The spokesman summons Noah up to the dais, and there places both of Noah’s hands in hers and, with great solemnity, announces to the assembled company:
“Davina gives her heart to Noah. Noah gives his heart to Davina. By the laws given us by the ancients, they are now joined as one.
“All as one respect and celebrate their union this day!”
As she releases his hands and clasps him to her, Davina whispers in his ear that which he had confessed to her:
“I am not whole apart from you. You can count on me always, Noah, for where you are shall I also be!”
Returning her embrace, Noah is speechless with joy as he raises her hand. Reaching across and bridging a cosmic divide between their separate worlds.
He is giddy at the prospect of sharing his life with this beauty in this ice-locked world sheltered from the uncertain dangers of the lands beyond.
He does not know he will soon tire of the aimless existence in this place.
He does not know he will journey back to the temperate latitudes.
He does not know that, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Creation, he and Davina will find their own Eden.
That, together, they will tame a primal, unspoiled frontier in the wide world they will reclaim as their own!
∆ ∆ ∆
Prising loose a strangely symmetrical object wedged between thin, confining layers of schist and volcanic breccias, the brute extracts a stone whose smooth, polished surface stares back at him.
His beetled brow arches in confusion as deeply recessed eyes reflect strange blue markings on the stone’s surface. One resembles the great finned beasts that swim the green polar sea, patrolling the shore he knows well. Other markings look like eyes, but are greatly exaggerated, while the rest are just random dots signifying nothing.
A low, guttural voice near him demands:
“What have you there, Gruk? Is it something to eat? Is it valuable?”
Turning on the other brute, Gruk snarls:
“It is nothing to eat, Grak, and nothing we can trade. Yet, it may have very great value, depending on where it may lead!”
Putting their heads together, the two brutes slowly examine the relic of a departed band of bipeds, evicted from their home by a violent earth.
“Watch what I do,” Gruk commands, “and let us see whether there are more of these strange stones here.”
Soon, both brutes are busy prying loose several of the funereal markers, all etched with pictograms the two cannot decipher. Placing the markers in line, Gruk cunningly sneers:
“Whatever the markings may say, these strange stones surely mean one thing:
“Whoever made them has ability. And we are in need of capable slaves!
“Let us see if there are tracks we may follow to capture them.”
At once, both brutes begin examining the rocky surface of the imploded valley. It is a place that ever had been beyond their reach. Blocked by the unscalable height of the old valley’s walls and its impassable ridge from the roof of the valley’s inland stretch to the depth of the ocean at the end of its glacial floe.
Now it is a flat, broken terrain riven with the recent wounds of volcanism and fire. This is the brutes’ first foray into this once-inaccessible place, and they mean to extract whatever of value is here.
Gruk is strong and sly, and the slow-witted Grak defers to his commands. It was Gruk’s idea to come to this place after months of patient waiting until the fires went out and the smoke fled.
Gruk is the unquestioned leader of his tribe, a bestial band of brutes and bullies kept in line by the blunt force of his heavy bludgeon and the sharp point of his crude knife. A coward himself, Gruk preys on the craven bluff and bluster of other bullies who back down before his superior size and swift vengeance.
They are descendants of the same race that spawned the scientists of the southern polar region. But their forbears were the industrialists who spurned the warnings of the scientists and doomed life on their planet to extinction.
As the scientists were banished to the antarctic, the ancestors of these brutes sneaked away to the northern polar region. Stranding the rest of their race to the lethal scourge of the omega strain.
While Davina’s people have been frozen in time, as scientific progress atrophied without industry to support it or commerce to give it useful meaning, Gruk’s tribe has devolved to a more brutish version of his ancestors.
Following the diaspora of others fleeing the omega pathogen, Gruk’s ancestors used their superior numbers to overwhelm and enslave the small pockets of survivors. It is the great evil of slavery, more than any other, that marked their descent into barbarism.
Like their forbears, they carry a callous disregard for all living things, save those that serve their base appetites. The sins of the fathers, who destroyed an innocent world and oppressed its few survivors, are visited upon their feral descendants who eke out a Hobbesian existence—solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
The refinements of a lost civilization are lost on them, supplanted by lust, avarice and rapacity. Thus are Gruk and his band baser than the beasts of the field.
Generation unto generation of harsh treatment has reduced the slave caste to a small number of wretches, and Gruk hungers for fresh, healthy prisoners to enslave and gratify his every appetite.
Scouting close to the ocean’s edge, Grak cries out:
“Here, Gruk.
“Here are the prints you seek!
“They are smudged, but we can track them along the shore away from this place.”
Closely inspecting the blurry prints and seeing the purposeful route they blaze, Gruk orders his companion to go back to the tribe and return with a dozen of its strongest males.
As Grak recedes from view, the leader looks to the dense cloudbank overhead and howls:
“The hunt is on!”
He does not know the tracks will lead the tribe to a world they have feared to tread.
He does not know they pursue a prey more formidable than themselves.
Gruk and his band of brutes are taking their first step on a journey that will lead them across a resurrected world.
To an epic clash that will decide the fate of that world and future generations of a race once thought extinct.
BOOK 2. LUNAR ANTIPODES
They stand on the outer edge of the cloud-shrouded southern polar region. Two pioneers on the threshold of a strange and changing world.
They survey the bleak, barren tundra beyond. As the harsh, frigid landscape tugs at emotions raw and deep.
For Noah, it is a boundary between past and future. Between the hollow pursuits of an insular existence and the promise of discovery and fulfillment in the wide world beyond.
For Davina, it is a portal to an unknown world.
To wonders revealed through the comprehending eyes and critical mind of her companion and soulmate.
To wonders she has long imagined from the retelling of ancient ancestral lore passed down through countless generations.
But their vicarious glimpses frame only the vaguest outline of things to come; they cannot convey the essence that flows from the direct experience of living them.
For her, this first step beyond the protective cover of polar clouds marks the opening of a journey of fulfillment she has longed for in every brief foray from the confines of her communal existence.
For both, it will be a life-long journey of self-realization as, together, they reclaim a world that once perished but is now reborn.
“Paradox!” Noah declares, sweeping his arms across the open panorama ahead. “I name this new world ‘Paradox’.”
Turning, he lovingly hugs his companion and explains:
“Nothing is what it seems in this place; it is truly a world of paradox. And yet, it is sanctuary to us both. Refuge from an empty existence for you, asylum from the emptiness of space for me. Let us welcome our new world of paradox, whatever mysteries it may hold.
“It is our
destiny.
“It is our mission.
“It is our home!”
Looking back at him, wide-eyed, Davina agrees:
“What a fitting name! It embodies all my dreams for us: the thrill of exploration and discovery, the novelty of a different world, the hope of a new beginning. All embracing the love that is ours to share!”
Looking upward, beyond the cloud margin, Noah points to the red-violet-yellow planet hovering overhead. It has regained its circular shape, since last he saw it, and somehow seems to have shrunk to a less menacing presence.
The second sun also has returned. Joining its twin near the far rim of the giant planet.
Together, they form a celestial trinity dominating the visible sky from the cloudbank above to the landward horizon in the distance ahead.
“And watching over us,” he adds pointing to the giant planet, “is ‘Cosmos’!
“It is where I lost the crew and ship that brought me here to you,” Noah elaborates. “And I name it ‘Cosmos’ to honor their courage and sacrifice in the quest to know our universe better.
“It is their quest that, ultimately, delivered me to you and us, together, to this threshold of a new world.
“We are refugees, Davina, two castaways on the shore of a renascent world.”
Following his gaze skyward, Davina blinks as her pupils begin constricting to adjust to the greater brightness cast by two suns. She is not unaccustomed to the presence of color and light. But the refracted rays of her obelisk home were pale compared to the direct rays of the suns overhead.
Pausing hand-in-hand at the extremity of the polar cloudbank, Noah is exultant at the promise of the frontier they are entering. Davina harbors few compunctions about abandoning the land of her birth as she, too, thrills at the prospect of exploring unknown lands.
Both know they are on the threshold of a new beginning.
Meantime, at the other end of the world . . .
Chapter 31. Descent
The dozen warriors, accompanied by Grak, materialize like wraiths out of the mist that now blankets the scarred surface of smoking ruin that is valley no more.
The soaring columns of smoke are gone, but there remain shallow wisps of hot vapor warning trespassers away from the cooling vents of lava still bubbling black skins resembling roasted marshmallow.
Like their companion and the waiting leader, the warriors are large of bone but small of stature. An impression heightened by their bandy-legged, rolling gait as they thread their way between the rising vapors to where Gruk crouches.
“Look here,” he barks, “and mark well what I show you.”
Crouching around him, they all become excited at the unexpected appearance of smudged footprints leading in the direction of the shore they have never trod. Now, with the valley gone, they are eager to travel the path that was barred to them.
Soon, all the brutes are jumping up and down in their crouched stances, gabbling and gesturing their eagerness to pursue the authors of the footprints and to fall upon them unawares. Gruk fans their enthusiasm with talk of fresh slaves and rich booty. His promises drive the brutes into frenzy, literally foaming at the mouth at the prospect of ambuscade and swag.
The brutes are not erect; nor are they standing on all fours. While they walk on two limbs only, their slouching demeanor makes them look bent and misshapen as they scuttle along in a mostly sideways, crab-like gait.
At the same time, their lowered profile accentuates the breadth and bulk of their massive shoulders. Telegraphing the great physical strength possessed by these primitive predators.
Millennia of devolution have made them almost unrecognizable from their civilized forbears and, in their case, culture has followed appearance.
The black hair that covers their hide proclaims their fall to the low order they have become.
Small, dark, deeply recessed pupils stare out from sockets surrounded by bushy black hair beneath beetling brows. The ridge of their nose has melted back into the skull, leaving only a vestigial smudge with two wide nostrils where the nose used to be. Like the nose, their ears have melted into the sides of their head so only the open auditory canals remain.
Shuffling after Gruk in the direction the smudged prints lead, the warriors carry the crude cudgels and rude stone knives they have fashioned from the low limbs of gnarled trees and from the rocks that lie on the ground.
Once the proud industrialists of this world, Gruk’s race retains only the arrogance and callous disregard for all living things that moved their ancestors to sacrifice a civilization.
Arriving at a sheltered cove, Gruk calls the company to a halt for food and rest. From experience along his tribe’s own stretch of shoreline, he knows they will find fish here.
But their hunt is not the elegant coup de grace of those he follows. Nor does theirs target the redoubtable finned monsters they hold in awe and fear.
No, the hunt this day will involve brute force and even more brutal gorging on the flesh of their still living prey.
To this end, the hunters gather around a narrow, deep pool on the lee side of the shoreline path, where they skewer several fish with their stone knives.
There is no cooperation in the capture. No sharing in the bounty.
As each warrior pulls out a wriggling fish on the point of his knife, he draws it immediately into his waiting jaws and rends every moving, quivering part—head and scale, bone and flesh—until the entire creature is consumed.
They wash down the meal with ice melt, using the warmth of their cupped hands, from the thick patches of snow mottling the cold stone walls around the cove.
Gruk knows it may be a long while before they again find such an ideal haven, and he commands his hunters to find what shelter they can to sleep as long as they will. When they strike out in earnest on the morrow, they will have no time for laggards.
He wants the hunting-party well rested for the rigors of the journey ahead.
While at the top of the world . . .
Chapter 32. Escape
Many bittersweet days have elapsed since their betrothal in the obelisk's great hall. A quotidian treadmill of mind-numbing tedium as Noah struggled to adapt to Davina’s world.
Made bearable only by the sweet tonic of her presence and comradeship every waking hour.
Assigned to the geology lab, he found the rote inspection of rock samples to be every bit as tedious and pointless as the process he observed on his first visit to the labs. Where ice-core wafers were examined and discarded without result or record. Its only redeeming quality was Davina’s constant presence beside him as they pointlessly processed stone after stone without end.
She had been his constant companion, also, on the crowded open terrace where they ate and talked between themselves amidst a throng of other couples doing the same.
While his nights were long and lonely, spent away from her in the men’s sleeping quarters, he filled the emptiness of separation with pleasant dreams of her by his side. Together in the wide world like two pioneers on an untamed frontier.
Little did he suspect these dreams would become prophecy!
While their long days at the lab stretched into tedium, they were a learning exercise for Noah in one important respect:
They showed him just how different Davina was from her people.
Like him, she balked at the monotony and meaninglessness of their motions at the lab. Although she tried hard to hide it for his sake and acceptance among her peers.
Like him, she exhibited a critical, questioning skepticism, although she repressed it entirely in the presence of the others.
And like him, she refused to accept the repetitive exercise as the central purpose of life.
While the others sat docilely, perfectly content to while away the hours in this pointless undertaking, Davina was stultified, restless and discontented. And the better Noah came to know her, the harder it became for her to mask her dissatisfaction for the sake of his acceptance into the community.
/> Her deepening discontent accompanied inexplicable behavior—actions she performed mechanically, rather than willfully—and it was most evident each time she and Noah helped tend the vast communal gardens.
It was customary for those working the fields to eat a handful of the seeds laid by for the purpose. A rewarding snack and important source of needed vitamins to supplement their normal diet.
But now, Davina is compelled to preserve her seeds and store them in Noah’s backpack.
Each day they visit the gardens, they share Noah’s allotment while the seeds she gathers for hers enrich their cache with new varieties and strains.
For her, it is an out-of-body routine, her actions guided by an invisible hand compelling her to set new and different seeds aside each time. And as the couple’s seedbank grows to encompass every garden species, her restlessness grows.
But she senses their time will not come until the deposits to their secreted seedbank are complete.
Months slip silently by on cat’s paws before every variety of seed is stored in Noah’s carry-all, and she makes the confession that will change their lives, unalterably and for a future as yet unimagined.
It is while they are eating alone at the edge of the open terrace, safely removed from others’ ears, that Davina gives voice to the urgency plaguing them both:
“You are restless and unhappy, Noah. I read it in your thoughts. And, as we are one, I share your discontent.
“As you were told, you are not a prisoner here. Nor am I. We are, both of us, free to leave.
“Life here holds no joy for you and, as we are alike in our wanderlust and need of purpose, neither does it for me.
“I, too, long to see the wide world you have told me about in your exciting tales on this terrace.
“It is time for us to go! And I, for one, am glad it is so.”
Astonished by her unexpected confession, Noah is struck speechless by the spirit of generosity and self-sacrifice that motivates her words. She is willing to give up her world for him, he realizes, and the thought humbles him.
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