“I thought you said feasting was first!” she shouts. She gazes longingly after the roasting animal as she is shoved through a tossing sea of frantically cavorting Observer bodies.
“I say a lot of things!” says an Observer, seizing another for a wild dance. “You should really pay more attention to what I do.”
“Here!” shout two more. Before she can react, her arm has been lifted and some kind of object has been thrust beneath it. It’s a hollow cylinder with a membrane stretched across each end. Two Observers near her hold smaller versions and they strike the membranes with their unoccupied hands. “Like this!” they shout in unison, beating a rhythm over the top of the madness.
So this is what was making those sounds! It makes perfect sense, and after a couple of exploratory taps Sarya finds herself breaking out into a smile as she tries to keep up. It’s a strange sensation, whatever battle is unfolding on her face. She is disoriented, pulled this way and that, but she is not even close to caring. She smells the roasting animal and feels the grass under her feet and then, holy goddess, she is laughing, for the first time since Watertower she is laughing long and hard and almost helplessly.
“This is amazing!” she laughs, shifting her body in awkward ways in time with the beat.
“Of course it is!” shouts Observer from a dozen mouths. “This is what you were made for!”
She doesn’t know or care how long the dancing goes on, but eventually the music begins to quiet. It becomes background, and then the crowd recedes like a tide and she is standing, mussed and manhandled and somehow missing both boots, next to one of the many fires. She wriggles her toes in the grass and inhales a thousand scents and thinks that she could die right now and call it a life well lived.
“Sarya the Daughter!” says the Observer stepping up to her, wielding a blade nearly as big as its torso. “Will you do the honors?”
Sarya glances from knife to glistening beast and back. She laughs again and marvels at how easily laughter comes given the right conditions. “Oh, definitely,” she says.
“Should be easy for the Daughter of a Widow!” says an Observer.
“For the butcher of the Network!”
“For the hero of the sector!”
“Sarya!” shouts the crowd. “Sarya the Daughter!”
With the help of a half dozen Observers, Sarya attacks the shining flank with the blade and a pointed stick. They offer pointers as she digs in, and they are there to catch the knife when she drops it. When she pulls that stick full of steaming animal away from the carcass, she has eyes for nothing else in the universe.
“Wait!” cries an Observer, rushing up and sprinkling something on her animal. “Sodium chloride,” it explains. “Delicious.”
“And some of this!” shout two more, one thrusting a cup into her free hand and the other filling it with a steaming liquid from a pitcher. It smells sweet and spicy enough to compete with the animal, which is really saying something.
“Sarya!” shouts Observer from any number of mouths. “Sarya the Daughter!” Dozens of him salute Sarya with identical cups before downing their contents in unison.
Sarya the Daughter, who stands barefoot in firelight with a cup of something hot and a stick full of animal, under a billion billion stars. Sarya the Daughter, who in her short life has traveled farther than perhaps any of her ancestors. Sarya the Daughter, ward of a Widow, product of plan or coincidence, born to find her people. Network was right, and Observer was right, and she was right.
She was made for this.
“Oh my goddess,” she says through her teeth when they meet in the middle of the mess on her stick. “Oh. My. Goddess,” she shouts with a full mouth.
“She likes it!” shouts a single body.
“She likes it!” roars the rest of Observer.
And now the chant begins to rise again. “Sarya the Daughter! Sarya the Daughter!”
She alternates between animal and drink as Observers bounce and dance around her. She is several steps beyond giddy. She has lived her entire life eating and drinking nothing more exciting than food bars and water, unaware that there were things like this in the universe, and now her eyes have been opened. The vapors of the liquid fill her nasal cavities as thoroughly as the animal fills her mouth, and the combination of the two lights a fire in her stomach. She bites and laughs, and sings music and laughs, and cries and laughs, and drinks and coughs and laughs, and it does not take long at all for a pleasant fuzz to settle over her brain.
“I can never eat a food bar again,” she mumbles into her cup.
“You’ll never have to!” cries an Observer.
She laughs again when she spills her drink, two actions that are becoming easier with each passing moment. She becomes aware, when the laugh is done, that a small hand has been tugging at her utility suit for some time.
“Got a moment?” says the Observer at her feet.
Sarya’s cheeks ache from all the smiling she’s been doing over the past…the past whatever. Of course she has a moment. She has any number of moments for Observer, the parent of Humanity. She follows this single weaving body across the stomped and matted grass, still chewing, her steps firmly on the beat of the music. A few more small figures join the first and the group leads her away from the fires, toward a darker spot in the clearing, where cool air can flow over her own roasted skin. It’s not so densely populated here, and the Observers who are present are simply lying in the grass looking up at the sky. The golden gleams of their eyes are scattered through the dark grass, mirroring the stars above them.
“Here,” says one, patting the ground beside it. “Lie down.”
She takes a deep drink before allowing another Observer to take her stick and her cup. She lowers herself to the ground, still swallowing, then lies back to gaze into the explosion of stars above her. She has seen a star field many times, but this is something different. This is far better—maybe better than reality itself. The stars are brilliant, scintillating, shivering in the depths of space. They are seen not through a Network unit or even a pressure suit holo system, but through a warm blanket of atmosphere and a tree-lined frame of horizon. “Goddess,” she whispers. She has never in her life seen anything like it.
“I created this view just for you, you know,” says an Observer. “It’s what the sky looked like from your homeworld, back when it existed.”
She knew this, somehow. Or some part of her did, deep in her brain. With the fire crackling and the scent of smoke and roasted animal in the air, with the tickle of the grass beneath her and the explosion of the universe above her, her brain hadn’t even considered an alternative. This is what it is to be Human, Sarya’s entire being sings.