Desperately I tried to clear my head and fight off panic. I still had my spear. He was grabbing under my arms. I brought the spear around, grabbing with both hands near the head, stabbing down with what little strength remained.
It was enough. The tip found the attacker’s neck, and I pushed harder. He dropped me, his hands flying to his bleeding throat. Unthinking, I swung the butt end of the spear down on his head, dropping him to his knees. Then I attacked his offered back, poking the spear between his ribs, then again to the back, where a human’s kidneys would be. I stabbed until he stopped moving. I collapsed to my knees and stared at what I had done.
I had killed a hren, a thinking creature. A person. Not an animal—I had grown accustomed to killing them in my time on Wayworld. Now I had killed a person. It was self-defense. It was necessary. It was right. But some part of me whispered that this shouldn’t be. I went numb and stared mutely at the body in front of me: the body of a being who had thought and language—presumably a soul—that I had just snuffed out. I watched his blood, thinned by the pouring rain, wash down into the dirt.
A groan from within the cottage brought me out of my reverie. I went in to see Hermes struggling to raise himself up. I helped him to return to his cot, then lit the lamp. His bandages were soaked in fresh blood, so I went about changing them. The wounds had bled, but it didn’t actually look too bad, at least, not in the half-light. Hermes fell asleep. I plopped down on the floor and was soon asleep myself, dreaming of a maddened, pig-faced ape attacking me.
I woke a little before dawn to find Hermes stirring. He winced and groaned, but despite last night’s attack, he was clearly doing better than before. I glared, and made no real effort to keep the anger from my voice.
“I don’t know what I should do with the body,” I said flatly. His head snapped my direction, as though surprised to see me. He stared at me blankly a moment.
“Bod. Dee,” he said slowly.
“Don’t play games with me!” I said with raised voice. “You speak English and I know it! “Not supposed to here.’ That’s what you said. I’m not supposed to be here? If I weren’t, you’d be dead twice over now! All these weeks and you’ve understood everything I’ve said and refused to speak to me. Don’t give me any more of your crap, old man!” He stared at me with his mouth open like a fish.
“Not everything,” came his heavily-accented whisper after several moments.
“What?” I said.
“Not everything,” he replied. “I did not understand everything. I have not spoken English in many years. Don’t know how many. Maybe twenty…”
“Twenty years?” I asked. “That how long you’ve been here?”
“Not twenty years of this world. Maybe twenty of ours.” His gaze never really met mine. His eyes darted about, barely missing my face. I stood up and pointed a finger at him.
“I plan on you telling me what all this is about, Hermes,” I said. “But right now, I really ought to do something about the dead shokhung on your front yard.”
“Dead…” he seemed confused. “You… killed…”
“Yes, Hermes, I killed the shokhung that was attacking you. He attacked you, then me. Now he’s dead. What do I do with his body?”
“I… do not know…” he stammered. “Burn it?”
“It’s soaking wet by now. It’s not going to burn easily.”
I stormed out of the house and grabbed a shovel. I got to work digging a grave on the outskirts of the glen. It was muddy, ugly work. It took hours. I worked through breakfast and close to midday. When I returned to fetch the body I had a chance to get a better look at it. It was no shokhung I had known. Its fur was reddish tan, rather that the red-brown of Thashingi’s troop.
I grabbed the body by the wrists and began dragging it away, noticing as I did so that he was missing the small fingers of either hand, one replaced by a jagged wound not fully scarred over, the other with a slightly better healed stump. The only possessions he had with him were his loincloth and a sack with some of our vegetables in it. Clearly this was our second thief.
I returned to the cottage tired and muddy. Hermes sat on his bed looking nervous and dejected. I plopped down on the bench unceremoniously and glared at him.
“Talk,” I said.
He sat silently for several moments.
“I am sorry,” he said.
“Sorry. Huh. So you’re sorry? What’s your deal, Hermes?” I asked.
“My name is not Hermes,” he said. “It is Prasun D’Silva.” He paused. I continued glaring. “You do not know the name?” he asked. I shook my head. He sighed heavily. “Then they have forgotten me?”
“I don’t know. Who are you that I should know your name?”
“They called me a killer,” he said to my feet. That got my attention. My anger subsided as I wondered if I should instead feel fear. “‘A reckless and arrogant fool’. ‘Hundreds of lives snuffed out’, they said. All because of me. That’s what they said.”
“Who did you—who did they say you killed?” He looked higher, almost at my chin, now.
“The passengers and crew of the Jamestown. The Jamestown was —”
“I know about the Jamestown,” I cut him off. That much I learned in school. The ship that promised the world a new era of space exploration. The ship boasted to travel trans-dimensionally faster than light.
The ship had exploded on its maiden launch, killing dozens of families foolish enough to believe in the hype—foolish enough to board a ship headed for an alleged extra-solar planet that no one had been to before, but that project assured everyone that the data was conclusive. The Jamestown Fiasco was what led to the outlawing of nearly all similar projects. The Jamestown was the ship that functionally ended the quest for Faster Than Light travel. “You had something to do with that?”
Hermes—no, Prasun D’Silva—blinked owlishly.
“Something?” he said. “I had everything to do with it. I designed the engine. It was my brainchild. My masterpiece. I was going to give mankind the cosmos, and then…” Tears welled up in his eyes. He closed them and sobbed quietly. When he regained his composure, he continued. “They blamed me. They said it was my fault. I was fired, my grants canceled. Shahjahal University even revoked my PhD. There were multiple class action lawsuits. There was talk of criminal charges.” So. Hermes the hermit was the father of the greatest disaster in the history of space exploration.
For the first time since I’d met him, the hermit looked me straight in the eye, his own eyes wide and wild with emotion.
“But it worked! My design wasn’t wrong! My engine worked!” His voice grew intense. “I stole the test ship. I launched. I was going to either prove I hadn’t killed those people, or else I was going to join them in death. And I came here. To this planet. I was stranded here, my ship crippled. I have lived here alone ever since.” The man seemed to deflate. He sagged back onto the bed, exhausted.
“That is why you weren’t supposed to be here,” he whispered. “I’m not lonely here. I finally escaped the accusations and the hatred of Earth. When you came, I tried to talk the okavi out of leaving you here. To me, you were a ghost sent to remind me that Earth still hated me and blamed me for the death of dozens of families.” He chuckled weakly. “I told you my name was Hermes. I made that up because I was afraid you would know who I was. And now you tell me that they have forgotten Dr. Prasun D’Silva. They remember the crime, but not the criminal.
“I’m sorry I misled you, Mr. Diggs. There is no excuse but pain.” He laid his head down and closed his eyes, though tears kept seeping from underneath his lids.
I left him alone and walked outside. I didn’t really know how to process this. No, I didn’t remember the name, but I was never much a student of history. D’Silva’s name was probably still taught. In my classes they spoke more about the political misfits that made up the passengers. My host was a reject from Earth. What now? I was still determined to leave. I was still angry, and clearly he didn’t want me
around. I blamed him a lot less now, but that didn’t change the basic truths.
One detail of his story nagged at me. He said his ship was “crippled”. The one that had delivered me exploded. And the tupa had told me that they, the shokhung, and the okavi had all fallen out of the sky. That’s a lot of stranded wayfarers to be a coincidence. How, and why, was this world a death trap for space travelers?
I returned later to find D’Silva sleeping. When he woke, I told him “I should go. But I’m not sure if you’re well enough to fend for yourself. The shokhung would have killed you if I hadn’t come back in time.”
He nodded. “You are right, Mr. Diggs. I am not well, yet. But I will not ask you to stay, if you wish to go.”
I sighed, my shoulders slumping. “I’m not not going to leave you like this, D’Silva. I’ll hang around long enough for you to get back on your feet.” He nodded again.
“And I will teach you more,” he said. “You could probably survive on your own now, if you had to. I will teach what little I know of this world. Its peoples, its language. Yes, I speak Shikachui. Quite well.”
“Oh,” I concluded, “it’s not ‘Mr. Diggs’. ‘Diggs’ is a nickname. My real name is Anton Diggory. Call me Diggs. Call me Diggory. Just don’t call me Anton.”
D’Silva and I settled into a new rhythm. His English was very good, for the most part, though sometimes a little stilted. As much as possible, however, our conversations were in Shikachui, sliding into English only when necessary. He still rarely, if ever, looked me in the face. Our first lessons were recaps of what he’d shown me earlier, with more detail. Over meals, or in the evening when it was too dark to work, he would tell me what he’d learned of the Wayworld. He’d never given the planet a name. To D’Silva’s knowledge, there was no consensus on the planet’s name, so ‘Wayworld’ was as good a name as any.
I told him of my journey and arrival on Wayworld. He was amused that I had risked so much for the love of a woman. “It is the oldest story in humanity,” he chuckled. He perked up when I mentioned the Heim Displacement Drive. “That was my design!” he said. Apparently LodeCorp had continued, rather than replaced, his work.
“Who is LodeCorp?” he asked. “Who runs them?” I did not know. “I would bet anything they are connected with my old project. How else would they have my plans?”
The fauna of Wayworld didn’t always fit into the same categories as they did on Earth. Many of them could not easily be classified according bird, fish, reptile, et cetera. Like me, D’Silva had seen nothing on the planet that had true feathers. Also, as far as he knew, nothing made milk. Even the shokhung and tupa, who seemed very mammalian to me, did not make milk (though both gave live birth).
Of the tupa, D’Silva knew only a little. They preferred quiet villages away from main trade routes, and had a reputation for being prolific farmers, and generous hosts.
The shokhung went everywhere. Many of them were traders and scavengers, willing—even eager—to buy refuse off others. They were industrious and clever, building simple machines from castaway technology. Some even used crude blimps or hot-air balloons. The thieving shokhung was, according to the hermit, a criminal among his own people, as evidenced by his amputated pinkies.
D’Silva knew the okavi better than he knew the others. They had come here from a solar system that boasted another intelligence besides their own, and had been at war with them for some time. The okavi that had come to this world were not soldiers, but it was their practice to carry sidearms whenever traveling, out of fear that the war may spill over even into their trading or exploring. Once they arrived, they quickly realized their weapons would be much sought after, hence their heightened sense of security. They were egg-layers.
There were other species, as well: I was shocked to hear perhaps dozens! There were large towns populated by multiple species, living amongst and trading with each other. All of this led me back to my big question.
“What’s going on here, D’Silva?” I asked him one evening. “All these different people, on this one planet? Is everybody stranded here, too?” He nodded. “Don’t you find that suspicious?” He blinked at me slowly.
“You do not know, then?” he said.
“Know what?”
“How you were stranded.” I relayed to him, again, everything I could remember about my arrival. “You didn’t see what happened? Of course, your view was too limited. Mr. Diggory,” he whispered conspiratorially. “You were shot down! All of us were! There are vessels, orbiting the planet, firing on ships as they arrive!” I could only stare at him.
“What!?” I exclaimed at last. “Who? Why?” He could only shrug.
“They never communicate. None of us were contacted, as far as we could tell. Simply shot out of the sky, by an unknown assailant.”
“But, but, aren’t there any signs of a ruling power, of a native intelligence?”
“None that I know,” he said. “Every species I have spoken with, and every other species that they have spoken with, came here from elsewhere. No one has found any native hren.
“But it gets stranger, Mr. Diggory,” he continued. “Do you know where your ship was bound?” It was my turn to shrug. “I know where I was headed, but I am not enough of an astronomer to know where I arrived. But I have spoken to others who do know. And all have told me that this world was not their destination.” Again, I could only stare. I heard his words; I understood their content, but my brain would not accept their meaning.
“What are you saying?” I whispered. “D’Silva, what is going on?”
“I do not know,” he answered. “But something is drawing people to Wayworld. And something is not letting them leave.”
D’Silva’s conspiratorial statement haunted my thoughts that night as I tried to sleep. Ships firing at new arrivals, mysterious forces sucking in travelers from across the galaxy. Dozens of species trapped on an alien world without knowing why, how, or by whom. It was too vast to be true.
“The Jamestown!” I blurted out the next morning. “How much wreckage was there?” D’Silva smiled sadly, knowingly.
“Very little,” he said.
“Are they here, too?” I asked. There was a long pause.
“I do not know,” he said, sadly. “I have often asked myself that question. I have asked others. No one has seen them. If they are on Wayworld, they are not near us. I never had the courage to seek them out.”
“What if they’re here, D’Silva?” I asked. “What if there are humans on this world?”
“What if there are?” he returned. “Earth may have forgotten me, but the Jamestown hasn’t, I can promise you! I cannot face them. I stranded them here. That’s what they’ll say. They will hate me as much as their families left behind on Earth did. If they made it here, if they survived, I wish them well.” His tone said that was the end of the conversation.
My host spoke only a little of himself. He came from Bangladesh. He was a physicist and an engineer. He had been married and had two sons, but they had distanced themselves from him after the Jamestown incident. He did not discuss them any further than that.
Within another week or so, D’Silva was again ambulatory. He was moving slower than before and looking older, but he could work in the garden and make short trips on the game trails. I picked up the slack in terms of manual labor, and he spent more of his time doing less strenuous work around the cottage. We conversed more and more in Shikachui as I become more fluent. My skills with the bow improved to “not quite hopeless”, and I learned more about tracking prey. I made a new tunic to replace the one I’d sacrificed to staunch D’Silva’s bleeding from the furrygator attack.
I learned that the Wayworld year was approximately four hundred thirty eight days, and the day was a little over twenty five Earthly hours long. The months were reckoned by the larger moon, Gantan (literally, ‘big moon’), and were about forty three days. Ganulan (‘little moon’) took only about twelve days to orbit, and its cycle was only used very informally to m
ark time.
It was mid-summer, D’Silva said, and had proved to be a mild one so far. This was a subtropical climate, with most of the year fairly warm, summer very hot, and winter brief.
About a ‘ganulan’ later, D’Silva was nearly good as new, though his right leg was given to aches and cramping when over-exerted. He still had some wounds that needed bandages, but with his guidance and my care they stayed uninfected and were healing nicely, though there would be very noticeable scarring.
Within a few months (gantan) of the rogue shokhung attack, the hermit and I were speaking almost exclusively in Shikachui, and D’Silva was entirely mobile and tending to his own needs just fine.
“I think it’s about time for me to leave, D’Silva,” I announced unceremoniously one afternoon. He did not look up from his gardening, but nodded his head.
“I suppose you are probably right,” was all that he said.
That evening he helped me to pack up my things, giving me several tips on the journey ahead. He granted me a number of seeds and a sack of brai-alu bulbs (Yay!) and an assortment of travel-ready nuts, meat jerkies, and dried fruit.
We set out the next morning after breakfast. I had explained to D’Silva my plan: I was going to make my way to the nearest large town and try to discover any trace of the Jamestown I could find. He offered to lead me to the trails that would take me back to the okavi village, saying that they could point me toward the nearest city.
A mostly silent hour later, we came to a trailhead that marked the border of D’Silva’s forest. He pointed up the dirt trail head.
“That is the way to the okavi,” he said. He blinked owlishly, looking away from me, as usual. “You may come visit, if you’re near. And if you’d like to.”
“Okay, D’Silva. Thanks.”
The hermit’s eyes rose nearly to my chin. “If you find them, don’t tell the where I am.”
We shook hands, said goodbye, and continued on our journeys—mine to the north, his to the south.
I walked on through the teal and grey forest, reflecting on my life on Wayworld. How long had I been here? Four months, maybe six? It was nearly impossible to say. I had traveled across a galaxy via the most advanced technology known to humanity, and yet I was living like a savage in the wilderness.
Diggory's World (Wayworld Book 1) Page 15