Exceptions to Reality_ Stories - Alan Dean Foster [44]
Her manner of speech was devoid of guile and long words but otherwise proper and correct. Apparently her mother had not wished her to dwell entirely in ignorance green. She had been given some home, or rather forest, schooling.
Eventually he felt secure enough in her presence to ask a few questions of his own, keeping an eye on the opening in expectation of the mother’s return. “Leea, how do you come to be here, to live like this in this place?”
She replied ingenuously. “I don’t exactly know. I was only seven when Mother brought us to the rain forest.” Her smile was as radiant and unspoiled as the rest of her, he mused. “We’ve been here ever since.”
“Hasn’t it been lonely for you without any other children to grow up with?”
“Oh no. There was always Mother and the animals. I’ve had every kind of pet you can imagine. Pythons, until they got too big, and cockatoos and possums and sugar gliders. I’ve always had playmates.”
“But you’d still like to visit a city?”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I think so. I wouldn’t want to live in one, though. I don’t think I could, after living in the forest.”
“What about—not having any clothes?”
She shrugged. “I’ve seen other people. I don’t understand clothes. You dry off much faster without them, and it hardly ever gets cold here.”
“What about people who come looking for you? Aren’t you afraid they might see you like this?”
“Well, you’re looking at me right now, and I’m not afraid.” Here was a directness of logic he rarely encountered and could not argue with. “Besides, if we don’t want to be seen by other people, we’re not.”
“You can’t move around all the time, Leea. You can’t continue to dodge the rest of the world your whole life. People will find you, eventually.”
“Not if we don’t want them to.” There was a certainty to her claim that puzzled and intrigued him. “We just walk off into the Dreamtime.”
He frowned. “I’ve heard of that. It’s the name for the Aborigine spirit world, isn’t it?”
She nodded enthusiastically. “Something like that. There are lots of Native people around here. Mostly in the Dreamtime. They’ve gone there to get away from this world. Modern Aussie people did bad things to them, so they left. Those who knew how. Sometimes Mother and I talk to them, and they teach us things. Like how to live in the forest. They taught us how to find the Dreamtime. There’s a lot of it in the Daintree.”
He shook his head impatiently. “Leea, the Dreamtime is myth. It’s the collected stories of a people. They’re very beautiful stories, but they’re just stories.”
Her smile and her eyes were full of secrets, like pearls at the bottom of a dark, dark pool. “The deeper you go into the Daintree, the closer you get to the Dreamtime, Michael. This is one of the oldest forests that has been on the Earth, one of the very first, and the Dreamtime is the first place. They’re very near to each other, the Daintree and the Dreamtime. You just have to know how to look.”
Girl, I’ve spent my whole life trying to learn how to look. Her mother has fed her this, he realized suddenly. To keep her here, away from civilization, away from other people. But why?
“When we don’t want to be seen or found, we just find a piece of the Dreamtime and go into it,” she was saying. “The people who are looking for us walk right past. They don’t see us. They don’t know how to find the Dreamtime, so they don’t see it, either.”
“What’s it like?” He wondered what a psychologist would make of her delusions.
She lapsed into dreamy, exquisite reminiscence. “A lot of it is forest, like this, but before the loggers and highway people came. There are no cities, no airplane tracks in the sky. No white people. Only the Aborigines, and Mother and I. It’s like it was when the Earth was before people.”
There was movement outside. Annabelle entered, clutching a handful of leaves and stems that were oozing sap. “This won’t take long.” She didn’t even glance in her daughter’s direction.
She’s crazier than Schneemann, Covey thought, isolating