Descending Star

CANYON

Emelia arranged furniture on the northern course of the wraparound deck, the better to enjoy the remarkably mild and sunny morning, while Edythe descended to the kitchen and returned with human-compatible refreshments. On some level Ben felt irritated by the availability of blueberry muffins and whole milk in a residence for people who didn't eat. He knew that they had stocked the kitchen especially for him.

The vampires kicked back on stylish recliners that appeared to be constructed of slender ribbons of anodized aluminum, but he knew that the pieces had to be made of cunningly disguised steel. Aluminum certainly would have collapsed under Emelia.

Above them, hints of blue peeked continually from behind clouds. Emelia, dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, radiated the entire visible spectrum, up and down her body. Her black hair transmuted and fluoresced, rainbows on an oil slick.

Edythe did not radiate, at all. Her exposed calves and feet were covered by fleshtone hose, and she hid from the occasional appearances of sunlight beneath a silk parasol.

Emelia began, "I suppose you'd have no way of knowing this, Ben. I shed my southwest accent long ago, and I'm the color of a bowl full of maggots. But we're from the same place. I'm an Arizona girl. I grew up in Monument Valley."

"Hold on, now," he exclaimed. "That would make you"–

"Navajo. That's right. Well, half. My mom was an English-Irish ethnic mix, which to my mind makes me mostly Navajo, despite the fifty-fifty split. My birth home is a short walk from the border of what is now the national park. I was the youngest of three kids. Two older brothers, the next in line older by five years, so I pretty much did my own thing. Spent my whole childhood digging, which I suppose isn't too surprising, since that's what my parents were doing. They were amateur archaeologists. That was how they met. Mom met my dad on a dig, where he worked as a guide. It was a big expedition, a couple hundred people, counting the locals. There would be social nights. Campfires, dancing, probably a lot of drinking. They were all young. Mostly college kids, and a few university faculty, out of Provo, managing the dig and moonlighting as chaperones. Anyway the story goes that Dad's turn to speak came around, and he regaled the palefaces for hours, until the embers burned down, with stories of the monsters that arose from Nihodilhil, the primordial black void of our cosmogony. Mom fell head over heels, and my oldest brother was an oops, born ten months later. The dig wrapped up that summer, but Mom never left, and as a family, we spent more time roughing it in the sandstone mesas of Monument Valley, than we did at home."

Ben observed, shaking his head, "Just like Carlisle. Edythe's also said that you guys remember almost nothing of your past lives, because your deaths wash out every memory. But you recall just as much as Carlisle does."

Emelia chuckled appreciatively. "Actually that's not true at all. It's true that I don't personally remember much of what I'm going to tell you. But I'm fortunate to have been born in the twentieth century, the dawn of the electronic age, with its emphasis on archives and the preservation of history. My parents practiced archaeology in a glory age for that field, when amateurs had reasonable hope of earning respect and repute. My parents had high repute indeed. They were known. Additionally, in my brief time I left quite a paper trail, myself. So I've been able to reconstruct the highlights of my first life, from the academic record. There's some creative embellishment, it's true, but not much.

"Mom was an amateur adventurer, yet she'd also been trained, with vigor. An Oxford education, dual masters degrees, anthropology and antiquity. Dad had no training whatsoever, but he could navigate northern Arizona blind. They made a good team."

"I get confused all the time by archaeology and anthropology."

"Yeah," Emelia sympathized. "I'm one of them, and I get confused, myself. Back in Mom's day, the crossover was so rife that they pretty much melded together. Anthropology deals with human origins, and archaeology maps human activity. What's the ultimate point of digging, I ask you? We do one for the other. The overlap of fields led to a lot of misconceptions. Just as the over-reliance on genomic evidence today leads to faulty conclusions about migration patterns. But ultimately it all comes down to the same problem, from different perspectives. We want to know where we're from."