Theme-Thology: Invasion

by Inc. HDWP

  And then, without warning, he was there, facing what now appeared before him as a vista, much wider than the mile-wide hole he'd heard about. This was no lake. It was an ocean, a savannah of emptiness, even shimmering somewhat despite the absolute darkness that grew from underneath. He realized, as he got closer to it, that the shimmer was light itself bouncing and refracting. It was as if something over the surface was breaking it into its spectral parts, holding it hostage just above the horizon of the void. Perhaps a trillion snails had left their sludge against the gauze of space-time itself. Jake thought it looked beautiful, not deadly.

  He felt his heart beating quickly, less from the trek in, and more from the brazen act of defiance he was about to undertake. In all his life, he had never needed to be brave or exhibit boldness. He'd never had to achieve any greatness. He was unsure of his fate, though he felt certain, now that he was here and standing before the abyss, that his life truly was about to end. At first it filled him with dread, unspeakably horrible as he contemplated the epic nothingness that he was sure awaited him.

  His breath quickened, and he knew his courage was already abandoning him. This, he realized, was what he'd been his entire life. A nobody who never loved anyone, not even his wife or daughter. He’d left everyone behind to pursue mediocrity and empty oblivion. This is what cancer had revealed in him, finally, after being masked for so long behind television and self-delusion. In the end, when there was nothing left for him, he had the agonizing sense of his loneliness welling up. He fell to his knees and tears erupted and he sobbed.

  He didn't notice it at first, but he was being tugged, as if caught by invisible strings. It was the gravity well. Tears flowed almost horizontally off his face into the gathering darkness. Through the prism of tears still clinging to his eyes he saw his knees and hands were next to a shimmering zone of utter black. It had expanded even while he’d knelt there.

  Could he pull away? He jerked, like a fish caught on a line. He still had some ability to move. He half fell to the side and rolled away from the dread pool until he was clear. He was free.

  He stood, steeled himself once more, took five steps back, and made sure his path was clear. He was going to go, and he wanted it to be his way. The rest was up to the Universe.

  He breathed deeply, and he imagined the cancer inside him breathed too. It stopped its barrage for a moment to respect the civilization it had come to corrupt and destroy.

  He lunged forward, running toward the black pool, his body suddenly joyful and free of weakness. Adrenaline pumped, and he leaped wildly into the air like a long distance jumper achieving, for the first time, greatness.

  No one was there to see.

  From Jake’s perspective, he soared. He saw the black rushing toward him. His mind was aware of a million sensations. He felt a brief twinge of regret, then a symphony of something like happiness with no source and no end, and as he entered the well of blackness, Jake knew he had won.

  Not Like Us

  Mike Reeves-McMillan

  Stone was eating seafood stew again when I came to see him. That man, he loves our seafood stew. Stone is a Southerner man, with those funny-shaped heads they have. He’s short and getting plump, his head hair is going away in the middle, and he grows hair around his mouth, too, which is messy with the seafood stew.

  "Stone," I said, "when you build us harbor?" It's what I always ask him.

  He usually smiles and says, "Someday, maybe," but this time he said, "Could be sooner than someday, Mistress Sand."

  He calls me Mistress Sand, but I just call him Stone. He speaks my language and I speak his, to practice. That's how it goes with us.

  "What you saying, Stone?"

  "News, Mistress Sand. There a treaty that we work on. My Realmgold, she want to make closer with Beasthead people."

  The Realmgold is like a clan head, like me, only over a lot more people. She's over all the people where Stone comes from.

  "What, and then you say, Beastheads do this, Beastheads do that? I got head like dog, I not got heart like dog, Stone."

  "Not like that. Beastheads and us pulling same oar."

  "That all right, but who owns boat?" I say. Stone's all right, but his people have bigger numbers, and they have faster boats, and they have weapons and tools we don't have. If they want our country they'll take it, one way or another, is my fear. We'll fight them hard for it, though.

  Good and hard.

  Whenever Stone came from then on, he talked about the treaty. We Beastheads know about treaties. We have treaties with all the clans that cover things like trade agreements and ways to settle fights. The Elves set it all up when they made us. This is like that, he said.

  "Except if I make treaty with Bird the Cattlehead over hill, he same like me," I said. "Bigger village, more people, but he same like me. You not same like us, Stone."

  "We still friends, not?" he said.

  "You trade me, I trade you," I said. "Not same like friends."

  * * *

  Our village is by the sea, but you can only get little boats up to it, because of the sandbanks. That's why I want Stone to build us a harbor.

  Stone lives in Bird's village, the big one up the river, where it gets wide and the bigger boats can tie up. He only comes to see us every few days. He wasn't with us when the other ones, the ones that looked like Stone but weren't his people, came.

  Reef was up early fishing, and he saw them and ran to me. I'm the clan head. That means if anything goes wrong, or even if anything is strange, someone will run to me.

  "Sand!" he whispered. "Sand, wake up!" He knew better than to wake my children early. It makes them whiny all day, and then I get tired, and whoever woke them up is in for it, I tell you.

  "What is it, Reef?" I muttered, moving out of the hut so that I wouldn't wake them either.

  "Boats, lots of boats, coming from the North."

  Boats from the North isn't good. To the North is the Isle of Turfrae, where the Elves used to live. The people who live there now think we're animals, worthless. They’ll eat the food we trade to them, though.

  "Catheads know?" I asked.

  He nodded. "First thing I did." Reef isn't a fool. I should have oathbound to him instead of his brother, maybe, but by the time his brother, my children's father, fell out of his boat and got eaten by a Mawfish, Reef was oathbound to Ripple, and they're very happy. So.

  "Wake a few others," I said. "Get some sticks and things, in case. Send someone out to the Southerners' big boat and make sure they know, too."

  The Southerners, Stone's people, had one of their big boats anchored off the mouth of the river. There were some people fighting over to the West, they said, and they thought it might spill over. I hadn't paid much attention, just sent my people out to trade food for fishhooks and other useful things, and bring back information on how the big boat was laid out. I reckoned we could sink it if we needed to badly enough, though it would take most of us to do it.

  The light was improving quickly, and I could see the shapes of boats moving in towards the shore. Most of them would get stuck on the sandbanks soon, but the water was shallow from there and they could wade onto the beach. I considered carefully, and decided not to wake my children just yet.

  I did stick my head in next door and call Auntie Bush to keep an eye on them, though. They were used to my being gone early sometimes, and would go to her when they woke, and she would give them breakfast. Auntie's old, and she doesn't sleep as long, so she was awake already.

  As I came back in to grab a piece of dried fish to gnaw on for myself, Gust, my oldest, stirred and woke. He knew better than to wake the younger ones, just nodded at me and followed me out of the hut, then went into Auntie's. I heard him asking her what was happening as I hurried up to the watchtower to talk to the Catheads.

  Part of how all our different peoples get along, the way the Elves set it up when they made us, is that we all have tasks to do, and everyone depends on everyone else. We Dogheads do a lot of the
farming, though my village is a fishing village. The Cattleheads, Sheepheads, Goatheads and Horseheads herd the animals they look like, and the Catheads travel from village to village carrying messages. They're also our fighters.

  We had six Catheads staying in the village. Leaf, the big Cathead who led them, was crouched at the top of the thickreed tower looking out over the sea. Cathead night vision is good, and he was counting, as best you can count people who are moving around that much.

  "How many?" I asked when he finished.

  "Too many," he said. "Six, seven, maybe eight times as many as your whole village. Start moving the children."

  If a Cathead says there are too many enemies, you believe him. They'll fight the waves on the sea and look around for the wind. And even six times as many as us is a lot. Nearly forty people live in my village.

  I nodded and hurried back down the tower, grabbed one of the younger Catheads and told him to wake the village and get the children and old people and nursing mothers headed to the caves. We don't have a stockade, because we're too far from the Elf-forests to get attacked usually, but there are sea-caves just down the coast where we can hide out if we need to.

  Not long afterwards, Gust showed up at the tower. First I knew was when his gold-tipped ears came over the edge of the platform.

  "What are you doing here?" I asked him, low and angry.

  "I can run messages," he said. "I'm a fast runner."

  "You think you're a Cathead?" I said. He was right, though, he was almost as fast as the Catheads, and they were going to be needed to fight. I looked at him. He was almost as tall as me, and his voice was already going low sometimes. He'd go through his man's ritual at the end of the fallow season. I nodded.

  "You can stay. But you have to do what I tell you with no arguing."

  He nodded back, and his ears went up, eager. He's a good boy, my Gust.

  By proper sunup, our people who couldn't fight were streaming out of the back of the village much faster than the people from the boats could wade through the water towards us. They were wearing big gray garments that weighed them down, and they didn't know where the holes were in the seabed, and so they would fall in them and go under, at least the first ones would, and then the ones behind them would have to go around. They were trying to hold their weapons out of the water, and not always managing it. I didn't know much about things made out of metal, but I knew that putting them in water didn't do them any good in the long term. Our concern, though, was what would happen sooner than that.

  The big boat, the Southerners’ boat, had some things like hollow logs, but made of metal. That much metal must be worth an amazing amount of trade goods, I thought. They had a whole row of them, too. They started using these logs somehow to throw what looked like rocks into the other boats as soon as it was light enough to see properly. There was a kind of a pop noise, like a tight stopper coming out of a bottle, and then the rock would come out of the log, much harder than a person could throw. And the stones were making a mess of the boats, all right. These must be the people the ship was there to stop.

  "We're lucky," I said to Leaf. "The Southerners have some kind of argument with these people. Stone said something about how his clan chief is supporting another clan chief who’s being challenged for his position. I didn’t follow all the details, but he said it might spill over into our country eventually, because the challenger man doesn’t believe we’re people, and he wants our land."

  He nodded, not taking his eyes off the people walking to shore.

  Some of the other boats started throwing rocks back, but they were a lot smaller -- the boats and the rocks both. It didn't seem to bother the people on the big boat much. Still, there were a lot of the boats from the North, and I could see that many of the people were going to make it to shore.

  "We need to stop them while they're in the water," I said. Leaf looked at me in that expressionless way Catheads do when they think you've said something obvious, and signaled to his people.

  We only had six Catheads, like I said, but six Catheads is like six Mawfish. You don't want to be the one facing them. They do these fight-dances at festivals, spinning their spears around and jumping and stabbing, and it looks impressive then, but it's even more impressive when you see them fight for real.

  When they do the dances they start out slow and build up to so fast you can barely see them, but in a real fight they're fast right from the beginning. It was like watching a scrubfire in the sandhills. They would run in and slash, stab, stab, stab, hit with the spearbutt, enemies falling in front of them like the sand-villages that children make when the waves come in. Then before the enemies could recover they were somewhere else, and there were bodies floating in the waves, and it must be unnerving to have to push your friend's body out of the way to go on advancing towards the people who just killed him. Specially when you're wet and cold, and it's only just dawn, and you're up to your armpits in the Sea of Turfrae.

  Still, there were only six Catheads. They had to be lucky a lot, but the enemy only had to be lucky six times, and some of them had the weapons I'd seen a few times carried by the fighters that Stone brought with him, what he called pressure guns. I suddenly realized that the rock-throwing things on the boat were probably the same thing, only much larger. These ones could throw a pebble-sized bit of metal very hard, and kept doing it time after time. The ones that had been dipped in the water didn't work all that well, and there weren't many -- most of the enemies had those big knife things, what do you call them, swords -- but the guns worked from a long way away, like a bow, only more so. Catheads only use bows to hunt, not to fight. It's some sort of honor thing, they like to be up close. Who really understands a Cathead?

  So anyway, the catheads, one by one, went down.

  * * *

  Just as the last of them fell, I heard a whistling noise overhead, and then the pop of pressure guns. These ones were going fast, poppoppoppop, and I looked up to see one of the Southerners' fast boats, the ones that look sharp like a Narrowfish, flying through the air. Stone's people were certainly full of surprises. I didn't know their boats could fly. It's the sort of thing you'd think a friend would mention.

  Anyway, there it was, flying, and the pressure gun popping, and down below it in the water it looked like someone was dragging a stick through the sand, except the stick was the metal pebbles coming out of the gun, and the sand was the invaders. My people cheered, and then I heard another boat at the end of the beach. This one was landing, and eight fighters were getting out of it. The Southerners' heads are all the same shape, so they have to wear different clothes to show what they do, and these were wearing the fighter clothes, the dark blue ones, all the same, and carrying pressure guns. They ran towards the fight while their flying boat went back up into the air and started shooting its fast gun, and then the first flying boat came down and let another eight fighters out at the other end of the beach.

  I looked around for Catheads to send with a message to the groups of fighters before I remembered. Then I called down to Gust, and sent him running towards one, and Reef towards the other. I wanted to go, but I needed to stay in the middle now, up the watchtower, because I'm the clan head and everyone expects to see me there.

  Stone has this thing he carries lately, a little wooden box you can talk into and people far away can hear. They're new, he says, new magic from a clever man back where he comes from. Gust came running back with one of those, and I said my name into it like Stone does, and the leader of the two groups of fighters talked to me and asked were the children all right.

  "We send children to caves first thing," I said, surprised.

  "Good," he said. "We'll try to hold these somethinghere," (he said a word I didn't know), "and you pull your people back among the huts. You'll besomething in the open."

  "Gust, Reef," I called down (Reef had come panting back too), "spread the word, pull back into the village."

  "Our boats," said Reef.

  "Can't paddle a b
oat with a hole in," I said, giving it an inflection that implied that it was him who would have the hole. He nodded and started shouting to the others. Reluctantly, they moved back from the beach, leaving behind a few people who had fallen to the pressure guns, carrying one or two others who were wounded. Mostly, the invaders who had the guns were now trying to shoot at the flying boats, but the flying boats were shooting back, and the two little groups of Southern fighters, too. Men and women in dark gray were floating, still, all over the water, and I could see the ones on the edge of the big group thrashing at something in the water. Mawfish, if I was any judge.

  There were still a lot more invaders than there were of us, and they had better weapons. The watchtower is at the front of the village, and I had to crouch down because of occasional metal pebbles or arrows (though most of the invaders' bows had got soaked and were no good). The metal pebbles went through the thickreed like it wasn’t there, so I had to keep low to stop them from seeing where I was.

  I could hear the fighters talking on the little box. They were working together with the flying boats, trying to keep the invaders from landing. I couldn't understand a lot of what they said -- I suppose everyone who does a particular thing has their own language for what they do, and I had mostly talked to traders, not fighters -- but one thing was clear. They were determined to defend my village. I wondered why.

  * * *

  There were hundreds of invaders. Even with their flying pressure guns and everything, the Southerners couldn't stop them landing, any more than my six Catheads. They ran up the beach and in among the huts, and my people faced them with oars and spars and fish-spears.

  "Mistress Sand!" said the talking box, in the voice of the leader.

  "Yes?" I said.

  "You need to get down off that tower while you still can. If you can do something to it afterwards to stop them capturing it, like setting it on fire, that would be good too."