Chromosome Quest

by Nathan Gregory

  “Many factors have acted to reduce human populations. Disease, warfare, natural disasters and so on. In typical situations, fertile people quickly replace the losses. When disaster attacks fertility itself, recovery is not as simple, not assured. The Greeks, and later the Romans lost significant fertility due to lead poisoning and became unable to replace their losses due to war and other diseases.

  “Even the disease of affluence can deal a crippling blow to any society. The threat that faces humanity today is artificial in nature, genetic in origin and originated on my home planet. It is more deadly to humankind than lead contamination was to the Greeks and Romans.

  “Earth scientists have not yet recognized the seriousness of this trend. The population is so high, the Earth so densely populated that any slight decrease in fertility seems a good thing. Perhaps it would be if it were not the beginning of a long slide into extinction. Instead of celebrating the reduced fertility and worrying about the 'population bomb,' Earth should be worrying about opening up new planets and new space for humans to live and grow.

  “As populous as humans are, in one thousand years humans on Earth will be all but extinct. Probably much less, really. Once fertility falls below a certain point, the population crash will happen quickly. A dozen generations and your people too will be living a stone-aged existence, watching your race die.

  “I cannot help but find it comical that so much of Western society is working itself into a frenzy over various perceived life-threatening 'end times' issues, pollution, climate, diseases, overpopulation and more, and yet a very genuine, and in-your-face disaster is bearing down on humanity like a runaway freight train, completely unnoticed.

  “Humans won't survive on the Earth long enough to cause the kinds of decimation forecast by some, a failure of fertility is going to soon 'save the planet' from the ravages of Mankind unless we can successfully intervene.

  “We must succeed, we must eliminate the threat, or else all of humanity soon will perish. Not just here, not just Earth. Everywhere!”

  Weapons

  Strength training gave way to speed and agility. We marked a trail through the woods, and I ran. And ran. I had never been much of a runner, and the ever-present sweltering heat made it especially tough. Nonetheless, I had been sold; I had gotten religion. I had bought wholeheartedly into Petchy's doomsday scenario and was determined to make the most of my contribution to the quest. So I ran. I suppose the veggies must have helped too because I soon found I was able to run ten miles in excellent time. Then I ran twenty. I would have loved to have a useful stopwatch. All we had was a makeshift and poorly calibrated hourglass and some grains of sand. Still, each day I got better and faster. Frankly, I was continually amazed at my new found athleticism. It seems once we opened the door to my potential I was exploding in all directions. I was developing from the stereotypical desk-bound computer nerd into a super-jock at a stunning pace.

  For a long time, my regimen consisted of push-ups, lifting an assortment of ever bigger rock weights, and running. In the beginning, I had mistakenly thought I was in pretty good shape, even though at first I had struggled to perform even one hundred push-ups. After several weeks under Petchy's driving, I was able to do one thousand in under an hour, non-stop. He insisted that the world record on earth was ten thousand non-stop push-ups. A few months later I was routinely doing ten thousand non-stop, and once, on a bet with Petchy, I did one hundred thousand in 24 hours with only a few short breaks. That was a long day!

  Then there was weapons training, which was tricky since we had no weapons. What we had was plenty of rocks. I switched from lifting them to throwing them. I learned sword-fighting, without a sword. Mock swords cut from tree branches. On a planet with little metal, swords are rare and precious. Petchy nonetheless saw that I learned the basics of the art. He direly predicted I would one day need it.

  Our hosts had made all they had available to us. Coming to their stone-age culture from the technological age I knew was jarring, and I kept thinking of their society condescendingly. I should have cured myself of that foolishness by now. They might have little in the way of raw materials, and nothing of what we would consider technology, but they were not precisely primitive. They had a way of doing more with less.

  Several weapons I had instinctively discounted as primitive and ineffective in what I thought of as 'modern combat' were, in fact, available to us. I quickly learned that these 'primitive' weapons were hardly ineffective. In the right hands, they could be incredibly deadly. Not my hands, however, as great skill was required to use them effectively. Skills I profoundly lacked. That was what we were here to fix.

  I said we threw rocks. True enough. I had never thought of simply throwing rocks as all that formidable, but merely throwing rocks is, in a way, the most elemental weapon. Plus the eye-hand coordination required to throw rocks accurately also applies to other weapons. Earthly baseball pitchers routinely break 100 MPH. I have no idea what speed I hurled a rock, but I do believe that since I had devoted weeks to intense strength training, I was now in the same realm of speed as the best Earthly pitchers. Between the effects of the local nutrients and Petchy's aggressive training regimen, I had developed a pretty good arm.

  Force equals mass times acceleration. Or in the case of a rock hitting its target, deceleration! Rocks are heavier than baseballs. A baseball-sized rock, hurled with world-class musculature impacts with tremendous force. Hit any enemy squarely with that, and he is going down. The problem was one of accuracy. Most people can't hit a barn door 50 feet away with a baseball, and I was utterly like most people! We worked on that. I improved. Soon I was taking down small trees with a single rock. Then when I ran out of small trees, I started targeting bigger ones. Well, the cooks needed firewood. It wasn't a waste.

  The next step up from hurling rocks is using a sling. Note, I did not say “Slingshot.” We had no modern elastic materials with which to build a useful slingshot. We had slings. Very different.

  The 'Book of Samuel' tells us how David slew Goliath using a sling. Many moderns mistakenly read that as slingshot purely from ignorance. They didn't have much in the way of elastic on Earth in 7 BC either.

  A sling is a simple thing, merely a piece of leather or fabric forming a pocket, and two pieces of rope. It is simple to use. Put the rock in the pocket, twirl it fiercely, release at the proper time and the missile flies toward the target with much more force than just hurling. I said it was simple to use. I didn't say it was easy. Hitting a target once with a sling can happen due to either luck or skill. Hitting the target twice requires skill. There isn't that much luck in the universe. In the hands of the unskilled, the safest place to stand is probably directly in front of the target.

  I was unskilled. Worse, I seemed physically incapable of learning the skill. When I first began with a sling, standing in front of the target was, by far, the safest place to be. I even managed whack myself with the rock. Several times, in fact. It left a mark!

  I practiced throwing rocks and then slinging them. A lot. I couldn't grok the sling. I persevered. Unfortunately, perseverance didn't help. It took days before I could make the release happen well enough to even launch the rock into the same compass quadrant as the target. Though I practiced tirelessly, I never, ever, hit the target. Couldn't even get close. Sometimes no matter how much one perseveres, at some point, you must face the reality that you can't do it. Some things cannot be self-taught.

  Petchy recruited a teacher. It turned out a young warrior I had already met a few times in my other profession was one of their most accomplished hunters, and her weapon of choice was the sling. She demonstrated. I capitulated. I no longer insisted it was impossible. She started giving me lessons. I rewarded her personal attention with some personal attention of my own. We worked for days and days, but finally one afternoon, I nailed it. Then in celebration, I nailed her. I can’t prove it, but I think that was the day she finally caught, as soon after that day she started to swell. We had a twofer. We were
both happy with the outcome.

  After that moment, all that remained to master the sling was practice, and I worked at it for hours and hours. It took a long time and a lot of work, but I eventually became strikingly proficient. My teacher presented me with a sling she had made herself just for me, a virtual work of art, almost too beautiful to use. I thanked her profusely in a manner that would not seem wasteful in light of her own growing tumescence. She was louder than even Lolita.

  With the sling conquered, finally, we added archery to our repertoire even as I continued honing my skill. I began practicing against a target, and after several weeks of steady improvement, I learned to hit a stationary target reliably, as long as I had ample time to aim. But I never became proficient at archery. Unlike the sling, I could hit something with an arrow from the beginning. Like the sling, progressing beyond that basic level to real proficiency required expert instruction.

  I continued to practice with rocks and sling, ran miles and miles per day. I did endless pushups. In fact, my stud duties had slacked off, as I had by now serviced every ostensibly fertile female in the castle many times over. Those who were going to bear progeny were doing so. Those who had not yet conceived probably would not if Petchy's statements about diminished fertility were accurate, but I kept banging away at the task regardless.

  Perseverance, and all that!

  With lessened demand for my stud-craft, I found I had more time for training. Petch added another hour in the morning and the evening. Now I was vigorously training for six full hours every day. When I wasn't eating or sleeping, despite decreased demand, I was standing at stud servicing would-be mothers as rapidly as my poor tortured testes could manage. Then I began to recognize new faces.

  Having exhausted the local pool of potential mothers, I discovered my talents were sold at auction to prospects from other castles. Candidates made an arduous and often dangerous journey to partake of my service. It would seem that my attentions were able to command a very high price in the market and Stapleya was busily making bank for her family!

  I was shocked when I first learned I was a prostitute, but once the surprise faded, I recognized she was an astute businesswoman. My taboos are not hers, and although I don't believe I would have thought of the idea, I decided it made sense. She controlled a valuable commodity which was in high demand. Why not? Good for her! Although the duty was not unpleasant, it was arduous.

  These people had been unfailingly kind, polite, respectful and yes, even loving to me, to both of us, as we imposed on them dreadfully, eating their food, taking their valuable time away from essential tasks. That I was able to compensate them with my own, to them, precious essence, and that which cost me nothing, well, who was I to get all wrapped up in taboos? I tried hard not to equate this with prostitution and illegality in my mind. A fair exchange between private, consenting adults should not be something that a tribe should punish its citizens for, should it?

  It turned out my sling-huntress friend had a sister who was equally proficient with bow and arrow and others who were master fletchers and whose services were available to us. We took advantage of them, and what they could teach us. I say us because Petch was now as much the student here as I.

  I was astonished to learn that almost everything I had known or thought I knew about archery was wrong. So very wrong on so many levels. I realized I had absorbed tremendous misinformation from old movies. Hollywood has propagated endless piles of archery flavored bovine excrement in the way archery has been portrayed on screen, and many of those bad ideas have made their way into the modern sport itself, to the detriment of the art.

  I came to understand that archery was once a highly skilled art, an art that had been virtually lost centuries ago on Earth. For example, the master archer does not draw her arrows from a quiver on her back as usually shown in the movies. The back quiver is, in fact, a Hollywood myth, and is useless if one needs to move quickly. It snags on tree branches and spills the arrows all too easily. Worse, drawing an arrow from a back quiver and shooting it is an unnecessarily complicated and inefficient motion.

  Arrows are, in fact, held in the hand while shooting. Not in the hand holding the bow, but actually in the draw hand, and not just one or two. Although loading up the draw hand seems cumbersome, and counterintuitive, it enables the archer to, in fact, draw and repeatedly fire in rapid succession, launching two or more arrows per second.

  My teacher was able to fire up to at least ten arrows with machine-gun rapidity, seemingly under five seconds as I counted them off! Lesser fusillades are even faster; three arrows fly in an eye-blink. My teacher considered standing still and taking careful aim laughable. While targets may be stationary, living prey is not! My master archer is able to shoot quickly and accurately while running and jumping, while in mid-air, while on the bounce. A classic Hollywood quiver would spill the arrows on the ground at the first bounce, leaving the archer defenseless. My teacher, a master archer far beyond any skill level I had imagined possible, did not use a quiver at all. Her arrows were always either in her hand, ready to fire, or firmly tucked at the waist into a belt worn for just that purpose.

  I had instinctively placed the arrow to the left of the bow and squinted with one eye to aim. More Hollywood tripe! Moving the arrow to the left of the bow wastes motion and time. My master archer instead places her arrow on the right of the bow, a much more efficient action that allows for much more rapid fire. The movement of the hand this way more nearly resembles throwing a ball, and like throwing a ball, aiming uses both eyes! As I had said, skill at pitching a ball accurately is very similar to shooting an arrow, and a prerequisite.

  It was necessary to unlearn what I thought I knew on the topic completely! In fact, my practice at throwing rocks played directly into the skills I was learning, once I realized all that I had been doing wrong.

  Aiming an arrow is almost precisely the same motion sequence as aiming a ball. It requires intense practice to learn to do it the proper way, but the skill, once perfected, is spectacular in motion.

  Modern archery on Earth is a joke, with its elegant compound bows, elaborate quivers, fancy aiming devices. That is only useful standing still and shooting at fixed paper targets. My master archery instructor would have a boisterous laugh at anyone dumb enough to think such activity was archery!

  The fletchers taught me the art of making my own instruments from any convenient local materials, tree branches, vines for string, various vegetable fibers, even my own hair, or strips of carefully cut leather. I learned how to slightly char the tips of soft wooden arrows in a fire to make them harder and more deadly. I learned how to select and shape a branch into a deadly bow. At the end of my training I could, with basic materials readily found in the forest make a serviceable bow and arrows with little more than a knife. If pressed, I could make do with a sharp rock! If I had some honest string, bowstring being the most challenging thing to make in the wild, I was golden!

  I studied hard under these experts, taking every advantage to learn this surprisingly complex and skillful craft. While I was taking advantage of them, they took advantage of me. I paid both the archer and the fletchers in the same coin, my highly prized seed. Both were in the thus-far failed-to-conceive group, and despite my very best extra-special attention, they remained so. I promised them all we would not give up. Despite the disappointment, I got individual one-on-one instruction in the art of archery and gradually became passable at it, unlearning all the wrong ideas I had, and relearning the proper way to do things.

  Then after a great many additional hours of practice, I became more than merely passable. It took months, but I became a 'Master Archer' in my own right too.

  When I graduated from archery training, my dear furry friends surprised me one evening at the communal dinner with a ceremony marking my achievements. They formally presented me with the biggest, strongest and heaviest bow I had ever seen on this planet or my own, and a double baker's dozen of the sturdiest, most deadly arrows to match it,
arrows crafted of finely polished quebracho hardwood, and tipped with precious brass!

  This bow, I was told, was no ordinary hunter's bow! That much was evident from the intricacy of its craftsmanship. This bow was a true Heroes bow, one of a series of nine which had been exquisitely crafted many years ago. As a Heroes weapon, she had a name. These people did not as a rule name their everyday weapons, but finely crafted works of art such as this deserved a sort of special recognition. Being the seventh bow in a series of nine identical masterpieces, she was dubbed The Lady Seven of Nine! I was left speechless by the extravagance of the gift. I was now a master archer in my own right, and the gift of such elegant weaponry was better and more meaningful than any diploma.

  The strength of the archer's arm is paramount. My teacher was amazingly strong, especially for a female. Better scratch the disclaimer. She was surprisingly strong for anyone! The pull of her bow was immense; her bicep was like iron. Even so, I had the advantage on her and not a small one, thanks to endless pushups and Petchy's brutal training regimen.

  With my newly developed muscles, I was able to pull even a much stronger bow, and The Lady Seven fully qualified! The best archers of this world could not pull her draw; until presented to me she had spent her entire existence as merely a beautiful work of art to be displayed, a wall-hanging too demanding for mere mortals to use.

  But draw her I could, and soon, with my finely-honed skill, I was able to drive my arrows with a force and power unmatched by absolutely anyone! Petch was no slouch either, but I had him beat by several points! My bolts fairly exploded into their target, hitting with a degree of force only insignificantly less than smaller firearms might muster. When I let loose, the best conventional arrows were rarely reusable after hitting a solid target. Even Lady Seven's special brass-tipped hardwood arrows took a severe beating. Better materials is the one area modern Earth archery bests these people. Application of advanced carbon fiber and high-strength polyethylene fiber technology to the ancient art as these people practice it would be awesome!