Never doubt that it was paradise.

    It rained, of course. Life requires water. But the rivers never overran their banks, the ocean never washed away the shoreline.

    At the southern end, the summer grew hot – tomatoes and peppers will not bear unless they get some heat – and the winter stayed mild, so that oranges and bananas would grow. In the north, winter brought frosty days and occasional snow, the kind of weather required for apples, maple syrup, and yellow daffodils in the spring.

    I spent months exploring the rain forest, soaking in the exquisite perfume that comes when so many different flowering plants bloom at once, finding one-of-a-kind orchids hidden in the crooks of trees. The insects buzzed around, taking pollen here and there, but never tormenting me.

    On the desert plains I smelled the dust and watched fire-red sunsets fade slowly to pink, and then to dark. The coyotes would howl as the moon rose, and snakes would begin to slither back beneath their rocks as the temperature dropped. I sat there unafraid of the wild animals, watching the stars take over the heavens.

    Tending the gardens gave me satisfactory work. I wove clothing from the fleece of animals and fiber of plants. Travel from one region to another took a day or two at most, allowing me the constant pleasure of exploration. Every day I came across something new, a tiny yellow flower, the thick odor of rich black loam, the sweet and tangy flavor of a fruit I’d never tasted before.

    Paradise, indeed, and yet incomplete in one respect: I was alone. If I sat quietly of a night, a cougar might come close enough to let me scratch its ears, a wolf might lie at my feet, a rabbit might snuggle up beside me. Pleasant – even joyful – but not the companionship of another of my kind.

    So I climbed to the top of the tallest mountain, and sat there, chanting and meditating, for a week, two weeks, three. Finally, a vision came: a large cylinder, etched with symbols on all sides, turned by a water wheel, set on the very site where I sat.

    I crawled underground, found a vein of copper, and chopped it out of the rock. Then I built a forge, worked the ore into a sheet of metal, and shaped it into a large cylinder.

    Next came the difficult part: developing the symbols to etch into the metal. I had never needed to represent ideas before; creating this written language took me more time than any other part of the process. But eventually I came up with the right marks to make on the metal.

    At the top of the mountain, I built a stone structure over a small stream, hung the cylinder from it, and attached a wheelbase that rested in the water. The running water caused the cylinder to turn clockwise. From then on, it turned continuously, for the stream never ran dry. My prayers and dreams turned with it.

    Later – days, weeks, maybe even years – I was walking along the beach when a hole opened in the space in front of me. Something fell through it and collapsed on the ground in front of me. The rift closed as suddenly as it had opened.

    I examined the thing that had fallen through, which now lay fast asleep on the ground, and found it was someone like me. And yet not like me, for where I had full breasts, this person had only the smallest of nipples. Between his legs dangled fleshy pouches, so unlike my own smooth structure. Having seen similar differences in the animals that I knew, I guessed this must be the other of my species.

    He awoke, looked up at me, and said, “God has answered my prayers.”

    I thought it an odd thing to say, for it was I who built the prayer wheel.

    But I did not ask what he meant. Instead, we spent our time discovering the differences between our bodies and how they could best be put to use. We found another paradise together, and for many days we did not leave that space.

    Eventually, we knew each other well enough to want to discover the other pleasures of companionship. I took him into the rain forest, and watched with delight when he found a tiny orchid I had never seen before. He yelped with pleasure when we waded the icy streams fed with mountain snow. The juice ran down his chin when he bit into his first tomato. Watching him discover those things gave me as much joy as discovering them myself.

    We leaned against rocks in the desert and watched the sunset, though he started at the coyote’s howl and shivered when the snake crawled by to hide under the rocks. I tried to teach him the symbol language I had made up, but he saw no point in it. “Why do we need to make such marks?”

    So I took him up the mountain and showed him the prayer wheel. “What does it do?”

    “It sends chants and dreams into the universe even when I am attending to other things.”

    “But why?”

    “Building it brought you to me.”

    “No,” he said. “No. God created you for me.”

    “What is god?”

    He looked truly shocked. “The creator.”

    “I was here before you. I was not created.”

    We had our first quarrel, then. We did not resolve the issue, but we did discover the pleasure of making up.

    I took him to the tropics, and we spent more time making up, at last collapsing into exhausted sleep under a mango tree. I woke before him, and sat admiring his glistening skin, his thick hair, his ripple of muscle. I plucked fruit from the tree, peeled it. When his eyes opened, I popped a piece into his mouth, to awaken him with that sweet flavor.

    He sucked it down, opened his mouth for another bite as if he were a baby bird, and I fed him yet again. His eyes closed. “What is this wonderful taste?”

    “The fruit of the tree we lie beneath,” I said. He opened his eyes, looked up, and screamed.

    “We have eaten from the forbidden tree.”

    “Forbidden? It is only the mango.”

    “God forbade it, and we have disobeyed him.”

    “I have never heard of such a thing. I have been eating from this tree for as long as I can remember.”

    “This is where your symbols come from, your metal device. It is heresy. It is disobedience. God will punish us.”

    “We have done nothing wrong.”

    “To disobey God is always wrong.”

    “What is this god?”

    This time the question angered him more than it shocked him. His fist came toward my face, and I saw the creases in his knuckles as I moved aside just in time to avoid the strike. I held onto his fist. “What is this force that makes you so angry?”

    But he was not listening to me. “We must leave this place. It has brought us to sin.” He gripped my wrist with his other hand. “Come.”

    “If you leave, I will regret it, but I will not come with you.”

    “You must come with me. You are mine. God gave you to me. Now that we have sinned, we must go out of paradise.” He pulled on my arm.

    I stepped to the side, and caused him to lose his balance. He lost hold of my hand as he fell.

    “I am not indentured to you, and I will not leave my home on the word of a god that only you can hear.”

    “But we have disobeyed.” He began to cry. “I love you,” he whispered.

    “And I you.”

    “Then come with me.”

    I shook my head. “Rather you stay with me.”

    “God will not allow us to stay. If we do not leave, he will rain down fire and flood upon us, and destroy all.”

    “Your god may do as he likes, but I will not leave my home.”

    He scrambled to his feet, tried once again to take my wrist, but did not resort to violence this time when I stepped out of his reach. Instead he turned and ran.

    I found him three days later on the beach where he first appeared, kneeling in the sand. He did not appear to be upset by my presence, so I sat down beside him.

    “I cannot find a way to leave,” he said.

    “I have never come across a border to these lands. The only opening I ever saw was the hole in space that brought you to me.”

    “Hole in space?” he asked, and I described how he had come.

    He shook his head, as if trying to comprehend it all. “I do not remember. This place looks the same as where I was before, except for you. I thought God had sent you.” He sat quietly for a long time. “I do not hear God anymore.”

    “Have you heard your god at all, since you first saw me?”

    He shook his head.

    “Perhaps your god does not exist here.”

    He jumped to his feet. “God is everywhere.” And when I simply sat, he yelled, “Everywhere,” and took off down the beach at an all-out run, soon disappearing from my view.

    I watched the waves crash on the shore, smelled the salt in the air, felt the spray of the water evaporate on my skin. The tide came in, getting closer to where I sat. The sun began to sink.

    I heard him panting from exertion before I saw him returning – much slower now. He dropped down beside me. “God is not here.”

    “Do you miss him?”

    “I should miss him.” Tears were rolling down his cheeks. “He created me. I owe him duty.”

    “But do you miss him?”

    He shook his head. I held him as he cried for his losses.

    Afterwards, he asked me to teach him my symbol language, and he, too, built a prayer wheel. He set it on the beach, with the wind to turn the wheel.

    I have never read the symbols on his wheel. The prayers of others are theirs alone.

    We made many children, he and I. They scattered and made more children of their own. Some traveled among the places of the world, as I had done, while others built homes and then villages. The land began to change.

    He died before me, though not long before. I knew my own days were numbered even as I held his head in my lap while he slowly slipped away.

    “I thought we would go on forever,” he told me.

    “Nothing goes on forever, even in paradise.”

    He smiled, and died.