. Our community is liquid and the borders of the habitat are elusive.

My mother has not yet built an Enclave. The last existing descendants of the Lael, who continued to live among us, were one of the reasons. We lived and interacted too closely with them for a long time, nevertheless with caution, keeping in mind how cruel Sangaru can be when their females' immune systems start accepting only seed of our kind. Some of the Baali proposed to assimilate them into our family, but some opposed the idea, saying that would destroy them eventually as the time would come when no Lael would be born anymore. These small people themselves haven't made any decision on the matter either. So we were preparing to disassemble several uninhabited systems and we excluded our Motherworld from the resource list to start the construction. The shards I worked with were to be used as the energy source for that task.

During that time I met Dorgu, long before I learned what he was, pretending to be a family-seeking Yarsh-d'n from an Allied System. Now even the most beautiful memories of our wildest days together were giving me sadness. I utterly hated this male, but I was still in love with him. And the worst part was he still loved me too. In a sick and twisted kind of way, but he still did. That's why, as ridiculous as it seemed in this situation, he asked for my consent and hadn't dragged me to his place by force, even though he could have. He wanted me to choose him over everything else by my own free will, or break me, if necessary, just to see me silently nod and follow him. He wanted me to betray everything I stood for. Without it the changes he stood for would not be possible to accept and fully join his cause. And as it turned out, it was me who didn't love him enough to take that path. If he had let this feeling go, things would have been easier for me. Because, as yet unknown to him and everyone else, I was carrying his child. I never intended to tell him, at least not before I took Shaamta's life.