The Imprisoned Earth

by Vaughn Heppner

  That meant I wasn’t going insane and did not appear to be hallucinating. Given those conditions, I continued staggering toward the fire—

  A man shouted. It was a human sound of alarm, a welcome sound to me. Those around the fire jumped up. The warning man in his desert robe pointed into the darkness in my direction.

  Those around the fire whipped back their cloaks, drawing long curved knives. A few drew long-barreled pistols with what looked like hammers on the end with flints to strike flash-pans.

  Someone on the sailing ship snapped on an arc light, indicating electricity. That light shined in my eyes.

  I raised my arms, blocking the blinding light.

  One of the men shouted, I suppose at me.

  I squinted, peering at him.

  The man shouted again, and now he made a “come here” motion with an arm.

  I took that as a good sign and staggered toward the fire.

  The men glanced at each other. I did not get a good look inside their hoods. One of the men laughed in an ugly way. He spoke to the others.

  The first man replied. The others argued back and forth, it seemed. The first man threw up his hands and put away his knife and gun. The rest of the men put away their weapons, too. The only one who kept out a weapon was the one who had argued hardest.

  He walked toward me with his long, curved knife in his right hand.

  I halted. His manner indicated hostility. He spoke to me. I said nothing, as I did not understand him. He was speaking an alien language. His words did tickle my ears, however, but I paid no attention to it. I was too busy watching the man and his knife.

  The man spoke again.

  I shrugged.

  He looked back at the others, doffed his hood and regarded me again. He had tanned skin, wide features and dark curls on his head. He also had a thin mustache like an old-style movie villain from the pre-nuclear-war world. When he opened his mouth, I saw he was missing teeth. A closer examination showed blotched skin and close-set eyes. I had no idea concerning his age.

  He began approaching me warily, holding the long, curved dagger before him, slowly moving it in circles. I heard him talk to me, taunting me, it sounded like.

  I did nothing.

  He moved closer, and now one of the others at the fire shouted encouragement.

  I was sport. I looked weak, no doubt. This man was a bully and maybe enjoyed inflicting hurt on others. I’d seen his type before. I did not care for him, but I did not think I should slay him because of that.

  My confidence surprised me. I was sick, emaciated and weak from my exertions—

  With a shout, he raced at me, feinted one way and swiped at my head. In that moment, he seemed to move slowly, painfully slowly. I shifted to one side and moved my head back.

  The curved blade swished past my face in seeming slow motion. The knifeman staggered in that direction.

  Those at the fire shouted. A few laughed.

  The man whirled around to face me again. He spoke harsh words at my face, spittle flying from this mouth.

  I said nothing.

  He snarled, looked back, seemed to realize he could not quit now, and yelled loudly. He charged me, with his knife outthrust.

  I shifted once more, grabbed his arm and wrenched hard as I pivoted my body. He went airborne, his head aimed down at the ground and his feet sailing as the soles pointed up at the stars. I released him, and he flew away, summersaulting until he struck the sand twelve feet from me. The impact caused the knife to fly from his hand.

  I silently marveled at what I’d done, but not half as much as the men at the fire. In an instant, they drew their knives and flintlock pistols again. They aimed the guns at me, whispering fast to the headman, the obvious leader.

  He had his flintlock aimed at me. He spoke, and my ears itched abominably. The itching seemed to slide internally from my ears until it exploded in my brain. The process had been ongoing ever since they first spoke. Now, I noticed it.

  He spoke one more time. “Who are you?”

  I understood him. He spoke an alien language, but I understood him. Perhaps—almost certainly—this was another manifestation of Avanti sorcery.

  I apologize for calling it sorcery. I was an educated man. I used logic, not superstations, but this was too much to accept all at once. I could heal from bullet wounds, expelling the lumps of lead from my body. I could move faster than I’d ever moved before, and I had greater strength than I recalled possessing. Now, I could learn an alien tongue just by listening to strangers talk for a time. Surely, that was sorcery, magic at its most fundamental. And yet, I knew the Avanti had done things to my body and mind.

  “Jason Bain,” I said.

  “That’s your name?” the headman asked.

  “It is. Who are you?”

  “What did you do to Jorjol?”

  I knew he meant the man who had fought me. “I disarmed him,” I said.

  “You have neutraloid strength and unarmed combat technique. But you are not tattooed blue.”

  “Neutraloid?” I asked. “Oh. No. I’m a man. No one gelded me.”

  “Why are you out here alone?”

  “I…seek passage.”

  “To where?” he asked.

  I looked at the men around the fire. They feared me. They might fire more bullets into me at any moment. What was reasonable to tell them?

  “I, ah, seek the Star Men,” I said.

  “Star Men?” the headman said. “Do you think we’re primitives without knowledge of space travel?”

  What would be a suitable story? What would they accept as possible? “I…ah, had to eject from my spaceship.”

  “Who attacked your ship?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I ejected and used—an escape pod to reach the surface.”

  “Metal,” one of the men said to leader. “The metal of the escape pod could be worth credits.”

  “Is your pod nearby?” the headman asked.

  “It’s in the mountains,” I said.

  The men murmured, not liking that.

  “The mountains are cursed,” the headman told me. “None go there but for the starmenters. Are you a starmenter?”

  The way he said the word indicated he didn’t like these starmenters. I shook my head.

  “Surely starmenters attacked his ship,” a different man said. “They might want him, even pay ransom for him. The Hunge sometimes trade pulsating rocks for sky-sharks. Why couldn’t we trade him for weapons to shoot down the sky-sharks?”

  The headman reached inside his hood and rubbed his hidden chin. He asked the man, “Do you wish to trek into the mountains to deal with the starmenters?”

  “The Hunge have become arrogant,” the man said. “They ambush us from the sky. We need weapons—”

  “I can help you against the Hunge,” I said.

  “How?” asked the headman. “Does your escape pod have weapons?”

  “No…” I said.

  The headman finally lowered his flintlock as he de-cocked the hammer. He indicated one of the men. “Check on Jorjol.”

  The robed man gave me a wide berth as he left the fire. He knelt at the huddled mass of the man I’d thrown.

  “Captain Gosso,” he shouted. “Jorjol’s neck is broken. He’s dead. The spaceman killed him.”

  The others around the fire murmured, looking at Gosso, their headman or captain, apparently.

  “I fought him in fair combat,” I said.

  Gosso nodded before looking around. “Does anyone say the spaceman did not fight fair?”

  No one spoke.

  Gosso asked that two more times. It seemed like a ritual. Finally, he turned to me. “You will travel with us. You must explain to Jorjol’s father and brothers what happened. If they accept the verdict of the fight—”

  “We need weapons to fight the Hunge,” a different man said. “Alger is right. The spaceman could be worth something to the starmenters. We could trade him for weapons.”

  “I have alrea
dy spoken,” Gosso said. “The spaceman travels with us. After he speaks to Jorjol’s father and brothers, then we will decide his fate. Until then, he is a guest. Or do you challenge me?”

  The hooded man shook his head, muttering, “He is a guest as you say, Captain.”

  And that was how I joined Captain Gosso’s crew on the Gyr Falcon, a ship of the Wind Runners on the Great Sarai of the Planet Aiello.

  -21-

  Fate played an inexplicable trick on the Gyr Falcon, and the majority of the crew blamed it on me for two reasons. I’d killed without spilling blood, which meant the Desert had not drunk of Jorjol’s life before he passed away. I was also a spaceman, an off-worlder, which surely meant I’d blasphemed in some manner common to arrogant and unbelieving men like me.

  The Wind Runners thought of the Desert as a living entity, although not as a god. I had the sense they thought of the Desert as ancient Algonquians and other North American Indians had thought of trees, lakes and other inanimate objects as possessing spirits. Like those stone-age primitives, the Wind Runners feared the spirit behind the object. The Sarai Desert was a particularly fickle entity, given to unpredictable and impulsive behavior—unless one appeased the Desert with the proper formulas and rituals. Clearly, killing without bloodletting was an offense to the greedy Desert spirit.

  In this instance, the bad luck was a dry lakebed. After two days journey toward the distant Black Rock Depot, our wind runner had parked beside the cracked bottom of the quite dry lakebed.

  I joined the team that inspected the awful portent. We saw dead fish and dying crabs on nearly dried mud with crisscrossing cracks between the millions of sunbaked pieces. That indicated the water had recently drained or evaporated.

  “No,” Gosso said, when I suggested that. He had a tanned, seamed face with a crooked nose and an old swirling tattoo around his left eye. “A spring feeds Lake Paga. We always net scissor-fish and green serpents here, and refill our water casks. The lake always has water, one of the few lakes on the Great Sarai to make such a boast. Without a refill, the next leg to Black Rock Depot—”

  Gosso worried his lower lip.

  “May I?” I asked, indicating a spyglass that Alger, the first mate, used.

  Alger glanced at Gosso. The captain shrugged. Reluctantly, Alger handed me the glass. The first mate was a superstitious and rather scrawny old man missing all but two of his yellowed teeth.

  I aimed the narrow tube at the middle of the dry lake. I’d thought to spy a huge hole out there. The spyglass proved I was right. What did the hole mean? I would guess that the spring had run dry and the water had drained out of the hole as if this had been a tub. Lowering the glass, I told Gosso about the giant hole out there.

  The captain snatched the glass from me, training it there. He swore in a small voice, and turned to me as the blood drained from his features. “The lake drained. How did you know?”

  “It was an obvious detection,” I said. “Given the many fish and cracked mud—”

  “He defies the Desert and mocks our ways,” old Alger said, pointing a skinny finger at me. “He is bad luck.”

  Gosso didn’t even think about it, but nodded. “The spaceman is bad luck.” The captain drew his flintlock, training it at me as he used his thumb to cock the hammer. “The Sarai is no place to carry bad luck. I am sorry to say—”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, interrupting. “It’s evil to just shoot a man without proof that he brought you the problem, the bad luck, if you will. I’m innocent of Alger’s charge.”

  “You killed Jorjol without spilling blood,” Alger said. “What more proof do we need that you’re the locus of our ill fortune? The lake has never been dry before you appeared among us.”

  I noticed that the others had drawn their flintlocks, aiming them at me.

  “Jorjol broke his neck,” I said.

  “That’s the point,” Alger said. “Everyone knows the Desert abhors bloodless killing. You vainly mocked the Desert by killing with your spaceman ways. Now, you must pay the price so the Desert doesn’t take out her continued rage on us.”

  “I defended myself from Jorjol’s baseless attack.”

  “But you did it in a blasphemous manner,” Alger said.

  “Don’t you have a priest to judge such things?” I asked Gosso.

  “Not on the Gyr Falcon,” Gosso told me. “We are a poor wind runner, and will be poorer because we have to turn back. Our pelts will dry out in this heat. We’ll be lucky to refit and make the run before the summer hot winds blow.”

  “We should have traded him to the starmenters like I first suggested,” old Alger said, a regular I-told-you-so kind of bastard.

  “You can still do that,” I said. “Look, Gosso, why accept a loss? Ransom me to the starmenters so you can still make a profit this trip.”

  Gosso blinked at me. “You want to go to the starmenters?”

  “No. But it’s better than dying out here.”

  Gosso’s astonishment was real. A second later, they all started laughing, including Alger. “Better than dying,” the captain repeated. They all laughed harder.

  I began moving away from them, wondering what to make of that, and if I could get back to the Gyr Falcon, grab some weapons and fight my way out of this.

  Gosso noticed, raising his flintlock abruptly. “Halt,” he said.

  I did.

  “Bind him,” Gosso told Alger.

  I let him, putting my hands behind my back. I’d eaten their food the past two days and drank lots of water. I’d eaten more than my fair share, and the others had muttered about that, but the food had assuaged my furnace of a stomach.

  “We must turn back,” Gosso told the others. “We don’t have enough water to reach the Black Rock Depot. We barely have enough to get home.”

  “We still have enough to make a short stop at the Kurgech Mountains,” Alger said.

  I’d noticed the red rock mountains upon first appearing on Aiello, which meant I’d be right back where I’d started.

  Gosso nodded at Alger’s suggestion, albeit reluctantly.

  “He may be worth a fortune,” Alger said, his greedy old eyes gleaming.

  Captain Gosso eyed me. “The spaceman is strange, talks strangely and acts strangely. Yes. Maybe you’re right. See that he does not escape, Alger. It will be on your head if he does.”

  “I won’t be worth anything to you dead,” I said.

  Gosso cocked his head at me.

  “I need plenty of food and water,” I said. “The starmenters will want me alive and healthy.”

  “Why would they want that?” asked Gosso.

  “Because I killed some of their men when they damaged my spaceship,” I said.

  “Ahhh…” Gosso said. “You lied then when you said you didn’t know who attacked you.”

  “If I did lie, I did so because I didn’t want this to happen.”

  “You cannot escape fate or the Desert on the Sarai,” Alger said. “You should not have lied to our captain. That was wrong.”

  “So is blaming your problems on an innocent man,” I said.

  “Should I cut him for saying that?” Alger asked.

  “It would be good to let the Desert drink,” Gosso said slowly. “But the men will be angry and upset that we cannot continue to Black Rock Depot. We cannot afford the losses that dried-out pelts will bring. We must show a profit somehow. No. Do not cut him. We will dicker shrewdly and win a goodly price from the starmenters.”

  “Will we park beside the Kurgech Mountains?” Alger asked, suddenly sounding worried.

  Gosso pointed at me. “The mountains are cursed and he is bad luck. He will therefore draw the evil as a lightning rod attracts lightning. We will be safe therefore as we camp at the base of the mountains and light a signal fire. That is how the Hunge attract the starmenters.”

  “I did not know that,” Alger said.

  “I heard it at Nesko Inn in the taproom as men played cards,” Gosso said. “Perhaps we will make a p
rofit after all, this voyage.”

  He motioned with the flintlock. “Go, spaceman. Head back to the wind runner with Alger. You brought us this ill luck, now you will pay for it and pay us for the trouble you have brought us.”

  “I can’t just say I’m sorry and be done with this?” I asked.

  “He mocks us,” Alger cried. “We should cut him and watch him bleed.”

  “Go with Alger,” Gosso ordered, “or we will spill your blood so the Desert may drink and turn away from us.”

  With hands bound, I turned back to the Gyr Falcon, with old Alger prodding me in the back with his flintlock.

  -22-

  I had barely begun to feel half-normal when I found myself confined to the cargo hold inside the Gyr Falcon.

  The wind runner creaked constantly as wind moaned around us. The balloon tires hissed as they churned across the endless sand. There were humps, and I bounced around in the hold, with my wrists and ankles bound tightly.

  A boy came down to feed and water me. Alger came down at other times, having others untie me so I could relieve myself outside.

  I listened to their chatter when I could, and I considered the situation as I endured my confinement. I did not like being bound, but my body needed the rest. Gosso must have ensured lots of water and food for me as I’d suggested. I ate heartily, and I would swear that I could feel my tissues swell because of it. I knew they fed me as cannibals might, wishing for a fat and healthy man in the cooking pot.

  The Wind Runners were semi-nomadic, as far as I could figure. They knew about spaceports, starmenters and star drives. They knew about other worlds and had spoken to people from different star systems. No one aboard the Gyr Falcon had been off-planet or far from the Great Sarai. I imagine they were like old-time Englanders that had plied Terra’s oceans, making a living as seamen during the Age of Sail. Mostly, from what I heard, anyway, the Wind Runners made a living hauling cargo from one oasis to the next.

  One thing bothered me. If people knew about space travel and higher technology, why did the Wind Runners live at this lower technological level? And how was it that regular humans lived on this planet? Did that imply that humans inhabited many worlds throughout the Orion Arm? Did that mean humanity hadn’t originated on Terra, or that these humans had come from Terra ages ago?