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Iau fingered the ceremonial knife hidden in her dress. It'd take Maria some time longer to return, so she quickly drew both it and the box. In the gloom of the small building, she made a small cut to the finger of her disguise. Blood welled from the wound, a deep blue in the lack of light.
A drop landed on the small box and was sucked in, seemingly absorbed by the wooden exterior. Nothing happened.
Iau sighed and tucked the items back into her dress. A quick check to ensure that the wound had closed, and she was ready to greet Maria. Her footsteps could be heard already.
"Sister Agata!" Maria called. "Sister Agata, please open the door, my hands are full!"
Iau opened the door to their small house, and sure enough, Maria's arms were full. Bless the girl for her skills in bartering; Iau'd never have been able to fetch that high a price for the hen's eggs they sold. "You have flour and meat, and what else?"
"I got another sheet of vellum, and a pot of ink," Maria said with a smile. Really, she was too adorable.
"Good job," Iau praised her, and they put everything in its right place.
As Maria went back out to tend to the chickens, she paused at the door. "Sister Agata ... will we be able to start our task soon?"
Iau thought for a while. They had adequate ink and parchment, and the task would take at least some months to complete. After its completion, though, she wished to be picked up posthaste. "Yes. I'll start arranging while you tend the chickens."
An enthused smile crept up on Maria'a face. "May the Lord be with you!" she said, and ran off to the chicken pen. Iau knew her, she'd be back in no time at all, but Maria was good about not interrupting her, so she could start arranging the parchment.
The new sheet of parchment was huge and square, and Iau had to deal with a few too-wide pieces already, but this one was too tall as well. She spread it out on the table; it almost went over. Of course, a slightly differently-sized perchment sheet might add some interest to the completed work, and if worst came to the worst, she could just cut it. Or perhaps fold it in the vertical direction. How large was it, anyway- Ah. Twice as tall as the pages she'd make. It'd make a magnificent foldout.
She counted out in her mind the plants she'd want to immortalize, then stacked the appropriate amount of sheets on the side. That still left roughly half the sheets, so she assigned a few for miscellanea and put aside the rest for reproduction of motifs.
Iau moved to the plant sheets and prepared ink. With Maria silently observing from the side, she dipped her quill in ink and started with the plant's roots.
Dusk approached, and Iau set down the quill in the dimming light. She had several plants drawn already, but not all. After she'd drawn all the plants for these sides of the sheets, she'd write the text to go with them before tackling the other side.
"Sister Agata, food is ready," Maria said.
They ate in silence. Iau was in no hurry, but Maria was obviously burning with curiosity. She kept stealing glances at Iau, obviously wishing to inquire about the God's mysterious work they had established a small convent here to do, but didn't wish to interrupt mealtime.
After they were finished, they washed the bowls, and Iau decided to indulge Maria's curiosity. "Sister Maria. You have been quite restless recently."
"I'm sorry, Sister Agata!" Maria wrung her hands. "It's just ... it's wonderful to be part of something like this, but I don't understand. I don't know of I'm supposed to understand, but I'd like to know more."
Iau smiled gently and led them the few steps over to the table where the illustrations were drying. "We're documenting the glory of creation. There will be plants, like in the herbals, but the text will be written in the language of angels," she repeated. This was the lie that had made Maria run off and join her. "At the end, there will be more things, things I don't yet understand, and with careful study, the reader can gain enlightenment." She hadn't yet decided what to draw on the rest of the pages.
"The language of angels?" Maria asked, starry-eyed. "Have your visions told you how to speak it?"
"Yes," Iau said, and said "I was born in a faraway land" in her own native tongue. The mouth of this guise was almost up for the task, even if the pitch was wrong.
"What does it mean?" Maria whispered. She was grasping Iau's sleeve and staring at her from too close a distance, utterly enthralled. Whatever Iau spun, she would swallow whole.
"I don't know," Iau lied. "Perhaps it will come to me. Perhaps it will forever remain a mystery."
Maria leaned back and let go of Iau's sleeve. "I truly am blessed to have known you."
"Mm. It is late; let us sleep."
Over the days, between laundry, cleaning, chicken-tending, and the garden, Iau drew the rest of the outlines of the plants and wrote the text. The ways these people represented their speech in writing were quite different to what she was used to; she'd read of monochromatic writing, but the extinct writing systems of her world were different in nature. Over the years she'd spent traveling this land, she'd come up with a way of representing each sound in a manner of writing inspired by the locals. She'd be fired when she got home, regardless of what she did, so she might as well have fun.
After all of her favorite plants were put down in outline, labeled, and described – both their growth in nature and use by locals – Iau considered the next things to do. The locals were enamored with a zodiac, so that was in order, and in her travels, she'd seen a fair number of intriguing representations of the local geocentric philosophy, so she decided to add one of those for some local color. For fun, she drew a bunch of rosettes, melding local influences with what she'd grown up with.
She'd stayed here for years; of course she had a finger on the pulse of the human psyche. Maria oohed and ahhed at her outline drawings, and kept asking about the meaning of the text. Iau occasionally read some of it aloud. Maria would hang onto every word, despite understanding none of it.
The vellum filled with lines. All art was supposed to be a mix of familiar and novel, and novel combinations of familiar things. Into the midst of earthling plants and designs, Iau would insert a section from her world: people inhabiting the infrastructure she'd grown up with, the tubes and ponds and pools, patterned after the women she'd met during her travels as a midwife.
Winter came, and with it, snow. They moved the chickens indoors to protect them from the chill, made preserves, and stocked up on flour. The world was crisp and cold, and there was little to do. Iau finished the drawings of women frolicking in the lands of her home in the light of a setting Sun. She stared at the familiar surroundings reproduced on vellum in ink, and stroked the dried illustrations.
"Sister Agata?" Maria asked. "Are you all right?"
Iau was not. "Sometimes I wonder what the purpose of this is," she said.
"Wasn't it to achieve enlightenment? I'm sure it'll be clearer once it's done!" Maria smiled in the darkness. "Come, it's time for evening prayers."
Iau let herself be led off, and led Maria through the same generic prayer they'd been saying for years, every dawn and dusk. Deep in her heart, she longed for home.
Even with scarce daylight, it was possible to draw and write. Iau stared at the pages and drew maps of the constellations she'd grown up with. In the margin of one, she wrote of what it was like to look up and see specks of light so utterly unlike what she'd been used to. Some of it must have been this guise's differing optical response, but everything here was strange, from smallest root to the glory of the night sky, and her trip here would be to no avail.
She turned her attention to the women, only newly familiar, in the old country of her home, and wondered what she could write.
A poignant sigh attracted Maria, who asked, "How does it progress?"
"What on Earth could go with all this?" Iau asked, nodding to the pictures of women in pools. She should probably know all this already, but she wasn't an artist or author by training, even if she'd have to pick up a second vocation to replace her current one. It was no fault of her own, but-
"Huh," Maria said, then launched into a long speech about God's glory and how he'd surely give her divine inspiration soon. At the end, she added, "Perhaps he will tell about what those women are doing, or where they are," which Iau actually found useful.
"May instructions come to me soon," Iau said. It was now too dark to write or draw, so in the dimming light, she and Maria gave the chickens a carefully meted amount of grain and prepared their own food in the light given by the hearth.
The next day, Iau still didn't know what to write next to the earthlings in her home, but the day after that, the inklings of an idea formed, and she took her quill to the vellum and wrote down all the things she'd missed in her years away from home. Her job was by its nature a lonely one, but this was performance art, and she wrote as if in a trance. A description of how this was a scene from her childhood, this from her second stemming, this a not-quite-famous location she had on one occasion been taken with, and then she filled the pages with subversive thought to better go with the subversive illustrations. If they were firing her anyway, she'd give them a proper reason, not the bullshit they were doing it for currently.
She ran out of illustrated pages, and spilled over to the untouched vellum. She couldn't quite bring herself to care, so she continued her incendiary indictment of foreign policy and the very concept of her job, then degenerated to passionate complaints about her superiors and their unfair treatment of her and their idiotic hiring and firing decisions. Before she could segue into lambasting her colleagues, she ran out of vellum. The quill hovered over the empty desk. She blinked in a stupor.
"Do we need more vellum?" Maria asked.
"This ... is enough," Iau said.
"Are you sure? We wouldn't want to disrupt the process Our Lord has intended!"
"This is enough," Iau repeated, more forcefully. The Sun had set. She noticed Maria had lit a candle. Iau blew the candle, like the locals did, and plunged them in darkness.
She wondered how much longer she could delay the completion of their task. After that, she'd have to figure out excuses, or try to proselytize, as she hadn't really planned for what to do after she completed her masterpiece of performance art. She had a mission, but that was all moot, so why waste time on pointlessnesses?
"Could you read some of it to me tomorrow?" Maria asked in a light voice. Youthful. Pleading.
Iau glanced at where she knew the papers lied in the murky darkness. "Sure." She rose, and had trouble keeping here eyes open. Had she spent that long writing? "Let's sleep."
The next few weeks, Iau walked around as if in a daze, second-guessing everything she had drawn and written. There was thankfully a lot to tend to, even in the winter gloom. Maria told her stories at night. It was clear she'd been a little girl from a little village who'd wanted to see what lay beyond the horizon, and the same tales she'd told kept growing in the telling. Compared to the stories Maria had told in the days after Iau had picked her up, these ones were wild.
After an evening story that culminated with a man being picked up by a griffin who only agreed to give the man back after witnessing the rest of the villagers band together and give it a dance performance, Iau called it a night. In the darkness, she shed her clothes by touch.
Just as she was taking off the dress that held it, the box buzzed. She froze.
All these years on this miserable planet, doing makework, and she would finally be free. A few more months, and she could go back home to face judgement for the crimes of others.
She touched the box again. It remained still. She'd have to see if she had a message waiting for her, so she'd need some excuse to separate herself from Maria-
"Sister Agata, what's wrong?" Maria asked from a few steps away in the darkness.
So little time before she left. "We'll bind the book tomorrow," Iau said. "Good night."
"...good night," Maria relented, obviously burning with unasked questions.
Iau woke only to find that Maria had started with the binding. Small pricks now decorated the centerlines of the vellum in preparation for the sewing of them together into quires and eventually the whole book.
"Sister Agata!" Maria cheerfully greeted her. "I separated out the large sheets so you can pick where the binding goes. The rest of the sheets I've started on myself."
Maria truly was useful; Iau was glad she'd picked her up from that small village. She sat down to pierce the sheets and write the intended quire numbers on them.
The work took most of the daylight of three days. On the fourth, she slipped out while Maria was preparing the binding thread. If asked, she was getting the plants necessary for color paintings.
In the crisp daylight, surrounded by naught but slumbering vegetation, Iau pricked the finger of her disguise and let the drop of blue hit the box. It was absorbed, like all the prior times, but this time it unlocked. She lifted the lid and observed as its interior surface flickered on to form blobs of color.
Extraction in 106 uan. Do not roam far from location for final 50 uan. Prepare all samples and documents in advance.
The screen waited for a long enough time that she could read its message twice over, then switched off. Iau closed the box and hid it back in her dress. 106 uan would mean another month. A tight deadline, given the time required by local bookbinding techniques, but perhaps doable. She sighed – a habit picked up from locals, her true form was incapable of it – and meandered through the forest to see if any pigmented plants would be obvious to sight.
Iau returned to the small house of theirs with a bag of herbs and earth for the paints. "We have until- What?!"
"I bound the book while you were away!" Maria said, and presented to her a book with wooden covers and slightly uneven pages.
"It ... wasn't colored yet." Iau said. "The illustrations need to be painted."
"Oh." Maria stared at the book. "Can we paint them one spread at a time?"
"We have a month."
"I'll cut the threads, then," Maria said. "I think I can still salvage some of it."
"I can spin some more," Iau reassured her. The only thing wrong with the girl was that she was a bit too earnest and helpful. Even if their ways would part soon, Iau wished her no ill.
Come the next morning, the vellum was spread out as sheets again. Maria had helpfully numbered the pages. They spent weeks spinning more thread and preparing paint, and Iau couldn't help but think that they'd run out of time. What would become of Maria, after she saw Iau disappear into the skies, with only an unfinished book for company? Would she think Iau's disappearance was punishment for not completing the book on time, and blame herself?
Iau fed the chickens absentmindedly. Maria would have to buy more grain, soon. At least she'd have some spare change; Iau fully intended to leave behind her moneybag.
Again, the box buzzed. Iau froze. It hadn't been a hundred uan yet.
Maria was still preparing pigments and had no reason to come out, so Iau quickly drew the ceremonial knife and unlocked the box. The message this time was shorter: Extraction in three uan. Less than a day.
Wait. The original message had said 106 uan.
She tapped at the bottom of the box, and summoned up a touch keyboard. A few taps of the colored squares, and the box confirmed it: extraction was several uan ahead of schedule.
Iau snapped the box shut. Hell. She'd have to bind the book together immediately, colored or uncolored. Perhaps she could claim it was intentional. With hurried strides, she walked to their small house.
Maria had a cheerful smile on her face. "Sister Agata! I started painting!" She looked down at the illustration – one of the plant pages – and opened her mouth, then closed it again. "I'm not very good at it."
"We have the rest of today to complete it," Iau said. She looked at Maria's coloring, and yes, it truly was dire, as were the other pages Maria had colored. Iau sat down and took up the other brush. At this point, the end aim would have to be "done" rather than "good", so Iau, too, joined in the slapdash coloring. The pigments weren't that great, either.
They rebound the sheets as they dried, though were much too early for some quires. The ink smudged across the pages, and that was when Iau noticed that the pages, numbered though they were, were out of order, a thought not continuing on the following page but rather skipping elsewhere. She recalled the binding hole-cutting and the piles of vellum, and yes, she herself had moved some piles slighly out of the way; Maria must've misremembered their order.
The box buzzed. Iau rose. "Please continue. I must go out to look."
Maria's expression was confused, and a bit suspicious, but Iau would leave her forever in no time at all. Maria would be heartbroken; best if she was a bit suspicious to lessen the hurt.
Behind the chicken shed, Iau unlocked the box. It was the long standard message that told her to get into an extraction-suitable location, take all her belongings with her, et cetera, et cetera, and required acknowledgement from her at every turn. It took a while to get through, and told her nothing useful, but letting it run unacknowledged ran the risk of being abandoned, and for all her future's faults, she wanted to go back home.
Iau marched back into the house and sat down at the table. She lifted up the six sheets she'd left to dry on the chair, and reached for the thread.
"Oh, no," Maria said, the most dismayed Iau had ever heard her. Iau looked up.
In her hands, Maria was holding a book, bound in leather-covered wood, perfectly inconspicuous, a bit coarse like the herbals and unlike the books commissioned by the rich and powerful. Iau held out her hands. Maria handed the book over.
Iau looked at the book. It was her magnum opus: for years she'd wandered this earth, studying the local populace and plants, knowing her original mission was pointless. She'd turned to art, hoping that this thing would fetch a high enough price and patronage to cover her upkeep, but her original plans had been thwarted, first in the order of pages, then sheets of vellum left out of the final binding. With all that Maria had done to the manuscript, never mind the upkeep of Iau, she likely counted as another author.
Ah, to Hell with it. Iau had been a bit too incendiary in the philosophical texts at the end. She flipped through the book's slightly paint-smudged pages and pulled out her ceremonial knife.
"Sister Agata!" Maria yelled. "What are you doing? Is God not pleased with our work?"
Iau sheared off page 12. "Giving people a reason to study it." She cut off page 74 and folded the cut pages within the unbound sheets. On the inner cover of the book, she wrote in Latin Written in the language of angels.
The box hidden in her dress buzzed again. She rose. "Come."
Obediently, Maria followed her outdoors. It was the brink of dusk after a clear, sunny day, and their little yard was large and flat enough to work. Iau held Maria's hand and waited.
"Sister Agata, what are we doing?" Maria asked, trusting as always.
Iau raised her hand to shield her eyes from the Sun. "Actually, my name is Iau."
Maria was momentarily taken aback, but recovered with her usual speed. "Sister Iau, what are we doing now?"
A familiar shape appeared on the horizon, slowly homing in on them. For years, Iau had dreamed of and dreaded this moment. She waved.
The spaceship's outline was distinguishable. Maria clung to her arm with a death grip, but Iau didn't mind anymore. "Sister Iau? What's happening, Sister?"
The spaceship was now directly above them, low in the sky. Iau looked up at the technology, glorious technology, steel and carbon and blinking lights, everything she had missed without knowing. She felt dampness on her cheeks.
Above them, the hangar doors opened, bathing them in ethereal light. "I will show you something beautiful," she whispered, and held on to Maria as they were pulled upwards.