by Garry Ocean
“But all right, let it be this way for now: the hunters are hunting the seedlings in the forest, and the gatherers take these seedlings, plant them and feed both themselves and the hunters. Why not? Quite a viable model of a socio-economic order. This is more or less logical. But the tools they have present a complete chaos, as if someone had deliberately mixed several historical eras,” Nick continued to reflect. Earlier in the forest, when he was walking next to Ron’s squad, Nick noticed that Goby and Valu had spearheads made of some animal bone, but Ron’s was made of iron. As for Sith’s dagger, it was quite the work of a craftsman. Nick was not an expert on ancient weapons but he had no doubt that the dagger was made of hardened steel. When Nick realized that, he went around the entire village but could not find anything remotely looking like a forge.
The natives’ utensils were made for the most part of wood or clay. But sometimes he saw ceramic tableware, and even more interesting, plates made of thick matte tempered glass. And it was unbreakable! Nick tested that when he made sure no one was watching him and he banged a plate with a stone several times.
But what shocked Nick the most was something he saw in Whisperer’s home. Not even shocked, he was awed. Nick accidentally took a peek of a box that the old man had brought from the basement the day before. The basement, by the way, was the only place in the house that the old man always kept locked. So, Nick unintentionally looked into the box and was struck by the discovery. In very neat stacks, there were Petri dishes there.
Nick even blinked rapidly, making sure it was not a hallucination. Then he got one of the plates out. No doubt, it was indeed a Petri dish. On Earth, it used to be widely utilized in microbiology to cultivate colonies of various microorganisms. The dish, named after its inventor, a German bacteriologist Richard Petri, was so universal and practical that one could see it even in contemporary labs.
Nick was holding it in his hands for some time, trying to come up with a reason for this find that would be explained by the local level of development, until Whisperer came back and took his box back to the basement. To all his questions, the old man was pretending not to understand Nick. However, at the same time his smart eyes concealed a cunning look under his bushy eyebrows.
Whisperer was an interesting man. Everyone in the village treated him with respect. He was their shaman or wizard. He was staying away from everyone, lived a lonely life, but at the same time took active participation in the tribe’s life. Sith was his apprentice, as it seemed. The boy was responsible for all the household chores but he didn’t seem to mind.
On the first day, Whisperer assigned the boy to Nick to help him to learn his ways in the village. Sith took the task with great responsibility and enthusiasm and never let Nick out of his sight. The boy was talking non-stop and at times Nick did not know where to hide from him to reflect upon his thoughts in silence. However, there was something positive in this, too. Nick was learning the local language fast.
Nick smiled at the memory of how silly he looked when on the first day he tried to establish contact with the natives he met in the forest. He drew a circle that meant their planet, with triangles for the pyramids, naively hoping that they must have seen these huge structures or at least heard something about them. The hunters, of course, did not understand him. And for a long time, he believed that their planet’s name is The Wheel. He just found out not long ago that the real name of the planet was Terius, and when they had met in the forest the boy decided Nick had drawn a cartwheel.
So Nick was studiously learning the local language. Surprisingly, for such a primitive society the language was quite rich and descriptive. Nick often stumbled upon words the meaning of which no one could explain to him. He had to turn to Whisperer for explanations then, but it did not always help. Often the Whisperer either did not know the exact meaning of the word himself or Nick did not have enough native vocabulary to understand the meaning. For example, Nick spent half a day asking Sith to explain to him what the words “star,” “stars” meant. He encountered it quite often in phrases like “Disappeared like stars,” meaning disappeared without a trace, got lost, etc. Or there was a saying “when the stars in the sky light up,” which, as Nick understood, meant an impossible event in the future, something like the Earth’s “when pigs fly.”
Of course, Nick did not expect the boy to give him a definition similar to the one in the Great Inter-Planetary Informatorium: “A star is a celestial light-emitting body shaped as a massive plasma sphere, which hosted, hosts or will host thermo-nuclear reactions.” Of course not. But he did expect at least something like a God of Hunting, for example. Or the forgotten candle of the Departed Gods, or something in that line.
Nick needed information just like he needed air to breathe. Any information. Myths, legends, fairy tales – anything and everything. At least he could attempt to interpret them into something more reasonable and coherent. Something must have happened on this planet. And this something could not have not left some trace, if not in recorded sources, then at least in the oral tradition. However, he was not able to receive anything remotely useful from Sith or any other member of the tribe. Nothing.
And what about the gigantic pyramids? Or the battle orbital station, in the long run? Nick had no doubt that it was a battle station, neither did he doubt that it was not alone. This was suggested by the fact that all the exploring probes deployed on different sides of the planet were destroyed practically at the same time. Not to mention the space “cocoon” that encapsulated their entire planetary system, making it sealed from the remaining Universe.
“One big, giant puzzle,” Nick summarized his hopeless reflections and scratched Bow behind his ear. To be more exact, in the place, where Nick thought Bow's ear must be. In any case, the poison-spitter liked that. He always started to hiss in a special way and opened up its thorny collar that looked like a big orange bow.
Bow turned out to be a smart little beast. He immediately recognized a master in Nick and would allow only Nick to hold him. Although, sometimes he would sit in Whisperer’s lap. He had a special relationship with Sith. He liked to come up to him unnoticed and hiss loudly, taking a battle-ready position. Sith always jumped up, and ran away, cursing. The poison-spitter’s saliva, as Nick had experienced himself, had a neuro-paralytic effect. In addition, it burnt like hell when it got on skin. The poison-spitter could discharge his saliva in an unbelievably exact, aimed manner, at about ten to fifteen meters. In nature, they most probably used their poison for defense purposes only, since they were herbivorous. As Nick suspected, their poison played a great role in their own metabolism. This is why they attacked only when it was absolutely necessary and inevitable. After the spit, they had to eat up on grass or tree bark for a whole day to restore their body balance.
Nick remembered his grandmother with great affection again. She should have been there, especially with her hi-tech equipment. It would take her no time to understand the local eco system. As Nick managed to notice, the flora and fauna on this planet were hard to tell apart. It was impossible to determine what or who is in front of you when you first saw them. Some species of the local ecosystem, as, for example, warthogs, must be a weird symbiosis of the animal and plant life forms. They preferred to spend part of their time in the swamps where they put roots and fed themselves like trees, taking the nutrients from the ground. In their usual state, however, they were quite dangerous predators. And when they got into herds, they were not afraid of attacking people.
“I should press Sith and convince him to spend more time learning to read and write,” Nick suspected that the boy avoided that because he might not have been very good at it himself. But it’s all right, Nick knew how to persuade him. Just like any teenager, Sith wanted to learn good fighting.
After that memorable encounter in the forest, Sith nagged Nick every day about teaching him the tricks. At first, Nick said no. On that fateful night he unintentionally caused deaths of three people from another tribe. And even now, when he was expl
ained that they themselves would not have been left alive under any circumstances, the memory of the incident made him nauseous.
When he was in grade school, Nick’s favorite game was tag. It had very simple rules. Two or three players were trying to tag the leader and the latter was trying to avoid being tagged for as long as possible. The one to have tagged first became the leader, and so on. A special device registered tagging and was able to detect even the slightest touch. The devices also timed the game. The longest untagged player was announced the winner. Much later, when he started to take sub-fight classes, Nick was surprised to learn that children’s tag was one of the training exercises for a contact fight. It helped achieve speeding-up of the body.
That evening, in the forest meadow, Nick was instinctively avoiding tagging, and a tragedy happened. He understood perfectly well that the vakhs were going to kill him for no reason, but he could not explain that to himself and to accept their death. It seemed that the human life was not of particularly great value on this planet. The natives attacked him without any word just like some savages or wild animals. Then they aimed for his chest and shot their arrows. He was trying to show them that he had come in peace, and wanted to return to one of his attackers his arrow. But they did not let him. They just attacked him as a pack. He had to knock them out one by one.
“This is a planet of the crazy,” Nick thought with sadness. “And I will soon become just like them. Upon return, I will definitely need a psychological rehabilitation treatment.”
Right that moment he saw Sith turning around the corner. The boy was clearly excited about something. Nick had learned to tell the boy’s mood by this manner of walking. This time, he was walking hurriedly, skipping on his way.
On approach, the boy eyed Bow suspiciously. The poison-spitter was spread on a bench, bathing in the Orphius’s rays, and his whole look showed that the boy did not interest him in any way. Sith kept his distance just in case and blurted out in rapid fire, “We are going to the Great City! And you are going with us!”
“You need to thank Whisperer, he insisted on that. The Elder at first wouldn’t budge. You know,” he added, a little embarrassed, “many people here believe you are strange. But Ron supported taking you as well. He said that without you we wouldn’t have brought the mycelium to the village.”
The boy was saying something else. In truth, Nick did not understand half of it, but he caught the main thing, that he had an opportunity to get into their mysterious city. Everyone knew about it, only a score of villagers had been there, but no one could say anything definite. Perhaps, this was just a language barrier. Nick constantly blamed himself for his slow learning, but couldn’t do anything about it. By now, he could rather freely chat with the villagers on various conversational topics, but when they started to talk about the forest and animals inhabiting it, or about the city, just like now, they started to use some allegorical narratives and Nick almost always lost the thread of the conversation. “Well, as they say, better to see it with my own eyes,” Nick thought.
Sith continued to talk in a rapid fire, “Ron wants to trade in with the Guardians more of the iron arrow and spear heads, and, more importantly, knives. But not the knives like I have, but…” he spread his arms, “like this long. I don’t remember what they are called; I need to ask Ron once again. And, of course, the seedlings.”
The boy’s eyes widened like a 5-year-old’s in bewilderment, “Do you know what kind of seedlings they have? Even the Forest does not have the ones like they have. Although, of course the Forest has them, but not as tasty as those ones. We will give them to the gatherers. They know how to plant them. And then we will have tasty treats for a whole year!”
Then he gave Nick a funny look and said, with a touch of arrogance, “But why am I telling you all this, you probably never ate anything better than a changeling, right? Or did you? What do you eat there, in your steppes, various thorns, no?”
Nick frowned. No matter how hard he tried to explain where he had come from, everyone decided that he was from some faraway steppe. Whisperer was the only one who got interested. He said they’d come back to this conversation when Nick learns the language better.
“Wait a second, Sith!” Nick finally decided to interrupt the boy’s verbal stream. “Didn’t you dream of going to the city for something different?”
“Yes, I did,” the boy looked down timidly. “But it’s still interesting to see, isn’t it?”
That was hard to argue.
“And how far is the city?” Nick decided to switch the conversation to a different topic. Once before, Sith and Nick had a frank conversation and Sith said that he’d been dreaming about the city often. When Nick asked him what was so special about the city, Sith said that his dreams are very much like the descriptions of the city he had heard from the hunters who had been there. So Sith wanted to see the City for himself. Just to make sure it was like in his dreams. Or it was not. Nick didn’t say anything then. Although he could have said that sometimes it happened just like in a dream. Perhaps, Sith heard these stories earlier in his childhood and then forgot what he heard, and now the memories are triggered in his dreams. Doctors call it déjà vu.6 Although he probably would not have been able to explain this to Sith anyway. In any case, why upset the boy? They did not come back to this conversation ever since then.
“About three days of walking, not less. We will also take a cart, so that we can take back with us as much as possible from the City. The Elder said that he had talked with the gatherers from the Near Valley. Looks like the old Igo promised to lend him two sloths for the trip. The sloths are of course slow but it is still better than carrying the heavy bags on our shoulders.”
********
It did not take them too long to get ready for the journey. Nick only had a small bundle to carry. Whisperer insisted that he’d change into the clothing of local people. The best village spinners made specially for him wide loose pants and a loose sleeveless shirt. He tied it around his waste with a rope, just like he observed the hunters to do that. The shirt also could have been fastened with special tabs. Nick found the clothes quite fitting. At first, his body was itching like crazy but then his skin got used to the fabric and the itch stopped. Of course, this was no spacesuit made of hi-tech nanofabric. But he had to take into account the local traditions. This is why Nick rolled his suit tightly and put it into a bundle he’d carry on his back.
Many of the local residents wore around their necks something like good luck charms, this is why no one paid attention to Umka. Good thing she started to mimic the look and texture of the local plant on the first day they landed on this planet. The natives must have thought that Nick was wearing a regular brown strap made of a tree liana.
The only thing that really upset him was that Bow had to be left behind in the village. Everyone was definite about it. As Nick understood, there were cordons through which it was impossible to take even the seeds of local plants, not to mention the forest animals.
Now, tracing the cart, Nick tried to call Umka again. In response, he only heard a slight pinch on his neck. “What could have happened to such a smart and perfect machine?” Nick thought for a millionth time. “Some destabilization of quantum fields. And what did she say about the leaking energy storage?”
Nick couldn’t remember when he had charged Umka for the last time. It was not needed indeed. Umka could charge from any open source of energy. And the energy of the local sun was more than enough for it. This was too similar to the problem he had discovered earlier on the Valkyrie: practically complete absence of fluctuation in this star system. Plus, artificially established quantum resonance and its obvious connection to the giant pyramids. To this, one can also add a malfunction in the work of anti-gravitational engines of the rescue capsule in the upper atmospheric levels. Nick felt that these are all links of one chain. But he did not know, from which side this chain could be caught. And how to pull it further was not at all clear.
One thing was obv
ious, though: the natives he met on the swamp had nothing in common with these puzzles. Therefore, he should set a definite goal for himself and move step by step toward its achievement.
“Well, what do I want to get right now?” Nick thought. “Any help from the Earth is a no-go. This is beyond me at this point. Then to goal can be, for example, to initiate contact with the beings who created the pyramids.”
“Obviously,” he quickly corrected himself, “Perhaps, they were created to achieve the quantum resonance effect. Or, no, not that. The quantum resonance is probably a side effect. It usually results from the distorted space continuum.”
As far as Nick could remember from his schooling, the quantum resonance is one of the negative factors in tweaking sub-fields. It could also affect the accuracy of a jump leap, for example. It was obvious that whoever had created pyramids was familiar with the wave theory of fields. But then… What then? Nick was at a dead end here. To be more exact, there were countless possibilities in that scenario. On several occasions, Nick tried to extrapolate a hypothesis he particularly liked into a workable theory, but then he found himself in such a quagmire of contradictions that finally decided to quit thinking about it.
“Stop, that’s enough!” he would stop himself then. “I just need to find the closest pyramid. And then we’ll see…”
Once he decided that, Nick felt better. His thoughts stopped jumping chaotically from one thing to another. His brain started to formulate specific questions. “First of all, I need to find information on the pyramids. Any mentioning of them. Umka may have stored the exact coordinates of these giants in her memory. Although, no. When the probes located those objects, Umka was not controlling the Valkyrie. Just like me, she would have only the visual feed. But this may be enough for Umka to calculate their approximate coordinates using indirect data. But I will not be able to tell exactly which hemisphere I at, Northern or Southern? How many continents does this planet have? Which continent am I on?”