“Once upon a time, there were beings who looked like people, only they weren’t the people you see every day. For one, they were stronger than ordinary people, and they lived a lot longer than ordinary people do. They existed to help people understand who they were and where they came from. By the few who knew them, they were called Ancestors, Archetypes, or sometimes Alvar.
“They lived in a realm far away, yet as close as a thought. In this realm, they existed rather than lived, mere vessels for the ancient memories they held. Some of them tired of this passive role, and wanted to go Earthside to see these people they represented. So they jumped to Earthside, which was only a thought away, defying their Oldest. These Alvar occasionally chose to bring children into the world, which defied their Oldest to a degree that could not be forgiven. Of those Alvar were born the Earthed Alvar, who lived among people.
“There was one of the Alvar who was born of the male Kiowa Alvar and a female Alvar of legend, Lilith. They left him (for Alvar were born full-grown) with the Kiowa to learn about them and to help them. All he remembered of his birth was that two people, his parents, told him he was special and that he was never to give it away to anyone.
“The Kiowa shaman named him “Old Man” even though he looked young, and as time passed, he did not age as the others did. Eventually, the band felt frightened of him because of his lack of aging, and he left to join other bands of the First People to hide his true age. He understood that others grew old and died, and he didn’t understand why he didn’t. He also wondered why he had never been young like the babies born to the Kiowa.
“Eventually, he was kidnapped by evil people who put him in chains, people who didn’t realize he was Alvar, but he escaped by jumping – something he had forgotten he could do – back to the place where the Kiowa, his original people, banded. They had gone away, but he became a cowboy, moving from place to place and job to job so that his true nature – which he didn’t understand – wouldn’t be detected.
“He lived like that for years, and finally found himself at a place of learning, so he could discover who he was. He fell in love with a woman named Allie, who looked at him as if she knew him, and asked him lots of questions that tipped close to uncovering his secret. One day, Allie took him to talk to their professor, and she, Mari, told Will that she was different in the way he was. Mari told Will and Allie about the Alvar, and Allie grew to love him even though he was not like her.
“One day, they made a child, born fully grown as children of Alvar and humans were born. All of the pain of Will’s past washed over him at the sign of his offspring, and his mind shattered. He disappeared before Mari or Allie could stop him. Allie never stopped loving him, or the child they had together, and she surrounded that child with all the love she could muster, love enough for two.”
“Mom,” I groused, “that’s not a bedtime story for a child – that’s an anthropological treatise.” I wasn’t joking – My mother, Alice Schmidt, was a preeminent anthropologist who studied Plains cultures at the arrival of white people. The story went that she had been trained by the famed Native American anthropologist MariJo Ettner, who disappeared ten years before and left her research notes to my mother. Alice Schmidt disappeared soon after, when my dad retired, and an anthropologist named Elaine Smith was hired halfway across the country from where Alice and her husband disappeared. I remember the safe house when we were in transition to our new identities, and the day I became Annie Smith.
“What do you expect?” my mother asked, her green eyes laughing. “You ask an anthropologist to tell a bedtime story, and you get anthropology. If you told a bedtime story, it would be a fable about an encrypted ghost that terrorized hackers.” Mom, of course, was right – not only because I had chosen to become a sociologist specializing in urban legends, but because I was my father’s daughter – and my father had been, before his retirement, a key government encryption expert. In other words, his programs were the ghost in the system.
“So that’s the bedtime story you told me?” I chided, hiding the fact that I couldn’t remember my childhood once again.
“It was the best I could do,” Mom shrugged, then looked at me searchingly, as she often did. My dad strolled in – although I was my father’s daughter, I didn’t share his blond hair and blue eyes. My looks came from my mother – dark wavy hair and pale skin and freckles. “I packed up your car,” he sighed. “Could you pack more stuff next time so I actually get a workout?”
“What, and give up my life as a pauper?” I snorted, and hugged my father, who came to just above my chin. I hugged my mother, plump where I was slender. I studied their faces, which looked just a little older, just a bit more worn, than my first memories of them fifteen years before.
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It was the last time I would see them. Three months later, they were murdered by assailants unknown.
Words Like Me 