“My parents didn’t even let me out of the nest until I was thirty,” Sara said, reminiscently. “Mind you, home is all crags, and the breathable atmosphere is five clicks up, so you can understand their reluctance to let go. It’s a long drop. But they used to hover over me and under me, all the time. It drove me mad. They didn’t let me fly solo until I was forty-five.” She rolled her eyes.
“It’s called extended childhood,” Xi explained. “The more complex our brains become, the longer a child remains dependent on their parents. Conversely, spikes have extended our lifespan. We can expect to at least live three hundred years, whereas the Originals die around seventy.”
“Seventy,” Tek’tek spluttered. “You mean, years?” At seventy, all going well, he would be starting an intergalactic career in professional football. “But why don’t they get spiked? Problem solved.”
“I told you, they reject all modern technology.”
“Even spikes and patches?” He couldn’t believe it.
“Especially spikes and patches,” Xi said patiently. “The trains stopped arriving several centuries ago, before my tenure here. The Originals were contacted to see if anything was wrong. They asked us to leave them alone. No one has visited since. I am trying to wangle an ethics request through the committee for a field trip. In the meantime we can study the records, starting with these ancient documents Sara kindly dug out for me in the Old Stacks.” He clicked his mandibles excitedly over the piles of smelly paper.
Sara shivered and hugged her arms to her chest. “I’m not going back there again,” she said. “I like the sun in my hair and air in my wings. Old Stacks is buried two clicks down and I couldn’t get over the feeling there was something watching me all the time. Eugh.”
They spent the rest of the class sorting through boxes.
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
Tek’tek was woken early the next morning by ’chat at full blast. He groggily recognised the voice. “Sara?” he muttered.
“Get down here!”
It was still dark. He stared disbelieving at the time on eyeview. “Five am!” he rolled over and tried to get back to sleep, but he could not ignore Professor Xi’s excited comments scrolling clear across his eye line. “Wonderful news! After all these years!” Xi exulted.
“Who what where?” Tek’tek mumbled.
“A train is coming!”
All right, that was exciting. Tek’tek scrambled out of bed and down the elevator.
“Hurry! You’ll be late.” Sara on ’chat.
It was a wonderful morning. The sun tinged the eastern sky red. The forested mountains to the west were gold. The Three Sisters glowed orange. The grass was springy beneath Tek’tek’s paws and the air was full of the sharp tang of eucalypt. The campus slept around him, tall, graceful towers.
Earth was too far from the galactic core to support a thriving interstellar community and most of the planet had been deserted for centuries. Only students with human heritage, whose parents had a sentimental attachment to their home planet, enrolled here. These students were fewer every year. Even during semester the campus was only half full. Now, in the peace of the pre-dawn holiday, it was silent and still.
Tek’tek bounded along the road in ten metre leaps, out of pure joy at being alive. The station hove in view, a plain ceramic platform with silicon web veranda. High above a winged figure spiralled in the dawn light. Sara was keeping an eye out. He did some mid-air somersaults, hoping she would notice.
She certainly did. “Quit mucking around. I can see the train!” She swooped down as he arrived, landing in a buffeting ten metre wingspan.
The train appeared around the bend of the mountains. It consisted of two grey cylinders, the passenger cabin and the engine, racketing uneasily on the rusty rail. Steam poured from the engine’s funnel, and from various leaks in an archaic boiler.
“It doesn’t look in great repair. We’ll fix it while it’s here,” Xi said, anxiously. He looped his upper half into the air, rehearsing his welcoming speech. His lower half snaked across the platform. Sara dived in a flurry of wings to stand by Xi’s side. With a self-important steam shriek the train pulled in. The door hissed open. Xi drew his upper body upright. Sara beamed. Tek’tek was puzzled. A long moment passed and nothing happened.
Sara was the first to realise. “Look down!” she said. They dropped their gaze.
An Original stood in the door, small and puny as a child. Eyeview identified a male, eighteen years. Height 150 centimetres. One pair each of arms and legs, no enhancements; trousers, coat and shirt of primitive, organic material. He had an anxious face, with ugly, unmodified features, grey eyes, black hair, and a short beard.
The Original clasped a suitcase and a black, heavy looking, rectangular object that eyeview identified as a “book, n. written or printed work.” He blushed as they all stared at him, then stepped cautiously onto the platform.
Xi was too excited to stay put. Clicking his mandibles he advanced and launched into his speech. The Original recoiled and raised his book before him. There was a gold cross on the cover.
“I, uh, don’t think your speech is working, Professor,” Tek’tek warned him.
Xi stopped. “What’s wrong?”
“He’s scared,” Tek’tek said. He had a seen that look on opponents just before he crushed them.
“He doesn’t have eyeview,” Sara realised.
“What, er, of course,” Xi was flummoxed. “I’m terribly sorry, I forgot. We’re so used to—” He had no way of communicating with the Original. “I — uh, yes. I think I had best leave,” Xi said, sadly. He reversed out of the platform.
The Original cautiously lowered his book.
“Great beard,” Tek’tek said, conversationally. He stroked his own chin ruefully. “I tried to grow one last year you know but could I? No. And I’m sixty.”
The Original flinched as Tek’tek towered over him, gaze travelling from Tek’tek’s hindquarters to his armoured exoskeleton. Wide-eyed he shrank behind his book again.
“We’re not getting through,” Sara said. She dropped to one knee, wings half open for balance, to make herself more the same height. She smiled, brightly. “Welcome to the university,” she said.
The Original shook his head, and spoke. They couldn’t understand a word. Eyeview was blank.
Sara’s smile became fixed. “Are you getting any of that?”
“I didn’t know they spoke a whole ’nother language,” Tek’tek protested.
“If he was speaking a known language eyeview would translate,” Sara said. “There was nothing in the documents about a dialect,” she fretted.
“Evolution of language,” Xi realised, via eyeview from his hiding place on the veranda roof. “Small communities are conservative. They retain the old forms. In larger communities language evolves rapidly. He’s not speaking another language, but our own language from several centuries ago. He has a different emphasis on the vowels and syllables, and he speaks much slower and deeper than we do.”
With that hint eyeview jerked into life. “Behold, I send an angel before you, to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place which I have prepared,” the Original said.
“Um, what’s an angel?” Tek’tek asked.
“They are definitely on your reading list,” Sara snapped, blushing. “Originals believe in a being called God who made the world, and created humans in his image. God’s servants are angels. They have wings.” She dipped her own in explanation.
Tek’tek snorted. “Yeah, right, a real angel,” he laughed.
“Watch it,” Sarah warned him.
“You are still speaking too shrill and fast,” Xi told them.
Tek’tek stepped forward. The Original did not raise his book this time. Instead, he squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. Tek’tek suddenly liked him. It took guts to stand up to someone twice your size. Tek’tek spoke slowly from the bottom of his barrel chest. “Sorry to disappoint you, but she’s no angel. She’s plain old human
. Like me.” He got slower and deeper, seeing the Original’s face remained blank. “Tek’tek. Sara. Friends,” he said, cavernously.
The Original smiled at last, a smile that illuminated his solemn face. “Enoch. Friends.”
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
The next few weeks were rather busy. Sara and Tek’tek got accustomed to Enoch’s speech, and he got used to theirs. It was easier for them. They had eyeview to translate. He had to learn from scratch. They remained Enoch’s primary contacts. Tek’tek tried taking Enoch to a party, but it was not a success. Enoch looked furiously uncomfortable amid the giant, tentacled, fanged, horned and feathered, tattooed and chiton-plated crowd, and he was really unable to deal with the exchange student, rKrKrK, a sentient clay conglomerate. He disappeared midway through the evening and Tek’tek found him on the lawn curled up in a foetal position. It was clear that although Enoch was bravely accepting as much as he could, there were limits to his world view that it would be best not to test. They had enough trouble hiding Professor Xi, who was always lurking hopefully in the background, pining for an introduction.
Enoch’s suitcase contained a change of clothes and odd items of black worked metal. “A tooth for a plough share,” he explained. “A candle holder,” was another, which looked like a flower. “I made them,” he said, with a smile. Then he carefully lifted a soft package from the suitcase and unfolded it. It was a beautiful piece of cloth, white and translucent.
“It’s soft, and so fine,” Sara squealed with delight as she stroked it.
“Lace,” Enoch explained. “My sister knitted it.” He folded it up carefully and put it away.
“He must have brought them as gifts,” Sara guessed, later, but Enoch did not distribute them. Perhaps he realised that they had no use for them. They had a hard time persuading him to accept the new clothes they bought him. Sara spent hours searching through the children’s sections, the only size that would fit, for clothing that didn’t glow, sparkle, mutate or automatically attend to bruises and scrapes.
“Modern first aid is genome based. We mustn’t affect his DNA in any way,” Xi explained.
Sara and Tek’tek told Enoch about genome technology, that spikes were permanent and patches temporary. “Like, I’ve got krakoid hindquarters and shoulder eyes,” Tek’tek explained, krakoid being the gene form his ancestors spiked to handle the heavy gravity and cyclones of his home planet. “The krakoid is permanent but the eyes’ll disappear in a year or so.”
Enoch taught them about his Bible, his old book. Sara was in agonies over it. “It should be in a museum,” she protested. It was three centuries old and all about this God, with Enoch’s family tree written in the margins. Sara insisted they wear gloves when handling it.
Enoch had drawbacks. He prayed at every opportunity. He had a passion for preaching, and could go on for hours. Tek’tek sat through these speeches only on stern threat of a Fail. The one good thing was at the end of each preaching session Enoch handed around the Bible, then insisted on a group hug. Group hugs with Sara made the whole situation bearable.
“I think he’s trying to save our souls,” Sara said after a long lecture on original sin that Tek’tek didn’t understand at all. Once again he made a mental note to actually do some reading.
“He can try all he likes,” he said, amiably.
Besides, it turned out Enoch hadn’t come down the mountain to have a fun summer vacation. His community faced a calamity so severe that eventually, reluctantly, the elders had lifted their generations-old ban on travel. They were being destroyed by a horrible disease. Children were born looking normal but their muscles slowly weakened until they were unable to breathe. They died before they were nine years old. In the last few generations the disease had spread. Of children born in the last decade four out of ten had died. Was there anything that could be done to save them?
The Medical faculty were intrigued but they had to step carefully. Most doctors had cephalopod hands, much better than clumsy human fingers, but everyone realised Enoch would view them with suspicion. They nominated one doctor as the primary contact. Unfortunately Dr Gregog had a cephalopod head as well. The donut-shaped brain and copper-based blood of cephalopods were highly prized in worlds where oxygen was not a viable percentage of the atmosphere. Dr Gregog was cheerful, bluff and competent, trailing clouds of interns. But she was undeniably tentacled. Enoch refused to let her get near him.
“Never mind, I’ll win him over,” Dr Gregog chuckled, writhing her tentacles together. “This is fascinating. We’ve got our interns delving into it. Each of them has to give a talk on ancient disorders.”
Her interns pulled wry faces. “Yeah, any time you want to learn about Cystic Fibrosis just let us know,” they muttered. They just couldn’t see the applications, when modern medicine had eliminated all genetic disorders centuries ago.
The interns took a blood sample from Enoch then ran some tests. They had to comb through ancient databases, but they came up with the answer. The children were dying from Brown-Vialetto-Van Laere syndrome. “Known as Brown’s Syndrome for short,” Dr Gregog explained. “A simple spike will fix it.”
The tests confirmed that Enoch was a carrier of Brown’s Syndrome as well.
Enoch refused the spike. He got upset at the suggestion. He tried to explain. The soul was immortal, the body transient. A spike was a temptation of the Devil.
Fortunately for Tek’tek, Sara had done the reading. “The Devil is the enemy of God,” she explained. The Devil worked to damn mankind, and one of his lures was spikes and patches.
Enoch refused to destroy their children’s souls just to save their lives.
Tek’tek just didn’t get it. “It’s all in his imagination. The kids are dying for real. Why don’t we give him the spike without telling him?” he suggested.
“We are dealing with a serious medical ethics issue. We don’t treat without consent,” Dr Greggog said, flat. “There might be some non-genome based ways.” She sent her interns back to trawl through the ancient databases.
“We can’t give him a modern spike anyway,” Sara pointed out. “Our genome is all cleaned up. His genome is original, except the Brown’s Syndrome ruins it. Somewhere along the line we unfortunately forgot to keep track of an original human genome sample. Still, if we can’t do it the normal way, we’ll try the old fashioned way. It’s a recessive gene after all. Let’s look at the genealogy, and see if there are any people in Enoch’s community who can intermarry.”
With Enoch’s help she scoured his Bible, worked out the family trees and marked the deaths of children. There were only one hundred and forty-seven people anyway, which even Tek’tek knew could no longer provide a viable genetic pool. Afterwards Sara crept away and cried on Tek’tek’s shoulder. Brown’s syndrome had spread through the entire Original community.
Meanwhile the interns reported failure. “Once modern technology cured genetic disorders the knowledge about them was lost. We need older information, maybe stuff that’s not on even on any databases,” they said.
Sara looked resigned. “The Old Stacks,” she said.
∞¥∞Ω∞¥∞
The Old Stacks had been built long ago as a protected library in case of war. Above ground only a fortified metal entrance to the lifts was visible. Below lay twenty levels. The highest was the one Sara had already explored, two kilometres below ground.
Tek’tek volunteered to go. Sara said she’d go too, and Enoch wanted to accompany them. “I would love to collect books for my people,” he said, eagerly. “As long as they are godly works.”
“We’d better stick to pre-twenty-first century,” Sara said. “They’re on level fifteen.”
Tek’tek took a large trolley with them to collect their loot. Enoch and Sara had to stand on it in order for them all to fit into the elevator. They went straight down to the fifteenth level, three clicks below ground.
The doors opened. The lights were not working. The Old Stacks were cold and dark and filled with the mus
ty, dusty, rotted smell of paper and leather. Sara shivered, rubbed her shoulders, and hunched her wings.
“I can see in the dark,” Tek’tek volunteered. He switched to shoulder vision, and pushed the trolley out. The lift doors hissed shut behind him.
“You might be able to, but I can’t,” Sara’s voice jumped. Like the avians her spike came from, she was night blind. “This is really not my thing,” she said, in a very small voice.
“Yea though I walk through the valley of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me,” Enoch took Sara’s hand.
Tek’tek looked around at the bookshelves stretching away on all sides. He examined the elevator wall behind them. “Ta-da!” He flicked a primitive light switch.
Every second or third light was out, and the remainder were dim and yellow. He sniffed suspiciously, wondering if any air was actually circulating. He thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, up near the ceiling. When he looked it was gone. Eyeview scanned the surroundings, but reported no identifiable life forms.
Tek’tek steered the trolley to the medical section, where Sara and Enoch scrambled down. “Gloves everybody,” Sara reminded them, spraying them on. Tek’tek scanned a crumbling volume. “Hey, it says here that weasels give birth through their ears,” he reported.
“Not helping,” said Sara. She and Enoch worked together in the mid-section.
Tek’tek studied the lights again. They were covered with webbing. “What could do that?” he muttered to himself.
“Silverfish eat mould and other organic matter found in badly maintained books,” eyeview suggested, helpfully. The picture of the silverfish that flashed up was nowhere near big enough for these webs. He walked along the rows. Level fifteen ended in a sealed door, a temperature controlled vault. He returned to Enoch and Sara. “Hey guys,” he started. “Oh gross,” he finished.
Something had tunnelled through the books, leaving the same sticky web that covered the light fittings. The holes varied from the size of his fist, to the size of his head. “Shit,” he said, sympathetically.
One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries Page 15