by PJ McDermott
Hearing the swish of goldengrass parting, she snapped back to the present, put a finger to her lips and pointed with her free hand.
Part of a face, barely a nose, and eyes protruded from behind the shelter of the grass. Blue Eyes waited several minutes, watching the water hole and sniffing the air before he seemed satisfied, then quickly darted to the edge of the pool. He scooped up several mouthfuls then left his short spear on the ground beside him and submerged a clay pot to fill it with water. Abruptly, he let go of the jug, and it splashed into the pool. He grabbed his spear and crouched, his head jerking one way then the other, a wild look on his face.
The Teacher rose from behind the rock and walked slowly to the water’s edge. He didn’t appear to pay any attention to the boy and stooped to drink, then gathered his cloak about him and sat by the bank.
Blue Eyes took several steps backward and glanced quickly behind him.
The boy could flee if he wished, but curiosity held him back. Hickory started as the Teacher spoke in her mind. Hickory, walk slowly into the open and sit beside me. The boy knows you are here, and he will not come closer if he feels you would harm or capture him. Sitting is an accepted sign of good will and indicates a desire to talk.
Hickory followed the Teacher’s example and sat cross-legged beside him. She extracted a cloth from her backpack and placed it on the ground in front of her, then arranged some sweetmeats on it. The Teacher popped one in his mouth and chewed with obvious relish, then signed to the boy to join them.
The boy approached hesitantly and crouched opposite, poised on the balls of his feet. Hickory pushed a leaf towards him and encouraged him to eat the sweetmeat just within his reach. His eyes widened as he placed the sugar-dusted confection in his mouth. Hickory smiled, nodding at him, and allowed herself her first close look at the boy.
Anatomically, he looked human. His frame was slight but proportionate to his four-foot height. His head was large, with a flat nearly vertical forehead and small brow ridges above two large, round blue eyes. Small pointed teeth sat behind a pair of full lips.
His clothing, such as it was, comprised the skin of an animal arranged around his waist down to his knees. Hickory had already noted the pale skin, smeared with earth, and the long, white hair on his head, slicked back with grease. The boy hadn’t washed in a long time, if ever. Without thinking, she screwed up her nose.
The primitive stopped chewing and screwed his nose up.
Remember this as the first communication between your two species, the Teacher’s voice spoke in her mind, sparkling with mirth.
Hickory selected another sweet and offered it to the boy on the palm of her hand.
He crouched forward and reached out his arm hesitantly, then jerked it back short of the offering.
Hickory nodded and smiled encouragingly and pushed her hand nearer to the boy.
He shuffled towards her outstretched hand, snatched the sweet, and swiftly moved back out of reach. He put the sweet in his mouth and wrinkled his nose at Hickory.
She laughed out loud and the boy jumped backward, startled.
“No, no,” she said. “Please stay. We mean you no harm. Have another.” She held her hand out to the boy and tried to project soothing thoughts at him.
Slowly, he came back to take the sweet from her palm then sat down opposite.
“Hickory,” she said, tapping her chest. “Hickory.”
*
“What happened then?” asked Jess, her eyes wide. She placed a dish of steaming vegetable curry on the ground and sat down.
Hickory ladled some food onto her plate. “Thanks, Jess, I’m starving. After the sugar fix, he became less suspicious and seemed to accept that we meant him no harm.”
“Were you able to communicate with him, Teacher?” asked Jess.
The Teacher declined the plate offered by Jess. “I understood only a little of what he said. The boy possesses telepathic ability, but he seems reluctant to speak. There is a cave somewhere on the mountain where he and others of his kind live. His name is Tirpogh.”
Hickory speared a mushroom with her fork. “My SIM couldn’t translate, so we talked mainly through sign language. He’s very young. He’s worried that his family might find out about his nocturnal adventures. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s broken some sort of tribal taboo by coming to this part of the island.”
Gareth mopped up the last of the gravy on his plate with some bread and grinned. “Sounds like an adventurous little whippersnapper, eh? How primitive do you think he is?”
“Difficult to tell from one meeting. We don’t know how widespread his tribe is, or anything about their customs. They might be quite an ancient species. We’d need to examine their culture, talk to some adults from his community.” Hickory glanced from Jess to Gareth. “Tirpogh has agreed to take me. Kar has a meeting with the admiral tomorrow…”
“Aaargh,” Gareth threw his head back and squeezed his eyes shut. “Wouldn’t you know it? I’d love to go, but Markhov practically begged me to work on one of the modules with him tomorrow. He thinks it might hold valuable records of the builders of the Ark, and he needs someone who understands the Schrödinger equation.”
“That would be you, boyo,” said Jess, nodding her head. A bright smile lit up her face as she turned to Hickory. “Looks like you and me, pardner. When do we head off?”
“As soon as I’ve finished this,” said Hickory. “Get your pack together. The usual stuff, and bring a notebook or something to make a record. The boy will meet us at the pool.” She reached across and lightly stroked Gareth’s arm. “I’m sure the professor couldn’t handle this without you. We’ll tell you all about it when we get back.”
Primitives
Tirpogh’s eyes darted left and right, and he clicked and whistled at Hickory and Jess. Prosperine’s moons, ghostlike behind a thin cloud layer, bestowed a dusting of dull orange on the boy’s hair. After three hours of walking, the land had changed from the predominately grassy hills to rocky crags. Boulders strewn across the slopes of El Toro cast shadows like dark pools of ink.
When they reached half-way to the summit, the boy signaled for them to wait and scurried up the face of a twenty-foot sheer wall like a mountain goat. His head popped over the top a few minutes later, and he gestured for them to follow.
Jess exhaled audibly, closed his eyes for a moment, then gritted her teeth and followed behind Hickory, placing her feet in the same footholds and her fingers in the same cracks. When she reached the top, Hickory extended a hand and hauled her up the rest of the way. They walked behind Tirpogh along an upward sloping track that clung precipitously to the mountainside.
“Just as well Gareth couldn’t come. I don’t think he would have managed,” said Hickory. Gareth feared nothing living, but heights terrified him.
Two hours later, they made it to the far side of the mountain.
“Breathtaking view,” said Jess. She stood on the lower lip of a caldera created by a glacier thousands of years past. White rocks lay inside the crater shimmering radiantly in the moonlight, while the top lip of the caldera was limned with a fiery orange-red from the rising sun.
Hickory nodded to a row of caves running from one edge of the crater to the other. “What do you make of those?”
Jess glanced at Tirpogh who pointed and nodded his head vigorously. “I suspect it’s our destination.”
Abruptly, the boy threw himself to the ground and cowered behind a boulder. He signaled frantically for the others to do the same.
Hickory and Jess crouched beside him. A flash of movement caught Hickory’s eye, then another, and another. Hundreds of flying reptiles poured from the caves and circled in a swarm overhead. The screeching, beaks snapping, and flapping of leather wings grew in intensity until the last creature joined the flock. Almost it seemed at a signal, they wheeled in a circuit of the caldera and flew into the distance.
Hickory scanned the departing reptiles with her spyglass. “I wonder if the Riv-Amok is amongst
them.” She shook his head. “I can’t see him, and I don’t hear his voice.”
“What are they—Charakai?” said Jess, thinking of the savage bird-reptiles Hickory had summoned to the battle of Ezekan.
Hickory rose to her feet. “No, not Charakai. These are a similar species, but smaller, more intelligent than my friends. I can sense that, but I can’t connect with them.” After she’d lifted the barriers imposed by the surgeons and successfully controlled the actions of the Charakai, Hickory had discovered that only the less intelligent species were susceptible to her suggestions.
Tirpogh waved for them to follow and set off at a fast pace across the caldera to join a faint track below the caves’ entrances. They hurried past a dozen openings where the acrid stink of guano almost overwhelmed Hickory. A hundred yards beyond the last of the caves, Tirpogh knelt and crawled inside a small fissure in the rock face. The hole was large enough to admit Jess, but Hickory needed to be dragged through the entrance by the other two.
“I hope we don’t need to come back this way in a hurry,” said Hickory, panting.
As they moved further inside, the dim light faded until eventually blackness surrounded them. A few steps later, Hickory felt the beginnings of panic creep up on her. She stopped with no idea of where she or anyone else was. The air became suffocatingly thick, and she could feel the moisture trickle down her neck. Gratefully, she felt a small hand slip into hers. Tirpogh’s night vision must be better than her own. After several minutes of total darkness, a faint red glow appeared in the distance. The light drew her on like a moth to a flame.
As the flickering light became brighter, a tumult of angry squawks grew louder. Hickory became aware of walking through a tunnel with walls and roof no more than two feet from her. She forced her claustrophobic thoughts into the back of her mind and concentrated on following Jess and Tirpogh. A few minutes later, they came upon a porthole in the passage wall. Leaning her head through, Hickory saw a large chamber covered with organic debris; dry goldengrass; leaves; shreds of dry animal skin, bones, and broken eggshells. About fifty young reptile chicks, not yet able to fly, squawked, flopped, and flapped amongst their brothers and sisters.
Tirpogh signaled for Hickory and Jess to wait, leaped nimbly through the gap then tiptoed across the nest, avoiding the snapping beaks of the chicks. He stood silently in the middle of the rookery and closed his eyes.
Hickory’s brow knitted as she tried to reach the boy with her empathic gifts. “I don’t understand his thoughts, but I’m sure he’s communicating with the fledglings.”
Half a dozen of the birds flapped over to Tirpogh and squatted before him. He caressed them on their down-covered heads.
“The reptiles will be more impressionable when they’re young,” said Jess. “Given how the boy reacted to the adult swarm, I’d guess it doesn’t last beyond puberty.”
Tirpogh signaled for them to approach and they moved on. Stepping over the nests, they ducked through a small archway into an adjoining chamber. It had become progressively hotter since they’d crawled through the entrance and now they could see the source of the heat and the light. A bubbling pool of molten magma spluttered and hissed only ten feet below them, extending almost wall to wall. Hot, noxious vapors saturated the air.
Hickory took a cloth from her pack and soaked it with drinking water. She gave it to Jess who tied it around her nose and mouth, then she offered another to the boy who looked at it with narrowed eyes and turned away.
They edged around the pool, keeping their backs flat to the wall.
Jess pointed out the marks on the walls created by previous surges of lava coming from the interior of the planet. “I wonder whether the admiral knows this mountain is a dormant volcano that might explode at any time.”
The pathway continued past the lava pool, and they clambered through two smaller chambers until, finally, they came to a dead end. It seemed they could go no further, but Tirpogh approached the rock, turned sideways and disappeared. His head came into view again, and he signaled for them to follow. What had seemed to be a single solid wall blocking their way was an illusion. It was, in fact, two walls, one behind the other. The original wall face had fractured along a fault line, and a cleft between the two fractured sides had opened just wide enough to let them pass.
They emerged onto a ledge, fifty feet above a vast subterranean chamber. Rough stone steps led down to the cavern, which was lit by the flickering flames of hundreds of fires and torches. Jess crouched low, and pulled Tirpogh down beside her, signaling for him to be quiet. Thousands of half-naked primitives were gathered in the space below, engaged in various activities. Fearsome-looking older versions of Tirpogh, bearded with chalk-white skin and wearing black streaks on their faces, gathered in circles, conversing in their weird language of clicks and whistles. Others oiled spears and axes or took part in a dance celebrating a successful hunt. Females sat apart from the males, some nursing young children or grinding wild seeds on large stone platters while others shaped knives and arrowheads by chipping flakes from stones using handheld tools. Children played games of skill and strength, wrestling, throwing bundles of tightly bound skins to each other or practicing spear throwing.
Jess touched Hickory’s arm. “Look there. I don’t believe it,” she whispered, nodding at the nearby wall. Detailed earth-colored cave paintings depicted hunters brandishing spears at large animals. There were hand prints, images of fire, the sun, the twin moons, and animals and fish presumably from the local area.
Hickory felt a cold tingle on the back of her neck as she came to the picture Jess wanted her to see. Contrary to the previous scenes, this composition had been etched into the rock. There could be little doubt about the subject matter. A triple-capped mushroom shape took center place encircled by three motifs, one seemed to float in the air, another on the sea, and the third had wheels. Dozens of humanoid figures carried crates or led animals into the Ark. “That’s incredible,” she murmured. Two distinct types of hominids were shown in the etching—the first, and more numerous, were the smaller of the two, who loaded the cargo into the Ark and seemed to defer to the taller lifeforms, who wore helmets.
An excited burst of clicks and whistles interrupted their examination as some of the primitives spotted Tirpogh and his two companions. Warriors grabbed their spears and rushed quickly towards them, while females ushered the children to the far end of the cave and through small openings leading out of the cavern.
Gesticulating and muttering fiercely, one of the warriors bounded up the staircase, grabbed hold of Tirpogh’s shoulder and pulled him away from the two strangers. The boy clicked and whistled at the adults, gesturing between the tribe and the newcomers, but he was quickly pushed into the crowd.
“I guess that’s Tirpogh’s father. Not the warmest of welcomes,” murmured Jess.
Hickory’s eyes glittered in the firelight. “I wonder if we would do as well in their situation. I daresay we look like monsters to them.”
The crowd parted as they descended the stairs to the floor, but some of the more courageous young males ran up to them, yelling loudly, and smacked Hickory with their spears before running off. One of the primitives pushed close to Jess and flourished a short stick adorned with colored beads in her face. He peered up at her, twisting his head first one way then the other with evident curiosity. He stood at Hickory’s side and scrutinized the speckled purple coloring that encompassed her eyes, followed the curvature of her cheekbones, and then faded to a point at her earlobes. He poked a finger at her rounded cheeks and felt her skinny arm, then mumbled something to the primitives behind him.
“I hope they’re not measuring us for the pot,” whispered Jess. “Do you understand what he’s saying? My SIM device is useless. I’m getting nothing but static.”
Hickory kept her eyes on the elder in front of her and replied with a straight face. “I can sense curiosity, fear, possibly even wonder, but no specific thoughts or meanings. We appear to be in no immediate danger of
being eaten, although by the look of it that might not last.”
The sweet smell of roasting flesh reached Jess’s nostrils as she followed Hickory’s gaze. Several hominids were suspended on a spit above a fire in the middle of the cavern. Her eyes opened wide, and she gasped. “Oh, God—they’re cannibals.” She put a hand to her nose to stifle the smell and struggled to stop gagging.
“I’d say they eat their own dead at least, so I doubt they’d be finicky about eating strangers.”
“If anything that makes it worse,” said Jess, whose face was almost as pale as the natives’. The elder primitive watched this discourse with a quizzical expression, then he grinned, showing two rows of pointed rotting teeth. He turned to his tribe and jabbered at them, stabbing his finger at Hickory as he talked. Those watching emitted a high-pitched ululation.
“I think he just made a joke at our expense,” said Hickory. “They’re laughing at us.”
Jess grinned nervously at the watching crowd. “What’s so funny, eh?”
“I don’t think he can make his mind up whether we’re male or female.”
The primitives half pulled, half dragged them towards the middle of the cavern.
“I guess these ones will decide our fate,” said Hickory as they approached a dozen or so males seated in a circle.
Cave Drawings
The Aged Ones observed the approach of the newcomers in silence. Each wore a prized animal skin draped over their shoulders and their hair, saturated with grease, was piled high and tied in place with a leather thong. Their faces glowed with luminescence—a sign to all of their approaching sanctification. Each was worshiped with the reverence accorded to those chosen to petition the Great One on behalf of the tribe.